During a recent CNBC interview, Mark Cuban, owner of the Dallas Mavericks, said:
When I bought the Mavericks, everyone in the organization thought we were in the business of basketball. But we aren’t. We’re in the business of “Honey, what do you want to do tonight?”
I read about the quote on Yaron Galai’s blog. Yaron is a co-founder of Quigo, an ad network. Over the past 6 years, he’s seen a few million examples of how sellers sell, and how buyer react. To the Mark Cuban quote he adds that:
It’s so easy to describe what business *you* think you’re in. The trick is to define the business *your customers* see you in. It’s not about what your product does, or which cool features it has. It’s all about understanding which piece of attention of your customers you’re fighting for, and who are the others trying to get that same slice of attention.
I thought of Yaron’s post when I saw MH-One‘s recent ad in Wired Magazine (pages 130-131 in the November 2006 issue)(MH-One is an utility computing service from Data Return). Its tag line was “Say Goodbye to Dedicated Hosting”.
Rackspace’s Mosso, too, devotes substantial website real estate to comparing “The System” against dedicated servers.
The assumption in both cases is that providers of grid hosting are fighting for prospects who are interested in dedicated servers.
In contrast, let’s take a look at how Amazon describes its Elastic Compute Cloud: it’s affordable, scalable, reliable and secure. Which is why developers are lining up for the beta.
So my question is, are Data Return’s and Rackspace’s customers really so keen on ordering un-dedicated-servers? Or are they just looking for an affordable, scalable, reliable and secure hosting platform? Is the goal to trumpet how far our technologies have come? Or to talk about how close we are to giving customers what they want?
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