Jive Talks

Best business hook-up hotspot: Clearstep

communities@jivesoftware.com — Wed, 30 Jul 2008 17:15:38 GMT

Ever wish you could find someone working on social media or Enterprise 2.0 efforts at other companies, same as you? Wish you could pick their brain about how the heck they justified the implementation cost? Found that elusive ROI? Tricks to get employees to use it? Best way to communicate your new online community to your brand fanbase?

Ever wish you could do this without all of we pesky software vendors trying to market to you the whole time?

Well, now you can.

Jive Software (your favorite pesky software vendor) is proud to announce the new Clearstep business community (register today - it's free!).

There's already quite a bit of activity in Clearstep. It's segmented into two areas:

Online Communities

Build, manage, and measure your community successfully

Social media folks focused on external-facing communities will be most interested in these discussions, tips and tricks. Current hot topics include (requires registration):

Engagement with Social Media: Personal vs. Business purposes?

Why Most Online Communities Fail

Recommendations for human moderation vendor?

What are community metrics that you measure?

Internal Collaboration

Discover best practices in leveraging enterprise social software

Enterprise 2.0 advocates focused on internal social networking and collaboration will be most interested in this area. Current hot topics include:

Do reputation points help or hurt?

What's your Governance Model Look Like?

Enterprise 2.0 Use Cases

How do you select your pilot groups?

Want to know the best part about this community? It is completely vendor-agnostic. That's right. There are folks discussing solutions from Microsoft, Jive (obviously), IBM, Atlassian, etc. The community managers are absolutely committed to keeping this place vendor-agnostic and marketing-free so that the truly valuable conversations can be had.

And last I checked, the majority of participants work at very recognizable Fortune 500 companies.

Makes you wonder if the old customer reference requests are a thing of the past. You can now just participate in Clearstep, and ask your peers yourself.

Expectations for 2008

communities@jivesoftware.com — Fri, 28 Dec 2007 05:02:37 GMT

Big 2.0 shakeouts

Whether or not a "S&L part deux" recession occurs, Web 2.0 startups will be forced to become responsible. That means they'll need to focus on profitability or close shop. More of them will address industry verticals to help gain traction.

"Social Productivity" stampede begins: Utility and social applications converge

Google is the most visible company who could connect the dots to unify utility with social applications. Rumor is they'll do this under the umbrella of " Google Sites" which is meant to:

allow business to set up intranets, project management tracking, customer extranets, and any number of custom sites based on multi-user collaboration.

This will be fantastic for the 2.0 market overall by providing a clear, disruptive "sum of its parts" vision for companies. It will also clear space for other collaboration-centric companies focused on enterprise 2.0 to compete.

Look at what Google has staked so far:

Utility	Social
Docs, spreadsheets, presentations	OpenSocial (unifies information across social networks)
Calendaring	Orkut (Social Network)
Email	Sites (Intranet/Extranet Product)<--All Google's pieces organized by this
Instant messaging
VOIP and call management (Grand Central)
Mobile platform (Android)
Knol (wikipedia competitor)
Gears (offline mode)

Attention! (Next year's buzz.)

While this year buzz was Social Networking next year should be "Attention Streaming." Given how many social applications and connections we have, it will be important to easily keep track of activity, content, and people (signal vs noise). This will be particularly in demand for companies embracing Enterprise 2.0. There are a couple of approaches to this. "Groupthink," which is a top-down approach where attention focus is determined by activity of the masses. "User Activity" is a bottoms-up approach to taming the data firehose. Right now it seems these are addressed as one route or the other and no one has combined both. There's already some interesting standards and traction beginning.

IT big guys buy some 2.0 souvenirs

Though for the most part it will be more wait-and-see from the Big Guys, my bet is there will be at least one minor acquisition, potentially one of the many me-too Office-style applications or maybe an enterprise wiki.

Content management will specialize

Content continues to change and so does the role of Content Management Systems. As more content lives outside those systems and inside social productivity applications, I imagine that the way we'll need to control content will change, too. CMS will hone in on the types of content that makes sense in this paradigm, some will zero-in on heavy file-centric, structured industries. It will be interesting to see how this part of the market evolves.

