http://www.tbs-sct.gc.ca/pgol-pged/cookies-temoins/cookies-temoins05_e.asp#s6

Well the first point that comes to my mind is that there would be no “mobile web analytics offerings”.

Theres a great post on mobile analytics you might want to check out by Bryson Meunier here;
http://www.brysonmeunier.com/the-mobile-seo-s-guide-to-mobile-analytics/comments/41#comment-41

It gives a pretty good overview of ALL the players in the space – yes even http://www.Amethon.com

Interesting to note that neither Omniture nor Google is even mentioned

Regards,
Dean Collins
Dean.Collins@Amethon.com
Phone: +1 646-240-4043

Anil Batra
Director of Analytics and Strategy, ZeroDash1
http://webanalysis.blogspot.com

http://thefutureof.webanalyticsdemystified.com/2008/02/18/web-analytics-is-dead-long-live-web-analytics/

Thanks to everyone who is participating! I agree, unlikely that the other vendors (and emerging vendors) will give up anytime soon!

If speculation pans out to anything, Google has its eyes on cellular bandwidth. Though I do not know whom, and if I did I certainly could not say, but someone made the reserve bid of $4.5 billion on ‘C Block. Let’s just take a look, Google has $166 billion in market capital and receives $0 in fees for using its tool. Its fair to assume this is not a company with a stake, yet, in trying to bully the world of online measurement. It seems to me, and I’d be willing to bet that the folks in Palo Alto would agree, that their attitude toward measurement is something akin to: “Yeah, we do some of that too.”

Omniture, on the other hand, has been gobbling up googles of “best-in-breed” for just about a year now. It was, I believe, Instadia, TouchClarity, Offermatica, which predated the WebSideStory/VSCI snag in October. This is a telltale sign of a company who is aware of competition down the road, and unsure of what angle its going to come from.

In theory, the discussion that a duopoly is bad for innovation is true. To play the part, I’d say, if we were to have a duopoly and these were the players, this particular race would be a good thing. Google, if they are capable of resonating their motto of ‘Don’t be Evil’ would seek to educated, accelerate, and elevate the practice of analysis based on game theory. (I think I covered some of that in my blog, if not, you could probably get the idea from a watching of ‘A Beautiful Mind’). In a nutshell, they would do what is good for them, and the market.

Omniture, I’d bet, would seek to emulate this, but, might play the cards a little closer to the chest. They’d probably do best to open the doors a little more. By that, I mean that they should concentrate less on the market tectonics and more on providing quality customer service to the complicated, but useful product, which they have as their primary business model foundation. They would also do better to settle the sales and empower users. For What its worth….

fortunately, i don’t think the folks at webtrends, coremetrics,
clicktracks, etc will throw in the towel anytime soon.

@Denise, it’s clear that privacy is becoming more and more an issue. Only the future will tell us where all this is going. I have to admit that I’m sometimes frightened when I see all that we can do with Web Analytics. I strongly believe that we as the Web Analytics industry need to create some codes of conduct or else like in Canada the legislator will do it on our behalf and not always the right way as legislators have sometimes problems understanding the technology and can miunderstand some concepts. There are for example regulations here in Belgium regarding emails that are more protective that the legislation of regular postal mail…

You can read some thoughts regarding this in a post I wrote last year (read specially the comments under the post): http://webanalytics.ox2.eu/2007/05/16/google-analytics-microsoft-gatineau-ox2s-web-analytics-code-of-ethics/

Cheers,

René

But let’s get back to your comments:

@Steve, thanks for your comments regarding Omniture’s perspective. It’s clear that Google Analytics is a big threat to all vendors and lately I’ve seen many companies walking away from ‘paying’ tools towards Google Analytics. This for two main reasons: price of course but also ease of use. Some enterprise solutions are really hard to use by people that are not Web Analytics dedicated and many companies don’t even have one dedicated resource to Web Analytics. As GA has imho the best user interface in the industry it’s much easier for this type of user to use this tool. Of course this might mean that they are not yet taking Web Analytics as seriously as they should, but well that’s another discussion

