AnshuBlog

From - You can't make this up department

2008-10-07T14:52:00.000-07:00

I don't re-post news stories on my blog because you can always read them elsewhere but this one is just a killer. And, it will make you feel good on a dog day on the Wall St.

CNET reports:

In an elaborate robbery scheme that's one part The Thomas Crowne Affair and one part Pineapple Express, a crook robbed an armored truck outside a Bank of America branch in Monroe, Wash., by hiring decoys through Craigslist to deter authorities.
It gets better: He then escaped in a creek headed for the Skykomish River in an inner tube, and the cops are still looking for him. "A great amount of money" was taken, Monroe police said, but did not provide a dollar value.

It appears to have unfolded this way, according to a Seattle-based NBC affiliate: around 11:00 a.m. PDT on Tuesday, the robber, wearing a yellow vest, safety goggles, a blue shirt, and a respirator mask went over to a guard who was overseeing the unloading of cash to the bank from the truck. He sprayed the guard with pepper spray, grabbed his bag of money, and fled the scene.

But here's the hilarious twist. The robber had previously put out a Craigslist ad for road maintenance workers, promising wages of $28.50 per hour. Recruits were asked to wait near the Bank of America right around the time of the robbery--wearing yellow vests, safety goggles, a respirator mask, and preferably a blue shirt. At least a dozen of them showed up after responding to the Craigslist ad.

"I came across the ad that was for a prevailing wage job for $28.50 an hour," one of the unwitting decoys, named Mike, said to the NBC station. As it turns out, they were simply placed there to confuse cops who were looking for a guy wearing a virtually identical outfit.

I say let him keep the money. He earned it - at least he earned it more than CEO's of Lehman, AIG and WaMu Countrywide did.

Dear Recruiter

2008-10-03T15:50:00.000-07:00

Dear Recruiter,

I know you have a stressful job and it feels like a sales gig where the more number of people you cold call, the better your chances of success and social engineering are. But here are a few tips before you call my phone or that of my reader friends:

Search My Name on LinkedIn and Google: Yes, that may seem obvious but many people have called me without the slightest inkling of what I really have been upto. I no longer run XML Web Services Integration teams or design XSLT engines. I no longer manage teams of developers. I no longer work for the big database company.
See the Date on that Resume: If you got hold of my resume from 5 years ago, chances are - its dated. That's why God (or was it Al Gore) invented the internets. Use it. I switched jobs after spending 9+ years at my previous company - and so what makes you think I will be interested 10 months into my new & much more exciting role?
Don't ask me for Help if you work for my Competitor: I love to help recruiters - and they have helped me in the past but I just don't feel comfortable referring the brightest people to my competition. So all SaaS Platform and CRM companies are out. If you want a referral for a storage or virtualization company, I will help you.
Ask me what I want: It may not seem obvious but it may be a good idea to ask me if you can help me. I am more likely to help you if I feel that you are at least trying to reciprocate. (Hints: My brother is looking for a job as a BI Consultant in US to migrate from Australia using the special visa for Aussies. I have a few other friends looking for marketing and PM jobs.)

If you do some of these things, you are much more likely to get my attention and help. Otherwise, I have 17 meetings to run to...

Thought Experiments in Understanding Fusion and Cloud Computing

2008-09-28T13:15:00.000-07:00

I have been struggling with what Fusion is now with all the announcements coming out of OpenWorld - and so are the likes of Gartner. Then I saw Larry Ellison's not so optimistic view on Cloud Computing and the profitability of the industry.

So, I replaced each "cloud computing" reference with "Fusion". See if this Fusion thing makes sense to you now:

"The interesting thing about Fusion is that we've redefined Fusion to include everything that we already do. I can't think of anything that isn't Fusion with all of these announcements. The computer industry is the only industry that is more fashion-driven than women's fashion. Maybe I'm an idiot, but I have no idea what anyone is talking about. What is it? It's complete gibberish. It's insane. When is this idiocy going to stop?"
"We'll make Fusion announcements. I'm not going to fight this thing. But I don't understand what we would do differently in the light of Fusion other than change the wording of some of our ads. That's my view."

Here is the original (from Wall Street Journal):

“The interesting thing about cloud computing is that we’ve redefined cloud computing to include everything that we already do. I can’t think of anything that isn’t cloud computing with all of these announcements. The computer industry is the only industry that is more fashion-driven than women’s fashion. Maybe I’m an idiot, but I have no idea what anyone is talking about. What is it? It’s complete gibberish. It’s insane. When is this idiocy going to stop?

“We’ll make cloud computing announcements. I’m not going to fight this thing. But I don’t understand what we would do differently in the light of cloud computing other than change the wording of some of our ads. That’s my view.”

I know cloud computing is real - I can click on a few URLs to start using it today:

Comments welcome.

BTW, Oracle Fusion Middleware has done amazingly well as a business and is very real. If it were a standalone company, it would be rivaling likes of VMware. However, Fusion goes beyond that - and that's where I am not clear.

(To those that don't appreciate humor, please read my disclaimer. These are my personal views etc.)

Wisdom of Not

2008-09-21T12:16:00.000-07:00

Who do you think is a genius?

Not Flying: A man who escapes a plane crash alive (Crash Survivor is a Hero proclaims newspaper) or the guy who cuts down on air travel by using video conferencing because he knows that the best way to lower your odds of dieing in a plane crash or car accident is to fly and drive less? And its good for the environment.
Not Buying: The man who gets a great deal on a property after its down 20% or the woman who decides to not buy a home but rent in stead in Las Vegas? The company (Bank of America) that buys Countrywide or the hundreds others that walked away?
Not Kissing: Wall Street or Warren Buffett? The genius of Warren Buffett is perhaps not so much in what toads he kisses but in the toads he chooses to walk away from. In 1992, Warren said in one of his famous annual letters:
In the past, I've observed that many acquisition-hungry managers were apparently mesmerized by their childhood reading of the story about the frog-kissing princess. Remembering her success, they pay dearly for the right to kiss corporate toads, expecting wondrous transfigurations. Initially, disappointing results only deepen their desire to round up new toads. ("Fanaticism," said Santyana, "consists of redoubling your effort when you've forgotten your aim.") Ultimately, even the most optimistic manager must face reality. Standing knee-deep in unresponsive toads, he then announces an enormous "restructuring" charge. In this corporate equivalent of a Head Start program, the CEO receives the education but the stockholders pay the tuition.
Not Graduating: Chasing after yet another degree that will get you a dream job or walking away from the rat race? Bill Gates chose to walk away from a Harvard degree, Steve Ballmer from a Stanford MBA and Michael Dell from University of Texas at Austin.

