Social Networking Archives - e2insideoute2insideout

Today you have to choose as an enterprise if you are in the Yammer camp, the Chatter camp or one of the other similiar locked down tools. What frustrates me is that a Chatter conversation cannot mix with a Yammer conversation and vice-versa. We are expected that all the people we need to socialise for work will be on the same tool. By the way this is the same in the consumer social space, Google+ and Facebook don’t mix and match either.

But imagine that you had a cellphone and you could only talk to people on the same carrier as you. Frustrating hey. You’d have to either convince everyone to join AT&T or whoever OR you would have to have a phone for each carrier !

Of course you can phone anybody on any carrier on any network on any device anywhere in the world.

We need the same open-standards for social especially in the corporate space. B2B, B2C, etc. means we do not have control on the tools each person and each company will have and we cannot be constrained in our ability to function, collaborate and progress by the tools.

When will we see open-standards for social. I am not holding my breath. The open standards movements of the 90’s that led to HTML and other advances seems to have given way to closed-walled gardens. These closed-walled gardens are great for the powerful vendors as they lock you into their system. Apple does it with their AppStore ecosystem, Microsoft with their SharePoint/Yammer space, Salesforce with theirs.

I hope for change but suspect it won’t come from these big companies but instead from some small startup that works out the magic sauce to get these to interact. Of course we will then have to watch out for the lawyers and patent trolls. Hopefully the start up will survive.

I have had some time over the break to read, think and pull together a list of topics I want to cover on this blog over 2012.

1) HTML 5 vs Native Webapp Development – a lot of movement in this area and if devices continue to evolve then a device-agnostic approach seems to make most sense. But open-eyes are needed going in.

2) Search – The concept of Enterprise Search has been a lofty goal for quite some time, you can achieve 90%+ in the unstructured space and adding the structured is possible although costly. But has Enterprise Search been surpassed by the need for Hybrid search and how do we manage the cost of search infrastructure, cloud/external hosting makes sense but IP protection concerns are a barrier – or are they.

3) The big 3 (or 4), Google, Apple, Microsoft and Amazon – yes Amazon. All these are affecting the direction of everything technology, from OS to devices, from productivity software to the way software is developed and hosted.

4) Patent wars – 2011 was characterised by many things including major buy-up of Patents and a lot of work for lawyers. Nearly everyone was suing everyone and I foresee as the economy is still weak, 2012 and 2013 will continue in this vein.

5) Microsoft and Apple – 1990 and 2000 was all Microsoft and Apple were in the minority. In an enterprise you couldn’t go wrong saying Microsoft and desktops were Microsoft, Microsoft, Microsoft. Google played a little in enterprise in the mid 2000’s but kept abandoning products. But Apple by not paying attention to the enterprise changed it by going after the consumer and ensuring IT departments were caught off guard by a flood of Apple devices (iOS and Mac). And right at the end of 2011 Google announced Google+ for enterprises and started to win some big Google App battles. Renewed interest from Google, why and what will it mean going forward.

6) Mobile Devices and Collaboration – From PalmPC’s to HP Jornada to BlackBerry to iPhone. From TabletPC to iPad to Kindle. Apple seemed to have it locked down, Google with Android took over market share but had patent wars beyond belief and Amazon stole the low end iPad market with Kindle Fire ! It is all changing and I suspect 2013 will deliver more surprises.

7) Social Networking – lots of buzz in this area for years and the focus historically has been on connecting people inside an organisation. But as organisations realize they don’t know it all and they can actually utilise expertise outside cheaper than having staff on payroll the concept of true social connection across organisation boundaries will become a reality. But what about Personal Information Protection and the Data Protection rules in different countries !

8) And Microsoft again – 2012 is a massive year for them with Windows 8, Windows 8 server, updates to their cloud and Office offerings. New OS for their Windows Phone. All this seems to come together into a single eco-system which with ARM support can now be used across device-chip types. But what about the search and consumer space. Well Bing continues to make progress and comes with innovative features we would expect from Google ! and Kinect for XBox will move into the enterprise in 2012. A new XBox could also be coming becoming more of a information/entertainment hub than a games console (you can see this with the Fall 2012 update for XBox360).

Well thats my list for starters 🙂