Media properties will begin to focus on Enterprise 2.0 software

Given the above predictions, media folks will take advantage of all the interest around Enterprise 2.0 and begin to dedicate some brand new media properties to it. For now, Web 2.0 (consumer) and Enterprise 2.0 (business) have been mashed together and covered in the same industry rags like Techcrunch, Read/Write Web and GigaOM. My sense is that there's now enough independent gravity between Web 2.0 and Enterprise 2.0 to justify targeted readership, editorial and (yes) advertising dollars.

Jive Dog and Pony

communities@jivesoftware.com — Mon, 24 Dec 2007 15:26:42 GMT

In case you haven't checked out BNET~~a business-centric CNET brand focused on helping managers succeed~~it's worth taking a look. One of their video programs is called " Dog and Pony," which is a daily interview with folks who share compelling ideas.

They invited Jive to participate a few months ago and have just published the interview. They don't provide embed code so you'll have to go directly to the video if you want to watch it.

Intranets: Premature Collaboration

communities@jivesoftware.com — Sun, 16 Dec 2007 23:32:23 GMT

Why all the recent intrigue about the notion of something like a Facebook in the Enterprise? Simple, Facebook is people-driven. It's easy to to tell what people are doing on Facebook and nearly impossible inside a company. Check out this quick interview with CIO-of-the-year, JP Rangaswami, who makes some interesting quick points on the potential values of social networking inside the enterprise:

You can look at the flows that matter rather than the flows of politics.
Allows you to form groups of interest--no different than arranging a meeting
Allows you to communicate in an efficient way vs blasting email
Opportunity for employees to subscribe to what they're interested in
Easy to tell what colleagues and subordinates are doing
Capture the coffee shop/water cooler as persistent, teachable, shareable, learnable content--a huge win since those are the most valuable, amorphous, softer communications that help get past the assembly line mindset and hierarchies
Now we can understand these relationships, how people really work and what they do as part of that work

That said, social-networking is still outside-of-work focused and it's only an ingredient of a larger enterprise social productivity system. But it does map to a painful promise that we never received as part of the intranet efforts 10 years ago: Intranets were supposed to be the common space for companies to find information, each other and then somehow collaborate.

Instead, Intranets are junk drawers. They are bolted together tools that people generally work around, not in. Most represent something like a city that experienced a hyper-economic growth spurt and couldn't keep up with the urban planning, then ended up having the bottom pulled out ten years ago. That's about when companies had teams doing anything other than maintain intranets. Those teams went out and found lots of ingredients like knowledge bases, directories, training modules, document repositories, project management software, forums, etc and then spent years trying to sew them together. Problem was, no one knew how to do that in a way that created something useful for everyone. There was no vision. The Navy Marine Corps spent $8B and seven years trying to figure out their Intranet.

The main problem is also that back then, people took a communication vs collaboration-centric approach. Intranets were places to get get stuff. They were a broadcasting system. Need the latest HR form? The approved price-per-gallon to put on expense reports? The Intranet would tell you. Check out the advantages that Wikipedia lists, among them that Intranets can:

Promote common corporate culture: Every user is viewing the same information within the Intranet.

Ultimately, there should be no better reflection of a company than their "intranet" (or whatever new name is the result of all this convergence). This starts with having a solid strategy and vision, then working to achieve it. It will require more than the software. It will require a whole new collaboration-centric approach with an eye towards thinking deeply about the type of environment companies want to build. The debate about which executive sponsor will drive enterprise collaboration is still in flux.

We're at a crossroads again. Collaboration tools, content management and office productivity is converging and either companies will approach things strategically or they'll end up with "junk drawer 2.0." We see this everyday. Either we're talking to business-focused leaders looking for a comprehensive, strategic solutions or to companies who have appointed a technician to go buy parts and then sew something together. Our industry has to help companies peer ahead by painting a clear vision of what a collaboration-centric, Social Productivity system looks like, otherwise: no vision, no decision.

Nominate Jive for a "Crunchie" by December 12th!

communities@jivesoftware.com — Wed, 05 Dec 2007 05:36:59 GMT

Our friends at GigaOm, TechCrunch, ReadWriteWeb and VentureBeat have banded together to create the the Crunchies an award that celebrates startup innovation.

