What happened when I wasn’t in? We did our 2 very best days last week in terms of single visitors.

Were we digged, or did we get a trackback from TechCrunch or what?

(On April 2nd, trackback from Loïc Le Meur’s blog thanks to a post by Ouriel Ohayon on the Silicon Valley trip; same business on April 1st with several trackbacks from several top bloggers (Michel de Guilhermier, Olivier Ezratty, etc.))

I’m back to the blogosphere after 8 days spent in Argentina. First time in South America: short but sweet. Here are a few pics:

•  It’s been nice not to meet one single geek in 10 days, to forget about computers, and to leave blogging aside. But it wasn’t so easy, & what helped me most definitely were the landscapes (here from Uspallata, not far from the Argentina – Chile border). They are SO wonderful.

• Looking back, I still can’t believe I did that:

• Blogs are very popular in Argentina. All newspapers, national or local, published a little something about the 10th birthday of the blogosphere:

• A street in Buenos Aires, by night:

 “Message from Jeremy: To all Tech IT Easy readers, who could obviously not necessarily remember the initial announcement, I have invited my friend Steve to help me try to provide you, dear readership, with everyday better technology insights. Steve’s mission statement is that there’s no mission statement: what matters most here is to raise the right issues on underlying market trends, bringing to light new software, Internet services and consumer electronic devices. Steve, the floor is yours…”

As some of you already know, I am currently working hard on a working paper about “The different business models based on connecting Internet users .” I have already posted a help request, and the proposal remains valid …

I have already begun my research, and I am struck by the absolute mess around some concepts such as Web 2.0, social network, Web 1.0, etc… It is a headache to define precisely those keywords. We already had several posts and controversies about that on this blog, here and here. Seems like most pundits, entrepreneurs and journalists just have their own definition, and don’t bother about reaching an agreement.

Well, I’m not satisfied. So I just felt like presenting you a preliminary model : I’ll be happy to put it to the test of your sagacity. After much wandering about, I now consider that Internet has been slowly switching from a “showcase” to a “platform” paradigm. Although the trend has been there almost since the Web’s beginning, it has gained momentum in the last years, and will get some more in the forthcoming ones since Web 2.0 is the final step of this mutation.  You’ll probably recall Tim O’Reilly definition of Web 2.0 as “Web-as-a-platform”. This is not my opinion since some old business models and websites have done this for ages.

In fact, I suggest to identify three types of Web sites which appeared one after the other, following this “platform” approach (see Fig.1): Web 1.0 – such as Meetic or Monster.com ; social networks – such as LinkedIn or Friendster ; and Web 2.0 (Facebook, Youtube, deli.cio.us…). All these companies are really about connecting people, and making money for providing that service. But they are part of three different models.

OK, so what are the objective criteria which allow us to distinguish between these three layers ? Here’s my theory:

1.  In the first case, Web 1.0, the main point is about making “static profiles” interact. If you consider Meetic, for example, the business model is just about filling a database with static profiles and allowing each profile to browse the database.
2. Social networks introduce a further refinement: profiles are not static but dynamic, ie. what matters most is not the initial information disclosed by the profile’s creator, but rather the context in which this profiles evolve. The main point here is about enriching permanently our own profile, adding connections, or joining groups. Instead of having a glance at a profile, you’ll now “enter the world” (generally the network) of this profile. The database gets more complex, and profiles contextualization may improve without even an intervention of the profile’s owner. [ ex: the groups you've joined keep inflating, by themselves]
3. And here comes Web 2.0 ! Basically, the criteria here is about introducing user-generated content. What matters most is not the profile (take Youtube: who gives a f… about the description of each users, and who uses channels ?), but rather the content provided by the user. On top of the classical database - just filled with “profiles sheets” -, you know have a worldwide repository. Users provide content, tag it, “contextualize” it…profiles are still there, but what matters most is their actual activity, rather than their mere presence. In most cases, the Web 2.0 websites would also keep most of social network’s aspects.

