The new brand name is the most striking part of this announcement. BPOS never really tripped off the tongue and always kind of felt like a code name. Office 365 as a major Microsoft brand will be a surprise to a certain UK office supply company, but will quickly become associated with Microsoft’s cloud collaboration suite. I actually was surprised at how Microsoft was able to keep this new brand name a pretty good secret until the unveiling. I was also surprised that the web site was not scheduled to be available until 3 1/2 hours after the launch event, leading to avoidable snarky Twitter comments.

Inevitably, there will be fun poked at the new moniker. Do I really want to be in the Office 365 days per year? What happens in leap years (Microsoft gives you a day off once every four years). I honestly don’t think that it would be possible to come up with anything that would not have some kind of downside, and it certainly is better than BPOS or some other anodyne acronym.

The second big news is that in addition to Exchange, SharePoint and Lync (OCS), Office 365 will also include Microsoft Office applications, delivered either in the browser or running from the desktop. While Microsoft naturally emphasizes the productivity benefits integration with the rest of the products will bring, many corporate buyers will be hunched over their calculators figuring out how the new possibilities will affect what they pay for Microsoft Office products. With prices ranging from $2 to $27 per user per month, it won’t be simple to do the maths.

The most important indication from this announcement would be if Microsoft’s design focus is really shifting to the Cloud. Yes, this has been the stated direction for some time, but it has been hard to defend when new functionality that was available in on premise products a year ago won’t make it to the cloud products until sometime next year. If Microsoft starts introducing new functionality first in its cloud products, that will be a major step towards proving that Microsoft is “all in” for the cloud, as Steve Ballmer keeps saying.

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.

I was excited by the original video clip that introduced Wave. It was unlike anything I had ever seen before, and I couldn’t wait to get an invite. Once I got one, my reaction was… “Huh? Now what?” Like most people who tried it, I never really got into it. I felt kind of guilty, since I never really devoted that much time to figuring it out. I thought I would have plenty of time to do so once the kinks were worked out. But alas. After about a year, Google announced that they will put no more development effort into it, essentially dooming it as a product.

Google certainly has the right to kill off its projects. It was still in Google Labs (not even Beta), and no one had paid for it. But the way that Google did this is unsettling. If I had spent a lot of time or money incorporating Wave into how I work, I would feel pretty bad after someone pointed out that blog post to me. Just imagine: you have to follow a specific blog page to find out that the product you have built a business around, or used every day is doomed. . If I were a partner who had spent money developing products around Wave, I  would feel even worse. Let down. Adrift. Angry. Certainly, I would think twice about doing business around Google technologies again. Actually, I wouldn’t think twice; I would never do it again.

I love how startups innovate. That means taking risks, which is to be applauded. But when do they stop being startups and when do the risks need to get smaller? I think that we have reached that point with Google now. It wants to be an enterprise player, so it needs to act like one. That means developing and communicating long term technology roadmaps that developers and enterprises can count on. Some think that this kind of flexibility and willingness to act quickly is a good thing. So do I, for small startups. Not for high profile products from grown-up companies. Google was still pushing Wave to enterprises at an event about two months ago. Even today, there is nothing on the Wave inbox page or the Wave help page or the official Wave blog page to indicate it is a dead product walking. Partners and customers are right to expect more. Google has made significant progress towards becoming a more credible technology partner and enterprise supplier. This episode is certainly a step backwards, however.

While the focus was supposed to be on the European tech scene, it often felt like a gathering transplanted tree and branch from San Francisco. The inside jokes, the focus on venture capital gossip, even the music felt very Californian. The smug, “we’re masters of the Tech universe” attitude was sometimes a bit hard to take.

Given Lemeur’s bi-continental focus (a Frenchman living in the Bay Area) and the influence that the US has on the tech industry worldwide that’s to be expected somewhat. However, I wasn’t sure why some of the companies presenting there, even in the startup competition were even there since they had no discernible European connection.

The main hall speakers were generally well chosen, even if some could probably develop a new story. I am not a habitué of these conferences, but I had heard several of these messages before. It was very clear that some of the speakers who had achieved great things had real ideas they were passionate about,which lead directly to their success. Others just seemed to have a reasonably good idea once, and were lucky enough to be where lightning hit, judging by what they had to say here.

Some speakers clearly understood what people were coming to the event for. Ryan Sarver from Twitter made several important announcements about new service offerings. Others, like Ethan Beard from Facebook  read from a prepared speech that told the audience basically what Facebook is and why it was so great, definitely not what anyone in the room needed to hear.

