Pattern Finder

So What's Your Web Site Built With?

Here's a nifty tool I found via DeWitt Clinton (Williams '98): BuiltWith.com. You enter the URL for a website, and it tells you what technology the site uses.

For chuckles, here are the results of some analyst sites:

• Burton Group
• Forrester Research
• Gartner Group
• IDC
• Outsell
• RedMonk

Here are the results of some high tech retailers:

• Amazon.com
• BestBuy
• Circuit City
• Crutchfield
• PC Connection
• Radio Shack

Here are the results of some mainstream retailers:

IBM's Lotus Symphony: Less Is More--Literally

In my last post, I said that I thought that some people were looking around for options to Microsoft Office. Based on an article in PC World, at least 100,000 people were: "[IBM] reported Wednesday that its free rival to Microsoft Corp.'s Office suite was downloaded 100,000 times in the first week of release." Somewhat caught by surprise, IBM had to triple the number of download servers to handle the load.

However, there's a big difference between downloading software and actually using it. There, the news isn't quite as good. Another article in PC World entitled, "IBM's Symphony Hitting Wrong Notes, Reviewers Say," documents problems that early users are having with the product. While the user interface seems to be a hit, the software has non-minimal system requirements. Here's a comparison of some office suites:

• Microsoft Office Standard: 256MB of RAM, 1.5GB of hard disk space (source: Microsoft web site)
• OpenOffice.org 2.3, Version 2.3: 128MB of RAM and 800MB of hard disk space (source: OpenOffice.org web site)
• IBM Lotus Symphony: 512MB of RAM and 540MB of hard disk space (source: IBM web site) Note: The PC World article said that Symphony needed 1GB of memory, so it's unclear whether the article got it wrong or IBM quickly changed the requirements.

In short, Symphony requires 100% more memory than Microsoft Office and an additional three times the memory of OpenOffice.org. The software is also slow. One commenter notes, "My VIA SP13000 box takes a couple of minutes just to bring up the main window."

These system requirements and slow performance would not be surprising if the software were more functional than Microsoft Office or OpenOffice.org, but it isn't. In the article, Don Harbison of IBM states, "IBM has little interest in chasing MS-Office's 'tail-lights'," Harbison wrote. "Lotus Symphony is powerful, simple, and focused. It provides all the tools and functions most businesses require without confusing features not required. ... In other words, no more, no less, than what is needed, as opposed to the alternative, which is wasteful, and unnecessary."

OK, so let me get this straight. IBM is pitching Symphony as a trim, lean version of Microsoft Office (which it characterizes as wasteful), and yet it requires twice the memory of Microsoft Office? In this case, less really is more. What IBM doesn't tell you--while it proclaims that the software is free, and so will save you money--is that the additional cost of the hardware will probably offset the software savings, which are $60 (based on the lowest price of Microsoft Office). It's a wash. True, if you've already bought the latest whiz bang computer with 2 GB of memory it's not a big deal, but if you're using a several year old computer with 512 MB of memory, it's going to be a disappointment. Yes, it's a free brick, but it's still a brick. I'm certainly going to feel productive waiting a minute or two for the splash screen to appear (hint of sarcasm).

So while IBM's dwindling Notes installed base may snap it up, it doesn't look as if IBM Lotus Symphony is going to make huge headway in the market at large. Time will tell.

Is It Time for Consumers to Move to Free Office Suites?

Peter O'Kelly and I fielded a call yesterday from Donna Fuscaldo of Fox News Business. She posed the following question: "Should consumers use these new free software packages [e.g., IBM Lotus Symphony or OpenOffice.org] as an alternative to Microsoft Office or Google's browser-based software?"

It's an interesting question, and one that shows that even general business reporters are noticing what Peter calls "an embarrassment of riches" in the space. Given that some suites are free (versus hundreds of dollars), you sort of feel the urge--at least I did--to say "Yes." However, the answer really isn't that simple.

The label "consumer" implies that's a person's only role. However, consumers are also workers, students, churchgoers, and volunteers. In other words, each consumer works with a variety of peer groups, and which system those groups use colors an individual's choice. For example, Burton Group (the company I work for) uses Microsoft Office. So while saving a few bucks is attractive to me, I don't really want to have to learn another user interface. In my case, my work system drives my consumer use.

But not all people work--retired people on a fixed income (such as my mother) are quite price-sensitive. Maybe a free suite is appropriate for them. However, a different dynamic kicks in there. I serve as computer support for my mother--a role common to people who work in high tech--so when she calls with a problem I want to be familiar with what she's using.

