I happened across a great blog post from Chris Bucchere, founder and CEO of BDG – the folks behind The Social Collective.  In response to a post about Robert Scoble losing his Facebook account because it was mistaken for a spam account, Chris wrote:

If you think there are safer or better places than Facebook to put “your data” on the internet, you’re also mistaken. Take a peek at Google’s TOS. In particular, read section 11, where you hand over all rights to “your” content to them (except basic copyright, which you automatically have any time you produce an original work and put your name on it). You’re basically giving Google a free license to use your content — even for their own commercial gain!

For your reading ease, here’s the part of Google’s TOS in particular that Chris was referencing:

By submitting, posting or displaying the content you give Google a perpetual, irrevocable, worldwide, royalty-free, and non-exclusive licence [sic] to reproduce, adapt, modify, translate, publish, publicly perform, publicly display and distribute any Content which you submit, post or display on or through, the Services.

(Yes, Google’s TOS agreement does indeed include a misspelling of the word license.)

Chris goes on to point out that this is because Google intends to parse the content and make it available to advertisers so that they’ll know what advertisements to display to you.  The exact section of Google’s TOS doesn’t indicate that you lose any rights over the content that you enter.  You still retain a irrevocable license over it.  But it is clear that Google claims a right to reuse it as they need, and to transfer that right to anyone else.

This brings up an interesting scenario, although probably somewhat unlikely.  Imagine if you posted some great ideas about a product you were building on Google Docs, and you had no intention of disclosing this information with any of your competitors because it was so fantastic.  What would happen if Google either purposefully or accidentally stole that very idea and started building a competing site?  This gets into a legal area that I’m totally unfamiliar with, but would love to find an IP lawyer who might be able to work out the possibilities.  It would seem, though, that Google could make claim that the work you posted was prior art, making any claim to a patent you might have (or be in the process of filing) void and null.

I’m no fan of software patents, though, but I am curious what might happen.

Oh, and remember that Google promised if they do use your ideas, you’ll at least get a shout-out on their blog.

Also of interest: cloud computing is expected to be less frequently used, with only 10% of developers using cloud services (although many of the SaaS vendors may ultimately leverage cloud computing vendors on the back-end to provide scalability, so who knows).  Development of RIA, or rich internet applications, was also expected by 68% of the respondents.

I still think this isn’t too surprising: cloud computing as a concept is useful for folks that want to take the halfway step.  It’s great if you don’t want to own datacenter maintenance, or if you want to deploy a piece of enterprise software on a scalable infrastructure, but there are more upfront benefits in jumping into a SaaS solution right away rather than taking the cloud computing interim step.

Also, with so many varied definitions of RIA, and so many easy-to-use frameworks (Microsoft Silverlight, Adobe Flex, Sun JavaFX), it’s not surprising to see such a high percentage of respondents say they’ll be working on an RIA project.

[c/o InformationWeek]

First there was VMWare and Microsoft Virtual Server (VHD) virtual machine images to demonstrate software.  The problem there was always: who wants to download a 600-900mb VMWare image and deploy it on their personal laptop?  And furthermore, who has the local computing resources for it? 

Now Adobe has taken it one step further, offering 10 hours of runtime on an Amazon EC2 hosted image that includes LiveCycle ES Solution Components for customers of the Adobe Enterprise Developer Program.

Additional details from Adobe:

• Provides pre-installed, pre-configured virtual instances of LiveCycle ES.
• Reduce time required to download, install and boot new server instances.
• Develop LC ES applications in a fraction of the time.
• Virtual instances can be used as to build proof-of-concepts

Using virtual machines hosted on the cloud is a good way to let customers play around in a sandbox environment.  If you’re not already a pure-play SaaS provider, and you don’t have a sandbox datacenter of your own that you want to maintain, this could be a good alternative.

[Adobe LiveCycle ES Developer Express c/o InformationWeek]

Here’s a round-up of three that I know of that focus on enterprise data (including Oracle, SAP, and Microsoft applications):

• Jitterbit
• Talend
• SnapLogic

Of the three, Jitterbit is my favorite so far.  They seem the most advanced in terms of capabilities, and their editor UI looks the cleanest.  I haven’t spent much time playing with all of them yet, though, so I’m not sure what the pros/cons are of each of them (yet).

It’s interesting to note that all three of the ones I mentioned are offered as open source.  Most of them offer free tools for smaller scale projects, and an enterprise version for larger projects.

And then there’s Gnip, which seems like a good solution for SaaS providers to create data endpoints that only get polled when data is updated, rather than periodic polls that often end up in empty sets.

