Briefly. With all this Chrome OS and HTML 5 talk, you’d think that we were already at the stage where we could run all apps in our browsers. Close, but one thing that I think is terrible about the current state of browsers is that they become so damn bloated the more you use them. Here’s Firefox, for instance, after just loading it and about 30 tabs:

My Macbook’s fans are running like crazy.

Apart from the obvious, that there needs to be better memory / processor management for tabs—optimally, unused tabs should use minimal percent of both—another big problem is the lack of visibility of what you have open in your browser. As soon as I have 10+ tabs open and a number disappear of the page or are in different browser-windows, I have no overview, not to mention little idea of what little flash- and other widgets are being opened in each page.

Some innovations, I’d like, are:

1. Grouping of tabs by domain-names, similarly to how Windows allows you to group windows by app.
2. The ability to control whether Flash is being loaded, what kind of flash, and what kind of other apps. Yes, I know about flash- and ad-blocking, but something more elaborate.
3. Better than 2, a common webpage standard for how much memory / processing a web-page should typically take. And perhaps a browser-imposed limit as to what pages get loaded or not.
4. An indication of where a tab is when I’m trying to load the same webpage or domain-page. E.g. I use Netvibes often, each of which has 5-15 widgets in each tab and thus consumes a fair amount of power. When I can’t find the right tab, I open multiple instances, which obviously slows down the browser some more.

All of this is relevant, I feel, both because of the “shift” we are seeing towards “Browser-OSs,” but also because there is a trend towards buying less powerful single-purpose machines often for use on the road. A bloated browser can use as much battery as running a game, the difference being that most mobile travellers know better than to run a game on the road.

Rant over. Would love to hear about Firefox extensions or Browser innovations that overcome some of these problems.

Vincent

Not my title, hence the quotes. “Smart Products” is the name of a 2006 Ph.D dissertation by Serge Rijsdijk, which I just purchased in a bookstore—I didn’t know you could buy these things. I’m fascinated with this concept, so much so that it was the reason for choosing Sony as my first serious company to work for, and why I worked in several projects / startups that dealt with interesting matters of industrial design. On this blog, I approached the topic a few times, with blog posts about “creating relevance,” about creating software for right-brained people, and probably some other things that I can’t recall at this time.

Before I go on, a little quiz. Which of these do you consider a smart product?

• The one-buttoned iPod? Is the iPhone a smarter product than the iPod? Why?
• The financial derivative, which was designed by many smart rocket-scientists?
• A bicycle gear-system that changes automatically, according to elevation-angle and intensity?

Think about these before you go on. Essentially, what a smart product means to me, is one that is able to interact with smart* human beings (*: by definition, ALL human beings). I would also say that a smart product adapts to the context of the user and does not force the user to adapt to it (though that, for the moment, is very wishful thinking).

An iPod, while on the surface a stupid device with a single button, is smart enough to just do the job we need it to do. It also has as a smart back-end that allows for a wide variety of content to be streamed through your device. An iPhone does the same job, except that it does more and it allows for two-way interaction: smart. A financial derivative may be smart by design but, from my understanding, it is a type of smartness that is incompatible with what humans consider smart, i.e. what makes sense to them. It does not speak our language, hence we should probably kill it (I fear the day that aliens come to our planet). The argument that it is designed for a different type of person, the financial genius, doesn’t apply either, considering the current crisis. The auto-gear system for bicycles, which I made up, but probably exists, is smart because it uses environmental intelligence to make our life easier. But in order to be able to do that, it must not make mistakes or else it becomes a very stupid device—there is a subtle line between smart and stupid, when speaking of technology… or biking.

Serge Rijsdijk has a much more complex definition of smart products, namely that they fit one or more of following seven dimensions:

1. The ability to co-operate: by which he means co-operating with other devices. He has an interesting quote from Nicoll (1999) who thinks that “the age of discrete products may be ending.” An example of this is a PDA that co-operates with a printer (or more modern: a camera that co-operates with a printer)
2. Adaptability: by which he means the ability to learn and improve the match between its functioning and its environment, e.g. my example of auto-changing gears or a thermostat that collects data about room and outer temperature and uses that to fulfil its user’s wishes.
3. Autonomy: meaning that the device can operate without interference from the user, e.g. some of those autonomous lawnmowers and vacuum-cleaners we keep hearing about.
4. Human-like interaction: as the term states, interacting with humans in a fashion that feels natural to them (I use a more broad description than the author). An example given is car-navigation, though I don’t exactly consider that a successful smart product yet—at least, the nagging voice telling you to “turn right” is not necessarily a characteristic of smartness, if you ask me.
5. Multi-functionality: i.e. a single product fulfilling multiple functions, such as a modern mobile phone. The fact that the iPhone has been so destructive to incumbents in this market would suggest that here too the definition of successful smartness need not necessarily always fit.
6. Personality: meaning the product’s ability to show the properties of credible personality. Examples given include the Furby, the AIBO, and (don’t laugh) Microsoft’s paperclip-assistant. My only experience with personable non-organics would be in the films: King Kong, Transformers, and Wall-E, all of which induced an emotional response in me. The AIBO was fun to play with at Sony, but, back then, not even close to the level of a dog. Still, I was sad to hear it has been discontinued. And I’ve killed many a virtual pet or plant (including that stupid paperclip), I’m not very sad to say.
7. Finally, Reactivity: i.e. the ability of a device to react to its environment in a “stimulus / response manner.” An example given is the Philips Hydraprotect hairdryer, which lowers the temperature of the air when the humidity of the hair decreases.

