June 10th, 2008
SocialCalc: a killer app?
David Greenfield details SocialCalc, the wikified spreadsheet from SocialText. While David’s assessment is comprehensive, I partially disagree with his analysis that:
…SocialCalc will have a long way to go. Today there’s no Excel integration, something that Google Sheets already offers. What’s more the range of functions provided with SocialCalc is still limited. Excel offers some 333 functions. Google Sheet has 263, 230 that it shares in common with Excel. SocialCalc only has 107 functions.
SocialCalc should have a means of importing/exporting direct to Excel, Google (I’d add Zoho into the mix), but it’s not necessary for SocialCalc to match Excel or Google in the number of functions it has. I’d argue that to do so would be taking the eye off the development ball. In my view it is much more important for SocialText to look at developing templates for specific applications.
The immediate examples I have in mind are for the production of accounts reporting as an alternative to existing systems and for M&A work. Most accounts production systems sit in siloes and cannot be shared. Since SocialCalc is inherently shareable, it offers significant opportunities for collaboration between customers and professionals. It should also allow for greater efficiencies in the production process, especially if SocialCalc can be made to include conditional text that is dependent on the data held in specific cells. An example might be: ‘If the value in cell A101 is greater than zero, then include text from wikipage123, if not then include text from wikipage124.’
When tied to forecasting templates, SocialCalc avoids the unnecessary data duplication that normally arises using accounts as the basis for developing forward forecasts. That should eliminate the potential for spreadsheet error I have described before. I discussed these thoughts with some of my professional colleagues and while they find it difficult imagining moving away from Excel, they recognize there is genuine value in this approach. Philip Woodgate said:
I can’t see alternative spreadsheets replacing Excel at this stage (it is both more powerful and polished), but I can see alternatives complimenting Excel. An online shareable spreadsheet that is freely available, reasonably powerful, easy to use, tracks changes and importantly has a joining process that is quick and comfortable for business users has value to me.
Simon Hurst added:
Given the extent to which most spreadsheets re-invent stuff that’s been done hundreds of times before, will the approach lead to more re-usable and shareable ‘building-blocks’ of spreadsheet functionality? If so, this could be of great benefit in improving spreadsheet reliability.
Taking a different tack, Ingrid Whitehead gets to the immediate potential benefits: “I have worked on projects that have involved sending around version upon version of spreadsheet to the project team / client / etc.. each version with just one or two changes. This (traditional!) approach is very traffic and time intensive and also has high risk potential with a number of different versions flying around. SocialCalc could be the answer.”
I spoke with Ross Mayfield, president of SocialText and a fellow Irregular about these scenarios. He says: “The best way for people to understand how SocialCalc can be useful is for them to see it in action. The M&A department of one customer is beta testing to assess how they might reduce reliance on stand alone spreadsheets. Early testing suggests a high level of acceptance. I must stress this is early days. Developing templates with the help of domain experts is something we are exploring.”
Does this add up to a killer application? I can’t be sure, but given the collaborative capabilities tied to solving problems outlined by others, I sense that SocialText is onto something interesting. Provided SocialCalc offers sufficient benefit for companies to rethink the value they derive from existing methods of operation, then it should do very well.
June 8th, 2008
Enterprise 2.0: my week ahead
Following the pre-show banter, most of which I missed, I’m sensing Enterprise 2.0 will be a LOT of fun. Here is my itinerary/day plan:
Sunday (today) - sleepless night, pre-post blog entries, pack bag
Monday - depart home 7.15am CET, drive to Granada-Jaen airport, gassing up car at €1.32/liter ($9.50/gall). Board 9.55am to Madrid, then 1.25pm from Madrid to Boston traveling Iberia cattle class but with points on my frequent flyer card. Arrive 3.20pm ET (9.20pm CET), fight through immigration, arrive at conference hotel, hopefully in time to check in for conference. May skim by The Cloud. Then on to Mayhem and pick up Chumby. Whatever happens, I must not forget to pick up my Norman Naysayer sticker with which to pimp up my MacBook Pro.
