Jeffrey Mann

Really, I am — like you wouldn’t believe.

Not just because I have been working on it for months as the conference chair. Not just because I have some interesting presentations to deliver. Not just because I get to hear dozens of stories from clients about what they are doing with social software and collaboration. Not just because it doesn’t look like it will rain as much this year as it did last year. Not just because Cannes is kind of a pretty place. Not just because I get to take a cool TGV there instead of a plane. Not just for these reasons.

Also because there is some cool stuff happening on the ITxpo floor, like a live functioning telepresence suite and a Windows 7 upgrade lab. Also because there are cool topics my colleagues will be presenting like Pattern-based Strategy, and Applications Overhaul. 

Also because I get to see a lot of customers and colleagues I usually talk on the phone with. That is cool. I hope you are one of them.

A journalist for an industry publication in Chile asked me some questions recently about Web 2.0 business models, when there doesn’t seem to be  a lot of business actually going on. Here are some of the edited answers.

Do you think it was a bad business decision for Google to acquire YouTube, in terms of the low revenue (or losses) the video site generates?

Outside of their core advertising-based products, speculating about Google’s business model is always a tricky thing to do. They don’t say much about their plans, and don’t seem to mind losing money on individual businesses if they think (for whatever reason) that it will make sense eventually. With so much money flowing into Google from advertising sales, this is an easier position to take than for many companies.

Google is in a position relative to the Internet similar to where Intel was several years ago with general computing. Intel figured that if people use computers more, they will buy more microchips, most of them from Intel. So they made a lot of investments (e.g. in games, virtual reality, 3D design, video) that didn’t contribute money directly to their bottom line, but increased the general usage level of personal computing. For Google, the more people use the Internet, the more they use Google services like search and the other products they offer. Youtube attracts lots of traffic, so it increases total Internet usage, which eventually — somehow — is good for Google.

Also, Youtube has become the place to put videos and to look for videos, making it more like a platform than just another service. This will open up more possibilities, like licensing deals, tie-ins with television and music companies, libraries, etc. Microsoft has shown with Windows how good it is for a business to control a platform. Google may not have figured out how to build a business (at least publicly), but there are lots of possibilities. Google is comfortable with short term uncertainty if they see a large long term advantage, something else that cannot be said about very many companies. 

It seems that being popular is not always enough for success as a business. Is that so? I’m asking because of Twitter and other free services…

Popularity alone has never been enough to be successful as a business. What is new now is that business success is not necessary to be a success, at least in the short term. Twitter has enough money and is well on the way to becoming a crucial platform. Once they are there, there are plenty of ways to build a business. The short term things they could do to get revenue now (advertising, premium accounts, selling highly desired user names) would get in the way of becoming a platform, which is where the real opportunity is. They don’t want to do anything which would discourage people from using it, and I think that is very clever. I talked about Twitter’s business model on this blog earlier.

What formulas are there to make these services profitable, considering
the big audience they have?

Really, I see two main ways:

1. Become a platform like Youtube and Twitter are doing. I discussed the monetization schemes for Twitter on my blog.

2. For the other free sites that won’t become an unmissable platform, the standard way to monetize is either by advertising or premium services. Consumer sites which attract enough visitors can build a nice business on advertising, but most are unlikely to really break through and be big successes. It could pay the rent and some reasonable salaries, but not buy a private jet. The problem with advertising is that the big get bigger; people advertise on the most popular sites, so that if a site starts to become popular it quickly pulls ahead of the others. The Long Tail for the less popular sites leaves a nice, but not great business.

Premium services attract payment from users who like the service, and are willing to pay for more features or availability. So-called “freemium” sites combine the two, providing free services (sometimes supported by advertising) with limitations, and then paid premium services for those willing to pay.

We have been experimenting with using Twitter at several of the recent Gartner events. I have the most experience with the PCC conference in London, but have also been watching what has happened at the recent CRM, Enterprise Architecture and BPM conferences.

I started to collect some of the best practices we have found to use in a research note, but since not many of our customers organize conferences like this, I figured it would have limited relevance. That’s what blogs are for.

Best practices for tweeting at events

A few weeks before the event, start tweeting about the event using the #hashtag you want to use. That establishes the hashtag so that you don’t have people trying all kinds of different ones. At Garter, we have established the convention of using #gartner plus a two or three letter abbreviation for each conference. For example, the upcoming Symposium events will use #gartnersym while #GartnerPCC was used for the Portal, Content and Collaboration conferences. We don’t differentiate the location or year in the hashtag, since it is kind of fun to see these as a rolling event across time and space.

