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'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 :

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" :-)

Viral Funpacks!

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 :

• 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	a b c d A C 3 1

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.

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 :

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.

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.

Yep, it's big news. Apple go social.

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.

Compare and contrast :

Jim Ware

Marilyn Waring

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.

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.

Dana Gardner : Ray Ozzie's vision lacks an economic foundation

Technologically, I wonder how Microsoft Live Labs: Photosynth compares with QuickTime VR?

But socially this could be a very big deal.

I've always found QTVR really worked in web-pages, but I've never seen Apple push it. I guess MS are going to produce something that mixes Flickr's socialization of online photo-collections with online tools for making interactive panoramas and letting you hyperlink between them.

Are panoramas going to be the first media that MS will lead the socialization of?

Update : it is technologically an advance on QTVR. But I'm not sure how important that is. It's the social linking of photos to make a space that's important. Whether you use clever algorithms or human tagging for that is probably less important.

Update 2 : I guess if they took some tips from Croquet it could be the new Windows :-)

Actually, I now seem to be up 365 virtual dollars on the Buzz Research prediction market (Suddenly I'm wishing this was real money :-)

Mainly, it's thanks to JotSpot, which has climbed phenomenally after the release of JotSpot 2 and their accompanying media binge. OTOH I've invested a lot of my virtual money in SocialText, and despite the Open Sourcing announcement, they've fallen. I suspect people on the market think they should be in the wiki sector but don't know where. So they work on the principle of having the succesful wiki company. Because Jotspot is going up, they're trading in their SocialText, TWiki and MediaWiki shares to buy it.

Me? I'm investing in them all.

When I started, I lost money on Laszlo, RSS and OPML but these have, slowly, climbed back and are now higher than when I bought them. Two reliable investments are "microformats" and "WordPress". I was surprised by the latter. I thought it was worthwhile, but didn't expect much. But it's creeping up and up.

The disappointment is Eclipse which has fallen. Not sure what's going wrong here. Maybe it's billed as a Java Development Environment and Java is falling? (Actually why no programming language market?)

Right now, I can't think of any rival to Eclipse. Unless something surprising happens, what other comprehensive free IDEs are there which can be adapted for things like Python and Ruby?

Against my heart, I haven't invested in Emacs, as I'm not sure I see a future for it. Even Vim seems more dynamic. But I could be wrong about this. I'd like to be.

Good overview : Ajax: Future of Web App Development

Here's something a bit jaw-dropping.

A 6 minute screencast from WebFaction showing how to set-up popular web-application frameworks using their control panel.

WebFaction are a hosting company who specialize in providing the cool frameworks and tools like Rails, Django, Turbogears, Trac, WordPress etc. Looks like for 15 dollars a month you can run several different applications based on these frameworks.

I am sorely tempted. This is way beyond what I'm getting from my current hosting company for roughly the same price. No wonder all the kids are creating cool web 2.0 startups when it's this easy to get and manage server space.

I wonder how typical WebFaction are. A lot of people in the comments want the cool control panel, which suggests it's a bit out of the ordinary. But I imagine that other hosting sites will have to catch up.

Clearly this is a hosting platform that WebFaction have built. They don't want to see it commoditized. In all the discussion about web-apps, and software as a service, and the browser essentially commoditizing the client, I haven't seen much about hosting companies like WebFaction. But might the conservation of modularity be bringing decommoditization to this area?

PS : and, yeah, I am digging the new JotSpot. Update : although it's slooooow

Techcrunch on BillMonk - Social Money

The place to make money in the coming web 2.0 / peerospheric / netocratic / attention economy is to set-up a toll-bridge at the border of money and attention.

Google do it with AdSense. Calacanis is doing it by paying people to submit news items to New Netscape. BillMonk is doing it by remembering money debts in social situations and selling financial services to social networks.

Meanwhile, in wikiwars : SocialText go open source and JotSpot integrate with more Office-like formats.

Robert Scoble : The coming G/Y/M/A/e developer wars

Buzz Prediction Market

I'm now very interested by prediction markets as a way of tracking my ability to understand and predict the tech. future. So I've started playing the Yahoo / O'Reilly mashup Buzz Game

Let's actually see how my predictions shape up. I'm going to be a "fundamentals" rather than "noise" trader. I'll buy things that seem to me to be either good ideas. Or likely to succeed for platform wars strategy reasons. I won't buy things that I think are going to be hot in the near future because of hype. (Although, even I will be misled sometimes.)

There are, of course, some obvious missing categories / products from the current game.

• Ning (and similar)


• Thingamy (and similar)


• Voted news (Digg / new Netscape)


• Prediction markets :-)

But it's generally pretty comprehensive.

Update : two days later I seem to have lost around 28 virtual dollars. Mainly on OPML and Eclipse. SocialText's up though.

How To Build a Website with Office 2.0

Read Dion Hinchcliffe (part 3) : Consumers as producers: Disintermediation without a net

Read Dion Hinchcliffe (part 2) : Blogs, wikis, and Web 2.0 as the next application platform

Read Dion Hinchcliffe (part 1) : Software as a Service / Enterprise 2.0

Attention Trust on social shopping

The Attention Trust have a couple of good posts on the intertwingling of markets and social networks.

Stowe Boyd on Social Shopping

Stowe Boyd on Me-commerce: Attention-Driven Shopping

O'Reilly Radar on Ning

O'Reilly Radar : A Week in the Valley: Ning

Interesting overview that gets at what I like about Ning.

There's a huge philosophical and mental gulf between the Ning conception of apps and the traditional programmer sense. We think there should be one perfect app, with lots of users. Flickr, for example. If we want a new feature, we whine at Flickr to add it. Ning isn't about software perfection and collective brilliance, it's about individual empowerment. If you want a photo site, you go to someone's photo site and hit the "ah gotta git me wunna thayem!" button. Boom, you have a photo site. If you want a new feature, you hit "edit my app" and add it. It's so very American, and is so against the grain of programmers who are taught that duplication is bad and must be avoided.

Now here's something I wrote on ThoughtStorms a couple of years ago :

Today I got the very first version of SpittingCobra [A simple web-based Python code-generator] working. And I had a vision. That thousands might install little code generating scripts on their computers and sites. All minor variants, customized for their own particular languages and situations and purposes. That cranking the handle of these thousands of little code generators will spit out thousands more scripts. That the cell learns to reproduce. That, just as the blogosphere is a rich, dense, weave of discussion and opinion and knowledge. So we'll create a rich, dense weave of software customization and authoring. That "programming" will be swamped by spitting scripts. That "design" will be an argument, flowing across weblogs and wikis. That we'll bang the rocks together harder. And split the atoms into smallers pieces.

OK. I got a bit carried away :-) But this idea of evolving software by reproduction and "natural" selection; an ecosystem of continuously adapting small-apps on the network is something that's intrigued me for (OMFG) nearly 20 years. (Since I first read Dawkins's "Blind Watchmaker" around the same time I learned Smalltalk in college.)

Ning is the nearest I've ever seen anyone come to that.

A reader asks : But Phil, have you actually used Ning to write any applications?

Erm ... well right now, strictly speaking, um, no. I'm holding out until they get the Ruby bindings ...

