Promoting SaaS on eBay?
Humor, Personal Productivity, SaaS June 23rd, 2009
This listing on eBay is hilarious, almost makes me wonder if it’s a true listing or carefully planted advertising for Google Apps (and SaaS in general). But the seller appears to be real, has been on eBay for ten years… Here we go, get Microsoft Office w. Outlook for $75, because:
It’s brand new and never been opened. My boss bought it right before I moved the whole company over to Google Apps.
We never looked back, but here’s your opportunity to live it up, 90’s style, with this great, retro piece of Microsoft 2007 software.
Tags: auction, eBay, google apps, marketing, microsoft, ms office, Outlook, SaaS, xref
Zoho Office for Sharepoint: Use SaaS, Keep Data Behind the Firewall
Collaboration, Enterprise Software, SaaS June 23rd, 2009
One of the major roadblocks to SaaS providers’ entry to the enterprise is IT and Business concerns about corporate security, thinking of the firewall as the last line of defense.
Microsoft SharePoint has a very strong position in the Enterprise as the incumbents behind-the-firewall collaboration server, and for years smart Collaboration and Social Software vendors with better functionality, like Atlassian, Socialtext, Jive Software, Newsgator have been "playing well", adopting their services to SharePoint.
Now Zoho joins, announcing Zoho Office for Microsoft SharePoint, which combines the benefits of a collaborative SaaS Suite with the (perceived or real?) security if keeping data behind the firewall.
Tags: Collaboration, Exchange, firewall, Google, microsoft, ms office, Outlook, SaaS, security, sharepoint, zoho, zoho suite
Your Digital Data My Not Be Accessible Soon
Personal Productivity, Technology December 12th, 2008
So you’re doing the right thing, backing up everything on CDs or DVDs. Too bad they may not be readable in a few years… and even if they are, you still have to worry about data formats.
Data sitting on your hard disk may not be much better: in fact files you created with the very apps you’ve just upgraded to the most recent version my no longer be readable by the current version anymore.
Read the details here…
Tags: archives, cloud computing, compatibility, data continuity, data conversion, data formats, digital continuity, hard-disk, legacy data, microsoft, ms office, netbooks, solid state drive, ssd, storage
SaaS and the Commoditization of the Software Market
Business, SaaS September 14th, 2008
Office 2007 Reaches a New Low – reports Joe Wilcox @eWeek. He means low prices: while Office Standard is still above $300, the Home and Student Edition can be purchased for as little as $89.99.
He then speculates on the reasons for this “Crazy Eddie” pricing, with percentage of likelihood:
- “It’s end of the back-to-school buying season, when Microsoft and retailers often discount consumer Office (50 percent).
- Microsoft is seeding the consumer market with the Home and Student Trojan horse for supporting Web services such as Office Live Workspace (25 percent).
- The low pricing is way of psychologically preparing the consumer market for $69.95 Office Equipt, which packs 12-month subscription versions of Office 2007 Home and Student Edition, Windows Live OneCare, Mail, Messenger and Photo Gallery. (20 percent).
- Microsoft is shoring up marketshare as proactive response to freebees like Google Docs. (5 percent).”
I strongly believe in the last one, which is way underrated at 5%. With freely available OpenOffice, Google Docs and the Zoho Suite, people have little reason left to purchasing Microsoft Office. I’ve said this before, while discussing the perfectly rightful clampdown on piracy:
The danger for Microsoft is not the direct financial impact of these users turning away from their product, since the never paid in the first place. It’s losing their grip; the behavioral, cultural change, the very fact that millions of people – students, freelancers, moonlighters, small business workers, unemployed – realize that they no longer need a Microsoft product to work with MS file formats. Microsoft shows these non-customer users the door, and they won’t come back – not even tomorrow when they are IT consultants, corporate managers, executives. That’s Microsoft’s real loss.
But this post is about commoditization, and there’s more to it than putting price-pressure on Microsoft. Yes, SaaS disrupts the traditional software market, but there’s another equally important trend happening: some of the early pioneers who evangelized SaaS but retained a 1.0 business model are being squeezed by more nimble competitors.
Days after my post on SaaS and the Shifting Software Business Model I received an email from Salesforce.com, announcing new, promotional pricing for Salesforce Group Edition. The promo was supposed to end July 31st, but I suspected this would become a permanent price cut. Why? Group Edition is where Salesforce.com feels intense price pressure – see the comparative matrix here. Today I checked again, and what a surprise (not really) - the promo deadline is now gone, Salesforce.com silently turned the promotion into a permanent price-cut.
