(There’s No) Accounting for the Subscription Economy

You may remember the subscription economy from previous posts.  It’s one way to make sense of cloud computing and the many new and very different ways of doing business on the Internet.  We’re most familiar with software as a service and how different it is from conventional licenses; so familiar in fact that I don’t [...]

Make Your Business Resilient

Welcome back to the discussion. At the top of my list is the idea of resiliency, which I consider a more practical form of sustainability for business.  We are now encountering a wave of sustainability-oriented ideas in the popular culture.  Forty miles per gallon is the new thirty, someone said and I have seen or [...]

2011 Say Bye-bye!

Every year around this time I write two columns one on the year that was and another on what I expect the new year to bring.  There is no methodology for this process and I believe this lack of method is important.  I take a blank screen and fill it up with what has been [...]

The Subscription Imperative Revisited

As often happens in evolutionary systems, availability precedes demand.  That’s a complicated way to say that we build products then figure out what they’re good for.  It’s not that innovators develop things willy-nilly, but no matter how well thought out an innovation is, the marketplace has the last word on its utility.  When we speak [...]

Subscription Economy Going Viral

We talk a lot about the cost of gasoline these days.  With prices pushing to the $4/gallon level it’s white knuckle time as we watch to see how the economy will react — and with good reason.  The economic stagnation of the 1970’s was due in part to the rise in fuel prices and the [...]

Tien Tzuo Talks About the Subscription Economy

We just posted a new interview with Tien Tzuo, CEO of Zuora, a company that provides billing and payment systems for subscription oriented companies.  Zuora sees a new economic model forming not just for SaaS but for any commerce that can be conducted through subscriptions. According to Tzuo, one of the things holding back more [...]

The Subscription Economy

I get a lot of email.  It’s not all because of my job or because I publish my work frequently.  Some of it is like that, but it seems like my email address is on a lot of lists and I am one of the people who get spammed whenever there’s a webinar to fill. [...]

The Subscription Economy

There are multiple ideas about the shape of the future competing for primacy in the electronic village.  I am pushing on sustainability but another idea that I really like is called the subscription economy championed most vociferously by Tien Tzuo, CEO of Zuora.  Subscriptions fit well into Tzuo’s company plan since his company has a [...]