His thesis is focussed on the one issue that smart innovation is all about: how consumers react to smart products. I hope this post has made you think about it! More on this fascinating topic as I get to it.

Vincent

Let me start by saying that we are passed the age of positioning, a concept that was pioneered as the 5th P, by the authors Ries & Trout of the book, fittingly called “Positioning: The Battle for Your Mind” Rather I think we are in the age of 2 C’s: Conversation & Customisation. Before I explain, I’ll briefly summarise my thoughts about the book in the next few paragraphs.

Book thoughts

What is positioning? It is

the art and science of creating positions in a targets mind, something “that takes into consideration not only a company’s own strengths and weaknesses, but those of its competitors as well.”

“Positioning” is neither a bad, nor an irrelevant book. Jeremy Fain gave it a favourable review a while ago, which inspired me to give it a read. Some things I immediately liked were its thinness (213 pages) and a very effective table of contents—every item has a short paragraph underneath it, shortly summarising that chapter. The book is also a pleasure to read, written in a flowing fashion and using effective titles that make you curious about what’s next.

The book itself points out that marketing has evolved in stages, determined by both our understanding of customers, but also by our competitors’ understanding and subsequent copycat-strategies. A marketing-strategy is only effective if it comes through clearly and isn’t diffused by too much noise.

In the 50s, according to the book, marketing was focussed on products, i.e. marketing your better mousetrap. As production-techniques evolved and more mousetraps were produced, that became increasingly difficult. This was followed by the image-era, where the focus was on brand and reputation. Again, as competitors caught on, the noise-level eventually decreased the ROI of that strategy. Now, the book (originally published in 1985, republished in 2001) states, we are in the positioning era, which is about “getting in the consumer’s mind.”

True, but clearly companies have had two decades to perfect and clone best-in-class strategies, so what’s next?

2 other C’s – Customisation & Conversation

Focussing on product features, on brand-image, and now positioning, is clearly something that won’t lose in relevance anytime soon. Nothing good in marketing ever disappears, but rather the marketing-mesh becomes ever more complex, integrating what came before into more comprehensive, more complete value-propositons. If I come up with more words starting with ‘C,’ I can probably write a book about it . Remember, there’s also the 4 C’s of positioning: confidence, clarity, continuity, and competitiveness.

What struck me about the book was that it seemed to describe a one-way strategy for interacting with customers. It wasn’t one-way with the competition, rather the book advises to actively combat other companies through your messages—e.g. “Avis is No. 2 in rent-a-cars, so why go with us? We try harder!“—and even change your brand-name if it makes sense—e.g. when B. F. Goodrich (a company I never heard of) makes a tire, it is actually Goodyear that get most of the PR benefits, so why not change the name? The book’s tagline is “The battle for the mind,” yet that battle only takes place within a competitive environment.

Now, I’m not saying to ignore the competition, but the book does ignore the relationship that can be built up with customers these days. In a recent interview, Jason Fried of 37Signals, said that the company a. doesn’t market, and b. doesn’t really focus on the competition. I hate to bring up that little company every time, but it just has some great attributes.

There are two facets of today’s society that make a significant marketing-difference, as far as I can see. One is that it becomes increasingly easier to customise products. From just-in-time / lean manufacturing techniques in the factory, to agile development techniques, quick prototyping and market-testing in software, the argument for creating static one-size-fits-all products becomes less and less relevant.

The second is that there is a bottom-up media-explosion. Everyone is a journalist, everyone has a voice. Now that is certainly a science that still has to be perfected, but when I see initiatives like Getsatisfaction.com for software, and Dell Ideastorm, it certainly gives me hope.

Using these two effectively can be a differentiator in consumers’ minds, one which is adapted to his or her tastes and one which evolves as that taste evolves. By perfecting the science of customisation, based on ongoing conversation, you actually lock in on a customer, you make him or her feel special and you completely make the competition irrelevant. At least… until the competition catches on, where we will need something else again.

A reading list:

I’d like to end with reading list of books that I think discuss the next step in marketing, none of which, I should add, I have read. But I’m hoping you give your critical perspective in the comments and add some other reading suggestions.

• Scoble and Israel’s The Naked Conversation
• Locke, Levine, Searls, and Weinberger’s The Cluetrain Manifesto (for free here)
• Tapscott & Williams’s Wikinomics
• Seth Godin’s Meatball Sundae

Vincent

“Ouch, it hurts, it hurts!” … “Oh yeah, that feels good, so good!” Guess which one is all other browsers moaning collectively (Microsoft & Firefox no. 1), and which one is the geeks…

Let me start by saying that Google Chrome rocks! OK, it crashed about 2 mins after I started it, and I think it has a process running in the background, which speeds up the launch, but which I hate, and it is Windows-only, which I hate 100x, but… it rocks! It’s simple, love that, it completely takes in all the bookmarks you had in Firefox, love that, and Gmail, man, Gmail loads like lightning! The browser loads like lightning too, because of the background process, can’t be any other reason.

Gmail’s loading speed confirms it: Google Chrome is Not a browser. Repeat: it is not a browser. It is a Google app-launcher. It is meant to bring the Google ecosystem to Joe Schmoe on Windows, who may know Google, but hasn’t thought about using its calendar, office-suite, or email, for that matter.

