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December 19, 2005
Oh, this is just fabulous
Ya gotta love this opening line from this article in today's NYT (registration required ... but, then, you knew that).
AMAZON, Walmart.com and other online retailing giants have always had upstarts nipping at their heels. But the little guys are starting to bite harder.
There's a lot to interest in this article (I'm reminded of what Mary had to say about the sophistication gap between micros who "get" the Net and those who don't), including the prediction from Forrester Research that small online retailers will pull in 45% of holiday spending dollars. But the part that caught my was this:
Liz Herbert, a Forrester analyst, said the biggest change in e-commerce software in the last few years was that it no longer comes in a box. It is delivered online, so businesses do not need technology specialists to install and run the company's system.
This is where the microbusiness software market is going, in case you haven't figured that out yet. Because micros don't have in-house geeks, selling technological capability is more attractive to this market than selling software-product-in-a-box.
This was one of the 2006 microbusiness trends I predicted for Anita last week — that is, the heating up of the heating up of the microbusiness software market — but I didn't really expect it to start making headlines in the NYT quite this soon.
Still, I'll admit it, I'm human. It's fun to be right.
Now all the software mavens have to do to cash in is to make sure that they don't offer those micros more bells and whistles than they need at prices they can't afford but are required to pay because those bells and whistles cost money. Stay tuned.
Posted by The Journal Blogger at December 19, 2005 08:36 AM
