TechWeb - Some of the new technology, which emphasizes
activity-management capabilities, will be built into IBM's Workplace
messaging and collaboration software and Eclipse development tools.
IBM Shows Off Next-Generation Collaboration Software (TechWeb)
Grok Headline matches for IBM Shows Off Next-Generation Collaboration Software (TechWeb)
TechXNY Becoming Many Shows In One (TechWeb)
TechXNY Becoming Many Shows In One (TechWeb)06/30/2004 03:13 AM TechWeb - TechXNY, the annual IT showcase in New York, is reaching
further beyond its PC roots this year by including several events
covering technology ranging from consumer electronics to wireless.
Apple Commands A Third Of Digital Audio, Study Shows (TechWeb)
Apple Commands A Third Of Digital Audio, Study Shows (TechWeb)06/24/2005 03:07 PM TechWeb - With it's iPod and iPod Shuffle Apple is the leader in
worldwide portable audio players with 30.2 percent of the combined HDD
and Flash-based portable audio player market, according to market
research company In-Stat.
New 'NBOR' Collaboration Software to Debut Next Month
New 'NBOR' Collaboration Software to Debut Next Month01/10/2004 09:32 AM Denny Jaeger's forthcoming software, called "No Boundaries Or Rules,"
or NBOR, includes an intuitive user interface for writing, drawing,
compiling multimedia presentations and other PC tasks.
Veritas Ports Management Software To SuSE (TechWeb)
Veritas Ports Management Software To SuSE (TechWeb)01/23/2004 03:49 AM TechWeb - Starting this month, Veritas Software is porting many of its
products to the SuSE Linux distribution, helping SuSE to offer the
same kind of storage management features already available via Red
Hat.
SourceLabs Ships Open-Source Software Stack (TechWeb)03/31/2005 07:00 AM TechWeb - SourceLabs, a start-up within the open-source software
market, releases an infrastructure software stack for application
deployment.
IBM Offers Free Software Tools For Power Architecture Hardware (TechWeb)
Component Software: The Next Generation06/11/2004 11:17 AM Forget about .NET for the moment. The language neutrality that
already exists in the Microsoft space (eg COM) is something that the
Linux and open source worlds could really use -- article by Jon
Udell.
In my opinion, Microsoft's great contribution to Computer Science was
to realise that Object-Oriented Programming was overrated at a time
when OOP was the rage, and that a simpler abstraction --
components -- was sufficient to develop one of the most
successful software interfaces of all time: COM.
When I was younger I used to like powerful class libraries such as
MacApp or Smalltalk's; but I have come to realise that a wonderful and
complicated inheritance hierarchy can be too confusing.
Too much OOP means you have to learn too much to do too little.
Software Deployment Shows Steady Growth07/01/2004 05:00 PM The latest reports show that the software deployment market grew by
4.4% last year. That brings the total up to $7 billion for the year.
Trends indicate that growth will continue well into through 2008.
While IBM, BEA and Oracle did show top rankings for 2002, there is a
high likelihood that IBM could loose it’s momentum with the
gradual increased usage of Unix, Linux and Windows systems
Green Hills Software Powers Next-generation of Military Unmanned Aerial Vehicles
IBM posts strong profit, shows slow software growth
IBM posts strong profit, shows slow software growth07/15/2004 07:05 PM IBM Corp. comfortably met analysts' earnings expectations for its
second quarter but fell slightly short on revenue, suggesting that it,
too, is feeling the effects of postponed spending. After a rash of
earnings warnings from software vendors, investors were looking to Big
Blue for reassurance about the sector's strength -- but while IBM's
hardware and services businesses grew, its software group's revenue
was essentially flat from last year, the company announced Thursday.
Update: IBM posts strong profit, shows slow software growth
Update: IBM posts strong profit, shows slow software growth07/16/2004 10:22 AM IBM Corp. comfortably met analysts' earnings expectations for its
second quarter but fell slightly short on revenue, suggesting that it,
too, is feeling the effects of postponed spending. After a rash of
earnings warnings from software vendors, investors were looking to Big
Blue for reassurance about the sector's strength -- but while IBM's
hardware and services businesses grew, its software group's revenue
was essentially flat from last year, the company announced Thursday.