Dave bought syndicationwars.com

Of course, PlatformWars.com was snapped up long ago. Not by me. :-(

Murdoch

BubbleGen links the Wired story on Rupert Murdoch.

Hmm. OK, so we all know that Murdoch isn't stupid. But I'm not entirely convinced of his visionary status either.

As the article points out, Viacom were after MySpace too. All Murdoch seems to have done is been a bit more decisive about having it. And Murdoch has always had a populist instinct : this is the guy who brought you The (UK) Sun, remember.

Then the article gets into the usual debate about the money to be made from MySpace. I'm sure there is a lot by my standards. But not as much as some people expect, given the number of visitors.

How will MySpace make a tonne of money? Comically, it seems that Murdoch himself either doesn't have an opinion or isn't letting on; so the journalist, Spencer Reiss, is reduced to reporting his own speculation as to how MySpace might become mega-profitable.

Umair's quote is interesting :

MySpace’s challenge is to do for branding what Google did for ads – to create a hyperefficient form of interaction.

It would be nice to know more, but Umair is now selling his more in-depth analysis, so I'll just have to make do with my own interpretation. Google, of course, have positioned themselves at the mutual border of the attention and money economies and get to charge a toll on people crossing in both directions. Ads are at that interface.

Branding is a little different. It's intention is to get inside the mind of potential buyers and create a strong but unspecific bias in favour of the company and its products.

The problem (for Murdoch) is that turning amateur ideas and community-spirit into feelings and biases can be done completely within the attention / IP (internet protocol) economy, not the dollar one. MySpace isn't at the border with the money economy. It's deep within the attention economy, where content creators pay illusory attention to their community when creating good stuff, and, in return, receive real attention and acclaim.

Murdoch doesn't need to flow much money through the system to make that happen, but when there's no great flow of money, there's little that can be skimmed off of it.

Update : It's a Wired tradition to laude big media when they (finally) "get" the internet and start trying to buy their way in. Anyone remember this? (From Bubble 1.0)

TCP/IP vs. the Dollar (continued)

Kaunda on my last post (on the internet vs. money) :

I'm not so sure the metaphor of Platform War is really the right way to see it. On one hand the "war" does highlight the differences in communications networks (money vs. social networks). But on the other hand obscures the interdependencies of the two.

I agree with him (and Amarty Sen who he quotes).

Markets are "embedded in" and "parameterized by" civil society and its explicit rule-sets. And these are political decisions.

I agree, too, that the relationship between economy and society isn't a "platform war", although it can be antagonistic. Political power isn't a direct rival platform to the market. (Where it's set-up to be, it's a disaster.)

OTOH, the zone of public discourse on the internet seems to me to be a much more direct rival to the market. Behind all the familiar phrases like "peer production" and "attention economy" and "amateur journalism" is the basic fact : people are being motivated to produce stuff by something other than money. Attention is attracted by PageRank and votes on Digg and social networks carrying viral memes etc; not by paid advertising carried by profit-making publishers who pay professional content-makers to lure them into their pages and onto their channels.

If you look at the amount of work that people put into, say, MySpace. And you count the number of viewers. You might be tempted to try to extrapolate a "monetary value" based on an analogy with how much money would be involved in organizing all this via the dollar economy; but you'll get a completely bogus figure. Questions like "where's the money?" seen to me to be assuming that something like MySpace is "failing" to live up to its potential as a money maker. (Which really means, a high-bandwidth "money router", able to skim a little bit off the top.)

But I'd suggest that this potential doesn't exist. MySpace is an "attenion router". And, unless they can think of something very clever which I can't, they'll never be a high-traffic money router. So there's nothing to skim. (Except attention, which will be increasingly recognised as valuable, of course.)

OTOH Google are very clever and very succesful because they've become the most efficient place to turn attention into money and back again. No one makes it so easy to try to sell your attention for money (by putting AdSense on your blog) or spend money to buy (relevantish) attention (by buying AdSense ads)

Oh, and Ross Mayfield has a great post on Markets as Social.

TCP/IP vs. the Dollar

Donna Bogatin : � Social Web or Business Web: where is the money?

Naturally, people are fascinated by this question of "where's the money?"

But it's the wrong question. The more interesting one is "why the money"? And it's still gonna take us a long time to get our heads around that. But that's what we're all gonna be asking at some point.

The more effective the internet and the web are at helping us communicate and co-ordinate, the less money will be involved. Because ultimately the economy is a communication network and money is its protocol

The network is not the means to the end of money.

Instead, money and IP are rival protocols in rival networks which are means to the same end : that of articulating human labour to create more wealth for humanity. Money isn't wealth, it's just a kind of signal which can be used to help identify good ideas and channel more resources to them. On the internet we are increasingly finding alternative ways of identifying and signalling what things are worthwhile.

And the better the network does this, the less need there is for money to be involved at all.

This is gonna be the ultimate platform war. All the stuff about Windows vs. Apple, or RSS vs. Atom or Google vs. Yahoo are minor skirmishes. This is the biggie : TCP/IP vs. the dollar.

Which will pull your strings in future? Which will motivate you?

Question of the Day

Why doesn't Google invest anything in Blogger?

Blogger accounts are not integrated with other Google properties. There's no note of GoogleBase or Orkut or Gmail integration. There's a simple AdSense connection but nothing else has changed in years. There's certainly no sniff of cool Ajaxy makeover for the UI.

Is this simply extreme "federalism" in Google? Do they want to let each part explore for itself? Have they decided that, strategically, blog-hosting isn't something important to them? (Blogs elsewhere host AdSense.) Have they essentially decided to allow Blogger to atrophy and die? Are there no, actual, people at Google who really get (or have ideas for) blogging?

Buzz.blogger is OK at telling you what other people are doing, but no news of Blogger themselves.

Perhaps none of this matters. We can move to WordPress.com or TypePad or some other new blogging tool. Or stick around as long as the hosting holds up.

But it's kind of weird too, no?

Donna Bogatin : � Google Base integrates Google Checkout for 'monster' sales

Something else to think about when it comes to application development platforms. Mobile phones. And, of course, Eclipse :

RedMonk Blog: Briefing: Nokia, Carbide, Eclipse

BeyondVC: Platform Wars, battle for startup mindshare

Manageability says :

Truth is, although we collectively see the train wreck coming, we don't collectively witness the failure as a single unequivocal event.

Why is it, that although we can intuitively grasp that a standardization effort is wrong, we don't seem to be able to stop it?

Why are Standardization Train Wrecks always in Slow Motion?

Maybe there's some simple game theoretical model for this. It's some kind of interesting question about individuals and the commons. You win if you jump on the standard early and it "does" become a standard. You also win if you avoid the standard and it fails. However you lose if you jump on the standard and it fails, or you avoid the standard and it wins. This is basically the "majority game". You want to join the majority.

On the other hand, there's a timing issue. The later you join a standard, the less value you get from it. (Because early movers have an advantage in designing it to suit themselves, plus they get early expertise and recognition.) On the other hand, the earlier you are in a standard's life, the less knowledge you have about whether it will be succesful, so the more risky the investment.

