Tag: cloud computing

Amazon and the Soviet customer service model

We all value our collections of CDs, books and photos, but what happens when we completely lose the digital equivalents?

We all value our collections of CDs, books and photos, but what happens when we completely lose the digital equivalents?

The story of Linn, a Norwegian lady who had her account terminated by Amazon, demonstrates the dangers of being locked into one Internet company’s empire. Get cut off and you lose everything related to them.

A little understood part of the cloud computing and app world is that you, the customer or user – which isn’t necessarily the same thing – don’t really own anything. The money you spend on ebooks, mobile apps or web storage are for licenses to use the services, not the products themselves.

Should the supplier decide they no longer want to provide you with their service, then you lose your account and everything with it.

This is what happened to Linn when Amazon’s algorithm decided her account was in some way breaching their terms and conditions.

We have found your account is directly related to another which has been previously closed for abuse of our policies. As such, your Amazon.co.uk account has been closed and any open orders have been cancelled.

Per our Conditions of Use which state in part: Amazon.co.uk and its affiliates reserve the right to refuse service, terminate accounts, remove or edit content, or cancel orders at their sole discretion.

“At their sole discretion” is the key point here. This is a standard term in most online contracts and reflects the legal realities of the physical world where a shopping mall manager or bar owner can ask you to leave their property without having to tell you why.

When you use a virtual service, which includes e-books and cloud computing software, you are on someone’s virtual property and they can ask you to leave any time they feel.

Of course those rights are subject to any contract you might have with that e-book seller, cloud computing service or shopping centre but you have to be in a position to enforce them – not an easy task when you’re in Norway and their lawyers are in Connecticut.

Even if you want to enforce the agreement you believe these services have entered into, the grossly biased contracts attempt to put all obligations on users or customers while freeing the vendor of the distraction of being responsible for anything.

The real problem though is the lack of notice and fairness – this blog’s previously looked at how PayPal, Facebook and Google will shut down business sites without any warning or due process.

It’s one thing to get thrown out of a shopping mall but it’s another matter when your car and week’s groceries are still in there.

Even more worrying in Linn’s case is how ebooks and music purchased with Digital Rights Management (DRM) controls can be erased by companies like Amazon. Which is like walking home from the shopping mall you’ve been banned from to find the manager has called by to confiscate the toaster and TV you bought last week.

What’s particularly notable in all of these stories though is the Soviet customer service model, the Amazon”Executive Customer Relations” representative Linn dealt with refused to tell her what she’d done wrong or what rules she broke.

The only thing “Michael Murphy” would tell her was she was effectively banned for being linked to a blocked account and stated;

“Please know that any attempt to open a new account will meet with the same action.”

No notice, no appeal, no rights. The computer says no and the bureaucrat cannot help you further.

Trust lies at the core of all business and this is even more true when buying services like e-books and cloud computing products. If you can’t trust a vendor to provide a service, or to act openly and honest with you when a problem occurs, then it’s unlikely you’ll use that service.

A lack of trust is what web 2.0 companies like Amazon and eBay risk with hostile, Soviet style customer service. This is the weak point of the entire online business model.

For individuals and businesses it’s important to understand that those e-book, cloud storage or social media services may appear to be a bargain, but there are risks lurking in the fine print.

The new Soviets might be doing well at the moment, but their days are numbered just as the USSR’s were.

Every business is a cloud business

Cloud computing can present an unexpected set of problems for a business.

Every business is a cloud business claims Zach Nelson, the CEO of cloud Enterprise Resource Planning service Netsuite.

In Zach’s view every business should be using cloud computing services and at a lunch in Sydney he illustrated this with companies ranging from agribusiness Elders through to furniture and design store CoCo Republic.

A buzzword used by Zach and Netsuite is ‘omni-channel’ and this is something we’ve heard from local retailers in the past.

Interestingly Netsuite’s definition of omni-channel is more as a catch-all phrase than a definition. “There are so many channels, there are really no channels,” says Zach. “Omni-channel was the only word we could find.”

This doesn’t bode well for older retailers struggling with the idea of a website as part of their “omni-channel’ strategy, let alone tablets, smartphones or 85” smart TVs.

The problem also faces businesses adopting cloud computing platforms with the related trend of Bring Your Own Device being in itself is an “omni-channel” medium where an employee could be using anything from a smartphone with a 7″ touchscreen through to a fully equipped PC workstation with a 27″ cinema display.

