Internet World 2010 – Get big, get niche or get out!…

As the homepage for Internet World 2000 announced in lurid pink and yellow… It’s big – It’s brash – It’s bright – It’s beyond… From my recollections of that time, this is an excellent summary of the atmosphere and sentiment of that dotcom boom peak period.

Click to compare and contrast IW2000 to IW2010

I remember this particular show well as I attended it in a somewhat ‘shellshocked’ state as I was immersed in the launch of ntlworld – NTL’s UK wide ‘free Internet service’. I was also working on NTL’s shopbuilder project at the time with Intershop and remember the whole buzz about eCommerce, which again, is emphasised by the exhibitors back in 2000. So many ideas before their time! – or at least before broadband made the user experiences vaguely tolerable.

Visiting IW2010 on Wednesday, I got a sense of deja-vu, particularly with all the talk about eCommerce. The recession has clearly put much more focus on the benefits of selling online but, given this is 2010 and the height of the social media boom, today’s eCommerce comes with a Social Media twist or two.

There’s talk of ‘Web 2.0’ eTailers usurping the long-standing ‘Web 1.0’ stalwarts by combining the latest WCM, Social Media and eCommerce developments to provide far better user experiences and greater conversion levels. I can see sense in this as the battles between the Rich Internet Application frameworks and HTML5 make online shopping a more pleasurable interactive experience and the growth in user generated commentary and reviews continues to help transcend the marketing bullshit. There’s certainly opportunity to implement eCommerce and integrate its vital content processes better, easier and faster than before.

Comparing the lists of Content Management System vendors from IW2000 to IW2010 shows I have observed the following…

The success of the .NET Framework over the last 5 years. By my reckoning, at least 8 of the CMS vendors listed are focused on .NET based applications. Although the PHP versus .NET debates often reach a stalemate, one thing that is generally agreed on is that .NET based sites are often faster. When you see that ‘speed’ is an increasingly important measure in Google rankings this could take on even greater significance for those who’s search rankings are vital.
The ‘Class of 2000’ has moved on. Of the content management orientated vendors who exhibited 10 years ago, only the original Mediasurface product offering had presence a decade later via Alterian’s heavy and visible presence at the 2010 show. Consolidation has played a big part in this in the upper tier and growth of the mid-market has made many of the original CMS vendors irrelevant at this type of show.
Few remain independent. Of the exhibitors in 2000, only Percussion and Day remain in their original independent states – but for how long?
The rise of Scandinavian and arrival of Eastern European vendors. The Danes and Swedes are coming to dominate the CMS mid-market through very successful offerings like EPiServer and Sitecore. A younger generation is showing through now too, with Sweden’s Onclick, Estonia’s Modera and Czechoslovakia’s Kentico (growing in popularity in the UK partner base)

So, as we progress through the next decade to 2020 and Content Management becomes more commoditised through the growth of Open Source, development of infrastructure beasts like SharePoint and gathering ‘Clouds’ of different shapes and sizes – how will the 2010 exhibitors fare and will they still be standing/showing in 2020?

Based on the last ten years, the odds are against it. In commoditised markets it’s said that only the ‘big’ and ‘niche’ survive. I’ve made some wild speculation below on what path the ‘class of 2010’ might take…

