Alec Saunders SquawkBox

Between Google Talk, and Vonage’s S-1 filing, VoIP is hot news these days.  A whole bunch of my favorite bloggers have been on the front pages of the Wall Street Journal over the last two days, including Jeff Pulver, Andy Abramson, and Jon Arnold.  Congrats guys!

• August 25th, Talk of the Internet.  Andy’s long distance romance with his fiancee made this one!
• August 26th, Market for Internet Calling, Once Tiny, Get’s Growded Fast.

Wendy Kennedy has a great post (Sizzle without Steak) on developing positioning.  You can’t position your product without understanding your customer, their needs, and how your product meets those needs.  She offers the classic formula: "For customer X, we offer Y, which gives benefit Z."  - what Jonathan Roberts and Rich Tong used to call the "XYZ’s" in our internal meetings at Microsoft. 

Many companies understand positioning at a high level, but then fail on execution.  They know the XYZ’s, but then can’t translate that into messaging.  One of my favorite tools is a messaging framework.  They’re easy to construct, and literally drive every communication vehicle you have from the web, to press releases, brochures, powerpoint presentations, and so on. 

When building a positioning framework, my favorite route is to work from the bottom up. 

1. Start by making a list of all the features and benefits of your product.  Grab your development team, product managers, and marcomms folks, get a big whiteboard, and just start writing them down. 
2. Next, group those features and benefits into no more than three categories of benefits.  My favorite formula for grouping is Rich Tong and John Zagula’s Awesome, Awesome, Doesn’t Suck.  Try to come up with two categories that have the features that will compel your customer to buy, and a third category that explains that using the product will be painless.  Awesome, Awesome, Doesn’t Suck.
3. Finally, write the overarching "For customer X, we offer Y, which gives benefit Z".

Two things are going to happen when you go through this process. 

The first is that you’re going to find that some of the benefits you thought were important just don’t fit the messaging you’re developing.  Either your over-arching message is incorrect, or the benefit doesn’t matter.   Do not shoe-horn the benefit message in somewhere where it doesn’t make sense.  You simply dilute your message.

The second thing that will happen is that you will find (as if it were magic!) that suddenly the chore of writing copy is dramatically easier.  Web sites, powerpoint slides, etc will practically write themselves.

So, what are they XYZ’s of your product?

Over on Om Malik’s blog this morning he has a guest post from Robert Young titled Google, the Ultimate Deflator.  It’s Google vs Microsoft, with Google as the "free" Microsoft killer.  

Legions of others have died on that hill.

Let’s start out with the assertion that Google’s business plan is to replace Microsoft.  Young says that the future is a utility based computing model, with dumb terminals attached, presumably advertising driven, since Google’s big innovation has been the development of a viable ad-supported business model for "free". 

How will this utility model handle applications that demand rich clients?  Games, media-editing, office productivity?  How will it deal with enterprise IT departments who wish to develop in-house IT applications, and control their own data?  How will they compensate the channel that supports and maintains the millions of small businesses who have customized in-house CRM requirements, or need support from a local VAR? Google’s biggest business model strength (the advertising model), doesn’t lend itself well to legions of consultants making a living from partnerships with them.

What Google and Microsoft both see is that there is a large market for web-based applications.  Developers will support the richest platform, and the winner of that platform battle will win the war.  Google is attracting eyeballs today, which will bring developers.  What they must do to capitalize on those eyeballs is to develop a rich platform those developers can exploit.  What is Google’s answer to .NET? 

Google’s strategy isn’t a Microsoft killer.  They might blunt, or perhaps even cap, Microsoft’s growth on the web.  They won’t displace the OS and office apps already on my desktop.