It is, to use a buzz-term, an in-the-cloud facilitator, bringing us one step closer to no longer needing computer-processing and storage, but just doing everything (essential) through an internet-connection. I don’t think, I’ve been this excited about a browser since Phoenix (what Firefox used to be called), which was in 2002, 6 years ago.

What’s different? Or what did Phoenix and now Chrome have in common? Phoenix had tabs, it introduced extensions, it blocked the pop-ups that IE never would. It was an evolution over the status quo. Google Chrome is just a browser, built on Safari’s Webkit-engine, with no extensions, but it helps us do what we were already doing, better. Because the world has evolved from the extension-model, it has gone way beyond what a company like Microsoft has even imagined. We live in a world where web-services matter!

I don’t use an rss-reader, I use Netvibes. I don’t use a mail-app, I use Gmail or Facebook. I don’t use a blogging-app (well actually I do, but the majority doesn’t), I use Wordpress.com. I don’t use MSN, I use Twitter or FriendFeed. When I’m on my PC, I’m in fact on the web, and the desktop only exists for work-documents and multimedia.

Google bites right into that trend, it executed well (ok, unstable browser, but localised in my language), it is a window in a world that 100s of thousands, if not millions, have accepted as their modus operandi.

Strategic angles

The love for strategy is really just the love for competition, disguised by fancy words.

Microsoft’s unbreakable chain?
Microsoft’s strength in the 90s was its software-platform. It was strong on multiple levels: market leader in OS, market leader in Office. And consequently, and still, market leader in browsers. It was able to build all these pieces of software on top of each other, tie them together, so that it would be an automatic choice to use them all. This is still the case today, as it is, by default, installed on 80% of computers out there (don’t quote me on this). Backwards integration, which also made it the number one choice for businesses, who like having the same software installed on 1000s of machines at once. And forward integration, through Office and IE, which add functionality in the value chain towards the consumer. From IE, Microsoft could build towards ActiveX and .Net, Silverlight, and other web-services that it was selling/giving to consumers.

Displacement by Firefox?
Yes and no… For displacement to occur there needs to be some kind of commercial angle. Firefox was built on top of open source principles, which is definitely disruptive, but it wasn’t until Google came into play, that Firefox became a commercial success. Google, these last few years, became the cash-cow for Firefox and other browsers, through affiliate fees it was paying for the use of the search-box.

While that’s cool, it also placed Google into a power-position. It knew that there was money to be made with browsers, it knew how much money there was to be made, so it just had to make the right move at the right time.

Google power
I already raved on why I think Chrome rocks, but for Google, the situation is actually pretty similar to Microsoft, except from the web towards the desktop, instead of the other way around. It is the market-leader in search, which some say is the operation system on the web. Nothing happens, without it going by Google, which can make or break a business. As is the case for browsers depending on Google cash as well.

Where Google leads is the web, and it has a pretty good read on where user-models are evolving too: web-services, with some anchoring on the desktop. So building a browser makes sense, it’s a step in bridging the value chain from web to desktop. Where it gets scary for Microsoft (which also collects Google cash through IE, I think), is when Chrome-users start getting the hint that Gmail works great, that Google Docs will hopefully work great (offline), etc. etc.

And I’m completely leaving Android out of this, whose future I still find hard to read… but I’m hopeful. Chrome definitely proves that Google can build software.

Doesn’t vertical integration rock? Doesn’t Chrome rock? I think they both do.

Vincent, the fanboy. Out.

P.S. I’m also not commenting on Firefox’s Ubiquity, it’ll be interesting to see where that goes… also largely built on Google-tech.

Another way to phrase this is, whether mobile commerce will drastically change life as we know it or not?

Disruptive technologies, according to Christensen, lead to products that are cheaper, simpler, and, often, more convenient to use. By that definition, e-commerce could certainly be seen as a disruptive innovation over brick & mortar commerce, and to some extent, m-commerce could do the same to e-commerce. Or could it?

I look at technological disruption on three levels:

1. Production: will people get fired/hired/retrained? Will production-methods change? etc.?
2. Will technological behaviour change?
3. Will societal behaviour change?

As for the first, I don’t think production will change as dramatically as it did from brick & mortar. Clearly, models like Amazon and eBay wreaked some havoc on book- and second-hand stores. But production and maintenance for an m-commerce application will likely just happen on PCs and will logically be built for both platforms (with some possible exceptions in emerging economies). With the mobile versions of browsers like Safari and Opera, changes also need to be minimal. I do see there being less reliance on keyboards, (i.e. an interface-change), just based on my own clumsy fingers, but e-commerce is not exactly word-intensive.

Regarding changes in technological behaviour, this is clearly already happen and will continue to happen. Things like the Starbucks-Apple partnership for digital music-downloads are just the tip of the iceberg. Eventually, we could be seeing more use of phone’s video- and audio-recording abilities. Imagine taking a picture of your neighbour’s clothes and doing a visual search for that sweater? And of course there could be innovations in terms of mobile payment methods, mobile logistics, rfid and barcode-scanning, etc. The possibilities are endless and only constrained by traditional businesses’ lack of imagination.

Changes in societal behaviour is one I am most excited about. The way I see it, PCs have been an immobile force in our lives for many years, forcing us (in my opinion) to think and act in left-brained ways, not to mention never leave our seats out of fear we might miss something. Now, clearly the 24/7 “crackberry” isn’t exactly the answer, but I’d like the new found freedom that mobile technology enables to lead us down a new or perhaps old path, one where I can even see room for brick & mortar again. Something like:

1. take picture of product in store (after smelling/tasting/touching/trying it on),
2. send picture to warehouse,
3. warehouse ships home.

