Haut Tech

How many times have you seen software marketing pursuing “feature comparisons” – either as a method to breakdown version options or as a comparison against competitive brands? Does “thousands” or “millions” of times sound more accurate? Can you navigate feature list comparisons?

People say that marketing for “cloud services” are really over the top right now – selling a lot more promise than can be delivered. If that’s true, social media is somewhere out in the stratosphere of hype – pushed into orbit by leaders like Twitter and Facebook – I’ve heard many people say if they were trying to avoid reading yet another article on the wonders of connecting to “communities” on the web.

In our first two podcasts for Haut Tech Conversations we covered service and pricing. Both subjects are critical for SaaS businesses to consider and understand in the context of their product. In the podcast we did yesterday, we went into yet another critical area – Marketing!

SaaS is not a “one-size-fits-all” business. There are many options now for platforms and services you can use and the number is increasing every day. A lot of the information available is laden with marketing hype. How do you make the right decisions?

In Part 1 of this list we covered the first five points – so if you haven’t read that already, I encourage you to go and read that first. For everyone else – here’s the remaining five points in my hit parade.

In this article we’re picking up where we left off in Part 1 on our expansion of the podcast we did with Steve Plunkett, CTO of Servitizer and our panel of industry experts – Luis Aburto, CEO of Scio Consulting, Mikael Blaisdell of MBlaisdell & Associates and Lincoln Murphy of Sixteen Ventures. If you haven’t read the first part of our series already – please start there – because the background for the conversation is there.

The question I pose in the title of this article is the theme of the podcast we did this month for Haut Tech Conversations. It turned out to be quite a conversation and you can download it and listen to it in its entirety here. Our panel and guest brought up so many excellent points that I’m going to take the time to summarize and extend them in this “post interview” so they are not lost.

I really enjoy working with entrepreneurs – helping them flesh out their ideas and making them successful. But too often I have to ask them – “What is going to make someone look at your product? How will they find it?”

Late last week there was a lot of buzz around the announcement that the president and chief executive at Salesforce, Steve Cakebread and two of his top sales executives had left the company. It has generated blog entries with provocative titles (Is the Bloom Off the SaaS Rose? by Jeff Kaplan) and several sober assessments about the general effect the down economy is having on IT spending

The number of negative predictions for the future of SaaS and Cloud Computing have reached a crescendo in recent weeks. There has also been a significant push back from both pundits and bloggers “in the field.” Is SaaS and cloud computing just more hype? Has it reached the level of being a “must consider” alternative?