The award was described by Om like this:

They are like the Grammies and the Webbys with a People’s Choice flavor, only for start-ups! The idea is to get the respective communities of various blogs to collaborate and vote and help pick the top start-ups of the year.

We'd love to be nominated for "Most Likely to Succeed," so if you think we have what it takes to "meet future financial success (may be defined as revenue creation, a big exit, or other future accomplishment)," then take a second to nominate Jive today.

Free office!

communities@jivesoftware.com — Mon, 03 Dec 2007 17:35:56 GMT

Office software hasn't changed in over 20 years

What was your office like 20 years ago? You were probably sitting at your desk jamming to Madonna's "Into the Groove," wearing stone-washed denim and working away on your IBM PS/2 486 MHz computer. Since then, office software has rested atop its "good enough" mountain with no real challengers. Somehow good enough is good enough as long as the checks keep rolling in. Meanwhile, two generations of us have used the same personal inbox, calendar, word processor and spreadsheet to do our work. This has gone on for so long, many of us can't even imagine our workplace framed a different way.

Office software will be free, then included in the OS

Suddenly, companies have a gaggle of "Office" options from folks like Google, Zoho, Thinkfree, Zimbra/Yahoo, Adobe, OpenOffice and a slew of others. But these Microsoft competitors are merely duplicating the Office suite--Google and OpenOffice even give theirs away. The resulting navel-contemplation in the industry often focuses on whether office software's future is based on the web or on the premises, but that focus is misplaced and misses the bigger picture. The spate of knock-offs will devalue this old set of features. Soon, paying for "Office" software will seem as ridiculous as paying for a web browser. Microsoft is painfully aware of this. Rumor has it they are readying the release of a free, limited and ad-supported version of their Office suite.

The current revolution of office software is not a revision of the old one

The picture has quickly expanded past file creation and email sorting. Traditional office software features are being absorbed into browsers and OSes. The next level of digital office work is shifting from a disjointed file exchange work model to one that's much more connected, contextual and collaborative. In the old model, users create documents in isolation and exchange them with other isolated users--all insulated from and out of sync with the bigger picture of relevant interpersonal activity. In the new collaboration model, connected people understand when, what and why to engage and they do it in a unified environment. They use file-sharing only as a supplement, when and if it's necessary. We refer to this collaboration model as Social Productivity, which frames our daily work activity in the "we" vs. "me" context and then delivers new functionality to help with these connections. This more accurately mimics our work-with-others activity vs. the produce-alone-and-distribute part of our daily equation. Now we can get context at a glance, work doesn't disappear once we hit "send," and we stay connected to the efforts most important to us.

The irony of the "Office wars"

There's a lot of speculation about how things will change but the good news is that there will be change. Some of it reminds me of what happened to Netscape. When they broke onto the scene in 1994 with their Navigator web browser, they charged for it and people gladly paid because it was the best (and arguably the only) solution available. Then in the late nineties, Microsoft introduced Internet Explorer--for free. After a very short "browser war," Microsoft integrated their browser into their OS. Netscape lost, but users didn't care. They happily looked past the browser features because the real value wasn't the browser; it was the content within it. Ironically, it is now Microsoft that is set up to stumble on its own shrewd business practices, which could cost them almost 30% of their $40 billion revenue engine. There's always Outlook.

Our office future finally changes

A whole new industry focused on Social Productivity has emerged. The door is open for new market leaders to lead this next wave of innovation. Demand is through the roof for this bigger picture approacha more visible and productive enterprise. All of this is good news for employees and companies. Social Productivity is already producing better results and more quickly than we ever did wearing the blinders of individual contributors. A whole new marketplace is changing the game. Our kids will smile with nostalgia when they think of a digital “document” saved somewhere on a hard driveliterally modeled after a piece of paper--that only one person at a time could access or give to someone else to look over. It already sounds quaint and archaic.

What Enterprise 2.0 can learn from the history of CRM

communities@jivesoftware.com — Fri, 09 Nov 2007 02:43:37 GMT

Does this sound familiar?

