TechCrunch : Facebook Has LinkedIn In Their Crosshairs
October 15, 2007
Interview with LinkedIn chief
Yep Facebook, LinkedIn have it right ... the opportunity for these YASNS is relationship-management platforms not open-access communication platforms. That's why openness is less of a virtue than discretion and control.
Yep Facebook, LinkedIn have it right ... the opportunity for these YASNS is relationship-management platforms not open-access communication platforms. That's why openness is less of a virtue than discretion and control.
October 05, 2007
October 03, 2007
Here's a left-field thought. I wonder if Enso has the capability to wrap the GUI, the browser (and therefore web-based services), the way Windows originally wrapped DOS?
It is, after all, closer to the user than all these things.
Kind of an old-skool platform strategy ... but may yet work. Especially if you can write "widgets" for it (or at least Python scripts)
It is, after all, closer to the user than all these things.
Kind of an old-skool platform strategy ... but may yet work. Especially if you can write "widgets" for it (or at least Python scripts)
October 02, 2007
Further clarification : here's a comment I tried to leave on Joshua's post (mentioned below)
Strange that you say that UI standardization isn't an issue on the web. What about the Jakob Nielsen "users spend more time on other people's sites than yours" school of usability design?
Actually, the world of Facebook apps. and widgets is the first time I've started to see that an old-style platform strategy may be possible. Here the basis is something which which is a hybrid of technology, namespace and social convention. Of which Facebook's "news-feed" is the archetypal example. Facebook's news-feed is not merely technological : which is why other generic data-sharing feeds like RSS or Twitter aren't equivalent. It's also a social convention within a particular namespace and community: I'm willing to look at data that an application writes on my friend's feed, even though I haven't installed the application or explicitly subscribed to it. This is different from the open web - I wouldn't welcome an ordinary web-application that my friend used, randomly spamming my email. (Similarly, if too many bots started writing to Twitter, that would kill that particular community pretty damned quickly, it's not part of its culture either.)
Facebook's platform power ultimately rests on their ownership of this complex but delicate socio-technical hybrid. If they can nurture and grow it, such as giving both users and applications, more and subtler ways to manage it, more nuanced types of relationships between people, with more fine grained privacy control and applications that access these both through the APIs and patterns of software behaviour, then I think they have something that's very hard to escape from or reproduce elsewhere.
This is no longer about just data, or arguments about open access to it. It's data + social data + social conventions.
Joshua Allen responds to Marc Andreesen's types of platform.
He says the new platforms are about "data". That's rather like Tim OReilly's "Data Inside" aspect of his web 2.0 definition.
But a) it's not the whole story. And b) it leads to demands for "opening" the platform by making the data migratable.
It's not the whole story because, in addition to data the's user, her social connections and social conventions are the platform. When you think about it, this is true even with Windows, which is why UI consistency is such an important part of a platform.
On social platforms, the lock-in comes not from just having the data walled up in your silo. It also comes from your network being the place where people tend to do X. And if, on somebody else's platform, people don't tend to do X, then they won't shift the X-related applications over.
Because of his "open-data" perspective, Allen, I think, under-estimates the importance of the hosting issue, although he understands it perfectly well.
This is the same debate that's had around Software-as-a-service. It's that "additional intelligence" which is the killer thing that social platforms can offer : doing stuff with social data that cuts across users and across applications. That's why Amazon's database is so much more valuable than everyone hosting their own "I bought and like this book". It can figure out the most popular or "readers who bought X also bought Y".
Yes, theoretically, "scutter" applications can run around a widely distributed microformats, but my bet is that the difference in efficiency and difference in privacy control is actually so great, quantitatively, that it can lead to qualitative differences of application.
He says the new platforms are about "data". That's rather like Tim OReilly's "Data Inside" aspect of his web 2.0 definition.
But a) it's not the whole story. And b) it leads to demands for "opening" the platform by making the data migratable.
It's not the whole story because, in addition to data the's user, her social connections and social conventions are the platform. When you think about it, this is true even with Windows, which is why UI consistency is such an important part of a platform.
On social platforms, the lock-in comes not from just having the data walled up in your silo. It also comes from your network being the place where people tend to do X. And if, on somebody else's platform, people don't tend to do X, then they won't shift the X-related applications over.
Because of his "open-data" perspective, Allen, I think, under-estimates the importance of the hosting issue, although he understands it perfectly well.
It's obvious what benefit a Ning or Salesforce.com would get from keeping your data and code on their servers; it's less obvious what the benefit to you is. There are only two real reasons such an arrangement would be a benefit for you :
If your data, aggregated with data from lots of other customers of the provider, can provide some additional intelligence.
If the provider gets dramatic economies of scale beyond what you could get on your own. In the case of a Ning or a Salesforce.com, this one is dubious. There are only a handful of companies who buy electricity and bandwidth in enough volume to offer hosting cheaper than Amazon. Companies like Yahoo!, Google, and Microsoft.
This is the same debate that's had around Software-as-a-service. It's that "additional intelligence" which is the killer thing that social platforms can offer : doing stuff with social data that cuts across users and across applications. That's why Amazon's database is so much more valuable than everyone hosting their own "I bought and like this book". It can figure out the most popular or "readers who bought X also bought Y".
Yes, theoretically, "scutter" applications can run around a widely distributed microformats, but my bet is that the difference in efficiency and difference in privacy control is actually so great, quantitatively, that it can lead to qualitative differences of application.
October 01, 2007
Me commenting on Umair's criticism of Facebook.
This is an important step in my thinking about widgets, SaaS and YASNs-as-platforms that I'm trying to write something more comprehensive and coherent about. Meanwhile, there's a lot of the ideas in that comment.
This is an important step in my thinking about widgets, SaaS and YASNs-as-platforms that I'm trying to write something more comprehensive and coherent about. Meanwhile, there's a lot of the ideas in that comment.
September 25, 2007
September 18, 2007
Marc Andreesen has a great blog-post that starts with an attempt at defining what a platform is.
He breaks it down into 3 levels :
Level 1 platforms provide an API for external applications to call their services.
Level 2 platforms (eg. Facebook) help the external application present themselves by incorporating the applications within their UI. I'd say that we're really talking about platforms which provide a "callback" to the application.
Level 3 platforms host and execute the application themselves. With the benefit that the platform can broker richer integration between the applications. This is obviously what Salesforce's Force does. And, of course, Ning - the best part of this email is that it signal that Andreeson is trying to promote the "development environment" idea of Ning which was the exciting idea that kind of got lost when they rebranded it as "just another social network". (Asde : In fact, does Ning have what it takes to become a budget Force / AppExchange rival?)
He goes on to make a very good point :
He breaks it down into 3 levels :
Level 1 platforms provide an API for external applications to call their services.
Level 2 platforms (eg. Facebook) help the external application present themselves by incorporating the applications within their UI. I'd say that we're really talking about platforms which provide a "callback" to the application.
Level 3 platforms host and execute the application themselves. With the benefit that the platform can broker richer integration between the applications. This is obviously what Salesforce's Force does. And, of course, Ning - the best part of this email is that it signal that Andreeson is trying to promote the "development environment" idea of Ning which was the exciting idea that kind of got lost when they rebranded it as "just another social network". (Asde : In fact, does Ning have what it takes to become a budget Force / AppExchange rival?)
He goes on to make a very good point :
Second, beware overfocusing on the apps of the past when thinking about the platforms of the future.
Lots of people got confused by the idea of apps running in the browser because when they thought of apps, they thought of the apps they used already on their PCs -- Word, Excel, Powerpoint -- and not the apps that would get built on the web -- eBay, Amazon, Salesforce.com. Now, it turns out in the fullness of time that word processing, spreadsheets, and presentation apps are also moving into the web -- as Google is demonstrating. But way before that happened, the web led people to create lots of new kinds of applications that were not possible on the PC.
A new platform typically enables a new set of applications that were not previously possible. Why else would there be a need for a new platform?
September 17, 2007
September 15, 2007
September 14, 2007
Salesforce's new open / social / online application platform..
This is massive. As the culmination and synthesis of several of the most important trends going on at the moment. This is going to blow up the enterprise software market the way the microcomputer blew up the mainframe market.
- any company can "rent" - as a service - an enterprise-class database-backed infrastructure from Salesforce.
- any programmer, or small company, can write applications for it.
- the applications will talk to each other via Salesforce's protocols.
- developers don't have to *sell* their application through the usual "sell big expensive software for humungous amounts of money, with lots of free lunches, kick-backs, professional sales-teams and special companies owned by the son of the procurador" channels; instead you just make your app available for companies to rent at ... erm "a flat $25/month/user".
(In fact, if Salesforce go the viral method - currently raging in Facebook - where you can encourage your friends (or in the case of business, your suppliers and customers) to install the application, then your app. can spread like wildfire *without* having to market it at all.)
Effectively, large suites break up into a swarm of widgets and mini-apps sitting on top of open, and standard, protocols and storage.
This is massive. As the culmination and synthesis of several of the most important trends going on at the moment. This is going to blow up the enterprise software market the way the microcomputer blew up the mainframe market.
- any company can "rent" - as a service - an enterprise-class database-backed infrastructure from Salesforce.
- any programmer, or small company, can write applications for it.