Tuesday - probably wake up brain dead. Attend morning sessions in the hope that the wifi works such that I can live blog. State of the Industry session at 10.15 looks interesting. (Dang I hate not having US 3G access when I spend so much time there. Anyone come up with the equivalent of a Frequent Flyer program exchange with Vodafone/Iberia?) IBM’s blogger event at 1pm should be interesting. Enterprise 2Open will be worth dipping in and out while the evening VIP cocktail reception will be a chance to schmooze and make any last minute, must-do appointments.
Wednesday - find brain while realizing this is the US. Breakfast meeting (7.30am start). The lineup includes Microsoft, OpenText, AMR, Docusign and Newsgator. It will be fun to watch the minnows slugging it out with some of the ‘drag queens.‘ I’m expecting great things of Ross Mayfield’s session, largely because the same day SocialText announcement will be a monster. The afternoon sessions entitiled Transforming work models and Three alternatives both have speakers I’d like to hear and meet. Unless there is something truly compelling then I plan to take it VERY easy in the evening but will probably chill with some of my Irregular chums.
Thursday - awake hopefully with at least 3 brain cells operating (much more and I’m positively dangerous.) Chairing a panel, the last one of the last day with the topic of microblogging. After a lot of juggling, we’ve got a great panel. I would say that but I’ve got high hopes of this non-marketing, shoot from the hip session. Once we’re done then I will sneak off to the local Apple store (gotta be done, I need my Apple fix.) Arrive Logan International around 3.30pm for 6.20pm return flight to Madrid. Swill two Tylenol PM with Bloody Mary for guaranteed six hours’ sleep.
Friday - 2.30pm (CET, 8.30am ET), arrive home. Crash.
In between the sessions I’ve mentioned, I hope to see at least some of the companies that will be presenting their wares. Above everything, there’s a lot of people I’ve not met in meat space but whom I’ve come to know through blog posts, Skype, Twitter (when it works) and other media. I hope I meet them all. Packing it all in will be challenging but hopefully there will be plenty to discuss during and after what promises to be an interesting event that juxtaposes the software giants and the minnows.
UPDATE: The conference has its own presence that includes blogs, discussions and other goodies. As an alternative way of seeing what’s happening, Eventtrack is following the conference as well.
June 5th, 2008
Firefox 3 RC2: still flawed
The world seems enamored of Firefox 3. I’m not one of them. I would like to be if it wasn’t for the flaws I keep finding when using the Mac version. Now before the Mozilla PR squad descend like a ton of hot bricks as is their practice the moment anyone puts up even the mildest of negative comment I want to get a few things clear.
Like many others I’ve been using Firefox 3 for months. Firefox 2 had become a memory hog/leak nightmare but as with many tools, it’s a wrench to move away from something which has become familiar. It’s the old learning curve issue when making a switch to a different tool. No-one wants to do it and so ‘we’ users put up with problems or find workarounds. In recent times I’ve found that:
- Firefox 3 beta has been a crash nightmare, especially when downloading documents for immediate viewing. The only way I could avoid that problem was to ’save’ and then ‘open.’ RC1 continued to exhibit that behavior. RC2 seems a lot better behaved.
- Yes, it is speedy and no it doesn’t seem to be a mem hog. Yes the quick bookmark and bookmark organizing capability is great but no, most of my favorite add ons have yet to be updated/upgraded though I’m sure developers will have new versions available within days of Firefox going into production mode.
Right now, the biggest loss is Greasemonkey. Update: Greasemonkey for RC2 now available from here.
Here’s what I found this morning. For reasons I have not been able to fathom, FFRC2 went pear shaped. By which I mean that the back button and bookmarking capabilities stopped working plus I could not set the home page to my required preference. Worse still, even after shutting down and restarting, Firefox reported it had crashed. The net effect was that I could not do a clean restart because Firefox tries to restore the browser to its former state - which was already bricked - and so the problems kept occurring. I attempted to re-import my Safari bookmarks but that didn’t work either (see screenshots.)
The only way to solve this problem is through Mozilla’s recommended complete removal and re-installation. Removing the plist file is not enough. You have to remove ~Library/Application Support/Firefox which holds all your passwords. Fortunately, I have all my passwords backed up in a separate file.
