Alex Barnett blog : Internet

The Third Order of Order

alexbarnett — Fri, 09 May 2008 11:45:00 GMT

I'm thoroughly enjoying David Weinberger's Everything Is Miscellaneous (The Power of the New Digital Disorder).

Weinberger has a canny knack for taking a subject matter I feel I'm already familiar with and yet illuminating and expressing facets of it in such a way as to greatly further and deepen my understanding of it. I'm storing the following quote from the chapters "Lumps and Splits" as I'm sure I'll want to reference it again - a great description of how knowledge and information is being transformed in its organization and interface:

"In the third order of order, a leaf can hang on many branches, it can hang on different branches for different people, and it can change branches for the same person if she decides to look at the subject differently. It's not that our knowledge of the world is taking some shape other than a tree or becoming some impossible-to-envision four-dimensional tree. In the third order of order, knowledge doesn't have a shape. There are just too many useful, powerful, and beautiful ways to make sense of our world."

If you haven't already done so, I recommend reading Weinberger's two other books, Small Pieces Loosely Joined and (co-authored) The Cluetrain Manifesto. And that reminds me, I need to update my LibraryThing.

8 Trends in Software as a Service Platforms

alexbarnett — Sun, 13 Jan 2008 17:40:00 GMT

To kick off the new year, I presented to around 40 or 50 members of Utah Technology Council (UTC) last week. The title of the topic they asked me to speak about was "Trends in Software as a Service Platforms". I searched around for some ideas and came across two recent posts predicting trends in SaaS for 2008, one by Phil Wainewright "Eight Reasons SaaS Will Surge in 2008" and Jeff Kaplan's post "Top Ten Reasons Why On-Demand Services in 2008". I decided to borrow liberally from these (thanks Phil and Jeff) and mash these two together (along with a couple of thoughts of my own) and present "8 Trends in Software as a Service Platforms" to an audience made up of CTOs and VPs of engineering and development for software companies in the Utah area.

In preparation for the presentation, my boss (Martin Plaehn) at Bungee Labs suggested I write up my presentation as notes blog them afterward, so here they are.

8 Trends in Software as a Service Platforms

SaaS is just part of the web mega-trend
Mainstream opinion says “Yes” to SaaS
Software vendors stampede into SaaS
All is being virtualized
Explosion of Web APIs
Economic factors favor SaaS
Enterprise and SMB IT embraces SaaS
SaaS platforms proliferate (PaaS)

1. SaaS is just part of the web mega-trend

Most of us have witnessed and many of us have been a part of the transformation in the way goods and services have been digitized, virtualized, delivered and consumed. Software, the data behind that software and the functionality that software provides is no different - software is subject to the very same transformational forces.

Just think about how even a class of product that is natively digital - such as software - has been transformed in the way it is delivered and consumed. For prosperity's sake, I've still got a few of those ZX81 software cassettes stashed away somewhere, gathering dust, looking ever more antiquated with each passing year. How will today's mode of software delivery and use look to us in a few years from now?

The web wants to connect things, and that's interesting. But connecting and interacting with "live" data, information and remote functionality make things more interesting.

At the fundamental level, the web connects things. It connects people to people, businesses to businesses, and people to businesses. Since the early 90's, the web has enabled the connection of so many things to so many other things at an ever accelerating rate, and yet we crave even more connectivity. But we increasingly also want the ability to interact with those things.

And it is the nature of these connected things that have changed since the early internet. The early web was good at connecting to static views of information and accessing limited and rigid functional services, very much a read-only mode. Then, as we learned a) the ability to read more dynamic-type information - at least regularly updated, and b) access richer remote functionality, we created whole new opportunities for ourselves. Next, we grew our ability read and write against dynamic, near real-time data and information and to program against remote functionality to create a new class of web applications leveraging those capabilities - and hence a new order of business and experiential opportunities have emerged. Some label this as "Web 2.0".

At its essence, it is the "liveness" of these real-time read-write data, information and functional sources available as "always on" services and the increasing ease to connect to, interact with - specifically change those resources available as live, programmable services that allows us to create new value out of those resources, opening up brand new market opportunities for businesses and the compelling, rich "live" end-user experiences of tomorrow.

