Content Log

Theory X, Theory Y and Theory O

I was speaking to a friend the other week about his relationship with his boss and how he always tells him what to do. This made me think about my first management courses back at Ingres. Because we had so many people straight out of Berkeley, few people were trained as managers and most had no role models to emulate.

In this first course, we were presented the concepts of Theory X and Theory Y. Although we weren’t told the history behind these theories, they were developed in the 1960’s and based upon Maslow’s hierarchy of needs. Theory X is about taking a pessimistic view of employees and don’t trust them. Theory X managers generally take an authoritarian stance with their employees and work better in control-oriented organizations. Theory Y states that employees may be striving for the higher level of Maslow’s hierarchy and searching for creativity and problem solving. Theory Y managers provide encouragement and trust for employees fulfilment. The end of the management course suggested that we as new managers should seek to balance between the two. Apparently, this is now considered a very old fashioned view of management and has been incorporated into other theories.

Maslow's Hierarchies of Needs

What dawned on me after my conversation with my friend was that this describes the difference in attitudes between closed and open source. Control over the source code and intellectual property is very Theory X. I constantly get questions about how can you trust giving out the source code. Theory Y describes very much the motivations behind open source and those that contribute code and make their code openly available to others. I have read that what motivates most contributors is not any zealotry, but a desire to be recognized by their peers and to express themselves creatively in communal problem solving. This fits neatly into the higher levels of Maslow’s hierarchy.

The open source process is becoming more mainstream in the economy as a whole. Open collaboration between employees, customers and partners yields more results when you are not worried about holding back information. In fact, I have found the whole process incredibly liberating. Perhaps it is worth looking at these theories again and recognize that we are shifting to Theory Y just as we are shift to more right-brain approaches. Maybe we need a Theory O for Open Source.

Open Source Business Models

Yesterday, I was on a panel at The Server Side Java Symposium at the Venetian in Las Vegas. It’s been 7 years since I have been to the Venetian when we had the Documentum user group meeting, Momentum, at the Venetian. Having since been to the real Venice and been in a real gondola, the effect of seeing indoor canals and tromp l’oeil ceilings is even more surreal. (BTW - Don’t pay 80 euros to ride in a gondola in Venice. Spend one euro to take the Targetto. Don’t spend any money to ride a gondola in Las Vegas.)

This is the first time that I had met Joe Ottinger, the editor of The Server Side, in person. We have spoken on the phone before and he is a nice, funny, unassuming guy. Joe was the moderator of the panel that included Joaquin Ruiz from Spike Source, Brian Kim from Liferay, Bob McWhirter from JBoss.org, and Neelam Choksi from Interface 21 (Spring Framework). Geir Magnusson of Apache was also planned to be on there, but had other commitments. I know Joaquin and I were a bit surprised when we found out that the panel was only supposed to last 35 mins. (I got up at 5am and flown all the way to share 35 mins with 5 other people?!) Fortunately, Joe was able to start the session earlier and let the panel run on a bit longer. Most people stayed as well for the post-lunch session.

Most of the questions were about why open source and what license people should use. The reasons were consistent among us around the power of the model, the cost effectiveness of open source and the draw of the community. Joe had a question on how the community is managed and I think it was Dave who answered that it requires a certain level of control and discipline to ensure the quality of the code that is contributed. There were lots of questions around GPL, of which Joe is not a fan nor is he a fan of Richard Stallman. However, I think how people perceive GPL has changed in that you can combine non-GPL components with GPL and the FLOSS exception allows you to embed GPL in non-GPL systems. Everyone wants to know what will happen with GPLv3 and although we are tracking it, I can’t really say what will happen with the restrictions. (See Matt Asay's comments on GPLv3. Matt is our VP, Bus Dev and he knows a lot more about this than I do.) I commented on the concern that some OEMs have with LGPL in that it has not been tested in court. JBoss and RedHat have a very liberal and ISV friendly interpretation of it, but we need to have a court test to prove that it is okay to use in commercial software.

Richard Stallman

I appreciate the time that Joe gave us and the opportunity to speak about Alfresco. The Server Side has been a good source of the downloads that we have had so far. However, the whole area of Open Source Business Models is so much more than licenses. It really is a disruptive model not just for software, but for many other industry sectors. I organized a few thoughts on the flight over to Las Vegas.