Lantica Software Shows Off Sesame Database Manager with Citrix GoToMeeting
I've written recently about the
future state of business, a world incorporating powerful, versatile
social networking tools. And I've played with most of the
first-generation social software and read volumes about how it will,
or
won't, work in business and ultimately affect our daily lives.
The concept is wonderful, and the technology is fun, but the tools
developed so far suffer from three fatal flaws:
They're built with a pre-designed, set content
architecture, and centrally-stored content, instead of harvesting
content that individual users already have stored, in different ways
of
their own choosing, on their own machines.
They're being populated just-in-case, with all kinds
of
content that people with lots of time on their hands see fit to
contribute, and no content from the very busy or technologically
illiterate, rather than just-in-time, with content being accumulated
only if and when there's a demand and need for it.
They're badly over-engineered, ranging in complexity
from
challenging to intimidating, so they take a lot of time, energy and
intelligence to understand and use properly, and hence drive most
potential users away.
In this month's Darwin
Magazine,
social networking guru Stowe Boyd also laments the growing pains of
many of the first-generation tools, and the absurdly high and
premature
expectations that people have of them. "My bet is that social
networking services will resist standardization until they see the
benefits of converging all sorts of private and public network
information, and realize that no one company can create and manage all
of it", he says. The heterogeneity of both content and context is
producing specialized social tools that are excellent for certain
focused purposes, but useless for others, and an aggregation of
content
-- filled-in forms, esoteric discussion threads and context-free
'knowledge objects' -- that is cumbersome and largely unreusable.
In an earlier post I stressed the importance of allowing each
individual to maintain and organize their own content and their own
networks their own way. At that time I
said: "When you force people to adapt their
mental models to a standard model (inevitably a complex one to
accommodate a variety of specifications), a
standard model that is dictated by the technology and its designers,
you will
get no usage, or at best reluctant, inefficient usage."
If I were start all over again, to design the second
generation of social software, it would be transparent to the user,
wouldn't require any submissions, wouldn't keep any content in any
central location, and would be so simple to use that even people without computers would use
it.
That
may sound like a tall order, but it really isn't. It would be like
building a house. Let's start with content, the foundation of the
house. Rather than getting people to submit stuff, we need to help
people to organize the personal information they already have, and
then
harvest it automatically. When I talk to people in the front lines of
just about every business, from proprietorships to large companies,
they confess their filing cabinets, the document folders on their hard
drives, rolodexes and other personal collections of information are
chaotic and impossible to find things in. They also say no one ever
taught them how to organize these personal repositories so that
content
could be found easily. Everyone just assumed that the skill to do this
comes naturally. So first order of business is personal content management. No
rules, no standards. Just some simple
tools that allow people to organize all the information and documents
they have into some order so it can be readily found again when
needed.
Let a whole bunch of PCM tools loose on the market, and let them
evolve
as people learn what they need and what they don't and what
organization makes sense to them as
individuals. Weblogs would be a good source of ideas for the
design of PCM tools, since essentially that's what blogs are.
The next floor of the house is the metadata. Software developers would
work with the users of individuals' content other
than the individual him/herself to ascertain how they might want to
use
the individual's newly-ordered content, and develop tools to harvest
the relevant metadata to do that. This second layer of tools
essentially reorganizes the individual's content, transparently, in
ways that make it more useful to the individual's networks -- actual
and potential friends, associates, customers, suppliers etc. These
tools would spider the content and essentially 'fill in the forms'
that
those in each of the individual's networks might need to access the
individual's information in the format they want it in. The PCM tools
would allow people to specify which content could be seen and accessed
by others with the appropriate 'permissions', and the metadata tools
would repect these permissions. These metadata tools
would be invisible to the individual user, and would work
automatically
in the background as the individual added, deleted, and changed the
content using the PCM tools.
Still with me? Now comes the pièce de résistance. The third level of
the house is the networking and
connectivity tools,
the ones that, analogous to the telephone switch, actually enable the
identification of relationships, the making of connections, the
transfer of information, and ultimately even collaboration and other
more dynamic interactive applications of connectivity -- transactions.
These applications harvest and mine the metadata, and have no
content of their own. They operate on a just-in-time basis. These
tools
might include an Expertise Finder, a Connector, a Super Address Book,
a
Network Builder, a Publisher, and a Subscriber.
