When Jotspot was acquired by Google almost 1 1/2 years ago, they were racing at full throttle releasing great features which could help businesses take care of their intranet (even internet) needs. Google’s acquisition raised the possibility of an enterprise level application with a potential to put Google at a striking distance from Microsoft. In fact, there were claims about Google Sites being a Microsoft Sharepoint killer. After checking out Google Sites for a few hours, I came back with an impression that it is more like Pbwiki or Wikidot. In fact, it doesn’t even match up with some of the features of Wikidot, like using a custom domain instead of getting redirected to a Google’s domain. The only advantage I see over Pbwiki or Wikidot is Google’s ability to scale and their resources to secure the data. At this point of time, I will call Google Sites to be a competitor to PbWiki, Wikidot kinda products and there is no way we can consider this to be a Sharepoint killer.Dennis Howlett of ZDNet Enterprise Blog says it the best

After 16 months at Google developer’s hands, the outcome is substandard. This is such a pity. In its JotSpot incarnation, it was far from perfect but that didn’t matter because JotSpot was shedding light on a new way of collaborating. Since passing into Google’s hands, the guts have been ripped out and then re-assembled with as much Google ’stuff’ as they could cram in but rushed to completion.

Google cannot expect to convince enterprise community with a collection of kiddie gadgets made by 10 year old programmers. They should have atleast collected enterprise ready gadgets before releasing this product. I hope that Google comes out with a better product in the next version. Till then, I can only recommend this product for informal group collaboration. It is not even Small Business ready.

So herein lies the problem with web operating systems like Cloudo, pointed to by ReadWriteWeb. They are not the web. They themselves leverage the platform, aka the web. No one is going to develop apps specifically for Cloudo, which will never scale the way that the web already does. That’s like developing applications for a subsystem of an operating system. As web technologies continue to mature, as the web becomes more programmable and broadband continues to get “broader”, Cloudo and the like will simply become redundant and irrelevant. What we need is applications for the web, not a “desktop” in the traditional sense. Things might work as an interim solution, but not in the long term.

Technorati Tags: Cloudo, WebOs

Turns out, I am not the only one concerned about these things. It’s the question asked by Blogspotting, others on Twitter, as well as lots of commenters on Jeremy Zawodny’s blog

Dan Reed is a Microsoft employee now, so Microsoft is definitely serious about the cloud. They haven’t figured it out yet. For that matter, neither has Yahoo really, at least not the way Google has, but a Microsoft/Yahoo combo on paper can be a wonderful foil to Google. Will it work? No idea. I am certainly skeptical.

Looking forward to seeing Google’s response to this bid. Their stock is certainly taking a beating.

Looks like Jerry Yang’s time to tear down the wall has run out

Further reading:
Microsoft is serious about the cloud too

Technorati Tags: Yahoo, Microsoft, Hadoop

Yahoo was once a poster child of the internet but now their homepage looks like a web 1.0 era relic. When I log into My Yahoo, the only personalization options available are different news categories, weather, TV Guide, Horoscopes, etc. This is what I got from them even in the Web 1.0 era. The main page of Yahoo.com still looks like what I saw during their hey days in the so called Web 1.0 era and the only difference I see now is the addition of some Ajaxy features. I feel like I am visiting an ancient relic and I don’t even visit these pages anymore. In short, I am running away from Yahoo these days. Having said that, I also want to point out that three of my favorite internet hangout spots are Yahoo properties. I have invested considerable amount of my time and data into these Yahoo properties. These vertical properties of Yahoo, Flickr, Delicious and Upcoming, are the reasons why I still want Yahoo to succeed.

Flickr, Delicious and Upcoming are some of the hot properties of Web 2.0, all three of them owned by Yahoo. Yet, Yahoo is not considered a major player in the Web 2.0 era. Let us analyze why this is the case. Yahoo stopped innovating after their initial success in the previous web 1.0 era. They completely missed the shifting of ground underneath the Silicon Valley and elsewhere in technology sector. All they could show as their innovation in the new era, is the addition of some Ajax features on their main page and their refurbished mail product, which appears “bulky” like a desktop application. Refurbishing a product with some glitter is not innovation, period. In fact, I am so pissed off with their spam filter and lack of features like imap, I have completely stopped using their mail system. Their mail system is frozen in the email of the 80s era (didn’t someone talk about lack of innovation in the email recently?) and it is even more frustrating if you get used to Google’s email system. Google has completely changed the way we do email and all Yahoo can do is to spend valuable human hours in producing a product that could, at best, mimic yesteryear desktop mail clients.

