Put out Beautiful Freak Volume Two and more $300,000 videos. The way that music is made now is basically for people who don't like music. It's made by focus groups. I would go insane. The only person I'm thinking about listening to a song when I'm making a song is me. I'm just trying to impress myself. If other people like it, that's great. But I'm not going to write a song to try and please a certain kind of person."
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“My challenge to everyone competing with Amazon, Google and Microsoft is to remember that you’re competing with Amazon, Google and Microsoft. These are strong technology companies, and if you’re going to compete with them, open source is the only way to do that. Otherwise, you have no leverage.” – Matt Mullenweg
Let’s accept up front that the next Amazon, Google or Microsoft is not going to be able to purchase hardware as cheaply as the last Amazon, Google and Microsoft. That’s strike one. Bandwidth is also going to be a bit more dear. Strike two. Consider the challenges of managing all of the above, and that’s strike three.
But before we call them – and count them – out, let’s consider for a moment the history of the software industry. Before the cloud, before software as a service there was this weird little trend called open source. This bizarre practice involved opening (read: giving away) your source code (read: your software) so that anyone, your competitors included, could use it. For free.
Odd as this might have seemed at the time, of course, open source allowed the small to compete with the big by leveraging rather than submitting to their weaknesses. It’s sometimes difficult to remember in this Google-obsessed age, but during Windows 95’s heyday, it was natural to conclude that Microsoft was the once and future provider of all the technology that one might reasonably require. Of course we’d once thought the same about IBM, but this was different. Microsoft was different.
My how things change. And stay the same, to be fair, as Microsoft hasn’t exactly gone the way of SGI. But anyone who’s watched the Microsoft business over the past decade or so will tell you that open source has been a disruptive influence on the firm, top to bottom. As if it wasn’t enough that monopolies like the browser and operating system markets were threatened by open source alternatives, its biggest and most terrifying competitors were building their own businesses on software they didn’t have to develop. Not that Microsoft’s been alone in feeling the corrosive disruption of free software, of course; it could and has been argued, in fact, that the biggest single reason that Sun is about to be subsumed into Oracle is the LAMP stack.
David versus Goliath, indeed.
To explore the specifics of how open source might impact the cloud, let’s indulge in a bit of Q&A.
Q: Before we begin, do you have anything to disclose?
A: Yes indeed. Folks with relevant technologies like Canonical, Cloudera, Convirture, Dell, IBM, Reductive Labs, Red Hat, Microsoft, Sun and so on are RedMonk customers, while we ourselves are customers of providers of Amazon and Google.
Q: To continue the above: could history repeat itself? Could David beat Goliath – again – in the cloud space, on the backs of free software?
A: Frankly, I doubt it.
Free software is not, by itself, enough to overcome the aforementioned economy of scale advantages enjoyed by the Amazon’s, Google’s, and Microsoft’s of the world, let alone the larger, enterprise focused systems players like HP, IBM, and Oracle (why not you too, Cisco?). But that, to me, is not the interesting question.
Q: What is the interesting question, then?
A: What we should be asking is not whether free software can replace Amazon et al, but whether or not it can power a viable cloud alternative. An alternative sufficiently viable to keep the big guys honest and prevent lockin. On the answer to that question, to me, hinges nothing less than the future of the cloud market.
Q: Why is that question so important?
A: First, there’s the aforementioned question of lockin. Neither customers nor the governments that tax them can be trusted to stave off damaging monopolies, in my opinion. History demonstrates conclusively that IT staffs, necessarily focused on the present, will happily sacrifice the future for the sake of Getting Things Done today. Equally clear is the fact that governments, when finally awakened to anticompetitive threats, generally do too little, too late. Meaning that the best hope for an open and vibrant playing field – i.e. a market of cloud providers not intent on locking you in at the first opportunity – in future is competition for the existing players.
Besides their monopoly-resistant properties, open source cloud software could play an important role in the rise of so-called private clouds – cloud infrastructures that are run on-premise. Whether one agrees or disagrees with the concept of private clouds or not, they’re coming. For compliance, privacy, uptime and a host of other reasons. Given that one can’t replicate the platforms of an Amazon, a Google or a Microsoft internally, it would seem to make public to private or vice versa transitions challenging in the extreme.
(Re)enter open source. Though some might point to interoperability and standards conversations as the most promising candidates for ensuring adequate competition in the cloud space, my experience in other standards arenas leads me to assign greater value to reference implementations of said standards. Open source implementations, more specifically, because at the end of the day the entire interoperability and standards discussion is about ensuring a level playing field. Throw in the fact that open source could potentially allow replication of the public cloud stack privately and you might yet see enterprises and governments pushing for open source.
Q: Are the benefits for open source cloud offerings strongest within the customer, then?
