Outside Innovation

Redundant Clouds; Next Gen Site Design

When Gmail went down for a couple of hours this week, I was annoyed but not distressed. As a small business owner, I rely on Google’s paid services for email and calendaring as well as on many of the company’s free services (e.g., Google Analytics).  Over the past three years, I have found Gmail to be as reliable and much less costly than our previous in-house, internally-hosted, and professionally maintained (by a full-time IT person) email system.

In monitoring my own calm reaction, I realized that I no longer rely on any single service to keep me online and in touch with the world. Like most of you, I have several email accounts on a variety of email services. I have messaging on my cellphone, Blackberry email and SMS, iTouch WiFi access, Internet phone service (free and paid), and both land line and cable Internet in my home/office and most of the places that I work from while travelling. I also use Facebook, Twitter, and other services to keep in touch with clients, family, and friends. Switching from one mode to the other isn’t really a problem. Not having the history or context available on my laptop or handheld IS a problem, so I’m quite conscious of making sure that I have access to my calendar and contacts (or someone to call or email who can access that info) in a pinch. I only begin to freak out when I am away from any source of Internet/Wireless connectivity. When I visit Uganda to work at the African Rural University, where connections are sparse and slow, I worry about missing something important. (But then I relax and realize that what I’m doing –working with smart young women who are changing people’s lives is MORE important than what I might be missing).

What I noticed in the chatter and punditry that surrounded the news of the recent 2-hour Gmail outage were three main threads of discussion:

1. What do you expect? It’s a cloud computing service. Don’t trust anything in the cloud!
2. What’s wrong with you guys? Don’t you use alternative emails (Facebook, AOL, Yahoo!) and alternative modes of communication (SMS, iPhone, Twitter)?
3. Big deal. It’s no worse than other email services and utility outages on services we have used.

Expect a Sea Change in Application and Information Architectures

Intersecting waves of technology are converging: Cloud computing, massive parallel processing, distributed file systems like Hadoop, dynamic provisioning to the cloud, embedded computing, open mobile platforms and APIs, and semantic publishing, to cite just a few. Patty’s Pioneers (technology architects) have been talking recently about how these phenomena will profoundly change the way we do business, use computers and address problems. We already have the ability to send huge volumes of information to the compute cloud to perform long-running, compute-intensive pattern detection. Google works that way. The genome project and many other scientific endeavors are enabled by this capability. You can solve BIG problems. You can offload bursty, compute-intensive applications. You can enable new capabilities like high-frequency trading.

Information, data types, and file formats are changing too. Scientific and technical data isn’t always organized in relational databases or spreadsheets. There are huge flat files, analog files, arrays, sequences, 3D models, and a myriad of data types and patterns that most business IT was never designed to address. We are sensing and detecting real-time changes in everything from weather to ocean pH. We perform chemical analyses, create molecular models, and find interrelationships among everything. We have massive amounts of genetic sequence data, with genome browsers, model organism databases, molecule- or process-specific databases.

Information that we want to share and have customers find and use is increasingly being tagged to accelerate semantic processing. Many of Patty’s Visionaries (customer-centric e-business leaders) have already embarked on large semantic tagging projects. They are convinced that, in their fields of endeavor, important concepts need to pop out of the sea of words and data so that these concepts can be linked to the appropriate behaviors and services. A company name came be linked to news, financial data, personnel information, products, patents, geography, partners, and customers. A chemical formula or a gene sequence can be linked, viewed, and acted upon with a staggering array of tools.

This next generation of distributed computing and pattern matching will unleash a new economy – with new opportunities for value creation.

As I contemplate the tremendous and revolutionary changes that will hit all of our businesses as a result of the new ways in which we can now detect patterns and process information, I am grateful for the magic of the human brain. Our intuition and emotions combine with our sense-making and pattern matching to make magical leaps across disciplines.

This next generation of computing architectures is upon us. It’s time to take the plunge. Say goodbye to Microsoft Word, say hello to N-dimensional arrays and patterns. Say goodbye to PDAs and laptops. Say hello to holograms you can gesture through.

