Picking the future of Microsoft

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Microsoft’s withdrawal from its bid for Yahoo! has hardly clarified the the tech landscape. In fact it has made the shape of the industry far more uncertain, as Microsoft mulls moves to shore up its future.

Microsoft is one of the most financially successful companies on the planet. It anticipates operating income this year of over $26 billion, maintaining strong growth from the last few years (just $9 billion in 2004), making it arguably stronger than other highly profitable companies in financial services and oil, which have more inconsistent incomes. However their success is founded on operating systems and client-installed office productivity software. Online services account for around 5% of their revenues, and entertainment 12%. There is no question that their core revenue is under attack. The summary of the challenge is “lower cost alternatives”, including online software and services, and open source.

So what will Microsoft do? The latest rumor is that Microsoft intends to buy Yahoo!’s search business, then buy Facebook for $15 to $20 billion. This is highly credible, though gossip is rife. Unquestionably this would give Microsoft a very strong position, both in the online advertising business, and also in leveraging what is now the dominant social network platform. In addition, the total price would be less than what Microsoft was prepared to pay for Yahoo! as a whole, keeping some of its financial powder dry.

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Search engines and journalism: Seven key issues as news goes online

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Recently the Future of Journalism conference was held in Sydney, run by the Media Entertainment and Arts Alliance, the body that represents workers in media and entertainment, including journalists. One of the broadcast media channels which covered the event called me last week to get some ideas for their interviews with the keynote speakers at the conference.

Their first question to me was about the impact of search engines on journalism. While our conversation went off in quite different directions regarding the future of journalism, I think it’s a very interesting issue to address. There are seven important issues for how search engines impact journalism:

Traffic from search engines provides a significant proportion of online media income. In some cases up to one third of traffic to online news sites comes from search engines. With the primary revenue from most online news coming from advertising, search engine optimization is not an optional activity for news sites and editors.

Headline writing is becoming a completely new art (and now science). As many have written on headline writing for search engines before, including the New York Times and an article I wrote on newspapers, search optimization, and old-school editors, publishing online requires a very different approach to headlines. The cute wordplays that have characterized newspaper headlines through the last century (Headless Body In Topless Bar; Ice Cream Man Has Assets Frozen; Two Convicts Evade Noose, Jury Hung etc. etc.) don’t tend to bring search traffic. Morever, visitors will usually find the content was not what they were looking for, and will leave in seconds.

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Interview on SkyBusiness: Facebook And Other Social Networking Sites Can Be Beneficial For Corporations

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Here is an old (November 2, 2007) interview I did on SkyBusiness about social networks, examining both the industry landscape and how social networks can be valuable inside organizations. What I like best about this is that for much of the interview they had up a banner reading “Facebook And Other Social Networking Sites Can Be Beneficial For Corporations”, a message that business audiences, especially at the time, hadn’t heard much before.

Some of the things I discuss in the interview:

* The role of advertising networks in social networks

* The upcoming launch of Google’s Open Social and what it means for the sector

* The value to organizations of encouraging strong social networks

* Examples of companies using Facebook and other social networks internally

* How Enterprise 2.0 takes social media tools to apply to organizational productivity

Participate in creating the list of top Australian web apps

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[UPDATE:] The final Top 100 list is now up.

In researching the Top 100 Australian Web 2.0 Applications list, I created a draft list on Google Docs of 125-odd applications I was aware of, and invited a dozen of the most connected and influential people in the space as collaborators, to add any applications I wasn’t aware of and provide updates on any apps in the list.

Phil Morle of Pollenizer told me the Australian Twitter community has been asking for the spreadsheet to be opened up. Click here to view the early draft list of Australian Web 2.0 applications. Note this is absolutely a draft, does not necessarily cover all the applications we’re looking at, may have incorrect information, and comments are unmoderated.

If you want to add to the list and are not currently invited into this list, either email me or comment on this blog, or ask me or your favorite leading Australian Web 2.0 entrepreneur for an invite to collaborate on the document.

