Michael Platt's WebLog

I have moved my blog to xxx. In future all my blog posts will be there.

Note, someone has taken over my domain and published offensive materials so I have removed the link until this is resolved to avoid pointing to the site.

My apologies for any offense caused, some things are very difficult to control on the internet :)

We have just announced availability of the Beta of Windows Live Writer. This is a really great product and very important (IMHO)

We have just announced a new tool called Blinq which produces a webform from a database schema. This is a really neat product which will make generating database based applications much easier.

Its been suggested that it's a framework like Ruby on Rails. In my opinion this is not correct, it is a scaffold built from the schema like a rails scaffold but does not include the language or framework elements of ROR. Tim has it right in his comparison. Mind you it wouldn’t be difficult to add them..

There are a ton of things that have come out which I feel are pretty important that I haven't blogged about so I will try to catch up a bit.

First off Gartner's latest prognostications put Web 2.0 at the top of the things to watch for the enterprise. As a matter of interest I went back to see when I came to that conclusion and it was last November, I actually blogged about it in Febuary. Funnily enough I have noticed that I am quite often about six months ahead of where the industry is going.

I'm not sure that I agree with Gartners sub elements to web 2.0 (I hate all the ajax hype) or timescales (I think the collective intelligence will happen very soon) but maybe in six months time...

I have spent the last couple of weeks pulling together my rather disjointed thoughts about the Architecture of Software + Services into a short article which has just been published on MSDN. Enjoy!

I have been blogging for a while about business value and how the whole Web 2.0 thing in the enterprise will be about business value and not productivity. I am convinced this is the way things are going and so was doing some research in the whole business value area which lead me to technology driven innovation and innovation generally. There is some great work going on in innovation by companies such as GE and IBM, interestingly enough I used to work in an indirect way for Irving Wladawsky-Berger who is leading IBM's innovation work and I have a good deal of respect for his abilities.

Wikipedia has a really good article about innovation and points to marketing and product as important innovation areas, just as I had independently determined. It misses the importance of consumer centric innovation however but then I found a book called "Democratizing Innovation" by Eric von Hippel, author of "Sources of Innovation" which seems to be completely about consumer centric innovation. I shall have to read it in more detail.

Innovation, business value and efficacy are going to be the watchwords for Organizations in the next five years and consumers and collaboration will be the delivery mechanism of innovation on a new platform built from software + services.

Dislocations cause business opportunities, new marketplaces and new models of commerce. This latest dislocation is no different than previous dislocations as can bee seen from the huge number of small dynamic startups that there are in the Web 2.0 space. As in previous dislocations we will see many of these business techniques and technologies move into the enterprise and provide new marketplaces and opportunities.

Whilst there will be opportunity in the IT space caused by the ability to outsource services and use new tools and software in the organization to improve productivity and team working the real opportunity in the short term will be in the business side of the enterprise.

The most interesting and potentially most profitable use of Web 2.0 techniques in the Enterprise is however in the customer facing areas of organizations and in a few specialist internal business areas. The specialist areas are things like product development where customer involvement and discussion in product design and development via blogs, wikis and discussion forums is a very fertile area for innovation and development. The other internal area which could benefit from these techniques is training where the use of video, VOIP, messaging, chat and even mobile delivery has considerable and extensive potential.

In terms of customer facing activities the whole of the customer contact, sales and customer relationship management cycle will be revolutionized by the Web 2.0 tools and techniques that are in common use in the consumer space. In marketing the opportunity to provide rich, interactive media and close customer interactivity through wiki's and blogs will provide new ways of contacting and engaging with potential customers. In sales the use of new form factor devices such as mobile phones to interact with the customer throughout the sales process is another area for new development. Finally in customer support the use of video to assist with problem resolution and blogs and wiki's for self help will create whole new support models.

All these areas can be made to be self funding through the use of advertising based models in the IT systems. It is certainly possible to think of the new marketing being a profit center for the organization.

Web 2.0 will create a huge new range of ways of interacting with customers and consumers for enterprises of all sizes that in turn will provide new marketplaces, business opportunities and revenue generation.

The Consumer web (Web 2.0) and the enterprise Web (SOA) both have value and applicability, the consumer web where responsiveness and scale are important the enterprise web where security and integrity are paramount. It is highly unlikely that organizations will either replace all their present systems or find the security and data integrity available in the consumer world to be appropriate to business critical information but they will want to take advantage of the Web 2.0 levels of responsiveness and flexibility. Organizations will add service support to their present server software based IT systems and use supplied services from SaaS based Web 2.0 systems to create a melded software and services approach loosely connected with a Service Oriented message passing system. This will allow organizations to ensure the appropriate levels of data security, availability, responsiveness and flexibility to their organization, their partners and their customers.

