Affiliate Programs and Affiliate Reviews
If you read Steve Jobs by Walter Isaacson, you get a good sense of the rivalry between Jobs and Bill Gates and Microsoft, or between Apple and the rest of the world more generally. But the rivalries were really between that past/present — and the future — and Jobs and Gates were only playing parts that were scripted long ago. The play’s outlines are of insurgent new ideas against the status quo.
One of my favorite Mark Twain quotes is, "History doesn’t repeat itself, but it rhymes." I thought of it again last week when I read about the price war going on in the Infrastructure as a Service space. Larry Dignon made the clever observation that he paid more for electricity in January than it cost to get IT infrastructure now that Microsoft and Amazon have decided to double down on the infrastructure game.
Yammer announced an impressive $85 million financing recently. You might already know that Yammer provides enterprise social networks, the kind of collaborative spaces that enable employees to "swarm" on issues to achieve resolution or deal with a customer issue, for instance.
You can gauge the success and financial health of almost any company by looking at revenues. At least this is true in the short term. Since revenue is a lagging indicator — with the exception of monthly recurring revenue that subscription companies measure — it only tells you where you’ve been, not where you are going.
You may remember the subscription economy from previous posts. It’s one way to make sense of cloud computing and the many new and very different ways of doing business on the Internet. We’re most familiar with Software as a Service and how different it is from conventional licenses; so familiar, in fact, that I don’t need to describe it for you here.