The first episode is, well, definitely different. But let’s assume that it will turn out to be the deceiving prelude to a great series. And it is a good thing that Microsoft did not fall into the trap of competing with the Macintosh ads. Features are irrelevant anyway, as proven by Apple that manages to sell a so-so phone to a huge base of forgiving fans / clients. Or as proven by Asus with their successful, complete trimmed down mini laptop. Or as proven by Google, that shakes the market with their minimalistic browser .

The challenge for Microsoft is not to show that Vista has superior features. It is to claim their place in a changed world in which technology is becoming ubiquitous, or even invisible. So what could you do? You hire Jerry Seinfeld who is known for his ‘show about nothing’. And you create a first ad which sets a stage that is far away from technology, content and shiny features. Bill Gates buying cheap shoes, eating a Mexican churro, socialising with Seinfeld, even waggling his derriere. Nothing about Vista, just a small logo at the end and a few words about a future that will be ‘ delicious’.

That is not a commercial. That is the denial of a commercial. The future of Vista is not Windows 7, it is somewhere in the cloud. You are just looking in the wrong direction.

Think about it, we may have high expectations of the next commercial. French surrealism possibly – they should check with some of my colleagues - or a postmodern version of the Dead Parrot Scene. Seinfeld enters a computer store with a completely crushed laptop. He’s trying to convince Gates (who wears a colourful poncho) that he has sold him a broken computer. Gates refuses to admit: that PC is perfectly fine - it will be delicious actually - Seinfeld is just not getting the point. Yet.

Sean, the floor is all yours!

WIRELESS ON-SITE COLLABORATION

I just finished several days of training with some of Capgemini’s thought leadership team, and it had me thinking about some of the things I’d like to see in the future from the hardware (and to a lesser extent the software) that I use on a daily basis. We were in a training room, with multiple large panel displays. Sadly, we had to connect our laptops via the normal wired cabling, and in some cases even reduce our screen resolution. Even more annoying we couldn’t have all the displays run the same presentation off of a single source. So this got me to thinking. We were all connected via a wireless router, and it occurred to me that with a little ingenuity, we should be able to broadcast what’s on our screen, through the router, and have either a wireless receiver or a Bluetooth implementation on the panels that would then be able to subscribe to the display. Or even displays, in cases where we would want to display multiple signals simultaneously, or in some picture in picture mode. After thinking on it a little bit, it seems to me that this is something we could see in the next few years.

Wireless is already widespread, Bluetooth is fairly widespread and it didn’t seem like a huge leap to create dedicated video output to wireless. All the pieces already exist or could easily be created. It also occurred to me that this could make sharing and collaborating much easier, especially if direct Bluetooth to Bluetooth connections are supported. Then it becomes a simple matter to share screens on each other’s laptops while working on some joint collaboration. Of course, the next thought is much more involved – if we can share the video, can’t we then collaborate across the desktops, sharing data, applications and other assets? I’ll need to ponder that further, but I’m looking forward to being able to direct my laptop to a screen without the need to cable up.

Sean Rhody

First up is SAP, who deservedly, or not, are often thought of as being pretty staid, but are right out there in the forefront of Micro Blogging with Twitter. Actually, SAP are doing pretty well in the use of ‘interactive’ technologies to support their customers, partners and their own staff, and have brought into their in-house team some hot expertise from some well known Web 2.0 leaders. My SAP colleagues are active in this for the simple reason that they tell me it works for them in making ‘sharing’ of information, expertise, etc easier. However Twitter is a long way further on from the now fairly mature use of the basic capabilities that ‘Wiki’ and ‘Blog’ based collaboration provides so to find ESME, Enterprise Social Messaging Experiment, a behind the Firewall version of Twitter running on Netweaver was pretty interesting.

