Are Free Customers Disposable?
Image by CC Chapman via Flickr Phil Wainewright writes on ZDNet.com about how web giants are treating their customers More than any of these acts, though, the most constructive change would be to get rid of the mindset that leads these Web giants to belittle the circumstances of its ‘consumers’. Is it unreasonable of us [...]
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. [...]
Counterpoint: Did Jott Betray Their Users?
Image via CrunchBase Yesterday, Zoli posted about Jott’s decision to do away with the free model. My philosophy is that it costs money on the infrastructure front to host web based services and it is OK to charge for the Web 2.0 or SaaS applications. However, Jott’s move from freemium to completely paid option brings [...]
Jott Wants Your Lunch Money and it’s OK
Would You Spend Your Lunch Money on a Web 2.0 Service? - I asked in October as part of a recession-related series. The key point was that software startups to turn towards business, offer value and charge for it. The genius in the Freemium model is that it allows new services to gain traction, essentially [...]
Would You Spend Your Lunch Money on a Web 2.0 Service?
Today I’m continuing a mini-series started 3 weeks ago with the intro: How Software Can Be Resilient to Recession which I wrote before the bottom fell out of all markets in the world, and recession-doom-talk became popular. Since one of the key conclusions in the first piece was for software startups to turn towards business, [...]
SaaS can reduce piracy
This topic has come up for discussion several times in the past and Microsoft has said they are not all that sure about it. But I want to touch this topic without appearing to be repetitive because this post will form the basis for another article I will post next week. In my opinion, SaaS [...]
Free is Dead, Long Live Freemium
3 weeks ago we launched CloudAve in turbulent times, so barely a week later I ended up writing about How Software Can Be Resilient to Recession. The summary: go where the money is, and that’s businesses (“Enterprise” vs. consumer, even if it means small business) deliver value – useful functionality that improves business charge for [...]