As an aside, I am finding that the Diigo sidebar and toolbar is a far superior method organizing bookmarks. I will talk about Diigo in a separate post but suffice to say it provides a rich bookmarking experience I’ve found hard to beat.
The screenshots below give readers some idea of the issues I faced:
Firefox 3 not showing the home page I want
Attempt to import from Safari
Import complete - but nothing there
Attempted restore from history fails
I don’t know if anyone else has experienced this problem but it’s serious. Not because it has happened but because it requires a totally clean re-install in order to solve the problem with all the aggravation that goes with it.
June 4th, 2008
The changing analyst landscape
The recent Institute of Industry Analyst Relations poll results produced some startling results. While the power hitters of Gartner, IDC and Forrester were well represented, it was the boutique groups that caught my attention. Redmonk, MWD and Freeform Dynamics all performed well across multiple categories, despite being minnows in the panoply of analyst groups.
Knowing James Governor, Dale Vile and Michael Cote adds a certain poignancy for me. They can all stand their own in the most powerful company albeit from very different perspectives. All are proponents of what they term the ‘open source model of analysis,’ where most of what they know is freely available on their blogs or websites. As Dale noted on my personal weblog:
The thing about the IIAR poll that pleased me was the bit about integrity, independence and industry knowledge being so frequently mentioned as criteria. I think the community-oriented analysts have an advantage here as an open approach and open dialogue keeps you well tuned in to what really matters to people and keeps everything very clean and unbiased.
At another level, I wonder whether this poll reflects a subtle change in the analyst landscape. Three years ago, the open source crowd wouldn’t have figured in the rankings. But then there are other differences. Ray Wang, who was named analyst of the year (with James Governor taking a creditable third place) was recently interviewed by IIAR. He said:
There is a real concern that analysts no longer make the tough calls and that overall analyst quality has declined. Analyst firm business models continue to shy away from star analysts who bring charisma, real world experience, and an ethos of quality.
Ray’s candor is to be applauded, coming as it does at a time when the ‘household names’ seem beholden to the vendor communities they increasingly serve. Vinnie Mirchandani observes that:
It is interesting that Gartner is ranked 10th in relevance but 1st in importance. The surveyed audience was mostly vendor analyst relations folks. That’s code for they cannot ignore Gartner, but wish it was nicer.
My problem comes in understanding the difference between the two measures. Importance to whom? Relevance to what? I can only guess but my conversations with large enterprise vendors suggest analysts are still regarded as important reference points in deal negotiations, even though they are only one of many reference points.
Relevance is a more subjective topic. If we’re talking the developer community then I know Redmonk is highly regarded among a number of the vendor developer communities and especially among startups where help is often most urgently needed. If we’re talking about the C-suite in Fortune 500 companies then I’d expect a different picture to emerge where the tick box reference is more important.
If we include the enterprise software bloggers, I’d argue that loose associations like the Irregulars are emerging in importance as quasi-analysts adding nuance to the otherwise more formal views of the traditional analyst community. I only have to consider that Vinnie and Zoli Erdos were recently named to the Industry Standard’s top 25 B-Z list of bloggers as justification for that position. Whichever way you want to slice and dice the influencer landscape, things are changing. But then as a buyer advocate who throws the odd pebble into the void left by the large, vendor funded analysts, I would say that - wouldn’t I?
In the meantime, I hope the independents continue to achieve the recognition they deserve. Regardless of what anyone thinks about their business model, they are achieving the kind of prominence that only comes from hard work and talent that is appreciated by their customers.
June 3rd, 2008
The spreadsheet love affair
I never thought I’d go on a tear about Excel in these pages, but Josh Greenbaum’s correct assertion that Excel is pretty much everywhere and is probably the software industry’s most successful product provides the perfect foil. Josh concludes:
So, like the floppy disk icon that never dies, the Excel spreadsheet lives on and on, despite advances in technology that should have buried it a long time ago. This ubiquity and staying power says volumes about what users want from enterprise software, and their continued votes in favor of a 20-plus year old user experience should give everyone who believes that the best technology deserves to win a deserved pause. Excel works well-enough for millions of users all day long, and learning to live with it is a strategy that everyone, from CEOs to managers to software developers, needs to keep in mind.
