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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 spa

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.

tptacek 18y ago
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.
- nir 18y ago
  I've never used either product, it does seem like an application where customers would be willing to pay to get better accuracy, especially business clients. Obviously, Google might improve their solution and offer similar quality for free. It's definitely possible, but judging from their recent performance it's not as "game over" as it would seem in the days of Gmail and Google Maps.
- bk 18y ago
  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 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).
  - aditya 18y ago
    BTW: Gmail for the enterprise comes with 24/7 customer support: http://www.google.com/apps/intl/en/business/details.html#b7 http://www.google.com/apps/intl/en/business/details.html#b7
    - seekely 18y ago
      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 :)
      - aditya 18y ago
        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!
    - 18y ago
- skmurphy 18y ago
  Simulscribe has an 800 number and support you can talk to. For firms where this is a mission critical service I think Simulscribe will remain a viable. Google doesn't have the strongest brand for services to business. I would think Fedex/Kinko, UPS, or Intuit (and even IBM) would be more highly respected by many of firms currently relying on Simulscribe/Phonetag.
- wyclif 18y ago
  I agree that he has plenty of room to compete, but re: 'handwaving', this jumped out at me, too: Google’s transcription is very low accuracy vs. SimulScribe’s technology He's missing the Good Enough principle: "but we have X feature!!!" That might put him over the top in B2B, but not B2C.

tptacek 18y ago

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.

nir 18y ago
I've never used either product, it does seem like an application where customers would be willing to pay to get better accuracy, especially business clients. Obviously, Google might improve their solution and offer similar quality for free. It's definitely possible, but judging from their recent performance it's not as "game over" as it would seem in the days of Gmail and Google Maps.
bk 18y ago
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 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).
- aditya 18y ago
  BTW: Gmail for the enterprise comes with 24/7 customer support: http://www.google.com/apps/intl/en/business/details.html#b7 http://www.google.com/apps/intl/en/business/details.html#b7
  - seekely 18y ago
    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 :)
    - aditya 18y ago
      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!
  - 18y ago
skmurphy 18y ago
Simulscribe has an 800 number and support you can talk to. For firms where this is a mission critical service I think Simulscribe will remain a viable. Google doesn't have the strongest brand for services to business. I would think Fedex/Kinko, UPS, or Intuit (and even IBM) would be more highly respected by many of firms currently relying on Simulscribe/Phonetag.
wyclif 18y ago
I agree that he has plenty of room to compete, but re: 'handwaving', this jumped out at me, too: Google’s transcription is very low accuracy vs. SimulScribe’s technology He's missing the Good Enough principle: "but we have X feature!!!" That might put him over the top in B2B, but not B2C.