Free Enterprise Software Online?
from the 1999-calling... dept
1999 is calling and they want their business model back. You may remember at the height of the boom, one of the popular business models was to give away something for free and support it with advertising. Many of those companies are now dead and gone, but some still insist that it's a business model that can work with proper execution. Now that the whole online CRM space has heated up with Salesforce.com getting plenty of attention and Siebel trying to buy their way into the space, a new company has come along with plans to offer a free hosted CRM application that will eventually be supported by advertising. This certainly sounds familiar. I remember testing out a few similar services around 1998 and 1999. So far, this offering from FreeCRM.com seems to fall short in terms of matching features with the bigger players, but I can see how some might find this useful. Whether or not they can bring in enough advertising (or people willing to bounce up to the premium version) to support the company is another question.
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ASP - Not for Me
I looked but couldn't find them - I'm sure somewhere in the Techdirt archives there are a slew of articles about all of the companies that were left in the lurch when their ASP went belly-up. The ASP holds all of your data, and when they go your data goes with them. Even when the failed ASPs made arrangements to get the data to the customer, how long does it take to get a replacement application up and running?
All I could find was this article, but the shortcomings then still apply now.
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Re: ASP - Not for Me
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