2. Mainstream opinion says “Yes” to SaaS

Not surprisingly, Wall Street loves the the predictability of subscription services. It's good for cash flow, forecasting and business planning.

The venture firms also relish the opportunities that are opening up in a software as services-oriented economy. The ability to circumnavigate the incumbent software players with new disruptive technologies and propositions that are significantly easier to try and access for prospective customers compared to traditional software evaluation, along with usage and subscription-based business models verses the old licensing model makes investing in services-based software companies very compelling propositions from the venture firms' point of view. We should also see healthy M&A activity based on these similar opportunities in the coming year.

And then there's the trend for offshore / IT business process outsourcing. These providers will surely get in the game and make their plays through investments in and acquisitions of SaaS vendors that align well with their current core businesses.

Add to that the excitement we're reading about the SaaS space from the IT Analysts, journalists and bloggers, plus the new book by Nick Carr (author of “IT Doesn’t Matter”) - delivered by Amazon to me last week: “The Big Switch: Rewiring the World, from Edison to Google”. I think there's little doubt Carr's excellent analysis of the computing industry as an analogy to the electricity industry's shift to a utility model will be on business bestseller list for much of 2008. His messages resonates with corporate executives and end-users agree with him:

IT is a needless hassle,
it should be as easy as electricity and
be as reliable as a utility

3. Software vendors stampede into SaaS

The Big Software Players are following the early SaaS successes

CRM as a case in point. If you've been following the CRM software market, you'll know about the noises Oracle-Siebel, SAP and Microsoft started to make in the 2007 about what they are are lining up for the 2008 in terms of CRM as a service. Their efforts to emulate Salesforce.com's success delivering CRM as SaaS will be key strategic bets from the incumbents' point of view - and loud, price and functionally competitive propositions from the point of view of their existing and prospective customers.

CRM is just one of the multiple horizontal solution categories to transform from on-premise with traditional licensing model to a service-based delivery and subscription-based revenue model. ERP, supply chain, e-commerce, HR and many more...the horizontal solution list goes on. And then there are the vertical solution players...

Here's another data point to consider regarding the move by traditional software vendors to a SaaS model:

“15-20% of application ISVs have already either begun new skunk works initiatives or gained access to SaaS assets and development experience through M&A activity”
(Source: Key Trends in SaaS: 2008 and Beyond, Saugatuck Technology)

4. All is being virtualized

Virtualization is a technology trend.

Virtualization enables hardware as a service. The demand for virtual machines met by hypervisor software (VMWare, Xen, Hyper-V) and the success of Amazon's Elastic Compute Cloud (EC2) in the last couple of years point to a continuation of further virtualization of applications and hardware. Virtualization is accelerating the move from traditional on-premise software to services.

Virtualization is a business trend.

We continue to become a mobile workforce. The younger entrants into the workforce in service-oriented economies expect and want to be always connected. It's very hard work, if not impossible to get your traditional on-premise applications and centralized servers sitting behind a firewall to serve today's mobile workers. SaaS and managed services meet the needs square on.

5. The explosion of Web APIs is upon us

According to ProgrammableWeb.com, there are 559 commercial and public APIs available today, most of these are new and there are plenty more to come. How many will we see go live this year? And how many private web APIs are there and will be developed and consumed in the coming year?

Data from ProgrammableWeb.com

6. Economic factors favor SaaS

On-premise software requires upfront capital investments
To lower costs, many companies hold back on their capital investments to mitigate their risks, especially in recessions
Adopting on-demand services on a pay-as-you-go basis will be a perfect sourcing strategy for businesses seeking greater cost-controls and flexibility – the utility model

All well and good, but the real economic value of SaaS is that fact that it unleashes new value of previously isolated data silos and functionality.

7. Enterprise and SMB embraces SaaS

When it comes to IT, who doesn't like

Low-maintenance?
Low cost?
Low-resource profile?

IT and business folk like these things, and externally delivered SaaS applications deliver these benefits.

8. SaaS platforms proliferate (PaaS)

The more mainstream SaaS becomes the more the large vendors will be forced to offer effective platforms for ISVs, enterprises and SMBs.

