What Do You Care What Other People Think?

Scoble Interview: Enterprise Mash-ups

I got the chance to sit down with Robert Scoble for 20 minutes last Friday.  The thing that has puzzled me recently is whether mash-ups are for real, or just another Web 2.0 buzzword.

So I asked Robert: "Are mash-ups going to make a real difference outside of the digerati - do you think they'll make it into the enterprise?"

His take was: what's to prevent mash-ups from being the main way that departmental apps are built in most enterprises 3-4 years from now?

We've seen composite applications pitched for years, with some very cool companies like Digital Harbor building development environments for constructing them, but in a way mash-ups are an even simpler way to build a composite application - pull together a set of ICCs (still looking for the definitive term for this, as are others, it seems - see Harry Pierson's discussion).

So what would an enterprise mash-up server look like?  How would it have to be packaged in order to be adopted by departmental users?  Would it be hosted like the other new technologies that are breaking into departmental use (salesforce.com, MarketTools, ExactTarget, etc.) or would it need to be a local server?

One of the other issues Robert raised was that of attention, and its necessary evolution to make the computing experience more useful.  Currently, attention is captured and processed only on the server, which makes for some thorny issues about trust (who am I trusting with my attention data? and why?).  To deal with these issues it seems to me that there will need to be a client-side standard for attention, implemented by browsers for inter-ICC communication, as opposed to relying on the server to have good behavior.

Then, in a twist of synchronicity, I got to talk with a very early-stage company building a mash-up server that can run on the client or the server.  It's in stealth so I can't disclose much more yet... but I am becoming convinced that this programming model could be just the thing to build SaaS composites on.

[Updated to add reference to Harry Pierson's entry.]

Innovation as Language Action

My colleague Don Dodge notes that innovation is breaking out all over again - and many agree with him.  Innovation itself is a hot topic these days - what is it?  How do we produce it?  What I find exciting is that people are creating new interpretations of innovation that can help us understand how to make it happen.

I had the opportunity to spend time with Dr. Peter Denning over the last two days at a leadership conference in Mill Valley.  He is the past president of the ACM and currently serves as Professor and Chairman at the Naval Postgraduate School in Monterey, and is co-creator of CSNET - the network which bridged between ARPANET and the Internet.

He discussed his current work on Innovation as Language Action - a framework for identifying the linguistic distinctions and specific skills involved in taking new technology inventions into the broader market.  He defines "invention" as the actual creation of a new technology, and "innovation" as the process of technology adoption - for example, the Wright Brothers invented flight at Kitty Hawk, but the innovation in flight was the DC9, 30 years later.  PC/M was an invention in operating systems, but MS-DOS was the innovation - it spread broadly and became the standard for future developments in the industry.   

He and his co-author, Robert Dunham, detail seven specific elements of an innovation framework:

• Seeing opportunities
• Envisioning new worlds
• Offering new games
• Executing plans and tools
• Producing adoption
• Sustaining infrastructure
• Leading with care, value, power, and focus

What I found exciting about their work was that even at this early draft, a real framework for assessing our own actions in leading and developing the future of technologies like SaaS or SOA can be found - one which allows us to identify where we've been successful and where we need to bring our focus to complete the innovation process.

I invite you to read the full draft chapters of his book, which can be found here, along with his course material on "Technology and Transformation".

Thanks for sharing your work and your time with us, Peter!

Do Ants Have Souls?

Nick Carr writes a brilliant piece on people's quasi-religious fervor over Web 2.0.  He pokes fun at Kevin Kelly's We Are The Web (this is from the last page of the article), who writes:

"There is only one time in the history of each planet when its inhabitants first wire up its innumerable parts to make one large Machine. Later that Machine may run faster, but there is only one time when it is born.

You and I are alive at this moment.

We should marvel, but people alive at such times usually don't. Every few centuries, the steady march of change meets a discontinuity, and history hinges on that moment. We look back on those pivotal eras and wonder what it would have been like to be alive then. Confucius, Zoroaster, Buddha, and the latter Jewish patriarchs lived in the same historical era, an inflection point known as the axial age of religion. Few world religions were born after this time. Similarly, the great personalities converging upon the American Revolution and the geniuses who commingled during the invention of modern science in the 17th century mark additional axial phases in the short history of our civilization."

I see the web as distributed intelligence as well... but ants are also a collective intelligence and I haven't heard anyone waxing poetical about them.  We can gain great understanding of our own behavior by observing clustering and learn from others we might choose to emulate; we can make each other smarter through our own sharing of information; and as much as we observe the blogosphere it is patently ridiculous to call it a "mind".

We've heard from the geeks on the Web and spirituality, but where are the philosophers on this one?  What would Jerry Fodor, Noam Chomsky, and J. S. Mill would say about this?

There are deep flaws in Kelly's analogy - stolen from Kristina Lerman and Francis Heylighen - between hyperlinks and neural synapses - not limited to the complex interactions and regulations of neurotransmitters, their reuptake in the synaptic cleft, and second messenger systems.  People making these analogies are, not surprisingly, physicists and mathematicians attracted to biological metaphors - not biologists, who would refuse the trivialization of these systems into one-way hyperlinks.

So let's leave well enough alone - Web 2.0 is fine and it makes good sense to build new companies and technologies around the capability of each user to add depth, content, and behavior to the application ... but let's leave biology to biologists, religion to theologists and keep technology where it belongs: in the domain of tools and not spirits.

Now, back to technology...

Don Dodge writes very insightfully about Web 2.0 - if you haven't checked out his blog yet, you should see what a veteran of Napster and Groove has to say about where it came from and where it's going.

Rick Segal of JLA Ventures has a funny, on-point perspective on the hype for startups and VCs ("Web 2.0 != a check").

Cliff Reeves has his own commentary on Tim O'Reilly and Rick Segal's opinions...

The Greenhouse and the Rainforest

My friend Dmitry Dimov came up with an amazingly powerful idea to describe the difference in how we have to think about the services world vs. the software world.  He calls it "The Greenhouse and the Rainforest".

The Greenhouse is the place where things are well controlled, nurtured, given sunlight and food when necessary, and grown in pots in neat rows.  Things work well because they are designed to work well, and the situation is consistent and manageable.

Step outside the greenhouse, however, and you will see the Rainforest - a vast jungle so vibrant and full of life that lightning storms and lack of perfect conditions cannot contain its progress.  Everything ends up interoperating because it has to; not in the most perfect or designed way but in a way that lets everything evolve independently according to its capabilities.

This is the difference between controlled infrastructure and open infrastructure, between object orientation and prototyping, between XML schema and raw XML documents.

The last thing he said is that if you're operating a greenhouse, you'd better look out because the laws of nature and economics are on the side of the rainforest.

Interesting.