I quit my job at Oracle in 1999 because I couldn’t stop thinking about a simple question: “Why isn’t all enterprise software like Amazon.com?”

More than a decade after Benioff asked himself this question, it is still timely. Why is so much enterprise software ugly and difficult to use?

In the article, Benioff asks a new question: Why isn’t all enterprise software like Facebook?

Market shifts happen in real time, deals are won and lost in real time, and data changes in real time. Yet the software we use to run our enterprises is in anything but real time.

To address this, Salesforce has launched Chatter, a “realtime collaboration platform”.

Salesforce’s Chatter reminds me of an IBM commercial where an executive with magical powers can see into the future. When his colleagues excitedly ask him what he sees, he replies dreamily:

“Everything is integrated”.

Hilarity ensued. Users started arriving at the ReadWriteWeb blog and commenting on it in their hundreds, complaining about “Facebook’s new look” and that they couldn’t  log in. Because of Google, they were confusing Facebook with a blog featuring Facebook log-ins. Among the comments were:

“I HATE THE NEW FACEBOOK PAGE , IN FACT I HAVE STARTED TO VISIT IT LESS, BECAUSE IT IS A HASSLE”

The blog post now carries a health warning:

Dear visitors from Google. This site is not Facebook.

The Lifehacker blog had a post recently, called “Top Google Searches Show We’re Clueless About The Address Bar” highlighting a list Google published about top search terms in Australia, showing that adding “.com” to most of the search terms would have taken users directly to the site they were searching for.

What a fascinating insight into how mainstream users navigate the web: Via Google.

1. Subscribe to the column online for a year for £50,
2. subscribe for a month for £10 or,
3. buy a single column for £1.

At the time you could buy the whole paper for 60p, 40% cheaper than a single online column. Unsurprisingly, the columns didn’t exactly fly off the digital shelves and eventually they started giving them away for free.

In all likelihood, this is not a good long-term solution. An annual survey run by Pew Research Center showed that in 2008, the Internet had become more popular than newspapers as the primary news source for US consumers. So, it hardly makes sense to use digital content as a loss leader to increase sales of the print edition. Soon enough, there will be no print edition. It also seems that banners, as effective as they actually are, aren’t enough to support proper journalism.

Enter: Google. It seems that they might start helping news outlets charge for their content by adding micropayments to Checkout, their payment platform. Surely, this is the way forward.

If Simon Carr’s column takes 2% of the real estate of one  Independent issue, charge 3% of the newsstand price for it. Or give the columns away for free and charge for the investigative journalism.

Micropayments might actually end up saving journalism. And Google will take a cut. They seem to be taking a cut from a lot of business models these days.

Why were the winning bidders willing to pay so a high price for a company whose very existence could be threatened by this lawsuit? One possibility is that they have nerves of steel. The other is that they know something nobody else does.

It’s an interesting question. With the lawsuit from the Skype founders, Zennstrom and Friis, hanging over the company like a dark cloud, it seems like a colossal gamble. Even more so given the current economic climate. Following this story is going to be very intesreting.

Did Accel Just Raise Money For A Facebook Bailout? Facebook needs cash and soon as revenues continue to miss expectations. Facebook CEO Mark Zuckerberg recently admitted CFO Gideon Yu continues to try to raise money at the valuation Microsoft set last fall when it bought 1.6% of Facebook for 240 million.

Since Facebook had trouble finding a revenue model in the kredit-laden, champagne days of ’06-’07 it could find the next year or two pretty tricky. Surely, it’s only a matter of time until they are acquired by Microsoft? Hopefully for MS, it’ll be at a more reasonable valuation than when they bought the 1.6%.

Time to time I help my friends with system configuration and other “wtf? it worked yesterday!” kind of issues.

Ah yes, good old “wtf? it worked yesterday!”.

The post is an interesting “who-dunnit” for techies and system admins.

Oleg’s post reminded me of a joke: “Q: What are the three secrets to French cooking? A: Butter, butter and butter.”

Oleg’s secret to scalability however, is: Cache, cache and cache.

during the Olympics, the iPlayer accounted for nearly 20 percent of the total broadband traffic in the UK, and at present has garnered about 10 percent of the total UK broadband audience

Forget about Joost or Hulu (which isn’t even supported in the UK yet), all the action is over at good old Auntie Beeb’s place.

when the market goes down, people want measurable advertising, and the internet is the most measurable, performance-based advertising … so it’ll actually be good, long-term, for the internet.

The Economist had an interesting article on this back in 2006, The ultimate marketing machine, with a great quote from John Wanamaker, who not only invented department stores and price tags, but also became the first modern advertiser when he bought space in newspapers to promote his stores.

Wanamaker said: “Half the money I spend on advertising is wasted. The trouble is, I don’t know which half.”

The Future of Web Apps expo last week (FOWA) started and ended on a religious note.

When I arrived on Thursday morning, I was greeted by hordes of people wearing red MyChurch t-shirts. “Good morning, good morning, good morning,” each of them greeted every new arrival.

At first I thought they might be a start-up at FOWA pulling a marketing stunt. But no, MyChurch, the christian social network, already is a thriving social network with an expo of their own.

Highlights of the FOWA expo itself included Languages don’t scale by Blaine Cook and Joe Stump and Huddle’s Andy McLoughlin’s part of How to survive prosper outside Silicon Valley (fast-forward into the middle for Andy’s part).

The expo ended in the same surreal way it started, except instead of MyChurch, this time it was the cult of Diggnation. The difference was not as obvious as one might have thought.

The expo itself was good fun and the Carsonified team obviously know how to stage these events. Kudos to them.

For a more detailed recap check out Mycycle and for a report from the fringe, the new media whore blog.

I’ve been using Twitter search a lot recently to follow ongoing events in Iceland. (click: search results on “iceland”.) It is by far the fastest way to find links to new articles and news coverage and to get a snapshot of the zeitgeist of the situation.

I’m tempted to say this is the most useful tool I’ve found in a while since … that other search engine. I can only imagine how powerful this can be when Twitter gets more adoption.

Anyway, I’m keeping my fingers crossed.