Regardless of whether you use Amazon services, if you are a Web 2.0 company, it makes sense to keep these firms to keep in mind for funding. And if you are using Amazon web services and are looking for money, you might want prepare your elevator pitch and contact one of the below:

Of course, the competition for their attention may be strong, as a full room came to hear a presentation focused mainly on Amazon's developer offerings and what they can do for business owners. One claim repeated several times was that Amazon eliminates 70% of the non-differentiating work for web startups. That means, things like building server farms, maintenance, and any operation that doesn't distinguish you from your competition. 70% strikes me as a bit high, but then my company produces desktop applications so I may not be the best judge. The other 250 people in the room were generally nodding their heads in agreement.

If you're already familiar with the Amazon web services pitch, there wasn't much new in the presentation. However, a question and answer session led by Andy Jassy, Senior VP of AWS, to clarify that Amazon is in fact building a distinct line of operation with its own investments and not using idle capacity sitting around until the next Christmas season, was interesting. True, they have not yet opened up Elastic Cloud Computing, but the servers currently running EC2 are dedicated for that purpose.

Some Take-aways

One participant wondered why Amazon hasn't started its own venture capital arm to make strategic investments in their AWS platform. Then we looked around the room and noticed all the engaged VC representatives and came to the conclusion they didn't need to.

The question of 'What happens if <Big Company> moves in on this space?' is becoming more common, and the big company on everyone's mind in this part of the world (Seattle) is Microsoft. To this, the only thing the AWS folks could do was smile and claim first mover advantages. However Matt McIlwain of Madrona Venture Group mentioned that he had just returned from a Silicon Valley forum where people thought Microsoft simply can't ignore what's happening here much longer. I did hear a rumor that the first Microsoft data center has come online in the last month, and one can only speculate about Google and Akamai, so stay tuned...

Speaking of data centers, there was a question among some attendees about whether Amazon actually owns or leases them. If someone from Amazon would like to clarify this in the comments, that would be appreciated.

Finally, something to watch for. Up to now, most of Amazon's success stories are in the consumer market. Since Amazon runs one of the largest consumer web sites, this makes a certain amount of sense. However, they must have designs on the business market too. While they have the technology, and events like today's certainly show developer interest, it may take a bit more effort to convince corporations their platform is secure enough for enterprise data. Once corporate IT departments begin buying in to Amazon's vision, the other big technology houses will be forced to respond. Given the recent stock market activity on AMZN, that time may come sooner rather than later.

Two reports have been released by major big business think tanks in the last two weeks which serve as bookends to a growing debate over the future of enterprise IT and, by implication, Web 2.0. On one side is Forrester Research and their contention that CIOs will spurn Web 2.0 startups and let the likes of Microsoft, Oracle and Google provide their 'best of breed' solutions. On the other side is The Leading Edge Forum and their multi-year study advising the enterprise to abandon intranets, live on the web and let IT and users cooperate in generating 'best of breed' solutions. It's hard to imagine both sides can be right. Like most indicators of the future, personal philosophy and position play a large part in interpreting the data. If you are a CIO, which do you find more appealing? Conversely, if you are a user, is your answer the same?

The IT Factor

What is the current role of IT? A quick Google search gives us a few options:

• Includes all matters concerned with the furtherance of computer science and technology and with the design, development, installation, and implementation of information systems and applications;
• a term that encompasses all forms of technology used to create, store, exchange and utilize information in its various forms including business data, conversations, still images, motion pictures and multimedia presentations;
• Information technology provides the "engine" used to drive useful information systems. This includes computers, software, Internet/Intranet and telecommunications technology.

The list goes on of course. Picking out recurring themes, we see IT defined as the 'engine' driving a corporations technological advantage, the means to automate repetitive functions and even the key to an organization's profitability and productivity.

I think everyone would agree with these definitions as the genesis of IT, but what we see today reminds me a lot of Cheetahs. Yes, the fastest mammals on earth. If a corporation needs to attack millions of database records and view the results in a nice report, they can often do so in record time - certainly compared to their corporate forefathers. Most corporate IT departments today are well suited to catching and devouring modern information problems. So much so that among all Fortune 500 IT departments, it may be difficult to tell if anyone enjoys an advantage or not. Uniformity has brought the great ability to move in a single direction at high speed.

But what if the game changes? Not just a permutation of current problems, but an evolutionary lurch of every business problem. How strong is a corporate IT group when today's viable solution providers have been whittled to a mere handful of well-known names. It's a situation not unlike the Cheetah's genetic stock: its very survival is threatened by the lack of variability. For instance, what if the next generation of business winners are selected by their ability to enhance communication - not just within the confines of business firewalls among colleagues, but outside the firewall with anybody that can provide an advantage? Furthermore, such choices in communication are highly individual. How will this square with IT departments that are trying to centralize every and all technology.

IT's Self Interest

Every generation there's a company that CIOs can purchase from which is considered 'safe' - perhaps because it's the best solution; certainly because everybody else is doing it. However, this is, in the long run, a self-defeating strategy. If there is no variation, then there is no advantage. If there is no advantage, then there is no superior profit margin. And if there is no superior profit margin, then there is no way to treat IT other than as a cost center. Suddenly the IT Cheetah is suffering from too little genetic variation and a decidedly herd mentality. If a social, more collaborative gene is suddenly needed, how much effort will be required to grow and nurture it - or is it even possible?

I re-read Nicholas Carr's well-written, compelling article The End of Corporate Computing. He proposes an excellent argument that business IT today is much like business power generation of yesterday - needed at the time, but better performed as a specialized entity that can properly scale. As businesses realized the superiority of commoditized and standard power distribution, they dismantled their water wheels and plugged into the grid. As a result, even though we take it for granted, anyone can go to any lighting store, purchase a lamp, plug it in and work well into the night. 'The End of Corporate Computing' makes a lot of sense when IT is compared to a utility.

In this scenario, is it any wonder why CIOs want to buy, as Forrester asserts, only from the large providers? If indeed IT is undergoing a transformation similar to a power grid, then it follows that the focus of IT is how to do more with less. This in turn means less resources for implementing anything requiring more pieces, hence the desire to purchase broader solutions from fewer and larger vendors. Taking things to their logical conclusion, it's not a stretch, and even quite probable, that in the end IT will be a department of one - choosing, among the commoditized solutions, the best fit for the company. However, while information can travel in bits and bytes at the speed of light, it is not electricity. And a person is most definitely not a lamp.

The Spark of an Idea

If lightening strikes and no one is there to see it, did it really happen? A forest fire might be an indication. If an original manuscript is dropped in a forest and no one is there to read it, does it really exist? There might be physical indicators like sheets of paper blowing in the wind, but even the combined works of William Shakespeare would be indistinguishable from a ream of paper - if no one was there to read it. Unlike electricity, information has no inherent, physical properties. Information requires both interpretation and communication to give it value. As of today, that frames information technology as a wholly human endeavor. Furthermore, institutions such as working groups, professional guilds and even universities demonstrate that the best way to exchange ideas and knowledge is still person-to-person.

What is the value of IT to corporations if the only option is to select from an increasingly homogenous pool of options? If at the end of the day two corporations have indistinct technology, they will be forced to compete by other means: marketing, sales, partnerships, COST, etc... Indeed, what is the value of a corporation itself? What it produces, the sum of its parts, or the knowledge of its employees?

Enter the study and report from the major think tanks. Obviously, as a software vendor, I would like IT to be as open and welcoming as possible. Unfortunately the implication of the Forrester report is rather chilling. Much like Joshua Bell playing violin during rush hour, you may have one of the great technical solutions in the world, but - as of today - the audience will be meager. And things will only get worse as CIO budgets constrict, solution providers winnow and IT slowly disappears. 

Information U

But what if IT let technology be commoditized and instead focused on information? Could there be an 'educational' model whereby corporations may be able to compete less on technology and more on  information - specifically interpreting, analyzing and communicating information; much like a university? We all recognize the value of a Harvard or MIT, for example. So could IT departments eventually hold similar prestige and value?

Doug Neal and The Leading Edge Forum presents this more compelling alternative. The LEF recognizes enterprise IT as a social contract among individuals and outlines a maturation step for everyone - IT, employees and management - in order to achieve the next generation of technology and business requirements. What the LEF describes to me is IT developing into more of an interactive, bi-directional department that concentrates less on policing and more on supporting its employees. In return, employees will have the responsibility to educate themselves on best practices and even bear the consequences of their decisions. As a result, employees will be able to choose the appropriate tools for their needs, information technology will again provide corporations with advantages over competitors. Accordingly, Web 2.0, and the entire software industry, should explode as the next generation arrives and is adopted.

