Reality Check | Ephraim Schwartz | TAG: Web 2.0

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April 29, 2008 | Comments: (0)

Everything is in place, the ducks are lining up nicely.

We have the great generational change from humans raised in an analog world and artificially inseminated with a digital gene to real live humans naturally born and bred into the digital age.

Out of this comes an entirely new approach to how these digital beings analyze their surroundings, solve problems, and conduct business.

And finally, we have the technology, both in terms of major shifts like Web 2.0 but also in the nuts and bolts like IBMs first server product line designed to work the way Web 2.0 works, moving in to place to support it all.

I spoke with Steve Papermaster, CEO of NGenera, formerly BSG Alliance -- a name change that might speak volumes about the changes sweeping across the global business landscape, thanks in some measure to powerful demographic forces Papermaster sees at work in the marketplace.

Anyone with two eyes in their head can see that today's young people work differently than most of us old analogers. They have 32 things going on simultaneously. They are texting their friends, perusing songs on their iPods, surfing Facebook, posting Twitter entries -- all while doing their homework.

In the U.S. alone, there are 80 million people like this. They are between the ages of 13 and their late 20s, many of whom are just now entering the workforce.

“This is the echo from the baby boom generation,” says Papermaster.

This digital generation -- always connected, highly collaborative -- will transform social networking into a way of doing business.

And here we have a second force at work: “consumerization” as a major technology driver for the enterprise. A nod to those who first identified this trend as one that will increasingly set the business agenda.

Every demand is on demand
Consider eBay. The company lays out a nine-month strategy to enter the Asian market. From an operational standpoint, the plan must include the ability to support millions of new buyers and sellers. The problem is, consumers in this market have already “self-selected” eBay -- pushing the business plan forward from outside the company because of the fast-paced and growing World Wide Web.

According to NGenera, these forces are leading toward a far less hierarchical structure to business organizations and one that values peer collaboration; a business climate that may be more inclined to sharing rather than in protecting IP; a movement from a plan-and-push-out mentality to one that emphasizes engagement and co-innovation.

In the old days, business centered around transactions and ERP. Even if you were a multinational company, you rolled out a marketing strategy slowly, across borders, which reflected local markets and pricing.

Today you can’t wait weeks or months to find out results. You can’t implement a marketing strategy that takes months to roll out across the globe. You can’t have lags built into pricing changes because of the rapid nature of currency fluctuations.

Commodities used to be more stable, like fuel prices. Now they change in a nanosecond. Everything is on demand.

"Think globally, act locally" might have been your mantra but not today.

More than half of Cisco’s revenue, for example, comes from outside the U.S. Companies like Cisco need to operate with a near simultaneous execution of their strategy worldwide, notes Papermaster.

Several years ago, I wrote a story on UPS rolling out its Wi-Fi infrastructure across all of its facilities. I checked back two years later, and they were still rolling it out.

Today, says Papermaster, they would have hired a company much like a city does to roll out its wireless infrastructure. They would have built in incentives for finishing the project early and would have allowed the company to participate in the savings achieved.

“It could be done in six months,” Papermaster estimates.

Supporting the on-demand business agenda
On-demand technology and thinking also means that your strategy must be flexible. Everything is in continuous mode, just like those tech-savvy digital kids you see every day doing 10 things at once.

IBM, a company that always surprises me because it, like the market, never stays still, is making a play for the infrastructure of those competing for business in this way.

Last week the company introduced iDataPlex, a new server product line designed for Web 2.0 datacenters that will process streaming video, online gaming, social networks, and other spikes in traffic.

It doubles the number of systems that can run in a single rack and uses 40 percent less energy in delivering five times the computing power.

The iDataPlex runs at room temperature, uses standard components, and according to Charles King, principal at Pund-IT, “It can connect with other machines in a cloud and process portions of enormous applications in parallel.”

The point is, according to King, next-generation IT solutions are expanding computer density and power consumption with it by 10 times.

King called the iDataPlex “a highly familiar yet essentially new approach to provisioning Internet-scale datacenters,” making it worthy of considerations for emerging Web 2.0 solutions.

King says IBM “has reset the bar” for what customers want from a Web 2.0 datacenter and what they expect IT vendors to deliver.

And like IBM, the bar has been reset for everyone who has something to sell, be it a product or a service.