- the applications will talk to each other via Salesforce's protocols.
- developers don't have to *sell* their application through the usual "sell big expensive software for humungous amounts of money, with lots of free lunches, kick-backs, professional sales-teams and special companies owned by the son of the procurador" channels; instead you just make your app available for companies to rent at ... erm "a flat $25/month/user".
(In fact, if Salesforce go the viral method - currently raging in Facebook - where you can encourage your friends (or in the case of business, your suppliers and customers) to install the application, then your app. can spread like wildfire *without* having to market it at all.)
Effectively, large suites break up into a swarm of widgets and mini-apps sitting on top of open, and standard, protocols and storage.
September 09, 2007
September 06, 2007
Multitouch will drive Apple's products? whereas Microsoft focus on voice? Except Microsoft have surface?
September 05, 2007
August 28, 2007
August 17, 2007
Hmmm. I'm pretty slow discovering Inside Facebook which is a mine of information about the fast evolving Facebook platform for both developers and about software companies who make Facebook apps.
August 04, 2007
Fascinating discussion by James Hong about Reinventing HotOrNot (part1, part2, part3)
"PEOPLE are the killer app" is probably attained the status of a truism in the social software world. But it's still worth keeping in mind as a "guiding star".
As an intriguing aside. HotOrNot is now smothered with adverts for illicit dating sites. Hadn't really looked at or thought about this before (honest!) but when you start to consider it, internet dating really is bringing a hell of a lot more liquidity and plasticity to what you might call the "sex market".
And in the process, the incumbent institutions (eg. marriage) are getting pulverised. In the UK, the Tories are currently banging the drum for marriage. But look how the internet is a) revealing the degree of dissatisfaction within it, and b) helping people route-around the restrictions it places on their erotic lives.
Is online dating creating a more efficient sex market? And if so, does that mean that more people are now getting more sex? Is that turning up in any other social statistics or having further knock-on societal effects? Are we happier? More at risk from STDs? More dissatisfied?
"PEOPLE are the killer app" is probably attained the status of a truism in the social software world. But it's still worth keeping in mind as a "guiding star".
As an intriguing aside. HotOrNot is now smothered with adverts for illicit dating sites. Hadn't really looked at or thought about this before (honest!) but when you start to consider it, internet dating really is bringing a hell of a lot more liquidity and plasticity to what you might call the "sex market".
And in the process, the incumbent institutions (eg. marriage) are getting pulverised. In the UK, the Tories are currently banging the drum for marriage. But look how the internet is a) revealing the degree of dissatisfaction within it, and b) helping people route-around the restrictions it places on their erotic lives.
Is online dating creating a more efficient sex market? And if so, does that mean that more people are now getting more sex? Is that turning up in any other social statistics or having further knock-on societal effects? Are we happier? More at risk from STDs? More dissatisfied?
August 03, 2007
Read/Write Web Netvibes Launches Facebook Widget
(Platform Wars reference nothing to do with me ... call it synchronicity)
Update : Umair pitches in and calls it an "anti-platform war" in that suppliers aren't trying to lock-in the users to their system against others, but are desperately trying to be as open as possible (and co-operative / inter-operable with other players).
(Platform Wars reference nothing to do with me ... call it synchronicity)
Update : Umair pitches in and calls it an "anti-platform war" in that suppliers aren't trying to lock-in the users to their system against others, but are desperately trying to be as open as possible (and co-operative / inter-operable with other players).
August 01, 2007
July 25, 2007
Interesting interview with one of the founders of Facebook. Sensible points : continuing to look at Facebook as a platform and as as tool to enrich existing social relationships rather than create new ones (that makes it more like LinkedIn than Tribe)
June 28, 2007
June 25, 2007
LinkedIn going the platform route in response to Facebook?
I think they're going to have to change the perception of what LinkedIn is quite dramatically to get away with this. LinkedIn isn't an online place the way that Facebook or Tribe or MySpace are. It's organized around part of your life which is offline : namely your CV, your job, the company you work for and your (ex) colleagues. Its strength is letting you keep track of these things, while otherwise staying out of sight and out of mind.
Simply opening up the LinkedIn API isn't really going to do much unless someone can dream up some widgets that somehow engage this offline life.
I think they're going to have to change the perception of what LinkedIn is quite dramatically to get away with this. LinkedIn isn't an online place the way that Facebook or Tribe or MySpace are. It's organized around part of your life which is offline : namely your CV, your job, the company you work for and your (ex) colleagues. Its strength is letting you keep track of these things, while otherwise staying out of sight and out of mind.
Simply opening up the LinkedIn API isn't really going to do much unless someone can dream up some widgets that somehow engage this offline life.
June 17, 2007
Marc Andreessen (remember that Ning is now a social networking service building platform?) looks at Facebook's platform.
Meanwhile, some people seem to be doing well on it.
Veterans of the software industry have, hardcoded into their DNA, the assumption that in any fight between a platform and an application, the platform will always win.
...
what Facebook is now doing is a lot more sophisticated than simply MySpace-style embedding: Facebook is providing a full suite of APIs -- including a network protocol, a database query language, and a text markup language -- that allow third party applications to integrate tightly with the Facebook user experience and database of user and activity information.
And then, on top of that, Facebook is providing a highly viral distribution engine for applications that plug into its platform. As a user, you get notified when your friends start using an application; you can then start using that same application with one click. At which point, all of your friends become aware that you have started using that application, and the cycle continues. The result is that a successful application on Facebook can grow to a million users or more within a couple of weeks of creation.
Finally, Facebook is promising economic freedom -- third-party applications can run ads and sell goods and services to their hearts' content.
Meanwhile, some people seem to be doing well on it.
June 01, 2007
Robert Cringely has a fun article about Google and its policy of letting internal geniuses work on their own projects.
He says :
I'm not so sure ... "too many good ideas" looks like the kind of problem that Google ought to know how to turn into an opportunity. (Maybe someone's already is using their 20% time in this direction?)
Firstly, "sort the good stuff from the rest" is Google's raison d’être. There must be dozens of variations on internal prediction markets / social routing networks / ranking algorithms which Google's internal community could use to discover the great ideas.
Second, Cringely's "the number of ideas that a company the size of Google can throw all its weight behind per year is about 10" smells suspiciously like "hit" based, rather than long-tail, thinking. This is a company that specializes in a) having smart, entrepreneurial people inside, and b) supporting large, liquid markets for micro-businesses (via AdSense, Google Checkout etc.) Why, having encouraged 4000 flowers to bloom, would it force them through a vicious filtering to become an official Google product? The answer to the problem of everyone has a product they want to launch ought to be "launch them all", with various degrees of Google official endorsement for those which the company wants to promote.
He says :
First there are those thousands of ideas and technologies that are being developed by Google employees in the 20 percent of their week devoted specifically for that purpose. That number of new ideas is far too high to be practical and too high even to be considered safe.
Say the Google Geniuses come up with 4,000 business ideas or technologies per year, which is probably around the current number. Let's guess that one percent of these ideas are truly great -- boffo ideas that one could easily build a company around. That's 40 world-beating ideas. And after the 40 absolutely top ideas, let's say there are another 360 ideas that are pretty darned good -- certainly good enough to pitch to the venture capitalists on Sand Hill Road. The remaining 3,600 ideas are, of course, crap, and can be forgotten by everyone except their inventors, whom I'll get back to in a minute.
Assuming Google executives have the insight to know which of their 4,000 proffered ideas are world-class, they then have to decide which 40 to pursue. Such an assumption is giving even Google too much credit, believe me. No matter how smart they are, issues of loyalty, prejudice, and the odd hangover will result in some less-good ideas making it through but mainly great ideas being eliminated. But this doesn't really matter because the larger question is: How many good ideas can Google pursue vigorously per year? The number isn't 40. It isn't even 20. The number of ideas that a company the size of Google can throw all its weight behind per year is about 10, of which five will probably not be the right ones.
I'm not so sure ... "too many good ideas" looks like the kind of problem that Google ought to know how to turn into an opportunity. (Maybe someone's already is using their 20% time in this direction?)
Firstly, "sort the good stuff from the rest" is Google's raison d’être. There must be dozens of variations on internal prediction markets / social routing networks / ranking algorithms which Google's internal community could use to discover the great ideas.
Second, Cringely's "the number of ideas that a company the size of Google can throw all its weight behind per year is about 10" smells suspiciously like "hit" based, rather than long-tail, thinking. This is a company that specializes in a) having smart, entrepreneurial people inside, and b) supporting large, liquid markets for micro-businesses (via AdSense, Google Checkout etc.) Why, having encouraged 4000 flowers to bloom, would it force them through a vicious filtering to become an official Google product? The answer to the problem of everyone has a product they want to launch ought to be "launch them all", with various degrees of Google official endorsement for those which the company wants to promote.
May 30, 2007
In general Dave Winer isn't too enthused about Facebook-as-a-platform. But here's a throw-away, but wise comment : "For extra credit, relationship-defining should be part of Facebook's open architecture."
May 25, 2007
May 24, 2007
May 22, 2007
May 21, 2007
May 08, 2007
As predicted :
The new SkyPal 3.2 beta :
The new SkyPal 3.2 beta :
What's new in this version?
Send Money with PayPal
Send money to friends and family direct from Skype.
