From what's listed in the news story, we don't know that, but the point of the article is not to single out Oracle, but to realize that financial accounting for cloud software products is a grey area that affects many firms -- including those that sell it, and even the buyers, and having clearer standards will benefit everyone.
Generally speaking, when I see hard-to-explain sales behaviours from enterprise vendors my experience is that:
1/ The sales incentives are leading to sales teams optimising their incentives in ways that seem bad for the organisation over all, and/or
2/ The contract has nasty fishhooks that will make all that money back, and more, in year two or three (classic example from my experience with a different vendor: selling servers at $50k, discounted from $250k, but then assessing maintenance on the original price, leading to a $50k/year opex).
The gray area is how one counts revenue as cloud or non-cloud. Some software can be used in both modes, and the question is how one categorizes them. For example, Microsoft Office 365 can be used in cloud (in style of Google docs) but it can be installed locally. The gray area affects many firms, and is not isolated to Oracle.
You have a good point. It's a spectrum. There are software companies that thrive by using different models. Some are based on open source, some are based on closed source and some even mix the two. Some other companies as listed elsewhere are ad-companies and give away software to bolster their eco-systems.
It seems that Jet.com (Ana Amazon-like competitor, I haven't used them yet, so don't know the experience) has a $35 threshold for 2 to 5 day free-shipping.
I've been comparing and buying on either Jet or Amazon recentlly. As a result, I've been buying on Jet more frequently.
Jet has a smaller selection but they usually have a good enough range on the price-value curve that it's not a big problem. Like for like, they are indeed cheaper than Amazon and free 2 day delivery is always a plus. Of course their model is lower prices with a bit more delayed deliveries.
I just ordered a few things from Jet.com and it was split into 3 shipments. A shipment of 1 item came within 2 days. A shipment of 3 items is on its way somewhere (although the tracking number gives no real details). The final shipment of 1 item is still 'processing' 4 business days later. It was supposed to be 2-5 day shipping, but I don't see the third item getting to me by tomorrow. We'll see, I guess.
If the lengthening indicates that vague subject lines such as "Hello!" or "Changes" is being replaced by something more specific like "Meeting at 3 p.m. agenda changed", then it's a good thing. I also like all the info in the subject line, such as "Free pizza in the break room <eom>"
Hypothesis: texting and Twitter have gradually forced (some) people to learn the skill of writing concise summaries of their thoughts, where centuries of schooling have failed.
I'm willing to buy into that. I'm very happy that they are doing that. But sadly, many are now tying to be more concise and the subjects now look like tweets with truncated words (please = pls) so its a new mind bender to decipher the subject. Lots of times its read the subject, go ??!?! and the read the body and spend a few mins trying to figure how the got the subject lines
When I start getting emojis in subject lines it will signal the death of email. ;-)
I answer tickets at my job and the subject line allows them to on forever, but due to our system the message will be truncated when it comes to me.
I have this one rep who will always send me tickets with the subject line reading, "Hi Randy Can you come take a look at this my software crashed three times and I don't know what to do I've tried restarting it and that hasn't seemed to help and then I got a bugsplat error message....."
I've explained to her 4x that the subject is truncated so all I see is, "Hi Randy Can you"
She still doesn't get it. Now I just walk over to her desk and ask what's up if she sends me something.
It's like trying to tech support my grandma, except this coworker is a 28 year old Berkeley graduate.
Those are excellent points. Old small flip phones sometimes had a small place for a strap loop so you can fish it out of a bag by the strap, and of course also to hold on to it. Phone straps are popular in Japan, and I've seen some that connect to the headphone jack, but it doesn't really work well, so the sturdier ones connect to a bumper.
A bumper-design (maybe a groove to hold a bumper) is a good idea too. One can argue that making phones easier to damage encourages people to replace it with new ones so manufacturers have hidden incentive to avoid such safety features, but ultimately if someone comes up with a better design like you state, people will flock to it.
All agreed. I'd add that the market is slowing down, so bumpers could end up bringing more profits. First, customers would be more willing to invest in higher margin products if the device was more robust and likely to last. And manufacturers could sell official bumpers with advanced shock-proofing, a nice metal finish, perfect fit to the case, many different colors, ...
Good point about market maturity. If people are holding on to phones longer, sell them more accessories that people replace periodically, and make the base unit more also high margin (if they accomodate the official bumpers). But it's the consumer's choice -- they don't need to buy new bumpers if they are content with what they have. It's a variant of the razor & blades model.
I didn't know about this book, and thank you. I think reading the style and opinion of key contributors to industry, science, nature preservation and other areas also helps me understand their motivations and world views. It's not just a listing of facts, but trying to get into their mind-set. I feel I do not get that from wikipedia.
On Feb 20th, 2016, it was reported that Secretary of State Kerry warned the kingdom of Saudi Arabia and Pakistan of non proliferation treaty consequences if the kingdom acquired such weapons. This news report may be related to that.
