Apple has made significant (relative) intakes into the OS business. I mean, wow, Apple is cool. I like the Aqua looks, the whole iPod culture (which to be true is the one making Apple popular – I even bought a pink mini for my daughter Anaïs). But a mouse with one button? Hell … if a command line guy like me is really desperate to get a mouse, he certainly won’t be getting a mouse without a middle button, not to talk about a mouse with a single button! I still think the single coolest feature in X11 for donkey years has been the middle button. Anyway, I am digressing.
I hate information locking and since I am paying for virtual private hosting I thought I would move out of blogger. I also changed the layout significantly, and used a theme by Neil Merton.
I came some time ago across an interesting buzzword, mashboards, which is really starting to show that at the end of the day what really matters is systems integration. Where we had mashups in the B2C world, we now have mashboards in the B2B world.
As we discussed originally while looking at Web 2.0 software-as-a-service business models, we saw how hosted software is not a competitive offering for mid- to large companies over 500 employees. New research by Quocirca and Forrester now comes to a similar conclusion, and they add that there is a grey zone between 250 and 500 employees where it’s not clear the value in hosted services. Quocirca concludes saying that hosted services are rarely cheaper than in-house services, overseeing the 5.7 million businesses in the US under 500 employees. I am still to read both research reports to understand the full details.
There seems to be at least 17 startups taking on the A-Team of the desktop applications, and possibly another hundred thousand teenagers creating their own little Web 2.0 application-du-jour in communities like entrepreneur extraordinaire Mark Andressen’s Ning.