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Wikipedia, the online encyclopedia built on the backs of a seemingly never-ending supply of free labor, is in a bit of a bind: Many contributors are throwing in the towel. As reported in a page one story in Monday's Wall Street Journal, "unprecedented numbers of the millions of online volunteers who write, edit... and police it are quitting." And, the article adds, not enough new blood is coming online to replace the quitters. While it may be tempting to view this as a failure of the "crowdsourcing" model, the article hints at another issue that has bedeviled software for decades: Barriers to entry increasing to the point where users no longer want to use it. Wikipedia's obscure markup language has always been a turnoff for new contributors, but the introduction of various rules over the years to counteract spam, vandalism, conflicts of interest and other problems has made contributing even minor updates an exercise in frustration. Try linking to a blog containing more information on the subject at hand, or creating an entry for a topic or person that is not yet included in Wikipedia. If the contribution isn't blocked or changed, there's a good chance it will be deleted by overzealous editors who think it's not worthy of inclusion (see "Deletionpedia: Where Wikipedia entries go to die"). The Wall Street Journal notes that dealing with the angry debates over certain articles can wear down even experienced editors. It's not at all surprising that many people simply say, why bother? But is this situation really much different than the frustrations people encounter with other kinds of software that are difficult to understand or operate, or present other barriers to entry? Marc Benioff's book Behind The Cloud cites an old Gartner research stat that claimed 65% of Siebel licenses were never used. The implication: The Siebel CRM applications were too hard to install and too hard to use, so many people didn't even try. One doesn't have to look far for other examples. Who in your office has actually figured out how to use the advanced features of Lotus Notes or Microsoft Word? How many people in your circle of friends have given up trying to update their antivirus software or device drivers because the stupid installation disc is nowhere to be found? The moral of the story: If a product is too hard or frustrating to use, or there are too many barriers to entry, people will turn away -- or turn to something else. Apple's successes with iTunes, the iPod, and now the iPhone are proof that easy-to-use software and hardware not only can attract new users, but also can leave established competitors in the dust. Wikipedia is fortunate in that there isn't any other broadly focused online encyclopedia that offers a better experience for contributions. But if Google figures out a way to supercharge its languishing Knol service -- or Wikipedia's PageRank value declines in Google searches -- there might be an opening for an alternative service to flourish. Sources and research: Wall Street Journal, Behind The Cloud, TheStandard.com Ian Lamont is the author of The Social Enterprise blog on TheStandard.com. Comment below, or email Ian at ian@thestandard.com. Follow Ian on Twitter at http://twitter.com/ilamont. Ian's bio and disclosures are located here. Industry Standard updates and asides are available at twitter.com/the_standard and in our newsletters, and you can join our Industry Standard Facebook page and LinkedIn group.
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When it comes to Second Life, some people just can't forget the bursting of the hype bubble following the first early wave of excitement. I admit, I harped on the reality check for in-world corporate activities too, but that was years ago. For some strange reason, the BBC still thinks it's news, judging by Lauren Ha...nsen's "What happened to Second Life?" article posted last week on the BBC News Magazine. Second Life's parent company, Linden Lab, clearly felt misled. An official Second Life blog post republished the BBC's original pitch ("[Linden Lab CEO Mark Kingdon] was recently interviewed via email by a reporter for the BBC who was working on a story that would be "a look at Second Life today - what's it up to, where's it going, why so quiet in the media after such great press a few years ago, etc.") and implied that the reporter hadn't really experienced Second Life ("we'd love to bring her inworld so she can see firsthand that there's much more to the virtual world"). But I was more interested in some of the other issues that came up in the email interview. The Second Life blog post published what looks to be a complete transcript, including this exchange relating to Linden Lab's recently announced business services: BBC question: With Enterprise is Second Life gearing its direction more toward a business client? Considering there are other business-focused platforms out there, is this more the way of SL's future? M Linden (Mark Kingdon) answer: No. Enterprise and education are important markets for us; the launch of the beta for Second Life Enterprise is a key step forward in serving those markets, and more is planned for the future, including a new entry path