Category: Rich Internet Applications
July 8th, 2009
Microsoft, hoist by a Chrome petard
As one Talkback commenter recalled during the discussion of my post earlier this week on free as a business model, Microsoft long ago used free as a weapon to capture the nascent Web browser market:
“Remember in 94 when Microsoft suddenly realised they had completely missed the internet boat? Netscape was THE browser, Microsoft didn’t even have a browser. Solution? Freemium it! Microsoft went to Mosiac … Then they shafted Mosaic and Netscape all in one go by giving the browser away ‘free’. Mosaic, who did all the development effort for what is now IE, were shafted. Netscape were also shafted. So there you have a lesson on how ‘free’ is done.”
Now Microsoft is shafted by the same tactic (or, in the Shakespearian idiom, ‘hoist by his own petard‘ — a petard being a medieval word for a bomb). Google’s new Chrome OS (see Techmeme discussion) will be a free-of-charge, open-source competitor to the Windows operating system, which is such a cashcow for Microsoft that its license fee is routinely described as a ‘tax’ on PC owners.
I’m old enough to remember when Microsoft worked with Intel and Compaq to make an end-run around IBM back in the late 1980’s, sabotaging the larger vendor’s abortive attempt to create a new PC operating system called OS/2 that would be a successor to the older PC-DOS developed for IBM by Microsoft. Windows triumphed over OS/2 because IBM moved too slowly and was too internally focused on its own roadmap for developing the PC to understand Read the rest of this entry »
May 7th, 2009
Hybrid cloud or half-hearted kludge?
Having lambasted Microsoft for its self-serving software-plus-services rhetoric the other week, today I’m going to apparently contradict myself and make a case for (some) hybrid clouds. Bear with me, though, there’s method in this seeming madness. What irks me about Microsoft’s position is that the company’s spokespeople assume that any departure from a wholly cloud-based stance — any hint that there might be a few lines of software code running anywhere on the customer’s premises — instantly validates their entire catalog of on-premise software. I find this immensely irritating because it seems to be an argument framed to justify their existing mindset, rather than attempting to engage with the new, cloud-centric model.
At the same time, I can understand that this mindset is prevalent not only at Microsoft but throughout the conventional software industry and among many of its customers. In fact, I think we all need to be much more aware of how pervasively the old, enterprise-centric way of doing things permeates all of our thinking and habits. I’ve been mulling this a lot recently in the course of preparing a keynote presentation for next week’s Glue Conference in Denver: Gossamer and Glue: Weaving the Loosely Coupled Web, in which I’ll be discussing the tension between our desire to open up to all the resources of the connected Web, balanced against our need to govern and protect our existing assets. A constantly recurring theme in the evolution of SOA, cloud and the Web has been the misplaced imposition of trusted, existing structures onto emergent patterns of interaction. This applies with special emphasis to hybrid clouds — build them to fit with your existing, unchanged infrastructure and you’ll get little-to-no benefit. Change your enterprise to really leverage the cloud and nine times out of ten, you won’t have any further use for a hybrid model.
Let me explain what I’m getting at here by reference to Cisco’s recent announcement of an on-premise extension to the rebranded WebEx Collaboration Cloud (what WebEx used to call its Mediatone network before the Cisco acquisition). ‘Ah-ha!’ I can hear the Microsoft S+S evangelists crowing, ‘yet another SaaS poster child acknowledges the need for on-premise components.’ Look closely, though, and you’ll see that Cisco isn’t talking about Read the rest of this entry »
April 23rd, 2009
Microsoft's software-plus-services disinformation
My blood boils every time I hear some Microsoft executive crowing about its so-called ’software-plus-services’ model. Microsoft’s FUD around S+S is deliberately muddling up two very different things. I fumed when I read this comment in an interview last week by Chris Capossella, senior VP of the group that oversees Office, in which he singles out Google’s use of Gears technology to enable offline use of its cloud-based applications:
“I thought the whole point [of the software-as-a-service model] was that I didn’t have to download anything,” Capossella said. “These guys are totally adopting the software-plus-services approach, but they just aren’t using the term. And no one’s calling them on it.”
This is so lame as a line of attack, and yet it’s a favorite at Microsoft, as if Google’s decision to take advantage of the compute power that’s there on the client justifies in one fell swoop not only Microsoft’s entire legacy stack of desktop-bound applications and operating software but also the whole gamut of its extended server family. Extending cloud-based services so that they’ll run locally in a few limited use cases is in no way equivalent to Microsoft’s policy of encouraging its customers to keep buying and upgrading their installed base of server and desktop software in return for assurances that the vendor has a strategy of offering the “choice” of cloud-based equivalents.
