TechHaze: Mr. Henze, some of our readers may not know what Jimdo is all about. Could you briefly describe the services offered, as well as give us a snapshot of the company’s current situation? How has your business scope evolved since United Internet, the leading German ISP, took 30% stake in Jimdo?
Matthias Henze: Jimdo is a free online website creator which allows users to create a great-looking website without any special computer skills. What really separates Jimdo from the pack is how easy it is to use and how professional the created websites look. We started Jimdo in February 2007, have over 1 Million users, and are doubling our userbase every 6 months. Jimdo is available in 8 languages and we see the growth from all parts of the world.

TH: You graduated from German and Swedish universities and obtained a degree in business. How did this lead you to the creation of Northclick, and how did Northclick lead you to the creation of Jimdo?
MH: I met Fridtjof through his brother with whom I studied together. Fridtjof at that time was 20 and had already co-founded a web-design agency with Christian. Their agency was doing well but they were looking for a unique product. In fall 2003 they developed a concept for easy content management, saw the potential, and were looking for a business guy. That’s when I jumped in. I had just graduated from university and couldn’t picture myself at a consulting firm or a big corporation, so I was more than happy to join. In early 2004 we went live with NorthClick and targeted SMBs in Germany with our easy-to-use content management system. Soon more and more of our friends asked us whether they could use our service for their personal websites. That’s when we recognized the huge potential for personal use and for very small businesses – and decided to launch Jimdo.

TH: How do you cope with immensely popular products like WordPress or Weebly, and on Macintosh, iWeb? Is there any Jimdo-specific feature that differentiates your product from the competition?
MH: I don’t think that you can break it down to a single feature. It’s the constant focus on permanent innovation, internationalizing the service and great customer support. Keeping the innovation speed high is quite a challenge when your service is growing quickly – you have to additionally focus on the infrastructure to keep the service running. For us in particular, we also had to manage the integration of Jimdo into the 1&1 infrastructure. However, I think we’ve managed well and we even expect to increaase our innovation pace in 2010. When it comes to internationalization – if you’re a start-up from a non-English speaking country but are aiming for the worldwide market you have to offer English as a language right from the get-go. That’s at least what we did and we thought, if we set up the process then we might as well add other languages too. I do think we’ve established a good knowledge of how to launch and manage different language versions of the service. And of course good customer support is always important.

TH: One of Jimdo’s most impressive feature is the ability to copy another website’s design. Some may find this incredibly useful, others may say it facilitates design theft. How do you respond to this?
MH: We developed this feature mainly for our SMB-users who should be able to hire a local web-designer to create a custom design for them and implement it in Jimdo. And that’s actually how it’s used. The results are great and the graphic flexibility of Jimdo comes to light. The feature indeed could also be used to copy a design of any website – but in fact there has not been any design theft reported to us since we introduced the feature in fall 2007.

TH: WYSIWYG editors are often accused of producing poor results. However, during our short test run of Jimdo, we found the results very impressive. What technologies did you develop to make this possible?
MH: We developed Jimdo ourselves – and it is mainly based on PHP.

TH: Jimdo is more successful than Weebly worldwide, but has a weaker market penetration in the United States. That seems strange in an industry where distance practically doesn’t matter. How do you explain this?
MH: That’s a good question. Probably, one reason is that the US in one of many countries we’re targeting whereas our competition is mainly focusing on their US home market. And in addition, although distance doesn’t matter as much as it used to, it still does matter. We know our tasks for the US and that’s why we expect to get stronger in the US, too.

TH: How do you see Jimdo’s future?
MH: It feels like we have just started out with Jimdo. We’re really proud on what we’ve achieved so far but there’re so many chances and challenges ahead of us. So we’re really looking forward towards what’s still to come.

TH: On a personal level, are you Mac or PC?
MH: Mac.

TH: Jimdo is an incredible success story. Do you have any advice for young companies starting up small, but aiming high?
MH: There’s a new startup movement in the US, called Lean Startup. The theory behind it is to focus on the product-market fit before you think of rolling out the product to the masses. In my opinion, this is very relevant to all entrepreneurs who are thinking of starting a company. If you’re interested in this theory, I can recommend the blogs of Sean Ellis, Eric Ries, and Steve Blank.

TH: Mr. Henze, thank you very much for your time!

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The video below is the result of quick “research” (i.e. some Google guys asking questions in Times Square, New York) on what people thought a “browser” was. The results are scary. For those who are not courageous enough to watch it, this video basically proves that most people have no idea what a browser is, and assimilate the term to the concept of search engine.

