Ben Kepes
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@dcook11 In Francisco's defence (and hey, I don't know the guy from a bar of soap) - having attended a number of events of this ilk, there does seem to be a real tendency towards lightweighted belief as opposed to deep critical thought.
The bigger issue here is that, one could suggest, this tendency is a response to societal changes and the demands of an attention-poor and satisfaction-demanding public.
Francisco - an incredible important and astute post. I was at a conference last week (an excellent event BTW, no criticism there) where one of the speaker roused the audience into an Obama-like "yes we can" fever with such themes as "Fuck misogyny, our industry is rife with it" and "Designers, demand your place at the board table" and other snippets. Rather than critical and analytic thinking around the statements, the crowd was carried away in what, quite frankly, felt a little too much like a Nuremberg rally for my comfort.
I sense the tide will eventfully turn - once everyone has had their five minutes of fame and the high-falutin ideas are proven to be nonsensical, we may just return to a more robust way of looking at and talking about these things.
Here's hoping
@njyx Not me dude, I don't have a TV, or cable, or Netflix, or Hulu, or or or..... Hippies y'know
@njyx Oh and one more thing - this is probably the best thing to happen to Ben, Sarah, Hermione and the rest in their careers. They knew what it was and were likely pretty sure how it would turn out but did they ever get themselves some fame in the interim....
@njyx Meh, I'm not so sure dude.... actually yeah I am, the show is awful, but then again so is most "reality" TV. To simply single out this show is probably unfair - all modern TV is shit... Luckily we all have ValleyWag and Business Insider to keep us highbrow....
;)
@adron @benkepes Adron, it was a tongue in cheek snark - pretty much all of the folks in here pimping their company's wares are friends, it's all good. Gotta put food on the table and all that... / @themaria @AaronEndre @kevinmarks
@AaronEndre @benkepes @themaria @kevinmarks @scott_allison @sarahcuda "outraged"? Aaron, you're in luck. I have a halo just sitting here waiting for you - you are indeed the caped crusader of consumer protection and we love you for it...
Oh and I'm sure Huddle is stoked too
;)
@kevinmarks yessum. And Maria is, I'm sure, stoked to have the support of Salesforce behind her ;)
All good, just enjoying being the malcontent in this group of folks
Man, is there anyone commenting on this post who isn't marketing their own product? @themaria for Yammer, @AaronEndre for Huddle, @kevinmarks for Chatter, @scott_allison for Tibbr, @bretthellman for Hell, @rurikbradbury for Unison.... I bet @sararcuda is feeling like the madam at a great big knocking shop right now... It's holiday season folks, quit selling for a week or two
*ducks*
@AaronEndre @themaria Oh but I loves me some nice product marketing masquerading as informed blog commentary.... ;)
Happy days....
@JohanKlarin Thanks Johan, I don't have breakout %ages in terms of what Dell is investing but I believe that yes, it is substantial and an integral part of where they see themselves in the future. Thanks for the comment!
Hay-mish - great post. I've written on many occasions of the fact that I'm dubious about Dropbox - it is an amazing product but the company has been built with a surprisingly immature attitude - not so much technically (barring recent problems) but more from a "we're building an enterprise product and we're going to create a strcutre with sales, support, service, SLAs and maturity to back that up".
Many people question Google as an enterprise-ready product, but they're far, far more mature than Dropbox is. I typify Dropbox as a product tht was created by a few guys and who were surprised by their own success. It's had amazing consumer uptake but unless they get some real enterprise smarts in there soon - they're toast.
The other issue is that Dropbox is unlikely to come close to the economies of scale that Google achieves - if it comes down to a simple price war, the 'plex will win...