tailored for enterprise users of Second Life that we plan to roll out early in 2010. However, the great majority of our business is still the individual consumer, and that is our primary focus. This works because we are a platform that can accommodate almost any use-case a user can imagine. This is important. Some individual consumers who regularly use the virtual world are concerned that their needs are being put on the back burner in favor of pleasing Linden Lab's corporate customers. Kingdon's words may be reassuring on this point, but Second Life Enterprise's hidden, behind-the-firewall virtual spaces will go a long way toward reducing such sentiment, as most consumer users -- who far outnumber corporate users -- won't be exposed to what's going on in the enterprise environments. Whether the mainstream press will move past the "businesses are abandoning Second Life" meme is less certain, however. To observers who visit Second Life infrequently, it may appear that corporations and large organizations are no longer using the world, when in fact they are simply using it in less-visible ways. Sources and research: Computerworld.com, official Second Life blog, BBC.co.uk, virtualworldsnews.com, Cnet, Massively.com Image: Second Life screenshot
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If it looks like a duck, quacks like a duck, and walks like a duck, it probably is a duck. That is, unless you're Salesforce.com, and you're talking about its new Chatter application. While observers have looked at features like profiles, status updates, Twitter and Facebook i...ntegration as proof that Chatter is an enterprise-grade social network, the company and its executives are taking pains to call it something else -- a "social platform," or, as carefully noted by Salesforce CEO and co-founder Marc Benioff, a collaboration tool: Benioff's explanation suggested that the distinction has more to do with sales and marketing than anything else. Salesforce was careful to position Chatter as a collaboration tool, not a "social this or social that" because there's such a glut of social networking tools, he said, and customers are more willing to pay for collaboration software. "We really want to talk about collaboration, because that really is a budget item for our customers," Benioff said. The verbal massaging extends to some of the feature descriptions. On the product website, "social content" doesn't mean updates or links, but rather documents, spreadsheets and presentations that workers can share with one another. The demo video (below) refers to "social computing," meaning social networks like Facebook. Another Salesforce co-founder, Executive Vice President of Technology Parker Harris, also stayed on message with the collaboration concept in a talk with ZDNet editors (see video below). "I think about our platform as a collaboration platform," Harris said. "You're building applications to collaborate around data in the enterprise on a trusted system." So, are Benioff and Parker right to call Chatter a collaboration engine, or is it really just a social networking tool, enhanced with document sharing and some enterprise-grade hooks into Salesforce.com's other apps? Until Chatter rolls out next year, you'll have to make your own judgments. The videos below are a good place to start. Video: "Parker Harris chatters about Chatter" Video: Salesforce Chatter Demo Sources and research: BusinessWeek, altimetergroup.com, blogs.ZDNet.com, TheStandard.com, VentureBeat.com, Salesforce.com Image: Demo video screenshot Ian Lamont is the author of The Social Enterprise blog on TheStandard.com. Comment below, or email Ian at ian@thestandard.com. Follow Ian on Twitter at http://twitter.com/ilamont. Ian's bio and disclosures are located here. Industry Standard updates and asides are available at twitter.com/the_standard and in our newsletters, and you can join our Industry Standard Facebook page and LinkedIn group.
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"We'll work to ensure that Internet Explorer is the best browser for Windows without compromise. A standards-based, modern browser to its core." That's Microsoft Chief Software Architect Ray Ozzie's pledge during his PDC keynote earlier this week (see video be...low at 6:30). Whether the company can keep it is another story. Skeptics will point to IE's tortured history with Web standards and delayed implementation of popular features such as tabbed browsing. Others will note that Mozilla and Google are constantly innovating with their own browsers, and IE will have a hard time keeping up. And don't even get people started on browser speed tests. But when it comes to Microsoft's cloud vision, IE developers will at least have a leg up on how the browser and other Microsoft software components will hook into Azure. And it is Azure that is the main focus of Ozzie's keynote. If you have a few hours to spare, watch what he and other Microsoft engineers have to say about how the various pieces will fit together: Video: PDC 09 Day One Keynote Image: Ray Ozzie, Professional Developers Conference video screenshot Sources and research: Cnet, Wired, TheStandard.com, Microsoft press website, email and phone call with Waggener Edstrom (Microsoft PR).
