Enter Zenter: "We want to be the Gmail of PowerPoint." | Hacker News Reader

Enter Zenter: "We want to be the Gmail of PowerPoint."

blogs.business2.com

15 pointsdanielha23 comments

This is a really cool idea, but I wonder about the danger of falling into the "X of Y" or "A meets B" style of describing software.

"X of Y" is how Hollywood describes new scripts. The danger is that this is also how Hollywood comes up with new scripts. Have we gone whole hog and transformed into a fashion industry? Are we optimizing for quick wins, sequels of existing software, at the expense of real innovation?

We encourage startups to explain themselves this way to investors and reporters, but not necessarily to think of the project in these terms themselves. Though the Zenters were pretty clever about their X of Y: they chose Gmail precisely because it was not merely web-based mail, but redefined what a mail program could be.

Yeah, but from the user's point of view, when I hear that I think I'm going to be zipping presentations to people instead of email, and looking at an inbox of presentations people have sent me. That can't be right, can it?

There's a large difference between the entertainment industry and the web application industry. Since the beginning of inventions, people have been crossing seemingly unrelated things to discover beautiful new insights. Because we create value, if "The Facebook of Wikipedia" is valuable, then it's safe to describe it in those terms; in fact, it's safe to come up with entirely new products in those terms.

However, you should note that you probably won't be creating / riding the Next Big Wave by crafting new things in terms of existing things.

And yet YouTube is the Flickr of Flash videos, right?

And Google was the better-AltaVista of AltaVista. I'm just saying, those are pretty big waves.

Well, what I meant was that it's a dangerous frame of mind to look for innovation only by crossing existing things. Originality helps :)

Originality is not, in itself, valuable in many markets. It's often a liability.

So maybe it's more true that originality hurts. That is, you don't want to be as original as possible, you want to be only as original as you can afford to be.

Joe Kraus's stellar lecture at Startup School last year explained this pretty well.

I don't personally have a problem with using that manner of description when it can describe the GENERAL idea of your business in few words. ie. Google in its starting days could say "Kinda like Yahoo Search" or iPod could say "Better than your walkman"

Problem here is the X of Y description doesn't make obvious sense, at least to me.

These days they call it a mashup, which sounds cooler.

"Gmail of Powerpoint"? Am I the only one who is struggling to make sense of what that means?

Gmail did a pretty good job redoing a certain technology, web based email, in this case. Powerpoint is a technology that needs reworking.

remember pb's (to distinguish him from pg) definition of a good product: the suffix "that actually works".

That's looking at it from the business's point of view, not the users' point of view. Also, it still doesn't make much sense.

It does? Seems to work just fine... everyone uses it, unless they use macs.

No, me too. Sounds pretty vapid, to be blunt.

Think of Outlook, Thunderbird, Pine, what have you.

Isn't Google building the Gmail of PowerPoint? I've heard rumblings of "Google Present" for some time now. Let's hope these guys don't go the way of Kiko; they sound like they have some pretty good ideas.

A Google Presently is in the works. I'm don't know the differences in approach compared with Zenter, but we should find out more as Google formally announces Presently and Zenter opens up a bit more to the public.

If the rumors are true, they'll have to worry about Google...

Yeah, I can totally see this being smooshed by Google like Kiko was. PG said that Google was only good at stuff that worked for hackers, but I bet it could parlay its Gmail userbase into a Zenter-killing web-based Powerpoint, even though hackers don't generally do that much powerpoint.

See, it's like "pre-zenter." Took me a while to get that.

Might be nice if it worked under Safari rather than just hanging. :-(

online sample: http://www.zenter.com/ed/view.html?id=226

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