Moonwatcher

Bill McDermott, CNBC, and the Rashomon Effect

SAP Americas, Asia Pacific, and Japan President & CEO (whew!) Bill McDermott recently went on CNBC to talk about SAP's quarterly results and the strong euro's negative impact on them. His performance drew this stinging criticism from ZDNet blogger Michael Krigsman:

In a moment of “irrational exhuberance,” McDermott described SAP as the only software company able to offer these things to customers. I suspect some SAP competitors will take issue with his comment.

One interviewer jokingly asked McDermott whether he had taken media training, because he spun virtually every difficult question into a positive for SAP; the journalists wanted to hear a more balanced presentation.

When Mike sent a note about his blog post (with an even harsher critique) to the Enterprise Irregulars mailing list, I decided to watch the clip myself. Personally, I thought McDermott came off as confident but honest and very well-spoken. The reference by one of the commentators was about his giving media training to other executives given the strength of his performance.

It's amazing how two people can witness the same event and see two totally different things. Cinephilic psychologists call this The Rashomon Effect. Here's the clip in question, so you can decide for yourself.

PS. Hey CNBC, people might want to embed your videos without having to View Source then cut and paste HTML. I'm just saying.

Historical Timeline of Internet Memes

Dipity brings the memes! I hadn't seen the Coverflow-esqe "Flipbook" view before. Nice!

No Meetings

It just occurred to me that in the 20 months or so Spanning Sync, Inc. has been in business, we've never had a meeting. No internal meetings, no partner meetings, no meetings with prospects or customers. I don't think we've even had a conference call.

Of course Larry, Byron, and I do communicate with each other, but it's almost always over email. We've had maybe 30 IM sessions, a handful of one-on-one phone calls, and maybe a half-dozen video chats. Larry and I had lunch together once, but we didn't really talk about business.

That may sound bizarre, but for us at least it's insanely productive.

We do have access to a shared conference room that looks pretty nice, with nice, comfy-looking chairs and a projector. Maybe we'll go in there some day and play X-Box or something.

Preview: Spanning Sync v2.0 Adds Contact Sync

(Cross-posted from the Spanning Sync Blog.)

People know Spanning Sync for its ability to sync Apple iCal with Google Calendar. In fact, more than 70,000 people have used Spanning Sync to do just that. But calendars are only one part of the equation.

Our users tell us that they also need to be able to sync their Mac Address Book with their contacts in Gmail and Google Apps. So Spanning Sync 2.0 does both—calendars and contacts.

Here's a quick video preview. Click here for a high-quality version.

Like all Spanning Sync upgrades, version 2.0—with Contact syncing—will be free to all paid subscribers. Watch this space for the announcement of the public beta, coming soon.

Amazon Introduces Service Health Dashboard, Premium Support Options

Amazon has just announced its new Service Health Dashboard, which "provides access to current status and historical data about each and every Amazon Web Service."

Similar to trust.salesforce.com, the dashboard gives developers and users some idea of how well the Amazon platform is operating. But unlike the Salesforce system, Amazon's also provides RSS feeds to allow easier tracking. It looks like the feeds are meant to be read by people (as opposed to automated processes) but they're a start. I'd like to see Atom feeds with quantitive data about the availability and performance of the various services.

This type of status information is important for users and developers alike, and is unfortunately lacking from both Google Apps and the new Google App Engine. We've considered biulding such a system for Google Calendar to let Spanning Sync users know when Google Calendar itself is down, as it will be most of this morning, but obviously we'd prefer Google offer it themselves.

(As an aside, why is it that PayPal operational issues so frequently coincide with Google Calendar outages? Ugh.)

Amazon also introduced AWS Premium Support, available at both "Silver" and "Gold" levels, both of which include guaranteed response times for support incidents, client-side diagnostic tools, and named support contacts. The "Gold" plan also includes 24 x 7 x 365 coverage and telephone support.

As Om Malik says, "Amazon Web Services has decided it’s time to grow up and play nice with business." Kudos to Amazon for continuing to address the needs of developers looking to build on their platform.

Persistent Storage for Amazon EC2 (!)

From the announcement on Amazon CTO Werner Vogels' blog:

Persistent storage for Amazon EC2 will be offered in the form of storage volumes which you can mount into your EC2 instance as a raw block storage device. It basically looks like an unformatted hard disk. Once you have the volume mounted for the first time you can format it with any file system you want or if you have advanced applications such as high-end database engines, you could use it directly.

Here's the money quote:

And the great thing is it that it is all done with using standard technologies such that you can use this with any kind of application, middleware or any infrastructure software, whether it is legacy or brand new.

Google, are you paying attention? Amazon is eating your lunch.

It looks like I'll be choosing between Joyent and Amazon to provide the infrastructure for the new service Larry and I are working on. Don't worry, I'll document my selection process here.

Update: Jeff Barr offers more detail on the Amazon Web Services Blog. Plus, here's an early review.

Update 2: Mark Fletcher lays it out:

This makes Amazon Web Services even more interesting, because it's now easier to run a normal MySQL instance without having to do something like running some kind of replication just to deal with the non-persistent local storage. And it scales up.

Salesforce for Google Apps Announcement and Coverage

The announcement: Introducing Salesforce for Google Apps

Some of the coverage:

• Phil Wainwwright: Salesforce and Google team to conquer the enterprise
• Mashable: Google Takes Aim at the Enterprise
• VentureBeat: Desktop applications beware: Salesforce integrates Google Apps
• Silicon Alley Insider: Google-Salesforce Deal Shows Google Not Insane, Microsoft Disruption Continues
• TechCrunch: More Details On The Google-Salesforce "Enemy Of My Enemy Is My Friend" Alliance
• Larry Dignan: Google and Salesforce.com: Why don’t they merge?
• Vinnie Mirchandani: Why just target Microsoft?

I'm glad to see Salesforce and Google Apps becoming more integrated. I'll have more to say on this later, but today is a coding day, so you'll have to bear the suspense.

Update: The Google Enterprise Blog has more detail on the announcement.

Austin Ready for 3G iPhone - Me Too

According to the Statesman, AT&T is spending $200 million to improve its Texas network, which is good news. But the better news is that, "AT&T already offers 3G service to nearly 350 cities across the country, including Austin."

C'mon, Apple. It's been almost a year since I bought my iPhone, and almost two weeks since I bought my last $400 worth of Apple stuff. I need a fix. Gimme my 3G iPhone, man. C'mon!

Dopplr and TripIt: Two Travel Startups Kicking Ass

This morning I got an email newsletter from Dopplr announcing their new Google Contacts integration, which uses the Google Contacts API to help you figure out which your contacts are also using Dopplr—without Dopplr needing to know your Google password. Keep in mind that Google only introduced its Contacts API last month. Nice work, Dopplr!

Also cranking out the new tech, TripIt yesterday announced their new mobile service, available at http://m.tripit.com, which works with BlackBerry, Treo, or any other mobile device with a web browser, but really shines on iPhone.

I'm rooting for both of these companies to succeed. Based on their quality and pace of innovation, I think they both have a good shot.

iPhone SDK Beta 3: Like Beta 2, but 1 Better