Removing one the most annoying component of shopping, carrying your shopping-bags home.

Two out of three… I think that qualifies as disruptive! But this is just my opinion of course, and I’m just beginning learn about the world of m-business. Tell me how you visualise mobile technology changing (y)our lives, or perhaps not?

Vincent

Context: I’m currently in discussion with a number of companies that are involved with SOA-vending & -consulting. As a result, I’ve been studying up a little on this market and hope to learn more by writing about it. Note: Since I know, judging by the response to other articles on enterprise-software, this isn’t exactly the most sexy of topics, I expect the number of comments to be minimal.

Jeremy has already written about this topic (primarily in terms of Software-as-a-Service (Saas) and Software + Service (S+S)) before (here, here, and especially here), so I won’t go very deeply into it, but SOA is roughly defined as:

“guidelines that allow software developers to design systems in stand-alone chunks of computer code, each specifying the critical outcomes, performance metrics, and interfaces between a discrete activity and other services.” (Src: HBR, June 2008)

If that’s a little abstract, I see it as a selling you a ticket to Lego-land, where you can play with legos all you like, those lego-blocks representing individual applications that can be used by businesses through a web (SaaS) or hybrid (Software+Service) interface, and Lego-land being the SOA-system that integrates all of them for you. This is opposed to the historical approach of buying a lego-box, which you eventually replace by another and another (side-prediction: we will eventually see Lego-world online).

SOA’s value-proposition

While traditionally it has been so that in order to compete in a technological world, you have to be technological, the idea of SOA is to remove that element, instead allowing individuals and businesses to focus on what they do best. I, personally, like that very much.

Other, more measurable advantages are that it is dramatically more cost-efficient. If you imagine that 5+ years ago, every company had to either invest into a powerful wide-area network (WAN) to be able to centralise IT-services, or replicate islands of IT-systems for each business-location, SOA removes that idea entirely, using a freely available infrastructure, the internet, and removing the need to build IT anywhere, instead paying-as-you-go for singular services that an external provider hosts and distributes. Added to this is the idea that performance now becomes accountable, in the sense that it is covered by contracts (e.g. QoS or SLA), something that was much harder to do with a permanently employed IT-staff.

With all these advantages and several more, it is no surprise that, in 2007, over 50% of mission-critical IT-projects were estimated to be SOA-based, a figure which is believed to increase to 80% in 2010 (these figures are from Gartner and may be US-only).

SOA’s hurdles

While this sounds pretty great, anytime you’re talking about system-wide change, you have to consider that this will meet resistance and involve a great many stakeholders, i.e. take a lot of time. And the question is here, who will you talk to as an SOA-vendor? Will it be the business-side of your client, as you are selling easy-to-understand lego-blocks, or will it be the technology-side, as you are selling technology? This is a serious question, so please answer it in the comments!

Added to this, a SOA-deployment is a strategic issue for your customer, meaning that your selling-proposition will also need to include the option of strategic support, aka consulting-services. This means that technology-only SOA-providers (vendors) will likely have to work with third-party consultants that pick-and-choose the best SOA-package for their client.

Related to this, the lego-like quality of SOA, which promises values like agility, flexibility, price, and reuse, and several more, all very important in this recession-prone time, also mean that someone can quite easily replace your service with someone else’s legos. Arguably this is much less the case if you provide an architectural framework and focus on building ecosystems (create lock-ins). But that is easier said than done, and as such this is a field dominated by few big players that buy up smaller ones.

Some more things, which I haven’t researched, are the degree that open source is a factor/issue here, and different revenue-models.

Grasping the paradigm-change

On the customer-side, there’s two ways of seeing this trend. On the one hand, extreme efficiencies, which also follows Nick Carr’s view that IT is no longer a competitive advantage. On the other hand, you’re giving away a lot of responsibility, which can be bad in two ways.

One, you’re giving away a lot of power to an industry, which will continue to consolidate. It’s something that may not be a problem now, but may become one.

Two, delegating a problem does not necessarily solve it. Taking the retail-industry, the biggest problem here is logistical inefficiencies, caused by delays, unnecessary replication of processes, or otherwise. Here, SOA, as long as it spans across the value-chain of manufacturers-transport-retailers-customer, is clearly a good thing. But it still requires a solid understanding of how IT does and can help your supply chain reap better results, something an independent SOA-vendor may not do as well. My opinion here is purely hypothetical, but it may be worth investigating how the masters of retail (Wal-Mart, Tesco, Carrefour, etc.) solve it. And if this is a problem, I imagine it is elsewhere too.

The SOA playing field

This post is getting a little long, so I’ll briefly go into this. Following Forrester-graphs show the players in the integrating corner of things (consultants) and, on the right, the vendors (also note the time-difference (the second one is Q4 2007) and region). You can find the originals here and here.

Clearly this industry is very layered, with some offering the complete package, including strategic assistance, and others providing either the SOA or a part of it (SaaS or similar). There is a lot of movement in this field with players buying each other out or moving into related industries, either on the hardware or software-side.

Final thoughts

Because I’m not a soft-/web-ware guy, I’m still very much undecided whether to head in the software-only direction myself, though I see much merit for an integrated business-consulting + software-deployment approach, and I also prefer selling Lego-blocks to rubber-trees. Feel free to convince me of your points of view.

