How Google changes the world
by Andrew Smith on 28/11/05 at 9:21 am
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A few months ago Google bought a website statistics company called Urchin. Urchin handled the statistics for 20% of the Fortune 500 companies’ websites. For the rest of us they charged $500 a month. Google dropped that to $200 a month for 50 sites. About a week ago they made it free, and renamed it Google Analytics. So many people have rushed to sign up that Google have had to pause new subscriptions in order to catch up with the demand. This made me wonder whether something that our company charges for is about to be released for free by a big company. Should we ensure that there is always a people/relational element in what we sell? Or if we’re going to create a product, how do we make it is that it can’t be a replaced by a free version?
Andrew Smith is the pedantic systems guy behind Live Alchemy, a SA e-commerce company. Andrew writes for Ideate in an attempt to make the world a more efficient place. View more articles by Andrew Smith.
