Sun microsystems buys popular open source database system MySQL.
Not to be outdone, Oracle buys BEA, enterprise middleware.
A day earlier, SAP bought Business Objects
The relevance is that the enterprise strongmen are consolidating the market. Everyone knows 2008 will be about shrunken IT budgets yet also about the excitement of enterprise social media and the coming of age of SaaS.
All removable, all transitory. All according to plan
Great research conducted by Brodeur, found via Valerie’s blog. I think the analysis is clear to understand from the stats alone:
- The biggest impact of blogs is in the speed and availability of news.
- Over half also said that blogs were having a significant impact on the “tone” (61.8%) and “editorial direction” (51.1%) of news reporting.
We’d like to think that news reporting is completely unemotional and factual. Research should uncover those factual data points, although I hear all the time from contacts I have in the news business that research budgets are being cut. What sells in my experience is the human connection, the story, and in regional markets the local angle.
That is why nearly 70 percent of all reporters check a blog list on a regular basis. Over one in five (20.9%) reporters said they spend over an hour per day reading blogs. And a total of nearly three in five (57.1%) reporters said they read blogs at least two to three times a week.
Journalists are increasingly active participants in the blogosphere. One in four reporters (27.7%) have their own blogs and nearly one in five (16.3%) have their own social networking page. About half of reporters (47.5%) say they are “lurkers” — reading blogs but rarely commenting.
Following on the heels (or should that be the leap that wasn’t pre-looked) of Facebook’s consumer advertising platform Beacon, Amazon has allowed its users to build up records of what they’ve bought and share it with people (friends) on Amazon. Obviously the big prize here is not accumulating friends like other social networks, but actual consumer items. Ca-swipe!
Amazon is one of the companies that deploys simple business ideas and are probably a step behind the early adopters. Their user reviews and comparison purchases model was peer-production and user generated content (UGC) before they became buzzwords. Now this. Their efforts in cloud computing also brand them as a player in the post W2 world.
