Instead of saying, “I’m going to write a blog post now,” or “I’m going to send an e-mail” or “I think I’ll tweet something” you simply say what you have to say, then decide who you’re going to say it to:

• If you address it to “Public,” it’s a blog post.
• If you address it to “Your Circles” it’s a tweet.
• If you address it to your “My Customers” Circle it’s a business newsletter.
• If you address it to a single person, it can be a letter to your mother.

I’d say this is pretty revolutionary.

The Google+ Circles enable this type of interaction – and it is nothing like a Facebook’s ‘list’, as the circle is also a content filtering mechanism far more efficient than anything on offer by Facebook, Twitter, or Linkedin.

The red dots are the tracker sites (confirmed by privacychoice.org). The two separate dots are mozilla.com (grey) sending information to webtrendsline.com (red), while wordpress.com sends information to wp.com, youtube.com, gravatar.com and quantserve.com (red) (top right five dots)

The big one, which surprised me, created by visiting arstechnica.com, amazon.com and cnn.com – only three sites – and another 27 companies know about my web browsing! Most of whom I have never heard about. For example, loading an arstechnica.com webpage will send your browsing information to Twitter, Facebook, scorecardresearch, outbrain.com, 2mdm.net, addtoany.com, reddit.com, doubleclick.net, and Google.

And sites like scorecardresearch, facebook and doubleclick (owned by Google) collects from other sites.  Basically, they are likely to know more about you than any government organisation and maybe even your friends.

Paranoid yet?

I occasionally read Nick Malik‘s blog, Inside Architecture, and his latest post about ‘Business Capability’ reminded me of IT people’s general ability to take a perfectly understandable word, such as capability, and turn it into something confusing. This is not a criticism of Nick or Paul Harmon who wrote the article, Capabilities and Processes, that promoted Nick to write – but merely used as an example to illustrate my point.

Now, IT’s definition of ‘Business Capability’ is ‘what a business does at its core‘, and its description (e.g., model) captures ‘what the business does (or needs to do) in order to fulfil its objectives and responsibilities‘. The idea is to focus on ‘what‘ an organisation needs to do, rather than the actual ‘how‘. A conceptual view, if you like. And so the discussion continues in search of the ‘what’ and what it really is.

I think the confusion around ‘Business Capability’ stems from the fact, that a noun can refer to an entity, a quality, a state, an action, or a concept. The above definition uses capability (the noun) in the meaning of an action, entity or concept, whereas ‘capability’ in its literal definition is a noun in the sense of a quality. Webster defines ‘capability’, as ‘the quality or state of being capable‘‘ – i.e., the degree to which an organisation is able to perform the ‘what’ rather than the ‘what’.

Within the management (rather than IT) literature, we find, that Grant (2002, p. 145) uses the term ‘capabilities’ in reference to an organisation’s capacity to undertake a particular activity. Similarly, Hanson (2002, p. 20) views organisational ‘capabilities’, as the capacity to deploy resources integrated to achieve a desired end state. In other words, a capability is a qualitative measure of an organisation’s skill and abilities, rather than what an organisation does – which is why they are often difficult to imitate. For example, Apple‘s capabilities in designing a new tablet are hard to imitate as evident by the poor reception of competing Android based tablets. Although the competing organisations know the required design activities (the conceptual view of ‘what’), their capacity to perform those activities are less than Apple’s.

No wonder people get confused.

References

Grant RM, 2002, Contemporary Strategy Analysis: Concepts Techniques and Applications, 4th edn, Blackwell, Oxford.
Hanson D, Dowling P, Hitt M & Ireland RD, 2002, Strategic Management: Competitiveness and Globalisation, Pacific Rim edn, Nelson, Melbourne, pp. 85-115.

Google has always been about getting the job done, and I think Google’s interpretation of a social networking site is about productivity and collaboration (one of the key features of Google Docs). In contrast, Facebook is mainly about keeping up with your ‘friends’ and playing a game or two – a virtual version of playing the games console at home while chatting with your friends (and watching a bunch of ads). Google’s strength in the social networking market will be their ability to turn the social networking experience into a useful experience for yourself and your friends; rather than being a time waster.

The more offerings Google is able to integrate; the bigger the differentiator to someone like Facebook. People isn’t going to leave Facebook, because Google+ is social feature by social feature better than Facebook. They’ll move to Google+, because they’ll find all of Google’s offerings in one place – and having your ‘friends’ in that same place will be handy for doing more than just chatting and play a game or two. Like organising a trip using Google Docs, Maps and Calendar in the hangout area, or reviewing tomorrows presentation with work colleagues. Or go virtual shopping together using Sparks and Shopping. Now add the Google Apps Marketplace and Android, and the sky’s the limit.

