The Now Economy

Slashdot writes:

Michael S. Mimoso writes “A Yankee Group survey of 473 enterprise decision makers reveals that companies have put aside money for service-oriented architectures for 2005.” This is a bigger deal than it sounds - if companies keep moving this away, it will mean a sea change in corporate technology usage - and change the way/why development is done. We’re talking everything from SOAP stuff to wholesale ASP adoption like Salesforce.com.

Yankee’s survey results suggest that the biggest investments in SOA will come from the wireless telecom and manufacturing markets (78%), financial services (77%), and health care (71%).

Tomorrow begins the WWW@10 conference on “the visions, technologies, and directions that characterized the Web’s first decade… a forum in which scholars and practitioners of all disciplines — cultural, historical, and technical — can share perspectives, concerns, and innovative ideas about the World Wide Web.” The program looks quite promising.

CNET: “IBM said Monday that it intends to spend $250 million on developing RFID, and a related technology known as sensor networks, over the next five years. HP is pouring $150 million into the technology, the company said in a dueling announcement.”

Most likely the money IBM and HP are pouring in are essentially the cost of consultants in their services divisions training to understand RFID technologies, but this still points to the trend that “RFID is projected to fuel a buying frenzy, with companies stocking up on the required equipment, including RFID tags, readers, computer servers and new software. U.S. retailers will spend nearly $1.3 billion on RFID projects annually by 2008, according to market researcher IDC.”

Shouldn’t there be more than one Web page in the Universe that uses the phrase “Semantic Web Disease”?

Oh.

Well now I guess there are two. Isn’t this how all diseases start to spread?

Tim O’Reilly writes,

The trends that are emerging today are at least as earth-shaking as the web and the open source movement turned out to be. I’m talking about the emergence of what I’ve started to call Web 2.0, the internet as platform. We heard about that idea back in the late 90s, at the height of the browser wars, but that turned out to be a false alarm. But I believe we’re now starting the third age of the internet — the first being the telnet-era command line internet, the second the web — and the third, well, that tale grows in the telling. It’s about the way that open source and the open standards of the web are commoditizing many categories of infrastructure software, driving value instead to the data and business processes layered on top of (or within) that software; it’s about the way that web sites like eBay, Amazon, and Google are becoming platforms with rich add-on developer communities; it’s about the way that network effects and data, rather than software APIs, are the new tools of customer lock-in; it’s about the way that to be successful, software today needs to work above the level of a single device; it’s about the way that the Microsofts and Intels of tomorrow are once again going to blindside established players because all the rules of business are changing.

Web 2.0 forms the foundation on which The Now Economy will develop — although I don’t know how I like this idea of “network effects and data [belonging to centralized services] [being] the new tools of customer lock-in” — wasn’t the internet supposed to free us from lock-in?

And by the way, in Web 2.0, people have a choice of browser. Internet Explorer is no longer as innovative, secure, or stable as Safari / Konqueror, Opera, and Firefox (the beta of which passed 1 million downloads in 100 hours. I use Firefox as my default browser now, and it makes me verrrrrry happy…

Via Mike Dierken we found this wonderful tidbit from Adam Bosworth stating

I have a posted comment about just using XML over HTTP. Yes. I’m trying, right now to figure out if there is any real justification for the WS-* standards and even SOAP in the face of the complexity when XML over HTTP works so well. Reliable messaging would be such a justification, but it isn’t there. Eventing might be such a justification, but it isn’t there either and both specs are tied up in others in a sort of spec spaghetti. So, I’m kind of a skeptic of the value apart from the toolkits. They do deliver some value, (get a WSDL, instant code to talk to service), but what I’m really thinking about is whether there can’t be a much simpler kindler way to do this.

Amen. Stick a fork in WS-*, because as Simon says, Web Services are receding:

Web Services are on their way to a CORBA-like market: sort of interoperable, vendor-ridden, and critically important to a small number of people. If that’s the case, then maybe the rest of us can return to vanilla XML HTTP, sometimes known as REST.

Ah, how we all pine for a simpler time, before WS-* made everything feel so much more complicated than Web applications should feel… since I don’t have anything more constructive to say, we’ll pile on with some beautiful words from Sean McGrath:

The whole WS standards thing has more moving parts than a 747. Much of it recently invented, untested and unproven in the real world.