Are corporate users ready for such power? Henry Ford began mass producing automobiles in 1908. However many states waited twenty years or more before developing guidelines for proper usage, establishing testing and culpability rules and requiring licenses for operation. If the PC revolution truly began with the IBM PC in August of 1981, then - like the automobile - the workplace is ready for more autonomy. By relaxing its vise-like grip on the technological wheel, IT can actually save itself from the bend in the road. By adopting a different social contract, IT may thrive again as differentiator in business - not by its ability to babysit the workforce, but by its ability to educate.

In May of 2003 Nicholas Carr put forth the argument that IT Doesn't Matter. In case there was any lingering doubt about Mr. Carr's views of Information Technology departments in the workplace, The End of Corporate Computing appeared in the Spring of 2005. While the essays have come and gone, one thing that actually has remained is corporate IT departments. Indeed, walk into any company today and IT's relevance is abundantly clear in myriad forms and options: desktops, laptops, cellphones, mobile devices, WiFi, terrabytes of storage, etc. The question isn't whether IT will go away, but rather, given all these choices and complexity, what will IT become? Doug Neal, a Research Fellow at the Leading Edge Forum, in collaboration with a Consumerization Working Group comprised of Fortune 500 industry veterans, has been studying this issue for several years and was kind enough to share his research with Read/WriteWeb. Their report, entitled Harnessing Web 2.0: Enterprise Strategies for Living on the Web, proposes that IT embrace the development of the internet, trust your employees, educate them on tools and live on the web.

• Can you make your numbers next year just by doing what you did last year?
• Where will the ideas come from to make your new numbers?
• Will the growth of your business increasingly require successful collaboration with customers, partners, suppliers and other organizations?
• What is the role of the IT organization in helping the company to make its new numbers in this new world?

The Complexity Ahead

In 2005 Ray Kurzweil's The Singularity is Near hypothesized that technology is growing at an exponential rate. Even more important, or unfortunate, is that human beings (according to Kurzweil) are very poor at extrapolation and unable to handle rapidly increasing complexity. Which leads me to believe that Ray didn't have kids. My 16 month old daughter has observed my time in front of the computer and has no compunction about manipulating the mouse or pounding the keyboard. But toddlers aren't the ones running multi-million dollar technology centers (yet!) and the point is well taken that the increasing rate of change is difficult for IT professionals who have finally managed to build reliable systems with yesterday's tools. It's only natural one would like to tend to the system that works rather than reinventing things again. But the truth is, what IT currently has is the aforementioned castle - built on keeping everything inside.

As the report makes clear, this is obviously not a long term solution. Just as manufacturing began assembling commoditized parts, the technology needed to run and scale a business will be solved better and cheaper by external producers rather than internal workers. For example, the study lists Adobe's Rich Internet Application initiatives and Amazon web services as two prominent advancements that corporate IT would be well advised to look at and consider using. (ReadWriteWeb has been covering Adobe's and Amazon's visionary technology as well).

In fact, all of the players one would expect are mentioned in this study, all making a bid for the next generation of enterprise needs: Google for collaboration, Microsoft and Intel for virtualization, Salesforce.com for an on-demand model, etc. More importantly, as each of these vendors are offering solutions that commoditize traditional IT roles, corporate users - and management - are encouraging IT to implement and use best-of-breed instead of prevent and use what kind of/sort of works. 

Just as the original PC revolution forced the creation of IT, the next generation of web technology is forcing IT to make a choice: vainly reinforce the castle again or open the gates and let information flow with enlightened users. I would recommend purchasing the report for details on exactly how this is being accomplished. What I can divulge from this report is an illuminating example of what one well-known corporation is doing today.

BP's Revolution

'Living on the Web' is a fascinating study - not so much by recognizing trends and needs of the internet and business, but because it comes from a group of big business thinkers dedicated to big business issues. What makes it powerful is actual examples of big business changing - in this case British Petroleum. When BP set about improving IT performance, they evaluated better ways to use public infrastructure and commodity computing, but more importantly they evaluated their employees knowledge and responsibility in the workplace and re-evaluated what IT's role should be.

Graphic from Harnessing Web 2.0: Enterprise Strategies for Living on the Web

Instead of IT edicts, employees were given the responsibility - including a budget - to build and configure their computing needs. Instead of issuing rules, BP  began issuing a Computer Driver's License. A BP employee was given an increased role in managing and protecting their desktop environment, from keeping anti-virus software current to being responsible for licensing practices. In turn, IT was able to reduce its overhead and turn on the internet full time instead of maintaining an intranet/internet duality.

Not that this has been simple. As the reports states:

Although the idea of 'Living on the Web' has gained considerable support within BP, especially among business executives, there are still instances where IT’s first reaction is to control, not support or teach the users. It is a reflexive reaction born of years running IT that way. When he sees examples of this attitude in meetings, Jim Ginsburgh, VP of Enterprise Architecture, says, "We trust these people with multimillion-dollar drilling platforms. Why won’t we trust them with a PC?"

The implications are profound. Instead of spending the bulk of their time monitoring and enforcing user behavior, IT can distribute the work and manage complexity by allowing users more autonomy - by trusting them. This lets IT focus on more pressing corporate, bottom-line needs like the best computing power for the cheapest cost. More importantly, it puts IT in a supportive role as employees leave the intranet castle and manage their own way in the internet world.

Will IT go away? Not as long as there are computers on your desk, on your lap or in your ear. Will IT's role begin changing in the very near future? The Consumerization Working Group, the Leading Edge Forum and Doug Neal certainly think so.

Like a fine fragrant perfume, Amazon has a revolutionary technology sitting right under everyone's noses. Their happy accident? Building a reliable, scalable and robust ecommerce system. While I'm sure Jeff Bezos didn't envision his online company being compared to perfume sprays, the fact of the matter is, even after immense technological investment, retail needs a lot of perfume to make the margins smell nice-- even if you're online.

But in their quest to prove to the world that online retail is the wave of the future, Amazon has created not just a fine mist. They have unexpectedly created a vapor cloud - or internet cloud - that is ready for ignition. Most fortunately for Amazon, they've been able to build one of the world's most impressive, massively scalable datacenter systems. Most fortunately for you, they're willing to share it. And most fortunately for corporate programmers, you're about to be relevant again.

How valuable is a robust, secure, scalable and reliable computing platform that allows you to store and retrieve any kind of digital data from anywhere in the world at anytime of the day? While your average high school student doesn't have much use for one, technology visionaries and corporate titans have been willing to pay big money to build such platforms. Groove Networks ran through approximately $120 million of investment in order to build and convince the world that theirs was robust, secure, scalable and reliable. Microsoft, which purchased Groove in 2005, is spending upwards of $2 billion in order to do the same thing. Google's entire business model requires them to reinvest huge amounts of capital into their storage platform. Throw in Yahoo and Baidu and it's clear that such computing power is seen as a technological edge.

However a high school student can rent one of the best, most proven, storage platforms of them all -- for a little less than $.50 per month. If he or she is willing to lay off the occaissional candy bar, he/she can be on an equal web infrastructure footing with the richest technology companies in the world. If I was an investor in MSFT, I might even ask if investing $200 million in Amazon makes more sense than $2 billion on your own technology and starting from scratch. In fact, taking it one step further, I might even be worried that Amazon's examples treat .NET as just another language - alongside Java, Ruby, PHP, Python and Perl. Another $1.8 billion into .NET and Visual Studio might take care of that, especially for those prized corporate programmers.

So Easy a High Schooler Can Do It

Like anything worthwhile, it takes a bit of time to figure out the best way to exploit it. The obvious comes first: use Amazon's storage capacity and scalability to store data such as images or globs of backup data. Indeed, a simple scan of Amazon's Simple Storage Service solutions shows many backup, photo sharing and large email attachment services. Furthermore, most of these services are web-based and so their single greatest cost is usually bandwidth. Hence Amazon's marketing focus on web 2.0 apps as their clientele. This makes perfect sense, as it fits the world's current multi-tiered architecture: the simple browser on the client, the business logic on a web server and now the robust data store on the backend.

Many well known and successful companies are exploiting this today: SmugMug, 37Signals and MyBlogLog to name a few. Would you know it buy using these services? Probably not, unless you have a keen eye reading the urls flash by as elements on your web page are downloaded. Does it matter? Not one bit. Each of these services uses Amazon S3 in order to offload the work of sending images and documents off their servers and onto Amazon's. As a result, each company can focus on their distinctiveness and bring it to market as quickly as possible, without worrying so much about infrastructure. In some cases it's enough to prove the concept and sell to a large company in just a few months.

