Gas-x: Potential Cure for TechCrunch

I’m worried. As I have been following my friendfeed and reading various posts, one particular topic keeps coming to mind. I am concerned that TechCrunch becoming too mainstream. Don’t get me wrong, I read or at least skim over nearly every single post they publish, paying particular attention to the ones by Michael Arrington, but I feel as if there’s some unhappiness brewing with true early adopters.

Really, this all stems from a book I read a little while ago called The Tipping Point: How Little Things Can Make a Big Difference by Malcolm Gladwell. It talks of different classes of people and which classes you really need to really become big. In particular, he writes about the company Airwalk (summary here), and how they tracked and worked with early adopters to find industry trends (in this case from the skateboarding crowd) to build a sizeable market for their skater shoes. These shoes became very popular and actually broke out of their intended market and became more mainstream for a while. Rather than just selling the shoes at locations where the true hardcore skateboarder would shop, they began offering them in more mainstream stores for everyone. This ended up alienating the real skaters because now everyone had the same shoes as they did and they were no longer a special part of the early adopters. As a result, Airwalk lost its bead on this group and fairly quickly most of the market share they had previously gained.

Parallels can begin to be seen between the Airwalk story and TechCrunch. Whereas they used to be trying to appeal to a smaller, more niche audience of entrepreneurs, venture capitalists, and the true tech geek, they have began branching out to reach a larger audience that falls outside these groups, and while their posts are still very relevant, I have started to feel as if they are trying to appeal more to the mainstream. Now from a business standpoint for a news source, there’s nothing wrong with expanding your readership. In fact, that’s probably very much a priority. But in an industry where many look forward to and enjoy the feel of a startup, where everyone knows everyone else in the company and there aren’t really egos to worry about, it seems TechCrunch may be getting a bit to big for its britches and while more people may be reading their news posts, I believe fewer of them may belong to the niche they originally wanted to serve.

Two things have lead me to this belief. First off, about a week or so ago, Michael Arrington twittered the following “screw hacker news, we’re banning them. http://snurl.com/27bhf”. The included link references a discussion that was occuring about banning news posts made by TechCrunch on the site Hacker News,
a site known to be frequented by many a new startup founder and technology geek. Arrington himself has even admitted to finding this site very useful in learning new information about what’s going on with new startups and yet TechCrunch seems to be evolving into something that many of the people he interacts with at HackerNews wouldn’t want to follow themselves. I worry that he might be losing this crowd.

A second thing that leads me to believe that trouble may be brewing for TechCrunch is the recent post that TC news posts will now be syndicated to the more mainstream news site WashingtonPost.com. The Washington Post, while being a great source of news, is meant for people outside the startup world… for the everyday people… not the innovators and developers and CEOs of the next wave of startups. With this larger audience to cater to now, I fear that future TC posts will become less information filled and more bloated with news that we in the startup world don’t care for.

In a business where you’re primary focus is with small startup companies that are breaking ground everyday in technology, to try to grow outside this niche is dangerous, especially because of the values of the original target audience. Kinda reminds me of how everyone wanted to work for Google when it had more of that “startupy” feel to it but as it became the corporate giant that it has interest from true techies has waned.

I believe technology insider Robert Scoble maintains a good approach to bringing quality content to the attention of his audience (the same one that TC targets), while also trying not to appear/become this great news breaking company. His method of doing interviews with startup founders (even the small ones) and subscribing and following thousands of people on Facebook, friendfeed, twitter, etc seems to keep him in the nitty-gritty of the startup world while still being able to learn about breaking news. As busy as he may be, he seems to make the time to get back to people who ask relevant questions and genuinely take an interest in the people he follows. This as compared to TC, where it’s seemingly impossible to get them to give you attention even though the company is more than just one blogger and reports of Arrington’s arrogance are known far and wide.

I truely hope this does not become the downfall of TechCrunch. I really do enjoy reading their posts and following the discussions that ensue. Arrington’s opinions of what’s going on are often spot on and I really respect him and the company he’s built. I just believe that TC may be going down a bad path and hope that highlighting some of the reasons why may help bring it to their attention.

Note to Arrington: This post is not meant to be trollish or put you or your great company down. As I stated before, I truly respect you and your work. I merely wanted to point potential pitfalls that may be coming your way in a hope that you can avoid them. Good luck and I hope to continue to read the quality posts that you and your team have been known for.

I’m going to lose my job… and so might you!