Sometimes not doing something is a sign of deeper wisdom than the heroic genius of doing, saving, buying, kissing, graduating, chasing.

Don't just do something, sit there. There is even a book on that. And on giving up.

The Year of Black Swans

2008-09-14T20:48:00.001-07:00

Here are the black swans of 2008 that very few could imagine a few years ago. And Taleb is proven right, and so is Warren Buffett.

All these banks were living the life of optimized returns - rather than trying to model for preventing a catastrophe, a black swan. They would have done well to have followed Taleb's teachings.

In some ways, Warren Buffett had been warning us customers, investors and regulators that some stories are just too true to be true. Even as Warren's firm wrote "risky" insurance policies, it turns out that the risk that you can see is usually the good risk - it can be managed. Disasters and catastrophes happen when you least expect them.

In fact, Warren recently said, - "We found out that Wall Street has been kind of a nudist beach."Adding a financial crisis revealed which players had been "swimming naked" when the tide goes out.

While this drama unfolds here in the US, the ripples will be felt globally. To my friends in India that continue to buy $500K apartments in a country of less than $5K per capita (annual) income - let me say once again - money does not grow on trees. Not forever, at least.

I don't give out investment advice but here is what I can share - if you don't keep cash for the rainy day, learn from Lehman and others - in times of real need, cash is useful. Also, try to optmize your portfolio for high returns but make sure a disastrous year or a sector does not wipe you out. You can do this by diversifying across asset classes - cash, real estate, stocks, international exposure, etc. An easy way is to put a sigfnificant chunk in diversified (low cost) index funds from the likes of Vanguard.

Update: Taleb has a new essay up on Edge.org (hat tip)with commentary relevant to this crisis and your future. (Alert - it can get fairly intricate so its not for the light-hearted reader.)

The Cloud is Falling

2008-09-12T10:53:00.000-07:00

Yes, the cloud is falling. And on-premise software executives are lining up to explain to us why the cloud computing era is distant and the promise of SaaS and PaaS is false. I will let you decide after reading this post by Vinnie and the original Forbes article.

Here are 3 reasons why they are wrong because the following arguments are tenuous:

Cloud Success Requires End of On-Premise: The argument that all computing has not moved to SaaS (and probably will never) is a false argument. DEC and Tandem did not die out because people no longer run mainframes, many do. They just became irrelevant as the newer technologies grew faster and faster. For SaaS to succeed, on-premise does not have to disappear - but SaaS is growing much faster than on-premise softare.
Core Applications will not be Re-written: Yes, GE's and Wal-Mart's of the world will not rewrite their applications any time soon. But, they are always writing new applications; and, there are new Wal-Mart's being born that will live in the world of Google GMail and Force.com. You don't replace your 2 year old Ford SUV with a hybrid, you just buy a hybrid next time you are in the market for a car.
Control, Security, Scale: This argument has been hashed many times. Your data is secure based on what processes are in place - not where its stored. Your applications scale based on the software and hardware architecture - not whether its inside your firewall or outside. You have control over what your users access and when based on a the capabilities of your applications and platforms - not whether you installed it yourself. Companies like Cisco, Merril Lynch, Starbucks, Dell and many others are running more and more applications in the cloud. The truth is that a platform like Force.com can help enforce greater control (one single place to administer, provision and de-provision users), enhance security (a security fix for one customer becomes immediately available for all others) and scale easily (the platform scales across customers and applications rather than having each developer worry about scaling).

No one (at least not me) is suggesting that on-premise software will disappear - its just that growth in enterprise software will come from SaaS and not on-premise (which is growing at about 4%). Venture capitalists like Emergence Capital and Hummer Winblad are voting with their dollars!

Declaration of Independence - SaaS Version

2008-09-01T19:33:00.000-07:00

DECLARATION OF INDEPENDENCE

When in the course of human events, it becomes necessary for one people to dissolve the political bands which have connected them with another, and to assume among the powers of the Internet, the separate and equal station to which the laws of computing and of computing's God entitle them, a decent respect to the opinions of userkind that they should declare the causes which impel them to the transition.

We hold these truths to be self-evident:

That all customers are created equal; That they are endowed by their Platform with certain unalienable rights; that among these are customization, integration, adoption and the pursuit of usability;
..

..

We, therefore, the representatives of the end users and CIOs, in General Congress assembled, appealing to the Supreme Judge of the world for the rectitude of our intentions, do, in the name and by the authority of the good people of these business units solemnly publish and declare, That these Applications are, and of right ought to be, ON-DEMAND AND MULTI-TENANT APPS; and as on-demand and multi-tenant apps they have full power to support customizations, web services, new user interface designs and do all things which useful apps may of right do.
..
..

[Signed by] Anshu Sharma [SaaS Evangelist]

Notes:
1. After reading the flood of responses to 'The End of SaaS' interview by an on-premise vendor, I was inspired to pen this declaration of indpendence on behalf of the customers and users who no longer want to be constrained by the cocaine (his words, not mine) of on-premise.
2. For those challenged in the humor department and therefore not amused, I invoke my First and Fifth Amendment Rights.
3. Computing's God - That would be Donald Knuth

The End of SaaS

2008-08-27T22:03:00.001-07:00

Sometimes, there is nothing much to add. So I present to you - words of wisdom - as could only be articulated by the leader of a stagnating on-premise software vendor emotionally tied to the "cocaine" of endless upgrade fees and maintenance streams.

