David vs Goliath, and both lost

Yet another stage in the death-knell of the UK E-university saga rang last night (http://news.bbc.co.uk/1/hi/education/4311791.stm), and it makes me so embarrassed & jealous and a 100 other adjectives. I skim-read the compendium of the e-university (http://www.heacademy.ac.uk/1641.htm) and it shouts out at you why the failure occured. (You have to skim read, the bible seems shorter.) This was a project with huge amounts of UK taxpayer money spent primarily on people with egos and pensions. It was spent on someone trying to play inside the Internet "by committee". It was a top-down approach with no bottom up feel. And perhaps there is another angle.

The report makes as an excuse the dotcom bust. But I have to ask why were they playing as a committee in an entrepreneurs world? The whole premise is laughable, except it just makes me want to cry. It makes me cry because you can see someone saying "oh, Tom go round all the higher education colleages and report back." So Tom spends six months travelling round, building up his pension plan. And for every Tom there is an Alice and a Jo, because this organisation needed to do its research throroughly. It was going to get things right! So all these teams come back, write their reports, and these get aggregated up into larger more complex reports that committees contemplate, and contemplate. And all the time the £££ are being spent.

And therein lies the first problem. A key to success in the Internet is the ability to react, instantly. An ability to get ahead. An ability to read an opportunity and turn a business plan on its head within 24 hours. We use PayPal for our e-commerce. They have their problems as a company, but they also do a lot of things very very well. They wouldn't have 50m customers if they did not. They did not start by researching all the traditional banking organisations. They did not send teams around gleaning facts and figures. They spotted a niche and pressed that advantage home. In the early days, pressing that advantage meant changing their business model as often as a new customer joined them.

So how is this relevant to PopG & Groove? In our time we have had far more success in e-learning on just about every statistic you could imagine than the e-university ever had. Our deployment model is so far superior we are on another planet. Our education customers include CalState, University of California, Stokholm University, Creighton University and the University of Western Ontario. Meeting their needs is not easy. They are demanding, not least in that they want to keep costs down. And how have we done this?

Well we haven't written reports of 1000's pages. We spotted an excellent technology - Groove and another one - Citrix. We realised that these are at the opposite ends of one measure of computing - server based computing versus peer to peer computing. We took two diametrically opposite technologies and we welded them together. Our insight is that together they work. Our IP is in the welding, and it is something that many others have tried and seem to have failed at.

And lest we forget, that other angle. What small companies are good at is spotting and exploring that niche. One goal of the UK E-university could be said to be to create a 21st Century edition of the Open University. A large organisation stacked full of the well-qualified and the well-meaning. Does that work? Just take a look at the way society is moving - the increasing proliferation of small companies will not abate. We are no longer in the era of mega-sized companies. In the microcosom that PopG inhabits we fit incredibly well into our mould. We shape that mould. We react and morph. And so many other companies are doing the same. This is the age of the entrepreneur, the age of diversification. So how on earth could anyone expect one solution fit all? One reason for our success is the ability to spot that niche and emphasise and apply our strengths. Dovetail.

And so we struggle on from project to project, improving our business bit by bit, thinking why for f**s sake won't the government encourage start up companies more effectively (with the emphasis on the word startup). There is a world we can beat out there. I just wonder how many more time the UK Government has to spend £50m on just 900 students, how many more large egos need satiating, before it realises that it has got something fundamentally wrong, and I don't just mean the UK E-University.