Exhibiting CMS Vendors 2000	Exhibiting CMS Vendors 2010	Will they be exhibiting in 2020???? (Some wild speculation!)
Autonomy	Activedition	No – Out by 2020 – Regular UK CMS exhibitors such as SiteKit, EasySite and Contensis were noticeable by their absence this year and I’ll wager that Activedition goes the same way in the next couple of years, swamped by the Scandinavian systems UK implementors are increasingly favouring.
Day	Alterian	No – Big by 2020 – With Immediacy’s roadmap now officially dead and a renewed focus on the former Morello product with the recent ACM-professional (a Morello-lite), Alterian’s positioning in the mid-market is still unclear. As a listed company they’ll continue to add value through acquisition then look to be acquired themselves.
EMC	Ektron	No – Out by 2020 – Acquired by Microsoft looking to reassert itself in lighterweight .NET friendly WCM
Eprise Corporation	EPiServer	No – Big by 2020 – With strength in globalisation and a favourite choice of the UK partner channel, these guys will be swallowed up by an increasingly desperate upper tier operator who can only seem to expand out of a saturated market by cannibalising those beneath them
Interwoven	E-Spirit	No – Out by 2020 – Acquired by Alterian looking to strengthen its international offering from the UK roots of Morello and Immediacy if focus remains on the Morello core
Mediasurface	Kentico	No – Out by 2020 – Low Eastern European cost base might keep it running for a few years but it’s late to the .NET party in the UK – could come onto Alterian’s acquisition radar to strengthen mid-market
Merant	Modera	No – Out by 2020 – Lower Eastern European cost base but late to the party in the UK – can shift its attention quickly to other emerging markets
Percussion	Nstein	No – Already out – Following acquisition by OpenText this is the last we’ll see of Nstein at IW
Tridion	Onclick	No – Out by 2020 – If their proposition becomes clearer than it currently is then perhaps they’ll be acquired by their big Swedish brothers to help UI evolution and/or a php based offering
Vignette	Sitecore	No – Big by 2020 – Another possible target for Microsoft if it looks to revisit WCM and must be coming onto the radar of the US giants
	Squiz	No – Out by 2020 – At the vanguard of commercialised open source but with an Aussie English language heritage – these guys will struggle against the rising tide of Drupal in the enterprise. May shift allegience to other open source offerings and develop as a UK open source implementation specialist
	Telerik	No – Out by 2020 – Niche development work on Silverlight components gets them swallowed up by Microsoft within 5 years
	Vyre	No – Niche by 2020 – Overshawdowed by others with Nordic history, they’ll return increasingly to a niche DAM position

What are your predictions for IW2020? Will we even be talking about an ‘Internet World’ in 10 years or will it have evolved into something very different? And will we still be talking about a ‘Content Management’ industry or will long heralded mass consolidation and commoditisation prevail?

Some learning from the Noughties…

Although the rolling passage of time makes a changing year somewhat irrelevant in the greater scheme of things, the turn of a decade is a useful milestone for reflection and looking forward. My biggest learning points from the last 10 years are…

The web has exposed what we really are…

Animals. There is no better illustration of this than the herd behaviour it has facilitated on a global level, which has been a repeated pattern of the last decade – from the dotcom boom and bust to the financial bubbles to Twitter. The latter is an appropriate name for something that induces ‘flocking’ or ‘swarming’. You can almost visualise this happening as a leading influencer changes direction or swoops down on something new.

So – is this a good or bad thing? I guess it depends whether, on balance, it has done more harm than good. It’s driven growth, that’s for sure – but has it been the right sort of growth? There would appear to be an even greater gap between rich and poor and it is becoming ever clearer that we have raped and pillaged our planet more in the last ten years than at any time before. The consequences of that could well be catastrophic if you believe the growing consensus of scientific opinion.

Bill Gates is right…

Well about one thing anyway. His soundbite from The Road Ahead about people “overestimating what will happen in the next two years but underestimating what will happen in the next 10” keeps playing out. Slightly ironic I guess that the biggest example from the last decade is the mobile market. When I worked on projects at the beginning of the decade to visualise the types of services 3G technology would bring to phone users I must admit that none of them looked much like a Microsoft approach. However, I had an underlying sense that the proprietary monolith would come to dominate the mobile world, as it had the desktop.

The big lesson here is that applying thinking and approaches from one environment to a fundamentally different one – is deeply flawed. Fresh thinking is needed. And Apple demonstrated that so well with the iPhone. Design a device and applications specifically for the context in which they are used rather than trying to get a phone to behave like a desktop PC. Lessons from my time at NTL in the 90s suggest exactly the same is applicable to the web and interactivity ‘on TV’ – in a communal, lean back environment, the context and approach must be relevant and compelling. Also lessons from spending half of the last decade in IT/software development roles also suggest that continuing to apply desktop thinking to an inter-connected always-on online world is also ultimately flawed.

