Search Results

My greatest impression of the "Generally Accepted Accounting Principles" is that they are no help in planning or making predictions. Although it has been a while since I read an accounting text book, I seem to recall statements of assumptions like: "There will be no war. Inflation will be moderate. There will be no recession." Of course that's not reality and, in my opinion, if such are your assumptions at the get go, then all you are really doing is failure-proofing your work. Later on you can look rather sage when you say, "Don't blame me, remember the assumptions!" Whatever...

Salesforce.com didn't get mad, they got even. Going after their own weaknesses with Sforce and broadening their application footprint with Appforce and ApplicationExchange shows Salesforce.com doesn't get mad at enterprise vendors who have tried unsuccessfully to compete, they get even by attacking their own weaknesses. Kudos to Denis Pombriant for his great coverage of this area of the market as well...

Ever notice how these year end reviews and a pundit's previous forward-looking prognostications rarely synch up? Of course not! Analysts and pundits are great at predicting the future, but lousy at coming back a year later to review how they did. Well, I'm different. I don't care if I was wrong last year as long as I was funny. Here are a few of my prognostications from 2004 and how they look today...

Let's talk about the newspaper industry. No. On second thought, they're just a special case of media, so let's talk about media in general -- and CRM. You wouldn't know it by looking at this Web site which is plenty high-tech, dynamic, and customer focused, but the Web sites of many media outlets are pretty poor and indicate that their owners lack much in the CRM department...

It's time to start thinking about what comes after CRM ...

I have always believed that I shouldn't use this bully pulpit to settle personal scores and that is why the vendor in this story will remain anonymous. But this is such a delicious story about the limits of CRM that I couldn't resist at least bringing it up ...

You could say I am a foodie -- food and its preparation mean a lot to me ...

Last week, Microsoft announced its embrace of the Web and software as a service (SaaS) but there might be less there than meets the eye. Rather than a bold strategy to move the company and the industry ahead, I see it as more of a hedging strategy to help the company hold on ...

I have been involved in some situations recently that have caused me to think a lot about the idea of the customer experience. I made a presentation -- by phone during a nor'easter -- last week to an executive education seminar at Duke University's business school. Martha Rogers, whose work with Don Peppers I have previously written about and, I believe, is very important to the evolution of CRM, invited me. I am also preparing for a webinar later in November sponsored by CRMA in Atlanta. The webinar is loosely framed by the concept of customer loyalty -- getting, keeping, and using it. Other speakers will include Ginger Conlon and Paul Greenberg, two of my favorite people in CRM...

If you came to Boston last week for Siebel's User Week conference you might have been disappointed. With the impending purchase of the company by Oracle, it would have been easy to regard the event as some kind of "last hurrah" -- and what better place than Boston for the atmospherics to pull it off. But instead of a funeral, you were treated to something more akin to the technology industry equivalent of an Irish wake. I can explain...

Last week in New York, Salesforce.com improved its position in the CRM suite market when it introduced version 2.0 of its service and support offering. The company has quickly come up the curve to a point where it has approximate parity with other companies offering a range of support options including a knowledge base and FAQ capabilities as well as live agent support, though it looks like the agent desktop will come later...

Going to the RightNow user conference feels like a trip to another world. Aptly called the RightNow Summit, the affair was held last week in Big Sky, Mont. at a lodge whose elevation is about 7,800 feet above sea level. At that elevation, you see nothing but tall pine forests and the occasional deer, elk, or moose. And, yes, it snowed, even in early October, like Mother Nature wanted to make a serious point -- not that she needed to -- when you first get there, climbing stairs carries its own admonition...

I had a wide-ranging conversation the other day with a software company CEO in Silicon Valley. If anyone could have insights into what's been going on lately in the software industry it would be this guy. He's a former Oracle executive -- that doesn't exactly limit the field much does it? -- and a keen observer of the front office software market. I won't use his name because we were discussing something else for background, mostly the future of the enterprise software business...

It's worth taking another look at the Siebel-Oracle merger from a different angle. Too often we make a snap judgment in this kind of situation and it becomes fixed in the mind never to be seriously re-examined. Rather than that, I did a thought experiment the other day starting with the presumption that Larry Ellison has a grand strategy and that the strategy will work. It goes like this...

OK, so here we are a week later and what do we know for sure? Well, lots of things. First, Oracle now has seven assorted CRM packages from its acquisitions and those of its acquired companies -- if you count Siebel. The issue with counting Siebel is that the deal is not done yet. Don't look for the shareholders to derail this one since many have been clamoring for greater returns on their investments for quite a while. And don't look to the SEC to stop this one either. Unlike Peoplesoft, Siebel wants to be acquired, so the whole process should go much faster...

It's very rare that you get clean demarcations between historical eras. Maybe the asteroid hitting the earth 65 million years ago was such an event, but I wasn't there to experience it so I can't tell you. Monday, Sept. 12, 2005 will go down as a deep line in the sand identifying the before and after in the enterprise software industry. It was the day that Siebel agreed to be acquired by Oracle, and coincidently, the day that Salesforce.com opened up its Dreamforce user conference in San Francisco...

I started a blog last week and while that might make me sound like some cutting edge guru, I am anything but. My friend Paul Greenberg, whose blog inspired me because he has let me post a few entries, informed me that there are already more than 14 million of these things, and a new one is forming about every pico-second. In the hierarchy of small, a nano-anything is a billionth, e.g. 10E-9, but there are smaller smalls, for example, pico-something is a trillionth e.g.10E-12, and femto- is the impossibly tiny quadrillionth or 10E-15. (You get to digress like this on a blog. Who cares?) The point is that blogs are forming very fast and for good reasons...

I was doing research for a book a few weeks ago when a friend recommended that I re-read Geoffrey Moore's Inside the Tornado and I am glad she did. Tornado has to be about 10 years old now which puts it in a very interesting historical perspective. It's old enough to have looked back on the amazing growth of companies like HP and its printer business, Oracle, Intel, and even DEC. But by the same token, enough time has gone by to show how useful many of Moore's concepts were in forecasting the emergence of the CRM market...

I love it when I can find independent verification for an idea and that's what happened on Monday when Walker Information released its "2005 Walker Loyalty Report for Software and Hardware." In case you are not familiar with Walker, this Indianapolis-based company has been studying customer loyalty since the 1930s; somebody ought to put them in the Wikipedia under that topic...

Just when I thought there was nothing going on in the dog days of summer, along came Wired magazine's August issue to remind me that yesterday marked the 10th anniversary of Netscape's IPO. That makes it a good time to stop for a moment and ponder how many ways the Internet has changed our lives, especially where a company's relationship with its customers is concerned...