On-demand Market Maturity and the User Experience: Salesforce, Workday, and Microsoft Show How to Get it Right
The week before Labor Day was an on-demand trifecta, a perfect storm of theory and practice on what the brave new world of on-demand software and services can and will evolve to in the coming years. It was the week of Dreamforce and the maturation of Chatter, the week that Workday hosted a group of [...]
Jive seeks to up IT’s game with social apps
While app stores have become enormously popular with users, particularly on mobile devices, they are now moving to the enterprise. The new Jive Apps Market provides an interesting approach that combines apps with direct integration into the flow of a …
Apple’s Crazy Ecosystem and the Prospects for an Amazon Pad
I read with interest Marco Arment’s speculation about an iPad competitor potentially being in the relatively near-term offing by Amazon: I’d bet on Amazon releasing a true tablet, competing more directly with the iPad than the Kindle currently does, in the possibly near future. While I don’t doubt Amazon could launch a tablet and very [...]
Re-intermediation — Same as the Old Boss?
Won’t get fooled again? I am watching a trend emerge. I don’t know if it has a name yet so I will offer this — re-intermediation. Most of us have been around the technology world in general and the Internet specifically to understand and remember its opposite, disintermediation. Re-intermediation is a reversal of disintermediation — [...]
Is the App Store Hamstrung by Its Billing System?
A subscription service provider’s offering has three parts — the actual service-product, an infrastructure for delivering it and, for lack of a better word, value-add. A provider may deliver all three as a single service but that’s not necessary. A common form of subscription is a car lease in which a customer buys the use [...]
10 things iPad rivals must do to compete with the Apple – Quick Analysis
If you’re going to compete against the might iPad, here’s 10 things you should do. Good luck storming the castle!
Where’s the Amazon AWS App Store?
I was talking to the interesting folks over at DreamFactory the other day (courtesy of Phil Wainewright who introduced us, thanks Phil!), and we wound up on a fascinating topic of conversation. At a time when many companies are still not in the Cloud, DreamFactory is in 5 different clouds with as many as 8 different applications. [...]
The Marginal Cost of Software
Fellow Enterprise Irregular, Bob Warfield calls me out on my claim that software has no marginal cost in my blog post App Stores Galore. I write about the economics of Information Products often and have used the term marginal costs several times over the years in connection with digital music, e-books and of course the [...]
Software Has Marginal Cost
Every now and again I see the old chestnut trotted out that Software has no marginal cost. It’s used for all sorts of reasons. The gut feeling that it is true is probably at the heart of most people’s justification for why piracy is okay, for example, not that I’m saying most people think it’s [...]
The Apple Developer Backlash – notes from the field #dropple
Ana Nelson, the creator of Dexy, a really cool tool designed for people writing, and writing about, code, pinged me the other day to say she’s considering dropping Apple. In the email she also mentioned that another friend of mine – Kirk Wylie, the guy behind one of London’s most interesting (and investable) startups [...]