In this joint SOA and Web 2.0, or software and services world, services will be supplied from service suppliers and / or enterprises and will be composited into new services or be mashed up on the device to produce secure, flexible and adaptable systems. So for example an Enterprise search system could include internet search from a SaaS provider, a internal search system running on an organizations servers and a local search on individual devices to provide a composite search experience.

Microsoft strongly believes that a "one size fits all" approach will not be appropriate for the organization of the future and the enterprise will include individual device, server and SaaS supplied services in a client server service configuration running both server software and Software as a Service to provide a complete service platform.

On top of this service platform there are a number of cross platform functions that are required such as identity and relationship management, search and discovery services, communication and collaboration services and content creation and management services. These provide user, consumer, partner and enterprise support across the complete Software + Services or Services platform layer for areas such as search, email, messenger, blogging and wikis. These cross service platform functions build a federated infrastructure layer across the organizationally distributed services platform and use one another to provide a complete service platform.

Relationship and Reputation (RR)

This is in many ways the underlying layer for the other elements of the Service Platform and provides all the security and governance support for those layers. It has multiple layers starting at the bottom with federated logon and single sign on support and identity and access control The R&R layer also supports the concepts of relationships with other individuals and systems and the roles played by these. Finally a trust and reputation layer  exists on top of the identity and relationship layer to provide levels of trust and reputation by role and individual which includes support for ranking and rating.

Participative Content (PC)

The content is the output from the burgeoning creativity that is occurring on the web either in terms of implicit or tacit content such as relationship information, attention information, page ranking information and usage information or explicit content such as geographic, audio, video or movie information.

Search and Discovery (SD)

Discovery is about finding things. Clearly search based on implicit information is well understood but in addition tagging systems,  favorites and bookmarks, preference capture and customization, location and presence based systems are all very important.

Communication and Collaboration (CC)

Unified communication supports all types of communication from real time such as instant messenger, chat, VOIP and video messaging  / conferencing to email. Collaboration provides the social networking systems such as bots, blogs, Wiki's, newsgroups, discussion groups etc. 

So how has this disruption effected the IT market? In this context we have to think of the market as being the Enterprise Market and the Consumer Market. The Enterprise can in turn be thought of as two different parts; the Business element and the IT Organization. The IT groups in enterprises have been struggling for a number of years now with the rapid and flexible creation of new applications for the business in a cost constrained environment whilst they have to support, maintain and integrate with an ever increasing number and complexity of applications and platforms. They have investigated standardization, governance and "one size fits all" approaches, new tools and technologies and outsourcing and off shoring as possible solutions for the delivery of business support in this complex environment but in general haven't yet been able to deliver the level of flexibility that the business is looking for at the level of cost it wants to pay.

In the last five years there has been a great deal of interest in service based application development to provide the levels of responsiveness and flexibility that the business side of the organization is looking for by building or buying in business level elements of service which are loosely coupled using a standardized message passing approach. This approach to building IT systems has been dubbed "Service Orientation" (SO) and an organization where all the systems are Service Oriented is said to have a "Service Oriented Architecture" (SOA). Of course in practice with real Enterprises such a homogeneous SOA approach is unlikely to be achieved but SO does hold great promise for building more flexible IT systems. A more recent development of SOA is the Enterprise Service bus (ESB) which provides SOA support via a messaging engine (the bus).

It should be noted that the most important aspect of a SO based approach is the ability to quickly link together services from a number of different sources built at different times (which is not the same as reuse). This implies the use of a standards based approach such as Web Services.

Microsoft strongly believes in a Service Oriented approach to provide a more flexible IT system and has invested heavily in Web Services support in areas such as .Net and WCF and support for Web Services Standards. It also supports ESB with Biztalk but believes that some of the wilder claims that are made for SOA and ESB should be tempered with pragmatism based upon the realities of large organizations and IT systems.

Whilst the enterprise has been focused on a rigorous and standards based Service Oriented approach the consumer web has focused on using the technology already available to be able to read and write from the browser to the web. Web 2.0, a read / write internet which allows users to create, save, use, interact and discuss rich content (text, documents, data, audio, music, images, photos' graphics, video, movies, games) and applications rapidly and easily, has become very important to all types of users in the consumer space and has had incredible take-up by small startups and consumers.

Web 2.0 systems are also built around the concepts of "business" level services (such as a map or photo) and loose coupling using a message passing approach (HTTP PUT and GET) so could be termed a "Service Oriented" approach but the message passing implementation is different with the services generally accessed as a mashup application running under the Ajax framework in the browser and provided over a Representational State Transfer (REST) message passing system from a software service supplier or as Software as a Service (SaaS). Architecturally however the SOA and Web 2.0 approaches are very similar with them both being based on asynchronous, loosely coupled message passing services. The following table shows the implementation differences between the approaches:

Microsoft supports both the Enterprise SO approach (SOA) and the Consumer SO (Web 2.0) approach with tools, technologies, services, servers and products.

