Thursday, February 07, 2002

It's funny.  I work in a group that work on Web Services.   Mostly, I think we have the wrong perspective on them - we tend to talk about them as if they were publicly exposed, high volume services.  Mostly, I think they're going to be used internally -- somebody with some interesting data or functionality whipping out a quick interface for people to use.   When they are implemented in a big way, it will be to solve the specific problems the IT department is currently having.   My sense of that market from first hand interactions and from what I've read is that they are not interested in hooking up with trading partners or exposing new services to the world.  They tried that and found they weren't really ready -- they need to focus on hooking together their internal systems, making their business run efficiently and enabling the sort of integrated e-services that proved so difficult to deploy in a couple years ago.    That's where web services will be used first and most heavily.  Just how the teeth of the gears are going to line up... 10:36:50 PM

This article looks like it might be interesting:   Web Services and the Banking Industry.  A case study from a bank about how they're planning to use web services in the short term.   10:28:00 PM

In the Clayton Christensen article two posts down, he says that the first rev of a disruptive product should be sorta incomplete and not necessarily fully baked -- something that appeals only to the fringe market segment because their problem is accute.   I guess the idea is "get a foot hold and give the big boys a reason to dismiss you".     Better truely is the enemy of good enough, i guess. 10:24:46 PM

from Doug... the k-logs mailing list... 10:21:42 PM

[SJL's Radio Weblog] New interview with Clayton Christensen in the February 2002 issue of Inc. Magazine. So you have been able to identify the strategies that allow new growth companies to succeed? The whole story is about motivation. The leaders in every industry have vast resources at their disposal. If I try to grab a piece of real estate that the established leaders want, where the customers are attractive and the business is attractive, the evidence is overwhelming that the leaders will win. So what I want to do is to craft a strategy that takes advantage of what I would call asymmetry of motivation. That is, a situation where I'm motivated to go after the business of the market leaders, but the piece of their business that I can most naturally go after is the one that they're the least motivated to defend. 10:14:39 PM

[Slashdot] Rob Fahrni did a Visio rendering of my Two Views of Scripting in 2005. What's remarkable is that Visio is a Microsoft product, and Rob works for Microsoft. This has always been one of the cool things about MS, a kind of Ballmeresque BOGU, it makes Visio look good, and it makes Microsoft look good (!) because they don't mind criticism, and they won't miss an opportunity to show off their products.  I included this for the reference to BOGU.  I'll save you the trouble of clicking -- Bend Over and Grease Up.  This refers to Microsoft's early day policy of being compromising when it came to working with big players like IBM.  It kept them in the game, so they could be there to capitalize on mistakes. 10:12:35 PM

TechInterview: "I have a black triangle, a white triangle, a black circle and a white circle..."  This site has lots of technical interview questions intended to measure people's ability to think on their feet.  None of them are purely "a-ha" questions, where you need a flash of insight to solve the problem.   9:38:36 PM

I was thinking about the record companies on the way into work today. Their basic problem is that they just see consumers as people with money to milk. In some businesses, you can get away with this because of lock-in. Even still there are limits. In the music business, there is no real lock-in. So, in order to get away with this, they're trying to create artificial lock-in with laws and bolt-on technologies. This won't work. Laws aren't good for stopping individuals from doing something they want to do in the privacy of their own home. In this situation, they'll only be good for keeping anyone from making big business by pirating content or by facilitating pirating. And, actually, this should be more than enough to protect a healthy music industry: if you can't make big business out of it, then you probably can't afford the investment it'll take to make it convenient. Convenience is something people want. Technologies won't work because, ultimately. First of all, it's too late for CDs - imo, CDS and similar will never be both acceptable to consumers and functional -- too much legacy hardware to contend with. Maybe when CDs are long gone, future music can be secured. I think the DVD experience suggests even then it'll still be hard. Second of all, you can't pass encrypted data into people's heads. This means, at some point (in the cpu, at the audio jacks, etc) that content is going to be unprotected. Sure, there might be some degradation, but enough to degrade it to an unacceptable level? Maybe for audiofiles, but not for your average listener (most of whom are content with the relatively low quality of radio). So, no real lock-in and no artificial lock-in in the long run. So, ultimately, record companies won't get away with milking their customers. If instead, they focussed on satisfying their customers and being agressive and competitive about it, they'd find that they still had a number of advantages, to be competitive and profitable. They have a unique offering to artists in that they can take a raw artist and turn out a polished offering with plenty of promotion in all the right places. On the consumer front, they should focus on making music convenient, timely, inexpensive, and personal. They're in a unique position to deliver those things. If they focussed on squeezing their own margins and loving their customers, their current problems would disappear... 10:41:45 AM

[Slashdot] Sun Unveils More Linux Strategems 10:15:53 AM

[Scripting News]Funny coincidence. Last year on this day Sun was taking cheap shots at a very nice cross-network protocol that we love very much. And I noticed that Don said, yet again, that everyone agrees that SOAP is the only choice. "By the end of 2001, everyone in the emerging Web service industry had converged on SOAP." Hey Don, click on the pic of Katie Couric to see what I think about that.   10:14:45 AM

[Scripting News] Patrick Logan comments on Don Box's article which I pointed to yesterday. Don makes a case that's pretty thin. My enviornment checks parameters. If a procedure requires 3 parameters and I pass 4 or 2, that's an error. The program stops execution with an Error Info window and a pointer to the offending line of code and a stack crawl. Scripting environments have come a long way since their humble beginnings. Don's piece is a perfect demo of the arrogance of C programmers. It's a retro kind of arrogance because scripting is here to stay, unless they repeal Moore's Law.  8:59:00 AM

[Slashdot] Still More Evidence for Evolution UCSD. 7:01:38 AM

[IBM DeveloperWorks: XML News] U.S. federal XML guidelines (XML.com) 6:53:22 AM

[Scripting News] Mozilla.Org: XML-RPC in Mozilla.  [Scripting News] 6:50:27 AM

[Yahoo News Headlines - XML] Sun Opts Out of IBM, Microsoft Web Services Alliance. ...-- UDDI, WSDL, XML and SOAP -... 6:44:09 AM

Mark had a story that gave a nice window into Python Web Services.... 6:43:50 AM