Elections 2.0

The Web 2.0 and related technologies, “Information Technology 2.0”, are creating profound changes in our socioeconomic structures, political campaigns, cultural behaviors and business environments. These changes had first started to occur in the business-to-consumer space with the use of online social networks, wikis, personal blogs, podcasts and online videos. And over the last few years, the businesses have joined the bandwagon and the cloud computing and on-demand SaaS architectures concepts have become major part of enterprise technology related discussions.

However, over the last 6 months, another change occurred – unrelated to businesses or consumers. The Web 2.0 and related technologies started to make their impact in the 2008 elections political campaigns. The candidates have had their individual websites in 2000 and 2004 elections. However, for the 2008 elections, we have started to see Web 2.0 tools - online social networks, online videos (i.e. CNN/YouTube debates), CampaignForce SaaS application, RSS readers, Blogs, Twittering, and keywords-based advertisements on Google, Microsoft and Yahoo search networks – as new communications channels in addition to traditional TVs, Radios and individual websites. This use of Web 2.0 and related technologies has enabled the 2008 candidates to collaborate and communicate with their supporters and undecided voters in the unprecedented ways. More importantly, the candidates are reaching more people than before and at a much less cost. In the last few months, various industry bloggers and pundits have called this phenomenon as Elections 2.0 and I would agree with them.

Personally, over the last few weeks, I have made following three major observations in these Elections 2.0 campaigns.

First, frankly, I had never followed political campaigns closely until the 2008 campaigns came along. Yesterday, when I contemplated why and how the change occurred, I came out with a single answer, the Google Reader. Why? I don’t watch TV that much. I don’t read print news papers. And in the last eight years, my source of information has always been the online websites. Before I started using Google Reader, I would go each individual news website and only read the sports, business and technology articles. The politics never interested me so I never clicked on those links. Fast forward to today, I only read news, articles and blogs through my Google Reader subscriptions. Over the last six months, my subscriptions started to contain political campaigns related articles and blogs. Why I started read them in the Reader when I had not bothered in the websites? It is much easier and faster and I don’t have to leave my screen as I am rarely interested in details. The headlines over the last six months generated curiosity and I followed the links to read more. I developed awareness, formed my opinion and became more involved.

The second one is the proliferation of online videos in the Elections 2.0 campaigns and debates. I strongly believe that an online short video is the most powerful communication mechanism out of all Web 2.0 technologies. Yes, Blogs, Podcasts and the profiles on the online social networks help but we are still human. We believe more on talk. We change more often when someone talks to us. The online videos have provided a very low cost, yet a very effective communication vehicle to the Elections 2.0 candidates. The most profound result of this? Read the third observation.

The third one is around the involvement of youth in the Elections 2.0 campaigns. It has become clear when it comes to Election 2.0 technologies; the youth (generation X) is way ahead of generation Y and baby boomers. Why? Because the generation X is more collaborative than all the generations before. They like transparency from others. At the same time, they don’t mind expressing their opinions. I had always thought the political choices were very private except when you were in a rally. However, today, I see people – especially younger generation - expressing their political choices in their profiles openly and persuading others to follow their choices. There has never been such an active participation of youth in any elections campaigns before. This has forced candidates to change their tactics. They cannot ignore the youth in their campaigns anymore.

The gist of all three observations is simple. The Internet and related advancements have changed the politics arena as we knew it. This is yet another evidence of the profound non-technological changes that will be made possible using the Internet related advancements.

Readers - Productivity Improvement or Information Overload?

My work day usually begins around 6 AM to accommodate my east coast colleagues and meetings. A typical work day of mine includes a lot of collaborative meetings, emails, chats, and of course readings of hundreds of technology and business articles that pop-up in my Google Reader. I have a habit of hitting my Google Reader after few hours (around 8-9 AM PT) as most of my subscriptions are about Silicon Valley, Web 2.0, and Internet companies so most of them get content as the work day starts in the pacific coast.

