

Startup Founder On Google Entering Their Market - ccarpenterg
http://blog.npost.com/2009/03/18/thank-you-google-thank-you-thank-you/

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mauricio
I think their determination is very commendable, but let's wait and see what
happens.

The important thing to note here is that Google is not just competing with
them now, they've commoditized the service altogether. This means that people
are going to be less likely to _ever_ want to pay for voicemail transcription.

~~~
patio11
The _real_ money is scaring TMobile et al that "This is the SMS of 2009. Your
customers are going to leave your cell phone and start taking calls on Google
Voice if you do not have this feature. That will cost you billions.

We have a solution. You can bill them $3 a month for it, added onto their
bill. They will pay it because they value their relationship with you (hah)
and they don't want to have to change phone numbers just to save $3 a month.

We'll license our technology to you for a cut of that $3 plus a piddling few
million a year. If you double the cut and guarantee a minimum of $STUPID_MONEY
per year, we'll even agree to avoid licensing this technology to any other
American cell provider, for as long as you maintain a growth rate of
STUPID_RATE%."

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mauricio
How long though before a company like Google throws their weight behind number
porting?

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10ren
He makes an interesting point that Google _hasn't_ been a category-killer, in
anything but search. Perhaps the most dangerous thing about them is the fear
they create in you, _making you give up._

 _Did Google Video kill YouTube?_

1\. market win: YouTube's advantage there was mass adoption/network effects...
which the article's SimulScribe doesn't seem to have yet.

2\. tech win: I'm a bit leery of touting technological prowess, because
through fast iteration anyone can catch up (especially if they have an example
to work towards - tech history is full of these stories). The crucial
exception is if the leading tech still isn't good enough. If that sounds
counterintuitive, read it as "has room for improvement". Because as the new
entrant catches up to where you were, you have moved ahead. The danger for you
is if your product is already perfect - then you have no where to run!

The other way of protecting a tech advantage is through patents. The article
doesn't mention patents, but perhaps that's because they create bad PR. People
don't like patents. Some people _hate_ patents. However, he's partnered with
IBM, and he's talking about technical advantage in difficult field. If his
tech really is that advanced, it's hard to believe he wouldn't have patents on
it.

However, none of that matters, because he anticipates that the carriers' fear
of google will drive them into his arms. He didn't say this, but an
acquisition seems likely to me. If not by a carrier, then by google itself.

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alain94040
Very good article. If you are in a market and Google is _not_ your competitor
yet, read it so you know what to do and what to look for when they enter your
market.

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jedberg
I wrote this on his blog:

I commend your resolve to continue, but there is one fatal flaw in your
argument: point 3.

Google has absolutely no intention of ever making money from their telecom
products. In fact, Google considers them a cost of business. Why? Because they
are trying to build the largest corpus of spoken text in the world. They are
simply collecting data. The purpose of that data is to build the best text to
speech algorithms in the world, so that they could then make it possible to
search for audio. For example, imagine the power of being able to search for a
spoken phrase in a youtube video.

So I don't ever expect them to shut down the services or charge for them. At
least not until they have text to speech down pat.

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gord
Google muscling in is a good thing, it means theres money to be made there.

Why not say "Were simply going to kill google, they are way too big and way
too slow. People will appreciate the extra depth of our offering and our
nimbleness, along with our highly attuned personal service. We don't have a
huge marketing budget, so people only use our product because its so damn
good."

One can also gain traction by marketing the venture as a "David versus
Goog^B^Bliath" battle - the public will empathize with the underdog.

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whughes
Remember this ad?
[http://www.macmothership.com/gallery/newads2/seriouslyIBM_l....](http://www.macmothership.com/gallery/newads2/seriouslyIBM_l.jpg)

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blasdel
I have an old GrandCentral account, and a large group of their original users
were homeless people that got free accounts as a part of a grant (don't
remember who paid).

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sgman
It's the classic "Paris Hilton at the Oscars" case.

That is, more people watch the oscars because Paris Hilton is there, even
though she is not likely to win one.

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vaksel
seems like the guy is trying to find some potential point where all things go
their way, where they might somehow attempt to compete with Google.

I just wish that companies would just admit that internet has such a giant
population, that you can build and grow a business from that 30-40% that have
no idea Google provides a competing service

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raptrex
I thought he was just happy that telephone companies will buy his speech to
text service/technology, which will make him rich

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paul7986
Would you not think someone owns the patent to such technology or it would be
a software patent & thus a bit useless?

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keltecp11
This is a fantastic article... sometimes there is a lot of room in markets for
competition. My favorite example is the Kayak.com example. They came into a
space that had a lot of competition and have done a well enough job that they
now are sitting quite pretty. Stay the course.

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tptacek
Really? Opposite response. Facing an existential threat to their business ---
by his own admission, GV is practically 1:1 with them on features, free vs.
paid, with his differentiator being "accuracy" --- what he's got is
handwaving. "Other people have gone up against us with free" (paraphrase);
yes, and those people didn't have the strongest brand on the Internet.

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bk
Gmail is free. People still pay for hosted email. If you get locked out of
gmail or they lose all your email, who are you going to call? Would you host
mission critical email that millions of dollars hinge on on gmail?

Even if that's addressed, in a huge market, a tiny market share can still be
huge. Opera has somewhere around 1% (non-mobile) browser market share, and
they still have millions of customers.

If there are 10M voice services customers, 1% is 100k. If you can charge
$10-30 per customer per month
(<https://apps.simulscribe.com/signup/register>), you've still got a
$12-36M/year business. For VCs this may be a zombie, but it's still a great
small business (a la 37signals).

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aditya
BTW: Gmail for the enterprise comes with 24/7 customer support:
<http://www.google.com/apps/intl/en/business/details.html#b7>

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seekely
From my experience, Google's customer support for it's paid Google Apps could
use a ton of improvement,to the point where I think it is a significant
weakness exploitable by companies with similar paid services and better
support. They are really difficult to contact and their support navigation
always frustratingly leads you to one of their help pages instead of a number
or email address to use. And if the problem is not a service outage/emergency,
you must go through email which takes days to get the typical generic and
unhelpful response.

I love all of Google's services, but I am/was incredibly frustrated that we
actually paid to use their services and then they left us out in the cold when
it came to a shortcoming of their infrastructure. We started with a domain for
Google Apps and purchased 6 accounts on the domain. A year or so into using
their service, we realized we needed to switch our primary domain from
ourhabit.com to habitindustries.com. Both the domains are owned by us, and
habitindustries.com was at the time setup as an alias on our ourhabit.com
domain. Turns out, Google Apps does not support the switch. And not only do
they not support it, there is no migration help to move emails or remove the
risk of losing email while you transfer over to the new primary domain. And
the real kicker? They made us pay for all 6 accounts again on the new primary
domain even though we would no longer would be using the old account. If you
aren't going to support a basic feature (which is called for again and again
and again on their forums), don't make us shell out another $50 per user to
mitigate it. Thank god we only had 6 users at the time.

Sorry for the rant, but seeing the claim of 24/7 customer support really set
me off :)

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aditya
whoa -- good to know, I was merely pointing it out since I know they do claim
to have 24/7 support, if it's useless then my point is invalid!

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furburger
its not even an issue of features. 99.99% of internet users have heard of
google. my guess is 0.001% have heard of simulscribe. this doesn't mean
simulscribe can't compete or doesn't have a kick-ass product, but users still
have to be able to find them.

i suspect the best way for simulscribe to compete with google is to be folded
into an entity that is well known, and has the marketing budget to remain in
the minds of potential users