My opposition to the ’software-plus-services’ mantra is that it puts the cart before the horse. If you’re going to do cloud computing right, you have to start with services. I wouldn’t be debating this with Microsoft if Read the rest of this entry »
January 28th, 2009
Google adds offline and 'flaky' modes to Gmail
Traveling through the French countryside at up to 186 mph, the Eurostar high-speed train service is a great place to put Google’s new offline Gmail service (announcement, Techmeme) through its paces. Connection via a 3G card (there’s no wifi on the train) is bound to be intermittent at best. But it works, says Dave Armstrong, head of marketing, Google Enterprise EMEA, who like 20,000 other Googlers has been testing the new feature for the past couple months.
Although the majority of the blogosphere comment this morning remarks that “finally” Gmail has an offline mode for disconnected working (albeit only in a Labs version for now), I’d say the delay is more than compensated by an innovation that Google’s developers have named “Flaky connection mode”, for those times when you’re connected intermittently. That’s the mode Armstrong was putting to the test on his recent Eurostar trip. In ‘flaky’ mode, the client connects when it can, but in the meantime the user keeps on working even when it can’t.
Flaky mode works with whatever data the Gmail client has downloaded at the time. So if you find yourself unexpectedly disconnected without invoking offline mode, you can enter flaky mode and carry on while awaiting a reconnection. Of course you must already have enabled the offline capability, which downloads your historical data — you can decide how far back to go.
This solves a problem that to my mind is much bigger than totally disconnected working, as I outlined a couple of years back when discussing the topic of offline users:
“The key point at issue here is that intermittent disconnection is an inherent fact of life in a network environment, and that a truly robust on-demand application design will accommodate disconnection in a transparent and non-disruptive manner.”
People talk about utility computing as if it automatically implies ‘always on’ networking. But if computing today really were only as pervasive as electricity, we’d be far worse off than we are with all our wireless access to live connectivity. Even so, we still need to cache that connectivity from time to time, just as we store electricity in a battery to tide us over until our next charge. This is what Google has achieved in its “flaky connection” mode.
“There’s a very real need [for offline working] for those traveling on planes and trains,” Armstrong admitted (not to mention conference rooms buried deep in hotel basements, I would add), as well as Read the rest of this entry »
September 1st, 2008
Google adds video to the virtual workplace
Google Apps Premier users now have a new option in their application menu: video. Google has combined its existing YouTube infrastructure with the authorization and permissions infrastructure of Google Apps to create a video sharing option for users of its business collaboration suite. Users can upload videos for sharing with selected colleagues, either embedded in documents and spreadsheets or within the video sharing application, where users can vote for favored videos, add comments and feedback, and search by title or other metadata (see screenshot below).
Adding collaborative video sharing underlines the disruptive nature of the Google Apps suite, breaking new ground rather than merely replicating what’s already available from conventional on-premise office products. Google’s YouTube property has helped demonstrate the power of online video sharing in the consumer world for entertainment, messaging and knowledge transfer — just try Googling the phrase ‘how to’ to see how commonplace it’s become to use online video as a way of learning skills such as applying makeup, tying a tie or performing massage. Google’s new application provides a business-friendly infrastructure for disseminating information and how-to skills using the power of video. But at the same time as making it easy to upload video for sharing, the vendor has been careful to make sure there’s no easy way of publishing video content beyond its intended audience.
The new application does however show up the inflexibility of the Google Apps subscription model. I can imagine that many organizations might find it useful Read the rest of this entry »
August 29th, 2008
Mashing up the client to the cloud
Next week, I’ll fulfil a long-running ambition when I attend the Office 2.0 conference for the first time — I’m moderating a panel on Platform as a Service, with speakers from LongJump, Salesforce.com, SuccessFactors and Zoho.
The event is now in its third year and is one of those events that brings together everyone of significance in its field — in this case, the fast-growing category of business applications served from the cloud. Naturally, that makes it a key event in the SaaS calendar, although many of the participants are a little wary of the SaaS label, which they feel is too closely associated with old-school vendors and other players who don’t fully ‘get’ the new cloud paradigm. This is definitely an event where you have to be unambiguously multitenant and cloud-centric — there’s no room for hybrids here. Like many of us, be there or be square.