Well, just a few remarks. First of all, clearly platforms like Chrome prove the point of the end of the desktop operating system. And yes, if the browser becomes the unified entry point to applications, its capabilities in terms of application support may as well be re-assessed. Obviously, Rich Internet plug-ins such as Microsoft’s Silverlight and Adobe’s Flex already provide a lot of the features we need to build serious, attractive business applications. But now seems indeed a good time to sit back, have a look at that container that we call a ‘browser’ (as in ‘browsing content on the Internet’, the way it started) and see how we can reincarnate it as something better, more focussed.

Secondly, I like Google’s approach to explaining the rationale behind Chrome with cartoons. It is difficult enough to communicate new solutions to business people, and here we have a light-weight, accessible medium that may do the job neatly, reaching out to techies, their business victims and the like. It certainly beats yet another meandering white paper.

Finally, you just have to love the way that Google have developed their new open source software product. Automatically testing intermediate builds just minutes after their release on tens of thousands of different pages, is definitely a case of catching problems early. Read the cartoons, and you will understand. As open source guru Eric Raymond once stated: "given enough eyeballs, all bugs are shallow". Guess Google now added something like “o, and a really, really massive test bed won’t hurt either”. To me, that is the real Gold in Chrome.

For some, this is a flash back to the late 90’s browser wars of Netscape vs IE, where whole teams of IT strategists and advisors would painstakingly determine which approach was going to serve the organisation best.

But taken in context of Google’s ongoing mission, it’s something really rather different. Here’s a little of what Google say about…

‘All of us at Google spend much of our time working inside a browser. We search, chat, email and collaborate in a browser. And in our spare time, we shop, bank, read news and keep in touch with friends -- all using a browser. Because we spend so much time online, we began seriously thinking about what kind of browser could exist if we started from scratch and built on the best elements out there. We realized that the web had evolved from mainly simple text pages to rich, interactive applications and that we needed to completely rethink the browser. What we really needed was not just a browser, but also a modern platform for web pages and applications, and that's what we set out to build.’

Along with Android, Google is changing the game of personal computing by moving the user’s first point of information access and organisation away from the user interface of the computer or phone and toward the Internet access platform – ‘the browser’.

If most of the useful information I want is on the Internet, it’s the Internet information access service I’m going to want to be really useful more than the desktop or phone device interface itself. Of course, the economic and business model that underpins Chrome is bang in Google’s sweet spot. And to my mind this is another indication that the 3 trends of 21st century business architecture seem to be holding true.

A positive move for the global socio-technical environment and an intriguing development for the industry.

The Web is shifting the world toward ‘people-centric’ information technology, or in other words, technology which more naturally supports how people behave – and therefore how organisations behave. New terms have been coined in an attempt to create helpful distinctions between pre and post-Web IT.

In my view, the Hype Cycle has reflected neatly the rapidly evolving nature of the IT profession pre-Web. But in the post-Web world, does it provide the full picture for everyday business and users? Should business be thinking about 27 technologies that will impact the world, or 5 computer clouds, or both in equal measure?

To my mind, the answer starts with the emerging role of the post-Web IT department.

That is, should businesses and governments primarily be in the business of creating services, or should they be in the business of configuring and consuming them?

It’s an important point as when you boil it down, most IT departments of most organisations have been developing on IT products to turn them into useful information services since the beginning of IT. Hence the relevance of the Hype Cycle.

But as the post-Web IT profession and IT department evolves its maturity, where might we look to understand adoption trends to help us place our strategic bets?

Here, Tim Berners-Lee’s ‘2 Magics of Web Science’ provides in my opinion a good foundational model.

What’s more, something quite interesting happens when you put the two pictures of the Hype Cycle and the 2 Magics together – a quite rich technical and societal picture emerges, and it is perhaps in this socio-technical combination that some of the post-Web information systems strategic planning golden nuggets lie for organisations.

The really interesting and challenging piece of course is that the ‘magic’ bit in the 2 Magics – creativity and collaboration - is down to people, and they tend to be unpredictable! (There'll be a guest post relevant to this 2nd magic soon…)

The first stage for many committed Wii users is to download the Opera Browser and surfing from their Wii console graduating towards Wii based Social Networking. This is only scratching the surface of what this kind of interaction is already bringing us. Take a deeper look at the Wiitalk site and you will find that you can construct your own avatar in a crude way.