It is not a question of whether the old ways were better or worse. That’s looking backwards. The old ways are dead, like it or not. From this new generation of producers and consumers we will see the emergence of a new way of living.

Get used to it.

Posted by Ephraim Schwartz on April 29, 2008 03:00 AM

April 15, 2008 | Comments: (0)

Salesforce and Google ally -- for now

Hamlet: Act I, Scene V

        Ghost
    Ay, that incestuous, that adulterate beast,
    With witchcraft of his wit, with traitorous gifts, --
    O wicked wit and gifts, that have the power
    So to seduce! -- won to his shameful lust
    The will of my most seeming-virtuous queen:
    O Hamlet, what a falling-off was there!

I'm not sure who will be the queen and who will be the ghost as an outcome of the "global strategic alliance" between Google and Salesforce announced this week, but I do predict there will be one of each.

"O Hamlet, what a falling-off was there!" says the ghost of Hamlet's father, and for reasons I will explain, this glorious -- er, I mean, global -- announcement of a close relationship between Google and Salesforce reminds me of that very scene in Act I.

In the announcement, Kraig Swensrud, vice president of applications at Salesforce, described in detail the very tight integration between Salesforce's CRM app and Google's growing productivity suite.

O wicked wit and gifts, that have the power/So to seduce!
All is sweetness and light at the moment. If a salesperson equipped with the integrated apps puts a "to do" task in Salesforce, it will appear in the Google calendar entry. If two people are working on a presentation at the same time -- say, an art director changing the colors of the bars and a finance person changing the number of dollars in the bars in the graph -- both will see, in real time, the changes being made. Gmail messages will be automatically sent to leads or contacts in the proper component of Salesforce.

It is indeed quite an integration effort from both parties, due in large part because both companies have the same 100 percent Web- and multitenant-based architecture. On top of all that, next summer, the partnership will become even more integrated by giving customers a single bill that combines both companies' services.

However, my skeptical mind tells me the seeds of discontent are being sown alongside the integration. Because let's face it, both Mark Benioff and Google co-founders Larry Page and Sergey Brin are no fading flowers.

With witchcraft of his wit, with traitorous gifts
How, I ask, will both companies and their leaders be willing to compromise their portion of the partnership if at some later date the other decides it wants to upgrade its service in a way that is not immediately compatible with or beneficial to the other's application?

Who will give in if Google wants to upgrade Apps in such a way that does not sit well with Benioff and company? Who will give in if Google wants to partner with an ERP company that is not part of Salesforce AppExchange? How will Google react if an AppExchange member offers a productivity suite integrated with Salesforce that suddenly grows in popularity?

I see trouble ahead.

O Mark, what a falling-off was there!
Like all great partnerships that fail, there are winners and losers. One needs the other more. So who will be the queen and who the ghost?

Google will receive the crown, and Salesforce will be crowned. Google will buy out Salesforce, or the two will come to a parting of the ways, in which case Google will have lined up another CRM company, leaving Salesforce to scrounge around for another productivity suite that has the brand recognition and industry clout of a Google.

Ay, that incestuous, that adulterate beast
Salesforce meets Microsoft? Stranger things have happened.

Posted by Ephraim Schwartz on April 15, 2008 03:00 AM

April 08, 2008 | Comments: (0)

SaaS favors Google over Salesforce

To say that strategy and technology are finally becoming interlinked in business is pure BS.

It has always been thus.

I'm certain that when the first cash-register salesman convinced the first general-store owner to buy a cash register, the sale went through because he was able to convince the owner that this new technology would improve the general store's bottom line.

SaaS as strategy
Even when companies bought and failed to successfully deploy technologies for technology sake in the late '80s and early '90s, you'd have to say they were well-intentioned. By that I mean, no company decided to spend $100 million on SAP R3 because it was cool technology. Some cash-register salesfolks reincarnated as SAP sales representatives convinced them it would, eventually, improve the bottom line.

There is a difference today, however, as Web 2.0 and SaaS (software as a service) are emerging to create technologies that perfectly serve businesses virtualization as a business strategy.

According to Ben Pring, vice president at Gartner Research, virtualization is just a synonym for the ongoing trend to outsource more and more processes.

Call it what you will, Web 2.0 or SaaS, coupled with outsourcing is a match made in heaven.

"First companies bought SAP instead of using home-grown ERP; then they used companies like EDS to handle customer support; now SaaS is just another version of this story," Pring says, who will elaborate on these points at the Gartner Symposium/ITxpo in Las Vegas this week.

