On Tue, 29 Jul 2014 18:05:11 -0700 Ted Mittelstaedt <t...@ipinc.net> wrote:
> > Eventually something will supplany MSFT and yes, even > > Google will fade eventually. > People used to say that about General Motors & Ford Motor Company 100 > years ago. Except for unconscionable intervention by the US and Canadian governments, General Motors would have been history. And Ford has nowhere near the dominance it had 100 years ago. [...] > Email providing IT NOT A NICHE MARKET. That is crazy and false. It > is a commodity market. Yes, exactly. And there is *no way* you can compete in a commodity market with behemoths. So you need to find some differentiating niche that you can service that the behemoths either cannot service or don't care to service. [...] > This is why your "we only want to sell to the smart people" plays so > well. It's absolutely spot on that same line of sales baloney, and > since your small you can make it believable, as an added bonus. It works for me. > That is one of the other reasons that this perception that Gmails > spam filtering is superior. Gmail's spam filtering is at least as good as stock SpamAssassin, and honestly I think it's better. You can achieve equal quality with SpamAssassin if you're willing to work at it. But it does take a lot of work. > Because the public swallows the advertising that their product IS > unique and special, and NOT commodity, because when weak people are > yelled at with the same thing every day, they start to believe it > must be true. I don't think that's why most customers use Gmail or O-365. IMO, they use those products because they've heard of them. Brand awareness is key in a commodity market. > Email today IS COMMODITY. We are all selling the same product. This > baloney about there being a special niche in email is just baloney. You are confusing a niche market with a niche product. Yes, email is commodity, but there are indeed niche markets. We service several of them quite nicely: Managed Service Providers, educational institutions, European national research and education networks. These niche markets care about things that Microsoft and Google don't offer. The Achilles heel of Google and Microsoft is that they cannot provide decent customer service and remain profitable. We and most small companies can and that's a huge differentiator. For example, we recently had a support ticket created by someone who wasn't a customer of ours, but who was trying to email a customer of ours and got a bounce. Within 20 minutes, we'd tracked down the email, found out what happened, and reported back. Both the requestor and our customer were impressed with the care we took to track down the email and resolve the problem. Try that with Google sometime... Regards, David.
