Oracle Gets Social

Here on the AppsLab team we have always been big believers in the power of people as a design point in applications. My personal background is in the portal space, and for years we preached people-centric. In those days, it meant a user had a configurable homepage with all the content they cared about in… Read More

Death of an Inbox

In a comment on my first post about the slow death of email as a communication medium, Julie asked: I guess you are talking about email in the context of personal communication rather than business? What are your thoughts on IM for business use, as a replacement for email? My position is that email is… Read More

Good Old Email in its Twilight Years

I’m sure most of you will not agree, or you’ll convince yourself otherwise. News.com has an interesting article with the catching headline, “Kids say e-mail is, like, soooo dead”. This got me to thinking about dead letters, for some odd reason. Like it or not, email is dying. Just like face-time gave way to phone… Read More

More High-Powered Friends?

First, it was Steve Ballmer. Now, Eric Schmidt? What is going on here? I’m surprised Eric would want to befriend me, since I called him coy in this space not once, but twice. Maybe he wants to hire me and doesn’t know I have no PhD, or even masters. D’oh. Seriously, can anyone shed some… Read More

Cases2.0 and IdeaFactory

As many of you know, Rich built a cool site we have been using internally called IdeaFactory. Adoption internally has been astounding. We have tapped into a well of pent up expertise. It is proof that the 1:1 model of sharing (i.e. email your boss a good idea) just doesn’t work. There are many reasons… Read More

Google Apps Suite Plows Ahead

Business Week has an article today about Google Apps. The suite looks more complete every day. Witness the Postini acquisition, the anticipated release of presentations (a combination of Zenter, Tonic Systems and probably some homegrown mojo too) this summer, the integration of JotSpot features and now, enterprise YouTube. This one jumped off the page for… Read More

Steve Ballmer is My Friend?

Fellow AppsLabb’er Rich, just informed me via IM (which is so 1999, why aren’t we Twittering?), that Steve Ballmer friended him on Facebook. Turns out that both Paul (AppsLab poobah) and I were also friended by Steve. Maybe the rumor is true, and Microsoft is digging out $6 billion for Facebook (Techmeme coverage). Or maybe… Read More

Google’s Backup Plan

I read today that Google Apps will soon include the features acquired from JotSpot. Not that big a surprise, but adding wikis and web site building capabilities to Google Apps will make them even more compelling in comparison to Microsoft Office. I hope Docs and Spreadsheets will be graced with these features, too. Anyway, it… Read More

My Very Own Facebook Post

Since every post about Facebook’s runaway success begins with “I’ve never been a MySpace guy . . . “, here goes: I can’t stand MySpace; it gives me eye seizures. I love what Facebook is doing. They spend several years carefully building a niche network for college students that protected the target users from spam… Read More

“Enterprise 2.0” is Weak

With apologies to Andrew McAfee, I hate the term Enterprise 2.0. Actually, I’m not crazy about Web 2.0 as a moniker either, but that’s not why I think Enterprise 2.0 is lame. Remember when B2B was the next great Internet business model? B2C was so 1997. All the cool companies were in the B2B space… Read More

The Problem with Enteprise 2.0

Enterprise 2.0 is Web 2.0 for companies. Some have called it “Consumerprise”, but whatever your term, you get the idea – applying successful concepts from the consumer web to companies. This type of thinking is the driving force behind any start-up that defines itself as “DIGG for the Enterprise” or similar. The more I see… Read More