How Netsuite deals with the plethora of channels is through responsive design strategy where their sites adapt to the various screen sizes their customers use. This is the opposite to the philosophy of building specific apps for each platform.

We’re seeing other cloud companies struggle with this problem as well, Mark Zuckerberg recently described focusing on the open HTML 5 standard over dedicated iOS and Android apps as one of Facebook’s biggest mistakes while Salesforce founder Marc Benioff used the recent Dreamforce conference to confirm his company’s commitment to the web despite releasing an iOS application.

Zach Nelson’s notion that every business is a cloud business is interesting and true, whenever business owners or managers say “no” asked it they use cloud computing they are genuinely shocked when its pointed out to them that almost every external internet service they use runs on the cloud.

Slowly we’re seeing this being accepted by the business community as show by diverse companies adopting services like Netsuite, Salesforce and Xero.

The big challenge for managers is in taking advantage of the processing power businesses find that cloud computing gives them.

Today’s business Neanderthals

Many businesses are hopelessly ill-equipped to deal with today’s realities and are doomed to extinction

“Bringing a knife to a gunfight” describes showing up hopelessly ill-equipped for the task at hand.

Two recent conferences, the massive Dreamforce in San Francisco and the smaller, but still fascinating, Australian Xerocon in Melbourne illustrate just how radically the commercial world is changing and how many business leaders are poorly equipped for today’s times.

In July, the Melbourne Xero Convention bought together 400 Australian partners of the cloud accounting service which showed how how one New Zealand based company is building it’s business through engaging other suppliers who add features to the basic service.

Vend, a Point Of Sale cloud service provider, was one of the companies exhibiting at XeroCon. In the past POS systems have been a pain for retail businesses with most suppliers’ business models being about locking customers into expensive contracts.

With cloud services, the old vendor lock in model dies as stores can use any device they like such as a PC, tablet computer or a smartphone so a business is no longer locked into using an overpriced and often antiquated piece of equipment.

Making the cloud offering even more attractive is that Vend, and many of their competitors, also take advantage of APIs – Application Program Interfaces – built into other services so they can seamlessly change records.

So a shop can make a sale in their physical store and inventory levels will automatically change in the online stores and on services like eBay. If an item is now of stock, the websites are automatically updated to reflect this.

This business automation makes it easier and cheaper to run a business. It’s everything that computer have promised for the last thirty years and is now being delivered through cloud computing services.

At Dreamforce in San Francisco last week, Salesforce.com CEO Marc Benioff showed the 90,000 attendees how these services work on a corporate level with demonstrations from companies as diverse as General Electric, ski company Rossignol, and Australia’s own Commonwealth Bank.

What really stood out with all of these presentations was how each business had made major technology investments that in turn allowed them to deploy modern tools.

The Virgin America Dreamforce presentation was particularly telling. Having just endured a 13 hour United Airlines flight in a plane that had been barely refurbished since 1988 it was clear that the older airline simply didn’t have the hardware to compete with the upstart even if management and staff wanted to.

From both Dreamforce and XeroCon the message has been clear, those legacy managers who won’t invest in new technologies or re-organise their businesses to meet the realities of the 21st Century are simply doomed.

In Australia this sense of doom in the business community is confirmed when MYOB and Google missed their target of giving away 50,000 free business websites as part of their Getting Aussie Business Online program.

Depending on whose figures you use, between 50 and 65 percent of Australia’s 1.7 million small businesses don’t have a website – and websites are last decade’s technology.

Business has moved onto mobile and social platforms, those 800,000 businesses who are yet to move into the new century are roadkill – the competition are just going to run over them.

If you are still struggling with the idea of a website – let alone a mobile site, mobile phone app or social media strategy – then you haven’t bought a knife to a gunfight, you’ve bought a sharpened stick. It’s time to figure out whether you still want to be in business.

Disclaimer: Paul travelled to XeroCon in Melbourne courtesy of Xero and to Dreamforce in San Francisco as a guest of Salesforce.com

Meeting the solid state Woz

The fast talking Steve Wozniak surfs into town on a wave of enthusiasm.

When the opportunity comes to meet co-founder of Apple computer Steve Wozniak you jump at it, despite being jet lagged from the previous day’s flight.

One of the tough things when writing about Steve Wozniak is that he is a fast talker. You have to be quick to keep up with his ideas and words.