Peter Fenton

When we first started to look at starting Alfresco, we interviewed and discussed the concept with some of the best thinkers in open source. One person in particular was very helpful due not just to his exposure to open source, but due to the thinking he had applied to looking at open source in the abstract as an investment thesis. Peter Fenton was an associate at Accel Partners and now a General Partner at Benchmark Capital. Peter had come up with a set of criteria of what worked and what did not work in open source. At the time we started, there had been 10 years of experimentation in investing in open source, although I think the last couple of years have been particularly instructional. Here are Peter’s criteria:

1. There must be a large market with millions of users. I would characterize this as having a critical mass. If you are going to try and spread this as far and wide as possible and you are only going to get a couple of percent actually converting to paying customers, then that number must be very large. In this case, horizontal markets are good and vertical markets can be very limiting.
2. There should be organic adoption of the project. As Peter points out most projects flame out in the first 2 years. The long, slow adoption of the organic community is a good thing. However, there are other ways to get a community. We have found a natural community in Enterprise Content Management practitioners who find Alfresco familiar and with which they are able to deploy much more cost-effectively than closed source options. Likewise, companies like IBM and Adobe have ready made communities as they exploit the open source model. Perhaps Microsoft will one day realize the potentially powerful open source community that they will be able to create with a quick email from Bill.
3. There should be demand-side economies. It’s hard to know exactly what Peter means here and it might be Stanford MBA speak for scarcity of open source alternatives. He states that there should be a natural monopoly or duopoly. As an investment, you are looking for a company to be big and therefore it needs to be not just a leader in the segment, but dominant. Open source web content management on its own is an example of a market that is too diffuse. Open Source Enterprise Content Management is not.
4. There needs to be sufficient product complexity or drift. This complexity provides a means to add value-added service over a product that is free. Products like application servers and database management systems are inherently complex. Many of the Apache projects, such as Tomcat, are too simple for someone to make money on them. It is possible that a product can work too well.
5. The project should address a new frontier of adoption. Innovation happens at the edge. This should not just be old stuff for free. Peter uses the example of the LAMP stack as addressing new web sites and an area that commercial vendors overlooked. This is classic Innovator’s Dilemma. However, I would state this as there being a compelling differentiation other than just being open source. The 10 times factor of performance or new functionality allows the product to sell itself with the open source model being a swift closer. The community can be the source of the innovation that adds this wow factor.

I would add my own corollary to rule number one. Rather than just a large market, it needs to be a commodity market. With the commodity market you get the size need for critical mass and the market has been educated on the need for that product. This, by extension, means that not all markets are ripe for open source. Lall stated during the panel that not all markets need to be commodities since open source has been a major source of innovation. I agreed that some categories of open source were created by open source, but they are still commodities. An example is wikis, of which there are lots and it is now a commodity.

Looking at these rules, there are a number of industries that fall into these categories. Back in 2005, Peter was evaluating content management, wireless, system management, internet browsers, security, business intelligence, application infrastructure, middleware, databases, build and test environments, development tools. The only major category that was missing was games, which has 3 of the top 20 software companies. Most of these categories have had investment and new entrants funded by the major VCs, including Peter while at Benchmark. Perhaps you can consider other industries that are commoditized where you can tell one product from another except through very deep analysis.

Tim O'Reilly has said that when the price of a product like open source goes to zero, then the adjacent activities in the value chain gain value. This fits very neatly into Michael Porter's concept of value chains and competitive value. How you make money from open source can be divided into a few different models.Those models are dependent less on how you make money on the software and more on other activities that are adjacent to delivery and use of that software. The most common models are:

