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 Zynga was Right to Buy OMGPop and Words With Friends, And What it Means for SaaS
Zynga just keeps getting hammered. The latest was on preannouncing a big miss for Q3, and an almost complete write-off of its $183m acquisition of OMGPop, the guys behind briefly ultrapopular Draw Something. Next up may well be a complete write-down of the $200m+ for Words with Friends. The OMGPop acquisition was called “catastrophic“, for example, [...]
Cloud ERP Starts to Break Out–NetSuite Reports Good Numbers
Last week NetSuite reported it’s Q2 revenue and earnings – high level numbers include: Subscription and support revenue was $61.0 million, a 27 percent increase on an annual basis Cash flows from operations were $15.2 million, up by 80 percent from Q2 2011 While the specific numbers themselves are of vague interest, and more so [...]
On Public, Private and Horses for Courses…
I recently wrote a post critiquing some shortsighted thinking around Cloud Computing and in particular the relative cost implications of a Cloud versus Self-Hosted approach. A recent series of events has reminded me of this issue and bought me back to the topic. Recently Zynga, during a regular earnings call, released the somewhat startling fact [...]
Zynga and Z-Cloud–A Corollary to the Public Cloud
At the Cloud Connect event in Santa Clara recently, Allan Leinwand, CTO from Zynga presented a keynote the day after a fairly emphatic statement contained in their earnings call that speaks to their marked retreat from the public cloud. In the space of 12 months Zynga has gone from 80% of workloads being in the [...]
eHarmony Says Cloud Is Expensive
One of the biggest selling points made by many of the cloud vendors is the lower cost of cloud services compared to the in-house solutions. Even though traditional vendors pushed back on this idea, it didn’t stand out because they usually mixed FUD with some solid arguments on the cost. In fact, for a long [...]
Eucalyptus Highlights Momentum As They Counter OpenStack Buzz
Ever since OpenStack (previous CloudAve coverage) was launched during last year’s OSCON, they are garnering too much buzz in the tech media. When Canonical announced last week that they will be using OpenStack as the foundational technology in Ubuntu, there was considerable buzz in the tech blogosphere about how it will affect Eucalyptus (previous CloudAve [...]
How Many Investors are Too Many?
This post originally ran on TechCrunch. Lately I have seen a number of deals announced on TechCrunch in which 5 or more different VCs were participating in the deal. This always makes me chuckle because in my first company we had 5 investors in our first round and we picked up 5 more before we [...]
Virtual Nonsense All the Way Down the Drain. A Twisted (?) View of US vs China
I don’t often recycle older posts in full – but sometimes I get all worked up, want to “blog it out of my system” only to discover I’ve already said it all. That’s how I feel about the explosion of virtual goods. So there it is, vintage July 2009, still valid, except this time I’d [...]
Entrepreneurs Should be Respected, Not Loved
I’ve been thinking a lot about what it takes to be a great leader and seem to be having this conversation a lot lately about Facebook, Yahoo!, Zynga and others. I wrote several of the characteristics when I did the Top 10 (11) Attributes of an Entrepreneur. One thing that I’ve realized over the years [...]
