Can Google OneBox put the Joy back in Enterprise Applications?

(August 24 2006) Update: Podcasts are now available of the sessions from the symposium.

Last week Dave Girouard from Google Enterprise Services spoke at the 2006 MIT Sloan CIO Symposium.
His talk was entitled “Arming the Innovators: How Consumers have changed the game for IT.”

His basic argument:

• Consumer technology is driving innovation today - because it is fundamentally usable, while enterprise IT applications are getting less usable over time.
• The modern enterprise is driven by “Self-Directed Innovators” who need unfettered access to information.
• Google technology (Enterprise Search appliance, One Box) provides an interface to enterprise information that is so usable (like consumer technology) it will bring joy to those self-directed innovators.

In what follows, I recap Girouard’s presentation in a bit more detail and then use it as the occasion to consider two questions:

1. Is the higher percieved usability and massive interest in google apps, including Gmail, Google Maps, Google Calendar, and related apps from Google and other providers, a sign of the fact that they are better meeting the needs of enterprise users?
2. Will the increased availabilty of web-based alternatives which can be chosen with little to no involvement of centralized IT purchasing committees fundamentally change the role of the CIO and Enterprise IT?

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AJAX, Open Source, and Business Models

Had I but world enough and time . . . I would do an audio mashup of these two conversations. That is, assuming I couldn’t warp space and time and cause the two discussions to have occured together in the first place.

The first audio source would be this panel from the recent Usenix conference in Boston on Open Source Business Models - moderated by my colleague Stephen Walli. The panel was on June 1st, and included Brian Aker (MySQL), Miguel de Icaza (Novell/Ximian), and Mike Olsen (Oracle/SleepyCat), discussing various issues about building communities of users, benefits of different licensing models, software patents, and the challenges of good business execution, all in the context of open source. (Audio is at Stephe’s blog, comments also at Brian Aker’s)

The second audio source in my mash-up / remix would be two episodes of RedMonk Radio, Episode 12 Part 1 and Episode 12 Part 2. (These are both joint podcasts with the DrunkandRetired.com Podcast where they are episodes 53 and 54).

The focus of the second discussion (not a panel but a podcast conversation) was “The Business and Technology of AJAX,” and participants included Cote (RedMonk), Charles Lowell (The Front Side), and André Charland (eBusinessApplications).

The benefit of bringing them together would be to ask the Open Source panel about AJAX and to ask the AJAX panel about Open Source.
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Open Laszlo - Beer, Pizza and Ajax

Update 6/13/06 - PTW (who commented below) also posted photos from the event on flickr.
Last week, the folks from OpenLaszlo / Laszlo Systems presented at a “Beer, Pizza, and Ajax” event here in Boston in the Optaros space (where I work).

David Temkin, the founder and CTO, did most of the presentation, joined by Amy Muntz to talk about how people can get involved as contributors to the OpenLaszlo project.

If you’ve never heard of OpenLaszlo, the basic value proposition is (from their site):

OpenLaszlo is an open source platform for creating zero-install web applications with the user interface capabilities of desktop client software.

OpenLaszlo programs are written in XML and JavaScript and transparently compiled to Flash and soon DHTML. The OpenLaszlo APIs provide animation, layout, data binding, server communication, and declarative UI. An OpenLaszlo application can be as short as a single source file, or factored into multiple files that define reusable classes and libraries.

The “and soon DHTML” part is the newest part, and that was one of the things they demo’d.

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RSS Feeds Get More Action

Marshall Kirkpatrick » RSS yields most action: Geffen Records to leverage FeedBurner

Good analysis of how Geffen is leveraging FeedBurner feeds on their site, offering end consumers a better way of staying up to date on their favorite artists than the old “newsletter” email approach.

Not only do these RSS feeds avoid the spam-filter problem of marketing email, they actually get more reaction

In a post on the FeedBurner Blog, Rick (from Feedburner) notes:

Geffen’s early trials proved that feeds were the marketing tool that garnered the highest conversions. Feed subscribers were four times more likely to take action (e.g. download wallpaper, play audio/video clips, sign up for a message board, etc.) than those reached through more traditional methods. Recognizing the growing audience that will no doubt follow the launch of the next generation of browsers, Geffen wanted to lay the groundwork for a company-wide embrace of feeds to ensure they’re able to leverage this new medium.

Couldn’t have said it better myself. Customers are looking for a way to stay up to date on your products: where’s your RSS feed?

Boston BarCamp - Consuming Amazon’s Web API Directly with Javascript (via JSON and XSLT)

This was actually a session I attended at BarCamp - in fact it was presented on my laptop.

However,  Alan Taylor already had the guts of the session put together as a blog post, so rather than try to reconstruct my notes, I’ll just link to the original.

Good clear overview of how to use xslt to convert what Amazon’s web services return directly to JSON - that way you don’t even need to do any server side processing- the client js can call directly from Amazon and let them do the transformation.
KOKOGIAK - Consuming Amazon’s Web API Directly with Javascript (via JSON and XSLT)