• Support - This is the model that Alfresco uses. This about providing technical support, maintenance and bug fixes. In this model, the free version usually moves faster than an enterprise version where more time is taken to certify the product against stack components. Bug fixes to this enterprise version are given higher priority, but are eventually folded into the main code line.
• Professional Services - This is providing professional services in using the software to create new solutions specifically for a customer. Custom engineering can also come under this category although the result can end up benefiting everyone as an enhancement to the product. JBoss and Interface 21 make some of their revenue from this model. At Alfresco, we give almost all the service revenue to our partners. Services is also one of the lowest margin businesses with the greatest risk in terms of building capacity.
• Insurance - This is a warranty or indemnity on the product. The company supporting the open source product guarantees to support the customer for damages or claims that may arise from the use of the product. This is rarely provided on its own and is usually provided as a value-added service in conjunction with either support or services.
• Enterprise Features - For those venturing into open source from a closed source background, this is the most comfortable model. By holding back certain features, particularly those that are related to scalability or system management, then users can try the software out, but if they are getting significant value from the software, then they will pay for this. We tried this model, but have decided that we could build a much larger community and hence more customers by providing the product 100% open source. Having enterprise features also encourages the community to replace your enterprise features, which can end up being counterproductive for everyone.
• Hosting - Hosting is becoming a more popular way to consume open source software. The people who create the product can get value by providing the software as a hosted service.
  Embedding - Commercial vendors who can use open source software can often license the software to include it in an OEM relationship. This model is often accompanied by a dual license, a license that can be distributed as only open source or as an exception to those who pay for a commercial license. Once a commercial license is purchased, then the licensee is free to use the software however they feel appropriate. This is a model that was pioneered by JBoss, but originally developed by Ghostscript, an open source PostScript interpreter.

Each of these models has different implication in terms of how big the community it creates, the perception it gives to those trying the software and how much pressure there is on users to convert to a paid-for version of the software. Those who have given trust have often returned it with either contributing back to the project or paying for support when deploying the product into production. The exception to this are Google and Yahoo, who have created multi-billion dollar businesses using open source, but have given nowhere near as much back. This is one of the reasons that there is so much controversy over GPLv3, which attempts to set boundaries on fair use in a hosted environment.

The open source model is very powerful and rapidly growing. In our first full year of revenue, we have grown 50% faster than Documentum did in its first full year of revenue. You can use this model regardless of where you are located since it is inherently global. Despite slower uptake of open source in the UK, we have been able to distribute our software to countries where open source has greater acceptance and make a big impact in the US, the largest software market. It’s also a lot of fun, because people who are buying your product are doing it because they have already tried it and like it, rather than being convinced or coerced into using it.

There is still a lot experimentation in the above dimensions in the model, but I think we will be seeing a repeatable, cookie-cutter model. After all the fuss around GPLv3 dies down and after there is clear precedence on interpretation of LGPL, I think we will worry less about license and more about growing open source faster and seeing the disruption through.

The Future of Enterprise Content Management

The Alfresco executive team and I have been on the east coast at a user advisory panel for our American customers here in New York. (See "Is New York the Center of the Software Universe?") That is one of the reasons that I haven’t been blogging as much. This meeting was graciously hosted by one of our customers, the law firm, Davis Polk and Wardell. The meeting room was such a contrast from our offices in little old Maidenhead with a conference room that was as big as our whole office.

We received a lot of great feedback, but it will take me a while to digest all the information. However, I can share the strategy that I presented to this group. In attendance were two large software companies, two major banks, one federal agency, one newspaper and two major games manufacturers. All of them are also customers of other ECM products, but have chosen Alfresco for new content applications. They also said that none of the other ECM products are thinking about what comes next or at least they aren’t communicating it to their customers - probably a combination of both.

I started by discussing what we saw in terms of major business trends. These included:

• Greater purchase power of IT customers
• Continued outsourcing of non-core activities and related communications problems
• More, not less regulation
• Acceptance of Open Source by major corporations
• The fruition and fatigue of implementing Service Oriented Architectures
• Further consolidation of enterprise software
• Re-emergence of B2B initiatives
• Major rewrites of corporate web presence based upon Web 2.0 concepts

Additionally, some people mentioned the move toward a more trust-based development of content, particularly things like wikis, but also pointed out the continuing need to demonstrating trust through workflow for regulated content. Others pointed out the trend for the desktop to just go away with Google taking a lead in this direction.

I also gave my predictions of what is going to happen next in the ECM market as a result of enterprise software consolidation and IBM buying FileNet. Some of this informed by Geoffrey Moore’s Stack Wars in Orchestrating the Stack, which is a great insight into the maturation of the software industry, but neglects to mention the impact of open source. We believe that open source will provide an alternative stack that will be open to substitution of best of breed parts regardless of whether those parts are open or closed.

