aqualung

No - privacy is NOT dead!

Facebook has been in the news recently over (yet more) changes to its privacy settings, and its sharing of your personal information. If you want to know how much noise the recent changes caused, you can start here. Mark Zuckerberg has been quoted as saying that privacy is dead, quoting statistics that suggest that each year we have doubled/will double the amount of personal information we share on the internet, as if it were some Moore's Law of personal data, ever increasing exponentially.

This is an incredibly flawed viewpoint, for a couple of reasons:

• given the increase in sharing of personal data, I would have shared with the world everything it is possible to share fairly quickly - once I am completely transparent, I don't have an endless supply of new "secrets" appearing ... so there's a real limit
• and as we share more, what we DON'T share becomes more and more important

What IS changing is our threshold of privacy - what I thought was private a couple of years ago wasn't worth sharing, maybe I think it is now; what my kids are prepared to share about themselves may be more extensive than me. But that doesn't spell the death of privacy ... it actually INCREASES the value and necessity for privacy - what we decide not to share is what we really, really want to keep private.

The other issue is control - if Zuckerberg can convince us all that we have no privacy, we will be more willing to cede control over our personal data to Facebook. But regardless of how open we are (I'm active on Twitter - virtually everything I post there is visible to the world) we still need to have control over WHAT is published, and HOW WIDELY it is published (arguments about the ease of finding stuff on the Internet notwithstanding). Facebook's premise and promise was that it was a social network where you could share as little or as much as you wanted, and you controlled who it was shared with. That was a heady incentive to millions of people who were uncomfortable with creating an internet presence for themselves "in the wild", and they took it up in droves. For many people, Facebook IS the Internet ... and now the trap is being closed on them in this massive bait-and-switch exercise as Facebook opens up your social graph to advertisers and commercial partners - with you having NO choice in some instances how (e.g.) your "personal interests" information is used, other than to remove it completely.

As Jeff Jarvis pointed out, Facebook started out in the "relationship" business, and now wants to be in the "identity" business - these are conflicting and conflicted ambitions, and need to be denied.

My view of the Progress/Savvion deal

... for what it's worth :)

There's plenty of talk today about the deal where Progress Software Corporation (PSC) is buying BPM vendor Savvion for about $49million - Sandy Kemsley brought it to my attention last night (in Australia) via Twitter, followed by her blog post.

My immediate reaction via Twitter was

@skemsley re PSC:Savvion - makes sense. PSC used to partner with Lombardi for BPM, probably wanted a new dance partner after IBM purchase :)

and it's still my thought that this is a defensive move by PSC - BPM and SOA are each other's "killer app", and Progress was missing the BPM part of the story. It would be interesting to see the respective timelines the IBM:Lombardi and PSC:Savvion deals have taken ... in the absence of their own BPM solution Progress have been recommending Lombardi for some time now (I'm not sure how formal the arrangement was), but it's telling that the IBM purchase was a pre-deal announcement and the deal doesn't close for some time yet, whereas the Progress purchase closes any minute - the deal was done before it was announced. So was Progress blind-sided by IBM (and react very quickly), or has the Savvion deal been going for some time now?

Most commentary I've seen so far seems to think it's a good deal - the key element I think is that there is little or no overlap with the existing PSC products (Apama CEP, Sonic SOA kit) and it DOES plug a gap in the PSC offering. It also means Progress doesn't get frozen out of the BPM market by SOA competitors like Oracle and IBM et al, when the SOA/BPM combination is becoming critical for many organisations.

There's a couple of naysayers, though: Jon Pyke of Cordys seems to think it's a waste of time and seems inclined to bag Savvion ... although that may just be his biases showing :) . His contention that the deal is not about innovation (and therefore valueless) is rather disingenuous - the deal ISN'T about innovation, but that's not where it's value comes from - it's about consolidation, defensive strengthening of the PSC portfolio and giving Savvion a platform for international growth.

Bruce Silver has a more philosophical concern with the deal: that the business-oriented BPM tools will become submerged and lost in the technical SOA world at both IBM and Progress (Malcolm Ross of Appian comforts Bruce in a comment on the post that is worth reading too!). While I agree with the concern that Lombardi will lose focus at IBM, and that PSC's strength in technical, rather than business, could mean that Savvion stops talking to the right people, I'm more comfortable with Savvion's chances. Progress has a habit of allowing acquisitions a considerable amount of autonomy (Sonic Software wasn't completely folded into PSC for some years) and separate identity. They are also conscious of their technical bent and are trying to get more "business-friendly" with their operational responsiveness theme.

