It’s The Information, Stupid
Marc Andreessen (who is both richer and smarter than I’ll ever be) recently caused a stir with his Wall Street Journal op ed, “Why Software Is Eating The World.” Marc is a good writer, and it’s a good editorial that helps explain the increasing importance of software. But I can’t help but feel that he’s [...]
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 [...]
Selling To Enterprise – Power Struggle Between IT And Line Of Business
During my several interactions with – CIOs, senior IT leaders, and Line of Business (LoB) heads – I have firsthand observed the power struggle between LoB and IT and a slow but continuous tarnish in their relationship due to cloud and SaaS offerings. IT and LoB work for the same company but they build their [...]
Organized Robbery
We’re at a time of rebellion against maintenance fees, which now include the elements of insurance, extortion, declining systems, and of course refactoring all of which add to the costs of any implementation. Add that into the actual implementation itself, and one is left with whopping fees and eventually ineffective…
Software is Roadkill
The fastest way to become roadkill to venture capitalists is to become a software company. Software may not be inherently evil (it has created wealth for many people that is in proportion to the pain it has provided to many customers). Software and specifically on-premise enterprise software, however, is clearly…
Tied Up? Dragon Naturally Speaking Comes to Rescue… or Not?
Nuance released version 11 of Dragon Naturally Speaking, their voice recognition / dictation software. Below is a rather unusual review by David Pogue of The New York Times: On a more serious note – I’m a really poor typist, my blogging is hampered by the slowness of typing, and there are all those situations when [...]
Lessons Learned from Cloud Camp Seattle 2010
Last night I got to attend cloud camp, which is an “unevent” that people can attend to meet up with people who are looking into a particular technology for business. Cloud Camp Seattle was held at the Grand Hyatt Seattle, which provided an awesome environment to discuss cloud computing with 200 of like-minded people. For [...]
Online Collaboration Tools – We Want Your Recommendations
Here at CloudAve we’re firm believers in the power of collaboration. When Ben became part of a group looking at building a collaborative platform for data sharing for a local Government organization, it seemed logical to approach the project in a similarly collaborative way. Wanting to "eat their own dog food", a joint group of [...]
Has SaaS Killed OSS?
Anish Kapoor, CEO of SaaS web conferencing start-up YuuGuu posted asking whether SAAS has killed open source as a business model. His contention that in fact this is the case was articulated as follows; Open source is always driven by… a central body that leads community development efforts to support developers and build revenue streams. [...]
The Anti-Beta Revolution. Or is it a Counter-Revolution?
Gizmodo has just issued A Call for Revolution Against Beta Culture – great article, and boy, do I love the illustration!. I’m tired of this beta culture that has spread like metastatic cancer in the last few years, starting with software from Google and others and ending up in almost every gadget and computer system [...]
Office Web Applications
This year’s Microsoft Professional Developers Conference is full of announcements and surprises. The next big announcement besides Windows Azure (and Windows 7?) is the new “Office Web Applications” live service. The Office team will be delivering the five most popular Office applications as light weight browser based versions that include Word, Excel, PowerPoint, and [...]
How Software Can Be Resilient to Recession
Are we heading into Recession? The “Big R” talk of early this year quickly subsided, economic growth returned, the markets appeared to vindicate the optimists. US Presidential Candidate John McCain repeatedly said the economy was fundamentally strong… until just days ago, when he quickly switched to declaring a crisis. The Wall Street Journal says we’re [...]
