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Microsoft Works 9: Ad-Supported, Free

Posted on July 31, 2007 ·

Download Squad summarily writes off Microsoft Works:

It’s always been sort of an ironic name for a product, because it just barely works.

I strongly disagree – at least with the “always” part. In the late 80’s Works was my main productivity suite: I was happily crunching numbers, generating charts, including them as well as data from my database in word-processing documents. In other words, I had a perfectly working and lightweight integrated office suite at the time when Word, Excel and Powerpoint were part of a suite only in name, but moving data between them was a major pain. It had to be lightweight: my laptop had 640K memory (that’s K, not MB!) and two 720k floppy drives – no hard-disk at all. Yet it was happily churning away with Works.

Once again, Microsoft had a perfectly working integrated suite 20 years ago, they just decided to downplay it favoring the higher margin, high-end but fragmented products, which took years to become a true Office Suite. As a result, by today Download Squad may be right:

Sure, if all you need is a basic spreadsheet, calendar, or word processor, MS Works will do. But since it can’t handle most MS Office documents, Works is barely worth the $50 you’d have to pay if you actually went out and bought a copy.

I doubt a lot of users shelled out $50, since Works has long been the default product OEM’s installed on (low-end) PC’s – but soon it may be entirely free, reports ZDNet:

“If ad revenues exceed 67 cents per year, we could actually give Works away and still make more money,” two Microsoft researchers and one person from MSN stated in a paper presented to Chairman Bill Gates at a Thinkweek brainstorming session earlier this year.”

“This year” in the above quote refers to 2005. It only took Microsoft to make up their minds two yearssmile_wink

Of course the question that everyone asks is whether Works will be enough to fend off Google, Zoho, ThinkFree, the online office suites invading Microsoft’s turf.

bbcI don’t think they are comparable: Works is still just a client-based, personal productivity tool. If you’re looking to get off the desktop, use web-based, anywhere-accessible, sharable, collaborative products – Works just does not cut it. Update: apparently BBC News thinks so, too.

But the ad-supported Works can’t be entirely client-based: MS will have to pipe in those ads somehow. And once you’re connected, they can start serving up more than just ads – could this become a “Software plus Service” offering one day?

Although Software plus Service is a new buzzword, Microsoft has been doing it with years – more about that in the next post.

More on the subject: TechCrunch, Andy Beal’s Marketing Pilgrim, Compiler, PC World: Techlog, One Microsoft Way , IP Telephony, VoIP, Broadband, Profy, Lifehack, Phil Wainewright, All about Microsoft, Read/WriteWeb,

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Filed Under: Marketing / PR, Personal Productivity, SaaS ·
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Flow vs. Structure: Escaping From the Document & Directory Jungle

Posted on July 23, 2007 ·

I do not think/work/create like a machine.

My thoughts flow freely and I tend to discover relationships between events (hence “Connecting the Dots” above in the Blog Header), so I like linking things – at least mentally. Why would I confine myself to the rigid directory & file structure that computers have forced on us for decades? There are better ways… let’s look at some.

A while ago Atlassian CEO Mike Cannon-Brookes wrote and excellent piece on how Enterprise Wikis Replace Shared Drives. Shared drives as collective document depositories are a disaster, we typically can’t determine where, to put things, and certainly don’t know where to find them. And if we do find a document, how do we know whether we have the latest version? How do we know who changed what in the dozen other copies with similar but cryptic filenames spread around the shared drive?

Wouldn’t it be easier to use the equivalent of a directory structure with meaningful names, the ability to attach longer narratives to our documents and find them easily via search and tags? That’s essentially what you get when you use an enterprise wiki as your “shared drive”. Think of not documents/files only, but the very reason they exist: in business we typically work on a few “projects” at any one time. If we create wikis / wiki pages for each project / function, the page content becomes the “narrative” that describes what we do, why and how, and further supporting details are in the document attachments. There really is no reason to bury documents (doc, xls, ppt) in some central dumping place (document depository) anymore – they belong to the wiki page (project description) where by definition they are in context. Of course they can be used in several other places, in different context, which is where linking comes handy – linking to wiki pages as well as other content (documents, web sites, etc).