Steve was in town to show off the range of solid state computer memory cards manufactured by Fusion-iO, a company based in Salt Lake City.

Wozniak liked the idea so much he became Fusion-iO’s chief scientist in 2009. “When I first saw the iO drive, it was so beautiful I had to buy one from the company and put it in a frame just to frame it at home.”

What enthused Woz were Fusion-iO‘s range of NAND flash memory cards that speed up servers while reducing their power and cooling requirements.

Those power savings are important for data centres when hundreds of thousands of servers might be in one building, Fusion-iO’s CEO and co-founder David Flynn estimates this could save up the industry a $250 billion a year in operating costs.

Probably the biggest benefits though are in the corporate space, one Flynn’s boasts is how one movie studio used Fusion-iO’s products to reduce transcoding between formats from two hours to 39 seconds.

Another case study they show off is how grocery chain Woolworths were able to reduce the 17 hours to run their weekly trading reports to three hours meaning they were able to capture weekend figures for their weekly Monday morning board meetings.

For smaller businesses, the biggest benefit is these products can turn fairly basic desktop computers into workstations with the $2,500 ioFX card promising some serious post production capabilities for a system although one would expect an entry level box wouldn’t have the data connection, hard drive or – most importantly – power supply to cope with the demands of such a device would put on the typical cheap components in a basic desktop system.

All of these changes though are heralding some pretty big changes for big and small businesses.

Where Steve Wozniak sees the greatest application of moving data faster is in Artificial Intelligence applications like voice recognition. Apple’s Siri is a good example of this.

The barrier to effective voice recognition is the sheer amount of data processing required to effectively understand voice commands. Doing this on cloud services is a far more efficient and effective way of doing this.

As we saw at Dreamforce last week, the sheer amount of data pouring into companies is changing how they manage information. Getting access quickly to relevant information is an important part of managing it.

“I’ve never gotten so excited about or fell in love with a technology like this since Apple.” Says Wozniak.

Having a chance to speak to Steve Wozniak up close shows that fast talking enthusiasm is for real. The Woz is a real geek.

Like all true geeks Wozniak is passionate about what he believes in – whether it’s about NAND flash cards or becoming an Australian resident he bubbles with enthusiasm. Just don’t try writing notes down while he’s in full flight.

Legacy people

Virgin America shows how quickly legacy operations are falling behind their younger competitors

“The problem with legacy businesses is legacy people” said David Cush, the CEO of Virgin America at the Dreamforce conference.

For many organisations this is indeed the problem; that managements, workforces and shareholders are locked into a way of doing business that has worked for them in the past, so when change arrives they are ill-equipped to deal with it.

One of the key take aways from the Dreamforce conference is that the rate of business change is accelerating as technologies like cloud computing and the Internet mature.

For the legacy businesses locked into old ways this means they are going backwards faster than they could imagine.

A good example of this is when Virgin America showed their vision of how customer service works in a connected, social world.

The problem for companies like United and the other legacy carriers with their older aircraft and lumbering IT systems is they simply don’t have the infrastructure to provide these services if they wanted to.

One of the characteristics of 1980s management thinking is under-investing in equipment. ‘working your assets’ by flogging them way past their replacement dates is a handy way to increase profits and management bonuses, but it leaves a business exposed when newer technologies come along.

That’s the problem the legacy businesses, whether they are airlines, banks, telcos or in any other sector. Those who are nimble and those who have invested in new systems can take advantage of the change.

For some of these businesses even if they had the wits, and cash, to make those investments it’s dubious whether they could make the tools work properly.

‘Getting it’ is more than just understanding how to turn on an iPhone or send a tweet, it’s about how these tools can be used in a business.

If you don’t know how to use these tools, or understand the consequences of using them, then the investment is wasted.

For those organisations who are falling behind, they have to start moving quickly or their legacy is the only trace there will be of their existence.

Redefining the social business

Salesforce.com announce a range of new products at Dreamforce 2012

Over the last two years Salesforce.com have been one of the more aggressive buyers of cloud computing and social media startups with acquistions of companies like Rypple, Desk.com, Buddy Media and Radian6.

Today, ahead of the company’s annual Dreamforce conference in San Francisco, Salesforce.com announced a revamped product range that brings together the social media and big data tools from these acquisitions along with some in house innovations.