Yesterday, I followed the same routine but little I knew the technology world had exploded within those two morning hours. My Reader was loaded with the news, articles, and blogs talking about Microsoft’s proposed Yahoo! acquisition. I was just two hours late, but I felt like I had missed the whole party! The articles and opinions were being written left and right by the industry pundits, and bloggers. Almost every subscription had some twisted story about the announcement. Additionally, as usual, the stock market was reacting. The Yahoo! stock was going up and the Microsoft stock was going down! Around PT noon time, the things had calmed down. The reality was setting in. The news and blog articles moved from the announcements to the consequences of the merger. Articles around technologies clashes, cultural mis-match, product over laps and lay offs started to pop-up in my subscriptions.

As I finished the work day, I had read so much about the merger that it felt like the announcement was made weeks or months ago. I didn’t need any more information to form my opinion or talk about the merger. I had all numbers on my finger tips. I could speak to both positive and negative consequences of the acquisition.

Later in the day, I stayed away from the Internet for few hours, and during those hours, I would realize that today I had just experienced a profound change in the way I consume breaking news in this new era of blogs and RSS readers. Only few years ago, I would normally read an acquisition or merger announcement on a news or technology website. Later in the week, my weekly magazine subscriptions would have articles on both positive and negative consequences of the announcement. Only after reading those paper magazines articles, I would understand details around the announcement and form my own opinion. Typically, it would be a week long process. Well, with the Microsoft-Yahoo! announcement yesterday, I consumed the same information in the same day and my opinion around the acquisition was ready at the end of the day.

Is this productivity improvement? Or is it information over-load? Well, I believe, it is more about personal preference of consuming information. Personally, I like juggling and working on multiple projects or initiatives. At work, I always get bored if I only have one thing going on. The Blogosphere has enabled me to multi-task more and thus has increased my satisfaction with the technology industry. However, there is a caveat around the multi-tasking. Each task takes more time and requires me to start much earlier in time to complete with quality and attention it needs. Therefore, I have adopted the habit of superior scheduling. And over time, I have come to realize that the habit of superior scheduling is the only way to remain productive and effective if you like multi-tasking and Blogosphere subscriptions.

I would like to know your thoughts around this shift on the information consumption through the blogs and articles aggregated in a single view of your favorite RSS reader.

Internet Services - Trust, Privacy and Safety

A week ago, I hosted few friends for a dinner. During and after the dinner, our conversations went from religions to politics to how Internet-based technologies are changing our personal, social and work lives. During the technology discussions, in which I was the most vocal for the obvious reasons, one of my friends said that she felt safer having TurboTax Tax Desktop Application in lieu of the online version of TurboTax that stores everything in the Intuit’s data center. I immediately challenged this comment with a rhetorical question as why she thinks that storing her information on her desktop is more secure than storing the same data in an Internet-based service. Thereafter, we all spent considerable time debating around the privacy and trust of contemporary Web 2.0 Internet services.

On a related note, yesterday, I met few ex-colleagues for a lunch in San Francisco. During our discussions, one of them said that she looking for the cheapest price for a book. My first recommendation was Amazon but she had already looked at Amazon and didn’t feel that the available options were cheap. My next recommendation was eBay and to my astonishment she replied that she does not feel safe opening accounts on multiple websites. Amazon was kind of known name to her but she didn’t feel safe opening an account on eBay. I was baffled.

These two discussions provoked a thought process within myself on why people have a perception that Internet-based personal business services are not safe and would expose their personal data. Is it because that the use of Internet-based services makes us more susceptible to the marketing and advertising schemes? Why do they think that a laptop or desktop at home or in a car is more secure than the hardened data centers of the industry giants? After some analysis, I have come-up with three broad categories of reasons that are causing these data protection concerns from my friends.

The first category is the personal data loss statistics, manual opt-out targeted advertisements debacles, and debates of personal data ownership over the last few years. The year 2007 was the worst year in terms of personal data loss statistics. More than 79 million personal records were part of identity theft, an increase of over 400% from the year 2006. These statistics instill fear in all of us and will require some major work from the involved companies to gain back the trust of their employees or customers whose records were part of the loss or identity theft. In the similar fashion, the FaceBook’s Beacon debacle didn’t help the situation. The users were furious as why their web actions (i.e. purchases) were shared with the friends without their explicit permissions. In another example, the recent Google Reader’s sharing feature is still generating debates on the boundaries around the sharing.