Now that we established the wiki as the “glue” to tie all our documents together, let’s take a step further. As we get comfortable with the wiki, we’ll often wonder when to create a separate document and when to use native wiki pages. If your wiki supports a rich word processor, textual content can easily move in the wiki pages themselves. (Interestingly, Blogtronix, the Enterprise 2.0 platform vendor uses the “document” metaphor for what others call a wiki-page.) Of course whether we call them pages or documents, they should still be easy to share with “outsiders”, by using workspace or page-level permissions, or exporting to PDF and other file formats should you need to “detach” content and email it.
This works well for text, while for other needs we shoot out to the point applications and attach the resulting files (ppt, xls… etc.)

However, like I stated before, I do see the irony of working in an online collaboration platform (the wiki) yet having to upload/download attachments. Atlassian’s Webdav plugin for Confluence is an elegant solution (edit offline, save directly to the wiki), but for most other wikis the process involves far too many steps. Why not directly edit all these documents online? This of course takes us to the old debate whether the wiki should become the new office, or just the “integrator” holding the many pieces together. As a user, I don’t see why I should care: I just want seamless workflow between my wiki, spreadsheet, presentation manager, project management tool …etc. Such integration is easier when all applications/documents are online, and there are excellent applications from Zoho, ThinkFree, Editgrid, Google, to do just that.

Working directly on the Web is not just a matter of convenience. Zoho’s Raju Vegesna points to mobility, sharing & collaboration, presence & communication, auto-Versioning, auto-save, access & edit history as native benefits of web-documents.

As we link web documents to each other, and smoothly transition between applications, a paradigm shift occurs: the definition of what we call a “document” expands. Offline, a document equals a file, defined by application constraints. Spreadsheets, presentations need to be saved in their own specific format, and they become “black boxes”: there’s not much we know about them, other than a short title. There is an overhead in opening every one of them, they need to be virus-checked, then “stitched” together to support the “flow-thinking” I was referring to earlier.
Those boundaries are stretched on the web: a document is no longer a file of a specific type, generated by a specific application: it’s a logical unit, defined by context, which weaves together content created by several applications.

Zoho’s Notebook is an experimental application that allows us to create, merge and store information the way we think, no matter whether it involves writing text, drawing charts, shapes, crunching numbers or recording/playing videos. Experimental in the sense that we don’t know how it will be used. In fact I don’t know what the future web worker productivity / collaboration tools will look like, but I suspect they will have elements of Notebook – multi-format, multi-media – and wikis – user-created structure, everything linked to everything – merged together.

Files, formats become irrelevant: there is only one format, and it’s the Web, defined by URL’s.

Additional reading:

Update (11/13/07): Read I Hate Files on Collaboration Loop. (via Stewart Mader)

Filed Under: Collaboration, Personal Productivity, SaaS · Tagged: , , , , , , , , , , , ,
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Can Tiny Zoho Beat Microsoft and Google in Online Office Apps? The Real Sanity Check

Posted on July 17, 2007 ·

  If you write a blog you’ve probably had the feeling I have this morning: want to react to an article – but I already did just that, a month ago.   Nevertheless, TechRepublic’s piece on Sanity check: Can tiny Zoho beat Microsoft and Google in online office apps? is a good one, worth another go at the subject.

Executive Editor Jason Hiner is impressed by the Zoho Suite:

“It’s impressive that Zoho has created a broad fleet of full-featured online apps in a short period of time, but just as significant is the fact that it has done it without sacrificing simplicity and usability. That points to software that is well-conceived and well-developed.”

Jason finds that almost all of Zoho’s apps have the best feature set in their class of online apps, and he is not alone: see the MIT Technology Review, Gartner and countless blogs  in agreement.  He also points to potential weaknesses:

  • business model
  • security (of not just Zoho, but online apps in general) 
  • full offline capability.

It’s good to see Zoho’s Raju Vegesna acknowledge these, and stating they are working on them.  In the past 18 months Zoho has proven that when they say  “we’re working on it”, they better be taken seriously.

TechRepublic concludes:

In taking on Microsoft and Google in the office application arena, Zoho sees itself in the same mold as Microsoft taking on IBM in PCs in the early 1980s and Google taking on Microsoft and Yahoo in search in the past decade. It would be easy to wave off Zoho as a bug destined to be squashed, but judging by the quality of what Zoho has created so far, I wouldn’t count it out.

