Who can make sense of what's going on with Yahoo these days? With many predicting the demise of the company or its ultimate submission to Microsoft, the news seems to be changing day to day.

Today, Yahoo announced another realignment of its staff.

Yesterday, it sent a letter to its stockholders trying to sell them on why the agreement to display Google ads would "do more for stockholder value" than a Microsoft merger would have.

Charles Cooper of CNET suggested that the reorg would give yahoo a little bit of breathing room but would not solve long-term problems. Cooper wondered whether Microsoft would now go to "Defcon 1" in its attempts to battle the company leadership.

Ina Fried also of CNET reported that forces are now pushing for Microsoft to acquire only Yahoo's search business.

Of course, this led to wild fluctuations in Yahoo stock, with the stock rising briefly after a rumor that talks had been reopened and then a subsequent drop when the rumor was denied. Ultimately the shares closed up 3%, reports San Jose Mercury News.

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I receive Google Alerts about mentions of SaaS and Web 2.0. I thought it was interesting today to see first:

Web 2.0 Scores Success in the Enterprise

...and then immediately underneath that:

Companies Wary of Web 2.0

It seems like depending on whom you listen to and which industry study you read, Web 2.0 is either taking the enterprise by storm and revolutionizing business collaboration, or it's lagging behind thanks to reluctant middle managers. I suspect the truth varies by the situation, as it does with most subjects. Tons of Web 2.0 collaboration probably makes more sense in some industries and applications than in others and isn't universally appropriate. Time will tell, however, exactly how many enterprises decide or need to become "2.0."

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Doug Henschen at Intelligent Enterprise has written a terrific essay that expressed a lot of what I'd been suspecting about some Web 2.0 type technologies -- at least in the enterprise. He ran an experiment in which he attempted to get a simple answer to a question through an executive's Twitter page as compared to good old fashioned email, and surprise surprise, the email answer came first.

I know Twitter is all the rage, but I can't see how "microblogging" (along with several other Web 2.0 tools) would have a very wide range of applicability in the enterprise. It's too time consuming. People are already expected to handle their desk phones, their cell phones, their email, etc. in addition to doing some actual work -- who has the extra time to maintain a microblog, much less check it regularly for people asking you questions?

(Not too surprising that 27 percent of IT decision makers worry that Web 2.0 will lead to employees wasting time.)

It doesn't surprise me that email would be handled more quickly. I confess, of course, to never having attempted microblogging but the few I've looked at were very cluttered and hard to follow with a lot of irrelevant information that I wasn't interested in. Email is easy. It floats into your inbox as it arrives, playing a sound to alert you to its presence, and the discussion threads are generally right there in the email. You don't have to search it out or wade through a mess to find it.

So I tend to agree with Henschen's conclusion that email is still the killer collaboration app and that microblogging is unlikely to become a serious force in the enterprise. I am sure there are a few exceptions when microblogging makes sense, but for the most part, it isn't better than email.

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After last week's Enterprise 2.0 conference, numerous articles have mused as to what, exactly, Enterprise 2.0 even means. Some outrightly doubt that such a thing exists while others seem to indicate that Enterprise 2.0 has a very clear definition.

Jason Stamper's blog at CBR is one that seemed to straddle the line. Stamper proclaimed Enterprise 2.0 to be "whack" while imagining what [Insert Digit Here].0 we'd be at if the mainframe were considered Computing 1.0, and also cited a list of checkpoints for what enterprises needed to know about Enterprise 2.0, most of which seem like common sense: young people want Web 2.0 tools, social media should have a business rationale, harness the wisdom of your network, etc.

Oliver Marks of the Collaboration 2.0 blog at ZDNet had a different take. He noted the ambiguity about the definition of Enterprise 2.0 and wondered whether the technologies would ultimately meet the same fate as "Knowledge Management," a 1990s buzz word that seems to have gone nowhere and meant a lot of different things to different people. Of course, he also points out that Enterprise 2.0 and other such technologies may be the new updates to that very buzz word.

