So I've been keeping quiet on the Dainow post re: Google displacing all other web analytics "products". Partly because this has been fun to watch, but mostly because I work for one of the other supposedly "dead" competitors. I wanted to see where this landed before I got in the mix.
Eric Peterson's thoughts on this are spot on. Here's Eric:
Dainow demonstrates a near complete lack of understanding of web analytics and the web analytics marketplace. Google Analytics already dominates the market in terms of total domains coded, but dominance isn’t defined by the breadth of your coding, it’s defined by the success your customers have using your application!I'll go one further. What Dainow fails to see is the difference between a product and a solution, where a solution is a product and a set of services combined to solve a business problem. While the market well served by Google doesn't really require a "solution" as much as they simply need a tool to do a job, the customers served by the big players (my employer included) tend to need (and have the money for) services to ensure successful solution design, implementation, deployment, and adoption of the tool set and the business processes required to make good use of the tool set.
The farther you go up the market, out of mid-market and into true enterprise class solutions, the more this is true. In fact, I would argue that in true enterprise-class solution deployments (the area of consulting I specialize in) the services are more important than the tool set. The greatest tool in the world isn't worth anything if it can't be successfully deployed across a global enterprise with a standards-based approach. Google, neat tool that it is, is nowhere near displacing the few vendors who can play at this level.
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