Also, maybe the stakes for being involved in a standard varies with the size of the agent involved. It's worse to be seen as a multi-national who missed out on the next big thing, than a small-business who pragmatically waited until the signposts were clearly visible.

Could be an interesting model for someone to build.

ThoughtStorms: BloggersAsEndoSymbionts

Dave Winer :

I bet there's a law here, or a life lesson. Either you're going to be a platform vendor or not. If you choose to push a platform, don't go half way. Platforms that are picky usually don't gain traction. If you got a platform you must be open to all comers, enthusiastically, without reservation.

OpenLaszlo Project Blog

Here's something else I'm keeping an eye on.

Yesterday we announced a strategic partnership with the Dojo Foundation: OpenLaszlo will not only be licensing the Dojo Toolkit for use within our next major release, we will also make substantial code contributions back to Dojo for use by the entire Ajax/DHTML community.

OpenLaszlo getting into Ajax.

Here's a prediction : the two most important GUI standards in the next two years will be the Flash virtual machine and DHTML + Javascript + SVG.

OpenLaszlo is probably set to become the first major tool to develop for them both.

Macromedia have "owned" this area for a while, with Dreamweaver and the Flash tools. The question is how their expensive proprietory software model will compete against OpenLaszlo. Their advantage : good connections with the existing, mainstream web-development community. Their disadvantage, not so good connections with the rest of the developer community. Flash is still weird for programmers.

Microsoft are where? They've turned VB from a decent GUI scripting language into C# with a different syntax, and both are essentially following Java on the road to statically typed oblivion. (With the added disadvantage that these languages are being used to try to drive people onto .NET 2 and Vista)

Java Applets themselves are out of the running. Scripting languages like Python, Perl and Ruby have no real story for GUI development. Tk is from two generations ago. wxWindows is still an awkward amalgum of two third-party libraries. The Java community themselves are deserting Swing for the Eclipse library. So why would, say, a Python programmer choose Jython + Swing? (Although she might, I suppose, choose Jython + Eclipse.)

Mozilla's XUL is intriguing but has no significant support from a development environment.

Everyone as Co-Creators

I have to say, I agree with everything Dion Hinchcliffe says here.

Spreadsheets, Hypercard, Wiki ... three of the applications that have most succesfully created a gradient between "user" and "developer". New innovation will come from the "edge" experts in these, and other software which takes its lead from them.

When I wrote that innovation came from developers and couldn't come from users, what I was really thinking of was "passive users", who couldn't or wouldn't understand what the deep model of what was going on in their software. Those that can understand what it's really doing, and can use this knowledge to help pioneer new ways of use, may very well be innovators.

Users vs. Developers

Trolling Chris Pirillo wants some.

He he! Well someone’s got to stand up and school the boy!

I admire people like Winer (who’s link I followed over there). I like the notion of “users and developers partying together”. I think developers have a responsibility to give the users good things. And that developers can’t know what these good things are without paying attention to users.

But the idea that development is a commodity - which is essentially what he's saying here -, that it’s like the water supply which can be turned on or off or piped-around at the will of the user, is wrong, wrong, wrong.

The reason is, that good software creation, like any other creative activity, requires a deep knowledge of the nature and constraints of the medium. You can’t invent the transistor without a profound understanding of physics. Nor write a great novel without being a master of your own language. Nor a great painter without knowing paint. Nor invent radio or television or the computer without a background in the relevant science.

Without knowing your material you’ll never see the statue in the block of marble. Never have intuitions about the possibilities that the medium holds. Users can, at best, offer advice for incremental improvements : “I want something like X but with these annoyances fixed.”

But that’s never going to give you radical new things. There are no great innovations in software that have been driven by user demand. (Name one!) They all come from geeks who knew what software looks like from the inside, who saw something in the computer and said “hey! I could make it do that, too. Kewl!”

Users and developers have common enemies : dinosaur software companies, companies who like to specify and buy software which they hope will impose particular work-practices on their employees, market-forces which require cutting-corners to get the product out of the door today rather than get it right.

Let’s work (and party) together to fight that.

But the other … don’t fool yourself. Users have been dreaming of getting rid of developers, like, forever. They never succeed.

Every time the users abandon us, we go away and create yet more cool stuff, on our own, for ourselves.

And eventually the users come crawling back, because they want more of our pure, raw innovation, rather than more of the stale old fluff which is all that they and the marketing people (who "understand real users better than those disfunctional geeks") are able to come up with by themselves.

Update : MP3 of Pirillo's presentation at BloggerCon. Yawn! ;-)

Startup Boy : Dare Microsoft Kill Google?

Robot Wars

Microsoft release their first Robotics Product : Robotics Studio.

Will this be more than a niche? It seems that here's the place where hardware is currently far from commoditized. It will need to be, before the software layer becomes a serious platform.

I wonder how it plays with White Box.

Meanwhile iRobot is a platform, too

Ning Screencasts

Aha! Ning have started putting up screencasts like Create an App from Scratch

Seb’s Random Thoughts � Is It Finally Happening? Will Skype Soon Become What We feared?

Are we about to experience a wave of audio-spam on Skype?

This is particularly obnoxious because Skype is using our machines to route calls. We, reasonably happily, give up "spare" processor cycles in return for free phone-calls. But what happens if Skype is deluged in spam? The spammers will be consuming our resources.

Hwo will Skype handle this? Maybe an official blacklist of spammer accounts? But what else?

Dave Winer is harsher than most about Bill Gates.

Phil Wainewright : Google spreadsheet: the big test for ads in apps

Some discussion over on ReadWrite Web on the new Netscape front-page.

My thoughts. Clearly it's not as bottom-up as Digg. But it's sure as hell more interesting than the previous incarnation of Netscape. Calacanis seems to be a smart guy who's pushing AOL in the right direction. Let's face it, when was the last time anyone talked about Netscape?

It's also worth comparing digg.com with something like slashdot.org, which has a fanatical community but is editor driven.

In fact, there seems to be a lot of cross-over between the Slashdot and Digg crowds, which suggest that the editorial-driven approach and the mob-driven are complementing each other rather than mutually exclusive rivals. If that's so, it's not hard to imagine that such a complementary mix might work within a particular site too. It's going to be worth experimenting with, at the very least.

Interesting Gillmor Gang.

Steve Gillmor is arguing with Mike Arrington about Google's Spreadsheet vs. the SocialText / WikiCalc deal. Arrington thinks WikiCalc, hosted inside enterprises, is going to be the bigger threat to Excel and a Microsoft Office oriented workflow than Google's Spreadsheet which business can't trust with its private data.

Gillmor thinks that Google are wiring their applications together to lure the user into their suite of applications. For example, an email received in Gmail that talks about a dinner-date, offers the user the chance to make an appointment via Google calander. This is turn leads to the option of looking up the venue on Google maps. Gillmor's assumption is that this will suck people into the Google-suite. Essentially each application recruits users for the next via a simple hyperlink.

Could Google eat Excel the same way? Automatically offer to import (and show via Google Spreadsheet) any Excel spreadsheet that passes through Gmail?

