http://www.techcrunchit.com/2008/08/01/welcome-to-web-30-now-your-other-computer-is-a-data-center/

The following is just a bulleted list of responses to both the article and user comments.

Agree – Web 3.0: Anyone Can Innovate

* A lot of people use it. It becomes a plague. Then people don’t use it. Look at the number of blogs that have the digg, reddit, stumbleupon, bookmark and delicious icons at the end of each post. Do you really use those links?Untethered Innovation = del.icio.us then digg.com then reddit then stumbleupon then buzz up. How many of those do you use to its fullest potential?
* Look at SFDC. I run an org of 70 users and it is amazing how people will sit in a meeting and stress how important an app like SFDC is to our company as a whole, then not use it. The only way employees end up using it is when the executives hold a gun to their head or their salaries are tied to the data in the system.
* We in the development and IT world need to get over ourselves and realize the day-to-day employees making the world’s largest companies run do not know what RSS is, don’t know how to post to an ftp server, will have a completely different definition of the term “cloud” than you might expect, have never heard of any Web 2.0 app, don’t know that an app running Ruby, AJAX and XAML can help anything or even how to insert a picture into a Microsoft Word document. They don’t understand the name of the application – joomla!, xoop, twitter, mint, jiglu, drupal, doof, iubo – much less how to use the functionality offered by such an app. Even if you do get them to use it, they inevitably come to one thing – one tiny, tiny obstacle – in the app they cannot overcome and they completely abandon it; give up on it and say “its too hard!” Innovation, therefore, becomes a vicious cycle.
* Marc is right, Web 3.0 is “the stuff of revolution.” Out of chaos, will come order (because someone will see profit in bringing order). Then there will be chaos again, then order.
* We end up with a very, very crowded marketplace. Look at this Web 2.0 directory – http://www.go2web20.net/ – and think about how many of those little apps do something very, very similar to the next only slightly different. In the end, we are going to get a ton of apps that do one thing slightly different than the next. They become a solution looking for a problem and that, my friend, is not innovation.
* We only buy the “shiny thing”. SaaS was, and is, the latest “shiny thing”. Business executives who don’t understand the cloud, what it takes to develop apps or the damage that can be done to thier company if the app is not properly used, feel as though they must have these technologies running their companies and, if not, they are considered ‘innefective leaders with a lack to innovate.
* When the world was small, we could understand it. I don’t like the way people can anonymously sit behind a computer monitor and tear apart someone eles’ attempt to make things understood; like Benioff is doing here. We in the development and IT world are the main culprits. But, then again, that is Web 2.0, isn’t it?

Technically, it is a sound move. Windows Server 2008, IIS 7 and .NET 3.5 are the latest generation Windows OS and web hosting environment. The site I am managing isn’t even that complex of a site.

Politically, it seems there are so many people you have to “sell” in order to make the move.

That’s fine, but it is teaching me a skill I didn’t think I would learn while trying to upgrade a web hosting environment – create a win for a customer, create a win for someone internally, and create a win for myself.

All good skills, I must say, but I never would have thought I would be honing the above skill this way.

For example, here is my inventory:

- This site (link)

- Family blog (link)

- Family pictures (link)

- My LinkedIn network (link)

- My amazon.com wish list (link)

- My bungie.net profile (link)

- My gamepsot.com blog (link)

- My salesforce.com profile (link)

And, if you are looking for it, I do not have a facebook or MySpace account.

Read this for background

If the company is expecting “commitment” from the employee, should the employee expect “commitment” from the company?

I can’t help but think that if a company hits a down market or slow growth that the company won’t be so “commited” to the employee. Maybe the reason that the employee is moving between jobs every 3.5 years is that he/she needs to move across the country or hates his/her job enough that they are doing more harm to the company than good by staying. Lets not paint with a broad brush and say that the reason employees leave every 3.5 years is because they are “not commited.”

If the company can change, why can’t the employee?

A company must be flexible and must change in order to stay successful and do the most good for its stakeholders, so too must the employee. Why, then, is the employee labeled as “not commited” when they must make a change in their life?

Define Commitment

So what does “commitment” look like for an employee? Is the definition of “commitment” simply a 5-year tenure at minimum? OK. We’ll work with that.

Lets ask the thousands that are laid off each year by poor management decisions (countrywide loans), companies going bankrupt (enron), banks being ran on (Bear Stearns). Are those companies, and the senior managers that run them, considered “not commited”? Hardly.

So what is the equivalent for the company? Is “commitment” for the company defined as offering benefits coverage? Well, what about those companies that offer very poor benefits or hardly match any 401k contribution? Is a company offering low-cost benefits and a manageable 401k contribution the same as an employee putting in 3.5 years at a company? Maybe so.

Framing the conversation

This is an interesting conversation and my thoughts above are not fully developed, but lets be careful about how we frame this discuss.

Look, employees can always do better and companies can always do better. So which side of the equation should move first?

Here are my keys to the vendor relationship.

=== Regular Communication ===

A systematic and regular form of communication is important to establish early. This is important for two reasons:

1. Reduce Anxiety : As a vendor, I knew that my point of contact at the client’s office was being measured by how I performed as a vendor but, most importantly, they were being measured by how well they managed me. Every vendor should realize that they need to make their client point of contact look good. One very easy way of doing this is by reducing anxiety. Having a systematic and regular form of communication forced me as the vendor to “think ahead” of what the client is going to ask me and it allows the client a medium to release any anxiety they may have about the success of the project or ask a question of you that they were asked and did not have an answer for.

Everyone wants to look good to their boss, everyone wants to look like they are under control and that the project is being managed well. Boss’ secretly believe that if those three things are happening, then the project will have a successful outcome.

“Wait! I hate weekly meetings!” – Me too, primarily because people do not think them through, prepare for them, or realize the opportunity they have to promote/sell a new idea, create synergy as a team, etc. Most often, those dreaded weekly meetings are never prepared for because vendors think they can just “dog and pony” their way through the entire meeting and update. Not true.

As a vendor, I created a list of ideas that I wanted to implement. Some very minor in terms of changes, some were pretty radical. But I had ideas. So on a regular basis – probably once a month – I would pull out a new idea. It would surprise my client, sometimes they would react positively and grant my wishes to implement the idea and sometimes they wouldn’t. With either outcome I win because it showed the client I was thinking about them strategically, or I was giving them ideas that they could take back to their boss and – here it is again – look good to their bosses. It is a mutually beneficial situation; I get a longer life as a vendor and my client point of contact has no anxiety, looks good to their boss and feels that they are managing me very well.

=== Crisis Management ===

2. Increase camaraderie : We all have those YIKES! moments where we think the world in crumbling in on top of us. When something in the project does go wrong, if you don’t have the documented outcomes of #1 above then guess who gets the bear the burden of the fall – the vendor. I’ve managed a vendor where we had a crisis and all I wanted was to be in constant contact. I got nothing from them. They knew things were wrong, I knew things were wrong and they were not responding to phone calls or emails.

To me, as the client in this scenario, I thought I was going to be fired because – here it is again – it didn’t look like I was managing my vendor well, I didn’t look good to my boss and I was full of anxiety. I was “contents under pressure” and hardly anyone makes a good decision under those circumstances.

I wasn’t keying in on the mistake, I was keying in on the complete lack of information coming from the vendor. That is what made me the most angry and is the reason that we will no longer work with that vendor.

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