
The eBay Turnaround that Never Had to Be: Now Here’s the Rest of the Story
Read an interesting account of John Donahoe’s turnaround at eBay in Business Insider. It’s a fascinating discussion that revolves around relatively few premises for how the turnaround was accomplished. Here are the money quotes: He de-emphasized eBay’s auction business and started describing the company as a “technology partner” to retailers small and large. eBay added clients Home Depot, […]

Facebook and ebay’s data centers are now vastly more transparent
Facebook announced at the end of last week new way to report PUE and WUE for its datacenters. This comes hot on the heels of ebay’s announcement of its Digital Service Efficiency dashboard – a single-screen reporting the cost, performance and environmental impact of customer buy and sell transactions on ebay. These dashboards are a […]
NetSuite’s Commerce-as-a-Service
At SuiteWorld last week, there was plenty of excitement about NetSuite’s successes in two market segments – subs of large multi-nationals (“two-tier” implementations) and fast-growing/recently public companies like Groupon and Splunk. You can slice its momentum by verticals or geography, but to me, the major reason for NetSuite’s appeal to a wide range of customers […]

Big Data = BI + ADD
Big Data is Business Intelligence plus Attention Deficit Disorder? That’s gotta be linkbait of an order I’ve not used since my NoSQL is a Premature Optimization post. What’s up with that? I just got done attending Jeff Kaplan’s excellent Cloud BI Summit at the Computer History Museum. It was a very enjoyable event and it […]

Fool Me Once?
Shades of George W. Bush and Victoria’s Secret all in one. We got fooled again last week by our own ineptitude and inability to learn from history when Target stores website crashed under the weight of a highly successful marketing campaign. The last time anything remotely similar happened was when Victoria’s Secret decided to do […]

Alibaba vs. Ariba?
I’ve always been surprised by how many advertising-driven supplier directory models continue to position themselves as sourcing tools for procurement organizations. The closest that a provider has come to pulling this off is MFG.c…

Crowdsourcing Our New Logo Design. Time to Vote.
We’re putting our money where our (digital) mouth is: having talked so much about crowdsourcing, we took 99designs for a test drive, hoping to see a new CloudAve logo emerge. I was not too impressed with the initial submissions, but just as I suspected, 99design works pretty much like eBay does: the better contestants ignore […]

Collector’s Item: Accenture/Tiger Woods advertising
The Tiger Woods/Accenture connection is starting to disappear. Better look fast as evidence of this marketing marriage is dissolving quickly.