Amy Wohl's Opinions

It's the Conference Season

By: Amy Wohl (amy@wohl.com)

(Posted 2/27/2008)

Have you ever noticed that conferences are multiplying like mushrooms in a dark closet? I think it's because we still have some very good "old"

conferences (DEMO, for example) and every new topic demands a conference of its own.

That's different. In the olden days (say ten years ago), most of those topics would have been served by a session, or a track of sessions at an existing conference, but we don't have very many big, general-purpose conferences any more in this age of specialization.

That said, I thought I'd mention a few I'm planning to buzz by in the next few months.

There are, of course, dozens more. They just aren't in areas I'm interested in. Maybe that's the good side of these topical conferences. If you pick wisely you'll get lots of what you like and not much of things you don't care about.

Next week (March 2-6) I'm heading to Seattle for Microsoft's SharePoint conference -- everything about collaboration and advanced use of the Office software. http://www.mssharepointconference.com/Pages/default.aspx (It is listed as sold out.)

Then I am going to Mountain View for Under the Radars one-day Web 2.0 Conference on March 20. I went last year and it was spectacular so many different new bits of software you didnt know where to look first. This iyiear they are showing 32 products -- and I bet there are at least 32 attendees with softwre on their laptops to show in the corridors and at lunchtime. http://www.undertheradarblog.com/

On March 26-27 I plan to stop in and check out a local Philadelphia conference (I dont get to do that very often - no one is a hero or an expert in their own back yard). The Emerging Technologies for the Enterprise Conference is at Drexel University in Philadelphia This is a conference with lots of sessions for enterprise users, including lots of technical sessions led by appropriate experts on topics such as Java and Lightweight Development, Open Source Software, SOA/Integration, Web 2.0, Agile Development, and Ruby on Rails. http://www.phillyemergingtech.com

On March 31-April 1 in Washington, D.C., Freedom to Connect will be holding their conference on telecommunications policy. Nearly anybody could turn up because David Isenberg (author of the iconic paper The Stupid Network) runs this conference. http://freedom-to-connect.net

Then theres IBM IMPACT conference for SOA customers and partners in Las Vegas, April 7-11. Ill be speaking there on the use of social networking in business, especially in SOA development environments.

http://www-306.ibm.com/software/websphere/events/impact2008/

On May 13-14 Im going up to Penn State (we Philadelphians refer to anything North and West of us as upstate) as a guest for a Research Forum hosted by the Center for Digital Transformation in University Park on The Next Enterprise, examining changes to organizations driven by a powerful combination of demographics, technology, and cultural change. There will be lots of social networking here, too.

I think you get the idea. And Ive let out dozens of developer conferences (Im not a developer, though I often write about developer issues, especially those relating to how developers communicate with their business clients). Ive also left out all kinds of executive conferences the kind with lots of well known speakers and fancy price tags. I never come away from those feeling Ive learned much although I do often meet really interesting people, which may be the reason for going to conferences anyway.

Do you have a favorite conference? One you keep on your calendar year after year? Do you know why its so appealing? Write me about it and well share our collective wisdom.

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Microsoft Decides to be More Open -- Much More Open

By: Amy Wohl (amy@wohl.com)

(Posted: 2/22/2008)

Yesterday was quite a day. Microsoft gathered its executives and, in a lengthy press conference with enough paper back-up to require several forests of electronic trees, declared that it was going to change some of its principles around interoperability.

Basically, it promised (this is in summary form) that it would

(1) Provide open connections to high-volume Microsoft products through open protocols, open APIs, open access to its documentation on its website (without the need to obtain a license or pay a royalty for access to this information), and RAND patent terms for a list of Microsoft Open Protocols for which Microsoft holds patents. Microsoft will not sue open source developers for development and non-commercial distribution of implementations of Open Protocols.

(2) Microsoft will commit to support relevant standards for its high-volume products in such a way as to promote interoperability by supporting key standards, participating in standards bodies, contributing to the development of new standards and the improvement of existing standards. This is intended to support robust, consistent and interoperable implementations for broad compatibility. Microsoft will document its own extensions to standards where they are relevant to interoperability, publishing this information on its website.

(3) Microsoft will help customers achieve Data Portability by designing its high-volume products and providing documentation to enable such data portability by industry standard data formats and documented open formats.

Access to specifications regarding Open Formats that are not standardized will be available on Microsofts website, royalty-free, and with no need to obtain a license. Patents, if any apply, will be made available for licensing on reasonable and non-discriminatory terms. Microsoft will also provide import and export functions and enable the use of customer-selected document format defaults.

(4) Open Engagement to permit collaboration with customers, partners, and other vendors. Microsoft will do this by creating an Interoperability Forum to support an open dialogue, by continuing to work with the Vendor Alliance and by an Open Source Interoperability Initiative.

You can read about all this in much greater detail on Microsofts website http://www.microsoft.com/interop/principles/default.mspx

You can also read dozens (probably hundreds) of opinions about what all this means. They vary from hostility through skepticism and Machiavellian plots to Hey, give these guys a break. I spent more than a day trying to read it all.

Heres what I think:

(1) Microsoft has realized, probably mightily encouraged by its customers, that the Open Source movement is here to stay. That means Microsoft has to find ways to manage its relationships with Open Source in a less hostile and more cooperative way or customers might be encouraged to think of replacing some of their vast infrastructure of Windows and Office (and Exchange and Microsoft development tools) for friendlier products. IT managers dont particularly want to tear up working infrastructure and Microsoft certainly wants to keep its installed base in place. This is about leveraging Microsofts considerable assets to keep itself in the game.

