Pierre Chappaz leaves Netvibes as CEO

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July 4th, 2007 by philip.wilkinson

This caught me unawares this morning with Pierre leaving Tariq and the Netvibes team to grow the business themselves. It even spurred me to dig up an old Kelkoo press photo (Pierre is on the far right, I’m in the middle.)

Varying comments on the blogs but generally they all follow a similar theme of a a disagreement over the business model of Netvibes where Pierre was interested in creating a sustainable revenue stream where as Tariq wanted to focus purely on the best product experience at all costs.

Also, interesting to see it mentioned that personalised start-up pages are facing more competition for each other and bigger brands such as MyAOL and iGoogle – with infinitely more resources, and most importantly other revenue streams they can call on to support themselves.

I know from experience with working with Pierre that he is a very intelligent guy with a real focus on creating clever business models and really milking many different revenue streams. From my perspective, it makes sense to listen very carefully when he tries to monetise a business he is involved with. After all, that $15m investment won’t last forever.

Perhaps it is a good time for Netvibes to look at selling itself and the technology?

Coverage here:

4 Responses

Netviber writes:
July 5th, 2007 at 12:32 pm

Hi Philip,

Thanks for your comment that confirms what I said about Chappaz
(http://netviber.blogspot.com/2007/07/pierre-chappaz-co-ceo-quits-netvibes.html)

I wanted to know your opinion on: ” Why iGoogle is so unattractive at the moment?” and therefore opens the way to independent personalised start-up pages like Netvibes.

1) Google does not think that there is a market in start pages
2) They just wait and see and buy the best
3) They are not able to do it better
4) They are afraid to spoil their other established revenues
…
philip.wilkinson writes:
July 5th, 2007 at 12:42 pm

well,

1) They haven’t really promoted it a lot
2) They have hundreds of products on the go now and it often would be hard to manage time and resource effectively on one single one compared with a start-up
3) They were later in the market
4) I’m sure they are trying to think of how advertising would work on a personalised start-up experience to see if they can make money from the thing / encourage take-up of their other products through it.

So if most people use Netvibes, then Pageflakes, then things like i-google, myAOL and they all have a big fight to get the most users. Question is then what? Also – how to go mass market with something like that.. very hard.

From a personal perspective I stop using them a few months back as I can use other tools to achieve the same effect and I do already suffer from “Information Overload” that you mentioned in your post about facebook!

Maybe someone should start web2.0 PA’s!
Louis writes:
July 8th, 2007 at 6:28 pm

Hello,
what are the tools you use instead of Netvibes, because i am myself drowning in the ocean of information…
thanks,
philip.wilkinson writes:
July 8th, 2007 at 9:15 pm

A mixture of things really but on the general principle of keeping things simple:

-Mail.app for email
-Rememberthemilk.com for my to-do-list items
-basecamp for team collaboration
-backpack for little temporary projects
-newsfire for reading rss
-ical for my appointments
-address book for contacts + “mailboxer” plugin to setup smart lists for all my content

That’s pretty much it!