There’s been a ton of posts already on Steve Job’s open letter about DRM. At the risk of adding one more, I wanted to echo a significant point that seems to be getting lost in the celebration: what’s holding back Apple from acting on their beliefs?
Tips for ASPs
One of my Optaros colleagues in Austin, Erik Smartt, recently posted 8 “Tips for ASPs.”
He’s put together a great list which should be required reading for any application service provider. It’s amazing to me how many managed service providers and large software companies make it terribly difficult to engage with them.
I’m from Corporate IT, and I’m here to help you innovate
Dennis McDonald, in “Needed: Enterprise Strategies for Innovation, Content Management, and Social Media Infrastructure,” argues for situating social media as part of your Enterprise infrastructure:
The more I think about how processes like innovation management can stretch across and into all aspects of an organization, the more it reinforce my strong belief that social networking and social media tools within an organization need to be thought of as part of the overall communication and information management infrastructure. That is, such tools should be universally available to all so that, when new groups and projects form there are no artificial barriers raised to interconnection and integration.
While I’m in perfect agreement about having “such tools . . . universally available to all” and that it is desirable to have “no artificial barriers raised to interconnection and integration,” I think we’re missing something if the only way we can imagine providing “the needed tools to workers where and when they need them” is to buy an enterprise license to one platform or vendor to bind them all. (McDonald’s example of a vendor who gets it is IBM and their recent product introductions).
Web 2.0 Panel at Davos
A webcast is available of this panel from the World Economic Forum: “The Impact of Web 2.0 and Emerging Social Network Models”
The panel, moderated by Peter Schwartz, Chairman, Global Business Network, USA, includes:
- Caterina Fake, Founder, Flickr, USA
- William H. Gates III, Chairman, Microsoft Corporation, USA
- Chad Hurley, Co-Founder and Chief Executive Officer, YouTube, USA
- Mark G. Parker, President and Chief Executive Officer, Nike, USA
- Viviane Reding, Commissioner, Information Society and Media, European Commission, Brussels
The “challenger” is Dennis Kneale, Managing Editor, Forbes Magazine, USA.
This is your brain. This is your brain on Web 2.0.
John Newton, reflecting on the “Geek’s Dinner” held during the World Economic Forum in Davos, describes a kind of epiphany he had regarding Web 2.0:
When you think about the touchstones of Web 2.0 like Google Maps, YouTube, Flickr, MySpace and Second Life, it all falls into place. When the last generation says that there is nothing new here, it is because they cannot see it. They see the technology, which has not moved on significantly, and miss the nuance and conceptual difference. There have been technological changes to be able to better express either abstract concept or spatial relationships, such as AJAX and the virtual world of Second Life, but these pale in the change in accessibility of internet services. First generation was created for the people who built the internet and second generation is for everyone else who isn’t left brain.
He goes on to suggest “the Right Web” as a replacement for Web 2.0. I can’t follow him there, perhaps in part becuase Left and Right are too loaded in the U.S. with political overtones. (I’m not lining up behind any Right Web). It also doesn’t seem too useful to me to exchange the Web 1.0 versus Web 2.0 discussion with a “Left Web” versus “Right Web” discussion – both are too binary and oversimplify the difference.
But I do think he’s on to something interesting, in terms of a resurgence (not that there wasn’t plenty of right-brained thinking in the first generation of web applications, or in the very creation of the web itself) of interests in the aspects of the web which are non-technical, or not immediately technology oriented.