Surviving the Corporate World While Drifting On The Web

When you are a startup, you should sell cheap for two reasons:
  1. Product is new
  2. Your cost is still low. This will kill away the bigger players with a lot of resources but requirements for high profit margins.
Basically, at this point of time, your competitors are those big companies with a lot of resources. Thus, if the problem that you are trying to solve is a solid one, then they are interested. Sell to corporate is a good idea. Try to just sell to a few big corporates so that you don't have to worry about support so much, as well as liaison. But the problem with corporate sales is that it depends on trends, because corporate sales is dependent on budget. This is so oblivious from the case of Apple iphone, Google free software and etc. They are all trying to build a brand into the corporate world, which Microsoft is still pretty much a monopoly. Same thing goes to Sun Microsystem, who has been working hard to create trends for the following areas:
  • Open source
  • ZFS
  • Identity Management
  • Cloud Computing

You have to create a trend and the only faster way is through the web.

However, about the web, there is an equally tasking challenge, which is to have "the need for speed". See, as we mentioned, for corporate sales, there is a culture. The big guys will set the trend, and corporate will slowly adopt it, it will all spawn from the USA. The new tech adoption rate in Malaysia is about 5 years behind, this is actually a good thing for local vendors; you got time to plan for it.

For the web, everybody levels across the world. If Americans are using the latest Windows Live Messenger, Malaysians are too.

This is the game which Google is gamed at and is better at compared to Microsoft.