CogBlog

Google announced this week that they are now offering Urchin Analytics as a free tool to site owners everywhere. Earlier this year Google bought Urchin and promptly lowered the price from $495/month to $199/month. Now under a new name, Google Analytics, the service will be free to all for the first 5,000,000 page views/month. Google AdWords advertisers will have unlimited free service limits.

The main problem with this announcement was that it caught all current Urchin customers completely by suprise. The Urchin site went down, Google Analytics went up in it's place. Accounts stopped working, traffic stopped being recorded until updates were made to each and every customer site, links were broken on the Urchin/Google site.

It seems in their enthusiasm to paste the Google name on Urchin, Google completely overlooked many, many issues that should have been well thought through before flipping the switch. Now they've closed the new account sign-up until they can get their house in order.

By handling things they way they did Google has:

1. completely alienated their existing Urchin customer base
2. devalued their own product
3. generated huge PR, only to ensure the first experience of any new customer is a bad one
4. shown the business world that they have a lot of growing up to do as a company

Free services are great, but as a business that relies on partners like Google, I'd rather pay and expect good service for my money.

Microsoft provided a look at their new web-services strategy yesterday. Their online offerings will be used independently and in conjunction with their traditional offerings. The first products will be Windows Live, and Office Live. Each will extend and enhance their offline counterpart software.

Web-based services is not a new concept, but I'm sure the Microsoft announcement will have many people thinking much more seriously about it. You can see some of the products that will be offered through Windows Live here:

http://ideas.live.com

A lot of the initial offerings are just re-named existing products like search, and chat. I'd imagine that there may be more interesting tools in the Office Live set.

The thing that is great about web-services is that it provides a platform for independent developers to create things that are often more interesting than the original product. There is web-based software, where a complete application is provided for you, and then there are web-services where a framework is created that allows you a lot of flexibility with how you use the product, and ultimately even what the application will do and how it will be used.

For example, Google AdWords is basically web-based software that allows you to create and manage your online sponsored search campaigns. It is a very good application, and I think the best management interface of all the sponsored search properties. But, it doesn't do everything, so they offer the Google APIs that allow you to build your own application. API stands for Application Programming Interface and basically sets rules that say "if you send us x in just this certain way, we'll send back y". This will allow you to incorporate all the power of their system into a format and structure that you define.

It is all incredibly powerful, and more and more companies offer this kind of service. But, the service provider has to be willing to give up a certain amount of control, and I wonder if Microsoft is likely to succeed in this way.

Over at Marketing Sherpa there is an interesting little blurb from their recent East Coast b2b summit. Referring to SalesForce:

Everyone was either already using it, or strongly considering switching. Nobody was totally in love with it ... many swapped war stories of programming tweaks to make it work better for them. Mainly they wished the salesforce.com R&D staff paid more attention to marketer's needs (not just sales.)

That said, the pain marketers experienced integrating competitors' non-ASP CRM systems made salesforce.com look golden in comparison.

We've seen that kind of pain from our own clients. A CRM system integration can go on almost indefinitely, taking years to complete.