So for example, if I'm researching solar power for my new house, or
looking for people to work with me on a Meeting of Minds business
assignment, I could use the Expertise Finder tool to identify who I
could and should talk to, what information each of those experts has
in
their personal content that is permissioned for me to look at,
multiple
contact information for each of those experts, and the cost, if any,
of
contacting the expert and/or accessing their personal content. A
Connector tool would then enable one-click connection to the selected
expert(s) regardless of medium selected -- telephony, instant or
asynchronous messaging, Simple
Virtual Presence,
etc. The Connector tool, just like a telephone switch, would connect
people within an organization, or between organizations, or between an
individual and someone in an organization -- it wouldn't matter. So if
I work for a bank and I need to find an expert in financial
derivatives, it would work exactly as my personal solar power search
did. I could then choose between 'found experts' within the bank and
those outside. If I want to contact my father in Winnipeg, or the
group
I play poker with on Friday nights, I would use the Super Address Book
instead of the Expertise Finder before using the Connector tool, but
the process would be analogous and as simple and intuitive as looking
in a rolodex or phone book. And if I wanted to build a new network of
people interested in discussing New Collaborative Enterprises, or
whether Kerry should pick Kucinich as a running mate, I might use the
Network Builder tool, which would function exactly like the Expertise
Finder except it would identify people with particular interests rather than particular
expertise.
Finally, I could use the Publisher tool to 'push' selected content out
instead of waiting for people to come and get it, and a Subscriber
tool, based on RSS, that puts out a 'standing order' to pull in and
aggregate others' content that meets my specified criteria.
Just-in-time. Dead simple.
Built on information I maintain, control and organize my way. Personal versus business
information, internal or external, doesn't matter. A utility. An appliance.
You could even build additional commercial and transaction tools on
top
of this. Buy a 'smart' fridge/freezer that takes inventory of what you
have, 'permission' it to feed your PCM tool, and your grocery supplier
can automatically compute, fill and deliver your order with no
intervention by you at all.
There are some important lessons to learn from the success and failure
of previous technologies. A combination of simplicity-of-use,
personalizability and adaptability has made tools like paper, books,
pencils, paints, diaries, typewriters, newspapers, timepieces,
telephones, radio & TV, personal calculators, CDs and DVDs
ubiquitous and hugely popular. In contrast, the lack of these
attributes in tools like the PC, musical instruments, the VCR, the fax
machine, almost all software, PDAs and videoconferencing, has severely
limited the market for these tools, and caused millions to curse their
complexity.
I
don't blame first-generation social software designers for making the
three mistakes that already have detractors raising their eyebrows. We
need to do lots of experiments to see what will work and what won't.
There's no harm designing and playing with skylights and new types of
shingles even before the foundation is ready to be poured. And as
Stowe
said, social software "will become the cornerstone of a revolution in
IT", not to mention a revolution in how we connect, network, and
organize and share information -- activities that comprise much of the
fabric of our lives. We just need to remember: Simple, Personal, Decentralized,
Just-in-time.
A Group of Software, Marketing, Specialists Have Come Together from 3 Continents to Release the Next Generation Marketing Tool for RSS (Really Simple Syndication)
We've used SubEthaEdit to shave hours off projects -- from building
outlines and ocnducting group meetings to revising articles. We think
it's only the first of many programs that will promote collaborative
processes. By Glenn Fleishman, Jeff Carlson and Adam Engst,
Macworld
In his InfoWorld column this week, Russ Pavlicek addresses a sensitive
issue: the relationship between open source and outsourcing:
It is true that many software tasks are being farmed out to less
expensive foreign programmers, but it is false to say that open source
is responsible for this migration.
...
The presence of millions of older PCs in the world with near-zero
market value means that some of these machines will eventually work
their way into the hands of foreign computer students with limited
budgets. The availability of open-source software makes many of those
machines useful to these students -- or at least "legal."
...
The rising number of these students overseas creates the supply that
will meet the demand of some American businesses to lower software
development costs. Open-source technology did not cause this
situation, although it does allow cash-poor students to use legal
software instead of resorting to illegal copies of commercial
software.
[T
he Open Source: Boon or Bust?]
