3 Billion Devices Run Java - Oracle marketing Java

Oracle monetizes and runs a lot of their technology well. Sun was a technology company that helped many others but itself make money :-) 

Here is how Oracle is now positioning Java, something that Sun Microsystems failed to do. Here is a screenshot of the Java update installer that sells to the masses what Java can do !

A nice lesson on technology marketing. Even if you make rockets, spell it out in a language that is easy for your consumers to understand.

What should Mail for businesses do?

Today email is like the blood that runs through the veins of a business. Businesses use it for communicating with customers and collaborating with employees. It is used for various reasons like sending an invoice, sending a generated price quote, scheduling a meeting, replying to technical queries, sending out bulk mailers about special offers, and lots of other tasks that help generate revenue.

If the number of emails sent for, say, replying to technical queries increases, it becomes hard to track it in a usual mail box. So the need for Support Management Software arises. Likewise the need for scheduling multi-user meetings and keeping oneself more organized, resulted in full fledged calendering software.

At a smaller scale email is actually good enough. Keeping your email unread is a basic way to remind yourself of a pending task.

Now when the number of interactions increase, that signals there is more customers and employees which signals more revenue for the business, which means there is a need for some special software. This software could be specialized software like CRM, Support Software or even better a mail suite that helps you get the job done right from within your mail client. For example, a reminder for contacting a client after two weeks, could be an email turning to unread state at the specified date and time and coming right on top based on a reminder you set for the last email with the client!

I would call these mailing solutions as "smart mail suites" as they give some sort of modelling (some additional capabilities) for a normal mail box.Now for every million dollar business, there will be tens of $100K businesses. These $100K businesses, I will call micro-businesses. For these micro businesses, smart mail suites are good enough. They can't afford to pay for integration of specialized software. They also find it an overkill to jump between interfaces to use these specialized software too.

Everyone needs an integrated view of their business communication. That usually needs a  million dollar software integration project to make happen in a big business. Why create the problem in the first place for a micro business, if you can provide those essentials in a "smart mail suite" ?

We could go one step further and tweak this use case for mail for micro businesses, mail for SMBs and more.


I will close with one additional point. Your hosted mail solution should obviously be miles ahead of hotmail.com of 1990s?

IT Team Job at stake?

If your IT Team has been caught napping when the virtualization, cloud and now SaaS wave is sweeping, I would say its your fault. Sorry for being harsh.

The main value I see about the cloud is accessibility of data. Virtualization and public clouds are an enabler for SaaS. You now have more ways to access it as your data has left the "sacred corporate premises". 

Previously IT Team would harp about security and prevent any form of access from outside. However that stiffled innovation and productivity of the employees.

If you had ensured your business critical functions (applications) were made more accessible, maybe with lesser rules, using other technologies,  the up take of SaaS could have slowed down. This could have given the IT Team more headaches. But headaches create work :-)