Alpha authors
- Dan Ackerman
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- Molly Wood
- Felisa Yang
January 17, 2006, 11:03 AM PSTApple worth more than Dell, Jobs crows
Posted by: Molly Wood So, in 1997, Michael Dell suggested Apple was doomed and ought to be shut down. Last Friday, Apple's market value surpassed Dell's, and Steve Jobs crowed about Michael's poor prognosticating skills in an e-mail to employees. Best part of the story? Picturing Jobs spending the last nine years stewing over that comment. Point: Dell. Permalink | 57 comments
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January 17, 2006, 11:01 AM PSTWatch out for your Wi-Fi
Posted by: Molly Wood One of the best features of Windows--its ability to automatically search for Wi-Fi hot spots--apparently poses a security risk that can lead to an attacker grabbing all the data on your hard drive. Unless, of course, you have a firewall. But should it be the Windows firewall? Now I'm not so sure. Permalink | 12 comments
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January 17, 2006, 9:54 AM PSTThe iTunes of business?
Posted by: Rafe Needleman Salesforce.com today announced AppExchange, a platform for business applications that run over the Web. This is a clever extension to the company's business model of delivering applications to small businesses directly through a browser. No additional software is required on customer PCs.
I admire the chutzpah of Marc Benioff, Salesforce.com's CEO. He wants to make a platform out of what started with a vision and a product--a Web-delivered CRM application. No, more than a platform. A market. To use AppExchange applications, users must be Salesforce.com customers, and to buy access to them, they have to use the AppExchange site that Salesforce.com runs. Since access to Salesforce.com and to AppExchange is delivered over the Web, the company can monitor, meter, and bill for its products in great detail.
Announcing AppExchange today (video link), Benioff compared it to both iTunes and eBay. iTunes is apt, because it's a market that drives adoption of an underlying platform (the iPod for Apple; Salesforce.com's basic CRM app for Salesforce). eBay is too, since it's a marketplace where sellers set their own prices (unlike iTunes), and each product and sale makes the marketplace itself more valuable.
But enough about the outlook for Salesforce.com. What does this mean for small business? I'm not asking, "Should you use AppExchange?" or "Should you write an AppExchange product," but rather, do you have a product or a service that can be extended to become a market unto itself? It's a nice business, if you can figure it out.
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