Thoughts about Google's Web Operating System

Google announced this week that it will roll out Chrome OS for Netbooks and Internet-connected computers in 2010. My reaction: Why not? I already rely on Google for much of my Internet experience (email, calendaring, search). Why not keep going? I suspect I will like Chrome OS if it does, in fact, allow me to get up and running to access my email, calendar, and other critical applications within two seconds, backs up everything, and is accessible from anywhere that I can get online. No doubt Google Chrome OS will help spawn many new application services from open source developers. So I like the idea that we'll all have additional software platforms that will become popular enough to spur more innovation from a broader community of developers.

However, I don't expect that I will be migrating to a solely Google OS. I typically switch among three operating systems in the course of a working day. I don't care about the operating systems I use unless they get in my way. I do care about the applications and services I use. And these are increasingly network-based application services with rich user interfaces.

Among the applications and services I use today, Google's services are useful and good enough to get the job done. Apple's user experience on both hand-held and Mac is satisfyingly seductive. Microsoft's user experience for browsing, search, and office applications is improving precisely because Google and Apple provide great alternatives. I find Mozilla Firefox productive and generally adopt many of its third party plug-ins. I use Adobe's Flash, Flex, and AIR on a daily basis without being aware of them as I hop from widget to applet. I happily use Ajax-style interactive tools because they give me quick ways to accomplish my tasks and to iterate among different choices.

What do I want out of an operating system? Invisibility, plug and play peripheral support, security, back-up, performance, and stability.

The Real Killer Service: Filing. But what I really need is a better cross-operating system file system. Today, every OS has its own. None of them is quite right. Do I trust Google to build a better file system? No. Google thinks that search is the best way to find anything. Those of us who want to be able to impose our own mental model on the messy reality that we swim in, need to be able to do more than search and tag. There's a human need to categorize, classify, and organize things, as well as a need to find the things that have been mis-categorized or mis-filed. My ideal filing system would turn successful search queries into dynamic file folders. But it would also allow me to set up and re-set up my electronic filing systems as my needs evolve over time. Each previous filing hierarchy would still be "there." But as I evolve my thinking and re-categorize things, they would "move" to the new, current categorization scheme.

My filing system is my database for keeping track of things. I want to organize things into hierarchical categories and subcategories and to search and sort based on attributes that emerge over time.

I suspect that Google's desire to provide an operating system is a Trojan Horse for Google's desire to store (and index) all of my files and everything that I have pointed to, tagged, or linked. If Google really wants to be the utility that I use to interact with the world, they should focus on helping me categorize and organize my stuff. But since Google doesn't believe in "putting" things in folders, and human beings like to organize their own desk drawers, file cabinets, folders, and stacks, in order to make sense of the world, I'm still looking for the killer app. And it’s not an operating system.

Google Wave: It’s "My" Design, but Will I Use It?

I'm pretty sure that I’m responsible for the design of Google's new Wave. I can't take full credit. There are millions of Gmail/Google Chat users like me who no doubt provided the pattern on which Google's new weird communications offering is based.

I haven't yet had the pleasure of trying out Wave. But thanks to early tester, Rafe Needleman's Hands-on with Wave: Weird and quite wonderful, I recognized, right away that I was probably at least partly responsible for the breakthrough design pattern on which Wave is based.

"Getting started in Wave: It looks a lot like e-mail..."

(Credit: Screenshot by Rafe Needleman/CNET)

Google Chrome: Browser Plus a New Platform for Web Apps

Whenever Google announces a new major application, it's big news. This week, Google announced a new browser. I have to admit that despite my discomfiture at having yet another browser environment to learn, and to support for our end-customers, I am intrigued.

Comic Book Used as Launch Collateral

Google appears to be targeting technorati first—not just the usual technical early adopters, but the developer/architect community. I found the most interesting and useful part of the Chrome launch collateral to be the 38-page Chrome comic book. (Comics are a great way to convey a lot of information quickly. Product marketers of many other categories of products should take note!)

User-Generated Comic Book Parodies!