Tony Blair was wrong…

Well, not about everything – but certainly in ‘his’ decision to commit the UK to an ill-conceived war and extremely badly planned peace in Iraq. Although I’ve highlighted the dangers of herd behaviour in the first point, there are times when ‘the wisdom of crowds’ is right – the challenge of course is to read the situation correctly. The largest demonstration ever on the streets of London and in other capitals around the world suggested that the majority of people felt uncomfortable with the reasons for going to war – even if they didn’t physically take to the streets. I’m sure that I and many others are having our own thoughts back in 2003 confirmed as the latest enquiries expose the degree to which we were misled. It is particularly galling to remember our prime minister telling us that we didn’t see what he saw in terms of intelligence reports and therefore he had to make the decision on our behalf. There was a collective sense, more than anything I have experienced in my life, that this was wrong – I feel we had an innate understanding that we were being lied to but were ultimately powerless to stop the political machinery taking us to war. This matters deeply and it’s made me question everything I ever understood about ‘democracy’. If social media had been more prominent in the early part of the decade I’m wondering if things would still have happened in the way they did and if many hundred of thousands of innocent lives could have been saved?

There is hope…

If we can harness herd behaviour effectively in the next 5 years to help fix some of the damage we have done to our environment and promote more sustainable ways of living – then the web driven booms and busts of the Noughties will provide some consolation. But, and it’s a big but, we need to be convinced that those influencing the herd or causing the flock to change direction have thought about what they are doing and the effect such mass changed behaviour will have in the longer term.

If we can be brave enough to slow down, take a step back and look at things differently then the next decade could be full of exciting innovations that really would have the potential to change the world for the better. The challenge here is having the courage and vision to turn away from the herd and head for new pastures. I encountered the Blue Ocean Strategy a while back which, although it really is a post-justification reasoning, it does illustrate the thinking that has created some of the iconic gadgets of the last decade such as the Wii and iPhone. Perhaps a more appropriate title for this approach in the next decade would be Clean Ocean Strategy given the damage we are doing to the remaining Blue Ocean. In this, we would be looking to create new opportunities that didn’t add to the plastic, chemical and CO2 pollution that is turning our seas to an acid bath but also captured people’s imagination in the way that communications and entertainment have done in more recent years.

If we can use the technology to empower those who are repressed and discriminated against to gain a voice and learn for themselves that there are alternative ways to think and live, fundamentalism in all nations can be shown for what it is – a destructive, pseudo reality. For instance, if women had been in a stronger position in places such Afghanistan and Iraq, and likewise in the leading administrations of the Western world earlier this decade I doubt these complicated, entrenched and drawn-out wars would ever have started. Social media in its broadest sense offers the opportunities to make things more transparent expose hypocrisy and lies and amplify wisdom. Conversely, it could be manipulated unhealthily to amplify destructive forces and promote damaging herd behaviour. We have it in our power though to use it for good, rather than evil.

Let hopes rather than fears prevail in the next ten years

2020 here we come…

#futureWCM – some thoughts from the last month…

November began with a virtual attendance at JBoye 09 and some remote involvement in the #fixwcm debate started at the event and continued online by Jon Marks. Crossing from West to East last week for a visit to China gave ample opportunity to think about #futurewcm and the upcoming debates on this being triggered by the Gilbane event in Boston.

So, in my blog round-up for November, I’m going to summarise some WCM client side views for this discussion and debate and hope that this provides a catalyst for other client views as these debates have a tendency to be dominated by vendors, analysts and commentators.

Getting back to basics…

In my first post of the month that coincided with the #fixwcm debate I looked at the CMS Watch definition of Web Content Management and in some further thoughts traveled even further back to how the father of the web Sir Tim Berners-Lee described his original invention and how he describes its transition into something greater – the Giant Global Graph (GGG).

So, ten years from now, will Web Content Management still be “A system that lets you apply management principles to content.” ? and to what extent will WCM have evolved so that it can be distilled down into the simplistic description of the GGG – ‘content plus pointers plus relationships plus descriptions’?

It appears one of the biggest barriers to the development of the Semantic Web is the degree to which information can be deliberately manipulated. Could ‘social network’ frameworks such as Twitter provide a human driven semantic process that machines can actually make sense of? Or will the same issues of deceit and manipulation render such information as increasingly unreliable?

How far have we come in the last ten years?

As my #futureWCM post here emphasised, we’ve got the costs of WCM down considerably during this decade. A sub $50K mid market proprietary solution will pretty much do what an upper tier one did 10 years ago and Free/Open Source solutions will do as much if not a lot more of what the mid market solutions offered in the early to mid noughties.

