Pat your head and rub your tummy - willprice.blogspot
Piece "In my experience as a VC and ex-startup CEO, young companies need to remember to develop and tell two stories. The first targets customers and explains specific, tangible, and focused value made possible via the currently available product. The second story targets the VCs and addresses the real concern with respect to scale, TAM, and a road map that supports the emergence of the company from a niche-product to a real company."
10 New Opportunities for Software Vendors - sandhill
Piece
"1) Consolidate or Be Consolidated
There is a perception in the industry that "Darwin's Law" applies: You must acquire or be acquired. This isn't quite the case. Oracle is almost done with its acquisition frenzy. The high valuations they caused are not going to apply to most other vendors.
If you want to be the acquirer, you need acquisition expertise. We all grew up building technology. No one ever gave us a course in executing M&As, post-acquisition integration or anything like that. Most vendors need to retool, and gain expertise to be acquire or be acquired at an attractive - and realistic - price.
2) "New" ERP is a Huge Opportunity
A unified enterprise platform continues to elude the industry. If you only look at SAP, MySAP has multiple code streams, CRM more, NetWeaver, another set. Through development and purchase, Oracle now has 10 to 20 enterprise platforms. Microsoft promised Longhorn in 2006. Then the company delayed the release to 2008, now 2009 or even later.
There is a game being played by major enterprise vendors. They keep baiting customers with a promise of a unified platform but the reality is that it will be many years before such a platform appears from any of the major providers.
This gap presents a giant window of opportunity for new vendors to provide an enterprise platform to customers of these vendors. The platform would need to be provided at 20 percent of the cost of ownership that the customer would have to pay to upgrade to the next version of their current vendor's product (which isn't ready yet anyway) in order to be compelling. Leveraging open source and on-demand applications would enable new vendors to move the larger vendors' installed base to a new platform.
3)The Sun Sets on "Packaged" Apps
Out of the 20 million lines of code in a typical enterprise application, only 2 to 3 million lines provide any meaningful value to the client. Said differently, 20 percent of a software product represents 80 percent of its business value.
Add the fact that customers much spend $5 to $10 on services for every $1 paid for an enterprise application and it is no wonder that customers complain about the price of software.
I feel that our industry created this notion of "packaged software applications" so that vendors could recognize revenue upfront and achieve bigger market valuations. It has also created the notion that maintenance revenue is a good thing to have.
These tactics have resulted in bad behavior by software makers. We end up including every "corner case" need that a client might possibly have in fear that said client will cut its maintenance contract. Before you know it, we have a product that is only worth 20 percent to most customers yet whose total cost of ownership is 100% for all clients.
Software is moving back to an age of semi-custom applications. The future belongs to these products which contain 80 percent of the value for common clients. These products could serve a vertical market, a horizontal process or any number of other niches. Various service providers can fill in the missing 20 percent on a client-by-client basis. This will lead to a sensible revenue recognition and maintenance model that won't force the bad behavior plaguing the industry today."
The Death of a Web Service - avc.blogs
Piece "have talked endlessly on this blog about the emerging world of web services where you can easily build really useful applications by patching together a bunch of open web services.
In fact this blog is a perfect example of that world. I started with Typepad, then got Feedburner, Adsense, Bloglet, del.icio.us, Flickr, Amazon, Indeed, Bitty Browser, LibSyn, and probably a few more web services. Together, they provide to me, and hopefully you, a really useful application.
But what happens when one of these web services dies?"
The Death of The Killer App - feld
Piece "They are:
Simply try things out: We are seeing this every day with all the web 2.0 stuff that’s being created. The new approach – being used by many of our favorite web services – is build, release, test, iterate. Google has popularized the notion of “beta services” - when everything is “beta”, you’ve got a new paradigm with a short (days / weeks / one month) release cycle that can be quickly iterated on rather than a monolithic 12 - 18 months (or more) release cycle.
Focus on the information context: This is a little harder to see in practice, but it’s all about “enabling the feedback loop between users and manufacturers.” Eric von Hippel has been talking about this since the late 1970’s – he’s now calling it “Democratizing Innovation” – if you get both sides deeply involved in the innovation context, better things get created. Tom Evslin’s been on a Typepad customization rampage – this is a great small example – and I hope our friends at Six Apart are watching."
Web 2.0: An opportunity for venture capital, or just a boom in lifestyle businesses? - vpfund
Piece "I wasn’t at OSCON this year but I was told that Tim O’Reilly referred to the Ruby programming language as “the Perl of the Web 2.0 era” – I agree. Furthermore, innovation is being driven by the excitement surrounding Ajax coupled with development of open source programming frameworks such as Ruby on Rails and Django. These frameworks are designed to accelerate programming, ease Ajax implementation and improve code by enforcing the DRY (don’t repeat yourself) principal.
By leveraging these platforms, a plethora of new Web 2.0 startups are bootstrapping and rapidly building focused WebApps such as Basecamp (web-based project management), Blinksale (web-based invoicing), Chalk.it and Writeboard (web-based white boarding), and many more that are fueling the creation of new businesses at a rapid clip (see TechCrunch for daily examples). Innovation at this level has not been seen for some time – It was ten years ago this month that Netscape had its wildly popular IPO. This was the tipping point that lead to the boom and eventual bust of the Web 1.0 era."
Link Experiment Results - Part III - j-walkblog
Piece "examined a number of blog search sites to see how many links to that specific blog entry they could find. I also did a general search for my blog URL for comparison. The table below shows the results for nine search sites.
Tool Links to specific entry URL General site links
MSN Search 136 19,712
Technorati 92 1,814
Feedster 91 2,152
Bloglines 73 6,156
BlogPulse 58 1,608
IceRocket 54 1,122
Blogdigger 24 58
Blogdex 5 25
Google 0 9,360
In terms of sheer number of links returned, MSN Search is the surprising winner. For the experimental URL, I don't think it found all of them, but it did better than any other single search site. Based on this little experiment, my opinion of MSN Search went up a notch or two."
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