Peter Yared's Musings

This post was also published in VentureBeat. There has been a lot of discussion about how the acceleration of technology is decimating the middle class and traditional jobs . But there has been very little discussion of an emerging trend where individuals are opting out of these same jobs people fear will disappear. Driven by a post-scarcity economic model whereby you can live very frugally if you choose to, some workers (mostly college-educated and urban) are opting out of the now traditional work structure and choosing their own path. As Chelsea Rustrum puts it in her book It’s a Shareable Life , “You can live a life dictated by choice, passion, and freedom — a life where your … experiences are of the highest value.” They are opting into alternative, passion-based professions that have gained popularity and acceptance, such as craft beer producer or yoga teacher, and that have flexible hours. Twenty years ago, if Bob, the valedictorian, showed up to his high school reuni

This post was also published in ReadWriteWeb. Since its inception in the 1960s, the modern computer has offered humans the same “pull computing” paradigm: make a query, get a response. Or, as we often experience it: Go to the haystack, try to find the needle. But that’s quickly changing. As software grows more intelligent and learns more about our preferences and behavior, it seemingly gets to know us. That knowledge makes software more valuable because it means that it can deliver things to us, perhaps even before we know we want it. We are at the start of the era of push computing. Pushmi-Pullyu With push computing, a computer is no longer just a question-and-answer service; it’s expected to proactively figure out what’s interesting to you and deliver that data. On mobile, that’s often an actionable stream of cards and timely notifications of important items. Push computing represents a major shift in architecture from the pull relationship computers have long maintained wi

This post was also published in VentureBeat. When Salesforce’s Marc Benioff first started pitching on-demand CRM software, people thought he was insane and were convinced software-as-a-service would never work. Although we are now living in a SaaS heaven with all of the benefits of software that is always available and up-to-date, we are also beginning to see the SaaS hell naysayers were warning us about. When selling Salesforce to a mid to large organization, Salesforce expects multi-year contracts with pre-negotiated user counts, exactly like the on-premise predecessors it ridiculed during its early days. The whole idea of “pay for what you use” has been subsumed by the realities of the sweet cash flow dynamics of a traditional enterprise sale, which ends up as shelfware when customers over-provision. Compounding this issue is that the expense is accounted as an operating expense that affects EBITDA, a key Wall Street metric, while on-premise software was accounted as a much m