Google+ is really about you and your friends + Google; rather than just Google+.

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According to a recent survey by MIT Sloan Management Review, 60% of employees surveyed don’t have enough data to do their jobs. And it is not a technology challenge; but rather cultural and management. Not an entirely encouraging statistics in the context of the growing importance of the tertiary sector of our economies – information is key, especially if you work within the IT industry.

The survey reminded me about Nonaka, a professor in management research. According to him, we have two kinds of knowledge – explicit and tacit; and four knowledge processes (framed below in the context of software architecture):

• From Tacit to Tacit – when a less experienced architect (or wannabe architect) observes a master architect in action; if your organisation has a shortage of good architects, then this one is important.
• From Explicit to Explicit – an individual can combine separate pieces of information into a new whole, e.g., combining several architectural styles and patterns into a new, solution specific architecture. But explicit descriptions are only as good as people’s ability to read and understand them – i.e., the tacit knowledge the reader is assumed to possess.
• From Tacit to Explicit – when specialists are able to articulate more of what they know, e.g., capture and describe unique reference architecture or new patterns. Do you or your organisation really knowledge how well the architecture is working for each system and project?
• From Explicit to Tacit – i.e., you learn by doing. You can only learn so much by reading, and the next step is always applying the acquired knowledge in practice. Are your architects following the templates, styles, references, patterns; or are they just making it up from scratch?

The key is the tacit knowledge, that people need in order to perform the four processes well – and mentoring people in how to do them is central to any organisation’s ability to `empower’ (another good management word) their employees. And as an architect, it is important to step back from the daily activities, and consider what you are doing as part of the four knowledge processes. Your architecture is only as good as the available mentoring…

References
Nonaka I, 1991, ‘The knowledge creating company’, Harvard Business Review, Nov-Dec, pp. 96-104.
Nina Kruschwitz and Rebecca Shockley, 2011, ‘First Look: The Second Annual New Intelligent Enterprise Survey‘, MIT Sloan Management Review.

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InfoWorld published a story last week titled the Top 10 worst cloud outages. The article certainly makes for good reading, although it would be nice, if people would stop acting so surprised about cloud failures. It is after all just software and server hardware, and, while very clever, all technology fail at some point despite the recent hype. In fact, the more you have, the more likely it is to experience failures. A Cloud vendor would actually need to work harder to just match a ‘simpler’, traditional data centre in terms of high availability.

The Butterfly Effect

The most important lesson taught at a first aid course is to ‘stop the accident’ – the same is starting to apply to highly interconnected software systems.

The recent Gmail failure caused by a software bug discovered during the deployment process, yet it still managed to affect 0.02 percentage of Gmail users. Skype has experienced two outages due to a combination of localised high load and a (replicated) software bug (discussed here and here). Amazon’s recent failure was a network misconfiguration which escalated into a data replication storm.

High availability built through infrastructure replication typically still share the same software infrastructure, e.g., multiple deployments, same code, so a bug in one equals a bug in all. The space shuttle had two separate flight systems to avoid this and achieve high reliability – not the same as high availability – which in a cloud computing context equals the ability to use two (or more) alternative cloud vendors for the same service.

The case of ‘localised failure bringing down an entire network’ isn’t new of course. Duncan Watts describes a similar incident in the American power network in August 1996, where a single power line failure brings down power to all of San Francisco causing an estimated $2 billions in damages. It was (of course) not a single line that caused the failure, only the trigger, as several factors attributed to the failure, such as poorly maintained trees near power lines, high heat causing power lines to stretch further, high winds, and high load – all which by themselves wouldn’t have caused a problem or be considered a fault, but the network failed because the trigger and all the factors were present. And many of the public cloud data centres are probably at a complexity level, where they are starting to experience similar properties?

A Reliable Cloud Requires More Than a Credit Card

If you need reliability/availability greater than what your Cloud vendor provides, or if a significant outage would (nearly) kill your business, then, you really need two separate clouds. But that might just kill the business case for moving to the cloud? Or the very least make the calculations as part of a business case significantly more complex, as the estimation needs to consider different service plans, different pricing models, and how do we avoid over-provision. Not to mention that the responsibility to develop this cross cloud high reliability/availability architecture has moved back in-house.

