A recent report from Forrester Research predicts the Enterprise 2.0 market is about to see impending “price drops” on tools ranging from blogs to wikis to social networks. Forrester analysts cite three specific reasons for the price drops:

“Commoditization, bundling, and subsumption. Increased competition and slowing innovation means that there is less differentiation between blogging solutions. Further, many vendors, from Microsoft to Six Apart, now offer a complete, enterprise-oriented suites that bundle a mature set of essential tools, which drives down prices for individual tools and specialized solutions.”

The increasing ubiquity of SharePoint — which supports many Enterprise 2.0 features — also may help to drive down prices from many other vendors, Forrester predicts.

The only area that may see price increases is software for handling mashups, Forrester predicts. “IT departments will prioritize mashup technology as part of portal, business intelligence, and business process management software investments as well as a major component of SOA implementations.”

Dave and I talked about the rise of WOA, and we both agreed that WOA and SOA have more in common than they are different. Both seek to address business problems by evoking shared, standardized services from across the network.

As Dave put it: “I view them as one in the same… I never saw service oriented architecture being limited at the firewall.”  We can “abstract services that somebody else owns and host, which is even better, because you’re not paying a lot of money for those things, able to bind solutions within yoiur enterprise, and create solutions around the whole notion of SOA, and extend it out to the world via Web APIs.”

However, a lot of the action now seems to be taking place within WOA frameworks, Dave adds. “SOA is boring, takes forever …no one ever seems to move the ball too far forward in the world of SOA…. A lot of the service orchestration and successes in leveraging services.. in binding them to solutions seems to be occurring on the Web..  around the sopcial networking stuff, the platform as a service areas… ”

But still, WOA is service oriented architecture applied on a global scale: “If you look at the fundamental approaches and really what they’re trying to accomplish, they’re really both innate SOA and WOA,” Dave said.

Everyone, even the most technophobic, seems to get what WOA means and how it works. SOA… well, even the best and brightest individuals in the industry are still trying to get their heads around what it means and doesn’t mean.

What’s interesting is that the worlds of WOA and SOA keep drawing closer and closer together, leading one to wonder if it won’t be long before they’re one in the same. As one reader pointed out, we’re using more and more WOA tools, techniques, and platforms to get to where we wanted with SOA. But is WOA capable of addressing enterprise requirements in the way SOA can? Will SOA subsume WOA, or visa-versa?

While some say WOA will become SOA, some say SOA will turn into WOA. According to ITWorld Canada, Ron Huxter, CTO of the provincial government of Ontario, said that services will come from the cloud, and that’s what SOA will be all about as well. “The issues that we’re coming into now are sourcing the actual services — in two to three years, SOA will fade into yet another sales banner like everything else has and it will transform into software-as-a-service (SaaS).”

Others even say WOA will simply push aside SOA. Another reader says the WOA phenomenon — which makes everyone masters of their own domains — is pushing the shared-service approach to SOA aside. In a recent post, he observes that the mantra for today’s businesses seem to be “Think globally, execute globally and collaborate globally” via crowd sourcing and open source techniques.

“The collaborate aspect changes the IT organization structure yet again. Instead of having a business head for ’shared services’ whose aim in life was to own everything common used in the enterprise, the lines of businesses now have the option to use crowd sourcing techniques and leverage SaaS type solutions to achieve their goals….  As a result the SOA concept of coming up with a master API that will be used by everyone is failing.”

That’s a subject or growing debate. Steve Bjorg, in his follow up posts, says WOA can deliver all the enterprise benefits of SOA, and then some:

WOA may sound too good to be true at first. Those who defend SOA as the ‘enterprise solution’ claim it is the more mature technology… unfortunately, these people are wrong. The rise in popularity of WOA is undoing the noise and bloat that SOA introduced. The truth is WOA existed first! It is what made the Web scale to billions of pageviews across a fully decentralized network of heterogenous machines, known was the Internet. A few years later, SOA was introduced as a way to fix something that was never broken. …the fix required lots of new tools and technologies, including compilers, registries, libraries, document standards, and so forth. Not coincidentally, the companies who designed and promoted SOA were those who would benefit the most from it… the tool vendors. Heck, if a solution requires an XML appliance to scale, then it’s not part of the solution, it’s part of the problem!”

