Point Solutions

I was looking at understanding what a Point Solution meant and came across this post by Fred Wilson, a VC. From his post, I understood that a Point Solution was aimed at addressing a specific problem rather than acting as an end to end solution. Google is a classic example of a point solution providing search capabilities. Though it provides other services, it is not integrated like Yahoo! is. To elaborate further, though Blogger is part of Google, the registration for using Blogger is independent of the registration required to use GMail, whereas Yahoo! is a portal, offering services customized for each user.

While many people like the concept of a portal as an end to end solution, there are others that would only like to take only how much they can chew. As Fred notes in his post, web sites with simple independent services such as del.icio.us that offer bookmark management are point solutions that are very popular.