This trend also makes startups just less attractive as destinations for employees. My experience is that startups that have started to scale still don't have as much compensation as larger more mature companies.
Employees join for a number of reasons but stock compensation is one of them. This compensation has always been risky and hard to value but it is now becoming risky, hard to value and even if the company succeeds the compensation won't be realized for a very long time.
Which is probably why cancer survival when it can be surgically removed is fairly good, but incredibly poor in general when it can't and must be treated by medicine.
I don't know if Burzynski has something better, but I have seen the documentary and researched the background. It is clearly not a case of the FDA trying to stop bad medicine. He has been in trouble mostly due to protocol and a clandestine attempt to take his patents. He has been in court many times, and won every case, and never was he in court due to damage to clients, it was always about some break of protocol, such as how medicine is delivered across state lines etc.
Anyway, in general you aren't allowed to even try Burzynski's medicine until all FDA approved medicines have already been tried. Only then can you apply to be part of the FDA trial for his medicine.
I am all for evidence-based medicine... this link is arguing that terminally-ill patients should not have the right to try various experimental treatments, which I find appalling..."those who sacrifice liberty for security deserve neither."
I generally agree with DHH's assessment of CRM and think it is ridiculous it trades such a high p/e compared to similar companies like Adobe.
That said, moving email providers is likely a huge pain in the ass for those 6000 customers. They are basically locked in for years and years. There may be potential to raise prices and gain profit from those customers. Internal investment to move vendors is likely in the hundreds of thousands.
Salesforce already has a few of these same clients through BuddyMedia and other B2C offerings, but the cross sell of a marketing suite is what they are envisioning. I expect that outside of a potential Marketo purchase, they will purchase companies with more b2c or general marketing offerings, potentially search, display or other ad related products to compliment Social.com.
something like 90%+ of Marketo's customers integrate it with Salesforce. Of course Salesforce won't just cut them off if they have a competitor tool, due to anti-trust issues, but it doesn't necessarily bode well for Marketo now that Salesforce owns a competitor. Pardot is a fairly small piece of Exacttarget though so potentially Marketo could still be a target at some point.
Larger scale B2C marketing automation is generally much more complex than b2b. Ecommerce databases are generally less normalized across businesses, aren't hosted by an intermediary like salesforce and contain more data. Cross-channel retailers with physical stores track a ton of transactions and customers. I really don't think that any b2b marketing automation platform will make much headway trying to go b2c. Hubspot has some success only because they focus on local and small businesses.
sophisticated marketers have done hold-out tests with retargeting shown that it can drive incremental sales at a profitable roi. this includes big ecommerce brands.
granted not every viewthrough and clickhtrough conversion is driven by the advertising, but some definitely are and it is often profitable if a campaign is optimized and run well.
so you're saying the best website should win without "cheating" right? its not that simple.
you could make the same argument about all advertising/marketing.
the best product should win on its own standards, without advertising, right? for example, wouldn't we all have better insurance rates if geico, progressive and esurance didn't have to spend their money on advertising?
But the truth is these insurance companies are disrupting old school insurance models that are less efficient and bringing value to more consumers faster with their advertising.
companies adapt, consumers adapt, markets adapt, search engines adapt. companies and people are going to work toward their self interest, and SEO is one way to do this. its called capitalism.
As always, there is a thin line between cheating and being ethical.
You know... marketing by itself is not unethical, though when you use tricks to induce people to buy something even though you know it's not good for them, the line is crossed. Like when a large fast food restaurant starts giving toys away if you buy their food... inducing children to annoy their parents so they buy unhealthy food just to get the toys. Or when you show sports people smoking a cigarrete, linking the image of smoking with a healthy life.
Of course, if all that matters is making money, then cheating the search engines (or peoples perception, in the case of marketing) is fine.
Español - Estoy aprendiendo hace 3 meses con los websites Duolingo.com, italki.com, anki y otros. Espero que en un año puedo tener buenas conversaciónen con hablantes fluidos.
There are some really interesting emerging ways to learn a foreign language also an emerging community of language learners and polyglots on the internet.
As a native Spanish speaker: DuoLingo es muy bueno para principiantes! ... some parts of Spanish are simple (acute accents rules are not hard) but verbs are terrible (compared to how simple they are in English) but there's plenty of material to study. Best of luck!
Employees join for a number of reasons but stock compensation is one of them. This compensation has always been risky and hard to value but it is now becoming risky, hard to value and even if the company succeeds the compensation won't be realized for a very long time.