Interesting opinion piece by Gene Marks in Business Week called "Tech Solutions Your Small Biz Can't Use." The gist of the article is a lot of technology is over hyped and not appropriate for small business. It goes on to list 10 technologies that the author claims don't work for small business.
The article was clearly written to be controversial and generate discussion and response. Because of this, it is a bit over the top in terms of complaining about technology. However, I agree with premise that technology is often over hyped and often underperforms. I also agree that small businesses need to be careful in choosing technology.
One issue this article highlights is that the small business sector is too broad and too diverse to make generalized statements about. There are lots of small businesses that shouldn't use the technologies on the list. But at the same time, it is obvious that lots of small businesses are effectively using these technologies.
For example, RSS, spam filters, blogs, SEO, CRM and Web 2.0 tools are all very important to my small business and work quite well. They also are cheap (mostly free) and easy to use. I don't use adwords, but I know of many, many small businesses that consider adwords crucial to their small business. The same is true for online video and mobile applications.
The bottom line is blanket statements about technology and small business are going to be wrong. What makes sense and what will work depends on the specific needs and requirements of the business.
Certainly any internet based business is going to use some of these tools. I also think any knowledge based business or any small business that uses a computer and the Internet in any aspect of their work will also use some of them.
From the sound of the article the author seems to mostly be talking about larger small businesses. He mentions one spending $20,000 on a CRM system and others getting bogged down by antivirus and spam filters. This means the small businesses involved have to be large enough to use server based installed versions of these programs. It also means they have to be big enough for some form of IT support.
The author is an IT consultant specializing in CRM and other software. These guys get called in when things go wrong, so I'm sure he has lots of experience cleaning up failed IT projects. Seems to me though he is throwing the baby out with the bath water.
Posted by: steve | January 07, 2008 at 08:35 AM
Good posting. It truly is impossible to lump all small businesses like that. It really depends on what they do and what their plans for growth are. An agressive, internet based business (an IT recruiter for example) would be much more likely to use those tools and get good results than a commercial engineering firm for example.
Posted by: James Farquharson | January 07, 2008 at 05:30 AM
Your comments on that Business Week article are a lot more measured than mine would be. I think it's one of the worst articles I've ever read. :)
In any case, I agree with what you've written here about the difficulty in applying such general statements to small business.
Posted by: Matt McGee | January 04, 2008 at 04:20 PM