@Phil, I get your point regarding micro innovations, but I still think that the duopoly will bring lack of innovation. Even if we have niche players that will focus on some aspects of web analytics (as Crazy Egg for example) I don’t see large corporations using several ‘little’ tools in order to get answers. Large companies need an integrated tool that will allow them to deploy on a global scale and thus having many little tools would be a real nightmare in a process point of view. We have many clients on a panEuropean or Global scale and I can assure you that even using a tool is difficult at the beginning. You can read more in the two presentations we had last year in our Web Analytics Wednesday in Brussels:
http://www.slideshare.net/Renator13/slideshows (watch the presentation from Michaël Notté from Toyota and the one from Julien our Country Manager in France).
I also invite you to watch/hear the WAA Webcast ‘Taking the pulse of International Web Analytics’ (you need to be a member of the Web Analytics Association to access):
http://www.webanalyticsassociation.org/waawebcastseries/2007archives/index.asp

@Eric, I understand your concerns about standards, I think that we all in this industry would love to have more spread standards among vendors, but the price to pay (having that duopoly) is just not worth it from my perspective, for the reasons I explained in the original post. I hope that standards will come one day but not because of acquisitions and lack of competition
And don’t get me wrong, the purpose of this post was to create discussion I don’t think that this reality will happen one day, but I find it an interesting exercise to explore that possibility and see what you all have to say about it. Thanks again for giving me the opportunity to express it here and your kind words on he Yahoo Group.

@Joseph James, while I know the pareto principle since I was I kid I don’t see the relationship with the 10/90 or the 10/20/70 rule… I don’t think that this industry can be ‘measured’ in terms of revenue as we have major players that have changed the rules. You state that 80% of revenue will go to 20% of players, what do you do then with players as GA and Gatineau? Google is by far the player that has more customers (if we could call like that their users) and it gets no direct revenue from it (except the ones using Urchin software which are a small minority). And regarding consolidation, even if we are seeing it happening these past years, I don’t think that it will go much further. Ian’s comment is very interesting on this but I’ll come to it afterwards.
I’m afraid that I disagree also with your statement that the barrier of entry is low in this industry… How many new global players have emerged in the past two years? It’s a very complex industry on the technical side and I don’t think that building a WA tool is an easy task and neither to market it right to get its use spread.

@Palani, you present exactly the dilemma that I was explaining. It’s clear that having 2 players would make things a lot easier for many things but your question about ‘mobile analytics’ shows that we need innovation in this field as the Internet is rapidly changing and I don’t expect it to stop any time soon. Nobody knows how we will surf in the future, what devices we will be using, etc… Yesterday night I was having a conversation with Aurélie and she told me that by when our future son will be able to surf, we would only give him access to the Internet from the computer in the living room (to avoid misuse) as our son will be born this year, this means that we are talking about a situation in 4-6 years time and my reply was ‘we don’t know what technology we will have at that time and if we will be able to control it…’. Getting back to Web analytics we need innovation as the Internet evolves and what is standard today won’t be in a few years. Take a look at social media tools or the example you gave about mobile…

@ Bryan, I really like your explanation where you say that data will be taken as hostage in the negotiation Which brings to another question, will the market accept in the long term that data sits outside in some servers they cannot control? The WA industry has moved these past years from software to ASP, but from my perspective in the future we will see a come back of software solutions as companies will want to make sure they own the data and that they can easily reuse it in other systems in order to integrate them. The web is not an island anymore! At OX2 we have customers in the public sector and all of them use software WA tools, they wouldn’t dare to take an ASP solution… And in the latest request for proposals that we have won in this sector, they always wanted to have access to the database where the data sat, so going further to not only software versions but also open databases…

@ Judah, well what can I reply to you except that I think that you’re right as always See you soon in SF!

I stop here for the moment as the next comment is going to take me a little bit more of time to answer (thanks Ian ;-)) but I promise I continue today!

Thanks again to all of you for your contributions and I hope that you don’t mind if I didn’t agree to all of you, but well that’s the idea to discuss and share point of views. No hard feeling?

Cheers,

René

@Denise: An excellent point, but what if we assume that Omniture is able to leverage their investment in Visual Sciences software and provide a cookie-free solution. Does the same objection still exist? I’m not saying they ** will ** but they certainly ** could ** …