Gary Zellerbach's Weblog: Focus on eMarketing and Electronic Software Distribution

The Buzz

I attended the Web2.0 Conference from Oct. 5-7, 2005, at the Argent Hotel in downtown San Francisco. It was one of the most entertaining and informative conferences I've ever been to. I'll admit to being a bit "star struck" with one Internet "luminary" after another right there on stage -- think of it as "Woodstock" for the Internet!

The general atmosphere was optimistic and enthusiastic. Is this the start of another Internet "boom"? I'd say the consensus was that the Internet is in its infancy -- there's plenty of time for new cycles of bust and boom, though hopefully we've learned enough to flatten out the peaks and valleys. Money is flowing back into start-ups, and new open source tools and cheap hardware make starting a "Web2.0" company easy and cheap. Exciting times indeed...

The Buzzwords

It was a great place to catch up on the latest buzzwords, so here's my list. I think you'll be hearing them a lot in the coming months.

• Web2.0 -- I can't possibly explain it better than Tim O'Reilly's "What is Web 2.0" article.
• The Long Tail -- I sure heard this a lot during the conference. The term was coined in an Oct. 2004 Wired magazine article by Chris Anderson, The Long Tail.  A quick summary: "Forget squeezing millions from a few megahits at the top of the charts. The future of entertainment is in the millions of niche markets at the shallow end of the bitstream." For example, your local video store can only stock top sellers due to shelf-space but Netflix can offer 15,000+ movies profitably. Your local book store can only stock a limited number of books but Amazon can offer almost anything ever printed, whether in or out of print. Once you get past the best-sellers, you get to the long tail, and there's a ton of value that can be derived there for the first time thanks to the Internet.
• Mashups -- Web services make for some unique possibilities. What if you can take a web service from provider A, mix it with services from provider B (and maybe C and D too) and create a whole new web application? Enter "mashups," sites that do just that. GoogleMaps seems to be the darling of the mashups so far and forms the basis for many, if not most of them. The prototypical mashup combines craigslist real estate postings with Google Maps and then voila! -- you get housingmaps.com.
• Ajax -- This recently coined acronym is credited to Jessie James Garrett of Adaptive Path in his article, Ajax: A New Approach to Web Applications. He writes, "The name is shorthand for Asynchronous JavaScript + XML, and it represents a fundamental shift in what’s possible on the Web... Ajax isn’t a technology. It’s really several technologies, each flourishing in its own right, coming together in powerful new ways." See Jessie's article for details on the technologies -- I'll just summarize the impact. The idea is that a confluence of new and even not-so-new standard Internet technologies are now evolved to the point where it's practical to create web pages with much more user interactivity without the need to go back-and-forth to the server. A really simple example is registering on a site. The "old" way: You put in a user name, press submit, and wait while the name is sent to the server, the server says the name is already taken, and then reloads the page with an error message. With Ajax, all this takes place almost immediately on the client, and numerous server round-trips are eliminated, and/or the data is loaded "in the background" through javascript initiated asynchronous communications. This is what makes Google Maps work-- give it a try and note how much you can do inside your browser and without the page reloading. What would the "experience" be like if the page had to reload from the server every time you made the slightest tweak? It wouldn't work!
• Prosumer -- Many Web2.0 companies are being built on consumer supplied content, so the customers become "prosumers" rather than "consumers." Think of all the companies sprung up around blogs for starters...

The Workshops

The conference began on Wednesday with a series of workshops. Here's the lineup. As the "formal" conference didn't begin until 4:30 that afternoon, the conference organizers had not expected so many attendees at the workshops. A number of the rooms were too small with overflow audiences, as there were some great topics and speakers. As was typical of the event, the people speaking on the subject were often the people who invented the subject, which helped explain the popularity.

I attended the Ajax conference where we saw some exciting examples of Ajax at work, including Joe Chung's new company, Allurent, which is creating a "next generation" ecommerce experience. (You'll also hear the term RIA a lot -- Rich Internet Applications.) Other new Ajax apps include Netsuite and SocialText.

Next up was the Open Source Infrastructure workshop which focused on how Web2.0 apps can be built on open infrastructure, components, protocols, data formats, and web services. Check out microformats for a very interesting example.

I then attended the Akamai workshop on "Marketing to Echo Boomers" (which was especially interesting as I happen to be the parent of two of them). Echo Boomers are the "echo" of the baby boomers and are the new generation aged 0-27. They're creating a "demand side" economy (rather than supply side), where users take control over what they want and what they buy. Zazzle took part in the program and is a great example of this new economic model.

AT&T research labs was next with a program called "Data on the Move". It focused on search technology for the most part, with some novel ideas on how to enhance the usability of sifting through the overwhelming amount of data on the web.

Finally came the Mashups 2.0 workshop where we learned all about this new type of application and saw some more examples (besides the aforementioned housingmaps.com) including Simply Hired and a just-announced search engine aggregator called rollyo (roll your own search engine). The takeaway here is to look at what data and data services you own (and we certainly own a lot from our extremely high traffic download site) and ask: Is this data set of interest or value to others? If yes, then make it available via open services and others may come up with some incredible uses for the data we never imagined. (This would certainly be a challenge for us but interesting to ponder the possibilities at least.)