Finally there's an interesting discussion over the fact that these online spreadsheets can't really import the formulas from Excel. The Gang seem surprised by this, but given that Excel packs the whole of Visual Basic for Applications as scripting language, it's obvious that the more sophisticated applications built with it will be hard to port without reproducing the whole Excel / VBA engine.

If I ran Microsoft ...

We can all fantasize, right?

Here's what I'd do if I ran Microsoft.

• My brand is "Hot"

  
  
  "Hot" not "Live" (which doesn't exist), not "Windows" (which is in trouble), not "MSN" (yeuch!).
  
  
  
  
  • Skin Hotmail.
    I'd tidy up Hotmail to make it CSS compliant. Then get a bunch of designers to churn out multiple Hotmail "themes" (ie. templates + CSS sheets). Get some input everywhere from the ZenGardeners to Design Outpost. Let users choose from a fifty different looks for their Hotmail page.
    
    The result would be cheap, cheerful and generally get Hotmail talked about for a while.
  
  
  
  • De-advertise
    Take most of the advertising off Hotmail. And talk about it very publicly. Maybe put some very discrete text-ads like Google's but nothing more. Tell people I'm willing to lose money on this in order to make Hotmail a more comfortable place for my users.
  
  
  
  • Spelling and grammar-checking in Hotmail
    'nuff said.
  
  
  
  • HotPage
    Whatever it is that MS do with Spaces, blogs, homepages, social networking etc. etc. It should be blended in and standard with your Hotmail account.
  
  
  
  
  




• Open Source Security

  
  I'd admit, right now, that security is not a question of private advantage but of public good. It should be treated as such.
  
  Vista and IE 7 must have an architecture with fairly loosely coupled modules. (If not, MS are fucked anyway.) Take all the security related modules, and release them under a BSD-style license, without patent restrictions. This includes malware detectors, live-updating code and things that check for pirate copies of Windows etc.
  
  Ownership of all these modules should be given to a new, independent, non-profit institution, spun out of Microsoft with some reasonable financing and some good staff. (Think of the Mozilla Foundation.)
  
  This foundation should have a general remit to be responsible for protecting the Windows ecosystem from all threats. As some of its products will be folded back into the main (proprietory) Windows codebase, employees should have the right to see the rest of the Windows source-code.
  




• Channel 9 and MSDN are the same thing

  
  Developer mindshare has always been a key part of Microsoft's success. Ever since MS were a company that made Basic, the whole edifice is balanced on their ownership of the development tools and leadership of a developer community. And, largely, MS have understood that and served that community pretty well. MS development tools are pretty good and not allowed to get rusty. Compared to Sun or Apple or IBM, MS have been relatively forward in opening up and allowing their geeks to take part in the global geek conversation. Channel 9 was a statement of intent and a recognition of the way things are going.
  
  Compared to the free-for-all of MS blogs and Channel 9 and the expectation of smart developers around the world, MSDN looks corporate and restricted and simply ugly. It's time for Channel 9 to take over. Time for MSDN 2.0.
  
  
  
  
  • Lose the subscription charge. Everyone who wants an account can get it for free.
  
  
  • Copy all the documentation into wikis and let people get in there and edit it. There'll need to be some policing by staff. But generally let the wiki stay up-to-date and reflect real problems people have.
  
  
  • Ultimately - and there's a question of "sequencing" here but, nevertheless, ultimately - the conversation with developers is more important to MS than the revenue from the tools. VisualStudio, the various compilers and .NET libraries should eventualy be released as free (open source) software.
  
  
  • MS should really embrace Python. (It could be another scripting language, but Python seems to be most likely.) VS for Python should be given equal billing with C#, ASP and VB.
  
  
  
  
  




• We don't need a browser. We need Flash

  
  Seriously. What value is there in Internet Explorer? MS will never make a penny selling it. The browser is one of the most commoditized components of the web. There's no "rent" to be captured there. Pitifully little incentive for anyone to violate standards like HTML, XML or SVG.
  
  The idea that MS should try to "own" the browser is based on a flawed analogy with the early 90s competition between Windows, OS2 and Mac; an analogy which Netscape originally encouraged (as in "the browser will commoditize the OS") to their own destruction. In fact, while browser standards are commoditizing the OS, the specific flavour is not an issue. Almost unanimously web-service developers are highly wary of getting locked in to IE or Firefox specific code and are targetting all browser standards. Treating the browser as an "ownable" platform is absurd.
  
  There isn't even a public service value in competition between Firefox and IE. Because Firefox is free software, there are dozens of micro-projects pushing it in different innovative directions and building new things on top of it.
  
  IE is a waste of time and money and attention for Microsoft. I'd simply forget it. We can channel some of the team and resources into supporting Mozilla. (And maybe folding some of the good bits into the Mozilla code-base.)
  
  At the same time, there is a remarkably successful proprietory platform on the web. One which has the kind of domination that MS can only dream of. And which seems to have its status almost by accident : Flash.
  
  Seeking advantage for MS, and if I hadn't completely cured myself of the habit of wanting to own platforms, I'd put some serious thought into how I could get hold of, and embrace and extend Flash.
  
  I wouldn't want to buy Adobe / Macromedia. But I might want to buy Laszlo Systems and push Flash authoring into Visual Studio.
  
  I'd make Flash a first-class citizen of the XBox and of XBox Live Market.
  
  I'd put a player as standard into Windows (probably as part of Media Player).
  
  Like I say, if I was still not cured of the whole "embrace and extend" tactic, this is where I'd probably try it. To allow some of the Windows media file formats to be embedded in Flash.
  
  Oh, and as we're in the realms of pure fantasy here, why not buy Broadband Mechanics and put Marc Canter in charge of the MS assault on the home.
  

Update 2007 : I wrote some stuff about the opportunities of Excel.

Linkstraviganza

Sorry I haven't been writing much here recently. A lot going on. Here's a quick resume of some things I've noticed.

Several of the usual suspects being insightful :

Umair Haque has a couple of great posts on Google, linkfarms and the effect that Google has on the media.

Robert X Cringely has had some really interesting thoughts on the different types of IT giant, with particular emphasis on IBM's woes. Not to mention some criticism of Google.

I'm naturally very excited by the news of strategic alliance between SocialText and Dan Bricklin's WikiCalc.

That's a very clever and sensible move. Bricklin has a lot of brand recognition as the inventor of the spreadsheet; and WikiCalc is a pretty good synthesis of spreadsheet and wiki : two genres which I've long thought have a lot in common. SocialText are already deeply wise about social software and seem to have mastered the art of selling wikis into companies. They complement each other beautifully.

(At this point, I guess I should disclose that I've recently applied for a job with SocialText, and I haven't (yet) had any sort of official rejection. So read this in that light. Nevertheless, even if they turn me down, I'm gonna have a hard time not cheering them on.)

Finally, Robert Scoble leaves Microsoft and Bill Gates says he'll stand-down in favour of Ray Ozzie. Nothing much to add here. Obviously MS will suffer from losing Scoble in the short-term, but I believe them to have been on the Cluetrain for a while, and I don't think they'll get off. Ozzie will continue to blog, and understand the internet. Others will blog from their corners with continued MS blessing.

