Extratasty is a "Web 2.0" site that lets you search and tag your favorite alcoholic drink recipes. Which means that it's easy to use, has high quality design, and uses "tags" as a form of navigation.
I'm coming to believe that all "web 2.0" really means is graphic design and information architecture that isn't insanely bad. A search on Google for "drink recipes" yields 13.5 million hits, yet I instinctively like the Extratasty site better than anything I've seen before because of its clean design and usability.
Continuing this train of thought, my brain now must debate two conflicting points of view: Firstly, as someone who works in product management and has run many big webdev efforts, I am absolutely thrilled at what might be called the "triumph of usability" (parenthetically, is there a usability-as-fascist-ideology meme out there waiting to be described). For years those of us working in the web have been frustrated by bad design, dumb clients, closed content strategies and general cluelessness in an uphill battle to make products that "work" in the broadest sense of the word.
Now, as a good product manager, I must switch hats and pull out the Excel, and call a meeting, and ask the obvious question -- is competitive differentiation based on design and usability sustainable. Put another way, if Citysearch hired 37 Signals to rework their crazily bad product would it make the Upcoming.orgs of the world quickly irrelevant. The entrepreneurs reading will quickly respond "but what about the network effects and the community we're building, and the APIs that let users extend our reach to their blogs?" Yes, good points all. So I will concede that if your Web 2.0 business can sustain a we're-not-clueless-based competitive advantage for long enough to get scale (which probably means 3-5 million users) you may have a business on your hands. Otherwise you have either a nice lifestyle business or an amazing proof of concept.
I've been enjoying your blog! Keep it up - always engaging to hear from PMs in the trenches.
You ask "is competitive differentiation based on design and usability sustainable?"
I say yes, but it's like any other competitive differentiator -- it can't be your only one, and it won't last forever. My product had a number of important differences from our competitors, among which were that a) it worked (some competitors didn't, or didn't work well), and b) it was an engaging environment to use with compared to its competitors.
We never used "ease of use" as a marketing differentiator, though. Instead we used other, more quantifiable differences such as the number of systems monitored, the number of monitoring fucntions, etc. Those got us in the door. The usability won the evaluation.
At this point the market is choosing another player as the leader, primarily due to cost, but also due to the fact that many of our quantitative differentiators have either be co-opted or are no longer important to the market. Also, some of our competitors actually work now. We still retain our usability advantage, but it's not as strong as it used to be.
Posted by: Nils on February 6, 2006 02:42 PM
This is Ari Paparo's blog. It generally concerns itself with Internet product development and marketing. 