If the move by the software vendors from traditional on-premise software to a services model is to be successful, they will need to provide programmable interfaces - not just end-user interfaces - to their services for their customers. Customers need and want the ability to access, intergrate and create new value out of live, programmable data, information and functionality living in the cloud. And in turn these same customers will want their custom-developed composite applications and integrated data available as programmable services - yet more APIs.

Customers want to unleash new value of previously isolated data silos and functionality through the development of their own applications programmed against those resources. And in turn these same customers will want their own custom-developed composite applications and newly integrated data available as end-user interfaces and as programmable services - yet more APIs. These customer needs will drive the software market to provide platforms to provide businesses and developers with with end-to-end:

programmable services and data integration
application development, testing and collaboration tools
deployment and scalable delivery

...all as a service with a utility model.

(hey...I needed to mentioned Bungee Connect just the once ;-).

2008 will mark a the proliferation of such offerings as "platforms as services" (or PaaS) through 2009, where then the consolidation will begin. Interesting SaaS and PaaS times ahead.

Update 2/20/2008: see "Time to Define "Platform as as Service" (PaaS)

The presentation seemed to go down pretty well and we had lots of interesting discussion throughtout. One of the topics we discussed was data security in a SaaS world. Don Kleinschnitz (VP, Development at Symantec) followed up with a mail linking to his blog covering Security 2.0 topics.

Again - thanks to Phil Wainewright and Jeff Kaplan for their post and to Martin for suggesting I blog this.

The Web Standards Fluster Cuck

alexbarnett — Tue, 14 Aug 2007 00:58:00 GMT

Clucking bell, Molly Holzshlag really has kicked the web standards beehive with a blog post expressing her great discontent with the W3C and WaSP.

Ridiculously Inadequate Backgrounder

Now, before you head off and read the post and the 60+ comments, here's a bit of background on why I find this post of interest (and rather depressing):

I've been following Molly's work for a while now. She first came on to my radar when after providing an update on the progress made between the Microsoft IE, VS and .NET teams and the Web Standards Project (WaSP). That was in 2005. Then in January 2007, I noted Molly's announcement that she had left WASP to join the IE team on a contract basis to work on standards and interoperability issues. I was pleased to see the IE team was making a real effort.

Entirely seperately, but not entirely, in October of 2006 Tim Berners-Lee called for the reinvention of HTML. His call to action caused a bit of a hoo-ha at the time. What's that got to do with Molly? Well, as noted, some of the reactions to TBL's post varied from skepticism, to 'About time!' - and here's the connection with Molly's latest post - to what role the WHATWG will play in what presumably could be a competing effort to the HTML 5 (or XHTML5) spec in progress at the time. However, I was pleased to hear TBL's public calling for progress and hoped we might see some of this progrss after HTML's 8-year stagnation. Then in July 2007, we had the news that HTML5 was being considered by the W3C.

Confused? You should be.

So after my ridiculously inadequate backgrounder, you can now go ahead and read Molly's post, along with the contributions be the cast of characters (the commenters), some of whom are affiliated with various competing factions wrestling with the future of web standards and HTML, who somehow manage to converge the various threads (now including a Fear of Air, the Semantic Web, microformats, Silverlight, XML, community, accessibility, transparency and who-knows-what-else) into what looks like a complete political mess (read: fluster cuck).

Yes, it is depressing,, but such is the business of web standards agreement. A messy business indeed...There's even a YouTube video covering the drama - HTML5 trailer - Find your Hero.

Thanks to Thomas Vander Wal for the link to Molly's post.

Ozzie's "Cloud OS" Raises More Questions than Answers

alexbarnett — Fri, 27 Jul 2007 20:04:00 GMT

Ray Ozzie's briefing this week provided quite a bit more detail around Microsoft's "Software Plus Services" strategy. It's definitely worth a read (or a look, and if you're feeling too lazy for either you can read Nick Carr's summary).

It's been a year since Ozzie took over the role as Chief Software Architect from Bill Gates, and I think it is exciting to see his influence further emerge throughout the business, architectural and experential direction of Microsoft. The 30 year old company needs this injection - a shot in the arm. And his vision is the right one. It is the only one that has any chance of seeing Microsoft through its need for growth.

