Online shared intelligence

Alaska Airlines distributes religious material in their food trays. They know you may not be a catholic, or christian, but they don’t care: if you don’t like it so be it. I say NO, I don’t like it and I choose not to spend my $12,000 a year with Alaska any more. You should do the same, even if you ARE religious. The principle of being respected in your beliefs is at stake.

Apple is becoming more and more Big Brother and less and less the innovator; that is wrong, and outbalances their ability to deliver well-packaged functionality. It’s time to start favoring other challengers, and the phone market is full of them.

COX Cable censors some numbers and you cannot call them. That has nothing to do with content, or porno, or any other convoluted excuse. They do it because they don’t make sufficient money on those numbers. So, I will cancel all their services, and walk away happy that they won’t have my $60,000 every ten years.

Silverlight, Microsoft’s latest piece of bloatware, is here to compete with Flash, a slick, multi-platform media delivery platform. Just to convince you that it is needed (why, oh, why, would we need another plugin), it will bomb your machine mercilessly. Unless, of course, it is running Windoz… Typical Microsoft.

A friend asked me if I was planning to get an iPad. I started answering “I haven’t decided yet” and then, without even an inflection on my voice, before ending the sentence I added to it “why I will buy it”. In other words, the decision to buy it is already there, I will just need to think of a valid justification. Further, the decision is there because I have a lot of speculative reasons to buy it, but still the purchase will be compulsive. Hats off to Apple for getting me in this unconditional purchase mode… So, I thought, let’s commit to this blog the reasons I can think of at this time, and get back to check the accuracy of my predictions in four months.

Evernote, with its apparently simple functional set, and the humble “note” as key metaphor, is taking over the domain of more and more applications, and in the process becoming irreplaceable for me. Makes me wander if “note taking” is not a term that has suffered excessive trivialization…

The buzz is slowly rising, in preparation for the October SharePoint 2010 conference, and the E2.0 conference somehow amplifies it. I can’t avoid but feeling a little alienated, to say the least, by what I perceive as a gap between reality and FUD.

A quick scan of enterprise feeds is enough to convince us that any company in the Web 2.0 space is about to shut down because of SharePoint’s presumably unstoppable momentum. And yet:

• Half of SharePoint users use it just as a file manager, not surprising, considering that that is the only part of SharePoint that users get for “free” with Windows Server;
• For SharePoint, social enterprise seems to be all about having wikis, blogs and a MySite page for each user (which can be expected to be the focus of SharePoint 2010), whereas most social enterprise leaders like Jive are already moving into what Kathleen Reidy of the 451 group calls “use cases, not tools” which in other words means real solutions for innovation, brand management, customer relationships, and more, as opposed to the possibilities opened by tool kits;
• Talk to any SharePoint implementation partner, and you find that by far most of the money spent in SharePoint projects is going into basic content management functionality, from extending search to be able to manage run amok SharePoint 2003 silos to getting workflow to work, and not into all the things that supposedly make SharePoint so “dangerous for E2.0 vendors”;
• The fact that most crucial business workflows are already managed by incumbent CMS’s like Documentum and IBM FileNet (and woven into it very strong content dependencies) is not frequently discussed, which is dangerous, because the most attractive bells and whistles in SharePoint only shine when SharePoint has omnipotent control of all content.

I suspect that such a gap between reality and KoolAid sweetness will take a few years to settle (Microsoft is putting s lot of fans into creating the dust storm). When that dust settles, I suspect the landscape will look like this:

• A content management layer where SharePoint will coexist tightly with other multiple Content Management silos;
• A basic team collaboration set of services, perhaps complemented with equally basic expertise location and small scale social snippets (and yes, very squarish and SilverLight-ribbon-heavy MySites);
• A thin coat of partner paint, delivering supplementary web parts (the same ones that Microsoft will deliver as “good enough” web parts in the next release) and trying to stay away from the proverbial elephant;
• A thriving layer of social, enterprise 2.0, solution oriented innovators that use all of the above as a source of content to feed interactions, activities, semantic knowledge, innovation management, brand management and many other Enterprise 2.0 functions;

I am sure there will be companies that implement the whole thing using Microsoft’s stack (who doesn’t like to be featured  in every Microsoft brochure and presentation, after all?) but the business transformation that Enterprise 2.0 requires will not be built like that: business just can’t wait for Microsoft…

At a time when Web 2.0 and wonderful technologies such as Flash, Air, AJAX, social business, innovation hubs, user-centric workspaces, and much, much more, are making the web into the creative fertile ground of a small, but quickly growing garden, with engaging and absorbing delivery strategies combining and evolving, always testing the future, here come the bottom-feeders (?). SharePoint the platform of the future? It surely is being touted as a thing of the past…

I really have no idea, I just heard the rumor. But for some reason, the driver for the MiFi is already built into OS X since 10.4 (As just read from the MiFi manual). Connect the dots:

• The MiFi is the killer enabler for netbooks-like computers;
• The netbooks have miniaturized to the point where they are becoming to use a keyboard and/or a good screen at the same time
• The Windows tablet is horrible, but an Apple one, with an iPod / iPhone interface would be awesome
• The iBlet (like the name?) is the drooling dream of anybody using iPods, iPhones, Macs, and quite a few Win-zealots

If it happens before September, send me a cookie. If it’s called iBlet, send me an email and I will send YOU the cookie.

The MiFi is not a revolutionary concept, or a totally new product. But I tell you, it will revolutionize the way people like me work. Constant connectivity in a computer with true computer ergonomics is now a reality