This Is the Online World of Flexible Computing

Flitting across the Internet from blog to blog as I do at least once a day, I found Evhead's Ten Rules for Web Startups. First of all, we need to recognise this guy's record. The co-founder and CEO of Pyra (the originator of Blogger -- the system in which this blog is being published) and which was bought by Google. He is now the CEO of Odeo a startup in San Francisco. Second, we need to look at his credentials in blogging having written this blog "Evhead" in blog form since 1999. There was one remark he made in the first of his rules that really hit me:

Focus on the smallest possible problem you could solve that would potentially be useful. Most companies start out trying to do too many things, which makes life difficult and turns you into a me-too. Focusing on a small niche has so many advantages: With much less work, you can be the best at what you do. Small things, like a microscopic world, almost always turn out to be bigger than you think when you zoom in. You can much more easily position and market yourself when more focused. And when it comes to partnering, or being acquired, there's less chance for conflict. This is all so logical and, yet, there's a resistance to focusing. I think it comes from a fear of being trivial.

"Focus on the smallest problem you could solve that would potentially be useful." Now lets look for a moment at blogger. Who would have thought back when Blogger was started that it would be a major location of thousands of people's thoughts? Blogger is a great little on-demand tool where I can publish my thoughts for today, or publish anything I want to publish each day. And what a great tool for Google to purchase -- many thousands of advertisements show on Blogger sites, and I dare say many millions of dollars are made for Google because of this little tool called Blogger.

There are two things that attract me to Blogger as a tool to produce my daily tome: first, it is an on-demand tool that I can sign-up for and start using at a time when I want; second, I don't have to read a manual to understand how to use it -- it is relatively simple to use if you have been using online tools for some time. Actually this is not unique to Blogger, but rather a characteristic of on-demand tools.

I use NetSuite everyday as well. It is great to use if you have been using online tools. Many of the processes that are in Blogger are to be found in NetSuite. If you know how to use Blogger, you know how to do many things in NetSuite. And by the way you will also know how to use GMail (Google's Mail Program) which is also an on-demand tool as well.

Gone are the days when I lugged a laptop around with me everywhere. There is no need for that now. All my data, my personal documents, my email, everything I work on is on the web. I can access these on-demand tools from anywhere at anytime. Whether it is at a hotel where I go to the business center there and use a computer, or at home, or at work, or even the other side of the world, everything I work on is on the web. This is the world where it will not matter what device you use to access the web, you will be able to access the tools you need for work.

NetSuite is not unique in this -- there are so many tools that are on-demand. I named a couple of them but there are others: how about Writely.com which is a wordprocessing center and document sharing system.

So working across the Internet with data available online and therefore available anywhere you are is so refreshing and makes one's working life so flexible -- I am glad I work for NetSuite because going back to any company that ran only proprietary on-site systems would be a killer for me.

The system NetSuite provides is so good -- I would like you to try it -- and if I could I would have built a little window where you could personally try it. But as I don't have those skills and there is not a programme to let me do that with point and click, the bext way I can do something like this is to invite you to a personal demonstration. Here is an invitation for you, why don't you click on this link and I will personally set up for you a demonstration of just how easy it is to use NetSuite. It just so happens that NetSuite is the only full service on-demand business suite in the world -- that is what is unique about it. But in that uniqueness, it is also one of the many online on-demand services that heralds the new world of flexible computing.