thecapacity

The socialweb.tv talks a lot about open standards, particularly in social networks. I find their videos are always energetic and help keep me abreast on aspects of the web that I don’t get to deal with frequently.

I believe their answer to the question of “Who owns your data?” (hint: “You do!”) is a little idealistic but the message and coverage is great. It makes little sense to duplicate this data and especially in tools like flickr, twitter, opensocial, and hopefully someday even Facebook, it seems obvious. Friends are friends no matter which network they’re on and if you tell me that your twitter friends aren’t the same as your facebook friends I’d reply they could be (and argue should) assuming there are more granular levels of classifications and control.

You hear a lot about this nirvana of open security and data for social sites, especially in the context of plaxo, yahoo, google, twitter and all the other “social web” buzzcompanies…. and that’s where it seems to be constrained.

It always seems limited to discussions about why no one would never implement a microsoft security API and why google and yahoo should talk more. Or speculated with hope that Facebook and MySpace will finally accept friend requests and, fingers crossed, that twitter will link with someone, anyone, who could tell them that drunk and disorderly does not make them cool.

What strikes me most is that within all these talks, Amazon is missing. Not only are they not “a player” but people have forgotten that they’re the reining homecoming king and queen when it comes to some new buzzwords like cloud computing and webservices! Many of these friends are sites built on Amazon’s services, from S3 to EC2 even the newly announced block storage gets people excited, but they haven’t stopped to think that inviting Amazon to the party would really get it started.

Amazon’s the popular kid that’s just too popular for their own good. Everyone else thinks they’re out at the college parties when instead they’re home alone day-trading while they’re waiting for their friends to call.

I think Amazon would benefit from a vast exposure to new customers and social data! Imagine what they could sell me if they knew I’d been boating with friends or that I had a camping excursion planned (maybe something first aid related). Even product “reviews” (which can be found in 140 character “this sucks” twitters) to broadcasting 40% discounts for kindle books when they know I’m stuck at an airport with a layover! There’s a huge wealth of valuable data for consumer companies to be gleaned from these social networks.

Amazon has a ton of users and already with their payment system and associates program they’ve shown that open standards can actually be used to make money, it seems that this would be another area in which they could reap the benefits and help everyone by driving the creation and adoption of standards.

I hope those who know me wouldn’t peg me as an alarmist. So take my title with a grain of salt but also, because of that same optimism, with a sense of sobriety.

I’ve followed “cloud computing” for a while (before it was called that), most often in the context of Amazon. From my position, it’s been really interesting to see the growth and dead-ends of this shift. And although in some ways it represents an outside disruptive force for my job, in others it’s a technology and mindset I’m trying to drive internally and externally.

My analogy for my job is that I help design, edit and publish “books” but never write one of my own, so some of my perspectives are gleaned second hand without the heat and intensity of battle. Yet, I’m also keen to learn from other’s failures (and successes) so I do my best to leverage the examples others provide.

SmugMug is a photo sharing site that’s been a big champion (and occasional critic) of Amazon’s services and despite seeing their use of them as a competitive advantage they’ve been very open about their practices. Recently they described how they’ve built a very successful workflow around these concepts and I think you should give it a read.

There’s a tangible shift in computing that I don’t think has been felt in more traditional environments. Certainly enterprise IT is used to hearing fads fall to the floor, anyone remember “The Mainframe is dead”? But it’s also very easy to point to successful companies like SmugMug and claim they’re not enterprise players.

However, consider Amazon (or Google) and remember they don’t just provide this stuff for fun. It’s what they themselves use internally for their “day jobs” and that it’s because of these same services and not in spite of them, that they’ve reached their current heights.

Time will only tell if they can hold these lofty positions, but my belief is that the future’s in the clouds.

No, this has nothing to do with strange anthropological experiences it’s even more fascinating…

I watched a great video from iTunes U (my new favorite pastime) and it made two (of many) interesting points;

1. Wal*Mart, which would be China’s 8th largest trading partner if it were a country and is the United State’s largest business, doesn’t make a single thing. Instead, their success is due to their logistical knowledge and expertise.
2. UPS doesn’t just “deliver things” they’re also “in-sourced” to perform operations for companies, for example Toshiba. When you mail a laptop out for service, it gets picked up by UPS, taken to one of their facilities, repaired by UPS and mailed back to, all without ever touching Toshiba’s hands.

In that many ways the world wide economy is turning into a “knowledge based economy”where the ability to conceive of an idea dictates success, not specifically the ability to build or deploy that idea, those proficiencies can be contracted.

There is certainly value for operational excellence a la Wal*Mart, Starbucks, UPS and today I think we get to add one more to that list, Amazon.

They’ve announced a “Fulfillment Web service (FWS)” which allows you to leverage Amazon’s existing distribution network to store and ship your products.

In addition to offering warehousing and shipping, in true Amazon tradition, they’ve coupled this capability with a programmatic webservices interface. I think this may be a pretty key differentiator. It’s not that Wal*Mart doesn’t have a business to business (B2B) interface, but EDI can be complex and costly to implement.

