Even if Joshua and company built del.icio.us only for resale, they created real value in aggregating users and creating a folksonomy – a user defined categorization and ranking of web content.  They did a brilliant job of solving the dilemma of all network-value businesses – how do you get to critical mass when there is NO network value for the first users?

Real estate analogy holds, but lots more to it – risk, sub-market knowledge, etc.

Remember Metcalfe’s Law that the value of a network scales with the square of the number of users.  This implies that big networks have huge value but also that small networks have almost no value at all,  Makes it hard to get started.

Del.icio.us had value for user #1 even if it wasn’t “network” value.  Tagging is a good way to remember all the web pages you may want to find again.  That use doesn’t depend on any one else doing any tagging.  So more and more people used del.icio.us to bookmark web pages for later retrieval.

Network value – build it and they will come?

Since the tags are public, anyone can use everyone else’s tags as a way to find information.  So, as soon as enough people tagged for their own selfish purpose, their tags became useful to other people looking for web content.  Moreover, there is information in how many people tagged a particular web site or blog.  Popularity means something although it’s not always clear what.  Soon del.icio.us had real network value and was off to the races.

First to market – ?

Del.icio.us got to a critical mass of users before its competitors.  That’s crucial to a network business because this lead kicks off a virtuous circle. The network service with the most users has the most value to each new user.  Other things being anywhere near equal, the larger network therefore gets more than its share of new users and grows faster than its would-be competitors.  Aggregating users faster than anyone else is why Skype succeeded and it’s why del.icio.us succeeded as well.

In this post, Nicholas Carr asserts that software will have to eventually reach Bell telco levels of reliability.  I agree with this argument and believes it applies to almost all businesses.  Disciplined focus on process management is the only sure-fire way to attaining this standard of reliability (also known as five nines (99.999+%).

With software forming an increasingly vital part of the infrastructure of the world’s economy, reliability, stability and security are paramount concerns. In the past, software companies routinely shipped bug-ridden programs, figuring they could patch and update them later. And their customers took what they were given. That’s history – or will be soon. In the future, the best business software companies will distinguish themselves by producing industrial-strength, bulletproof code – code that approaches Six Sigma standards.

I am posting this for the benefit of those who do a Google search for ” vsmon.exe memory leak “, as well as anyone else considering the purchase of the Zone Alarms Pro software firewall.  This program, vsmon.exe, is the core engine of the firewall and in any of the 5.0 releases of ZA Pro, many users are experiencing diminished system performance as this program consumes system memory in huge quantities (typically several hundred MB and oftentimes on my Dell PC (3.2Hz Pentium, 1GB RAM,Windows XP Pro-SP2) it will exceed 500 MB.  It use to happen sporadically, but now occurs on a daily basis and often several times daily.  Every time it happens, I have to shutdown ZA Pro and restart it.

Emails to their tech support bring no response.  Innumerable posts to the company sponsored and maintained user forums from users experiencing the problem are consistently met with the same answers; either stop using P2P software, which they say causes the issue, or, do a clean reinstall of ZA Pro, or, drop back to an earlier version (e.g., the 4.5 release).  All of these responses are completely unacceptable, from my perspective.  I paid for a license of the 5.* release, not a 4.* release.  I use a P2P program to sync files on three PCs, which is far more important to me than the continued use of ZA Pro.  Finally, the re-installs are a waste of time.  I’ve tried them repeatedly to no avail.

There
is no reason for Zone Alarm users to take Zone Labs’ (the company which develops and sells the software) support
personnel seriously when they repeatedly ignore this critical problem with their software.  The “memory leak” is no longer an
annoying “feature”; it  now  impairs the software’s usability. Unfortunately, no one is stepping up to be accountable for resolving the malfunctioning code.  The
fact that no moderator/support personnel will even acknowledge the
reality of their customers’ experience, as repeatedly described in the user forums, speaks volumes about this
company’s value system, as well as its management.

At this point, I will fix the problem myself by uninstalling Zone Alarm Pro, for the last time, ever!  I will find another software firewall – there are lots of them available (i.e., it’s a commodity) and soon enough the one included in Windows XPSP2 will include all the functionality needed in a firewall (although it does not currently).

Finally, I am writing about my experience with the Zone Alarm Pro product and Zone Labs, the software company (now owned by Check Point), to exemplify the power of blogging (which was the original, primary theme of The New Ground Blog).  Although my one post will not be sufficient to change anyone’s behavior, if other users also publicize their dissatisfaction, then anyone else experiencing the problem and searching the web for a solution will find our posts.  Likewise, prospective purchasers researching the software will also be forewarned.  Finally, the message might get through to someone at Check Point who cares and who can do something about the problem.  Members of Check Point’s board of directors, perhaps?  Significant shareholders?  Check Point CEO or CTO,  maybe?  Someone at this company should be listening (or searching)!