SaaS Market will Collapse in Two Years

Lawson's CEO, Harry Debes, doesn't believe in software-as-a-service (SaaS).
In fact, the ERP (enterprise resource planning) software company's top executive has put a two-year expiry date on SaaS' head.
.
.
Q: All the other big players are going "on demand". Is cloud computing the next big thing?
Debes: This "on demand", SaaS phenomenon is something I've lived through three times in my career now. The first time, it was called "service bureaus". The second time, it was "application service providers", and now it's called SaaS.
But it's pretty much the same thing. And my prediction is that it'll go the same way as the other two have gone--nowhere.
SaaS is not God's gift to the software industry or customer community. The hype is based on one company in the software industry having modest success. Salesforce.com just has average to below-average profitability.
People will realize the hype about SaaS companies has been overblown within the next two years.
An industry has to have more than just one poster child to overhaul the system. One day Salesforce.com will not deliver its growth projections, and its stock price will tumble in a big hurry. Then, the rest of the [SaaS] industry will collapse.
Read more here...

My opinion - no comments. As Dana Carvey used to say - wouldn't be prudent. The truth is so self-evident as is the case with the inevitable transition to SaaS and PaaS that I don't need add my commentary. Readers can come to their own conclusions.

What do others have to say? (Update: More added.)

Here are some snippets:

Human Capitalist says

While I would agree profitability has been difficult to achieve for most SaaS vendors (Salesforce.com, Taleo and Concur are the only one’s that come to mind), the reason is actually good for customers….because these companies continue to focus on rapid innovation and are continuing to re-invest into their products frequently and creating new products at the same time.

Appirio says

The reality is that Salesforce.com, with 94% of its customers saying they'd refer the company to a colleague, has much higher than average customer retention. 74% of its customers say they have already done so. These figures are twice what most on-premise software vendors are seeing. SaaS solutions tend to be good because they have to be, to keep customers. On premise software can afford to treat customers as addicts - at least for the short-term, until the customers kick the habit for good.

Getting Things Done at Office2.0

2008-08-25T08:57:00.000-07:00

Ready to be connected? (Photo by Azi)

Ismael Ghalimi is someone I have long admired for the number and quality of projects he takes on and finishes. In fact, he has built an Extreme Productivity Seminar that shares his techniques. (See slides here). He also happens to use Force.com, the salesforce.com platform, for automating his productivity techniques. He also wrote about Force.com iPhone functionality!

Once again, Office 2.0 - one of my favorite events that combines the world of all that is cool and office productivity into one great conference that's actually enjoyable to attend. REGISTER HERE!

Fellow friend and Enterprise Irregular blogger Dennis Howlett has a nice post about Office2.0 conference and who is attending. Zoli has a follow up post.

Here is what I am most looking forward to:

David Allen's opening keynote on Getting Things Done.
Meeting Enterprise Irregular and other friends including - Zoli Erdos, Phil Wainewright, Susan Scrupski, Ross Mayfield, Vinnie Mirchandani, David Terrar
My Photographer friend and mathematics/software genius (Azi). He will be photoblogging the event.
Platform as a Service Panel that I am on with Phil Wainewright as moderator.
Startups!

Send me any questions/comments you have and we will try to address them at the panel (or here on the blog).

Letter to MBA Summer Interns - Five Things I Learned The Hard Way

2008-08-14T00:13:00.000-07:00

I had dinner a few days ago with some very smart interns who are spent their summer at salesforce.com. We talked about what they did, who they worked for and even caught up on some gossip.

As is my wont, after a few glasses of wine, I was off pontificating about life lessons. The interns pretended to be interested but I was sane enough to hold off on my spiel - I promised to write it up for them. So, dear MBA interns from Harvard, Stanford and Chicago GSB - here are the lessons that I have learned the hard way over nearly a decade of working at some of the most boring jobs and a few exciting projects.

Five Life Lessons

Don't Work for a Jerk: Actually, the first life lesson should have been - always start with the obvious truths when trying to persuade people. So, this is an obvious rule but you wouldn't believe me now (but will 10 years on) that most people when confronted with a jerk manager, freeze, loose confidence and start believing that they must be doing something wrong. You will too. Make sure you have friends, mentors and people that love you in your life to keep you from doing that. Also, you want to work for a company that has the "No Asshole Rule". (Hint: salesforce.com) Update: Here is an excellent post by Guy Kawasaki on Jerk Bosses.
The +-2 Rule (Ignore the Ladder): Hopefully, your career will be a long, linear growth - may be even a nice hockey stick. But most likely, just like the generations before you, you will hit some rough spots where nothing will seem to happen and you feel left behind. When that happens, you can rely on my plus minus 2 rule: "Over time, most people are never more than 2 levels below or above their rightful role in the organization". Yes, we have all met the SVP that got promoted early and knows little or the individual contributor engineer who doesn't get enough credit. But when I really think hard about it, I have yet to meet someone who is 45 that should be an EVP (and wants to be one) that is still first line manager. I have met tons of directors that could easily be vice presidents, many engineers that could be managers/directors and so on. As "wrong" as this seems, in the long run (3-5 years), most of us return to our natural mean. Think of it this way - a stock price can be way higher or lower than its true "intrinsic" value but if you believe Warren Buffett is right, its best to ignore those variations as mere fluctuations - use them to your advantage to hire "low" and fire "high" but don't get upset.
Get A Speeding Ticket Every 2 Years: I have a nice (inexpensive) convertible and I like to drive it just above the speed limit. My rule of thumb is - if I don't get pulled over for speeding every few years, then I am clearly driving way too slow. In a similar way, most of you will end up with jobs where its easy to cruise at the posted organizational speed. Nothing spectacular will ever come out of that. Given that many of us are blessed to have a good education, you will never be really out of a job - your only risk in life is not taking one. Break the boundaries - but only once in a while. Just enough for you to feel that you could loose your job one of these days.
Use What They Taught You, Everywhere: Those case studies make for good life lessons, iff you apply them. We have all met doctors that smoke; spiritual gurus that flirt with women or eat too much; or even economists that got a PhD in Economics after learning that there are too many economics graduates and the demand-supply curve. Don't do that! I have met smart investment advisers that were not diversified during dot-com boom, or real-estate agents that bought property to "double down". They all had excuses. With an MBA from a top school, you won't have one! So, use what you have learned and not just in your job - but in understanding your motivations, risks associated with choices you confront, irrational aspects of your personality. Picking a job, life partner, city to live in - are all opportunities to apply your learned knowledge.
Question The Source of Life Lessons: I don't have a management degree and I am not uber successful. My path to life learnings has been a slow arduous one - making one mistake at a time. I have borrowed from life lessons taught by people I meet every day and from the internets (thanks, Bush), Warren Buffet's Letters to Shareholders, numerous books including some lame, self-help books and from watching the abject absurdity and stupidity of senior executives at some very successful companies. As I tell my friends, I feel optimistic and happy when I meet one of them - it makes it easier for us to beat them one day.

