On the Pricing of Web Applications.

The blog post titled Account Sharing lands Goldman Sachs in Court, is not only a wake up call to enterprises, but also one for the content providers.

One of the reasons why the account sharing mentioned in the blog post happens is because of the pricing of the service. Yearly pricing models tend to produce the account sharing behavior whereas monthly, or pay-as-you-go, pricing tends to avoid account sharing. Salesforce.com's is an example of monthly pricing.

So, the moral of the story is that content providers can facilitate proper subscriptions from enterprises by offering proper pricing models.

Do CEOs of Collaborating Companies Talk to Each Other?

I guess there is room for all kinds of corporate behavior. In EMC: Enterprise data centers won't all flock to the cloud, where we learn about new storage solutions — called VPlex — from EMC, we also learn the following:

Tucci also criticized the data center verticalization strategy that companies such as Hewlett-Packard and Cisco are taking, saying it will lead to a new kind of lock-in that will ultimately lend itself to inefficiency. He said EMC’s private cloud strategy swaps out verticalization with virtualization and allows all of your data center solution providers — even EMC competitors — to plug in.

Now, you will recall that the Virtual Computing Environment collaboration was setup with good amount of fanfare: Power of 3 - VMware, Cisco, EMC and so on. You would think that there is a better way for EMC to promote the launch of VPlex than to deride a collaboration partner, in this case Cisco, right? Wrong. EMC finds it necessary to talk down Cisco.

The power of a coalition such as the VCE lies in the integration and the attendant advantages: data centers can deploy well integrated pieces rather than waste precious time in stringing together components: servers, networking, storage.

I guess it takes corporations of all kinds to make up the world.

[Why] Is JavaScript Popular?

When one has to extend the experience of web browsing beyond what comes out of browser-makers, a key programming language that everyone seeks refuge in is JavaScript.

In my previous post, I wrote about Google Apps Script that enables customization and integration of Google Documents and Products through JavaScript that is executed on the server, in the cloud.

Now, with this additional flexibility at the server, you can expect more adaptation of product and computational functionality by Internet application users themselves by using JavaScript.

The use that JavaScript can be put both in providing Rich Internet Applications — e.g., Google's Gmail — on the client side and in customizing server side logic in the form, for example, of Google Apps Script will only increase the popularity of JavaScript. Even if other languages -- Java, C++, Ruby on Rails, etc. -- are used for implementing server-side functionality, there is a certain homogeneity that is brought about by the use of JavaScript on both sides.

Google Acquires BumpTop.

Google acquisition today of BumpTop is an exciting prospect for making a non-browser based OS irrelevant as the future unfolds. You can even see a multi-touch interface version in this YouTube video.

The future desktop, and TVs, will definitely deserve this; maybe some laptops and netbooks will get this as well.