Cain vs. Abel

YouTube succeded over GoogleVideo.

Although YouTube had unique features, and more elegant interface if compared to Google Video, it was its viral impact that made the difference. In YouTube, not only can users know about the popularity of a video posted, they can also make it more popular -via comments, ratings and embeddings. Users can make a video succeed or fail, and this is having a viral effect.

I wonder which comments and ratings would be given to the contents of our corporate websites, if our clients were allowed to.

Occasional Marketers

Citizen marketers are customers who generate media on behalf of companies. They can either promote good things or call out bad things about your product.

Unsatisfied clients rarely send negative feedback to companies, they leave them across the internet. The majority of consumers fail to provide that feedback because of contact barriers, or lack of responders.

Citizen marketers could be turned into an opportunity for the company, if identified in advance on the early stage of the sales process. Companies should better identify the customers who have their own web site. Networkers and social media users should be enrolled as occasional marketers.

The Art of Pricing

Sun-microsystems markets the new 8-processors server T2000, that can blow out all the old 4-processors. One T2000 can replace two old servers. Theoretically server sales should be halved. Theoretically. Jonathan Schwartz (Sun CEO) actually says the sales revenues from the new T2000 are growing fast, pointing out an interesting phenomenon: “if you double the performance of a machine, customers don’t buy half as many, they tend to double their order”.

Hardware comes together with the software. Software can solve large problems on many processors at the same time. Each processor has to run one software licence. Still, a double number of processor at the same price, comes with a double software price.

An effect of the above price policy is that massive parallel processing or distributed computing will remain rare, unless software companies will change their price policy.