Executive Blog on SaaS and Application On-Demand


Cloud Hogwash

When Mike Mankowski sent me this blog post today, I figured “Yeah! My running buddy David Greenfield from Altera is writing a post about me. I didn’t even know he blogged.
Alas, it was a case of mistaken identity but the post was real. This David Greenfield disagrees with my hogwash, but that’s O.K., […]

Hard to stay mad at Google

As many who know me, know that I have not been a big fan of Google. I love the desktop search (or I did until I got a Mac with Spotlight) but am not a big fan of their corporate culture. Just because they got search right (emphasis on the past tense, but that’s a later […]

The Children are the Future — Pt. 2

Just a quick update on the last post. I’ve seen a variety of articles on the decline of Educational Software, but I like this one the best. I like it because the time frame represents the delta between my oldest child, who we bought software for, and my youngest, who we have never […]

When The Children Grow Up

Reading M.R. Rangaswami’s recent post Where are Software’s Children, I am struck by the continued belief that enterprises will continue to use installed applications through the next generation of software. That is simply not going to happen.
Mr. Rangaswami’s observation of the age of the ruling class of software companies is aging and that most […]

Open Source vs. SaaS

Let me be the last to post about “Open Source vs. SaaS”. Two excellent posts have been put up recently (O.K. not so recently.) Anshu Sharma’s and Dave Rosenberg’s. Both are very well written, and I agree with Anshu’s arguments. That said, they both are essentially missing one essential point: all applications will be Web […]

Web Services - Terminal Services

When we first started getting in to SaaS back in 2004, there were a lot of companies still looking for shortcuts in to the space. Virtualization and terminal services were seen as a way to take your current app and “voila”, turn it in to a SaaS offering. Three years later, I cannot think of […]

Door Close Buttons

So I use Good Mail to get mobile e-mail on my BlackJack. I find it much more usable than the mail client in Windows Mobile 5 to get my exchange mail, and the good people at Cingular have yet to offer Windows Mobile 6 (can you imagine if I couldn’t upgrade my Mac to Leopard […]

SaaS and HA

Bit of a buzz last week about how NetSuite was IPOing even though it didn’t have a back-up datacenter. This came as a surprise to many in the press, analyst and investor world, but it shouldn’t have. As the guys over at Saugatuck Technology pointed out, this is the most likely case. Most […]

SaaS and the Shop Foreman

Recently at the Progress Software Partner Summit, it was stated that certain type of users wouldn’t buy SaaS. Interesting enough the type of person who was used as an example was the Foreman of a Machine Shop

Web 2.0 <> Jerks

I’ve been saying a lot lately that you can tell things are getting good because the jerks are back. 24 year old entrepreneurs who think the world did not exist before ValleyWag and have a shiny new Series A term sheet to prove it.