After more than eight months of hype Microsoft's cloud-based productivity suite, Office 365, formally went live Tuesday with Microsoft launch events from New York and around the world. Google Apps has proclaimed a premature victory, but as we all know price isn't everything - both Office365 and Google Apps will be winners.

Google reacted with 365 reasons to consider Google Apps on the Official Google Enterprise Blog. Frankly I thought that it was a very immature response, perhaps it just illustrates that if you're not using a competitor's product in earnest then you'd better be careful what you say it cannot do. The fact that in the post Google could only come...

Do companies honestly think that they can "own the customer" these days? I'm astounded to say that some behave as if they do, in such ways as lack of transparency, creating false expectations, and creating artifical exit barriers. Mistaking owning the customer relationship with owning the customer may be part of the problem.

In the last two days I have had cause to ponder how significant organisations can be so backward and outmoded in their behaviour towards customers - it seems to me to be such a serious disease that it may even have the smell of a rotting corporate carcass.

Case 1

At a small meeting with a team from a leading global IT business, a household name and a monster company, pricing models were being discussed for a new software product. The visiting US expert was here to explain that there are three customer segments - 1-100 seats, 100 - 1000 seats, and 1000+. For each segment...

Social business strategy creates such a profound shift that the competitive effects can be devastating. But you don't usually see it so starkly, and in your own backyard.

On the same day that Melbourne IT shuttered it's SME cloud offer "Melbourne IT gives up on SMB cloud" - subtitled "Not worth the investment" - competitors were ramping them up:

• Melbourne IT has told its small business customers that it is no longer interested in providing them infrastructure-as-a-service, versus
• The micro is a highly reliable, highly redundant, small memory virtual server — in an Australian cloud — for less than the price of a lunch-sized pizza a week!...

IBM and Facebook are not really fighting each other, just looking at the world from opposite ends of a telescope.

Consider, IBM has to make big inroads into the cloud computing world as a commercial necessity - to sell lots of servers (hardware) and lots of layers of management applications (software). It's a hardware, software and services business, right?

Facebook operates one of the world's most massive web-systems, far bigger than any bank and far different from any bank, which in fact are not web-systems but just very traditional datacentres and networks. Facebook's front is as social platform, but one of its key competencies is massive web-systems operations. Tim o'Reilly said...