On a different note, with different reports saying different things about Enterprise 2.0 adoption, eWeek had an article saying that middle management is often holding back adoption of Enterprise 2.0. Many middle managers are not sure how Enterprise 2.0 tools fit into existing business processes and so may hold back before adopting them. At the same time, CIO reported on another study that concluded the generational divide in Web 2.0 to be largely a myth, saying that people over 51 were just as likely to be in the thick of online collaboration as were the younger workers.

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After Microsoft walked away from its bid to buy Yahoo a short while back, numerous people predicted that Microsoft would ultimately be back and Yahoo would have to surrender to the Redmond Empire despite its initial reluctance. But on Friday, Yahoo announced that talks had concluded with Microsoft and the shares subsequently plunged 13% in value.

Recent articles have looked at why the deal failed and specifically focused on Yahoo's deal with Google for advertising, the nail in the coffin for the Microsoft acquisition. The deal allowed Yahoo to run Google's ads alongside Yahoo's search results.

One controversial piece was TechCrunch's Michael Arrington analyzing the failure of the negotiations with Microsoft. Arrington points out that this will ultimately hand much of Yahoo's core business to Google and that "Yahoo's hatred of Microsoft runs so deep that they were actually...willing to destroy the future of their company just to keep it independent a short while longer."

An article by John Naughton in Observer News Service accuses Yahoo of being a "groupie to Google's Mick Jagger" and points out that the deal included a hefty escape clause for Google if the deal proved less than lucrative but that the sum was a tiny threshold compared to Yahoo's quarterly revenues.

In Investor's Business Daily, Patrick Seitz reports that Redmond appears to be working on numerous smaller deals to replace what it had hoped to do with Yahoo. It signed a deal with Hewlett-Packard to boost distribution of its Live Search offering. It also put in place an offering for "ad-funded cash rebates" for customers who use Live Search to find and purchase products from specific merchants. He points out that the deal hurt Microsoft's chances of taking on Google but also harmed Yahoo's future in the long term.

Not everyone predicted doom and gloom by the developments, however. Fred Wilson predicted that Yahoo would be spurred to clean house and get out of businesses it shouldn't be in and possibly undergo a change of leadership. In addition, Tim O'Reilly pointed out that not everything was about search and that Google's search dominance wasn't the end of the world and Web 2.0 was the bigger thing.

In fact, according to some reports, the deal is only "mostly dead," as an analysis in TheStreet.com put it. CNET interviewed several analysts who also said not to rule out the deal just yet.

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It seems cloud computing was a hot topic at this past week's Enterprise 2.0 conference, and many of the wrap-up articles being posted around the Web center around that.

InformationWeek has an interesting piece on the real concerns that customers have about cloud computing, particularly security, the possibility of vendor lock-in, how regulatory and legal compliance works, reliability, TCO, and long-term vendor commitment. The piece raises some interesting points about the way companies are addressing these concerns right now.

The FASTForward blog has some notes by Bill Ives on an interesting session in which four companies provided a variety of different approaches to social computing.

Dennis Howlett at ZDNet posts a wrapup of the whole event with some jabs at Oracle and Microsoft for being out of touch with the spirit of Enterprise 2.0. The article also has an interesting discussion in the comments, in which Howlett astutely points out in response to a reader's security concerns that if Lockheed Martin and the CIA are working with Enterprise 2.0 that it can't be an impossible task to do so securely.

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Microsoft got a bit of attention last month when it launched its Live Mesh service to synchronize data on multiple devices and machines. This week Apple has thrown its hat in that ring with its new MobileMe offering, which is basically a reworking of the .Mac service to offer device data synchronization via a Web browser. In its web page about the service, Apple calls MobileMe "Exchange for the rest of us."

InformationWeek reports that current .Mac users will be automatically upgraded and that MobileMe is compatible with Outlook as well as with Apple software offerings.

Most reception to MobileMe looks overwhelmingly positive. An article in SmartHouse suggested the launch could stymie Google's attempts to push its online Office alternatives. A post in the Smartphone Thoughts blog by Jason Dunn called it the "first credible consumer-focused Exchange-like service." Even a website devoted to Windows Live sang Apple's praises over the offering.

