C|Net is picking on my theme from yesterday and running with it.
Sure, C|Net is a link-farm, you can get in but never get out. But by keeping everyone’s pagerank low they establish authority, and I find that reassuring. They also have trackbacks. So without further ado, here are some gems from the article.
Buttoned-down IBM, which mainly sells to businesses, on Wednesday detailed QEDwiki, for example. The project is meant to let people assemble Web applications using wikis, really simple syndication (RSS) and simple Web scripting.
Wondering what this new “simple Web scripting” would be like? I did. So I followed the link and found out it goes by the generic over-the-counter name PHP.
Instead, he recommended the ‘interpersonal enterprise’ approach
It’s time for me to update my architecture diagram, and I need your help with that.
Does the ‘interpersonal enterprise’ go left or right of the ‘interconnected enterprise’?
IBM, a major advocate of the SOA concept within corporations, is doing exactly that. Its QEDwiki project is specifically designed to let businesspeople with no formal programming training to assemble “mashups,” Web applications that mix information from different sources, said Rod Smith, IBM’s vice president of emerging technology. For example, a person could track the effect of the avian flu on employees by mixing internal company information with public sources of data.
A better/cheaper way to solve the avian flu/employee effect correlation problem is what I would call a killer app.
Sorry for the bad pun. I’ll go wash my hands now.
At its Mix ’06 conference in March, the company sponsored a workshop, called Spark, to find common technical-design patterns that can be applied for business and consumer software.
I can think of a few:
- Identify which problem needs to be solved. As we all know, real problems are not felt, they need to be use-cased.
- Devise a solution using the words ‘simple’. Now that all solutions scale, you need to differentiate.
- Use as many out-of-content examples as possible. The C|Net article has a good one: talk about the iPod.
- Google is your exit strategy.
And you can’t say I’m wrong on the last one.
“Everybody is calling the enterprise software market dead,” Kraus said. “But it’s really not dead. There are just new models at work.”
Since Web 2.0 companies tend to use the word ‘model’ as a synonym for ‘expenses’, I worry about that one.
Sterling Camden
Assaf