I am not dismissing Yahoo as a non-player in the Web 2.0 space. In fact, they have acquired three of the hottest properties in the Web 2.0 space. Flickr and Delicious are, in fact, leaders in their respective verticals. The number of people visiting flickr has increased by 145% in the last year alone (Compete Stats) and del.icio.us has got a 60% increase in the last year (Compete Stats). I have seen upcoming gain some traction as well. Yahoo Mail is the leader in the webmail space with 250+ Million users. It stands second to Google.com in the US Internet usage market share and the traffic growth for Yahoo.com is still on the positive side (a solid 9.4% in the last year (Compete Stats)). In fact, their performance in the Web 2.0 space is not all that gloomy. Why, then, is their name stirring up so much antipathy among the TechBiz elite? The answer is simple.

Lack of vision and no execution. They just couldn’t capture the imagination of technology and business elite, in spite of having some of the greatest verticals in the Web 2.0 space. This could very much account for the lack of buzz in the TechBiz circles and the much talked about demoralization in their workforce. What did Yahoo miss in the Web 2.0 era and what can they do to position themselves in an advantageous position in the upcoming Web 3.0 (disclaimer: I think this Web n.0 notation is a plain marketing gimmick but I am using it in this article to keep up with the crowd) era?

Web 2.0 brought in social to the web apps. My idea of an ideal social network is a collection of verticals, serving to different niches, controlled by a central dashboard. Yahoo has many verticals (some of them being highly successful in the marketplace) and they could have bought many more verticals in various niches (as Sramana Mitra suggests in her GigaOm post). They could have ripped off the ancient relic called Yahoo.com Main Page and converted it into a dashboard for its users. Instead of reading news and analysis from handpicked sources, Yahoo users could have added different vertical Web 2.0 properties (both Yahoo’s and other’s) in their global dashboard. If 250+ Million Yahoo users had got a dashboard that helped them to connect with their social graph (identified by the email addresses in their addressbook), Myspace and Facebook wouldn’t have gained any traction in the first place, leave alone their current  dominance in the social networking marketplace. Yahoo had a tremendous opportunity to become social dashboard for every one of their 250+ Million users but they just missed it due to lack of leadership and vision. In the hindsight, I think ex-CEO of Yahoo, Terry Semel, played a major role in this miss, by projecting Yahoo as a media company instead of a social-media company.

All is not over for Yahoo yet. They could adopt a two pronged approach to generate the necessary buzz in the TechBiz space and turn Yahoo into an exciting company to work with. Such a turnaround could lead to innovation and, thereby, offer the much needed oxygen to position themselves as innovator in the next web era. On one side, they should try to establish themselves as a player in the enterprise space and, on the other side, they should innovate and capture the imagination of consumers. It is definitely going to take lots of perseverance on the part of Yahoo and its shareholders. In the end, they might be able to get back into the Silicon Valley’s hot internet companies list.

On the enterprise side, they have already made a valuable acquisition in the name of Zimbra. If they manage to acquire a company like Zoho, they could position themselves to compete with Google and Microsoft in the Office 2.0 space. There is no leader in this space yet. Yahoo can definitely compete to get a big market share in this space. Zoho is already a mature company in the Office 2.0 space with a diverse range of products including CRM and Online Communication tools. Zoho has already established themselves as an innovative player and if Yahoo can offer the much needed big company legitimacy, businesses will take a hard look at their offerings.

In fact, Yahoo is better positioned for success on the consumer side than even the enterprise side. They should acquire more verticals in niche areas (like travels, real estate, etc.) and tear down the Yahoo.com ancient homepage and turn it into a social dashboard for all their users. They have already announced that they will support OpenID. If they support other open standards like OAuth, more Microformats (they already support microformats in Upcoming and Yahoo Local), etc., it will help them position themselves to compete hard in the upcoming semantic web era. A global social dashboard with open standards is actually the dream of many tech evangelists and such a dashboard also empowers the users than locking them in to proprietary standards. This dashboard will spur the imagination of TechBiz elites as the web timeline shifts from 2.0 to 3.0. Such a buzz will put back Yahoo in the “hot companies to work” list and, thereby, making Yahoo the epicenter of innovation once again.

Well, I do agree that I am not taking the current business reality into account here. There are many other blog posts (including the one by Sramana Mitra, quoted above) that talks from that angle. The idea behind this post is to start a conversation on how they can put the buzz back into Yahoo and offer an image makeover from a purely technology angle. I also agree that it could be just a wishful thinking than anything concrete, considering a company of Yahoo’s size. But, I am just arguing that Yahoo needs a completely different vision that is in tune with the current buzz in the TechBiz space. Like how Ronald Reagan called upon Gorbachev to tear down the German wall, I think we all should call upon Mr. Yang to tear down the old relic (called Yahoo Main page) and infuse new energy into the great organization.

