Trends

Year over year, we see the numbers. In 2017, e-commerce represented 49 percent of all total retail growth, up 16 percent from the previous year. If this year's $119.99 billion holiday shopping season spend indicates anything, it's that 2018 is projected to be yet another banner year for commerce. It...

I've been writing a forecast column every year at least since W was president. Nothing's wrong with that, lots of people do. However, I often find that my forecast is more of a wish list than a true prognostication, so this time I'll dispense with the fiction of analytical rigor and just say what I ...

Oracle narrowly missed its number last quarter, so it was good to see the company come roaring back -- it made a lot of money. More importantly, many analysts have conceded that Oracle has reached a point in its infrastructure deployment where it can mount a serious challenge to other providers and ...

The Dunning-Kruger effect is a cognitive bias that leads relatively unskilled individuals to believe their ability is be much higher than is accurate. They be highly skilled and successful in other areas, but they behave like novices in new areas outside of their skill zones. The bias was observed e...

The borderless promise of e-commerce doesn't mean one size fits all. Your business can have customers from around the globe, but if you want to keep them and grow, it is crucial to understand local shopper preferences and behaviors, and be able to respond to them. Without localization, you won't h...

Oracle has filed a suit in federal court over the $10 billion Pentagon JEDI contract to be awarded to a single vendor. Oracle claims that the single-vendor award is unfair and illegal, a claim it first filed with the GAO, or Government Accountability Office. The suit followed the GAO's denial of Ora...

You can roughly chart a product's lifecycle based on how it is sold, and this may be having a profound effect on CRM. We generally know that product categories start with disruptions but commoditize over time, and because of this, the economy needs to be refreshed with new disruptions to drive it. D...

Americans are used to hearing the refrain, "We pay the sales tax," from mattress sellers and car dealerships during big sales weekends. The phrase, "You pay the sales tax," however, is something we're all going to become a lot more familiar with in the wake of the Supreme Court's ruling in South Dak...

Metrics matter. In business they measure sales, they measure profits, they measure brand health. Marketers measure their reputations, their ad recall, and their shares-of-market. They measure tweets and shares and all sorts of social networking outreach. Big Data was invented just to measure all the...

The hoopla over vertical market or industry CRM might be eclipsing a similar move that does the same kind of thing but with less fanfare. In the end, we might be discussing two iterations and just a difference of degree. The proliferation of CRM development platforms by companies like Microsoft, Ora...

Looking back at 2018, there's one competitor we underestimated this year. It's slowly draining the attention of every human on the planet. It plays into almost all human needs -- as they are defined by the Maslow Hierarchy. It's the rectangular status-seeking device in your hands. That's right. It's...

When the Oculus Rift launched in 2014, industry stakeholders speculated that the new, high-end in-home virtual reality headset would disrupt the entertainment industry. Just four years later, the technology has reached a crossroads, still lacking adoption by mainstream consumers. In a recent survey,...

In Salesforce's recent revenue announcement, it described the vast majority of its nonprofessional services revenues as "subscription and support." Proserv revenues were appropriately small, at $224 million, while subscription and support was $3.17 billion, or 26 percent more than a year earlier. Ni...

Nurturing customer relationships has always been and always will be fundamental for company success. However, as the world becomes increasingly connected and more communications become instant, it arguably is more vital now than ever before.