I see a lot of vendor briefings as an analyst. A disturbing number of them go wrong. I cannot count how many times I heard the phrase “Haven’t seen that before…” or “Can you see anything?” or “It worked this morning.” My favourite is “We just released a new build, and it might not be completely stable,” as the software crumbles into a smouldering heap of bits. 

Or worse. Just this week, a very proud web conferencing vendor wanted to show me their flashy new version. It did look good, until it crashed my machine with a Blue Screen of Death, the first one of those I have seen in several years. That day also saw the second and third time I saw it, until we finally gave up.

I’m not sure why, but I am prepared to believe it is my fault somehow. I spend a lot of time in the mountains, which makes for sometimes dodgy Internet connections. Maybe that is what does it.

Maybe its just my karma. Whatever the reason, I am sorry. If I could make it stop, I would.

But usually, creepiness is all about perception and how a policy, feature, or incident makes people feel. There is no ISO standard for degrees of creepiness that everyone can agree on. That makes it hard  for many technology suppliers to get their heads around. They are accustomed to making powerful tools that can do amazing things. Something as squishy as “how people feel” doesn’t fit into their engineering plans.

That feeling is not rational, but triggered by deep, unexplainable ur-reactions. I saw that myself when a supermarket I visit started using big monitors that display every item I bought as I went through checkout. Intellectually, I know that anyone can look over my shoulder and see what is on the rolling band. Still, it felt super-creepy to see all my purchases displayed on a big screen for all to see. I must not have been the only one; that experiment didn’t last long.

This problem has come up a couple times when talking to vendors promoting social network analysis (SNA). A tool to map the real communication lines and understand who collaborates with whom is undeniably a powerful tool, one that many companies can profit from. However, describe SNA as “our system will snuffle around in your email, read all the documents you create, and analyze everything you post on the intranet and Internet so that we know more about how the organization works” and you can feel the anti-creepiness hackles rise. Explaining that only automated algorithms will read the email (no people) and that subjects can preview and edit the analyses generated can help, but not really. The feeling of creepiness persists.

Different situations and places also bring different attitudes. Instant messaging and presence are good bellwethers. It is part of the standard infrastructure and work process in may organizations, while in others, employees rebel at the thought that their bosses can monitor when they are at their desk from a distance. What is a useful and even necessary communications tool to most is as bad as hanging surveillance cameras in the bathroom would be to others. Anecdotally, Germans seem to be especially sensitive to these issues. Hundreds of thousands of people in Germany reportedly find seeing their house on Google Streetview too creepy to bear.

Creepiness is also impossible to defend against. The second a company or a person starts to explain why what they have done is not creepy, it already ipso facto becomes creepy.

Google recently made the news with a creepy story of a Google employee who was fired after he used his position as an engineer to read the email, chat logs and other private information of some kids he had met IRL. While creepiness is often hard to define, everything about this incident was creepy. The facts of the breach itself, the pictures of the offending employee, the fact that children were involved, and the realization that quite a few Google employees can apparently dip into our private communications — all of this adds up to a huge bout of creepiness.

There is not much that Google could do in this instance, except fire the creepy guy and hope that the incident blows over. It looks like that will happen, but I expect the overall issue of creepiness will not go away so easily.

The theme for 2010 is “Think B4 U post!” (sic), with videos and posters aimed at reminding people of the potential consequences of posting embarrassing videos and pictures, or worse. Something that “seemed like a good idea at the time” often goes pretty wrong when populated across the Internet.

While the primary audience of Safer Internet Day is kids, the advice given also has relevance to enterprises. As so often happens, what is important to consumer users of social media, also apply to businesses:

Kids: Have you thought about what could happen if people you don’t know see what you are about to post?
Enterprises: Have you done an impact/risk assessment of what could happen if your social media sites are compromised?

Kids: Do you think about and use the privacy settings of the social networks you use?
Enterprises: Do you understand and effectively use the security and privacy protection capabilities of the collaboration products you use?

Kids: Do you know how much you can trust the people you “friend” into your network?
Enterprises: Do you understand the limits of trust with the partners you collaborate with?

Are you following the advice that you are giving your kids?

The thing that particularly made me think this time was that while I was clearing, it was still snowing. A lot. Half of me felt like I was wasting my time since by lunchtime, it would all be covered again. But I could come up with several reasons while I was shoveling :

• What is gone is gone. There was about 20 cm when I started shoveling. Clearing it now would make doing it later easier.
• Even though we don’t need to get out now since I work from home, we might want to go out later.
• Walking on unshoveled snow makes it hard to remove and eventually slippery ice.
• If the driveway is relatively clear, the snowplow is somewhat less likely to throw a mass of wet, heavy snow onto the driveway when it goes by next time.

Indeed, Powerpoint has ruined me such that I think in bullet points even when away from a keyboard.

