Economic crisis = software2.0 opportunity
So SAP’s in some trouble …
Adding fuel to the raging fire on which stock valuations are now burning, SAP (SAP) Co-CEO Henning Kagermann this morning warned in a statement that market developments of the last few weeks have been “dramatic and worrying to many businesses,” which has triggered a “very sudden and unexpected drop in business activity” late in the company’s third quarter.
Well, when you sell multi-million installations to major companies, you’re extremely vulnerable to the onslaughts of fear, uncertainty, and doubt that is currently plaguing the interconnected global economy.
This is an opportunity for smaller, nimbler, simpler, and - yes - cheaper software. Web2.0, enterprise2.0, everything2.0 … this is your chance.
The needs have not changed. The requirements have not changed. If anything, they’re getting bigger, harder, and more intense. Because of this crisis, companies have to ramp up innovation, ramp up marketing, ramp up workloads just to tread water.
If they can’t afford the $150,000 solution … maybe they can afford your $500/month pay-as-you go software service.
Brian Solis’ Conversation Prism: the social web
Now this is interesting:
Click through to get the version and see more of the social web than you ever wanted to know about.
Growing up online
I watched a re-broadcast of Growing Up Online tonight. This is an excellent, nuanced treatment of issues with kids online, including cyber-bullying and online predators.
This chapter on Ryan Halligan rips at my heart:
My daughter Gabrielle is in middle school as well, and the thought of her being attacked online is difficult to think of. I’m glad our computers are in public places, and I think she’s a smart kid who knows what’s right and wrong, and knows how to take care of herself … but social pressure is intense at this age. It’s something we’ll have to discuss - perhaps after watching that chapter together.
On a brighter note, it was neat to see danah boyd on the show (in other chapters) supplying some good insight on what’s going on in kid’s online worlds … which essentially, are their worlds.
Firefox: number one browser
I’ve been woefully remiss in not checking my server logs and web stats packages lately. But I found a nice surprise waiting for me when I finally did tonight …
Here’s the browser stats for Sparkplug9.com:
- Firefox: 29.2%
- Mozilla-compatible: 22.8%
- Explorer: 18.3%
- Safari: 5.5%
- A long list of spiders, agents, and RSS readers …
Firefox number one? Obviously Sparkplug9 readers are not representative of the majority of web surfers. Still, an impressive showing.
Just for reference, W3Schools says Firefox currently has 43.7% market share.
Google moderator: trial run
I saw a link to Google Moderator tonight on Matt Cutts’ blog and thought I’d try it out.
It’s a tool to aggregate questions on issues and let the wisdom of crowds moderate up the most important ones. It can be used real-time to generate questions for a speaker or presenter - Google uses it during company meetings for precisely that purpose - or asynchronously online.
Here’s my quick test of Moderator: What I’d like to ask Warren Buffet.
SEO 2.0
I saw this on Clientside SEM’s website this morning:
SEO up to now has been mainly technical (and tactical) in orientation. But as basic SEO skills become increasingly commoditized, SEO will require more than just technical ability to grow brands and companies on the Web — it will require a keen understanding of business, marketing, risk management, resource allocation, and creative problem solving.
This is bad news for SEO professionals who are simply technical, blackhat, or who have come in from the quasi-developer side. It’s great news for traditional marketing firms who have understood these things for decades … but only if they can also pick up new skills and techniques.
How markets work
It’s just about that ludicrous …
I don’t like their continual reference to a black individual, however. It rubs me the wrong way, and the reality of the current meltdown is that it’s colorblind, and caused probably much more by middle-class white people trying to live in McMansions than any other class of people.
Social media: blessing or curse
Have you ever seen DearAdobe.com?
It’s a site created by a designer who knows and loves Adobe products … and hates their many flaws. Visitors can add new gripes and vote up existing ones - just for fun, check out the top gripes. Most gripes are about Adobe’s installers (horribly awful), prices (sell-your-organs high), world pricing policy (schizophrenic), and bloated software (slow and complex).
Now imagine reading this as an Adobe exec. Do you think:
a. What great client input!
b. Uh oh - bad press!
Your response determines whether social media will be a blessing or a curse to you.
Colin Powell on leadership
I happened to see this Colin Powell quote in a PM Network magazine I picked up on a flight to Virginia today.
Leadership is all about problem-solving. In the military, there is a lot of discussion about where a leader should be on the battlefield. Should the leader be up front where it’s possible to be a quick casualty, or should the person be at the rear?
The correct answer is that you should be at the point of a decision. You should be where you can make the most difference.
The trick of leadership is being in the right place at the right time.
This is a great quote … it helps me clarify how involved and hands-on (or off) I need to be in terms of the hundreds of projects that my team works through in a given year.
Googling predators in airplanes
I’ve had the most amazing neighbors on flights lately …
Last week it was a Google engineer who heads up the ?SRE? unit for Gmail. He works in Zurich, and his team’s focus is provisioning servers and other resources for the growing user base. Interesting phrase of the discussion: “up and the the right,” which is what Googlers say when they talk about increasing resources being required for services.
Today it was a chief research scientist who is a cofounder of a start-up that works on video processing technologies for Predator UAVs, among other things. They’ve grown from 8 to over 100 in about 14 months, and he had fascinating stories to tell about goverment and defense contracts. (He was a triple-booter: Mac, Linux, and Windows, and carried two laptops and an jailbroken iPhone.)
I hope I’m so fortunate in my seat selection on the way back!
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Sparkplug 9 is John Koetsier's blog on life, the universe, and everything,
but mostly the stuff you see big in the tags to the left.
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