I suppose this is all about that old chestnut, "Focus on your core competence and let somebody else do the rest."

But what Pring predicts will happen next really caught me off guard. He believes that a company such as Salesforce.com can grow linearly during the next three to four years but that there will be no exponential, sudden leap in the number of customers it serves. And if it did happen, Salesforce.com couldn't handle it anyway.

Enter a company like Google.

"Google is prepared for the exponential. They built out the architecture and the infrastructure to manage that kind of growth," Pring says. Whereas Salesforce celebrated its 1 millionth user a couple of months ago, it is estimated that Gmail serves well over 5 million users.

What's more, as I mentioned in "A step closer to the integrated cloud," Google is looking to acquire ISVs from the CRM, ERP, and BI markets. By combining those offerings with front-end productivity applications, Google could create a service that, over time, will be hard to beat -- a back-end, front-end suite that Pring believes businesses will more readily buy than anything Salesforce develops via its AppExchange partnership model.

Google: Point SaaS solution killer
Google certainly has the cash to acquire ISVs to round out a complete application suite. Perhaps we are witnessing the oncoming death of point SaaS solutions in favor of those who can offer complete solutions and back it up with infrastructure that the enterprise respects. If this is the case, Google’s brand, positioning, and perception of reliability -- real or imagined -- means that Google will soon pose a significant commercial threat to all traditional ISVs.

In this, Google represents the changing of the guard, one that heralds a new wave of upstarts who know how to exploit the Internet. As I said up top, strategy and technology are and always have been interconnected. But companies like Google understand better than most how to leverage the emerging Web 2.0 technology in order to give companies a competitive edge.

Yes, Salesforce opened the door. But it may be Google and its kin who will be the ones to boldly step through.

In the short term, Pring advises enterprises to review their application portfolios to ascertain where SaaS can deliver advantages and then go about making the best use of it. But remember, there are not that many areas where SaaS is part of the equation today. CRM, HR -- but beyond that, there is not a lot out there, yet.

For the long term, Pring suggests keeping your eyes on the SaaS and Web 2.0 vendors but also watch how the old-guard likes of Oracle, SAP, and Microsoft respond.

My advice? Outsourcing, in all of its forms, sounds good in theory, but as outsourcing initiatives have proved over time, it takes solid analytical thinking to understand where it makes sense and where it doesn't.

Posted by Ephraim Schwartz on April 8, 2008 03:00 AM

February 05, 2008 | Comments: (0)

The medium is the business

With new startups delivering distributed infrastructure, and old models failing, dot-com promises are finally coming true

Sitting at Demo08 in Palm Desert, Calif., was quite a change from my normal northern New England digs where the meteorologist calls 20 degrees Fahrenheit a warming trend. In contrast, Palm Desert's temperature is usually in the mid 60s to mid 70s during the winter months.

The contrast in weather made it crystal clear to me that there's a change in the air as well when it comes to technology direction. You would have to have been sleepwalking throughout the entire two days at Demo08 to have missed it as startups demoed their new ideas and services hoping to attract VC money.

It's apparent that a major shift in business models is taking place due to the Internet and Web 2.0 applications and services.

Demo08 gives an inkling of the future: distributed infrastructure
Two companies at the conference exemplified this shift more than any others: Toktumi and Ribbit. (See the slideshow to learn more.) Both companies are offering small to medium-size businesses a complete package of telecommunications services without partnering in any way with the traditional giant carriers.

I spoke with an old friend I always meet at Demo, John Jordan, executive director at Penn State's Center for Digital Transformation, about this. Jordan describes the change as the move to a "distributed infrastructure."

"Everything will be on the desktop, not in a centralized location," says Jordan. In other words, Toktumi and Ribbit have no need to own and manage a 10-story building that houses a 10-story telecom switch or a vast support system of technicians, linemen, operators, and other customer service workers.

Thanks to the distributed nature of IP networks and the Internet, the need for a new business to run such a massive, expensive telecommunications infrastructure is fast disappearing.

Lest you think I am a bit naive, I understand that somehow companies will have to tithe to the giant network providers who help make this happen or else their backbone or the Internet wouldn't exist.

But it won't exist the same way as in the past, even if the new way is still sorting itself out.