John Bates of PSC gives his ten reasons for the purchase - Sandy Kemsley quipped that he left out an 11th:

in the "10 reasons" post, he forgot "Because Lombardi was already taken" ;)

as I mentioned above, I'm not convinced that was the case, but it's a distinct possibility!

[update: disclosure - I used to be a Progress customer (until I quit the job and set up by myself) so I'm pretty familiar with PSC's existing portfolio]

Related articles by Zemanta:

• Progress moves forward with Savvion BPM buy
• Progress Software Buys Savvion

The irony of talking about annoying software ...

ZDNet in the UK has an amusing article about some of the most annoying pieces of software we might come across in our PC/Mac/whatever adventures.

What's really amusing about it is that it's on a site where they split an article over 11 pages to maximise pain with the garish ads, and you have to register to comment ... you want to talk about annoying?

A tale of two conferences

As some of you know, early last week I was at Progress Technology World, a techie love-in for Progress' OpenEdge, Sonic, Actional and Apama products. Disclosure: I was there to present a customer case study of the project I've blogged earlier, so attendance was comped by Progress; we've been a Progress customer for over fifteen years, and we use Sonic's MQ and ESB products.

This week I was in Sydney for an Oracle Fusion Middleware forum - just a one day (free) set of presentations of what Oracle has in SOA/BPM/Portal stuff. We are running (what is now) Oracle's JDEdwards EnterpriseOne ERP on an Oracle database.

Now this isn't going to be a blow-by-blow technical comparison, because I'm not in a position to do so: I've used the Sonic products, but only saw Powerpoint for the Oracle stuff. The conferences were different in nature, so not directly comparable.

But (well, there HAS to be some point to this) I detected somewhat different emphases in the two events that I think define key differences in the two companies (beyond the obvious mismatch in size):

Progress Tech World demonstrated a commitment to developers - not just that there were a pile of live demos, and most presentations in the technical stream were given by practitioners (people that I've actually cut code with); but that the ethos behind it was about developing great business applications (Most companies that use Progress don't know it - they normally sell via ISVs who develop applications with the products - we are one of the few direct customers in Australia. This development emphasis is one of the reasons I think Redmonk is a great fit for Progress).

Oracle certainly has all the middleware you could ever want: Portal, messaging, appserver, ESB, BI, BPM - they've bought one of everything. They tick most boxes - WS*, JSR168, JSR170 etc. They had a good story in the presentations (though I detected some recidivism in answers to audience questions)... and it seemed to me that they are a selling organisation with development products ... and Progress is a development organisation with some products to sell.

Don't get me wrong - both companies want to sell, and neither model is "wrong" ... but there are different cultures and organisational DNA on show - and it's probably painfully obvious which I prefer! Blame it on familiarity, perhaps - or maybe credit the account manager who works hard on the relationship even when he knows our next discussion will probably mean less renewals for him.

Or maybe blame the arrogance of the Oracle VP who said "Sonic - they won't even be around in a few years!" Well the clock is on ... and I'll be interested to see if that VP is still working at Oracle then.



Technorati Tags: SOA, ESB, BPM, Oracle, Progress, Sonic

The gauntlet thrown down ...

Dennis has issued a challenge in a comment on my post about FreeAgent Central: find 100 people in Australia willing to give FAC a try, and there's the carrot of not only an Australian version, but 6 months free subscription to the service to participants.

All good, although my level of readership may make it difficult! Still - nothing will happen unless I try:

If you are (or know of) a small (1 - 3 person) professional consultancy/practice (it would possibly fit a tradesperson as well) who currently does their bookkeeping in a shoebox, leave some details here, or at Dennis' blog, or the FAC blog. By all means give the service a try as it is, but bear in mind it's made for the UK - all pounds sterling and VAT (but that's what we're trying to change, right?).

You can also keep up with what people are saying about FAC via del.icio.us, and if you're really nice you might even help with the challenge by spreading the word to any Australians you know!

Disclosure: I have absolutely no financial interest in the outcome of this - I'd just like to see more Software-as-a-Service stuff happening.


Technorati Tags: SaaS, accounting, FreeAgentCentral, for:freeagentcentral

Shout out to del.icio.us - promote "via:"!

