Brij Singh's Blog

Intuit and Google have announced a strategic alliance targeted to help millions of “small” business owners. This is an important move by Google as it allows them to spread into another important business workflow. This will provide them behavioral data from the financial community which they will mine to improve on Adwords , Checkout and Spreadsheet applications.

I believe this relationship and resulting mix of workflow will also enable further slicing of “small” business sector defintion. Current definition of small sector is very generic and vague. Between 1-person company to 100-person company they all get clubbed under small, offcourse there are other categorizations as well (revenue, sector etc) but they all get applied at the broad level.

Very soon near-closed loop transaction model will be in place thanks to workflow enablers like Page (though I doubt why they need this useless service, instead of leveraging Blogger for the content publishing) , Base, Adwords, Checkout, Analytics and Quicken (and many more in the labs). All we need now is to figure out what to sell and when/where to sell. There is lot of help on the How part (atleast for small customers). I think majority of sales process optimization will happen in the area of when and where to sell. That’s where Adwords specialist will play their role. Expect a sudden surge in demand for Adwords skillset. Google has made the setup fairly easy but there is always some place for experts there. These experts will differentiate themselves based on the vertical market knowledge they will bring to the table.

In a related news Quicken’s purchase of Stepup Commerce is a step in the same direction of building this near-closed loop transaction model. $60 million is a sweet valuation for this small technology play. Good times are back looks like.