A: Not at all. Lost in discussion of cloud development has been the fact that the development platforms and targets are changing, and quickly. The level of interoperability that even unwieldy standards like J2EE offer is generally absent in the cloud. Platform as a service (PaaS) customers are writing applications, typically, to a completely proprietary abstraction layer, whether it’s offering by Google, Salesforce or someone else. And even Infrastructure as a Service (IaaS) customers deploying to enterprise standard platforms like RHEL will find their deployments regrettably unique, be that in the way that storage is accessed or the instances themselves are managed.
As Matt points out above, then, open source is going to be the primary mechanism with which startups compete, in my view. In the two primary styles of cloud implementations, IaaS and PaaS – what I’ve previously termed instance and fabric – we’ve dramatically different economic opportunities. With IaaS, the opportunities for developers and vendors has typically been to abstract the infrastructure via management, clustering and provisioning type applications. These opportunities are, frankly, likely to dwindle as Amazon increasingly offers these services itself. Within PaaS ecosystems such as Google or Salesforce, there is even less opportunity, in that the fabric is responsible for many of the tasks currently being serviced by vendors operating in the IaaS ecosystem. Most cloud vendors are building on Google or Salesforce rather than around them.
In other words, it’s a competitive market, and it’s only going to get more competitive as the bigger systems players rapidly pivot and reposition their wares for use in the cloud.
So how do you compete? Realistically, unless you’re company letterhead reads Google, IBM, Microsoft, Oracle or Salesforce, you’re probably going to have a hard time convincing even medium size cloud customers to write to something other than Amazon.
Unless, of course, you can develop a credible alternative that is popular enough to assuage concerns about longer term viability. Which pretty much means you’re going the open source route, in my view. Thus it is that the combination of open source and cloud is even more important for developers than it is for customers.
Q: Are any developers seeing things in those terms?
A: Sure. Take Cloudera, who’s offering a suite of commercial services around the open source Hadoop platform. Or the folks from Reasonably Smart – recently acquired by the folks from Joyent – who offer up the code from their Git and Javascript based PaaS layer with the following explanation: “we see [open source] as the only real way to make our platform truly attractive. Other Platform-as-a-Service providers may state a desire to be open, we’ve been that way from day one.”
Elsewhere, Red Hat is throwing a virtual conference strictly on the topic of open source cloud computing.
Q: Is the cloud a natural ally for open source?
A: Not at all. One of the godfathers of the free software movement, Richard Stallman, has called cloud computing “stupidity.” Others have argued that software deployed to the cloud obsoletes open source licenses, undermining the point of the software itself, with some even going so far as to call the loophole that permits this “a cancer.”
Q: Is there evidence to support these concerns?
A: Not much that I can see, candidly. Though the thinking is sound, in practice there are a great many healthy open source projects that are primarily deployed in network settings. From Hadoop to WordPress, well managed open source projects are succeeding without resorting to the more severe restrictions of the AGPL.
Q: Besides customers like enterprises and governments, who might most benefit from an open source cloud stack?
A: In a word: hosts. Given the stark economic reality that the major provider cloud providers’s economic advantages will expand with the growth they’re currently experiencing, what are smaller providers to do? Embracing open source seems to be the clearest response. Much as smaller and medium sized hosts worldwide today run Debian, Fedora, CentOS or Ubuntu as a means of minimizing their expense, so too are tomorrow’s would be cloud providers likely to embrace open cloud stacks in an effort to remain competitive in the burgeoning cloud market.
Besides, it’s not clear how big a cloud market will be left when the big guys are finished carving it up. If you assume (as you probably should) that IBM customers are more than likely to leverage an IBM cloud, HP customers an HP cloud and so on, you’ve already lost an important portion of the Global 100. Then consider the entrenched strength of the category’s market pioneer in Amazon and the relative strengths of communities that the likes of Google and Salesforce.com can sell into, and the addressable market is dwindling rapidly.
LAMP, with its flexibility, simplicity and perhaps most importantly – lack of upfront licensing costs – fueled an explosion in the hosting services market once upon a time. It’s entirely possible that a similarly open source cloud stack could do the same, particularly since far more software is delivered via the network than when the hosting industry first expanded.
Q: What is this cloud LAMP stack going to look like?
A: What we’re going to see, what we’re beginning to see, I think, is a loose coalition or confederation of projects and vendors that will together comprise an increasingly viable top to bottom alternative to some of the cloud providers today. We’re clearly not going to see an Amazon or a Google spring forth, complete, overnight, but the fact is from management to virtualization to operating systems to cloud provisioning the open source alternatives to the current proprietary cloud stacks are more credible by the day.
Q: Which projects and vendors will be part of this “coalition?”
