Meanwhile smaller, Web software firms including Salesforce.com and SuccessFactors are stealing attention and customers to their Web software.
Customers can tinker with their creations over the Web as quickly and easily as they would on desktop software because Zazzle uses the Web software tool kit known as Ajax.
Potential targets for acquisition include Moveable Type, a software-based Web-log service, and Radio Userland, another desktop software product used for publishing Web logs produced by privately held UserLand Software of Acton, Mass.
Aydin Senkut, who left with tens of millions of dollars after Google's initial public offering, has funded some 22 companies, including Mashery, a service for combining different Web software packages, and BuzzLogic, a service for spotting trends on the Web.
Last month, the FTC notched a win for its guideline approach when the online-advertising industry voluntarily agreed to one of the main privacy recommendations: the development of a "Do Not Track" mechanism that would let users limit Web tracking using a single setting in Web browsing software.
RightNow is a Bozeman, Montana company best known for self-service web software, such as the ability to manage your own returns with a web retailer like Overstock.com.
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Competitors include small firms such as Farmlogs, a Web startup that focuses on crop data, and software maker Farm Works, as well as John Deere, which has software and Web support for managing crop production and machinery.
No word yet on whether the independent Web software makers will develop for copiers.
The most successful Web software firm to date, Salesforce.com, thrives by focusing on customer management tasks.
Nimble Technology, a developer of Web software for data integration, is also a recent Madrona bet.
The giants naturally are fighting back with newly-stitched in acquisitions and their own Web software offerings.
Developers can now create web software, mobile apps or Google Motion Charts based on World Bank data.
It is tiny compared to Oracle, of course, but looms large relative to the younger Web software players.
Workday sells Web software that helps big companies run back-office functions such as payroll, personnel, asset-tracking and spending.
This may give a boost to other Web software names, notably Salesforce.com.
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Both companies are competing with Oracle, IBM, and the smaller Web software firms like Salesforce.com and Workday.
Oracle issued an emergency update to its widely-used Java web software on Sunday, but experts say it still contains security flaws.
He has acknowledged that selling Web software is going to require a massive shift inside Oracle, notably on the part of salespeople.
Web software is billed as a flexible alternative to maintaining a suite of huge applications from sap and Oracle inside a corporate data center.
Then again, there may be even more opportunity for marketing intelligence as Web software companies increase the number of modules they offer to customers.
Fried is the founder of 37Signals, a Chicago firm that sells Web software for project management and collaboration under the names Basecamp and Backpack.
The most successful Web software firm to date, Salesforce.com (nyse: CRM - news - people ), thrives by focusing on customer management tasks.
Just as Microsoft used its dominance in operating systems to get its browser onto millions of computers, it now can rely on that browser to offer Web software.
She went to the Tableau Software Web site, downloaded the freeware, connected it to SQL and got her answers, said Fink, now the chief marketing officer for Tableau.
Google and Singtel are rapidly signing up small and medium-sized companies in Asia to use the Google Apps suite of web software (email, video, chat, office software like Microsoft Office).
And so there is a land-grab afoot where the younger, nimbler Web software firms Salesforce, Workday, Netsuite, and Box are aiming to gain share from the giants including Oracle and SAP.
The American boom in venture capital that began in the 1980s has both incubated and accelerated the commercial development of countless quantum industries: personal computers, Web software and social networks, to name three.
Web software is billed as a flexible alternative to maintaining a suite of huge applications from sap and Oracle (nasdaq: ORCL - news - people ) inside a corporate data center.
In addition to retail sales to individual consumers, Google is trying to sell Chromebooks to the millions of student, corporate and government customers that use Google Apps, the company's suite of Web software that competes with Microsoft's Office.
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