Use Tweetdeck or some other client app to monitor mentions of the event’s hashtag. You can set up a search panel that automatically displays new tweets with that text.

If someone says something cool, retweet it.

During the keynote or sessions you can see, quote what is interesting, and always add the hashtag

Tweet any interesting trends or non-confidential insights from customers.

If someone complains about something minor, respond to them (too cold in the meeting rooms, where is the veggie lunch…)

If someone has a major complaint or wants to challenge what is said in a presentation, engage them if you feel like it, but don’t let the discussion descend into a long argument.

Publicize events happening on the show floor, mention room changes or extra sessions, encourage people to sign up for 1on1s, especially if they are filling up.

Organize a tweetup: meet other Twitterers at a certain time, preferably when there is an open bar. It’s a nice way to put faces to @names.

Consider displaying a rolling list of tweets on a display in the hallways.

Displaying tweets during a presentation is trickier. It works in some situations where the speaker is prepared for it, but it can be very distracting to be reading with one eye while trying to say cogent things delivered in an engaging way. If a non-speaker is moderating the session or will be posing questions, they should monitor the twitter stream for comments or questions.

Save some of the best Tweets and display them in the locknote, if there is one, or collect them in a blog post

Look here for more tips on live tweeting.

As well as the Enterprise Architecture Summit, I had the opportunity this week to present at this year’s European Portals, Content and Collaboration Summit conference in London.  This is my “home” conference, since these are the topics I normally write on and talk with clients about as pat of the collaboration and social software team. It offered the chance to go deeply into the subjects I care about with some of the leading practitioners in the field.

As always, these conferences are amazingly energizing for analysts, and I hope for the participants as well. Hearing what people are up to and how they are using the technologies we talk about helps keep our research from being too abstract. External speakers like Edward deBono (the father of lateral thinking) and Chris Thorpe of the Guardian (who described how they built groundbreaking crowdsourcing initiatives like Investigate Your MP’s Expenses in a few days using almost no money) were inspiring as well as entertaining.

Dr. de Bono plans to autograph the stack of transparencies he used during his presentation and auction them for charity. See www.debonosociety.com for details.

As well as speaking and talking to clients, this year I took on an additional role as Twitter ambassador. I had planned to tweet highlights and notable quotes using the #gartnerpcc hashtag,but pulled back when I saw that other participants were already tweeting away. In all, we had about 600 tweets, which is quite a bit for or events. There was enough traffic that followers from Canada, the US and Korea were able to get an idea of what was going on without making the trip to London.

Many of the tweets repeated quotes that caught people’s attention. Some examples:

More than 50% of large ecm projects fail if less than 6 months are spent on vendor choice + planning Tony Bell (sic) @ #gartnerpcc

“You shouldn’t need training on tools: who took Facebook training? who’s Myspace certified?” – Deb Logan #gartnerpcc nicely put, again

Others commented on what the analysts were saying.

Unified comms can lead to clashes between those who run the phone/data netwowrks & those who want to innovate on it #gartnerpcc Surely not!

Social networking analysis very interesting, but has some interesting cultural issues. Definite Big Brother overtones #gartnerpcc

Inevitably, some some sessions didn’t go down as well, and Twitterers let us know it.

#gartnerPCC That session with the countdown questions was a train wreck. Sorry Deb, keep the day job.

Ironically, Dilbert had a cartoon that same day which sums up how analysts feel when someone criticizes the presentations they’ve poured their souls into.

I happen to know that the person who sent that last tweet knows Deb Logan quite well, and did not intend it to be as harsh as it might sound.

Thanks to all who contributed to the event IRL and on Twitter. All of the Tweets are accessible in this archive with a representative word cloud here.

I am doing a couple presentations on collaboration and social software at the Enterprise Architecture Summit in London this week, just before the Portal, Content and Collaboration Summit. I just got out of a roundtable on corporate blogging, which raised several interesting issues and a few solutions.

The most striking observation, although not unexpected, was that they looked at corporate blogging in very different ways, depending on their industry and what they want to achieve. One participant from a broadcasting company was exploring how to weave blogs through their normal activities. Blogs are well on their way to becoming yet another channel they use to communicate the news they collect.