Tim O’ Reilly and Matt Asay have written positively about this deal and there are a few people who are skeptical about Sun’s intentions. Sun’s CEO has written a blog post highlighting their intentions about MySQL. From his post, it is clear that they want a big piece of the market share in Web 2.0 era and beyond. They might make attempts to push Solaris along with MySQL, as Glyn Moody expects, but they will not antagonize the young web based industry that has pledged their loyalty to the L part of the LAMP. I get a positive vibe about this acquisition. I like the attitude of Jonathan Schwartz towards open source. Ever since he took over as Sun’s CEO, he has followed up his words about commitment to open source with his actions. I think the folks at Sun pretty much understand that their future doesn’t lie in SAMP. I am sure they know that any such attempts is disastrous to their company. Also, any attempts to compromise with the open source ethos of MySQL will not work just for the reason that MySQL, till now, is under open source license and anyone can take it from this point and develop it just with the help of the huge MySQL community. Mr. Schwartz is smart enough to understand that they can mess around with MySQL community only at their peril. Besides, they understand the value of Java community to their company and they will, similarly, use MySQL community to their own advantage. It just doesn’t make a business sense to mess around with the status quo of MySQL vis a vis Open Source. If my hunch feeling is right, they would allow MySQL to operate as an independent unit and use the acquisition to establish themselves in the database market. Let us just put our concerns about Sun’s commitment to open source into back burner and think about what this means to the industry.

As Matt Asay clearly points out in his blog, this acquisition will help open source vendors gang up in their war against Oracle’s proprietary software. Sun’s support will help convince enterprise customers to use open source MySQL for their mission critical applications. Sun’s weight will also help spur more innovation and, thereby, help develop MySQL into a world class database. If Sun moves its cards properly, this could mark the beginning of the end of proprietary companies like Oracle. Add this to efforts by Amazon and others to offer Database On Demand, we are definitely in an interesting phase where companies like Oracle and Microsoft are facing the heat.

This deal also marks the beginning of flow of big money into Open Source software. Myths about lack of big money in Open Source is put to rest once and for all. This has two fold advantage. On one hand, this will convince enterprises to bet on Open Source software without inhibition. A consequence of this, on the other hand, will entice more and more companies (both the established ones and startups) to take the open source path because it is a win-win scenario for both businesses and consumers. A proprietary approach may be a win for businesses but it is definitely a loss for consumers.

However, I would like to end this post with a word of caution. I am optimistic about this deal and I have confidence in Jonathan Schwartz’s commitment to Open Source. But, Sun Microsystems is a publicly traded company and it has to play to the whims and fancies of its share holders. Finally, it boils down to how Sun’s management and MySQL team play their cards. Let us hope that this turns out to be one of the historic moments in the Open Source movement.

Deepak’s post, and many other posts in the tech blogosphere, called upon the big companies like Google and Microsoft to open up the data they mine from their online services so that third parties can build a business out of them. The proposal is similar to what Amazon has done for its computing resources. It is an excellent idea but it raises two very important issues. One is about the privacy aspects of the data and the other is about the computing resource usage. I am not going to write about the privacy aspect in this post and my discussion here is going to center around the resource usage.

Before I touch the main premise of Deepak’s post, I want to pose my questions within the domain of Web 2.0 startups. Sharing of data using API is considered as a common sense approach in the Web 2.0 era. In fact, people frown upon those Web 2.0 companies that doesn’t offer an API for their service. Companies like Twitter are very liberal in opening up their APIs. Twitter is yet to figure out a business model. It is one of the very few companies with very open APIs. There is a huge ecosystem around the twitter platform in the form of third party services. The depth and breadth of these services are simply amazing and it has extended the functionality of twitter beyond what the Twitter team would have imagined. Some of the products /web services built around twitter platform are already making a lot of money whereas twitter is yet to make anything. Most of these services use the computing resources of twitter to make their money. It is like someone using electricity from your house to set up a shop just outside your house. Twitter will not mind this till they achieve the necessary threshold of scale. There will come a time, in the lifecycle of every startup, when such an use of resources by third parties, will begin to have a toll on the startup’s financial health. At the same time, they have to allow third party access to the APIs, to leverage value to their business and also to stay competitive. How can a startup, like Twitter, manage such a situation? What is the ideal environment to have a symbiotic relationship like this? A company like Twitter cannot offer its resources for free to third parties, if the intention of third parties is to make money out of it. Then it is not business, it is plain altruism. At the same time, any attempts to make money exclusively out of this relationship will mess up the equilibrium in the ecosystem. It is very important to achieve a fine balance in this delicate ecosystem. This is the biggest dilemma facing the Web 2.0 companies and Twitter is a very good example for this dilemma. People do argue that they can figure out a business model once they manage to scale. They may be able to do it. But, the nuances in the process of figuring out a business model is going to pose a big dilemma to the startups. All the startups that open up their service through open APIs will face this dilemma sooner than later in their startup life. Please note that I am not considering companies with closed data systems here. I am only discussing about the dilemma of those Web 2.0 companies that believe in opening up their data to outside world without any unnecessary restrictions. I would like to know your opinion on this dilemma and how you would solve the problem, if you are a founder of such a startup.