A very nice review, but let’s have a real sanity check: the question isn’t whether tiny Zoho can beat Microsoft and Google, but whether it needs to beat them at all.  I don’t think so.

This is not a winner-take-it-all, zero-sum game: all players, including Google and Zoho are creating a new, emerging market.  It’s not about slicing the pie yet, it’s about making sure the pie will be huge – and Google’s brand is the best guarantee to achieving that.  Little Zoho can be a tremendously successful business being second to Google.  There will always be room for a second .. third… perhaps fourth. Data privacy, the quality of the products, better service, or just having a choice – there will always be reasons for customers to opt for a non-Google solution.

The above is a quote from my earlier post, The Web Office Smackdown – Why It Does Not Matter, which covers further details, including Zoho’s small business apps, beyond the scope of Office.  For a better understanding of what Zoho is all about, I warmly recommend Sramana Mitra’s interview series with Zoho CEO Sridhar Vembu.

Filed Under: Collaboration, Personal Productivity, SaaS, SMB / SME ·
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On-demand CRM: Lunch is (Almost) Free

Posted on July 10, 2007 ·

Will Microsoft eat Salesforce.com’s lunch with their freshly announced pricing for hosted CRM? There is a heated debate on the subject, with longtime enterprise software guru Josh Greenbaum declaring that Microsoft is about to eat Salesforce.com’s lunch:

“2008 promises to be the real year of on-demand CRM: It’s Salesforce.com’s market to lose, and, unless something changes dramatically in their favor, lose it they will.”

Josh has been bearish on Salesforce.com for a while, declaring it the next Siebel. It’s a bold call, but calling it ahead of the curve, based on fundamentals, going against the trend is what makes a real analyst.

Salesforce.com does not seem to be worried about their lunch-ticket though:

“What it looks like is that Microsoft is just marking down an inferior product to what customers are actually paying right now. “

–says Bruce Francis, vice president of corporate strategy on Tod Bishop’s Blog. Ouch! He goes on:

“Also, one thing that I haven’t seen is the url where I can sign up for a 30-day trial.”

Well, I can point to such a URL, albeit not at Microsoft: http://zohocrm.com. (Disclaimer: I’m an advisor to Zoho)

I’ve long stated that Zoho’s product is actually more than just CRM: with Sales Order Management, Procurement, Inventory Management, Invoicing functionality Zoho seems to have the makings of a CRM+ERP solution, under the disguise of the CRM label. The company also stated they are working on Accounting and HR, they have a database/application Creator, and the best-in-class Office Suite: can you see the Big Picture?

Now, for the best part: pricing. Microsoft is heralded to undercut Salesforce.com with their $44/$59 per user pricing. That’s still a hefty price, if you ask me – Zoho CRM is free for the first 3 users, then $12 per user. I don’t know who is eating whose lunch, but if you are a business user, $12 bucks for CRM+++ is as close to a free lunch ticket as you can get.smile_regular

How can Zoho do this? They are passionate about the real meaning of the On-Demand revolution: bringing good quality yet affordable software as a service to the masses. They are an efficient development “machine” and manage to cut out “fat”: Sales expenses, traditionally representing 70-80% of costs in the enterprise software business. We have an ongoing debate in the Enterprise Irregulars on whether this inexpensive “pull” model is hype or reality. The nay-sayers point to Salesforce.com, or the new IPO-hopeful NetSuite: sales costs are sky high, and for all the “no software” revolution Marc Benioff has brought about, he employs a rather traditional enterprise sales staff, a’la Oracle. The key differentiator IMHO is the target market:

“Salesforce.com is focusing more of its efforts these days on capturing larger enterprise accounts”

-says Phil Wainewright, and that means traditional, expensive sales. Viral Marketing, demand generation, try-online-then-sign-up works better with the Small Business market, which is what Zoho is focusing on. The Street only seems to value the large corporate market, so it’s understandable that venture funded, IPO-driven or already public companies strive to move up the chain; Zoho is privately owned, and can afford to grow their business as they wish – apparently they see the goldmine waiting to be explored on the SMB market.