However, the average organisation still struggles to make content management integral to its employee’s roles and CMS providers across all tiers are still struggling to make the content management process as intuitive and user-friendly as it needs to be. I’ve started a wish list at the end of my previous post for capabilities I’d love to have at my fingertips in my current role.

My personal belief is that CMS developers across all tiers and types tend to be focused far too much on the next big thing rather than understanding how the basic elements in the system need continual focus and development to make sure tasks can be achieved in as productive a way as possible. Let’s make the next ten years the ‘age of user experience’ and revolutionise the processes of creating and managing content online with some fresh thinking rather than too much herd behaviour.

The bigger picture

From my ramblings over the last month, you’ll probably have gathered that I feel Microsoft has hindered the progress of information management during the last decade through its efforts to protect its desktop dominance. Although I have been a big user and, at times, advocate of SharePoint the heritage of that product will always pull it back to the past rather than looking to the future. It is my personal belief that information management as a whole will benefit from Google making further progress into the average medium to large organisation.

Beyond the big software ideology battles that will doubtless continue to influence WCM development considerably over the next ten years, I think we will see new regional influence. The US led the way in the 90s, Europe has dominated the 00s and I believe that the East will come to dominate the 10s. Why? because in the same way the US has never really understood Europe, neither Europe or the US really understand the East.

When will the social media bubble burst?

As I’ve mentioned in posts during this month, alarm bells are ringing for me on ‘Social Media’. It’s another bubble for sure as I’m hearing the same levels of irrational comments and exuberance I’ve experienced many times now over the last 15 years or so.

Personally, I think organisations would do well to not get unhealthily distracted by the hype and really focus on what it is they do well. After-all, if the products and services they provide live up to their promise, they will be talked about with positive sentiment and the brand advocates will naturally do their part to drown out the negatives. Conversely, if social media becomes one big game of manipulation, trust will be undermined to such an extent that nobody will take any notice anyway and return to the long-standing beacons of trustworthy information – more than often the historical media properties whose people have been trained well to sniff out the truth. Citizen journalism is here to stay, as is ‘the cult of the amateur’ – the last few years of this decade have shown the benefits of this, but also the downsides and I am looking forward to a return to common sense during the next decade that brings some balance to some of the more ridiculous social media hype around today and lets us recognise reality from pseudo-reality.

A 2020 vision…

Ten years from now I’d like to see Microsoft Office (as we know it today) consigned to history and for people to be having nostalgic conversations about the days when they used to spend most of their working days creating Word documents or PowerPoint presentations and describing how ridiculous it was compared to how they work today. I’d like to imagine us all working in ubiquitous ‘context aware’ and ‘adaptive’ tools that help create and manage content assets in universally standardised ways and for that to become a basic commodity that nobody really feels the need to talk about anymore. In 2020 I’d like us all to be ‘web’ masters and not for web publishing to still be seen as a technical domain divorced from the rest of the operation.

I absolutely don’t want to be feeling that we are locked into a particular vendor or implementor or that in order to benefit from new ways of managing information for the web that we are going to need to start almost from the beginning again. I’d like to be sure that when we say we are making iterative improvements we are actually improving rather than just approaching the same issues from a different direction or adding a superficial veneer of improvement but not fixing the basics.

In an ideal world I’d love for us to be able to ‘engage’ with our web users on a ‘one-to-one’ basis. Firstly though, they’ve got to really want to do that in the first place. Secondly we need to be so good at managing the information flow throughout our organisation that we can engage with an individual customer in a meaningful and useful way, beyond how it’s always been done. Right now I don’t think the average organisation is remotely close to achieving this. Maybe the next ten years will finally make ‘one-to-one’ web ‘engagement’ a reality – but only if it really makes sense in the real world.

#futureWCM – some thoughts from China – part 4

Just to add some context to the next post…

For the first few years of this decade I was immersed in an Enterprise Content Management project for a global products company. For the last couple of years of this decade I have also been immersed in web/enterprise content management for global products companies.

click image for book link

Therefore, as we come to the end of another decade and the first of the 21^st century my thoughts are turning to the progress that’s been made over the last ten years and if I was writing this blog in 2020 (as from its title you may guess I intend to) what would I be saying about the next ten years of progress?