A pharmaceutical company had very different concerns, mainly concerning compliance and control issues. Their regulated industry put very different demands on how to blog. Finally, a financial services company was looking at various aspects, including communicating with customers as well as encouraging internal exchanges. Very different issues arise depending on what the enterprise wants to achieve with their blogging initiatives. All agreed that the technical issues were not really a big problem anymore. They had access to more than enough blogging technology, at least from an EA perspective.

One of the more interesting issues raised by everyone at the session has to do with managing the different personas that people inhabit every day. When someone blogs publicly, are they writing for themselves, or as a representative of the company? Even on an ostensibly private blog, it can be difficult to separate the professional and the private. Different employment relationships muddy the waters as well. When a freelancer or part time employee says something, does it matter less than when employees say it? The level of influence the enterprise will need to assert over these sometimes private/usually professional postings will differ by person, industry, role and company.

I like coming to these conferences which are not 100% in my coverage area, because the participants often have a different perspective than the customers I commonly talk with. Enterprise architects often deal with collaboration issues, but they also usually have a broader brief. The wider field of operations they deal with often delivers different views. Rather than adoption or technical issues, they are asking how it affects the enterprise as a whole, and what policies and plans to put in place.

#GartnerPCC picks up tomorrow. I’m also looking forward to going deeper into these issues with collaboration practitioners.

Gartner’s Symposium/ITxpo conferences are a mammoth undertaking. For the second year, I get to serve as the chair for the European conference, to be held in Cannes November 2-5, 2009. I work together with colleagues organizing Symposia in Cape Town, Sydney, Tokyo and especially Dave Cearley, the Orlando chair.

The series of Symposium conferences is a big event for Gartner clients and analysts. For analysts, it is the flagship opportunity to get in front of clients, gain exposure for new ideas, and demonstrate what they can do. Customers look forward to an intense week where they can hear about a wide variety of IT topics from all of Gartner’s research groups, meet with vendors and peers from other organizations, and talk directly with many of the analysts who produce the research they use all year. Obviously, a lot of effort goes into these events, so let me describe a bit of how it happens.

I will talk mostly about preparations for Orlando and Cannes, the two largest editions. These events are closely coordinated, because they are the closest in size and timing, and the interests and requirements of the potential attendees align most directly. Cape Town, Tokyo and Sydney tend to be smaller events, which allows them to focus more on the specific needs of the local markets.

Formal preparations start when the conference chairs, together with Events staff and research managers define the overall structure and themes for the event. This year, we are putting more focus on the Gartner for IT leaders’ roles around which more and more of Gartner’s research is organized. The conference is divided into specific tracks for each role, plus one strategic initiatives track for content which crosses several or all roles.

I talk about Symposium 2009 themes

A track manager is responsible for the content in each track. Track managers have responsibility for both the Cannes and Orlando events, and also work with the chairs for the other Symposia. While much of the content appears in several venues, there is room for quite a bit of divergence across the geographies. Analysts are encouraged to tailor their presentations for the different locations to allow for local differences.

The larger analyst community gets involved when the Call for Contributions goes out in April. Analysts use an online tool to contribute their ideas for the presentations they would like to develop, along with background information like the target audience and why the topic is important.

Track managers use these proposals to select the content for their tracks, based on the slot allocations determined primarily by the respective conference chairs. Conference chairs divide the the total number of session slots available as determined by budget, rooms available at the conference venue and scheduling across the different tracks. Track allocations are driven by expected profile of delegates and the need to have adequate coverage of every track. We use surveys of last year’s and prospective delegates as to what topics are important, as well as delegate speaker evaluations.

Inevitably, many (if not all) track managers are disappointed by their allocations. There is always far more content than can be presented, so competition for the scarce slots can get intense. Selecting the content for tracks feels like pouring 30 liters of content into 10 liter sacks. There is always good stuff that doesn’t make it in.

The overall agenda starts to take shape in May and June, and is pretty nailed down by July, when the detailed scheduling process begins. This involves assigning sessions and presenters to time slots and rooms. It starts with an intense day sticking bits of colored cards onto sheets hanging on the walls of a conference room. Each card represents a session, and each color a track.

The goal is to create a balanced agenda with few content clashes (where there are two presentations at the same time that would appeal to the same people) and no speaker clashes (with analysts speaking at the same time in two different rooms). We also try to make sure there is something for every role in every session and that analysts aren’t too overloaded with back to to back presentations. Delegates dislike it when there are several sessions they want to see at the same time, and analysts don’t perform as well when they are run ragged from too many pitches on one day.