In a comment on one of my link posts, James made the suggestion that the "via:" tag should be chained. This was in response to me linking back to his pointer, one of which had in turn had been "via:" someone else - being able to track the "chain of conversation" would be a good thing, and an extension of the "via:" reputation economy I suggested in an earlier post.

So here's a shout out to del.icio.us - let's make more of the "via:" tag!!


Technorati Tags: del.icio.us, via:, reputation

Stream of Presence

No sooner had I signed up for Twitter finally, than Stowe Boyd pointed the way to Jaiku. This seems more complete - you can actually include anything with an RSS feed - Flickr, Twitter, del.icio.us, your blog, last.fm ... so it gives a much broader view of your Web presence, or "lifestream", as Boyd phrased it. The really sweet thing is that you can have comments on anything streamed through Jaiku (is this a meta-community - comments on comments?). When you find someone on Jaiku, you can be selective about which of their streams you subscribe to - for instance if you have already subscribed to someone's blog, you don't need to do it again via jaiku (but you COULD swap your subscriptions around ...). If you want to check it out, I'm aqualung there, too.




Technorati Tags: twitter, jaiku, presence

The left and right hands aren't on speaking terms

Over the last few days, I've seen a fair few electrons displaced over IBM's announcements about Lotus Connections and Quickr (Dion points to an ITNews article which sums it up reasonably well), and while there's some interesting discussions about their pros and cons, what gets me is that there appears to be considerable overlap between Connections/Quickr and the work being done on QEDWiki.
On the one hand, it's not surprising that in an organisation the size of IBM there's some duplication of effort, but two such projects with what seem to be very similar feature sets looks careless. I'm guessing that QEDWiki may stay as the free, community-based offering, while the Lotus-branded products will be sold (they're hoping) into corporates as Enterprise2.0 - although as ITNews points out, Microsoft owns the space at the moment, and is releasing new functionality around Sharepoint.

Following up the previous thread on IBM/Rational and SaaS, Infoworld has an interview with Rational's Danny Sabbah in which he hints at, but carefully downplays, the possibility of Rational products being offered as hosted services.

Also following up on the requirements management stuff, my last post elicited a comment from Stewart Rogers of Rymatech pointing me to their Featureplan product, available on-premise or hosted. I had a look at the site, but to get more details on the hosted version and pricing, it seems I had to email their sales department. Stewart, can I suggest you check out Guy Kawasaki's recent blog post on hindering market adoption - they don't all fit, but you might recognise some of them. I'm more into VRM than CRM ...

Oh - in case you're wondering why I seem to kick IBM a bit: it's because I like a lot of what they are doing, but they seem frustratingly unable to get it all together coherently, and I'd like to see them do better. It's meant to be constructive - the corollary is that I don't mention Microsoft much ...


Technorati Tags: IBM, Lotus, Quickr, SaaS, VRM, Rational, Featureplan

A follow up post ...

My last post about IBM's apparent reluctance to go down the SaaS path has generated some activity - James included the story in his 'Blogs as RFPs' post, Cote' had some more words to say, James and I have been swapping emails about it, and the mysterious "IBM channel partner" is now thinking about blogging (good move, Nick). Oh - and I have had a few IBM-ers show up in my traffic stats ...

Nick has managed to get us a 90-day free trial of RequisitePro (had to use his OWN license to do it), so we're sorted for this project, and maybe that will be enough to persuade us to purchase an on-premise copy. But the points I made in the previous post still stand - I wasn't insisting on a freebie - I was happy to pay a reasonable rental for 'on-demand' access to the product (remember IBM - they're the 'on-demand' company?), and if and when we needed it again, we could have done the same thing. We might even have found it SO useful that we'd be happy to buy on-premise licenses - but a SaaS model reduces the risk for potential customers, without having to give away software.

Never mind - there might be some good partnerships come out of this anyway.


Technorati Tags: IBM, SaaS, Redmonk, Toast

Some fun stuff

Anybody looking in the side panel will notice I am using CoComment. This is a funky liitle gem which allows me to show what I am saying elsewhere here on my own blog (it will show other related comments, but only if the other commentor is using CoCo as well). Given I probably write more on other blogs than my own, I'm pleased that I can have that stuff here as well. Like a lot of things, it was Hugh that that brought it to my attention, and if you visit the site you'll learn more. You need an invite to get the beta, but you can ask for one there, or let me know and I'll send one.

It's definitely a work in progress, and there are still a few blogs it won't work on, but I suspect that a lot of these problems will be fixed soon.