No wonder there wasn’t much fanfare: price cuts are a red flag for the Street. Commoditization can be a death-spiral to businesses – except for the few that drive it. But it is beneficial to customers, and in the end, that’s what matters.
(Disclaimer: I am an advisor to Zoho, the company with a mission of Deflating IT).
Tags: business model, commoditization, crm, microsoft, ms office, office, Office 2007, On-Demand, price cut, SaaS, salesforce.com, Software, zoho
Microsoft Legal Wants Me to Take Down THEIR OWN CONTENT
Marketing / PR, Personal Productivity June 11th, 2008
I received a surprising voicemail from Microsoft Legal – they demand that I take down the content at www.theultimatebug.com since it points to a promotion that’s no longer running. Click below to hear the voicemail, courtesy of GrandCentral:
There’s only one problem (actually more): this is not my content, it was set up and is controlled by Microsoft, or an entity that created the promo for Microsoft. The promotion it refers to, The Ultimate Steal was actually quite generous, giving MS Office away to students for $60. My post on the subject was partly promotional, partly poking fun at MightySoft since they could not even get the promo site up working properly:
The countdown reached zero, and started again. And again… several times, even after the advertised opening of the promotion, users were not able to get in, they were just staring at the recycled counter. A commenter @ CrunchGear called it The Ultimate Publicity Scam. I thought it was just a bug, so I created www.theultimatebug.com and pointed to to the MS promo site.
Now they want me to take it down. I can’t, since it’s not my site. The Ultimate Bug domain points to 209.162.191.152, which appears to belong to Peek Consulting LLC, in Louisville, KY. Perhaps MS or Digital River worked with them to create the promotion … I have no clue. Ultimatesteal.com is owned by Microsoft, and while they rerouted the main page to an end-of-life notice, the original content, the one Microsoft Legal wants me to take down is still available here: http://www.theultimatesteal.com/store/msshus/ContentTheme/pbPage.microsoft_office_ultimate
Dear Microsoft, feel free to take your content down any time. And perhaps next time use a smarter agency.
Of course this makes me wonder: what if I really had duplicated the content on my site? Could MS legally force me to remove it, even though it clearly identifies the end-date as May 16 2208? I know some attorneys who read this blog, perhaps you’ll be kind enough to jump in with your comments. Thanks in advance.
Update (6/13) : Someone at Microsoft is reading this blog, after all. 209.162.191.152 which theultimatebug.com was pointing to now shows ‘under construction’. The “bug” lost its meaning after MS fixed the error anyway, and now the promotion itself is over… I need to figure out what to do with this cool domain. In the meantime I am redirecting it to the original post that started it all.
Tags: copyright, grandcentral, Humor, legal, microsoft, Microsoft Office, ms office, take-down, theultimatebug, theultimatesteal, Ultimate Steal
Zoho Expands Group Collaboration
Collaboration, Personal Productivity, SMB / SME, SaaS February 27th, 2008
Today’s Zoho Writer update is not what it looks like. Yes, I get the story about:
- DocX Support
- Thesaurus (in 10 languages)
- Enhanced Endnotes/Footnotes
- Enhanced Headers/Footers
..etc, but that’s not what I find exciting. DocX support? Personally, I don’t care, MS Office 2003 was the last version I bought, people much smarter than me call it a completely insane format … but hey, the Borg is the market leader, so why not support it… Layout improvements? I’m already in a paperless world, barely ever print, so I don’t really care about these features. But Microsoft Office was created at a time when the purpose of document creation was to eventually print it, and in our legacy world the challenger is measured against the standards of the incumbent, so, yes, I can accept these are important features for Writer. Besides, the academic / student community has been dying for endnotes / footnotes, so now they can have it. 
But the hidden bomb here isn’t just a Writer improvement: it’s a feature that shows Zoho’s hands regarding collaboration in the entire Zoho Business Suite. Yes, I am talking about Group Sharing. After all, one of the key drivers behind moving to web-based Office applications is to enable easier collaboration.
Most of the collaborative apps, including Zoho or mighty Google typically allow either public sharing, or inviting users individually, but until now there has been no way to share your documents with a predefined set of users, i.e. members of a group. A year and a half ago I praised Google Groups for stepping out of being just a group email mechanism, becoming a mini community/collaborative platform – but the definition of a “group”, i.e.it’s members does not exist outside the Groups application, I can’t share Google Docs or Spreadsheets with my Group. (And make no mistake it’s been the same with Zoho until now.)
