April 16, 2007
sap and thingamy
Thomas Otter [Chief Business Solution Architect at SAP] and Sigurd Rinde [Founder of Thingamy] have become friends. Thomas has some nice things to say about both Sig and Thingamy here:
Thingamy is well worth having a look at. Sig has worked harder than anyone I know to focus in on simplicity. He is the zen master of simplicity.
The application can run from a USB stick. I’m not a developer, but there is something aesthetically pleasing about small and simple. Have a listen to a recent interview with Sig here. If I was at SAP ventures I’d take out the cheque book. Sig is onto something.
What’s interesting to me is, Thingamy has gotten most of its big interest in the last few months not from the startup Web 2.0 crowd, but by the senior folk in the heavyweight tech companies. SAP is by no means the only example I could give… but I guess there’s more to life than killer blog apps etc.
[Disclosure: I have a small stake in Thingamy. This has nothing to do with the stuff I’m currently doing with Microsoft.]
As always, something of value! Thank you, Hugh.
germany…
Hugh,
Thanks for the link.
One of many points where Sig and I agree is that making too many assumptions about who is your target market is dangerous, and often if way off the mark.
One of the best examples of a solution that was planned for one market but ended up dominating another one is SAP R/3.
I quote from an old Hasso Plattner interview.
“The first prospect in Germany for R/3 we thought is a so-called medium sized market company dealing with screws. They are a large screw dealer. When we learned more about the company, the company had two billion in revenues in 1991. The company was operating in eighty countries in the world. So this mid-sized market customer all of a sudden had one of the largest warehouses in Germany, was — as far as transaction rate is concerned — larger than the largest R/2 customer in operation. That means from day one all these ideas how we go for the low end of the market got stalled.”
If you do make assumptions, you need to be prepared to change them. Fast.
Hey Thomas, thanks for dropping by.
Agreed with your last sentence. Luckily for Sig, he has structured Thingamy to remain extremely flexible in its early days… to allow whatever happens, to actually happen.