Joshua Greenbaum

One of the more interesting problems facing startups today is the double bind that cloud computing offers innovative new software companies. On the one hand, deploying new innovative software in the cloud is a godsend for startups trying to appease the IT department’s often obstructive attitude toward new software. This is particularly true of anything […]

There’s a government agency you may have heard of, the Food and Drug Administration, that’s charged with ensuring that the food and drugs you put in your body are safe to ingest. In general, most of us think the FDA isn’t just a good idea, but an absolute necessity in a rough and tumble commercial […]

The rise of the social Web has been greeted by the same kind of hallelujah chorus that proclaims the advent of all new technology-meets-business trends: breathless and unerringly positive. The coverage is quick to point out the infinite virtues of the latest and greatest while forgetting – or leaving for much later – the mundane […]

In the future, every vendor will be famous for 15 minutes. Unfortunately for everyone. If your company is a typical consumer of enterprise software, there’s a new category of user emerging that is challenging accepted notions about how those users identify with the software they use and the vendor that provides it. These new users […]

Last year at this time I wrote a column predicting that, despite the pending recession, enterprise software would show real growth in 2008. The reasons I gave can be found here, but the sum of the arguments I presented was that this recession was not at all like the dotcom bust of the last recession, […]

There’s no time like the present for specific, dramatic, and concrete statements on what enterprise software customers should expect from their vendors in the coming year. Customers are, like everyone else, scared, very gun-shy, and loathe to buy things they don’t know if they can afford or if they really need. So visibility into the […]

With doom and gloom dominating the news, and that’s only on the economic front, one hopeful scenario that can be dragged out of the current disintegration of laissez-faire capitalism is the growing recognition that we need more regulation, more oversight, and just a little bit more control over Adam Smith’s now infamous unseen hand. Welcome […]

The New York Times had a pathetically funny article in its business section last week that highlighted a common misperception about what constitutes a customer – and thereby, what constitutes customer service – in the age of free. The article tells the tale of Gmail users and their travails as they try to find a […]

Editorial: It’s time to stop letting “free” be a shield for anonymous criminal behavior at a wide array of major sites, including eBay, Yahoo and Google. If there was a shopping mall in your town where it was your responsibility to protect yourself from crooks and thieves, whom everyone acknowledged were lurking in plain view, […]

In the eternal quest to find the next orchard, the one replete with all that proverbial low-hanging fruit, the entire enterprise software market has focused its considerable energies on the small and medium-sized enterprise (SME) market. And that means marketing managers are consumed with the need to decipher the exigencies of the so-called mid-market customer […]