Web Coder Plus

Well, still no news really; 29 hours and still no data. But then it’s free, so what am I complaining about? Well, it sounds like the old paying Urchin customers are suffering from the same lack of data as the rest of us.

A Limited Beta

I remember when Google released Gmail in its first limited beta. So very few people had it, and the few invitations that were around quickly gained in value, causing an entire new business opportunity to spring up practically overnight. When I finally got my Gmail account, the service was solid, barely ever unavailable, and one struggled to believe it was still in beta.

So why now mass release this analytics program, that would obviously be a sensation, and bring this service to its knee’s? Surely a small release to existing AdWords customers (keeping the paying customers on their stable, and separate, servers), would be better? Once up and running, maybe offer the paying customers the opportunity to move over and stop paying, but also giving them the opportunity to stay separate from the new free service. Eventually a month or two down the line you could have everyone on it, and once stable, the remaining customers could be “forcibly” made to stop paying.

Paying Customers Pay

I know Google, being the “Long Tail” company that they are, are more interested in the little guy; the long tail doesn’t pay all of their bills however. The guys who payed $199 a month for their analytics programs, are almost certainly the guys who spent a lot more on advertising, and Google is facing the very real possibility of losing them.

The little guys however would wait, they didn’t have analytics before, and waiting a few months while the kinks were sorted out wouldn’t drive them away. If anything, the wait would probably make them all the more keen; and I have no doubt that some first time users will have been driven away by the rocky start.

I think Google has a great product here (from what little I’ve seen), but some of the decision makers at Google are getting just a little to eager. Maybe they need to sit back and take a few deep breaths next time.

This entry was posted on Tuesday, November 15th, 2005 at 7:22 pm and is filed under General. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.