Salesforce expect nearly a hundred million enterprise tablet computer users and smartphones by 2016, so like all web based services, they have to make their platform available as an app. Salesforce’s new Touch iOS App allows users to use Salesforce.com as an app on the iPhone.

Despite Mark Zuckerburg’s disavowal of HTML5 last week, Salesforce remains committed to the standard despite developing an app for the iPhone.

“Initially we’re rolling out Touch in a way we’ve made sure works the way people want it to work on an iPad,” Peter Coffee, Vice President of Platform Research at Salesforce.com, says.

“We are reiterating our commitment to HTML 5 as a device and platform neutral cluster of standards.

“As HTML5 begins to clearly coalesce we’re making a major commitment to that and we’re going to lead the way while the opposition is still trying to work on one browser.”

Salesforce continues their focus on social media with their Chatter service becoming a key part of their Force.com cloud applications platform. Chatter itself is being extended with a new feature to enable companies to create their own branded communities.

That social integration continues as the company rolls out Social Key, an application which, as Andy MacMillan, senior vice president and general manager of Data.com says “will empower companies to derive value from social data for the first time.”

If Social Key does achieve a real measure of value from retweets and Facebook posts it may well mean many social media experts will have to return to multi-level marketing or real estate sales. This in itself is not a bad thing.

The new Salescloud platform uses Chatter to build business intelligence on customers, bringing data across a business to help sales teams target their efforts more effectively.

While sales is by definition the focus of Salesforce they are also launching a similar Chatter service for support teams. This compliments the acquisition of Assist.ly at the beginning of the year.

Marketing too is being targeted by Salesforce with the launch of Marketing Cloud that combines the Buddy Media Facebook marketing service and the Radian6 social media monitoring platform.

While already the leader in business cloud applications, Salesforce are making a strong bid to dominate the sector in a way that Microsoft did in the desktop computer industry twenty years ago.

Browsing through the 400 partner stands at the Dreamforce Expo shows Cloudforce  are building a deep ecosystem around their products that will make it hard for competitors to break into the space.

Whether Salesforce achieve this dominance remains to be seen, but they are certainly giving a new set of tools for businesses to understand their customers.

Pricing and Availability
Salesforce Touch is generally available today on iOS devices, and included in all Salesforce editions.

Sales Cloud Partner Communities is currently scheduled to be available in limited pilot in Fall 2012.

Sales Cloud Partner Communities is currently scheduled to be generally available the second half of 2013.

Data.com Social Key is currently scheduled to be generally available the second half of 2013.

Pricing of Sales Cloud Partner Communities and Data.com Social Key will be announced at general availability.

Living the Salesforce dream

Dreamforce showcases Salesforce.com’s vision of cloud computing, big data and social media’s future.

The history of Salesforce.com tracks the evolution of cloud computing. Founded by Marc Benioff and Parker Harris in a San Francisco apartment at the 1999 peak of the dot com boom, today the company has over 100,000 customers with a market capitalisation of 21 billion dollars.

While founded as a sales Customer Relationship Manager (CRM) service, Salesforce’s range of products has extended across a number of other business functions such as business intelligence and customer support.

Dreamforce is the company’s international major conference which in 2012 is expected to attract 90,000 attendees to hear what is planned for the platform as they expand into new fields.

Along with Salesforce are 350 partners exhibiting their services that plug into Salesforce’s system. As we saw at the Xero conference, the community of developers and support companies are as important to a software company’s success as its products.

One of the notable things about Salesforce is the company’s hunger for acquisitions having taken over twenty-four companies in the last few years. It will be interesting to see how Salesforce are integrating those startups.

Salesforce are probably the company at the forefront at adopting social media into their products as seen with the acquisitions of companies like Facebook advertising platform Buddy Media and the Rypple  social performance review service.

The move to mobile is changing how businesses interacts with customers, this is one of the challenges for Salesforce.

Just as Salesforce has tracked the rise of cloud computing, the company is now tracking the evolution of Big Data and social media.

The Dreamforce 2012 conference should give some insight into how the company, and other industries, are adapting to the challenges presented by the mobile web, big data and the social workplace.

Paul travelled to the Dreamforce conference courtesy of Cloudforce.

Microsoft TechEd Australia 2012

Microsoft’s Australian TechEd in 2012 comes at an important time for the software giant.

2012 is the year that will define Microsoft as the market place they have dominated moves to tablet computers and smart phones.

The challenge for Microsoft is how they migrate their desktop and server products to the platforms dominated by Amazon, Google and Apple.

