deal architect

Windows 7: Winning Battle, Losing War?

“But here's a funny thing. By the end of the week, I looked at what I was doing on the tiny screen - and found that just about everything involved software not made by Microsoft. So I'd installed the Firefox browser in preference to Internet Explorer, and started writing documents using Google Docs rather than Microsoft Word, and checking my e-mail via Gmail. As for music, I'd installed iTunes, and to feed my social networking needs, I placed Tweetdeck on the taskbar.

I had ended up furnishing my new Windows 7 home with some familiar items from elsewhere - so perhaps the operating system matters less than it once did.”

says Rory Cellan-Jones after reviewing the new software for BBC.

In general, the feedback about 7 is it’s more stable, faster than Vista.

But in the 5+ years Microsoft lost with Vista, the world has clearly moved on to SaaS, to social networks, to mobile..as Roy and most other consumers will testify

Update: Anshu points out the lag will continue in future "And so, if Microsoft recognized a killer feature like 'conversations' in Gmail, and decided to add it to the product last year (2008), the product will be released in 2010 and by the time people replace their PCs and corporations adopt the latest as 'standard' - it will be 2013 to 2015 for many."

The disruption from Global Warming

A blog which focuses on disruption should highlight what Discover considers the 9 industries which will be most disrupted by climate change…

• Wine making
• Fishing
• Ski resorts
• Other tourism
• Insurance
• Forestry
• Mining
• Meat
• Energy

I am surprised they did not include real estate – guess my Florida property will do fine :)

More Innovation

On New Florence

Starbucks’ new high-tech coffee

Mainstreaming tech for the disabled

Best Buy as Art Gallery

One-touch Ping Diabetes system

The lost art of changing flat tires

Asian Drama

No, not the Gunnar Myrdal Nobel Prize winning classic. What is going on in the Galleon case. A net of S. Asian (Sri Lankan, Indian, Pakistani) immigrants accused.

By a DA who is also S. Asian (Indian) in origin.

Shades of Giuliani versus Mob in 1983. For which the Italian government actually gave him an award.

Not sure Preet Bharara will get an award from India for the Galleon case. though, even if he wins prosecutions.

Maybe a Bollywood movie in his honor, though? 

Introducing a new sponsor: salesforce.com

Given the disruption theme of my blog, I am pleased to welcome salesforce.com to the past and present gallery of innovators and disruptors who sponsor this and the New Florence. New Renaissance blog.

One of their differentiators in the SaaS market is their PaaS – Platform-as-a-Service – Force.com. Readers may finding interesting this IDC report based on interviews of 10 companies that developed custom apps on Force.com and ran them for at least 12 months. Pretty impressive results including 3 month payback - check them out here

Disclosure: Blog sponsor policy is outlined here

Intacct Webinar slides

If you would like the slides Dan Druker of Intacct and I used for our Webinar on Wednesday – The Mandate for Cloud Financials – you can access them by registering here

SAP TCO – Enterprise Advocates Webinar

Dennis Howlett, Ray Wang, Frank Scavo and I hosted a webinar on the topic of SAP TCO reduction. Lively session -  we went 20 minutes over as the questions kept flowing and covered plenty of ground. And there was plenty of live Twitter feedback at #EAcall

Dennis has posted a summary and a few of the slides we used. We will shortly be putting together a package with all the slides, speaker notes and the fuller q&a.

Many more SAP-Siemens like software renegotiations

It is a small sample, but one with gravitas. Kash Rangan and team at BofA/Merrill Lynch surveyed 21 CIO’s from major, well recognized U.S. organizations in the Fortune 1000 and across different industries and found improving success rates around their renegotiation of maintenance contracts -  similar to what appears to have happened at Siemens

Mark Hurd : Cancel your HP/EDS Outsourcing Contracts

Well, he did not say that. But he came close.

“”We have 1,000 hacks a day and I can’t tell you why, but they keep showing up. We wouldn’t put anything material in nature outside the firewall.”

Actually he meant oh, you are fine with HP/EDS infrastructure, but now with amazon or salesforce.com or Google, you better watch out.

Ingenious.

And insulting to the large customers who are signing up in increasingly large scale with SaaS and cloud providers. And doing so after crawling through the data centers and networks of these providers.

And insulting to the firms which are issuing SAS70 Type Ii audit reports on their infrastructure.

As Larry Dignan summarizes “Here’s a guy who was speaking as a CEO running a massive company that happens to sell infrastructure that’ll revolve around cloud computing.”

Advantage Michael Dell – he stands next to Marc Benioff at conferences and writes a foreword to his new book knowing full well Marc is already one of his biggest customers.

This was originally posted on the Enterprise Advocates blog

SAP-Siemens: He said, she said

“SAP said Wednesday that Siemens has signed a three-year renewal of its software maintenance agreement, an announcement that would seem to quell widespread speculation that the global engineering and electronics company was considering dumping vendor-provided support in favor of lower-cost alternatives.” PC World

I checked with Helmuth Guembel at  Strategy Partners (I worked with him at Gartner) who is close to a number of SAP customers in Europe. His sources tell him other details SAP chose not to publicize.

He hears Siemens got the deal at under euro 20 million a year compared to the euro 35 million they were paying earlier. They also got perks such as MaxAttention, extended maintenance on some Siemens specific  enhancements thrown in and also got some shelfware off maintenance.

SAP will, of course, publicly deny this and Siemens will, of course, publicly not confirm it. And they are very justified in not sharing the gory details.

What cannot be denied is more and more mature SAP shops are questioning the value of the maintenance dollar. If only SAP would let the maintenance rates float - so far lower for mature SAP customers, all this gossip, intrigue and badwill with customers would go away.

Instead SAP, will like Oracle, let customers leak away to Rimini and other third party maintenance providers one by one– Oracle’s losses are already in the hundreds of customers. Or discount heavily when push comes to shove.

And try to spin via PR every thing is just honky-dory.