Ian Landsman is Starting From Scratch, August 18, 2006:
I Don’t Trust You
If you're in the market for a powerful and user friendly Help Desk solution, please take a look at my company's flagship product HelpSpot.
The other day I saw a post by Brent about this really nice looking bug tracker called Porchlight. It looks like a pretty nice bug tracker, especially because it seems very simple which is what I want. Here’s the problem. I don’t trust them. I don’t want a hosted version of their product. I want to control my own data. I want it on my own domain, I want it backed up with my own backups, I don’t trust them for $10 a month to take better care of my data then I will. Why should I trust them?
In all the web2 hysteria people have forgotten that most people don’t trust other people. Especially with their very important proprietary data.
Update: Scoble has a post just now that’s tangentially related to this as well.
Discussion
Ditto!
I remember a couple of years ago before I left my (now ex-) employer, we were visited by 2 guys with a nice CMS package. It looked exactly what we were looking for.
But they wouldn't want to sell it. They wanted to host our company Web site.
Sorry boys, no deal!
Created by Serge Wautier on 08.18.2006 9:45 am
> most people don’t trust other people
Well, actually, not quite true. Ever heard of eBay? 
Created by Serge Wautier on 08.18.2006 10:56 am
You don't have to trust the random other people on ebay with your private corporate data though.
Created by Ian on 08.18.2006 11:01 am
Yes, interesting thoughts. I don't know if I want my data out in the world either, since you are just trusting some unknown individuals with it.
I guess the optimist in me says there are a lot of web-based businesses and there are a lot of users trusting them, so why not trust them?
I have tossed the idea around of a web based product for doing small business accounting, like billing clients, paying bills, profit and loss statements, etc. Much like 37Signals Basecamp but for small business accounting, simple and gets the job done. My thinking is companies would not trust me with their data, so who would use it. I think there is a market for it since we are stuck with Quickbooks or Microsoft Small Business Accounting, but I am not sure people would trust me. How can I convince people I am trustworty?
I think it's a tough one to sell and tough to buy when you are spending money on something so important, in your case bug tracking, with the hopes the company is backing up your data and is not allowing others to get ahold of it. How do we even know if the company would stay in business.
Just my thoughts.
Created by Rob Bazinet on 08.18.2006 11:01 am
Yep, staying in business is a big one. I should clear up that I don't think these guys are untrustworthy, but things happen and this data is just too important. If it's on my server at least I can still use it if they go under or don't do their backups or whatever.
Created by Ian on 08.18.2006 11:11 am
I was speaking of not trusting in the general sense relating to anyone having a web-based SaaS model.
Created by Rob Bazinet on 08.18.2006 11:31 am
The company who makes the #1 acounting package in my country (no name to protect the guilty decided to offer web-based solutions to their clients: Yes, they keep their clients accounting data.
One of the ex-dev leads of that product told me it was crazy how the boss and the sales guys don't hesitate a single second to secretly dig their client's data when they think they can find interesting stuff :-(
Still, these people are successful!
Created by Serge Wautier on 08.18.2006 2:23 pm
Ian, of course I agree that corporate data is more important than a few bucks on a Paypal account.
What I mean is that it's hard to say what people would trust. When the eBay founder started up, he was the only one out there who believed people would put money in an envelope and send it to someone they don't know. You know the rest of the story!
I saw a documentary about it a few days ago where the guy explained that in the beginning, he simply wrote in the e-mail to the auction winner : "BTW, when you have some time, it would be nice to send me an envelope with the $XX fee". In no time, he had to hire someone to open the envelopes!
Created by Serge Wautier on 08.18.2006 2:29 pm
Heh. That'd be kind of cool to have a guy to open the envelopes! Maybe I'll start doing my billing that way 
Created by Ian on 08.18.2006 2:31 pm
It will be nice when the day comes that every person with an Internet connection has a chunk of remote, encrypted web space they can use to host apps, store data etc.
Until then relying on some third party to host your important data, without a sustainable business model, is plain crazy stuff.
I touched briefly on this in my comment to this blog post surfulater-for-pim with relation to my product, Surfulater.
Created by Neville Franks on 08.18.2006 9:08 pm