"The line between departments will disappear"
"There's a lack of established success metrics"
"Too much IT involvement"
"Companies with point solutions have difficulty integrating those to look at the entire solution"

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It should. They could be quotes about our industry but are actually CRM industry quotes from nearly a decade ago. So, if history repeats itself it might be helpful for the “Web 2.0,” “Enterprise 2.0” and “Social Networking” players to take a quick look back at how other industries have evolved as we speculate our future. For example, quite recently, the term Customer Relationship Management (CRM) didn’t exist. That industry evolved over 20 years from “database marketing” to “relationship marketing” and settled on CRM around the year 2000. That’s when the market became energized by intensified competition and easier to use, more cost effective and valuable software solutions.

Houston, we have a framing problem

Similar to our current market, the CRM industry started out very fragmented with lots of players focused on many component parts. These pieces ultimately connected--both in terms of the software solutions and with respect to the concept and value in business people’s minds. Now, CRM is a multi-billion dollar, growing industry with a few big players and innovative challengers. As soon as the CRM market started to frame the problem and solution in a holistic way, and accompanied it with solutions that tied the pieces together and connected them to business value, CRM finally began to make sense for businesses.

Larva, cocoon or butterfly?

I’d argue that our multi-monikered industry is 20 years old. It began with “personal productivity software” and then “groupware,” and “knowledge management.” It now searches for a salient concept and a higher value for connecting the pieces into a networked whole. We refer to this next evolution as “Social Productivity” and frame the opportunity as the next evolution of productivity software. But that concept will take time to grow. As an example of where we are now, today I had a conversation at the Web 2.0 Berlin conference with a multinational company that told me that their executive management resisted their “collaboration project” until they reframed it as simply “an Intranet solution.”

Seeing past the 2.0 hype

CRM had its own hype cycle, too. It was going to “forever change the way businesses connected with their customers.” The reality is that it provided positive, but incremental improvement in efficiency and visibility. CRM is now a required element to be competitive with the top players in a market. Social Productivity is also part of the “2.0” hype cycle. A lot of our industry’s messaging is focused on social technology forever changing cultures and the way people work together. I think that promise is similarly over-inflated but I can understand why presenting this polar extreme is important in the short term. Longer term, Social Productivity Systems, will be a required element and part the set of mission critical systems like CRM, ERP, and PLM.

Navel contemplation vs the windshield

As our industry’s echo-chamber continues to examine the Petri dish of alternative technology tools, potential customers wait for us to start making sense. If we can’t look down the road and make sense of how we’re adding value, how can the rest of the market? They simply want to know, “what can I do with this stuff I couldn’t do before?” and “how can this add enough business value that it becomes a need-to-have?” The CRM market used to suffer the same malady. Those industry discussions were focused on “the power of contact optimizers” or “which campaign-management player was going to win.” Pushing toolboxes at companies gets us nowhere.

Bursting the bubble

Another problem that plagued the CRM industry in the beginning was that all the assets were being stored in lots of solutions all over the company. Newer CRM solutions only added to the problem. Although they may have been easier to use or more powerful, they still became CRM asset bubbles disconnected to the rest of the company and their systems. As long as the customer market sees what we do as “aliens from another planet,” we won’t be able to gain serious traction. Our solutions must connect in smart ways with our customer’s asset and technology investments.

IT needs viable alternatives, not blame

Yes, there is friction between lines of business, executive management and IT. This isn’t new. IT has been living with this type of friction for decades. It was true for the CRM market, too. Sales and Marketing did what they wanted because IT wouldn’t help or IT forced a solution on Sales and Marketing they wouldn’t use. It’s always easy to paint IT as the bad guys. I do agree that IT has the opportunity to reshape their value but they need viable options, first. Right now, there’s not much choice for IT to help beyond solutions that are either too small or ones that lines of business don’t want. This will change soon.

The potential industry impact

It’s interesting to chart the revenue opportunity and market size if you believe there is a relational pattern between the last 20 years of CRM and the last 20 years of productivity software. When you look at the market growth of CRM, you can clearly see the value of connecting the dots. I couldn't find Gartner's database or relationship marketing market size for the 1980s-1990s but did find nearly 10 years of Gartner predictive market sizing starting in the optimistic .com mania in 1999 (hopefully we don't have a similar bubble). CRM is now a $7.4 billion sized market growing at 13% a year. When you think about a value that’s realized across all departments within companies, my sense is that the Social Productivity market can be even bigger.