Not only that, but Toktumi and Ribbit can actually assign you a telephone number and offer your company the same features, and more, than what most of the traditional telecoms provide. (And for less money: At the moment, Toktumi can charge something like $12.95 per month and 2 cents per minute for calls.)

For example, by using VoIP technology, Ribbit and Tokumi offer everything from instant-on telephone conferences to a Web 2.0 version of caller ID where the caller ID service streams down far more than the name of the caller. It also provides information both from behind the firewall or gathered from databases across the Web all kinds of information about the person you are talking to as you talk to them.

But if this new way of doing business was just about VoIP, the story wouldn't be complete. VoIP is only the beginning.

Business models are being turned on their heads
The deeper story is that online is changing from a medium that you adapt existing offerings to into a medium in its own right.

For example, in a conversation with Pat McGovern, the founder and chairman of InfoWorld's parent company IDG, he told me that the likelihood that he would ever start a print publication before first testing the waters with an online pub is slim to none.

Obviously, the Internet has already set traditional publishing on its ear, so let's look at why McGovern might have said that.

For a print publication to exist requires nothing short of the infrastructure of the U.S. Postal Service. The USPS charges a publisher about $1 per issue to mail. So if your magazine has a weekly circulation of 250,000 readers, which is not considered huge by any stretch, we are talking about an investment of more than $1 million a month just to distribute the publication to readers.

Printing costs -- requiring another huge infrastructure from timber cutting to pulp mills to printing plants to distribution systems -- adds another $1 or so per copy.

Let's look at InfoWorld again, which discontinued its print edition 10 months ago. Now that InfoWorld is online and no longer a print publication, not only does it deliver more information (more pages) to the desktop than it ever did to the physical mailbox, it does so to more readers than it ever did as a print pub.

In the old world, the additional cost of paper and postage makes an increase in magazine pages or size of circulation a major cost consideration. Not online.

Two shifts are occurring: one old, one new
I understand that what I am saying is not something that hasn't been talked about before. But the Internet bubble burst changed the discussion around this topic.

First, the old disintermediation model was discredited and tossed out, after a flurry of startups that failed. I believe disintermediation is back, as Ribbit and Toktumi demonstrate. In its second coming, the Internet will in fact disintermediate many traditional businesses.

Second, we're seeing a wave of businesses that are purely about what the online medium can do, not ports of existing businesses. IDG's new Industry Standard is such an example, despite its use of an old print vehicle's name, it's a new business.

Telecommunications and publishing are probably at the bleeding edge of this change. But all you need do is think about other businesses that require huge infrastructures and support systems, whose centralized physical entities can be replaced by bits over the air.

To paraphrase Bob Dylan, in high tech you don't need a high-priced consultant to tell you which way the wind blows.

Posted by Ephraim Schwartz on February 5, 2008 03:00 AM

July 03, 2007 | Comments: (0)

Sun puts "Sparc" into Web 2.0

Company aims its Redshift initiative at expanding network loads

Moore's law and the commoditization of server boxes had most of us believing that the days of big iron were over. For a while at least, it looked as if Intel and Windows Server would take over the heart of the datacenter.

Perhaps even Sun Microsystems believed this would happen. How else to explain its adoption of x86 chips to the detriment of its high-performance Sparc product line?

The argument posited that it would be insane to spend $50K, for starters, on a Sun Solaris box when an Intel cluster at a third the price would do. Actually, in 1996, a high-end Sparc "mainframe" could cost more than $1 million.

Although many analysts -- and nearly all vendors with Windows hardware and software to sell -- endorsed the idea wholeheartedly, I don't think IT ever really bought into it.

If the poet William Blake said, "You never know what is enough until you know what is more than enough," then IT departments never got there. You can never have enough performance, as IT knows. And now, with the advent of Web 2.0, SaaS, widgets, YouTube, and streaming video over your cell phone, that truth is self-evident.

Enter Redshift. Sun's answer to the newest demands on the network, one that could in fact indicate an actual shift taking place in the IT industry.

The name of Sun's initiative comes from an astronomical phenomenon -- the shifting of light toward the red end of the spectrum due to the expansion of the universe. Get it? Sun, universe, expanding -- as in scaling to meet the needs of an expanding network. You could say that with Redshift, Sun wants to be the Sparc behind the Web 2.0 network infrastructure as it evolves.

