If you talk about web 2.0 sites (applications) from the point of view of an IT business related professional, these are the applications that are most used : Email, Instant Messaging, Calendar, Tasks, some sort of Project Management, a Document Management System, maybe a CRM and a sales funnel and a Dashboard. in the web 2.0 space there are a lot of application providers some big one like Google, Yahoo, Microsoft and some small ones like 37 Signals, Zimbra, 30 Boxes, Devshop. I am not talking here about the infrastructure providers like IBM, Oracle, Sun which allows all the “front end” applications to be developed and hosted.
From a small business point of view, the are some issues that are stopping a wider spread adoption of these apps:
- lack of offline access
- lack of privacy
- too little or too many features
- missing single sign on
- common interface
If you take a look at all these applications you will see that all these sites offer a limited free version, and then a feature complete paying version. After I looked at all these sites I noticed that most of them are asking anywhere between 2 to 4 $ per user per month for the services that they are offering.
Assuming Firefox 3 will help alleviate the issue of off line access I am sure there is a big opportunity for a company to offer all these services under a single sign on and a common interface with a pricing scheme like this:
- no matter what you are using your encrypted remote hard drive the storage should cost you around 0.5$ per GB per user per month.
- basic services which will be used by individuals and companies like Email, Contacts, Instant Messaging, Calendar, Tasks, Information Organizer (something like Google notebook and docs), Photos, should cost you 1$ per service per user per month.
- advanced services like Project Management, Document Management, Clients management, Sales Funnel should cost you 2$ per service per user per month.
- the client should be able to buy credit in 10-20$ increments and then should be able to use the credit however he wants it, enabling and disabling services, increasing and decreasing the storage space according to his needs.
You could have let’s say Email, Calendar and Instant Messaging with 4 GB storage space for 5$ per month without the lack of privacy or adverts in or around your email. I know I would pay these amounts for this kind of services if I would be sure my data is private and encrypted at all times.
Waiting for your comments
Yes, this is definitely something that is lacking. Google seemed to have some plans in this area when they were demoing their corporate stuff last year, it was very basic however.
I must say that Zimbra looks to be impressive and easy for end-users to navigate. There is an open-source version that should be free of charge but lacks subscriptions and support. So once setup on your Linux server I guess you’re good to go. The other issue then would be having enough server space and bandwidth.
I’m still looking for a decent project manager though
Open WorkBench, DotProject & co just don’t do it for me.
When I think about companies like Rapidshare are charging something like $20 /quarter just for their storage service so the prices you quote sound very reasonable.
You should check http://www.devshop.com This seems the first decent project management oriented towards software companies
I’d be interested to get your input on BlueTie’s offering in this area.
Agree that finding a good Web-Based project management tool is very difficult. We have done extensive research in terms of online project management and tried several. We weren’t satisfied with any and continue to use MS Project for now.
I’ve took a look at the bluetie free version around one year ago. At that time I was annoyed about the similarity with Outlook (I consider Outlook a little bit outdated) and the fact that I had to get all sort of offers for travel and hotel bookings which for me was nothing more than spam at that stage.
I’ve looked now at your bluetie pro demo. If you make your application more google like, add something similar with google docs and then in the future create some web based project management tool you have a winner.
Make sure your privacy policy includes something like “your data is at all time encrypted and we are not able to see the content” and implement that policy.