Office 2.0 Recap

communities@jivesoftware.com — Thu, 13 Sep 2007 17:48:48 GMT

Last week, I was in San Francisco for the Office 2.0 conference. <span class="jive-body-profile-padding">Ismael Ghalimi, the guy behind the whole thing, pulled an amazing conference off in eight weeks. He chose Clearspace to power the conference site , the first use of our product to power an event and (given how fast things were moving) he launched the conference's site a day after setting Clearspace up. As always, he was open about what that process was like and what he learned. From the website's perspective, a little more time would have been great. In the meantime, everyone at the conference was blown away by what Ismael was able to pull off. On the lighter side, attendees who stayed at the conference's hotel were greeted by what looked like the USA Today delivered to their room but was really us having a little Onion-style fun.

I participated in an Enterprise Collaboration panel with SAP, Oracle, BEA, Zimbra and Sony. It was a bit high-level but I tried to reinforce the importance of keeping collaboration focused on productivity. You can watch the video of it and the rest of the conference thanks to coverage by Veodia.

We also participated in the demo tracks. Ismael asked that we have our customers demo our software so we invited Intel and Attensa who both gave great demos of how they're using Clearspace and Clearspace X. Check out the video of Attensa's presentation (slides above) on how they're using Clearspace internally and the sort of impact it's made to their company (like the 31% reduction in email). Intel's video does an excellent job articulating their goals and the short term impact Clearspace X has had for them.

The best part of the conference was how many of the discussions recognized the need for true enterprise-class collaboration software that recognized the needs, challenges and reality-based technical environment that large companies deal with everyday. I remember one person at our booth saying, "you mean you make 'real' software that companies can actually use behind their firewall?!"

The sort of Marketing people I would never hire

communities@jivesoftware.com — Sat, 18 Aug 2007 17:28:59 GMT

You use the word "brand" a lot

That word is used so broadly, obscurely and recklessly, it's meaningless to me. Not to mention that it's rarely used in a context I agree with. Leave brand to consumer packaged goods and let's focus on delivering meaningful and remarkable value through the company.

Your market is actually other marketers.

Most marketing people don't know their market at all. Their "market" is what they read in articles, analyst reports and in talking with their agencies. Rarely do I find someone who actually gets out there and has continual conversations with people to truly understand them.

You're guilty of being invisible

Paint by numbers doesn't cut it. Granted, most people haven't had the chance to do brilliant Marketing, but at least be able to tell me how you took a risk and how it paid off.

You think in terms of advertisements

Real ideas come way before you ever communicate them. People focused on advertisements never let the idea bloom. If marketers can't articulate how to notify someone in a compelling way, I don't want to hire them. Advertisements are horrible and all of us have become experts at avoiding them.

You don't have your own ideas

We're a creative company with creative products addressing a creative market. Triple the reason to be amazingly relevant with powerful ideas that you know how to pull off.

You're not a student

If marketing people aren't voraciously consuming, internalizing and changing their skills they've already given up.

You're used to other people doing it

Everyone and no one is doing the work in huge companies. If you haven't owned it, you can't know how to do it or be smart about it.

You have no influence

If they can't influence me in their resume or interview, how can I expect them to influence the market?

You can't write

Writing is making ideas clear for everyone. Good writers are good marketers.

You're scared of change

Marketers' jobs are to change the market. You can't be a good marketer if you can't stand change.

You can't say no

Have an opinion. Stand up for yourself. Don't just accept what I say.

You can't see what needs to happen

Take a step back. Are you spending your time on things that will make (the right) impact? What is required down the road? Don't drive while contemplating the inside of the car.

You don't believe

We have a fantastic product. It changes the way people work with each other. If you can't fall in love with that and market from the heart, we don't need you on our team.

You're a good multi-tasker

That's right, I don't want someone that's awesome at keeping 300 things going. People who chase everything get nothing done. I want someone that kicks ass on one thing and then moves on.

iPhone and Product Management

communities@jivesoftware.com — Mon, 06 Aug 2007 13:21:10 GMT

I was one of those Apple fanboys that got his iPhone the first week they were out, so I've used mine for a while now. Recently, I met with Mike Rogoway who writes both for Mac Newsworld and the Oregonian and he asked me how I liked it. It's an easy answer: I like it.

