The empire strikes back

It can't be easy being Ray Ozzie. Microsoft's chief software architect is just 18 months into the job as Bill Gates' handpicked successor, yet depending on whom you ask, his tenure will either signal a bold new era for the company or mark the beginning of its terminal decline.

From the perspective of Microsoft shareholders, the picture certainly looks grim. After a decade of timid stock performance, the fiscal year that ended June 2009 saw Microsoft's net revenue decrease for the first time in its history. It also announced its first-ever layoffs and has since exceeded its original estimate of 5,000 pink slips. But worst of all, for the first time in recent memory, Microsoft confronts a rival of goliath proportions that actually seems capable of going the distance with the software giant.

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That rival, of course, is Google, and the search leader's relentless expansion is battering Microsoft on virtually every front. Google's emphasis on the Web as an application platform challenges the primacy of PC software and operating systems, Microsoft's traditional cash cows. Its forays into mobile devices call into question the very concept of desktop computing. Its Web-based services and open source software fly in the face of Microsoft's core business model. Philosophically speaking, Google is the anti-Microsoft -- and it's making a killing at it.

By comparison, the world's largest software vendor has adapted poorly to the changing market landscape. On the Web, Internet Explorer is dead last in standards compliance, and its critical security flaws sometimes go unpatched for months. Windows Mobile claims just 7.9 percent of the smartphone market, and according to Gartner, sales are slowing. Microsoft's vaunted new search service, Bing, has won few converts from Google, except where Microsoft has strong-armed them into using it. In short, while it may be first in desktop software, Microsoft's track record outside its comfort zone has been fairly dismal, enough so that in 2007, venture capitalist Paul Graham declared, "Microsoft is dead”.

But Ray Ozzie has a plan. With the Windows division back on track and new version of Office set to debut this year, "software plus services" is the new mantra at Microsoft's Redmond headquarters. It marks a strategic shift that will transform everything about the company, from how it develops, markets, and deploys software to its relationships with its customers. Ozzie doesn't want to beat Google at its own game; rather, he wants to remind Google that the software game has been and remains Microsoft's. But to succeed, he's going to have to rewrite Microsoft's playbook along the way.

Ozzie rules: The "software plus services" vision
Nearly five years ago Ozzie, then Microsoft's newly minted CTO, issued a memo outlining his vision of the next step in the company's ongoing evolution. "(People are) increasingly drawn toward the simplicity of services and service-enabled software that 'just works,'" he wrote. "Businesses are increasingly considering what services-based economics of scale might do to help them reduce infrastructure costs or deploy solutions as-needed and on subscription basis”.

In other words, Ozzie felt it was high time for Microsoft to compete with Google on its home turf. But in Ozzie's vision, Microsoft would embrace the Web differently than the search titan has. While Google sees the browser as the ultimate client UI for software large and small, with the cloud as the ultimate repository for all data, Ozzie sees an opportunity for Microsoft to offer services that augment and enhance traditional desktop software. Where Google sees thin clients interfacing with powerful applications, Ozzie sees rich client applications consuming lightweight services.

Nexus One and Android 2.1

Google's Nexus One is an astonishingly fast phone. Use it for more than a few minutes and you'll see that much of the slowness we've learned to associate with smart phones is not the fault of the network but of the phones themselves specifically, their processors.