This is a candid, stream of consciousness blog post. A better, more honest and perhaps more interesting post would be - what have I failed to learn in last 10 years.

I guess that takes a certain higher level of self-awareness that I don't yet have. On to the next 10 years, to learn that.

PS: I encourage you to post your comments or shoot me an email at anshudotsharma@gmail.com (replace dot by .)

Update: Looking for a primer on SaaS and software business models? Check out this excellent book by Tim Chou entitled Seven. Tim teaches at Stanford University and is a successful software industry executive veteran who created Oracle On-Demand. The book is, predictably, printed on-demand. More on this book later. Watch this blog.

Mortgage Crisis Explained: Warren Buffett Tells A Story

2008-07-14T20:04:00.000-07:00

As we go through this volatility and near madness in the equity markets triggered by mortgage crisis - further enhanced by hedge funds; I thought it would be good to go back and read what Warren Buffett said on this topic. And unlike my other posts, where I pontificate - I will simply quote Warren Buffett (comments added by me in italics):

How to Minimize Investment Returns (and what value hedge funds add!)

It’s been an easy matter for Berkshire and other owners of American equities to prosper over the years. Between December 31, 1899 and December 31, 1999, to give a really long-term example, the Dow rose from 66 to 11,497. (Guess what annual growth rate is required to produce this result; the surprising answer is at the end of this section.) This huge rise came about for a simple reason: Over the century
American businesses did extraordinarily well and investors rode the wave of their prosperity. Businesses continue to do well. But now shareholders, through a series of self-inflicted wounds, are in a major way cutting the returns they will realize from their investments.

The explanation of how this is happening begins with a fundamental truth: With unimportant exceptions, such as bankruptcies in which some of a company’s losses are borne by creditors, the most that owners in aggregate can earn between now and Judgment Day is what their businesses in aggregate earn.
True, by buying and selling that is clever or lucky, investor A may take more than his share of the pie at the expense of investor B. And, yes, all investors feel richer when stocks soar. But an owner can exit only by having someone take his place. If one investor sells high, another must buy high. For owners as a whole,
there is simply no magic – no shower of money from outer space – that will enable them to extract wealth from their companies beyond that created by the companies themselves.
Indeed, owners must earn less than their businesses earn because of “frictional” costs. And that’s my point: These costs are now being incurred in amounts that will cause shareholders to earn far less than they historically have.
To understand how this toll has ballooned, imagine for a moment that all American corporations are, and always will be, owned by a single family. We’ll call them the Gotrocks. After paying taxes on dividends, this family – generation after generation – becomes richer by the aggregate amount earned by its companies. Today that amount is about $700 billion annually. Naturally, the family spends some of these
dollars. But the portion it saves steadily compounds for its benefit. In the Gotrocks household everyone grows wealthier at the same pace, and all is harmonious.
But let’s now assume that a few fast-talking Helpers approach the family and persuade each of its members to try to outsmart his relatives by buying certain of their holdings and selling them certain others.
The Helpers – for a fee, of course – obligingly agree to handle these transactions. The Gotrocks still own all of corporate America; the trades just rearrange who owns what. So the family’s annual gain in wealth diminishes, equaling the earnings of American business minus commissions paid. The more that family members trade, the smaller their share of the pie and the larger the slice received by the Helpers. This fact is not lost upon these broker-Helpers: Activity is their friend and, in a wide variety of ways, they urge it on. After a while, most of the family members realize that they are not doing so well at this new “beatmy-brother” game. Enter another set of Helpers. These newcomers explain to each member of the Gotrocks clan that by himself he’ll never outsmart the rest of the family. The suggested cure: “Hire a
manager – yes, us – and get the job done professionally.” These manager-Helpers continue to use the broker-Helpers to execute trades; the managers may even increase their activity so as to permit the brokers to prosper still more. Overall, a bigger slice of the pie now goes to the two classes of Helpers.

The family’s disappointment grows. Each of its members is now employing professionals. Yet overall, the group’s finances have taken a turn for the worse. The solution? More help, of course.
It arrives in the form of financial planners and institutional consultants, who weigh in to advise the Gotrocks on selecting manager-Helpers. The befuddled family welcomes this assistance. By now its members know they can pick neither the right stocks nor the right stock-pickers. Why, one might ask, should they expect success in picking the right consultant? But this question does not occur to the Gotrocks, and the consultant-Helpers certainly don’t suggest it to them.

The Gotrocks, now supporting three classes of expensive Helpers, find that their results get worse, and they sink into despair. But just as hope seems lost, a fourth group – we’ll call them the hyper-Helpers – appears. These friendly folk explain to the Gotrocks that their unsatisfactory results are occurring because the existing Helpers – brokers, managers, consultants – are not sufficiently motivated and are
simply going through the motions. “What,” the new Helpers ask, “can you expect from such a bunch of zombies?”
The new arrivals offer a breathtakingly simple solution: Pay more money. Brimming with selfconfidence, the hyper-Helpers assert that huge contingent payments – in addition to stiff fixed fees – are what each family member must fork over in order to really outmaneuver his relatives.
The more observant members of the family see that some of the hyper-Helpers are really just manager-Helpers wearing new uniforms, bearing sewn-on sexy names like HEDGE FUND or PRIVATE EQUITY. The new Helpers, however, assure the Gotrocks that this change of clothing is all-important, bestowing on its wearers magical powers similar to those acquired by mild-mannered Clark Kent when he
changed into his Superman costume. Calmed by this explanation, the family decides to pay up.
And that’s where we are today: A record portion of the earnings that would go in their entirety to owners – if they all just stayed in their rocking chairs – is now going to a swelling army of Helpers.
Particularly expensive is the recent pandemic of profit arrangements under which Helpers receive large portions of the winnings when they are smart or lucky, and leave family members with all of the losses – and large fixed fees to boot – when the Helpers are dumb or unlucky (or occasionally crooked).
A sufficient number of arrangements like this – heads, the Helper takes much of the winnings; tails, the Gotrocks lose and pay dearly for the privilege of doing so – may make it more accurate to call the family the Hadrocks. Today, in fact, the family’s frictional costs of all sorts may well amount to 20% of the earnings of American business. In other words, the burden of paying Helpers may cause American
equity investors, overall, to earn only 80% or so of what they would earn if they just sat still and listened to no one.