Let us now consider the case of big companies offering information as a service. This dilemma extends further in the case of big companies, if they try to monetize information as a service. The big companies are not dependent on the third party services to get value to their business. They have the information data and building any service, like those offered by small players in a Twitter-like ecosystem, is just a cakewalk for big companies. But, there is still enormous potential for monetization when the information is offered as a service. Such efforts to monetize user’s data will also rub off user’s in a wrong way. This also adds to the Web 2.0 dilemma described in the previous paragraph.

As we move from the desktop world to a world of web services, we are faced with tactical and ethical issues. On one hand, the data should be shared among the networks but, on the other hand, no company can remain altruistic and offer the use of their computing resources for free. How do we manage these two extreme necessities of a business and come up with an ethical solution? I don’t have a clear answer for this at this point of time. I would like to hear from anyone who has a solution.

In the Facebook-Scoble fiasco, I am entirely against Facebook for locking up user’s data and not allowing the users to take it out in any form. However, if facebook is worried about Plaxo using its computing resources for doing what I consider as the right thing (data portability), we have to understand their worry too. The dilemma I raised above shows up in the Facebook’s fiasco with Scoble. On one hand, facebook is losing out because some third party is using its computing resources for free. On the other hand, Scoble’s data is being held to ransom by Facebook and he has no way to take it out. I know the answer for the second part and I believe that Facebook should allow user’s to take their data with them. But, I don’t know the answer to the first part where a third party service is using Facebook’s resources without compensating them. In the case of facebook, one can always say that facebook didn’t allow the usage of computing resources and it is illegal. However, in the case of companies like Twitter, users are allowed to use the Open APIs to take out their data. How can a company be compensated for the usage of their computing resources by other businesses? If we can sort out this dilemma in an ethical manner, we can solve a big chunk of problems facing the Web 2.0 businesses today.

Amazon has done a pretty good job of allowing people to build services on top of either their compute resources or set up online store. Companies like Lijit have built very powerful services using published APIs. However we are now talking at a different level of granularity. In my life science blog, I have often argued about the intrinsic value of data, or lack thereof. In other words, the value of data comes from what you do with it. Not everyone has the same interests or needs. One option is to lock the data away, using it for your needs. Another is to open at least some parts of it up, in a way the equivalent of what Amazon has done with computing resources, to treat some aspects of data as a commodity, and allow developers to build services on top of the underlying data. It has always been my opinion that people look at data differently and derive different information content from it. Google could choose to make some of its underlying data available to people who can present information in a different way than Google might want to. The company can probably build in non-compete safeguards into any API/access to information. We will all be richer for it, and I suspect the Google’s of the world will also benefit in the long run as an ecosystem builds around data services.

Google, Yahoo, etc already provide access to a lot of data, but I believe that we are talking about access at a different level here. In addition, instead of dancing around the bushes, lets put some standards down, develop a set of data sharing and utilization rules (no spam, etc), and take the programmable web to its logical place, an open ecosystem of data, collected by a few, but leveraged by many.

Technorati Tags: Information, SaaS, Open Data

In his post, Robert writes

I’m also seeing significant changes to how you all interact with each other. Over the past year we’ve seen Twitter, Facebook, Kyte, Seesmic, Ustream, Justin.tv, Pownce, Jaiku, and quite a few other technologies get popular.

This interview with Mogulus’ CEO and Chris Pirillo’s pioneering efforts with his own live TV channel played a key role in getting me to see that there’s a new kind of TV channel possible — one that’s participatory instead of one-way — and one that would be very low cost and potentially have high revenue possibilities compared to the cost.

In recent months I have come to believe that video is going to make a huge impact on the future of communication via the web. While Kyte.tv was a big reason for that realization, by making me realize that video can be a conversation, not a one way discussion, there is no denying the influence of Chris Pirillo. While not all of us can do what Chris does, his ability to use video as a two-way medium and incorporate into his brand has been fascinating to watch. Incorporating video into blogs also generates a wonderful conversation in the context of other material, something I have been exploring myself.

With h.264 support in flash and increasing support for HD video, advanced solutions like Mogulus, and fun ones like Seesmic, ones gets the feeling that 2008 is going to be the year of video. Are we going to see the tipping point next year? The year after? What do you think?

Technorati Tags: Video, Robert Scoble, Chris Pirillo