Wolfram Alpha Pro...

At $5/month, the price is certainly in the right range.  I haven't checked out the features, but the announcement sure makes it sound interesting.  But then again, it would be pretty sad if it didn't :-)

Upverter...

A SaaS design tool for hardware.  Very cool!  Free accounts if you don't mind making your designs public...

Oracle, RightNow, and ServiceNow...

Yesterday our industry was abuzz with some interesting news: Oracle (long a cloud/SaaS nay-sayer) purchased RightNow – very much a cloud/SaaS company, and very much in competition with Seibel (owned by Oracle).  Naturally, everybody would like to know what this means.  The people at my company (ServiceNow) want to know, in particular, what it means for them.

One commentator (Bob Warfield) has an interesting take on his blog.  From his post on the subject, this colorful conclusion:

For the rest of you SaaS companies, guys, party like it is the late 90′s again. Oracle just put a floor under your valuation. If your growth slows, you can be bought and added to the Red Hoard, or is that the Red Cloud now? Just be alert if there is more than one of you in the space to what it means if one is bought and it isn’t you. I would draw no other conclusions whatsoever. Whatever RightNow has other than revenues and the possibility of a plan to cut unnecessary expense to wildly expand profitability, that’s all that matters. Whatever conspiracy theory you may have about the underlying tech, execs, or whatever–forget it. You’re over thinking it. The Oracle Machine has to be fed on a regular basis to sustain growth. That’s all that’s happening here. It’s not particular about what it eats other than that revenue and cost cutting part. OTOH, if you really don’t want to be bought, you had better be able to keep growing and running fast. Those sounds of flesh being ripped from bones, that crunching of marrow noise, well, that’s what the Machine sounds like when it’s just around the last corner you turned.

The rest of you SaaS companies?  That would be ServiceNow.  Party time?

Trello Upate...

I posted very briefly about Trello last week.  I've been using it ever since to keep track of my personal “to do” list, and so far it's proved to be the single most usable such implementation I've run across.  For a developer, the checklist feature is absolutely perfect – I can plan out all the little steps involved for a new feature I'm adding, and then run through them.  I can add or delete or reorder these steps as I go.  I can attach screenshots and documents willy-nilly.  I have yet to run into something that I want to do, but cannot.

Nice job, Fog Creek!

Trello...

Another interesting product from Fog Creek (Joel Spolsky's company)...

Stallman on SaaS...

Richard Stallman (EFF) is a great example of a very smart person who is blinded by their own prejudices.  Here he's slamming Software-as-a-Service (SaaS) for one issue, while completely ignoring (indeed, not even mentioning!) it's many benefits.

No solution to any problem is 100% perfect.  Every choice is an exercise in balancing out the pros and cons.  Every time I buy a new vehicle I'm reminded of this – there are a bewildering variety of choices available, each with its own advantages and disadvantages. Imagine how arbitrarily limited your choices would be if (for example) you refused to consider vehicles that came with floor mats as standard equipment.  That's roughly what Stallman is advocating here.

SaaS is just one way to buy software.  It's got a suite of advantages that I (and many others) think are compelling, and a few disadvantages, many of which can be mitigated or minimized.  Refusing to consider SaaS for the reasons suggested by Stallman is just silly...