A: Ultimately, there will have to be a variety of participants with varying aims and interests, but they’re probably going to look a lot like the recent Eucalyptus/Ubuntu partnership. Besides Linux (all flavors) and Eucalyptus, examples of projects I would expect to see considered for various roles in an open source cloud stack would be things like ConVirt, Drizzle, Hadoop, Puppet, Reasonably Smart and so on. Which is not to mention critical enabling technologies like KVM or potential API candidates like the one GoGrid made available under a CC license.
As you can tell, it’s far too early to begin casting for the new acronym, but it’s clear to me that there are going to be options for those that wish to pursue open source cloud computing. Which should be obvious, since most of the existing clouds are built on open source.
Q: What about timeframes: what are your expectations in terms of when the open source cloud will arrive?
A: It’s far too early to tell. What I would say instead is that the clock is ticking, and that the network effects favor the incumbents, so if I were an open source provider with cloud ambitions, I’d be ramping up the partnership and alliance conversations as quickly as possible.
If you happen to be one such developer or vendor, drop us a line and we’ll do what we can to help connect you to similarly interested parties.
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This was supposed to be a post about what I’d consider to be an obvious enterprise marketplace candidate, but between Firefox 3.5, Weave, and some tinkering with Android, I got a little sidetracked.
So as Plan B, I offer up to those of you that haven’t seen it on Twitter yet an interview I did with fellow Williams Alum Barton George, in which we discuss a bit of the history of RedMonk, from a few of our founding principles to our hiring philosophy to our client base.
And if we at RedMonk bore you, maybe you’ll find the discussion of Enterprise 2.0, cloud and Google Wave more interesting.
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I’m not quite Victor Kiam when it comes to the iPhone – I haven’t yet bought Apple, as far as you know – but I’m a serious fan of the product. Enough that I spent my own, not RedMonk’s, hard earned dollars to upgrade from a first generation to the recently released 3GS.
To own the truth, however, I didn’t buy it for the phone, because frankly as a piece of hardware, it’s flawed. It’s marvelous and ground-breaking and all of that, true, but let’s be honest: it’s a bit large, the lack of a keyboard can be problematic and the battery life still isn’t great.
Why did I shell out better than three hundred dollars of my own money in a down economy then? The developers, of course.
Ballmer’s throat-damaging “developers, developers, developers” fit might have fully transcended into the realm of cliche, but as someone once said: cliches are cliches for a reason, and it’s not because they’re untrue.
Much has been made in some quarters of the problems with Apple’s app store gating policies, and rightly so: they’re fundamentally broken. Nor is the development of the applications themselves any picnic. Or maybe you enjoy learning Objective-C?
And yet the App Store is the single most compelling and commercially successful application catalog in existence; I’m not even sure who would be second. The store launched July 10, 2008. By April 23rd of ‘09, Apple had sold a billion applications on behalf of their creators. And as of three weeks ago, those creators had put 50,000 applications up for sale in the marketplace. That kind of traction is incredible and transformative.
Remember that, at its core, the iPhone offers not a whole lot more than a phone, browser, camera, iPod and GPS. Which, ok, is kind of impressive. But not truly differentiating, Apple’s acknowledged strength in user experiences aside. As good and smart as Apple is at design – and they are very, very good – they’re never going to be as good and smart as everyone else. We see this in the enterprise world frequently, where vendors that foster an ecosystem succeed and those that don’t, well, don’t. But we haven’t seen too many examples of this play out in the consumer world yet, which is one of the reasons the iPhone is such an interesting platform. With the App Store, Apple’s attempting to cement its role with a community play.
And at least with this customer, it’s working. Well.
Is it interesting that Apple’s continued to update the platform with features like video? Sure, if you enjoy seeing my cat chase a laser pointer around the office rug.
Far more interesting though, I think, is the degree to which other developers and vendors have extended the platform.
For example, there’s WunderRadio, brought to you by the good folks from WunderGround. The only radio station that I listen to you, as some of you know, is WOXY, an absolutely tremendous Indie Rock station out of Cincinatti. But as I don’t live in that geography, I’ve previously only been able to listen to it while at the office via internet radio. WunderRadio, however, changes that, giving me the ability to listen any time I want.
The runners in the audience might be aware of Nike+, which while certainly not exclusive to the iPhone, unquestionably extends it.
Boaters, on the other hand, are probably very familiar with the expensive marine GPS units like the Garmin we have for our Triumph up here in Maine. Guess what $5 will buy you from the App Store? A pretty credible alternative to those $800+ devices.
The travelers in the audience, meanwhile, probably have seen flight tracking applications before. But how about one that syncs with TripIt? With FlightTrack Pro, all of my flights are tracked automagically. With a few Gmail rules, I’ve set incoming flight confirmations and itineraries to auto-forward to TripIt, where they are processed and then synced to FlightTrack Pro. All with zero effort from me.
