I really enjoy a good “caper story” as made famous by Donald E Westlake’s Dortmunder series. In fact I like a healthy dose of comedy in everything I read; and where it isn’t there (as in much management and technical writing) I work on the assumption the comedy is subtler. Works for me. You should try it sometime. Stops people like me from taking ourselves too seriously. [Actually, children are pretty good at making sure you don’t take yourself too seriously as well. If you let them].

Over the last few years, one of my favourite people is a guy called Serge A Storms, created by Tim Dorsey. Absolutely wonderful stuff.

How can I describe Serge? Take Banksy and Swampy and Borat, add a hefty slice of Hunter S Thompson, mix them up like discarded fluids in an airport queue, place them in deepest darkest Florida and let the state do the rest. Carl Hiaasen almost seems quiet in comparison, and I really like Hiaasen!

Serge is amazing. If you prefer, read what Wikipedia has to say about him. But do be careful, the entry discloses too many details about too many Serge plotlines, so if you intend to read any of Tim Dorsey’s wonderful rants then please desist. Rather than make you do that, here’s an excerpt:

• Serge has been diagnosed with a variety of mental illnesses, and has been prescribed a “cocktail” of drugs to keep him stable. These are effective, but he often refuses to take them since he dislikes their effects. Free from the drugs’ influence, he quickly becomes manic and obsessive about trivial things; he frequently acts as an extremely eccentric tour guide for whoever happens to be handy. Despite his psychological disorders, Serge is for the most part a charismatic, likeable person (he can be viewed as a somewhat more liberal version of Joseph Heller‘s Yossarian). When an event or person offends his extremely strong (and subjective) sense of justice, however, he can quickly fly into a homicidal rage; he has committed a string of murders for which the police pursue him as a serial killer.

Imagine my glee when I found out he has a blog. It’s early days yet, I guess, but I’m waiting for the podcasts.

In the meantime, all I can do is wait for the next Serge fix, scheduled for next spring. Keep them coming, Tim.

A couple of days ago, I mentioned that the commonest question anyone ever asked me about Four Pillars was “What will it look like?” And  I answered “Like Netvibes“.

Today I’d like to explore this further, try and articulate my arguments more precisely. But before I do that, time for some disclosure:

• I have NO shares in netvibes. Never have done.
• In fact I’ll make it simpler.
• I have NO shares in anything other than the company (-ies) I work (-ed) for. Never have done, since October 1987.
• End of disclosure.

Back to Netvibes. Why am I choosing to use a specific example? Here’s why.

Many years ago, when I first started working with Al-Noor, he used to say “Show them a Ford Escort. Ask them what’s wrong with it. Don’t start with a blank piece of paper. Show them something. Something that works. Then they can really tell you what they want”.

Things haven’t changed.

It’s always better to be able to visualise something rather than just theorise about it. Criticism has more value.
Netvibes already has syndication, search, fulfilment and conversation built in. It can do a lot better at the IM piece; it is more an enabler rather than a vehicle for conversation, staying agnostic about the specific tool used. There aren’t many real examples of fulfilment. Nevertheless it is a good place to start.

It has single sign on; powerful personalisation; a good drive towards platform and OS and browser agnosticism. It leverages community value a la WordPress by having an outstanding ecosystem approach. And it provides a good foundation for my granularity debate. More of this later.

Staying with Netvibes. Here’s a quote from their “landing page”.

• Welcome to Netvibes! This is your personalized page, you can now modify everything: move modules, add new RSS/ATOM feeds, change the parameters for each module, etc. Your modifications are saved in real-time and you’ll find your page when you get back on Netvibes.com. If you want to be able to access your page from any computer, you can sign in (at the top right) with your email and a password.The content is available from the “add content” button at the top left of this page.

  Feel free to check the Netvibes blog to stay tuned about new features on the site.

That should give you a feel for what this is about.

As of today, the netvibes ecosystem has 555 modules, 7703 feeds, 642 podcasts, 138 events and 2335 tabs. These terms are nothing more than words until you get into them, I recommend you start familiarilising yourself with what they mean. The words are less relevant than the meaning.

In a strange kind of way, the ecosystem model of today has replaced the AT Bus of the mid 1980s, with significant differences in how we look at minor things like innovation and IPR and for that matter DRM. The community innovates at a significantly higher speed, there is far less of a gap between innovator and consumer (quite often they’re one and the same); the innovations happen on a Long Tail basis, with local solutions to local problems and global solutions to global ones. Language and localisation customisation happen at a rate of knots as well, we no longer have this appalling drip-feed of regional releases of things.

