In the midst of the Great Recession, I find it ironic that Network Solutions – already a target of criticism for nuisance up-sell advertisements and expensive domain registration – has decided to reinvent the wheel.  While businesses everywhere are forced to downsize and get back to the basics of delivering value, Network Solutions has decided to go in the opposite direction by burdening their existing customers with new proprietary terms for familiar products and services.  They’re all prefixed with “ns” for “Network Solutions,” ostensibly to serve a misguided campaign to supplant 100% of the Internet’s existing competition not by virtue of delivering value, but simply through re-branding.  Apparently they’re under the delusion that either (A.) customers will come to adopt the term “nsWebAddress” instead of “domain,” or (B.) customers will be so impressed by their ambitious marketing they’ll forgive Netsol for confusing them, and won’t cancel their renewals.  (Of course, you have to first find the renewals screen in order to configure it.)

That someone convinced Netsol upper management to invest heavily in a more bloated user experience – alienating existing customers and probably scaring off new business, both unsolicited and through potential referrals – is almost too hard to believe.  Reminds me of a line from Walk Hard: The Dewey Cox Story.  Three days into a marathon LSD-induced trampoline session, a bearded, bouncing Dewey announces to his manager ”I’m reinventing music, into something I call schmusic!”

Could it be an elaborate prank?

Google, with all due respect to anyone else in the software game, is really looking way ahead. The way they’ve poured research & development into both their robust network and their array of useful tools really demonstrates what is to me a comforting emphasis on utility and common sense above all. I don’t see Google trying to be everything to everyone, but rather a big-picture plan to improve the way things work for consumers and businesses, and really just make everything secondary to delivery of undeniable value.

As an SMB there are a number of ways to really leverage Google. Here’s a short list of ways your average web newbie business owner can make use of their tools:

• Search engine – People can debate the Google algorithm until they’re blue in the face, but the fact of the matter is that it serves relevant answers to specific keyword searches…feed the search engine relevant, topic-specific information from a relevant, topic-specific website, and the Google search engine will rise up to meet demand by offering up your URLs in response. It’s common sense; if you build it, the traffic will come and while the “specialists” will do everything they can to get you to hire them to do this, the bottom line is that meaningful, relevant answers – and lots of them – are what you need. Use common sense and feed the information machine what it is hungry for. Your customers are using Google, trying to find answers.
• Gmail - After years of relying on a rather ubiquitous mail client which is packaged with a software suite, I realized it sucked after I had to run special repair tools on the massive proprietary file types which represented all of my critical communication for the last N units of time. This “corruption” event happened approximately every six months, when the inbox reached about 1GB in size (easy to do if you’re regularly receiving binary file attachments.) Also, since a mail client like this downloads everything from your webservers, unless you’re making regular web server backups nothing you have is protected…it’s scared and alone and vulnerable on your local machine, where it can be deleted, infected, quarantined, corrupted, melted, or otherwise rendered useless. Gmail makes many of these challenges moot. It’s remotely hosted, so Google assumes the performance and backup overhead while you enjoy lots of filespace and redundancy and security. Instead of chewing up your CPU searching for an email, the Google Gmail server handles the load with labels, which can now be color-coded and applied automatically as filters. And, you don’t have to worry about your easily-corrupted ubiquitous operating system on your local machine rendering your inbox inaccessible. Access Gmail from anywhere, and everything’s as you left it. They even have a decent version for PDAs and smartphones. Additionally, GoogleTalk (the chat client packaged to work with Gmail) maintains lightweight transcripts that don’t require the damn Java virtual machine to gobble up your resources. Forget everything but Gmail for your email and chatting, if you want to simply USE the tools instead of constantly fighting to preserve and tweak and improve their performance.
• Documents and Spreadsheets – The future of office programs is software as a service. There is NO REASON in the world for a frickin’ word processor to run on your local machine as a bloated application that hogs resources and becomes naturally corrupted as a function of time. Every individual has the right to a lightweight, hosted word processor and spreadsheet program that communicates with and imports/exports popular file formats easily. Let your local machine remain unfettered, and let Google’s robust servers handle the word processing and number-crunching. They’re also saved remotely so no need to backup…ANOTHER great time- and business-saver.
• YouTube – Again, think of Google (the search engine) as an answer machine that feeds hungrily on relevant, topic-specific information. In the context of a universe in which relevant information rises up to meet specific demand, YouTube is a great demonstration of this. Instant access to everything from old episodes of The Greatest American Hero, to a video tutorial of how to replace the LCD on your Treo, to viral marketing videos. YouTube gives you the audience and the exposure, all you have to do to unlock it is offer up something of video value. A tremendous opportunity for a business owner with something useful to say, free or not.
• Blogging – Build your initial site around a turnkey blog using blogspot.com, Google’s blogging tool. It’s a time-tested, ever-improving and easy-to-use web publishing tool that can get you set up with your standard run-of-the-mill business card website and more, and empower you to regularly publish relevant content. You likely won’t win any art contests with their standard out-of-the-box themes, of course, but then your focus should be on WHAT you’re saying, and not HOW you’re saying it, because ultimately that is what is of value to your customers.

See how far you can get using Google’s tools to establish your business on the web. You may be (really) surprised.