I tried to talk to or hear as many startups as I could, either on the show floor or in the competition. There seemed to be four main themes among the new companies’ products.

• Helping people organize their web experience and online resources (Mendeley, Symbaloo, Wikio, Allmyapps)
• Cloud support services (Superfeedr, Joilcloud, Cloudsplit
• Using the social grid in different ways (Kukunu, Friendbinder, Stribe the competition winner)
• Ecommerce (Shutl, Storific, Sokoz)

The star of the event was Queen Rania of Jordan, who gave an impassioned and clued in speech on how the Web can be used to improve how people live and calling on the entrepreneurs to support her main charity programme.

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.

That isolated word comes to a screeching halt when the last session ends. Physically, the world inside the conference room disappears in a few hours. Workers start tearing down the show floor and some of the conference area even while the last presentations are being delivered. By early afternoon, the site doesn’t look the world we’ve come to know so well for the last four days. From having every minute planned and parceled out, having two hours with nothing specific to do before my train leaves is an odd experience. That’s when I take the chance to stare off into space for a bit. The view from the Croisette is really quite nice, it turns out.

Aside from the normal questions about vendors and best practices, I was surprised by the number of organizations looking to take advantage of new vendor dynamics to shake up the hold that they perceive that Microsoft and to a lesser extent IBM has over their collaboration strategies. They welcome the advantages of integrated offerings and upgrades with more functionality, but dislike the idea that they have no choice but to stay with their incumbent vendors. I think the traditional titans could be in for a surprise when they see the number of organizations seriously looking at Cloud computing as a way to shake up existing relationships, and taking steps to understand which parts of their collaboration lineup can be commoditized and federated.

As conference chair again this year, it was gratifying to see that some of the changes we made this year went well. We continue to see more senior executive attendees, which is reflected in the CIO track. We dramatically increased the number of workshops and roundtables, most of which were well-attended. Several analysts and about 20 attendees were actively tweeting, with about 200 messages per day. Scheduling the analyst keynote on Monday afternoon to give attendees the option of arriving on Monday morning seemed to go over well. The stormy weather on Monday morning was not very welcome, but there’s not a lot we can do about that.

Right now, several analysts are on their way to Tokyo for the Japanese Symposium. I have started the trip to Australia for the event there to be held next week. I expect these to be just as intense.

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.

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.

Up to now, Twitter has chosen not to put much effort into developing business models. Like Google did before it, Twitter is building out its platform and attracting users. With a fair amount of VC money in the bank, it can afford to take its time. Twitter does indeed have value, even if it is not what most people think it is. Premium user accounts aren’t the answer. That wouldn’t bring in much money, potentially alienate users and reduce traffic. That last risk is why Twitter shouldn’t go that route.

As I said in my last blog posting, Twitter’s value is in its content, not the client. The Twitterbase is growing by 6 million tweets per day. Twitter is attractive because it has built a service which attracts this much volume, creating a constantly growing, twitching, seething real time source of comments, news and opinions. Companies will be willing to pay for better access to this information for lots of reasons. Consumer products companies can track attitudes toward their brands and their competitors. Media groups can use it to track real time public opinion. Governments can use it to follow what citizens are doing and thinking. Access to this data and the services to analyse it is where Twitter’s business model lies.

Even though Twitter can build out a business model, I don’t necessarily think it should. This is a good time for Twitter to sell itself to somebody. Media hype is pretty high now, with celebrities regularly talking about how they tweet on talk shows instead of promoting their latest film. It is unlikely to get much more intense than it is now. While building a business is possible, it will be a long hard slog for Twitter to monetize its assets on its own.

Google would be a good candidate. The culture and ambitions of the companies match. The Twitter founders sold Blogger to Google earlier and work on the same principles of build first, monetize later. An acquisition plays to Google’s strengths in terms of infrastructure and monetizing analysis of large amounts of data. Google knows how to run highly scalable applications, and make money doing it. Google is not the only company that would benefit from a tie-up with Twitter, but it certainly looks like a good candidate.

Other tie-ups between Google and Twitter short of an outright acquisition could make sense, but would be harder to sustain since Twitter already uses such open interfaces. it would be hard for Twitter to offer Google better access to its data than any of its other partners if Google is just another partner. That rich API has been instrumental in building the healthy ecosystem of clients and analysis services that make Twitter so much fun.

In the end, of course they will do what they think is best for their companies and shareholders. Judging by the lack of noise in the blogosphere, it looks now like “Twoogle” will not happen (but that might have changed by the time I post this).Either way, it will be fun to watch.