How Do You Do.com?
We’re just a day past announcing the CRM Idol winner (GetSatisfaction) and I’m already involved in a beta for a new product, Do.com. I can already tell you that it won’t make it into next year’s CRM Idol because the sponsoring company, Salesforce.com, won’t make last year’s emerging company revenue cut of $14 million. Something [...]
Software Spending and the Economy
We just completed another re-forecasting exercise at IDC, as uncertainty increases over the health of the global economy. This time in particular, I was pressured to lower the enterprise applications forecast for next year and adjust the 5 years forward…
Robert Scoble ko gussa kyon aata hai
With due apologies to my non-Hindi speaking readers. A Bollywood film with a similar title just fit so nicely. It means “Why is Robert Scoble so angry?” And boy is he angry. A couple of days back, Robert Scoble, who hopefully needs no introduction to readers of this blog, posted a rant on the usability [...]
End of the On-Prem Paradigm
Uber analyst Dennis Howlett over at ZDNet wrote a piece ruminating on the Gartner Symposium and colleague Larry Dignan’s summary of the meeting, “Enterprise IT: Here comes that deer in the headlights look again” that is well worth reading. Together the articles wonder aloud how much time there is between now and the paradigm shift that will [...]
“From Empowered to Superempowered”
Thomas Friedman, notable author of The World is Flat, published a great op-ed in The New York Times yesterday describing the vast difference between Wall Street and Silicon Valley. “…to paraphrase the Columbia University economist Jagdish Bhagwati, Wall Street, which was originally designed to finance “creative destruction” (the creation of new industries and products to [...]
IDC Names 2011 Innovative Application Software Companies Under $100M to Watch
Today, for the third year in a row, IDC published the Innovative Software Companies Under $100M to Watch, in an effort to recognize innovation in the software around specific hot trends. The selection for the Application Software vendors was conducted…
What Apple Means to Me
On Wednesday, as I trudged out of Oracle Open World after Larry Ellison’s keynote, I learnt that Steve Jobs had passed away. It threw a pall of gloom over me and most of the attendees. The world is poorer without Steve Jobs. On Thursday I was talking to my 15 year old son about the [...]
Oracle Buries the Lead
by Oracle_Photos_Screenshots At his second and final keynote address to the 2011 Oracle OpenWorld user meeting, Larry Ellison finally gave the rabid software oriented audience something to savor. Throughout the week the Oracle CEO and his minions had spent large amounts of time telling us about hardware or some other aspect of the business leaving [...]
Password Strength and Security
xkcd has a cartoon that beautifully explains why strict password rules have brought us to a pass where it remains relatively easy for a computer to hack the password. But very difficult for people to remember them. My company, like most large corporates, has a password policy that forces the use of numbers, large caps, [...]
Our Work is Done Here, Right?
The recently concluded Dreamforce conference in San Francisco might have been the most successful CRM conference ever. That’s not hyperbole. I have been at some major events in the last ten years that rival this year’s Dreamforce. For instance, whenever Siebel had a user conference that was also major. But a lot has happened since [...]
