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Last week, Microsoft announced its embrace of the Web and software as a service (SaaS) but there might be less there than meets the eye. Rather than a bold strategy to move the company and the industry ahead, I see it as more of a hedging strategy to help the company hold on ...

I have been involved in some situations recently that have caused me to think a lot about the idea of the customer experience. I made a presentation -- by phone during a nor'easter -- last week to an executive education seminar at Duke University's business school. Martha Rogers, whose work with Don Peppers I have previously written about and, I believe, is very important to the evolution of CRM, invited me. I am also preparing for a webinar later in November sponsored by CRMA in Atlanta. The webinar is loosely framed by the concept of customer loyalty -- getting, keeping, and using it. Other speakers will include Ginger Conlon and Paul Greenberg, two of my favorite people in CRM...

If you came to Boston last week for Siebel's User Week conference you might have been disappointed. With the impending purchase of the company by Oracle, it would have been easy to regard the event as some kind of "last hurrah" -- and what better place than Boston for the atmospherics to pull it off. But instead of a funeral, you were treated to something more akin to the technology industry equivalent of an Irish wake. I can explain...

Last week in New York, Salesforce.com improved its position in the CRM suite market when it introduced version 2.0 of its service and support offering. The company has quickly come up the curve to a point where it has approximate parity with other companies offering a range of support options including a knowledge base and FAQ capabilities as well as live agent support, though it looks like the agent desktop will come later...

Going to the RightNow user conference feels like a trip to another world. Aptly called the RightNow Summit, the affair was held last week in Big Sky, Mont. at a lodge whose elevation is about 7,800 feet above sea level. At that elevation, you see nothing but tall pine forests and the occasional deer, elk, or moose. And, yes, it snowed, even in early October, like Mother Nature wanted to make a serious point -- not that she needed to -- when you first get there, climbing stairs carries its own admonition...

I had a wide-ranging conversation the other day with a software company CEO in Silicon Valley. If anyone could have insights into what's been going on lately in the software industry it would be this guy. He's a former Oracle executive -- that doesn't exactly limit the field much does it? -- and a keen observer of the front office software market. I won't use his name because we were discussing something else for background, mostly the future of the enterprise software business...

It's worth taking another look at the Siebel-Oracle merger from a different angle. Too often we make a snap judgment in this kind of situation and it becomes fixed in the mind never to be seriously re-examined. Rather than that, I did a thought experiment the other day starting with the presumption that Larry Ellison has a grand strategy and that the strategy will work. It goes like this...

OK, so here we are a week later and what do we know for sure? Well, lots of things. First, Oracle now has seven assorted CRM packages from its acquisitions and those of its acquired companies -- if you count Siebel. The issue with counting Siebel is that the deal is not done yet. Don't look for the shareholders to derail this one since many have been clamoring for greater returns on their investments for quite a while. And don't look to the SEC to stop this one either. Unlike Peoplesoft, Siebel wants to be acquired, so the whole process should go much faster...

It's very rare that you get clean demarcations between historical eras. Maybe the asteroid hitting the earth 65 million years ago was such an event, but I wasn't there to experience it so I can't tell you. Monday, Sept. 12, 2005 will go down as a deep line in the sand identifying the before and after in the enterprise software industry. It was the day that Siebel agreed to be acquired by Oracle, and coincidently, the day that Salesforce.com opened up its Dreamforce user conference in San Francisco...

I started a blog last week and while that might make me sound like some cutting edge guru, I am anything but. My friend Paul Greenberg, whose blog inspired me because he has let me post a few entries, informed me that there are already more than 14 million of these things, and a new one is forming about every pico-second. In the hierarchy of small, a nano-anything is a billionth, e.g. 10E-9, but there are smaller smalls, for example, pico-something is a trillionth e.g.10E-12, and femto- is the impossibly tiny quadrillionth or 10E-15. (You get to digress like this on a blog. Who cares?) The point is that blogs are forming very fast and for good reasons...

I was doing research for a book a few weeks ago when a friend recommended that I re-read Geoffrey Moore's Inside the Tornado and I am glad she did. Tornado has to be about 10 years old now which puts it in a very interesting historical perspective. It's old enough to have looked back on the amazing growth of companies like HP and its printer business, Oracle, Intel, and even DEC. But by the same token, enough time has gone by to show how useful many of Moore's concepts were in forecasting the emergence of the CRM market...

I love it when I can find independent verification for an idea and that's what happened on Monday when Walker Information released its "2005 Walker Loyalty Report for Software and Hardware." In case you are not familiar with Walker, this Indianapolis-based company has been studying customer loyalty since the 1930s; somebody ought to put them in the Wikipedia under that topic...

Just when I thought there was nothing going on in the dog days of summer, along came Wired magazine's August issue to remind me that yesterday marked the 10th anniversary of Netscape's IPO. That makes it a good time to stop for a moment and ponder how many ways the Internet has changed our lives, especially where a company's relationship with its customers is concerned...

A couple of weeks ago, which corresponds with my absence from this space last week, I was on vacation trying hard to not think about work or CRM, but something hit me while watching a ballgame. I don't have a lot of current statistical data to back me up, so this might even be right ...

I have enjoyed reading Clayton Christensen's books on disruptive innovation and observing how many of the concepts articulated in his books have played out in the CRM market and beyond. With the theory in mind, it has been fascinating to watch as smart people have behaved in ways that are either predictably on target or way off the mark. One of the more interesting chess matches to watch over several years has been the growing importance of hosting in the CRM market...

I was on vacation when the news came out and for the life of me, I could not understand why Microsoft decided to announce version 3.0 of its CRM product a few days before July 4th -- the biggest public holiday of the year -- when practically no one was looking. They weren't alone. Siebel also made an announcement designed to garner minimal exposure...

One of the best parts of being an analyst or a journalist is that you get pretty easy entry to some of the most interesting companies in your space. I feel particularly fortunate to be able to call up a company to ask for a briefing. Most of the time they say yes and I get to spend an hour or so on the phone or in person talking to smart people about cutting edge ideas in business and technology. This ringside seat gives me access to understanding about where the market is moving as well as insight into the how and why...

When I was in high school, the summer reading list included titles like Great Expectations that were sure to induce a coma-like state if I tried to read them while hanging out at the pool or beach. As adults we look for mindless potboiler paperbacks to stuff in the beach bag and maybe we feel a bit guilty for it. But if you are looking for guilt-free reading that might even help your professional life when you get back to the desk in September, I can recommend several titles that will keep your attention when the sun gets high and motivation is low...

The big CRM news last week was Siebel's announcement initiating a dividend for its investors. In an open letter to shareholders, CEO George Shaheen announced the 2.5 cent dividend in typical Wall Street-ese, promising that future payments would be based on a decision of the board and, obviously, on how the company is fairing, etc., etc ...

Whenever I think about the direction of the CRM market and of technology and business in general, my mind keeps coming back to some data I saw in The Economist magazine in April. Frequent readers might recall this graphic from an article in the April 23 edition of The Economist titled "Looking for Trouble."Figure 1: Capital investment decline ...