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People who write code for a living have a love/hate relationship with Microsoft. Over the years the press has played up the hate (and the hype), but today I thought I would turn to one Microsoft software project which is generating genuine interest and kudos from some developers. The product is Microsoft...'s free Web Platform Installer, now on version 2.0, which lets developers quickly install Microsoft's Internet Information Services and a boatload of free Web applications on top of IIS, including WordPress, Moodle, SugarCRM, and Acquia for Drupal. The fact that this Microsoft product is playing nice with open source software is remarkable in itself, but what has gotten developers particularly interested is the cloud potential. Blogger and developer Jorge Escobar yesterday said: "I was blown away with the concept behind this application. Basically Windows has introduced point-and-click cloud computing for the masses and it's doing it in a way that resembles the iPhone application directory but for web applications. I hate to say it but it's brilliant." Not everyone who has seen the Web Platform Installer is so impressed, however. Last week, developer, author and podcaster Kevin Yank acknowledged that Web PI makes it "easy to set up IIS as a development environment for PHP which has been really painful in the past," but said he believed it is not getting much traction in the marketplace, where WAMP or LAMP installations are often preferred. He also said open-source developers are suspicious of anything Microsoft does, which would slow adoption. But it's the cloud connection and the potential hooks to Azure -- Microsoft's soon-to-be-launched cloud computing platform -- that also come into play. More than a few developers commenting on a Hacker News thread that they were looking forward to Web PI applications being tied into Azure instances, even though someone identifying himself as working on the Azure platform made pains to note that the two products are "really quite distinct". Nevertheless, the idea that Microsoft is simplifying and opening up its cloud-related offerings, and removing development obstacles and other potential barriers to entry (such as billing-related headaches) is enough to draw a lot of interest and maybe even turn the page on some of the bad feelings resulting from its bruising battles with the open-source community. In the months to come, the big question on many people's minds will be how Azure measures up in production environments, and how it works with both Microsoft and non-Microsoft applications. Sources and research: news.ycombinator.com, SitePoint podcast #36, Microsoft.com, jungleg.com, sriramkrishnan.com, hanselman.com, kevinyank.com Image: akakumo/flickr (creative commons/commercial use license)
The Industry Standard Question: Salesforce's Chatter social network. Sounds good on paper, but will it follow path to obscurity blazed by enterprise IM clients 10 years ago?
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Remember when Java was going to take over the world? The idea of writing an application once and then having it run on a multitude of different platforms was a compelling vision that would have a major impact on enterprise development and CS education. Of course, that was before a host of new Web frameworks ...and mobile platforms appeared on the scene. Few hold out hope for the "write once, run anywhere" dream these days, and in fact, Stephen O'Grady of RedMonk thinks the Tower of Babel situation is going to become even more pronounced in the coming year: "Between cloud fabrics, programming language proliferation, mobile application development and the spike in development framework popularity, development targets have been fragmenting for several years now. We are more or less in full retreat from the one time promise of write once, run anywhere as an industry. I see nothing on the horizon that will throttle or even slow this trend; if anything, the increasing volume of cloud platforms and the surge in interest in mobile development will accelerate this trend. This has significant implications for purveyors of middleware, application development tools and cloud platforms, but also for those charged with setting enterprise technology standards. The CIO's job is going to get harder in 2010, because picking a winner from the myriad language, framework and platform options will be much more difficult than picking a safe option." It's not hard to imagine what can go wrong for CIOs who back the wrong horse. Platforms and standards that fail to take hold eventually translate to additional development work, hiring and training headaches, software costs, and friction with customers and partners. Take the mobile apps space. Shops that made big bets on Windows Mobile and J2ME a few years ago have watched as a new generation of smartphones and mobile platforms have come onto the scene and upended the marketplace. Unfortunately, there's no crystal ball which will predict the long-term winners and losers. So, for the time being, navigating the proliferation of platforms is will require tried-and-true evaluation skills, as well as a healthy dose of common sense. It means keeping a close eye on the evolving marketplace, carefully listening to peers and trusted advisors, and treading warily when it comes to vendor hype and FUD. Image: Brughel's Tower of Babel, fimoculous/flickr (creative commons/commercial use license) Sources and research: RedMonk.com, News.Ycombinator.com
The Industry Standard Anyone out there not think this was inevitable?
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A federal judge has dealt a crushing blow to Mac clone maker Psystar by ruling that the Florida company violated Apple's copyright as well as the Digital Millennium Copyright Act (DMCA) when it ...