The second category represents the proliferation of obscene pop-ups, phishing emails, and spam emails among many other techniques used by the Internet thieves to steal personal information of the Internet users. For technical people, this might be a non-issue because they can interpret phishing URLs, malware, spam, websites and hacker techniques. However, the non-technical people (normal people) cannot necessarily discern a real email send by a provider from a phishing email sent by a hacker; though, the latest browser versions have come-up with built-in features to protect these normal users. But as it happens in technology industry, the hackers will come-up with the new ways to trick our normal users. And the safety issues will remain there. We can only hope that the issues will decrease with time because more of these safety issues will result into less and less use of the Internet services.

The third category is the education (or lack thereof) around the data privacy rights and laws. As I was writing this article, I came across this blog entry on the data privacy protection. It talks about the data privacy day of 2008, to be celebrated tomorrow (01/28/2008). I could not agree with the concept and the effort. My recent discussions with co-workers, ex-colleagues and others friends have made me realize that the most of the Internet users are simply not aware of data privacy rights and laws.

I have described the major reasons of my friends’ comments, but what can we do to fix these reasons remains a challenge. Briefly, I would say that the privacy education is a very good first step towards the solution. Additionally, we need advancements in the database technology to assure anonymity and data encryption in the database tapes and storage. These advancements (anonymity and data encryption) will assure privacy of the users’ data even if the hackers are able to get hold of raw data or tapes. Lastly, we must make computers to be as safe as our cars are. Of course, the education for the drivers (users of the computers) is also important part of it as the car’s (computer) safety has a major dependency on the skills of its driver (user).

If you have a suggestion, please feel free to leave it as a comment to this blog entry.

The Next Digital Decade

Last week, as I settled down at work after a two-week’s vacation, my Google Reader subscriptions were loaded with the news, blogs, gadgets marketing ads, videos and podcasts from the 2008 Consumer Electronics Show . Bill Gates’ last CES speech, including a funny video of his last day at Microsoft, was quite impressive. In the speech, he discussed the digital media industry past, present and the ever-changing future. He made a comment that the next decade of the digital media will be more connected than ever before and will be mostly driven through the software innovations.

Personally, when I think about the next decade of digital media, I am unable to make a decision due to so many choices. The contemporary digital media gadgets market is very fragmented. On top of that, the applications are mostly locked to the specific devices and sometimes to the service providers. We have multiple competing hardware architectures and operating systems. I wonder when will all the mobile applications be available on all devices? Why a digital device cannot be as general purpose as a PC? Why can’t I access the mobile applications without buying specific devices?

I believe that if we want to realize Bill Gates’ dream, the industry must move from custom hardware gadgets and proprietary operating systems to fewer more standard hardware client gadgets and operating systems. If we want ubiquitous connectivity and choice, we need fewer hardware architectures to be used in our TVs, Setup boxes, DVD/DVR players, Stereo systems, Video systems, Personal productivity gadgets, and gadgets that we cannot imagine as of now. Once we have fewer hardware architectures, we would naturally have fewer operating systems. I would be living a perfect world if I said that there would be a single architecture and one OS running on it. In reality, we will have fewer in the same way as the PC industry that has x86 as the dominant hardware architecture, and Linux, Windows and Mac OS as the main operating systems using the x86 architecture. Unfortunately, what I saw in the 2008 Consumer Electronics Show was the proliferation of more custom hardware gadgets and operating systems. Yes, devices were cool we had multiple different hardware architectures and different operating systems. This is bad for the application services developers because they would need to develop and test on more gadgets and operating systems to increase the market penetration. Pragmatically, there will be no way for any single application services developer to keep-up with the never ending combinations. Therefore, the more vendors enter the market, the more fragmented market will become. Consequently, the next era of the digital media may actually become less connected due to the proliferation of the non-compatible devices.