Of course, you can still deploy x86 rack-mount and blade servers, even with the Sun logo. But what Sun seems to be saying with Redshift is that fast, cheap, and easy no longer scale well enough. Wintel will just have to wait a bit longer before it becomes the heartbeat of the datacenter.

To meet these expanding network needs, Sun's latest products are built around Solaris ZFS, a 128-bit file system that yields almost unlimited data capacity, says Peder Ulander, vice president of marketing for Web 2.0 at Sun.

At the risk of becoming a commercial for Sun, here's how I see Sun reading the market as revealed by its Redshift initiative.

Project Blackbox is literally a virtual datacenter in a box. It houses eight server racks in a 160-square-foot shipping container. At 38 units per rack, it has the capacity for more than 700 CPUs, 2,000 cores, or 8,000 compute threads. And the entire network system architecture and management network are included inside.

Sounds to me as if Sun is trying to transform the datacenter into a commodity product. Yet commoditization usually occurs when a high-demand market is saturated with enough vendors that they end up competing almost entirely on price.

Obviously, datacenters in shipping containers aren't quite there yet, but what Sun seems to be saying with Blackbox is that, as everything moves onto the network, owning and running a datacenter will not remain in the hands of a few suppliers. It can't, simply because too many companies will find themselves in need of those levels of performance.

For example, SaaS solutions require a powerful infrastructure to deliver a user experience equivalent to that found on the desktop. And if more than 50 percent of all new software startups are delivering products via the Web, then the demand placed on datacenters will increase tenfold.

Code-named Thumper, aka Sun Fire x4500, is similar to Blackbox only it is a hybrid data server/storage solution in a box with 24TB in 4U of rack space. It combines the functions of 2 dual core AMD Operton processors, network fabric and switch, and SATA storage in a single integrated system.

Code-named Streamstar, aka Sun Streaming System, provides broadband in a box and is designed for the delivery of high-definition broadband TV, IPTV, and steaming video to the home.

Project Darkstar is a box optimized for the gaming industry.

Network.com is a Sun subscription-based service that delivers pay-per-use CPU cycles.

We have all seen companies selling products "in a box." Not many have succeeded. Some were too far ahead of their time; others failed because some technologies just change too rapidly to be put into a box.

Nevertheless, I think Sun is reading the market correctly, and while I'm not 100 percent convinced that Project Darkstar and Streamstar will be roaring successes, Project Blackbox has a lot going for it, as does Thumper.

Whatever the outcome, it will be interesting to watch the market and see how products and partnerships develop to meet the new demands on the network.

Perhaps IT will get what it has always wanted: performance to the max.

Posted by Ephraim Schwartz on July 3, 2007 03:00 AM

June 19, 2007 | Comments: (0)

IBM lends gravitas to Enterprise 2.0 trend

Leveraging Web 2.0 in the enterprise will mean transforming IT to fit a new paradigm of end-user needs

While far from being the first major enterprise software vendor to offer Web 2.0 capabilities, IBM today jumped into the game with both Big Blue feet, a move that will surely accelerate enterprise adoption of Web-based social software.

And when that happens, IT will have a lot to think about and do to ensure that Enterprise 2.0 delivers on its many promises.

IBM today announced three major collaboration and social networking applications under the heading of a Web 2.0 Goes to Work Initiative. The three applications are IBM Quickr 8.0, IBM Lotus Connections, and IBM Info 2.0.

IBM has been using the concept of collaboration and information sharing internally for the better part of a decade, according to Jeff Schick, vice president of social software at Big Blue. Schick tells me that seven years ago the company built employee profile capability within IBM -- called Blue Pages -- that support connecting people to people, people to information, and people to the extraprise.

With 6 million lookups per day, Blue Pages gives IBM employees access to co-worker's phone numbers, IM presence, and profiles -- which help them locate colleagues with a particular expertise.

This week IBM officially launches the commercial version of all this under Lotus Quickr, Lotus Connections, and Info 2.0. While the concept may have been around for 10 years, I'm certain the technologies IBM is using today are far different.

Quickr is team collaboration software, and Connections is a social-networking application in the vein of MySpace and FaceBook, but with an enterprise focus. The apps have a lot in common in terms of the technologies underneath.

Quickr allows users to share and organize content libraries, create online collaboration sites, and access libraries through plug-ins on their desktop applications.