Humongous general purpose enterprise applications start looking like feeds. Take a look at how you configure a feed and you will get a feel for how simple it is. Move the position of the feed around, change its size and shape and colour and alerting mechanism.

More specific applications start looking like modules. There’s a lot of value to be gained in looking at events from a corporate viewpoint; there’s even more value to be gained from looking at predefined tabs as the way new hires get trained.

There’s still a lot for us to learn about enterprise applications, and Four Pillars is not a silver bullet. It is nothing more than my way of describing what’s happening, in the benighted belief that decent dialogue will occur as a result.

Some of the learning that has yet to take place is non-trivial. Three aspects:

• How an application works when in a Not-Connected State, as opposed to a wired/wireless differentiation.
• How to prevent bad DRM from clogging the works before we’ve had a chance to build them out.
• How to ensure that we move away from interoperability to true substitutability. A genuine I-don’t-care-what-you-choose approach.

More later.

A closing aside.

Some years ago, I had control freaks telling me all the things that a mobile phone or PDA was NOT allowed to do:

• Connect to the firm’s computers and network
• Use Bluetooth
• Have any firm data on it
• Allow access to the web
• Allow use of the camera

I started laughing and suggested we put in for 200,000 tin cans and a zillion miles of twine, so that we can replace the entire mobile phone network with things that kept the control freaks happy.

And then I realised they were serious. There was much wailing and gnashing of teeth, but, largely, sense prevailed.

Now I see the same happening with computers and televisions.

Under the banner of “content protection” and IPR and DRM and whatever else they choose to brandish, what we are seeing is amazing.

People are very carefully putting crap in the way in order to make a computer look like a television….

because they understand television, and feel good about the control it provides them.

Sadly, we’re all culpable. Because we’re allowing it to happen. Twenty years of bloatware have taught us nothing, it would appear.

It’s been maybe eighteen months since I first put pen to paper on the Syndication/Search/Fulfilment/Collaboration model for enterprise software, and I’ve learnt a lot since then. Some of you were at the workshop at the bank in early December 2005, when I shared what I was thinking with participants; it just doesn’t seem like it was over a year ago.
Over the last eighteen months, one of the commonest questions/comments I’ve had on Four Pillars is this one:

But JP, what’s it going to look like? It all sounds like airy-fairy theory to me. Do you really expect SAP and Oracle and Excel and e-mail to disappear? Go get a life.

My answer is simple.

It’s going to look like Netvibes.

I think there’s a lot that we can learn from the Netvibes model. Here’s a summary:

• 1. It encapsulates syndication, search, conversation and fulfilment already. Yes it’s currently weaker on conversation and fulfilment, but the model’s already there.
• 2. It helps people visualise what it would mean to have “traditional” enterprise applications get “demoted” to becoming content publishers. Why do you think all the world and his wife are trying to patent RSS implementations? We should all rally round Dave Winer on this. RSS is for everyone; every attempt to patent a particular implementation just adds more gunk to the DRM gunge.
• 3. It exemplifies how single-sign on can work, how layers of application authentication and permissioning can get taken care of.
• 4. The powerful personalisation it represents is a sign of the times. Choose what you want to see, where you want to see it, how you want to see it. Mass customisation provided by relentless standardisation.
• 5. It leads the way on what browser independent means. Just look at how long it took for Netvibes to have Wii browser support. Amazing.
• 6. The ecosystem model is very much where enterprise software needs to go. To me it really gets the Free as In Freedom model right, it has all the feel and behaviour of community yet  is packaged in a sensible commercial manner.
• 7. It captures something that I think is critical for enterprises. A sense of consistent information from single trusted sources with differentiated granularity. You choose the granularity. The information remains the same. The process of altering the granularity is the same for everyone.

There’s a lot that’s good about Netvibes, and a lot we can improve on as well. What do you think? Do let me know.

I will continue on this theme sometime over the next couple of weeks. In the meantime, I wish everyone a happy new year.