By far the best development for me, however, was the recent iteration of MLB’s AtBat iPhone application. Useful last year as a means for tracking games down to individual pitch locations and velocities, this year’s edition was – as mentioned – the best $10 I’ve ever spent on software. First, it introduced gameday audio. So whether I’m walking down the street in San Francisco or cruising through the Portland Whole Foods, I can take the Red Sox game with me. And as if that wasn’t enough, they’ve gone and launched live video streaming of select games per day. Granted, it’s only a few games and they are still subject to MLB’s positively asinine blackout rules, but think about it: you can watch the game on your phone. And the choppy picture below notwithstanding, the quality is really not bad: I seriously feel like I’m living in the future.
All of this, of course, reflects my interests: yours are likely to be very different. Which is the point; with 50,000 applications available and growing, if you can’t find something that interests you, you may want to rethink your interests. Want to see satellite images of the RedMonk Portland office? Done. Learn Spanish? Yup, they’ve got that. Hell, you want to know what the tide schedule is up in Robinhood Cove? All set.
And so on.
The point here is not to try to sell you on an iPhone. It is rather to point out that, as we’ve known for years, developers and developer traction can and probably will make or break your product, presuming it has platform ambitions of any kind. Because it reframes the debate; Android, Pre and the likes aren’t simply competing with the iPhone any longer, at least not for me. They’re competing with the iPhone and every application that runs on it that improves my quality of life. More, as we’ve seen with Windows, the network effect comes into play, as the larger and more successful the market becomes, the more compelling it is for developers in a self-fulfilling cycle. It all kind of makes you wonder why this lesson is proving so hard for enterprise vendors to learn.
But no matter; I’m just happy that at least Apple understood the potential of a marketplace.
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There was not a lot new at Enterprise 2.0 this year. And that’s a profoundly good thing.
Gone are the days, fortunately, when blogs were a foreign word within enterprises. With everyone from ESPN to Oprah aggressively promoting their Twitter channels, awareness of quote unquote 2.0 collaboration and social media technologies is at an all time high, and with it has come acceptance and even adoption. While I spent most of my time at the show, as I do more and more these days, in the hallway track the sessions I was able to attend were notable for their pragmatic embrace of tools that would have been inconceivable even a year ago.
Sure, it’s a self-selecting audience to some extent, but the speed at which these tools are flowing into the enterprise is borderline startling. Gone is the novelty. Even the traditional barriers to entry for tools such as Twitter – absurd, CYA conversations about the ROI of such approaches – are falling in the face of simple and correct arguments that such tools, in many cases, are nothing less or more than a cost of doing business. Like email, they’ve become basic, necessary infrastructure.
Not everywhere, of course: there’s no shortage of businesses that are anti-2.0. But from Electronic Arts (”we get it!”) to JetBlue to MyBarackObama.com, there are any number of businesses and government agencies that do, in fact, get it. They get that whatever their personal feelings might be vis a vis a channel like Twitter, if their customers are there they need to be there. They get that the fact that a fifth of the world’s population is on Facebook and spends 20 minutes on it per day is important. And they get that these and others technologies may inform the direction of their own corporate infrastructure, assuming that Facebook, Twitter and so on don’t become that infrastructure.
Also interesting – besides the voracious governmental appetite for 2.0 tech, which I’ve documented before – was the increasing role that cloud applications will play. To the extent that one firm there turned it into a verb, as in “they need to cloud those apps.” Again, this isn’t new, but it’s validation that the cloud is top of mind when it comes to infrastructure selection and architectural planning.
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Two broadly supported open-source projects may help pave the way for such standards. Eucalyptus, which uses an interface familiar to those experienced with Amazon's Elastic Compute Cloud, provides the means to create a cloud either within a private data center or with resources from a cloud provider. And Hadoop imitates elements of Google's system for handling large amounts of data. "
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we'll see if they can transition from the old, small loyal customers to a higher volume of newer, less loyal revenue sources.
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“What would email look like if we set out to invent it today?” – Lars Rasmussen, via Tim O’Reilly
In spite of substantial evidence that it’s at best a mixed blessing, the world outside of technology largely celebrates tradition. Even as humanity moves forward, we actively look for ways large and small to anchor ourselves to our past. For better and for worse, the answer to “Why do we do things that way?” is usually “Because that’s how they’ve always been done.”
The technology industry, on the other hand, is far less warm and fuzzy about that idea, even as it is similarly beholden to that which came before. Tradition and related terms like “legacy” are little but a pejorative in our world, spat out about products that have, in their antiquity, become the the very burden they were designed to relieve.
All of which is a long winded way of explaining just why I think Google Wave is so interesting: it’s not legacy. Rather than mimic the traditional channels like physical mail or telephony, Wave is a deliberate and clean departure from the past: it’s a complete rethinking of the way we communicate today. Which is why it should fail, but might not.