The Next Fortunate Event

In the US there is a saying: "Only Nixon could go to China.". While Amazon has positioned itself as a proven resource for eager online entrepreneurs, they have also (accidentally?) created a solution that makes the client chic again - actually both the Client and the Server. Indeed, Amazon's Simple Storage Service takes us back to the 1980s, resurrects Client/Server architecture and provides it on such a scale that it actually works.

In the late 1980s, when C/S became a holy grail, it quickly sprang a leak at the supper table as large deployments grappled with networking protocol decisions, scaling issues, big capital investments for servers and, of course, maintenance. Amazon has moved these giant obstacles aside and resurrected something most thought dead. And this from an online department store!

While Amazon is still very much a consumer site selling anything they can display on a web page, at some point people will see the light and realize that a lot of C/S architecture implemented, deployed and wheezing along in corporations around the world can be refactored with services like Amazon S3. By providing the ultimate server, Amazon has made it possible for programmers to build corporate client software that a) actually scales and b) actually cuts costs - no more corporate servers to procure, house and maintain. A corporate programmer can create a client that can scale for the entire organization by using a good GUI tool and something only moderately more complicated than File.Open. Web application stacks of functionality might not look as appealing compared to this new reality. (Have you noticed that programming stacks have evolved like razor blades? We started with one, then two blades, then three solved the problem, until four blades really did the trick, and so on - in fact, aren't servers even called blades now?)

But while Amazon has provided the fuel, it's still up to the developers to provide the ignition; and right now we're dealing with sticks. By that I mean that Amazon isn't offering a database, nor server side scripting, interpreted languages, web server plugins or anything else to add complexity. Instead, at its core, is the world's greatest file server.

Groaning from the Peanut Gallery

The collective moan you just heard was from everyone who actually lived through the client/server days rolling their eyes and recalling how difficult it was to merge everyone's changes into a single file on the server. That was indeed a huge problem and yes it did lead to C/S being discredited. HOWEVER, the problem was twofold: 1) tackling multi-user scalability issues for the server and 2) tackling multi-user data issues for the client. In the 1980s, personal computing was still in its infancy, and nascent applications struggled to meet the needs of a single user, much less two.

If we look at the path highly available and scalable servers have travelled the last twenty years, we see a single machine-- even a really big one-- was simply inadequate for the task-- it's just too prone to failure. Furthermore, data needs have exploded past workgroups or departments in a single location-- people across the globe may need access to specific data now. Although it will take a post in the future to adequately describe how Amazon and others are building scalable and reliable data services, they do require multiple data centers located around the world connected by fiber optics, with each data center housing thousands of redundant systems built for quick switching in case of any single point of failure. In other words, a far cry from a PC running IBM OS/2 with an Intel 386 and 32 megs of RAM locked in a closet.

But while the server side of the equation has advanced over the last twenty years, can the same be said for the client? Or, more specifically, for the data clients are producing? No. While operating systems are more powerful today and prettier to look at, the state of application data today is not so different than it was back in the 1980s-- a stream of data supporting the state of the application as last saved by a single user. In this day and age, multiple people need to work in single context to produce a deliverable. Unfortuantely up till now this has been dealt with using the checkout, checkin, 'hey, you overwrote my data!' design pattern. The server has improved, now it's time for clients to respond in kind.

One More Event Before The Big Bang

The solution? How client applications read and write data needs to make the same advancements that server platforms made to make data storage reliable and delivery scalable. As application's become decoupled from the desktop, they should also decouple from the notion that a single user updates data at one time. Does only one person work ever work on a document? Does only one person ever participate in a project? Only if they wish to remain in the past.

Now that a superserver like Amazon S3 is almost a given (just a bit more reliability and maybe one more feature), applications can pull 'multi-user' files off, perform merge operations using local computing power and then place the file back in the cloud with an updated, combined view - ready for the next user to come along. Save doesn't have to mean 'write out my view of the data only' - it can also mean 'merge my view of the data with the group'. It might sound like a database, but it's really functionality that all apps working with groups, or in a group context, should have. The applications themselves will have the knowledge to merge files they recognize together - an excercise left to the developers of the next generation of client software.

There's a lot of refactoring to do, but this time the benefits are tangible. Entrepreneurs seem to be embracing Amazon web services, and the next wave can't be far behind. If Amazon manages to catch that next wave, they could be in for a great ride. And however it works out, in their quest for the ultimate online department store, Amazon might have finally solved the server side of the equation in Client/Server architecture. If they manage to attract the corporate programmers ready to build the next generation client pieces, then not only would Amazon again enjoy first mover advantage, but it would be for something worth a lot more than books. Even James Burke would have been proud of that connection.

What will the software solutions of tomorrow look like? They will be forged by four powerful elements: The Internet, Open Source, Mobile Devices and Web 2.0. We can debate the merits of each, but taken as a whole they will shape the genetic blueprint for the successful applications of tomorrow -- starting now.

Web 2.0

I had been wrestling with the merits of Web 2.0 for a while and I decided that MyBlogLog would be my case study to figure it out (since bought by Yahoo). It's the vertical strip of 10 avatars found on more and more 'social' sites, including to your right in Read/WriteWeb's sidebar. There's an odd fascination when you see 10 strangers enter your world. In the real world I would keep my eyes straight ahead and focus on the distant horizon. In the web 2.0 world, however, I can let my eyes wander and - best of all - click on somebody. While it may fulfill a voyeuristic impulse, it was hard to make a business case for this social metaphor. In fact, I had just about concluded web 2.0 was more sizzle than substance when I went to a Christmas party...

A good friend of mine is co-owner of a medical transcription company. He invited me to their Christmas party to see the whole operation and meet what makes their company work - the transcriptionists. Functionally, the act of transcribing audio files of medical dictation to digital content is what generates cash flow for the company. But the eye-opener was the relationships the transcriptionists had cultivated with their medical professionals. Each doctor may have an idiosyncrasy or two - a pronunciation issue or unknown idiom - which may require a transcriptionist to ask a question or two. One thing would lead to another and pretty soon the doctors would get to know their assigned transcriptionists and trust them.

As I sauntered around the room meeting the various transcriptionists, each of them obviously had taken 'ownership' of their relationship with their medical client. When I spoke to a couple of the medical clients in attendance, it was obvious how much they appreciated the transcriptionists assigned to their personnel. So much so, that a feature demonstrated for the next version of their software had both doctor and transcriptionist information available - something that looked a lot like MyBlogLog from the back row where I was sitting. As I got closer, I could read the additional information that turned audio files and email addresses into real people with names and biographies - maybe even a blog.

Throw broadband internet connections into every transcriptionist's home (the company doesn't have a traditional office) and you have low overhead, motivated employees and satisfied customers. Forget about proprietary file formats, exclusive contracts and sneaky lock-ins, the single best way to keep your customers coming back is an efficient online system and interactive relationships built on trust - on a human level. What Web 2.0 promises, in my opinion, is an online, social and economical way for people to connect. In one sense it addresses the classic 'service economy', where a doctor can work with a transcriptionist, re-imagined for a virtual world. In another sense Web 2.0 can address a 'collegial economy', or peers working together.

For example, every member of a project should have presence, live up to social expectations and have the tools to express themselves in an online environment. Project management, with its origins in academia, has focused more on the technical aspects of allocation, organization and scheduling. However, is there a more social endeavor in the business world than working on a project together? Currently, people are called 'resources' and their working days are reduced to blue bars of various duration. And people hate it. The philosophy of Web 2.0 dictates we turn these resources and blue bars back into people and real life. And people will love it.

Note: Photo of Medical Transcriptionists is from Wikipedia

The Missing Link

It wouldn't be mutation and evolution without a missing link. However, instead of finding the link from our past, we will predict it for our future. Like a Babel Fish crawling from a sea of data, we will begin seeing applications whose main purpose is to translate and transpose data from one system to another. While most current software applications can import from several formats and write to a few, they will soon be overwhelmed by the permutations - as distribution, portability and specialization increase the options.

Perhaps we just caught the first glimpse of the missing link with Mozilla's announcement that Firefox will support Microformats. It may be a little awkward at first, as it sounds like specific extensions (see comment #7) will be required for applications to interact with the microformats, but Firefox has made its move toward the beach. As Mozilla's Alex Faaborg correctly noted:

"... the difficult part of microformat detection is not parsing the data, it is dealing with the wide range of APIs for all of the different applications on all of the different platforms that can consume this data."

Firefox 3 as Information Broker; diagram by Mozilla

If Mozilla can solve this by elegance or by sheer people power, and make this data accessible, Firefox might just begin to encroach on Outlook in addition to Internet Explorer. Call it the inbox for the next generation.

