I have to admit, I’m glad the last decade is over.
Fate really jammed in a lot of extras over the past year, just to confirm that the Big Zero truly lived up to its name: global pandemic flu, the great recession, the collapse of the American auto sector.
“Fear” and “desperation” were the operative terms of the past year and half. Swine flu in Canada had grown men queue-jumping in front of pregnant women and infants. In the innovation sector, money flew the coop and the big got bigger, while the small got leaner and meaner. This meant an increased reliance on customers as funders, which then turned companies of all sizes against one another. In March of last year, I saw non-web companies developing websites to stay alive, while web development companies were getting into branding in order to keep their customers in their silos. Even some of the big players migrated into service offerings in order to subsidize their product companies.
Google still charges virtually nothing for any of its services. I’m starting to wonder when there will be a ticker somewhere on the web to count all the small companies that the Big G has killed with its freemium philosophy. I’m also wondering when people are going to start paying for only a few small, but aesthetically pleasing and really reliable services.
The good news for innovators is that the customer list of the big companies has grown, but relatively little has changed in terms of product offerings. I’m beginning to notice that these huge companies in new spaces used the recession time very poorly. Rather than forge ahead with innovative new offerings, instead they scrambled for a bigger customer base. This means they essentially wasted 10’s of millions, with little to show except a few dozen more big brand logos on their websites and in their demo videos. Meanwhile, the little guys have come out of the fog, realizing that they have the same (or more) technological capacity as the big guys. Plus, since their focus was innovation (out of simple desperation), they now possess the intellectual property of the future. (NB: I’m excluding Google from the talk of these companies… they innovated and innovated and innovated again.)
I think we’ll see some seriously increased M&A activity as the big players in various innovation spaces buy up smaller startups, either to increase their customer credibility (as these startups are now landing big deals), or to up their innovation curve.
I highly recommend that every small tech company out there revisit any plans it may of had to forego patent filings and to begin taking intellectual property seriously again. This doesn’t mean the emergence of “the stealth startup” again. Just make sure that if you do talk about something that you’re about to launch either a) you know it’s already been launched somewhere else, or b) you already have a provisional or some trademarking around it.
Because, when the money starts to flow again, people start to act quite a bit differently.
Hopefully, we’re moving into more respectful and responsible times.
Here’s to surviving the worst decade of our lives!