Thursday, February 21, 2008
Your Widget's Untied...
What is a widget, if not able to be mashed up with another widget?
Does it currently net a profit? Good job!
Can it sustain an enterprise scaling of collaboratively licensed and individually monetized widgets from authors around the world to form the ultimate full-time bringer-of-bacon? Now you've got my attention.
Perhaps I should title this, 'Your Widget Is Solid Potato' or 'Peel, Boil, Mash' or better yet, 'I smell Bacon! Bacon, bacon, bacon, bacon! It's Bacon!'. No, not Bacn, but Bacon!
With everything we've done over the last nine months at Nth Penguin, we have yet to produce the IDE of dreams. Of course it drives us crazy. Of course we'd like to be inviting users for beta-testing already. But when you're putting together the most kick-ass group of people this world has seen since Bauhaus*, things ... take ... time.
*Like anything else in life, confidence is key. Comparing our little on-shoring consulting firm to the ultimate influence of modern design? Priceless.
Never the less, I'm very glad to hear that Bill Gates believes it will be a while before it becomes easier for the non-coder to develop their own situational applications. Okay, that's not exactly what he said. I'm translating a bit. But he has just granted us a breather for at least another month or so.
What is my point exactly? Getting there....
What if you could turn your Shadow IT Department into your R&D firm? Think of it - all your employees, knowledge experts in their department or role ("Ma-kin' cop-pees!") trying to be better at their job, in hopes that one day, the effort is rewarded. If they could generate little applications on the fly, that obeyed all the rules of IT, and actually improved productivity, cut costs or brought in more cash, legally, repeatedly, automagically, wouldn't you start booking your Paradise Island Villa now?
But it's not easy to generate apps on the fly, unless you can boil it down to the most intuitive of interfaces (perhaps culturally tailored). It's not easy to please the IT department either, unless someone is willing to test the app for all criteria of success AND guarantee it. Hardest of all is swallowing the cost of improving productivity or bringing in more cash. Bacon tastes waaaaay better.
Yet this is where we need to go. People need to put their ideas to the test quicker. They need the results faster, and they want to improve at the speed of light if it means increasing their paycheck. Yes, I do like agile design and development methods, thank you. :)
But if they can do it on their own, what's to stop them from taking it solo? If you're an expert, why work for anyone other than yourself?
First of all, the world isn't flat yet. Bill's not kidding when he proclaims it will be a while before people really adapt to a declarative model where you can code without knowing how. In our many demonstrations of our WebWidgetry framework and forecasting the potentials of a MashupStudio IDE, we have yet to see a twinkle in our audience's enterprise "eye" that says "we get it, we love it, we want it". I don't blame them. It's hard to understand without a better demo. It's also scary to think that all of the employees could be automating, licensing and monitizing their knowledge without your help. Or worse, without your consent. Yes, yes, we better get Legal on this right away....
Second, the software isn't there yet. It's close - oh so very close. If you watched the death of Teqlo, the rising of Mashery or curiously cool collabs of QEDWiki a year or two ago, you've had a taste.
Third, there's the whole trust thing.... who owns what? What would be your value layer? Can you really defend it? Why can't I screen scrape those social security numbers? Picky, picky.
So there's a long way to go.
Now, if you just happen to pick this post up and have never heard of anything like this before, I'm sorry to tell you that you're at least 3 years behind the curve of the current (geologically speaking) meme of techo-market strategies. On the other hand, by the time you catch up, someone should be coming out with a defendable product for your employees and like song-prophetic twenty-somethings at a Dave Matthews Band concert you can scream with glee "Dude I so called that one!".
On the other hand, if this post is so 24-Quants ago that you can only smile smugly in your supreme knowledge that you and your teammates at Google are about to unleash the world-flattening widget masher, then I bow to you sir. I bow to you.
But if you're like me, someone in-between, someone who knows the value of creating a Platform-as-a-Service, then I encourage you to start spending money on mashing.
Be a part of third-party PaaS-apps revolution, bare-footing it between break-rooms. Understand the new-found legs of your corporation before it runs off without you. Get excited! Learn to tie your widgets!