All of this was initial thinking of course, and as such I’m happy to hear if you have anything to add or if I made some obvious mistakes. Again, considering the relative unsexiness of this area, I don’t expect too much

Vincent

Premise: A while ago, Fred Wilson, a (possibly biased) tech-investor, wrote that he was bullish on the tech-industry. Recently, the New York Times reports that e-commerce is up because people want to travel less (fuel costs). And previous stories reported on the migration of advertising revenues from traditional media to online media.

A note: I don’t know that there will be a recession. I know that the real-estate bust in the US is a pretty big deal, and that banks from Europe and Asia have been pretty heavily invested in that supposed goldmine. And any fall-out in the US, i.e. banks shutting down or otherwise, will likely have global repercussions on the banking-sector, and affect other industries also.

With that out of the way, three problems/phenomena I associate with these times are:

• A lack of accountability in investments (e.g. currently real estate and previously startups & Enron), also accompanied by emotions like fear & greed.
• Rising input-costs (the market should normally adjust for that, but the explosive growth in demand from emerging countries + the lack of an alternative for, in this case, fuel, make this a pretty big uncertainty)
• Changing paradigms, such as the rise of webware, the (expected) fall of hardware-prices, the possible fall of software-sales, the continuing displacement of brick & mortar business models, businesses being forced to go & think green, and much, much more.

So, there’s probably a few more symptoms (throw them out in the comments!), but it seems to me that the internet is pretty well placed to deal with some of these problems.

Let’s start with accountability. The strength of the web is that everything on it is digital and, in theory, nearly (*) everything can be measured (*: I am quite sceptical about the measurability of video & audio, though arguable the serious data is still in text). Added to this, there are technology-shifts, like digital television, mobile computing, and E-Ink, which make it easier to have a wider reach as a data-gatherer, not to mention that business are increasingly placing their data online, again facilitating data-exchange in partnerships. This should make it easier for businesses to base their expense on actual data, the same for investors and advertisers. Together with the consequences of the last internet-bust, I think that everyone is pretty careful to base their decisions on information, not hopes and dreams (well, I’m still sceptical about Twitter).

Next, rising input prices. Having blogged on the topic of food and retail for about a year, I’ve obviously had to follow this trend/reality quite a bit. The NYTimes heading I linked to above summarises my feelings quite well, customers are looking at the opportunity cost of fuel (as well as the cost of being green) and alternatives like e-commerce may seem much more attractive. In the long-term, people like James Howard Kunstler are calling for more and more “locality,” i.e. that people will be willing to migrate less for work and, I guess, shopping, which opens up opportunities for e-commerce and ways of working across a distance.

Finally (?), changing paradigms. Well, whatever the new world looks like, a pretty warm place is reserved for the web. Web-apps and -services are maturing, offering more and better features, and providing individuals and businesses with a comfortable ecosystem to operate in. The OLPC, the Asus EEE, and other cheaper systems (when Dell comes in, it will be mass), may be less powerful, but they will be optimised to use the web most of all. Societally, it may eventually become the logical choice for the mainstream to spend less than $500 for a laptop, in which case hardware-makers and, possibly, software-makers will suffer. But the web won’t. Similarly, while I don’t yet see brick & mortar disappearing, it is clear that eventually 99% of B&M businesses will have to have an online presence. About the world going green, I can’t sell everything, perhaps someone else can give the answer to that.

Is the internet recession-proof? My guess is as good as the next guy. But, more efficient use of computing, datamining, search, advertising, e-commerce, and logistics are all technologies I am extremely bullish on these coming years.

What do you think?

Vincent

Business is all about three things: generating income, generating growth, and making smart spending-decisions to generate both of them. Within that framework, it’s not surprising that business often make compromises as to the feature-set that they offer. This is especially true of web-businesses, who, while they may have built a relatively cheap business (compared to the physical alternative), also find it difficult to create sustainable business models. And, considering the barriers to entry are as low as ever, I imagine that this situation won’t change anytime soon.

My “rant” today is about relevance, which I define as targeting your app or service to work within the context of your consumer. Many internet-businesses focus on two things: building easy connections to other web-users and trying to prevent total breakdown when viral growth reaches a peak.

The fallacy in that mindset is that users are being treated like nodes, who connect back or connect to other users. A node, in a P2P network, is a static entity, one that doesn’t move. A user is, typically, a human being, one that not only moves, but exists on a different plane, the physical world. A lot of web-businesses fail to make that distinction and it has created not only the reality that we are being bombarded with connections whenever we sit at our PC, but we are expected to be connected 24/7.

I alluded to this last year, when I asked “what place does the web take?” The point of that article was really about the relevance of the web to real life. According to a theory, there are three places relevant to people: the first place, which is home-life, the second, which is work-life, and the third, which is leisure. The web, through email, blogs, work-apps, twitter, media, has become a hub in all three places, but its consequences are both information overload and obesity, both caused by passivity.

When you look up the word “break,” it’s defined as “a period of time taken out of one’s professional activity in order to do something else.” If the web is work and the web is home, then the break should not be the web.

Relevance is, once again, having services be context-driven, i.e. being relevant or shutting up at the right time and the right place and for the right person. A pretty complex task, but that is an ideal to live for.

Let me give some examples. Both TheFilter and Last.fm are services that both passively monitor media-life and actively provide services (such as radio-stations and the like). When I plug in my iPod after a run (a third place-activity), Last.fm asks me whether I want to “Scrobble” my tracks, which it in turn uses to make recommendations. TheFilter is not quite there yet, but it passively scans my iTunes-behaviour and creates custom-playlists for me if I want. You may think this is no big deal, but you’d be surprised how few services make even that tiny step from the web to the desktop.

