Strategy
A friend pointed me to this interesting post by Allan Packer of Sun entitled Are Proprietary Databases Doomed? Overall, I think it's a well done analysis of the DBMS market and well worth reading. First, a nit. When I was a lad, "proprietary" didn't
On December 13th Google took its first step from organizer and indexer of the world's knowledge to supporting-creator of it with the announcement of a new free tool called "knol" (a cutesy-ism which stands for unit of knowledge). The folks at publishing industry watcher
Frankly, I don't spend much time worrying about my web search history -- but I'm starting to wonder if maybe I should. Sure, I blogged about the topic once here (You Are What You Search). If you've never looked at the rather famous anonymized AOL
Just a quick post to direct you to this interesting presentation, entitled Software Trends Update by Kris Tuttle and Dennis Byron of Research 2.0. I know Kris from his days at SoundView, and I always found him a particularly astute financial analyst. I particularly enjoyed this slide, which does
A quick post to refer you to this outstanding article in the New Yorker, entitled Future Reading: Digitization and Its Discontents which covers the history of libraries and archiving, an overview of the Microsoft and Google digitization projects, the information explosion problem (e.g., "scholars have to deal with
This Slate story, entitled The Death of E-Mail, has been getting a lot of attention in the blogosphere of late. I felt compelled to comment because the story was published so close in time to our launch of the MarkMail service for getting intelligence from e-mail archives. If
BI
Newsweek recently published an article that should be sending shock waves through the business intelligence (BI) market, populated with vendors like Business Objects, Cognos, and MicroStrategy. BI tools help business people get access to information in corporate databases and data warehouses, so they can make better business decisions. In fact,
VC
Everybody has some understanding of what venture capitalists do, right? * They sell money * They invest in [technology] startups hoping to get 10x returns * They invest in people, not technology or companies * They invest in market segments, not companies or technologies * They take risk hoping to yield superior returns * They eliminate
I found an interesting post on SandHill.com by Ken Bender of the Software Equity Group, entitled After the M&A Frenzy: What's Next? One of my recent memes is that the mega-players in enterprise software are becoming new conglomerates. They seem more driven by size
Strategy
I found this post today on Vallewag, which shows that Facebook grew from 8.7M to 19.5M users in the year ended 10/07 while LinkedIn grew from 1.7M to 4.9M. So while Facebook is nearly 4x LinkedIn's size (and MySpace nearly 3x Facebook'
As predicted in my post about the SAP acquisition of Business Objects, IBM today announced that it has offered $4.9B in a friendly bid to acquire #2 independent business intelligence tools maker, Cognos. Per this New York Times story, the bid amounts to a 9.5% premium over Friday&
One of our consultants is doing some testing of MarkLogic vs. XML-extended relational databases, and he sent me an example of the kinds of queries you need to write when you're mixing SQL and XQuery/XPath. Here is an example: SELECT XMLQUERY( '$p/Citation/Index/ConceptCodeList/
