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Initial reaction: Zenter is dead in the water even if it has more features. Google's brand name alone will be enough to propel it to the top and Google obvious
by veritas 20y ago
Initial reaction: Zenter is dead in the water even if it has more features. Google's brand name alone will be enough to propel it to the top and Google obviously has the technical muscle to make up ground pretty damn fast.
- brlewis 20y agoI disagree. Calendars have a large social component; creating presentations does not. If Zenter has features that appeal to people who create presentations, then it will do well. Using the same calendar system others use helps. Using the same presentation system mostly doesn't.
- jkush 20y agoGreat point. I hope it's true for Zenter.
- brett 20y agoThat may be true of how people currently use presentation software, but inside of organizations people share decks and slides very frequently and it's a pain. Presentation software probably should be highly collaborative even if existing options are not.
- JMiao 20y agoI agree, but how does Google leverage their existing products and promote collaboration with presentation software? Google Calendar worked because planning and sharing events/meetings makes sense to be integrated with GMail. As I've said before, I think this is going to be a different story because, while collaboration brings a lot of value to presentation software users, I can't see a killer app that Google can leverage beyond Image Search that would make their product a must-have. Zenter has done a great job making a connected presentation app with a very slick Google Search-based image import tool. Pound for pound, I think Zenter has a fighting chance as long as it keeps innovating on the feature front. Don't forget that collaborative presentations will likely give rise to a slide sharing community (i.e. slideshare.net), so there's more to online presentation software than the app itself.
- JMiao 20y agoWeird how I got downmodded for furthering the discussion. I've been noticing a lot of this in the past week, don't know if it's related to the rush of new users in the past month. Small thing, but kind of annoying.
- veritas 20y agoGood point, but as long as Google provides the essentials for creating online presentations, it will win easily. Just ask someone out on the street who they'd trust more to do a good job with their presentations: Google or Zenter? My money is that the majority (by a large amount) will say Google simply because of the name. In reality, everyone on YCNews and TechCrunch are startup obsessed, tech obsessed early adopters. We have no problem choosing Zenter over Google if Zenter is a good product. Normal people, however, will, more often than not, gravitate towards Google.
- jason13 20y agoIt is not that the average person will trust google over zenter, as much as the average person, will not even know that zenter exists. Its hard to give someone a chance, if you don't even know they exist.
- JMiao 20y agoI think you're thinking in the right direction. You may also consider how e-mail and calendar use cases are tied closely together. I'm not sold on how Google can leverage their offerings (aside from better image searching) to make as strong of a case in presentation software as they did with online calendars.