I’m not going to disagree. As Josh alludes, there’s very little point trying to roll rocks uphill. What Josh doesn’t expose though are the risks that go with spreadsheet use.
Each year I pen a lament to spreadsheet use for my accounting colleagues, usually prefacing with some tale of spreadsheet woe. I have a bag full of them. Everything from the mortgage provider that overpaid some $270 million for a debt book, through to energy futures overpaid by $9 billion down to the $2 million a month interest calculation error. Heck, there’s even an annual European spreadsheet risk conference. Ray Panko of the University of Hawaii has been tracking the issues for many years. On its website, the University notes:
Initially, spreadsheet research focused on errors, including typing errors, pointing errors, logic errors, and omission errors. More recently, regulatory compliance pressures have focused a great deal of attention on how corporations are doing financial reporting and other critical corporate processes. What they are finding is lots of spreadsheets, often hundreds arranged in manually-operated webs. Suddenly, spreadsheet error and security research is no longer “just academic.”
It never has been ‘just academic’ but companies, CFOs and users seem so enamored of spreadsheets that their inherent dangers are often simply ignored.
I’ve always held the view that the spreadsheet was never designed for the sophisticated uses to which companies continue to put it. At best it is a development envronment that is rarely documented because users are not trained as developers. The net result is that when things go wrong, errors are notoriously difficult to find. What’s more, there seems to be a fundamental lack of awareness around the extent of spreadsheet error. Some studies I’ve seen suggest it is as high as 95%. Panko’s latest research asserts:
In general, errors seem to occur in a few percent of all cells, meaning that for large spreadsheets, the issue is how many errors there are, not whether an error exists. These error rates, although troubling, are in line with those in programming and other human cognitive domains. In programming, we have learned to follow strict development disciplines to eliminate most errors. Surveys of spreadsheet developers indicate that spreadsheet creation, in contrast, is informal, and few organizations have comprehensive policies for spreadsheet development. Although prescriptive articles have focused on such disciplines as modularization and having assumptions sections, these may be far less important than other innovations, especially cell-by-cell code inspection after the development phase.
The broader question then is why business continues to use this most elementary of tools instead of the wholesale embracing of specialist analysis tools and products? The only conclusion I can come to is that the spreadsheet is seen as convenient in a way that other applications are not and that the learning curve is sufficiently shallow for anyone to pick up the basics and do something useful. It’s also cheap, often pre-installed on user machines at low cost in bulk deals.
In the meantime, the software industry continues to find ways of patching up an old horse that should, in my opinion, have been put out to grass a long time ago. And it doesn’t go unnnoticed that the most popular topic of conversation on the UK’s community site for accounting professionals is: the spreadsheet.
June 2nd, 2008
If Brian likes it, it’s gotta be good
My Irregular colleague Brian Sommer waxes lyrical about the OpenAir/NetSuite deal. Brian has more years’ experience implementing and analyzing business applications than most others I know. If he says something is good, then that’s high praise and well worth a buyer’s attention. Condensing Brian’s analysis:
We believe this deal will have a significant impact on the PSA software market space…the PSA marketplace has maintained a nominal sense of stability wherein PSA vendors quietly competed with one another.
In our discussions with SMB top executives, we have consistently heard complaints about the high cost of integrating clusters of application functionality with other components that companies have purchased/licensed.
OpenAir now brings to the market an integrated financial back-office solution with its own service industry product line. Both will be offered in an on-demand (i.e., SaaS) basis. Service firms will, in time, benefit from the tight integration to come between these two product offerings.
The acquisition of OpenAir brings a significant East Coast presence to NetSuite. OpenAir brings 300 service based customers into the NetSuite family. Virtually all of these customers utilize back-office applications that are prime replacement candidates for NetSuite…Every OpenAir customer is an upsell opportunity for NetSuite. Likewise, NetSuite has over 5000 customers and considerable experience in the services sector.
However, what we really like about NetSuite is its product development architecture: NS-BOS. This platform, also known as the NetSuite business operating system, permits two key things:
- the rapid development of vertically specific applications in a well-designed multitenant SaaS architecture
- the seamless integration of these applications with NetSuite’s core front and back office products
Business application suite providers have been slow to provide deep domain offerings of the kind OpenAir/NetSuite is proposing. Last Month, SAP’s Doug Merritt admitted SAP only provides 25-35% vertical market functionality ‘at best.’