Related posts on TechMeme: eWEEK.com, Enterprise Anti-matter, Software as Services, Steve Clayton, Techdirt , CNET News.com, Microsoft News Tracker ,Zoho Blogs

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Filed Under: ERP / CRM, SaaS, SMB / SME ·
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Not All Notebooks Are Created Equal

Posted on May 22, 2007 ·

Whenever Zoho releases a new product, the “default” comparison is to relevant Google products.  Perhaps it’s because of this “reflex” that most  blogs  immediately   compare the newly released Zoho Notebook to Microsoft OneNote and Google Notebook.

I have a suggestion: let’s add 3M’s post-it notessmile_wink   Joke apart, Google Notebook is really an online yellow sticky, while Zoho’s Notebook is a full-featured multimedia application to create, aggregate, share, collaborate on just about any type of content easily, be it text, database, spreadsheet, image, drawings, audio, video – you name it.  The only thing the two “Notebooks” share is the name, otherwise they simply play in different leagues.  I tend to agree with Read/WriteWeb:  “Zoho Notebook offered different things than Microsoft OneNote and more things than Google Notebook.”

You can clip content from the Web, or create your own, in a free-form, true drag-and-drop environment. Embed video, audio, RSS feed, or use special page types that load Zoho Writer, Sheet and other applications. 

The level of re real-time collaboration is a true breakthrough: you can share book-level, page-level or individual object-level information.  This means you can selectively collaborate with certain users on your text, while sharing the chart with yet another group, and hiding the rest.   Updates to any of these objects are reflected in the NoteBook real-time.  Integration with Skype allows Skype presence indicators in the individual shared object as well as direct IM-ing over Skype. Needless to say, version-control is taken care of at the object-level, too.

This is application is way too feature-rich to describe. Instead, watch this demo, then try it yourself.

 

NoteBook is unquestionably the sleekest of all Zoho apps, and a technological marvel.  There are clearly specific target demographics, like students, where an All-In-One notetaker is the killer app.  In a more typical business environment one might wonder where it fits in the range of products available, and what application to use when. Back in January when Notebook was “pre-released” at Demo, fellow Enterprise Irregular Dennis Howlett found specific use-cases for the accounting profession:

“I can see huge potential for this among those professionals who need to assemble audit and M&A resources for example. It makes the creation of a multi-disciplinary team very easy with the ongoing ability to collaborate as projects evolve while remaining in an organised, controllable environment.

I can see other use cases arising in forensic work, planning, budget management, time and expense management – the list goes on. In this sense, Zoho Notebook could become the de facto desktop for knowledge workers because you don’t need to leave the service to do pretty much all the tasks you’d expect a knowledge worker to undertake. I can also envisage some interesting mashups using accounting data from a saas player that gets pulled into Notebook on and ad hoc basis. Does this mean Notebook is a ’silver bullet’ application.

I’m going to stick my neck out and say a qualified ‘yes.”

Office 2.0 critics/sceptics often say these apps should go beyond offering web-based equivalents of existing PC applications. With Notebook Zoho clearly shows they don’t just take us to the “cloud”, they bring us true innovation. 

(Disclosure:  I’m an Advisor to Zoho and am obviously biased. Don’t take my words for anything I’ve just said – go ahead and try it yourself).

Update:  Robert Scoble has just posted his recent  video interview with  CEO Sridhar Vembu and Zoho Evangelist Raju Vegesna.

 

 

Filed Under: Collaboration, Personal Productivity, SaaS, Software, Startups, Technology ·
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Box.net Releases "Office On Demand"

Posted on May 17, 2007 ·

No, the online storage company does not enter the race to compete with Google, Zoho, ThinkFree and the like… what they did was a further step to providing seamless offline/online access to MS Office documents.   Office On Demand is a plug-in that will place an icon on your MS Office toolbars, which will allow to directly save your Microsoft documents to your box.net account.  This makes it even more convenient to later access your documents from any other PC that has the MS Office Suite installed.

In fact for .doc and .xls files you don’t even need MS Office – thanks to the recently announced Zoho integration, just right-click, select “Edit Document” and work on it online, using Zoho Writer or Sheet.  Your document can still be saved in proper MS format.