Scoble has a big brand, but I'm not sure how it will survive away from MS. Scoble and MS were a great double act. The incongruousness was part of the allure. Scoble as good blogger in what's essentially a straight journalistic organization may have less creative friction to work with.

Meanwhile, as Cringely points out, MS's business model is still disappearing. Proprietory software, ultimately, doesn't scale. MS can't hire or co-ordinate enough coders to keep churning out 95% of the world's users' software every three years. And as the market fragments, the benefits MS get from network effects decline catastrophically.

The whole thing (ie. the Windows product line / world domination strategy) is a huge soggy mess, and it's not surprising Gates is bored with it. MS have got the talent and money to change direction. But they may be suffering the classic "Innovators Dilemma". The alternative business models available just aren't as profitable as they're accustomed to. They can't easily take Google's advertising market. And even if they could get in there they'd end up dividing it. My betting is that even Ozzie and a clued-up workforce won't be able to escape this problem.

Micro Persuasion: eBay to Launch Blogs, Wikis and Search Tags

SPARQLing FOAFrolls

Danny Ayers : SPARQLing FOAFrolls

Aparently, Thingamy is written in Lisp

Dave Winer : How I'd compete with Feedburner

Interesting example of the disputed territories of web 2.0 : eBay bans users from linking to a rival reputation system.

TechCrunch has exploded from no-where as a major resource in web 2.0 startup space.

But I notice Guy Kawasaki uses a reader poll to get an opinion about the companies he reviews.

That seems like a smart attempt to be 2.0 and leverage the edge etc. (I'm very interested in polls and compasses.)

Afghanistan Platform Wars

John Robb :

I know how this is going to turn out, do you?

Must remember to keep an eye on Web 2.5.

Today Liam has a scoop on Croquet.

OPML vs Squidoo

I commented on a Techcrunch article.

Microsoft and Google Grapple for Supremacy - New York Times

Microsoft and Google Grapple for Supremacy - New York Times

AOL Buddy List’s Social Network Expands With AIM Pages, Phoneline | paidContent.org

AOL Buddy List’s Social Network Expands With AIM Pages, Phoneline | paidContent.org

Share Your OPML

Dave Winer's tanks roll on.

Protest movements as platforms

Ben Hyde commenting on John Robb's Weblog

The goal of all political activism is to activation of the political muscle of the movement. The outward facing goals are always secondary. To put it in high tech terms - the highly cohesive and activated political base is like a platform; it has no goal beyond creating a rich option space for actions and a sense of urgency to take action to execute those options.

When you create a platform you select some options and highlight them to make it easier for developers to visualize what is possible. That increases their awareness of the rich option space and it acts as an accelerant on their taking action. When you create a political movement you select issues to focus on for just those reasons; but the you have different names for the actors. Activists and voters substitute for developers and users. In both cases a modicum of fear to drive people to action can be useful; with luck you can get your competing platform/movement to do things that frighten users/voters developer/voters. Microsoft did that for open source. The current immigration crack down talk has done that for the immigrate movement.

Markets vs. the Peerosphere

Zbigniew Lukasiak has been reading the (naturally) excellent Wealth of Networks, and wondering about the relation between the Peerosphere and the market.

Anyway, here was my comment, which I think is worth repeating.

I think the really interesting thing is that for a long time paid, exchange economies have driven out gifting ones. And suddenly, on the internet, that's being reversed.

Suddenly, gift-economies are able to compete with, and out-perform, exchange economies. My guess is that this is something to do with scale : there comes a time when you cross a threshold of number of people, and the cheaper, asynchronous co-ordination of gifting is more effective than the more expensive synchronous co-ordination of payment.

Obviously, as Benkler says, the wider distribution of productive capital is a necessary precondition.

I think I have a three-part answer to the "how to make money" question.

1) In the short term, you sell services around the peer-produced information products. That can be anything from customized modification of free-code, renting server-space, through to some higher-level reviewing, indexing, derivitive services.

The problem is, these become commoditised really quickly. That's why everyone from SourceForge to MySpace to Google is offering you gallons of free hosting for your content in return for an infinitessimal advertising revenue.

I recently got a bit annoyed when I discovered that I couldn't create any more "sets" on my free Flickr account. But I see the point. Flickr give away commodity hosting, but require me to pay for access to a higher value, highly abstract categorisation resource. Ironically I can have free disk-space but not free name-space.

I don't think this will last. Competition will commodify "sets" just as it commodified disk sectors. But I think it's an experiment that shows Flickr are looking in the right direction.

2) To avoid getting commoditised, you have to look more closely into two strategies : what Umair Haque is calling "edge competencies", and what OReilly is calling "data inside". How do you become a non-commodity, essential hub / partner in an ecosystem of peer-production, in such a way that people have to pay you?

EBay, Amazon and Google can all take a cut of transactions you do through them, because the peer-production is inalienable from their service. The challenge is how to get yourself into this position.

3) Ultimately though, we're moving towards full Netocracy, where links (or live attentional connections) start to be valued and "imploitable" in themselves. I'll give away content because the connection with the audience is more valuable to me than any money I can make. At first we'll asssume that this is simply a kind of investment, because, ultimately, downstream we will be cashing out those links into real money. But money itself is is something we might pursue without worrying about how we actually spend it - sure, ultimately it will buy us food, but we may hold on to it and invest it for decades before we end up eating it.

In the same way, we may hold on to, and invest in, and trade links for decades before we finally expect them to be "exploited" (converted back into money).

So as our recognition of netocracy grows, we'll worry less about the ultimate payment and more about how our peer-production is helping with our link portfolio.

Hotmail

ZDNet on Hotmail revamp

I say dumping the Hotmail brand would be a big mistake. People who use Hotmail don't think of it as Microsoft or Windows, it's just their mail. The Windows brand isn't an asset to Hotmail, quite the opposite, they're trying to leverage the Hotmail brand to promote the new "Windows Live" which is a desperate attempt to keep Windows fresh.

Apple to implement the XP API?

I haven't been following Apple (or anything) closely recently. (I've been travelling.)

Fortunately Cringely has :

PBS | I, Cringely . April 20, 2006 - Native Speaker

Dabble DB: 7 Minute Video

Wow! Hadn't seen the Dabble DB, 7 Minute Video before. But it's cool.

Don Marti www/on-web-20.html

Don Marti www/on-web-20.html

Web 2.0 By Paul Boutin

More questions about what "web 2.0" means.

I think "web 2.0" is a pretty easy concept to understand.

Back in the 90s I found a few people who really "got" the web; who really understood what was important, what wasn't, how it worked, how it didn't, what you could expect, what you couldn't. I'm not saying these were the only people who were smart about the web. Or that they were the originators of all the ideas. But they were the ones that I discovered, and who I knew instinctively were right, and who I shamelessly stole my ideas from.

For me, "web 2.0" means one thing : vindication of those people and those ideas. Pretty much everything (good) in web 2.0 is really a playing out, in one form or another, of things those people were saying around 8-10 years ago.

So who are they? I'm sure you're not likely to very surprised by the list. Maybe you'll be more surprised by some people I missed out on.