There’s truly the anti-SOA view of WOA. But other observers say that maybe WOA has been part of SOA all along.  It may even be one form of any implementation that follows SOA principals. And remember, SOA is not about any particular technlogy or even approach to technology. Another reader and avid commentator, Reamon, picked up on Gartner analyst Nick Gall’s observation that WOA is actually a “substyle” of SOA. It takes a service-oriented architecture to get to WOA. Reamon boiled down WOA to this simple formula:

WOA = SOA + WWW + REST

SOA, which is an architectural style, is not tied to any particular standards or formats “The complaints about SOA seem to be driven by fundamental misunderstandings or faulty assumptions,” says Reamon. “SOA is not a technology. It is an architectural style… SOA is not SOAP… SOA is not WS-*… SOA does not require an ESB, registry, and XML applicance, or any other tool….  SOA is not SOAP.”

Steve Bjorg elaborated on his quotes in the original article and also predicts that SOA will very much be a legacy architecture in the near future:”I predict that SOA will morph into WOA in a few years. Some remnants of the old SOA will remain and a few unlucky chumps will be tasked to maintain it somehow. A situation not unlike that of the lost souls that keep COBOL code running to this day.”

Cartoon by Oliver Widder, Geek & Poke)

Are we there yet? Can Kathy in finance now build a front-end analytical application that will call up data from several different departments to help her prepare a new quarterly budget report? Or does she still need to go to IT to make sure it’s “done right”?  Industry watchers have been pondering the efficacy and possibilities of user-built applications over the last few years, and generally have concluded that most business users aren’t quite ready and willing to spend a lot of time in application development. Plus, enterprises need to keep tabs on who’s doing what with data and applications.

But, lately, Enterprise 2.0 tools and platforms — especially mashups — have been clearly exhibiting the levels of accessibility and simplicity that may make user-built apps more of a reality. There’s certainly a great deal of collaborative interfaces and Websites being built by non-techy folks — are they ready to take on more sophticated apps?

Ovum analyst Tony Baer recently took a look at the mashup phenomenon that is gaining steam across the Enterprise 2.0 landscape, and sees some progress, but agrees that we’re not quite there yet in terms of end-users building more sophisticated apps: As he puts it:

“…the very notion of “writing programs” is not exactly the kind of thing that you would expect your grandmother to do, not to mention business stakeholders who do not fall under the category of ‘power users.’ To date, that goal has only been realized with the common office productivity tools that are equipped on just about every desktop which provide bare bones features for extending a spreadsheet or word processed document with a macro, and to varying extents, hobbyist programs like kinder simpler photo editors that are thrown in gratis with Windows or Mac platforms. But for the most part these are automation, not programming tools.”

Tony warns that particularly at the enterprise level, IT still needs to stay involved in end-user projects, pointing out that “no matter how visual mashup tools are, you still need developers or power users at some point of the lifecycle, whether it be to vet objects or sources than can be safely mashed up without violating some corporate policy, or to deal with some complexities of JavaScript under the hood.”

However, there is progress, as exhibited by the Mozilla Foundation’s “Ubiquity” project. Ubiquity is supposed to bring mashup app development to users of all stripes, in what Tony describes as an “attempt to transform the browser into a natural language mashup tool accessible to non-programmers.”

Tony illustrates the types of mashups a Ubiquity-enable browser would enable:

“Ubiquity, is supposed to enable anybody – not just JavaScript developers – to casually mash things up when you perform tasks like send emails. Let’s say you want to throw a party and invite a bunch of friends to a restaurant. Instead of signing up with a site like Evite, simply name the restaurant, hit an option key, type in ‘Map,’ and voila, a Google Map with the location of the restaurant populates your email. Want some reviews or a display of the menu. Press the option key again and enter a command like ‘Yelp’ and type in natural language that you want some reviews or display a menu. Of course, you can do similar things today by embedding links, but this makes the process a lot more direct.”

Tony adds that the concept could also find its way into other leading portal sites such as Facebook and Yahoo News “to embellish messaging, Wikis, micro-blogging, or other uses limited only by the imagination.” However, he adds, since corporate data and software are involved, enterprises will still need to maintain boundaries over such activities, so IT staffers may still need to play a supporting role for the foreseeable future.

