Enterprise Anti-matter

Microsoft’s on-again, off-again flirtation with the high-end of the enterprise software market is off – again. The current thinking, the product of the latest massive shift in the leadership team of Dynamics, is that the lower to mid-market is the place to be, and Microsoft plans to be there to the exclusion of the massive, global enterprises that represent the tip of the customer icebergs – and an enormous revenue stream – for both SAP and Oracle.

September 16, 2008 by Joshua Greenbaum

2 Comments Vote

It turns out that Google's Chrome, like Google's Apps, started life with the same ridiculous EULA, the one that gives GOOG the right to use any content you send to Chrome (and Apps as well) in any way that Google sees fit. They generously allowed you to retain the copyright on your content, just as long as you didn't care if Google used it for its marketing, promotional, or other (hedging operations?

September 8, 2008 by Joshua Greenbaum

13 Comments Vote

The Genghis Kahn school of marketing, made famous in the 1980s by Larry Ellison, has as its principle maxim the notion that it’s not enough that one succeeds, one’s opponents must also fail. A look under the covers at one of Microsoft’s latest additions to its CRM Online product has a little of that old Genghis Kahn “zero sum” game plan, and the zero with the target on its forehead is good old Google.

September 8, 2008 by Joshua Greenbaum

22 Comments Vote

It’s leapfrog time in enterprise software land, and the next frog to jump will be Oracle, which is hosting industry analysts next week in Redwood Shores and then hosting the entire world at its much-too-massive Open World Conference in San Francisco the following week.Oracle is jumping into the marketing fray following a summer in which its two major competitors, SAP and Microsoft, both trotted out their respective strategies for market domination.

September 4, 2008 by Joshua Greenbaum

2 Comments Vote

Lawson CEO Harry Debes started -- or rather continued -- a brouhaha that's getting some pixels in the blogosphere, and his position is worth commenting on for both its courage (foolhardy) and its excess (hyperbolically so). According to Harry, the SaaS market will collapse in two years time, due to the Saas model's inherent lack of financial merit.

August 28, 2008 by Joshua Greenbaum

5 Comments Vote

USA Today had an interesting article today that calls into question a few of the doomsday scenarios that have dominated US policy-makers and those for whom policy has been made over the last decade or so. And in the process America’s newspaper debunks some stupid policy issues on the subject of offshore drilling, offshore manufacturing, among others.

August 12, 2008 by Joshua Greenbaum

4 Comments Vote

You’d think, based on the timing, that Oracle was trying to deliberately make a PR run on what was looking like, and turned out to be, some pretty good news for SAP. The day before SAP’s nice looking Q2 earnings call, Oracle upped the ante in its lawsuit against SAP by claiming more direct executive involvement in the alleged theft of Oracle support IP by the now defunct TomorrowNow.

July 29, 2008 by Joshua Greenbaum

3 Comments Vote

When Shai Agassi called me in early 2005, he asked me a loaded question: How would I respond if SAP decided to take the fight to Oracle by providing third party maintenance for Oracle’s recently acquired PeopleSoft customers? I told him it would be an incredibly aggressive move, but that SAP would have a lot of trouble proving it had a credible offering for PeopleSoft customers.

July 21, 2008 by Joshua Greenbaum

Comments Vote

I came away from this week's Microsoft Worldwide Partner (WPC) conference convinced, finally, that the future of Vista is assured in the enterprise. Don't get me wrong, it wasn't because of anything Microsoft said -- the combined mea culpa/back atcha delivered by Microsoft's Brad Brooks, the Corporate Vice President in charge of Vista's rehabilitation, isn't what swayed me.

July 11, 2008 by Joshua Greenbaum

72 Comments Vote

I spend a lot of time tracking the deskless souls who inhabit the workworld, the factory workers, nurses and others who spend more time on their feet and less time on their butts than the rest of us.

July 8, 2008 by Joshua Greenbaum

8 Comments Vote