Software Blog (beta)

Chasing deals

Standard article in BusinessWeek about a Web 2.0 bubble here, but I thought this statistic was worth mentioning:

"After a sharp decline in investments following the tech bust of 2000 and 2001, venture firms are beginning to pour money into a new crop of Internet companies, in businesses such as social networking and online video. Together, they're called Web 2.0 companies. Venture firms have put a total of $455.5 million into 79 of them during the first nine months of the year, according to a study released on Nov. 7 by market researcher VentureOne, which is part of Dow Jones & Co. (DJ). That's more than twice the amount of money that was invested in such companies during the same period in 2005."

Emphasis mine. 

Brittanica and Wikipedia

Read this story to get up to speed on a fascinating milestone on the way to "Web 2.0."  In short, a wildly biased report originally claimed that Wikipedia and Brittanica were about the same from a fact-quality point of view.  However, under further review, the article was closer to fiction than not. 

Buried in the facts of the case is the point that Wikipedia had fixed their errors (no word on Brittanica).  I am struck time and again at how quickly the collective will and intelligence of Open Source can clean up their messes. 

Ultimately this should serve as a guidepost on when to use the slower but more reliable offer versus the quick and "good enough" alternative.  They aren't mutually exclusive, but the focus will be on the bazaar in the near term because IT has been all Cathedral for ages.  The additional granularity of service level in software is a good thing for CIO's who may be able to match requirements with the solution that has the right price/feature balance. 

Metering

John Udell is onto at least one of the flies in the ointment of distributed, composite applications.  Money quote:

"When we talk about a grid of Web services, we like to compare it to the power grid, but the analogy is deeply flawed in at least one way. My electric bill isn’t itemized."

While I think that composite applications are an almost certainty, several kinks need to be worked out.  The Off-The-Top-Of-My-Head Top 3 are:

1. Uptime - this needs to be many nines
2. SLA's - how do we ensure these from across many different providers?
3. Metering - how do we charge for use?

And all the while, composite applications must be easy to assemble and use.