The new beta plug-in is compatible with Word, Powerpoint, Excel, and Access both in 2007 and 2003 (and XP/Vista).

Filed Under: Personal Productivity, SaaS, Software, Technology ·
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Google @ Work Breakfast Seminar in San Francisco

Posted on May 17, 2007 ·

Two days ago I attended a Google @ Work Breakfast event in San Francisco. Below are my raw notes and some conclusions in the end.

Google is not @ work at the Westin, where we are now, for lack of a wireless connection. But that’s OK, this is more of a briefing, they want us to watch, not play 🙂 Oh, and breakfast is good.

Speaker: Michael Lock, Sales Director, North America, Google Enterprise

Consumer Technology seeing a lot of Innovation, while Enterprise IT falling behind on the innovation curve. 75% IT budgets going to maintenance. Gartner , 2006: $8 out of $10 $ IT spend is dead money. (Hm… I feel like I’m hearing a generic speech, it could have been delivered at Software 2007 last week).

Google wants business users to have apps that they will not be forced to use, they will love to use.

More than 7000 Enterprise customers (Wow! I wonder how “Enterprise Customer” is defined. Using Google Apps with my own domain, am I one? smile_wink)

Google Enterprise team about 300 people. Not making new products, leveraging what already exists in consumer space.

3 Key Areas: Search, Geo-spatial Products, Google Apps.

3 lessons Enterprise IT can learn from Google

  1. Fast is better than slow – talks about traditional software deployment cycle. (20 minutes into the show, where’s the beef?)
  2. Simple better than complex (storytelling, this is the generic “SaaS is better” pitch) Complexities of the on-site model. “Every Tuesday somebody issues a patch” – subtle hint to Microsoft Patch Tuesdays…good slides, btw.
  3. Assume Chaos and Deal with it. “This is what Google does best” ( yeah, right… OK, the link was a cheap shot, I admitsmile_tongue). Data has changed and it does not come in rows and columns. 80+% unstructured data. Typical way we deal with it: Inbox > categorization, hierarchies. Manual categorization, hierarchies are dead. (I *almost* agree: still doing some categorization, using labels) Refers to Yahoo’s original name: “Yet Another Hierarchical Officious Oracle”. Too much data today to manage hierarchically. Search to replace hierarchies. Uses slide that compares Outlook folders to Gmail – (hm, his Gmail screenshot does not have any labels!) Embrace search as a way to navigate.

 

Google Apps

Now: Gmail, Calendar, Talk, Startpage. 

Soon: Docs & Spreadsheets, Blogger, Groups, wiki

Reduced complexity. Cost: Old: $200-1000/user/year, 1G? New: $50/user/year 10G.

Security fears, adoption curve: uses analogy of money in mattress vs in Bank, online banking > trust issues, we got used to it. Where’s the best place for money? for email?

Demo – pulls up his email account. (Has a bunch of Interview Feedbacks with actual names – one can never be too careful). Pitch against categorization, for search. (still missed the label concept – when the actual common word may not be in the mail. Has 33k unread mail in his inbox. Needs some GTD training? smile_speedy)

Calendar – shows integrating several calendars. Spreadsheet demo, with another user shared, including IM. Complementary to MS Office environment.

Enterprise Search

Easier to find things on the Net than in your company. Cute slide: top search engine on the Net: Google. top search engine in the Enterprise: …. the phone- aka asking around.

Shows MOMA, Google’s internal internal page. Pulls up a manager’s record (search), gets all reports/management chain – link to map, down to cube level. “key match”: unlike public Net, here admin can control what goes to top of search results.

Shows examples of how search pulls info from Oracle expense system. Pulls Cisco orders from order entry system. (Somewhat reminds me of how SAP’s Plattner talked about accessing data via search)

Search appliance works with existing permission systems, too.

Geo-Spatial

Maps, Earth, SketchUp

Earth Pro – data import, telephone support ..etc. Earth Enterprise – create custom earth. e.g Caltrain adding their own imagery. Utility companies ..etc.

