At Mix07, is Microsoft’s bottom-trolling for developers with weak knees?

April 30, 2007 at 5:54 pm · Filed under Enterprise 2.0, Enterprise Software, Mashups, Microsoft, SOA, Web 2.0

From the early reports coming out of the Mix07 conference, Microsoft is making revamped offers to Web 2.0 developers that they are not supposed to be able to refuse. It worked in the client/server world, where getting your applications into a mainstream channel made the Microsoft ecosystem hard to resist. The price was you — and your customers — had to use Microsoft everywhere.

Now, in the Web 2.0 iteration of the same model, we’re seeing Microsoft come to table with a rich smorgasbord of enticing offerings: tools, integration, mash-up-able services, a big crowd of end users, a way to easily add Web ads into your mix, and even a cheap way to get into full production — up to 1 million unique users per month without having to pay Microsoft. Beyond that, Microsoft will charge 25 cents per user per year.

So wait. Microsoft wants to attract the entrepreneurs, ISVs and developers who will create the Internet’s new largest-volume applications and services, and so is offering them a quick, cheap on-ramp while later taking a modest toll based on volume. At the same time Microsoft gets to maintain its killer profits position due to the ongoing revenues from other tools, licenses for clients and platforms, and — the real icing on the cake, an ever larger piece of the online ads business — while retaining some ability to lock the end-users into using Microsoft software and online services/marketplaces everywhere forever.

So let me get this straight. The developer players with the best applications should partner with Microsoft early and often so that Microsoft can continue to have its cake and eat it … but the developers get automation, low-cost and a ready Internet consumer market. Developer/entrepreneurs will be sizing up this deal, but they should look at the big picture, not just the early attractions.

The deal will not be so sweet for the best of the mashup and Web 2.0 development crowd because they only thing Microsoft can bring to them that they can’t already get is the large, ready-made audience. They can already get cheap, easy tools; cheap hosting; mashup APIs that work well and mostly free, and integration if they are decent developers thanks to open source and open standards. But, as we know, getting a large web audience quickly — if you’re good, early and lucky — has never been easier … or cheaper. Just ask Digg, YouTube, and Twitter. But it is still hard and risky.

Here is Microsoft’s secret sauce … it’s big MSN and browser audience that it can help you to. But is it any bigger or better than … Yahoo!. Google, Salesforce.com (B2B), Amazon (retail)? How about Time Warner? Or Viacom? Perhaps News Corp.? Wouldn’t any of these have a nice audience for your applications and services too? Microsoft is by no means the last word on Web ecologies. (But it has tried.)

Microsoft’s value to the Web 2.0 development milieu is attractive, but it is not unique — even when packaged as it is becoming clear it will be. So the question is who will go for it?

If the best and brightest of the Web 2.0 crowd probably won’t line up to drink the Microsoft cool-aide and buy-in to the revamped volume market quid pro quos, then who will? Enterprises that are dabbling in SOA? But they won’t be building up to 1 million unique users per month, I dare say.

Well, perhaps the developers and ISVs that need all the help they can get from Microsoft  (and/or don’t have the stomach for entering into a web-based business without the help of a large, global, multi-faceted powerhouse provider like Microsoft to provide the role of loan shark) will. We give you the goods you need now, and we take out our cut forever, is what Microsoft Live seems to be saying. Perhaps that will attract a crowd, but won’t they be bottom-feeders — not the top dogs?

Loan shark may be a good business, except for the clientele. I’d rather be Bank of America.

Will those bottom feeders that like the vig and think this is all a good deal quickly bulk up to 1 million unique users per month each? Seems less a bet than a hedge.
So is Microsoft really expecting this all to work at this late Web 2.0 date? Or are these Mix07 moves not so much to attract the best and brightest of the Web 2.0 innovation and creativity field, but rather a rather tepid response to the following:

1) Adobe Flex goes open source.
2) Google adds PowerPoint-like services to stable of Office-like business productivity services and communications offerings.

3) Amazon S3/EC2 now holds 5 billion objects.

4) BungeeLabs offers up Connect, a software development and deployment as a service model.

5) Google buys DoubleClick.

6) Yahoo! buys Right Media.

7) All of the above.

Yep, it’s 7. That’s the real “mix07″ that has me jazzed about Web 2.0.

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Where to provide transparency and where to provide privacy?

