As enterprise as a war-room

David Hansson has a valid point:
How do we fork the word enterprise? The capitalized version has obviously been hijacked by McGovern and his like-minded to mean something that is synonymous with hurt and pain and torment.
There is a billion dollar industry protecting this hurt-pain-torment market. They are HMOs of the software industry.

Only Oracle Survive

When you are buying companies like there is no tomorrow it can mean only few things. Only paranoid survive philosophy hitting software industry and software industry consolidation has become a goal rather than a prediction.
There will be a fierce battle to get into [...]

Selling Social Media

Jeff Nolan writes about the challenges involved in selling “social media” both inside SAP and to the customer stakeholders. Issue is pretty much settled for him -
The best arrow I have in my quiver is the overwhelming evidence that the technology industry has already moved beyond the question of whether or not to go [...]

Microsoft customers or Microsoft

Though I am an open source bigot but I tend to stay rational when it comes to expressing my views about Microsoft. There is one exception to that rule. That happens whenever I see this ad -

You be the judge , would you like to be treated as an extinct species ? Someone should [...]

Bill G’s tax related fud

During the recent trip to India, Bill Gates was asked to comment on the growing phenomena of open source.
Giving his usual answer that it’s not going to be at the same quality level as proprietary software he dropped in a carefully worded hint to the government officials, it basically meant that “Open source is [...]

Enterprise software business model

Jeff Bussgang posting about Microsoft’s VC conference held at Mountain View:
The enterprise software business model is dead.  This
is refrain many VCs are mumbling to each other lately.  Price pressure
is incredibly intense between open source, Microsoft moving up the
stack, vendor consolidation, IT buying wariness, the ASP model,
overfunding in interesting sectors and many other factors.  It used [...]

Recommendation leads to commerce

Chris Anderson expanding on the Long Tail concept:
I think narrow-focus blogs and other microsites with high trust amongst
their readers will be an essential compliment to recommendations within
commerce sites. The first can create demand from scratch by
interjecting recommendations into an otherwise interesting stream of
content; the second steers it once a consumer is already in buying
mode.  Both [...]

Story of FUD

First and last lesson for all sales hunters. Learn the FUDs and lob it hard and wide.
The concept of FUD enjoys a venerable history in the computing field. According to The Jargon File, an online dictionary of hacker slang, Gene Amdahl used the term as an attack on IBM after he left in the early [...]

Software That Lasts 200 Years

Dan Bricklin has a thoughtful essay on how one should go about building a software which is everlasting much like civil engineering discipline. This requires new style of development (and also the mindset).
Funding for initial development should come from the users
The projects need to be viewed as for more than one customer
The requirements for the [...]

BSM confusion

Denis Gaughan from AMR on the confusion created and spread by vendors on promise and scope of the Business Service Management (BSM)
With all the marketing hype surrounding Business Service Management (BSM), you’d think that everyone has a clear understanding of services. But right now, the vendors are too far ahead of the market. By and [...]