Anyway, in no particular order :

Jakob Nielsen : intensely at war with all the bad UI design of the web, particularly from designers who mistook it for print or TV. Ajax and other web 2.0 design fashions may not be Nielsen in letter, but they are in spirit. Web 2.0 is more with the grain of the media. (Of course, that's partly because the media has become closer to what they want with CSS and standards pushed by Firefox.)

Philip Greenspun : his book on database backed web-sites pretty much covers most of what you need to understand about the synthesis of technology and community at the core of web 2.0 thinking. There's a reason I call mash-ups "Greenspun 4 models".

Chris Locke : Those Cluetrainers knew how this was going to affect business and the market. Is there a blogging-for-business book now which really has much more insight than "Gonzo Marketing"?

Eric Raymond : developing all the ideas about what we now call "peer production" in the context of thinking about hacker culture and open source.

Dave Winer : Starting from an insistence that the web was a place for everyone to be a speaker, journalist, publisher rather than a consumer of content, Winer simply put the theory into action, promoting a world where everyone can (and often does) aspire to be a speaker, journalist and publisher. Web 2.0 is a step-change in public participation, and we learned that mainly from Dave.

And someone I missed at the time, but who was developing some of the profound ideas. Ward Cunningham, invented wiki and contributed important ideas to xtreme / agile software development philosophy. The "lite" development strategies behind quick and cheap web 2.0 services are due to Cunningham and friends.

If you understood and accepted what these people believed, sometime around about 1999, then nothing in web 2.0 is likely to have been a surprise or confusion to you.

Finding New Sources of Strategic Advantage : HBS Working Knowledge

Finding New Sources of Strategic Advantage : HBS Working Knowledge

Atom as a Case Study

Tim Bray's Atom as a Case Study is fascinating.

l.m.orchard's XOXO outliner

Les Orchard has been doing some interesting experiments with his XOXO outliner and simple OPML server.

UML for SemWeb?

In a comment I wrote

I wonder whether anyone considers adapting Poseidon etc. for SemWeb modelling.

Aggregators and BitTorrent

Dave Winer:

It's time for all aggregators to learn how to do BT. Permanent link to this item in the archive.

Apple in France

Interesting analysis

Embrace and extend Wikipedia?

I thought Winer wanting to get OPML Editor talking to wikis was a smart-move, in the sense that it showed how fast he moved when he became aware of potential rivals to his world-outline project, and was planning to make an alliance.

Nevertheless, I didn't think that the result would be all that exciting. But some people seem to find the idea compelling.

However what got me thinking is this. Wikipedia pages are trees. They have a TOC, sections and subsections. What would it mean if I could edit wikipedia in my OPML Editor.

Well, first, that I'd likely have my own local copy of my ideal version of a page.

And, second, that updating the central server (Wikipedia), would be a matter of hitting a "sync" button.

Now imagine fighting an edit-war on a Wikipedia page, armed with this tool, against someone who's going via the browser. I think the guy with the OPML Editor is going to have a big advantage. It's going to be trivially easy to simply keep my version of the "truth" locally and keep hitting "sync" every time someone tries to change it.

In fact, if the editor allows batch updating of dozens of pages, people going through the browser won't have a chance. OPML Editor based users will own Wikipedia. In essence, Wikipedia will just become one hosting node in the world-outline.

I think I was wrong when I said that Wikipedia wouldn't be affected by the OPML campaign. How much does the successful ecological balance on wikipedia depend on a slow network; a roughly egalitarian speed of access for editing the pages?

Might the OPML Editor actually have the capacity to destroy this fragile ecology as we know it?

OPML to Wiki

Phil (yesterday) :

Aside : I don't think Winer really "gets" wiki. If you want to take him on, that's the front to do it.

Dave (today) :

How long will it be before there's a wiki that supports the MetaWeblog API? ...

Anyway, send me a pointer to such a wiki, and I'll try to get the OPML Editor working with it. If there are problems, I'll document them, and when they're fixed, I'll try again.

Dave may not be trying to "win", but he's sure as hell determined to "succeed". And connections are the secret of that.

Strategic! :-)

Dave on war

Dave responds to the last piece.

Phil why are all your analogies about wars and fighting? I’m actually a creative person, always have been. Does someone who writes a book try to defeat anyone? I don’t think so. I think they want to express something. I want new tools to exist for people with knowledge to be able to share it with others and to build on other people’s knowledge.

Good point. I accentuate the conflict here on this blog, not because I'm interested in stirring up trouble, but as one analytic technique. I probably spent too much of my life studying evolutionary game theory. And I tend to see history as formed by the clash of competing ideas, strategies, classes and technologies.

But that's not the only perspective. I think conflict can be useful to help understand what happened, and what will happen, but there are other filters too. No question that Dave works as hard as anyone to build bridges, increase interoperability and allow people to communicate.

And making connections is pretty much the meaning of life in the rapidly arriving network society.

There should be analyses of platforms in terms of construtive, non-zero-sum deal-making and creative expression, rather than merely in terms of competition as though it was all some kind of sports event.

Well, let's see if I can find a way to do that.

Dave Bonaparte

He he! I get some link-love from Dave Winer. There goes my credibility ;-)

Actually, I am a trifle embarrassed, because I've just finished writing a response to something Danny said, where I've been, generally, complimentary of Dave. So now this is gonna look like reciprocation. It isn't. It was mainly written before I saw that link, and it hasn't been substantially changed since. (Y'all believe me, right?)

Actually, who knows what Dave will think of this? ;-)

For the record, I'm not a friend of Dave's, I only know the virtual Winer through reading DaveNet and Scripting News, and nothing of the real one. In the past I've admitted to being a "fan". And intellectually I'm an admirer. I think he's consistently smart and right about a lot of things to do with the internet and software industry; although there's plenty of stuff I disagree with too.

But most of all, I'd claim to be a "student" of Winer. I watch him carefully. Like everyone else, I have an interpretation of what he thinks and does - which is obviously open to criticism, comments are welcome - and I have an interest in trying to keep the story as accurate as I can, for my own benefit. In many ways, he's a role-model I want to learn from. In some ways, he's a model of what to avoid.

Anyway, here's what Danny said.

If I interpret Phil's this line correctly in the context of the rest of his comment ... he's placing Winer on the side of pragmatic tool builders.

Which is odd given Winer's history of extremely idealistic format building.

Not exactly. What I'd suggest is that Winer understands, maybe better than anyone, how these things work as an "ecosystem". Primarily he's a "platform" builder. It's not that any particular piece of his platform is necessarily all that great, but he knows that he has to produce all the bits and he knows how put them together.

Look carefully. Whatever Winer is promoting, he always has a tool and a format and some kind of hosting or central server and he's "dog-fooding" it and talking it up on his blog and he's finding new, quick-win, applications to extend the platform and he's making new connections into a user community and he's on the offensive, smacking down any potential rivals or threats to his authority.

(That last bit isn't particularly pretty, but who's to say it isn't part of the success of the things he's promoting?)

The point is that other people don't have this perspective. They just make a format or a tool and hope the other bits fall into place. Or they dream of an entire ecosystem that's way beyond their capacity to build. Or they are corporations pouring money into a bloated, late and unwanted attempt to enclose this new platform for their own profit.

