Seven Vices, Virtues - and Software Business Models

I had breakfast with Tim Chou during my West Coast trip. Tim has probably helped SaaS gain respectability in business more than any other living person - and he has done it via academia. He runs a seminar at Stanford U.  where tech executives make guest presentation. And the list has been dominated by SaaS company executives. The soft spot for SaaS goes back to Tim's role as President of Oracle On Demand way back in 2000, when the term SaaS had not even been coined.

He has a recently released a book titled Seven: Software Business Models where he talks about several successful SaaS companies and compares its business model to traditional on-premise, open source, outsourcing among others. It's a good tour guide to the software industry, its history and twists and turns, and at around 175 pages a nice read.

The Chinese character for 7 on the book cover led me to ask about his experiences in China. He has gone there on a regular basis for the last two decades. With his story telling style, I suspect he could similarly catalog China's recent evolution as eloquently as he can talk about the software industry.