May 04, 2007
May 03, 2007
Personally, I gotta agree with Mark Pilgrim.
In pure platform-warring terms, Silverlight is an almost smart move by Microsoft, although I still think they should have directly tried to get their hands on and embrace and extend Flash / Apollo rather than make their own competitor.
The crucial question for them is how much they are willing for the VM to float freely vs. whether they'll tie it into Windows Vista.Seems like it's planned for MacOS, but not Linux. Will they encourage the Mono guys to clone it? Is this actually a sneaky attempt to wrap MacOS in their own VM?
If I was, say, YouTube, why would I switch from Flash to Silverlight? (Actually, now I'm owned by Google, of course, I wouldn't. Full stop.)
Maybe there are two ways of looking at this.
On the one hand, Silverlight is going up against two strong incumbents : Flash and QuickTime. Both are going to fight back hard, and Flash can position itself as the "already platform independent" platform, because it has no Operating System to peddle (Nevertheless it may acquire a powerful strategic ally in GoogTube.) Clearly MS, rightly, understand that Apollo is a serious and bold attack on their ownership of the desktop (everything that Java tried to do but with a better programming language, a huge existing user-base and cuter graphics). At the same time there's Apple taking over the home entertainment zone with QuickTunes.
Can MS make something so compellingly better that it makes much headway here? Can it be so much better that Adobe or Apple couldn't match it?
On the other hand, maybe the best way to look at this is as MS trying to unbundle some of the multimedia functionality of Windows Vista and give it a more independent life, creating value in other contexts, such as a downloadable component for XP and MacOS.
Or maybe MS will be unable to resist tying in with Vista in the long run to try to sustain their monopoly.
In pure platform-warring terms, Silverlight is an almost smart move by Microsoft, although I still think they should have directly tried to get their hands on and embrace and extend Flash / Apollo rather than make their own competitor.
The crucial question for them is how much they are willing for the VM to float freely vs. whether they'll tie it into Windows Vista.Seems like it's planned for MacOS, but not Linux. Will they encourage the Mono guys to clone it? Is this actually a sneaky attempt to wrap MacOS in their own VM?
If I was, say, YouTube, why would I switch from Flash to Silverlight? (Actually, now I'm owned by Google, of course, I wouldn't. Full stop.)
Maybe there are two ways of looking at this.
On the one hand, Silverlight is going up against two strong incumbents : Flash and QuickTime. Both are going to fight back hard, and Flash can position itself as the "already platform independent" platform, because it has no Operating System to peddle (Nevertheless it may acquire a powerful strategic ally in GoogTube.) Clearly MS, rightly, understand that Apollo is a serious and bold attack on their ownership of the desktop (everything that Java tried to do but with a better programming language, a huge existing user-base and cuter graphics). At the same time there's Apple taking over the home entertainment zone with QuickTunes.
Can MS make something so compellingly better that it makes much headway here? Can it be so much better that Adobe or Apple couldn't match it?
On the other hand, maybe the best way to look at this is as MS trying to unbundle some of the multimedia functionality of Windows Vista and give it a more independent life, creating value in other contexts, such as a downloadable component for XP and MacOS.
Or maybe MS will be unable to resist tying in with Vista in the long run to try to sustain their monopoly.
May 01, 2007
April 26, 2007
Joel on Excel VBA and on how MS losing it's "backward compatibility" religion is totally screwing itself.
April 20, 2007
April 18, 2007
John Hagel on the "end of web 2.0 innocence" meme.
For the large Internet API platform providers, there is also an important caution. Sustaining a straddle between a platform business and an end-user business may become increasingly challenging. If you become too greedy in terms of expanding into the end-user businesses of companies using your API platform, you may find that your platform business becomes less attractive. Before you start eating the young that are nourished by your APIs, you might want to be sure there are no other food sources to sustain you.
I suspect that sustaining the right balance in the Web 2.0 ecosystem over time will hinge on a new development – charging relatively nominal fees for API use. This will put increasing pressure on API users to come up with viable business models and reduce the incentive for API providers to compete with their API users.
April 17, 2007
TCP/IP vs the Dollar (part 3)
CEOs of open source software companies aren't rich because there's less money to be made in open source.
That doesn't mean open source is less significant or isn't a threat to proprietory software. It just means it's not playing in the same game, and the indices of success don't line up. Remember, trying to measure the information / attention / netocratic economy in dollars is like trying to figure out the worth of Microsoft by the number of acres it occupies.
CEOs of open source software companies aren't rich because there's less money to be made in open source.
That doesn't mean open source is less significant or isn't a threat to proprietory software. It just means it's not playing in the same game, and the indices of success don't line up. Remember, trying to measure the information / attention / netocratic economy in dollars is like trying to figure out the worth of Microsoft by the number of acres it occupies.
April 15, 2007
April 10, 2007
Paul Graham thinks Microsoft is Dead. Dave Winer disagrees. Sort of.
The caveats don't matter. Graham's greater point is compelling. Microsoft don't really seem to be making it as an Internet Playa. They've neither come up with any really compelling or exciting software on the web-as-a-platform in the last seven years nor have they bought any of the interesting new web 2.0 companies. In fact, the last interesting thing MS did was buy Hotmail which was about 10 years ago.
10 years??? !!!!
...
!!!!!!
In the meantime, it more or less looks like they've bet everything on Vista and lost, big time. The desktop operating system is a commodity. There's no (and will be no) interesting software that really needs Vista. Web served applications can run as easily on Unix. Office and Photoshop will run as easily on Macintosh. And browser-based software will run anywhere.
Microsoft may still have platforms that matter - though it's not easy to imagine where : ASP.NET essential to web-based apps? XBox beating Wii or PS3? Ray Ozzie, their great hope, seems to be missing in action, last seen a year ago speculating about his clipboard while Yahoo has Pipes up and running.
Graham's suggestions for restoring Microsoft's relevance aren't nearly as interesting as mine.
Now, of course, the funny thing is in my day job I use nothing but Microsoft software. I basically live in Windows and (and this may reflect my new status as a project managery kind of guy) Excel.
In fact, this is something I'm trying to think about more. Excel is a truly great piece of software; it's Microsoft's masterpiece. Word is an OK Word Processor. Access is A.N.Other database. Powerpoint is ... well frankly let's not go there.
But Excel is wonderful. It's the universal, "Swiss Army" desktop solution with dozens of little functional "blades". Want a "to-do" list? Excel. Want a status report? Excel? Want to do some calculations? Excel. Want to do some basic string processing? I write VBA macros for the same kinds of simple data crunching that I'd use Perl for in Unix. Want to make a couple of graphs and charts? Excel. Want to mock up some forms? Want to make tables of data and sort and filter them? You guessed it ...
And not only does Excel does all this, it makes it all pretty intuitive. Have a look at how they do Pivot Tables for an example of something pretty slick.
No-one else is even close. Not Google's online spreadsheet. Not Open Office's attempts at catching up. Not WikiCalc. Microsoft's advantage with Excel is undisputed. It's all theirs to throw away.
And what sucks most about Excel? The fact that people are always mailing spreadsheets around to each other and they have trouble keeping a single, up-to-date copy between them. What they need is Excel socialized. And where's socialized Excel? Caught up in turf-wars and lost behind a bunch of vague, confusing products like "SharePoint" and technologies like Excel Services.
Now, if I ran Microsoft, and I was worried about Microsoft being dead, I'd be making the most I could of Excel : pumping money and smart people and advertising into it, setting up skunk-works, hiring clever explainers to get simple messages out, as loudly and clearly as possible.
In particular I'd have :
99% of the world's "semi-structured" data is not in Microformats but in tables in spreadsheets. And, Microsoft pretty much own that. But there's a huge demand (and opportunity) to put it all on the internet. Like I say, this is Microsoft's platform to lose.
The caveats don't matter. Graham's greater point is compelling. Microsoft don't really seem to be making it as an Internet Playa. They've neither come up with any really compelling or exciting software on the web-as-a-platform in the last seven years nor have they bought any of the interesting new web 2.0 companies. In fact, the last interesting thing MS did was buy Hotmail which was about 10 years ago.
10 years??? !!!!
...
!!!!!!
In the meantime, it more or less looks like they've bet everything on Vista and lost, big time. The desktop operating system is a commodity. There's no (and will be no) interesting software that really needs Vista. Web served applications can run as easily on Unix. Office and Photoshop will run as easily on Macintosh. And browser-based software will run anywhere.
Microsoft may still have platforms that matter - though it's not easy to imagine where : ASP.NET essential to web-based apps? XBox beating Wii or PS3? Ray Ozzie, their great hope, seems to be missing in action, last seen a year ago speculating about his clipboard while Yahoo has Pipes up and running.
Graham's suggestions for restoring Microsoft's relevance aren't nearly as interesting as mine.
Now, of course, the funny thing is in my day job I use nothing but Microsoft software. I basically live in Windows and (and this may reflect my new status as a project managery kind of guy) Excel.
In fact, this is something I'm trying to think about more. Excel is a truly great piece of software; it's Microsoft's masterpiece. Word is an OK Word Processor. Access is A.N.Other database. Powerpoint is ... well frankly let's not go there.
