409A Valuations
Don Dodge wrote about a very dry but critically important issue facing private companies that issue equity to employees… 409A valuations: IPO bump? – If private investors have already bid up the valuation, will there be an IPO jump in the stock price? Doubtful. This breaks the conventional wisdom about pre-IPO stock options. Companies are [...]
Smart Grid Technology conference
I attended the Smart Grid Technology conference in London last week and there were a number of interesting themes which became apparent. The main theme to emerge was the question of how utilities could engage the residential customer. This is good news – the first step on the road to recovery is [...]
Did 37Signals Increase BaseCamp Price or Not? The Backdoor Experiment.
There’s a debate going on about 37Signal’s “hidden” “unannounced” price increase of their popular Basecamp service. Apparently most of the uproar wasn’t so much due to the price hike itself, but the fact that it happened without any announcement. Cinovate Cinovate Cloud Inn. Why did 37 Signal’s Basecamp price double unannounced? http://bit.ly/bLan2a Contact Cinovate for [...]
Microsoft’s Extraordinary Quarter, Valuations, and “Who Owns the Cash?”
As usual, there is another fascinating discussion underway among the Enterprise Irregulars. And again, as so often happens, there are related discussions. In this case we have a discussion about whether there are any companies who’ve reached $100M in revenue with 100 employees, and one about Microsoft’s recent quarter, its cash position, relative valuations versus [...]
Dennis Howlett-Inspired Post #1 — Multi-tenancy In HRM SaaS
Dennis Howlett This is the first of what I suspect will be many posts for which the impetus is a question from a specific colleague, in this case Dennis Howlett. So as to give credit, or at least curiosity, where it’s due, this one’s for you. Having seen me refer to (Dennis might say pimping) [...]
Event Report: PDC10 Focuses Developers On Cloud And Devices Opportunity
Microsoft Bolsters Developer Tools To Inspire Innovation At the October 28th, 2010 Microsoft Professional Developers Conference, CEO Steve Ballmer presided over 3 key announcements that affirm the software giant’s ambitions to retain and grow the mind share and market share of worldwide developers. In fact the 3 main announcements foreshadow Microsoft’s convergence in the five [...]
From Microsoft Monolith to Monopoly to Monocellular – as in Brand
Just two weeks ago when Microsoft’s brand had at least some value, the company launched its renewed efforts into mobile computing, namely Windows Mobile 7. No – wait, I think it’s just Windows Phone 7. Microsoft dropped "Mobile" in more ways than one, though I’m sure the irony is lost…
Windows is the dominant (Java) Developer OS: So what is Microsoft going to do about it?
Tweet Stephen wrote a great post based on data from our new RedMonk analytics platform the other day that set me thinking. Its easy to blithely assume that all developers use Macs these days, but the data doesn’t bear such a thesis out. Briefly, Ian Skerrett of Eclipse asserted that, according to Eclipse’s community survey [...]
SAS Bucks the Trade Show Trend
Trade shows have been dying for many years to the point that they have been all but totally supplanted by vendor sponsored conferences. The vendors have become adept at the logistics of hosting large numbers of people for upwards of a week in cities like San Francisco, Orlando, Chicago and Las Vegas to name a [...]
On SAP’s Q3 2010.
(Cross posted on my Gartner blog.) Here are some quick thoughts on SAP’s Q3 performance. It was was okay. It wasn’t awesome, but it wasn’t grim either. Have a look here for what the FT says. The headline number of 20% revenue growth seems impressive but strip out the Sybase numbers and it is very [...]