(2) Now for a wisp of Machiavelli. If Microsoft is successful in buying Yahoo (and it seems likely that they could be) they will need to figure out how to interoperate with open source to integrate with Yahoo, I would think.

And then theres the EU who may or may not be impressed by Microsofts change of policy and the standards bodies who may be influenced in Microsofts attempt to have its document format accepted as a standard (next

week) by its new openness.

(3) It seems to me that everyone has missed a big piece of what happened yesterday. By placing 30,000+ pages of its former trade secrets on the web and making them available without license, confidentiality agreement or any contract, I believe they are no longer trade secrets. The lawyers I consulted today agree that is the case. That doesnt abrogate Microsofts IP rights to any patents, just to the protection of trade secrets (which requires that secrets be protected). Well have to figure out how much of a value that has to developers and customers.

(4) Developers routinely complain that when Microsoft does provide documentation or technical information its so complex as to be almost useless. Im not a developer, so Im in no position to judge. But I read a great article this week by a developer I admire, Joel (Spolsky) the Programmer, on just that subject, speaking to the publication of the Office binaries. He says that Microsofts way of updating software adds complexity to complexity because they are doing it just for themselves in a closed environment and because all those changes one on top of the other IS complicated. Wonder how that will affect their desire to interoperate? Joel offers his opinions and some workarounds here.

http://www.joelonsoftware.com/items/2008/02/19.html

I think you should adopt a wait-and-see attitude to Microsofts Interoperability Day pronouncements. If theres action behind the words and more words and action to follow then this represents a change in how Microsoft will relate to the rest of the industry. They still expect to be paid for their IP, but they seem to expect to share information more freely and try to support open standards, open source, and the goal of interoperability in heterogeneous environments in new ways. And that would be a good thing.

Will Microsoft Buy Yahoo?

By: Amy Wohl (amy@wohl.com)

(Posted: 2/11/2008)

I wasn't sure I would write about this topic. After all, what could I add to the conversation when so much had been said already? But after wading through pounds (electronic pounds, to be sure) of comments pro and con (mainly con, I must admit), I could see that some of the things that I was thinking about weren't being said. So here goes.

(1) Yahoo may need to be bought - or at least seriously partnered with. Its current market position may be untenable. But deals like this are usually crafted over time and with a lot more sensitivity to the culture of what's being bought. Otherwise you wind up with a pile of technology that needs constant updating and a bunch of irked and talented people who are looking for jobs elsewhere, just when you need them most. There are too many examples of this phenomenon to bother providing a list.

Think of the incremental dance of first partnering, then buying a share of the desired company, then raising that investment and then -- when everybody has gotten comfortable with each other -- dropping the last shoe and making the acquisition. By then, nobody's even surprised.

(2) Microsoft hasn't offered Yahoo, its management, or its employees a single assurance or what might happen if they take over. (At least not one that we can see.) Gobs of money isn't a good answer to every question. It generally just makes everyone greedy for as much money as possible and very little commmitment.

(3) We have lots of proof that 1 plus 1 does not necessarily equal 2, especially in the computer industry. Especially when we're talking about companies in less than the #1 position in the target market. Think Sperry

(Unisys) and Burroughs, AT&T and NCR, IBM and Rolm. Or if you want just software, think Novell and WordPerfect.

I suspect that without a great vision and perfect execution Yahoo could be more of a distraction than the technology, customer, and revenue addition Microsoft is looking for. Perhaps they will tell us something about what they have in mind?

(4) $44.6 Billion is a lot to pay for a search engine and a pile of ad customers. Perhaps Microsoft is also interested in some of Yahoo's other goodies.

It has occurred to me, for example, that Yahoo paid $350 million last September for Zimbra, a Web 2.0 purveyor of next generation email and collaboration software to large ISPs, universities, and businesses, enabling organizations to host e-mail on or off premises with their own domain.

Zimbras offerings include rich, AJAX-based e-mail, calendar, and contact management features that can be used both on and offline and mash-ups (called Zimlets) that tie Web services to e-mail and can be tailored to fit individual customer needs. Could Zimbra be a way of helping Microsoft provide on-line offerings sooner? Or does Microsoft think of it as inconsequential throwaway?

Microsoft is also buying a site with hundreds (perhaps thousands -- I dont know how to get a count of them all) of communities, arranged by interest into groups. Anyone can start a group and decide how it should run. Yahoo provides the space and reaps the rewards of selling topical advertising.

These communities are a valuable Yahoo asset and Microsoft will need a plan to either carefully reassure them that nothing will happen to disrupt their activities or a way to improve their benefits as part of a new, merged company.

I think, in the end, it will all come down to execution. For that Microsoft will need very smart and focused managers with the right experience for the job at hand. This will be a tough assignment, just at the moment when many Microsoft managers are coming into retirement age and Microsoft itself requires enormous amounts of ongoing (and smart) management.

Can it be done? Surely. Will it be done? That depends on whether Microsoft crafts a deal that allows them to buy Yahoo while keeping the company sufficiently intact to meet its ongoing requirements and whether it can put together the management team from Yahoo, Microsoft and outside that will bring the new company into its vision and goals.

And then, of course, there's always the question of whether Yahoo's rejection is just the company being coy in hopes of upping the ante or something more serious and strategic. We wait with bated breath.