A year ago, Dave Winer accidentally included the wrong image of me in a posting on
Scripting News. The picture was, in fact, of an Indian programmer
named Nish, who had written an article on C# that I found
useful. A year ago, Nish's bio read:
...
The Language of Collaboration
The Language of Collaboration06/05/2005 11:27 PM Irving Wladawsky-Berger, VP of Technical Strategy and Innovation at
IBM and new to blogging, on the essence of open source, which isn't so
technical: Now, when you collaborate with your colleagues, they have
to be able to read and...
A
few years ago a furniture company flew me down to their headquarters
to
talk to them about innovation, and to get my comments on a new product
that they'd developed for the professional services industry. This was
a company that had been honoured for years as one of America's most
innovative companies, so I wasn't sure how much I could help them.
They
ushered me first into the R&D department where I met with some
very
creative individuals who obviously knew a lot about their business,
and
about product innovation. The department featured a giant furniture
'playroom', stocked with a variety of furniture components, where
creative minds could serendipitously experiment and build makeshift
prototypes on the fly. I was impressed.
Being a consultant, the first question I asked them was about their
innovation process.
Specifically, I asked, how were customer needs, complaints and ideas
routed from the front-line customer contacts (the sales and marketing
people) to R&D. I got blank stares. New product ideas were
developed in the laboratory, it seems, and the only customer input was
from surveys and focus groups once the R&D people already had
something to show them.
An interesting discussion ensued. The gist of it was the company's
argument that customers, not being experts in furniture, don't know
what they want until they're shown something. If you were to ask them
what they want, they'd just respond "what can you offer me?" My
response was two-fold:
First, I said, you
shouldn't be asking people what furniture they want, because it's not a piece of
furniture that they're looking for, necessarily, it's the attributes and benefits that the
furniture offers that people want: Comfort, orthopedic support, mobility, prestige,
'workability'.
I described a company I had recently read about that had abolished
chairs. All the work surfaces had been raised to a comfortable
work-level while standing, and each employee had been given a
lightweight, personal 'memory cushion' to stand on that clipped to
their belt, and a pair of personal orthopedically-designed shoes
designed to make standing for long periods comfortable. In this
company, people were constantly on the move and an enormous amount of
time was spent booking meeting rooms. Now, the entire office could be
configured as ad hoc meeting areas, chairs (with their high attendant
cost and floor-space needs) could be eliminated, and mobility was
optimized. People even found that they were more productive standing
up
and constantly moving around. This was a company that understood
furniture was a means to an end, and the end for them was mobility and
flexibility, so they 'invented' tools (furniture, cushions and shoes)
that had those attributes.
Secondly, I added, you
need to use an iterative process to
elicit what people need, want and would use, a process Imperato
and Harari (in their book Jumping
the Curve)
call "Thinking the Customer Ahead". This process entails a combination
of visioning, asking a lot of 'what if' questions, and generally
helping customers imagine the future state of their own organizations
and needs, and how they would react if something new were suddenly
available. This is an inherently collaborati
ve
process, as much as it is an innovative one. Just as asking people
'what would you like to see on the company intranet?' is likely to
produce unimaginative (or no) answers, so would asking customers what
furniture they need. But if you helped them to envision what the
future
of their business would look like, and then worked from that vision to
ask an iterative set of 'what if' questions to elicit the kinds of
furniture they could imagine using effectively in that future
environment, and then collaboratively work with them to 'design' it,
then you'd be getting
somewhere.
As it turned out, the new product they had asked me to evaluate was
designed to solve a problem in the professional services industry that
had been widely talked about for a generation. Now they had an answer, but it was
an answer to yesterday's
problem, for which effective work-arounds had been found and were
still
evolving. And they had designed a product that had several critical
inconvenience factors that were show-stoppers, and which they could
have known about by spending more time talking to customers much
earlier in the process.
One of my creative suggestions to them, as a customer, was that if
they
really want to sell their top-of-the-line ergonomic chairs to CEOs,
they should give them away free to hotels and conference centres for
their meeting rooms, where CEOs hang out and where the chairs are
notoriously uncomfortable. The proviso would be that the name of the
chair be conspicuously emblazoned on each chair. I don't think they
ever took me up on the idea. I still think it would work, and pay for
itself in no time.
