Category Archives: History

#futureWCM – some thoughts from China – part 2

1st generation web content management was driven by the US and the desire for the dominant global organisations of the 90’s to embrace the commercial opportunities offered by the web

2nd generation web content management was driven to a large extent by Europe and Scandinavia, who have needed to deal with many more language and cultural challenges across all types and tiers of organisations

3rd generation web content management is being driven by web users themselves who have discovered the power of open source community development, online content creation and socially driven communications

4th generation web content management will be driven by the East – simply because the West doesn’t understand the East well enough. An excellent recent TED presentation here by Devdutt Pattanaik emphasises some aspects of this lack of understanding

I’m not making this observation because I am currently writing this blog in China. My experiences in working for European brands with strong Asian presence in recent years has given me an insight into how business is done in the East at a grass routes level, how and where this is influencing information management requirements and how this is likely to impact web content management.

For product manufacturers, particularly those with some heritage, the web can be a double-edged sword. On one hand it has helped them create effective global sales operations. On the other, it erodes margins and polarises markets – with mass market low-cost products at one end and premium products at the other. The middle ground is not a comfortable place to be in today’s wired economy.

Sitting in meetings here in Hong Kong I have been struck by the contrast of presentations by the marketing folks. The European contingent’s slides are often peppered with the phrase ‘no internet’ – referring to efforts to prevent high-end, premium products being subjected to a price-led web war. So the unease in the room was apparent when the Chinese marketing folks presented. In contrast, their presentations were almost entirely about the web and it’s hard to forget that almost every single product being discussed, including competitive ones, is manufactured in China.

The more I listened, the more I got a sense of déjà vu. There was a lot of comment about sites like Taobao and Team Buy  . Although terms like social networking were being used liberally, the concepts they were talking about, such as ‘team buying’ sounded awfully familiar to web seminars I attended back in the late 90s where start-ups like letsbuyit.com were regular presenters. During the peak of the dotcom boom, their concept of people coming together to push down the price of an item made regular appearances on TV in the form of their ‘ant’ logo.

Letsbuyit.com was a high profile victim of the dotcom bust but it is making a comeback – this time as a membership orientated price comparison site

Given that the great firewall of China is blocking access to some of the familiar names of the ‘social media’ world, it appears there are no shortage of online ‘conversations’ happening amongst the countries many, many millions of web users. It looks like China is continuing to through it’s own dotcom boom within its firewall, with the types of irrational exuberance that continues to be a feature of the western world’s web usage, fueling a boom in online communications and shopping. Regardless of whether this bubble bursts any time soon, I think these developments are significant to the future of the web and web content management in the coming years.

At present, open-source software is not big in China – mainly because extensive pirating means that proprietary software is mainly free too. I imagine that Microsoft, in particular, is quite happy about this as it has helped indoctrinate the world’s largest population into the belief that the only way to operate a computer, deal with content and communicate online is via its software.

From what I’ve heard over here, China has big ambitions in software. Perhaps the recent resignation of Kai-Fu Lee from Google China (who originally headed Microsoft’s Chinese Research operation) indicates things are gathering pace as one imagines he would have the background knowledge and insight to jump into the Chinese tech venture capital space at the right time. If China is to make an impact beyond its firewall, then it needs to look beyond what Google is doing to usurp Microsoft’s desktop computing dominance. The netbook market development driven to a large extent by Taiwan’s ASUS innovations has often been described as a threat to Microsoft’s dominance because it has demonstrated that there is an alternative. ASUS and it’s fellow Taiwanese manufacturer Acer’s enthusiasm for netbooks is clear and I understand it shook Microsoft that these innovations were more popular in the western world than it believed they would be.

So, with Chinese companies innovating in hardware, it follows that they’ll be innovating in software, in the first instance to deal with the obvious differences in language and culture close to home and secondly to help create a new world order.

#futureWCM – some thoughts from China – part 1…

…Not much specific Chinese WCM input yet but I’m expecting some over the next few days. The following is just a few initial thoughts from the flight over and being wide awake when I need to be asleep 😦

As another decade is coming to a close and we begin heading towards 2020, there is increasing commentary about the future of Web Content Management and what the next year, 5 years and 10 years might bring forth.

Quite often, looking back and learning lessons from history helps in the process of anticipating what the future might hold. While we can be sure there will be unpredictable developments, we can also be sure that history will repeat itself in one form or another. After-all, the ‘noughties’ has been a decade full of ‘history repeating itself’ – from the Dotcom  ( read South Seas) bubble, to long drawn out ‘religious’ wars in ancient lands to another great economic disaster. This last decade would seem to haved showed more than many that the more technologically sophisticated we get and the more electronically connected we become, the faster and more frequently we repeat our historical mistakes.