But Excel is wonderful. It's the universal, "Swiss Army" desktop solution with dozens of little functional "blades". Want a "to-do" list? Excel. Want a status report? Excel? Want to do some calculations? Excel. Want to do some basic string processing? I write VBA macros for the same kinds of simple data crunching that I'd use Perl for in Unix. Want to make a couple of graphs and charts? Excel. Want to mock up some forms? Want to make tables of data and sort and filter them? You guessed it ...
And not only does Excel does all this, it makes it all pretty intuitive. Have a look at how they do Pivot Tables for an example of something pretty slick.
No-one else is even close. Not Google's online spreadsheet. Not Open Office's attempts at catching up. Not WikiCalc. Microsoft's advantage with Excel is undisputed. It's all theirs to throw away.
And what sucks most about Excel? The fact that people are always mailing spreadsheets around to each other and they have trouble keeping a single, up-to-date copy between them. What they need is Excel socialized. And where's socialized Excel? Caught up in turf-wars and lost behind a bunch of vague, confusing products like "SharePoint" and technologies like Excel Services.
Now, if I ran Microsoft, and I was worried about Microsoft being dead, I'd be making the most I could of Excel : pumping money and smart people and advertising into it, setting up skunk-works, hiring clever explainers to get simple messages out, as loudly and clearly as possible.
In particular I'd have :
- Excel Studio : a complete development environment for people to build new applications on top of the Excel engine or to compile spreadsheet-based prototypes into other pieces of software.
- A Social Excel : the Excel client would allow many people to work on a shared spreadsheet either via a central web-server, LAN server, or simply sync. multiple users together over P2P (imagine something like a Skype call working on one spreadsheet.)
- Excel Live : a free, central web-based server to set up groups sharing the same spreadsheet with (obviously) Wiki-like (WikiCalc-like) hyper-linking between spreadsheets
- Excel Express : a completely free-as-in-beer cut-down version of Excel that anyone could download and use to work on a shared spreadsheet. I'd want Excel Express to be as easily available and viral as Skype or Pando.
99% of the world's "semi-structured" data is not in Microformats but in tables in spreadsheets. And, Microsoft pretty much own that. But there's a huge demand (and opportunity) to put it all on the internet. Like I say, this is Microsoft's platform to lose.
March 17, 2007
March 13, 2007
March 03, 2007
Hmmm. Social Networking news ...
Cisco buying Tribe's tech. People are confused.
Meanwhile Ning seems to have decided to reinvent itself as ... erm ... Tribe : a generic build-your-own-social-network site.
Me, I'm confused too. And more than that, I'm disappointed by the Ning change. Taking a quick look at the site, it seems to have utterly disowned the previous "social development environment" incarnation of Ning, handing over that mantle to Yahoo Pipes.
OK, I half understand : maybe the business model wasn't working. Not everyone is, or wants to be, a programmer, and Ning didn't get the kind of traction of a MySpace or YouTube. Nor was it likely to.
Faced with that predicament, my suggestion to Ning might have been to pitch it as a white-label development tool for third-party resellers : small agencies who are creating web-sites or intranets for other companies. Or maybe something to do work on enterprise intranets. However they clearly wanted something else.
Now what we've got looks suspiciously like Tribe given a makeover by 37 Signals.
Which is mysterious. I'm a member of Tribe, and I like it very much. But it's widely considered to be a "failure" in the YASN market. What makes Ning think that the business model is viable? Or that they can make it work?
One thing that occurs to me, maybe this is really the old Ning in disguise. Perhaps a lot of social development stuff is there behind the scenes, and this is simply wrapping it in something that looks more familiar to the general public. That would make some sense, use "make your own tribe" to draw in people who wouldn't have dared go near the old Ning, but then just happen to have a bunch of Ning-apps. sitting around which can be add to these networks. And which the more curious users could learn to customize and share.
However, having gone to play around a bit, that doesn't seem to be the case with the new Ning. Contrariwise, it looks like history has been ruthlessly rewritten; Ning was allegedly founded in October 2004 to give everyone the opportunity to create social networks. The old Ning was full of "HotOrNot" style comparison games and mashups with Google Maps. But while the new Ning allows you to add discussion forums, photos and videos to yourtribe social network, hotornots and mashups are conspicuously absent.
Maybe the developers' docs will cast more light on things. You can still program stuff, but there's no hint of users sharing their code with each other, which was the really interesting part of the old system.
So why does Cisco want Tribe's code? Beats me. Speculating wildly, maybe there's something to do with convergence in the home between television, internet, entertainment etc. And maybe the next step beyond BitTorrent peer-sharing and You Tube is some kind of private P2P video sharing within social networks, so that tribes become an organizing principle for video, rivaling television channels.
But that's speculating wildly ...
Anyway. I'm a member of several YASNs but only two mean anything to me : Tribe and Linked-In. I joined Linked-In years ago, and pretty much forgot about it. It's a pretty inert sort of service. I wouldn't think about it or visit the site at all except that people I know keep joining it and linking to me. I've started to come to the conclusion that there's something rather interesting about this extremely slow social network. Most importantly, it's all about the world outside the web and outside web-time. You don't go there, don't do anything with it. But slowly and surely the network keeps accreting more ex-colleagues at the glacial pace of 4 or 5 a year.
That's all it does. But it's more succesful at that than anything else. I tried to recruit my IRL friends to Tribe. But only a couple of the more web-oriented ones bothered to join. Yet people who have no time or inclination to be on the web keep turning up on Linked-In. Whereas Tribe is great for meeting new people and having valuable conversations, Linked-In turns out to be great for reconnecting and tracking "old" people. I guess it's the combination of seriousness and undemandingness; people join it who have no time for web-culture and who are scared to become involved in the more active YASNs.
Cisco buying Tribe's tech. People are confused.
Meanwhile Ning seems to have decided to reinvent itself as ... erm ... Tribe : a generic build-your-own-social-network site.
Me, I'm confused too. And more than that, I'm disappointed by the Ning change. Taking a quick look at the site, it seems to have utterly disowned the previous "social development environment" incarnation of Ning, handing over that mantle to Yahoo Pipes.
OK, I half understand : maybe the business model wasn't working. Not everyone is, or wants to be, a programmer, and Ning didn't get the kind of traction of a MySpace or YouTube. Nor was it likely to.
Faced with that predicament, my suggestion to Ning might have been to pitch it as a white-label development tool for third-party resellers : small agencies who are creating web-sites or intranets for other companies. Or maybe something to do work on enterprise intranets. However they clearly wanted something else.
Now what we've got looks suspiciously like Tribe given a makeover by 37 Signals.
Which is mysterious. I'm a member of Tribe, and I like it very much. But it's widely considered to be a "failure" in the YASN market. What makes Ning think that the business model is viable? Or that they can make it work?
One thing that occurs to me, maybe this is really the old Ning in disguise. Perhaps a lot of social development stuff is there behind the scenes, and this is simply wrapping it in something that looks more familiar to the general public. That would make some sense, use "make your own tribe" to draw in people who wouldn't have dared go near the old Ning, but then just happen to have a bunch of Ning-apps. sitting around which can be add to these networks. And which the more curious users could learn to customize and share.
However, having gone to play around a bit, that doesn't seem to be the case with the new Ning. Contrariwise, it looks like history has been ruthlessly rewritten; Ning was allegedly founded in October 2004 to give everyone the opportunity to create social networks. The old Ning was full of "HotOrNot" style comparison games and mashups with Google Maps. But while the new Ning allows you to add discussion forums, photos and videos to your
Maybe the developers' docs will cast more light on things. You can still program stuff, but there's no hint of users sharing their code with each other, which was the really interesting part of the old system.
So why does Cisco want Tribe's code? Beats me. Speculating wildly, maybe there's something to do with convergence in the home between television, internet, entertainment etc. And maybe the next step beyond BitTorrent peer-sharing and You Tube is some kind of private P2P video sharing within social networks, so that tribes become an organizing principle for video, rivaling television channels.
But that's speculating wildly ...
Anyway. I'm a member of several YASNs but only two mean anything to me : Tribe and Linked-In. I joined Linked-In years ago, and pretty much forgot about it. It's a pretty inert sort of service. I wouldn't think about it or visit the site at all except that people I know keep joining it and linking to me. I've started to come to the conclusion that there's something rather interesting about this extremely slow social network. Most importantly, it's all about the world outside the web and outside web-time. You don't go there, don't do anything with it. But slowly and surely the network keeps accreting more ex-colleagues at the glacial pace of 4 or 5 a year.
That's all it does. But it's more succesful at that than anything else. I tried to recruit my IRL friends to Tribe. But only a couple of the more web-oriented ones bothered to join. Yet people who have no time or inclination to be on the web keep turning up on Linked-In. Whereas Tribe is great for meeting new people and having valuable conversations, Linked-In turns out to be great for reconnecting and tracking "old" people. I guess it's the combination of seriousness and undemandingness; people join it who have no time for web-culture and who are scared to become involved in the more active YASNs.
February 28, 2007
February 26, 2007
Dave Winer : If I had one wish, it would be that everyone who reads this blog would listen to the talk I gave to the NPR people last Thursday
February 22, 2007
Dave Winer on his ideal podcast player
An intriguingly succinct definition of "platform". You can see how it works. A platform must be something that multiple agents (manufacturers) have to collaborate (and sometimes compete) around. If not, there is no real platform war possible. Platform Wars are competitions for the hearts and minds of developers.