The Conference

There were many incredible speakers and topics at the conference -- here are the schedule and the speakers list. I'll note a few key messages and highlights.

• Sky Dayton, founder of Earthlink, took us on a brief multimedia tour of South Korea, where the "future of wireless" (in the US) is happening in S. Korea now. The cell phone is king and does everything, from music to satellite TV. iPods aren't happening -- they're not needed.
• We saw a web-based word processor that's available now, Writely. What's the point? In true Web2.0 spirit, it's all about collaboration -- and adding web-based collaboration to word processing is what makes this a "value add" over what's on the desktop. This was especially interesting in light of all the recent buzz about "Google Office" following the Google/Sun announcement.
• Terry Semel, CEO of Yahoo, talked a lot about the future of media and Internet video ("IPTV"). A recurring Web2.0 theme is to enable users to create content. The future of content is no longer the exclusive domain of the giant media companies. (It's interesting to see how the Chronicle extracted the most "noteworthy" and "controversial" aspects of his talk for an article the next day.)
• The Open Source discussion panel included Sun President Jonathan Schwartz and Mitchell Baker, head of the Mozilla Foundation. I jotted down a few key Web2.0 aphorisms from the conversation, echoing some of Semel's comments: "The power of distribution is shifting from who distributes the operating system to the community and the web" and "If you have to advertise it, it's probably not Web2.0!"
• Mary Meeker from Morgan Stanley had some eye-opening Internet trends and stats. Following on the preceding comment about advertising, it was noted that Skype was the fastest growing application in history (and without advertising!).
• David L. Sifry, founder of Technorati, had some impressive blogs stats. They currently track 18.9 million web logs, with 70,000 new blogs created daily! It shouldn't come as a great surprise that this was undoubtedly one of the heaviest blogged events in history.
• Jason Fried, founder of 37signals, gave a somewhat controversial talk with no slides and no props -- he just stood there and talked for 15 minutes. (I thought it was really well done, by the way.) The presentation style was fitting since the topic was "less is more" in Web2.0. His model focused on creating lightweight apps and simple products. To do that, you need "less money" (i.e. less debt and less pressure), "less people" (you only need 3 people for a product -- designer, programmer, and the "business" person), "less time", "work less" (and you'll be more effective), "less abstractions" (use an agile programming iterative approach, no functional specs!). To be a success, you just need to solve simple problems. Build the UI first -- it defines your product and becomes the functional spec. Then write the code.
• Similar to Jason, Stewart Butterfield,  founder of flickr, introduced his WTF principle (you figure out what it stands for). He said when they launched the site the model was "96-97% wrong," but you put it out there and evolve it realtime. (Another Web2.0 principle -- constant evolution and releases versus mega-releases every 18-24 months.) I guess it worked -- Yahoo just bought Flickr -- and there are somewhere around a zillion photos uploaded there now every day.
• It was interesting to see Sun co-founder Vinod Khosla take the stage -- he's a very successful VC now. A few of his words of wisdom: "Just because you get funded doesn't mean you're successful" and "Spend wisely, scale conservatively -- the more money you give a company, the less likely they'll be successful."
• Another Sun alumnus, Kim Polese, discussed her latest start-up, SpikeSource. A key point she and other entrepreneurs made is how little money it takes to start a web company now. That's because the hardware is cheap, the (open source) software is free, and you can start your site on a hosting service for a few hundred bucks a month. You can start a company with $100,000 today where millions were needed not so many years ago.
• Sergey Brin from Google made a special appearance (he wasn't on the schedule) and sat down for a 1/2 hour interview. During Q&A, I asked him about "Google Office" since that seemed like a good question for a Sun employee to ask. Unfortunately,  I couldn't get him to spill any super secret plans. He said he didn't see much point to moving office functionality to the web as an Ajax technology unless value could be added. (That relates to the point made earlier about the collaborative features in Writely.) But he said "it might be of interest." He's obviously well-coached on what not to say!
• Scott Cook, founder of Intuit, re-emphasized a message we heard over and over -- KISS (keep it simple stupid). Intuit's products are all based on making the complex simple for users (think tax returns).

Whew! I could go on, but enough already. I hope you find these concepts interesting. Now comes the tricky part -- what does Web2.0 mean to our ESD team at Sun Microsystems and what can we do about it?

I can think of a number of  "Web2.0" concepts for how we could evolve the download experience, and some of them have already been touched on in recent brainstorming and planning sessions. We could take those initial ideas much further. But frankly it's not easy to quickly "Web2.0-ify" our applications, due to the overhead associated with project development in a corporate environment and the typical issues of competing priorities and limited resources. (This is not a judgment call -- our processes do work well, and there are pros and cons to any development process.)

Just the same, this has been a tremendous opportunity to familiarize ourselves with these concepts and to start imagining what they can mean for us and our customers over the next few years. We'll continue to do the best we can to improve our user experience and look carefully at how we might work Web2.0 into the mix.

Update: Be sure to check out some great posts on the conference from fellow Sun bloggers: Rich Sharples and Claire Giordano.

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