When I took a look at IBM’s Jazz product a few years back, I said the following:
If application development had been invented after Ajax, Bazaar/Subversion and instant messaging it would look a lot like Jazz.
Whether you agree or not with that assessment vis a vis the Jazz product is immaterial here, because it’s the concept we’re after: the idea that it may periodically useful to fundamentally rethink the evolution of one product in light of the development or invention of other seemingly unrelated products. While I personally both hate and fear them, if evolution worked differently, bats would be excellent examples of this: what happens if you rethink what a small mammal can be, in light of the invention of wings and sonar?
For perhaps a more useful example, consider mobile phones, which become dramatically more interesting – and different – once cameras can be shrunk to a certain size, touchscreens are available, wireless data networks become broadband-like in their bandwidth, suitable processors reach reasonable speed thresholds, and battery life will support all of the above. What is a phone in light of those external developments?
We’re beginning to find out. Meanwhile email is, like sharks and crocodiles, largely unchanged from an evolutionary standpoint. Which is why Wave was built, of course.
We don’t see a lot of dramatic leaps forward in software, I’d argue, both because it’s exceedingly difficult to develop and launch revolutionary products and because the economics act against it. It’s difficult, of course, to produce them: how many vendors can afford the indulgence of turning high quality resources loose on a multi-year project with no clear revenue plan in place? But it can be even more difficult to market sell them, because, well, they’re not what people are used to and they take some explaining.
As the task of explaining new technologies is kind of our job, as analysts, let’s do a quick Q&A on some of the questions we’re getting about Wave. Because I was unable to do San Francisco/San Francisco/Alaska in consecutive weeks, I couldn’t make Google I/O and thus don’t have a Wave account, but I’ve been through enough of what’s available to answer at least a few high level questions.
Q: For those that missed it, what are the basics of the Google Wave news?
A: The Google folks, in announcing Wave, consider the product in three pieces: product, platform, and protocol. I’d probably collapse the first two, in that the product itself is inherently a platform, with all of the attendant benefits (and cautions). The protocol, for many, is the really interesting piece, in that it’s open in the sense that it’s documented, if not from a participation standpoint. In a manner of speaking, it’s a new hosted collaboration server product with a new documented protocol.
Q: Is Wave vaporware?
A: That depends on your definition, but according to mine it is not. The product is not publicly available, but it does exist and is supporting alpha users at present. Further, the protocol is both defined and documented. So this is more than smoke, mirrors and promises at this point.
Q: What did that mean above, “new hosted collaboration server?”
A: That’s the tough part to define. To help, I’d recommend checking out either the Google Wave keynote from I/O, or more simply, Andy Ihnatko’s piece, “Google Wave is genius, but will it work?”. Both will give you a hands on look at Wave, which collapses the distinctions between IM, email, and documents seamlessly. Indeed, it challenges basic conceptions of what’s a document and how it’s worked on, hence the invention of the new term “Wave,” which I, for the record, don’t love.
Q: How does it challenge ideas of what a document is?
A: Even absent Wave, the definition of a document is evolving rapidly. Simply put, the traditional notions of what consititutes a document are rapidly becoming obsolete in a variety of settings. Here’s how I’ve described the transition in the past:
Documents today can have, as IBM’s Doug Heintzman noted last Wednesday at IBM’s annual analyst event, more in common with a web page than the document you or I might have authored a few years – or a year – ago. Parts of it might be static, parts of it might be dynamic, but each of those parts might arrive from separate, external sources of record. The days of static documentation are drawing to a close, thanks to innovation – finally – in an area that should have seen it years ago.
While we at RedMonk are so far out on the bleeding edge that we can’t even see the mainstream when it comes to our own work habits (though not our coverage, hopefully), it’s nevertheless worth noting that I really don’t create documents at this point. Customer, expense and other operational spreadsheets are kept in Google Docs, and frankly they’re more webpage – even database – than they are spreadsheet at this point. At no point in their lifecycle, generally, are they transmitted as ODF, OOXML, or PDF: I can’t honestly remember the last time I exported one for the purposes of sending. When we need to collaborate with an external party, we simply share the asset. Even the pieces I author for this space are documents only in a nominal sense. Each is composed in emacs, then pasted to WordPress. There, it is reforged as an entirely different asset, pulling in pictures, videos, or other embedded assets, all while collecting comments, trackbacks, and revisions to become something new and distinct.
Is that a document? I’d argue not.
Wave, in many respects, can be seen as aggressive embrace of this transition. The word “wave” itself can be considered, in a sense, as a drop-in replacement term for the increasingly archaic “document.” As Google puts it, “A ‘wave’ is equal parts conversation and document.”