Dave is fascinating, and probably unique, as an individual who's smart (and rich) enough to put together an entire platform pretty much by himself. (OK, by definition an ecosystem needs other people; but Dave puts it together : he co-ordinates, leads, bullies, entices, flatters, does deals etc. He makes it happen.)

And his hubris is spectacular. From a standing start last year, he's co-ordinated all his resources to launch an assault on the "permanent, trusted, hierarchical data-repository" market. He has a simple little editor which people are using and already seem to love. He has partners creating various OPML viewers. He has people talking about OPML for reading lists, OPML for attention data (in the "year of attention"), an OPML network of world outlines, OPML as a replacement for traditional CMS, live outlining for intra-corporate communications etc. He knows who his enemies are (DMOZ, Wikipedia, and to a lesser extend Google) and he's already spinning against them. He knows who his friends are (librarians, a significant alliance with WordPress which essentially turns it into a generic hierarchical database server). You can even see Edgio as a cheeky attempt to steal Paul Ford's vision from under Google and the SemWeb's nose. How long before Edgio is accepting "stores" written in OPML?

Compare this with what the SemWeb community has achieved over the last (what?) 7-8 years? This is a project / community invented and led by THE guy who created the web. (How much better publicity can you get than that?) It's full of super-smart, super-enthusiastic people. They've written gallons of code. Libraries for every language I can think of. Dozens of programs that let you enter, query and manipulate RDF data. There've been several attempts to build real popular applications for RDF (eg. FOAF).

And they're still promising that the tools, applications and users are coming "real soon now". At some point you have to suspect it's not lack of effort or tactical ability which is holding them back, but lack of a plausible strategic objective.

[Ed - that's as far as I got before seeing Dave's link. The rest was written later. So you can start assuming some sycophancy creeping into the mix.]

I'll stick my neck out and make a few predictions. (And you have permission to quote them and laugh if they all turn out to be wrong in 5 years ;-)

I think the SemWeb has got very little time left before it finds itself side-lined. Of course, it's got a lot of momentum so it's not going to disappear over-night, it will even continue to grow and gather new users, but as the amount of machine-treatable metadata in "web 2.0" explodes over the next couple of years, the proportion that's part of the SemWeb (ie. in RDF, marked-up with URIs who's "meaning" is defined in OWL ontologies) is going to be infinitesimal.

That's why smart pragmatists like Danny are, quite sensibly, trying to make bridges between their technology and the users who actually have the data. But these attempts are being sabotaged (eg. by Shelley who is missing one of the golden rules of establishing a platform), and it looks like Danny's too polite to fight his corner. ("Fair enough" indeed!)

Instead, this is Winer's game (again). Publicly hosted OPML hierarchies are going to roll right over DMOZ this year, by which I mean they'll exceed DMOZ in popularity. They'll give other silos of expertise (About.com, Squidoo) a serious fright. OTOH, they won't make a dent on Wikipedia. (Aside : I don't think Winer really "gets" wiki. If you want to take him on, that's the front to do it.)

Within two years, most major blogging clients will be exchanging reading-lists, blogrolls and attention data with each other and online aggregators, memetrackers etc. in OPML; scutters will be crawling raw OPML for "who-likes-who" data; and FOAF will be gone. And FOAF was the greatest hope for a genuine popular RDF application.

It's not that I think everything is all going Winer's way. My guess is that the most popular OPML Editor by then probably won't be Dave's. He doesn't seem interested in cultivating a community of developers for the editor itself, which strikes me as a strategic error. Someone will take his code (or write their own) and pretty-it-up for the mass-market. [Note that Dave hasn't made a connection with the whole Getting Things Done cult. (Unless you count moving to the Mac.) There's no great OPML-love on 43 Folders (I can't even find the Editor in its wiki). And these guys are obsessive about outliners. But they're much more driven by aesthetics.]

On second thoughts, maybe Dave doesn't really care about the Editor. In practice, Dave's business model seems to be "create platforms, sell ping-servers". (Which casts some light on the whole Winer / Cadenhead fallout, doesn't it?)

But that's another story. The point I want to make here is that Winer is Napoleon, and the poor SemWeb people don't even know they're at war.

Or rather, they know something is up. They know they're hurting, and that people seem to keep getting inexplicably excited by stuff they consider obviously inferior to their grand project. They complain about the crappiness of Winer's format, or the obnoxiousness of his personality, or that it's "only" because of the free publicity he gets on his blog, or his infantile fan-club, or that he's rich. What they don't see is the master strategist playing the game.

Let's be clear. Winer isn't mainly attacking the SemWeb - it's incidental to him. He's likely to be far more perturbed by more practical rival formats like Atom, defending himself against losing the server business (like he lost the podcast-server business), and fighting off the big companies.

The damage he's doing to the SemWeb is a side-effect of him being a smart SynWeb operator in the inevitable conflict between SemWeb and SynWeb. But there are plenty of others willing to play a SynWeb strategy if Winer were to retire.

Tools and the SemWeb / SynWeb debate

Danny responds to my latest SemWeb rant. I really don't like being boring, but this subject interests me a lot (and I quite like all the rhetorical flourishes) so I'll indulge myself with some further responses. But to be clear, I'm not dissing Danny, I have a lot of respect for what he does both technically and as a SemWeb advocate.

But I would suggest that these things are well on their way. ... But the real application is the Semantic Web itself, in the same way that a browser isn't interesting without the web behind it.

I'd suggest that they're not well on their way at all, because he misses my point about what a tool "is".

A tool is not simply a program that manipulates a data-structure. It's something which solves an existing problem. Something which is the "best tool for the job". Or at least the prefered / preferable solution to the problem. I might be able to open a beer-bottle with a pen-knife, but a pen-knife, however well made, is not a tool for opening beer-bottles. The inner-technology has to, in some sense, match or "afford" the outer usage.

The trouble for the SemWeb technologies is that there are almost no problems for which they have any real distinguishing advantages over the SynWeb ones. (This is assuming my distinction between SemWeb, as the place where the meaning of a piece of meta-data is fixed a priori by attaching a URI to it, and the SynWeb as a place where meaning is determined later according to context and convention. As far as I can tell, Danny does still agree with this distinction?

Regarding formats without tools, I think you've got a fallacy in suggesting RSS and OPML are somehow special. Which came first, the RSS aggregator or RSS?

No, I certainly wasn't trying to suggest RSS and OPML are special. They're interesting only in the sense that they are succesful examples of the SynWeb, and what you could call the "Winer" strategy.

Heh, your choice of the word "parasitic" is a bit ironic, because you could say the OPML Editor and RSS apps are parasitic on the web, and the Semantic Web is an extension of the web.

Balderdash! ;-) The web is a wonderful example of doing the right thing. It's a "worse is better", funky little hack which combines an easy to use tool (the browser) with the simplest protocol which could possibly work, and a slightly fuzzy, problematic mark-up language, to solve a real-world problem : how to share documents over the internet. It disregarded mainstream academic Hypertext theory (how do you avoid broken links? answer : we don't) and the complexities of client-server architectures of the time. Consequently, it spread like wild-fire, adding many incremental improvements. It's survived (and thrived) for nearly 20 years with incompatible, buggy browsers and multiple specifications for HTML. (There are now three "official", incompatible versions of HTML from the W3C alone.)

