« Selling Through Distribution. | Main | Marketing Strategy, Financial Strategy...Or No Strategy At All. »
November 18, 2008
What Is An Application? iGoogle and Beyond.
This is the first in what will become a series of posts regarding the evolution of software applications and its relation to . I am very interested in the changes, in part because we deliver a number of applications tageting sales channel partners (i.e dealers, distributors, etc) for corporate clients, and have noticed how increasingly difficult it is to get the focused-attention of sales teams. Tough economic times are not going to help.
To fight "sales dis-attention", most companies use typical "sales" techniques...make the information into a game, throw lots of promotional contests up against the wall...and the list goes on. In reality, the answer is no defined by games or gimmicks (although they have a place). Especially in tough economic times, the focus needs to be on determining what "real" value is, and in making user environments both interesting and useful. Of course, "interesting" and "useful" are both relative and personal -- one size does not fit all users.
Which leads to what is an application today? Look at the Google Apps/iGoogle environment and you can see nascient world of new applications -- customer-configurable modules in a shell that let a user define "value" in their terms. Data feeds and tools are supplied as required, but users build the final screen.
Is this "usable" in classic terms? Perhaps not, but new Gen Y workforce entrants have grown up in this world, and even boomers are quickly adapting to software spaces where they can "mix their own." Classic definitions of delivering applications to employees and customers need not apply.
For us, this new environment is partly a technical challenge, but even more, it is a cultural one -- most customers are not only unfamiliar with the chnages, but are not informationally ready to support this new era. But the trend is well-defined and the future is closer than you think.
Posted by jcioban at November 18, 2008 11:44 AM
Trackback Pings
TrackBack URL for this entry:
http://www.freshsqueezedmarketing.com/cgi-bin/mt-tb.cgi/118.
