在donews的新闻里看到这个《Kiko之死引发的Web 2.0思考》，题目耸人听闻，也有些莫名其妙。看题目还以为是某个web2.0应用导致了kiko这个人的死亡。
kiko无法继续下去，最后决定是八万美元拍卖。我觉得很难有下家购买它，价格不菲，而且前途渺茫，因为google实在是很难打败的，八万美元不过是google的一簇牛毛罢了。当kiko最火爆的时候，肯定不会认为自己只有这个价。（包括豆瓣也是如此，我记得当时有新闻说豆瓣几百万卖了，阿北在blog澄清，另外也笑称怎样也不能这么便宜，当然，豆瓣仍然健在）
Richard White 是一个界面设计师，看上去有点像金凯瑞。他的blog上写了一片文字，介绍一些经验教训。我觉得这比什么吹牛B的文字都有意义有价值。每个想进入Web2.0的朋友都应该读一读。
Actual lessons from Kiko
Posted by Richard White 2 days ago
With all of the buzz about Kiko’s demise (and how Web 2.0 going with it) I thought, as a member of the Kiko team, I’m in a good position than most to give a detailed explanation of what we learned and what went wrong. Be warned, this post will be long on facts and stories so if you’re looking for assumptions and hand waving I’d suggest reading some other posts 
First, a few common questions:
Did you see Google Calendar coming?
Yes. It had been in internal beta for over a year and not all the Googlers at the ‘plex are good at keeping secrets. The launch that really surprised us was 30boxes.
Did Google Calendar kill Kiko?
No. One of our biggest traffic days was when Google Calendar was released because we were mentioned in all the new stories as one of their top competitors. In fact, we repositioned Kiko to take advantage of a market that most other players, including Google Calendar, were neglecting: users outside the US. We added options like Monday week start and different date formats. We setup a wiki and let our users translate Kiko into 11 languages. And we moved away from a US-only SMS reminder system to one that worked internationally. At last count 60-70% of our users are from outside the US.
That said they did have an impact on our ability to garner press for our re-launch (see below) but it wasn’t a case of Google coming into the calendar space and crushing us as some people have suggested.
Where was the business model?
Everything was predicated on getting a critical mass of users. Without that there’s no point in coming up with alternatives and if you do achieve it then you can monetize through the usual channels (ads and premium accounts). I agree with the 37signals argument that having paying customers forces you to hone in on what that market wants, and that probably would have done us a lot of good, *but* that’s not why we went under (see next question). Many people seem to disagree with me on this point so feel free to post your counter arguments (or links to them).
Why did you guys decide to call it quits?
We didn’t have the capital, and not just in the monetary sense, to take Kiko where we thought it would successful: the small business / OEM market. The team was burned out and we decided that it was time to find someone else to carry the torch. We did not run out of money. In fact, we pulled up well short of the end of our runway. So if you’d like to make the argument that our lack of a business model did us in, go for it, but it has little basis in reality. For more about this, read my Kiko eulogy.
And now, what I learned on my web 2.0 voyage
Stay focused
Justin mentioned this on his post mortem write-up but I’ll elaborate a bit more. We were on track to release the new version of Kiko in the middle of January, when we *lost focus* and starting working on something totally different altogether. This was obviously a suicidal move in hindsight as it cost us 2 months: Kiko 2.0 launched on March 15th instead of January 15th. During that time two important things happened:
1. 30Boxes came out of nowhere and launched on Feb 14. Thus becoming the new internet calendar darling.
2. Screenshots of Google calendar were leaked and posted all over the internet.
The combination of those two events meant we got very little press coverage for our launch (or re-launch) since everyone was holding their breath for Google Calendar or fixated on 30boxes.
Release early, but not too early
You always hear “Release early, release often”, especially if you hang around Paul Graham crowd, but the footnote that doesn’t get enough airplay is that you shouldn’t release too early (queue the sophomoric jokes in 3.. 2..). You only get one shot to impress people; don’t blow it because they won’t coming back next week to see if you’ve improved. Kiko 1.0 was released in September 2005 and was met with much fanfare for being one of the first AJAX calendars on the web. Unfortunately, the user interface was pretty bad (which is how I pushed my way onto the team) and people generally said “wow that’s cool… next!” The obvious problem is that when we launched version 2.0 I think the general reaction was “Kiko? Seen it. Hey how bout that new Google Calendar coming out?”.
Too many features killed the cat
It didn’t look it at first, but if you played around with Kiko 1.0 for 15 minutes you found out that there was a *lot* of functionality under the hood. Problem was that we felt we needed to bring *all* of that functionality over to Kiko 2.0. I mean you can’t cut features between versions, right? Wrong. We should have cut features, probably about 40% of them and launched.
This also contributed to our late launch and slowed us down after the launch because we had so many features to maintain.
You must have a plan for escaping the Technosphere
To a degree, it didn’t matter how many posts we got on TechCrunch, LifeHacker or Scoble; we would still be stuck in the same Technosphere duking it out with Google, 30Boxes and everyone else. You can make a nice living just pimping your wares in the technosphere (which is what I’m attempting with SlimTimer) but if you ever want to gain any real traction as an online calendar service you have to target the cubicle dwellers and their Outlook calendars that only exist outside the sphere. Techie users are fickle, transient and demanding. You can spend all of your time implementing ATOM feeds and hCalendar export and never be the better for it.
We didn’t have a plan for how to go mainstream, which, in hindsight, was a prerequisite for our success. We would have needed capital to do old school PR, marketing and sales and develop a sync service for Outlook. That said, I don’t think either of Google Calendar or 30Boxes have managed this feat either.
…
Regardless, we were feeling pretty good about ourselves around the middle of April. We were running neck and neck with 30boxes, according to Alexa, and we thought that the release of Google Calendar might be good because it would push one of the other big players into acquiring a calendar application to compete. 30boxes had stated that they didn’t want to be bought out so, as the #3 player, things were looking hopeful. Things didn’t pan out, but that’s okay. None of us were ever had a Lexus on hold; we were just happy to be in the fight.
So, What’s next for me? Well the ‘next big thing’ for me is already here: SlimTimer, online time tracker and the solution to the scourge of timesheets, launched to positive reviews a month ago and I’m working hard to keep the momentum going.