Based on these two examples, it may seem that I think Microsoft Office will reign far into the future, based purely on user inertia. Perhaps, but I'm not so sure. I do think people feel Microsoft Office is expensive. While you can buy a Home and Student edition of Microsoft Office for $125 on Amazon.com (contains Word, Excel, and PowerPoint, and valid for three licenses), it doesn't have Outlook, and is just one of eight Office flavors. If you have money to burn, you can spend $679 (SRP) on the Ultimate Edition. To put that price into perspective, for the same amount of money you can buy (1) seven DVD players or (2) a 23" HDTV or (3) a PC from Dell. While Microsoft has held steady on its software prices, the price of hardware has plummeted, making Office comparatively more expensive than it was in the past. While Microsoft realizes this--witness the Home and Student edition--it is still being coy with the cost, preferring to obfuscate pricing via marketing. Let's face it, Microsoft could make things simple and just say, "The suggested retail price of Home and Student edition is $42 per user." Since it hasn't, people are feeling gouged, and they're looking around.   

Vendor Oops #1: Getting the Dial-In Number Wrong

In this highly wired world, about 90% of my vendor briefings take place over the phone via a web conferencing mechanism (e.g., Adobe Connect, Microsoft LiveMeeting, Cisco WebEx). These save time and are quite effective.

However, familiarity breeds contempt. Unlike a person-to-person meeting, where everyone makes sure they know where to turn up and whom to ask for, sometimes a vendor doesn't doublecheck things and sends me to a non-existent web conference or gives me a dial-in number that doesn't work. It doesn't happen a lot--maybe once a month--but when it does, it's scramble time, and the communications channels light up. I get urgent e-mails from analyst relations folks, other Burton Group analysts on the call send messages via IM ("Does the PIN number work for you? Did they cancel the briefing?"), and PR people call my cellphone assuring me, "We'll be ready to go in a moment."

I vacillate between being aggravated and being amused--I often have briefings booked back-to-back and can't afford delays. Vendors often figure they have an hour to talk--so if it takes them 15 minutes to straighten things out, they now assume they deserve an hour and fifteen minutes. Not necessarily so.

At the same time, it's kind of amusing to watch how long it takes vendors to figure out that the analysts aren't turning up for their briefing because they can't. I had a briefing yesterday that started off with a bad PIN number and a bad Adobe Connect URL. When I got to the meeting, the splash screen stated something along the lines of, "This meeting is blocked. Press the button below to request admittance." I did, and got a message about 10 seconds later saying, "Your request to join the meeting has been denied."  Based on the later cellphone call I received, it took the analyst relations person about three minutes to realize, "Oops, I should have let him in."

This seems to be an equal opportunity error. Large companies make this mistake, as do small ones. So a word to the wise--if you're a vendor about to brief an analyst, doublecheck your dial-in info before you send it out and give the analyst a number to call in case of a problem. You want to be remembered for your product, not for the fact that you can't set up a web conference.

Book: "Technological Revolutions and Financial Capital"

This book--Technological Revolutions and Financial Capital by Carlota Perez--will change your view of the high tech world. I would put it on a par with Alfred Chandler's The Visible Hand and Thomas Kuhn's The Structure of Scientific Revolutions--high praise indeed.

The author reviews previous high tech revolutions (Industrial Revolution, Age of Steam and Railways, Age of Steel, and the Age of Mass Production) and maps them to the current revolution: the Age of Information and Telecommunications. She comes to two major conclusions.

First, all such revolutions demand financial capital and often new ways of procuring it (in the high tech revolution the new means was venture capital). People and institutions get tired of low returns from current technology and start looking for new ways to get a higher return. These groups, by funding emerging technologies, make the early stages of a technological revolution possible.

Second, these revolutions play out in 60-year intervals. The first half of the interval is Installation; the second half is Deployment. Installation contains two phases: Irruption and Frenzy, punctuated at the end with some kind of turning point--the Panic of 1847, the stock market crash of 1929, the dot.com implosion in 2000. At this point, Deployment takes over, again in two stages: Synergy and Maturity. Towards the end, returns start to dwindle, and financial institutions once again start looking for the next technological green field.

According to Perez, we are now in the Synergy stage. Some hallmarks of the era are "making the products truly user friendly and mutually supported" and "speed, reliability, quality and cost reductions receive special attention." Sound familiar? Read the book and get a glimpse of what's coming.