Living Networks – Chapter 4: Relationship Rules – Free Download and Commentary

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Download Chapter 4 of Living Networks on Emerging Technologies

Every chapter of Living Networks is being released on this blog as a free download, together with commentary and updated perspectives since its original publication in 2002.

For the full Table of Contents and free chapter downloads see the Living Networks website or the Book Launch/ Preface to the Anniversary Edition.

Living Networks – Chapter 4: Relationship Rules

Building Trust and Attention in the Tangled Web

OVERVIEW: Connectivity allows companies to integrate their systems more deeply and form many more business ties, but these opportunities are often neglected. In an increasingly transparent world, trust is becoming more rather than less important, and organizations must take steps to develop trusting relationships with their partners. The one scarce resource today is attention, so you must earn it from your clients and partners in order to create and maintain profitable relationships.

Chapter 4 of Living Networks – Commentary and updated perspectives

I opened the introduction to my first book Developing Knowledge-Based Client Relationships with the words: “Knowledge and relationships are where almost all value resides in today’s economy.” For the last decade I have explored the apparent paradox that in an increasingly digital world, human relationships, particularly trusted relationships, are becoming ever more important. At the same time, as the amount of information available swells, attention is becoming an increasingly valuable commodity. It is commonplace to talk of the attention economy, where value is based primarily on attention.

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The feedback loop of customer attention and personalization

(See below for description)

Since trust and attention are so fundamental to where business is going, this chapter is absolutely as relevant today as when it was written. Arguably the underlying principles will become even more important in coming years.

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Announcing the 2008 Top 100 Australian Web 2.0 Applications list – Launch is on 19 June

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[UPDATE:] The final Top 100 list is now up.

Following the great success of last year’s Top 60 Web 2.0 Apps in Australia list and Web 2.0 in Australia event, this year we will release a list of the Top 100 Australian Web 2.0 Applications.

The list will be launched on 19 June in BRW magazine together with feature stories on the relevance of the leading online applications to business, including on investment, corporate productivity, customer engagement and innovation. It will then be published online on the Future Exploration Network website and this blog.

A lunch event on the same day at KPMG’s Sydney offices will formally launch the list, including showcases of some of the winners and a panel discussion by leading figures in the Australian scene. Full details of the lunch event, including registration, are coming soon. It will be in a similar format to our full capacity Web 2.0 in Australia last year, though open to everyone instead of invitation-only.

We are again looking for event sponsors. I’ve approached the obvious candidates in the last couple of days but we’re open to interest from any organization. Download the event and sponsorship information here or by clicking on the image below.

topweb2apps08_cover.jpg

We currently have over 125 candidates for the list. Please email me or comment below if there are relevant apps that you think I am not aware of. We have information on all of the apps listed last year and those that applied to Vishal Sharma’s Startup Carnival earlier this year and those featured on his startup blog (a great resource!).

Montage of recent media coverage

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We recently created a montage of some of my recent television, newspaper, and magazine coverage. This was created primarily for the dozen or more Australian speaking bureaux I work with. The majority of my Australian, US, and global speaking work comes to me directly, but that is complemented by work that comes in from a range of speaking bureaux in Australia. I provide them with material regularly to keep them and their clients informed of what I’m up to.

Click here or on the images below to download the montage pdf (2MB). It includes most of the text of a few interesting articles, such as my predictions for the future of home and immersive technologies, and thoughts on the media landscape in 2020. The robot pets TV interview is also up – I’ll try to get some other recent TV interviews up on the blog soon.

TELEVISION

TV

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Social networks open out – celebrating the last year’s change but “lots more work to be done”

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In the last two days MySpace has announced Data Availability and Facebook launched Facebook Connect, while Google is due to announce “Friend Connect” on Monday, according to TechCrunch. MySpace and Facebook are providing ways to open out users’ access to their data on those social networks. TechCrunch says that Google’s initiative may not be quite as open as the other initiatives, in that it will require data to be accessed directly from their servers each time rather than being able to be downloaded and manipulated (under strict terms of service), However Open Social, which Google’s initiative is based on, is being used by most of the major social networks other than Facebook, making Friend Connect potentially broader in scope, as long as the social networks supporting Open Social choose to use the new offering.