Let's Make a Deal

The internet is delivering more and more useful, utilitarian options. People will always demand more access to their data and more integration with their apps. Mobile Devices will drive specialization, slicing and dicing rich data for their specific needs. And Babel Fish applications will connect this cacophony into coherence. The result? The single minded, all-encompassing applications of today will begin dying off in favor of multi-celled, specialized solutions. As soon as data begins to flow freely from app to app, as Joel Spolsky noted, the size of the ecosystem is no longer a barrier (or lock-in) - instead the efficacy of the solution becomes the desired characteristic for survival.

In fact, the best solution may no longer be under the purview of a single company. It may actually grow, like some genetic algorithm, after several iterations of various combinations. Companies may end up spending more time negotiating all the possibilities, than making up new proprietary formats, as agreements and pacts will become the new means of customer lock-ins. Why did the Motorola iTunes phone fail and the new iPhone take more than a year to appear? It wasn't just the technology.

The coming agreements, pacts and understandings among corporations will need a word beyond byzantine to describe them. But if you lack a legal team and have customers chomping at the bit for solutions, you have more opportunity than ever before to cut your own deal and get a piece of the action. You could try to create all the pieces for the next generation solutions (internet connectivity, open source data interoperability, mobility and usability), but it will be impractical for even large companies to create something compelling. Instead, it will be combinations of best of breed technology.

And what trait will the eventual winners in this brave new world share? The solutions that can hone their data requirements, move results from system to system, use the best form factor for the job and still keep it on a human level.

What will the software solutions of tomorrow look like? They will be forged by four powerful elements: The Internet, Open Source, Mobile Devices and Web 2.0. We can debate the merits of each, but taken as a whole they will shape the genetic blueprint for the successful applications of tomorrow -- starting now.

Evolution and Global Warming have been my themes lately, but today we'll explore what these macro events foretell: mutation. The leviathans of our primordial software world have been busy hatching their vision for the next generation of solutions. But while size and scale have been advantageous up to now, four major events have set off an irreversible chain of events - altering the desired characteristics of software. In this new environment, nimbleness will again be rewarded and size may just be a disadvantage. Indeed, the meek have just gotten another crack at inheriting the earth.

The Internet was a meteor strike unleashing a myriad of possibilities; Open Source was a breath of fresh air; Mobile Devices began a great migration from the desktop and Web 2.0 brought everything to a more human level. We can debate the merits of each -- the Internet was a cataclysmic event, whereas Web 2.0 seems more like a change in the weather -- but taken as a whole they will shape the genetic blueprint for the successful applications of tomorrow, starting now.

How far have we come incorporating the internet into our daily lives? Where once relatives would ask me - being the 'computer guy' - how to format their Microsoft Word document, now they are purchasing their new computers online from the company store and plugging them into their broadband connections. My once promising career in family support is officially in the dustbin.

Everyone knows the virtues of the internet and, at this point, can even harmonize its praises. Combined with those aforementioned broadband connections, the internet has reached the point where its ubiquitous, dependable and - most importantly - taken for granted. It took years for a robust electrical grid to hook up all our houses. A few more for the novelty of flipping a light switch to wear off. Finally, once electricity from the wall could be counted on, we began to get cool things like radios and tvs. Ultimately the indispensable items like refrigerators, vacuum cleaners and washing machines - the stuff of everyday life - started showing up.

The internet grid is up, web sites have long passed the novelty phase and we've got our iTunes and YouTube. Now its time for the indispensable stuff. We'll have to wait a little longer to see what an internet-enabled vacuum cleaner looks like, or even what form it takes, but we do know how it will get there - online.

Save a Tree, Buy Online

Other than the massive MSDN software package that is trollied into our office every quarter, I cannot remember the last time I bought software in a box. Similarly, now that I've had my iPod for a while, my CDs are getting dusty and the last place I bought one is out of business. And guess what - my company makes software products and we don't even bother with packaging. At least not any packaging that needs trees.

It's all gone online. If the internet went down tomorrow and stayed down for a month, or long enough that people thought physical media was important again, we would very likely be out of business. Losing the internet probably wouldn't be very good for Read/WriteWeb either. In fact, all that our collective competitors have to do is take down the net!

The point is, it used to be only web applications betting their business existence on the internet. However, now it carries only a bit more risk than betting your company on electricity. Entities that used to either rely on physical media (publications and software houses) or combined the real and online worlds, are making the leap to be purely online. It can be a difficult leap to make if you're a newspaper looking at multi million dollar printing press investments. But if you blog, write software, transcribe medical dictation, produce music or direct movies, then you only need one thing to deliver your product: a large pipe.

Ubiquity, reliability and accessibility. Now we need a philosophy.

Open Source

The first things that come to mind when mentioning Open Source is Linux, code in the public domain and young idealists. A grassroots competitor to the world's dominant software company is irresistible; stripping preternatural algorithms from the cloak of intellectual property is daring; and who doesn't like a young idealist? But for all the good Open Source philosophy has done, it hasn't accomplished what should be its true calling. Indeed, whereas a young curmudgeon has no heart, an old idealist has no head. Providing a legal means to open source code was nice, but it's more important to apply Open Source principles to data.

In fact, I would go so far as to say (if given a choice) that I would rather data be open and accessible -- than code. Code can, and often should, be rewritten and refactored again and again, but systems only work if they agree on the data. As we, and our computing devices, become more and more intertwined, it will become less and less important whether code reading my calendar appointments is proprietary or open; served by Microsoft's or Apache's internet servers, shown on a .NET or X.org display. What will matter is my calendar data adhering to (for example) the iCalendar format. As the importance of data becomes clearer, the origin of software applications, proprietary versus Open Source, will diminish.

It's All About the Data

Jeff Atwood recently accused Joel Spolsky of jumping the shark. While there may have been something fishy in that post, the fact is that Joel has written more than his fair share of brilliant essays - including one in particular that has always resonated with me, explaining how Excel reading and writing Lotus 123 data turned out to be the tipping point for success.

The immediate goal was removing the barriers for an application to win market share from a competitor. But the real lesson is even greater: if any spreadsheet application can read and write with any other spreadsheet application, then they can be evaluated on how well they work instead of how large their ecosystem is. Instead of resting on the laurels of one's barriers, companies will have to continually improve their products. You can choose what you eat, where you shop and what car you drive. Shouldn't we demand the same flexibility for our spreadsheets, appointments and online presence? Heck, the software code you buy isn't even yours - it's on extended loan. But your data is yours; created, edited and archived by you.

To Market, To Market

Open Source has captured the attention and time of many talented programmers; and as a result has shown the world what can be done. But what the Open Source movement needs is the attention and time of many talented marketers to explain why it's important. In typical engineer fashion, marketing has been the afterthought. But if the same effort in writing operating systems were put into marketing data standards, the idealists would be a step closer to their better world.

Honestly, though, the starry-eyed Open Source non-business model is just about a thing of the past. The most prominent Open Source projects today - Linux, Apache and Mozilla - have some extremely deep pockets behind them (IBM and Google). Do you think it's an accident that Firefox has been marketed so well? Something a bit more tangible than a dream is needed to incent the backers watching the bottom line. What's needed is a new catalyst.

Mobile Devices

Sales of mobile devices rocketing past sales of personal computers goes a long way towards capturing peoples attention. What are the ramifications of this? Whereas a personal computer was designed to be a generic device driven by complex software, allowing it to do most anything adequately, mobile devices are designed to run simpler software - combined with a more targeted form factor, allowing it to do a few things very well.

Today's desktop computers, and even laptop computers, have more in common with steriod laden athletes than trim computing devices. The new computer my aforementioned relative just bought came with 250 Gigabytes of disk space. It's going to take a lot of pictures of the kids to fill that up. In fact, if we average 100 100K pictures per week, the kids will be 480 before grandma's hard drive is full.

Clean Computing

Mobile devices don't have it quite so good. They have to undergo rigorous testing in order to be light enough to carry, small enough to fit in your pocket and slim enough to be chic. Sure, single purpose mobile devices like the iPod can have large drives too - but programmers want wireless internet connectivity, more gadgets and widgets, and a development platform. The result is something akin to the early days of desktop computing, when the most memory anyone would ever need was 640K. Mobile devices don't work well with most data on desktop and laptop computers, simply because the amount of data is too large.

What mobile devices should do is work only with the amount of data they need to. Or to put it another way, you shouldn't need an entire dataset in order to be 'correct.' As long as you have a unique identifier, any other part should do. This will not only allow data to be more mobile, but will also make it easier to refine and specialize data interaction.