3. Must be a platform, that is, people other than the manufacturer can add apps.
An intriguingly succinct definition of "platform". You can see how it works. A platform must be something that multiple agents (manufacturers) have to collaborate (and sometimes compete) around. If not, there is no real platform war possible. Platform Wars are competitions for the hearts and minds of developers.
February 21, 2007
February 09, 2007
The other platform I'm going to be watching is, of course, Yahoo Pipes.
By weird synchronicity, yesterday I wrote an email to someone where I was talking about ideas that intrigued me, and I was thinking of examples where you'd want a fluent dynamic gestural device like, say, a pen-mouse or a Wii controller for real-time programming.
And, looking for an example, I went into a crazy rant, inspired by Seb Paquet's Algebra of Feeds.
Here's what I wrote :
And now, to quote, Tim OReilly :
These are very interesting times.
By weird synchronicity, yesterday I wrote an email to someone where I was talking about ideas that intrigued me, and I was thinking of examples where you'd want a fluent dynamic gestural device like, say, a pen-mouse or a Wii controller for real-time programming.
And, looking for an example, I went into a crazy rant, inspired by Seb Paquet's Algebra of Feeds.
Here's what I wrote :
Or maybe you can create software "in real-time" by, for example, routing and mixing RSS feeds. Eg. you'd have feed-traffic-controllers, pulling together, mashing up and mixing the outputs of different web-services, maybe by dragging and dropping, or sketching pipelines with a pen or Wii-like controller. 10 years ago, Philip Greenspun needed his own server and to be a serious programmer to make the Bill Gates Wealth Clock. 4-5 years ago, smart people were mashing up Google maps with other services with little bits of glue script. Now we have reblogging services that help automate the process of getting a feed from one place and pushing it elsewhere. And Ning which is a sort of platform for creating mash-ups and reusing other people's code.
Jump forward 5 more years. You can imagine feeds of "objects" (data + encapsulated behaviour) being published. And enterprising people noticing that objects from feed 1 have input signatures of this format, and objects of feed 2 have output signatures of that format and it only needs them to be wired together in the right way, for us to have this useful combination. So how to define the wiring? Why not just draw something like a patch diagram in a virtual modular synth? A diagram of Unix-like pipes. How frequently does this need to be done? As data gets more dynamic, you might want to have people updating the wiring diagrams daily. Why make it hard work? Why not just let them draw it with a pen, or Wii controller.
And now, to quote, Tim OReilly :
Yahoo!'s new Pipes service is a milestone in the history of the internet. It's a service that generalizes the idea of the mashup, providing a drag and drop editor that allows you to connect internet data sources, process them, and redirect the output. Yahoo! describes it as "an interactive feed aggregator and manipulator" that allows you to "create feeds that are more powerful, useful and relevant." While it's still a bit rough around the edges, it has enormous promise in turning the web into a programmable environment for everyone.
These are very interesting times.
February 08, 2007
Yesterday I downloaded Skype 3.0. There are now some interesting plug-ins. There's a cool, shared white-board for collaborative drawing over your Skype call, and a Chinese checkers, a game I used to play a lot with my parents.
What's also cool, of course, is that these plug-ins are viral. Before you can use the whiteboard with other people, they also have to download them. I imagine that makes Skype quite an exiting place to develop software for, right now. A chance for your apps. to take off ... very, very quickly.
There seems to be a torrent-style file-sharing software. Hope it's better than Skype's relay. If it is, and it really is like BitTorrent, it could be very useful.
There also seem to be a couple of plug-ins for finding people and asking for live advice. This is really significant ... Skype could end up really running the "live" web. Especially if they get live people searching. Essentially anyone will be able to set themselves up to sell live phone services without having to work for a call-centre, a phone-sex company or the Mechanical Turk.
What I find strange, though, is that Skype still don't seem to have sorted out some kind of PayPal integration that would allow people to pay for services directly over their call. I don't see a plug-in for that, but it seems obvious. And an obvious revenue stream for Skype. Skype don't charge for the calls themselves but at least skimming something off pay-by-the-minute services should be possible, if they get involved in the payment part. And as both Skype and PayPal are owned by EBay ...
Not sure whether this is actually already going on and I just missed it; or if Skype have a blind-spot about this; or if it's going to be announced next week; or if there's some glaring technical or legal impediment I'm too dumb to notice.
Any ideas from the readers?
What's also cool, of course, is that these plug-ins are viral. Before you can use the whiteboard with other people, they also have to download them. I imagine that makes Skype quite an exiting place to develop software for, right now. A chance for your apps. to take off ... very, very quickly.
There seems to be a torrent-style file-sharing software. Hope it's better than Skype's relay. If it is, and it really is like BitTorrent, it could be very useful.
There also seem to be a couple of plug-ins for finding people and asking for live advice. This is really significant ... Skype could end up really running the "live" web. Especially if they get live people searching. Essentially anyone will be able to set themselves up to sell live phone services without having to work for a call-centre, a phone-sex company or the Mechanical Turk.
What I find strange, though, is that Skype still don't seem to have sorted out some kind of PayPal integration that would allow people to pay for services directly over their call. I don't see a plug-in for that, but it seems obvious. And an obvious revenue stream for Skype. Skype don't charge for the calls themselves but at least skimming something off pay-by-the-minute services should be possible, if they get involved in the payment part. And as both Skype and PayPal are owned by EBay ...
Not sure whether this is actually already going on and I just missed it; or if Skype have a blind-spot about this; or if it's going to be announced next week; or if there's some glaring technical or legal impediment I'm too dumb to notice.
Any ideas from the readers?
February 06, 2007
Steve Jobs says Apple are willing to give up DRM.
It's a plausible story. I imagine Robert X. Cringely won't take it at face value though.
It's a plausible story. I imagine Robert X. Cringely won't take it at face value though.
February 02, 2007
I, Cringely:
Mobile phone carriers are eager for video to succeed on their 3G and 4G platforms because it represents a major new source of revenue. Apple's iPhone is the best handset yet for displaying that video. But Apple isn't going to allow this to happen without Cupertino gaining a substantial piece of the action. I'm sure discussions are taking place right now with Cingular where Apple is arguing that the carrier should make its video service iTunes-compatible.
January 31, 2007
I have better things to spend my money on than a computer that can run Vista.
Vista has already failed. You know the game is pretty much over when its most (allegedly) innovative software can be faked in Ajax in the browser. And Microsoft really should have noticed that if people needed more 3D graphics in their lives, VRML would have taken off and the web would have been full of virtual environments a decade ago.
The web-as-platform has decisively beaten both Apple and Microsoft as the platform for building useful software applications. And both Apple and MS are now reduced to fighting over who'll be putting the prettiest packaging around good-old-fashioned music, photography and home-movies. They've effectively succumbed to the worst tendency of the games industry : zero innovation (in fact boring rehashes of the same formulae, dumbed down) smothered in lashings of eye-candy that demand ever-more absurd hardware specs. in order to run; all in a desperate attempt to titilate the jaded palettes of the customers one more time.
It's the WaterWorld theory of software-making.
Really, really hard to see how Microsoft are going to make back their investment in Vista. Sure, they'll tax new PCs for a while yet. But, frankly, they could have done that anyway with a 10th of the effort. We know where they're headed; we've seen it with IBM : monolithic, unfocussed, and ultimately unprofitable, until someone finally breaks them up and lets a few of the pieces fly off in their separate ways.
ps : Remember if I ran Microsoft?
pps : Yes, Platform Wars is back with a new look - thanks to Google finally giving a minimal upgrade to Blogger. I approve. It's not ambitious, but it is nicely incremental, and feels a bit less clunky to use.
Vista has already failed. You know the game is pretty much over when its most (allegedly) innovative software can be faked in Ajax in the browser. And Microsoft really should have noticed that if people needed more 3D graphics in their lives, VRML would have taken off and the web would have been full of virtual environments a decade ago.
The web-as-platform has decisively beaten both Apple and Microsoft as the platform for building useful software applications. And both Apple and MS are now reduced to fighting over who'll be putting the prettiest packaging around good-old-fashioned music, photography and home-movies. They've effectively succumbed to the worst tendency of the games industry : zero innovation (in fact boring rehashes of the same formulae, dumbed down) smothered in lashings of eye-candy that demand ever-more absurd hardware specs. in order to run; all in a desperate attempt to titilate the jaded palettes of the customers one more time.
It's the WaterWorld theory of software-making.
Really, really hard to see how Microsoft are going to make back their investment in Vista. Sure, they'll tax new PCs for a while yet. But, frankly, they could have done that anyway with a 10th of the effort. We know where they're headed; we've seen it with IBM : monolithic, unfocussed, and ultimately unprofitable, until someone finally breaks them up and lets a few of the pieces fly off in their separate ways.
ps : Remember if I ran Microsoft?
pps : Yes, Platform Wars is back with a new look - thanks to Google finally giving a minimal upgrade to Blogger. I approve. It's not ambitious, but it is nicely incremental, and feels a bit less clunky to use.
January 18, 2007
December 18, 2006
Meanwhile Adobe's Apollo makes a lot of sense.
