sales

Black Friday and Cyber Monday have come and gone, kicking off the 2007 holiday-shopping season...apparently in full force.

As you are probably aware, Black Friday is the term in the U.S. for retail shopping on the Friday after Thanksgiving, and Cyber Monday refers to online shopping on the Monday following Thanksgiving.

These have become milestone shopping days that retailers use as indicators for the health of the holiday-shopping season. While they are often referred to as the busiest or even biggest shopping days, they are quite often trumped by other days leading up to Christmas.

Retail, probably more … Read more

I've written before on the remarkable JBoss revenue machine. As I learn more about its operations, the more impressed I become.

First off, for those who think that open source is a high-volume, low-ASP (Average Sales Price) game, you've obviously never worked for an open-source company. At least, not long enough. To the right you can see JBoss' ASP/Average Deal Size over time*, which maps very closely to my direct, personal experience with Alfresco and the other open-source companies I advise.

This graphic shows JBoss moving from isolated, departmental implementations (low dollars) to company-wide deployments (big dollars). This is the natural progression for any successful commercial open-source project. Invade the enterprise through free downloads and let the positive experience percolate throughout an enterprise until the CIO pushes a site-wide license.… Read more

Dell announced on Wednesday that it's offering Spanish-language sales and support to U.S. consumers.

The computer maker, through its Spanish-language sales-and-support site and toll-free number, provides full-service sales support, customer service, and financing and financial documentation in Spanish.

The move, designed to help the company tap into rapidly shifting demographic changes, comes roughly six months after the company launched a Spanish-language blog, where its management, customer care, engineering, and personnel departments could gather customer input and discuss technology trends.

In the United States, an estimated 32.2 million households, with residents ages 5 and older, speak Spanish in … Read more

I've been hearing more and more that proprietary companies are fighting back against open-source companies by giving away their software. "We can compete with free!" they chortle as they discount their license fees to zero, occasionally winning deals (with customers who don't yet fully understand that open source is far more than price tag).

But with every deal they win on these terms, they lose. Their cost structure can't support giving away million-dollar deals that cost (literally, at times) a million dollars to close. Talking with a friend at Oracle, he tells me they expend upwards of 18 months and 100 or so people working on their million-dollar deals.

In other words, they spend money like crazy so that they can win the deal and hold onto that maintenance revenue.… Read more

Updated Oct. 23, 11:50 a.m.; details at bottom.

What if you threw a World Series and no one came because they couldn't buy tickets?

That is the dilemma facing the Colorado Rockies on Monday after the baseball team suspended online ticket sales because servers were overwhelmed by traffic.

"We are as frustrated and disappointed as (fans) are," Jay Alves told The Denver Post, adding that team officials had no idea so many people would try to use the Web site.

The team said it would honor the several hundred tickets already sold but it's … Read more

People often complain about the high cost of organic foods, hybrid cars and pesticide-free bamboo T-shirts. GreenDealsDaily, which launched this month, attempts to bust the myth that living a more eco-friendly lifestyle is only for the well-heeled.

The site lists the latest price drops, coupons and freebies for green products, as well as lifestyle tips from IdealBite, Treehugger and other blogs. Hurry and call ConEd now, for example, if you want free compact fluorescent bulbs for your Manhattan apartment. Or get thee to Gaiam for its 75 percent discount while the organic cotton bedding lasts.

You can register with GreenDealsDaily … Read more

I have tried to keep an open mind about services where users buy and sell personal contact information. My default position is that personal relationships are priceless, and if you try to sell them you're asking for big trouble. That's why I find services like Jigsaw and Yuwie (review), both of which pay you for selling your friends and contacts to strangers, ethical disaster zones.

There's a new product that I was considering putting in this bucket: Salesconx. It's a site for buying and selling introductions to sales leads. If you're looking for the account … Read more

Peace and happiness are all well and good, but apparently not as enticing as a new Vaio.

In a just -released survey by the Consumer Electronics Association, computers topped respondents' holiday wish lists of top-five gifts--followed by peace and happiness, big-screen televisions, clothes and money.

Notably, the big-screen TV moved up in the 2007 survey to No. 3 from 11th in 2006. The teen wish list remained unchanged: clothes, MP3 players, video games, computers and cell phones (with international human rights way down the lineup, just under skateboards).

In its "14th Annual CE Holiday Purchase Patterns" study, the … Read more

Update--Vizio stunned the consumer electronics world when it became the No. 1 seller of flat-panel TVs in North America.

But it may be only a temporary victory.

During the second quarter, Costco and Sam's Club, the two primary retailers of Vizio TVs, asked the company for more TVs than normal to increase their own inventories, according to a Vizio spokesman. The store chains typically had been carrying one to two weeks of inventory. They requested that the inventory be increased to three to four weeks. (Costco, by the way, declined to comment.)

As a result, Vizio experienced a sudden … Read more