by Jon Husband
February 10, 2008 at 11:18 am · Filed under
2.0 Design Thinking, Blue Monster, Business Model, Enterprise 2.0, Enterprise Social Computing, Enterprise Software, Hugh McLeod, Mashups, Microsoft, SOA, Social Computing, Web 2.0, Web Services
Mashups for the business world are a promising outcome of the application of design and development principles coming from the consumer application and web services arena to the business environment.
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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by Jon Husband
January 28, 2008 at 9:23 pm · Filed under
Blogging, Change, Economics, Emergent, Enterprise 2.0, Enterprise Social Computing, Enterprise Software, IBM, IT Department, Social Computing, Social Networking, User Revolution, Web 2.0, Web Services, Wisdom of Crowds
This just off the presses at ZDNet …
It won’t be a surprise to most of the FASTForward blog readers, as I think there’s probably a unanimous consensus amongst analysts and pundits who write on this blog that social computing in an enterprise setting and the related architectures of hardware and software is an important and massive shift that will affect knowledge work and organizational structures.
And it’s now clear that Forrester, Gartner, Jupiter, McKinsey, Deloitte Touche, Watson Wyatt, Ernst & Young, IBM, Microsoft, Oracle, Sun … all the major ‘brand name’ providers of advice and technology to enterprises … are taking the emergence of Enterprise 2.0 very seriously.
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Enterprise Web 2.0 predictions from Forrester
Forrester published a report, “Top Enterprise Web 2.0 Predictions For 2008” ($775, about $100 per page), which concludes that blogs, wikis, and social networking will further gain importance in 2008 as enterprises look to Web 2.0 tools to solve long-standing worker problems.
Not a big revelation.
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UPDATE:
Huh ? 42% "Not on our agenda" and 32% "Not a priority" translates into Forrester’s "Web 2.0 will be a 2008 priority" ?
Did that non sequitur get your attention ? It did mine.
The next section of the short ZDNet piece states:
Forrester expects at least half of the 42 percent of enterprises that say Web 2.0 is not on their agenda to make it a priority by year’s end. Here’s why:
First, the IT shops that began experimenting with enterprise Web 2.0 tools for their own use in 2007 — for tasks like help desk ticket resolution, standards and documentation tracking and IT project management — will begin rolling out these tools more broadly to lines of business as they pass IT muster.
Second, CIOs will concede that they cannot quell passionate employees’ use of consumer-oriented or SaaS Web 2.0 tools and will mitigate risk by deploying enterprise-class tools in their stead.
Finally, for IT departments aspiring to be more relevant to the business, enterprise Web 2.0 tools will be a high-impact, low-cost method to show leadership and innovation.
Tags: Enterprise 2.0, Forrester
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by Jon Husband
January 22, 2008 at 9:40 pm · Filed under
Change, Dead Paradigms, Emergent, Enterprise 2.0, Enterprise Social Computing, New Realities, Social Computing, Social Networking, User Revolution, Web 2.0, Web Services, Wisdom of Crowds
Many of the readers of this blog will be familiar with the terms "digital natives" and "digital immigrants" (both terms coined by Marc Prensky, a virtual learning / game-based learning guru), and recently colleague Rob Paterson offered up a post (The Social Web – A New "World") noting his "aha" moment about the issue.
"It" is interactive, it’s fast, the flows of information are overwhelming, it feeds social computing, it’s not going away, and it will be coming to a workplace near you. It’s also becoming clearer and clearer that the pressures due to a growing demographic shift are getting more and more tangible every month. When the Gartner Group starts predicting that the coming generations of knowledge workers will understand how to work in wirearchies, and predict that their influx will cause 40+ % annual growth in the adoption of Enterprise 2.0 capabilities .. well, one might say that awareness is growing.
Remember sending groups of people off for training on the latest complicated software ? Will that change ?
JP Rangaswami, who writes often about the use of social software in the enterprise based on his experiences at DkW and BT recently emphasized the coming impacts at the LeWeb 3 conference in Paris, noting in his presentation that:
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The digital natives now starting to flood into the workplace are already all trained up on these (social software) tools.
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This also reminds me of the central issues raised in a seminal article article in the Economist 18 months ago titled The New Organization, namely that most organizations have watched the rise of the networked worker (and equipped them all with Crackberries) without making fundamental changes to organizational structures and work design,
I suspect that’s one of the core targets of Gary Hamel’s new book The Future of Management, in which he lays out this key challenge for executives and managers everywhere.
Here’s one Gartner Group analyst’s take on the coming challenges associated with Enterprise 2.0 and the war for talent in a digital era.
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‘Digital Natives’ Will Drive Web 2.0 into Your Business
Clint Boulton
September 20, 2007
Analysts delve into how businesses might leverage blogs, wikis and other social networking tools.