The only very slightly skeptical article I saw was in CRN, where an analysis concluded the offering was strong but it remains to seen whether the service will have the same bugs that have plagued other offerings. In addition, it remains to be seen whether Apple will offer a business version and whether the service will be made Linux compatible.

An open source offering called Funambol was also announced to compete in the space, although not offering the entire functionality of MobileMe.

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The preview articles are starting to come out for this week's Enterprise 2.0 Conference, where all sorts of things ranging from wikis to microblogs are sure to be discussed.

CIO Magazine's C.G. Lynch has posted a comment on the three things that would be neatest to see at the conference -- case studies, more on the "innovation gap" between new and old, and measures of user adoption.

InformationWeek, a publication run by the same company that is sponsoring the conference, has a conference preview on one of the upcoming sessions, written by reporter W. David Gardner. In it, Gardner discusses the CIA's "Intellipedia" project that keeps intelligence group members up to date across different agencies. InformationWeek also has an article by about an planned presentation on Sony's use of wiki's in the enterprise.

In a little bit more juicier news, something of a disagreement erupted between ZDNet's Dennis Howlett and InformationWeek's David Berlind after Howlett posted a somewhat cynical note about how the conference was unlikely to be new or shiny or fresh, and Berlind took offense and suggested that Howlett stay home and accusing him of judging the event by its sponsor list.

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Everyone says different things about SaaS, with disagreements going down to the basic definition of what qualifies software as a service. I recently spoke with Christopher Cabrera, the CEO of Xactly, about common SaaS misconceptions. Listen to the podcast below, or read the transcript.

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KD: Hi! I'm Krissi Danielsson. Take one look at the technology press and it's pretty clear that many companies still have a lot of confusion about SaaS. Here today to talk to us about common SaaS misconceptions is Chris Cabrera, the CEO of Xactly. Let's start by talking about what those common misconceptions actually are. Chris, what do you think are the major reasons why some enterprises are wary of SaaS, and which of those do you think are valid?

CC: First of all, I would tell you that I think the number of enterprises that are wary of SAS is diminishing rapidly as the number of proof points of successful SAS deployments within the enterprise rise. That said, of course, there are concerns and they generally fall into the areas of, you know, security, integration and even some legacy and so I’m going to just touch on those briefly.

First of all, on the security point, this was certainly the largest concern in the early days of SAS and today, most of the big enterprise companies are coming to terms with the fact that this is a little more of a red herring so this would be one of those areas that I think is more of a misconception. In many cases, some of the CIOs that we work with have indicated to us that where we house their data is even more secure than where they had it previously because in many cases even though they might have a very big data center with security, the actual data that’s being pulled of there is on individual employee’s laptops and floating around all over the place. So, this is one of those areas where, you know, I think the smart CIOs are realizing that with all the good technologies out there and, you know, certainly, we use Oracle at the database level that helps insure a lot of the security that, you know, let’s face it, when was the last time you logged in to your online bank account and saw your neighbor’s balance? And so, CIOs are realizing this and I think that’s one of those areas that’s a little bit more of a red herring.

The second area that I mentioned is integration and a lot of the large enterprises have this belief that they are doing something that is never been done before or couldn’t be accomplished in the SAS world and this is another area which I would put in the category of a misconception because the reality is that part of the power of SAS and specifically multi-tenancy within SAS allows SAS providers to work in conjunction with each other and provide best of class solutions so, you know, in our case, in one example, we have a 4-way mashup you may have heard Mark Binian talk about mashups. This is simply the ability for four different companies and in our case exactly Sales Force.com and Amazon and PayPal to work together so that the user gets this great experience of the four different, the best of the four different companies without ever having to sign on to different areas.

The final point I’d make on this question is the legacy and what I mean by that is, you know, a lot of companies, certainly big enterprises watched how, you know, the advent of hosted on-premise apps and companies like Koreo (???) and this was kind of a failed strategy because it wasn’t a true SAS from the ground up, you know, multi-tenant app and so there’s some worriness around that and, here again, I think that that’s more of a red herring because good SAS companies aren’t hosting on-premise apps they’re building from the ground up true multi-tenant apps.

KD: OK so when companies have these kinds of concerns what can SAS providers do to make enterprises feel more at ease about choosing a SAS solution?