However, as the Ozzie's "Cloud OS" story slowly becomes more concrete, the future influence that Microsoft will have throughout the software and internet services ecosystem is becoming less clear.

Yes, we know Software as a Service (Saas) is becoming an increasingly significant trend, and we know that the enabling role Web Services (SOAP and REST based) has to play as part of the overall move to a distributed computing model is becoming ever more central, and we know that the browser will continue to further its dominance as the primary interface between humans and data, functionality and people, but what is not so clear is how many "major players" there will be in that future, what their roles will be, nor what the roles of the "everyone elses" will be.

Microsoft Partners have been assured a place by Microsoft's side in this future, but does anyone really know? How will all this fall out? How will Microsoft's traditional partner profile fit into Ozzie's new brave future? What kind of ecosystems will emerge? Will Microsoft's ecosystem of tomorrow look radically different to its ecosystem of today? Who are the Microsoft partners of today who will find themselves competing head-to-head with Microsoft tomorrow? What will Microsoft's competition of the future even look like?

The answers to some of these question may surprise us. How many people, for example, would have imagined a just few years ago that search engine providers or an online bookseller or online university network would emerge to become a serious potential competitor in the computing and software space of Microsoft? Not many. In the second internet age Microsoft's future competition and partners can literally come from any direction at any time. And they often do. In many respects, the future looks bright, but I suspect that for many in the software / computing industry the future is also very cloudy indeed.

Premonition video? - OMG! All Online Data Lost After Internet Crash

alexbarnett — Tue, 24 Jul 2007 23:33:00 GMT

When the directors of this video dreamed up the "OMG! All Online Data Lost After Internet Crash" scenario, I bet they didn't expect this to happen quite so soon after their premonition:

"The Web 2.0 datacenter 365 Main, in the heart of SOMA, just lost power. Sites that are affected include Craigstlist, Technorati, Yelp and all Six Apart properties, TypePad, LiveJournal and Vox...People using LiveJournal OpenID will be unable to authenticate to other sites until service has been restored."

That's a lot of sites and users down. Not the end of the online world for everyone, but it certainly comes close to that for some.

So what do we mean by the 'Internet Cloud'?

alexbarnett — Thu, 05 Apr 2007 05:49:00 GMT

Danny dropped by and asked me: "Hi Alex, do you happen to know of any half-decent definition of "the cloud"?"

I know it sounds corny, but 'good question'!!

So I'll give it a go.

Now, I could get textual, but I'll first try to answer with a few pics...

Maybe I see the 'cloud' as over-developed green jellyfish layer that's growing over the surface and orbit of Earth?

Hmmm, maybe not.

Or is it more like a cliché?

Maybe it's more like one giant thought-bubble in the sky?

Or a memecloud perhaps...

Or, and I do like this one, a cloud of APIs:

Enough pics.

Let's get textual now. Here are some that allude to the half-decent definition you're asking for:

"the Internet cloud, where massive facilities across the globe will store all the data you'll ever use" - George Gilder

Good, but limiting. The cloud is much more than 'just' all the data in the sky. Next...

"Like a cloud, the Net can't be pinned down - it's alive, unpredictable, and, as innumerable startups learn, can prove a funnel cloud or even a Bengali typhoon. When the Internet is depicted as cumulus humilis, it's dead wrong...It's much more altostratus - intense, rapid - and a failure to give it proper respect can result in disaster." - John Chambers

Yeah, kind of, but not particularly helpful in terms of understanding what is meant by 'cloud' (and, frankly, a little over-dramatic for my taste).

The next is more like it:

"Once your software becomes a service in the cloud, it opens up the potential to link it up with other services that are out there. For many vendors and users this is still a barely dawning realization, but it's of fundamental importance. In many ways, the Internet cloud is one great global SOA — still very rudimentary in many ways, but flexible enough to accommodate different levels of sophistication, and evolving fast." - Phil Whainewright

Descriptive, yes, and with the right keyword: services, but it's not really the definition I think you might be looking for.

So I'll have a go this time. Consider this a mesh-up (and I mean 'mesh') of the above definitions:

The Internet cloud, where the distributed and programmable network of services across the globe will serve all the data, resources and functionality we will ever use.