The Wired Army

With Google and pundits claiming that all the great new technology comes from the consumer sector, they're missing another source: the U.S. Army.

• Soldier Flex PDA: A ruggedized PDA that contains Ethernet, USB, and Bluetooth technology; weighs less than a pound; contains no glass; and can receive battlefield information, increasing what the Army calls "battlefield awareness."
• Head Impact Telemetry (HIT) System-Equipped Helmets: The helmets contain sensors that measure the impact of an explosion; the digital data can then be transferred to a soldier's medical file.
• Electro-Textiles for Battlefield Awareness: Wired fabrics that support networking and communication; rather than carrying a bulky computer, the soldier wears it.

Xobni Insight Now in Beta

A company called Xobni (Inbox spelled backwards) is currently in beta with its Xobni Insight product. It's a rethinking of the Microsoft Outlook Mail interface, offering search, threaded conversations, entity extraction (phone numbers), and analytics, among other things. I first got interested in it when I wrote my Content Analytics report last year, since I was intrigued by the founders' goal of generating data on how e-mail is used.

Some Useful OOXML References

Last week I gave a presentation to a group of CIOs on Office Open XML, the ECMA International standard (ECMA 376) currently going through the ISO certification process. (To give a bit of context, OOXML was originally created by Microsoft; it's an XML standard that competes with the Open Document Format (ODF) backed by OpenOffice.org and IBM.) In the course of preparing for the presentation and asking around for some helpful documents, I came up with this list. If you're trying to figure out OOXML, you may find it useful. (Before the religious zealots weigh in, this is a list of resources for understanding OOXML, not for comparing and contrasting OOXML and ODF, so it's meant to be one-sided).

• The "Office Open XML" entry on Wikipedia. This is useful because it's updated in realtime, so you can get the latest on what's happening, especially important during the ISO certification process. In addition, both proponents and opponents weigh in, so it's a quick guide to the affiliated religious wars.
• The specification on the Ecma International web site. The Primer, Part 3, is a good place to start.
• "Office Open XML Overview" by Tom Ngo of NextPage. An introduction (14-page PDF) to the standard.
• The OpenXMLDeveloper web site. A Microsoft-sponsored web site for developers. It has links to the ECMA International standard, as well as offers code examples and discussions.
• The OpenXMLCommunity web site. A Microsoft-sponsored web site for business people. While it not surprisingly spins the OOXML story positively, it also has some useful papers and studies that describe adoption rates and how OOXML can be used.
• Brian Jones' blog. A program manager at Microsoft focused on OOXML and its implementation within Office 2007.

It's Getting Crazy in the Collaboration and Content Space

Boy, things got crazy in the collaboration and content space this week. Within the past three days,

• Yahoo! bought Zimbra
• Google announced that a Presentation application was finally available in Google Apps
• IBM began giving Symphony (office suite) away for free with Lotus Notes
• Salesforce.com announced a new content management application, Salesforce Content

Within a year, this space has gone from being a relatively well-ordered universe occupied by a set of best-of-breed software vendors to a free-for-all among large suppliers, many of them going for SaaS-based solutions. Get ready for some major head scratching trying to figure out which route to take.

John Chambers, Then (1987) and Now (2007)

I got to see John Chambers give a keynote address at Salesforce.com's Dreamforce convention and it brought back memories. I hadn't seen John in person for about 20 years. Back in those dark ages we both worked at Wang Laboratories: John was Senior VP of Sales for Wang's Central Region and I was a product manager of operating systems and utilities. (For those without long enough memories, Wang was a minicomputer company that was a 1980's version of Google, in the sense that it grew as fast as Google and was known for making easy-to-use systems.)

John was a wunderkind even at Wang: his territories consistently outperformed all others and he got results without being a tyrant. I dealt with him from time to time on product questions, but I especially remember an entire day when I was locked up in a room with him and a major customer hashing out a new sales contract. This Chicago-based customer was looking for major product improvements--John was there to make the sale and I was there to make sure we didn't commit to anything developmentally impossible. (Difficult was OK; impossible was not). He started out with, "So tell us what we need to do to make you happy"--and it was a negotiation roller coaster from there. We'd take a break every couple of hours, and I remember saying to him at one point, "Geez, John, you've got us right up to the edge. I was about to cry 'foul' on that supported users demand but you pulled back just at the right moment." John smiled and said in his West Virginia accent, "Don't worry Guy, I'm a lawyer--I know how far I can go." I also remember him telling me, "We don't need to get them to sign today--that will be too far a leap that they may regret later. We just need to get them to the next stage." In short, I knew I was in the presence of a master 20 years ago, and it was a pleasure to watch him work the crowd yesterday.

