Microsoft price hikes will push customers elsewhere

Incredibly, Microsoft is pushing ahead with a change to its licensing model this summer that will effectively raises prices to customers, especially small businesses. The only silver lining I can see to this cloud is that the backroom analysts at Microsoft headquarters evidently expect the economy to be back in overdrive by then, because a recession is no time to be pushing through unpopular price hikes. If they're wrong, then expect small business interest in Microsoft alternatives to rise substantially over the course of this year — naturally that's a trend that would definitely benefit many online service providers.
posted by Phil Wainewright 9:38 AM (GMT) | comments | link

Web services gaining credibility

A lot of enterprises are now investing in web services, according to this article on InternetNews. It quotes an IDC forecast that web services will be at the center of a $1.6 billion industry by 2004, rocketing up to $34 billion by 2007. But most of the action is focussed on integrating existing applications behind the firewall. That means enterprises are spending their money on using web services to patch over things that are wrong within the existing infrastructure, rather than exploiting all the new opportunities that are becoming available out on the wider Web.
posted by Phil Wainewright 3:05 AM (GMT) | comments | link

Yahoo gets serious with webhosting

Yahoo! has added some serious new webhosting capabilities to its GeoCities services. The new GeoCities Advantage service in particular is going to make it possible for businesses to build sophisticated sites. I'm particularly impressed by their inclusion of a PHP editor, and at $19.95 a month for a remarkable 25GB of bandwidth, it's very competitive. Meanwhile, the $4.95 a month GeoCities Plus service, including FTP access, is terrific value for non-commercial bloggers.
posted by Phil Wainewright 3:27 AM (GMT) | comments | link

ASPs migrating to web services

Here's another take on the relationship between ASPs and web services, in an article from the increasingly useful title, The Net Economy. This finds several analysts agreeing that ASPs who already built their software for web-centric delivery are a natural fit for the web services environment, where online delivery is the de-facto norm. Whereas the benighted ASPs who attempted to make a business delivering conventional applications via the Web are still having a hard time convincing customers that their model makes sense, according to Pradeep Khurana, founder of Surebridge, one of the few surviving pioneers of that approach. Frankly I wonder why any of this comes as a surprise ...
posted by Phil Wainewright 7:54 AM (GMT) | comments | link