The bottom line is this: A series of cloud acquisitions won’t help lumbering old ERP one bit. Acquiring cloud companies doesn’t make you a cloud company any more than buying a Giants jersey makes you Eli Manning. It’s not a strategy for an on-premise solutions company. It’s an attempt to distract customers and hope they will forget about the ERP boat anchor they’re stuck with.
The big ERP players had their day, but now it’s coming to an end. This is the classic Innovator’s Dilemma. For too long SAP and Oracle have watched the enterprise market innovate around them, stuck to their knitting and failed to adapt. The cloud technology wave has passed them by, and now it’s too late.
It’s time for SAP and Oracle to either accept that they need to adapt and go all cloud, or accept that they are going to go the way of the mainframe stuffed in the back closet. They won’t die completely. They’ll just become irrelevant.
Sunday, February 19, 2012
Great Acquisitions! Now Put a Fork in ERP | TechCrunch
Apple sold more iOS devices in 2011 than all the Macs it sold in 28 years | asymco
Tim Cook on the 55 million iPads sold to date:
This 55 is something no one would have guessed. Including us. To put it in context, it took us 22 years to sell 55 million Macs. It took us about 5 years to sell 22 million iPods, and it took us about 3 years to sell that many iPhones. And so, this thing is, as you said, it’s on a trajectory that’s off the charts.
via Transcript: Apple CEO Tim Cook at Goldman Sachs – Apple 2.0 – Fortune Tech.
That gave me an idea. Here is a plot of each major computing product Apple sold throughout its history shown as a cumulative total since product launch.
The iOS platform as a whole reached 316 million cumulative units at the end of last year. The iOS platform overtook the OS X platform in under four years and more iOS devices were sold in 2011 (156 million) than all the Macs ever sold (122 million).
Minimal Mac | Microsoft's Biggest Miss
Microsoft’s DNA is software. They are primarily a software company. The very name of the company is a mashup of microchip and software. And of all of the software they produce, one is more important than all the rest and a huge revenue source that the very livelihood of the company has come to depend on.
Are you thinking Windows? Wrong.
This is also the main cross-platform software they build. Got it yet? Yep.
Saturday, February 18, 2012
Microsoft's new Windows 8 logo: This one looks like a window | Microsoft - CNET News
The software giant continues its march toward releasing its upcoming operating system, debuting a new logo that does away with the flaglike design of Windows past.
The new Windows 8 logo, with previous Windows logos.
(Credit: Microsoft)Microsoft unveiled a new logo for the upcoming Windows 8, featuring a clean one-color design that leans heavily on its new Metro user interface.
50 years ago, John Glenn became America's biggest hero | Geek Gestalt - CNET News
Monday is the 50th anniversary of NASA astronaut John Glenn's mission to be the first American to orbit the Earth. On that day, Glenn became one of America's most important heroes.
On Feb. 20, 1962, astronaut John Glenn became the first American to orbit the Earth. Here, Glenn is being inserted into Friendship 7, his capsule, prior to launch.
(Credit: NASA)
Sunday, February 05, 2012
The Real Facebook IPO Winners? Sean Parker And Bono - Forbes
The real winners in Facebook’s upcoming public offering will be its current owners. Brian Barrett has a helpful pie chart illustrating just who these lucky few happen to be:
Honestly, I had no idea that Bono had such a large invest
Thursday, February 02, 2012
Robert Scheer: The Democrats Who Unleashed Wall Street and Got Away With It - Robert Scheer's Columns - Truthdig
That Lawrence Summers, a president emeritus of Harvard, is a consummate distorter of fact and logic is not a revelation. That he and Bill Clinton, the president he served as treasury secretary, can still get away with disclaiming responsibility for our financial meltdown is an insult to reason.
This is Obama's biggest failure....the US government has done nothing to ensure the type of global meltdown we had will not happen again. Nothing....
Wednesday, February 01, 2012
Facebook’s Revenue Growth Strategy: Ad Targeting By In-App Behavior | TechCrunch
Since Facebook has already exhausted much of the supply of highly monetizable first world users, it will need to make more money per user to grow revenue. Higher click through and conversion rates of action spec targeted ads will allow Facebook to charge advertisers more per click and waste fewer impressions to get those clicks. It’s also expanding ad inventory by complementing its ad sidebars with Sponsored Story ads in the web news feed, and it will likely monetize its mobile user base in the same way. By serving more ads at a higher cost per click, ad revenue will grow with time.
Until the launch of action spec targeting, advertisers looking to target those with purchase intent often went to search or ad networks employing cookie retargeting that scraped a user’s browsing history. Facebook only offered biographic, social, and interest targeting. These are effective for institutional brand advertising and demand generation, but aren’t as useful for reaching users in the purchase funnel. Direct response performance advertisers sometimes had to buy large volumes of clicks to drive one conversion.
Open Graph action spec targeting will help these Facebook advertisers reach users who’ve stated they’ve already made a related purchase, or plan to. This could help it break out of the demand generation stage of the purchase funnel and into the more lucrative demand fulfillment stage where Google search ads currently reign. Some Facebook advertising experts tell me action spec targeting could double ad conversion rates.
If Facebook can pull this off successfully, their valuation of $100B is entirely justified.