Living vSocial

In the case of Products v. Services

So, the latest Refresh Phoenix meeting was last night. I showed up about half an hour into it, as some of us have to actually work. Ahem. Anyways, the topic of conversation was surrounding the Refresh Conference that AP, Ritz, Josh and Archer have cooked up, and it spawned a lot of interesting discussion as to how and what it should be.

I'll be honest, I was pretty disheartened by the whole thing.

Let me explain that, because I'll probably piss a few folks off with that. The focus for the main planners to this point has been about bringing SMB owners, developers, designers, et al. together to have a big day of talking and networking.


ARG!

I gave my speech about how the Valley (Phoenix, that is) is still primarily a service-focused tech industry. People want to custom and one-off everything. Guys, I hate to pop your buzzword bubble, but that's not what Web 2.0 (hate that term!) is about! We should be busily working towards the point where professional services are pretty much about just design and implementing products that are hosted by folks that do what they do and do it far better than your/our/anyone's one-off is going to be. Integrate things that folks have built into a product that you roll out that's self-service. Would you rather have clients that demand pixel-specific changes and are whiny "I know what I'm doing" babies, or 10,000 people using a platform or product that you can iterate and service across your customer base -- but they maybe only pay you $30, $100, or $250 each a month?

I really take issue with the short-sightedness of my peers here locally. I think they're realy smart guys, but man are they missing the boat on how to really apply that talent and those smarts to being long-term succesful. Trying to rope a local company into a $50K custom web build is just less and less honest every day, and eventually that's going to be really obvious. Plan for the day when those services just are complete fiction, guys, or you're going to be doing a lot of catching up.

posted by webba @ 9:05 AM