Gas prices affecting SUV sales. Toyota sales down by 14%

We were discussing about threshold gas price which can tip behavior and force people to change their habits. I think anywhere near $5 pg should cause widespread introspection.
Blogged with MessageDance using iPhone

Microsoft’s Patent Fud: Spring edition is playing now

Steve Ballmer is saying “What’s fair is fair” and dropping a not so subtle hint that Microsoft will be coming after those who are enjoying the fruits of open source without paying the patent toll (or troll) tax.
Timing and news coverage is bit fishy here.
Redhat launched RedHat exchange and further solidified their perceived [...]

Redhat’s data integration move and the steady march of pricing disruption

Redhat is by far the only big pure-play open source success story out there. They have perfected their subscription based revenue model and now it seems they are intent on putting more and more components to add incremental revenue. Complete SOA stack strategy is designed to shift enterprise budget from licensing model to the subscription model.

They [...]

Google Applications goes premium, When elephants fight…

It’s the grass which suffers. In this battle there are many different kinds of grass which will now have to adjust in which direction they will be tilting going forward.
For those who don’t get their daily high from Techmeme, news of the day is that Google is now offering premium version of their Google [...]

Sizing SaaS market

Phil Wainewright guesstimates SaaS market to be around $7 billion. Though the definition of SaaS is still all over the place but his explanation comes out strongly:
Web conferencing/collaboration (WebEx, Citrix Online, Microsoft Live Meeting, Raindance, Convoq, Projectplace, LivePerson etc): close to billion dollar
Human resources/payroll (Employease, Taleo, Workstream, Successfactors ) : ~$250 million?
CRM [...]

GFYD is officially on

Why this Google For Your Domain is a big news? Even if Google is just scratching on the office footprint, revenue numbers are huge and considering the growing  market  this number will increase as well -
Microsoft’s Office products generated $11.7 billion in revenue for thefiscal year ended June 30 and nearly $8.3 billion [...]

Writely right on target

Now disruptive is a much used (abused) word but I am tempted to use that to describe Writely. Its very well designed and comes with extensive features.
Though comparisons will be made against Microsoft Word but I think it’s biggest impact will be on the Wiki market. It has powerful collaboration and revision control which [...]

Fall of the Hit

Chris Anderson’s take on the demise of hit phenomena reads like a manifesto for user-generated-content philosophy
The mass market is yielding to a million minimarkets. Hits will always be with us, but they have lost their monopoly. Blockbusters must now compete with an infinite number of niche offerings, which can be distributed just as easily. [...]

Lessons from CORBA

Anybody remember CORBA? It was just yesterday when this designed-by-committee acronym was the hottest thing in town. Panacea to all your integration and dynamic interface requirements. I experienced this first hand while working on Visigenics, Orbix and later on while doing a project for Active Software (later bought by Webmethods).
CORBA suffered from that slipper [...]

Base creep

Honest and innocent looking Base page listings are now a major threat to lot of walled gardens. Content based business models need reach, scale and precision. Nobody has this better than Google right now. Richard MacManus has more on the slow and silent expansion of Google Base into new verticals.
Mixing bizarre with sensible [...]