Yahoo is up for sale. Microsoft has a tradition: You mess with them twice they never talk to you a third time. Would Google buy Yahoo? No. Who else? SAP? Not a fit, not happening. Oracle? Hmmmm – let’s think about that one.
Oracle just bought Sun and turning Sun into a cloud computing power house. Probably rearrange the software part, integrating professional services, shutting down MySQL, and decommissioning the hardware box sales over time.
Now – Oracle is thinking Social-CRM, they have a cool online community, they are very much SaaS and Web 2.0 aware (even if they don’t produce yet). While maintaining their existing enterprise business, they will migrate carefully into the networked world – built from ground up on: yes, their own cloud.
The first meaningful application: Search. A search server farm is a cloud on its own. So here is a fit too. Oracle is bold and crazy enough to pull this off.
Oracle could even become the SaaS, Search, Social Web cloud provider for their own acquisitions plus the rest who is out there.
The benefit for the users? Huge. Oracle is the last company that would build an advertising based business model. Hence search may become a whole new user experience.
Search is over 10 years old and there was zero progress for the user – only for the advertiser. We still struggle with 10,000,000,000 search results generated in 0.0007 seconds. We still have no structured search, we still have no geo based search, we still have no social search, we still have no crowed search, we still have no ranking, selection or filter based search, we still have no…. – Simply there is zero evolution in the single most used software application on the planet. Right?
I would even pay 10$ per year for a search that does a good job. With a billion users that is $10 Billion per year.
And that is just the obvious beginning….
Strike – done – we will see.
Your willingness to pay for better search results/experience is something I would agree with. The "piling on and commodisation of ads" to sites is becoming the sign of maturing products/markets lacking ideas. Ironically, my experience in the online publishing space shows people are less willing to pay for content that is free normally. However, to your point, if the experience is THAT bad, people are actually willing to pay for better experience for something they need. This may be the the new modern commercial internet cycle. Grow a site, pile the ads on, squeeze the dollars out till the ad yields go down, then your customers will pay you to not advertise, increasing your companies yield managing less ads. That is the final resting place or sweet spot for where business and the consumer maximise each others yield in the relationship. Hmmm, have I talked myself into believing in subscription models now? Nice thought provoking peace Axel.
Very interesting article.
Y! and ORCL…that would be a real game accelerator.
Social CRM? 5 years time CRM could be dead. Relationship Management with greater context driven from live data from social media and collaboration solutions should be the way forward.