These are just subjective criteria, and no Chinese Walls. It is not difficult to jump from one paradigm to the other. For example, allowing to browse a specific user’s relatives on Meetic would be enough to make it a social network. And Facebook is indeed a social network which can boast itself as “Web 2.0″ compliant, just because users can enrich their profiles with photos, articles, etc….

 Now, let’s get into it: what is your opinion about this model ? Can you help me improve it ?

Message from Jeremy: To all Tech IT Easy readers, who could obviously not necessarily remember the initial announcement, I have invited Vincent to write about innovative start ups based in the Netherlands, Apple, the media industry, incubators, business books and many other things that happen to interest him at the moment. Vince, they’re all yours!

You know, I always found it surprising that Apple started pre-announcing their products this year. What would be the business-sense for a company that has been doing so well in the rumour-market. Everyone was expecting Intel-Macs and Windows on Macs, but no one knew for sure. Everyone was expecting a media-console and an iPhone, but it was just a guess. Still, many of these products are becoming successful.

The iPhone is a different story though, entering a market that is saturated with phones that are cheaper or virtually free. Why enter such a market and why pre-announce it? It makes little business-sense to me, and I’m not alone.

But the mistake I made was to be blinded by the shiny device that Apple is throwing out there and seeing it as a stand-alone. Some of the biggest problems mentioned with the device was the saturated market and the fact that business-users, it’s primary market, would barely use it. And why would they, having already such brilliant (I exaggerate) integration of their existing devices with Microsoft’s suites?

If you remember, when the iPod launched, it wasn’t a big hit. The reason was because it was aimed at Mac-users. Apple got a clue though and as soon as it released software for Windows, the music-player soon became the hype. It is unlikely that they didn’t take this as a lesson for the future. Any device aimed at the Mac-market only, will only grab a tiny part of global market-share.

There is another piece of a puzzle that only Mac-users are likely aware of. The delay of the iWork and iLife-suities, which offer stuff like word-processing (Pages), presentations (Keynote), a speculated excel-app, an image manipulation app (iPhoto), iTunes, and Quicktime. This was expected at the beginning of this year, yet failed to show.

Now let’s think about this. Chances of mass-market adoption of a device aimed solely at Macs = low. Chances of the iPhone working flawlessly with existing Microsoft-solutions =  low to medium (at least according to the latest Microsoft-rant). Chances that iPhone will come with software for windows = your guess is as good as mine, but I think the chances are medium to high.

A final piece of the puzzle is perhaps that Apple is said to restrict software for iPhone, due to reasons of security. Opening up to the Windows-OS does pose a security-issue, I can imagine, and it’s possible that they want to close holes on that side as much as possible. Another possibility is spill-over effects from software-vendors learning to play on both sides of the fence and finally deciding to move to the much bigger and profitable market of Windows instead.

This is of course all speculation and I take absolutely no responsibility if you or your business starts pre-ordering iPhones now!

I’m leaving the surface of the web until further notice. This blog remains on air as my mates Alexandre, Kari, Steve, Lucien & Vincent are planning on posting interesting stuff for you guys. Comments will obviously remain opened, hope not to get too many spams though.

I’m planning to avoid geeks & computers for 10 days: you bet I’m gonna do it.

Btw, if you feel like taking a guess: which web company impresses me most? The answer when I’m back.

PS to C.: don’t forget to vote on my behalf as planned.

I had recently posted a few excerpts of an interview, given at a venture capital event in Paris, of Bernard Charlès, the CEO of Dassault Systèmes. This time this post is about Dassault Systèmes, a world leader in product life cycle management (PLM) solutions aimed soon to turn to B-to-C 3D environments.