It would be presumptuous of me to give an advice to any digital media provider. However, it is quite clear that unless industry leaders join forces to agree on a fewer set of digital media hardware architectures and operating systems; I do not see a ubiquitous connected digital media decade. A recent research has concluded that there is at least 30 realistic combinations mobile handset, carrier, and operating systems in the North America market alone. This makes application providers’ lives very difficult as they have to develop and test on every single combination to reach everyone. Imagine, if the contemporary websites had to do the same? Or the Internet Browser concept never existed? Remember, those fat client days?

Good or bad, as of now, the contemporary digital media vendors such as Apple, Palm, Microsoft, Sony, Panasonic among hundreds of others, have mostly their own operating systems and hardware architectures. Google’s Android is one step in the right direction but its success is also argued. No body can predict what will happen in the next 5-10 years but I sure hope that digital media hardware architectures become as common as x86 and hopefully, we can have operating systems such as Android, Windows Mobile, and Mac OS among others using those common architectures.

2007 - The Year of Online Social Networks

As we approach the end of 2007, the start of 2008, and of course, the holidays in between them, I was yet again assured on how much of a difference a year makes in the technology industry. Every year, we see new technology advancements that become part of mainstream. 2006 was the year of user-generated content and I would call 2007 as the year of online social networks. In 2007, FaceBook launched its developer platform to propel the social networking into the mainstream. I had user ids on FaceBook, Friendster, and LinkedIn for the last few years but I only started using the social networks more regularly in 2007. May be I was late to the party, but I am sure, I was not alone.

The current proliferation of online social networks is a reminiscent of the Internet email in 1997. At the time, I was a sophomore student. The Internet email was a new phenomenon and to be honest I don’t even remember how many email services I had signed-up for. The few I remember were Hotmail, Yahoo, USA.NET, mailbox.com, mail.com, and a service from some company (don’t remember the name) that had let me create a @technologist.com-based email address, which was a very cool thing for a young undergraduate technologist at that time! Fast forward to today, I only use Hotmail, Yahoo and Google. I don’t even remember my user ids from other providers and don’t know if they are in business or not.

To make my point, if you look at the online social networking websites today, we are witnessing the same scenario. We have FaceBook, LinkedIn, Bebo, Hi5, Plaxo, Dopplr, Twitter, Google Reader Sharing, VodPod, and Yelp among many others that enable virtual networking of my life with my friends. I don’t logon to all these websites in the same way I didn’t logon to all of my Internet mail boxes in the late 1990s. Slowly but surely, through a natural selection process, I adopted Hotmail, Yahoo and later to Google email. I still use these three services as I like to continuously compare them to see which one brings me (a user) better features. I believe, in the similar fashion, over time the social network websites will consolidate and some will close down due to unsuccessful monetization models.

As I was writing this post, I had CNN Your $$$$$ program running in the background. I don’t remember who it was from but a Holidays gift advice from a program’s guest caught my attention. The advice was for the parents looking for a gift for their children’s teachers. The woman advised the listening parents to contact the parents of other children in the same class and pool the money together to give one good gift to the teacher. It was yet another aha moment in my life. Social networks could save money, help us select better gifts, and help companies to do more targeted advertisements? How? Just setup a community/group in a social network website that would enable parents to collaborate to select a gift for the teacher. And the targeted advertisement model of the social network website would show teacher gifts ideas. Am I taking it too far? Not really. Technically, it is all possible with the contemporary social network websites. The difficult part would be to have boomers or early generation X parents to use the online social network websites. Therefore, it may not become part of mainstream in the next few years. However, as the late generation X (including me) and generation Y people - who are very comfortable with the concept of online social networks - enter the parenthood, it will become part of mainstream because the use of the social websites to network with other parents to discuss the school lives of our kids will be a part of our routine life. Well, we shall see.

More Enterprise SaaS

As I sat down to write this Blog entry, the SaaS market welcomed the entrance of Amazon’s SimpleDB that will let developers and companies store simple tables in the Amazon’s cloud. The SimpleDB is yet another example of the shift from in-premise software deployments to the SaaS model – slowly but surely.