A bigger deal, in my opinion, is NearByNow, which allows shoppers to search the shopping-malls that they visit, not by searching every store, but by entering a search-term for a product on their mobile or via the web, and having it search the retailers’ inventory. I wrote about it here before. This is just a first step, but especially in retail there’s much room still for merging the web with the shop.

Some more examples are the Nintendo Wii, which brings a physical dimension to gaming, and even the MacBook Air and the Asus EEE, both of which are clearly designed to not chain users to a location.

Relevance is something that a lot of commercial and non-commercial services are battling with nowadays. How do you sell a good online that you need to smell, taste, feel, or try on? How do you integrate virtual friendships into real life? How do you limit the amount of noise that your online customers are exposed to? How do you “synergise” the power of the web—information at a finger-tip—with a fragmented physical world? How do you create business models based on both the online and offline behaviour of consumers?

Those are the real questions to answer, not only for the web to become truly mainstream, but for it to stop treating us “users” like grey square boxes with a blue light shining out of it. We, the kids, the workers, the retired, are people dammit, with muscles (not just in the fingers), mouths, and other senses. We were not put on this planet to read 12/7 and type the other 12.

The next liberation-age is, I hope, about freeing ourselves from the machines and living life again as the hybrid entities that we are, producing both physical and mental energy.

Rant over.

Vincent

(The picture is the cover of the book “Snow Crash“—still the most relevant book about a very possible future of the information age today… if you ask me.)

This morning, I read an interesting piece written by Steven Poole, and just had to comment on it. In it, he discusses his book, which he released for free (and DRM-free) around the net, and which has received ca. 30,000 downloads so far. But he also discusses the idea of artists, or creators in general, making money, and how that + giving away stuff for free, doesn’t compute.

He also refers to what he calls the “Slashdot argument,” one, I should add, I’ve used myself several times, that (music-)artists should keep giving away their creations for free, because it’s possible, and instead collect revenues from live-performances. As a counter-argument, he uses the programming-profession:

Oh Mr Freetard, you work as a programmer, do you? How interesting. So do you perform all your corporate programming duties for free, and earn your keep by selling personally branded mousemats on the side?

It is actually interesting, because the live-analogy actually applies to programming also; where is software slowly but surely moving too? Towards hybrids, like Software-as-a-Service, Software+Service, and other incarnations, as well as a 100%-on-the-internet model. A hybrid model is, incidentally, also the way gaming-companies like Shanda combat the problem of piracy in China.

But a large part of what he’s saying, I do agree with. Releasing your stuff online, for free or a freemium, is most suitable to artists whose concerts are sure to be sold out: NiN and Radiohead. Plenty of artists, like my mother who paints, just want to create art and sell it; not release it for free and do crazy live stunts to earn a living (even though that’s what’s entrepreneurship is all about).

I guess, when he calls for a renaming of copyright to Right-to-Eat, that perhaps he has a point. There are plenty of people out there, who don’t get copyright, don’t care about it, or justify it through a self-serving argument.

I don’t particularly think that prosecution works that well here—crime is global, while crime-prevention is local—but perhaps we need more education; perhaps we need the equivalent of pictures of blackened lungs on cigarette-packs to be extended to media? The only problem with that are videos like this (couldn’t find the original, so enjoy the parody), which, ironically, mainly target those people who paid for a DVD, while pirates smartly removed that “feature” long before releasing the DVD into the wild. Or perhaps we do need DRM, like the kind that Steven Poole refers too, tying you to your Kindle or iPod?

It’s definitely a tricky situation, and I’m not sure there is an easy answer that works for everyone. I’ve heard of people pasting a big copyright-sign across their pictures; of authors, who read chapters or the whole book for free through a weekly podcast, while selling the book on the side for the impatient. And of course, of Radiohead and NiN, both of whom are huge artists, but who didn’t exactly employ an all-your-eggs-in-one-basket formula either.

But what about my namesake, Vincent van Gogh, an incredibly talented, yet socially awkward individual? If we expected people like him to “perform live” to earn money, perhaps we would have never seen his art today.

This piece is written by Vincent van Wylick, co-author on Tech IT Easy. The picture is courtesy of csauce.wordpress.com.

Hello again, Vincent here. Excuse me, I seem to be in a cranky mood lately, as far as technology goes, probably explaining my public rants towards the Facebooks and Scobles of this world. But I can’t let that stop me, here’s another one, aimed at Google’s Android.

Yesterday, Rich Miner, group manager for mobile platforms for Google, announced that he believed the distribution of Android to surpass that of the iPhone-OS. Maybe so, but I have little doubt that it will be equally, if not more crippled than the iPhone has been so far.

Three reasons:

1. hardware,
2. carriers,
3. and the business-model.

On the hardware-side, Google will have to design an OS for a number of mobile-technologies, ranging from Samsung to Motorola. The kind of legacy-support kind of reminds me of a number of other software-projects: Microsoft’s Windows, which is historically (maybe not currently) known for its software-vulnerabilities due to its legacy-support; and cross-platform web-ware like Adobe’s Air and Flash, and Sun’s Java, both not exactly top-of-the-line in terms of performance and elegance. But, cross-platform alone has never stopped developers from creating (mostly free) applications. So, my worries here are security and user-interface, and I expect the latter to especially suck.