That got me thinking of other things that seem pointless, but actually are worthwhile doingto be done.

• It is worthwhile to set up a scalable, manageable platform even if you suspect or even know that not many people will use it initially. Once the infrastructure is in place, you can concentrate on encouraging adoption. Reversing that order could cause problems.
• Even though everyone hates formal content categorization systems, they are necessary. Even if you know that any hierarchy of categories set up will ultimately break down or need an overhaul, you have to start somewhere.
• Participating in social media rather than a medium the corporation control invites negative comments. Too bad. You have to do it anyway, or risk something worse: irrelevance.
• The quickly-changing technology market means that any product choice could be undermined at any time by a better product that comes along. But you can’t stay on the fence forever.

What examples do you have where something seems like a waste of time, but needs doing.

Update: I just cleared another 30 cm which fell by lunchtime. This could get old pretty quickly.

Instead, I want to talk about my anti-resolutions for 2010.They are “anti” in a couple different ways. The main one is that these are not things that I intend to do, but stuff that I hope that other people will do. That is much easier.This is also what analysts usually do; we rarely do stuff, but we comment a lot on what other people or organizations should do. Most of the resolutions are also “anti” because they describe something that I hope won’t happen rather than new things that should happen. I am generally not a negative person, but there’s a lot of undesirable activity going on out there. After reading this, please stop it. Thank you.

1. Vendors should stop confusing “You can use it to do that” with “We designed it to do that”
   Maybe it’s because I am working on a new magic quadrant (for “Externally-facing Social Software Platforms”), but I’m growing weary of vendors who think because a feature can conceivably be (mis)used to fill a need, that they should be considered just as much as a product specifically designed to meet a particular set of requirements.

   You can use a heavy duty flashlight to hammer in a nail (I know; I’ve done it), but that doesn’t mean that a flashlight should be considered part of the hammer market.

2. Organizational planners should stop thinking that participation in social media is enough.
   Don’t get me wrong; I think participation is wonderful. Participation, (or at least monitoring if that’s all that you can swing at the moment) in communities and broader social conversations is the best place to start.

   But merely participating cannot be the end goal. You need to understand what you realistically can get from the community, and what you can contribute, with emphasis on the latter. If you contribute well, you have a much better chance of benefiting at some point.

3. More enterprises will look beyond SharePoint
   I have nothing against Microsoft SharePoint. It is good at serving several needs, and just fine for addressing many others. But there are plenty of other good products out there, doing innovative things. In too many cases, SharePoint has become the default answer no matter what the question. Rather than asking “How can I use SharePoint to do X” most of the time, a better question would be “How can I do Y” or even “What should be the role of SharePoint in supporting my efforts to achieve Z?”
4. Vendors should stop thinking that it is the analysts’ job to promote their product.
   I shouldn’t be, but I’m regularly surprised and depressed at how often this comes up. The biggest part of my job is to help end user customers make better decisions, and to help vendor customers develop better products and marketing strategies. I am not a direct part of those marketing efforts, however.

   I talk about vendors and products a lot, but not because the vendor is a client, or because they took the trouble to brief me. I realize that briefings take time and effort, and appreciate it when vendors invest their time in talking to me. But neither that nor being a client creates an obligation to promote a product.

5. Please don’t blithely assume that analysts are scuzzballs.
   Again I shouldn’t be, but I am often unpleasantly surprised at the ease with which some people assume that analysts are unethical, sleazy, scumbags who do nothing unless bribed. I have no problem with people disagreeing or challenging judgements, but I am as insulted as Tom is by offhand, unsupported assumptions that question my integrity. Luckily, I have enough customers who seem to value the advice which my colleagues and I provide. If we were really as scuzzy as some people seem to think, no one would put any weight in what we have to say.

   I can’t speak for the entire industry or even all of Gartner, but I know that for a fact that I have never been asked to favour a vendor client over non-clients in any research I have done. Most of the time, I don’t even know for sure which ones are clients. We spend a great deal of time discussing how to keep our independence, and none on how to reward paying clients. In the last month, I had two situations where I know that Gartner lost revenue because a vendor client expected their customer relationship should deliver them more mentions in research notes and conference presentations and better ratings (see #4). We showed no hesitation in making clear that this is not the way we work.

6. Please don’t let the Apple people get pitted against the Android/ChromeOS folks
   I suspect that the time is soon coming when we we will see “I’m a Mac, and I’m a ChromeOS” ads, or at least spoof videos along the lines of Apple’s ads making fun of PCs. Since I am more of a PC/Blackberry type, most of this will pass me by, like when the cool kids in high school  split along a strict Michael Jackson/ZZ Top divide (I was more of a Joe Jackson fan).

   I already find most Mac vs. PC discussions irritating (they both work, they both have problems, IMHO). But a split like this will inevitably encourage the disturbing trend that splits the world into camps that generally either talk past each other, or shout at each other. There’s enough of that in politics; let’s try to avoid it in tech where we can.

