by Jeffrey Mann | October 19, 2010 | 7 Comments
In an announcement from San Francisco today, Microsoft provided more details about next year’s planned revamp of its Business Productivity Online Suite (BPOS) cloud-based collaboration suite. Gartner’s official take on this announcement can be found here, but here are some of my thoughts. The new brand name is the most striking part of this announcement. [...]
Category: Cloud Google Microsoft collaboration social software Tags: BPOS, Cloud, Microsoft, Office 365, SaaS
by Jeffrey Mann | September 26, 2010 | 10 Comments
I’ve been thinking about “creepiness” over the last couple weeks. I’ve been finding the concept come up more and more as I speak with end users and vendors about social software, because it is becoming a real barrier to adoption as end users react with sometimes unexpected revulsion at what seems normal or trivial to [...]
Category: Google compliance email privacy social media social software technology Tags: creepiness, creepy, gcreep, Google, privacy, SNA, social network analysis, social networking
by Jeffrey Mann | August 5, 2010 | 14 Comments
So Google announced yesterday that it was pulling the plug on its high profile Wave initiative. Gartner will soon publish a First Take with the official reaction, but the way this announcement was made got me thinking. I will not cry for Wave, but I find this an unsettling move. Not because Google has killed [...]
Category: Google collaboration social software startup Tags: enterprise, Google, startups, wave
by Jeffrey Mann | December 19, 2009 | 2 Comments
It was a hectic, but fun and informative two days at entrepreneur Loic Lemeur’s LeWeb conference for high tech startups in Paris earlier this month. I was looking for exposure to new ideas and activities, and mostly achieve that. That’s me at the lower right of the picture. For those not there, Ustream has posted [...]
Category: Cloud Events Facebook Google LeWeb Vendors europe social software startup Tags: europe, Facebook, lemeur, leweb, venture capital, youtube
by Jeffrey Mann | December 18, 2009 | 8 Comments
Google CEO Eric Schmidt is getting a lot of flak for a statement he made about privacy in a CNBC interview. Here is the quote that many people are upset about: If you have something that you don’t want anyone to know, maybe you shouldn’t be doing it in the first place. Wow! What an [...]
Category: Google privacy technology Tags: cnbc, Eric Schmidt, Google, privacy, something to hide, spanking
by Jeffrey Mann | November 9, 2009 | 4 Comments
The time period after an intense conference like Symposium closes down is always a bit strange for analysts. We inhabit an isolated world with the delegates, revolving around presentations, workshops, 1 on 1 meetings, receptions, meals and (usually not enough) sleep. It’s the same for attendees, but there are a slew of people making sure [...]
Category: Events Google IBM Microsoft being an analyst collaboration symposium Tags:
by Jeffrey Mann | October 22, 2009 | 2 Comments
A journalist for an industry publication in Chile asked me some questions recently about Web 2.0 business models, when there doesn’t seem to be a lot of business actually going on. Here are some of the edited answers. Do you think it was a bad business decision for Google to acquire YouTube, in terms of [...]
Category: Google Twitter microblogging technology Tags:
by Jeffrey Mann | July 9, 2009 | 9 Comments
Before I was an analyst, I can remember lamenting why the people in our industry were so obsessed with chips and operating systems. It was around the time when DEC released the Alpha RISC chip, and rivalry between the different strains of UNIX and Windows was at its highest point. The horse race between BSD, [...]
Category: Apple Google IBM Microsoft technology Tags: chrome, Operating systems, OSX, RISC, Unix, Windows
by Jeffrey Mann | July 1, 2009 | 2 Comments
Tonight I finally took time to watch the entire demo of Google Wave from the recent IO conference. I had already read a lot about it, but had not yet found an hour and a half to watch the entire presentation. This is a pretty busy period, so finding that much time to do anything [...]
Category: Google collaboration social software Tags: google wave, video demos, youtube
by Jeffrey Mann | April 8, 2009 | 6 Comments
Last week saw fevered speculation about an impending acquisition of Twitter by Google, and just as much fervent debunking of those rumours. I don’t pretend to have any inside information, so I won’t comment on whether this will happen or not. We don’t like commenting on rumours anyway. But I do have some ideas about [...]
Category: Google Twitter microblogging social software Tags: acquisitions, business model, Google, twitter