Long ago, Sir Isaac Newton gave us three laws of motion, which were the work of genius. But Sir Isaac’s talents didn’t extend to investing: He lost a bundle in the South Sea Bubble, explaining later, “I can calculate the movement of the stars, but not the madness of men.” If he had not been traumatized by this loss, Sir Isaac might well have gone on to discover the Fourth Law of Motion: For investors as a whole,
returns decrease as motion increases.

This post is repeat from a year ago.

Meanwhile, my friends in India continue to believe that laws of gravity fail to apply to them. (Read more here.)

My Favorite Blogs and Non-Blogs About Business, Marketing and Sex

2008-07-06T18:16:00.000-07:00

Even as my blog revolves around technology - my favorite blogs don't - no offense to my favorite Enterprise Irregulars friends. Here are some of my favorite writers:

Calculated Risk: This blog focuses on housing and the economics around it. I started reading it in 2006 when I was trying to sell my house and had a feeling that the bust was near. I love their graphs too. For bonus read, check out Cafe Hayek - a blog on free market economics from two professors at George Mason University.
Bill Gross' Monthly Newsletter: Bill Gross runs one of the largest Bond investment houses (PIMCO) and is extremely intelligent and wise - a rare combination. One interesting fact about him is that he does one hour of Yoga every morning.
Warren Buffett's Annual Letter: This is the cheapest MBA you can get. Its free! And the (very quirky) humor makes these long letters an easy read. As you can see, we are getting very far from the blog land now - annual letters.
Seth Godin's Blog: Back to blogs, Seth - a marketing guru -writes a very frequent, well-thought out blog that is an absolute must-read.
Fake Steve's Blog: Funniest. He also invented the iPhone.
xkcd Comic Blog: Anyone who can write sex jokes about Fibonacci Series is God. xkcd calls itself a a webcomic of romance, sarcasm, math, and language.
Brazen Careerist: She blogs about her marriage, divorce, sex-life, career transitions, life concerns and struggles more openly than any other writer. I was initially turned off by her dissection of her marital counseling sessions which I thought was doing a disservice to the marriage she was trying to save. Like a highway accident that you can't turn away from, I kept going back and found her blog to actually be quite interesting. Even inspiring some times. Goes to show you can learn from every one and that first impressions are just that - first impressions.

Tell me yours!

Customer is King - Feedly RSS Reader Launched! Long Live the King!

2008-06-17T22:22:00.000-07:00

Its been a great day for feedly - the start up created by Edwin Khodabakchian and his impressive team. I have known Edwin since Oracle acquired his previous baby Collaxa. He brought a fresh new spirit to Oracle and was an inspiration to be around. My favorite are his minimalist diagrams - he can convey complex ideas and abstractions with the simplest of figures.

Customer is King at Feedly

James Governor of Redmonk and a fellow Irregular wrote this excellent post on how Southwest makes customers feel like kings by treating its employees like customers, first. I was impressed. But seems like the feedly team knows how to take customer focus to the next level.

Feedly launch has been tremendously successful so far but a few people wanted to find out how to undo the install completely. What did feedly do? They immediately responded with a detailed how-to and then automated in next 24 hours.

I am not surprised. In several months of beta testing, I could reach Edwin almost 7 by 24 on email or IM - and he would listen to smallest of my peeves or perceived and real bugs and get them fixed. I am delighted to see the extensive support for keyboard shortcuts (just click ? when using feedly to see them). As a power Google Reader user, I was hard to please but the feedly experience won me over.

What is Feedly?

Briefly, feedly is my RSS Reader of choice but it is actually so much more. In Edwin's own words, feedly is an attempt to use everything which is good in cloud service, RSS and social connectivity to create a more social and magazine-like start experience.

Here is a full description:

feedly is focused on creating a more social and magazine-like start experience. Think MyYahoo meets Digg meets Wired. Here are some of the core features…with many more to come:
Welcome Wizard
The welcome wizard can learn from your existing personalizations - bookmarks, My Yahoo!, Bloglines, Netvibes, Twitter, Yahoo Mail, Gmail and Friendfeed - and apply them to your feedly.

What’s New?
The what’s new? page provides a real-time summary of the most relevant content available on the web based on your interests, your reading patterns and recommendations from your friends.

Annotate+Share
The annotation tool makes it easy to clip the most interesting parts of a an article and share them with your friends. It also allows you to easily search for related informations.

Twitter
The feedly+twitter integration allows you to easily spread the word about articles you find interesting. In context.

The Wall
The wall gives you a quick overview all the all the articles recommended and annotated by your friends. It combines your activity on both twitter and feedly.

Dashboard
The dashboard makes it easy to get an at-a-glance view and manage all your favorite sources.

Explore
The explore module adds a pinch of serendipity by continuously suggesting new sources you might be interested in.

Search
The search bar allows you to perform a personalized search across your favorite sites.

feedly API
The feedly API allows source owners to extend their reach by taking control over various aspects of the feedly UI. It will also allow third party developers to create new UI experiences (see cover, screensaver and feedly+flick’r for example) or weave in new annotation extensions (see Yahoo finance for example).

Google Reader
Feedly is powered by the unofficial Google Reader API so any subscriptions you add to feedly will be added to Google Reader, any article you read or recommend in feedly will be marked as read and shared in Google Reader. And vise versa.

The feedly site is open to public beta. Try it! The product and the customer service will delight you.

Haiku Poet

2008-06-07T18:08:00.000-07:00

My blogging life touched a new low today. Or high, depending on your taste in literature. I am honored to be a published poet - using both words 'published' and 'poet' loosely. Very loosely.

Our Enterprise Irregulars group is an amazing group of people that chat, share ideas, argue, comment and sometimes even console each other or laugh at ourselves and those that we work for. In line with the tradition, we spontaneously broke out into some Haiku poetry that Michael Krigsman posted on ZDNet Blogs.