On the first point about SaaS disillusionment: it is pretty clear that there’s a lot of hype and excitement about around SaaS right now, but that’s pretty normal.  SOA and BPM went through the same hype curves, and SOA in particular is currently at the tail end of what I would describe as a prolonged trough of disillusionment.  BPM, on the other hand, is finally mature enough to be providing companies with business value.

It’s certainly probable that some companies may get in over their heads and invest too quickly in SaaS without proper planning, but that can really happen with any kind of software initiative.  Just think about all the disaster stories you’ve probably heard about CRM or ERP deployments gone awry and how costly it ended up being.  But that doesn’t mean that all types of SaaS solutions and targets are going to end up being big disappointments.  As I wrote earlier, some target for SaaS conversion are inherently easier than others.  And smaller companies who are looking for new investments in CRM, ERP or other business productivity tools might find value right away in solutions like Salesforce.com, Zoho, SugarCRM or products from 37signals.

On the second point about SaaS being a platform: I think this is true for companies that still think of their business applications needing to be built all on a single platform.  The problem, as I’ve discussed earlier, is that a single platform almost always ends up creating a big data silo, where it’s easy to move data around on the platform but hard to write connectors to other applications.  Companies that have started to invest in SOA are probably less concerned about having a single platform – they may already be realizing the benefits of having loosely coupled systems that can interoperate regardless of the underlying development platform.

SaaS providers should certainly learn from what’s been through the hype curve before to try to prevent SaaS products from hitting an extended trough of disillusionment.  As I mentioned before, in part this can be done with data portability, but I think this also can come quite effectively by providing customers with tools to prove ROI.   For example, SaaS providers offering dashboard-like ROI calculators that can show a customer their SaaS usage.  SaaS providers could even potentially show aggregate data other companies of similar size and industry, that could give them an idea of how efficiently they are operating – akin to comparing site metrics in analytics tools like Google Analytics.

It’s true that some business software just won’t prove to be a viable SaaS offering at all, and some customers won’t be able to adopt it because of their business restrictions, but there are already SaaS success stories for both customers and vendors today, and there are likely to be many more in the future.

In an interview with Weier, Lye discussed Oracle’s approach to CRM On Demand as opposed to Salesforce.com.  In particular, Lye brought up CRM On Demand’s “Pod” structure, wherein customers can either be in a single-tenant or multi-tenant datacenter.  Some customers get their own dedicated “pods”, while others share theirs with customers that share similar qualities (for example, all want maintenance to run on a particular day).

Lye positions this design as a competitive advantage over Salesforce.com, but to me this actually seems a like an extra cost for Oracle without much benefit to customers.  No single pod can be perfect and completely invulnerable to outages, and if I’m a customer of Oracle’s CRM SaaS, and my competitor is too, I’d be happy if both me and my competition was without CRM for a period of time, and not take a chance that my pod may be down while the competition’s is up and running.

In terms of the extra cost to Oracle, running multiple “pods”, all with potentially different releases of the CRM software, and different usage levels makes it difficult to manage the data center.  It seems like a lot of extra management cost.  If that management cost is passed on to the customer, it’s probably going to make them turn to a competitor who is running their datacenter more efficiently.  If Oracle eats the cost, they’re shaving off profit from a business which is already has notoriously slim profit margins.

Weier goes on to write:

But my sense is Oracle is going to be looking at any way it can to weaken Salesforce.com’s position of strength in the CRM SaaS market. SaaS may not be a highly profitable business model for software companies, but Ellison & team clearly want a piece of it

I believe this is absolutely true, and is what I wrote about earlier regarding Larry Ellison’s recent comments on cloud computing.  SaaS is just in its infancy.  As SaaS matures, customers and enterprise software companies will reap significant rewards.  Ellison appears to be readying Oracle to claim Salesforce.com as its prize in case their own CRM On Demand business fails to gain traction.

Sun Microsystems

According to the official press release:

The Q-layer technology simplifies cloud management and allows users to quickly provision and deploy applications, a key component in Sun’s strategy to enable building public and private clouds. As businesses continue to rely more on technology to drive mission-critical processes, the agility of the datacenter determines the flexibility of the entire company. The Q-layer software supports instant provisioning of services such as servers, storage, bandwidth and applications, enabling users to scale their own environments to meet their specific requirements.