The problem is that people are not aware of what software they are using. If they bump into limitations from using that software, they’ll think their at the edge of all possible technology and not that the particular software they are using is limited. One out of ten people is using Internet Explorer 6. They are not using it because they chose it but rather because they have no idea that Internet Explorer is a software program that can be replaced. You might argue that there’s no bad to that, but it is clear that people using IE 6 have a lower web experience than those with IE 8, FF3, etc. Of course Google is worried because their whole business is on the web: a bad web experience for 10% of the Internet’s users ultimately means 10% of users that would have a limited experience with their products.

Imagine what people would answer if they were asked what OS they used? Would they know there were alternatives? Microsoft has long taken advantage of this situation by pushing hardware brands to tie their operating system to the PCs. Practically nobody revolted against that situation because they did not have the knowledge to study the alternatives. You might say that the situation has changed because Apple is making a lot of noise, but according to the numbers I’ve seen, Firefox is much more used than Mac OS. That means that if more than 10% of users are not able to see the advantage to switching to a new browser from IE6, these same users will not even think of changing the whole OS. If 90% of users do not know what an OS is (and it’s probably harder to understand what an OS is than what a browser is), who can break the Microsoft monopoly.

On a more cheerful note, Apple’s advertisement serves the OS market as a whole as it opens consumers eyes and consequently pushes it towards more innovation. Now I’m asking myself a question: will the browser chooser option on Windows 7 (in Europe only) open people’s eyes about choice? The “ballot screen” that Microsoft will have to provide their new costomers with a new insight on browser competition, even if I don’t believe a larger share of customers will actually will care. This video just made me realize why Microsoft was fighting the EC so much.

Conclusion? I’d say computer illiteracy is good for Microsoft and any information is dangerous for their dominance. If people don’t know what a browser is, they won’t feel the need to change. The same thing goes for the OS.

If you’re not sure yourself what a web browser is, here’s a video that explains it is (very) simple terms:

You might want to check whatbrowser.org (from which this video comes from), a web site made by “some folks at Google”, that is non partisan (i.e. not pushing Google Chrome down your throat), and that’s simple to understand for non-tech-savvy users. I think I’ll send the address to my clueless friends. You should do the same.

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“Here’s the Buzz: ‘By and large, we found that Internet Explorer 8 performed well, and beat out Firefox 3.0.7 in the majority of our time trials.’
Browser Showdown: Internet Explorer 8 vs. Firefox, PC World, 5/19/09″

Well, they found a nice quote, so I’m ready to believe them. Then again, beating Forefox in speed is not the greatest of all achievements. Firefox is the slowest of all IE alternatives (including Google Chrome, Apple Safari and Opera). So what about it’s comparison to other browsers?Microsoft is very generous: they give us a nice comparison chart so we can see for ourselves.

Security: IE wins. Explanation?
“Internet Explorer 8 takes the cake with better phishing and malware protection, as well as protection from emerging threats.”

Well, as much as I am ready to believe IE has made enormous progress with their last version of IE, I wouldn’t really bet on that.

According to the Softies, IE also wins in Privacy and Ease of Use. A tie on Web standards and Customisation, but IE still wins in Reliability, Compatibility, and Manageability. As to Performance, a tie again. They know they loose to Google Chrome hands down on this last one, so what have they to say? “Knowing the top speed of a car doesn’t tell you how fast you can drive in rush hour. To actually see the difference in page loads between all three browsers, you need slow-motion video. This one’s also a tie.” In other words, “we’re still losing on that one”. Can you tell me why small details are used to show victories of IE over Firefox and Chrome but these same details are considered negligeable the other way round? Sometimes, when they (the Microsoft employees who wrote this article) are confident enough in their commentaries, they actually name Firefox or Chrome. Sometimes the only name Firefox, Chrome is just forgotten… Revealing? Some other things are funny too. In customisation, Explorer and Firefox are on the same level, according to the Microsoft guys. They admit Firefox has more addons over-all, but some of the add-ons for Firefox are included by default on IE. Therefore, Firefox is not more customisable. Huh?
I’m not going to attack IE any more on what is said in that web page, it’s just too easy, but I’d like to ask a question: why isn’t Apple’s Safari present when Google Chrome is? I have my theory. Google and Apple react differently to attacks, especially when they come from Redmond. Google will ignore this. Apple would have bashed Microsoft in a well thought ad and made them look ridiculous. Of course, Microsoft would tell you that Chrome has already surpassed Safari in Windows’ browser market share. Would they have done the same with another competitor?
Want to know more (or just have a laugh)? Go to Microsoft’s Browser Comparison

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Image courtesy: !killer7ben