With today’s update you can now create a Group in the ‘My Account‘ section of Zoho, and that Group is recognizable in any other Zoho Application, including Writer, Sheet or even Zoho Mail. Eventually there will be multiple privacy / sharing levels within the Zoho Universe:
- private
- shared with individual email id’s
- shared with Groups (defined once, recognized in all apps)
- shared by Domain (i.e. share info within your business)
The last one will be a feature of Zoho Business, currently in private Beta, but the other two are available. Thesaurus in 10 languages, format and layout improvements are all nice, but the real news of the day is the improved cross-application collaboration.
Related posts: TechCrunch, Mashable, ReadWriteWeb, Wired, Digital Inspiration, Zoho Blogs.
Tags: Collaboration, Google, google apps, google Groups, group sharing, microsoft, ms office, office 2.0, paperless office, web office, zoho, zoho writer
Microsoft Decides You Don’t Need Your Old Data
Personal Productivity, SaaS January 3rd, 2008
Do you think old, archive data on your computers is safe? Think again. Or just re-define safe: so safe that you can’t access it yourself.
In it’s infinite wisdom Microsoft decided certain old documents, including those created by their own Word, Excel and PowerPoint may pose a security risk, so they decided to block them in Service Pack 3 to Microsoft Office 2003. SP3 came out in December September (thanks for the correction) so you may or may not have it yet. Here’s the “fun” part:
- There is no clear definition of what’s blocked: the easy one is PowerPoint, where anything before 97 is dead, but as for Word or Excel (let alone other, previously compatible programs), you have to rely on this cryptic description by MS.
- There is no warning whatsoever at the time of installing SP3
- Even if you know what’s coming, there’s no way to easily locate and convert what is about to become inaccessible on your computer. Disaster may hit months or years away, when you need to access an archive file, but can’t.
Now, before you shrug it off, remember, this isn’t simply abandoning users still running pre-historic versions of software; we’re talking about data files here. You may run the latest release of all applications and still have no reason to touch old documents. After all, that’s what an archive is all about – you *know* your documents are there and will be accessible, should the need arise at any time in the future.
Back in the 80’s and 90’s paperless office was a popular phrase but remained largely a dream, since a lot of information still originated in paper form. The balance has largely shifted since then: the few things I still receive in paper format either end in the waste-basket, or I quickly scan them trusting that with cheap storage and powerful search I will always be able to pull up anything I need. I am finally living in a largely paperless world. But Microsoft just violated that trust, the very foundation of going paperless. Of course I shouldn’t be entirely surprised, this coming from the company which previously decided that the safest PC is a dead PC.
Solution? Microsoft offers one, in this article: tinker with your Registry, an admittedly dangerous, and definitely not user-friendly operation. I prefer Wired’s alternative:
Naturally, there’s an alternative which is somewhat easier (and free): just grab a copy of OpenOffice which can handle the older file formats. Once you’ve got them open, now might be a good time to convert them to ODF documents lest Office 2017 decide to again disable support for older file formats.
And of course I wouldn’t be me
if I didn’t point out that this, and many other headaches simply disappear when you ditch the desktop and move online. Web applications typically don’t have major new versions, they just get continually updated (e.g. Zoho updates all their applications every few weeks). When that’s not the case, like when Zoho Show 2.0 was released recently and it required updating the user documents, the service provider takes care of it. They work for you – you don’t care about program versions anymore, just have access to your data. Anywhere, anytime.
Related posts: CNet, Ars Technica, Compiler , An Antic Disposition, AppScout, Security Watch, Download Squad, Blackfriars’ Marketing, Feld Thoughts. The winning title comes from The J-Walk Blog: Office 2003 Downgraded With Service Pack 3.
Update: Phil Wainewright brings up an entirely new aspect of this issue: Microsoft breaks the perpetual licence covenant.
Tags: data formats, excel, file formats, microsoft, ms office, ms word, openoffice, powerpoint, web office, zoho
Death to Attachments
Personal Productivity, SaaS December 14th, 2007
From Tony Hirst:
If an email comes with an attachment, then I suspect that in a large number of cases the sender is probably using the wrong medium. So for example, this morning I found in my mailbox:
Three seminar announcements with *ALL* the details in an attached word file (nothing in the body of the message). (“Please find enclosed details of our next seminar” – you know the sort of thing…)
Two newsletters as PDF attachments (they’re available on the web as well…)
Yes, I hate that… and if you’re on a slower machine, you spend the next several minutes opening different applications (Word, Excel, Acrobat), wait for the virus scan ..etc, only to wonder how than organize it all…
Here’s Tony’s solution:
So I think I may try a new mail rule:
if attachment then
- silently delete AND
- reply-to-sender “Please find another way of letting me see the document you sent as an enclosure – I do have a browser, you know… If the document is for commenting on by several people, try Google docs, Zoho, or Microsoft Live whatever it’s called…”
I love it… like I’ve said before, Attachments are Evil – Link, don’t Send.