An public company listed (Euronext), Dassault Systèmes is a spin off of jet manufacturer Dassault Aviation – born after a bunch of people decided to market outside the company the CAO software they had devised for internal purpose. 60% of Dassault Systèmes is owned by a number of historical, managerial & institutional investors. Thanks to its locked capital structure, Dassault Systèmes engineers don’t get disturbed by M&A rumors such as Business Objects software guys, which helps the management (Charles Edelstenne, a chartered accountant and significant shareholder, as a President & Bernard Charlès as an executive director) execute their very conservative and yet aggressive acquisition strategy (DS is hot on acquiring strategic targets; e.g. SolidWorks in 1997, MatrixOne in 2006, etc.).

DS competitors include AutoDesk, PTC, SofTech, EDS-PLM Solutions, MSC Software, Aras Corp, Arena Solutions, Agile Software Corporation & Unigraphics on a fast, 2-digit growing but yet cyclical market. Indeed, in case of an economic downturn, R&D budgets are likely to be cut first (which I think is dumb, but what can I do about it?). And since PLM is aimed at R&D departments…

Dassault Systèmes is truly international software company: 60% of its revenues are generated in Asia & the Americas. Unlike a majority of software publishers who prefer to keep product development centralized at corporate headquarters (such as Microsoft does), Dassault Systèmes has R&D centers spread all over the world (France, USA, India, Israel, etc.) – which I think is good in the business of technology: it fosters competition, diversity, creativity & innovation.

Dassault Systèmes has one of the best software development teams worldwide: their people are highly knowledgeable in a number of areas such as C++ programming, 3-D modeling & mathematics, industrialization processes, & mechanical engineering. Oddly enough, and although Dassault Systèmes isn’t famous for paying software developers so well (compensated by a highly technical culture within the company & a number of perks such as preferred shares, no work on week ends, etc.), staff turnover is extremely low. Headhunters spend a lot of time trying to recruit these high flyers for their software clients, but it’s no piece of cake: Dassault Systèmes’ technology is cutting-edge in the industry. DS engineers know too well about their technological competitive advantage and are, as far as I know, usually proud of their company.

DS’s product portfolio include 5 brands: CATIA, DELMIA, SIMULIA, SolidWorks & ENOVIA. Each one of these address specific market segments & functional needs. See for yourself: product engineering for CATIA, life cycle management & product data for ENOVIA, manufacturing process simulation for DELMIA, physical phenomena simulation for SIMULIA, etc.. In total, DS’s 5 brands have been packaged into 400 different products!

Dassault Systèmes’ 90,000 clients include Boeing, Embraer, Airbus Industries, Toyota, Smoby, Essilor, Nordica, and, this is pretty new, a number of pharmaceutical companies. One of Dassault Systèmes’ major upcoming challenge, considering the sector diversity of its clients, will be to integrate its clients’ know-how into DS products.

When it comes to distribution & integration, DS rests on a vast ecosystem of local VAD and global partners. The most noticeable of these partners being IBM: Dassault Systèmes & IBM Software Group have been working together for more than 25 years. The latter is responsible for marketing & deploying the solution to Fortune 500 corporate accounts – which enables DS to focus on its core business: crème-de-la-crème product development.

A few figures now: DS is to generate US$ 1.5 bn of revenues this year, representing a US$ 6.5bn market cap. Its business model is one of the most profitable in the entire software industry, with gross margins reaching 48%. DS employs 7000 people, amongst which 3000 are R&D engineers (1,700 of them are located just outside Paris, in Suresnes).

Let’s add to it some corporate bullshit: DS’s vision is that “3D opens the door to the world we imagine“, and its mission is to “enable people to create innovative products & experience the whole life cycle to build a better environment for the future“.

Last but not least, Dassault Systèmes has always led market trends: I take the company’s ability to drive strategic shifts successfully very seriously. Check this out: in the 1970s, DS was in 2D CAD; it turned to 3D CAD in 1985. It turned to process modeling in 1995, and packaged the whole thing into PLM solutions in early 2000. Now the company’s been focusing on integrating more client knowledge into its products. Its roadmap include turning to realistic simulation and 3D collaborative tools at the 2010 horizon.