The other side is the carriers, who have shown no qualms about enforcing their rules on both hardware- and software-manufacturers. Fact is that while iPhone 2.0 may become more open, it will be limited by Apple to not disrupt their business-arrangement with carriers. This is implemented in two ways: in the restricted range of applications that can be developed for the iPhone (e.g. very likely no Skype) and the distribution of said applications (centralised and approved by Apple or NO GO).

Finally, the business-model. When the iPhone SDK was released, it was reportedly downloaded more than 100,000 times. Very likely this happened for several reasons:

1. the market for Apple-products is notably less price-sensitive (k-ching, baby!);
2. iTunes as a store (easy $$$);
3. VCs like Kleiner Perkins are holding out carrots (omg, I’m gonna be rich);
4. and it has strong relationships with carriers (a big barrier for mobile software-publishing so far).

Will the same thing happen for Google’s Android? Let’s see.

• It’s Google, and we all know that the company does not have a history for charging for things.
• While Google has created ecosystems of “apps” with its iGoogle and Google desktop-service, I don’t think any of these are premium. Also, their video-store, its one commercial platform, has failed.
• Similarly, it’s releasing the OS for free under an Apache Software License, and we all know how easy it is to make money on open-source platforms.
• There is a fund, but it comes from Google, not exactly a signal that the market believes in Android’s commercial success
• It does have confirmed partnerships with carriers like China Mobile, Sprint Nextel, and T-Mobile, but how restrictive will these partnerships be?

And probably some other things I forgot.

I may be cranky, but believe me that I want software like Android to succeed. Just like I want a self-sufficient Linux OS (no, it doesn’t exist!). But Google’s strategy appears too fragmented, too focussed on the technology, and too little on the business of it. Maybe, maybe, Google is planning to become a carrier themselves. There have been plenty of rumours about that since the 700 Mhz auction. Instead, I expect that their main goal is to extend their advertising-platform as efficiently as possible to the mobile sphere, and that that would be incompatible with a large technology-push towards building physical networks.

What do you think? Thumbs up or down for Android and why???

Here’s a quick question to all people used to either interact with or being part of software development teams.

Consider a software vendor, a good one, and its technical headcount. It is no secret that R&D teams aren’t made of software developers only. In order to be deployed successfully, architectures and code need to be tested by a QA department (QA = quality assurance) where professional testers run through thousands of automatized-or-not scenarii; documentation; technical support staff help the install base with potential regressions occuring during updates and coping with changing information system environments; localization project managers monitor translations of the software: and last but not least, application engineers actually parameterize the software at clients.

Now my question, how many technical staff should you account for every software development engineer? I figured out an average ratio of 1 to 4, that is to say, for every technical team of 100 there should be around 25 software developers actually hacking code.

I know there exists extremes but by and large, from what I’ve seen, I don’t think I’m too far from the reality with a 1:4 developer / all-categories-technical-staff ratio.

What do you think? Feel free to describe what the company does when sharing your experience, because, since there are very large discrepancies between, say, an SAP that manufactures ‘heavy’ enterprise software and any web application designer that may not necessarily run industrialized testing and that has no professional service department, we might not get nuances at first sight.

PS: the ratio will also depend on the maturity stage of the company: at Microsoft, [# of develops]/[develops + Microsoft Consulting Services staff + developer evangelists + localization engineers + testers (1 for each develop) + architects] approximately equals 1/4 (1 to probably 5 ot 6 adding documentation specialists; & 1 to much more if you consider the system integrator ecosystem that actually does the application engineering). But the company is rather mature and therefore can afford to focus on quality of execution rather than productivity in execution. Which probably wouldn’t be the case for an enterprise software startup for obvious resource reasons. Anything to share? Best and worse practices, per specific industry (Web 2 / UGC, Video Games, enterprise, affordable consumer traditional applications, etc.) most welcome. I need to test my own budgeting assumptions

No it is not. And when you think about it’s kind of a good thing. Because it means that the path from technology to revenue is that much shorter. Of course, the other side of that coin is that there are many people competing for that same revenue.

After writing my last post on this, and Marc’s comments, I started to ask myself some questions, such as:

• What is technology? Is it mechanical, digital, a hybrid?
• What is software? Is it the nail, the hammer, the glue, something else?
• Should software be an end-product? Is is worth anything without the hardware, is hardware worth anything without software?
• What would it take to make something innovative, aka. high-tech?

Certainly not an exhaustive list, but a good start.

My favourite of these is the fourth question, what it takes to be innovative. Back, when I was trying to convince myself to go into software, my main objective was to create something that would change my / the world in some ways. But it was strange, every-time I was thinking about a product, or rather a service (I see software as a service), I was always thinking that it would be so much better if there were hardware designed for / with it.

It’s the age-old debate of Apple vs. Microsoft, Quicktime vs. Flash or Java, a console vs. a computer, Firefox vs. IE/Safari etc. The difference between these “technologies” is that the one is designed to be—somewhat—platform-agnostic, and the other is designed for a platform.

We’ve rehashed Apple vs. Microsoft many times, so I won’t go into that too much. But if you look at cross-platform apps like Flash (as well as AIR) or Firefox, they are clearly feature-rich, but in many cases laggy as hell. I would consider both an inferior product, simply because it does not work as well as other competing products on the same hardware. The same with Windows, which has huge legacy-support, but is in some cases (a loud minority, I’m sure) not as “plug & play” with the systems it runs on, as e.g. Apple’s OS X, or the Xbox-OS.