My guess as to what will happen to the ECM market is:

• SAP will buy an ECM vendor further filling out one of the prime stacks in Geoff’s Stack Wars
• OpenText continues to look for a buyer. Could they hook up with SAP after being jilted by Oracle? OpenText’s iXOS acquisition makes this an attractive pairing.
• Vignette, partnering with companies like Microsoft, are testing the waters for a possible acquisition
• Interwoven is testing a niche play by retreating into Marketing applications, but may still opt for being acquired. EMC could do worse than to acquire Interwoven. They could also help Microsoft.
• The remaining players (other than Alfresco) will retreat into niche areas either around verticals or technical specialization. After the current boom in web redesign, this is a sure path to the living dead.
• Alfresco may end up being last independent ECM vendor
• The introduction of Microsoft Sharepoint 2007 will be the single most disruptive factor in the ECM market
• Sharepoint 2007 has not really launched yet, but in competitive situations, Microsoft has told customers that a new version will be out (Service Pack 1?) with additional Web 2.0 features. Will this be the time that Sharepoint launches along with all the customers that Microsoft has been giving free consulting to?
• Continued expansion of Alfresco will be the second most disruptive factor

One person asked about the missing Gorilla - Google. To what extent would we be competing against Google? Looking at a next 3 year time frame to 2010, I don’t see it happening, but it could in 5 years. Interestingly, at Davos Eric Schmidt made the statement that as far as Google is concerned, web sites, applications, service provision, telcos and devices are all merging together. If that is true, an always connected Google would have a powerful position.

I talked about standards as well. I have been reluctant to blog about these, because I am not sure what the confidentiality rules are around participation in the JCP (the JSR process) or in AIIM’s iECM. However, at a high level, I think that:

• JSR-170 still only has stealth support as IBM and Oracle have active development around this standard, but don’t really say anything about it
• JSR-283 is moving along and will have greater acceptance with the greater involvement of IBM, FileNet and Oracle. We’ll see what happens with Documentum
• iECM is not happening, but something will happen to fill its place

With these current factors and trends, what will happen to technology? Well I have already written my predictions for what will happen by the year 2010. But I stuck my ill informed neck out to predict that storage will triple in capacity, network capacity will increase by 5 times and with WiMax emerging, we will see the first notions of constant connectivity. I also predicted that typical desktop PC will have 4 to 8 cores in this time frame. The only pushback I got was that one customer believes that cores are low and that we will see 64 cores in this timeframe.

There are substantial implications for these factors. Desktops are overkill for the applications that people will be working in 2010. Much more knowledge worker activity will be handled on handheld devices that will be much more easier to use due to improvements in user interface and much greater power and storage.

At this point we had a very interesting discussion on licensing. Our customers were concerned about what happens to our per CPU pricing model when cores go up to 64 and beyond. It is a problem that is facing every enterprise software manufacturer that charges based upon CPUs or servers. Those companies that charge per user will face a backlash of charging this way when all a user does is take a look at a single piece of content. The idea of charging for usage also came up as an access or “click” charge appealed to some people as a way of paying for value. Someone mentioned Google per content model, but most seemed to agree that this was hard to measure and enforce. Expect more discussion in this area in the future.

I then discussed some of my thoughts around Web 2.0 and its relationship Right-brained thinking. The nature of right-brained thinking with its specialization of artistic sense, spatial relationships, face recognition, abstract concepts and future orientation explains a lot about the trends happening in Web 2.0. The way to think about this is that the first wave of the web was about use left-brained programmers who built it and now it is about everybody else.

I believe that there are implications as well for enterprise software as the focus moves from back office systems to front office applications and customer facing web sites. The Web 2.0 concepts of conversations and connections between people must factor in these systems as do improvements with usability. Creativity and engagement will be just as important as the factual accuracy, completeness of information.

The subject then turned to Sharepoint. Many companies represented also have Sharepoint implementations. No one seemed especially pleased with it, but felt that it implementation was inevitable largely due to Sharepoint’s connection to Office. This is consistent with my observation that Sharepoint is an extension of the Office monopoly. I reiterated my point that I made in What the Heck is Sharepoint 2007 that Microsoft is still not clear on what Sharepoint is. The only definition is this picture:

However, I conceded that Sharepoint is addressing a need in the enterprise that was not being met by the other ECM vendors. It is a knowledge worker stack for building knowledge worker applications as long as all the tools, platform and databases are Microsoft. Open Source, I believe, will provide an alternative with best of breed components. Our advisors suggested that we provide out of the box templates that would make it easier for end users to visualize what is possible. Our advisors also suggested that we provide integration with Office as Sharepoint does, which Paul Holmes-Higgin was able to demonstrate later. (Slick demo by the way.)