CC: That’s a great question. There’s a lot of things that SAS providers can do and certainly providing, you know, information on up-time and performance metrics is important usage data so that customers can understand, you know, how often it is up and how well it works. There’s way to diminish a lot of the security concerns with standards, there’s, you know, all kinds of different compliance standards, things like SAS 70 Type 2 security on the data, there’s ways for, a lot of times we’ll let our customers come and tour the data center or we’ll let them talk with our engineers and understand, you know, what it is that we’re doing at the security level, the datamart level to, you know, make sure that their data is safe. Certainly, providing references, talking to companies that are of like size and complexity and have been doing the same types of things and making sure that what kind of experiences they’ve had. I think also, one of the things, I keep talking about multi-tenancy, which really just means a one-to-many kind of approach, many people will so, “Oh, the customer shouldn’t care” well they really should care and one of the reasons they should care is by doing multi-tenancy and only supporting a single version of our product, we can provide for the first time APIs and so this is another area where companies can mitigate their risk by getting their hands on those APIs and doing their own, you know, integration works. And then finally, I think that the RLI metrics are so powerful in the SAS model because the hurdle to get into these systems is so low that the return can be measured in weeks often, certainly not years but not even in months, it can be measured in weeks. And this is another area that can put enterprises at ease so that they don’t feel like they’re throwing a lot of money away, if they are nervous.

KD: OK. That sounds like good advice. What are some key points do you think companies looking at SAS solutions should keep in mind? Was there evaluating possible solutions?

CC: That’s a good question and I think that, you know, the downsideof SAS and the publicity and how hot the market is for SAS is that it’s a moniker that does carry with it some weight and so, you know, caveat emptor, the buyer has to beware that, you know, just because a company says they’re SAS or they’re on demand, they may not be and so, you know, companies can get burned pretty bad on that and this is where to look at the architecture and understand, “Are you a SAS company that has been built from the ground up to be a SAS company, meaning you are multi-tenant, meaning you only support a single data set source and line of code and you can provide an API?” If you’re talking to a vendor who’s claiming SAS and they aren’t able to do those things, you are potentially going to put yourself at risk and run down this path of the old Koreo (???) model that we know doesn’t work. Part of these new SAS companies that are true SAS companies, they use all the Web 2.0 that’s a service-oriented architecture, they’re doing these kind of mashups between multiple companies that I talked about. So, I would advise companies that are looking at these solutions to not only look at the company they want to, you know, may be interested in or the service they may be interested in but who are the partners that that company is partnered with and what are the kinds of mashups that they’re doing because if they aren’t doing the kinds of things that I talked about with Amazon and PayPal and Sales Force.com, then, you know, there’s probably a reason for that and it’s probably because they don’t have this single line of code and these APIs that are built to be able to do that.

And the last point I would make is, you know, clearly proven success is really important. You have to go to these SAS companies and understand who all are their customers and if they don’t have customers who are like, you know, the enterprise that’s looking that should potentially be a red flag and you should talk to these references and do blind references. One of the best things our customers do is, you know, field calls that we haven’t set up and only in the SAS model where you’re earning this company every month, I think that the service quality, you know, is high enough to make sure that you get good references all the time.

KD: Thanks! We've been talking with Christopher Cabrera, CEO of Xactly. Thanks for listening and have a great day!

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In a column in Canada Free Press, writer Joshua Hill looks at the recent top 10 technologies list that Gartner Group released to predict the main interesting technologies from the next four years. Not too surprisingly, Web and Enterprise 2.0 technologies made that list -- including social networks, cloud computing, Web mashups, and the technologies generally considered "Web 3.0" such as contextual computing and semantics.

In the post, Hill offers brief explanations of the differences among these terms. And indeed, most have been the subject of press releases lately.

I find it interesting that the concept of cloud computing seems to be slowly stealing the spotlight formerly held by SaaS. The concepts are certainly related. In a post last week on Intelligent Enterprise, Mark Madsen astutely concluded that "in the cloud" seems to be becoming the new "as a service," and that companies are throwing out the -aaS acronym for -itC.

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