Specialization has created intellectual and imaginative silos in
organizations, and a recent Wharton
study written up in S+B
Magazine
has found, as I did on that trip, that these silos are a huge obstacle
to innovation: "The most effective product development and
commercialization processes encourage dynamic communication and idea
sharing among engineers, marketers, and customers...Failure to
incorporate the customer’s perspective often seriously limits the
potential financial and competitive value of corporate
innovation...Often, engineers are tucked away so far within a company
that they don’t see firsthand what customers really need."
Other key findings of the study:
over-concentration on technology and under-emphasis of
the emotional appeal of products leads to market
failure
better products result when employees are themselves
customers of the product
'anthropological research' --
visiting customers to see how
they actually use (and mis-use) products can provide huge insights on
need and innovation opportunities
when entering new markets,
having local partners 'on the
ground' can help tweak products to meet needs that are unique to that
new market
using cross-functional teams and having the R&D
people 'get out more' can help reduce 'customer
blindness'
spreading R&D efforts around the world can help
global
companies enhance their 'environmental scan' and tap into ideas and
adaptations that may not be apparent at head office
surveys
that gather data on customer behaviour are insufficient -- it's more
important to know why
customers do what they do, to determine their true wants and needs,
and
this usually requires face-to-face contact and collaborative effort to
determine
it's important to understand customers' aversion to
change, and annoyance with having too many choices, when developing
products
key qualities needed of the facilitators of dialogue
between R&D, sales and customers: humility and curiosity
This study focused mainly on new product innovation, but the same need
for collaboration with all the departments of the company, and with
customers as well, applies equally to other types of business
innovation. I like the Doblin Group's Ten Types of
Innovation, an excellent way of parsing all the innovation
opportunities open to a company:
Business model: How you make money (e.g. Dell's
pay-in-advance for a custom-made PC model).
Networks and
alliances:
How you join forces with other companies for mutual benefit
(e.g. Sara
Lee sticking strictly to branding and outsourcing all
manufacturing)
Enabling process:
How you support the company's core processes and workers (e.g.
Starbucks' premium wage and benefits packages to attract superior
staff)
Core processes: How you create and add value to your
offerings (e.g. Wal-Mart's reinvention of retailing as shelf-space
leasing)
Product performance:
How you design your core offerings (e.g. the Mercedes Smart
Car's
unique and imaginative attributes -- pictured above -- pick up the new
Feb/05 Fast Company for a
fascinating discussion of why you
won't see it in the US)
Product system: How you link and/or
provide a platform for multiple products (e.g. the Microsoft
integrated productivity suite)
Service:
How you provide value to customers and consumers beyond and around
your
products (e.g. Singapore Airlines' thoughtful and pampering
extras)
Delivery Channel: How you get your offerings to market
(e.g. Martha Stewart's multi-media ways of getting her 'home' stuff to
your home)
Brand: How you communicate your offerings (e.g. Absolut
vodka's "theme and variations' advertising concept)
Customer
experience<>: How your customers feel when they
interact with your company and its offerings (e.g. the Harley Davidson
owners' community)
Collaboration within company departments and with customers is
absolutely essential to the success of any of these ten types of
innovation. My sense, however, is that in most large organizations
collaboration (as opposed to mere coordination) is antithetical to
corporate culture, modus operandi, and hierarchical structure. That's
why many innovation advisers think innovation is best done in a
business unit separate from the main operating unit, where emphasis is
inevitably on protecting the status quo.
And that's also why I was surprised to see the results of a new
study,
by KPMG and Ipsos-Reid, of Canada's most innovative companies. Only
three of the top 10 are small-to-medium sized businesses (Research in
Motion, Westjet Airlines and Ballard Power Systems). The others
include
four of Canada's five largest telecom and broadcasting firms, its
largest grocery chain, its largest engineering firm and its largest
software distributor. And while this 'bias to big' is less noticeable
in the Innovation category than in the overall Most Admired rankings
(which are top-heavy with banks), it struck me as peculiar -- until I
read how the winners had been selected: Only the CEOs of Canada's
leading (read: biggest) corporations got to vote. It's not surprising,
then, that they picked almost exclusively other large corporations.
