[clue-talk] Zimbra - Demo for 15 attendees

[Nate Duehr]

David L. Willson wrote:

> One of my friends (Nate Duehr) went through your website and was ~really~ disappointed
> at how out-of-date it is, how products are called one thing in one place, another thing
> in another place, and the feature-sets are too long and sometimes, even they are
> out-of-date.  I can send you his point-by-point critique, if you like, but you might not
> be the right person to do anything about it.
> 
> I think the product quality makes up for it, but I hope you are working on a refresh for
> 5.0, too.  New customers (especially) want to see a clean sales flow and clear guidance
> to the right product for them, on the website, not a jumble, updated here and there, but
> obviously written for the last version, or the last go-round of packaging.

Viral,

(CC: To the list)

I'm *easily* "disappointed" by websites.  Don't worry TOO much about any 
comments I might have made.  It wasn't THAT bad.  :-)

I think the key to the website is this:  Less than three clicks to the 
answer of "Why should I buy this product?".

Complex matrices of "compare the X number of versions of the product we 
offer to each other" are just confusing and time-consuming for potential 
buyers.

I don't think the information was all that out-of-date, honestly -- just 
scattered.  Having to jump through hoops to get to pricing also is 
common in the software industry, but drives someone with a short 
attention span or little time to research things a little crazy...

Sadly, as I mentioned to David -- I'm not a potential customer of the 
product anyway.  I work for a corporation firmly entrenched in the 
Microsoft Outlook/Exchange solution, and at home I'm a "geek" and want 
all the toys.

The "personal/open-source" editions of Zimbra don't have the mobility 
and other toys... so they're not going to appeal to me.  If the idea is 
to get folks who are techies to try it out... a high-tech version with 
all the toys at LOW cost, limited to a specific number of users (5? 10?) 
  but with very limited technical support options -- might be a better 
way to get people to try it, see what it will do, and recommend it to 
larger entities.

I was excited to see the section of the website that talked about Zimbra 
being offered as a hosted service -- that's usually the way to go for 
"techie" folks looking to use something that's too expensive to deploy 
for personal use -- so I thought I'd follow the links and see if I could 
afford a full-blown, do-everything account somewhere.

The links to the first company on the list, led to outdated information, 
and linked away from their site to someone else who handles Blackberry 
integration... and just kept going and going... while their front page 
listed their ultra-cheap $3.99 option.  I'm certainly willing (like most 
techies) to pay more than $3.99 for something good -- but it just was 
too much to dig through their site to figure out what the bottom-line 
would be.

That first vendor in your list (I didn't catch their name) should be the 
BEST partner who really has their act together.  I didn't get that 
impression from that link.

That's really about all of my comments -- again, I'm likely not your 
website's target audience, so take or leave all of the above!

Of course, feel free to continue the discussion off-list directly if you 
like.

Best Regards,

Nate