Enterprise 2.0

Dreamforce: Benioff preaches cloud computing gospel, Facebook

SAN FRANCISCO--After a decade as the chief evangelist in the wilderness of software as a service, which has morphed into cloud computing, Salesforce.com founder and CEO Marc Benioff is having a more challenging time coming up with groundbreaking industry disruptions. But that isn't stopping him from enthusiastically preaching the cloud computing gospel.

Benioff and company have built a $1 billion business and gradually expanded a CRM application, run like Google runs search in the cloud, into a platform that greatly reduces the friction involved in business software development and delivery. With Microsoft recently entering the cloud-computing platform arena with Azure … Read more

Microsoft's Manhattan Project

This week Microsoft gave evidence that it will continue to be a major force for at least the next decade. The company outlined its products and strategies that more fully embrace the "cloud," such as the Azure set of cloud services; Web-based, lighter-weight versions of Microsoft Office applications; and the latest iteration of the Live Mesh middleware. Google may have won the search war, but Microsoft isn't about to cede the global cloud to the search engine giant.

Ray Ozzie explains Azure to CNET News correspondent Ina Fried.

As in past epochs in its 33-year history, Microsoft … Read more

How Microsoft will compete with 'free'

Guest post: Jean-Louis Gass?e explains how Microsoft's future business model will borrow from both Apple and Google to compete with the free world of software. The essay was originally posted on Monday Note.

How do you compete with free? That's the question Steve Ballmer, Microsoft's CEO, is trying to answer every morning when he goes to work. On the server software side, Windows Server is doing well, especially with the Exchange e-mail server and the unheralded but very good collaboration server, SharePoint. These products have matured, they're relatively easy to set up and manage by … Read more

Tips for surviving the market meltdown

Guest post: Christopher Lochhead, the retired chief marketing officer at Scient and Mercury, offers a follow-up from his post in August on how companies can thrive in a prolonged economic downturn.

Reading The Wall Street Journal and watching CNBC lately can drive a person (namely me) to drink. Which is fun, but beyond answering the question, "Which scotch will I drink?" the seminal question is "How do we thrive in a downturn?"

Downturns are the best time to take market share. Most companies overreact. They get too conservative. They also forget that they are not the … Read more

EIC Squared: Will the tech sector melt down in the economic crisis?

In this week's EIC Squared podcast, ZDNet's Larry Dignan and I talk about how the economic crisis will impact the tech sector. Both the House and Senate have passed the bailout package, but the legislation doesn't mean that tech or any other industry sector will reverse the downward spiral. Tech companies and financial analysts are rapidly cutting estimates to prepare for a potential nuclear winter in the global economy.

We also discuss Microsoft's forthcoming moves into cloud computing and the state of citizen journalism following the fake Steve Jobs heart attack story that showed up on … Read more

Oracle's Ellison nails cloud computing

Finally, a technology executive willing to tell the truth about cloud computing. Speaking at Oracle OpenWorld, Larry Ellison said that the computer industry is more fashion-driven than women's fashion and cloud computing is simply the latest fashion. The Wall Street Journal quoted the Oracle CEO's remarks:

"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. … Read more

Here come the numerati

The pile of digital data is growing, doubling every 18 months or less. That pile is the new gold, drawing data miners hoping to strike it rich by finding patterns and uncovering insights that can lead to more efficient markets, higher productivity, safer streets, and the much loved increased profits.

Stephen Baker's new book, The Numerati (Houghton Mifflin), introduces some of the data miners, or numerati, who are leading efforts to probe the depths of the global data dump.

He profiles several numerati, focusing more on the personalities and potential use cases than the arcane details of the computer … Read more

EIC Squared: Chrome, iPods, and a Dell-Salesforce union

On this week's EIC Squared podcast ZDNet's Larry Dignan and I discuss Google's latest disruption in the Web 2.0 field, the Chrome browser, as well as Apple's product launch event on September 9. In addition, Larry explains his idea that Dell and Salesforce.com could merge. Dell is trying to be more of a software company and is using the Force.com platform, and Salesforce.com is a major Dell customer. But, it's unclear how Salesforce.com, its shareholders and customers, would hugely benefit from a union.

Google Apps tops 1 million businesses

Google is well known as a one-trick pony.

Almost all of the company's revenue comes from its search engine, which last quarter accounted for more than $5 billion. New initiatives, such as the Chrome browser, Google Gears, and Google Friend Connect, are focused on building a mostly open-source Internet operating system out of Google technology in order to funnel more user data and targeted advertising opportunities into the Googleplex financial engine.

It's easy to draw parallels to Microsoft, which gradually built the dominant 20th century operating system and applications platform. Bill Gates and company realized that attracting developers … Read more