"I said, well daddy dont you know that things go in cycles
The way that Bobby Brown is just ampin like Michael" - A Tribe Called Quest
I think that there is indeed a pendulum effect of over-reaction from one mainstream mindset to the other. But one things is for sure, no company in the past was able to predict what the future would bring - if they did they would have switched their ways. I think the sad fact is that these changes in mainstream mindset are very fluid and hard to predict and survival of the fittest company/solution is very much a game of chance.
This might be a reason for the longevity of larger companies like GE that can afford to have many bets on the table.
While I am a bit worried about how scatterbrained AdventNet seems to be - I do think that they have a chance to disrupt a very inefficient and parasitic software eco-system that exists in Business Software. They only need to figure out the integration piece and the fact that they have played with some Microsoft Active Directory tools and embrace outside identity systems may help them get there.
I have found that the biggest draw to "integrated" software is not having a new set of credentials to login into it.
I am finding some success with technologies that can play nice with various directories. I am currently playing with Novell's EDirectory and its Identity Management solutions and it surprises me how few companies focus on what I see as one of the central problems in business IT: the seamless integration between the company's CRM, the team's contacts and the directories that power each business solution.
There is a huge need for a business class 'identity-in-the-cloud' solution that speak to many internal systems using software hooks/drivers that are very transparent, have good auditing and can be controlled by the company/customer.
I bet a large percentage of software projects at companies have overlapping user management sub-systems that could be better addressed by an identity-in-the-cloud system like the ones emerging from Microsoft, Google et al.
And for those who say that your company has too many secrets to possibly use an outside solution for identity - get over it, it is not true. You have many people forwarding things to their Gmail accounts and many mobile devices around the country without even a pin code to secure them. Your sense of security is an illusion, embrace solutions that can provide complete audits of what happens with them, then you will know how insecure you really are and plan around the fact that total security is impossible. And your internal development team will never reach the self-auditing stage of the solution because as soon as it half works they are pulled to something else.
I am currently reading 'The Black Swan' and he does a good job of explaining how some fields lend themselves to extremes and others don't and that it is hard for our minds to wrap themselves around this. He explains that if you take the shortest person ever and the tallest person ever - the differences would be a lot but not orders of magnitude greater. Yet, if we were to take this year's best selling book, it would be so many orders of magnitude more than the least selling book. Our minds have a hard time dealing with comparisons that don't have real world equivalents.
What this does is create an opportunity for some industries to have 'winner takes almost all' scenarios. Book publishing and POP music are two examples where the very top people take almost all the rewards. Brain surgeon is not one of these industries - being the very best brain surgeon would still require a (in comparison) a lot more time than the author of the Harry Potter books takes to sell another book.
Most wealth is created by massively scalable business models such as licensing, show biz and mass media. And interestingly not that many fortunes come from Wall Street.
I was there, part of the Pseudo team, and I can say that it was just one idea from being wildly successful - user generated content. We had done some amazing things with early streaming as one of the first realaudio sites. As with most ideas, the idea of user generated content was there but broadband lines were not what they are today - so the user content focus was chat - which we now know is not enough. I think Pseudo was doing some genuine innovating in streaming, high traffic sites, crawlers and intense live video (some shows were 7 hours long!). But in the end we only hear about the successes and the silent evidence of the failures usually goes unnoticed. I think Pseudo was what MTV would have been had it been 5 years too early in trying to go on the air.
I think this might be a useful application for mobile devices. Maybe a sort of newsreader that would pre-load the day's headlines and let you read them this way on the subway...
I totally agree that things could always be better and that incentives are the key to this. There is a business concept from the 80s called 'open book management' where everyone in the company sees where all the money goes. This is more transparency than even public companies have.
I think it could be a technique that would get everyone from accounting to IT more involved in the business. I also think there needs to be much shorter expectations of how long someone will work for a company. Hollywood is on to something with the way they bring together small teams to make a film that then disband and reform in a new configuration for the next film. I wonder what would happen if every person in the company had to choose each year whether they want to continue with the company. They would in effect have a one year job. This might make their sense of urgency and priority for the 52 weeks within that year much more focused. It might also form a company with much more dedicated people who really want to be there.
These tools are great and I love DabbleDB. But I think the powerful version of these same concepts is a 'Data Repository and Reporting' service. A service that lets you suck in data from many sources (csv, Web Feeds, Database Queries, Emailed Reports, SMS, mailing lists, etc). It would not be scared to hold all this data for me and keep it secure (and would charge me for usage so that people with lots of data pay their due). It would then give me a very flexible "Crystal Reports 2.0" meets DabbleDB interface to relate, dedupe, create conflict rules and schedule data refreshes. It would then let me create beautiful reports that can be embedded in a CMS, emailed, published like a Google Doc and versioned. If anyone is working on something like this, I have lots of ideas of how it should work that I would be happy to share.
I don't think IT will ever become that important. IT will just take its rightful place next to Law Firms and Accounting Firms as a necessary part of the business but not the core.
It is kind of surprising that IT, with its self references as fast-paced and innovative has taken so long to realize its own inefficiencies. IT (in the sense of internal computer systems for businesses) was greatly over invested starting in the 90s because the executives of the time were so scared. I remember stories of Hollywood executives who would ask their assistants to surf websites they were going to invest in and videotape it. They would take these video tapes home for 'research' the same way they would research actors, directors and movies to invest in. They completely didn't get it. So what did they do? They did what most people do when they are scared, they try to buy insurance. This insurance came in over-investment in all things technology both externally and internally, leading to huge IT departments that then used their bulk to buy more technology and increase their internal political might until all this over investment corrected itself in the legendary bubble pop.
I think when all is said and done, IT will be just like Payroll. When was the last time you met a person who works 40 hours a week processing payroll? They used to exist at every company - now everyone's checks come from ADP or PayChex. IT will be done by an outside company and will part of the budget for each person on the payroll. But of course I am a little biased...
Hmm, payroll - There is an industry to be disrupted...
I think the problem with 'simpler' computers is similar to the problem with WYSIWYG development and database platforms: they are too simple for anyone whose job or interest it is to create a webpage or database and too complex for the ocassional user. This is why MySpace took off where all the many DIY webpage creation tools did not. MySpace redefined the goal with tools that leveraged the hidden desires of people to have a webpage. In the case of MySpace is was to socialize. Most people don't think of MySpace and Facebook as a web development tool but if you look at what the end result is, you'll see that people are creating online content using these social networks.
So the problem of "simpler browsers" will likely only be solved by solutions that redefine the experience and goal and it will likely be very close to what we now call a smartphone.
I think that there is indeed a pendulum effect of over-reaction from one mainstream mindset to the other. But one things is for sure, no company in the past was able to predict what the future would bring - if they did they would have switched their ways. I think the sad fact is that these changes in mainstream mindset are very fluid and hard to predict and survival of the fittest company/solution is very much a game of chance.
This might be a reason for the longevity of larger companies like GE that can afford to have many bets on the table.