SaaS is a new model and it will take years before it will be used in lieu of in-premise software deployments more pervasively. Though, the actual impact of SaaS on enterprises is debated among the Internet leaders, nobody would argue against the SaaS shift and it is a market that no one wants to ignore. The jury is still out there as which companies will be the eventual leaders in the SaaS space, but the participation of all big Internet players has guaranteed that it will only get more interesting with time.

For my discussion, I will divide the Enterprise SaaS into two broad categories: Infrastructure SaaS and Application SaaS.

Infrastructure SaaS

Over the years, infrastructure installation configuration tasks have improved considerably through better user interfaces and more thorough introspections of the target environments. In contrast, the day-to-day administration of the infrastructure software has gotten more complex due to the advancements in the applications that use the infrastructure software. Today as before, every Enterprise still has to hire skilled system administrators, security administrators, backup administrators, database administrators, and web server administrators to keep these infrastructure software deployment running smooth and securely. The Infrastructure SaaS is mainly employed by the companies that want to do away with the internal infrastructure software installations, for some part, at least.

The contemporary infrastructure SaaS is mainly centered on the online backup storage services. However, Amazon is changing this slowly by coming up with more sophisticated Infrastructure software services. Amazon’s S3, EC2, and SimpleDB services can move real time storage, computing and databases into the cloud. Google, which by far runs the world’s biggest cloud computing cluster to deliver search, advertisements and apps, has surprisingly stayed away from the Infrastructure software SaaS. However, Google and IBM did join forces to generate an academic interest in the cloud computing science. It remains to be seen as which companies will be the eventually leaders in the Infrastructure SaaS space.

Application SaaS

Salesforce.com’s CEO, Mark Benioff, saw the Application SaaS dream in 1999. As I said in my last Blog entry, the entrance of big players such as Microsoft, Intuit, and the creation of new big players – Amazon, Salesforce.com, and Google – in the last few years have finally forced IT departments to take a serious look at the Application SaaS.

To make my Application SaaS discussion more specific, I will divide Application SaaS into three sub-categories.

Collaborative Application SaaS

Zoho, Microsoft Office Live, Cisco’s Webex and Google Apps are the few prominent players in Collaborative Application SaaS space. The new players are popping up, however, eventually they will either die or will be acquired by the big players. Santa Clara Cricket Club, a non-profit social organization, where I serve as a CTO, uses Google Apps SaaS. Recently, I was interviewed by the Google communication department regarding my implementation of Google Apps. I was asked why I had used Google Apps to run my organization. I answered that I saw the market shift towards SaaS products and realized it could transform my own organization. I implemented Google Apps SaaS for my own organization to confirm my understanding. At the end, I was very glad to move all of the features development work to the Google’s engineers for free!

Platform Application SaaS

Salesforce.com’s AppExchange is considered as the pioneer in the Platform Application SaaS. As of today, it has more than 725 application components that can be integrated into the Salesforce.com SaaS application(s). However, earlier this year, the opening of FaceBook as a platform to run third party applications has added a social twist to the Platform Application SaaS. The Social Platform Application SaaS has created a new market in itself. After Facebook’s announcement, other Social network players such as MySpace, LinkedIn, Bebo and Hi5 have also either opened their platforms or are in the process of developing a platform to enter into the Social Platform Application SaaS market. The Google’s OpenSocial has a potential to make developers’ life easy, however, I will wait for the market to confirm that in the next few years.

Business Application SaaS

This is the category that is getting most attention from Enterprise IT departments. Salesforce.com, Quicken Online Services, NetSuite, Microsoft CRM, and Workday are few prominent examples in the Business Application SaaS. Recently, SAP entered into this by creating a SaaS offering for the mid-market customers. Oracle already has CRM SaaS through its acquisition of Siebel.

Though, we have a big push towards the Business Application SaaS, I still believe that the enterprise software development is very hard and will remain hard. It is more art and less science. The big players took twenty years to create platforms that can be customized to meet large enterprises’ complex business processes. The Business Application SaaS is forcing the same issue again but moving it into the cloud. Jeff Huber of Google recently said that the platform wars are over and the Web is the winner. I could not agree more. The creation of a cloud-based SaaS platform that can support complex enterprise business processes is not an easy job. It will be the hardest job done when completed, if ever. The companies that embrace the SaaS shift early will be the winners at the end.