One thing I'm always curious about. Where is Javasript as a scripting language for desktop apps?
One thing I'm always curious about. Where is Javasript as a scripting language for desktop apps?
December 04, 2006
November 19, 2006
November 08, 2006
October 26, 2006
Go Dave!
I think maybe I should write a book about how you invent and promote standards for fun and profit, because what I'm doing here is exactly what I did when I started blogging, or publishing in XML and then RSS, or started pushing audio blog posts as enclosures in my RSS feeds. You start by putting two things next to each other that you think should work together. Then you shorten the distance, and shorten it again, and keep optimizing until you have something that other people could use. Then you tell them about it, and tell them again, and again and so on until you have a standard.
October 15, 2006
October 04, 2006
Great Steve Yegge post on the importance of Javascript.
This OTM :
Kind of makes up for the dumb things he said about Agile a couple of posts ago. ;-)
This OTM :
This phenomenon will happen in the browser space. I can assure you it will. It's an economic certainty. There's money at play here, lots and LOTS of money; every company in the world wants a cool website. Not just a cool website; they want cool apps. Companies are realizing — glacially, yes, belatedly, yes, but inexorably — that most people with computer access in the world today live inside their browser, and they'd prefer not to leave it.
"Everyone in the world" — that's an awful lot of money at stake.
So as soon as "Scheme on Skis" or "JavaScript on Jets" or whatever comes along, that Rails-like radical simplification of the huge ugly Browser Swamp, the game will change almost overnight.
Kind of makes up for the dumb things he said about Agile a couple of posts ago. ;-)
September 28, 2006
Hendy commented that Ning isn't open source.
Agreed. I'd like to see an Open Source online web-app development / code-generation / code-management / code-sharing platform. Possibly Trac could evolve in this direction (from a very different starting point.)
I notice that I missed something from the list of improvents (in that previous post I linked) in web development. I said templating-oriented development (eg. PHP), and object publishing systems (eg. Zope) were the only real changes from trying to program web-apps as though they were any other kind of app.
Perhaps I need to add continuations based servers like Seaside. I finally watched these videos and got how cool this is.
Essentially you're allowing the language to hide all the session / interaction management.
Agreed. I'd like to see an Open Source online web-app development / code-generation / code-management / code-sharing platform. Possibly Trac could evolve in this direction (from a very different starting point.)
I notice that I missed something from the list of improvents (in that previous post I linked) in web development. I said templating-oriented development (eg. PHP), and object publishing systems (eg. Zope) were the only real changes from trying to program web-apps as though they were any other kind of app.
Perhaps I need to add continuations based servers like Seaside. I finally watched these videos and got how cool this is.
Essentially you're allowing the language to hide all the session / interaction management.
September 14, 2006
Joel trolling the Ruby community (yes you are, you know it)
Meanwhile, wouldn't the practical thing to do be to write the little bits that need to be fast in C?
Meanwhile, wouldn't the practical thing to do be to write the little bits that need to be fast in C?
September 13, 2006
The moral of the story is simple. You should see Heavy and YouTube as opposites in strategic error. Heavy doesn't create enough value consistently enough to be able to exert enough pressure to capture a significant share. YouTube, on the other hand, is creating a great deal of value - but also can't exert enough pressure to capture a significant share.
Bubblegeneration Strategy Lab
September 09, 2006
September 05, 2006
What's one of the most amazing, cool, web-based apps that no-one talks about?
Trac.
It's not flashy, or Ajaxy. But this packs so much useful functionality. Every time I show this to a developer, they drool.
Right now, if I was building a wiki-like application product for use in enterprises, or something to compete with Basecamp, I'd seriously consider starting here rather than with the usual Rails or Turbogears etc. It feels so well thought out that I bet the code is nice. And it's extensible.
Trac.
It's not flashy, or Ajaxy. But this packs so much useful functionality. Every time I show this to a developer, they drool.
Right now, if I was building a wiki-like application product for use in enterprises, or something to compete with Basecamp, I'd seriously consider starting here rather than with the usual Rails or Turbogears etc. It feels so well thought out that I bet the code is nice. And it's extensible.
August 28, 2006
Steve Gillmor on Offices
Actually, Google Apps for your Domain is sort of the opposite of what I'm predicting, that SaaS will also be available for local caching. Here the opposite seems to be taking place. Google keep hosting it their end, but let you brand it your way.
Unless, of course, it ends up in a sealed box.
Actually, Google Apps for your Domain is sort of the opposite of what I'm predicting, that SaaS will also be available for local caching. Here the opposite seems to be taking place. Google keep hosting it their end, but let you brand it your way.
Unless, of course, it ends up in a sealed box.
August 27, 2006
As predicted : construct your river of news in the OPML editor
update : I wonder if he'll find a way to filter out the feedburner ads.
update : I wonder if he'll find a way to filter out the feedburner ads.
August 26, 2006
John Robb compares US rule-set globalization with the real thing.
If the US rule-set is Windows, the new, minimal rule-set is free-software. A lot more open and dynamic (but less user-friendly?)
If the US rule-set is Windows, the new, minimal rule-set is free-software. A lot more open and dynamic (but less user-friendly?)
River of News
Of course, talking about Winer gets links from Dave and more discussion in the comments than most postings. But I don't just do it for the flow. There's something really interesting going on here.
But thanks for all comments, here're my responses (including further development of ideas) :
But thanks for all comments, here're my responses (including further development of ideas) :
gardenstate :
of course the money comes from selling weblogs.com. But Winer has no reason to try to mislead people and pretend he has other types of income. He's trying to expand your way of thinking about the economic model of blogs to *include* things like that deal.
danny :
Don't we all take ideas from elsewhere and mix and match them together? I've seen Winer sometimes more, and sometimes less, meticulous about setting the record straight about his influences. He credits them often enough that I think he's not deliberately trying to mislead, although, agreed, I've seen him lazily allow an interviewer call him things like the "inventor of RSS" without correcting that too. (My take is that Dave didn't invent RSS the way Ray Kroc didn't start McDonalds.)
Seems to me, one of the issues is that Dave's been around since the 70s and is copying ideas that were already current then. Today people say "why doesn't Winer credit TBL for the idea of a readable / writable web?" But Dave claims to have been working on outliner-shaped public discussions on buletin-boards in the 80s. If anything he should probably be crediting Plato. Or maybe Engelbart.
In terms of platform building, Winer's modus operandi has always been *incremental*. River of News for NYT and BBC is infinitessimal as a technological invention; it just makes the lives of one group of people (Blackberry users) a tiny bit easier.
But behind the scenes, lots of interesting things are going on : people are getting used to Dave's server becoming an intermediary to their news-reading lives. Pretty soon (I'm betting) there'll be OPML in there. For editing subscriptions, or filters or something else.
So Winer's made strategic links, wiring up various components and actors : big media, himself, mobile devices, an existing user base, OPML Editor, OPML, RSS.
Compare this to Apple's strategy for music. That worked because Apple had all the pieces : iPod as the mobile player, iTunes as the software for buying and recommending, their DRM format, *plus* big music companies willing to go with them. All the parts were there. A music player or service disconnected from this network may have been technically "better" in many ways, but the overall ecosystem from Apple was compelling.
Winer has nothing like the resources of Apple, but look, he's created the same shape of platform : he's got the content, he's got the nice reader, he's got the flow going through his middleware. And now he can start innovating on top of that. Like I say, I'm betting it will start with "edit your subscriptions in an OPML Editor" although Winer's hinting that it might also be "Edit your blog on the Blackberry" too.
Danny has lots of frustrations with Dave, but I think the real issue is that Dave's strategy of minimal incremental improvements plus link-making work with the grain of the web. Whereas the better, comprehensive standards that Danny works with, continuously fail because they are actually against this grain.
What is the shape of the web? Individualistic, opportunistic, one-way links. Anyone on the web can choose, by themselves, to make a link to anyone else. The only required standard is the URL. You don't need two-way co-ordination to make something happen. Yet links are hugely valuable (as Google discovered)
So, what is with the grain of this web? Individualistic link making; the quicker and dirtier the better. Or rather, the more links, the better. And quality is secondary.
Danny wants to make good quality links. He wants a group of smart people to come together to thrash out the right model for a type of data, one which eliminates ugly, funky problems, and is as flexible and generic as possible. Once the model is defined then it should be published and adhered to. How do I find out how to represent my data? I go and find the description of the model, try to read, digest and understand it, and then adhere to it.
Dave is continuously undermining Danny's way of doing things. He won't adhere to the codes for good link quality. Instead he makes valuable links as quickly as possible. (Where valuable means one that has a genuine application or usefulness to someone) Obviously this looks like sabotage from Danny's perspective. It invalidates the hard-work of the people who design the good links, and their attempts to get consensus. And, yes, leads to poorer quality links. (Although not so poor that the culture can't adapt to and live with their deficiencies.)
Winer doesn't do this to be evil. It is a matter of intuition. To me he looks like someone genuinely at home on the web. He lives there. He "washes" there. Of course what he does is with the grain.
dave : I think you're too ad hominem about Danny. I'd like to talk about ideas here.
others : yes (gotta rush)
August 25, 2006
Guess I'm one of Winer's explainers.