Today's 3G networks can deliver data to your phone faster than the broadband connections that many people have in their homes: a laptop equipped with one of those USB modems from AT&T or Verizon functions splendidly. Yet most smart phones take several seconds to click between Web pages or launch a new application. That's because the typesetting and image processing necessary to turn the text of a Web page into something that can be displayed on a screen takes a lot of computation. And most phones have comparatively slow processors in many cases, they are no faster than a Pentium 3 from 10 years ago.
The Nexus One, by contrast, has a one gigahertz processor more than 60 percent faster than the processors in the iPhone 3GS, Palm Pre, and BlackBerry Bold 9700, according to several benchmarks. In my testing, it took 2.5 seconds, on average, to click from one Wikipedia page to the next using T Mobile's 3G network and half that long when using a Wi-Fi connection. You can open applications, zoom in on photos, and search your phone's databases instantly. The faster processor dramatically improves the phone's enjoyability.
The Nexus One also has a beautiful high resolution screen 800 by 480 pixels crammed into 3.7 diagonal inches for a display that's roughly 250 dots per inch, making even tiny text quite legible. (Apple's new iPad, in comparison, is 1,024 by 768 pixels on a screen that's 9.7 inches, for just 132 dots per inch.) The Nexus's five megapixel camera can autofocus and takes detailed photos at six centimeters, and it has a surprisingly bright LED flash. The phone also has a standard 3.5 millimeter headphone jack, which means you don't need those bulky adapters to use high end earbuds.
Google's phone runs an updated version of the company's Android operating system, the same software that's at the heart of Motorola's new Cliq and Droid phones, T Mobile's G1 (a.k.a the HTC Dream), and even the Barnes and Noble Nook e book reader. But unlike the others, the Nexus One runs Android 2.1, the latest and greatest version (of course). Droid runs 2.0, although it's scheduled for an update, while the G1 is still running Android 1.6.
Android has been on the market for nearly 18 months, and this new version has a significantly improved user interface that requires fewer button presses for the same functions. For example, when you are in the middle of a phone call, you can now use buttons on the screen to add a call, display the dial pad, switch to and from a Bluetooth headset, mute, and control the built in speakerphone (on the G1, these features all require clicking the Menu button). The screens also show more information. For example, a photo of the person you're speaking with is displayed in the middle of screen; put that person on hold to take another call, and the first caller's photo appears behind the second photo.
Photos appear more often than you might expect, thanks to the close integration between the Android and Facebook. Type your Facebook username and password into the phone's Facebook application and the phone's Contacts (the address book) will immediately be populated with the names, phone numbers, photos, and even status updates of your Facebook friends. You can decide whether you want to have the phone augment existing contacts with the Facebook information, bring all of your Facebook contacts into the phone's contact list, or remove all of the Facebook data from that list. It's creepy, sure, but also kind of useful.

Four Aspects of Social Web Evolution

So what kind of emerging standards and technologies are we seeing that can help address these issues? It turns out that there are quite a number of interesting efforts or new takes on existing efforts worth examining right now. These include :

Open activity streams. The central artifact of social media has become the activity stream, whether this is the familiar Facebook news feed, Twitter stream, or the classical reverse chronological list of blog entries or wiki modifications. The problem is that there are too many streams to interact with these days and they are too distributed to perceive and interact with directly. They also come in many different types from syndication formats like RSS and Atom to custom API streams. End users don’t care about the technical details anyway, so there has been some interesting work on standards for modern activity streams and activity stream aggregation. The one watch is activity strea.ms which has already been adopted by Facebook, MySpace, Windows Live, and Opera and many others with Google and Yahoo! close behind. Some are likening this to when different phone systems or e-mail providers allowed their respective populations to communicate with each other.

Once standards are put in place by providers (and release officially in their tools and platforms), activity streams can be more easily accessed for both browsing and posting using well defined APIs, thereby directly enabling unified 3rd party experiences across different social channels. Activity stream aggregators like Friendfeed or social dashboards such as Tweetdeck can then offer a single social front-end that holds the promise to reduce the friction of using today’s proliferating channels of social media. This could also address some of the disconnect between older and newer social media platforms I outlined above. The bad news? Standardizing activity streams might not create a unified experience across popular social networking application formats such as those between Facebook apps and OpenSocial. In other words, social media data flow will likely be open and standardized soon, but not the social applications themselves, keeping the walled gardens up between social apps for the time being. For now, smart consumers and businesses will insist on open activity streams in 2010.

Portable identity, contacts, and data. Having a single, chosen online identity has become the holy grail of the social Web in some circles for years now. Fortunately, it’s fast become a reality, whether that’s for logging in to Web sites (the approaches include OpenID, Facebook Connect, and Google Accounts) or for directly accessing the data that you own at a site (OAuth and OAuth WRAP). All of these approaches made major headway in 2009 and are poised for mainstream use in 2010. For those building Web sites or using social media tools, these standards will be the stamp of approval. The social graph is also becoming more portable and despite fairly unsuccessful attempts to standardize this up until now new attempts such as Portable Contacts may have more success this year with backing from Google and influential figures from the open Web community including Chris Messina and Joseph Smarr. There are also efforts emerging, such as WebFinger, to make metadata about people more open and easily obtainable instead of relying on profile pages on proprietary social networking services or poorly supported microformats. A few semi-proprietary yet popular social metadata services have thrived as well and will continue to be grow in importance this year. A good example is the Gravatar service, which let’s users define how their user profile picture looks, and is then pulled in from whatever social media tools they interact with later on. This gives users one single place to control their visual representation across the Web.