Tags: attachments, email, Google, linking, microsoft, ms office, prodcutivity, url, zoho creator
Ulteohhhhh…
Open Source, Personal Productivity, SaaS, Startups December 12th, 2007
Before I say anything, I want to prefix this post by stating that I am an Advisor to Zoho, which can be perceived as a competitor to Ulteo, the company that just announced providing OpenOffice On-Demand. That said, I often I’ve repeatedly stated my belief that we’re at a state of early expansion for Software as a Service, and for now, the more players the better. It’s not about slicing the pie yet, it’s about making sure the pie will be huge:
Summing it all up, I believe the winner of the “on-demand race” will not be Google, Zoho, or any of their competitors – the winners will be the customers who will have a lot more choice in picking the right business solutions later this year.
So I am happy to see new On-Demand offerings that work – and am royally p***ed when they don’t. I tried to use Ulteo, repeatedly. At the first attempt in the morning, I got stuck with a blank screen:
Next I tried in the evening: I spent a minute or so at the above blank screen, but finally I got some signs of life:
Oops… I don’t know of another instance, I don’t have Openoffice installed on this machine, and a Vista glitch forced me to reboot since my early morning attempt with Ulteo. And I certainly have no clue who the *** user u7670 is or how I should close Openoffice for this user on the Ulteo servers. But let’s click Yes to continue anyway:
Why am I in document recovery mode and just what is it I am about to recover? Finally, I got into this somewhat broken screen:
Not a very positive experience, if you ask me. On the other hand, it’s still more than the previous web-office “announcement”: Live Documents, which is still to materialize…some time next year.
Like I said, I am happy to see more On-Demand services. Those that actually exist, and perhaps even work.
Update: Jason Brooks at eWeek had similar experience.
Tags: Google, live documents, microsot, ms office, office 2.0, On-Demand, Open Source, openoffice, openoffice.org, SaaS, ulteo, web office, zoho
Now You Can Really Zoho Offline
Collaboration, Personal Productivity, SMB / SME, SaaS November 26th, 2007
As much as I am a certified web-app fan, I’m not naive enough to believe I’ll always have 100% broadband availability. Crazy shooters, limited conference availability, or just traveling to less covered areas (and I don’t mean here) – there will be times when we need our documents offline.
That’s why I’m happy to see Zoho Writer get offline editing capabilities today. The offline implementation is based on Google Gears, which, ironically, has yet to show up in Google’s own Apps. This video tutorial walks you through the new features – note, the steps to install Google Gears are obviously required only once. After that, you just click “Go Offline”, and can access your documents at writer.zoho.com/offline. When you’re connected again, click “Go Online” and Zoho will sync your changes back to the original document.
The features are more than covered by all the “big names”, including TechCrunch, Read/WriteWeb, GigaOM, /Message, Digital Inspiration, CenterNetworks, Webware.com and Wired – to name just a few. I’ll focus on what’s still missing, and a few comments.
Yes, this is not a perfect solution – yet. Going offline has to be a planned activity since you actively need to click the option while still online; this is the way Google Gears works for now. But life produces unexpected situations, like the other day when I had to hop on a train, and was staring at an empty Google Reader as I had forgotten to click “Offline” at home (Google Reader’s offline capability is also based on Gears). But Zoho never stops enhancing their products, and they plan to tackle auto detecting online/offline status and periodically sync the contents of online and offline documents.
Some reviewers compare Zoho’s approach to full integration by Live Documents. I find it rather funny: since when can we compare a PR release to existing products? GigaOM’s headline is also quite surprising: Zoho Seeks to Replace, Not Embrace, Microsoft Office. Again, this in comparison to yet-to-be-launched Live Documents‘ “embrace and extend” strategy. What this comparison forgets to mention is that Zoho has their own MS Office plugins, so, using their analogy, Zoho’s strategy includes “embrace, extend or replace”. The choice is up to the users, as it should be.
Last but not least, the little birds are singing that the next Zoho announcement will prove that web-based apps can be on par with their desktop counterparts: care to guess which application I am talking about?
Tags: Google, google gears, live documents, ms office, ms word, office 2.0, offline/online, web office, zoho, zoho writer
Zoli Erdos