Prior to going into a detailed review of the Roadmap with Paul Holmes-Higgin and Kevin Cochrane, I talked about the strategy our team has been developing of creating a next generation ECM platform that meets the needs of Web 2.0 and exceeds platforms like Sharepoint. Characteristics of this platform include:

• Multi-channel distribution to mobile devices as well as PCs
• Mashup architectures that blur the line between internal and external systems
• Incorporate best of breed components regardless of the platform upon which they were developed
• Appliance delivery including soft appliances as virtual machines
• Highly interactive content as visual, video-oriented and personal. We would really like to see Flex become open source and become the basis of this content.
• People-oriented with close connections to directory services, presence and instant messaging
• De-centralized and loosely coupled in the same style that we have integrated OpenSearch
• Evolved by the community where it is not a single vendor driving its development and it developed through cooperation, not competition

For Alfresco there are four main use cases that our driving our strategy. These use cases are independent of how the solution is delivered whether it is a simple download, an additional package, a completely configured virtual machine, embedded in a device or hosted.

1. Collaborate and Publish. We have seen in many companies a desire to set up an out of the box solution that allows users to collaborate on deliverables, help them track and manage those deliverables and then publish out the result to the web. In another time and place, one would call this knowledge management.
2. Controlled documents. These are things like contracts and procedures that may be regulated and need to go through version control, review and approval and be audited.
3. Intranet and Internet sites. This includes sites that are especially targeted toward marketing products.
4. Records Management. The nice thing about US DoD 5015.2 is that it is a use case and has an entire validation test suite.

Our product strategy is to do the following:

1. To fulfil the four quadrants of ECM functionality of document, web content, image and records management. The four quadrants are the main areas that Forrester says are the main areas that are being spent on ECM.
2. Componentize our user interface to make it more mashable with other web sites and web applications. This is also the basis for our portal and Office integrations.
3. Focus on Web 2.0 - People and Collaboration. We went through what our plans are for wikis and blogs as well as calendaring and integration with directory information.

Other things that are important for our product strategy include scalability where we ultimately want to scale to 1 billion objects with 100 million being the next stopping point. We also plan to do more work on distributed including replication of content, but still focusing on loosely-couple architectures. Finally, we intend to work on security, particularly in a loosely-coupled, mashed up environment where it is necessary to authenticate not just inside the enterprise, but outside and between web properties.

Overall, we got great feedback from an impressive list of customers. It’s too bad that their legal departments won’t let me mention their names. I look forward to writing up more about what they feel we could be doing better and where we should be investing our time.

Open Source Goes to Washington

Mr.Smith Goes to Washington
An idealistic young man tries to change the way things are done

John Powell and I were in Washington yesterday and took some time after dinner to walk around the White House and other buildings in the area. We were staying in a hotel in Foggy Bottom at the east end of Washington.

I had been to Washington a few times and lived nearby in Springfield, VA when I was a kid. However, this was John’s first time to downtown Washington having only gone in and out of the Dulles area before. He was really surprised by the lack of imperial decoration on the buildings that you find in London, Paris and other European capitals. In the last few years the buildings have become grander, but few take away from the impressiveness of the Capitol and the Washington Monument. I was surprised at how small the White House looked, not having seen it for a long time. It was a little disheartening to see all the security measures and barriers that have been put in place. It’s an unfortunate aspect of the times we live in.

Several federal agencies and departments have now purchased support for Alfresco. Many more are using the free community version. Walking around the streets of Washington, it’s interesting to see these organizations as real buildings. Most, but not all, we have never visited. Enterprising people in the organizations have just downloaded it and started using it. It’s usually about 3 to 6 months before any initial inquiry or contact before these organizations start engaging us in earnest. Most of this interaction is through email and a few phone calls. The whole process is one of savings both for us as a cost effective way of selling services and for the government as a way to save money on big enterprise software.

I am surprised at how things have worked out. Last time I came to Washington was for the second AIIM iECM meeting not far from the Capitol Building late summer 2005. When I made some inquiries in the federal government while I was there, I heard that take up of open source was less that 5%. Microsoft’s lock in particular was pretty strong having hundreds of people supporting just the Navy. I figured it would be years before we would do anything in Washington, just like it took years before Documentum made any inroads.

