Good for HP (with a but!)
Last week the IT industry had a major bombshell. HP announced it’s intention to get out of the PC business, drop it’s WebOS smartphone and TouchPad products and buy enterprise software company Autonomy. If you don’t recognize Autonomy they are a major success story born out of research at Cambridge University. Founded in 1996 they [...]
Teachable Moments in PR & Crisis Management
I was recently approached by Fast Company to comment on “crisis management” at startups in the wake of the Airbnb “ranksackgate” story. I agreed to do the interview because the story was about what other companies can learn rather than about airbnb in particular. What are the teachable moments? The short article in Fast Company [...]
Skype: Interop is a Waste of Time
Ecomm is a fantastic conference (for telecom propeller heads). This year I was only able to do a fly-by. However, the organizers are starting to post videos. Jonathan Christensen of Skype discusses the latest release of SkypeKit, an SDK for real time communications. SkypeKit is primarily targeted at consumer electronics manufacturers to embed Skype into a [...]
Dial M for Skype
The more I think about Microsoft acquiring Skype, the more I think it was a pretty smart move. The initial reports were all about synergies with various MS and Skype technologies, upon further reflection, I think the endgame will be carrier disruption….
Customer Focus: the Constellation Supernova Awards
Constellation Research, founded by fellow Enterprise Irregular and star analyst Ray Wang has just announced the ambitious Supernova Awards program, focusing on – what a twist! – customer champions of innovation, rather than vendors. Krish and I both feel honored to have been invited as Judges for the Cloud Computing category. Below is the official [...]
The Hollywood Culture
Debates are fun, especially when you are jousting with such fantastic and respected cloud dignitaries as Chris Hoff, Adrian Cockcroft and Simon Wardley. Come on, I mean who wouldn’t enjoy a good natured, well intended, yet fierce back and forth about the various clouds and their various philosophies ? Well, March 12 was a day [...]
Cloud Channel Challenges – SaaS Channel Compensation
The SaaS subscription model shifts risk from the customer to the vendor. Shifting risk back onto SaaS channel partners can put them between a rock and hard place.
Twitter delegates the monetisation strain to its developers
On the Twitter Development Google Group, Twitter announced today that they’ll stop whitelisting. Whitelisting basically lifts an application developer’s limitation of 150 Twitter requests per hour, that mere mortals suffer from Beginning today, Twitter will no longer grant whitelisting requests. We will continue to allow whitelisting privileges for previously approved applications; however any unanswered requests [...]
Shockingly Honest CEO Memos–Microsoft, Nokia
Engadget calls freshly minted Nokia CEO Steven Elop’s internal letter to the troops “one of the most exciting and interesting CEO memos we’ve ever seen.” Selected quotes: We have more than one explosion – we have multiple points of scorching heat that are fuelling a blazing fire around us. Apple disrupted the market by redefining [...]
The “True But Useless” Problem
In the social business world we hear about a lot of truths that practitioners, analysts, vendors, and consultants throw out into the air. In fact listening to the discussions around social business today is a bit like walking into a flea market where everyone is screaming at you trying to get you to come to [...]
From Microsoft Monolith to Monopoly to Monocellular – as in Brand
Just two weeks ago when Microsoft’s brand had at least some value, the company launched its renewed efforts into mobile computing, namely Windows Mobile 7. No – wait, I think it’s just Windows Phone 7. Microsoft dropped “Mobile” in more ways than one, though I’m sure the irony is lost on them. I don’t know, [...]
Dear Google, Google Apps Standard Users Are Not Freeloaders
I am a long time Google Apps Standard Edition user. I can be considered as one of their power users because I not only test all their beta and labs features but also do it on more than 10 different accounts due to my association with various business and non-business organizations in different parts of [...]
Appmatcher.com: eHarmony For SaaS Apps
Yesterday, Rackspace launched Appmatcher.com, a match making service which will help businesses find suitable apps for their needs. Imagine it to be something like Match.com but catering to the business users helping them find the right set of SaaS applications for their organization from accounting to project management to HR. This is a pretty interesting service [...]
Microsoft, the Walking Dead
This post @ Computerworld about Microsoft’s coming heart-attack moment prompted me to resuscitate an old post from my personal blog. We’ve long forgotten all the pain inflicting on us by Vista (really? can we ever forget?), but the Bill Gates letter revealed below is very telling – about the future of Microsoft. Over a year ago [...]
RIP XMarks – Can You Build A Viable Business Around Browser Extensions?
XMarks, formerly Foxmarks, announced shutting down of their service today. XMarks is the first plugin that brought browser bookmarks synchronization to Firefox browser in 2006. Later, they brought in password synchronization, tab synchronization, etc. to Firefox and, also, expanded to support other browsers. They tried many different options to monetize and scale but they failed [...]