Ten years ago, the company I was working for was spending in the region of $25 million to consolidate its many external and internal websites onto one consistent platform and empower the subject matter experts around the organisation to create and manage content for themselves. There were great ambitions to be able to deliver highly personalised content and use the web as a dynamic multi-channel publishing tool that would create PDF documents on the fly based on the web visitors specified preferences.

The consolidation worked well and came at a crucial time as technology markets started to collapse and the dotcom boom turned to bust. The ambitious and complex personalisation efforts were abandoned completely and as far as I can see today were never resurrected.

Fast forward to the end of the decade, the global projects I have been working on are a fraction of the budget (around $1-2 million) but have been achieving the same types of results in terms of website consolidation and functionality. However, I am experiencing some of the same issues I did 10 years ago that call into question how far we’ve actually come in that time.

When you are responsible for managing websites, global or otherwise, the degree to which you can empower others around the organisation to create and manage content is the top concern because all other aspects of web management and marketing are ultimately dependent on this. Consider for a moment all of the debate and hype currently being generated around ‘social media’. The best way for a product manufacturer to achieve positive sentiment on the social web is to focus on producing products and associated services that deliver on their promise of performance and reliability and will be talked about for those reasons and not any negative aspects. Getting the information management right both inside and outside the organisation is crucial to this.

So, ten years on, is this getting any easier? Well, yes and no. In general the tools have become more non-technically focused and generation shifts mean that the younger employees are more web savvy. However, I still think that the deep dependence on Microsoft’s largely disconnected desktop environment that is so ingrained in many organisations is hindering rather than helping progress in content management. Too often, the web is still seen as an activity that ‘someone else does’, that it is too technically complex for everyday business folks to get involved with and that responsibilities for it come in addition to people’s day jobs. Web Content Management in particular sits in too much of a separate domain which still leads to considerable duplication of content and effort.

Over the next ten years I’d really like to see organisations really focusing on breaking their Microsoft Office dependence and beginning more of their content creation and management processes online rather than having to go through lengthy re-purposing exercises to make that content useful on the web. There is undoubtedly a place for ‘social web’ style publishing processes within organisations once the downsides of such approaches have been fully exposed on the wider web but these will entail major IT and cultural change programmes that will typically take years not months to push through

The CMS providers who successfully address the concerns of the IT department for secure, reliable, robust and supportable solutions with the non-technical ease of use exhibited by the likes of Twitter, Facebook, Flickr and YouTube are poised to win and deep down I’m really hoping this isn’t Microsoft SharePoint, simply because I think SharePoint continues to be a counterproductive information management approach that is designed to safeguard Microsoft’s desktop application monopoly.

In 15 years of content management projects from enterprise to medium to small companies I can’t remember ever initiating or participating in a content related workflow. Now that it’s become commonplace to publish anything and everything to the web through social media tools it seems unlikely that I ever will.

However, thinking ahead, this is an area that could well turn on its head during the next 10 years as we climb the slope of enlightenment. The more I get under the covers of social media, the more I think that organisations need to play a very cautious game here. This may well be contrary to the hyped-up view of greater transparency and openness that’s currently pervasive but then after so many years of hype exposure I’m more inclined to turn against the herd view these days.

A Global Web Managers Wish List…

The cost-effective globalisation capabilities of EPiServer (with a touch more object orientation and shared content support but maintaining the traditional site tree mental model)

The image management and manipulation capabilities of Flickr, expanded to support the video capacity and capability of YouTube

Non-technical creation and management of rich media illustrated by 10CMS

Article creation and management with the simplicity of WordPress and document capabilities of Google Docs

A microsite creation capability with the simplicity of WordPress but within the globalised framework of EPiServer

Module/application development and integration with the breadth of Joomla and simplicity of Facebook

Collaborative site building with the breadth of SharePoint but the simplicity of Google Apps and WCM connectivity of Alterian

Community site building breadth of Drupal with simplicity of Community Server

A content repository that works with the speed and accuracy of Gmail that could auto-categorise and make related content recommendations on the fly

Google Analytics expanded to incorporate social media monitoring – as I want to keep all analytics in context

An internal relationship building and knowledge sharing capability illustrated by Twitter

Beyond 2020 Visions …

Imagining the World my children will inherit

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