I wonder whether Google expected users to immediately begin creating spoofs using its own marketing collateral. But that's what has happened. If you want a quick way to see all the negative reactions to Google Chrome, check out these comic parodies:

* From Conde Nast's Portfolio.com
* From The Register

For those of you who want a shortcut to the technical pros and cons of Chrome, check out Charles Nutter's A Few Thoughts on Chrome.

Why You Should Pay Attention to Chrome

Anything Google does is important, since Google is the most powerful and most widely used platform on the Internet today. From a business/marketing standpoint, you'll want to be sure that your Web sites and portals are Chrome-friendly. From a technology strategy standpoint, you now have yet another browser and Web application platform to support and to consider when designing information and tools for your prospects, customers, employees, and stakeholders. Think of Chrome as a next-generation Web OS for rich Internet apps.

Google Strategy #1: Track Everything We Do

The biggest "aha" in Google Chrome is that the browser bar and the search bar are now one and the same. This makes a lot of sense to those of us who have become used to just typing a word or phrase to get to the right site(s).

Who Will Use Google App Engine?

At Web Expo 2.0, I attended the session on Google App Engine and listened to the Q&A between the Web applications developer community and the Google App Engine product development team. I also managed to get my own coveted code that will let me in to the beta program. Now, I just need to find a real developer I can work with to take advantage of this application platform. I’ve already gotten some push back from people who have looked at Google App Engine and claim that no real applications will wind up there. So I thought it would be useful to think about the kinds of Web Applications that are most likely to gravitate to Google and the kinds of people who will create them. The short answer is this: If your product or service is information, Google App Engine is of interest. If accessing and manipulating the information about your products and services is increasingly important to your prospects and customers, then Google App Engine should be of interest.

Business Strategists Who See the Potential. As the CEO of a small consulting/publishing business, I may not be Google’s target audience for this development platform, but I believe I actually represent the ideal strategist who can take advantage of this environment. There may be lots of other small business owners and professionals like me who will be early adopters. In my case, I’m looking for a Web applications platform upon which I can start over. I want to re-envision and redeploy Web applications that will provide value for my clients. Not just a new Web site, but a new Web platform. I want to be able to design, throw away, and redesign an iterative series of information-based applications. Why not start fresh with an infrastructure that I know will scale, that will be easy to search, and one that will have hundreds of thousands of developers sharing tips and techniques (as well as applications)?

Why Is Everyone Agog about Google’s OpenSocial ?

Last week Microsoft invested in Facebook. This week, Google unveiled the first details about its OpenSocial API platform. This move hit the news big time. Michael Arrington at TechCrunch broke the news. The New York Times ran Miguel Helft's and Brad Stone's story yesterday, and the Times' Saul Hansell blogged about it today. The blogosphere has been in a state of buzzaphoria for the past few days,  and Google's stock has soared again.

What Is OpenSocial? Instead of competing directly with other social networking providers, Google is spearheading an initiative to create a cross-social network set of APIs. As Stowe Boyd explains in his blog post, Google OpenSocial: The Open Common Services Approach, there are three key APIs:

• Profile Information (user data)

• Friends Information (social graph)

• Activities (things that happen, News Feed type stuff)

The way I read the preliminary information, the profile API enables you to request and send information about people; the Friends API enables you to request and offer connections and social graphs; The Activities APIs let you request and send information about activities (events, dates, locations, files, updates). Here's the link for the actual Google API (soon to be made live): OpenSocial API 

Instead of being platform-specific (working only with LinkedIn or Facebook, for example), the idea is to create a set of high-level standard calls that will work across social network platforms. Developers could then write applications to these “meta-APIs” and know that their applications can plug and play with dozens of social networking platforms.

eBay Refocuses on End-Customers’ Moments of Truth, Goes Back to Basics with Auctions and Community

eBay’s executives sold a new buyer-centric strategy to an audience of 10,000 eBay sellers and a smattering of buyers at the eBay Live conference held in Boston on June 14th through 16th.

Meg Whitman, eBay’s CEO, described the company’s strategy as “continuing to reignite the core auction experience….You will see more changes to eBay's buyer experience in the next 12 months than you probably have seen in the past three or four years,” Meg explained in an Associated Press interview on June 15th. The same Associated Press article went on to say, “Perhaps most dramatically, eBay is crafting a more social experience, so people browsing from isolated computers feel at least somewhat like they're going to the mall with a pack of buddies.” (One glimmer of where this strategy may lead appeared in May, when eBay purchased StumbleUpon.com for $75 million. StumbleUpon is a site that lets people rate and share favorite Web sites and information online.)

