I’m more convinced than ever that Users need to invest time and well as money to get an appropriate return on investment. What does that mean? It means that most Users benefit greatly from interacting with other Users. It means that the best ideas for solving problems come from the community of users and not from the vendor. It means that you, as a User, should attend User Conferences to gain a better understanding of how others use the same tools to add more value.

Web 2.0 and community aren’t fads. They are solid business strategies.

It’s easy to focus your decision-making on an application’s current feature-set and functionality; after all, you’re trying to solve for a particular business problem that’s causing some level of pain. As important as it is to consider these things, something that is often overlooked but is maybe more important is whether your solution provider can scale.

Why does scaling matter? (more…)