Month: June 2005

Tags and Search

Clay Shirky answers a question posed by Tim Bray: “re there any questions you want to ask, or jobs you want to do, where tags are part of the solution, and clearly work better than old-fashioned search?”

First, tags keep found things found. Search is about finding things, tags (in the del.icio.us mode) are about keeping them. Like many people, I stopped remembering things when the internets came along, and started remembering pointers to things instead. Manys the time Ive wanted to find something I read N months ago, and had to remember whether I saw it on slashboing or blogpop, or I had to recreate a multi-word search on Google. Tags, fby contrast, are thumbtacks with filters.

Second, tags add people and time as cross-cutting elements. del.icio.us provides a measure of social velocity I have not worked in a development shop for some years, and would have missed the significance of the original Ajax article, but seeing the ferocity of attention on del.icio.us, I knew that something important was going on, not from reading the article, but from reading the userbase. Again, you can imagine adding this sort of thing to search, but youd do it by watching what people tagged.

Third, a look at the top tags on del.icio.us reveals several that could not work as part of a search. I cannot search directly for things toread, or things that are fun, funny, or cool, because those are in the eye of the beholder. I cant search directly for tools or reference, because what I consider a tool or a reference work is different from what you do, and people writing things that I might think of as a tool or a reference work rarely label them that way.

Real-Time Enterprise

AlwaysOn Network has an interview with Regis McKenna, who published the book “Real Time: Preparing for the Age of the Never Satisfied Customer” in 1997. Exceprts:

In a very short span of history (about a decade), the entire world has come under the influence of real-time technology. It didn’t happen with a bang. It evolved and is still evolving. I wrote Real Time in 1995 and 1996, and it was first published in 1997. (Book publishing isn’t real time!) Most corporations were spending money on IT, but they weren’t forward-looking enough about coordinating their disparate databases. It was costly and time consuming to compare one database with another, let alone rebuild the enterprise architecture to meet the pressures of competition and the demands of customers. The data wasn’t very secure, but demand and growth continued unabated.

We have a lot to do. With a billion people moving into your neighborhood, the opportunities and issues are huge. It’s little wonder, then, that viruses, identity theft, and data integration, integrity, and security are major concerns. From a marketing viewpoint, the growth of CRM, web services, open systems, and self-service automation are all about maintaining a competitive edge and keeping it responsive and flexible because we now work and compete in a real time marketplace.

Services now comprise more than 75% of the U.S. GDP. For most other industrialized nations, services are 40% to 60%. We’ve automated all the factories, and now we’re automating services. We have to in order to compete. It’s evident that everything that can be codified in software will be. If you’re traveling, you’ll notice an increase in the number of self-check-in kiosks. Rent a car, and all the information has been pre-approved: You’ll find your name in lights notifying you where to pick up your carand you won’t have to interact with a single human being. Self-service is nothing new, but supporting and coordinating transactions from thousands or tens of thousands of customer requests per day can only be done efficiently with real-time networks.

Cellular or WiMax

Barron’s has an article by Bill Alpert:

Unwired communications will allow the emerging economies of Asia, Latin America and Africa to transport their masses into the age of the telephone and the Internet at prices affordable even to a low per capita GDP. But how much of the job will go to the cellular technologies promoted by the likes of LM Ericsson, Nokia, Motorola, Texas Instruments and Qualcomm, and how much to WiFi and WiMAX, the wireless networking technologies driven by Intel and a flock of smaller vendors like Broadcom, Atheros Communications, Marvell Technology Group, Alvarion and Airspan Networks? For now, my money’s on cellular.

I got to thinkin’ about this after hearing how Alcatel says communications firms in spots with low numbers of telephones per capita — places like Russia, Latin America and India — are more interested in WiMAX than in the latest 3rd Generation cellular products. WiMAX is like WiFi with a metropolitan reach. It’s faster than the fastest cellular, but the first WiMAX products won’t ship until this summer.

In Mexico, a proto-WiMAX wireless service from Axtel is growing impressively. Analyst Cary S. Robinson of Miller Johnson Steichen Kinnard reports that Axtel subscribers grew 8% sequentially in the March quarter, to 490,000. Robinson figures Axtel’s little supplier Airspan (ticker: AIRN)will reach profitability by the end of this year on sales of about $110 million.

While WiMAX is only at the zygot stage, cellular is full grown. Cellular handsets cost less than the computers needed for WiMAX. Service charges for WiMAX will exceed the monthly $10-$15 average revenue per user that cellular operators are getting in emerging nations.

At investor meetings this month, Qualcomm showed stats on the correlation of per capita GDP and the penetration of telephones and the Internet. As average income went from $1,000 to $10,000 — looking across nations in 2002 — the phone penetration went from about 5% to 40%. The same income difference corresponded to an increase in Internet penetration from a few percent to 20%. Each additional percent of penetration required twice the additional per capita GDP for Internet as for phone.