LAS VEGAS—Digital natives—people who grew up using interactive Internet tools—will push the enterprise social software market to grow at a compound annual revenue growth of 41.7 percent through 2011, said Gartner analysts at Web Innovations here Sept. 19.
As these digital natives grow up, they’re moving into the work force, taking with them blogs, wikis, mashups, RSS feeds and other so-called Web 2.0 social networking tools that will enable them to collaborate more freely in an enterprise environment, said Gartner analyst Anthony Bradley.
"They bring with them a set of expectations of how they will interact and the tools they’ll use to interact, and they can be woefully disappointed walking into organizations that don’t have some of the Web 2.0 tools that they’re used to using for building relationships and getting things done," Bradley said.
Digital natives will thus usher in what Gartner calls the Enterprise 2.0, where users will use rich Internet applications, social software and a Web platform to execute tasks.
Social software includes social networking (Facebook-like profiles), social collaboration (JotSpot-like wikis and blogs) and social publishing (social tagging, think Digg) tools to interact socially and boost organizational effectiveness.
While traditional Enterprise 1.0 tools were more rigid and siloed, Gartner analyst Tom Austin said Enterprise 2.0 technologies need to be "free form," or informal, messy and participatory, to make co-workers comfortable.
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Tags: Marc Prensky, Rob Paterson, JP Rangaswami, digital natives, Enterprise 2.0, hierarchy, wirearchy, the new organization, networks, Gartner Group
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by Joe McKendrick
December 23, 2007 at 12:35 pm · Filed under
2.0 Design Thinking, Business Model, Cloud Computing, Data Management, Enterprise 2.0, Enterprise Software, Web 2.0, Web Services
Run an entire enterprise — including sophisticated IT — from the cloud? Just a couple of weeks again, I posted Ismael Ghalimi’s list of all the Office 2.0 tools and technologies you could ever need to avoid bloatware of any kind and run your business entirely from services delivered over the network. Ismael cited Dabble DB as an example of a cloud database that can provide such functionality.
Since that posting, Amazon Web Services announced a “limited beta” of a new service called SimpleDB.
SimpleDB, Amazon says, is a Web service for running queries on structured data in real time. This service works in close conjunction with Amazon’s Simple Storage Service (Amazon S3) and Amazon Elastic Compute Cloud (Amazon EC2), which provide the ability to store, process and query data sets in the cloud.
Amazon charges for SimpleDB services on a per-use basis, which initially is priced at 14 cents per machine-hour consumed. Data transfer rates range from 10 cents per gigabyte for data transferred to the database to 13-18 cents per gigabyte for outgoing data. Structured data storage is $1.50 per gigabyte a month.
Cloud computing has interesting implications for enterprises in the long run. Already, cloud computing appears to be leveling the playing field for many start-ups, helping to basically avoid the necessity of any enterprise IT investment at all.
For example, online podcasting service GigaVox Media, an Amazon Web Services customer, reportedly spent just over $80 in its first two months of business on storage, messaging and processing. (I went into some detail about this case and cloud computing over at my ZDNet blog.)
GigaVox uses Amazon Simple Storage Service (S3) to store files from podcasts, videocasts, and advertising images. The alternative would have been to buy disks and storage arrays to provide back-up storage, which typically range in price between $2,500 to $20,000 for network-attached storage units. GigaVox would also have had to invest in switches and hubs, as well as the expertise to put it all together and manage on an ongoing basis.
The company then adopted Amazon EC2 to fulfill its transcoding and automated show-assembly needs, and Amazon Simple Queue Service (Amazon SQS) to serve as the glue between these services monitoring EC2 server instances, queuing transcoding requests, and issuing instructions for program processing. As Doug Kaye, co-founder and CTO of GigaVox, put it in a Webcast:
“Even if we could have done this with a cluster of outsourced managed servers, which still wouldn’t have been as scalable, we would have spent tens of thousands of dollars more,” said Kaye. “We didn’t have to buy a single server. We didn’t have to spend any time in a ‘cage.’”
Cloud computing services such as SimpleDB are more likely to catch on among smaller companies and startups. However, Oracle and Microsoft have little to fear at this point among enterprise customers suddenly dropping their onsite databases installations in favor of cloud databases. In fact, open source databases such as MySQL may suffer the most.
Along with small businesses, the cloud databases will most likely start to catch hold among individuals or departments within organizations that need to pull something together quickly, without the necessary budget machinations. But as with all new paradigms, cloud services may start at the peripheries of enterprises and slowly be absorbed into more and more functions. That’s the route open source is taking now, and Microsoft technologies took in the 1990s.
