Nov 27

Written by: Nick Matteucci
Thursday, November 27, 2008 7:33 PM

As I sit here after a wonderful Thanksgiving dinner wondering where all the food I stacked on my plate went, I am compelled to reflect on a great year at our company and the 200% growth we have seen in new customers signing up and defecting from Daptiv, @Task, Innotas, and others. 

So here is the short list of the things I am personally thankful for...

• I am thankful for @Task, Innotas, and Daptiv for charging 3x to 6x more for a product that is overly complex and slow to adopt in an organization.
   
• I am thankful for Microsoft, CA, HP, Planview, and Primavera for charging 10x to 30x more for their products and then charging 30x more for supporting their products.
   
• I am thankful to our #1 world class datacenter partner, CoSentry,  for making the most physically impenetrable and electronically secure data center in the world.  I am sure our cage neighbors PayPal and Bank of America would agree. 
   
• I am thankful for Dell's enterprise line of servers and their world class support for our servers.  Even though we spend 3x more per user on only the best security, high performance servers, and dual gigabit connections, we still only charge a fraction of the price of our competitors.
   
• I am thankful to Microsoft for making the ever impossible to understand Microsoft Project Server.  That a small company like ours could reverse engineer Microsoft Project and build a SaaS Microsoft Project Server that exceeds Microsoft's own efforts is nothing short of miraculous.
   
• I am thankful for our enterprise customers like Express Scripts, Scottrade, US Army, and the many others that continue to invest in our company both monetarily and intellectually.  Without your years of support and guidance we would have never risen to the top of our industry.
   
• I am thankful for the Venture Capitalists (VCs) that poisoned Daptiv, Innotas, @Task, Planview, and every other competitor in our field who is driven by profits and not passion.
   
• I am thankful for the shareholders of Computer Associates (CA), HP, Microsoft, SAP, Oracle, and Deltek for their insatiable desire for rising earnings.  Without your pressure our competitors wouldn't be forced to sell "at all costs" and think of their own interests over their customers.  
• I am thankful for CA and ChangePoint salesman.  They force the development staffs at their companies to "go crazy" adding features at an alarming rate thus making these tools wildly expensive and increasingly unusable.
   
• I am thankful for Basecamp for their cult like belief in their own genius.  The way they ignoring customer phone calls, requests for features, and even the most basic things like task end dates and Gantt views insures they will never be taken seriously by anyone that understands project management.
   
•  I am thankful for the CIOs who realized in the financial catastrophe to let go of their assumptions about SaaS and quickly adopt SaaS PM to dramatically slash their budgets without affecting service levels.

Have a very happy Thanksgiving and wonderful holiday season. 

Warm Regards,

Nick Matteucci, Co-Founder www.VCSonline.com
VPMi = Simple + Sensible + Supportable SaaS Project Management

About the Author: Nick Matteucci is a co-founder of VCSonline.com a web 2.0 project management software company headquartered in St. Louis Missouri. Mr. Matteucci is also an active board member and the Chief Technology Officer for the PMI ISSIG. When not obsessing over virtual project management best practices Mr. Matteucci enjoys spending time with his wife and three small children. He also enjoys travel, running, and all things automotive.

 

 

 

 

 

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