Small Businesses. They make up the lifeblood of our nation. I think its fantastic. I also think its interesting to see how small businesses rely on what I believe is an archaic “internal network” to share and manage information. I think there are two sides to this issue.
MSP’s & Service Providers
These are also small businesses who set up a network based on best known practices. Many small business reach out to these people to set up their network. Unfortunately I think many of them don’t try to make their service providers or themselves innovate in this space. Many of them just set up what they know and are licensed for across all their customers.
Many of them revolve around Microsoft products with internal networks, servers, and backups located onsite and offsite. It includes a traditional network with all the computers linked together. Some might prefer a “terminal server” setup because of the simplicity for the user, but then fail to keep the system up to date.
Small Business Owners
Small business owners just want it to work. They don’t care so much how it works just that they are able to get work done, and that uptime is as good as possible. I believe this makes many small businesses end up paying more in the long run because they base it on what their MSP’s tell them they need. It reminds me of a copier we purchased from a company. They told us we “needed” a big upright copier for the maybe 500 sheets of printing and scanning we did per month knowing that they would be making quite a bit of profit out of the equipment. Yes, it worked, yes it did what they said, but did we need that much? No. Not in the slightest. They were just trying to sell what all their other customers had and keep their support costs low and sales profits high.
Revolution
I think small businesses and innovators should be looking for better methods to create these small business networks. Some MSP’s look at a network and set up a 5 person business the same way they would set up a 50 person business. Many Service Providers set up their systems requiring a small business owner use an MSP because its so complicated to set up. I think of deploying programs to a small business network. It’s nigh impossible to do it remotely without some level of coding or lots of time spent on Google finding how to do it. Another difficult setup is Microsoft Exchange server. The amount of small businesses I’ve helped set up their Exchange server because it is this web app thats cumbersome to setup. It’s ridiculous.
Granted, some businesses need a network because of the files, or programs they are working with. But I’d say a vast majority of them can use a system like Dropbox to share files and a web based program to do other information sharing (I think of Slab for an internal Wiki, or ClickUp for task management).
I’m sure as we become more reliant on web apps the only app we will need is a browser, but it will likely be multiple years before we get there and will still have small businesses with big business networks setup for them and small businesses spending far more than they need for a simple browser and file management system.
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