The existential threat to on-premise models
4 years ago when I interviewed Sridhar Vembu, CEO of Zoho for The New Polymath, the prime driver in the marketplace for SaaS adoption was better economics compared to on-premise. But Sridhar also spoke about agility in SaaS delivery Feature parity to Microsoft Office (and other software) will come sooner than you may think. We [...]
Building a platform for files in the cloud
Microsoft, Google, Box, Huddle, Dropbox … who will dominate the enterprise market for cloud-based file storage and collaboration?
CRM reaches the heart of small business — metaphorically, of course
For years, we have been talking about the value of CRM for small business. Yet, we the pundits of whatever, always have been publicly puzzled by what we thought was the slowness of small businesses to adopt CRM. How dare they buck the trend that we were declaring! Admittedly, what we were talking about was [...]
Zoho Rounds Out Small Business Suite with Accounting App–Zoho Books
This morning Zoho, known for SMB focused SaaS offerings in the areas of productivity, collaboration, business processes launched an Accounting app: Zoho Books. I typically don’t do detailed product reviews, when I see the first good ones, will link to them – just a few points here and then let’s discuss how it rounds out [...]
Motorola Takes Us a Step Closer to Personal Computing Nirvana–and it’s Not Even a Computer
It took five years, but the personal computing nirvana vision I first heard from Zoho CEO Sridhar Vembu is becoming reality. The concept that I discussed in The Cell-Phone Aware PC May Be a PC-less PC, and other posts is simple. Instead of a plethora of situational devices with redundant computing capacity, carry around just [...]
The Master of Guerilla Marketing Turns Microsoft’s Prank Around
CloudAve readers know I am a fan of edgy marketing. Now it’s time to update my recently compiled inventory of software marketing pranks. A major show like Salesforce.com’s DreamForce would not even be real without some guerilla marketing activity – except the players seemed to have traded places this year. Guerilla Marketing is normally David’s [...]
Gmail, Don’t be a Yahoo!
In the 90’s I used to laugh at friends who all used Yahoo! as their personal email service. I did not understand how anyone could put up with the slow speeds of web-mail, and tried to convince them to install a decent email client, like Outlook, which is what most of them used in their [...]
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 [...]
Software Marketing Pranks
I envy software marketing types. They get to stay kids forever: pull pranks and even get paid for it.:-) Today’s example comes courtesy of TechCrunch: PayPal competitor WePay dropped a 600lbs ice block at the entrance of the Paypal developer conference. They got chased away and Moscone security removed the ice block. My question: who [...]

