It looks obvious

I read the interview of Wendy Kellogg with Ray Ozzie, Microsoft’s CTO, with great interest. Mr. Ozzie’s vision will no doubt affect our life in the coming years. As I read the interview I marked to myself several remarks I would like to share.
As someone with great affection to the ideology represented by Thomas Jefferson a vision of many small companies is very appealing to me. Although we yet to see the corporate culture move toward this vision, it is worth waiting for:

”Tom Malone has been saying this, and Peter Drucker’s idea of “The Next Society” is that in the future we’re going more or less from corporation to confederation where many, many small firms united by a common strategy and common economic goals will get together to produce a product or a service, and then reband with a different set to produce a different product or service. We’re seeing the leading edges of this, and again I think that technology plays a tremendous role in helping these teams virtually assemble, get their jobs done very effectively, and disassemble as the business requires.”

Yesterday I wrote that companies that will know how to adopt the concepts of Web 2.0 into corporation use will be the companies that “will make it”. Microsoft was always known for its ability to translate someone else’s technological innovation into very appealing solutions. It seems that Microsoft going to tie together and rebrand some of the solutions:

“A lot of the social software that is now appearing on the public Internet, which is a bit like a Petri-dish, really must be thought of from the perspective of how it would play inside an enterprise. How can some of that software be adapted for use in the enterprise? It’s difficult for me to conceive of how some of that petri-dish software will become accepted inside the enterprise because of some of the overwhelming compliance and security issues that exist there.”

Unlike the hype and the total submission all around to the technologies and approaches, that we recognize as Web 2.0, Mr. Ozzie’s view is much more balanced and sober. His recognition of the limitations of collaboration and communications should be a compass to Microsoft’s development efforts

:”The first thing to recognize is that collaboration and communication technology is not a panacea. Many people, particularly in the early years when I first brought Notes to market, would have problems that they were trying to work out within their company, and they would deploy this collaboration software thinking it would solve the problem. In fact, many times what they were really trying to do was institute business process or culture change at the same time the technology was deployed. When the initiative failed because of inadequate recognition that they were trying to change the process, or the culture, they would blame the technology.
Technology can assist the change, but it can’t make it happen on its own. People really have to understand what the role of technology and the role of leadership are when it comes to effecting change within corporations. ”

One of the essential problems of any I.T. organization is that we become in love with the new technologies and the changes the promised and we are less aware to the psychology of the propose changes. Moreover, we tend to forget sometime that the technology suppose to support the business and not vice versa. It seems that Mr. Ozzie put his finger on this issue and demonstrates how solutions planning should be focused on the users not on the paradigm:

“if a company is so focused on the artifacts and it forces all work to be done through a browser, for example, then it can fail because it doesn’t match the way that people work. Sales force automation is a really good case in point where the pendulum swung toward Web-based systems a number of years ago and every major vendor of sales force automation had to make a browser-based version of its products. But that’s not the way salespeople work. Salespeople are on the road all the time and they use the phone a lot. If you don’t design the tools to match the way people actually work, you end up with shelfware. ”

The last remark from this interview is the most interesting for me. For awhile now we are hearing discussions about the web as a platform, as oppose to the desktop. In the following remarks Mr. Ozzie changes the dimensions of the discussion and focuses it on the main issue - the data is the platform:

“I believe that the platform of the Internet really is the data, and by putting data out there that is re-mixable into different types of applications, we can get interesting, unanticipated results. The most fundamental standards around that start with XML, but it really revolves around what some people call microformats, small formats that are easily understood and generated by a broad variety of applications, such as iCal, hCal, and vCard, and then encapsulating them in RSS.
RSS is an extremely important standard. It’s the HTML of the next generation of the Web, or some people might refer to it as the Unix pipe of the Internet. It’s a way of channeling data from one application to another in very interesting and robust fashion. Again, I think it’s important as a technique far beyond just collaborative software.”

It will be very interesting to see how it will be incorporated into Microsoft’s products

Technorati Tags: Ray Ozzie, Web 2.0, Collaboration, Social Applications