I am prepared to take what Brian says on good faith but I wonder how far the combined offering will reach before requiring scripted additions, NetSuitge’s preferred method of dealing with customizations.
Professional services organizations come in all shapes and sizes but the one thing I see consistently omitted are ways to provide contractors with a smooth way of doing business with their PSO masters. I can see opportunity for the niche vendors that service freelance consultants like FreshBooks and FreeAgent to piggy back onto PSO’s. It would be a single point of integration, something Brian I’m sure would wish to avoid, but one that adds value inside the PSO value chain by reducing the friction that often exists between contractors and PSOs.
Disclosure: I have a tiny holding in FreeAgent. Brian and I are currently collaborating on a report about Business ByDesign.
June 2nd, 2008
Microsoft Dynamics AX looking more like SAP?
Mary Jo Foley has the skinny on what’s inside the latest release of Microsoft Dynamics AX 2009 (aka AX5.0). Mary Jo thinks:
But what caught my eye most about AX 2009 when Microsoft recently demo’d it for me was how it is the showcase app for so many different Microsoft technologies.
Mary Jo also notes that:
Microsoft has been encouraging developers to integrate its Office Ribbon, its Windows Workflow technology and support for its Excel Services technology into their own custom line-of-business apps. Relatively few have done so, to date — for lack of tools, fear of becoming too locked into Microsoft’s stack and/or other reasons.
Hmm - I’m not so concerned about the third party app vendors because as SAP has demonstrated, if the core is good enough, development shops will build around it. The difference is that Microsoft positively encourages 3PD while SAP erects a pretty high bar over which wannabe partners have to scramble.
The bigger question for me is whether Microsoft is trying to butt up against SAP in deals. Last Friday, I spoke with Mogens Elsberg, general manager for Dynamics ERP about the latest release and what Microsoft is seeking to accomplish.
AX2009 takes Microsoft closer to a full role based computing model which will certainly satisfy those customers who want to operate in functional siloes. The Windows Workflow Foundation is being rolled into the entire application with current emphasis on payment processes. Longer term it will be interesting to see how Microsoft copes with competition that stresses the value of process based business systems. Right now that seems a distant ambition for Microsoft.
Microsoft is making a big play on compliance, saying that its ability to monitor processes and provide both alerts and warnings should assist CFOs in their process compliance activities. I’m not so sure. “We don’t have processes aligned to specific regulation but we are working through the issues with our finance community to ensure the implementation of best practices,” said Elsberg. This is wishful thinking.
Regulation has proven notorious to implement in software with any degree of certainty prior to audit. This is because the expertise necessary to both implement and then audit is not something that can simply be acquired from a single firm. What’s more, the plethora of sometimes discrete yet interlinking regulation can create industry specific issues that require special attention.
However, as our conversation moved forward, I started to wonder whether Microsoft is trying to look more like SAP. The emphasis on having an Office look and feel (Duet anyone?), emphasizing embedded BI capability and that note about compliance all sound remininscent of things on which SAP wishes to score points. Given that Microsoft is positioning itself for businesses with 50 to 10,000 users, it is bound to come into competitive discussions. How real those discussions become is another matter but it will be interesting to watch.
June 2nd, 2008
An Oracle nose job
In researching for an upcoming Oracle event, I stumbled across this video. It demonstrates how it is possible to install an instance of Oracle RDBMS in under an hour, simply by using your nose. Coincidentally, several of my Irregular colleagues pointed me to the same video.
I’m surprised this hasn’t received wider attention as it represents state of the art nasal action.
Enjoy.
May 27th, 2008
Google’s obfuscation on privacy
Does Google have something to hide? A report in the New York Times claims that:
It’s the only one of the big Internet companies that doesn’t put a link to its privacy policy on its home page.
Indeed, Google believes so strongly that adding the phrase “privacy policy” to its famously Spartan home page would distract users that it has picked a fight with an advertising trade group over the issue.