Starting to sound like a normal data centre situation – only more complex? Not surprisingly, a private cloud is starting to sound compelling.

But maybe the real outcome of all this is a revised Cloud architecture, where customers can purchase high reliability as well as high availability. There isn’t anything that stops Amazon (or anyone else) from building the ‘back-up’ cloud using different infrastructure. After all, one of the probable reasons people want to move their infrastructure to the Cloud is to avoid having to think about all this technical stuff.

The basic motivation for Cloud vendors is to design their cloud with a focus on maximising server utilisation, and may inadvertently sacrifice some of the reliability. Maximising server utilisation creates many software inter-dependencies in the underlying infrastructure, as the sharing of infrastructure goes up. This will make it harder for a cloud vendor to isolate and resolve problems, before they propagate to an entire data centre.

Moving to the Cloud really takes the debate from high availability to high reliability.

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MIT’s Sloan Review recently published an article by Tellis, Yin and Niraj about the network effect versus quality in determining which high-tech products win the largest market share. Certainly an interesting article with the reassuring message, that the product with the best quality, and not market dominance, will eventually prevail. It just seems fair.

What is the ‘network effect’? The term refers to the situation, where a current market dominant product (e.g., due to early market entry) provides access to a larger number of services and accessories, and has greater general or social network brand awareness – the network effect plays in favour of the current market dominant player preventing new players to take the leading position. For example, Microsoft Windows might be preferred due to a (perceived) greater number of 3rd party applications, or Facebook because everyone else is there.

However, there is one aspect which the researchers do not seem to have considered – the situation where the network influences the perception of a product’s quality. For example, people who choose word processing software (unfortunately) have to consider what other people use. Sharing MS Word documents with other word processing applications is, at best, a trying experience. If two out of three people sharing documents use MS Word, then my bet is that the third user will soon give up and ‘convert’ to MS Word – simply because the ‘quality’ of the non-MS Word application’s ability to work with MS Word documents is considerably less than MS Word (surprise, surprise).

Microsoft won the majority of the word processing market prior to email and the Internet enabled a greater sharing of documents, but once the Internet had gone mainstream, it basically eradicated whatever market share was left for other vendors. The only ‘competitors’ left in today’s market is those with a cost of zero (LibreOffice/OpenOffice, Google Docs etc).

I think we’d all like to think that quality always wins – it just seems fair – but the perception of quality is sometimes linked with the network effect. Apple was able to launch a quality product such as the iPhone, because making a phone call between an iPhone and a Nokia phone was no different than making a call between two Nokia phones. I.e., the user’s perception of the product was not directly impacted by the network effect.

Not so in the case of word processing software or social networks, where the cross product compatibility (or complete lack off in the case of social networks) plays in favour of the dominant player. MS Word has been the market leader for at least a decade, maybe longer, whereas Tellis et al. found an average of 3.8 years for market leaders.

Related Research
G.J. Tellis, E. Yin and R. Niraj, “Does Quality Win? Network Effects Versus Quality in High-Tech Markets,” Journal of Marketing Research 46, no. 2 (April 2009): 135-149.

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A good friends of mine recently casually replied: ‘Don’t be so pedantic’ (or something along those lines) in response to me commenting that what they referred to as their ‘iPhone’ actually was an Android phone. It’s not that the person is stupid (far from it) or didn’t know what kind of phone they owned.

It was just their way of referring to this new type of phone with the fancy, animated buttons, a ‘large’ screen and computer like behaviour (and so complicated that even Bjarne Stroustrup finds it too much – allegedly). The power of Apple’s brand is such, that the average phone user (sometimes) thinks ‘iPhone’, even when they see an Android phone.

I guess there is nothing new here – the Danish word for ‘instant coffee’ is ‘Nescafe’. The French fought hard to regain ‘Champagne‘ (and leaving the Australians with the word ‘sparkling wine’), and similar for the Greeks over the word ‘Feta‘ (this time the Danes lost). As a consumer, it doesn’t really matter – although the producers may or may not like the association.

However, it is quite different for software….

A lot people still cannot associate a desktop or laptop with anything other than Windows. I like to read the odd article at techcrunch.com, but the comments section mandates a login to Facebook. iPhone appears to be doing similar things for smartphones (or just ‘phones’ as they’ll probably be called soon), even if Google currently are selling more Android phones.

For software, a strong brand can actually dramatically reduce our choice – e.g., equating a web login account to Facebook or smartphone to iPhone would not be a good thing. I, for one, would like to live in a world with more than Windows, Facebook and iPhones…