Moonwatcher

Steps Toward a Phoneless iPhone

The iPhone is great, revolutionary, amazing. But it's a compromise device and only a stepping stone between plain old cell phones and the real revolution: the iPod touch.

And with Skype that real revolution just got one big step closer.

The "Great Recession" as an Economic Stress Test

It occurs to me that this "Great Recession" (and to paraphrase Axl Rose, what's so great about recessions anyway?) might wind up serving as a fascinating experiment: a no-holds-barred stress test of the economies of countries around the world, and of the global economy itself.

Last week I read Daniel Suarez's Daemon, a techno-thriller in which an artificial intelligence threatens to take over the world. (Ha!) In the book, companies and governments are motivated to comply with the AI's demands by the threat of an unthinkable economic apocalypse. Well, since Mr. Suarez wrote Daemon, that apocalypse has become not only thinkable but, according to the news, actual. And although we may not have seen the worst yet, life goes on.

When we come out of this thing on the other side, will we as a country and a world be forever weakened? I doubt it. We may come out not only stronger but also, having passed a serious stress test, more aware of our strength than ever before.

Google Graphing "Real" Social Networks?

Facebook is great, if that's how you happen to communicate with your friends. I don't. I suppose it's due to my age, but I tend to connect with my friends and acquaintances mostly in email and on the phone. Interestingly, Google seems to be building social networking infrastructure not only for the web (with OpenSocial) but also for these more traditional communications channels—with Gmail and Grand Central Google Voice.

From the Grand Central Address Book page:

Use the "Recent" link to see contacts that you have talked with lately

So Google knows whom you've talked to recently. Interesting.

Gmail doesn't currently expose a list of recently-emailed contacts, but it goes provide a "most contacted" list. It's not clear what information is being stored beyond the number of emails sent to each contact, but the "updated" field of the contact record itself—accessable via the Google Contacts Data API—is touched, and it's entirely reasonable to assume that a complete history of emails sent and received is being maintained.

Google's phone-and-email approach is slower and more difficult than Facebook's (Gmail has somewhere north of 51 million users compared to Facebook's 175 million, and Google Voice is just getting off the ground) but it's potentially much farther-reaching. There are roughly 1 billion email users in businesses alone, and over 4 billion mobile and fixed-line phone subscribers.

In the long run, graphing real social networks by watching traditional communications channels—and integrating that data with online networks outlined by OpenSocial—could allow Google to assemble much more useful information than Facebook's walled-garden approach.

It will be interesting to watch this over the next few years.

Making Better Teams by Supporting Remote Members

My post last week spurred some very interesting conversations in the comments, on the Enterprise Irregulars mailing list, and (gasp!) in person.

As Atlassian CEO Jeffrey Walker pointed out, "Humans create wonderful things as physically connected teams. Things that are very hard to do virtually. ... I welcome competitors who think otherwise." I appreciate the sentiment, and agree that interpersonal bonds between team members can have a big influence on their output, but I'd argue that it's possible to create and maintain those bonds at a distance, and that doing so is increasingly easy with tools like Twitter, FriendFeed, and Facebook.

As someone on the EI list put it so well, "We may be distant. We may have never met face to face. We may be simply using a strange new medium to connect. But it all works, and the humans behind the bits are what matters."

Others pointed out that some job functions lend themselves to remote work better than others, which is surely true. Customer-facing roles are probably the easiest to single out as appropriate for online work, at least in the case where that's where the customers are.

For instance, as a developer I like to get my information online. I may actually get on a plane to attend a conference once every now and then, but for for the most part I prefer the higher bandwidth (and higher signal-to-noise ratio) of online resources. If you want to connect with me, you better be prepared to do it online.

Finally, I had a great conversation with Clay Spinuzzi, an associate professor at UT who's writing a book on modern working arrangements. We talked about the awkward dynamic of a team comprised mostly of people working in the same physical space but with one or two members working remotely. We agreed that such an arrangement is problematic, and that the remote workers would no doubt become marginalized. But then it struck me: maybe the fact that a team can't support remote members effectively is an indication of a problem with the design of the team.

In the same way that an on-premise system that uses proprietary protocols and can't connect to cloud-based systems is severely limited, so is a team that relies on in-person communications among its members.

The good news here is that technologies (dare I call them "social"?) like Twitter and its more business-oriented knockoffs make it possible to translate much of the casual, interpersonal communication that has traditionally happened over the cubicle walls in an office to online, asynchronous, geographically-distributed teams. In other words, Twitter is the new water cooler—which comes as absolutely no surprise to anyone who uses it.

When two machines sit next to each other in a server room it doesn't really matter what networking technology they use to communicate: AppleTalk, NetBIOS, and Banyan VINES will all get the job done. In fact, so will a serial cable—and one might argue that this is in fact the best solution since it requires the least overhead. But TCP/IP will work too, and with the added benefit that if you move one of the machines across the world it will still "just work" thanks to the vast infrastructure of the Internet. I suggest that the same is true for intra-team communications.

Teams built to rely on electronic, and more specifically Internet-based, communication channels can include remote members transparently, and can therefore be comprised of not only the best people in town but the best people period.

Google and Salesforce: Compute in the Cloud but Work On-Premise

There's no small irony in the fact that Google and Salesforce.com, two of the biggest cheerleaders for on-demand applications, want their employees to be on-premise. At least that's where they both wanted me to be when they talked to me about working for them.

On-demand—or more currently "cloud computing"—vendors have painted a picture of IT managers who insist that their IT infrastructure remain in the building as backward and retrograde. "Control is an illusion," they say. "Our servers are more secure than yours anyway, and more efficient." And I agree. But I think the same is true for people.

At Spanning Sync, we're essentially all remote workers. I have an office, but Larry and Byron don't work there. In fact, I'm not sure where they work, and I don't care. Likewise, they don't care, and usually don't know, where I am. Sometimes I work from home, sometimes from my office, sometimes from campus, and sometimes from a hotel room or an Admiral's Club. All we care about is that the work gets done—and it does. I would have guessed the same to be true at Salesforce.com and Google, but I would have been wrong.

A couple of years ago Adam Gross at Salesforce approached me about working for him as a developer evangelist. I said I was very interested (Salesforce was and is one of my favorite companies, and that's a role I enjoy) but that I was settled in Austin and wouldn't consider moving back to San Francisco. He said that wouldn't be a problem, since my "territory" would be "online" as opposed to a specific geographic region.

So I flew out to San Francisco, interviewed with a bunch of smart people at One Market Street, and a few days later received an offer. We negotiated the terms and agreed on a start date. But a few days after that I got a call from Adam. Marc Benioff wanted the position to be based in San Francisco, so that was the end of that. It was a huge disappointment.

Last year I had a similar (but slightly more complicated) conversation with some people at Google, another one of my favorite companies. It unfolded in much the same way: I flew out to Mountain View and interviewed with a bunch of smart people at 1600 Amphitheatre Parkway. They call the role "developer advocate" to avoid the religious overtones of "evangelist", but it's the same idea. For me the position would have been a dream job. But to get it, I was told I'd need to move back to the Bay Area. This time the disappointment was even bigger.

In the end it all worked out for the best. Running Spanning Sync is the most thrilling professional experience I've ever had, and I wouldn't be able to do this if I were working anywhere else. But I hope that the way my little company works becomes more the rule than the exception in our industry. The natural place for that to happen next is at the companies that best understand the value of on-demand resources.