Archive for May, 2009

Microsoft – Windows 7 to drive Online App usage

Friday, May 8th, 2009 by deri

With the past record of Microsoft’s business practise, such as lost court cases in the EU for misuse of monopoly power with billion dollar fines, I guess no one is surprised at the hard line Microsoft takes at most every opportunity.

But this time, I wonder if they live to regret it sooner rather than later.

Windows 7 will have a Starter edition – a cripple-ware version, priced to be cheap enough to be bundled with NetBooks. I guess they had to do something to stop Ubuntu and other Linux versions becoming dominant in that market.

But the cripple-ware limit is a show stopper – only 3 applications can be used by the user. Yup, just 3. So that’s your browser, your email and maybe a music player…and you’re done. Some one emails you a photo you want to edit… tough, close something first. You want to run Openoffice, or a stripped down word processor..nope, close something first.

And what about that the cool new tool for desk-top apps that are kind of the step-brother to javascript/web apps -will they count as an app each too?

Ouch. Those are nice Web 2.0 kind of applications -the open source Titanium is looking like it’s getting nicer, Adobe Air is there of course

But instead of shelling out for Microsoft’s new idea of upgrading online your Windows 7 to something sensible…. won’t users just be more tempted than ever to try out online hosted Apps like GoogleDocs.

Windows 7 also seems to have caused hiccups with Intel, as several Notebook makers are nw admitting that their models won’t all quite work with Windows 7 – the ability to run XP virtually on topon Windows 7 won’t work.
Not only is XP much more loved than Vista… but Windows 7 appears to be losing more compatibilty to the past, so that some folks with old Windows apps they still want to use, really do need the XP virtual machine on top.

So when shopping for netbooks and laptops in the next 3 months, be sure to check it’ll everything – check down to the Intel processor model.

Posted in Browser monitoring, RIA Monitoring, SaaS monitoring, Web monitoring | Comments Off

Lost sales – not anymore

Friday, May 1st, 2009 by deri

It sounds like it should be the first metric we all want from our website – what’s the money value of Lost Sales due to problems on the site this month? And how do we fix them, and not lose the same again next month?

I’m talking about problems in the final delivery – the website platform itself – where we’ve brought buyers to the site and then let them down through any number of root causes: sporadic technology glitches, treacly slow experience for maybe 10% of users, code upgrades that killed functionality for a few precious hours and so on.

Taking the old management adage ‘if you don’t measure it, you can’t manage it’- I’ve just seen how one marketer helped their London HQed retailer do just that – and show the ROI of a bite-sized project within 8 weeks.

‘Not my department, not my problem’ a marketer may say when the word technology comes up.

But these issues hit the company bottom line, and do affect brand and likelihood of repeat visits, and do make it hard to work out campaign returns – maybe high drop-out was the result of a treacly slow site that week.

Marketing success inevitably causes traffic peaks, and every site has it’s capacity limits – 10% extra visitors per minute at peak, can translate to maybe 30% more errors, and/or be 30% slower on the major shopping journeys.

Having finished just this process with a major retail site this quarter – the resounding praise the team are getting internally tells me that the process we went through with them was a first, and is giving them an edge they didn’t have before.

And it wasn’t hard or expensive to do.

We had already put in place 24/7 monitoring of the core User Journeys – multi-page routes where our electronic ‘mystery shopper’ would visit the site every 5 minutes and perform the money_making tasks of:

  • CheckOut
  • Add to Basket- via navigation
  • Add to Basket – via search

With the help of a little cleverness in our web monitoring engine, it was able to plot the Lost Sales each day.

Bob’s your uncle – real-time indication of the lost sales due to web site overload, technical hitches, planned maintenance etc.

Suddenly, those graphs became hot news – several of the commercial managers requested portal-logins so they could see for themselves. “This is what web monitoring should be about,” commented one “with all the data feeds we get and graphs that I’ve always ignored… at last something that makes business sense…journeys we relate to”

Having those graphs with Money (£) as the Y-axis, made it really easy at the monthly meeting between the business and tech teams; all minds focused on the bigger losses.

And of course, the ongoing graphs gave the tech teams quick feedback, as or whether the problem was resolved.

All in all, a nice ROI story that makes sense even (or especially) in a credit crunch year.

Posted in Lost Sales monitoring, Missing Product Monitoring, Web monitoring | Comments Off