Both of which are designed for the specific hardware, and it is actually the whole package—hardware + software—that is considered the innovation.

For something to be considered innovative, it should be seen as the whole end-product for the consumer. A minor example. When I installed OS X Leopard on my ancient (but perfect) G4-laptop, it gave me the two-fingered right-click. By all accounts a hardware-innovation, a tiny one, but which made the whole interface better. I’m not sure if software on its own could ever achieve a similar effect on the user.

So what would it take for real innovation to occur? It would have to be a paradigm-shift. We’re seeing a lot of interesting software coming out, a good example probably being Second Life. Yet Second Life—which was inspired by a world called “The Metaverse” that an author, Neal Stephenson, came up with in a book, called “Snow Crash,” is nowhere close to that ideal.

The reason is that, from a user-perspective, the Metaverse started with the interface—gloves and a helmet hooked up to a box—which allowed the user to literally hook into a system. How does Second Life ever compare to that? Instead, it forces users to be immobile behind their PCs, staring into a 2-d interface, imagining themselves to be in a world, in which they clearly are not.

And, in my eyes, the same applies to lots of software designed for an interface that simply does not innovate.

Facebook, Windows, OS X, Open Social, AIR, etc. All platforms actively marketing for developers. Yet how much of that marketing is happening in hardware, an area which has largely been commoditised over the last 20 odd years to the degree that R&D in that area must have been stagnating much.

You do see some changes. Microsoft, when it started on the Xbox, made a paradigm-shift. Apple has been doing the same for years, but now at an exploding rate. Microsoft’s Surface will be very interesting, as will the next version of Windows, though still restricted to a 2-d interface. And there’s probably 100s of other examples, which I can’t think of now.

The thing is that innovation in software has exploded in the last decades, as has, to a lesser degree, hardware. But we have reached a mature-level where the novelty has worn off. For software to become interesting again, we need new hardware—a new way to interface with technology, that takes us away from the boring old mouse and keyboard, and allows us to the live the mobile life for which our physical bodies were actually designed.

The Wii is a good example of what happens when you don’t just focus on hardware, you don’t just focus on software, but you focus on how your product can actually become useful in the lives of people that are not geeks, early adopters, or the loud minority.

Vincent out. This is my last post this year, I think.

If you’re serious about software development &/or IT infrastructure, you can’t miss the Tech Ed developer training event between November 5th and November 9th in Barcelona. All the best developers from the very best European software publishers will be there. And I’ll be there too (as the outlayer, the worst developer in the room), to support IDEAS startups Chief Technical Officers making it to the EMEA TechEd. A few days ago, I chose the sessions I am going to attend. It’s going to be a great learning experience, not to mention the fun side as I’m going there with a bunch of wild animals from the French Developer & Platform Evangelism group of which I belong to at Microsoft. So, here’s my agenda for Tech Ed:

Mon, 5 Nov 2007

Putting the User Back into Architecture

Windows Live Platform: An Open Discussion

Why Software Sucks

Principles and Patterns of Security

Life Beyond Distributed Transactions: An Apostate’s Opinion

Implementing Microsoft SQL Server Express Edition

Tue, 6 Nov 2007

ASP.NET: Why, What, How and When?

Build Your Own Software Factory

Understanding Software + Services

Improving Software Safety and Reliability

Applying Ergonomics to the User Interface

Wed, 7 Nov 07

Exploring the Building of Software + Services

Applications with Microsoft S+S Reference Bits

Communities? Can They Really Help My Business, My Day-to-Day Job, and My Career?

Identity for .NET Applications: A Technology Overview

Agile Development with Team System

Thu, 8 Nov 2007

Exploring Event Driven Architectures

Self-Paced Hands-on Labs and CommsNet Open

ASP.NET Roadmap

The Irresistible Forces Meet the Moveable Objects Auditorium

Understanding the Data Mining Add-Ins for Excel

Software Plus Services

Fri, 9 Nov 2007

Blogging Panel

Top 10 Mistakes Developers Make – Tales of an Over-Worked IT Pro

Windows CardSpace Case Study 1: Identity Providers – Experian

The Future of IT

Web Application Security

Not bad, is it? I look forward to being there sooo much. And on top of that, I have many friends to visit in Barcelona.

A not-so-interesting, but worth watching once, buzz marketing video for SalesForce’s AppExchange platform & Force framework. You could basically leave content as it is and replace SalesForce – AppExchange – Force by: Microsoft + CRM 4.0 ‘Titan’ + .NET; Facebook + Facebook API; Twitter + Twitter API; Google + GWT; Adobe + Flash + Flex; etc. I like the overall approach but I think the video lacks specific content.

What I found rather innovative here is SalesForce’s notion of “Platform as a Service”, that is getting close to the concept of “Software + Service” (thorough post to come sooner or later) introduced by Microsoft. It seems market players converge on the idea of interaction of ’solid’ platforms developed and marketed by software market leaders + a number of customized services run by an ecosystem of independent software vendors & software developer communities. In other words, Platform as a Service = Software + Service.

[youtube=http://www.youtube.com/v/EbnCUqAL6UM]

Xobni is an amazing OBA S+S example.

But what is OBA (see links here, and here, and here, and here)? What is S+S (see my quick explanation to Vincent here)?

[youtube=http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=CYwNhyvCmuo&eurl=http%3A%2F%2Fwww%2Exobni%2Ecom%2Fblog%2F]

Thanks to Julien for spotting Xobni.