It's only worth getting involved because I think there's actually some ideas here that are worth spelling out and talking about.
Winer has a nice take of his own :
Sounds right to me.
The silliest thing, ever, is people getting all uptight because Dave is "arrogant".
So what?
It's only worth getting involved because I think there's actually some ideas here that are worth spelling out and talking about.
Winer has a nice take of his own :
The way technology works, for those who care about such things: Start with a vision you believe in, and keep trying to find ways to show others how powerful it is. Over and over, often for years.
Sounds right to me.
The silliest thing, ever, is people getting all uptight because Dave is "arrogant".
So what?
August 24, 2006
ZDNet has a good round-up of opinion on why Open source won't doom traditional enterprise software
I'll continue to stick my neck out. Free software + Software-as-a-Service are going to drive today's commercial enterprise models extinct. The only question is how long it will take.
(BTW : yes, free software isn't the same as SaaS, but the two are a good fit, along with eXtreme development.)
Proprietory software is ultimately doomed, because "proprietoriness" is not a feature that customers value or want. At best, it's an inconvenience they're willing to put up with in return for other benefits.
But those benefits will diminish relative to the free / SaaS model.
They'll diminish because :
a) however slow burning, free software is cumulative. If one company providing it dies, the source-code won't go away. It will get resuscitated when the next eager entrepreneur sees a new opportunity to apply it. Free-software is the undead, you can't kill it.
Every generation of competitors based on free-software starts one step closer to the proprietory incumbents.
b) as mentioned earlier software-as-a-service is a better fit, as a business model, for agile, iterative development. And agile development is more effective than giant, product-shaped packages.
The two trends will combine : providers of SaaS won't try to differentiate themselves on the whole software stack. Instead they'll focus on their core application functionality and use free components like LAMP for the rest.
It's the SaaS providers who are already, and will continue to be, at the forefront of free software use. They'll continue to have both the expertise and motivation to engage with the free communities and to contribute back to them. In fact, we'll see most serious free-software worked on in service software companies rather than by total amateurs or product companies.
By succesfully re-using free-software, and through having the freedom to work in a more agile way, SaaS vendors will simply outperform the product makers.
How long will it take the big customers to notice? Hard to tell, but the Free-SaaS combination is classic "disruptive technology". At the moment it still lacks features which satisfy the biggest customers, but it satisfies some, and so is eating its way up through the small and medium sized customers, adapting, evolving and improving itself all the while.
Currently, the main argument against free-SaaS is that software providers don't want to offer it (there's less economic rent to be collected in services than in owning Intellectual Property). That's as may be. But as long as someone can make a profit providing free-SaaS, and is willing to do so, competition and customers will drag the market in this direction.
BTW : it's plausible that the free-SaaS world itself will unbundle into the three types of companies : infrastructure, customer relations and developers. Hence small (dynamically assembled?) clusters of programmers will be paid by a more customer-focused SaaS provider to add a small piece of functionality to an existing free system for existing customers.
BTW 2 : OReilly thinks that mating with SaaS (where the GPL doesn't force people to actually share their changes) will weaken free-software culture. That's possible, but I don't think it's a big deal. In the competition between various ecosystems, the more free will tend to flourish and drive out the less. I may think I can lock-up the veneer of business-logic that I put on top of a LAMP-stack, and charge an economic rent for it.
But my slightly less popular competitors will immedietely scent competitive advantage by opening their developments to each other and the wider community. In fact, as a customer-relations company, I'm probably far more interested in holding on to my customers through good service than locking them in by nefarious tricks.
I'll continue to stick my neck out. Free software + Software-as-a-Service are going to drive today's commercial enterprise models extinct. The only question is how long it will take.
(BTW : yes, free software isn't the same as SaaS, but the two are a good fit, along with eXtreme development.)
Proprietory software is ultimately doomed, because "proprietoriness" is not a feature that customers value or want. At best, it's an inconvenience they're willing to put up with in return for other benefits.
But those benefits will diminish relative to the free / SaaS model.
They'll diminish because :
a) however slow burning, free software is cumulative. If one company providing it dies, the source-code won't go away. It will get resuscitated when the next eager entrepreneur sees a new opportunity to apply it. Free-software is the undead, you can't kill it.
Every generation of competitors based on free-software starts one step closer to the proprietory incumbents.
b) as mentioned earlier software-as-a-service is a better fit, as a business model, for agile, iterative development. And agile development is more effective than giant, product-shaped packages.
The two trends will combine : providers of SaaS won't try to differentiate themselves on the whole software stack. Instead they'll focus on their core application functionality and use free components like LAMP for the rest.
It's the SaaS providers who are already, and will continue to be, at the forefront of free software use. They'll continue to have both the expertise and motivation to engage with the free communities and to contribute back to them. In fact, we'll see most serious free-software worked on in service software companies rather than by total amateurs or product companies.
By succesfully re-using free-software, and through having the freedom to work in a more agile way, SaaS vendors will simply outperform the product makers.
How long will it take the big customers to notice? Hard to tell, but the Free-SaaS combination is classic "disruptive technology". At the moment it still lacks features which satisfy the biggest customers, but it satisfies some, and so is eating its way up through the small and medium sized customers, adapting, evolving and improving itself all the while.
Currently, the main argument against free-SaaS is that software providers don't want to offer it (there's less economic rent to be collected in services than in owning Intellectual Property). That's as may be. But as long as someone can make a profit providing free-SaaS, and is willing to do so, competition and customers will drag the market in this direction.
BTW : it's plausible that the free-SaaS world itself will unbundle into the three types of companies : infrastructure, customer relations and developers. Hence small (dynamically assembled?) clusters of programmers will be paid by a more customer-focused SaaS provider to add a small piece of functionality to an existing free system for existing customers.
BTW 2 : OReilly thinks that mating with SaaS (where the GPL doesn't force people to actually share their changes) will weaken free-software culture. That's possible, but I don't think it's a big deal. In the competition between various ecosystems, the more free will tend to flourish and drive out the less. I may think I can lock-up the veneer of business-logic that I put on top of a LAMP-stack, and charge an economic rent for it.
But my slightly less popular competitors will immedietely scent competitive advantage by opening their developments to each other and the wider community. In fact, as a customer-relations company, I'm probably far more interested in holding on to my customers through good service than locking them in by nefarious tricks.
August 23, 2006
I'm taking issue with Liam Breck over here.
Breck is smart, and pushing the incredibly cool idea of a wiki-server on a pen-drive. But nevertheless, I'm gonna disagree with his scepticism about web-as-a-platform.
Here's my comment :
Breck is smart, and pushing the incredibly cool idea of a wiki-server on a pen-drive. But nevertheless, I'm gonna disagree with his scepticism about web-as-a-platform.
Here's my comment :
Right now, I agree, that web-based simulcra of existing desktop apps are very unlikely to take off.
Why, really, would I want a web-version of Word? If I want something free, then Open Office is as good.
However, apps which are inherently social. and those which deal with online databases, are already native to the web-as-platform.
After GMail, I can't imagine a compelling reason to switch back to non-web-based email client. Nor an offline blog editor etc.
So I think we *will* see a sudden and dramatic shift to web-based applications, particularly in the enterprise, but it's going to be accompanied by a sudden shift to a whole new way of working with new tools. Not a web way to handle Word and Excel files, but a realization that in the age of blogs and WikiCalc we don't actually *need* Word files and Excel spread-sheets 99.99% of the time.
Unlike you, I think this will happen, and I think it's going to switch very fast. It's not something you'll really see coming in long-term rising trends of adoption.
Word benefits from a network effect. When whatever replaces it, replaces it, a sizable chunk of the whole network will have to go almost at the same time. Before this, very little will show up on the radar.
I buy the web 2.5 concept, of course, but my betting is that it's going to be coming via the web-as-a-platform, rather than from desktop / machine-centric software.
So, at some point in the near future, someone will come up with a derivative of Firefox which
a) has its own local database to store as much user data as needed without creating a security holes on your computer,
and
b) can *cache* large javascript applications.
At which point what's the difference between your web 2.5 concept and the mainstream web-as-a-platform service model?
Users will go to a site, implicitly grabbing the application, which will be cached locally, along with the user's data, for offline work. The data will be synced back with the central or cloud servers whenever reconnected. Similarly, the application software will be written as if served centrally, and kept continuously updated, but will be cached locally to minimise network traffic and for offline use.
My feeling is that software-as-a-service is inevitable *as a business model* given two truths about software development :
a) large-scale software development sucks
b) free-software
Trying to specify and build and deploy a large-scale piece of software in one lump (two to three year project) is an incredibly difficult and inefficient way to do it.
It makes far more sense to develop according to iterative Agile / eXtreme methodologies, releasing small new incements of functionality on a regular basis.
The problem with eXtreme or agile development is that it's very difficult to *sell*. Customers want fixed time, cost and functionality negotiated in advance; they don't want an open-ended commitment to funnel money to developers.
How do you reconcile the contradiction : monolithic development sells, monolithic development sucks?
Microsoft used to have an answer, before free-software destroyed it.
SaaS offers another : rent the software, which can be either hosted by the provider or, for convenience and confidentiality, brought inside the organizational firewall.
