Outside Innovation

Microsoft Opens XBox Gaming, O/S and Office APIs

The "new" Microsoft  (Ballmer/Ray Ozzie combo) is opening up in a variety of ways! This week, Microsoft made two significant announcements that will foster outside innovation. The first one that really grabbed my attention was this one: Xbox 360 Becomes First Video Game Console Ever to Invite the World to Create Original Games and Share Online With Millions.

Awesome! I can't wait to see what happens as the geeks who have already flocked to XBox contribute their coding skills to creating games for the Xbox platform. It's not yet clear to me how truly "open" this platform is, e.g. whether game developers will be able to extend each others' games. The image at the right is from "Culture" -- one of the seven user-created games developed bt Hidden Path Entertainment using the XNA platform that Microsoft featured at the Game Developers Conference.

Here's the description included in the official press release:

"An Xbox 360 community game created using Microsoft's XNA Game Studio software and XNA Creators Club membership will be able to be submitted for distribution on Xbox LIVE. Each community-created game must then undergo a thorough peer-review process and be evaluated for accuracy in representation and appropriateness. Community game developers will be able to beta test the process this spring and will be able to distribute their games on Xbox LIVE by the end of this year."

I look forward to learning more about how "open" this environment is.. Of course, Microsoft hopes to attract millions of budding game developers. The official release goes on to say:

"Xbox 360 once again broke new ground by introducing a new, open distribution service for games created by the community and soon playable by its 10 million Xbox LIVE members. Community-created games on Xbox LIVE will quickly double the size of the Xbox 360 game library. By the end of 2008, Xbox 360 owners will have access to more than 1,000 games, making it the largest, most creatively diverse library across all next-generation platforms."

At the Games Developer Conference this week,

"Chris Satchell, general manager and chief XNA architect at Microsoft, announced that seven games created using XNA Game Studio 2.0 would be available immediately for Xbox 360 owners to download from Xbox LIVE Marketplace."

In reading through some of the heated discussions among participants at this week's Game Developers' Conference, the "consensus" seems to be that Microsoft is releasing a true "Game Developers' Platform" and creating a marketplace in which game developers can strut their stuff, whereas Spore (coming in October 2008) and LittleBigPlanet (LBP) are "content-creation systems inside of a game."

The second "opening up" of Microsoft this week is of course the announcement that Microsoft will finally publish open APIs both to its OS and to its office applications.

Integrated Search Marketing Tools

We're finally on the cusp of having search marketing tools that will give marketers more control over the customers' search experience starting with search engines and quickly getting to the right content on your site. The trick, according to our search maven, Sue Aldrich, is to closely monitor what people search for and find (or don't find) on your site and to use those phrases to optimize what shows up on Internet search engines as well as to ensure that both the landing pages and the content you show on those pages are tuned to yield the specific information and/or products that people are seeking.

The good news is that there are new and better tools now available to search marketers that help integrate these two seeker experiences for you. The other good news is that many of our clients are now merging their SEO experts and their Site Search experts into one integrated team of search marketing experts. You need both integrated information and integrated expertise to excel in search marketing.

On February 14, 2008, Sue reviews SLI Systems' Learning Search. This is a hosted solution that provides an integrated approach and a set of experts to supplement your own team. You'll find that the "learning" approach the SLI uses has some interesting benefits.

SLI Systems Learning Search Ecommerce January 2008
Integrated, Automated Internet and Site Search Marketing
By Susan E. Aldrich, February 14, 2008
http://psgroup.com/research_868.aspx

Making Customer-Contributed Content Work for Your Business

The usual term for this phenomenon is “UGC”—user-generated content. I prefer the term customer-contributed content because it rolls off the tongue better and fits our definition of a customer as an end-user of the goods and services you provide (whether they or someone else pays for those services).

On February 6, 2008, the Professional and Scholarly Publishing (PSP) division of the American Association of Publishers held its annual symposium. For the second year, I was the moderator for a day of fascinating talks and case studies. The topic at hand was Cyberscholarship: Where are our users taking us? The objectives for the meeting were to gain a clearer sense of:

1) How do today’s readers, scholars, and professionals want to interact around professional and scholarly content?