Connections offers five capabilities, including profiles to find people with expertise in particular fields, communities to build team sharing sites, wikis, blogs, and something called Dogear, which is essentially a way to share bookmarks. Another feature called Activities allows users to monitor their work with a dashboard, share tasks, and establish best practices.

Finally, Info 2.0 is a mashup technology that gives users the ability to mix and match components from various applications to make new applications. The example IBM offers is a store manager tracking inventory shipments against weather reports from national weather advisories and then mapping that with Google for inventory management.

IBM tipped its hand about all this in January and this summer will be under a full head of Web 2.0 steam, shipping these applications by the end of June.

All of this could potentially have an impact on network traffic, bandwidth, and storage, but that is not the largest issue IT faces, according to David Cearley, lead analyst at Gartner.

The main challenge for IT will be delivering a set of end-user computing capabilities that best enable Web 2.0 for the enterprise.

Up until now, IT in the main has been focused on delivering e-mail and Microsoft Word to the desktop. But new tools will now be needed to seed the environment with the ability to build community. Yes, end-users will create, maintain, and drive those communities forward, but according to Cearley, IT will need to deliver a new set of capabilities to make that happen.

For example, there are a lot of tools for blogs and wikis. Differentiating the functionalities each offers will be vital as enterprise demand for these tools proliferates.

"Simply giving someone wiki capability doesn't mean anything," Cearley says. Rather, IT will have to identify how employees will use the functionality, paying particular attention to the types of communities they will want to build. IT will then have to examine a range of social software to determine the best fit.

Choosing a solution is one thing; getting end-users up to speed is quite another. If you recall back in the '80s companies actually had end-user computing departments that worked with people to show them how to use word processors and how to create applications with spreadsheets. Over time, the need for that kind of end-user support diminished.

Giving end-users the ability to create applications and mashups will likely mean a resurgence in the importance of having an adequate end-user support plan in place.

"It raises a whole new era of support requirements," Cearley tells me.

I have to confess I was part of the community that first ignored social networking, then laughed at it, then attacked it, and now, I guess I have to say I was wrong. It wins.

My advice is to skip a few stages and figure out how to accommodate social networking and collaboration into your IT architecture now. And if you can't, well, now that Big Blue is in the game, get out your checkbook; there's always IBM Global Technology Services.

Posted by Ephraim Schwartz on June 19, 2007 09:00 AM

June 04, 2007 | Comments: (0)

Google, Salesforce miss the mark

Group Edition isn't the killer app the industry was hoping for

Is the Google-Salesforce announcement of a new, jointly developed application just smoke and mirrors, or is it the start of something big?

Certainly Group Edition, which combines Google's AdWords with Salesforce's CRM lead-generation feature, is not the big announcement we were all expecting when I wrote a blog last week, Google, Salesforce may make software history.

If there had been something nifty about how Group Edition replaces Team Edition, the entry-level CRM SaaS (software as a service) application for small businesses, there might cause for excitement. But I question whether there is anything new here at all.

Google AdWords, for the uninitiated, allows companies to buy the right to have their business linked with keyword searches. In other words, when someone searches on a keyword you have bought advertising rights to through AdWords, a link to your company's Web site will show alongside nonpaid results relevant to that particular search.

So now Google AdWords will be promoted in Group Edition. A user wanting to sign up can punch out from Group Edition to Google and sign up. Zzzzzzzzzzzzzzz.

Let's say you take that step and a search for, say, baseball bats brings up the name of your sporting goods store and the user clicks on your link, it is still up to Salesforce to get that potential customer to fill out a lead form in order to identify himself. Typically a company can offer an incentive, a Webinar or perhaps a topic white paper, if the visitor fills out a name capture form. Zzzzzzzzzzzzzzz.

The only difference now is that the Google AdWords stats can now be incorporated into the Salesforce lead-generation form, giving salespeople more data on the customer, such as how long they stayed on the site, what they looked at, and so on.

Because Google will give a small portion of its ad revenue to Salesforce if a Salesforce customer signs up for Google AdWords with no reciprocal revenue exchange on Salesforce's part, the immediate benefit goes to Salesforce. However, Google hopes that Salesforce will sell the heck out of the new co-designed site so that Google can garner an entirely new market for its AdWords product.

For my money, it doesn’t even qualify as a great mashup; rather, it is just an improved interface. One plus one still only equals two, with the only change coming from the fact that salespeople can now see all the data in one place.