At this year’s TechEd Australian conference the pressure is on Microsoft to present how they will deal with this challenge from tablet computers, mobile phones and cloud computing.

The big ticket item is the Windows phone. After the disastrous launch of the Nokia Lumia 920, Microsoft has to convince the market place they have a viable competitor to the iPhone and the plethora of Google Android devices.

Microsoft have taken the opposite strategy to Apple in trying to offer the same operating system on all their devices. If Windows 8 can run on all systems then they have a chance of locking high margin corporate users onto their platforms.

Windows 8 itself has to have a compelling story to tell. Much of Microsoft’s future relies upon a successful rollout of the new operating system that meets the demands of both consumers and businesses. Users increasingly expect social media and cloud computing services to be integrating into their systems.

Cloud computing is an important part of Microsoft’s corporate strategy and how the new version of Windows Server delivers on the business requirements of using cloud services will be an important factor in the product’s success.

One of Microsoft’s most profitable product lines has been their Office suite of applications. Margins on Office have been under pressure since the release of the free Google Docs suite and the corporate Google Apps product.

The advantage Microsoft have in the office productivity market is their products have the full range of feature business users need and Google, and Apple, have struggled to include these tools in their products.

With new versions of Office, Server, Phone and Windows all being released Microsoft have a lot of stories to tell and the stakes for the software giant are huge. It’s going to be an interesting few days at the Gold Coast Convention Centre.

How much server space do Internet companies need to run their sites?

How much server space do companies like Google, Amazon, YouTube, Hotmail and Facebook need to run their sites?

“How much server space do companies like Google, Amazon, or YouTube, or for that matter Hotmail and Facebook need to run their sites?” is the question I’ve been asked to answer on ABC Radio National Drive this evening.

This isn’t a simple question to answer as the details of data storage are kept secret by most online services.

Figuring out how much data is saved in computer systems is a daunting task in itself and in 2011 scientists estimated there were 295 exabytes stored on the Internet, desktop hard drives, tape backup and other systems in 2007.

An exabyte is the equivalent of 50,000 years worth of DVD video, a typical new computer comes with a terabyte hard drive so one exabyte is the equivalent of a million new computers.

The numbers when looking at this topic are so great that petabytes are probably the best way of measuring data, a thousand of these make up an exabyte. A petabyte is the equivalent to filling up the hard drives of a thousand new computers.

Given cloud computing and data centres have grown exponentially since 2007, it’s possible that number has doubled in the last five years.

In 2009 it was reported Google was planning to have ten million servers and an exabyte of information. It’s almost certain that point has been passed, particularly given the volume of data being uploaded to YouTube which alone has 72 hours worth of video uploaded every minute.

Facebook is struggling with similar growth and it’s reported that the social media service is having to rewrite its database. Last year it was reported Facebook users were uploading six billion photos a month and at the time of the float on the US stock market the company claimed to have over a 100 petabytes of photos and video.

According to one of Microsoft’s blogs, Hotmail has over a billion mailboxes and “hundreds of petabytes of data”.

For Amazon details are harder to find, in June 2012 Amazon’s founder Jeff Bezos announced their S3 cloud storage service was now hosting a billion ‘objects’. If we assume the ‘objects’ – which could be anything from a picture to a database running on Amazon’s service – have an average size of a megabyte then that’s a exabyte of storage.

The amount of storage is only one part of the equation, we have to be able to do something with the data we’ve collected so we also have to look at processing power. This comes down to the number of computer chips or CPUs – Central Processing Units – being used to crunch the information.

Probably the most impressive data cruncher of all is the Google search engine that processes phenomenal amounts of data every time somebody does a search on the web. Google have put together an infographic that illustrates how they manage to answer over a billion queries a day in an average time of less than quarter of a second.

Google is reported to own 2% of the world’s servers and they are very secretive about the numbers, estimates based on power usage in 2011 put the number of servers the company uses at around 900,000. Given Google invests about 2.5 billion US dollars a year on new data centres, it’s safe to say they have probably passed the one million mark.

How much electricity all of this equipment uses is a valid question. According to Jonathan Koomey of Stanford University, US data centres use around 2% of the nation’s power supply and globally these facilities use around 1.5%.

The numbers involved in answering the question of how much data is stored by web services are mind boggling and they are growing exponentially. One of the problems with researching a topic like this is how quickly the source data becomes outdated.