Live demo from NT Department of Transportation, traffic cameras included. Traffic snapshot (every 5 mins) pops up. Asset tracking from Toronto company. (Runs out of time, I learned more from Mono, the Citi College guy sitting next to me, who talked about using all this stuff for facility management)  

Summary: This was a standard road-show pitch, I did not hear anything new – for a while this irritated me (hence the early comments), but towards the end, looking around the audience I realized I was wrong. I need to re-calibrate my expectations. Perhaps I came to the wrong meeting, but if Google is to achieve mass adoption outside geek circles, then doing these basic road-shows is probably the right thing.

Michael’s story-telling was good, the jokes, the Powerpoint tricks were all in the right place… somehow I still felt this was the “classic salesy” style I could have heard 15 years ago from Oracle, IBM and the like. Naive me, I was hoping Google’s innovation does not stop at technology, they also bring some freshness to sales… like actually knowing one’s product well enough not to have to dodge most questions.smile_omg  (To be fair, after the presentation there was an hour left for product demos in the breakfast area).

Finally, considering the amount of “new information”, I wonder what the big deal was uninviting some Microsoft participants. Unless of course Google Marketing subscribes to the “bad PR is good PR theory”, since the rejection earned more blog feedback than the seminar itself.

Related posts:

Filed Under: Bay Area, Marketing / PR, SaaS, Software, Technology ·
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Software 2007 – First Impressions, Opening

Posted on May 9, 2007 ·

First impressions:

Registration is smooth, there’s hardly any wait.  Hm.. am I too early… where is the crowd?

 This is growth: the badge is triple the size from last year: it’s actually a little bag, with a zippable compartment to store goodies.  Are we close to dressing up in a badge? 🙂

WiFi: Finally, free WiFi! (Oops, it does not work in the main Conference Hall, where the Opening Keynote is about to start. 

MR Rangaswami, Opening Speech

Started this event in 2003,in the middle of the tech depression, still had 1100 participants – today it’s 1900.   Now we’re thriving.  Theme for this conference is Innovation.  Name a few innovative companies: Apple, FedEx, Southwest..etc.  But where’s software? 

Innovation in software was thought of as product innovation.  Get it out the door, see what customers say.  Industry changed, innovation is more than Product Release.

McKinsey Innovation Tech Vendor Survey.

PE funding is now larger than VC funding.   Surveyd 475 customers: 55% believe innovation is on the upswing.  CIO’s expect innovation from “little guys”.  (contrast to recent other survey)

Share of software expanding withing IT budgets.

Download two surveys jointly issued with McKinsey:

Enterprise Software Customer Survey

State of the Software Industry

New Sand Hill Index (stock index, obviously public companies)

 

Hasso Plattner, SAP

Innovation, Speed, Success.  Uses blackboard-style slides, with chalked handwriting. Dressed in matching black:-)

This is good, breaking it out in separate post…

 

Filed Under: Bay Area, Business, Enterprise Software, ERP / CRM, SaaS, Social Networking, Software, Technology ·
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Software 2007: Plattner to Turn the SAP Mothership Again

Posted on May 9, 2007 ·

Photo Credit: Dan Farber, ZDNet For half an hour or so I felt I was back at University at Software 2007 – in Professor Hasso Plattner’s class. That’s because his keynote was a compressed version of his recent SAPPHIRE 07 speech, which in turn was an “offsite class” for his Stanford students – literally so, he flew the entire class out to Atlanta. To make his point, he used the blackboard-metaphor, with chalked handwriting (and dressed in matching blacksmile_shades).

I don’t normally enjoy keynotes, but found this one fascinating: it was about a lot more than most in the audience thinks – more on this later…

The “lecture” was about his New Idea for enterprise software – more than an idea, it started as a side-project about 5 years ago, then about 3 years ago they realized they can’t do it with one codebase.. so it became a completely separate system from SAP’s current business suite. They kept the project secret as long as they could, but this year they started to talk about it: it’s code-named A1S, and currently 3000 people are working on it (For comparison, Salesforce.com has less than 200 engineers). It will be On-Demand, and not a point-solution, but a full-featured, integrated business solution, as one would expect from SAP.

