thinks

Bill Gates retires from Microsoft tomorrow. He’s a brilliant man, one of the richest people on the planet. He may end up more famous for his philanthropy than for his software company. And he never got the web.

As Time Magazine notes, “…there is no greater blinder than success, even for a visionary like Bill Gates.” So tied was Gates to the Windows monopoly, he missed, for a time, the fundamental change the web wrought. Once he realized its importance, he miscalculated the way to respond, leading to a costly antitrust trial and countless bad PR.

Every business faces competitive threats. Every day, in fact. For many small business owners, those threats will come via the web. Or the mobile web. It might be internet print shops threatening your brick and mortar store, Amazon’s avalanche crushing your retail outlets or online brokers breaking your bank. You can’t avoid competition. And you can’t necessarily continue as you always have.

But, that doesn’t mean you’re doomed. All it takes is looking at what you do and how you differentiate yourself from online only competitors (hint: service is often a big plus). Remember, threats to you also reflect threats to your traditional competitors and opportunities for you to exploit. Heck, despite their mis-steps, even Microsoft seems to be doing just fine these days.

So, maybe you want to be like Bill Gates after all.

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How’s your week been? Mine. Not so great. Last Thursday, my web hosting company appears to have closed their doors, taking this site down with them. Gone. Dead. Kaput.

How would you like to spend your weekend trying to get your site up and running again from scratch? Worse, how would you like to do it on big revenue days like a Monday? Yeah, me neither.

I’ve learned - re-learned - some valuable lessons during this period. I thought you might appreciate avoiding my pain by hearing what they are.

1. Keep backups. I know, I know. We’ve all been told this. Here’s the thing. How many days do you want to spend getting your life together after if it goes away? Backup one day less than that. If you’re OK with spending a month putting your life back together, back up every 29 days. I did my last backup on November 4. When my site died on November 25, I got screwed. EVERYTHING between those two weeks was gone. Is gone. If anyone has a copy of my blog posts, boy I’d sure like to have them. Seriously.
2. Make a copy of the backups. No, really. It doesn’t take much to backup your hard drive with a site like Carbonite (PC-only today, though Mac is coming) or any number of Mac services. I had the nightmare scenario. My laptop - where I do all my writing - died the same week as my web host. Think stuff like that only happens in Ben Stiller movies? Surprise! Fortunately, I had a copy on a share drive in addition to the one on my laptop. I’d have been way more hosed if I hadn’t. It’s likely I still wouldn’t have content on this site. And just imagine what happens to your Google PageRank then.
3. Develop a checklist of emergency tasks. For instance, should you stop your paid search campaigns first or should you put up a page telling your customers what’s happened? Most small companies don’t have the resources to do these in parallel, so it’s critical you - and your team - understand what the priorities are. When you find yourself in a hole, first you need to stop digging. It’s bad enough that you’re losing revenue. Don’t make it worse by not knowing how to stop.
4. Make sure you have all your critical contact information for your hosting company, development shop and other key providers available in more than one location. For instance, I didn’t have my web hosting company’s super secret tech support phone number I’d dug up a while back anywhere but on my local drive (see item #2 above). While I found their main number on Google, they weren’t answering that line anymore.
5. Manage your DNS separate from your hosting. If my DNS was hosted by the same company as my website, I’d seriously be dead right now. In truth, I wouldn’t remotely know how to deal with that situation. Which is another item for #3 on this list now, isn’t it?
6. Pay attention to trouble with your service providers. I don’t recommend jumping ship every time you have a little bugaboo with your service. Managing websites/hosting/development is complicated and occasionally things go wrong. But if you start to see a pattern of issues with a provider, demand immediate resolution or start shopping for a new provider.
7. Always have a Plan B. What saved my butt was that I was already in the process of moving my site from one host to another. You don’t want to have to figure out what your alternatives are when you have no alternative. No matter how happy you are with your hosting company, development shop, analytics provider, marketing agency, what-have-you, you need to know who else is out there and what they can do for you. Take an hour or two every month at lunchtime and review alternative providers. That way, if you do need to make a sudden move, at least you’re not starting from scratch.

