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Google Inside your Business

By Nick Hodge | September 14, 2006

Google and Intuit have announced a major part­ner­ship. Along with the Google Maps changes this week where an organ­isa­tion can advert­ise at a loc­a­tion — the world of web applic­a­tions and deeper con­nec­tion between the desktop and inform­a­tion — is at hand.

It would be extremely unlikely in the near-term that a web-based account­ing applic­a­tion for small busi­nesses would fly — as fin­an­cial inform­a­tion is the holy-of-holies for busi­ness. One can just ima­gine the pri­vacy watch­ers hav­ing a field day arguing against sens­it­ive num­bers being scattered through the tubes.

In my mind, being more con­nec­ted with this inform­a­tion aids the flow of busi­ness. The less paper­work in the world is a good thing. But my mind is a not a safe place for ideas such as this.

Back onto Intuit: recently, Aus­tralian retail­ers such as Office­Works and City Soft­ware have been advert­ising Quicken for AU$0.00 (after $99 cash back). Every­one in mar­ket­ing knows that there is never a 100% redemp­tion on these cash back offers; but still the num­bers seemed “odd” to me — didn’t add up to being bene­fi­cial to Intuit at all. If the redemp­tion rate drif­ted above 70% (that is, 70% of pur­chasers sent in their Intuit coupon, the each unit sold would cost more than they received in rev­enue in dir­ect costs)

There are sec­ond­ary rev­enue oppor­tun­it­ies: post-sales sup­port agree­ments and the abil­ity to direct-mail mar­ket future upgrades to the users who have redeemed their cash-back.

With the Google announce­ment, it all falls into place: the rev­enue is either from sup­port agree­ments you would pur­chase to help you determ­ine whether some­thing is an asset or a expense. The second rev­enue source is online, in-your-face, in con­text advertising.

Account­ants and book­keep­ers the world over are now going to see mul­tiple advert­ise­ments whilst send­ing out the day’s invoices.

As the world of pure-in browser applic­a­tions moves to richer cli­ent applic­a­tions, the new rev­enue stream open to smal­ler developers is enticing.

Get­ting mar­ket­ing people into the applic­a­tion as an advert­ising “plat­form” is the chal­lenge. Inter­est­ing world.

Topics: channel, google, strategy, technology | No Comments »

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