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regift_of_the_gods writes:
"The makers of Nutshell CRM, a web-based service for managing sales leads and workflow (screenshots here), have notified their customers that they will no longer able to populate profiles with data from Linkedin accounts, after Linkedin informed Nutshell that it was violating the developer API's terms of use over a year and half after Nutshell first announced the feature. It's hard to argue that Nutshell's Linkedin integration feature does not violate the Linkedin Developer API Terms of Service (specifically section C: 'If your application falls into one or more of the following categories, you are required to be part of one of our Partner Programs and have a signed agreement with LinkedIn... applications used for hiring, marketing, or sales...').
However, Nutshell's CEO says Linkedin representatives also informed him they weren't accepting applications for their Partner Program from CRM vendors at this time, leaving Salesforce and Microsoft (Dynamics) as Linkedin's sole partners in that space. Also, the TOS page notes it was last revised in August 2013; it's not immediately clear whether this clause was in place when Nutshell first announced Linkedin integration in May 2012. The CEO of Zartis, which runs a web service for tracking applicants, blogged his layman's interpretation of Linkedin's Developer API TOS sometime in 2013; his post makes no mention of a prohibition for sales or marketing."
(Score: -1, Offtopic) by MichaelDavidCrawford on Sunday March 09 2014, @07:53AM
Microsoft is one of the largest companies on the planet.
Salesforce is quite large, and a leader in its application area.
This is the first time in my life I've ever heard of Nutshell CRM.
I speculate that Microsoft and Salesforce clued in to maybe that Nutshell was better than either Microsoft's or Salesforce's offerings. There are many reasons that could be: maybe LinkedIn's members preferred Nutshell's GUI, mayne Nutshell was better at delivering value to other LinkedIn members, maybe Nutshell had lower overhead, maybe Nutshell, being a small company, could respond quicker to changing customer requirements. Maybe Nutshell is not publicly traded and so could operate at a significant loss for years on end while laying the foundation for its eventual success.
One of the world's very largest corporations, Bechtel, is privately held. They don't need an IPO and they don't want one.
Let's say your people just forced your autocratic president out of office in an almost but not quite peaceful protest, but with the puzzling result that your previously peaceful and friendly neighbor just next door scuttled a container ship in the middle of your driveway so you couldn't get to work in the morning.
1-800-BECHTEL.
"Bechtel Corporation. How may I direct your call?"
"Areal Logistics please."
"Thank you, please hold."
"Areal Logistics, Joe Stack speaking. How may I help you?"
"Some manner of former KGB agent is blocking my driveway. Any chance you could airlift an armored division in by next week or so to keep them from breaking into my capital city."
"No worries. May I put you one hold for five or so?"
"Great thanks."
(Ten minutes later.)
"We're happy to deliver, but it's going to set your taxpayers back ten billion dollars."
"I'm down with that."
"What's your fax?"
"1-800-UKRAINE"
"Please check your fax twenty minutes or so from now, if your cool with our contract, sign it and fax it back."
Seven days later, your neighbor to the east hurls a brick through your living room window, only to find a depleted Uranium round has spattered his brains all over the wall.
Hardly anyone outside of the military the airlines the airplane companies and the like have so much as heard of Bechtel. It's just a construction firm, but they only build really, really big things like military airbases.
I have a close friend who once worked for a high-end web design consultancy in SFO. That firm made bank throughout the dot-com years because they flatly refused any contract for less than a quarter million.
I mean like Taco Bell would drop them a dime to ask if they could flog their new Enchirito offering for the next seeks weeks or so, so could this consultancy add Enchiritos to http://www.tacobell.com/ [tacobell.com]
"No worries. That will be $250,000.00 net thirty."
"Sure."
You might think Taco Bell is a lo-budget operation, that is, until you cruise by their corporate headquarters somewhere out in the middle of nowhere between LA and San Diego. You can see that building from the surface of the moon.
So my friend is now quite prosperous, not as a web designer, but as a consultancy unto his own. He doesn't have any employees, he outsources everything. If Taco Bell asked him for Enchiritos on his home page, Andy would ring up someone like my ex, my ex would snap a digital photo at her local Taco Bell, Yum Foods would cut my friend a check for a quarter million, then my friend would cut my ex a check for fifteen dollars per hour!