In reality, open source moves in mysterious ways. People at the top are probably not aware of the extent that open source is being used. With the model of download and try, it is so much easier for people in government to experiment and see if it works. It is much better for your career to work with something you know works rather than something you hope works.

This is a lesson that we have already seen in France, Spain, the European Union and now Washington. I hope that the people in Whitehall are listening.

Rudyard Kipling on Innovation

Portrait of Kipling at the National Portrait Gallery - one of my favorite museums

I found this quote by Rudyard Kipling, author of Gunga Din and the Jungle Book (remember Mowgli and Baloo?), when I worked at Documentum. I found it amusing that we would come up with an innovation and everyone would copy it. We would compete against other companies with capabilities like virtual documents, object models, auditing, query languages and workflow.  We would focus on vertical solutions and use the crossing the chasm model and then you would see the competition do the same thing. Kipling said:

They copied all that they could follow
but they couldn't copy my mind
and I left 'em sweating and stealing
a year and a half behind.

But then we lost our eye on the ball. After Version 2.0 of Documentum, I really investigated the web, but I found a real lack of enthusiasm to apply Documentum to the web. Some Documentum people seemed to think that there would be a richer set of protocols on their way. I remember speaking to Jeff Miller who said that this was very interesting, but FileNet was our competition and we should have a laser-like focus on dominating that market. Kipling said:

And they asked me how I did it,
and I gave 'em the Scripture text,
"You keep your light so shining
a little in front o' the next!"

We started doing to the competition what they had done to us. About the time that Dave DeWalt came on board, we took on Interwoven using their own game. We came to match their capabilities and for awhile get ahead. This became the foundation for the Enterprise Content Management platform. Howard Shao then scouted the other missing pieces of a larger puzzle that included digital asset management, digital rights management and imaging. That force of innovation is now gone from Documentum and we will see how the next generation rises to the challenge.

The quotes from Kipling come from a poem called The “Mary Gloster”.  It is about a dying old man who made his fortune the good, olde Victorian way. The man has grown bitter to see his seemingly ne’er-do-well son not know the benefits of hard work and keeping close to the roots of the old man’s success - the Sea. Those forces of innovation have died and he looking on to a better life in the hereafter. In case you are wondering, I’m not very religious, but I always like a good parable and object lesson.

Unlike the old man, I have had the chance to try it again and I love it. Interestingly, I am seeing the same pattern. We have been out long enough to start to see people copying what we are doing. We can’t be complacent though, there is still a lot of innovating to do.

There may be an object lesson as well for the next generation. I once wrote about the fact that the younger generation is not interested in computer science and information technology. Perhaps Web 2.0 is changing that or there are new sources of wealth around the corner. But just as wealth moved on from Britain in Dickie's generation, perhaps that wealth is now moving on to the developing world (the BRIC countries - Brazil, Russia, India, China) where they are interested in core value creation around boring old things like computer science.

Information Technology in 2010

I was asked by a major IT magazine how I thought Information Technology would be different in the 2010. Bill Gates said in the Road Ahead, “We always overestimate the change that will occur in the next two years and underestimate the change that will occur in the next 10.” He’s right, but this is on the cusp of being in between, it’s only 3 years away. I would actually prefer to describe further in the future with my promised write-up of the Davos Connected User in 2015 session.

Here are my prognostications:

1. Storage and the network bandwidth to store and access information is growing much faster than computing causing an explosion in content creation. This will make content management one of the most important information technologies and new technologies will emerge to automatically find, organize, verify and visualize content.
2. Content and content management will increasingly be delivered in two main forms - appliances and on-line services. Extremely simple, purpose-built physical appliances for household and office use will capture and organize documents, photos, music and video. Software appliances, configured as virtual machines for specific tasks, will be downloaded from the internet to generic hardware that will come in sizes Small, Medium or Large.
3. On-line collaborative and content services will extend from Web 2.0 to the community developing sites and user experience with open source accelerating their rate of evolution. Mash-up technology will replace web services and will blur services as it blends internal and external services. Services will start to spill over into the physical world as shops and delivery become more integrated into requests from the internet.
4. A new revolution in user interface design is just beginning as designers move from physical to soft design. Gesture control will make its way into handheld and notepad devices. User interfaces will move from 2D to 3D as gamers influence work habits and we may see the first holographic interfaces. Avatars will begin to replace dialogs as the request-response metaphor and we may see practical voice recognition and language understanding.
5. Business computing will shift significantly from PCs to mobile devices as Blackberry-size devices capture more business activities and form factors improve. Ubiquitous internet access and informality espoused by blogs and instant messaging will lead to simpler forms of communication. Content will be consumed on something probably closer to a Playstation Portable and your very thin mobile phone.

