A New Chapter In My Life; Google
When I decided to leave SAP to take a short sabbatical I didn’t really know what to expect. Six months later I am happy to report that it was one of the best decisions I ever made. These were some of the best weeks and months of my life. After this short period of disconnecting […]
Google Cloud Platform : Good Times Ahead
The tech behemoths Amazon, Microsoft & Google are established players in one of the battes that will change the future of customers view and investments of computing. This is an area with a potential hundred billion dollars plus that can be secured for the vendors – a lucrative space that each one wants to corner […]
What You Can Learn from a Scorpion
The hardest thing about starting a company is that from day one you emerge as this completely vulnerable entity trying its hardest to project success, power, trajectory and inevitability while you secretly know that you’re one knock-out blow from extinction. Think about it: You start with nearly no money, you bring on some co-founders and if […]
Does Google’s Knowledge Graph have a ‘facts’ problem?
Does Google’s Knowledge Graph have a ‘facts’ problem?: Maybe. It might, of course, be unwise for a single short response at the top of a set of search results to even try to ‘answer’ a question when we think, theorise or hypothesise towards an answer, rather than knowing it. I’m not suggesting, for a moment, that Google’s current […]
Amazon iterates, Google partners
Positive cloudy news from two of the big three, with Amazon Web Services (AWS) making some significant improvements to their DynamoDB service and Google signing on as a sponsor of the OpenStack cloud platform. AWS has got this incremental improvement thing down to a fine art, to the extent that too many competitors have stopped […]
The Discriminatory Dark Side Of Big Data
It has happened again. Researchers have discovered that Google’s ad-targeting system is discriminatory. Male web users were more likely to be shown high paying executive ads compared to female visitors. The researchers have published a paper which was presented at the Privacy Enhancing Technologies Symposium in Philadelphia. I had blogged about the dark side of […]
Just Remember, We Don’t Really Need Any More SaaS Products. Then You’ll Do Far Better.
I guess in some ways SaaStr is a digest of mistakes we all make in recurring revenue businesses, how to avoid them, or at least, make fewer. There’s one important mistake folks tend to make consistently in the early days. It’s the mistake of thinking anyone, any company, actually needs their product. And because they […]
It’s time to reconsider, Google
Almost a year ago, Google made an apparently small change to Google Calendar. They started automatically adding Google Hangout video links to every new appointment. And it was bad. I’m sure you’ve all seen appointments like this pop up in your calendar. How do you join the meeting? Do you dial the phone number, or […]
The Silent Killer – The Company Your Community Never Created
I was at a dinner recently in Chicago and the table discussion was about building great companies outside of Silicon Valley. Of course this can be done and of course I am a big proponent of the rise of startup centers across the country as the Internet has moved from the “infrastructure phase” to the “application […]
Public Cloud Economies of (Web-)Scale Aren’t About Buying Power
As you no doubt heard this week, Rackspace has announced the intention to focus on managed cloud. Inevitably this brought observations from many about RAX, and others, ability to compete effectively against the web scale public cloud giants: Amazon, Microsoft, and Google. One of the commenters was Mike Kavis (twitter link), a long time cloud pundit […]
Privacy is Dead and We Killed it
Privacy…everyone keeps talking about it and apparently everyone is concerned with it, but does it matter? I recently watched the documentary, “Terms and Conditions may Apply,” which provides a fascinating look at how organizations such as Facebook, Google, Apple, and others have changed the way they look at and approach privacy. After watching the movie […]
Optimizing Data Centers Through Machine Learning
Google has published a paper outlining their approach on using machine learning, a neural network to be specific, to reduce energy consumption in their data centers. Joe Kava, VP, Data Centers at Google also has a blog post explaining the backfround and their approach. Google has one of the best data center designs in the industry […]
Why I’d Go Big. And Why You Should Ignore Me, and Most of the Others That Tell You That.
Everything on the web, and in SaaS, these days is about going big. Larry Page at Google I/O wants Google to start doing brave new things that build billion dollar markets. Peter Thiel wants the best of us to skip college and go straight to building the next Pallantir and PayPal, just bigger. Elon Musk […]
50% on S3? AWS Helping Google Into the Game or Stopping the Cloud Race to Zero?
One day after Google announced a substantial price reduction for their cloud services, Amazon announced their own dramatic price reduction on several AWS offerings. This move will reduce the revenues of one of Amazon’s most profitable services, the S3, by about 50%. What were the AWS leaders thinking just before Andy Jassy went on the […]
Gmail offers surprising innovation lessons for the Fortune 500
If you’re familiar with the story of Gmail, you know – for a fact – that it was a 20% time employee project by Paul Buchheit. A little bottom-up experimentation that grew into something big. Surprise! That story is wrong. It was a desire by Google, the company, to offer its own email. From Harry McCracken’s great piece How […]
