petethomas

One question perhaps worth asking: Why do this piece and the many similarly tiresome pieces preceding it mostly fail to mention how higher salaries offered would motivate graduates and other unemployed people to acquire these missing skills?

Put a different way, fifteen or so years ago: "Economists who have studied occupational shortages generally hold the view that in an unconstrained market, supply will equal demand at the 'true' market price. If demand exceeds supply, salaries will be bid up until the market clears." [1]

Also of interest but perhaps unrelated, "At Goldman Sachs and JPMorgan Chase average pay slipped by about 5% in the first nine months of last year, a figure that is probably representative of the wider industry." [2]

[1] http://www.bls.gov/mlr/1999/03/art2full.pdf

[2] http://www.economist.com/news/finance-and-economics/21592642...

EditGrid is still around and free and unlike Google Spreadsheet's broken importXML function (see: http://goo.gl/fWYDi) it has a web_xpath function that mostly works.

Also worth noting DabbleDB is one of the (few?) relatively well-known projects implemented in Squeak/Seaside as discussed here: http://www.jarober.com/blog/blogView?showComments=true&t...

Also WSJ's "From Diapers to 'Depends': Marketers Discreetly Retool for Aging Boomers" http://online.wsj.com/article/SB1000142405274870401360457610...

It likely depends on what kind of B2B service you are promoting, the size of the companies you are targeting, and how deeply your service needs to integrate with the target customers' existing software systems. In my experience marketing to businesses via the same channels that work well for consumer web products is no easy task.

Give serious consideration to making a real effort to discover, meet, interview, get to know, perhaps even partner with a talented salesperson with great personal and/or professional connections in the industry you're trying to reach.

Here are a couple posts that you might find useful:

  http://www.gabrielweinberg.com/blog/2010/09/sean-murphy-on-the-first-1-6-enterprise-customers.html

  http://www.walkersands.com/Comm_Selling_to_CIOs.htm

I couldn't locate a direct link but the "full 28 page report" is viewable and downloadable as a PDF via docstoc on the CB Insights blog: http://www.cbinsights.com/blog/venture-capital/venture-capit...

The main advantage of one-database-per-business-customer isn't isolating customer data, it's the ability to serve business customers who are willing to pay for heavy customizations and the extra support those entail, while not polluting your core offering through the introduction of attributes, features, etc. for which other customers will have no use.

For a lot of B2B web applications aimed at serving "bigger" companies, customer adoption can still hinge on scotch-sipping and rounds of golf more than well-placed sign-up buttons or great viral marketing campaigns. It's been argued of late that maybe this part of the industry is becoming more "web-like"[1], but in any case it's not very web-like yet, when it comes to sealing deals.

Many times the companies who were convinced by your talented sales team to buy your product eventually demand that the product be tailored to their (sometimes very company-specific) needs. If you want to keep the customer happy, or maybe just keep the customer, you have to keep customizing.

One could make the argument that the most talented sales teams are the ones that sign deals with customers who are willing to "stay on core", but over time as your customers' own businesses evolve, the challenge grows for everyone involved.

[1] http://techcrunch.com/2010/07/25/enterprise-software-is-sexy...