Dassault Systèmes has always operated in the B-to-B market, leaving a share of the pie to its value-added resellers. At Capital IT in Paris recently, CEO Bernard Charlès announced Dassault Systèmes was to turn in the short term to the consumer market. In Bernard Charlès own words, DS is to come out very soon not with a Second Life-like, but with a “First Life”. The underlying rationale of this strategy being to provide a tri-dimensional environment to everyone. Turning to B-to-C is so exciting! Considering the tradition of the company to deliver top quality products, I hardly see any market adoption risk.

Needless to say, I purchased 50 Dassault Systèmes shares @ a EUR 40.55 price each, after running the company numbers thoroughly. I’m confident on the company’s long term potential, and I’m holding the stock until it reaches EUR 65 – which according to my financial forecast & crash test should occur within a 24 months time line.

If you plan on joining a B-to-B software company (or ISV, independent software vendor) or investing in one, here are 2 success factors I noticed while watching the start up market that will help you make a decision. You want to join a winner, right?

1. The shorter the sales cycle, the better. I know it’s obvious, but on top of finding it harder to keep one’s sales force motivated, a short sales cycle show the market is mature for a product and needn’t be evangelized. An ISV may shorten its sales cycle through doing its marketing homework: thoroughly measure ROI and express the result of it in payback will do. For instance, in their presentation, fast deal makers don’t write “our software will improve your operations by 10%” but “ROI = 9 months” rather. Clients don’t want to listen to an outsider telling them how to run their business, but what value for money you offer them. And of course, top-tier pre-sales guys and sales reps are prepared to show the appropriate backup as potential clients will ask for it for sure.
2. Deployment should be as seamless as possible to enhance scalability. The less consulting work (interfacing, parameterizing, etc.) is needed to install your solution, the better. Heavy deployment interventions are a real constraint to developing fast. Why? The rationale behind it is crystal-clear: clients will of course look at the value the ISV solution will create on their business, but also at the start up capacity to deliver. And since it’s really hard to seize consulting teams in today’s job market, tedious deployment requirements will harm the capacity of the ISV to deliver on schedule. Consequently, the ability of the software company to close deals with clients, in other words Sales, will be harmed as well. Seamless deployment is key to a fast development.

Hope this will help you pick up your horse!

13 out of my last 15 posts didn’t get any comment. But you know what? I don’t care about comments anymore.

I used to think the quality of a blog wasn’t measured by traffic, but by the number of comments your visitors leave rather. My point used to be: if people leave a comment, it means you have managed to embrace a turn-the-table approach that fosters interest, curiosity & will to debate.

I was wrong. Maybe I’ve been maturing towards a better understanding of the blogosphere, I don’t know. All I know is that the only metric I’ll be using from now on is “am I having fun or learning something dedicating 40 minutes a day blogging?”.

As of now, I am having fun trying to make use of my brains, and learning as well, as my new approach of blogging relies on taking notes to keep track of ideas & theories I may have had and my current state of mind. Put it that way: this blog is a personal knowledge management platform made public.

Hope my fellow co-bloggers will approve…

Everyone working close to high tech hears the word “XML” at least thrice a day. Back in 2001 when XML was in the process of democratizing, everyone became crazy about it. Some venture capitalists exclusively wanted to invest in start ups that “used XML” – hence the famous dummy investor question: “does your product use XML?” (see an occurrence here in a Paul Graham essay). I was sort of taking part of a conversation this week that included at some point a question very similar to what used to happen with XML: “do you have Ajax on your website?”. I immediately thought I would very quickly draw a very simple historical vision linking these 2 technologies to lower the risk of hearing such things again (focus on the use, not the technology).

XML (Extensible Markup Language) introduced a major change vs. put-and-get-between-client-and-web server HTML.