I know this list is incomplete. Preparing for emergencies with your site can be a full-time job. But, these are the critical items most businesses need to have covered. Please add anything I missed to the comments. And I hope you have a better week than I did.

What’s it going to take for the mobile web to catch on? Om Malik gives a view of the underlying business of mobile data vs. the mobile web. Well worth the read. He’s certainly right in talking about the adoption of mobile broadband cards. I practically sleep with mine these days. But I think the phone will improve, too. As many of Om’s comments note, the iPhone changes the experience dramatically. Additionally, they’re easier to tote, cost less, and far more common. Once screens adopt more iPhone-like capabilities and networks improve - and Verizon’s recent “bring your own device” plan is a step towards that - expect consumer adoption to grow.

Fred Wilson asks interesting questions about the utility of Kindle as a blog reader, particularly given the $0.99 monthly subscription cost per blog Amazon is tacking onto the thing. I wasn’t aware of that “feature” and agree with Fred that I want my content to be free (though if you want to buy a book and support this site, that’s OK too). Here’s the thing, though. How many folks interested in an e-book reader will think that $0.99 per month is unreasonable? Clearly, the early adopters will - and that’s likely the current audience for the Kindle. But what about a year down the road? I don’t know. Does Amazon think they’re playing nice with the blog community and encouraging a new business model. Maybe. It does seem awfully weird to me that the company who essentially invented the concept of disintermediation (remember the “how to avoid getting Amazon’ed” meme during Web Bubble 1.0?) is now trying to become a content intermediary. I wonder who’ll Amazon them this time around.

That’s right. Overrated. It might be the most overrated topic in business today. Sure, you need to innovate. But a boatload of good ideas gain you nothing if your culture, capabilities, or competencies keep you anchored in the same spot. One good idea delivered trumps fifty great ideas sitting in your head.

Take this example. Maybe you’ve heard of Facebook? Been in the news lately. Facebook didn’t build the first social network. They weren’t the first to open their site to new customer types. They didn’t even build the only one targeted at college students. They simply delivered on the needs of their customers and then fed that network back on itself repeatedly. In other words, they executed. They delivered what they planned to do. What brilliant ideas sit on the whiteboards of Facebook product managers? Probably the same ones that sit on the whiteboards of product managers at MySpace, LinkedIn, Xing, ClubMom and so on. Ideas on whiteboards don’t matter. Only ideas that see the light of day have any chance of growing into something special.

A reporter once asked football coach John McKay how he felt about his team’s execution. McKay deadpanned, “I think it’s a damned fine idea.” A joke, sure. But the point’s the same. The best innovation is the one that gets to a customer.

Are you innovative? Or are your competitors eating your lunch? Do they really have better technology, tools, processes? Or is it that they’re just better at getting to market?

Anne and I debated information workers vs. web workers some time back (you can review Anne’s side of the argument here and here and see my arguments here and here). Now, Anne seriously ups the ante over at GigaOM, making a strong case for what’s truly different about web work. While I’m still not ready to concede the point that Drucker didn’t presage this perceived shift (although that’s not really the important part of the debate), Anne’s argument has merit on its own. Without a doubt, ubiquitous connectivity changes behaviors. It seems to follow that workers’ behaviors would exhibit similar shift. Additionally, the traditional concept of a corporation no longer occupies the central place in business that it once did for many workers. Anne’s notion supports Jason Calacanis, who claims who you know who knows is more important than what you know or even knowing where to find it (though I’m not getting into the Web 3.0 versioning debate anytime soon). I completely support this notion (as does Stowe Boyd in an excellent corollary). The intelligence of the network matters; “we” is smarter than “me.”

A particularly relevant theme emerging in the comments to Anne’s post is the importance of trust in this connection economy and how intermediaries offer trust by proxy. You don’t need to trust the folks on Craigslist, Rent-a-Coder, eLance, eBay, and the like so long as you trust the site itself to insulate you from risk.

What do you think? Does web work change the game for everyone? And how do you establish trust with folks you might never see face-to-face?