Blog Yes & Know

Distribution Model = New Markets

Hats off to OReilly for the name of this web 2.0 session: Pirate and the Suit. Eric Nicoi, Chairman of EMI, and Eric Kleptone on stage together. Given what has …

Web 2.0 vs. SaaS

Web 2.0, meet Software as a Service.
SaaS, meet Web 2.0.
You two need to talk. You’re working on many of the same problems, but you don’t communicate well, and sometimes it seems like each of you barely knows that the other exists.

Web 2.0 Investment Opportunities

At the web 2.0 conference here in San Francisco and will be doing a series of posts. I would guess 30% of the attendees are VC / Capital / Investment …

The “Lamest Feature Ever” on a Corporate Weblog

All right, it’s probably not the lamest one ever. But it’s the lamest one we’ve seen in quite a while.
Sprint has a weblog that lists podcasts the company has created. That’s fine. But for some reason the site has a prominent tool to let the user change the background highlight color used in the weblog’s graphics. Not the whole background, just the highlight color. And there are only four choices.

The "Lamest Feature Ever" on a Corporate Weblog

All right, it’s probably not the lamest one ever. But it’s the lamest one we’ve seen in quite a while.
Sprint has a weblog that lists podcasts the company has created. That’s fine. But for some reason the site has a prominent tool to let the user change the background highlight color used in the weblog’s graphics. Not the whole background, just the highlight color. And there are only four choices.

Even Steinways Get Out of Tune

What’s the difference between an ethical leader and a business leader? Are they mutually exclusive, a subset of each other, or one and the same?
Like the best Steinway can get out of tune, we humans can get slightly off kilter in small ways. The many decisions that lead to “right or wrong” are often more like shades of grey or unclear forks in the road. Ethics are fundamentally about a set of gradual and subtle decisions that lead to a larger impact.
What can people can put into place to make perhaps better decisions? We can move from being experts on facts and novices on values to experts on values, and students of fact.

Solving the Puzzle: Pricing, Licensing & Business Models

Today, almost all software vendors are doing something in the SaaS arena. Salesforce.com, NetSuite, Yahoo! and Google are well-know SaaS developers, but IBM, Oracle, SAP, and Symantec are all moving that way too. Single-user desktop applications are under the least pressure, and are moving the slowest.

Solving the Puzzle: Pricing, Licensing & Business Models

Today, almost all software vendors are doing something in the SaaS arena. Salesforce.com, NetSuite, Yahoo! and Google are well-know SaaS developers, but IBM, Oracle, SAP, and Symantec are all moving that way too. Single-user desktop applications are under the least pressure, and are moving the slowest.

Cluetrain 2007: Ten Commandments Revised

Seven years ago, Rick Levine, Christopher Locke, Doc Searls, and David Weinberger posted an online document called the Cluetrain Manifesto. It laid out 95 principles for communicating with customers online. The Manifesto created big stir, was signed by a lot of people working in the tech industry, and turned into a book that sold well at the height of the Internet bubble. But since then it has been largely forgotten.
Seven years later, the Manifesto is a mixed bag. Some of its maxims are seriously out of date, and a few are just plain wrong. There are also some things missing. Because the document is long, and parts of it are badly off target, we’re reluctant to refer any of our clients to it today.
However, parts of the Manifesto are just plain brilliant, and deserve to be spray-painted on the walls of corporations around the world.