John Blossom at Shore comments on an article in IT Week titled Law Users Irked by Lacklustre Service, written by Tim Buckley Owen at IWR. The article focuses on anonymous user complaints about the duopoly controlling legal information - Thomson and LexisNexis. Blossom comments:
Where a few years ago some usability enhancements on a search interface and a few new subscription sources could be touted as major enhancements by subscription database providers today these same improvements ring rather hollow in the ears of enterprise customers learning how to leverage Web technologies to get smarter faster than ever before. It's not even a matter of the bloom being off the rose: the rose of business information services is in danger of being uprooted altogether by enterprises in search of competitive advantages.
While I don't disagree with the points made in the article or the commentary, they only touch the surface of the dramatic changes in the economics of the business/legal information industry over the past decade. True, the larger providers find it difficult to move the needle on their large revenue bases with their legacy platforms and business models. But in some segments they still provide the best product at the price. What users often under-appreciate are the younger, smaller content and software providers that are able to move more quickly and offer excellent customer support - the kinds of businesses often acquired by the giants: Starmine, Sharkrepellent, Capital IQ, Interaction, First Research, mergermarkets, etc.
Comments