It was quite a year of mistakes, with Carol Bartz leaving Yahoo, HP
trying once again to re-orient itself and hiring ex-California
gubernatorial candidate Meg Whitman. On top of this comes various
reports that once again email is dead or dying (this could be a tedious
repetition of the "year of the LAN" that we went through in the 1990s,
even though email has been incorporated at the main notification
mechanism of just about every piece of corporate software). But there
were some spectacular enterprise Web blunders of the year that we've
seen that are worth
- Delicious
sold from Yahoo to YouTube.Delicious continues to
be a disappointment, as
we wrote earlier this fall, looking like "just another Web 2.0
startup." As social bookmarking morphs into "Like" and "Share" buttons
on just about every social software, Delicious' time has come and
seemingly gone.
- Data.com and Salesforce.com. Data.com has two parents, Salesforce and Dun & Bradstreet. The union will result in combining the information in Jigsaw with the information in the D&B archives, which tracks mostly large businesses across the world. We wrote here that the conflict with Jigsaw, an existing Salesforce effort was going to be a problem earlier in the fall. The jury is still out on this one.
- VMware v5 mispricing. We wrote about
the various miscues with the new v5 versions of various VMware products
here. While they made some adjustments, their pricing is still far
too complex and too costly. Eventually, we think they will regret these
decisions. In the meantime, the VMware ecosystem is rich with apps,
partners and users. While there are stories of a few customers who are
switching, most are just complaining for now.
- Google App Engine overpricing. We wrote about
Google's huge price increases to its App Engine here earlier this
fall. They still haven't done anything to address this and answer the
complaint from many of their developers.
- In
June, OpenOffice.org began the transition from a 12-year
project at Sun/Oracle to a "podling" as they are called in the Apache
Foundation open source community. Many of the original developers of
OpenOffice left or were pushed out and went to The Document Foundation,
where they developed a separate fork called LibreOffice that was first
released at the beginning of 2011. Apache's public license is somewhat
different from the GNU licensing terms used by Oracle, which means that
code improvements from Apache can be used by Libre but not the other way
around. Since LibreOffice began, they have added features and cleaned
up the old code, announced plans for delivering iOS and Android
versions, and are now the default Office software in numerous Linux
distros.
- Microsoft
acquired Skype in May and a lot was written about the promises
and opportunities. To date, none of these have been realized, but also
Skype seems to be fine and continuing under its new overlords. There are
new versions for both Mac and Windows, something feared when Microsoft
made its purchase but which hasn't come to pass. Hopefully, Microsoft
will leave Skype alone and not try to make it into Unified Live Office
Communications Realtime Professional Edition.
- Facebook. No accounting for enterprise blunders of the past year can ignore the numerous bad examples of Facebook. On its way to becoming the great equalizer of the profound and the trivial, they continue to perplex everyone with its UI-of-the-week club, features that come and go faster than Microsoft can say "Office Ribbon" and of course so many privacy options to make your head spin. Perhaps next year will see more maturity and stability of the popular service. Until then, its antics are a case study in what not to do for ordinary mere mortal developers who have apps with say 750 users rather than 750 million).
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