So, a good place to look back, before looking forward, is to the birth of the ‘Web’ part of Web Content Management and the great works of Tim Berners-Lee.

Aside from Sir Berners-Lee’s association with Dorset UK (where the very best of ‘noughties’ WCM came from of course 😉 ) and his more recent time at Southampton University working on the Semantic Web (I’m trying to put my home town on the map for something other than the Titanic 😉 ) I believe the simplistic essence of his original idea hits at the heart of what Web Content Management, to date, has been all about .

The essence of the WWW is ‘content plus pointers’ and you can pretty much distil the majority of our WCM efforts over the last 10-15 years down to that simple description. Content (documents, text, data, images, video) plus pointers (taxonomy, site navigation, search engines, blogs (chronological pointing), wikis (pointing simplified) )

Through his work on the semantic web, Berners-Lee has described the WWW transitioning into the GGG (Giant Global Graph). Spookily enough, when you read more about graph theory, one word stands out – the ‘Matrix’.

However, prophetic film making aside, the simple description of the GGG is ‘content plus pointers plus relationships plus descriptions’

Twitter, for example, distils down nicely into this description. 140 characters can provide surprisingly valuable content – it is the best content ‘pointing’ tool yet devised (because of the following 2 points) – relationships between content and pointers are visible and can be analysed – and the content, it’s context and relevancy, is often described well – by humans rather than metadata.

But, like any first mover in the technology space, Twitter is gaining critical mass but also generating considerable hype. I think that looking beyond this hype and the mechanics that Twitter is illustrating is key to the future of WCM. In part two of this post, I’ll give the reasons for this thought…

Immediacy is dead, long live immediacy…

RIP_Immediacy2The publishing of the latest CMS Watch report brings with it the death of another notable CMS brand – Immediacy.

Although it has been slipping away over the last year or so following the acquisition by Alterian, the recent relaunch of the Alterian Content Manager website and the listing of the 42 products reviewed by CMS Watch has consigned the brand to CMS history once and for all.

In terms of the product itself, I’ll take a wager on Alterian CMC 6.2 (or Alterian corporate edition) being consigned to history too by the time the next CMS Watch report is published.

So this post is an obituary to an old friend who brought fulfillment to many but could, at times, be frustrating and hard work to live with.

Born as a product in its own right in 2001, or thereabouts, from some previous efforts of providing content management capabilities to customers of increasing size, Immediacy encapsulated a new breed of simpler content management systems focusing very strongly on ease of use.

If the founders had listened to analysts at that time, they probably wouldn’t have bothered starting a CMS product business, as the consensus at the turn of the century was that there were already far too many products trying to do the same or similar things and that the market wasn’t there for reinventing the wheel continually.

However, no-one told the potential customers that – and although the technology markets were reeling from the over-inflated expectations of the dotcom boom and the reality check that was the dotcom bust, many organisations themselves were just only starting to understand how to create and manage dynamic websites and the vast majority didn’t have the budgets or technical expertise to deploy the type of systems the big telcos and the Global 2000 were using at that time.

ImmediacyeditorI arrived at Immediacy from just that type of organisation, deploying just that type of system.  As the 10th employee joining the already crowded offices that were shared with a local taxi company it was quite a culture shock but also a breath of fresh air.

After several years spent navigating through the complex interfaces of systems such as Vignette, Oracle Portal and Documentum – Immediacy’s ‘Word like’, WYSIWYG Editor was a joy to work with. For a marketing person looking to build an engaging, effective, search engine friendly web presence, the emerging range of plug-in modules for things like menu building, form-building, email newsletter creation and user polls etc it was like a kid being let loose in a candy store in terms of the capabilities I now had at my fingertips. The sort of feelings I get using WordPress or Joomla for free these days.

It was clear that other organisations were starting to think the same. I remember particularly, interviewing a local council for a case study that is still being used here and recognising just what potential there was for an easy-to-use system that could be packaged to the particular needs of local authorities and then to extend that idea to other organisation groupings and organisational needs such as Intranet solutions and marketing suites. Credit to the Immediacy developers such as Simon here who made such things happen – and fast!

One of the things I remember most during my early days with Immediacy was describing the marketplace at that time as a ‘land grab’. The net result of which was an explosion in activity to take on as many partners as possible and get through the doors of as many organisations as possible (particularly local authorities). All credit to the formidable Immediacy sales team who traveled the length and breadth of the UK to grow the partner and customer base to a level where it had to be taken seriously by the industry commentators. The downside of going for quantity over quality of course is keeping pace with demand and focusing on high standards of delivery. In retrospect though I still believe it was the right time and place to make such moves.