This post was sparked off by a recent comment made by Stephen Smoliar, which I reproduce here:

Massively parallel reading may work for entertainment, but I find I need to focus when I get to the heavy stuff. Otherwise, I just come away with a superficial feel; and, if THAT is what I want, then I can get a bit more depth from THE NEW YORK REVIEW. Actually, I think that good review writing is probably one of the most valuable talents in the age of information overload; but, since so few people agree with me, I doubt that I shall be able to start my own service business around it!

Fascinating comment; there are some bits that resonate very strongly with my thoughts, and other bits where I rise up in dissent.

When Stephen says “I think that good review writing is probably one of the most valuable talents in the age of information overload” I couldn’t agree more with him.

The only question or issue is an old one. one that has already been debated between me and Stephen. What makes an expert an expert? Who decides that a review is good?
When we have active feedback loops and ratings systems and rankings, what is the role of the reviewer? What makes a good reviewer?

For some time now, I’ve been reading Amazon reviews by Kevin Killian. I was put on to Kevin by Ron Silliman, via his blog. And how did I find Ron? He once linked to me, and I followed him back. Now he’s on my blogroll, and I read him regularly.

Instead of Kevin Killian, I could have said any of the following:

• PD Harris
• Daniel Jolley
• Kurt Messick
• Lawyeraau
• Mary Whipple

Actually there’s a very long list. The names above are the top 5 in a Top 500 list at Amazon, which you can find here.

But the guy I read? Kevin Killian? Well, he was last seen at number 122, or something like that.

And that’s where the sheer power of the web comes in. Sure I subscribe to, and read, the New York Review, The London Review of Books, the Times Literary Supplement and, for that matter, even Kirkus. At some layer of abstraction, I could argue that there is very little to differentiate between Kirkus and Zagat, which I also subscribe to.

What differentiates all of these from people like Kevin Killian is something very small, yet very important.

There’s a Long Tail Effect in Reviews, in Reviewers, and in Review Readers. A Long Tail Effect that gets suppressed in a traditional hub-and-spoke model.

It is only the market that can determine who is good and who isn’t. And over time, as we remove the corruptions of traditional sales and marketing, there will be a high correlation between what the market thinks and what the market is perceived to be thinking.

So for the most part I agree with Stephen: good reviews, and good reviewers, are really important. What we have to be careful about is formulating “expert” rules about what makes a good review or reviewer.

There’s one other thing that niggled me slightly. Stephen seem to suggest that being entertained by books is not a good thing. Even when I read to learn, I am entertained. I like being entertained. Why ever not?
Maybe it’s the words used, and I shouldn’t get hung up over the semantics. But I’ve heard similar arguments about new ways of working, even about social software, so I am wary. “If people are having fun it can’t be work”. Why ever not?

Kerry Buckley came up with a wonderful piece of apocrypha when commenting on a recent post of mine. I reproduce the entire comment here:

• ….During the run-up to their launch, the schedule slipped significantly, and the CEO (overall a great guy) made the classic engineering management mistake of adding many more developers to the late project in hopes of speeding its completion.
• …
• After failing to win several arguments on this point, the engineers … each bought a copy of [The Mythical Man-Month], brought the CEO into a conference room, and stacked up the copies of the book, telling him, It is extremely urgent that you read this book. We’ve bought you many copies so that you might read it faster. They made their point.

Great stuff. It’s amazing how many people I meet today who have zero understanding of Brooks’ book. Maybe we’ve made it too easy for people to call themselves project managers; maybe we roll over too easily and go into the hairshirt-and-woe-is-me mindset as IT gets accused yet again of not delivering; maybe we’ve just grown to be too apathetic. I sense that for many IT people, life is now about Take A Number. Folks, we need to start caring again. It’s up to us.

On a lighter note. Another apocryphal story.

There was this guy, worked years at trying to get his book published. Failed gloriously. Finally went for a vanity publisher. Published the book. Failed gloriously.

Last throw of the dice. He rents a disused warehouse, scheduled for demolition in a few weeks. Converts it into a simple bookshop. Stocks it up with a zillion copies of his book. And nothing else. Calls the shop The One-Book Bookshop.

Fails gloriously.

There was a die still tumbling, though.

He puts up a notice in the window, saying:

Satisfaction Guaranteed. If you don’t like the book, come back anytime and exchange it for any other book in the shop. No quibbles.

ABC, NBC and the rest of television’s alphabet soup cover the shop.

His book becomes a best-seller.

By the way, if any of you knows how to get a copy of this book, please let me know. I’d love to acquire one. Again the blogosphere may succeed where Google failed.