By exploding the notion of a document and how it’s created, Google frees itself from some of the strictures that traditional office productivity vendors must adhere to in service of their respective markets. Whether that will lead to market success is yet to be determined, but it certainly gives them more flexibility in attacking an increasingly dynamic space.
Q: And what of the document creation process? How has Google abandoned tradition there?
A: Google and other SaaS vendors like Zoho have long enjoyed an advantage in this space, in that documents hosted online are easier to work on in collaborative fashion. Anyone who’s coauthored documents using Google Docs realizes this. But Wave takes this concept further by eliminating the barriers between collaborative channels around the document; documents can be collaboratively constructed in real-time or asymmetrically using instant messaging like presence and commenting, all of which is captured and becomes, effectively, a part of the document…er, sorry, Wave.
Q: Doesn’t that introduce tremendous versioning challenges? Constantly updated documents are, after all, potentially problematic in real world settings, not to mention compliance?
A: There is no question that we’re all going to have to adapt to the idea that the days of static documents are, for all intents and purposes, nearing an end. We’ve seen this coming for years, of course, which is why we’ve seen the rapid evolution of everything from distributed version control systems like git and Mercurial to syndication formats designed to alert us to changes in content. So yes, versioning is going to be a challenge.
But there are two things mitigating the issue. One, Waves can, of course, be snapshotted into particular documents or formats. So you can, for example, produce from a collaborative process a one time report, memo, whatever that will have a predictable and non-dynamic lifespan. More interestingly, however, Google Wave understands inherently the challenges of this process and offers a Time Slider-like ability to walk backwards through the history, revisisting not just the changes and change history, but the evolution of the Wave itself.
Q: Is this type of group collaboration and multi-artifact incorporation a new concept in the collaboration space?
A: Very few things are developed in a vacuum, and Wave clearly is no exception. We’ve seen similar efforts like this from Groove – since acquired by Microsoft – and more recently IBM’s Lotus, with its notion of Activity-centric Collaboration. Wave borrows heavily, in my view, from both Groove/Microsoft and IBM in its reimagination of what the collaborative process should look like.
Q: So what’s the difference between Google Wave and those efforts? Groove never hit the bigtime and ultimately exited via acquisition, while the Lotus’ Activity-centric collaboration hasn’t exactly broken the hold of email centric workflows either?
A: Maybe nothing. But in a couple of key areas, Wave has some advantages:
More, as Joe puts it:
The difference is that the extension model with Wave is events over HTTP, which makes it language agnostic, a feature you get when you define things in terms of protocols. That is, as long as you can stand up an HTTP server and parse JSON, you can create robots for Wave, which is a huge leap forward compared to the extension models for Notes, Exchange and Groove, which are all “object” based extension models. [Note: Sam Ruby doesn't necessarily agree].
Not that the protocol is perfect, of course.
Q: Let’s look at the protocol some more: is it really open?
A: The answer depends in part on where you’re coming from with respect to open protocols, but the short answer is no. It is open in the sense that it’s documented, but there are two primary issues which challenge that definition. First, there’s no external participation in the direction of the protocol at this point: “The committers for the Google Wave Federation Protocol project are currently all from the Google Wave engineering staff.” The plan is for that to change, apparently, but at the current time the development cannot be considered open. Second, there are – as is all too common – undocumented aspects to the API and the protocol itself. Much of the success or failure will depend on Google’s ability to make the entire stack as transparent as possible, top to bottom.
Those criticisms notwithstanding, is it a step in the right direction? I think so.
Q: Do you think that Google Wave is open enough to encourage third parties or competing vendors to participate?
A: It’s too early to say, and there are many variables that will play a role in the adoption of lackthereof of Wave beyond the Google firewall. But I did find Zoho CEO’s Sridhar Vembu’s comments from a piece talking about Google Wave and Microsoft Silverlight interesting:
That brings us back to Google: today, it is Google which is driving web standards forward. That is why we at Zoho are firmly aligned with them, even if they are our primary competitor. We believe in an open web, there is plenty of opportunity for all of us.
While not promising anything specific, they at least indicate a willingness to work with Google on the subject, which is quite the accomplishment, considering that Google aggressively competes with Zoho.
Q: What about the claims that Google Wave means that HTTP is dead?
A: Not sure I followed them, really, given that the Wave Javascript libraries, anyway, leverage HTTP pretty heavily, and that as Joe puts it, “the extension model with Wave is events over HTTP.” It’s true that XMPP is given a leading role in Wave, but as I have for some time, I see this as purely different tools/different jobs. And even if we forget all of the above, the fact is that HTTP is so fundamentally embedded into the fabric of the internet that its place is guaranteed for years to come.
Q: Is Google Wave open source?
A: Not yet, at least. As Lars Rasmussen told Tim O’Reilly, the intent is there: “To encourage adoption of the protocol, we intend to open source the code behind Google Wave.” But that hasn’t happened quite yet, so the answer at present is no.