April 30, 2007 at 4:13 pm · Filed under Enterprise 2.0

Nick Jacobs provided an interesting blog post recently on Wikis, Blogs and Transparency as it relates to healthcare. Nick argues that hospitals should disclose more information such as deaths through medical errors and adds, “Openness causes accountability.” He adds “So, as we move more completely into a new world order of more open communication, we will continue to see the morphing of our previous rules, perceptions, and realities.” This is certainly true.

Nick notes as an example, without endorsing the idea, that a UK study suggested that doctors should sometimes use Google to find diagnosis for unusual cases. Do doctors know that this action is discoverable? Should Google reveal the search strings of a doctor if there is a malpractice suit as it has done in other cases? Another doctor, David Williams, compares Googling a diagnosis to stupid pet tricks in his blog. I do not pretend to be an expert here but I hope my doctor has better tools than Google.

More to the broader enterprise issues, Alfred Fortin, another physician blogger, links to a more comprehensive treatment of the healthcare transparency issue in a comment to Nick’s post. He lists some of the things that the public might want to be transparent (with links for a few examples) such as

· “Physician and hospital costs

· Physician and hospital charges

· Physician and hospital compliance with best medical practices

· Physician and hospital compliance with evidence-based medicine

· Physician and hospital health outcomes

· Physician and hospital medical errors

· Physician and hospital disciplinary actions and lawsuits

· Physician and hospital accreditation, board certifications

· Health plan benefit design and benefit decision making

· Health plan subscribers health demographics, indices

· Health Plan rate-making process, cost of benefits

· Quality of care stats for minorities, gays, immigrants and others

· Everyone’s lobbying activities, dining expenses, airline seat preference

· Health Care CEO’s, and high-priced medical specialists’ outrageous salaries and fees”

Nick closes his post with the comment, “Let’s force transparency in health care, and insurance, and the building industry and the investment industry and law. Well, you probably see where I’m coming from on this one.” This caused me to reflect on what should be transparent and what should be private? Where do we draw the line in the above list? What do we add to it? This transparency takes many forms. There are also now a growing number of pubic sites where patients can rate their doctors, parents can rate their kids teachers, clients can rate their lawyers, and I am sure this will spread to other industries, if it has not already.

We have been promoting transparency within the enterprise as a good thing on this blog and I remain part of this chorus. However, the ease of transparency raises important policy issues. Many discussions have already been started here but the posts of Nick and Alfred were clear reminders of the need. Certainly when it comes to healthcare the records of individuals must remain private. This is not limited to healthcare. The individual records within any industry should remain private or are there instances when they should be public? We could come up with an equivalent to Alfred’s list for any industry including, but not limited to, the other industries that Nick names in his conclusion. Before we get too far into unleashing transparency within the enterprise, there needs to be some more clear thinking about policy.

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Now for something completely different. Or is it?

April 30, 2007 at 2:40 pm · Filed under Enterprise 2.0

In some ways, the simplicity of this helps us understand why we want to open up knowledge, increase human connections, and create more ways for people to exchange more — in the enterprise, on the block, around the world.

In this generation, in a world where so much has become possible, will we not all be measured by what we have contributed to change?

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Enterprise two point twitter?

April 30, 2007 at 2:29 pm · Filed under Enterprise 2.0

My friend Luis Suarez, an IBM knowledge management 2.0 guru, has written a nice post about the ways Twitter would be useful to enterprise workers, especially those who are very mobile — obviously, that’s a growing number.

It’s a great post, and I hope you’ll click over for a read — so I won’t summarize it here. What I will say is that it indicates a trend I’m watching: an amazing percentage of new services on the Web, that debut for… well, lets say just for whoever might be interested in something new (usually – tho not always – techies and geeks), really do refactor well for enterprise use. Sometimes, as in the case of Twitter, it’s obvious — especially once someone like Luis does the work of pointing the applications out to you! Other times, it is a matter of experimenting with the functionality of an online service and trying to think through how it would translate to your business context.

On the subject of software to experiment with, I’ve been looking at Library Thing, a service that lets you catalog your books, tag them, and create social networks around the books in your library. It’s neat.

It seems obvious to me that Library Thing would be useful in an enterprise context. We all have favorite books, ones that have influenced us or that we have been able to apply in our business life. Nor need it be limited to books — periodicals, individual articles, Wikipedia entries, blogs and posts, each of these represents a social nexus, a way to find, interact with, and grow through people who can add to what we know and can do. In that sense, Library Thing, which was certainly not conceived for business use, seems a natural for business users to experiment with.