I wrote last year about how the dominant platform in technology is shifting to social networks, and the inexorable trend to openness in social networks. It turns out the MySpace and Facebook announcements may not be quite all they seem. Chris Saad of the DataPortability Working Group writes:

Both moves have rightly been attributed as ‘Data Portability’ plays – but neither of them are true ‘DataPortability’ implementations… yet.

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MySpace embraces “data availability” – a major step forward to the Wide Open Web

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MySpace has just announced its Data Availability program, which includes adoption of a range of DataPortability standards, and data sharing with Ebay, Yahoo, and Twitter. Detailed coverage of this at TechCrunch, ReadWriteWeb, VentureBeat, and many others (see Techmeme). At the same time, MySpace has joined Google, Facebook, Microsoft, LinkedIn, Digg and others on the DataPortability project. DataPortability notes:

While the participation and endorsement of large vendors such as MySpace in the DataPortability project is a key part of our overall goals of industry wide user-centric data portability, we’d like to re-iterate that the project is an open, grass-roots initiative. This means that individuals, startups and medium scale companies are just as welcome to join the process and have just as much capacity to influence or even lead the discussions and the outcomes.

An important part of the background to this is that Ben Metcalfe is Director of Engineering for the MySpace Platform. Ben has played an important role in getting MySpace to understand the importance of an open approach (see his thoughts on this announcement), drawing on his experience in leading the BBC’s developer platform, and his existing involvement with DataPortability. I caught up with Ben recently in San Francisco and we discussed where data portability is going. Absolutely the leadership of the large players is fundamental to driving this.

This year there will be many announcements of this kind, but this is a particularly important one, both through the visibility of the announcement, and even more importantly the value of what it enables. The millions who are using multiple platforms such as MySpace, Yahoo, Twitter and so on will be able to bring together their activities, and clearly see that we are transcending the closed web. People will begin to understand that the natural format of the web is open, with our activities naturally flowing across applications. Expectations will heighten, and the already rapid pace towards the Wide Open Web will accelerate.

Laurie Lock Lee on Governance in an Networked World

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Laurie Lock Lee is one of the top practitioners globally in network thinking. I first came across his work in the mid-1990s, when he was one of the first people in world applying social network analysis approaches to organizations, for his then-employer BHP. He moved to CSC with the acquisition of BHP’s technology group, and last year set up his own firm Optimice with Cai Kjaer. I have featured some of Laurie’s work in the last two Future of Media Reports, including a high-level view of media industry networks, and a detailed analysis of the impact of a large acquisition on the Australian media industry landscape. Many other great reports and industry network maps are available from the Optimice website.

Laurie has just launched a new blog on Governance in a Networked World. He notes that it’s important to find the right scope and topic for a blog, and I think this is a fantastic one. As I wrote in releasing Chapter 3 of Living Networks, governance is perhaps the most important perspective on how organizations need to deal with a networked world. There are certainly risks to be understood and dealt with, but there are also opportunities that must be recognized and addressed. Business and government leaders are abrogating their responsibilities if they do not engage with the issues raised by our hyperconnected, networked world. Laurie says on his inaugural post:

Now to the governance bit. The old conglomerates grew up in an era when hierarchical control was the order of the day. Decision making necessarily travelled up and down the chain of command. Governance was all “top down”. Today many of the conglomerates have largely disappeared. Organisational structures have been flattened to facilitate agility and faster decision making. And governance systems have done what? Have they changed substantially at all? The focus is still top down control. The expectation is that senior management can “control” everything. In my view the networked business environment has worked against senior management’s ability to “control” the business. I believe the paradigm has shifted from one of “control” to one of “influence”. Until governance mechanisms are adapted to this change I believe they will continue to add cost and reduce value to the very organisations that they are trying to help.

I look forward to Laurie’s insights on his blog.