But as a Marketer, the one thing that drives me nuts about the iPhone is the home screen. It's gorgeous. It works great. And, for the most part, I like how Apple decided to utilize the home screen icons to let me know there's something new. Whenever I have a new SMS, phone message or email, a little red dot with a number is overlaid on top of the icon.!http://img300.imageshack.us/img300/7008/iphonecritiquemh4.png!

But for the life of me, I can't understand how Jobs, the ultimate Marketer and Product Manager, let the iPhone out the door with the Calendar icon working the way it does. Along with the little red numerical dots, the Calendar icon is the only other icon that's actually updated with real information. It shows today's date, without the need to launch the Calendar.

Why would Apple introduce this concept, of near-time information displayed at a glance, without holding this one part back and then rolling the same intelligence across the entire interface and calling it "a new feature?" Now, every time I look at my iPhone's screen I end up staring at the weather, the stock market, the time, and the map while thinking, "why are you other icons so dumb, while your calendar friend so smart?"

I want to put a competitive matrix on our website and our CEO doesn't

communities@jivesoftware.com — Thu, 05 Jul 2007 21:31:47 GMT

I see Dave's point. He's worried we're going to burn bridges. Not that it's a heated debate. It's not. Dave and I just thought it would be good to voice our perspectives and get feedback. Regardless, we strongly believe in how Clearspace stands up to other choices.

My idea is to have a place on our website that compares us to other applications and then allows for public comments. If people have other information or opinions they could just post them right under the matrix. Everyday, we get the "how do you compare" question. I bet your company does, too. If you're like us, there aren't any really good places to go to get that sort of information, short of consumer reports. Is the fact that no one else puts up comparison charts reason enough to not do it? What would you think of a company that did have that information public?

I do realize that it will be hard to capture everything accurately and stay on top of it, I know we'd make mistakes. But I think it's worth the risk to give it a shot. Perhaps the other idea is to just buy all those applications and host them so that people can test drive them all in one place. I mean, Saturn is doing it. You can go to their lot and test drive their competitor's cars, too.

I'd rather focus on providing customers with the information they want then to worry about potential relationship conflicts. No doubt, as much as the matrix wouldn't be intended as a commentary on other people's products it would be perceived that way. Not to mention how objective could we be, right?

My opinion is that we shouldn't worry about upsetting potential partners or other friendly companies. These are risks worth taking. We will make some people upset and some people happy.

What do you think?

A Jive keynote

communities@jivesoftware.com — Thu, 14 Jun 2007 21:07:27 GMT

Last Friday I joined Sam Lawrence and Greg Unrein at the PDMA/PMF conference. Sam was keynoting the event (watch it below) and we supported the event by powering their online community with Clearspace.

Sam's keynote was not your father's keynote presentation (your Dad was a big keynoter, right?). Looks like Sam got some blog love on how he strayed from the conventional "read from your slide deck" method of presenting. Did it work? I think so...but give it a watch and let us know what you think.

The PDMA/PMF did a good job with the conference theme, "Putting Collaboration to Work." They obviously put a lot of work into practicing what they preached. The conference was semi-structured with a keynote and some sessions in the morning and an "unconference" in the afternoon. Lots of care was given to keeping things collaborative. For example, it was the first time I had been to a conference where everyone sat in a big, deskless circle.

Next up: Matt Tucker, Greg and myself will head to Boston for Enterprise 2.0. Come by our booth and say hi.

I cced you, we're collaborating

communities@jivesoftware.com — Wed, 13 Jun 2007 09:54:20 GMT

The scariest button on your computer is "reply all."

We've all got the scar tissue to prove it. Tell me you don't hesitate before you click that button. The repercussions for you on either end of "reply all" are not pretty.

Problem is, we've outgrown email and now use it for way more the simple 1x1 messaging system it was meant for. We desperately need space to collaborate, not just message each other. Because there's no space, we end up ccing a bajillion people and then having endless threaded conversations. Most of these conversations consist of responses like, "no problem" or "thanks."