One point on which I personally differ from Office 2.0 orthodoxy, however, is on the matter of client software. Organizer Ismael Ghalimi has walked the talk, having begun using (and documenting his use of) browser-based Office 2.0 applications more than two and a half years ago. His Rules for Office 2.0 are adamant: “No client application other than a web browser … No files on personal computer … No browser extension or plugin …” not even Java or Flash, if they can avoided.
My own take is that many applications work better when they can take advantage of the compute resources of powerful clients, and that cloud-serviced client platforms such as Adobe’s AIR, Microsoft Silverlight and Google Gears are the way of the future (albeit with some caveats, which I’ll come back to later). I say ‘cloud-serviced’ because it’s important that the software for these client platforms should be managed from the cloud. I’m not advocating a return to the bad old days of leaving users struggling with shrinkwrapped software installs.
But I do think that there are many occasions when users want to be delighted and supported by a client experience that the browser alone simply can’t deliver (and sometimes they want or need to work offline, too). I’ve written about several vendors that exemplify this approach: SlideRocket, Entellium (see disclosure), DreamFactory (see disclosure) and RightNow.
This week, CRM vendor RightNow has brought out a new release of its software and several of the new features impinge on this question of whether smart clients have a role in the Office 2.0 landscape. Mashups are also an important part of this release, and the way RightNow has implemented mashups cast some additional light on the smart client issue. Read the rest of this entry »
July 30th, 2008
140-year-old telco embraces its nemesis
When I spoke to Ribbit in early May, CEO Ted Griggs told me his company was out to obsolete telcos: “Phone companies aren’t open. That’s a problem,” he said. But yesterday, Ribbit sold out to BT, which the FT’s Chris Nuttall helpfully reminded us “began as a telegraphic service in 1868.” So why is Ribbit sleeping with the venerable epitome of its erstwhile enemy? The story the BT-Ribbit team were spinning yesterday was that the new enemies are closed IP telephony systems such as Google Android and Skype.
Perhaps BT really does mean to reinvent itself with the aid of its new acquisition. SaaS analyst Jeff Kaplan, who started out working in telecoms, says he’s “always viewed BT as among the most visionary of the major telecom companies,” and highlights its statement yesterday that the “acquisition will accelerate BT’s strategy to transform itself into a next-generation, platform-based, software-driven services company.”
Certainly, BT has shown itself committed to succeeding with SaaS (however many times it fails in the attempt), and its CIO JP Rangaswami declares on his personal blog that he’s “passionate” about “how telephony becoming software and the wireless internet interact with mobile devices” and “about opensource” and “democratised innovation.” Perhaps BT will end up surprising us all by forging a fresh destiny.
At the heart of the Ribbit acquisition is a telco-grade softswitch that acts as a bridge from the closed telco world into the open landscape of the Web. Much like Google acquisition Grand Central, it enables rerouting of calls between devices, but in Ribbit’s case the ‘wow’ factor has come from a softphone implemented using Flex technology in the browser. Griggs told me in May that the business opportunity his team saw Read the rest of this entry »
July 24th, 2008
How SlideRocket plans to make money
SlideRocket, the Flex-based online presentation builder that’s been attracting pre-release plaudits from industry observers, has shared with me its planned pricing when it comes out of beta in September.
SlideRocket has had positive coverage not only from ZDnet’s rich Internet application expert Ryan Stewart (twice, plus a screenshot gallery) but also from TechCrunch, Mashable and ReadWriteWeb, which headlined its story Look Out PowerPoint - SlideRocket Rocks.
Unlike many of the Web 2.0 startups those sites cover, SlideRocket isn’t relying on advertising, venture capital or the prospect of getting bought out by Google/Adobe/whoever to make money. It’s going to ask its users to pay — not only for its own application but also for third-party add-ons.
“I’ve never been a huge fan of the advertising model,” CEO Mitch Grasso explained to me in a call late last week. “We definitely from the get-go wanted to make sure we had the right kind of functionality that people would want to pay for.”
“I think you’re going to see more and more companies needing to do that,” he added. “Giving stuff away for free is just not a sustainable business model” [my emphasis added] “… Enough of building these destination sites that are just features and not actually [complete] products or [viable] companies.”