2) How do they want to use and interact with published research?

3) How do they want to learn from each other?

The panelists included Kevin McKean, VP and Editorial Director of Consumers Union; Paris Patton, VP of consumer research firm Sachs Insights; Mark Ranalli, President and CEO of Helium; Melissa Burke, Director of Strategic Partnerships for Sermo; and Bryce Johnson, President and CEO of CafeScribe. What all of the panelists had in common was a passion to make it easy for customers to interact with and to contribute content.

My Take on Yahoo! / Microsoft

My first reaction to the news that Microsoft wants to absorb Yahoo! was “of course.” After all, Microsoft has not managed to stop Google from becoming the only technology player that matters. Microsoft has not stopped Google from becoming the only player whose strategy is the center of the universe. Microsoft held the coveted position as the company around which everyone planned his strategy for two decades. Now it’s Google. Venture capitalists, investors, content providers, advertisers, businesses, and technology firms plot their courses around Google’s trajectory. This must really annoy Microsoft! More pragmatically, Microsoft needs a competitive search marketing/advertising offering. There’s a lot of money at stake. There’s brand at stake. There’s mindshare at stake. Search has become the starting point for all network interactions. Microsoft can’t afford to cede that first point of user-contact to Google. It’s worse than losing the browser wars. People search from their mobile phones, from their PDAs, from their cars, from their phones, from their TVs. 

My second reaction to the Microsoft/Yahoo! take-over bid was, “oh no!” This is not good for customers. Having fewer choices never is. Having Microsoft—an already untrusted behemoth as our alternative to Google—(can we trust Google not to spy on our every move?) gives us two “big brothers” from which to choose and fewer alternatives. I immediately began thinking about white knights. Barry Diller, Rupert Murdock, John Malone all came to mind—so did eBay, Amazon, and Apple. I was intrigued that Google stepped up to the plate and offered a helping hand to stave off Microsoft. “Come partner with us, the way that AOL has done, and we’ll help you keep the green giant at bay.”

Enterprise Mash Ups and SOA

As I plunged back into the world of Web 2.0, mash ups, and gadgets, I noticed that there's now a huge buzz around "enterprise mash ups" and a convergence between the worlds of Service-Oriented Architectures and Ajax/Executable Web/Mash Up promulgators. This epiphany has been too long in coming. The handwriting has been on the wall for a while. And pioneering lead users have been combining Web Services with end-user-friendly gadgets, using RSS and event-based syndication (publish and subscribe) for several years.

As usual, the hype around Enterprise Mash Ups will no doubt be extreme. It's already being pushed as the next nirvana for the IT-run around crowd. Use Web-based tools to snap together services. Leverage all the great utility services that are already out there (Google Maps, Amazon S3, Eventful, Flickr, YouTube... pick your favorite platforms and tools). You don't have to wait for your IT department to wrap your back-end application functionality into real Web Services, you can "cheat" by extracting data in the form of reports and turning them into RSS feeds, which you can mash up with graphical user interfaces and tools. This is the general spin. And there are now dozens of "roll your own" enterprise mash up platforms and toolkits springing up to absorb Venture Capital dollars and vie for our attention.

This convergence is a good thing. It's way overdue. It will be overhyped. But there are ways to take advantage of this trend without going off the deep end. I look forward to helping you chart your path!

Web 2.0 for B2B

This week's report is an annotated slide presentation. You'll find the slides on Slideshare.net at http://www.slideshare.net/pseybold/using-web-20-for-outside-i-nnovation-seybold-stm-dec-07/. This particular presentation was very well received by an audience of scholarly and technical publishers who wanted an update on the status of Web 2.0 in business. So I thought I'd try to recreate some of the points I made in the form of a narrative. I think podcasting the speech would have been more useful, but let me know whether this transformation of presentation turned into report format works for you or not. A simple thumbs up/thumbs down would be great!