David Mitchell Smith, VP & Gartner Fellow, will kick off the event with a discussion of how innovations in the consumer Web 2.0 space are translating into enterprise applications. He will also discuss what lies beyond Web 2.0 — and it isn’t Web 3.0.

Smith’s presentation will be followed by a panel discussion on how the Web 2.0 and SOA fit together. Dan Woods (Evolved Media), Nathaniel Palmer (Workflow Management Coalition), and Puneet Gupta (Connectbeam) will debate about whether end users actually be able to create their own mashup applications, and how IT should control and manage this new breed of applications.

Rob Koplowitz, analyst with Forrester Research, will then talk about chaos — and how to leverage Web 2.0 technology entering the enterprise and still plan for maintaining process, system, and data integrity against an increasingly chaotic backdrop.

Dion said that many business end users — still accustomed to forwarding their requirements over to IT when they need an application built — may not be ready to build their own front end interfaces. “The biggest challenge of all: The habits and expectations of the larger part of a generation of workers who don’t yet realize mashups are poised to change many things about the software landscape on the Web and in the workplace,” he writes.

Dion also observed that “the tools that empower users to weave together existing Web parts and open APIs into the exact solutions they need are just now becoming easy enough and robust enough to readily enable these scenarios.”

This is in line with research I have been involved with (Evans Data), which, in a recent survey of 380 enterprises, found that the greatest obstacle to user application creation, cited by 22% of respondents from a list, is the lack of availability of easy-to-use assembly tools.

However, help seems to be on the way, in the form of an emerging industry, including companies such as JackBe, DreamFace, Intel, IBM Lotus, Kapow, and Serena. Dion cites the latest market overview from Forrester, which estimates that this space is expected to grow into a $700 million a year industry sector by 2013, or about 1% of the entire software industry.

Now, granted, 1% is a very small chunk, but it will be a very potent chunk — one that’s grabbing the attention of more vendors. “One thing is now clear in this burgeoning new industry; that there is genuine interest in being a leading provider of enterprise mashup tools as organizations begin getting serious about applying them to make the development of Web-based business solutions faster, more commonplace, and less costly,” Dion says.

Dion also observes that “many of the issues that have been holding mashups back are beginning to be resolved.” Such issues included lack of a common assembly model, an immature services landscape, uncertainty about management support, security concerns, and data quality concerns. As more vendors emerge or wrap their offerings around mashup capabilities, mashups will become a more ubiquitous part of enterprise computing.

In an important sense, it was useful to his theories that 1) they helped respond to the massive spread of the Industrial Era’s requirements for growth in the first half of the 20th century, and 2) World Wars I and II came along in the late 1910’s and in the late 1930’s to provide a massive need for manufacturing.

30+ years elapsed from the publication of Principles of Scientific Management in 1911 to the codification of those principles into work design methodologies in the 1940’s and early 1950’s.  He and his theories get a bad rap today, but it seems clear that they were highly useful to the process of creating wealth by improving manufacturing processes and capabilities.

It seems banal to say that those theories are less effective today, but I am not sure that’s the case.  There have been no comprehensive theories and principles come along (yet) to replace them, notwithstanding a plethora of management books published since the mid-1980’s promising enhance organizational effectiveness … more often than not by combining Taylorist principles with developmental workarounds and adaptations.

The recent emergence of the field called Enterprise 2.0, and clarion calls for management innovation that have followed (see Gary Hamel, Andrew McAfee, Tom Davenport, Don Tapscott, Dave Snowden and many, many others) promises much potential disruption.  It also portends significant struggle as the forces of buttoned-and-battened-down efficiency derived from a manufacturing-focused era vie with the forces arising from networked flows of information in an era where economic value is derived from the construction and application of knowledge to product and service design and delivery (manufacturing happens in China now).