SlideRocket currently has 10,000 users on its beta program plus another 30,000 on the waiting list who’ll be offered free access to the application in the run-up to the production launch. SlideRocket’s moment of truth will come in October when it finds out how many of those beta users believe the functionality really is worth paying for. It plans to launch two paid versions, both with a 25% discount: Read the rest of this entry »
July 18th, 2008
SaaS vendor quits browser to boost sales
Any SaaS CEOs who are feeling bruised after reading Sarah Lacy’s Business Week article today on the brutal slog of on-demand computing may take heart from the story of a SaaS vendor that told me this week it has cut its customer acquisition costs by a massive 80 percent. There’s a catch, though: abandoning the browser was the key to achieving this remarkable turnaround.
SaaS CRM vendor Entellium this week released a new smart client version and said it will phase out its existing browser-based product over the next 12 months. It’s doing so, I can exclusively reveal, because of business metrics (which I’ll quote below) that show its smart client product — called Rave — achieving some kickass conversion and retention rates in the past year since first release [disclosure: Entellium is a former client and I have a small investment in the company].
Like its browser-based predecessor, Rave is still based on a fully hosted, multi-tenant application infrastructure-in-the-cloud, but the user experience executes on the desktop using Microsoft’s Windows Presentation Foundation (WPF). That has allowed Entellium to pioneer an approach to contact management and sales and marketing automation that’s tailored to the get-things-done needs of the small businesses that make up its target market.
Three characteristics in particular combine to make Rave stand out against other on-demand CRM packages in the market:
- Liquid interface. Rave fully exploits all the client horsepower that WPF delivers, and the ease and visual feedback when rearranging information on the screen has to be seen to be believed. I’ve pasted a screenshot below the jump, but a static image just doesn’t do it justice. This is the first on-demand product I’ve seen where the client interface is so fluid, you need video to really convey how it looks. The purpose is not to look ‘cool’ though, it’s so sales users can organize the screens how they want them and get down to work as fast as possible.
- Gamer-influenced design. The product borrows proven techniques from games software — but again, the intent is serious not frivolous — to get users started quickly and keep them engaged. For more on this, see my post from April last year, Gaming comes to business software, plus this New York Times article on Why Work Is Looking More Like a Video Game.
- Results focus. The entire user experience is built around the core premise of “How should I spend my time most profitably?”. For example, a new analytics module lets users compare key metrics to industry benchmarks to help decide where they most need to focus attention.
Maybe it’s the results-oriented mentality, maybe it’s the ‘gamer-influenced design’ or maybe it’s simply the familiar process of receiving a digital download when you hand over your cash. Whatever it is, Entellium has found that Rave has transformed its cost of customer acquisition.
Entellium’s CEO Paul Johnston has given me a private peek at a string of metrics collected over the past year of selling Rave and the difference is stunning. Read the rest of this entry »
April 10th, 2008
Why Symantec bought Appstream (not)
Of course we all know the real reason why Symantec is acquiring AppStream — a move announced yesterday at its user conference in Las Vegas. Virtualization is hot and Symantec is big in systems management. AppStream helps round out its offerings for packaging and streaming virtualized software. It’s as simple as that.
Just for a moment, though, let’s imagine Symantec is following a much broader vision — one that positions it to wrest control of the on-demand desktop from right under Microsoft’s nose. I know this is the stuff of fantasy — it could only happen if Symantec were serious about SaaS. Sadly, Symantec’s track record on this score is lamentable.
A year ago at SaaScon 2007, the company proudly unveiled its overarching strategy for capturing the SMB market for SaaS with the announcement of … an online backup service. For a moment there, I thought I’d been transported back to 1998 and the early days of application service providers. There was talk at the time, admittedly, of this being just the first in a portfolio of SaaS offerings, and indeed, the range today also includes online archiving. But at a dollar-a-month per GB — more than six times the price of storage at Amazon S3 — it’s hardly going to set the world on fire.
It would be much more exciting to round out the offering with, say, pay-as-you-go hosted Microsoft Office, delivered as a service for a low monthly subscription. An Appstream partner in the UK, Fasthosts, introduced such a service in February and, despite some initial squeals of protest from Microsoft, is still selling it today — with a bargain-basement starting price of £5 (around $10) per user per month.
Granted, such offerings still reek of ASP-dom, even though it would spark a few interesting headlines were a company the size of Symantec were to start offering MS Office on the same model as Fasthosts’ more limited experiment. But where this desktop streaming capability becomes especially strategic Read the rest of this entry »
Phil Wainewright is a commentator and strategist on emerging software industry trends. See his full profile and disclosure of his industry affiliations.
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