So yet again I think I must be stupid because I don’t understand the whole Service Component Architecture thing. It looks like a programming model (e.g. set of API's) to build web services. I thought that’s one of the many things that J2EE was meant to be supplying. Anyway Microsoft already has that with Windows Communication Framework (WCF) so what's the big deal? Why do we need yet another way of calling web services?

As I have commented on before the disruption that is taking place in the consumer space that is commonly called web 2.0 will rapidly move into the enterprise and cause massive dislocations in product development, marketing, sales, support and training. The first hit will be marketing, indeed I am already having meetings with "Directors of Disruptive Marketing" for fortune 100 companies. John Hagel has a interesting and accurate assessment of the change in marketing in his latest post. Watch this space!

We are entering a time of rapid change in the IT industry which will cause considerable disruption and change in business, IT companies and the way that people perceive and use technologies. This dislocation is similar to the PC and internet revolutions in terms of scope and effect, touching millions of people, huge marketplace, models of commence, ways of making money and IT usage. It has already spawned new marketplaces, industry's and multibillion dollar companies, has engaged hundreds of millions of people and will have a dramatic effect on all aspects of business. Microsoft strongly believes that this dislocation is underway and we are just in the early days of seeing how it will to effect all our lives.

The driving forces behind this dislocation are the same ones that have driven the previous dislocations we have seen in the IT space; Creativity, Communication and Commerce. People want to be creative and individual, they want to innovate and build, to make new things and generate new ideas. Additionally people want to communicate and share with one another, to work in teams, to collaborate, discuss and interact both locally and globally. This desire to share and the value that can be created by collaboration is tearing down organization barriers, blurring the divisions between consumers, suppliers and business and making all enterprises more transparent. Finally people and organizations want to expand their businesses, marketplaces, revenue and profit; to benefit from their endeavors. Microsoft calls this triumvirate of Commerce, Collaboration and Creativity the Experience hub; it is the driver for the services platform which will provide the infrastructure for all these experiences.

The tipping point that is enabling this dislocation, as in the previous ones, is technology. The lowering cost of bandwidth, the availability of computing in new and cheaper form factors and devices and the increase in productivity and ease of use enabled by simple web based applications and tools have caused a massive uptake of web based applications; the so called "web 2.0" space. This dislocation is in it's early days yet as yet and the full ramifications of what will happen and who will be the leaders has not yet emerged but the opportunities are clearly all around us and those people and organizations which recognize them will be the ones to benefit going forwards.

What is happening at the moment is the learning's, businesses, activities and  technologies that have been incubated in the consumer space are rapidly migrating to and being assimilated by organizations of all sizes. Senior executives in businesses and their families are being able to create, store, find, communicate and share content faster and better than ever before for nothing and are wondering why the same isn't true in their organizations. People expect at least the same if not better facilities at work than they have at home. This expectation will cause many of the consumer based techniques and technologies to move rapidly into the enterprise and forward looking companies are already investigating ways of utilizing this dislocation for their own growth and profit. Talking to the business side of organizations of all sizes this assimilation of consumer based ideas and techniques for innovation and growth in product development, marketing, sales, support and training.

Finally the incredible business opportunity that has been demonstrated by the use of an advertising based revenue model to provide "free" services has created great interest in businesses of all sizes in new charging and revenue models and the associated growth and profit potential. It is clear that moving forward there will be three commerce models: unit, subscription and advertising based.

 The "browser can do everything" vs "one (old) size wont fit all" argument rumbles on with Robert and Tara (love the picture) on one side and Joe and Ryan on the other.

I remember when the PC was first attached to the Mainframe using a 3270 card I took a job working on a project (PC/G) which would allow you to do all the PC things on the mainframe using a "smart" 3270 protocol (TCA). I even demo how to run space invaders on a mainframe via the PC... It was not a great success to say the least. The browser can do everything argument reminds me a lot of that old TCA protocol, it looked at the old model of doing things (mainframe) rather than the new (PC). We are in danger of doing the same thing and thinking of the old model (internet) rather than the new (devices such as Xbox, Zune, VOIP Phone, Mobile phone, Media centers etc). There will of course always be the internet as there still is the mainframe, it just wont be the center of our universe.

This is also why I hate all the hype over Ajax, to me it is the same as the extended 3270 datastreams which allowed me to run mainframe space invaders in the terminal PC. I could do it but it was hardly very sensible. This makes me very dubious of all the "write once, run anywhere", "one size fits all" and "Ajax can do everything anyone can ever want" arguments.

As I have said before with software you can do anything anywhere, the trick is to do the right thing in the right place.

Why is this so hard for some people to understand?

The snag with my previous diagram was that there was a big oval called delivery that S+S didnt address. Ray has just fixed that by describing the Experience Hub at the Microsoft's annual Finacial Analysts event. He also rolled up Software + Services into the Software Platform so we now have:

 Brilliant!