Here is what Michael had to say:

The intellectual capabilities and knowledge of the Enterprise Irregulars are highly regarded in the enterprise software world. Less widely known, however, is the true poetic talent of these fine folks. I’m therefore pleased to present IT failure haikus written by Jeff Nolan and Anshu Sharma, two of my Irregular colleagues.

In the first poem, Jeff muses on a ZDNet post by Phil Wainewright, discussing usage-based pricing for on-demand software:

Good thing this is
head in cloud
Get same stuff for less

Anshu follows a similar theme, but adds an exhilarating IT failures climax:

Free like air.
Twitter, Myspace.
Alas, they break.

There is more on the ZDNet site - see the full post.

Platform as a Service Magic from Coda with Google Apps and Force.com

2008-06-02T11:54:00.000-07:00

The value of platform as a service (PaaS) is not that you can take your on-premise applications and run them in the cloud - that's so ASP! In my opinion (and what would a blog be without one), the real value is in enabling functionality that was simply impossible or too hard in an on-premise world.

For a great example,check out what Coda is doing with Force.com and Google Docs.

Coda is a Platform as a Service partner of salesforce.com building their next generation SaaS application on the Force.com platform.

In Andy's own words:

Following the recent launch of the Salesforce and Google Apps offerings, we have prototyped our own CODA 2go-specific Google Apps integration! This has been built using a Google Gadget, Apex code and Visualforce and the result has got us and everyone we demonstrated it to at Dreamforce very excited about the possibilities this proof of concept opens up.

Our experience of producing finance software over decades is that accountants love manipulating transactions in spreadsheets! The success of our on-premise CODA-XL product (which extends Microsoft Excel) has been outstanding, with virtually all customer organisations adopting it enthusiastically. Now in the on-demand world we have produced an equivalent solution that uses Google Spreadsheets and Force.com.

The initial prototype can be used to perform a Cost Allocation over extracted transaction details from the CODA 2go product. The user can then apportion new values by editing the cells used by formulas in the spreadsheet; we then post back the results in the form of a journal back into CODA 2go from within the Google Spreadsheet user interface via a Visualforce-powered Google Gadget!
More at Coda2Go Blog...

Note that this functionality was conceived, designed and built in weeks. Let me know if you have seen this pace of innovation in the on-premise world.

She Loves Me, She Loves Me Not: SaaS and SAP

2008-05-21T19:48:00.001-07:00

From the Department of Irony and Confusion:

See if you can find a common theme. The only one I could find: She loves me, she loves me not, she loves me, she loves me not,...

I really like the "rejection" of SaaS by customers that are in the middle of SAP implementations or run large SAP implementations.

As Upton Sinclair said: "It is difficult to get a man to understand something when his salary depends on his not understanding it."

Update: Dan Druker has a great, thoughtful post on challenges faced by traditional ISVs entitled Different is Hard: SAP - (Not Too Much) Business By Design

Run by Wall St? Cause or Company?

2008-05-11T12:54:00.000-07:00

In light of the Yahoo! - Microsoft fiasco, fellow bloggers Larry Dignan and Vinnie Mirchandani have been asking the question whether there is too much emphasis on just one stakeholder - the shareholder. After all, shouldn't a technology company (or any company for that matter) be equally focused on the value for customers, partners and employees.

I believe that the real problem is not that of prioritization of stakeholders but a more fundamental issue: Does your company stand for something?

Larry and Vinnie discussed the following in a recent conversation:

Technology companies cater to Wall Street interests too much often at the
expense of good strategy.
Isn’t what a company does for customers and developers more important than
shareholder interests?
What’s wrong with being a mid-size technology company if customers and employees are happy and the products–software, hardware, services–fit a need? There’s nothing wrong with it, but Wall Street would lead folks to believe that any company that isn’t acquired by Oracle isn’t worth existing.
And why are we listening to Wall Street at all given that analysts, investment bankers and other financial wonks can’t even manage their own businesses (subslime, credit swaps, write-offs galore)?

Even as I do agree that the recent focus on shareholder's (short-term) returns is probably misplaced, the real problem is elsewhere.

What Does The Company Stand For?

The problem with Yahoo! is not just its mediocre financial performance compared to its more successful cousin in Mountain View - Google, but that Yahoo! does not seem to stand for anything and rarely arouses any passion amongst customers, employees or partners. Its a listless organization that seems to be going through the motions - see this excellent post by Jeff Nolan.
Marc Andreesen recently wrote up an article praising dual-class structure to help management teams prevent hostile takeovers. I believe this is the wrong remedy - its a cure for a disease that should be prevented in the first place: A lack of clear vision around what a company is trying to achieve.

A company (and its management team) deserve to be independent as long as they inspire confidence among investors, employees, parters and customers that the company has a vision that it aspires to that the stakeholders can commit to.

After all, what does Yahoo! stand for? A hodge podge of websites relating to entertainment, communication, search etc with no grand vision of changing our (digital) lives. There are hundreds of smaller companies that are not under any duress to be acquired because their management teams inspire confidence around a vision.

Here is a list of companies that I don't know what they stand for, and hence will not have shareholders clamoring to keep them independent if the right opportunity came along:

BEA (Sold)
Yahoo!
Tibco
WebMethods (Sold)
IAC (Bought/Sold/Consolidated/Unbundled)

Contrast this with list with:

Salesforce.com (Changing the enterprise software world; See my disclaimer)
Google (Organizing World's Information)
Amazon (Changed Retail, Now Web Services)
COST (Concur, Omniture, Salesforce and Taleo - the SaaS horsemen, per Phil Wainewright)

The same holds true beyond technology businesses - if your company does not stand for something bigger than management's entrenched interests and egos, its not very likely to inspire shareholders to forgo a 50% overnight return.

There is a story of two labourers working at a construction site, breaking stones. A passer-by asked one labourer what he was doing. “Breaking stones”, was the bored reply. A few yards down the road the traveller came across the other labourer. This worker was different; there was a spring in his steps and a tune on his lips. So the passer-by asked, “What are you doing?” “Oh, I am helping Christopher Wren to build the greatest cathedral in the world.” The vision of the great architect, Sir Christopher Wren, of building a cathedral that was to be the pride of England, gave meaning to the labourer’s work.

So, the question is: Do your stakeholders see your company as a stone-breaking venture or as a company that's building a Cathedral?