Via Wikipedia:

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Taylor published his Principles of Scientific Management in 1911, which elucidated four core principles:

1. Replace rule-of-thumb work methods with methods based on a scientific study of the tasks.

2. Scientifically select, train, and develop each employee rather than passively leaving them to train themselves.

3. Provide "Detailed instruction and supervision of each worker in the performance of that worker’s discrete task".

4. Divide work nearly equally between managers and workers, so that the managers apply scientific management principles to planning the work and the workers actually perform the tasks

Management theory

Taylor thought that by analysing work, the "One Best Way" to do it would be found. He is most remembered for developing the time and motion study. He would break a job into its component parts and measure each to the hundredth of a minute.

[ Snip ... ]

He was generally unsuccessful in getting his concepts applied and was dismissed from Bethlehem Steel. It was largely through the efforts of his disciples (most notably H.L. Gantt) that industry came to implement his ideas.

Managers and workers

Taylor had very precise ideas about how to introduce his system:

"It is only through enforced standardization of methods, enforced adoption of the best implements and working conditions, and enforced cooperation that this faster work can be assured. And the duty of enforcing the adoption of standards and enforcing this cooperation rests with management alone." (Taylor, Principles of Scientific Management, cited by Montgomery 1989:229, italics with Taylor)

Workers were supposed to be incapable of understanding what they were doing. According to Taylor this was true even for rather simple tasks.

"’I can say, without the slightest hesitation,’ Taylor told a congressional committee, ‘that the science of handling pig-iron is so great that the man who is … physically able to handle pig-iron and is sufficiently phlegmatic and stupid to choose this for his occupation is rarely able to comprehend

[The scope of] Taylor’s Influence - United States

• Carl Barth helped Taylor to develop speed-and-feed-calculating slide rules to a previously unknown level of usefulness. Similar aids are still used in machine shops today. Barth became an early consultant on scientific management and later taught at Harvard.
• H. L. Gantt developed the Gantt chart, a visual aid for scheduling tasks and displaying the flow of work.
• Harrington Emerson introduced scientific management to the railroad industry, and proposed the dichotomy of staff versus line employees, with the former advising the latter.
• Morris Cooke adapted scientific management to educational and municipal organizations.
• Hugo Münsterberg created industrial psychology.
• Lillian Gilbreth introduced psychology to management studies.
• Frank Gilbreth (husband of Lillian) discovered scientific management while working in the construction industry, eventually developing motion studies independently of Taylor. These logically complemented Taylor’s time studies, as time and motion are two sides of the efficiency improvement coin. The two fields eventually became time and motion study.
• Harvard University, one of the first American universities to offer a graduate degree in business management in 1908, based its first-year curriculum on Taylor’s scientific management.
• Harlow S. Person, as dean of Dartmouth’s Amos Tuck School of Administration and Finance, promoted the teaching of scientific management.
• James O. McKinsey, professor of accounting at the University of Chicago and founder of the consulting firm bearing his name, advocated budgets as a means of assuring accountability and of measuring performance.

I’ve long appreciated the aphorism that is the title of this post, and I think of it regularly when surfing and reading the latest insight from the many pundits and critics of the Web.  And today I am thinking about "the future of work".

It’s my assertion that the changes social computing will bring to knowledge work and knowledge-based workplaces may be even greater than the generally immature experiments that have taken hold today as early adopters play with tools that allow them to connect, create, converse, convulse, coopt, and carry on about all manner of things … including work issues, challenges and opportunities.

David Weinberger is a well-known expert on knowledge management and the hyperlinked web / organization.  He has from time to time written about how the digital infrastructure and the dynamics it fosters "cuts the slack out of interactions" (The Need For Leeway, October 2002) .  We need "slack" to reflect, to think, to imagine, to support the filling in and filling up of the connections we have made between people, information, task and problems.  And we need analysis and measurement, specialized skills, budgets, accountability and best practices to optimize work and eliminate what is clearly unnecessary, not useful and / or wasteful.

But efficiency is not and will not be the hallmark of human interaction, and human sociology in the modern workplace cannot forever take its architectural design principles for Taylorism.  As we watch Enterprise 2.0 emerge, I watch what seem to be regular waves of dots (widgets, applications, platforms, services and people in equal measure) joining together, using the Web, to meld efficiency and slack … the "both / and" so often cited as characteristic of this new environment.  A flow of questions, responses and pertinent information soldered together to provide a design, or a service, is not the same as carrying out efficient repeatable supervisable step-by-step tasks the result of which are combined with other sets of efficient repeatable supervisable step-by-step tasks to produce repeatable products or services (You can have any Model T you want, as long as it is black).