The Industry Standard So which is it, folks? Was Microsoft inspired by OS X, or is there absolutely no connection?
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Microsoft yesterday disowned a company executive who said his company's Windows 7 was inspired by Apple's Mac operating system, calling his comments "uninformed" and "inaccurate."In an interview ...
The Industry Standard Tweet:
Big news from Linden Lab: The company has officially launched an open beta for Second Life Enterprise, and says it is planning a marketplace for enterprise applications and virtual goods such as collaboration tools and business environments. Linden Lab says the services can be used for events, product prototyping, ...and simulations. But one of the most interesting aspect of the announcement relates to security. Second Life Enterprise lets companies run the virtual world on their own network, much like a corporate intranet. Companies which had previously shied away from the virtual world because of concerns about proprietary data or 3D models living on Second Life's public-facing servers can now host the world within their own security perimeter, and according to their own technical and work policies -- for instance, the service offers LDAP integration and administrators can have employees use their real names for avatars. Justin Bovington, the CEO of Rivers Run Red, was positive about the open beta. His company operates Immersive Workspaces, a turnkey corporate meeting and training service that has been part of the Second Life Enterprise private beta. In an email to the Standard, Bovington said: We see the behind-the-firewall solution as a very important next step. It's giving the market what they've wanted: security, privacy and the ability, working with people like Rivers Run Red, to develop bespoke applications. This was the main point picked up and highlighted by LL's competitors. We're going to see a greater adoption level now, as it was one of the main things that would derail the corporate buy-in. We also think that Corporates will create a mixture of hybrid behind-the-firewall closed-off spaces on their Intranets and a private, gated Internet-accessible space for their partners and collaborators. However, Bovington sounded a note of caution on the Second Life Work Marketplace. "It has be less Xstreet, more Wall Street. It has to reflect relevance, rather than drowning us all in deluge of content: clothing, furniture and avatars," he wrote, adding "if [Linden Lab] attracts the right people to develop these apps, this could be the tipping point." Linden Lab says pricing for Second Life Enterprise starts at $55,000. The beta will run through Q4 of 2009, with general availability expected during the first half of 2010. The company said the Second Life Work Marketplace has a closed alpha planned for the end of Q1 2010, and the product launch expected in the first half of 2010. Image: Linden Lab Sources and research: Metanomics.net, Second Life Enterprise website, Linden Lab/Second Life press release, email interview with Rivers Run Red. Comment below, or email Ian at ian@thestandard.com. Follow Ian on Twitter at http://twitter.com/ilamont. Ian's bio and disclosures are located here. Industry Standard updates and asides are available at twitter.com/the_standard and in our newsletters, and you can join our Industry Standard Facebook page and LinkedIn group.Â
The Industry Standard Google and Microsoft's cloud rivalry may seem restrained, but make no mistake: It's war
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tank_chefrandan_flickr.jpg"All warfare is based on deception," goes the famous line attributed to Sun Tzu in the Art of War. It may very well be the operating principle that both Google and Microsoft have taken to ...
The Industry Standard As someone who has tried to use the Chinese version of Windows in the past, this is a welcome development. But Mac OS X users have had this type of language support for some time.
www.thestandard.com
Of the new features in Windows 7 it's probably among those that has received the least amount of coverage, but for expatriate PC users the ability to switch the language of the operating system ...
The Industry Standard Interesting take on why one power users does not use Google Reader anymore. Echoes of Bloglines?
scobleizer.posterous.com
I used to be the biggest user of Google Reader. At one point the Google Reader team told me I shared more items than anyone else. But lately it's a rare month I've checked into it and Twitter is in the process of adding a new feature -- lists -- that is getting me off of Google Reader altogether.
The Industry Standard
Tweet: Tweeting at the office: Have you checked your work contract lately?:
Hey you -- the developer sitting in that suburban cube farm, happily twittering away about going to lunch, the bug report you're filing, and.. http://bit.ly/12b8RE
The Industry Standard Started a little discussion over on Slashdot about the surge in Asterisk (VOIP/PBX software) "vishing" attacks. Click through to read the comments and see what vishing means ...
tech.slashdot.org
Ian Lamont writes "Remember the report last year that the FBI was concerned about a 'vishing' exploit relating to the Asterisk IP PBX software? Digium played down the report, noting that it was based on ...