In India, with Force(.com) !

2008-05-05T03:29:00.000-07:00

The Tour de Force events across the globe continue to draw great attendance and interest from developers looking to build new SaaS applications. The event is yet to make its way to India but I have been traveling across India (Pune & Bangalore) meeting with partners, educating them about Force.com and Platform as a Service generally – and the response has been tremendously positive. At one of our partners in Pune, I delivered an hour long session on PaaS and Force.com – and the result was a lot of very interesting questions and interest in this paradigm shift. A similar event in Bangalore with over 100 attendees drew a similar response.

India is Ready

There was genuine appreciation about how difficult and wasteful it is to currently build, deploy and manage software applications. This is especially true for IT outsourcing firms that month after month see ISVs and IT departments of large enterprise burn time and money on infrastructure and platform, delaying and risking delivering business value to the end users.

Across Generations

India is a country of young people – over 50% of India’s population is under 25. And presenting to various audiences – I couldn’t help but wonder how many in the audience can even remember what computing without connectivity was like. The shift from client-server to SaaS comes naturally to this generation.

More interestingly, the senior executives and technology gurus – some that wrote compilers in 1980s by hand – were even more excited about this shift. The questions and discussions revolved around how to navigate this shift and understanding the new evolving SaaS ecosystems and not whether the shift is underway.

Here is a sampling of questions:

Is There a Whitepaper on SaaS?

Yes, we do have whitepapers on SaaS and PaaS. However, whitepapers are so 90s – I encouraged our audience to learn through building and engagement with the community – blogs, online forums, how-to wiki’s, informational videos.

What Kind of Applications Can I Build on PaaS?

Even as salesforce.com started out as a CRM company, the Force.com platform is being used by our customers and partners to build out applications that cover wide variety of solutions be it Finance and Accounting (Coda), Risk Management (Riskonnect), Life Sciences (Verticals OnDemand) and many others. Business Applications that are data and process driven is where Force.com provides the most value today

What about Security?

No one asked this question – so I thought I will mention it. This question that resulted from both genuine apprehensions and FUD created by certain vendors that did not have SaaS capabilities is increasingly becoming a non-issue. I think there are two reasons for this: First, as customers use more and more SaaS applications their experience invalidates the concerns. Second, initiatives such as trust.salesforce.com that educate and inform have re-assured the community of users, developers and investors.

Really?

Yes, this question was asked a few times. For example, when I explained that Force.com is multi-tenant not just for our direct customers but also for all applications written by end users and partners – and that everyone is on the latest version of the software. The response is: Really?

Salesforce.com’s success with the platform in releasing as many as 25 major releases in last 8 years – and comparing that to once in 3 to 7 years cycle for legacy software vendors also draws a: Really?

So yes, really!

The proof is in the pudding – you are welcome to get a free developer login and build an app.

First US Real-Estate, now UK : India & China - You Are Next!

2008-04-09T15:56:00.000-07:00

Calculated Risk, my favorite blog on the mortgage mess reports from the Economist.

From The Economist: The bust begins
... finally, tighter credit and overstretched household budgets are pulling prices down.

A collective shudder ran down the spines of British homeowners on Tuesday April 8th when Halifax, a part of HBOS and the country’s biggest mortgage lender, revealed that house prices fell in March by 2.5%.
And just like in the U.S., transaction volume is declining, and inventory is increasing:
... both the Halifax and Nationwide are predicting “modest” declines in house prices this year. Forward-looking indicators suggest a gloomier picture. The number of mortgages approved for house purchase was almost 40% lower in February than a year before. According to the Royal Institution of Chartered Surveyors, estate agents have been grappling with the worst conditions—measured by the ratio of completed sales to unsold stock—since September 1996.
The housing bust is going global.

Meanwhile, in India the facade of the boom continues while the underlying fundamentals deteriorate further. Business Standard, India's leading pink newspaper reports - (and by the way, all business & finance newspapers in India are pink):

“Apartment sales have gone down by 20 to 30 per cent in Mumbai. Developers are doling out goodies like stamp duty relief, free parking and interiors to boost sales,” said Rajiv Sabharwal, head, retail assets, ICICI Bank.

Crucially, developers are not cutting prices.

“Developers can not cut prices because once you do that, it signals the start of a downward spiral. They are holding on to the prices to maintain the momentum,” said Rajesh Mehta, a leading property consultant in Mumbai, adding: “April and May are the key months as far as property deals go. If transactions do not pick up, prices of apartments will fall at least 10 to 15 per cent”.

As I posted earlier, the numbers don't look good. See my story on: India, Real-Estate and Some Numbers.

Franchises are for Pizza and Burgers, Not SaaS and Banks

2008-04-03T14:55:00.000-07:00

I get a feeling that some mediocre MBA read a case study on franchising and the huge profits it has delivered to companies behind the big pizza and burger brands, and decided to apply it to software. Add the failed ASP model to the inappropriate franchise model borrowed from pizza and burger chains - and you pretty much can figure out the product and go to market strategy of the last generation software vendors when it comes to SaaS.

As a public service, I am providing a maturity model for these companies that aspire to be SaaS winners.

Pizza Pie Maturity Model for Franchising: Pizza and Burgers, Banks and SaaS

by avlxyz (CC)

This is a very simple maturity model. I know big companies like maturity models (see here) rather than straightforward examples. The following are the maturity levels I am proposing for those rushing to market with their half-baked SaaS offerings:

Level 1 - Pizza Delivery: Yes, pizza delivery is the first step in this hierarchy. In order for you to deliver a pizza consistently and of good quality, you need a set of tools, some training and then hire low cost teenagers - and you get the cheesy goodness of pizza, delivered to your home by a freckled teen. Most franchising opportunities such as laundromats, burger joints function well when you are delivering a simple product or service that is easy to deliver, has minimal security/quality/reliablity constraints and is easy to replicate. I recommend the INSEAD case study referenced in the MIT Sloan Management Review article.

Level 2 - Banking: As you can guess, delivering banking services is slightly harder. You need to make sure thieves can't steal your customer's money, that you provide certain level of services and if you have online banking - you need to ensure that customer's accounts are not hacked and money stolen. As a customer, you entrust valuable assets (money) to your bank and it is the trust that a bank has earned over years, if not decades that helps you feel safe coupled with certain regulations and assurances from the federal government. Banks do not have franchises - you cannot pay Bank of America $50,000 - get trained and then start operating a bank with their logo, system and processes. The reason is that the trust earned by banks cannot be delegated away nor can the brand be put to risk or diluted.