Given that there are no exceptions to Gall’s Law:

A complex system that works is invariably found to have evolved from a simple system that worked.

I believe WS-YouMustBeJoking is doomed to collapse under its own weight. Good riddance to it.

Why has this situation come about? Because smart people had neural spasms? No. Because smart people realise that this stuff is real important and commercial agendas are at work all over the map.

The most important document to read if you want to understand the WS-IfThisIsProgressImAMonkeysUncle cacophony is How to wage and win a standards war by Carl Shapiro and Hal Varian.

That felt so satisfying to read, I’m going out back for a cigarette…

For more wonderful backlash, see also Tim Bray’s The Loyal WS-Opposition:

No matter how hard I try, I still think the WS-* stack is bloated, opaque, and insanely complex. I think it’s going to be hard to understand, hard to implement, hard to interoperate, and hard to secure.

I look at Google and Amazon and EBay and Salesforce and see them doing tens of millions of transactions a day involving pumping XML back and forth over HTTP, and I can’t help noticing that they don’t seem to need much WS-apparatus.

I’m deeply suspicious of “standards” built by committees in advance of industry experience, and I’m deeply suspicious of Microsoft and IBM, and I’m deeply suspicious of multiple layers of abstraction that try to get between me and the messages full of angle-bracketed text that I push around to get work done.

This led to WS-PageCount, with a followup and a reference to WS-Halloween.

For more backlash, see also Mike Gunderloy’s WS-JustSayNo. (which quoth, “One of the powerful concepts in Extreme Programming is YAGNI, which stands for You Aren’t Gonna Need It. The idea is simple: implement things when you need them, not when you think you might need them in the future. As far as I’m concerned, this applies to most Web services experiments today.”)

For a more even-tempered approach, see Phil Wainewright’s WS-LooseCoupling.

And for those optimistic folks who still believe in the Web Services stack and/or want to know how all the pieces fit together and lead to Nirvana, see Microsoft’s just-released An Introduction to the Web Services Architecture.

Joi Ito points out that Wikipedia just passed one million articles: “Wikipedia is in more than 100 languages with 14 currently having over 10,000 articles… At the current rate of growth, Wikipedia will double in size again by next spring.” Wikipedia itself points to the power of a massive, decentralized content authoring effort.

Ross Mayfield adds, “To put this in perspective, if each article took 1 person week to produce, getting the next million would take 40,000 full-time equivalent resources to get it done in the same amount of predicted time. Co-incidentally Wikipedia has about the same amount of registered users, but they have day jobs too.”

Even more impressive, “Wikipedia is a volunteer effort supported by the non-profit Wikimedia Foundation.” When I clicked on their fundraising effort, I discovered that they’re looking to raise fifty thousand dollars — a tiny amount by corporate standards. It speaks to the fact that a massive, decentralized effort need not cost a tremendous amount to have a huge impact.

Laura Landro’s 9/22/2004 Wall Street Journal article, “Electronic Medical Records Are Taking Root Locally” (available to WSJ subscribers) talks about how

More than 100 state and local groups are moving quickly to establish their own networks in which various health-care providers can securely share patient information, aiming to cut down on medical errors and duplicated efforts…

The regional networks aim to get local providers to convert patients’ paper medical files to electronic records, and persuade doctors to exchange pertinent information with a patient’s other health-care providers. By using a single network, regional health groups say they can reduce medical mistakes, better track patients with chronic diseases such as diabetes, zip prescriptions electronically to pharmacies, and cut costs by eliminating duplicated lab tests and X-rays…

With no money or federal authority to mandate a national health-care network, regional networks are also emerging as the only solution to wiring up the country’s medical system. Creating a nationwide system for sharing medical records would cost billions of dollars, scaring off many legislators… because the U.S. has a highly fragmented private health-care system, ’starting from the bottom and working up is the only viable approach,’ says Lewis Redd, who runs the health-care consulting practice for Capgemini.

The federal government’s role, he says, is to push for widespread adoption of a single technical standard that will let all the different medical records in the country eventually talk to each other and share data, all the while allowing access only to authorized users, to ensure privacy. Such technical standards already exist, and David Brailer, the U.S.’s health-information-technology czar, is in the process of deciding how best to endorse them and provide guidelines for their use.