Email is convenient for recaps, updates or communicating with people outside of work, but it's horrible for quick and effective collaborating. There are a lot of reasons email isn't good for collaborating but let's pick one (you can add the others).

The one that I always think about is a story my college psychology teacher told. She said that when someone is laying on the ground in a small town and someone walks by they immediately stop to help them. In New York, however, everyone walks right over someone on the ground because they think that someone else will help.

The same thing happens with email. Someone else who received the email will help, won't they? Anyway, the last thing you want to do is to reply all.

In an open space, like Clearspace, no one is addressed as the recipient of a question or document. So, while even more people can access the information than anyone you would have added to an email, people don't feel as scared and are more likely to participate. They could be the only person walking by, right?

Notes from WWDC

communities@jivesoftware.com — Tue, 12 Jun 2007 14:18:27 GMT

Yesterday's WWDC conference may have mixed reviews but one of our engineers and I had the chance to attend and I was struck by a few things in listening to Steve give his keynote.

Release frequently

The last few "Stevenotes" have compared just how many OS releases there have been for OSX compared to Windows. This reinforces not only that Apple continues to innovate but that they're listening to people and responding vs. the epically long releases from Microsoft.

Keep it simple

Yesterday, at the end of Steve's speech on Leopard, he disclosed each edition of the OS and it's respective price. Basic edition: $129. Premium: $129. Business: $129. Pro $129. Enterprise: $129. Ultimate: $129. This was an obvious poke at Microsoft and all their ridiculous OS editions and prices. The subtext: We treat you with respect.

Make something painful, exciting

Steve showed a lot of cool things, but the one thing he showed that got my attention was Time Machine. I think this feature will attract a lot of Windows users. In essence Apple is making backing-up~~the ugliest, scariest most denied part of computing~~actually sexy and fun. With Time Machine, when you can't find something and have that moment of "oh uh," you simply click on Time Machine and literally go to a new interface that looks like you're in the Millennium Falcon. When you search for something, you zoom past screens of time until you find it. Then simply restore it. In essence, Apple is turning the fear and pain of file loss into something fun. Brilliant.

There were many other cool announcements like the ability to go deep into viewing the contents of files without launching applications (Quicklook). But most obvious is Apple's vested interest in increasing it's stake in the browser market with their announcement of Safari for Windows. I'm not sure how bundling Safari with iTunes will give Safari market share. I had hoped Steve would also announce Safari was now open-source or at least have plug-in support (it is very standards-based). My guess is that Apple expects to sell enough iPhones to lure Windows/Apple developers to make lots of iPhone apps (since they have to be delivered through Safari) and that's Apple's road to browser marketshare and even more Apple developers.

Social value: Networking vs. bookmarking vs. productivity

communities@jivesoftware.com — Wed, 30 May 2007 22:11:32 GMT

I had a really interesting conversation today with Dennis McDonald about Social Networking. His observation was that most of what he's seen so far with social networking is that it's been focused on people connecting to people that they already know. Not that there's anything wrong with that, I love to find the people I know online but for me it's usually a quick, "I found you, cool now we're connected." I'm sure that there are stories out there -- particularly with job searches -- where social networking has been instrumental. Outside that, it seems that more often it's card collecting. I can see that Jill knows Steve but I'm no closer to knowing Steve, I just know that Jill knows him. I do like knowing there's a bag of potential contacts, even if I never use them.

Social Bookmarks have a great purpose, too. I can see what other people mark as interesting content. I have no connection to them personally, but social bookmarking allows me to snoop "good readers" and track their information consumption. I follow the tags and feeds of a number of people but I have never said one word to them. Love reading over their shoulder, though. It saves me a lot of time.

Social Productivity is different than social networking or social bookmarking: it's about getting work done outside the team of like-minded people you work with everyday. With social productivity, an idea is introduced and all sorts of people get to chime in on it. These could be people you work with a lot, people you've never worked with or even people outside your company. Now all of a sudden your idea has been developed openly by all sorts of people who bring their own, valuable perspective. You can evolve those ideas into all sorts of collaborative or locked content but thanks to the social whetstone, your original idea is much stronger now. This isn't just true "behind the firewall" within companies. Look at Wikipedia, the content has been built, written and organized more relevantly than any single or traditional team of authors could have done.