I grant, it's more of a prediction than a definition as I'm using the future tense ('will') rather than the present tense ('does'). But we're all going there. It's just a matter of when.

How's that?

Does REST need a WSDL?

alexbarnett — Tue, 13 Mar 2007 22:15:00 GMT

First read this (written by Marc Hadley)

"This article describes the Web Application Description Language (WADL). An increasing number of Web-based enterprises (Google, Yahoo, Amazon, Flickr - to name but a few) are developing HTTP-based applications that provide access to their internal data using XML. Typically these applications are described using a combination of textual protocol descriptions combined with XML schema-based data format descriptions; WADL is designed to provide a machine processable protocol description format for use with such HTTP-based Web applications, especially those using XML."

Then read this by Sam Ruby:

"Those that merely attempt to produce compliant WSDL based on the available specifications often find problems such as these. But the siren call for viewing the programmable web as merely a serialization format seems unstoppable: the current incarnation is called WADL."

Then read this: Automatic Multi Language Program Library Generation for REST APIs, by Thomas Steiner

"The question of describing (REST) web services in a machine-readable way other than WSDL has been raised before^[9]. However, often the motivation behind was more to get rid of WSDL rather than actually solving the REST description issues. Many suggestions are more or less ad hoc inventions designed to solve particular problems. It is to be noted that with WSDL 2.0 it is possible to describe REST services^[10], but here we want to focus on some examples of non-WSDL approaches. As Sun Microsystem's Norman Walsh writes^[11]: "We know the hard things are possible, we just have to make the easy things easy." "

Then see this, also by Thomas Steiner.

What do you think?

-shutting down comments on this post due to spam-

Thinking with a hyperlinked-content processor

alexbarnett — Fri, 23 Feb 2007 15:35:00 GMT

Alex Pang's post Thinking with a word processor led me to ask myself...

This question: How does my trawling / tagging / blogging / processing of hyperlinked content affect my thinking?

Answer: Immeasurably, I suspect.

Thoughts on 'Reinventing the Internet' and Identity

admin — Fri, 08 Sep 2006 06:46:00 GMT

Jason Kolb has been writing a great series of posts called 'Reinventing the Internet'.

I've been bookmarking and sharing some of these posts via Del.icio.us (and if you're sub'd to me, you would have seen these in my feed). Dipping in and out of these since the first post of his series, they seem to be getting better with each post.

In Jason's first 'Reinventing the Internet' intro post, he starts off with the assertion that:

Why?

"If somebody wants to know something about me, I point them to www.jasonkolb.com to find out about me, or to my personal site if it's on a personal level. Everyone I know tells people to find them via their MySpace account, LinkedIn account, or blog. Or, people who still don't have an account on a social network of some type (they will) give out their email address."

As Jason points out in his second post 'A domain name in every pot', companies bet their existence, brand, success and ability to be trusted on this very premise - the domain rules. So, Jason asks, why not for you and me?

And then a quick reminder:

"owning your own domain name is like owning the title to your car. Otherwise, MySpace, LinkedIn, your blog provider, or your email provider owns the title to your online identity."

I think somewhere along the line of my reading the series, Jason kicked me into action as I recently moved my blog to my new domain. Come to think of it, I'm amazed that I hadn't done this years earlier. I've been playing on the web for 12+ years, 10 of those years professionally. It's taken me some time, yes, but now I'm here, wow - it feels good!

And so on to the fundamental question Jason begins to tackle in his series::

should a blog at a domain name that you own be the epitome of an online presence?

Well a blog today, and something else tomorrow. The the point he makes is your domain is yours (as long as you keep paying the rent that is - Jason has another idea on that permarent issue.)

If the answer to Jason's question is 'yes', then what does it mean? What does it enable and why does it matter?

In the next few posts, Jason describes an architecture involving personal servers, URIs as unique personal online addresses and distributed applications, that will allow everyone to:

"eventually have their own personal server hosted at their own personal domain, and those servers will be able to talk to each other and collaborate with each other.
...be a node on an open source peer to peer social network."

It is a fascinating idea and it opens up some interesting scenarios (I'll get to those in another post). There are two key advancements he has discussed so far that would enable this vision:

an identity system that provides an authentication service that then allows the authorization of the user to connect and interact with distributed systems via their personal server
the internet becomes one giant relational database.