As evidence mounts that easily-transferable electronic medical records reduce costs and errors, these grassroots regional efforts will build momentum.

Reading Anti-Virus Spamming and the Virus-Naming Mess by Dr. Vesselin Bontchev, I was struck by the fact that there is no common name for each virus.

Virus names, once chosen by anti-virus producers, are difficult to change because the original name is already present in press releases, on the website, and in the virus definition files of anti-virus software.

Because it is unrealistic to expect that a standard agreement can be reached by every anti-virus producer over the name of every single virus in existence, any future-proof naming scheme will need to accommodate multiple names referring to any given virus.

Yet another good use for a decentralized namespace.

More evidence of the steamroller in action — but still, precious little to say of what the killer apps may be except to remind us that the status quo may be pretty awful to begin with. Here’s the state-of-the-art: “If there’s a discrepancy–the quantity shipped is less than the quantity ordered, for example–the system will automatically push an E-mail alert to the customer.” Sigh.

RFID Tops To-Do List In Consumer Goods By Beth Bacheldor and Larry Greenemeier, Information Week

Consumer-goods companies this year once again embrace an innovative technology, though for now their time and attention are focused on the mechanics of implementation rather than the higher art of finessing it. Sixty percent of the consumer-goods companies on this year’s InformationWeek 500 list are developing or testing radio-frequency identification tags. The technology’s promise has caught the imagination of large companies such as Wal-Mart Stores Inc., which is requiring its top 100 suppliers to affix RFID tags on all the cases and pallets of goods they ship to the retailer by January. Target Corp., the U.S. Department of Defense, and others have similar mandates, hoping that RFID will help them track products as they move through the supply chain, providing up-to-the minute inventory details, triggering automatic replenishment, and ultimately generating more sales.

Imperial Sugar Co., with sales of $1.1 billion in 2003, already has begun the arduous task of planning to use RFID in its distribution centers so that it can meet customers’ requirements. But the company’s aggressive stance has more to do with VP and CIO George Muller’s belief that RFID offers a way to outsmart competitors. “With RFID, the people that get there first will have a competitive advantage,” Muller says. “And they’ll be able to take costs out of their supply chains sooner.”

…Muller has bigger designs that would take advantage of the fact that IT is a core competency of Imperial Sugar. He’d someday like to co-develop and co-market an RFID system with a third-party service provider that could hook into any back-office ERP system and provide visibility into any company’s flow of inventory. “This is late-breaking news that I haven’t really discussed with management,” Muller says. “We can generate a nice revenue stream with some very attractive margins.” Extra revenue would be welcome in the sugar industry, where, Muller says, margins are only about 3% to 3.5%. Plus, “this would give our IT employees an opportunity to expand their horizons,” he says. “That could be a lot of fun.”

The biggest challenge regarding RFID is to comply with business partners’ requirements without breaking the bank, says Jeryl Wolfe, CIO and VP of global business solutions for McCormick & Co. Inc., which makes spices and sauces. “The technology isn’t mature, not even close,” he says. Whereas cost-effective use of RFID is predicated on the 5-cent tag, decent tags aren’t available today for less than 20 cents. “The costs get scary as they scale,” he says. McCormick also is a second-tier Wal-Mart supplier with a January 2006 RFID deadline.

RFID implementation cost estimates vary wildly, and much of it depends on how many tags will be required and whether the use of scanners and other associated tools will extend beyond the point that goods are loaded on trucks and moved to retailers. In a Forrester Research study earlier this year, which included interviews with 10 of Wal-Mart’s top 100 suppliers as well as 25 tag and reader manufacturers, the research firm estimated that Wal-Mart’s mandate could cost a supplier $9.1 million in startup and maintenance fees for one year.

…Imperial Sugar’s IT team has just implemented a custom collaboration tool that lets it more effectively communicate order and delivery information with its customers. It’s integrated with Imperial Sugar’s PeopleSoft supply-chain apps and compares supply-chain data against a number of predefined rules. If there’s a discrepancy–the quantity shipped is less than the quantity ordered, for example–the system will automatically push an E-mail alert to the customer. “We’re using push technology to people that need to know so we can provide better customer support,” Clemmons says.