XML allows for tearing apart data & the actual layout. Structured content ease applications when communicating together, without having humans interact in this whole process. On top of being conceptually interesting, XML making a difference between content & form help limit the load of data circulating on the network. Consequently, it is now possible to access the same data from different terminal devices (PCs, TVs, PDAs, mobile phones, pagers, watches, showers, etc.). Sending data through XML messages is called “parsing”.

Although I’m not going to give any better explanation on XML than Wikipedia, O’Reilly and W3, I see 2 reasons why XML is a long term thing on the Web:

1. XML is both readable by a human and a machine;
2. XML is text, the most widespread standard in the world (no proprietary format).

XML helped give birth to Ajax, an asynchronous combination of script language Javascript & XML.

Ajax basically allows, through on-the-fly data parsing, for refreshing part of a web page. Thanks to Ajax, you don’t need to reload the page and send the same requests all over again everytime you breathe. In other words, Ajax saves bandwidth – hence the device portability potential of such a technology (ex. Google Reader on a Smartphone).

Ajax is one of the technologies behind the web app takeoff: a good Ajax programmer can now build applications that compete in performance against fat-client, more traditional software.

Tonight, I moved all my stuff from Paris outskirts Ecole Centrale campus back to Paris

4 hours of class to go (and a few more skipped, but shhhhhh) and I won’t be a student anymore. That’s SO weird. I can’t say anything else than “I’m a student” when introducing myself. I’ll have to come up with something new I guess.

I had a great time in all the institutions I had a chance enough to occupy a lecture room chair, and had a lot of fun everywhere I went to.

I thought I wouldn’t feel bad leaving my student status, but actually I am sad.

It’s late at night. I’m ways too tired to keep on working or start reading, so as usual in this situation, I switch to reading newest blog stuff and browsing YouTube, MetaCafé & DailyMotion. Here you go with today’s findings:

• Why does agile software development pay? Excellent content although I would have enjoyed some words about the optimal conditions to use an agile method.

[youtube=http://youtube.com/watch?v=OWvSnYjqOTQ]

• 2 videos on software projects shipping late.

The first one is an inspiring speech excerpt by Steve McCarthy, head of Microsoft Visual Studio team. Too bad it’s too short.

[youtube=http://youtube.com/watch?v=kGKMTCvq-RM]

The second one is a must-see, by AxoSoft’s founder @ 2006 conference “Shipping Software On Time“.

[youtube=http://youtube.com/watch?v=o68bLCX5CVo]

• Halftime! Take a break:

[youtube=http://youtube.com/watch?v=rXKQ0DiTpWM]

• Software project management saga in 2 episodes by Bas de Baar:

1/2:

[youtube=http://youtube.com/watch?v=vgOVuFpw0Tw]

2/2:

[youtube=http://youtube.com/watch?v=ORzQQn3YTV4]

• Too long a conclusion (65 minutes…) & not exactly on software project management but rather on the impact of software on community. Still an interesting view point on the role of software. Software is as crucial in the 21st Century as steel was in the 20th Century, according to by Eben Moglen, head of the Software Freedom Law Center. I think the statement is a bit far-fetched, but rather stimulating, intellectually speaking. A lot of things he says (“software is crucial towards economic development”) are true but such awkward statements such as “the good news is that nobody owns software” (first, it’s wrong; second, had it been true or should it become true, it wouldn’t be good news at all – but I acknowledge that’s just my opinion). Excellent points on the importance of mathematics.

[youtube=http://youtube.com/watch?v=NorfgQlEJv8]

Nota Bene: for those of you who read French, a really good blog on software project management is Laurent Deséchalliers’s, right here.

Unlike Apple and Google & putting the few exceptions aside, Microsoft has historically hardly shown appeal-driven & KISS (Keep It Simple, Stupid) taste when designing consumer applications. Well, things seem to be changing fast: with the XBox 360, killer app Photosynth, SoapBox, the release of Windows Vista & now Silverlight, Microsoft’s product portfolio suddenly looks more sexy.

I’m very happy to see the company’s transforming so fast to adapt the long term thirst for ‘beautiful things’. I guess there’s more to come from Redmond.

