Category Archives: Markets

Markets

The Once and Never King

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We are about eight years behind schedule. Around the millennial epoch I helped SuSE whelp the SuSE Linux Enterprise Desktop (SLED), a product that is till on the Novell price list. Growing frustration with Microsoft viruses, continued vendor lock-in and the inherent lower cost of an Open Source desktop were hailed as the beginning of the end of Microsoft’s dominance. Yeah. I didn’t believe it either. SuSE arguably had and still has the best alternative to a Microsoft desktop, and considering that it is not Vista, perhaps the best desktop available. But like many good technology solutions it never took the market by storm despite continued frustration with Vista, continued vendor lock-in and the inherent lower cost of an Open Source. Market dynamics and realities stopped SLED’s march. “The reality is that (the Linux desktop) is a slow, gradual, unstoppable growth,” said my buddy Jeremy White at CodeWeavers, a crew … Continue reading →

Mobile Money Madness

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Remember that in these times of chaos that there is money to be made by sorting it all out. Just ask Citigroup, AIG, JPMorgan Chase, Goldman Sachs Group, Ford, GM … The mobile industry makes chaos appear orderly by comparison. Like the internet (and other largely unregulated industry) innovation occurs so rapidly in the mobile market that your new handset is obsolete before you make your first call. (Did you know that you could call people using a mobile device!?!?!? I thought they were tiny personal computers – a means for letting Outlook nag me while away from the office.) There are three markets where making order from mobile chaos is proving profitable. These include mobile web application platforms, mobile application testing, and mobile analytics. In other words making apps, testing apps, monetizing apps. Mobile application platforms are application servers with hooks for managing myriads of mobile machines. These servers … Continue reading →

White Space Gold Rush

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The FCC has created the next big technology gold rush, literally out of thin air. Chip and mobile technology mavens are the first folks who will strike the new mother load, but others will follow. In between existing television channels are buffers collectively called “white space”. The FCC established these buffers in the Bad Old Daysâ„¢ because back then television broadcast equipment was less than precise. A broadcast signal could drift a little up or down the frequency spectrum causing recliner-bound fathers to order their children to adjust dials, knobs and rabbit ears (if you do not know what “rabbit ears” were, then you are too young to be reading this). Basically white space buffers kept channel 2 from clobbering channel 3. But with television broadcasts going digital this February and the unused white space spectrum being valuable, the FCC has opened it up for “unlicensed” use. Unlicensed spectrum devices … Continue reading →

SaaS Surprises

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Who would have thought Oracle would lead the SaaS market. Not that I hold perfect confidence in the source of these numbers, but a report at venture capital focused SandHill.com shows Oracle at the #1 slot for companies using and considering vendors for SaaS deployments. In fact, top-shelf companies fill the top shelves of the SaaS vendor list. Oracle, SAP, Microsoft are all players. The early-advantage entry — SalesForce.com — scores a trailing 11% compared to Oracle’s 16% and Microsoft’s 14%. Sarah Friar — the Goldman Sachs analyst who wrote this report — tells me that the focus of the survey was at the application level. I would have automatically believed her numbers had  databases and infrastructure management tools been included. But focused on applications, Oracle’s dominance caught me by surprise. This spells bad news for SaaSy start-ups. Mature markets are dominated by an average of three vendors. This is … Continue reading →

Finding Niches

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I want to brag about a client of our for something they did on their own (kinda). We have had a relationship with Open-Xchange since our days advising SuSE Linux on their North American marketing strategy. Open-Xchange is groupware with highly usable features uncommon in other groupware offerings and with all components well integrated to make collaboration dirt easy. I routinely recommend the product to everyone I meet. Like many companies they started by selling on-site server software and had a tough time of it. Going toe-toe-toe with the likes of Microsoft Exchange, Novell Groupwise and Lotus Notes is no easy feat. Despite a better over-all design and vastly better usability, Open-Xchange did not find the huge adoption it deserved. This was in part because the high end of the market was saturated. Online collaboration was recognized by top enterprises as a necessary tool. Thus the installed base was dominated … Continue reading →

Embedded

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One problem with Linux is that nobody really knows how big it is. Like any other virus, you have no idea exactly how many bodies it has infected. Ignore the sales numbers from Novell and Red Hat. They tell only part of the story, namely the demand by larger institutions who must ensure success and have support. These sales figures do not even come close gauging unsupported replications of subscribed distributions, hosted Linux (which often is self maintained), departmental servers, all the OpenSuse and Fedora installs, and the occasional renegade Linux laptop. And those are the small markets. I’ve been watching the embedded space more and more. Silicon Strategies Marketing has clients in the mobile phone business, the Linux business, and now in the embedded Linux space. We have been mapping where embedded Linux is finding traction, and some of the issues within that market. The question is “where is … Continue reading →

Collaboration Opportunity

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For varied and unrelated reasons, I have been involved with many firms either in the collaboration field (VA Software cum CollabNet, Open-Xchange, Novell and their GroupWise offering) or for whom collaboration is an essential part of the product (Mobile Compete). This accumulated history led to me being the Collaboration Solutions judge for this year’s CODiE award. When it comes to collaboration most vendors don’t get it. Collaboration is not about technology, it is about people. Specifically it is about people sharing information in a manner that achieves one of several possible goals: Reduce miscommunication Ensure the appropriate information is available for making good decisions Reduce the time to acquire that important information So, the “it” that vendors don’t “get” is the multipart question of collaboration, those parts being: Who needs to collaborate What kind of information do they need to share How do they prefer to share it Let’s take … Continue reading →