While the videos started off a little distasteful (to be honest some very smart and moderately humble software execs came across as... douchebags) this latest video was very valuable. Aaron is right on the money with his three step classification of users (consumer, SMB, enterprise). I would say however that the challenge for anyone heading for the top end of town is really building out the models that enterprise needs. Flexible licensing, integration with their existing systems (both hardware and software) and a maturity level that they're used to from legacy vendors are all important. Oxygen Cloud (@juliamak) who replied below works for them, is taking an interesting approach to the problem space by bringing "cloud-like" document sharing and collaboration to existing enterprise storage - that's one valid approach that will succeed in the medium term, the Box approach is another take.
It comes down to maturity, while @levie is undoubtedly a little different from what CIOs are used to, Box as a corporation is articulating a consistent and mature story, which (in my view) DropBox is not. Yes these consumer tools have significant enterprise adoption through rogue IT, but the key here is for vendors like Box and Oxygen cloud to move into the space, have a conversation with CIOs, explain the rogue IT that is occurring within their organizations, and have a credible and secure alternative to slide in to deliver the agility that users need, with the robustness that the C-suite demands.
@dealarchitect Awesome reply Vinnie - would love to see @hamishmckenzie continue this theme further....
Great post Hamish - I've been meaning to comment for awhile. I agree that we're seeing a big shift in enterprise IT - away from monolithic products, from massive capital expenditure, from ludicrous maintenance fees.However I respectfully disagree and believe it would be wrongly hasty to write off the legacy vendors this early. In the past few weeks we've seen some massive acquisitions - SAP buying SuccessFactors, Oracle buying Taleo and RightNow - this trend of consolidation and protectionism by the large vendors will continue.
Just the other day Larry Ellison was excited to announce that, post spending spree, Oracle is now the second largest enterprise Cloud vendor globally on a recurring revenue basis. SAP has had a few false starts, but it has an amazing cloud Tsar now in Lars Dalgaard and it looks like SuccessFactors will be the launching pad for a newly invigorated cloud strategy for SAP. Then Microsoft amazed even the most prescient of pundits a week or two back by embracing a world beyond their own proprietary languages and even tipped its hat in the direction of open source.
Yes disruption in absolutely in the cards but all indications that I have are that traditional vendors are now realizing that they need to disrupt themselves before the likes of box, atlassian, yammer, zendesk, enStratus et al do it for them. Watching the (somewhat awkward) videos from teh CEO dinner that Sarah hosted, it becomes obvious that even the poster child of this new age, Box CEO Aaron Levie, realizes that the industry is highly cyclical and that consolidation will occur alongside the fragmentation.
I'm totally with Mike Cannon-Brookes on this one - don't dismiss the legacy players (both at the enterprise, and the SMB end of town), just yet....
Good post @alexwilliams - as you suggest the question here is one of social as a fabric vs social as a bolt on. This is being played out by other vendors as well - witness the differences between the salesforce and the netsuite approaches
http://www.diversity.net.nz/social-an-enterprise-overlay-or-an-enterprise-fabric/2012/06/12/
@hamishmckenzie @benkepes The best I've ever had? From a super smart cloud developer evangelist person. "Wow, you're from New Zealand. That's awesome, it must be so cool living so close to Egypt". I shit you not....
And that is why I'm going to leave my laptop, head to C4 and enjoy an ace flat white... Oh and yeah, since we're both kiwis I figured it wouldn't be lost on you...
@hamishmckenzie And anyway - you're a Kiwi? Dude, you so look like a hobbit... and do you know I just love FoTC? ;-) #HeardItAllBefore
@hamishmckenzie So what I'm working on right now is a startup pivoted from a previous startup which hadn't quite reached escape velocity. Anyway, this new pivot seeks to take the seemingly orthoganally opposed trends of big data and wee data and, by using a SoLoMo enabled predictive analytics play, leverage the two to derive some insights which look set to really amp the social graph. All in all I'm super excited about this play and have super-angel's jumping over each other to take the lead on our adviser round which we're using as a bridge to take us to our first couple of angel rounds. Of course we're going to take around $2M on the adviser round but (to keep up the orthogonal theme) we're running this totally as a lean startup 9at least for this iteration)
Or something...