The Problems of Competition: The Cost of Switching and Sequential Building Blocks

And the winner of the most convoluted and awkward blog post title of 2009 thus far goes to……….this post.

This morning I was going through a bunch of unread emails, unsubscribing from lists and deleting junk. I then saw an email from a service called Soocial. The email let me know that the service had completed a full backup of my gmail address book. I vaguely remember doing something like that, and I definitely didn’t remember what Soocial was all about. I went to the site and found that soocial is a universal address book that synchs contacts between macs, blackberries, gmail, phones and outlook. They promise "hassle-free" contact management, and even go so far as to have a cartoonish photo of David Hasslehoff on their site:

Hassle-Free Contacts

I took about five minutes to check out the service, and it looks like it is as promised. But I had an overwhelming "so what?" feeling. Why? Because I already use something else to accomplish the same task.

The Cost Of Switching

Without knowing it, I was doing a cost-benefit analysis and decided that the cost of importing my contacts and the risk associated with giving my login credentials to yet another service was just too much. The switch wasn’t worth it. Which made me ask the next question: what would soocial need to have in order for me to make the change? Then the question moved into more general grounds: what does any competitor need to have to get users to switch from a service they’re currently using?

Think about it for a second. If you use flickr, what would a new competitor need to offer in order to get you to join and bail on flickr? If you use twitter, what would the new microblogging/status tool need to have to get you?

The first answer to this question is: well, it depends. I mean, if we’re talking about a "social" service that derives its value on the community of users, that’s one thing. A new competitor to twitter could have any feature you can think of, but if it didn’t have people using it, it wouldn’t matter. But let’s ignore the social stuff for a minute. Let’s talk specifically about services that are kind of in-itself offerings. Things like contact management tools. Like text editors, blogging software, etc. Applications that matter to you and you alone regardless of what others say.

Let’s pretend you use MS Word. Price aside, what would a new word processing competitor need to have to get you to switch?

Sequential Building Blocks

Here’s an example I had today. Since switching over to using a mac, I’ve been looking for a decent alternative to Windows Live Writer. I absolutely love WLW and I just can’t find something comparable for the mac. I was so used to it that I had all the shortcuts memorized and composing a post was a breeze. I’ve tried everything I can find for the mac, but nothing does it for me.

I’ve been using Qumana for the last two months, and it’s decent. It’s very basic, but it gets the job done. But when I hear of another blog editor for the mac, I’m always willing to check it out. I heard about a similar product called Blogo and had to give it a try. The interface was really slick and simple, but it lacked some of the features I’d grown accustomed to in Qumana. Even though Blogo had features that Qumana lacked, I bailed.

Why? Sequential building blocks.

To me, a new competitor needs to have everything plus. That is, it needs to have all the features of the product I’m currently using along with additional features. Otherwise I’m out. Maybe I’m more impatient than the public at large, I’m not sure. But if someone comes up with an alternative to Excel, it better have everything excel has…..and more. Otherwise what’s the point?