Every shift in the technology industry kills some existing players and creates new players. The SaaS shift will do the same. However, as with any shift, no body knows which companies will die, which companies will thrive and which new companies will be the next Oracles, IBMs, Salesforce.coms, Facebooks, Googles, Yahoos, Microsofts, Intuits, eBays and Amazons in 2020. Unfortunately, I can only connect the dots backward and not forward, otherwise, I could have predicted the next leaders. Nevertheless, the question is not “Why SaaS” any more; instead it is “When and how SaaS”. Do you know “When and how”?

Enterprise SaaS

I started my professional career at the start of a major shift from client/server applications to the web-based applications. Subsequently, almost all software products migrated to the HTML front-end and the web-based presentation layer became the choice for all user interactions. Fast forward to today, the advancements of web-based computing and communication technologies have created a great turbulence and major shift in the enterprise application architectures, yet again. This time, it is not about client-server vs. web-based applications. It is the delivery of software as a service (SaaS) in lieu of an in-premise software deployment. In both cases, the user interface is still a web application. However, the concept of SaaS moves the actual storage of data and execution of application logic outside of enterprises’ firewalls, and into the cloud.

It is not the first time that the concept of SaaS has hit the enterprise technology departments. During the dot-com bubble days, the same concept was captured as application service provider (ASP) or managed service providers (MSP). The dot-com bust bankrupted most of those ASP and MSP providers but some did manage to survive. Now, those survivors have been joined by Microsoft Live , Salesforce.com, Google Apps, and Amazon S3 among others. It is a fair question to ask as what is different today vs. five years ago that makes SaaS is a viable option. I believe there are three major differences.

First is the ubiquity of computers connected to the Internet, the dramatic improvements in the communication bandwidth, and the cheaper availability of the storage and computing infrastructures. For example, in 2000, I paid $65 for my home Internet line. In contrast, today, I only pay $20 for my home Internet line that is actually faster and more reliable. It is almost a 200% decrease in cost with increases in speed, reliability and availability.

Second is the change in the way people use Internet. Though, younger generation has led the way here, the adults have also caught-up on the use of Wikis, Facebook, Mobile Web, Instant Messaging, Blogging and many other communications mechanisms. All of this has made Internet as ubiquitous as TVs, thus, the average users have become comfortable using the Internet and related applications.

Third difference that I believe is pushing enterprise technology leaders over the edge is the entrance of big players in the SaaS space. Large enterprises only do business with big software vendors because they want reliability and future assurance. Though, Google, Amazon and Salesforce.com were small companies five years, today, they are considered big companies with billions of dollars in revenues. Microsoft’ CTO, Ray Ozzie, recognized the shift two years ago. And even SAP, the biggest enterprise application software vendor, has admitted that SaaS has become a viable for small and medium enterprises. Of course, time will move those deployments to large enterprises.

However, make not mistake. SaaS model is a major change in how enterprise software is developed, deployed, customized and supported. It is not a mere change from fat client user interfaces to web interfaces as we had in the early days of Internet. It requires SaaS providers to not only develop but also deploy applications and platforms that are very highly available, highly secure, highly customizable, and web intergrate-able. It is not an easy task by any measure and certainly it is not a task that can be accomplished in few months or sitting in a closed lab for few years. The only way to do this is to deploy these SaaS applications on a trial basis, learn from those deployments, adapt the platform and software based on lessons, and then upgrade existing deployments seamlessly – all while keeping the customized logic intact.

The enterprise software developers and customization engineers might dismiss SaaS due to its limited customization capabilities but they would be wrong about it. Every major shift requires us to re-think our process, cultures, organizations, strategy and talents. This shift to SaaS warrants a re-thinking process. It is a change that will take five-ten years to materialize. But it is a change that will hit your processes, people, organizations, business systems in every way you can think of. Realizing the shift is only a start.