Download Microsoft’s Silverlight (read MSFTie & blogger Don Dodge’s product analysis) Development Kit (SDK well done guys) for PC & MAC right here.

Now I just hope the rich media fight between Microsoft & Adobe, 2 companies I am fond of, will benefit the entire computer industry and most of all Internet rich media developers & end users.

Tonight, I had dinner with Eric ((amongst others), a first class developer & Internet entrepreneur who started quite early. Check this out: as a Christmas present when he was 14, what he had asked his parents was..Visual Studio! (Just in case: Visual Studio is Microsoft’s software development platform & in my opinion a really amazing tool)

I wish I had my camera to podcast him. I need to shoot all this stuff to build marketing material later on for Microsoft. We planned to arrange a meeting for Eric to tell me more about his early geeky attitude (he used to sell applications for Palm devices when in high school).

More on Eric’s venture when I start blogging in French (ie when Tech IT Easy moves out to become independent, I really don’t know when: 2 weeks? 2 months? 2 years? Depends on staffing).

Unlike in the software industry, 0-default in terms of integration is the quality standard of aeronautic giants Airbus, Boeing, Dassault, Cessna and Embraer.

It takes thousands of suppliers to manufacture a plane. And guess what? Suppliers don’t immediately get paid for their work. Airbus, for instance, has built risk sharing partnerships with all its suppliers to reduce its working capital and enhance interest alignment.

But what is a risk sharing partnership? Basically, for each plane sold to an airline company, the supplier gets a percentage of the revenues corresponding to the relative value in complexity and workload it has put into the project. As an example, Messier Bugatti wouldn’t get paid when it ships carbon brakes, but would receive x% of all revenues derived from Airbus using Messier Bugatti’s aeronautical braking systems – x most probably being the result of both a negotiation and a cost breakdown analysis.

When it comes to hacking code, it seems so many complains about offshore development quality that it’s the responsibility of both software module suppliers and their clients (quality’s usually good when the client know what it takes to manage a project) to define new business models to align interests of all parties involved in information system projects. For instance: fee per SQL request, percentage of each transaction, percentage of each sale in B-to-B markets, etc. I don’t abide anymore by the paid-per-man/day dogma: it lacks the handcuffs to help invisible contractors turn into business partners.

In my opinion, risk sharing partnerships represent an elegant solution to the drawbacks of offshore development.

Software companies founded by hackers quite naturally have a culture deeply rooted in technology and software development genius. So far, so good.

The founder in most times is an excellent software developer with a sound business acumen – or (s)he wouldn’t have found a start up. But since the culture of the company values technical abilities, the employees most likely to be called in managerial functions will tend to be the very best software developers.

However, these excellent hackers don’t necessarily have what it takes to manage a team. I can’t avoid to bring a cliché on the table here: it happens that geeks spending days in front of a monitor are quite introverted.

As a result, some of these top programmers will reach their level of incompetency: second to none when it comes to writing smart code, top software developers aren’t necessarily good managers (although there are countless counter examples). Consequently, frustrated with not having time to hack code (what they’re best at) anymore while reviewing code and getting their people organized, or constraining their teams with their tendency to intervene directly on their code at night, many software start ups loose some of their best assets during their growth phase. It goes without saying that every top developer leaving to the competition jeopardizes their innovation capabilities.

To avoid this epitome of Peter’s Principle, I guess software start ups should 2 different people development paths: the managerial scheme, and the technological expertise scheme. IBM had initiated the move with their distinguished engineers program, soon followed by Microsoft and many other top technology companies – but my call is that it was too late already. IBM & Microsoft had lost many talents growing into big companies. In my humble opinion, start up founders should start thinking on how to empower their people to become crème-de-la-crème in their field of interest from Day 1.

Recruiting, developing and retaining top technical talents is crucial to the success of fast growing start ups. Software development talent should be empowered with the appropriate ladders to advance in their career without having to move into management.