Level 3 - SaaS: Yes, SaaS is higher on the Pizza Pie Maturity Model for Franchising than banks. As with banks, customers trust valuable assets (data) with the SaaS company. The SaaS provider must earn the trust of the customers one day at a time by providing the right service levels, ensuring security and business continuity. Just as with a bank, the trust embodied in the brand of the SaaS provider is of great value - and this trust cannot be delegated in a simplistic manner. Providing software (and perhaps some training and best practices) to the SaaS Franchisees does not take care of the most critical elements of SaaS:

Reliability: How do you ensure that the SaaS Franchisee has architected its end to end systems to provide reliable service?
Security: What kind of processes are in place to ensure data is not lost?
Performance: How will the brand owner ensure that the SaaS Franchisee provides the right performance?

You may be wondering:
Why is SaaS higher than Banking on the Pizza Pie Maturity Model for Franchising?

I have two good reasons for this:

Data Loss vs. Money Loss: Data is lost when someone performs a successful read operation without your permission. If I read your mental health records, I don't have to steal them. With bits and bytes, reading is stealing. With money, not so much. Just because you know my bank balance, I haven't lost my money. (Yes, there is loss of privacy and trust is eroded but its not the same. You don't call a cop because someone read your bank statement but if I read your critical health data you would have to call the cops.)
No FDIC: A small bank or cooperative can be insured by FDIC and therefore provide sufficient protection to a customer but with SaaS you are relying on the trust earned by the brand. How comfortable do you feel having your data in a Uncle Billy's HealthCare On-Demand App that runs on software from NanoSoft?

Reliable Platform, Trusted Brand: What you need is a reliable platform from a trusted brand in Software as a Service. A multi-tenant platform with customers sharing one single system ensures that all customers and ISVs running their applications and trusting their data with the platform are receiving the same high level of security, reliability, availability and that any issues that are discovered are resolved for all tenants.

The approach taken by some vendors to deliver SaaS without true multi-tenancy or even worse, entrust third-parties with running copies of their software takes the Level 1 Pizza Delivery franchisee approach.

What do you think? Want more debate on SaaS styles?

You may want to consider force.com Platform as a Service from salesforce.com for business applications. (Please read full disclosure at the bottom of the blog. No MBA's were hurt in the writing of this blog.)

Cloud Computing: Its Raining Ideas - Want a Cup of Starbucks?

2008-03-28T18:17:00.000-07:00

I know I went overboard on metaphors in the title (cloud, rain, coffee) but then when you have the last few weeks like we have had at Salesforce.com, its hard to not to have your head in the clouds. I know.

So here is the scoop, if you have been living under a rock: Starbucks rolled out its website MyStarbucksIdeas.com powered by Salesforce.com (Jeff Nolan was one of the first bloggers to pick this up). The press has had nothing but the nicest things to say.

Courtesy: by emergent007

As the software guy, here are my key takeaways:

Focus on Innovation, not Infrastructure: Starbucks could have spent its own time and resources building out the infrastructure, renting bandwidth and compute capacity etc. but it instead chose to focus on customer feedback and was able to deliver greater value to customers (and therefore shareholders), faster.
Simple is Beautiful: Starbucks website is really simple to use. A few neatly placed icons tell users exactly what to expect. You can view the ideas without creating a login. Voting and commenting require a login which makes sense.
Business Value: For the budding technologist who wants to be an entrepreneur - notice how a simple concept forums+voting can become a great product/service. I have often met technologists who are looking for the hard problems to solve rather than looking for simple solutions to real business problems.

If you have an idea for Starbucks, Dell or Salesforce.com, please visit their ideas sites (all powered by Salesforce.com Ideas).

If you have an idea to build an entirely new service that customers like Starbucks and Dell should use, come build it on Force.com and market it on Salesforce AppExchange.

What Game Are You Playing? Snakes and Ladders? Chess?

2008-03-16T19:35:00.000-07:00

Our world view predisposes our behavior and reaction. I have lately been thinking about how people use the metaphor of sports and games to describe their behavior in personal and business life - 'I won', 'She lost', 'Not fair', 'Wrong call', etc.

However, we do have one big fundamental choice. And some of exercise it consciously while others grew up and settled on a particular choice without fully realizing it - and its implications on their lives. And that choice is: What game are you playing?

The reason this is so important is because how you behave in the game of life will depend a large part on the game you perceive it to be. Is it a game where winner takes all? Is it a game where there can be multiple winners? Is it a game where you can/should cheat?

I have come up with a basic ontology of games of life.

Snakes and Ladders: Its us against the (unknown) forces of nature and the world at large. If you are a Snakes and Ladders person - there are good events (ladders) that lead to sudden upward moves and bad events (snakes) that lead to severe setbacks. You are a bit paranoid (in your world, snakes exist and bite) and may not feel like you control your own destiny. Examples would include- Britney Spears.

Chess: Its you vs. someone - always. Life is deterministic and if you could make just the right move you can beat the other side. If you visualize life as a chess game, you believe that you can manage your destiny. You may also tend to focus on finding one (or a few) person or entities that you are up against. Examples would include Dick Cheney and Karl Rove.

Scrabble: Everyone can do better and win. Even though you keep score and are competitive, you enjoy the game for what everyone brings to the table. Its okay to challenge your opponent by doing better - not necessarily hoping the other does worse. The beauty of this game is that you are not just competing to be better than others but are trying to outscore your own previous high scores - the objective is to do the best you can. Examples would include most successful venture capitalists - the nature of the business requires you to invest in other people and help them improve and grow.

What game are you playing?

Here are some questions to ask yourself:

Do you feel like that others must loose for you to win?
Can you identify 3 other people whose success will bring you greater reward/success?
Do you play for something - a team, mission? Or do you better when you are up against an enemy?
When you have a great day, are there people at work who you can walk over to and share your success with? Would a great day for you mean - they achieved something? Or would it mean - they lost?

Next, figure out if this is the optimal game for you to be playing. Perhaps even try a new game for a week?