Over the last few weeks I’ve realized something. This might not be news to you, but it defiantly was to me… my job (and the jobs of many other IT professionals) is going to disappear in the next 10 to 15 years and maybe sooner. Sure, they’ll be some Systems Administrators and definitely some network engineers, but no where near as many as there are now. Here’s my thinking…

The IT industry is currently about applications both on the PC and the server side. These applications and the machines they run on have to be set up and maintained, whether its a SQL server, a DNS server, a file server, a collaboration server, etc. Its the job of people like me to plan for, deploy, and maintain the computers that provide and can access these services. Typically, each company has their own private set of these servers and so there are a copious number of jobs in the industry, but there won’t be for long.

The with the help of Web 2.0, the technology industry is moving away from applications hosted in house to applications provided as a service. We see this in the slow transition from applications like Microsoft Office to Google Apps or Zoho Office, from Microsoft SharePoint to Basecamp, from Oracle CRM Applications to SalesForce. As more Web 2.0 companies are created, more applications will become services and so require fewer in house resources, but its going to take a little while.

Right now, there are some limitations to prevent this from happening quickly. First, there’s the problem of bandwidth, but this is steadily being solved with the deployment of low cost, high-speed connections. Next, there’s the problem of web services not being able to function when off-line, but this was somewhat fixed with the creation of Google Gears and other utilities like it. Third, there’s the heavy lifting that is required of some applications such as those required in photo, sound, and movie editing. The beginnings of a fix for this can be seen in platforms like Adobe Air and Microsoft Silverlight, which still make heavy use of web services but shift the CPU intensive functions to the clients PC.

There are also new initiatives like Microsoft Mesh, that will help facilitate the transition by making existing applications and storage available on any platform/device from anywhere but this is just a transitive step towards the inevitable.

Further proof…As I’m sure many of you are aware, more and more companies are turning to “Managed IT Services” for everything from Spam protection (think Postini) to Hosted Exchange. Companies typically love these because they are able to have enterprise class features without the enterprise price tag. Don’t let that misnomer fool you. These “services” are the just the beginning of what’s coming and the fact that small, mid-sized, and even large companies are eating them up is just further example of the inevitable.

In the end there will just be the browser or what we would consider a super browser, robust enough to do the heavy lifting of the most intensive applications. Companies will shed their servers in favor of the more cost effective service model for all their computing needs… a CRM service for CRM, an accounting service for accounting, a collaboration service for working together, an online office service for productivity… the list goes on. These disparate services (initially until they are bought up by big companies) will be linked together through a company portal (which will also be a service) that has links to the various services needed by the employees. File storage, when not handled by the specific service being used, will be its own separate service that the others link into. No more VPN connections to the office; a browser from anywhere in the world is all that’s necessary. Troubleshooting problems will become something repetitive like, “Can you get to the internet?… Yeah… Okay, then you should be good.”, requiring little to no expertise to fix.

There will still be IT jobs. The main jobs will be working as a desktop support technician who’s main responsibility is to make sure the company computers can get to the internet (and this may not even be necessary), working at a web service company maintaining the companies infrastructure (the only thing that would resemble the high-end IT job of today) or maintaining the network between the two. That’s it. No need for the many Senior Systems Administrator positions that exist today.

BUT THERE IS HOPE! You (and I) are currently in the industry going through the very beginnings of this change and so we have both the insight into the current applications that will become services and the technical know-how to run these new service companies. We must use this knowledge to build the service companies that will be the corporate IT infrastructures of the future. If we don’t… someone else surely will.

(Reposted from Personal Blog)

This is the DMarc!

Hi all,

So I decided that I’d start a new blog, one separate from my personal blog, to discuss more serious topics including posts about various startups in the web 2.0/3.0 industry, my point of view on problems that many entrepreneurs must face (including me), and my opinions on posts from other blogs. I hope to make this blog a composite of not just standard text but also video posts as well. I’m not looking to be the next TechCrunch or Scoble, but just share some of my thought and hopefully learn some from yours.

A bit about the blog name:

First off, I come from an IT background and in IT, the “Demarc” (or Demarcation Point) is the point in an internet connection where the service provider (think Verizon) is no longer responsible for the connection and it is up to the in-house IT staff to make sure everything works from there on. Its the point at which the “Them” and the “Us” interface and connect. I feel that such a concept applies here as it is a place where I will interface with the world (and hopefully some readers).

Secondly, its a personal “Demarc” for me as I have previously be shy about voicing my opinions about topics and getting myself out there for fear of looking like a fool and ruining any chance I had a successful start-up in the future. I’m done with that and realize its better to be out there and have people publicly disagree with you than not to be out there at all. “All press is is good press” as they say.

Lastly, the blog name “DMarc’d” is actually my initials and my middle name: Daniel Marc Delphin, so I thought it was fitting.

Anyway, without further ado, here’s DMarc’d… I hope you enjoy it as much as I do (and link backs are appreciated too).