Wake Up and Smell the Data

Going back to the iCalendar example, we can imagine a circular mobile device supporting WiMax with two bells at the top that tells time - we'll call it iAlarmClock. While the completeness of the iCalendar specification makes it useful for just about any time based event, with the iAlarmClock we only have one pressing concern: when should the alarm go off? A proper, well formatted iCalendar entry may contain enough information to fill four pages of UML. Our iAlarmClock just needs the information from page four - Alarm Component Properties. Better yet, if I use the manual override - the roundy knob on the back - to adjust the alarm time, then the source iCalendar entry, and any other device depending on that source, should be updated automagically from my data fragment. That way all my iAlarmClocks will let me sleep-in, no matter where I take my nap.

We programmers have to get used to working with pieces of data instead of the whole thing. Sometimes it's ok not to have the complete picture, we just need that part that makes sense for the task at hand. The goal isn't data completeness, it's data usefulness - just enough to enable boring stuff like alarm clocks, refrigerators, vacuum cleaners and washing machines.

Go to Part 2 to read about Web 2.0, Social Glue, and The Missing Link!

Turning the Tide

The other day I was trying out IE 7. It has a nifty feature that downloads all the elements of a web page and stores them together in one file for future viewing. We do a lot of work with SharePoint at my company and I was curious how many bytes a generic, freshly created Document Workspace takes. It turned out to be 715K or so, which is surprisingly close to a megabyte. Thinking maybe this was MS/SharePoint specific, I tried a new Google Docs page (472K), a new Google Spreadsheet page (418K) and the front page of Yahoo Finance (429K). Somewhere along the lines, as HTML pages have entered the mainstream as real workhorses, the nimble HTML burros of the early web have morphed into plodding, three-tiered-architecture clydesdales. It doesn't take too many clicks and page refreshes before you've downloaded more bytes than a comparable rich application. Many, many more bytes. And that's just one page.

Could history repeat itself? What will be the tipping point for a few rich application machines to replace scores of web page clydesdales? One possibility is an increase in the cost of all those bytes, which is why Google (and most other web application providers) really would like to see a Net Neutrality amendment or bill [update: we edited the previous sentence after publication, based on comment 14 below].

More likely is something like Ektasis, a startup company that recently introduced itself to the world. Building a new platform, as noted earlier, is difficult enough. Handicapping it with a startup's cash constraints is insanity. But it's folks like these that make the world a better place. And thankfully, they do have a very impressive solution to the install/uninstall problem facing rich applications today. It's a solution that Microsoft would do well to copy and Google to study: fully functional client software that can install and run with a click, and an automatic code versioning/updating system. This means instead of downloading entire applications, pieces of applications - individual classes or object files - can be retrieved and fine-grained, surgical updates can be performed. What they've done is taken the best practices of browsers and web page assembly - and applied it to desktop apps. Ektasis has a great strategy for merging the desktop and web environments. Perhaps they will be able to catch the right wave.

Any virtual machine can also use this piecemeal download and assembly strategy. In theory, an operating system like Windows could do it too. But in practice, because of its own success, there are too many millions of windows applications to support - some written by software publishers, most written in offices and cubicles in every part of the world. Therefore the better solution is to lay new groundwork for a better virtual machine, something that includes a smart loader/linker like the Ektasis framework. This will negate the installation/uninstallation advantage web applications enjoy today. Furthermore, it will give developers more choices in how they want their apps to work.

More choices? The other nice thing about virtual machines is that they are portable, just like a browser. But it's not for running .NET apps on Macs, though that may happen. Rather, portability is gaining in importance for mobile devices. Any company with an eye for growth has noticed cell phone sales far surpassing PC sales. Add millions of cell phones, Blackberries, SideKicks to the environment and it's clear the playing field of tomorrow is a whole lot bigger than the playing field of today - if you're able to span devices.

Google's Dilemma: The Next Big Thing?

As enormous as Google seems, its position is far from unassailable and their options are surprisingly limited. There is nothing preventing Microsoft from duplicating Google's online strategy, other than prime mover momentum. Even with copious advertising profits and their astounding growth rate, Google makes only a little more than 10% of what Microsoft makes. Which means MSFT can easily outspend GOOG. Enough to slow Google's current momentum? Probably not. Enough to pounce on Google when advertising profits suffer a downtown? Most definitely yes.

In fact, Google 2006 reminds me a bit of AOL in 1996: long on one cash cow, short on any others. In 1996 AOL was the growing giant. By 2001 the giant's food source had changed. The cause of AOL's problems was over-reliance on their growth engine. Once it started sputtering, they had no other profitable property to rev up. As a result, even though they had well known properties (AIM, 'You've got Mail', etc), they could not monetize them and thus were dead in the water. 

For all the apps Google puts out, very few can be considered 'sticky', and even fewer can be monetized outside of advertising - it's too easy to go to Yahoo or MSN for the same free service.

Indeed, Microsoft is already encroaching at each potential feeding ground. Google offers Earth, Microsoft offers Virtual Earth. Google offers AdWords, Microsoft offers AdCenter. Google offers documents and spreadsheets, Microsoft offers Office Live. Google invests heavily in Firefox, Microsoft shakes the dust off Internet Explorer. Google has built its momentum by brilliantly exploiting the web. While Microsoft just seeks to match them, they have a fighting chance. But what happens when Microsoft takes the battle to the next level and introduces a smarter, portable virtual machine that unifies the development experience for PCs and mobile devices? Google answers with... what?

Perhaps they can invest more in Firefox. Perhaps Eric Schmidt fondly remembers his Sun days and resuscitates JavaOS (he did just resuscitate 'The Network is the Computer,' after all). Unfortunately for Google, Microsoft is more than a match for them on both counts. One possibility is buying an undervalued property aligned with its business, but currently lacking frothy sizzle. A company like EMC (an information infrastructure company). It aligns well with Google's information driven goals, has lots of assets and even more relationships. But even that may be window dressing for EMC's crown jewel, which might be worth the acquisition alone: VMWare.

Acquisition options for Google

VMWare has actually, unbelievably, beaten Microsoft on its own turf - building a better virtual machine (the V and M in VMWare). I'm sure they could create virtual machines that would run .NET and .NET apps. While Google would never be able to root out Windows on PC machines, they could capture the bulk of billions and billions of cell phones, mobile and personal devices that will deluge us over the next several years.

Such a staid purchase, however, might wash a bit too much glitter off Google. For something a little more snazzy, and just a bit more affordable, they could make an even bigger splash and buy Adobe. It's all funny money for Google at this point and buying Adobe would give them fabulous software assets in PDF, Flash and Photoshop - three pivotal areas of the web, and markets Microsoft has been unable to capture. Furthermore, Adobe's ambitious Apollo project could become a crown jewel, too. Finally, Adobe is just up the creek from Mountain View. (Full Disclosure: I'm a former employee and own shares of Adobe)

But Google will have to act soon. Microsoft has already taken away one potential option for Google - Novell's .NET Mono project. Microsoft must be thinking about the mobile deluge too. They've already met Google head on at every online PC location, and there's every reason to believe the same thing will happen at every mobile hotspot as well.

If Google wants to avoid being the next AOL and instead make a real grab for software supremacy, it needs to expand and diversify its revenue source. Fast. Firefox is not enough; their own OS is not viable. With their stock price Google has some options. Perhaps a solid information infrastructure provider like EMC, or a 24 carat technology treasure like Adobe. Either way, Google needs continued brilliance at managing their search armada, stickier internet properties they can monetize and an extra boost to propel their ascent past Windows.

And they need Microsoft to make a mistake.

Windows is Dead. Long Live Windows.

Have you ever read Slashdot and noticed that every article about Microsoft is accompanied by a picture of Bill Gates made up as a Borg? While it may appear in bad taste, it's actually a very flattering compliment. For most of their history, Microsoft has been able to adapt like very few companies before it - and it speaks to the very core of their success. Though the software environment may be warming in Redmond - the water lapping at their ankles and the investors clamoring for greater returns from the hunt - Microsoft has usually been able to make hard, but correct, choices. And when they don't - then scariest of all, they learn from their mistakes. The result is that Microsoft has a solid position at the top of the software food chain.

Learning from their mistake with Linux is what led to the recent deal with Novell. Microsoft's initial mistake? Not taking Linux seriously. Now it's a serious headache for them. Though it may seem a stretch today, another headache had been looming on Microsoft's horizon - especially with the growing importance of .NET. That was Novell's Mono project. Mono allows .NET code to run on any machine that can run Mono, similar to HTML code running on any machine a browser runs on. But Novell needed the money; Microsoft needed to remove a threat. The solution: pay chump change (for Microsoft) to Novell for access to Mono. Lesson learned and problem solved.