In short both devices make the multi media life style, as opposed to what I would call the home use of a PC a reality. If you are using one of these devices with in excess of 100Gb of storage, always on Internet and wireless connectivity will it change what you do on the over the Internet and in using the Web? The only possible answer is yes, as you will no longer think about many of the current constraints that cover the use of digital media.

As always, thoughts and/or comments are greatly appreciated.

This issue:

• Has Apple helped create the real Web 2.0? [psfk]
  Is Apple breaking away from today's browser centric applications to be the first to create the user centric web?
• The Web that time forgot [The New York Times]
  More than half a century before Tim Berners-Lee released the first Web browser in 1991, Otlet (pronounced ot-LAY) described a networked world where “anyone in his armchair would be able to contemplate the whole of creation.”
• Gartner identifies top ten disruptive technologies for 2008 to 2012 [eHomeUpgrade]
  Agree or disagree?
• Pixar's tightknit culture is its edge [Signal vs. Noise]
  As the pace of change increases, and companies increasingly hand once core elements of their business to partners, it's a companies culture that provides its edge.

Many regions will have their own, excellent best practices (the NBC Olympics site for example), but in my home country – the Netherlands – the official Dutch Television Olympics website has drawn a lot of attention. Not only because people eagerly want to follow our nation’s neck and neck race with China in winning the most medals, but also because the site is an excellent showcase of how Rich Internet Applications and Web 2.0 concepts combine into a truly compelling result. Have a look yourself (I take it the Dutch language is self-explanatory to most of you) and see how many recent, good IT ideas fluently merge into one experience.

The challenge is not the topics, in fact I reckon they have done a pretty good job of highlighting technologies across the width of Industry, even though some, like solid state drives, are a little out of the playing field for my tastes. No, it’s the timings of the so called ‘S’ curve as the technology moves through five states; Emerging (interesting to enthusiasts); into Hype (does everything and more than you ever wanted); to Trough of disillusionment (no doesn’t do everything and its over sold); into Rising market (but it works really well in the right areas); to finally Plateau (mature and everyone uses it now).

Katiushka Borges is Senior Advisor for Capgemini UK.
She is a communications specialist, journalist, psychological profiler, NLP Master business trainer, CXO executive coach and ‘half a geek’.

"I’ve been working for at least 20 years trying to understand what make business leaders succeed by choosing to ‘put myself in their shoes’. I have tried all sorts of fine pairs, styles and shapes to understand what makes them tick.
Early this year, I decided to try on ‘the shoes of the most influential CIOs’ that are now leading the way. What an exciting experience!
These new CIO shoes felt like a glove with wings, so I decided to walk the path of this new generation of amazing CIO leaders and pay respect to them as they can inspire us all!
Please take a look at their leadership styles, and notice what has changed from the role of IT Director to the new influential CIO.

We now follow the ‘scent’ of the topic that interests us jumping from site to site and skimming the text looking for instant recognition of the key facts that we seek. He has much to say on how to create readable content that will be easy to assimilate and gets the maximum across in the minimum number of words to suit this behaviour. All good stuff, and for those of us who are trying to maximise the use of online to ‘market’, ‘inform’, or whatever, worth following so here is the link, and following his advice I didn’t provide the link till I had made you read the above!!

BUT here is the controversial point – he doesn’t believe in Blogging! Quote; ‘such postings are good for generating controversy and short term traffic …. but they don’t build sustainable value’.

However the big reason that was supposed to be the reason for adoption namely that that the limited number of IPv4 addresses would bring a limit to Internet expansion has not yet proven to be the issue that needs to be addressed. In fact I don’t think I have ever seen any comments from any user/administration direction that says this is proving to be an operational issue right now. So it seems we can all sit back and wait this one out till it does become an issue, right? Wrong!