After the initial planning sessions, the agenda is transferred to spreadsheets and online tools. The next couple weeks are taken up with fine tuning and lots of small changes, based on analyst availability, last minute ideas, content changes, etc. As the weeks pass, it becomes increasingly hard to make changes, as each shift triggers a cascade of other changes to minimize clashes. This information is posted to the online Agendabuilder so that customers can begin to plan which sessions they want to see. Click here to see the current agenda for Cannes and Orlando.

Analysts spend July and August building and reviewing their presentations, which need to be finalized well before the conference. Every presentation goes through a rigorous review and editing process where other analysts examine their peers’ work for accuracy, quality and to contribute new ideas and suggestions. Editors check the content for consistency, quality and format them based on standards applied to all Gartner presentations.

In this post, I have only talked about the analysts, but something as big as Symposium obviously requires work from many more people. This is also a busy time for the people working with sponsors, planning logistics, setting up the thousands of 1 on 1 meetings, negotiating with keynote speakers, reserving hotels, designing the graphics, preparing the IT network, and on and on. It is a lot of work, but is always worth it.

This is Hype Cycle season, which always leads to lots of comments on blogs and other social media sites. I wrote the Microblogging technology profile, and have been alternately bemused and amused about the reactions to its position this year. Talking about Twitter always generates reactions, especially on Twitter.

This year, Microblogging (which includes the Twitter service) has crested the Peak of Inflated Expectations and is beginning to move into the Trough of Disillusionment. Some people disagreed with the placement of the dot, but that’s to be expected. From an unscientific survey, about as many people felt microblogging still had plenty of hype left in it as thought it was well onto the Slope of Enlightenment. So that’s OK. If the critics are all over the map, then the position is probably just about right.

It was also apparent that many people don’t really get how the cycle works. The most prevalent Tweet said some variation on “Web 2.0 Trending Up, Twitter Down.” Many commentators seemed to think that moving towards the trough meant that Twitter was over, never to be heard from again.

Actually, microblogging is moving along the cycle rather smartly. The structure of the hype cycle means that everything goes through the trough, before it reaches the plateau of productivity and wide adoption. Moving into the trough is therefore, a good thing for someone’s favorite technology, but not without risks. It is far worse for a technology to languish on the up side of the peak, never to approach wide adoption. Other technologies whiz quickly through the trough to reach the slope and onto the plateau.

The Twitter backlash has certainly begun, and many are piling on enthusiastically. I am not one of them, but there are definite indications that microblogging will have a difficult time getting through the trough. Moving into the enterprise will be especially tricky, one of the necessary steps to really achieve productivity. While there are several enterprise microblogging platforms out there, one of Twitter’s attractions is the massive volume of Twitterers and the amount of content they generate. Recreating that internally will be hard. Some companies have achieved successes, and I would love to talk to any others I haven’t spoken with. But it will be more difficult for microblogging to jump from the consumer to the enterprise market than many other collaboration technologies, such as instant messaging.

Before I was an analyst, I can remember lamenting why the people in our industry were so obsessed with chips and operating systems. It was around the time when DEC released the Alpha RISC chip, and rivalry between the different strains of UNIX and Windows was at its highest point. The horse race between BSD, Xenix, Ultrix, AIX, Solaris, HP-UX, and Unix International seemed to be a life or death struggle. Meanwhile, Microsoft wasn’t in the horse race, but was building a horseless carriage.

Chip architectures were also popular points of discussion. At one point, I was able to sound reasonably informed about RISC architectures, multithreading and other stuff that seems pretty arcane to me now. Even then in the early 1990s, it all seemed a waste. Why so much attention to chips and operating systems? That should be far too low a level for most people to be worried about. It’s like spending hours discussing the type of nails and bricks used to build a house, while ignoring the room layout, window placement or paint color. I would think that applications and what end users see would be far more important than the details of the innards of the machines they run on.

Now, most people don’t worry about chips too much, unless you really like that sort of thing (and I am oh so glad that there are people who do, so I don’t have to). But we still seem obsessed with operating systems. Either because they are ho-hum (Windows Vista), might be less ho-hum (Windows 7), supposedly just work (MacOS X — although I disagree), or just sound really cool (Google ChromeOS).