Wal*Mart attempts to server “the common man” but it seems clear that Amazon’s focused on “the common business”.

One last question and thought; Why has this taken so long? We can be pedantic about definitions or dissect the statement that innovation can truly not exist without invention. Semantics aside, I believe Amazon’s practice and “inventions” in the webservices technologies has afforded them the “innovation” required to bridge this gap.

PS, if you have the opportunity check out iTunes U, specifically the presentations by Thomas L. Friedman at MIT; “The World is Flat” and “The World is Flat 3.0″.

If you’ve read my earlier posts you know I spend a bit of time following Amazon, both from a business perspective as well as my interest in the energy they’ve invested in webservice (SaaS) technologies.

I recently gave a presentation to discuss their offerings and wanted to make that available to anyone interested.

I build presentations that can also act as “guidebooks” once the discussion is over, i.e. the presentation interests someone in the topic, but the charts should also be useful as a starting point for their own experience. Thus I’ve included links and citations for the various sections. It may seem a little overwhelming when you’re just paging through but it seems to work well for my presentation style and my typical audience.

I always find it interesting to compare and contrast my experience with a presentation given verbally vs. paging through the deck later. In an engaging conversation, some of the more interesting and thought provoking dialogs revolve around a single bullet point. However, when paging through a deck you’re often drawn to “examples” which are really for a reference or to substantiate a divergent discussion.

I’m most interested in the “implications and extrapolation” phase of a presentation as opposed to ones that review the “what and why” of an activity.

I hope you’ll find this interesting and helpful and if there’s any parts I can help elaborate on please let me know.

I’ve been pretty hot on Amazon for a while now. No that’s not a stock tip, rather a statement of my amazement at their success and innovation as a company.

If you haven’t realized, Amazon has been branching out beyond being “a bookstore”, in fact they hate it when people contextualize them as such. You knew they sold electronics but did you know you can get groceries from them too?

An even more strange and interesting curiosity is the fact that that you can “subscribe” to discounted deliveries of toilet paper delivered free with Amazon Prime!

So it seems like a natural progression… Amazon’s moved from bookseller, to general retailer, to an online super Wall*Mart who can deliver fiber, suggest an appropriate book and routinely deliver appropriate accessories for the experience.

However, Amazon’s become more then any of that, much more… They’ve moved from being an online presence to enabling others, which is a powerful transition because it leverages other business’s success, avoiding the burden of their failures and acts as a force multiplier for their revenue!

First it was their marketplace, which is to ebay what Facebook is to MySpace. However, they’ve since moved beyond alternate definitions of ‘retailer’. Now, in the techno-sphere, Amazon’s best known for their WebServices which have been used building all kinds of interesting businesses. They’ve grown so influential in the Web2.0 world, that James Governor at RedMonk suggests IBM should consider purchasing Amazon!

It would be hard to convince me that Amazon needs IBM. They’ve been sponsoring startups and recently put themselves front and center with consumers, something James believes IBM’s been neglecting

So currently, it seems no company can compete with the breadth of Amazon’s offerings. However, Kevin Burton and Nick Carr have been discussing whether or not Google may soon challenge Amazon’s hosted offerings, aligning itself more fully against Amazon.

With its search capabilities, Google has long had an leveragable retail presence. First it was passively with Froogle and then more explicitly with Google Base and Google Checkout.

Now the argument centers on whether or not Google will open its compute resources, and Kevin asserts that neither Amazon or the potential Google offering is sufficient. As a ‘techie’ I understand his perspective, which I would insufficiently summarize as being “vendor lock-in is bad”.

However, having been introduced to the broader business perspectives, I disagree with his conclusion.

1. Historically vendor lock-in hasn’t prohibited adoption when it’s strategically and tactically expedient (e.g. Microsoft, Token-Ring, Intel)
2. I strongly believe OpenSource’s momentum is inevitable and will destabilize and nullify permenant vendor lock in (e.g. WINE, the recent opensource implementation of java, and numerous MS Office “import/export” techniques)
3. Technology changes too fast to waste time “not doing” or “reimplementing the wheel”. This is less about the latest and greatest gadgets and more a statement of business need.

There’s a great phrase by Marc Hedlund which has stuck with me since I read it; “Jedi’s build their own lightsabers”. Marc leverages this pop culture meme to remind us to never outsource critical for your business components (You must read it!).

I believe the correlary suggests that any function, fundamental but incidental to your business value should be a candidate for procurement.

Even at the risk of “vendor lock in” there’s a list of trade-offs including “time to market” and “cost of competency” to consider. In Kevin’s ideal world it sounds like we’d all build from scratch and have unlimited time to implement, tweak and benchmark to our heart’s content.

Unfortunately, business necessitates an alternate reality and if expediency, simplicity and accuracy mean vendor constraint, so be it.

However, Kevin would be right to point out that many companies require “flexible on-demand IT” in order to succeed, even if they don’t realize it, trapped as they are in legacy models and processes.

When companies talk about outsourcing these components, or letting a vendor’s software product dictate their business & IT processes… I always check to make sure my lightsaber is close.