Great article on True SaaS (multitenant, single code line, hosted software) and why enterprises should care about it.  Its a common practice for software vendors with highly successful products to just assume that it can "be SaaS" if we just repackage the solution as hosted.  While this may look "SAAS" and your customers may even like the appearance of a higher level of data security, it has huge trade offs in terms of an enterprises need to manage the solution.  Customers of these type of solutions are tied to higher per user costs, they have to do their own upgrade coordination and scheduling, normally with high up front PS costs, and they suffer less than stellar quality and performance as they scale the solution.  If your in the market for a SaaS solution you should be asking about the delivery model, if your not your doing yourself a disservice.

Come on Google!! Hire away some UI people from Apple, or hell even Microsoft and fix this!!

Not happy right now!! Will give it a few days and see if I can cope with this change.

I'm a huge fan of VMWare, i've promoted it to my colleagues, used it to save my employers money and ultimately built more agile IT teams to deal with changing business requirements.  While i'm a huge fan, some of my colleagues are not pointing out the high price of VMWare licensing, additional complexity, and the 15-20% performance hit between Virtualized servers and bare metal.  Having been an ESX user since 2.5 I've been a long time supporter, unfortunately with the announcement of Vsphere 5 I have to now reevaluate my entire thought process.

Vsphere 5 isn't the first time that VMware has alienated their customers, the first was "Enterprise-Plus" that was introduced with Vsphere 4.0. Enterprise customers had traditionally been buying Enterprise licenses for ESX after being told that it was the "premier license" that included all of the features of ESX.  Vsphere 4 introduced Enterprise-Plus now going against the messaging from VMWare sales.  Luckily while there were some compelling features in Enterprise Plus (vswitch, standardized host config, etc) and larger memory configurations 99% of VMWare customers didn't find these as critical features they must have. 

Now with the introduction of Vsphere 5 they have added to their socket licensing model vRAM allocations.  I understand the rational for this the major push in Virtualization shops is larger servers, with more cores per socket and lots of ram.  This allows you to reduce your VMWare server needs and increase your consolidation ratios.  With customers buying less ESX Servers this put VMwares cash cow at risk and they needed to take action.  My issue is with their vRam allocations per ESX version, for Enterprise-Plus their "premier" license you only get 48gb of Allocated memory in your license.  A server with 96gb of ram only costs around 16k from Dell right now, meaning that your VMWare licenses are now over 70% of your hardware cost! This is stupid, and is going to cause nothing but pain for customers and increase costs in a time when were being ever squeezed to reduce costs and provide more.  

So, VMware has taken a page from Oracles book, get your customers invested or buy your competitors, and than jack up your rates holding them hostage to you unless you want to go to great lengths to migrate off your existing solution! VMWare is the new Oracle, and shame on them for screwing their loyal customers and advocates. 

1. Value/Reward - Posting updates and photos on Facebook is not as rewarding as it used to be. Sure you may get some likes, but you don't get any feedback and most of the time when you do get feedback it something negative and discouraging or a counter opinion putting you immediately on the defensive.

2. Trying to keep track of the ever increasing privacy issues on Facebook is exhausting and confusing, and people are tired of dealing with it. 

3. They get more value out of other websites that have like minded individuals (website for your knitting club, computer club, book club, etc) that have more value to you and put you in touch with like minded people who can add value. 

4. Honestly if were really friends we talk outside of facebook and I already know about what your posting... having a debate over a political issue is more rewarding in person and you don't hurt peoples feelings, etc. The need for human feedback is better met with face to face, phone to phone or some other interactive method like IM than in posts on facebook.

So what am I doing with my time now that i'm not using facebook as much.

1. Well a new baby and a 22 month old take a up a ton of my personal time (and do you really want to know that i just changed the 5th poopy diaper for Corbin for the day?? No not reallly.

2. Work. My company makes an awesome product called Spaces, that we use for corporate collaboration and social, I keep track of it throughout my day for information on prospective sales, HR updates, and projects my team is working on. 

3. Posterous - Why just post on facebook, when i can post on Twitter, facebook, disqus and a dozen other social avenues and feed most of the comments and discussion back to one central place. 

4. Twitter - If you want breaking news this is the best place, faster then any traditional media company. 

5. Google Reader - Keep up on the blogs and twitter feeds you can't watch all day and night, but are interested in following.

Is anyone else finding Facebook less and less valuable than it used to be?