June 12, 2009

Another sign that Microsoft is re-inventing itself

Posted by julianwoodward under Desktop Software | Tags: , |
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cnet news reports that Microsoft is shortly to discontinue Microsoft Money.

MS Money was born in a time when Microsoft could bear no competition. Anything that seemed to be interesting or good, they had to either buy (where possible), or build their own competing product. This was back in the early 1990s, when the software market was still primarily about business, and home PC users were in the minority. In this instance, Intuit came out with a revolutionary product called Quicken, tapping into a market that nobody had previously identified, and Microsoft did some nimble bandwagon-leaping to come out with Money shortly afterwards.

Since that time, however, the software market has grown massively, and Microsoft have finally acknowledged that they can no longer be the all-things-to-all-men software house that they had aspirations to be (and pretty much were) in the 1990s. So a number of sideline products – including Money, Encarta and OneCare – have been dropped.

While that’s a disappointment to long-term Microsoft Money users, myself included, it is for the best for Microsoft. They needed to regain some badly-needed focus, and decide where their prime strengths are. As the pace of change continues to quicken (pardon the pun), and the traditional desktop software market continues to lose ground against cloud-based services (it’s early days still, but it is happening), software behemoths with more heads than arms – and more products than they know what to do with – will increasingly struggle to stay in the vanguard. Does that matter? No, not really – somebody nimbler and brighter will rise to replace them. Does it matter if you’re a Microsoft or an IBM shareholder? You bet it does.

 

June 11, 2009

Social software usage turns a corner … or does it?

Posted by julianwoodward under Social Software | Tags: , , , , |
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According to compete.com, May was a trend-bucking month in the life of one of everybody’s favourite websites.

A lot of attention in the last 12 months has focused on the rapid rise of Twitter, which has taken over from Facebook as most-zeitgeisty most-talked-about “Web 2.0″ ’social’ site. And the rise has been rapid: consistent monthly growth from just 1.7m monthly visitors a year ago to nearly 20m visitors now.

So it’s interesting to read the latest stats, which show that Twitter’s meteoric growth suddenly stalled in May:

May 2008 April 2009 May 2009
Users Users % growth since May 2008 Users % growth since April 2009
Twitter 1.7m 19.4m 1041% 19.7m 1.5%
Facebook 31.9m 104.1m 226% 113m 8.5%

So, suddenly we have Twitter growing not-at-all (well, 1.5%) in May, while Facebook adds another 9 million users – half of the entire Twitter user-base – in the same month. (These are unique web visitors, not registered users, by the way).

Now this could be an oddity to do with the way that compete.com collects its figures … except that Quantcast shows similar results. So we do need to pay attention to them.

And it could be that many people don’t visit the Twitter site directly, instead preferring to use tools such as Twhirl, TweetDeck, etc … but that would have been the same situation last month. While that is a perfectly valid argument for saying that compete.com and quantcast.com, by only tracking site visitors, underestimate the use of Twitter, it doesn’t explain the sudden stalling in May.  Plus, of course, the same argument applies – albeit to a lesser extent – to Facebook, with many people using Facebook applications on their iPhone and Blackberry phones. In both cases, how many of those users will never visit the site (Twitter or Facebook) itself over the course of a month? I would suggest that most of them will, at some point, so they will have been included in the stats shown above.

So, is this a one-month blip? Or does it show that the Twitter story has been over-hyped, and the reality of its future place in the world of social software is not quite as rosy as many people believe? Well, we won’t know until next month, of course.

But let me leave you with this related thought: Twitter’s monthly retention rate – that is, the percentage of people who, having signed up, are still using Twitter a month later – is down at just 30% to 40%. When Facebook and MySpace were at the same stage in their life – the first phase of sudden explosive growth – their retention rates were double that. Even today Facebook’s monthly retention rate is around 70%. So of the 5.5 million users that Twitter gained during April (the month before our ‘blip’), it can only expect to keep around 2 million of them for more than a few weeks; whereas of the 13 million users that Facebook added during April, it can expect to keep about 9 million of them. And that sort of retention rate means that Twitter will top out its market penetration at about 10% of the potential userbase. For what its worth, Facebook already has about 7% of the world’s internet population as regular users, and nearer to 13% already have an account. (Source: eWeek)

 

June 10, 2009

Google smooths the way for Outlook users

Posted by julianwoodward under Messaging | Tags: , , , |
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Google announced, yesterday, Google Apps Sync for Microsoft Outlook.

This new tool allows people who currently use Outlook with an Exchange server to migrate the back-end services onto Google Apps, whilst still leaving the familiar Outlook experience on user desktops.

As a tool to bridge the chasm between the traditional on-premises (or hosted – which is basically the same thing but with more wire in between) email platforms, and the cloud-based services that are either [a] the flavour of the month or [b] the way of the future (depending on your point of view), this could prove very powerful.

Most – but not all – Outlook data is synchronised between Google Apps and the Outlook (2003 or 2007) client, meaning that users will see little difference in terms of their work. But the IT department can turn off that Exchange server.

I see this making significant inroads in SME, particularly as current on-premises Exchange 2003 hardware comes up for renewal and the business is facing a decision between continuing with the ‘old’ Exchange 2003 platform or a relatively expensive and complex migration to Exchange 2007 or 2010. Being able to de-couple Outlook from Exchange makes a lot of sense, and could end up being less disruptive than a full server migration. This helps Google compete head-to-head with Exchange Online Standard, and they could win a significant chunk of that business over the next 2 to 3 years.

 

June 10, 2009

Here we go

Posted by julianwoodward under Blogging
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Welcome to The Vanishing Point.

This blog is dedicated to the rapid convergence of several aspects of the IT world:

  • Personal vs ‘Business’ use of information technology
  • Online vs disconnected use
  • Asynchronous (e.g. email) vs synchronous (e.g. instant messaging)

As time goes on, many of these lines – which previously were quite clear – are becoming blurred. At some point in the future – the Vanishing Point – such distinctions will disappear altogether. Or, if not disappear, then become so blurred that people (let’s try to stop calling them ‘users’) are almost unaware of them.

The blog will cover not just the trends in abstract, but also those technologies and technology-related stories that are contributing to this change. While personal preferences are inevitable, all reasonable efforts will be made to remain agnostic in terms of software companies. There are many players in this game: big and small, lumbering and nimble, revolutionary and evolutionary, cool and uncool, shallow and deep, solid and flaky … all of them have their part to play in this unfolding story.

We do, indeed, live in interesting times.