I've been meaning to point people to a couple of other Gillmor Gang interviews.
First, there is the recent discussion with Ray Ozzie – founder of Lotus Notes. If you know him you'll want to hear this. If you don't, check it out for sure – Ray is so clear, perceptive and thoughtful. He is his own analyst.
He says Notes was built on the concept that the nature of the organization was changing. Previously it had been vertically oriented. When Notes came out, organizations were becoming more internally meshed. People within organizations were suddenly collaborating with each other. Today – in the era of Groove – businesses are becoming externally meshed. Individuals are dealing with people from lots of organizations – not to mention friends and family. Software moving forward has to be based on this evolving mesh.
Corollaries:
- The key here is that going forward, IT departments will not be able to simply dictate the software which individuals use – because the software must span companies, each of which will have different IT departments.
- Building things based on ubiquitous standards (COM, J2EE) doesn't take into account the amazing speed at which things slip into history – we always need to look forward 5 years.
- When looking forward, watch the underlying phenomena – the explosion of wireless options; being able to assume that everyone has a PC and access to the net; and terrabyte desktop storage – which has arrived before we even have any idea of what it can be used for…
He also comments sagely on the complexity of current identity-based systems, and wonders what he missed by underestimating the power of anonymous technology. I couldn't agree more – that complexity must go or we all fail.
For those who missed it, the Gang has also interviewed Phil Windley – who does a great survey of identity management issues. I'm not sure I agree with him on the relation between Metadirectory and other technologies, but I'll try to find out more about his thinking and then drill into this.