Bayosphere

Dan Gillmor writes about his new venture:

The promise of the Internet was simple, but incredibly powerful: to be a medium through which we could connect and collaborate, for mutual benefit. It’s happening. As the Net matures, we are learning to write as easily and fluently as we read.

At Bayosphere, we’re going to create a community fueled by that notion. We will reflect — and reflect on — the news, needs and ideas of the San Francisco Bay Area and especially the technology sphere that is the prime economic driver of the area.

I’ve moved my blog to Bayosphere, where I’ll report and comment on the Silicon Valley technology community — and a whole lot more including my observations about the burgeoning arena that’s variously called citizen journalism, personal publishing, grassroots media and a lot of other things. They all have something in common: the read-write Web.

As you’ll see in days and weeks to come, I’ll be one of many voices, including yours. I’m a host here, not The Editor. Communities have values; we’ll have the kind that make this a place we want to share with visitors and each other. So while our postings and conversations will frequently be impassioned, they’ll also be civil. Beyond that, we’ll be adding tools that make it easy to join in and to do good work, often collaborating with others.

Let’s build a space where people can find news and opinion they can trust, and information that helps us in our daily lives.

I don’t know everything that’s going on the Bay Area. And I don’t know everything about citizen journalism. But you and I, together, know a lot.

The Bayosphere team will offer ideas and assistance. In the end, though, we’ll all figure this out together.

TECH TALK: The Coming Age of ASPs: The Sellers View

What about the software vendor? What are the benefits for software companies to sell software on a hosted basis as a service? Ed Sim enumerates the benefits for the vendor:

1. Easier to sell
-shorter sales cycle-do not have to test extensively in a customer’s environment
-lends itself to telesales, can demo over phone and web, do not need a huge sales infrastructure to close deals (just need quota bearing reps without a huge staff of sales engineers and professional services guys to get the job done)
-not a capital expense, usually sold as monthly or annual subscription which can many times be taken out of business budget as opposed to IT budget

2. Easier to install
-no messy installation process, long testing process, or even waiting for hardware to be delivered to customer
-can leave a customer and simply point them to a URL, train them over the phone, and get them up and running
-all of this means that the business can scale rapidly

3. Cheaper to support
-browser-based delivery and richer client interfaces like DHTML make it easy to use for the customer=less training=less customer support costs

4. Easier to integrate
-standard APIs make it easier for software delivered as a service to integrate disparate systems
-once again, reduces costs to deliver product to customers and also removes obstacles to getting customers

5. Cheaper to build
-versus a few years ago, you now have much cheaper bandwidth, storage, servers, and software
-think Linux, Intel boxes, cheap bandwidth, commodity software stacks, and smarter entrepreneurs changing the economics of building and delivering software as a service.
-the economics speak for themselves

Ray Lane adds:

Many established software companies will see the benefits and figure out how to make the transition: A service delivery and pricing model gets software vendors out of the hockey stick sales dynamic at the end of the quarter. It gets the customer out of having to buy something before they can use it.

Even the largest, most entrenched suppliers can start by offering software online, especially to under-served markets and incremental offerings to existing customers. Companies can also use the down market and its lower expectations to begin offering more remedial commercial arrangements, such as term licenses or leases, for example. And then, vendors must learn to say no to big discounts to get deals done in the quarter. Every deal done for quarterly gratification by a sales team or analyst expectations erodes long term value. Customers already know this and drive supplier to highly discounted deals, which many times turn to shelf ware.

Small private companies starting up have an advantage. They can develop a service model from scratch and use it as a competitive advantageIt boils down to simple economics. With a large customer, you can discount very large product sales up front and erode the value of a relationship or develop a long term relationship that is a win-win in terms of price/value that builds a more sustainable and predictable business. Any economic analysis will show that the service model will offer a better opportunity long-term for profits and cash flow, despite more required investment in the short term.

From an emerging market perspective, sellers have few choices. If their packaged software is good, it will likely get pirated and they will be forced to increase their prices which can further encourage piracy. Most software companies then opt for customization which locks the customer, but prevents them from building a large, scalable business. In India, accounting software maker Tally has been the only exception even as it ahs built a near-monopoly market share, it too suffers from very high piracy levels. It has now reduced pricing of its single-user version to under Rs 5,000 ($110) and backed it up with a large advertising campaign and channel building exercise to capitalise on the adoption of VAT across India. Software companies will need to learn from the Chinese gaming companies: shift to an online model to eliminate piracy and increase reach. Going the ASP route is going to be the only option for ISVs seeking to build a large and profitable business.

Tomorrow: The Problems

Continue reading TECH TALK: The Coming Age of ASPs: The Sellers View