Better social and location capabilities added to the core of mobile devices. Social APIs in mobile devices that understand the Web (and things like Portable Contacts) have not yet emerged in the iPhone or Android SDKs other than some local address book access. For now, individual applications must connect to social media on the Web and access activity streams and contacts only if they are socially savvy. A few, such as FourSquare, are doing some impressive things but the industry currently lacks the critical mass of a major mobile vendor putting intelligent social capabilities into the device APIs itself, thus making most mobile apps non-social today. For now, there are some innovative examples of mobile social solutions including Bu.mp for easy contact exchange and Loopt for socially-powered mobile discovery. As for location, while initiatives such as Yahoo’s Fire Eagle and especially Google Latitude have made some headway in fueling location services in mobile apps, there’s still a long way to go yet before location is ambient enough to make a big impact on the social side. Emerging to fill the gap this year are open source projects such as PhoneGap, which offer consistent location-aware capabilities across the iPhone, Android, and Blackberry.

Better distributed models for the social Web. Two good examples of this includes the advent of the increasingly widely used PubSubHubBub for faster and more efficient notification of social media updates and the Salmon Protocol which “aims to define a standard protocol for comments and annotations to swim upstream to original update sources — and spawn more commentary in a virtuous cycle.” I’d also expect to see some social capabilities emerge in Open Mashup Alliance, which itself can help bring together social capabilities very easily, both in the Web and the enterprise.

What’s missing from this picture? Unfortunately, quite a bit and this means 2010 is also going to be another year of consolidation and hard work to get the many and varied pieces of the social media world to fit together better and more easily. Of the issues I raised early on, a few will hardly be addressed this year by new social Web standards and technologies. These include the ability to support aggregating and filtering social media in a consistent way. Specifically, while some services, notably Twitter, make it fairly easy to build services that can sort through, process, and analyze the flow of social media to derive real intelligence and insight, most do not. Other areas where work needs to be done is in social media applications models 0where the great divide lies between Facebook apps and OpenSocial, neither of which may be ideal vehicles for the long term. There are others as well.

Of course, in terms of how it will impact us at home and ultimately in business, as we’ve seen with Enterprise 2.0, cloud computing, open APIs, and other major advances, the ideas in software these days are increasingly coming from the consumer world and then pushing their way into the enterprise realm. This is very much the case with the social Web. Thus, those looking to bring the latest advances into their organizations will need to track the developments above closely as many of them will appear in an enterprise social computing platform near you very soon.

The Social Web in 2010 is the emerging standards and technologies to watch

The emergence of Facebook, Twitter, and the rest of the social Web as a global force in the last several years has done a great deal to highlight their potential to fundamentally alter the way we communicate and collaborate both at home and in business. However, despite the movement of social computing into our daily lives we’re all clearly on a long journey together as the technologies themselves emerge from infancy.

The state-of-the-art today when it comes to the social computing environments that surround us now — in our browsers, mobile devices, and elsewhere — underscore how much more we have left to do to make these new modes of digital conversation and discourse become mature, efficient, safe, and truly useful.

Fortunately the Web doesn’t stand still and a great deal of research and development continues to go into evolving the mechanics of today’s online social universe. There are presently many new efforts under way to refine and improve the world of social media, some of which we’ll explore here and many which are just beginning.

The consumer Web continues to drive social business

While some advances in social media are happening in the enterprise space as well, the real story continues to be the Web as it continues to forge quickly ahead in terms of sheer innovation and raw output to shape the latest developments in social computing.

Naturally, we’ll likely see some of these attempts fall by the wayside in the relentlessly Darwinian environment of the Internet. We’ll also see many of them succeed because of their broad engagement with the Web community, apparent utility, and subsequent widespread adoption.

As for 2010, it’s shaping up to be a year of general improvement in the business and technology industries hard hit by recession, the impact of which has seemed to hold back new investment and experimentation in social technologies, many of which are funded by staff participation from Internet firms. But it’s now looking to be a banner year for significant advances in social software standards and technologies, many of them to address well-known shortcomings and inconveniences in today’s Web 2.0 landscape.