Web 2.0: Show me the money!

There is so much buzz about Web 2.0 but I am yet to come across a Web 2.0 product with a believable business model. Yet there is plenty of Venture Capital pouring into it Web 2.0 companies. Is Silicon Valley leading another bubble?

I must admit though that many of the new technologies in the so-called Web 2.0 space are really, really cool.

MS Office Live beta -- More "On Demand"

Microsoft announced its beta launch for MS Office Live the other day. This is clearly one more big step towards "On Demand" software applications going mainstream. I am curious to see/hear about MS beta launch. Despite being a late entrant one can be certain that MS will be going at this market in a big way. I signed up to check out the beta version but haven't heard back from MS.

"On Demand" Software

The On Demand software market just gained additional legitimacy with SAP entering the fray. It is great to see more interest in this. It makes no sense to battle installation, maintenance, support and implementation when so much can be accomplished online.

Interestingly enough it comes at a time when the leader in this space Salesforce.com has been battling some bad press for unanticipated downtime. After all these years, this is the first time this has ever happened at Salesforce. To be fair to Salesforce, its not as though software maintained and supported by in-house IT depts don't suffer outages! In fact, resolution for in-house outages might be more troublesome (because the vendor might have to pulled into resolve the issue) and expensive. Its definitely less painful to simply call and yell at a vendor for an outage.