I
wonder what the answers would have been if they had asked customers?
Collaboration Evolves
Collaboration Evolves04/19/2004 11:15 AM New offerings address diverse enterprise needs.
Red Hat Summit Day 2: Good collaboration and more
Red Hat Summit Day 2: Good collaboration and more06/05/2005 11:36 PM Day 2 of the Red Hat Summit in New Orleans began with speeches from
Red Hat's Michael Tiemann and IBM's Irving Wladawsky-Berger. I also
caught up with free music guru John Buckman for his thoughts on making
money from music online.
SugarCRM Adds Collaboration
SugarCRM Adds Collaboration04/04/2005 11:25 AM Open-source customer relationship management software developer
SugarCRM Inc. is adding several new components to extend the
capabilities of its sales, marketing and customer service
applications.
Collaboration, Up Close and From Afar07/20/2004 11:17 AM With great regret, I bid my goodbyes yesterday to the folks at the Strong Angel II
demonstration, but I'm staying well-connected to the project in
several ways.
One is by using software that has become a crucial component to the
project, Groove, the collaboration
software that just hit its 3.0 milestone. Groove does so many things,
but at its heart is a peer-to-peer networking system, replete with
widgets and tools and fully encrypted at every level. In situations
like the ones the Strong Angel teams are modeling, security is vital
for some data even if not for all.
One of the most intriguing demonstrations on Kona has been named "Pony
Express," after the relay mail system of yesteryear, except this is
being done with WiFi, laptops and Groove. The idea is that
humanitarian assistance people in the field -- where there's no
connectivity -- could fill out forms on their laptops, gathering data
about populations and needs; then someone would drive by with a
WiFi-equipped vehicle, synchronize the Groove "workspace" containing
the data; and bring it back to the home base. This would be done again
and again, and ultimately each person in the field, not just the
people at the base, would have the most current possible data even
without a direct Internet connection.
My ongoing regret about Groove is its Windows-centricity. Ray Ozzie
and his team at Groove really should find a way to port the
application to Unix (Mac and Linux). But they've heard that from me
before...
Oracle Blends IM, Collaboration06/14/2004 02:25 AM Oracle Collaboration Suite 3.0, aimed at the enterprise, adds an
instant messaging capability to complement the suite's e-mail, voice
mail, calendar, Web conferencing and file management features.
Supply Chain Collaboration11/19/2003 01:03 PM marcus evans Nov 19 2003 12:15PM ET Grok Description matches for IBM Shows Off Next-Generation Collaboration Software (TechWeb) GrokA matches for IBM Shows Off Next-Generation Collaboration Software (TechWeb)
IBM Shows Off Next-Generation Collaboration Software (TechWeb)
The following phrases have been identified by the grok system as matching this entry:
That
may sound like a tall order, but it really isn't. It would be like
building a house. Let's start with content, the foundation of the
house. Rather than getting people to submit stuff, we need to help
people to organize the personal information they already have, and
then
harvest it automatically. When I talk to people in the front lines of
just about every business, from proprietorships to large companies,
they confess their filing cabinets, the document folders on their hard
drives, rolodexes and other personal collections of information are
chaotic and impossible to find things in. They also say no one ever
taught them how to organize these personal repositories so that
content
could be found easily. Everyone just assumed that the skill to do this
comes naturally. So first order of business is personal content management. No
rules, no standards. Just some simple
tools that allow people to organize all the information and documents
they have into some order so it can be readily found again when
needed.
Let a whole bunch of PCM tools loose on the market, and let them
evolve
as people learn what they need and what they don't and what
organization makes sense to them as
individuals. Weblogs would be a good source of ideas for the
design of PCM tools, since essentially that's what blogs are.
A
few years ago a furniture company flew me down to their headquarters
to
talk to them about innovation, and to get my comments on a new product
that they'd developed for the professional services industry. This was
a company that had been honoured for years as one of America's most
innovative companies, so I wasn't sure how much I could help them.
They
ushered me first into the R&D department where I met with some
very
creative individuals who obviously knew a lot about their business,
and
about product innovation. The department featured a giant furniture
'playroom', stocked with a variety of furniture components, where
creative minds could serendipitously experiment and build makeshift
prototypes on the fly. I was impressed.