We'll explore the 'internet as a database' idea further in another post (a topic close to my heart), but for now I'm going to stick with the ID question.

As his posts unfolded, I wondered how he saw his ID vision fitting, if at all, with CardSpace - formerly Infocard, the identity metasystem effort led by Kim Cameron.

Today, Jason posted an 'interlude post' responding to some of the feedback he's received on his series so far and he called out CardSpace specifically. Bottom line is that Jason believes there is no fit. Jason write of CardSpace -

"The alternative to this are identity metadata schemes like CardSpace. These assume, however, that you will still have pieces of your online identity scattered amongst various providers, which is precisely what I want to get away from. Consider this statement from the CardSpace information page:
"Different kinds of digital identities will always be necessary—no single identity will suffice... No single organization can unilaterally impose a solution."
Basically what I'm saying in this series of posts is that I completely disagree with this statement. The individual himself should be the single source of online identity. There IS a single organization that can unilaterally impose a solution, and that's the individual. Power to the people ;) "

Jason and Kim (and others in the community working with Kim) agree on the 'power to the people' mantra. I've spoken to Kim, met him and heard him present a couple of times on this and it's a prominent theme in CardSpace (hey, he even blogged me!). I realize Jason has at least looked into CardSpace - he quoted from the Seven Laws of Identity - but I'd encourage him to find out more on what CardSpace has to offer in helping him achieve his vision.

I'd like to highlight two other quotes from Seven Laws of Identity. For the uninitiated, think of these Seven Laws as a base set of requirements that any ID system must meet:

"1. User Control and Consent
No one is as pivotal to the success of the identity metasystem as the individual who uses it. The system must first of all appeal by means of convenience and simplicity. But to endure, it must earn the user’s trust above all.
Earning this trust requires a holistic commitment. The system must be designed to put the user in control of what digital identities are used, and what information is released.
The system must also protect the user against deception, verifying the identity of any parties who ask for information. Should the user decide to supply identity information, there must be no doubt that it goes to the right place. And the system needs mechanisms to make the user aware of the purposes for which any information is being collected.
The system must inform the user when he or she has selected an identity provider able to track Internet behavior."

Back to Jason's objections, I think the following is another key concept to point out with the identity metasystem - the need to support multiple identity providers and systems.

"5. Pluralism of Operators and Technologies
A universal identity system must channel and enable the inter-working of multiple identity technologies run by multiple identity providers.
So when it comes to digital identity, it is not only a matter of having identity providers run by different parties (including individuals themselves), but of having identity systems that offer different (and potentially contradictory) features."

(My bold). Does this mean that universal identity system proposes or requires the use of a gazillion different username / passwords? No, precisely the opposite in fact. However, the metasystem design accepts a heterogeneous internet as a fact of life (you know, Utopia is a very hard thing to come by, if not impossible - I've tried...).

So, should Jason try to solve today's identity nightmare by trying to get everyone to use his one system, or does he try and solve what he really cares about by using a common layer above the various ID systems, including his, that abstracts out the differences (various UIs, behaviors, etc) of these systems out and away from the user? You know that the banks / merchants / services ain't going to replace / swap out their ID systems for years, if not decades or at all.

Instead of asking them to replace their systems, they could just adopt an additional (not replacing) protocol that we can all agree on and that provides an single common UI / ID experience for the users, and go from there. That is what we want for users - a better experience, right? But to get there, we need to accept that:

"The universal identity metasystem must not be another monolith. It must be polycentric (federation implies this) and also polymorphic (existing in different forms). This will allow the identity ecology to emerge, evolve, and self-organize."

The last point is what allows us all to win. In other words, if Jason's system works, and it works well, it will interop with any other system that also uses the universal identity metasystem. If his works really well and populous like it, then Jason's solution could become the system of choice by the majority of internet users, if that is how it turned out to be. But without at least an initial level of interoperability between his and the multitude of other systems (that users will want to use via their personal servers), the chances of mass adoption of Jason's vision / solution are vanishingly small compared to the alternative route.

As I see it, in the ID space there is no downside to playing with the rest of the others. You can have your cake and it. I really think Kim and James can and should have a discussion on this.