There’s an enormous amount of resistance, both intellectual and cultural, to acknowledging that maybe work cannot be designed and structured based on the principles that have been in place for more than three-quarters of a century now.  A lot of that has to do with what "management" still means to us (especially the incumbents of managerial roles).  It’s hard to give up power and control, especially when you are charged with making stuff happen and the budgets and performance management and compensation bonus schemes reinforce that charge. So, while it appears that the Internet, and thus the difficult-if-not-impossible-to-control flows of information, are here to stay, it also seems that about every 6 months or so there’s another wave of "this newfangled hyperlink stuff, personal publishing, connecting social-this-and-that is now officially over and it hasn’t yet changed the world".

Generally, I agree but with reservations.  Those reservations are that "we tend to overestimate the impacts in the short term because we overlook all the details of how things are done and the tenacious stickiness of peoples’ habits, and tend to underestimate the impacts in the longer term because we overlook or ignore the scope and depth of accumulated change" (not verbatim).

Today I found this snippet from Clay Shirky’s now-well-known Web 2.0 Expo keynote.

In my opinion he puts none too fine a point on the fact that the Internet seems to be with us to stay, and that it’s impacts will continue to accumulate.  Tomorrow’s workers won’t understand meetings, collaboration, supervision or accountability in the same way we do … all because of gin and that damned mouse.

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Gin, Television, and Social Surplus

… a British historian arguing that the critical technology, for the early phase of the industrial revolution, was gin.

The transformation from rural to urban life was so sudden, and so wrenching, that the only thing society could do to manage was to drink itself into a stupor for a generation. The stories from that era are amazing– there were gin pushcarts working their way through the streets of London.

And it wasn’t until society woke up from that collective bender that we actually started to get the institutional structures that we associate with the industrial revolution today. Things like public libraries and museums, increasingly broad education for children, elected leaders–a lot of things we like–didn’t happen until having all of those people together stopped seeming like a crisis and started seeming like an asset.

It wasn’t until people started thinking of this as a vast civic surplus, one they could design for rather than just dissipate, that we started to get what we think of now as an industrial society.

If I had to pick the critical technology for the 20th century, the bit of social lubricant without which the wheels would’ve come off the whole enterprise, I’d say it was the sitcom.

[ Snip ... ] 

I was having dinner with a group of friends about a month ago, and one of them was talking about sitting with his four-year-old daughter watching a DVD. And in the middle of the movie, apropos nothing, she jumps up off the couch and runs around behind the screen. That seems like a cute moment.

Maybe she’s going back there to see if Dora is really back there or whatever. But that wasn’t what she was doing. She started rooting around in the cables. And her dad said, “What you doing?”

And she stuck her head out from behind the screen and said, “Looking for the mouse.”

Here’s something four-year-olds know: A screen that ships without a mouse ships broken. Here’s something four-year-olds know: Media that’s targeted at you but doesn’t include you may not be worth sitting still for.

Those are things that make me believe that this is a one-way change.

Because four year olds, the people who are soaking most deeply in the current environment, who won’t have to go through the trauma that I have to go through of trying to unlearn a childhood spent watching Gilligan’s Island, they just assume that media includes consuming, producing and sharing.

[ Snip ... }

I think that’s going to be a big deal. Don’t you?

Well, the TV producer did not think this was going to be a big deal; she was not digging this line of thought. And her final question to me was essentially, "Isn’t this all just a fad?" You know, sort of the flagpole-sitting of the early early 21st century? It’s fun to go out and produce and share a little bit, but then people are going to eventually realize, "This isn’t as good as doing what I was doing before," and settle down.

And I made a spirited argument that no, this wasn’t the case, that this was in fact a big one-time shift, more analogous to the industrial revolution than to flagpole-sitting.

I was arguing that this isn’t the sort of thing society grows out of. It’s the sort of thing that society grows into.

But I’m not sure she believed me, in part because she didn’t want to believe me, but also in part because I didn’t have the right story yet. And now I do.