Having subsequently spent a year implementing Immediacy for multiple websites and then returning to the company to help push forward product management and strategy, I learnt a lot about what were the customer pain points and top priorities for ongoing development and spent many hours understanding how and where Immediacy could be developed further to address usage scenarios beyond those seen as its core strengths. It’s at times like those that you recognise what CMS Watch are now describing as ‘complexity versus flexibility’ and how it is difficult to achieve one without the other. In reality, Immediacy was only going to achieve more complex scenarios and greater flexibility with a radical overhaul of its underlying architecture and that anything else was really going to be  in the words of the developers themselves as ‘hacks’ and ‘fudges’.  I understand that this was the type of decision taken by longer standing CMS providers such as EPiServer who re-wrote their original ElectroPost application substantially following the arrival of .Net.

I think it was the realisation that the lower tier of the content management arena was going to get even more crowded and that simpler Open Source solutions were going to become more widespread and popular that prompted the founders to drive for an exit strategy. I know they’ve debated themselves whether they did the right thing at the right time. Having seen the fallout from the global financial crisis that came after the Mediasurface acquisition and now recently  information about the latest CMS Watch report and the way they have re-categorised the market place I have to say I believe the Immediacy founders certainly did do the right thing at the right time.

To be honest, they only had the opportunity to do that by getting a lot of other things right in the proceeding years. That focus on trying to achieve the best possible user experience within the confines of earlier browsers was fundamental to the uptake of the product and I’d personally love to see a new generation of CMS developers take a radical view of the market and use the very latest Rich Internet capabilities to revolutionise the user experience once again with a laser sharp focus on productivity.

Although the essence of the product still remains for now, the Immediacy name is disappearing fast. Of all the Content Management product and company names around, Immediacy remains my favourite. In fact, when you look at how the market has evolved in recent years with the growth of social networking, user-generated content and increasingly mobile content then ‘immediacy’ is an even more relevant term for content creation and management than it was 10 years ago. Maybe Alterian will revive the name at some point for some product specific branding and we will see the Immediacy name rise again. Until then, goodbye old friend.

Can't see the sun for the contrails…

contrailI set off for London at an early hour this morning. The air had a crisp autumn bite. As the train headed north of Basingstoke and the sun rose above the low lying mist in the fields a striking criss-cross matrix of contrails became increasingly visible across the skyline – some from planes that had long since left UK airspace or landed at the big London airports and a load more from planes still in view. At one point I counted 10 aircraft at varying altitudes adding their fresh white trails to the blue canvas.

Aside from being a reminder of just how busy the skies are above us, particularly in the South East of England, it was also an illustration of how issues around climate change are not as straightforward as sometimes thought. On my way home this evening I read a couple of articles concerning climate change and air travel, both of which were calling for a dramatic cut in the number of flights in and out of the UK to reduce carbon emissions. This reminded me of some research that was conducted following the 9/11 terrorist attacks when the entire US fleet was grounded for several days.

Observers at the time said how abnormally clear and bright the sky seemed over the US during those days and those monitoring atmospheric temperatures noticed a sudden and dramatic rise across the US not seen in research before. It became apparent that contrails and air particles associated with air travel and long suspected as being a large contributing factor in global dimming were doing more than imagined to keep the opposite effects of global warming at bay.

The global economic crisis is all Dave's fault…

I said this to my brother-in-law (Dave) at the weekend – and then went on to clarify. Other than the two articles in the new Wired magazine that I’ve commented on already, the other very interesting read was one quite compelling explanation for the current financial crisis and it is indeed to do with a man called Dave. 

David X Li is a Chinese mathematician who emigrated to Canada and while working for Barclay’s Capital in 2004 invented a new formula for managing risk – which ultimately led to the growth of the subprime mortgage market. The Wired article gives an excellent analogy (you can read here) to explain the thinking behind the formula but the bottom line is that although, on face value, it is a persuasive concept it didn’t work and now we are all paying the price.

The big problem here however is that the formula wasn’t just tested out by one or two traders – it was adopted by every single trader. As the article states more accurately, “David X Li can’t be blamed. He just invented the model. We should blame the bankers who misinterpreted it”

groupthink

To me this is one of the biggest and most explosive examples of ‘Groupthink’ in history. The speed with which the world now operates and the complexity and immediacy of the computer and communications systems we are surrounded by, means this was a scenario just waiting to happen. There is also something here about American business culture in particular that I have personally experienced, having worked for US run organisations for a fair chunk of my career. That ‘can do’ attitude that has built many a successful business can also backfire spectacularly when it is at the expense of ‘critical thought’ and valid opposing viewpoints.

These same issues can apply on an even larger scale and make concepts such as ‘collective intelligence’ and the ‘wisdom of crowds’ – that are often fuelled by social media mechanisms but not always governed by clear thinking – as potentially quite dangerous. On this occasion, the US pioneering on the bleeding edge of technologies has provided a massive wake-up call!