Chromebook on the go after 3 months
Bit of an update on cloud working and the tools that I'd picked out to investigate over the past three months:
Pixlr editor is a good replacement for what I need in an image editing tool. Haven't missed the desktop aspect. Similar experience with Caret, although I haven't needed a text editor that much. Office online is a bit frustrating as it loses what should be a key feature - consistency. All I want to do is put some bullet points in!! But it suffers from the same issues that ALL WYSIWY HTML tools I have ever used suffer from. It gets confused between where the formatting applies.
As a laptop I have no complaints with the Chromebook, it makes the hardware a commodity item. One that I don't have to worry about. The ability to mount Dropbox and OneDrive as file stores also negates vendor lock in. I can have multiple back ups and work where it is appropriate. iOS even comes with a Google Drive widget so I can email my mock-up files on the go!
Where it gets interesting is with Codeanywhere and Cloud9. I prefer Cloud9 as being a bit more user friendly and a tad more RAM in the free pricing tier. It took no time at all to get a virtual machine running Linux and install R and create a PDF containing a graph.
This does open up all kinds of possibilities. For hobbyists, you can try out a new stack without much knowledge about the setup or ops. Then if you don't like it get rid of and you don't have clutter on your system. Then have a clash of libraries the next time that you want to try something. It also provides the ability to get some experience while using similar technology to enterprise systems .
For startups you get access to enterprise style infrastructure, if not scale. One of the most surprising things for me as I've looked at a couple of side projects is just how easy it is. I'm sure that for $9/month you could host an email marketing system for an SME. It'd (optimistically ;) only take a few weeks of full time work to get it up and running.
For enterprises that last sentence may seem worrying. How can competitor analysis keep track of specialist companies? Especially if they can pop up within a month and steal your business? Well, by doing the same thing. Get your pioneers to experiment. No need to wait for ops to be available. No need to worry about too much in fact. Do the experiment. Learn the lessons. Then either bring the experience in house or do some knowledge transfer. Or migrate to your usual infrastructure and tech stack.
The other aspect is that with scale in customers, you also have an advantage in problem knowledge. One way to keep customers is to double down on understanding their problems. Then solve them. Also keep revisiting this, to keep actual problems at the forefront.
* my optimistic and purely hypothetical SME marketing tool:
Of course this is dependent on experience with the technology, free time, and understanding customer you could get each stage above down to about a week. It's also not going to be competing with Pure360 after a month, but it will do a job for someone.
- Codeanywhere and Cloud9 (online IDE and dev environment VM),
- Caret (simple text editor in the style of Sublime),
- Pixlr Editor and Polarr (online photo editor in the style of photoshop),
- WeVideo (online video creator and editor)
- Office Online (Microsoft's free online version of Office, inc editing ability)
- Draw.io Desktop and Mockflow
Pixlr editor is a good replacement for what I need in an image editing tool. Haven't missed the desktop aspect. Similar experience with Caret, although I haven't needed a text editor that much. Office online is a bit frustrating as it loses what should be a key feature - consistency. All I want to do is put some bullet points in!! But it suffers from the same issues that ALL WYSIWY HTML tools I have ever used suffer from. It gets confused between where the formatting applies.
As a laptop I have no complaints with the Chromebook, it makes the hardware a commodity item. One that I don't have to worry about. The ability to mount Dropbox and OneDrive as file stores also negates vendor lock in. I can have multiple back ups and work where it is appropriate. iOS even comes with a Google Drive widget so I can email my mock-up files on the go!
Where it gets interesting is with Codeanywhere and Cloud9. I prefer Cloud9 as being a bit more user friendly and a tad more RAM in the free pricing tier. It took no time at all to get a virtual machine running Linux and install R and create a PDF containing a graph.
This does open up all kinds of possibilities. For hobbyists, you can try out a new stack without much knowledge about the setup or ops. Then if you don't like it get rid of and you don't have clutter on your system. Then have a clash of libraries the next time that you want to try something. It also provides the ability to get some experience while using similar technology to enterprise systems .
For startups you get access to enterprise style infrastructure, if not scale. One of the most surprising things for me as I've looked at a couple of side projects is just how easy it is. I'm sure that for $9/month you could host an email marketing system for an SME. It'd (optimistically ;) only take a few weeks of full time work to get it up and running.
For enterprises that last sentence may seem worrying. How can competitor analysis keep track of specialist companies? Especially if they can pop up within a month and steal your business? Well, by doing the same thing. Get your pioneers to experiment. No need to wait for ops to be available. No need to worry about too much in fact. Do the experiment. Learn the lessons. Then either bring the experience in house or do some knowledge transfer. Or migrate to your usual infrastructure and tech stack.
The other aspect is that with scale in customers, you also have an advantage in problem knowledge. One way to keep customers is to double down on understanding their problems. Then solve them. Also keep revisiting this, to keep actual problems at the forefront.
* my optimistic and purely hypothetical SME marketing tool:
- Get the sending side sorted with basic metrics recorded (this would be heavily manual driven process by the startup)
- Get some reporting based on metrics for performance of first send to users (first time you give access to system)
- Get some basic content management for next send
- Get billing in place ready for first invoice
- Then refine each aspect of above each time you sell it
Of course this is dependent on experience with the technology, free time, and understanding customer you could get each stage above down to about a week. It's also not going to be competing with Pure360 after a month, but it will do a job for someone.
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