Now consider that Google has about 900,000 AdWords customers, but most of them are very small companies paying pennies per keyword. While Salesforce is in fact courting the enterprise customer more and more, the majority of its 650,000 users are small businesses, too.

Yes, nickels and dimes add up, but SMBs don’t set the course for how companies do business in the future. That kind of leadership comes from the enterprise level.

Enterprise Applications Consulting lead analyst Josh Greenbaum says Google needs some kind of capability to team up with the enterprise.

"They don’t get where the key inflection points are," Greenbaum says.

For more of Greenbaum's take on Salesforce and Google, check out "The Salesforce/Google Killer App: Not coming anytime soon."

Naturally Google is trying to make more of what they are doing -- driving ad revenue to the bottom line. But that's not strategic. This announcement should have been about a killer alliance and a killer application for the enterprise.

Of course, both companies still have that opportunity, but the window won't stay open forever. They need to do something this year, or some new upstart may just come along and capture the imagination of big business.

Posted by Ephraim Schwartz on June 4, 2007 09:42 PM

May 29, 2007 | Comments: (0)

Dumbing down and smartening up via the Web

Social networking and information design will have a profound effect on generations to come

As an old friend once told me, whenever there's a transition in a culture, something is lost. When Gutenberg invented the printing press and written information became widely available, tricks for recording history orally were lost. Prior to literacy, people leaned on poetry more to relay their histories because poetry provided a structure to help them remember their stories.

We are going through such a transition now. And we can watch as two opposing trends regarding people's relationship with information unfold thanks to the World Wide Web.

One trend is bent on grabbing folks' attention; the other is geared toward moving their attention to where deeper sets of shared knowledge reside. How these two trends affect one another could have wide-reaching implications on how information affects our lives.

The scarier trend is what I call the dumbing down of information to accommodate what some are calling Digital Natives, aka DNs. As far as I can tell, the term originated in 2001 in a blog titled "Digital Natives, Digital Immigrants" by Marc Prensky.

Prensky says DNs are all "native speakers of the digital language of computers, video games and the Internet."

Digital Immigrants, on the other hand, are "those of us who were not born into the digital world but have, at some later point in our lives, become fascinated by and adopted many of or most aspects of the new technology."

Gartner, on its media Weblog, six years later, picks up on this theme, proclaming that DNs "absorb information differently from digital immigrants."

Whereas Digital Immigrants are "more methodical, find text a far more efficient way of absorbing information, and invest time clicking on a video link only if they think it will really add value to the story," Digital Natives "graze somewhat randomly for information, scanning Web pages for photos and video, and reading the text only if the images capture their attention."

This is where I start to get scared.

Please understand me, I do not believe information needs to be "dumbed down" for DNs because they are any less intelligent than non-natives, aka DIs. Obviously, any evolutionary changes in humanity, negative or positive, would take a bit longer than the approximately 25 years since the birth of the PC age.

What I am saying is that, as in any business, the people who make money from consumers have figured out how to attract, how to sell, and how to keep customers coming back to their Web site, be it an e-store or an online news service. Therefore, we can expect over time more and more of the Web to adopt the environment that appeals to those who "read text only if the images capture their attention."

Capturing and holding the attention of a viewer, not a reader, started with television. Sociologists have long been commenting on the fact that American television programming jumps from scene to scene far more rapidly than British programs do. It both appeals to and, I think, helps create viewers with shorter attention spans.

I have two concerns about this development. One, unless we get DNs to behave more like DIs, future generations will have a harder time developing the study skills they need to master and understand their environment in order to become the kind of professionals -- doctors, architects, engineers -- that we need to keep a complex society running.

My second fear is political. Unless our future generations learn to analyze content and understand issues by reading deeply, they will be far more susceptible to being manipulated -- and not likely for noble goals.

OK, that's on the downside. On the smartening up side, I see the concept of social networking -- in business and nonbusiness environments -- creating a growing pool of people who have access to and thus are aware of far more information than ever before.

Companies such as Attensa and ConnectBeam are at the cutting edge, creating enterprise-level social networking technology that allows users to easily exchange information. This in turn allows more people to use information more intelligently.

Making information and the people who possess it available to others can have a viral effect, too, one that will motivate future generations to tap into a variety of sources of information to obtain a complete picture on any given issue.

Perhaps we can also say when you have a transition in the culture something is gained.

Posted by Ephraim Schwartz on May 29, 2007 03:00 AM

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