7. No one will “Reply all” to more than ten people.
   Yeah, that would be nice.

As for last year’s anti-resolutions, as I expected not many of them came to be, or stopped being as the case may be. A little bit of progress on numbers 7 , 8 and 9, but not much. However, this year’s list only has 7 items instead of 10, so I suppose that is close enough to good news to be worth celebrating.

Happy new year to everyone.

If you have something that you don’t want anyone to know, maybe you shouldn’t be doing it in the first place.

Wow! What an incredible attitude, right? I mean, if Google thinks that only perverts and terrorists need to worry about privacy, then they have totally gone over to the side of evil.

But listen to the whole interview, and read what else he had to say, and what the question was that he was answering:

Q: People are treating Google like their most trusted friend. Should they be?

A: I think judgement matters… If you have something that you don’t want anyone to know, maybe you shouldn’t be doing it in the first place. But if you really need that kind of privacy, the reality is that search engines including Google do retain this information for some time, and it’s important, for example that we are all subject in the United States to the Patriot Act. It is possible that that information could be made available to the authorities.”

That puts the outrageous statement in a different light. The word “it” refers to treating Google as your trusted friend, not to having something to hide.There might be many reasons to distrust Google, or to expect them to do better. But not on the basis of this extremely poorly-worded, but legitimate and even insightful answer.

All he is saying is that laws like the US Patriot Act exist. The UK Official Secrets Act exists. The Chinese government exists. Google must obey the government where they operate. It can be argued whether they obey too enthusiastically or should use their influence to change policies, but refusing to obey the law is not an option. Search engines and ISPs keep information to provide better service and comply with the law. He is saying that given that governments have these powers, you cannot rely on someone like Google – or anyone else online – to protect you completely. So if you have something to hide, you shouldn’t be blabbing about it online. That seems like an un-outrageous statement.

This clip tells me that Eric Schmidt needs media training more than that Google has a privacy problem. It is far too easy to take this quote out of context and make it sound like something outrageous, as many commentators have been doing. But talking about the limits of what Google can do to protect you is perfectly legitimate. So this was a stupid, bonehead thing to say, because the bald statement in the first quote is clearly not what Schmidt meant to say. Now just like Al Gore has to continually explain what he really said (it was not that he “invented the internet“), Schmidt will  spend the rest of his career clarifying what he really meant to say. There would have been no problem if he had said:

If you have something that you don’t want anyone to know, maybe you shouldn’t be talking about it online in the first place.

But CEOs of major corporations with a high profile shouldn’t need a PR flunky or analyst/blogger to come along behind him insisting “What he meant to say was… ” In this area certainly, we should expect better of Google and Eric Schmidt.

Gartner’s John Pescatore also had a comment on this incident.

I decided earlier this year that this would be an interesting venue to explore. It is a European technology conference which focuses on startups. Bigger players like Google, BT, Orange, Facebook and Microsoft are here too, but to emphasize their connections with new technology. Most of my Gartner customers are bigger, more conservative enterprises that are interested in startups, but hesitate to go too far with them. I spend a lot of time taking about SharePoint and other mainstream products, but will be looking for ideas out of the mainstream and for what comes next.

I am especially interested in what is coming out of Europe, where I live. It’s easy to find startups in the Bay Area, but I know that there is great stuff coming from the rest of the world.

Anyone here who has ideas about what is coming next from Europe can DM me at @jeffmann on Twitter. I will be writing later about the things I see.

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.

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.

The truth is that most organizations are messed up or behind to some extent; at least, they have some areas where they could perform better. That’s good for me as an analyst, because otherwise I wouldn’t have much to talk with them about, Analyzing and helping to apply best practices from other customers is one of the main things I do.

I often feel like a therapist, reassuring managers that there are good or even great things about what they are doing, and that most organizations really aren’t that much different from them. Some might be more aggressive, or have spent more time planning their projects, but, really, that’s OK. There can be good reasons to go more slowly. Many of the early adopters suffered expensive mistakes, as well as realized value. If those other guys are ahead in some areas, chances are that they are behind in others.

Of course, there are some companies I talk to who really are way behind, Strangely though, these usually aren’t the ones who lament about how good it is everywhere else. The ones who are strongly lagging usually have decided that’s the right thing to do, and get defensive when I suggest that there might be some value in moving a bit more quickly. The force of technology progress pulls most organizations along. Those who resist, have made a conscious decision to do so.

I also hear from some customers about how good they are, and how advanced their adoption and use of technology is. Sometimes they are obviously correct, but I usually try to speak with end users when I hear this from the IT people. They often tell a different story. The IT people who talk down their current accomplishments and are looking for ways to improve what they do in the future generally get better reviews from their end users.