Dear Google, I need an iMac
After writing a blog post titled �Dear Google, You�re Giving Me a Headache�, Google sent the author a small pack of acetaminophen, with a message saying "I hope this helps you keep up with the many Adwords changes."
I think an iMac would really contribute to my Google experiences. My wife is looking to start a photography business and I'd like to see if I can experimenting with iPhoto + Picasa to make a website where she can sell photos.
Or something.
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ClickTale
It's a closed beta, but it LOOKS like a pretty sweet product/service. And a good excuse to re-test the integration of my digg account with my blogger account.
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Web 2.0
This article is a month old but good. I especially liked the chart with stuff like
Ofoto --> Flickr
Akamai --> BitTorrent
mp3.com --> Napster
Britannica Online --> Wikipedia
...
but then there was
screen scraping --> web services
and I was like wtf mate? WS does quite a bit ... "more" than screen scraping. It wasn't long before Tim shut me up.
Once the idea of web services became au courant, large companies jumped into the fray with a complex web services stack designed to create highly reliable programming environments for distributed applications.</p>
But much as the web succeeded precisely because it overthrew much of hypertext theory, substituting a simple pragmatism for ideal design, RSS has become perhaps the single most widely deployed web service because of its simplicity, while the complex corporate web services stacks have yet to achieve wide deployment.</span> ...which, for those of you just joining us, is dead on. There will, of course, always be a place in the world for thick, fat stalks of really-complicated SOA apps that can run a whole department or a whole company. But I don't see these impacting the general public much. What has much more creative potential are specific little very-hackable webservices that do one thing and do it well. Throw a few hundred thousand of them out into the Net and see what a bit of remixing does for them. This, of course, assumes that creating/modifying webservices without licensing the various applicable (ha) patents remains possible. Anyway, read the rest of that article. Very slick.
Important - "Live" is not alive yet
But, let's look at some other MS analysis and combine the two a little...
Most relevant in the MS analysis to our discussion are the last 2 paragraphs in that 2nd page, so read those at least.
So in 2000, Microsoft said that .NET products and services "Includes Windows.NET, with a core integrated set of building block services; MSN™ .NET; personal subscription services; Office.NET; Visual Studio® .NET; and bCentral™ for .NET."
So a couple of quick Google searches show Windows.NET doesn't exist, MSN.NET doesn't exist (though MSN does include some of those "personal subscription services"), Office.NET doesn't exist, Visual Studio.NET exists (and is actually quite good I hear), and bCentral was shelved.
Microsoft's initial description of .NET was the perfect example of what Wainright described - "Announcing an offering that doesn't exist yet buys valuable time while the vendor brings it into being." Today's .NET is only related to what Microsoft said it would be.
Let's apply the same logic to these new Live offerings. Aside from a Google Personal Homepage rip-off (Phil calls it a Web 2.0-style portal template), we're supposed to be seeing things like Internet-to-phone, virus-scanning, and web hosting. But we don't see them. We only hear about the plans for them.
This is because Microsoft is probably throwing out some marketing in an effort to cool down the hype around Google. But if they were to actually follow thru on the vision of the web as a base platform, they have to jettison their precious marriage to the operating system as the base platform. And since the www.live.com site does not support Firefox (coming soon, yeah right), Microsoft hasn't even shown that small amount of interest in using a standardized web platform.
That's all for now. Between the time I started writing this post and the time I actually posted it, most of the buzz around the Live offerings predictably died down. It's obvious that Microsoft is playing catch-up and is using the old vaporware tactic. It's not going to work this time.</div>
SoSaaS
From the second link, about the difference between ASP's in the 90's and today's real services models - "designed from the ground up to be delivered over the Internet on pay-as-you-go terms."
From the third link, somewhat related, as to why there can be a real SaaS model - "No on-demand customer pays simply for the privilege of accessing the software. They pay because the software delivers business results." [emphasis his]
I like Phil's analysis, and I've slapped his RSS feed right on the front of my Google Personalized Homepage. And since I want to contribute back, I'll add on some of my own analysis.
I think a perfect (and very successful) example of a software-as-a-service model is Google AdWords. Basically, the way AdWords works - an advertiser sets up an AdWords account with Google, and can then create some basic text ads for Google to display on the most relevant sites, targeting by content. The advertiser deposits a certain amount into their AdWords account, and specifies how much they are willing to pay for each click-thru they receive via Google ad listings.
The two important characteristics here are that the software service is designed to 1) be delivered on the internet 2) on a pay-as-you-go basis.
Obviously, the service revolves around web content, so it's built with the web in mind. That kind of design enables great expansion, as I'll describe in a bit...
But also key to the success is the pay-as-you-go aspect. If a business buys the AdWords service, they don't pay for access to AdWords, since creating an account and creating the ads are both free activities. They are paying directly (and only) when the service yields actual business value - a marketing contact with potential customers.
Furthermore, the business has complete control over their software service budget. They can start small and go up on their own pace. Can you imagine if Google tried to sell this as a one-time fee, or tailor it to each advertiser? The pricing difficulties for Google and the advertisers would be monstrous and costly, and the advertisers would be stuck only with the prices Google can come up with.
The internet-designed service enables more and more application of the service instead of traditional software model - a single use per application. Related to AdWords is AdSense which is another software service to help Google (and others) make money by helping AdWords's advertisers. AdSense lets anyone display the ads and receive a portion of the click-thru fee. Because AdWords was designed for the internet, it has application at Google - ads displayed in their other software services like GMail, Google Search - and outside of Google via the AdSense program. And Google recognizes that it can and should pay its AdSense partners when those partners' services (target-marketing/advertising) deliver business results as well.
All of this is to say that SaaS is not only sound, but is already a huge software market for those that implement the right kinds of software services - that deliver business results.
UPDATE: I read this post of Wainright's AFTER I wrote this post. And he included such good analysis of API-accessed services like AdWords vs. On-Demand services that I included yet another link to his blog. That guy is awesome.
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