Colonization of Alfresco

I am preempting another Work In Progress post by putting up this map. This indicates the top 500 cities that are using the Alfresco wiki and forums, which we think is indicative of who uses Alfresco. It shows that the usage of Alfresco is truly global in nature, but naturally follows the cities that are big users of enterprise software. Still we are getting to places that are relatively new to enterprise software. This definitely shows the power of the open source model.

I'll be writing more about the "Colonization" of software in general in my Work In Progress posts.

You can click on the map for more detail.

How to Discount Your ECM System without Really Trying

If you are a customer of Documentum, FileNet, IBM, OpenText, Vignette or Interwoven, there is a really easy way to get deep discounts in your next license negotiations. Just follow these 3 easy steps:

1. Download Alfresco here
2. Install it in less than 5 minutes
3. Walk through the Alfresco Tutorial here

Even easier, try a hosted trial here.

That’s it. If you say you are using Alfresco and that it is so much easier and cheaper, these ECM guys are offering massive discounts. The steps above will give you all the information that you need to have the upper hand in negotiations. Alfresco is even cheaper than their annual maintenance, because it is based upon CPUs, not users, so you can use it in negotiations for annual maintenance.

If the discount isn't massive, it is because they don't think you are strategic. It really shows what they think of you. In the strategic accounts, they are definitely discounting just to keep the business. If you still want to do business with them, it could be worth some free extra training or some free consulting time.

The secret to negotiation in enterprise software is to be confident and know that you can get a better deal elsewhere, even if you have no intention of doing so. They are often willing to match our support costs, but you can’t beat free. That's all it costs to try Alfresco out. The sales guy may appear to be confident in his negotiation, but he’ll be thinking, “Oh no! Not again.” You’ve got him where you want him.

Oh and by the way, try this at the end of the quarter. Right about now would be perfect for Q1 targets when things are pretty tough for them anyway. Having flushed their pipeline to get their annual commissions in December, they are much more flexible right now.

Harvard Business Review Podcast on Wikinomics

If you read my blog, you know by know that I am a fan of the Harvard Business Review. However, somehow I missed the regular free podcasts that are the front page of their web site.

I listened to the cast on Wikinomics with the author, Don Tapscott. His book is called Wikinomics: How Mass Collaboration Changes Everything. The basic premise is that if owners of intellectual property ignore their rights and open it up to everyone, they get far more back in terms of mass intelligence than they would have by protecting and hording their knowledge. In the podcast, he uses the example of a geological surveyor who opened up his geological data and got free analysis in return. He also refers to how Boeing used this concept against Airbus in the design of new aircraft.

He uses the concept of Wikipedia as the metaphor for this new economic structure. The metaphor of open source equally well, but may be over-used. I have heard of Open Source Beer and now Open Source Gold.

The podcast can be found at the HBR podcast page. Listen here (MP3)

What is becoming increasingly clear is that this notion is not just limited to Information Technology. It is now permeating the global economy as a whole. The centuries old notion of protecting intellectual property that was formalized in the Guilds is now being overturned in favor of a more open, collaborative and collegial system of cooperation facilitated by instant communication of the internet. The university system of openness and sharing to benefit of all is taking over where the only evil is plagiarism.

It may be far-fetched to say that this period will be looked back as a new Enlightenment, but that is what I believe. (Am I an idealist and optimist or what?) The internet has made possible the destruction of distance as a barrier to collaboration and enabled the opening of new markets with instant communication. If only we could come up with a better name than “Wikinomics” or even “Open Source”.

The Server Side Symposium in Las Vegas

I'll be speaking at The Server Side Symposim in Las Vegas on Open Source Business Models on March 22 at lunchtime. Also on the panel will be Geir Magnusson from Apache, Bob McWhirter from JBoss, Brian Kim from Liferay, Neelan Chokski from Interface 21 and Joaquin Ruiz from SpikeSource.

Remember, if I flub it, "What happens in Vegas, Stays in Vegas."