Archives for January 2008

I am excited to share with my readers that I have joined Salesforce.com. I am on the product management team and will help drive strategy for Salesfore.com’s SaaS platform. The Force.com platform provides end-users, enterprises and ISVs with a complete, integrated, hosted solution for building and delivering custom applications without worrying about the underlying infrastructure. The best way to describe Force.com SaaS Platform is through a million words:

(Note: A picture is worth thousand words, and a video is worth thousand pictures – you can do the math).

Its an exciting time for Salesforce.com and you can feel the high level of energy and enthusiasm for replicating the success in CRM software as a service to the platform as a service (or SaaS platform). Its a great team with a deep understanding of the SaaS space and I am excited to be part of a company that really gets it.

If you would like to email me, please write to anshu at anshublog (.com). Or, connect via LinkedIn.

Phil Wainewright writes:

The event itself signals Oracle’s increasing awareness of its opportunity to become a leading supplier of the building-blocks for Saas infrastructure. There’s been a big turnaround in Oracle’s public pronouncements on SaaS in the past year, culminating at Oracle OpenWorld with the announcement of its new CRM On Demand products and a restatement of its commitment to the on-demand model. Meanwhile, the company has been drawing together the ingredients of what it now calls the Oracle SaaS Platform, which aims to package up a range of Oracle products into a coherent platform that ISVs can build their SaaS offerings on. As I mentioned when I wrote about Eight reasons SaaS will surge in 2008, the proliferation of SaaS platforms from major vendors will be a big factor in bringing more and more SaaS offerings to market in the coming years, and it’s a theme I’ll be discussing in my presentation on Friday.

Earlier, Aberdeen Group put out a research report that speaks to the momentum.

By way of disclaimer, I am biased and its been an exciting year for me as I have had the opportunity to lead this initiative at Oracle. More on this soon.

We are still accepting registrations for the SaaS Industry Summit.

So, the HD DVD vs. Blu-Ray wars continue and but for the early adopters, there is little adoption of either format. The problem is that customers don’t want to bet on the wrong format like they did (or heard people did) in Beta-VHS wars. And until there is significant adoption of either format, there is no way to know which format is winning. A chicken and egg problem.

I would like to suggest a solution – the main problem is that customers don’t want to spend 100s (or even 1000s) of dollars on buying content that becomes worthless if their format looses. The solution would be as follows and for ease, I propose the solution from HD DVD perspective:

Offer to replace for free all HD DVDs if at any time in the next 5 years, the market share of HD DVD falls below 10%.

But how will this work? Who will pay for it?

• The increased adoption in the near term should deliver sufficient profits for the sellers of HD DVDs who can set aside a small %-age of the revenues to pay for the replacement, if it comes to that.
• This bet is even more lucrative for the format that has a higher potential of winning (HD DVD?). They could accelerate the adoption and it would be hard for the loosing format (Blu-Ray) to offer the same guarantee.
• To keep costs low, HD DVD vendors could offer the guarantee for an additional fee ($1) or conversely bundle it in cost and offer discount if you don’t buy the guarantee.
• Alternatively, there could be a small fee of say $1 or 2 to cover the cost of converting content from one format to another.
• None of this solves the sunk cost of the player but that is smaller concern for customers than the cost of DVDs.

What do you think? Would you go out and buy HD DVDs if such a guarantee were offered?

Quick Question: What do you think of when someone mentions a great looking computer that works well?

If your answer was Apple as was the response from 10 or so friends I quizzed, you are part of the majority. And this is a huge problem for Microsoft and its allies. Every time, a PC maker like Dell or HP unveils a sexy looking desktop or notebook, the media and the consumer seem to think of Apple. This is resulting in buyers asking themselves and their friends asking them: Why not an Apple?

If I were Microsoft or an ally, I would be worried. Very worried.

What should they do? Here are some choices, none of them look like a path to winning:

• Ignore Apple and pretend the world is flat. Or round. I hate Friedman for killing this metaphor.
• Build great looking PCs and Notebooks. This is harder than it sounds. And even when companies succeed with products like Sony Vaio and HP’s latest Notebooks, they invariably end up only competing with Apple. Also, the PC vendors are limited to hardware improvements. If I am going to pay a premium, why not get the real thing?

So Huckabee and Obama have won the primaries and if nothing else this shows that Americans care about what kind of a person you are rather than how much money you can raise, how politically astute you can be or how you can dodge the issues. From the day I was exposed to Huckabee in 2006, listening to him talk about the health challenges in America and what he has personally done to lead, I was impressed.

I found him real, charming, articulate, honest and a do-er. The fact that he is not from New York-California (or as AT&T would call it, New Yorkifornia), makes him more real in some ways with a feel for what life is like for millions of Americans.

I liked him enough to check out his website to see where he stands on issues. That’s where I was a little taken aback. Here are some of his stands:

• Replace all taxes with “FairTax”: The name Fair Tax notwithstanding the proposed tax would essentially be a national sales tax. The unintended (or unseen) consequences of this could include consumers buying more second-hand goods or even conducting transactions in tax without reporting them. A simple taxation system could also mean its simpler to avoid taxation. The incentive to cheat would be much higher given that the proposed fair sales tax would be around 20%+. I am all for reforming the tax code but any time a huge change like this is proposed I am worried about unintended consequences. For example, the rich could spend more of their time and money in foreign countries while earning in the US. Take your (much maligned) hedge fund trader who could do his job in London as well as in New York and compare that to the Wal-Mart clerk. Doesn’t seem fair to me!
• Immigration: He wants to crack down hard on illegal immigrants and employers. Although, I agree that enforcement of laws needs to be strengthened there seems to be very little emphasis on immigration reform. By way of example, he wants to eliminate the visa category for brothers and sisters of citizens – I don’t understand why this is a key issue. After all, does pro-family stop at the border? He does propose to increase the visas for highly skilled and highly educated immigrants – I support this increase but few highly skilled and highly educated immigrants want to live in a country that doesn’t let their spouse, siblings or parents in. Germany tried a restrictive program to attract top talent from countries like India and the program was a failure.
• Marriage and Sanctity of Life: Huckabee wants to define marriage. As a union of man and a woman. I am relieved. I guess this is a huge problem. Why bother with real issues like poverty, climate change or disease when you can define marriage.

There are several issues on which I do agree with Huckabee including his healthcare reforms agenda but I need to see him articulate his positions on immigration and taxation with more nuance and show his understanding of the issues involved for me to be able to trust him.