It’s easy to overlook the complexity and size of the technologies that run social media, cloud computing or web searches. Asking questions on how these services work is essential to understanding the things we now take for granted.

Selling old rope

Sometimes rebranding an old concept works in the favour of customers.

“Big Data is a fad” announced a speaker at a technology conference. “We’ve had Big Data for years. We used to call it business analytics.”

He’s right. The IT industry is very good at rebadging technology and the term ‘Big Data’ is just the latest of many examples — the best of which is how ‘cloud computing’ which is largely a rebadging of SaaS, Application Service Providers or client-server.

While it’s easy to be cynical about this IT industry habit, there is a valid underlying point to this repainting old rope — that the refurbished old string is cheaper and more useful than what came before it.

The problem for innovators creating accessible, cheaper and faster ways to do things is they risk that their product will be likened to the old, expensive and inaccessible methods. No cloud computing provider wants to be associated with IBM’s expensive client-server products or the flaky Application Service Provider of the dot com era.

Most innovations aren’t revolutionary, they have evolved out of an older way of doing things. So saying “it’s being done before” when seeing an innovative product may be missing the point.

In the case of Big Data the principles aren’t new but we’re collecting more data than ever before and the old tools — even if they could manage with the volume of information— are far more expensive than the new services.

So repainting old rope isn’t always done for purely marketing purposes, sometimes there’s a real benefit to the customers.

Stranded markets

Businesses with old, declining markets are going to slowly fade away

“Stranded assets” are an accounting term for property that’s worth more on the books than it is in the marketplace.

Often the valuation problem has come about because of market, legislative or physical changes – what was a valuable and useful asset becomes isolated from the rest of a business.

Customers are biggest asset we have in our business – so what happens if our customer base becomes a “stranded asset”?

This situation isn’t far-fetched in a time when technology changes a marketplace – a blacksmith providing services to stagecoach companies would have been in this situation a hundred years ago.

In response to Are Businesses Fleeing the Online Space?, Xero’s Australian CEO Chris Ridd made some points about the problems MYOB have in the accounting software marketplace.

We see that going online to the cloud is finally allowing many small businesses the opportunity to avoid the “walk into Harvey Norman and fork out hundreds of up-front dollars on on-premise software” experience and instead go straight to the simplicity and cost efficacy of the cloud.

This is evidenced in our numbers and the fact that 40% of new customers signing up to Xero are coming from no software. (I mentioned last week at the NBN Forum that it was 30%, but we doubled checked and were staggered to find it was actually a lot higher). So we are creating a new market and cloud is therefore increasing the addressable market for accounting software. The cloud changes the economics of doing IT and makes automation of the business accessible and attractive to  a whole new category of SMEs.

Chris’ point is interesting – the new generation of businesses aren’t going to the computer superstore and buying box software. Which is a problem for those who sell box software such as MYOB and Harvey Norman.

What’s more, customers have moved away from those same superstores along with things like phone directories and classified ads, which is the problem companies like Sensis and Fairfax have to deal with.

A decade or so ago, MYOB, Sensis and Fairfax were dominant in their markets with a loyal band of customers. Today the remaining customers – many of whom have not changed their business plans for decades – are”stranded markets” made up of holdouts who won’t move to new technologies.

Those holdouts aren’t particularly profitable and they are slowly leaving their industries through retirement or, increasingly for these slow adopters, going broke.

Being dominant in a market that’s declining in both profits and sales is not the place to be for any business.

It’s difficult for the managers of these enterprises to move as their existing products are their core business, which is the classic innovators dilemma, but the alternative is to end up like Kodak or Sony.

One thing missed in the eulogies for Steve Jobs is how he overcame the innovator’s dilemma problem within Apple. When it became apparent the old Mac OS was a barrier to innovation, he killed it along with the floppy disk and Apple Device Bus.

Apple’s customers hated it as most of them had a substantial investment in the hardware which Jobs had made obsolete overnight. But almost all of them came back and became greater fans.

News Corporation are trying a different tack to Steve Jobs in splitting the operation into an “old” business and a “new’ business. That way the old business can find a way to make money or quietly fade away without affecting the newer, more dynamic entertainment and electronic arms of the organisation.

The challenge for MYOB – along with Harvey Norman, Fairfax and Sensis – is to move their customers to the new technologies, those who won’t go are the past and those stranded customers will isolate the business from the mainstream.