The Semantic Web isn't an extension of this at all. It's basically a naive assumption about how meaning works ("hey! if we all use the same code-numbers for things then we'll know when we're talking about the same stuff") and a crowd of enthusiasts engaged in the Sisyphan task of trying to make anything useful from this assumption; while, all the while, casting covetous glances at the meta-data which is being generated by people who aren't burdened with the responsibility of inventing common code-numbers and ontologies.

Final point on what I meant by "tools trump formats / processes" because both Danny and Scribe have picked up on it. I'm not saying you can do without common formats. Of course a format is absolutely essential. What I'm saying is that the "goodness" of the tools is more important than the "goodness" of the format for the adoption and survival of the combined pair. Because it's the tools which are the interface to the outside world : the users.

Genesis III

I'm arguing with Danny Ayers again.

My latest take on tools vs. formats.

Oh well, I'm getting repetitive, but still, as everyone's still OPML-bashing. :-)

Getting data out of OPML and RSS 2.0 is SynWeb rather than SemWeb, because the decision as to what the information "means" is decided by the scrapers (following usage conventions) rather than by explicit URIs added by the data's creators.

Tools trump formats and processes. The funny thing is not simply that this is *true*, but that the entire history of computer science can be interpretted as one long war between pragmatic tool builders and idealistic format / process builders. And the tools win every time. And the idealists *still* haven't noticed.

A format without a tool is like a technology without a business model. It has no interface to the wider, user, consumer community. It is not ecologically "fit". It can't feed itself on user attention or money but must be kept on life-support by optimists.

The SemWeb people are great programmers. They spend all their time writing code. How come they never actually produce any "tools"? Because all the tools they produce are explained like this : "this is a great tool because it uses a better format / process". That's not a "tool" or an "application". Because tools / applications have an inner-world of their technology, and an outer-world of their usage. And they have a story that mediates between the two. That explains *why* this technology is necessary for that usage.

SebWeb programs have an inner-technology *and* an outer usage. But they have no story that joins the two together. A story that says "this technology is *also* for that usage, but better (by some internal criteria)" isn't the same thing. This is why they must be parasitic on the story provided by real tools like the OPML Editor and various RSS generators, consumers.

Global Guerrillas: JOURNAL: Thriving in Nigeria

This criminal "economy," which I call the bazaar, is an economic platform that connects transnational crime with local global guerrillas.

Global Guerrillas: JOURNAL: Thriving in Nigeria

Writely = Microsoft's Pearl Harbor?

ZDNet : Writely = Microsoft's Pearl Harbor?

Squash : Poor Web 2.0 fools

Squash : Poor Web 2.0 fools

Google Drive: What we know so far

TechCrunch on Google Drive: What we know so far

Iranian oil bourse story

Here's another kind of platform war.

There's a story going around the net that Iran is starting an oil bourse, where people can trade oil in Euros instead of dollars.

Read here for the geopolitical effects, including some of the theories of how this influences the current US build up of rhetoric against Iran; and here for some fairly good criticism.

I'm not sure which of these positions is more plausible, but what I am convinced by is that the petrodollar ecosystem is as much a platform as the Windows or iPod ecosystems are. And that, there could be a platform war fought between it and a petroeuro platform, and if so, generic platform war strategies would apply.

Will Apple Adopt Windows?

Dvorak has an intriguing question : Might Apple Adopt Windows?

Hmmm. On first glance it sounds crazy. But he makes a couple of good points : that business sense trumps sentimentality (even at Apple though?), that Apple see themselves as a hardware company, that with the switch to Intel architecture Apple are losing a lot of the control they used to have anyway.

Apple basically provide nice hardware and a nice presentation layer. By putting their presentation layer on top of a Windows OS infrastructure, they'd sell a lot of nice, expensive hardware into corporate settings which need to run standard Windows software.

A couple of thoughts. Firstly, Apple already admitted that they weren't in the OS infrastructure game when they switched to a Unix core.

Presumably if Apple did go this route, they'd be building on some version of post-Longhorn windows which would presumably have a fairly modular architecture?

What would then happen to Apple's Unix core? What about Darwin? Or let's put this another way. How much of MacOs's develoment is actually being done in the BSD, Darwin etc. communities? What's the value for Apple in switching from an free software core to a proprietory one built by MS? What's the value to Apple if their fanatical community decide to create a free MacOS clone based on Darwin?

As commenters point out, there are some very important, Mac-only niche applications (in the creative industries etc.) Unless Apple can move them over to a Windows core, early, then this is Apple effectively ditching its existing userbase in favour of a different one.

Isn't Jobs now going to be running Disney? How does a "non-creative" Apple fit with that?

Cringely thought that the Apple / Intel deal was about Intel taking control of the PC market. Apple getting into bed with Microsoft doesn't help there at all.

Dvorak is right, that what Apple wants is Windows software able to run transparently on the Apple platform. Dvorak thinks that porting the Mac higher level presentation layers to a future Windows is more likely to get them there than Windows emulation tech.

After writing this, I suspect that's off the mark.

Les Orchard gets it

I think a lot more effort needs to be given toward making useful, personally rewarding tools - and less effort given toward expressing awe toward the potentials given by formats and models. You can have both, but you've got to pick one to start with.

And, the reason you need to make tools first that use formats second is attention. (That's been a buzzword lately, hasn't it?) You need attention if you want adoption and help. And, you can get attention - and subsequent help - by scratching someone's itch.

l.m.orchard's 0xDECAFBAD OPML blog: Monday, February 13, 2006

Read/WriteWeb: Rating the Meme Trackers

Read/WriteWeb: Rating the Meme Trackers - Memeorandum still tops, but Topix and TailRank up there too

These are, I guess, what Umair Haque calls "recombinators"?

Sociable games at Suttree, Elixir for Immortal Baboon

Interesting comparison of a social gaming site with Ning.

Sociable games at Suttree, Elixir for Immortal Baboon

TechCrunch : Ning’s New Stuff

TechCrunch : Ning’s New Stuff

Anne 2.0: Ning: Great for Mediocre Programmers

Anne 2.0: Ning: Great for Mediocre Programmers

Steve Gillmor on Office Dead

Steve Gillmor on Office Live and open attention

Search Engines as Leeches on the Web

Fascinating AlertBox on Search Engines as Leeches on the Web

How the auction for adwords transfers profit from business websites to Google.

Winer's game-changers

Winer's game-changers for 2006

Orchard on OPML

Les Orchard is digging the OPML platform.

Hmm. - Tribe's New Look (Jan 2006) - tribe.net

Tribe support me as an individual user, but not me as someone building value on the Tribe platform.

My thoughts on Tribe, in a discussion on
Tribe's New Look

Cringely : Commercial Runs Through It

Robert Cringely predicts Google's big plan is targetted advertising on TV.

Tecknik.net: FOAF Autocreation

Tecknik.net: FOAF Autocreation from OPML blogrolls.

Attention Wars

Umair :

As attention scarcity tunes decision-makers in to attention economics and strategy, an emerging theme in 2006 will be Attention Wars erupting across industries,

Bubblegeneration Strategy Lab