In practice, installing it in-house is another form of local caching, and is a mere implementational detail for something which at the business level is treated as a service.
In short, this is gonna happen because companies producing SaaS will be more agile and get better quality software written, faster, than those sticking to large scale product development.
In practice, you may have local copies of both the software and your data, but that will be "mere" optimization (and certainly not to be planned "prematurely" :-)
August 22, 2006
I've just had an epiphany!
May I present the humble dhtmlxTreeGrid.
Go play with it. It's cute.
I've never seen a TreeGrid before. Or, if I have, I've never really noticed one before. But recently I've been thinking about one of the great challenges of software geometry : "squaring the triangle" (the CS equivalent of the age-old problem of "squaring the circle".)
In other words, managing a world where rectangles (and combinations of rectangles such as tables in a relational database) meet triangles (object hierarchies, outlines and other trees).
When you look at the treegrid, you are looking at the solution of a problem. "Our data has rectangular structure and hierarchical structure. How should we present it to the user?"
Well, in HTML you can have hierarchies :
And you can have tables :
And you can even nest one inside the other :
But no combination of nesting triangles inside rectangles (or vice versa) will actually give you a treegrid. (In fact, it's quite a puzzle to figure out how it works in HTML.)
In the TreeGrid, who is master? At first glance, it looks as though rectangles are. After all, at any level down the hierarchy, the columns are the same. Same width, same type, same format etc. The tree is imprisoned in the grid. Surely, the "hierarchy" is a fake. They're simply keeping some kind of indentation information with each row. A visual trick.
On the other hand, close them all up. You're left with just one node. Are the others really all inside that? Perhaps it's a hierarchy after all, and the columns within each element are simply measured to seem like they line up? Triangle is master and rectangle is illusion?
But what about sorting, and filtering and summ(aris)ing. Surely columns rule there. Or do they? In the example, open them all up and sort by price. Results are constrained within their parent node. But what if you wanted to sum across all subnodes? or filter across all subnodes?
No-one is to be master. Instead triangle and rectangle must subtly interact. They cross-cut, one or the other taking the lead when it comes to particular operations.
The question of how to balance hierarchy with relations goes way beyond interface widgets. Almost certainly the data in your company is both triangular and rectangular. But how does your software treat it? Does it manage to get the right intersections? Or does it force it into one shape, losing the benefits of the other?
What can we learn about beautifully combining rectangles and triangles from looking at the treegrid?
Bonus : Here's another one.
May I present the humble dhtmlxTreeGrid.
Go play with it. It's cute.
I've never seen a TreeGrid before. Or, if I have, I've never really noticed one before. But recently I've been thinking about one of the great challenges of software geometry : "squaring the triangle" (the CS equivalent of the age-old problem of "squaring the circle".)
In other words, managing a world where rectangles (and combinations of rectangles such as tables in a relational database) meet triangles (object hierarchies, outlines and other trees).
When you look at the treegrid, you are looking at the solution of a problem. "Our data has rectangular structure and hierarchical structure. How should we present it to the user?"
Well, in HTML you can have hierarchies :
- a
- b
- c
- d
- e
- f
- g
And you can have tables :
| A | B | C |
|---|---|---|
| 3 | 2 | 1 |
And you can even nest one inside the other :
| A | B | C | ||||
|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|
| 3 | 2 |
|
But no combination of nesting triangles inside rectangles (or vice versa) will actually give you a treegrid. (In fact, it's quite a puzzle to figure out how it works in HTML.)
In the TreeGrid, who is master? At first glance, it looks as though rectangles are. After all, at any level down the hierarchy, the columns are the same. Same width, same type, same format etc. The tree is imprisoned in the grid. Surely, the "hierarchy" is a fake. They're simply keeping some kind of indentation information with each row. A visual trick.
On the other hand, close them all up. You're left with just one node. Are the others really all inside that? Perhaps it's a hierarchy after all, and the columns within each element are simply measured to seem like they line up? Triangle is master and rectangle is illusion?
But what about sorting, and filtering and summ(aris)ing. Surely columns rule there. Or do they? In the example, open them all up and sort by price. Results are constrained within their parent node. But what if you wanted to sum across all subnodes? or filter across all subnodes?
No-one is to be master. Instead triangle and rectangle must subtly interact. They cross-cut, one or the other taking the lead when it comes to particular operations.
The question of how to balance hierarchy with relations goes way beyond interface widgets. Almost certainly the data in your company is both triangular and rectangular. But how does your software treat it? Does it manage to get the right intersections? Or does it force it into one shape, losing the benefits of the other?
What can we learn about beautifully combining rectangles and triangles from looking at the treegrid?
Bonus : Here's another one.
August 21, 2006
Dare Obasanjo is right : Kiko was a feature, not a full-fledged online destination let alone a viable business.
Paul Graham gives them an encouraging pat on the back. In a sense he says plan to throw one away, you will anyway.
Update : Umair Haque :
Paul Graham gives them an encouraging pat on the back. In a sense he says plan to throw one away, you will anyway.
Update : Umair Haque :
PS - No, despite what Paul Graham tells you, the moral of this story isn't about Google economies of scoping Kiko to death. It's that Kiko's innovation wasn't revolutionary or challenging enough.
August 18, 2006
If you build software to solve a particular business problem, though, isn't it likely to taste bad when you go and install it somewhere else?
Oldish, slightly rambly piece by James Governor of RedMonk, but cool ideas and bisociations.
Includes Thingamy.
Update : and this is nice.
August 16, 2006
Over at Stowe Boyd's, I left a comment on interpreting Publishing 2.0 (and Jason Calacanis / Mike Arrington) in light of John Hagel.
Seems to me that, from [a Hagelian] perspective, what the media 2.0 people have done is succesfully unbundled their infrastructure management by delegating it to blogging software, but they still have to decide if they're primarily in product innovation or customer relationships.
If they're in product innovation, they have to find someone else to bring customers to them.
Or, are they really in the customer management business ie. owners of a fanatical audience, looking for any way to serve that audience? In this case, they probably don't need to be bought; finding, servicing and growing their own audience is core to them.
So I'd interpret Calacanis as basically a product innovation guy, going to AOL is his way to get his hands on a bigger audience and getting paid for his innovation. Once in AOL he keeps trying to develop new products, trusting he can sell them to AOL's existing users.
Arrington is a customer relations guy, adding things like a job-board allows him to serve his existing audience in more ways. In essense he's a taste-maker, and could be reselling products from anywhere. What matters is his understanding of what his readers want.
Getting bought by a large media 1.0 company wouldn't make much sense for TechCrunch. Its future is probably closer to Chris Pirillo's LockerGnome or even O'Reilly (the OG of media 2.0 customer relations plays)
AOL themselves, of course, are trying to do it all. If they eventually decide they're customer relations people I guess Calacanis will get bored and leave.
August 06, 2006
August 03, 2006
Great news for people who care about such things. Microsoft are on the verge of committing suicide.
There are millions of people around the world who would be using Linux if it wasn't so easy to score pirate copies of Windows. It will be hilarious if MS really pull the plug and drive them into the flippers of the penguin.
OTOH, maybe this is a secret plot by the "Live" faction in MS to smash the power of the Windows die-hards. Might even make sense in a weird kind of way. There's a momentum because companies and PC sellers probably keep buying (extremely discounted) copies of Windows for a while. Shedloads of people are inconvenienced and switch to Linux but these weren't your customers. And Live services and XBox gaming and handheld devices hold up. MS innovate in these areas, but essentially become another Apple : a niche seller of desktop operating systems to those who can't get by on free.
That way, MS never have to go through the hell of creating another Vista (ie. trying to create one gigantic mega-product to satisfy a third of the world's population.) They can leave that to the bazaar while concentrating on levying a laziness tax on corporate buyers.
There are millions of people around the world who would be using Linux if it wasn't so easy to score pirate copies of Windows. It will be hilarious if MS really pull the plug and drive them into the flippers of the penguin.
OTOH, maybe this is a secret plot by the "Live" faction in MS to smash the power of the Windows die-hards. Might even make sense in a weird kind of way. There's a momentum because companies and PC sellers probably keep buying (extremely discounted) copies of Windows for a while. Shedloads of people are inconvenienced and switch to Linux but these weren't your customers. And Live services and XBox gaming and handheld devices hold up. MS innovate in these areas, but essentially become another Apple : a niche seller of desktop operating systems to those who can't get by on free.
That way, MS never have to go through the hell of creating another Vista (ie. trying to create one gigantic mega-product to satisfy a third of the world's population.) They can leave that to the bazaar while concentrating on levying a laziness tax on corporate buyers.
August 02, 2006
Nicholas Carr has one of the best posts on Jason Calacanis's offer to pay news-voters.
Partly because he lays out the sceptical argument against Benkler's "Wealth of Networks" (which I'm calling TCP/IP vs. the dollar) and treats Calacanis as evidence for an eventual recolonization of the attention or peerospheric economy by capital.
And partly because Benkler has a great come-back in the comments.
Partly because he lays out the sceptical argument against Benkler's "Wealth of Networks" (which I'm calling TCP/IP vs. the dollar) and treats Calacanis as evidence for an eventual recolonization of the attention or peerospheric economy by capital.
And partly because Benkler has a great come-back in the comments.
August 01, 2006
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