But just as Google 2006 reminds me of AOL 1996, Microsoft 2007 will soon have a major decision to make similar to Microsoft 1997. Back in 1997, strange as it may seem, Java was the rage and elements within Microsoft were comparing and contrasting the virtues of virtual machines with the ungainliness of Windows. A management shakeup resulted and Microsoft, correctly, continued to orient itself around their OS and fortified any cracks in the foundation. Fast-forward to 2007 and Microsoft will again be comparing and contrasting virtual machines with an even more unwieldy Windows.

This time however, Windows is acting like a dam blocking a surging ocean of innovation. Further fortifications are useless - you can't stop a sea change in technology. Of course this time Microsoft happens to own both options on the table: a nimble virtual machine that can run on as many devices as needed, or an unbowed warhorse ready to fight the last battle. Once again it's the horse that must go. Not Windows the brand, but Windows inextricably tied to the PC platform.

Except in 2007, it won't be Bill Gates delivering the memo. The mantle of technical leadership, and compelling memo writer, has fallen on Ray Ozzie's shoulders. His greatest test? Slowly defocusing Windows bound to a PC and refocusing on a portable, virtual machine 'Windows' fueled by .NET and online services. My company worked with Ray's former company, Groove, for many years and while I haven't had a chance to sit down with him, I know he's very capable technically. But it's the selling part - the clarity of vision, the sureness of direction, the respect of employees, the sheer force of personality - that is extremely difficult for 99.9% of the world. In that respect, Bill is an exceedingly tough act to follow.

How important is it to have a leader when coming to a fork in the stream? History tells us that most empires start crumbling from within before the outward edifices are breeched. Microsoft head count has nearly quadrupled since 1997, as has revenue. There's a good chance the number of internal fiefdoms has quadrupled - as well as competing interests. It was definitely surprising how little the web was mentioned in the recent Vista/Office 2007 press event. Perhaps Google's best bet is whispering sweet nothings in every willing ear.

When the Storm Clears

But for all the managers, marketers, salesmen and saleswomen hired, Microsoft is still, at its core, a technical company. In order for the outside world to know if the technocrats at Microsoft have bought in to Ray's vision, the key development to watch will be 'old' Windows being put out to pasture. Again, Windows the brand lives on; Windows the tightly integrated OS for x86 computers does not. It's not a unique situation, it's just that the stakes have never been higher. DOS was a tremendous cash cow before Microsoft replaced it with the greatest cash cow in history: Windows. There's every reason to believe the next cash cow will be even greater. If Microsoft engineers can convince everyone it's time for Windows, following the revolutionary trend, to disappear and be re-imagined as a virtual machine intricately tied to the web, then Google will be up a creek no matter what they do.

Remember, you always want to follow the data. Microsoft and Google are struggling to own it on the estimated 234 million PCs shipping this year. But it will be the first company that can extend their reach to the 245 million mobile devices shipped last quarter that will be the winner. While Google has the richer feeding grounds as Microsoft struggles with the current Windows/Desktop status quo, it's actually Microsoft with the canoe, the paddles and the most rods and reels. If they get everyone on board, then Microsoft should continue ruling the land and the seas.

Until the next unintended consequence.

The most insidious thing about global warming is that it's everywhere, but not right in front of you. And really, it has more to do with things disappearing than appearing - things like glaciers, ice shelves and low lying islands. The odd thing is that the progenitor of global warming, the Industrial Revolution, was rooted in making things disappear as well. For example, teams of horses became a steam engine or two.

Though not as pernicious as climatic change, the software environment - admittedly nowhere near as complex, but growing more convoluted every day - is tracking a similar course. Just as odd, the Information Revolution was also rooted in making things disappear. For instance, teams of typists became a shared printer or two. But now newspapers are shrinking, phone and cable companies are mutating and the distance between people is vanishing. In fact, just like the first scientists researching the rise in ocean temperatures, a group has recently been commissioned to study the ramifications of the web.

Windows is leaking, while a Google hurricane forms...

Revolutions have many components, including the seeds of their own destruction. Once the genie escapes from the bottle, he begins enforcing the Law of Unintended Consequences. Ask an industrialist in 1875 if his coal burning plant could change the earth's climate and he would have thought you're from another planet. Ask a venture capitalist a few years ago if operating system hegemony could become an albatross weighing a company down, hindering entry into new markets and emboldening competitors - and he or she would have thought the same.

It hasn't happened overnight. Rather, its been a trickle - which started the very second that Windows shipped. Water actually started pooling around Windows back in the mid 90s when Netscape offered a portal to a new frontier. Bill Gates - well acquainted with weather in Seattle - recognized the moisture in his foundation, installed an Internet Explorer sump pump and weathered the storm.

Now it's the mid 00s, and it's Google gushing with ideas, cash and optimism. Many observers think a hurricane is forming in Mountain View that threatens to swamp not just Windows, but Redmond's entire empire. Well, forecasting has never been an exact science - and I wouldn't fret for Microsoft quite yet. Sure the vista may be a bit foggy, but Microsoft has a few more resources than anyone else. Even as the tide rises, they already have newer, more sea-worthy vessels well under construction. And Google? They might just miss the boat.

GoogleOS actually fogging the field

The mere mention of a new operating system competing with Microsoft reminds everyone how much fun the old days were. Apple, IBM and Microsoft continually sparred, parried and blocked each other for many years before Windows finally won the battle. It's gotten downright boring since those days, so it's easy to understand the tizzy surrounding even the prospects of another brouhaha. But Google building, releasing and supporting their own OS? I'd sooner believe them walking on water.

Bringing an operating system to market is an extremely poor idea if you want to grow a business. Indeed, recent history has plenty examples of great new operating systems - OS/2, Taligent, BeOS, JavaOS to name some prominent ones - that siphoned off huge amounts of resources and either left the company in ruins or seeking greener pastures. An ill wind blows for any OS leaving the comfy confines of its incubator. And Linux? It's not a business, and therefore not in this article - but I think Microsoft fears Linux a whole lot more than GoogleOS.

First a brief primer on why it's great to own an operating system. In short, it's a lot like owning an industrial age railroad. Railways and trains are like operating systems and applications. Operating systems are the rails themselves. Applications are the trains which, of course, run on the rails. In order for trains to travel on a railway, they must match the railway's gauge. In order for applications to run on operating systems, they must match the OS's API. If a train doesn't match a rail's gauge, or an application doesn't match an OS's API - things don't turn out well.

As the robber barons found out, when a railroad achieves critical mass you make a boatload of money. Better yet, once that track is laid it's very difficult to move aside. Like any good robber baron, Microsoft would love for Google to compete on the same field where Microsoft owns all the rails and most of the trains. In fact, that kind of GoogleOS is Microsoft's wildest fantasy come true. Microsoft would be fully capable, and would probably relish the opportunity, of roughing Google up, dragging them through the mud and sending them on their way - just like they did with Sun, Apple, IBM, Netscape, Novell and Digital Research.

What Google wants is new real estate on a higher level - a better location where they can lay their own rails. But while it may look like they've found the best location on the web, Google is in fact still traveling on other peoples rails - Microsoft's, Apple's and Linux's. They do so by offering free train rides on various implementations of the world's most successful virtual machine. But the free ride won't last forever. Google most likely will need another virtual machine to compete and grow. Otherwise, they may face a fate similar to yet another high flyer from the 1990s (see if you can guess who!).

A perfect Virtual Machine storm is breaking Windows

If you can't run on the rails, you can always take to the air. Such a notion probably would have seemed silly to Jay Gould or Leland Stanford - at least until Orville and Wilbur Wright traveled by rail to North Carolina. While Orville and Wilbur might have not have understood the business pitch of Larry and Sergey, they would have recognized kindred spirits riding along the world wide web on someone else's infrastructure.

Consider two classic applications for two platforms. One is more or less owned by Microsoft, the other more or less owned by Google. The apps are familiar to every programmer: 'Hello World' done in C++ and HTML.

In C++:

#include <iostream.h>

int main( int args, char **argv ) {

cout << "Hello World" << endl;

return 0;

}

In HTML:

<HTML>
<BODY>
<P>Hello World</P>
</BODY>
</HTML>

As always, the devil is in the details. What is not shown is the C++ compiler and linker that turns code into executable. Also not shown is the web browser which takes HTML and makes it presentable. And that's really the only difference between these two programs. Of course the ramifications are profound: the C++ application can only run on the operating system it was built for, whereas the HTML application can run on browsers, which in turn run on operating systems. In fact, the browser is really a virtual machine. The world's most successful, widely deployed, virtual machine.

There are two additional properties that add critical value to this virtual machine: 

1) An explicit contract on how to install and uninstall applications; and 

2) An explicit contract on how an application can affect a user's machine. 

These two features have tipped the balance so far that users are willing to put up with a more rudimentary web UI than rich desktop UI.