One of the core principles of the group has been that its members should provide “clear and conspicuous notice” of how they collect and uses data. This has been interpreted to mean that a link to a site’s privacy policy should be on its home page.
Google, however, told the group that it would not comply with that rule.
You only have to look at Google’s privacy policy center page to realize it has good reasons not to provide a link on its home page. (see image above) There are slightly different policies covering each type of service with which Google users engage. Just looking at the page makes me go ‘What the heck?’
The report goes on to say that despite Google’s non-compliance, it’s application to join the Network Advertising Initiative is likely to be approved. The reasons are far from clear and NAI policies are said to be ‘in a state of flux’ - whatever that means. The author speculates that:
Some Internet executives wonder whether it is getting ready to start some sort of targeting system that might help its graphic ad network compete better with AOL’s more successful Advertising.com and others that do make use of information about users.
Privacy is an ever present issue for all users and business in particular. Why then does Google NOT have an issue in putting a link to its iGoogle privacy page which contains links to the prrivacy center? Confused? You should be.
I have said before that Google’s ToS are inconsistent though others disagree. It now seems Google’s attitude to presenting information required by a self-regulating body with which one would have thought it would wish to play ball is also inconsistent.
May 23rd, 2008
Blog fight: on dumping email servers
Our old friend David Berlind is proposing that traditional Exchange/Notes email servers be banished in favor of Gmail, arguing that it is not a case of ‘if’ but ‘when’ enterprise starts shifting email (and calendaring) to the Internet cloud:
It’s only a matter of time before the remaining rub on Gmail is history and your CFO starts asking questions about that long-running cost center associated with your e-mail and calendaring systems. In the bigger picture, you shouldn’t be asking if you should be moving from insourced servers to Gmail (or an equivalent for e-mail). Within the next five years, that will no longer be an “if.” The bigger question you should be asking is what application comes after e-mail and calendaring and, as time goes by, how will you manage your company’s undeniable attraction to the cloud?
Ed Brill (of IBM) leaps to the defence of the status quo arguing that:
Whether it is Google’s offer or Microsoft’s new push, hosted e-mail is one of those things that sounds at first like a great idea. Then you have to start asking the practicality questions. For Notes customers, the question is much more complicated, because it’s not the e-mail that is driving value in the use of Notes today — it’s the applications integrated with that e-mail.
Ed goes on to note (sic) that he’s never lost a deal when up against Google. That’s hardly surprising. Many businesses have massive investments in Notes that are difficult to write off in one go. The cost/benefit argument falls on deaf ears in those circumstances though I have yet to see a thoroughly evaluated comparison exercise which talks to the long term benefits of substituting cloud based alternatives.
IBM is also muddying the waters. It is hoping that its inclusion of more socially oriented applications coming out any time soon will breathe fresh life into Notes/Domino server deployments. IBM might succeed, provided its consulting led sales people don’t mess up by trying to dream up cross and through selling consulting services. In my mind, that would be an opportunity for business to re-evaluate the whole email debate.
Email has become a scourge for many people. While in Berlin, one senior SAPper who seemed to have his head permanently stuck in his Blackberry said to me: “It’s not the email I need that worries me, it’s all the cc and Bcc stuff I don’t need that I still have to wade through in the off chance there might be something of importance.” How many will empathize with that problem?
I am fortunate that I receive little of that kind of waste, yet I understand why people distribute to all and sundry. It reflects the age old problem of ensuring you cover your backside in a corporate world where the ever present specter of litigation matters. Or where missing out your control freak boss could cost you a bonus or worse.
But even IBM’s people find email a royal pain. Luis Suarez, an IBM knowledge worker expert and social media maven has been fighting to get rid of email by using social media tools. After 13 weeks, Suarez seems to have hit a plateau of around 35 emails a week. I’m betting that most readers would love it if they got that number in a day. More to the point, he is actively fostering the notion of Thinking out of the inbox - Collaboration through less email. (Slideshare presentation here)
I don’t doubt that email has utility and that David’s argument will resonate among the SMB audience he identifies as an obvious target. However, I have some sympathy for Ed’s argument, not on the main grounds he suggests but on the detailed (if somewhat overplayed) argument that Google provides:
A service that its own vendor won’t take the beta label off of, that has bugs or issues, that isn’t best-in-class functionally, that has no offline provision of its own, and where more questions than answers exist. In fact, I pushed on this precise point — and learned that Google simply can’t seem to answer the basic questions about support, compliance, security, service level, or integration (both internal and third-party)
Ed won’t find much disagreement here today but I wonder how he’d argue if Google put its development muscle and legal eagles to work in solving the problems?
