From: Emlyn O'regan (oregan.emlyn@healthsolve.com.au)
Date: Tue Jun 03 2003 - 18:26:39 MDT
Adrian Tymes wrote:
>
> Nice one.
>
Thanks.
> --- Emlyn O'regan <oregan.emlyn@healthsolve.com.au>
> wrote:
> > How does it take off? I'm pretty fuzzy on this;
> > basically, you'd need to get
> > accepted by social groups a bit at a time. Phone
> > companies could sell it as
> > a feature of newer devices. Hopefully it would be
> > hugely attractive to
> > twenty-somethings, as a start.
>
> Interoperability with the other popular scheduling
> apps
> might help a lot - but beware what happened when the
> IM
> world tried that. (Companies changing the specs
> withoutbnotice, specifically to reject competitors'
> compatible products. A good reverse-engineering team,
> monitoring the latest releases of and patches for,
> that
> which you want to be compatible with would help.) If
> you could pull this off, though, that could easily get
> your foot in the door - or, at least, convince
> competitors to adopt the same features. (Extropic
> goal
> met, even if the business would probably only earn
> minor profits at best.)
>
I forgot to mention that. A good start would be to have an import/export
function with a users' desktop copy of Outlook. That way a corporate user
can log onto the HotSchedule site, sync with his corporate outlook (via a
downloadable activex probably; it'd just talk com to the local copy of
outlook, and so sysadmins need be none the wiser).
Maybe there's a way to keep a corporate outlook schedule and a web site in
sync, if you had the blessing of the system owners (such that they'd be
prepared to install custom software to do the integration)? I'd assume
that'd be a very small minority of users until you'd already won the main
game.
About compatibility; in the case of Outlook, the product is open enough
(iirc) via com automation interfaces, to talk to it at a very high level.
It's not the same as the reverse engineering IM protocol game; there is no
attempt by MS to close it's desktop products.
And there's not even much need to compete against MS. It'd probably be no
problem to sell the thing to them once it was doing well. The extropic goal
would already be met by then (ubiquitous personal roaming network access);
once it is met, we are done. Selling it would more than meet any goals of
profit :-)
Emlyn
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