Month: February 2006

[via Rajesh Jain]

• Web 2.0 is people, collaboration, creating together.
• Business Model change is more important than technology change.
• The divider between consumer and enterprise software will blur.
• Give up control, gain value.
• Start small, grow bottom up.
• The question is not what new programs can do for us, but now that we’re enabled, what do we do together, better.

I thought I could pick out two or three of the most important points from this list, but each one seems as important as the other. Each is a necessary, but not sufficient, condition for succeeding in leveraging the power of the Internet to do business. If pressed to pick the most important one, it would have to be

• The divider between consumer and enterprise software will blur.

I wrote about this a long time back (Feb 2005), in “ Hula and the future of software“. I hadn’t even heard of the term Web 2.0 back then, but the paradigm was clear. I was talking about Novell’s new business model, after the acquisition of Ximian and SUSE. The challenge, as I said back then, was to gain acceptance from the wide user community Out There, but the application itself must be usable by organizations too. Software applications can no longer be classified into verticals like B2B, B2C, C2C (or P2P). The Internet just throws these paradigms out the window. To quote from my year-old article,

“…the company needs to build great, industry-strength products that large corporates will use, and will be willing to pay for support. But on the other, these products also need to be “cool” enough, “sexy” enough, for the average nerd to download, try out, and muck about with.”

Joe Shaw, the jolly hacker from Novell and chief maintainer of Beagle, is having problems with Bloglines. Joe, I think you need Google Reader. It’s got everything that you want:

• Web based – I read blogs from at least two different computers, so my subscriptions and read counts need to carry from one to another.
• Two paned – I really, really like the two paned system Bloglines uses. You have feeds and groups of feeds on the left, you click one, and your unread ones load in the right. The pervasive three paned view is just retarded: way too many clicks and far too little information, and a one paned view (like Planet) is just too much information due to the number of blogs I subscribe to.
• Ability to mark items as unread – Bloglines has this nice “Keep new” checkbox in each item that allows me to come back to an article later. Particularly nice for all those Boing Boing NSFW items.

Google Reader is web-based, two-paned, and can mark items as Unread. Besides, Bloglines’ primitive web interface doesn’t even compare with Google Reader’s AJAX-ed smoothness. It handles Atom, RSS, and Feedburner-style syndications. Can import/export from/to OPML, so migrating from Bloglines is going to be a non-issue.

I’ve tried out Bloglines, Google Reader and Thunderbird’s built-in RSS reader, but Google Reader really beats the lot.

Here’s an interesting take on the entire “Offshore” development paradigm that every American firm worth its salt has implemented.

Ed Burnette from ZDNet contends that over the course of time, most jobs in IT will deal with maintenance/sustenance of a product/system (since that’s an unending task, until the product itself is end-of-life-ed), as opposed to actual product development. In fact, he already sees this happening today:

“A colleague told me today that 70% of her time is spent maintaining the old version of the software as opposed to working on the next version. By maintainence I mean duplicating customer reported problems, fixing bugs, creating hot fixes and service packs,  tweaking performance to address complaints, and so forth”

And it is these kinds of tasks, he says, that he would much rather see being done in India than here. According to him, right now it is the opposite situation:

You have a long list of innovative ideas and features that you’d love to put in the next version, but you’re unable to find the time. Management promises that you’ll be given time as soon as these maintenance things let up. But they never let up. Management promises to clear your schedule, to restrict maintenance to part of the team and let you have some breathing space. But then the next day a high priority gotta-have-it-now defect comes in. Experienced, highly qualified and highly paid developers become firefighters, running from one emergency to another. Meanwhile the remote teams, with no such baggage, get the new projects and growth opportunities, and produce quicker results because they can do it full time.

And then Ed calls for a reversal of roles. Actually, I’d say that has happened already.

Most Indian companies today deal with “Level 2 and Level 3 support”, and handle customer issues and product defects. The teams in the US, instead, focus on the next release, feature-adds, and longer-term strategic issues. It’s a lesser form of outsourcing (the o-word has come to imply really low-end jobs; call-centres), but it’s all about focussing on your core competencies, letting your top workers do what they do best, leveraging your talent pool to maximize value to the customer/client. From the point of view of a firm in the Unites State, you don’t want your top developers fixing bugs, handling customer issues, since that requires less creativity, less talent and more drudgery than true product/system development.

What about this situation from the point of view of India? Next: Part Two: Commoditization of Science, and Art as the Differentiator.