I’m much more interested in reading reasoned arguments as to when, where and how email should and should not be used. Ed talks about vague use cases and David has identified a sliver (albeit a large volume universe) where moving to the cloud makes sense. Once we reach the point of identifying clearly defined business scenarios, then we can properly address the cost/benefit issue of in-house/insourced and outsourced/cloud alternatives - or somewhere in between.
Dennis Howlett has been providing comment and analysis on enterprise software since 1991. See his full profile and disclosure of his industry affiliations.
Recent Entries
- SocialCalc: a killer app?
- Enterprise 2.0: my week ahead
- Firefox 3 RC2: still flawed
- The changing analyst landscape
- The spreadsheet love affair
Most Popular Posts
- Firefox 3 RC2: still flawed
- Google's obfuscation on privacy
- The spreadsheet love affair
- Microsoft Dynamics AX looking more like SAP?
- An Oracle nose job
- Is SAP's weakness its real strength?
Top Rated
- Is SAP's weakness its real strength?+5 votes
- Google's obfuscation on privacy+4 votes
- HP to take out EDS: does it make sense?+3 votes
- SocialCalc: a killer app?+3 votes
- HP's to-do list following EDS acquisition+2 votes
- Enterprise 2.0: my week ahead+2 votes
- Workday: a tipping point?+2 votes
- The changing analyst landscape+1 vote
Premier Vendor Content Whitepapers, webcasts & resources from our Power Center Sponsors
- Sun Microsystems Recognized for Environmental Innovation
-
Sun's Open Work Program Cuts CO2 Emissions, Reduces Real Estate Costs, Improves Job Satisfaction; Additional Focus on Energy Efficient Products, Greener Datacenters Delivers Value for Sun and Customers.
- Read Sun's feature story >>
- Marc Canter: The master of multimedia speaks
-
In this Super Techies interview, larger-than-life techie Marc Canter talks with ZDNet's Editor in Chief Dan Farber about his career as a multimedia pioneer.
- Watch the video >>
- New entries posted to Know Issues, Best Practices and Workarounds wiki
-
Latest Topics: Running virtual machines and DHCP can cause Intel® AMT to be inaccessible; Wildcard certificates are currently not supported for remote; Dell 755 returns a duplicate UUID during activation configuration
- See the latest entries on the Intel wiki >>
Archives
Favorite Links
ZDNet Blogs
- All About Microsoft
- The Apple Core
- Between the Lines
- BriefingsDirect
- Collaboration 2.0
- The Core Truth
- Dev Connection
- Digital Cameras
- Ed Bott's Microsoft Report
- Emerging Tech
- Enterprise Alley
- Enterprise Anti-matter
- Enterprise Web 2.0
- Googling Google
- GreenTech Pastures
- Hardware 2.0
- iGeneration
- Irregular Enterprise
- IT Facts
- IT Project Failures
- John Carroll
- Laptops & Desktops
- Lawgarithms
- Linux and Open Source
- Managing L'unix
- The Mobile Gadgeteer
- On Sustainability
- Rational Rants
- The Semantic Web
- Service Oriented
- The Social Web
- Software as Services
- SOHO Networking
- Storage Bits
- Team Think
- Tom Foremski: IMHO
- The ToyBox
- The Universal Desktop
- Virtually Speaking
- ZDNet Education
- ZDNet Government
- ZDNet Healthcare
- Zero Day
The Green Enterprise
-
- A look into the enterprise to explore eco-friendly practices and innovations. In this ZDNet video series learn about what's motivating green tech, and how green technologies are impacting IT. 0:42
-
Harnessing the power of waves
3:13
-
Planting solar gardens
5:06
-
Fill your car for $1.10 a gallon?
1:43
- All series videos »










