Of elephants and mice

When in october 2004 Peter and I took on the idea of developing epointment.com, we thought we had all the time in the world, given the fact that at that time most online calendering applications were rather rubish.

Over the past few years, several new sites have been created for this same purpose, and when a few months back the rumours about Google Calendar started, I was initially horrified. I felt what I think employees of Netscape must have felt when Microsoft released Internet Explorer.

Funny thing is, it's hardly ever about money. Netscape was already freely downloadable when Internet Explorer was released. Similarly epointment is as much free as Google Calendar is (our investments are to be won back by providing professional services). This is more about how given enough weight, any market can be taken. Internet Explorer didn't crush Netscape because it was a better browser. Microsoft just was a bigger player with better cards.

Now we don't claim to be better than Google Calendar, that would be quite presumptuous, given that probably they employ some of the smartest minds in the industry and have a lot bigger team than the two of us working on epointment. But my point is that neither price, nor quality, matter, when the elephants walk by. The fact that it is 'Google' Calendar and not 'Just Any Calendar', makes it Good. (I sometimes have the same feeling about art. Some art is art only because of the signature on it). And don't get me wrong, Google Calendar actually *is* good. And competition is a good thing anyway, it gives people choice.

And, instead of sobbing, which never really helps anyway :-), mice like us should do the only sensible thing: distinguish ourselves. We have many ideas that we will roll out in the foreseeable future, but we already do it very subtly. While Ajax is hype and everybody makes sure Ajax is part of their product description, we stay away from the term. We actually use the technology (using prototype and script.aculo.us if you're interested), but you will have a hard time finding it.

Another choice we made is to make the agenda not look like the digital version of the schedule of a trained secretary, but make it something that is more like the type of calendar that hangs on your mother's wall. Keep it simple, so to say. Most people don't really need a digital secretary, they just need a way of keeping track of (and remembering) their appointments.

So no, you cannot sync your appointments in epointment yet, we'll focus on ease of use first (and how much do the non-techies sync their agenda's in real life anyway? ;-))

One thing we did realize in the past months do is that looks do matter. The initial layout (well, let's rather call it a complete lack of layout) was, in hindsight, terrible. So yesterday we finally released a new version of the site that we feel looks a bit better. Now all we have to do is stay away from the elephant's feet and run right under them and finish first.

Oh and, because we are geeks after all, we just had to implement easter eggs. Not that anyone would ever find them, but writing them was fun in itself.

Tags: calendar, epointment, google, peter

This entry was posted on Thursday, April 27th, 2006 at 8:17 am and is filed under PHP. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.