Paul Miller

Last month I wrote about the interest of the Financial Times‘ Digital Business supplement in exploring Cloud Computing, noting that there would be more in an upcoming edition of the supplement. Peter Whitehead’s ‘Editors’ Note‘ went online this afternoon, ahead of its appearance in print tomorrow. No great surprises there although Jim Hietala’s piece, Don’t [...]

I am increasingly concerned by the extent to which the tech sector’s current and future behemoths squander finite effort on reinventing ‘context’ at the expense of excelling in delivery of their ‘core’ proposition. The post explores some of the reasons for this reinvention of wheels, and asks whether previously sound reasoning is increasingly becoming a thinly disguised excuse for lack of change.

Wired Magazine Editor in Chief (and Long Tail author) Chris Anderson has a short post on his blog exploring ways in which a ‘freemium’ business model might be applied to “one of the biggest software-as-a-service companies.” The concept of freemium has gained widespread acceptance amongst consumer-facing Web 2.0 companies, enabled by the low incremental cost [...]

Having published last night’s post on the difficulty of moving any traditional software business toward offering a SaaS solution and gone to bed, I wake this morning to see the Web a-buzz with news of SAP‘s latest hire. See, for example, Ben Worthen, Joshua Greenbaum, Vinnie Mirchandani, and Maureen O’Gara. John Wookey, formerly an executive [...]

Bob Warfield is amongst those reopening the self-inflicted wounds of European software behemoth SAP AG with his latest post on the SmoothSpan blog this week. The central question, though, isn’t whether they messed up; but whether what they’re attempting is even possible. Facing the real prospect of significant disruption to the mid-range part of their business [...]