Does it currently net a profit? Good job!
Can it sustain an enterprise scaling of collaboratively licensed and individually monetized widgets from authors around the world to form the ultimate full-time bringer-of-bacon? Now you've got my attention.
Perhaps I should title this, 'Your Widget Is Solid Potato' or 'Peel, Boil, Mash' or better yet, 'I smell Bacon! Bacon, bacon, bacon, bacon! It's Bacon!'. No, not Bacn, but Bacon!
With everything we've done over the last nine months at Nth Penguin, we have yet to produce the IDE of dreams. Of course it drives us crazy. Of course we'd like to be inviting users for beta-testing already. But when you're putting together the most kick-ass group of people this world has seen since Bauhaus*, things ... take ... time.
*Like anything else in life, confidence is key. Comparing our little on-shoring consulting firm to the ultimate influence of modern design? Priceless.
Never the less, I'm very glad to hear that Bill Gates believes it will be a while before it becomes easier for the non-coder to develop their own situational applications. Okay, that's not exactly what he said. I'm translating a bit. But he has just granted us a breather for at least another month or so.
What is my point exactly? Getting there....
What if you could turn your Shadow IT Department into your R&D firm? Think of it - all your employees, knowledge experts in their department or role ("Ma-kin' cop-pees!") trying to be better at their job, in hopes that one day, the effort is rewarded. If they could generate little applications on the fly, that obeyed all the rules of IT, and actually improved productivity, cut costs or brought in more cash, legally, repeatedly, automagically, wouldn't you start booking your Paradise Island Villa now?
But it's not easy to generate apps on the fly, unless you can boil it down to the most intuitive of interfaces (perhaps culturally tailored). It's not easy to please the IT department either, unless someone is willing to test the app for all criteria of success AND guarantee it. Hardest of all is swallowing the cost of improving productivity or bringing in more cash. Bacon tastes waaaaay better.
Yet this is where we need to go. People need to put their ideas to the test quicker. They need the results faster, and they want to improve at the speed of light if it means increasing their paycheck. Yes, I do like agile design and development methods, thank you. :)
But if they can do it on their own, what's to stop them from taking it solo? If you're an expert, why work for anyone other than yourself?
First of all, the world isn't flat yet. Bill's not kidding when he proclaims it will be a while before people really adapt to a declarative model where you can code without knowing how. In our many demonstrations of our WebWidgetry framework and forecasting the potentials of a MashupStudio IDE, we have yet to see a twinkle in our audience's enterprise "eye" that says "we get it, we love it, we want it". I don't blame them. It's hard to understand without a better demo. It's also scary to think that all of the employees could be automating, licensing and monitizing their knowledge without your help. Or worse, without your consent. Yes, yes, we better get Legal on this right away....
Second, the software isn't there yet. It's close - oh so very close. If you watched the death of Teqlo, the rising of Mashery or curiously cool collabs of QEDWiki a year or two ago, you've had a taste.
Third, there's the whole trust thing.... who owns what? What would be your value layer? Can you really defend it? Why can't I screen scrape those social security numbers? Picky, picky.
So there's a long way to go.
Now, if you just happen to pick this post up and have never heard of anything like this before, I'm sorry to tell you that you're at least 3 years behind the curve of the current (geologically speaking) meme of techo-market strategies. On the other hand, by the time you catch up, someone should be coming out with a defendable product for your employees and like song-prophetic twenty-somethings at a Dave Matthews Band concert you can scream with glee "Dude I so called that one!".
On the other hand, if this post is so 24-Quants ago that you can only smile smugly in your supreme knowledge that you and your teammates at Google are about to unleash the world-flattening widget masher, then I bow to you sir. I bow to you.
But if you're like me, someone in-between, someone who knows the value of creating a Platform-as-a-Service, then I encourage you to start spending money on mashing.
Be a part of third-party PaaS-apps revolution, bare-footing it between break-rooms. Understand the new-found legs of your corporation before it runs off without you. Get excited! Learn to tie your widgets!
# posted by Erin Quick-Laughlin @ 9:20 PM 
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