Q: So considering all of the above: what does Google Wave mean for established office productivity vendors like IBM and Microsoft?
A: At present? Not much. Same for the near term. Considering how much pushback enterprises have had about a mere reskinning of an existing product in Office, the idea that Google will have substantial immediate success in pushing such a radically reshaped authoring proposition on a conservative market is laughable.
Over the mid to long term, however, it represents a potentially serious competitive threat. For years one or both vendors have effectively defined the office productivity experience, from collaboration to document authoring. And while, as discussed, both have experimented with radical reconsiderations of that experience, neither has had much success driving significant change into the mainstream. If Google Wave is successful, it will mean that Google will be the vendor defining the next generation experience for millions, potentially tens of millions of users, worldwide. Next to that prospect, the threat of Google Apps is but a trifle.
We’re already seeing enterprise collaboration vendors struggle to adapt to generational shifts in the workplace, as older retirees are replaced by young, tech savvy graduates. They’ve also grappled with the increasing importance of simpler, SaaS offerings and the threats that tools from Facebook to Twitter may pose. Wave, in many respects, is a far more grave concern than any of those, so fundamentally does it target what has traditionally been the province of high cost enterprise productivity tools.
So while there’s a long way to go between here and there, and success is far from guaranteed for Google’s latest product, Wave is one to watch.
Disclosure: IBM and Microsoft are RedMonk customers, while Google and Zoho are not.
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I haven’t been coming to JavaOne quite as long as my colleague, but I’ve been making the trek to San Francisco for Sun’s annual Java confab for at least seven or so years, as near as we could determine. Of those I’ve been to, this was unquestionably the strangest.
And why not, given the elephant in the room. As Ian put it, many were there not to learn about Java or Sun, but to answer for themselves the question “What is Oracle going to do?” To Sun’s credit, they took this on early, integrating Larry Ellison into the opening keynote with some minimal awkwardness.
Still, the show had a distinct farewell ring to it, from the return of McNealy and the salute to Gosling to the conversations with the rank and file. Change is coming and everyone there knew it, which lent the show an expectant, almost pregnant, atmosphere.
What did we learn?
Well, we already knew that Sun was proud of its Java ubiquity; the trotting out of large numbers around the volume of desktop and mobile instances having become almost a cliche over the years. But with the announcement of the Java store, it would seem that the soon-to-be-part-of-Oracle vendor is indeed serious about getting into the enterprise marketplace game.
Also interesting was Ellison’s high profile nod to the JavaFX technology, which – James‘ aside – was an afterthought in many an analysis, mine included (I didn’t cover it in my breakdown on the acquisition news). While my colleague is spot on when he asserts that the one time pet project to make Swing apps prettier could be used to reskin Oracle’s profitable but unattractive business applications, I wonder what the comments portend for the future.
It can and has been argued that one of Sun’s problems, historically, was focus. Beyond the obvious and trite “is Sun a hardware business or a software business” conversation, the question was where the focus was. JavaOne’s a good case in point here; for a business that sells servers, storage, databases, operating systems, enterprise middleware, development tooling and – of course – office productivity software – enterprise stuff, in other words – this show has in recent years had a heavy consumer focus. Lots of time spent on handsets and mobile and games and ringtones, which are certainly relevant to the Java ecosystem, but perhaps less so to the audience. Even considering the increasing frequency of consumer to enterprise adoption patterns.
Much attention was paid to Java the brand, and its admittedly remarkable penetration on a variety of platforms from Blu-Ray to mobile handsets. All good. But with the JavaOne audience heavily skewed towards enterprise developers – as is the general Java development community, reported to be six and a half million strong these days, actually – it’s reasonable to ask whether JavaOne should have been a different show.
Soon, of couse, this won’t be a question for Sun any longer; it will instead be one Oracle’s answering, should they decide to proceed with JavaOne. But while the database giant has been, historically, very well run and intensely focused on growing from traditional enterprise businesses, from its relational database to its more recent acquisitions in the middleware and packaged applications spaces, Sun’s would-be consumer ambitions raise interesting questions about what Oracle wants.
Sun presents some unique challenges for Oracle here, however, as JavaOne clearly illustrated. Assuming for the sake of argument that Oracle does not intend to decommit from the hardware businesses – and I don’t believe they do, analyst recommendations notwithstanding – Oracle’s going to become more than a database and packaged application firm shortly. Which is fine, and demonstrably manageable; HP and IBM, at least, seem to manage the business of being full spectrum systems vendors fairly effectively.
But note that – the discrete HP printer and PC lines of business notwithstanding – neither has anything resembling a comprehensive consumer strategy. Which you wouldn’t expect Oracle to, either…except for the fact that Ellison specifically mentioned OpenOffice.org and seems to have bigger plans for JavaFX. Raising the question of whether his plans are more ambitious than becoming a mere systems player.