Some of my raw notes on the key concepts:

  • On-demand: Google, Salesforce.com showed it works. Time now for the whole enterprise to run in the cloud. Very small footprint at customer.
  • New markets: small business customers.
  • Key difference: user-centric design. Iteration, version 7 of user interface already, it will be 8 or 9 before it launches. Every single functions delivered either by browser or smart client. They look 100% identical. Office (MS) client, Mobile, too.
  • Separation of UI, App, Db – physical sep, multiple UI’s for same App. Front ends very specific to industries. Portal based. Company, departmental portal. User roles. Multiple workplaces. In smaller companies users have multiple workplaces. High degree of personalization.
  • Event driven approach. Model based system. Instead of exposing source code, expose the model. Not just documentation, active models. Change system behavior through models. Very different from SAP’s original table-based customization. Completely open to access by/ to other system. 2500+ service interfaces exposed.
  • The future of software design will be driven by community. SDN 750K members, 4000 posts per day. We’ll have hundreds of thousands of apps from the community. Blogs, Wikis, Youtube.
  • In-memory databases. Test: 5years accounting, 36 million line items. 20G in file 1.1G compressed in memory. Any question asked > 1.1sec. There is no relational database anymore. Database can be split over multiple computers. Finally information will be in the user’s fingertips. Google-speed for all Enterprise information. Analytics first, eventually everything in memory.

For a more organized writeup, I recommend Dan Farber’s excellent summary, and for the full details watch the original SAPPHIRE 07 Keynote (after a bit of salesy intro).

As it became obvious during the post-keynote private press/blogger discussion, most in the room thought Plattner was talking about the mysterious A1S, SAP’s yet-to-be-seen On-Demand SMB offering – although he made it clear he intentionally never used the A1S moniker. I think what we heard was a lot more – but to understand it, one has understand Hasso Plattner himself. No matter how his formal position changed, the last active SAP Founder has always been the Technology Visionary behind the company – the soul of SAP, it there is such a thing.smile_wink He is not a product-pusher, not a marketer: he sets direction for several years ahead.

SAP has an existing (legacy) market to protect, and they clearly don’t want the On-Demand product to cannibalize that market. But Plattner knows On-Demand is coming, and I bet the SMB space will be the test-bed to the new system eventually “growing up” to all of SAP’s market segments. Hasso Plattner gets the On-Demand religion, and when he gets a new religion, SAP typically follows. Plattner oversaw two major paradigm changes: the move from mainframe to client/server, which was entirely his baby, and the move to SOA/Netweaver, where he embraced Shai Agassi’s initiatives. The ‘New Idea” will likely be the last time Plattner turns the Mothership around. Next he will need to find “another Shai” to make sure there is a strong tech DNA in SAP’s leadership, as the Sales/Marketing types take over at the helm.

Filed Under: Bay Area, Business, Enterprise Software, ERP / CRM, SaaS, SMB / SME, Social Networking, Software, Technology · Tagged: , , , , , , , , , , , ,
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Snap CO2 Saver Abuses Green Theme

Posted on May 8, 2007 ·

I used to really dislike Snap (the obtrusive preview bubbles popping up and covering just what you were about to read), but I changed my mind when they became “civilized” and introduced little preview icons, instead of popping up over any URL. Even so, the preview bubbles were clearly just a popular Trojan Horse to get users install their script and help them build their search capabilities.

Their current CO2 Saver campaign is a new low, though.

 

They want you to install their CO2 Saver Bar, which will:

  • Save energy when your computer is idle – Reduce electricity usage;
  • Reduce harmful CO2 and other emissions;
  • Lower your electric and cooling bills;
  • Show how much you’ve saved!

What it does is adjust some of your Windows Power settings.  I have those set just right, thank you – why would I need to run another resident program ALL the time?  Isn’t that .. get this! – a waste?  Oh, and note to Snap: before you tinker with my system settings, the minimum I expect is that you tell me exactly what you’re about to change.   Not some fuzzy BS about saving the Earth…

Oh, and by the way, while you’re so happy about “going green”, you also have installed Snap’s Search Box.  That’s what it’s all about: Snap knows very well nobody would download just another search-bar, so they dress it up in “save-the-Earth” theme. A very, very dishonest effort.

 

Filed Under: Blogging, Marketing / PR, Personal Productivity, SaaS, Software, Technology ·
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