One thing we may be learning is that “collaboration” is not the only, maybe not even the main, software-supported social application. I.e., neither wikis nor blogs even begin to exhaust the field of enterprise social software. We may be about to figure out that they really aren’t even central to the field. Perhaps it’s the kind of connections that have potential for serendipity that are the greatest untapped resource within the social potential of the enterprise.

Software and serendipity — now there’s a subject for further investigation. Please feel free to use the comment thread to that end. I’ll be very interested to follow and participate in the discussion.

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Is There Anything SaaSy About SOA, or Are They Two Different Animals?

April 29, 2007 at 11:09 am · Filed under Enterprise 2.0, SOA, Web 2.0

What’s the link between Software as a Service (SaaS) and Service-Oriented Architecture (SOA)? After all, they both seem to be all about “service,” right?

I’ve been engaged in an interesting debate in the blogosphere around the whole SaaS-SOA relationship, and I thought I’d surface it here.

In my initial post over at ZDNet on this topic, “Is SOA Software as a Service, Delivered Internally?“, I posited that SOA is, for all intents and purposes, a form of SaaS delivered inside the corporate walls. For starters, it’s a great elevator speech to help line-of-business managers grasp the SOA concept, but there’s much more value beyond that.Rather than building, maintaining, or delivering their own services, business units subscribe to services from a publisher somewhere else in the enterprise (SOA), or outside the enterprise (SaaS built to SOA specs). Someone else worries about upgrades, maintenance and testing; you consume the service, and pay on some pay-as-you use arrangement. That’s SOA; that’s also Software as a Service.

Ian Thomas picked up on this post, and agreed that SaaS pushes the right buttons in terms of reuse, economies of scale, standardization and cost transparency — providing a frame of reference for SOA.However, for the most part, Ian disagrees with the idea that SOA is actually SaaS embedded within the enterprise, and, therefore, he says, the answer to the question “Is SOA SaaS, Delivered Internally?” is “no.” SOA is weighted down by heavy internal enterprise infrastructures, while SaaS offers far nimbler and cost-effective third-party service options, he says.

Dale Churchward also joined in on the discussion, observing that while SOA is not likely capability of functioning as an internal SaaS, SOA can, in many respects, pave the way for SaaS. “Since many applications now support XML based messages, for example, integration becomes a much easier task. SOA also focuses on business processes. This encourages businesses to break off individual capabilities that need to evolve rapidly to support changing business drivers. This is where SaaS comes in.”

As the SOA-SaaS interplay gains critical mass, Ian predicts that the outside services — which have greater economies of scale and value propositions — will overtake internally delivered services. “As organizations increasingly grasp the concepts of service provision – driven by SOA, ITIL and SaaS – they will need to grapple with the idea that as a service provider they will need to deliver services quickly, cheaply and reliably with inclusive service management, reporting, billing etc. in order to be competitive. As a result, organizations will unlikely be able to sustain expensive, bespoke and plodding enterprise infrastructures and will start to look at external utility computing platforms.”

Looking further into the future, Ian predicts that ultimately, enterprises will be subscribing to “Business as a Service” (BaaS) propositions, in which they “construct an overall value chain rather than just buy software.” I agree, and have posted some thoughts on the emerging “Loosely Coupled Enterprise” that SOA-SaaS is making possible.I responded to Ian’s thoughts with a follow-up that I believe most organizations will end up being both consumers and publishers of services, thereby blurring the line between SOA and SaaS.

Ian responded with a clarification that he believes “all organizations are going to be providers of some services, but my contention is that they will become forced to specialize in order to survive.” In addition, he adds that it will be “increasingly difficult to sustain the ability to implement these with internal IT capabilities.” Effective SaaS that the market will support must be built on “highly scalable platforms that support specific architectures along with the other capabilities needed to monetize service provision (e.g. billing, service management, reporting etc).”

Ian’s point: Internal infrastructures, no matter how SOA-ized they are, may not have the agility to compete with market-driven SaaS offerings. Food for thought.

Members of the Fastforward E2.0 community: Do you see organizations developing their own internal SaaS sites using SOA (and potentially offering them to outside consumers), or is SaaS inherently a market for third-party providers?

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