Does Oracle want to become, like Microsoft, a firm that tries to play in both the consumer and enterprise worlds? Does it intend to compete with Flash and Silverlight for consumer hearts and minds? It’s too early to say, but it’s not too early to observe that few if any companies pull that off successfully. The DNA for consumer and enterprise vendors seems to some extent to be mutually exclusive, hence IBM’s inability or unwillingness to muster a consumer story, and Apple’s reluctance to ride its desktop momentum into the enterprise.
Whatever the fate of Sun’s assets within Oracle, if this proves to be the last JavaOne as many are speculating, let me be the first to wish it a fond farewell. Whatever else may be said about the show, it’s been a must attend for us at RedMonk as long as we’ve been a firm.
It’s not too often that you get that many smart and fun people in one place, and I will miss it if this is the end, even if I end up replacing it with Google I/O.
Disclosure: IBM, Microsoft and Sun are RedMonk customers, and my T&E for this show was comped. Google and Oracle are not RedMonk customers.
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“A shark attack is an attack on a human by a shark. Every year, a number of people are attacked by sharks, although death is quite unusual. Despite the relative rarity of shark attacks, the fear of sharks is a common phenomenon, having been fueled by the occasional instances of attacks, such as the Jersey Shore shark attacks of 1916, and by sensationalized fiction and film, such as the Jaws series. Many shark experts feel that the danger presented by sharks has been exaggerated, and even the creator of the Jaws phenomenon, the late Peter Benchley, attempted to dispel the myth of sharks being man-eating monsters in the years before his death.” – “Shark Attack,” Wikipedia
For a variety of reasons ranging from dramatically better information availability to increasing cultural acceptance and advocacy of informed, data-driven decision making, rational thought is making something of a comeback. Or at least it seems more common today than it might have been in a past where intuition and tradition ruled the day. Rationalism has not come close to vanquishing its historical enemies, of course – human nature being what it is – but at least it’s perceived as a virtue these days (unless you’re a baseball writer).
Still, there persists a certain class of primal fear that – progress or no – effortlessly bypasses our logic centers. Some of these, of course, are entirely legitimate. If you’re in the water with a shark like the one above, you should be afraid.
But far more of today’s fears are entirely disproportionate to the actual threat involved. These I tend to discuss as Shark Attack fears.
Anyone that has seen Jaws, particularly as young as I did (thanks a lot, Dad), can identify with the visceral, elemental fear that a shark attack evokes. It was this emotion that Benchley and Spielberg leveraged to their respective commercial benefit. Massive commercial benefit.
Lost in the shuffle, however, was the actual likelihood of an attack itself – the probability of the fear becoming reality. Many of you are probably aware that you are more likely by far to be killed by a bee or in a car crash than you are by a shark. You are, in fact, more likely to be killed by lightning than a shark.
And yet we remain instinctively terrified by the prospect of an attack. Why? Many reasons, but I’ll leave that to better, more qualified minds than mine to answer. But such examples are relentlessly common.
We remain – at least here in the US – collectively petrified of a terrorist attack. In spite of the fact that, like shark attacks, we are statistically terribly unlikely to be personally affected. We’re more likely to be killed by a bee, a car or even – yes – a shark than a terrorist. So petrified are we, in fact, that we have sacrificed the kind of basic civil liberties that were in the past regarded as Orwellian fiction.
We’re terrified for our children, too, when the numbers actually say that if anything, they’re at least as safe as they were before. Amber alerts notwithstanding.
And so on; I’m sure that each and every one of you can think of similar or better examples.
In each case it’s unlikely to be the fear that’s the problem. Like the 1918 flu victims that were killed not by the virus but by their own immune response, the asymmetric reaction to these fears is the real threat. The behavioral responses, which have unpredictable and often undesirable consequences.
If you kill all the large sharks, as it turns out, you remove one of the checks on the smaller predator population, and fish populations decline precipitously. If you try to assuage the population against the threat of terrorism with security theater, you inconvenience everyone and risk investing in the wrong areas. And if you raise your kids in a bubble, you deny them experiences that may prove vital later in life.
When I use the Shark Attack analogy these days, my subject is generally far more trivial in nature. It’s most often employed, for example, in conjunction with discussions of cloud reliability; my view is that cloud users are irrationally apprehensive of cloud uptime because, as Joshua puts it, “if you’d been doing this yourself you’d either have way more downtime or spend way more.”
But the problem is troubling in other, more meaningful settings. We’re not going to see the end of irrational fears in my lifetime, clearly. The question I’m pondering, however, is whether we’ll ever see them filtered according to their respective probabilities.
If we’re going to worry about something, let’s at least try to make sure it’s something worth worrying about.
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105 days ago
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