Google's high tide?

When you visit a web page for the first time, you are installing an application. The HTML page your browser is reading is both a manifest for additional resources (images and graphics, cascading style sheets, javascript and embedded objects) and instructions for how the page should be rendered. Your browser stores as many of these resources as possible on your local disk, in order to start up faster the next time. Better yet, it checks whether these resources need updating on each visit. So why doesn't your IT person freak out when you install HTML pages, like when you install desktop applications? Because of the explicit contract that limits how an HTML application can affect your machine.

Purveyors of C++ applications realized the advantages of HTML applications immediately and even tried to address the manifest issue. But while they could create a download manifest, they couldn't enforce the necessary constraints that make IT people happy. Additionally, the applications they were downloading were much larger than piecemeal HTML pages. Throw in a few security holes and well publicized exploits and it's obvious why HTML web applications are in such favor.

These are the advantages Google enjoys today. However, two fissures exist that will force them to move:

1) Microsoft's ability to use the exact same HTML based strategy (like their current Live initiative); and

2) More threatening is Microsoft leapfrogging the current environment by solving rich application installation/uninstallation and enforcing an acceptable contract regarding what rich apps can do on a user's machine.

Unfortunately for Google, Microsoft is a lot closer to solving these two issues than people think. Microsoft has the best virtual machine with .NET, the best development tool with Visual Studio and the best access to developers with their MSDN programs. And they have a notion. Steve Ballmer himself has started touting the exact strategy they need - Click Once and Run. The final thing they need is a technical solution for .NET - similar to what a little startup in Redwood City, CA has done for Java...

TO BE CONTINUED... Join us for the next installment, when we find out just who this little Redwood City startup is!

Image by Jon Cornforth

Update: Part 2 of this series is now available.

The days of purely desktop-based applications are clearly numbered, but so are the days of exclusively web-based apps...

The two elephants of personal computing these days are Microsoft and Google. Microsoft rose to dominance by capturing the desktop. Google is rising to dominance by capturing the web. Both strategies revolve around who can capture your data. Elephants require massive amounts of food to survive, so it's no surprise that Microsoft and Google are eyeing each other's data. Microsoft has started a 'Live' initiative to engage Google on the web. Google has tinkered with productivity apps that might just work offline, to join Microsoft on the desktop. If either Microsoft or Google is successful at grabbing the other's data, the most useful byproduct of their efforts will be new ways to easily move data between the desktop and web. The result of this battle will further blur the lines between purely desktop and exclusively web applications.

But as often happens when elephants trample the landscape, they create new opportunities for smaller, more nimble animals to grow and prosper. As Microsoft and Google narrow their focuses on each other, they will either fail to notice the landscape is changing underfoot, or will be unable to adapt quickly enough. It's not just naive optimism; there's plenty of historical precedent. Just as Ford couldn't build all the world's cars, AT&T all the world's telephones and IBM all the world's computers - neither Microsoft nor Google will be able to write all the world's software. In fact, the very rise of Google demonstrated this to Microsoft. As a result, the consumer and business software markets are poised to open up as never before.

Can a foundation become an elephant? And not elephant as a pejorative, but as a measure of power - the power to change the environment around you. The Gates Foundation is such an elephant. The Heritage Foundation has certainly had an outsized impact. In the software world, the foundation to keep an eye on is Mozilla. How does a lizard become an elephant? By doing something nobody thought possible, of course. Take on a product that dominates the web experience and is embedded in over 90% of the world's computers, carve a niche for yourself with inspired innovation and market yourself into one of the top ten brands in the world.

Though there may be infinite user interface features to invent, I would like to see Firefox address the area in most distress: data distribution and replication. The browser is uniquely positioned among all applications as the desktop gateway to every existing web application. It's so obvious it seems trivial. It's not. Just as every desktop app needs an OS, every web application needs a browser. Forget standards, pay no attention to partnerships and don't let XML web services fool you - the web browser represents a GREAT opportunity to connect web applications together.

But first the web browser needs a feature. And in the spirit of open source I'm happy to dispense my advice freely: data recognition. Right now the browser excels at data caching, which is how your email pops up on different web pages in any edit box named 'EMail'. It's time for the next step. The browser should start recognizing the concept of email and be able to offer suggestions for fields of similar ilk. It wouldn't even be that hard.

Have you noticed the anti-phishing features included in the latest browser releases? Solving the phishing problem is cool, but the method is even cooler: the browser constantly checks against a server for the latest exploits. What if a browser started keeping rich profiles of sites? And what if Mozilla started defining some common field groups, like 'User Information,' as rich data types? Mozilla could define rich data types and provide canonical lists of field names describing them. A web designer could then tag their forms to match rich types. Perhaps they match Mozilla's canonical names or perhaps they upload a field mapping to a Mozilla server. Much like checking the anti-phishing server, Mozilla could check this server for a site's rich data mappings and syntax turns into semantics.

With its popular browser, penchant for innovation and willingness to extend what the user experience can be, Mozilla has a chance to solidify itself among the giants and lay the groundwork for a real semantic web.

Trumba: A Hyrax

Richard MacManus recently reviewed Jeremy Jaech's latest company, Trumba. Mr. Jaech has enjoyed incredible success with two desktop business applications: PageMaker and Visio. Rather than rest on his laurels, his latest venture seeks to unify calendaring systems. It's an excellent idea - certainly a sweet spot for data distribution and replication issues. If Trumba can pull it off, it will certainly grow and Mr. Jaech will indeed  have a well-deserved hat trick.

However, while the idea is excellent, Trumba has an implementation problem: they have no desktop presence. In order to achieve ubiquity, Trumba is providing calendaring customizations and is pushing standards for web designers. This might work, but what about all the desktop organizers? What about Blackberries, SideKicks and cell phones? And if you're not online, it's impossible to read your current event information at all. Perhaps this is why consumers are still grappling with Trumba. Though the company is well rooted in desktop business apps, they seem a bit mired with a philosophical devotion to a 100% web solution. As a result, though consumers can see the basic problem and Trumba sounds interesting, the solution isn't compelling enough.

I think they need to return to their roots a bit and develop a browser plugin. Something to give them a foothold on the desktop, able to synchronize with mobile devices and, most importantly, synchronize with the most common personal organizers. Start with MS Outlook. Entertain Thunderbird. But by all means make it a one-button-and-done issue for the consumer to note an event and publish it to every relevant device. Perhaps a Google calendar, perhaps a Blackberry or cell phone - most likely all of the above. Remember it's the browser that offers a connection point today. Maybe you can convince everyone to adopt your calendars and your standards tomorrow. But if you make it work today, then you can dictate instead of cajole.

Strangely enough, a company is attempting to do something similar right now. SpanningSync works only for the Mac, but that's never stopped a good idea before.

By happy geographic coincidence, Trumba and my company TeamDirection are both located in Seattle. If I've gotten anything wrong, then I offer to be re-educated in person. Perhaps they have a suggestion or two for my project management solution. Like Trumba, TeamDirection is focusing on connecting tools together - in this case bidirectional synchronizing with MS Project, MindJet MindManager, SharePoint and Groove. I won't bore you with the details here, but I'd be happy to here.

Adobe: The Darkhorse (Darkelephant?)

One company has all the needed pieces on the desktop, but is searching for the right server parts. It's the best software company you've never heard of, even though it has a market capitalization of $22 billion US. It's the company that liked Mr. Jaech's PageMaker so much that they bought it. They were even critical to YouTube's success, yet somehow stayed out of the headlines. Of course the company is Adobe Systems. (Full Disclosure: John Milan is a former Adobe employee and owns some stock.)

Adobe's purchase of Macromedia was also a masterstroke, giving them two ubiquitous desktop applications, PDF and Flash, that derive much of their value by working across the web and across different systems. Adobe is currently touting their Apollo project, which looks like a very promising lure for developers. As they state:

"Apollo is targeted at developers who are currently leveraging web technologies, such as Flash, Flex, HTML, JavaScript and Ajax techniques to build and deploy Rich Internet Applications."

In other words, it's a toolset that anticipates desktop and web convergence. If they can convince enough developers to sign on to their Apollo platform, then Adobe won't need to build any server parts - all those developers will do it for them.

It's an audacious strategy which has been flying mostly under the radar. While Microsoft and Google have been trying to encroach on each other's turf, Adobe has been trying to move the whole playing field. I believe if they can include a few popular mobile devices as well, it just might work. According to Adobe, their HTML rendering engine was chosen because it works on mobile devices, so they're thinking along the same lines.