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At OpenWeb I was introduced to one of the presenters, Duane Nickull, Senior Global Technology Evangelist for Adobe.  According to Duane, he is Adobe’s only Vancouver employee (nice work if you can get it, jetting all over the world whilst coming home every once in a while to this lovely little corner of the globe).  Duane has also just co-authored a book with Tim O’Reilly … I’m pretty sure it’s about SOA but I can’t quite remember.  I’ll clear that up soon and report back in the interview (see below).

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The main focus of my professional career has been working for both the United Nations CEFACT committee and OASIS for the purposes of writing and building new architectures for global integration of multiple systems. I also work for Adobe Systems which I love. Great company!

I have worked on many other interesting technologies including the first contextual XML Search Engine, an Alternative fuel hydrogen project and the new UN/CEFACT eBusiness Architecture and related technologies. The next level of this work will probably be linked to Ontology work. I participate in the Ontolog Forum which is a great group.

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Duane’s OpenWeb Vancouver session was titled "Web 2.0 Design Patterns, Models and Analysis".

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"Many enterprises seek knowledge of the design patterns used by successful Web 2.0 companies. This session starts with Tim O’Reilly’s list of Web 2.0 examples and distills the abstract architectural patterns from behind the examples. By using the patterns notation, the core knowledge of the design principles is preserved in a template which can be reused in multiple domains including government."

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I asked Duane if I could interview him … about Adobe, it’s plans for Enterprise 2.0, what flows of information mean to him and his colleagues at Adobe and insights on noticing, and using patterns  to design and build better, easier-to-use, more flexible and more powerful applications.

We’re still looking for a mutually convenient date (he travels a lot and is speaking at the Web 2.0 conference at the moment, so this really means when will Duane next be back in Vancouver ?), but it looks like I will interview him sometime in the first week of May.  I hope you’ll check in for what I will strive mightily to make an interesting and educational interview.

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Both Andrew McAfee and Dion Hinchcliffe have publicly stated that they are seeking examples of serious productivity issues resulting from Web 2.0 deployments. So far, Dion reports, “no one has come forward with a significant story around productivity loss, or misuse of these tools in the enterprise. “We have been unable to hear even one. So far, the evidence is looking favorable.”

Dion had recently joined Beth Gold-Bernstein, my colleague from ebizQ, who hosted a fascinating online panel discussion on the growing convergence between SOA and Web 2.0. Beth and Dion were joined by ZapThink’s Ron Schmelzer, and Doug Wilson, CTO of portals and collaboration products at IBM.

For those managers who fear the ramifications of productivity loss as a result of unleashing Web 2.0 into their enterprises, think back to the first Macs and Windows-based PCs 20 years ago, said Doug Wilson. “When we introduced GUIs 20 years ago, there was the same question. Weren’t we going to waste a lot of time, people moving the mouse around?”

Of course, PCs and Macs had a very different kind of an impact on productivity.

An even more delicious example is employee orientation at a candy factory, Doug added:

“Candy makers indoctrinate people by telling them to eat as much candy as they want off the line for the first day, or anytime else for that matter. After 20 minutes, people will have had their fill.”

Likewise, when a new technology or technique is introduced, it’s only natural for people to try and learn and teach themselves. That’s how human beings learn — they experiment and play.”

Dion also provided this example of how Web 2.0 sweeps through the enterprise:

“AOL rolled out…a very heavyweight content management platform. But users gravitated to a new media wiki platform, the same platform that powers Wikipedia. Within a couple of months, because the tool was so much easier to use, and had been proven on a very large scale, with all the adoption kinks worked out of it in that very large laboratory called the Web… it was successful to the point where 95% of their content management now occurs in those platforms.”

This is a fairly common story, Dion added — analogous to the way the PC came into the back door of organizations 20 years ago.

As noted in the excerpt from the NY Times below, Microsoft has for the most part been regarded as a laggard, or essentially a reluctant participant in the Web 2.0 world to date because of its focus on operating systems (though its Blue Monster initiative was created in order to address that perception, I believe).

While it’s Popfly initiative and a team of 17 programmers does not represent a wholesale shift in strategic direction for Microsoft, it’s an interesting signal.

