Ad-supported applications: just say no
The CEOs of NetSuite, WebSideStory and WebEx all agree with the majority of TalkBack posters -- ad-funded on-demand business applications make no sense at all.
Software as Services
In the best-informed blog on software-as-a-service and on-demand business applications, Phil Wainewright cuts through the vendor spin, analyzes the trends to watch and adds his thought-provoking insights.
Phil Wainewright
Since 1998, Phil Wainewright has been a thought leader in cloud computing as a blogger, analyst and consultant.
Latest Posts
Why not fund on-demand with ... money?
The thing I don't understand about ad-funded applications is this: Why does everyone have such a problem with asking people to pay for them instead?
It's dog-eat-dog in CRM land
CRM vendors are fighting each other for business. Old dogs like Siebel and Sage are fair game for aggressive upgrade deals, and even Salesforce.com isn't immune to churn.
How to fund on-demand applications
There are several ways of making money from on-demand. Advertising is the least effective, subscription remains the most popular, and transaction commissions will overtake both.
Who could possibly benefit from ad-funded applications?
Supporters of Microsoft seem to believe that ad-funded applications will be the solution to all of the vendor's major woes. But they're not recognising what users and advertisers want.
Let users write their own applications
Nsite's latest release is a hosted IDE that allows users to modify, build and deploy sophisticated applications online without having to write a single line of code.
The unforgettable Peter Drucker
The management guru, who passed away yesterday, foretold the rise of Web 2.0 in an analogy to the fifteenth-century printing industry.
The incumbent's conundrum
Microsoft has become the latest example of an established incumbent that left it too late to embrace disruptive technologies that will obsolete its existing products.
Watch out for Amazon
Amazon's services revenue is small beer compared to its total turnover, but it's still more than most conventional on-demand vendors make, and its upside may be bigger even than Google's.
Wetware as a service
By providing programmatic access to real people -- 'wetware' -- the Amazon Mechanical Turk service solves a very real problem for software developers.