"Why are they so afraid to mention this “one startup”?"<p>They don't want to legitimize you or give you any publicity. That's obvious and a good business strategy on their part. After all what do they have to gain by doing so?
This is an excellent case study unfolding in real time in the A/B Testing software industry on how large incumbent products (Adobe's Omniture - Test & Target) get killed by startups (Optimizely) .<p>The core of the issue seems to be something called MBox (<a href="http://www.managingecommerce.com/glossary/i-n/mbox" rel="nofollow">http://www.managingecommerce.com/glossary/i-n/mbox</a>) which is a mechanism for setting up a test e.g. Does A page perform better than B page - which is the essence of A/B testing. Of course, some genius strategist comes up with "our value is driven of by the number of tests/experiments that people run so lets set our pricing strategy of that" and then over time you slowly "capture more value than you create".<p>And then comes a startup which calls BS on that practice because most tests don't end up anywhere & they design a really radically simpler software that is not constrained by "per test" & other artificial constraints! They win by creating more value than they capture. More background on that topic here: <a href="http://www.avc.com/a_vc/2012/09/does-open-conflict-with-making-money.html" rel="nofollow">http://www.avc.com/a_vc/2012/09/does-open-conflict-with-maki...</a>
At first I was skeptical whether the article would correctly quote Ghandi (yes, disputed) [1]. I was pleasantly surprised at how optimizely is responding to Adobe. I think I'll go try it out.<p>[1] <a href="http://en.wikiquote.org/wiki/Mohandas_Karamchand_Gandhi#Disputed" rel="nofollow">http://en.wikiquote.org/wiki/Mohandas_Karamchand_Gandhi#Disp...</a>
About the quote: I first came across this quote in my college library,in some linux book.Though I didn't know who wrote this quote at that time,I really liked it and wrote it down on my college books.I was the only guy who was sticking with linux ,where as all my friends advised me to switch to j2ee/.net platform because thats where jobs are available for it but not linux.<p>When I told,I'm going to do something project with linux,the reply will be "Linux is OS,what could you possible do with it?".I still remember,the day-before When a company came for campus recruitment,I was doing some linux related on my new desktop.Then one friend commented 'he doesn't need to be prepare for interview,he will get a job with linux :P'.<p>Next day,I was lucky to meet a linux-enthusiast in my interview panel and 9 students got a job out of 180 students.My name topped that list !:)<p>Few days later,the same guy who commented a day-before the interview,saw this quote on my book asked 'did you wrote this quote?'.I said,"read it some book". again he insisted 'don't lie,looks like you wrote this'.I replied 'no i didn't'<p>In my final-year college project,I mentioned thanks for my parents and my guide and 'unknown' person who wrote this quote.<p>After few years,one of my oss project received foss india awards (www.giis.co.in/LFY.png).I came to know to this quote was actually written by Gandhi.<p>As for as I'm concern this quote has 3 questions :<p>What will <i>you</i> do when others ignore you? [are you going to give up?]
What will <i>you</i> do when others laugh at you? [are you going to get discouraged ?]
What will <i>you</i> do when others fight with you? [are you going to quarrel with them? or shut-up & continue your work]
I am a regular contributor on HN but I work in this industry and so i am using a throwaway account.<p>Dan,
1.3 billion 'visitors' is a really vague representation. Is it user sessions or page views or number of unique visitors measured in one of the experiment/control groups?<p>Test & Target mbox hell as mentioned in the post is very very true. Learning to use it within one hour is a joke. The technology they use is really stale and hasn't changed a lot in the recent years. Many of the players who started after 2008/09 have far superior implementations, thanks to lot of advancements in browser technologies which T&T failed to capitalize.<p>I am very happy for Optimizely's success and these two posts will bring them a good amount of well deserved PR. Test & target and in fact a good number of other providers are way ahead of Optimizely in this game. The number of sessions/experiments is one good metric but it is definitely not the best one to measure the leader in the race.<p><i></i>* What is optimziely's ARR?<p>At 2800 customers paying $250/month [1], it should be around $8.5M. Lets be generous and make it $10M. A handful of T&T's high profile clients will be paying Adobe that amount.<p><i></i>* How many IR100, IR500 [2], top 100 travel, publishing, finance sites are in Optimizely's client list?<p>Builtwith's data is not very accurate. We have worked with the guy from builtwith to compute some lists and their methodologies are not very great. They just look for signals in the script tags and it throws lot of false positives. Out of my own interest, i have spent hours writing parsers and scripts to compile the list and Optimizely is not really in that picture.<p>You can have thousands of clients paying you hundreds of dollars or have a few hundred clients paying 5/6 figure amounts. Optimizely has been after the former while the other players including T&T have been targeting the latter. I guess Optimizely is now trying to expand their enterprise client list since that is where the big money is but it takes a lot more to compete in that arena with long sales cycles and vast requirements.<p><i></i>* How many user sessions are being served?<p>Requests is probably the worst measure. T&T mentioned it because they can show their artificially inflated metric which is a result of their terrible implementation. IMO, user sessions is a better measure. 1.3 billion user sessions (in 2 years)[3] is still no where close to what the other providers serve. Number of tests currently running is also a good measure.<p>Optimizely is a great product and they have made it super easy to run A/B tests but false proclamation claiming you are number one when you are not even close is not very nice.<p>[1] Optimizely probably has a good number of clients in that 2800+ who pay $10k-20K a month. The highest openly priced plan is $360. I guess it wouldn't be wrong to assume that 50% of the customers will be in one of the two lower plans ($17 or $71). Optimizely's current ARR would be somewhere between $5M to $10M (My guess!)<p>[2] <a href="http://www.internetretailer.com/top500/list/" rel="nofollow">http://www.internetretailer.com/top500/list/</a><p>[3] There was no mention of the timeline. So i assume it is from when they started in 2010.
Give them hell for all of us who've been subsidizing their bloatware all these years! Love it.<p>I wish some well-financed Mac devs would build a Photoshop/Fireworks killer....
If you look at the home pages for both products, it's absolutely clear which one uses their own "medicine".<p><a href="http://optimizely.com" rel="nofollow">http://optimizely.com</a><p><a href="https://www.omniture.com/en/products/conversion/test-and-target" rel="nofollow">https://www.omniture.com/en/products/conversion/test-and-tar...</a>