The way my friend got established in this business, was that he would keep track of all the potential clients that his employer turned away as not lucrative enough to accept their work, that is, clients that wanted any less than $250k worth of deliverables.
He'd cool his heels so as not to arouse suspicion, then cold-call them so as to inquire whether they needed any web design!
Forgive me if I don't tell you my friend's name or link his site.
The reason I know all about why Nutshell could in many respects have been far better than either Salesforce or Microsoft, is that I at one time was the coder for a small Mac productivity shop called Working Software in downtown Santa Cruz.
We were working closely with an Apple Evangelist by the name of Susan Layman. At the time I was happily working for half the pay I knew I could command in the Valley. Working Software's owner, found and President, Dave Johnson, worked for no pay at all.
I don't know what Sue was paid but I do know that everyone at Apple is paid quite well, with health insurance stock options and the like, a phenomenal lunch room and all, a gym, a childcare center with its own on-site staff nurse and so on.
So Sue drops by one day and apeshit with envy because my company and Dave's company is so very small.
"WUT? WHY?"
"Because you can move so quickly. If you want to introduce a product to market, you can just write it then ship it. You don't need buyoff from anyone."
Actually we did that all the time at WSI. "Hey Dave! I got a great idea. It would be really easy for me to trivially patch toner tuner to turn it into working watermarker. Are you down with that?"
We shipped it like a week later, it sold like hotcakes for years on end.
Apple actually had a direct competitor to both toner tuner and working watermarker. It was called QuickDraw GX, it required revisions of all the client applications, it was a huge PITA to code to its API, it did not work at all well and I would be completely unsurprised were someone to tell me that QuickDraw GX set The Cupertino Fruit Company back a billion samoleons and required five solid years to design, focus group-test, prototype, implement and qualify.
However, WSI going tits up was in many respects due to Microsoft in particular. I eventually resigned on good terms, then returned a year or two later as a consultant, then ported Spellswell to the BeOS.
I received a significant royalty for each sale, yet in the five years or so it was on sale, we did not move more than ten copies.
This because Microsoft was OK with OEMs installing BeOS as a second operating system, but it flatly refused to permit OEMs to ever install a boot menu.
BeOS and Windows coexist just fine, if one installs either the BeOS boot menu, grub or LILO, but Microsoft knew that BeOS ran just about any application ten times faster than that same application could execute on the same hardware under Windows 98 or Windows 2000.
Hence no boot menu. BeOS IPOed for sixty million, later declared bankrupcy and sold all its assets to Palm Computing for nine million. For years its be.com domain redirected to beincorporated.com, which had one page of legaleze regarding its bankrupcy.
Eventually be.com transformed into a "What You Need, When You Need It, Recommended Searches" parking page. Now some unrelated in business in france owns the domain, while Haiku [haiku-os.org], despite not yet having made it to beta, is a BSD licensed clone that uses far more memory, CPU and disk but in other respects puts BeOS 5 Professional completely to shame.
Yes I Have No Bananas. [gofundme.com]
(Score: 2, Troll) by Lagg on Sunday March 09 2014, @08:56AM
http://lagg.me [lagg.me] 🗿
(Score: -1, Offtopic) by Anonymous Coward on Sunday March 09 2014, @11:12AM
At the risk of being modded offtopic myself
You're welcome. When you posted this, this was the highest-score comment for this story, thanks to your karma bonus. Next time, consider using the "No karma bonus" checkbox on the comment form.
At least I didn't see "I know I will be modded into oblivion for this" (usually with the opposite effect) yet on SoylentNews.
(Score: 1, Offtopic) by maxwell demon on Sunday March 09 2014, @07:15PM
I know I will be modded into oblivion for this, but now you have.
SCNR :-)
The Tao of math: The numbers you can count are not the real numbers.
(Score: -1, Offtopic) by Anonymous Coward on Sunday March 09 2014, @02:50PM
He seems to be one of those guys you used to see on the internet who were at the same time smart and old school bananas.
(Score: 1, Offtopic) by FatPhil on Sunday March 09 2014, @07:59PM
Great minds discuss ideas; average minds discuss events; small minds discuss people; the smallest discuss themselves