Looking at Q-Layer’s website, it looks like a good buy for Sun. They provide pretty easy to use Microsoft Windows-based tools to deploy new virtual machine images onto datacenters, which should meld nicely with Sun’s previous announcement about their intentions with cloud computing.  Q-layer also provides a customized OS for cloud computing called NephOS:

The main components of the Q-layer NephOS Platform include a repository-based model of the data center, termed the Data Center Resource Planning (DRP) model, a Data center Abstraction Layer (DAL), and a uniform data center scipting environment, called Qshell. This provides in turn the abstract model, the translation and orchestration logic, and the extension language required to fully enable an agile data center.

The price of home computers has dropped significantly.  It’s now cheaper than ever to buy a home PC, and with most of the best applications on the web being free or advertisement driven, the only recurring cost is the monthly fee for an Internet connection (unless you’re using a free municipally-operated WiFi service or public hotspot).  It seems like market forces are attempting to drop it even lower, and Microsoft is looking at how to make that happen.

I’ve read lots of opinion articles and speculation before that Microsoft should consider making a "free" version of Windows that is entirely ad-driven, as a way to sway people from switching to alternate operating systems like Linux, or even beat Google to the punch assuming they ever enter the OS market.  The suggestion was that even businesses would consider switching to Vista if they knew that it was free.

Here’s one final rambling note: it seems a bit ironic how AdWare and SpyWare aren’t well tolerated practices for desktop applications, but it’s okay for sites like Facebook to have targeted ads.

Ellison recently made yet another dig against Cloud Computing, this time with a particular brand name in mind.  During a meeting with financial analysts yesterday, Ellison mentioned that Oracle’s most recent quarter’s success was notable for it’s “series of competitive wins versus Salesforce.com [including] our largest deal ever of salesforce-on-demand, or cloud computing, or whatever you want to call it.”

There are several things that are rather interesting about Ellison’s rants against Cloud Computing and SaaS. 

First, there’s no question that Ellison knows that Cloud Computing is not simply a new buzzword.  It’s more plausible that it’s a part of his strategy to continue to drive sales of Oracle applications, including Oracle CRM.  Larry also knows that most SaaS providers have poor margins – it’s generally more profitable for software companies to sell licenses and consulting services than it is to host and rent software.

Second, Ellison owns a large stake in Salesforce.com.  When he’s not winning a fight, he doesn’t hesitate to acquire the challenger.  Witness, for example, the Seibel story.  Tom Seibel was an Oracle executive for a number of years, even helping to build the software that drove Oracle’s marketing department.  When sales of Oracle CRM remained flat against Seibel, Ellison made a wise move to acquire the competition.

Finally, between Microsoft, Oracle, IBM and SAP, Oracle is probably the least experienced and prepared to launch a scalable SaaS offering.  Microsoft, for example, has had years of experience with the consumer web, building out services like hotmail.com and msn.com for over a decade.  IBM can build its own customized servers for scalability, optimized for performance and virtualization.  And SAP already has experience and market exposure with its on-demand offerings. 

Oracle has some limited SaaS offerings, and is partnered with Amazon’s EC2 Web Service to allow customers to deploy Oracle software, including Oracle Database and Oracle WebLogic Server onto Amazon’s EC2 platform.  Oracle could potentially leverage their partnership with HP, but they don’t build hardware themselves, which puts them at a slight disadvantage.

There’s no question that Oracle is preparing to build out SaaS offerings, despite Ellison’s amusing comments that seem to indicate otherwise.  Ellison’s comments are likely a part of his overall SaaS strategy: defame SaaS until it proves profitable, and then acquire the right team to deliver it.

According to the new announcement, SGI will focus its efforts around demands for computation, visualization and data management solutions:

Moving forward, the company intends to:

• Maintain its focus on delivering solutions that meet the evolving requirements of customers
• Adapt its business plan to today’s economic reality
• Eliminate costs that are not aligned with the refined business plan
• Implement more efficient and streamlined international sales and service coverage via strong channel partnerships, as it has already done in Japan and Korea
• Continue investment in key technologies for the future including its next-generation server products, visualization software and the Industrial Strength Linux Environment.

It’s unclear from the announcement if SGI has any plans to enter the Cloud Computing market as Sun Microsystems announced earlier this week, although it could potentially be a good move for the company given its similarity in business structure to Sun.  Both SGI and Sun product Unix and Linux-based operating systems, large-scale server equipment, and also provide large network management and storage services.

SGI’s servers and software are primarily aimed at the enterprise, large company market today, but their solutions could be very useful to smaller and medium businesses looking to increase efficiency at a reasonable cost.  Providing some of the solutions that SGI has today in a consumable fashion for small and medium enterprises, especially in a SaaS or pay-as-you-go model could attract businesses currently ignored by other vendors, giving much needed momentum to SGI’s brand and product line.