Google has unleashed a flood of commentary and speculation by saying that it is thinking about a new PC operating system built around the Chrome browser. I will let my colleagues debate what this really means. But this all makes me a little sad. I thought that obsessing about an OS in 1993 was depressing; why are we still doing it in 2009? Next, I fear we will re-open the big-endian/little-endian compiler debate. Isn’t it much more important what we do with these operating systems? I was impressed with the thinking behind Google Wave because it shows what can be done with the clever technology under the hood. The thought of having another OS that gets in the way of what I want to do grinds down my soul like a bad third grade teacher.

I realize that operating systems and even chips are important. They make it possible to do the cool things that we can imagine. But sewers, roads, electrical grids and payment systems are important too without too much of the population having to pay too much attention to them. I will pay my share of what it costs to keep them going, but please don’t make me think about them; I have other things to do. That is how I want to think about operating systems; get out of the way and let me think about something really useful, and where I can make a difference, however small.

Tonight I finally took time to watch the entire demo of Google Wave from the recent IO conference. I had already read a lot about it, but had not yet found an hour and a half to watch the entire presentation. This is a pretty busy period, so finding that much time to do anything not attached to a deadline, or some outdoor activity not connected with a keyboard is difficult.

But it was well worth the time invested. While 80 minutes is a bit long, this is a nice way to get an overview of new technologies; certainly better than white papers or static web sites. The enthusiasm of the Google developers and the people in the audience were obvious, It was easy to see that these were the actual developers, showing something they believe in strongly. It felt like watching a high school science project at times, with better graphics.

I found many of the quick asides about usability in the talk the most interesting. The speakers didn’t make a big deal of them, but they give good insights into how to look at technologies that really can change how we work. The two that come to mind are the observation that real time updates that happen too fast can end up being distracting, so might have to be artificially slowed down. Another one was that watching people type letter by letter exposes work in progress that might not always want to be shown.

Public interest in Wave is very high, perhaps even too high. A client recently asked if they should stop all investments in collaboration until Wave is released. I don’t think so. As exciting as Wave is, halting current projects on the basis of a Youtube video about a product with no release date, no pricing, no upgrade path and a hundred other open questions does not seem like a good idea.

Wave certainly is exciting. It shows what is possible when smart people are given an interesting task, without all those annoying constraints that most product vendors have to content with, like backward compatibility, effort to upgrade, migration costs and established infrastructures. Even just as a think exercise, Wave is useful to show we could work together, and questioning the assumptions that short messages happen in an IM client and longer messages in an email client. These distinctions are more a function of history than necessity. 

My colleagues have published a First Take on Google Wave with more thoughts, but this is what impressed me the most. There are many more questions to be answered before Wave will make a big impact on enterprises, but I look forward to hearing more about it as it approaches real release. I also look forward to more online videos to introduce new products, but please hold it to 30 minutes or less.

I talk with a fair number of vendors every month about their collaboration and social software offerings. Usually, these briefings have a familiar pattern (the easiest to use, the most experienced management team, growing ecosystem of partners, logo slide with lots of customers…), but I’ve noticed something new starting to creep in. Rather than talking about the features and what customers have done with them, more vendors are talking about how they built their products.

I recently spoke separately with two vendors with newish offerings (Oracle with Beehive and Day Software with CQ5 Social Collaboration) who emphasize that rather than pulling together different products or evolving an existing offering, they started over and designed a new product on top of a solid repository. A clean technical architecture has not typically been a high priority from vendors in this space, who either leverage technology from a variety of sources, including open source, or have legacy products which they need to build upon. Rather than making a point of their long history or leveraging of proven technology from elsewhere, Oracle and Day emphasized the “clean sheet of paper” design approach.

I know that there are others out there who have done this, but these are two that I happened to have spoken with recently who had a similar message. This could be just a way to differentiate a late entry into an established market. In Oracle’s case, I expect they also want to distance Beehive from its failed predecessor, Oracle Collaboration Suite.

I believe it is more than just a stab at differentiation, however. Social software has grown beyond the gee-whiz phase where early adopters can be induced to buy by flashy functionality or anecdotes of somebody having done something fun, somewhere. Corporate buyers and IT architects are getting involved and looking for justification and supportable infrastructures.

in response, I expect to hear other suppliers emphasizing this type of advantage, if they can find a way to claim it. No doubt, some vendors will come up with a variety of “creative” ways of demonstrating architectural superiority as this becomes a more common customer evaluation criteria.

For some, building on a framework that has proven itself over 20 years of usage with millions of users will be their evidence of superiority. Others will wave their clean sheet of paper to show they were not tainted by old ideas. Both approaches have their merits in different situations; the good thing for users is that this discussion has started, because how one builds software matters.