So eBay is going back to basics—re-focusing on its core auction business and on the vibrant user communities that were the hallmarks of the eBay experience that Pierre Omidyar brought to life in 1995.

Bill Cobb, President of eBay North America, described the “new” focus this way:

“We’re investing in the quintessential eBay experience of buying and selling—person to person—in an auction format. Today online shopping is mainstream—but it’s also becoming boring. We’re taking a stand for what we believe—that different is good—that people are more interesting than things—that eBay is still the place to go for the rockin’ deal—and that the combination of all these things is what has created eBay.com into a destination site like no other.”

Bill also described the moves as “a high stakes balancing act.” Why? Because eBay has a long history of trying to please its paying customers—its sellers—rather than focusing on the end-customers or consumers who purchase the sellers’ wares. eBay charges fees to the sellers, not the buyers. But, obviously, if buyers don’t continue to buy and bid at eBay and bring their friends, the company’s growth will slow. Bob Tedeschi reported that Meg Whitman said, “We're optimistic that these changes will translate to accelerated growth and help us change the trajectory of our two largest markets, U.S. and Germany.” Bob points out that, as of early June 2007, the volume of eBay’s U.S. listings was down by 3.8 percent, and “the listings on eBay’s German site had dropped by 16.5 percent earlier this month, compared with the similar time last year,” according to Citigroup. eBay’s revenues were $6 billion in 2006, with $1.1 billion of profit.

However, eBay has learned the hard way that making changes that adversely impact its 700,000 sellers is a risky proposition. So the trick is to convince the sellers that the changes eBay will be rolling out over the next few months will spawn more buying activity, attract more shoppers, and increase repeat shopping behavior.

Based on the early reports from eBayLive and on the relatively civil behavior of the vocal power-sellers at the eBay Live Town Meeting last Saturday, the early signs are that the renewed focus on the “buyer experience” appears to be working.

WEB 2.0, SOCIAL NETWORKING, AND CUSTOMERS IN CONTROL

Last week, we hosted our semi-annual Visionaries meeting for our lead users in the “Let Our Customers Re-Design Our Businesses” camp. Unfortunately, our timing isn’t so hot. O’Reilly’s Web 2.0 Summit was also last week. They have more technorati. We have customer-centric business leaders who are recruiting customers to help shift their corporate cultures to become customer-adaptive. The Web 2.0 Summit is on the West Coast. We’re meeting in Boston. But we’re both talking about many of the same things: customer-created content, customers taking control, customer communities, customers designing, sharing, and voting on each others’ creations, customers acting as promoters and marketers, customers acting as problem solvers and guides, and customers creating folksonomies.

For our customer-centric visionary business executives, Web 2.0 enablement is both a boon and a curse.

MICROSOFT (ORACLE) AND LINUX

We rarely write about Microsoft any more. Compared to Google, Microsoft has less and less effect on the business strategies of our corporate clients. Yet in the past two weeks, there has been a major sea change afoot that warrants commentary. Microsoft has apparently stopped seeing Linux as the enemy and realized that it’s time to co-opt Linux.

Linux is winning on the server. There’s no question about the fact that customers large and small want to mix and match Linux and MS boxes. Trying to fight against that customer tide wasn’t working. So Microsoft made peace with Novell (along with an infusion of $442 million) and is now promoting SUSE Linux and MS/Linux interoperability. Add to that news the fact that Oracle is now offering cut-rate prices for support of Red Hat’s Linux, and you have a major seismic shift afoot.

The Linux community is worried about fragmentation of Linux--two many variants promoted by too many strong parties. I don’t think these latest industry machinations are about fragmentation. I think they’re more about capitulation. Linux on the server is big business. It’s a business that Intel, Dell, HP, IBM, and Sun still hold dear. It’s a business that Microsoft can’t afford to lose to Oracle, Linux, Google, et al.