He came out on stage to great applause, and then began to tell his (and Cisco's vision) of the future: command and control is out--collaboration and communication is in. It was not all 50,000 foot stuff, either. He had concrete examples of how Cisco was using web conferencing to make decisions faster. But the best part was when he went into preacher mode. After about three minutes at the podium, he walked down the steps and into the audience. Given the shaky images on the video monitors, you could tell the camera people were thinking, "What the...?" He then spent the next hour walking back and forth within the audience, making eye contact with individual audience members and making his points forcefully with no script. A bravura performance that attendees were still marveling over hours later. John Chambers was great 20 years ago, and he's even better today.

Dreamforce Announcements: Visualforce and Salesforce Content

Today at its Dreamforce user conference, Salesforce.com announced Visualforce: the ability to modify the Salesforce UI on the fly. In the past, the Salesforce UI was pretty much hard-coded: e.g., tabs at the top. Now, by clicking an edit button at the bottom of a page, you can use a script language to turn on and off such UI features in realtime. Furthermore, you can customize the UI for a specific platform, so that the same application running on a PC looks different from the same application running on an iPhone.

This is a huge step in making applications much more user-centric, what I consider the hallmark of apps moving forward. (Discussed in detail in my Copernican Revolution report published last year.)

Salesforce also announced Salesforce Content, a new service derived from their Koral acquisition. It's basically in-context content management: rather than storing marketing and sales documents in other repositories (e.g., SharePoint or Documentum) companies can store them in Salesforce. When a company generates a sales proposal to a prospect, they can store it with their Salesforce record. However, it's not just an attachment capability. Users can vote on content (giving a thumbs up to a good datasheet and a thumbs down to a bad datasheet), subscribe to alterations in content (notify me when the pricelist changes), and see which is most popular based on downloads.

This is an interesting alternative to horizontal collaboration and content solutions such as SharePoint 2007. Rather than getting into an IT-centric platform debate, business units will buy Salesforce Content to solve a specific problem they have (the sales reps can't find the relevant documents easily). This is a camel-getting-its-nose-in-the-tent move by Salesforce.com.

System Integration via SaaS

I'm in San Francisco for Salesforce.com's Dreamforce Convention and took a quick tour around the Exhibit Hall on Sunday evening. Some interesting apps:

• SpringCM: A SaaS-based content management system, including workflow. It integrates with Salesforce so that content management tasks don't become process black holes. For example, let's say a contract is in Legal. In Salesforce, that's all you see: In Legal. When you add SpringCM to the equation, the contract and other content is attached to that bid within the Salesforce UI, and you can see the process status within the Legal Department via SpringCM. In short, a relatively sophisticated content management system. The bad news is that the market will overlook the option of SpringCM for SaaS-based content management because they've never heard of the company--Cisco, Google, and Microsoft will be grabbing all the headlines.
• Endeca: Endeca, a company selling enterprise search software, can use Salesforce.com as a data source, as well as other systems. This allows Endeca users to drill down into the data held in their disparate systems via faceted search. For example, the Sales VP could drill down into sales within the Central Region (data held by Salesforce.com) and then look at the affiliated contracts (data held by a content management system) within the Endeca interface. The gotcha here is that your metadata needs to be in pretty good shape for the multisystem consolidation via the UI to work. If one system calls a client "IBM" and the other calls it "International Business Machines," the system won't necessarily know they're one and the same unless you create a synonym table.
• Business Objects: Business Objects, the business intelligence (BI) vendor, can extend the standard Salesforce.com reports via Crystal Reports. In addition, the company just started a service that consolidates information from data providers such as D&B, so you can run sales reports and then see how you stack up against the competition and the economy at large within the reporting interface. This is a change from buying the information from D&B directly and then having to consolidate the benchmarking data with the Salesforce.com data via spreadsheet.
• Omniture: This web analytics vendor can both get information from and pass information to Salesforce.com, thereby making it easy to map campaign initiatives against sales in either the Salesforce UI or the Omniture UI.

When talking about the advantages of SaaS solutions, people often cite (1) the pay-as-you-go model and (2) avoiding the need to install software due to brower-based access. However, another advantage is the one visible above:  being able to buy pre-built complementary applications offering functionality that used to demand hiring a systems integrator. While all of these applications require some integration work, it's days or weeks rather than months or years--not a bad deal.