Conclusion: The Promised Lands

The days of purely desktop-based applications are clearly numbered, but so are the days of exclusively web-based apps. Both Microsoft and Google are racing toward a happy medium. However, they aren't the only players in town, not by a long shot. Both Mozilla and Adobe are well positioned to take advantage of desktop and web convergence. Companies offering solutions that connect desktop and web apps together will get their chance too. Calendaring and project management are two obvious choices, but every productivity app deserves to be re-examined.

Who will the winners be? To borrow a catchphrase, "Just follow the data." The key for success will be how easily data can be identified, distributed and synchronized. Soon enough it will be immaterial where your event or task originated. Instead, what will matter is that your data being everywhere and in sync.

Written by Guest Blogger John Milan and edited by Richard MacManus. John is Senior Software Architect and founder of TeamDirection, one of the companies mentioned in this post.

What amount of time is the right amount of time for two people to tie the knot? Three months? Two years? One decade? It turns out to be not so much a specific duration but an appropriate duration - long enough to understand each other, but no so long as to get bored.

Does the same hold true for software technologies and philosophies? It took about thirty years for a robust operating system to successfully join with a fetching graphical user interface. It took about forty years for the internet and markup languages to hook up and bear the web browsers we can't live without today.

Thirty years. Forty years. It takes a long time for technologies to understand each other. So how long will it take for social and business applications to embrace each other, much less produce the next generation of applications? It turns out not too much longer, because social and business applications have both been around the block a few times. If you believe that the first personal business applications arrived at the same time as the first personal computer; and if you believe that the first massively social application arrived when Dungeons and Dragons fans began to learn how to program, then social and business apps have been courting each other for well over twenty years now. It's starting to look like commitment time!

What exactly is a social application? As Ebrahim Ezzy observed in a recent Read/WriteWeb post, a social application is one that allows groups of people to coordinate certain kinds of interaction. However, he traced its origins back to only the late 1990s. I claim it dates back to the first MUD programs in the early 1980s. An older fellow with a better memory than both of us might claim it was the IBM 360 Mainframe, which brought SABRE to tens of thousands of travel agents and allowed them to coordinate ticketing interactions.

Or would that be an example of a business application? As Microsoft defines it: "business application refers to any application that is important to running your business". For example, the most critical application for most companies today is Email, which helps people coordinate certain kinds of interaction. Could Email be the first social business application?

Yes - and it also happens to be the most successful application of all time. The reason is simple: because it shares aspects of both social and business computing. Email is everywhere. Desktops or webtops, phones or blackberries. And because it has both social and business aspects, it can be used by corporate CEOs or PTA moms or dads - anyone who needs to coordinate group interaction.

That sounds like the definition for social business applications: software that coordinates group interaction that is important to running your business.

People, Data and Identity

There is one more feature critical to social and business applications - and it's the reason why Email can be everywhere. Identity.

If you want to be social or in business, you need an identity. With an identity you can build web pages and blogs. You can sign up for memberships and services. And you can participate in groups, discussions and the marketplace. As technology evolves, you see more features relying on identity - such as presence (for both instant messaging and workspace activity) and authority (such as Richard MacManus being an authority on web technology or Apple being an authority on coolness).

But what about Email messages? Do they have identities? Absolutely. Without an identity, how would the sender and the recipient(s) know and agree that the message on each person's computer is the same? As with any communication, we need assurances that the message we send and the message people receive are equivalent.

Identity is fundamental to any social or business application - not only for the humans involved, but also for the data.

Take a purely social application like match.com. Its value is not only in presenting individuals, but in presenting data about those individuals that everyone can agree on.

Or take a purely business application like salesforce.com. Again, its value is not only in presenting client applications - but in presenting data about those clients that everyone can agree on.

Finally, take an incredibly successful application like iTunes - which works equally well with the identity of the consumer and the identity of the merchandise. iTunes makes acquiring more songs via your credit card very easy. It shows social awareness by listing songs other people also like and manages the songs themselves superbly - both with licensing and by providing a handy carrying case. 

The iTunes/iPod experience is an excellent example of the next wave of social and business computing - applying social and business philosophies to both people and data.

Example Social Business Applications

After a few million years of evolution, it's not surprising you have an identity. After a few hundred years of litigation, we have established that corporations also have an identity. It's taken a scant 60 years to understand the implications of giving data identity, but then we're working on internet time these days. And social business applications? They're starting to appear today.

Microsoft Live Meeting

Purchased by Microsoft in January 2003, PlaceWare (now called LiveMeeting) was an excellent example of merging the social possibilities of the internet with the business requirements of the workplace. People could create and join meetings, have a presence visible to other members of the meeting, and share files - or even real-time desktop states - with an entire group.

Groove

Founded by Lotus Notes creator Ray Ozzie back in the late 1990s, Groove joins the immediacy of online presence and instant synchronization - with business context like permissions, roles, secure communication and offline capabilities. The origin of Groove can be traced back to Ray watching one of his kids playing online games and seeing how these virtual groups interacted. He drew parallels for how business groups could collaborate on problems (remember those MUDs?). Microsoft acquired Groove in March 2005 and Bill Gates has since transferred his visionary duties to Ray Ozzie.

TeamDirection

Founded in 2002, my company TeamDirection created the Project Management tools for Groove Project Edition. TeamDirection took advantage of the Groove infrastructure to provide a workgroup environment for all participants of a project. This allowed people to schedule, track and report their individual pieces - while TeamDirection kept the entire project synchronized and up to date with a master MS Project. We are extending the business aspects of Project Mangement by integrating with SharePoint web services. Similarly, TeamDirection is also extending the social aspects of Project Management by integrating instant messaging.

Colligo

Colligo Networks, Inc. was formed in April 2000 to address the collaboration challenges faced by mobile teams. In response to a significant customer problem, Colligo developed technology to enable users of IBM Lotus Notes to replicate their databases directly between laptops - without the need to connect to the Domino server. This was then expanded to enable laptop users on Microsoft Windows to connect directly over ad hoc wireless links to share messages, files, folders and resources. More recently, the company has developed products that enable users to take Microsoft SharePoint team sites offline.

The Future of Social Business Applications

While you might not be able to teach old dogs new tricks, you can certainly teach old applications a thing or two. Even old stalwarts like Email. While Email does a lot to connect people together and coordinate group activities, it would be even better if it incorporated a simple little feature most social applications use - an unread marker.

The Inbox has an unread marker. What if individual Emails could have unread markers too? That would allow users to update their Email messages. Would that break the social contract of everyone looking at equivalent messages? Not if a sender's updates are synchronized with all the recipients copies.

Why would this be a nice feature? The most common problem with Email today is that email fills our inboxes to the point of obfuscation. As the recipient list broadens and the discussion lengthens, it becomes too difficult for humans to organize sequential messages into a coherent structure. The Emails begin to lose their context.

But what if we could keep the discussion in context? People like to use social features (the sender, the message title, the date it was sent, whether I replied or not) to organize their messages. Nobody I know of can recall a message id (e.g. AaLLsd32232o002dad), but we do remember Bob's Email from last week.

If we re-factored Email to include a little social engineering, we could not only cut down on the sheer volume of email in our inboxes - but increase the utility of larger groups participating in a discussion. If it matches the original message id, then the new information can be merged seamlessly. And if it's merged seamlessly, then the context can be preserved and Email can be a productivity tool once again.

Enhancing Web Applications

You may have noticed that each of the above social business applications has a significant presence on the desktop. What might not be so obvious is that each of the above applications also has significant web awareness. 

Indeed, the job of social business applications is not to obviate web applications, but instead to enhance them. 

Each of the above applications makes tremendous use of web infrastructure to transfer and synchronize data. In the case of TeamDirection and Colligo, they treat the location of data agnostically- either in their environment or in a web (SharePoint) environment. Groove requires the internet for all communication, be it server-based or peer-to-peer. And LiveMeeting could not function without the internet. These apps all focus on synchronizing data to provide a uniform view for their clients. Such a view is only possible with the agreement of identity - be it a person or a bunch of bits.

It is also interesting to note the moves Microsoft has made in the social business application world. Holders of two of the the most lucrative franchises of all time, Windows and Office, Microsoft has been looking for ways to leverage their hegemony and lay the foundation for the next generation. Rich, internet enabled applications - by all outward appearances - seem to figure prominently in Microsoft's plans.

Summary

Social business apps are not about raising the profile of desktop applications, or diminishing the role of web applications - but rather enabling the flow of data in such a way as to make its location immaterial. As Email has aptly demonstrated, there is no one correct way to interact with messages. Rather, there is an incorrect way to stifle access of messages. 

The task at hand is to expand options for richer types of data: files, meetings, tasks, calendars and much more. When this individual data is synchronizable and accessible anywhere, anytime on anything offline or online - the next revolution of the Web will be at hand.