While most readers of this blog will no doubt be familiar with Web 2.0 and mashups, here’s a bit of context. Generally, Web 2.0 refers to a "second generation" of web sites whereon visitors / users can contribute information for purposes of sharing and collaboration. Web 2.0 applications use Web services - most commonly Flash, Ajax, Silverlight or JavaFX user interfaces, Web syndication, blogs, and wikis. There are no set standards for Web 2.0, and generally it has come into existence through the work of designers and programmers building upon existing web server architecture and adding / stitching together web services. It can be said that Web 2.0 shares some principles and characteristics with SOA.

Mashups are often thought of as Web 2.0 applications. "Enterprise mashup" describes Web applications that combine content from multiple sources into an integrated user experience.  Enterprise mashups are application hybrids combining content and functions from more than one existing source to create powerful Web applications, integrated Web experiences and to expand customer value networks. They are created when different application program interfaces (APIs) are combined or ‘mashed’ such that the functions from the combined applications come together to create an entirely new application.

As noted in the NY Times article, "Microsoft has long been a software engineering culture in which huge projects like Windows Vista are developed and tested by teams of hundreds, and whose completion time is measured in a large fraction of decades.

Although it is not yet widely visible to the outside world, some people inside Microsoft are beginning to break that mold."

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Mashups Are Breaking the Mold at Microsoft

[ Snip ... ]

Mr. Montgomery, a veteran product manager who has also worked as a computer industry writer and editor, is an example of how it just might be possible to teach dinosaurs to dance.

Last fall, his team introduced an intriguing software Web service called Popfly that is intended to make it possible for nonprogrammers to plug together Web components and data sources quickly to create useful new Web services. For example, news feeds could be added to digital images, or data lists to maps.

Introduced at the Web 2.0 conference last year by Steven A. Ballmer, Microsoft’s chief executive, Popfly was picked by PC World magazine as one of the most innovative computing and consumer electronics products of 2007. It has garnered more than 100,000 users — the company says the exact number is confidential — and now has a library of more than 50,000 “mashups”: new components or Web pages that have been created in a visual snap-together fashion, like Lego blocks.

The mashup is at the heart of a generation of Lego-style software that is emblematic of the second generation of the Internet. Both Google and Yahoo have developed tools to help Web users display apartment rentals on maps, or build complicated Web sites like

The Popfly programmers, however, have gone a step further in an effort to design a tool that is intended for a generation of Web users who are familiar with the Internet but are not skilled programmers.

A user might take Popfly and mash up his list of Amazon book recommendations with the Seattle Library book catalog on the Web, he said, and receive a notification when the waiting list for a particular book was down to zero.

“This is not just a passive experience,” Mr. Montgomery said. “You can take this stuff and use it in new ways.”

He now sees his target audience as people who are not professional developers, but who work with information.

Popfly, he said, is for “the 21- to 27-year-old crowd who grew up on the Web.”

“They have never known a world without eBay, Amazon, or Google,” he added. “They assume that when you create a piece of software it will be Internet-connected and it will have an innate sense of who your friends are.”

Microsoft is certainly not alone in seeing this kind of an opportunity. Yahoo offers a widely used tool call Yahoo Pipes that offers some of the same capabilities as Popfly, and Google has designed a “mashup editor” for more skilled programmers.

But Mr. Montgomery sees Popfly as a more ambitious and comprehensive effort. He also thinks that it could turn into a general educational tool for nonprogrammers.

[ Snip ... ]

The largest challenge facing the Microsoft team of Popfly developers will be to gain the acceptance of the broader Web world. Because the company chose to design Popfly using a Microsoft Web graphics and animation technology called Silverlight, it will be treated with suspicion by an Internet universe that is increasingly committed to open standards.

Silverlight is an alternative developed by Microsoft to compete against Adobe’s Flash and, more recently, Flex systems, that are now used ubiquitously by Web developers.

Mr. Montgomery will also have to overcome the skepticism with which many Internet veterans now view Microsoft.

“Popfly shows me that Microsoft still thinks this is all about software, rather than about accumulating data via network effects, which to me is the core of Web 2.0,” said Tim O’Reilly, the founder and chief executive of O’Reilly Media, a print and online publisher. “They are using Popfly to push Silverlight, rather than really trying to get into the mashup game.”

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I’m sure we’ll find out how serious Microsoft is …

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