Acquisition News – Cloud Sherpas Broadens the Franchise and Moves Into ITSM
I’ve been covering Cloud Sherpas since its inception – I’m particularly interested in this new breed of services brokerage that is proving successful despite deriving its revenue from a small sliver of a very small annual charge – this in comparison to the traditional on-premise world where companies enjoyed massive consulting fees for implementation project [...]
Irked by IRQs
PCs use interrupt requests known as IRQs to manage various devices such as sound cards and modems. When the device has a need for processing power, it sends an interrupt request to the processor. It’s a silly design as the mere request is an interrupt itself. This is my day. It’s like when someone says [...]
Saasu Drops Freemium–Some Users Balk at the Change
On New Years Eve, while on a holiday skiing trip in the French Alps, expat Aussie and Clouderati ringleader Sam Johnston wrote a series of tweets exclaiming his anger about a change that cloud accounting vendor Saasu had made to its terms and conditions. earlier this year, a Saasu blog post advised customers that it [...]
Easing Password Hell – Key To Living Online Life Safely
As we all use more and more different services and applications in our personal and work lives, password management becomes ever more of an issue. It’s staggering the number of times I’ve had to gently make people aware of the fact that using one simple password for every single service
Siri, You Don’t Say
Google slated Siri. Apple’s Siri and I have never gotten along. I don’t need a personal assistant with a sense of humor. I need a computer assistant that gives me answers. Siri gives enough backlash that it just isn’t fun to use…or usually does it answer my questions. It’s easy to poke at a new [...]
MuleSoft Launches API Repository and Community Resource
MuleSoft, the integration platform for both SaaS and on-premise applications, is today announcing the launch of APIhub, a public repository and community resource for API discovery. The idea of the hub is to give both application developers, and enterprise customers the ability to find and use a wide selection of
Dropbox, Google Drive, Apple iCloud, Microsoft SkyDrive; maybe they’re not apples after all?
Cloud storage product Dropbox is one of those tools that users tend to rave about. It’s deceptively simple. It’s pretty reliable. The value proposition is immediately apparent. It has paid tiers of usage that bring additional storage but (like other freemium beacons such as Evernote) the free offering is rich enough to be compelling, engaging, [...]
Google Play Site Falls Apart on Nexus 4 Launch. Now I Know Why it’s Called “Play”
Now we know whey it’s called Google PLAY. As it sure ain’t no e-commerce site:-(
#FAIL.
Google Compute Engine Is Gonna Change The Public Cloud Game
During the last Google I/O, Google’s user conference, Google announced Google Compute Engine (GCE). GCE was Google’s answer to Amazon EC2 and they opened up their private beta to handful of people. I was not lucky enough to get into the list but I recently got an opportunity to check it out myself. Before I talk [...]
Mobile First? The Desktop Still Has Three Good Years Left in It in SaaS
“Mobile First.” OK, we all get it. Look what’s happening on Facebook, as the majority of its usage has rapidly transitioned to mobile, throwing at least a wrench into its browser-based ad model for the time being. Google, Zynga, etc. the impact is huge and clear. Apple seems to be the only one in consumer [...]
Why Competition Is So Bitter in SaaS: Oligopolies and Dominant Strategy Equilibriums
Perhaps the oddest thing about the Apple-Google “go thermonuclear” strategy to SaaS guys is that it is so odd at all. Competition-to-the-almost-death seems the norm in SaaS. Just look at Larry Ellison or Marc Benioff. You can see the blood lust in their eyes, in every speech, in a way you never really saw/see in [...]
The Workday IPO and ‘F You Money
The other day, a VC asked me about a founder he was thinking of investing in. He asked me if this founder had, quote, ‘F You Money. {I learned how this was spelled when a Businessweek article this week used the term, btw}. I wasn’t really sure if he meant this as a negative, but [...]
Has Apple Peaked?
You probably think I am out of my mind – well … hm… no comment. But yes I agree it’s close to madness to discuss Apple’s decline right on the heels of a record-breaking iPhone 5 launch and a stock price that despite some correction is still a rocketship. But bear with me for a [...]
Scale Out vs Scale Up – ProfitBricks Aims to Challenge the Current Thinking for IaaS
One thing that few people argue about in the move to the cloud is the accepted view that the best way to achieve scale is by throwing together lots of lightweight commodity machines with relatively low specifications, and stringing them together to achieve scale. It’s a compelling story and one
Is Silicon Valley Really Coming to an End?
By now you probably know that David Sacks, co-founder of PayPal and founder of both Geni & Yammer made some observations on Facebook that Silicon Valley “as we know it” was coming to an end. He says “In order to create a successful new company, you have to find an idea that (1) has escaped [...]
