chris horn's blog

A core theme of Web 2.0 is the collective wisdom that results from the network effects of sharing across the community. The wisdom of the crowd is sometimes more than the sum of the individuals therein. Wikipedia is one prime example, since collective knowledge can trigger insights for individuals, which can then augment the collective wisdom: the added knowledge which would not arise if the group did not collaborate together. I recently wrote a blog entry about a similar phenomenon in multi-disciplinary research. Group and individual reasoning can positively feed off each other.

One of the dichotomies of the Web 2.0 phenomenon is on one hand, the power of the group and the collective knowledge of the crowd; and yet on the other the significance of each individual. Yes, collective knowledge such as Wikipedia and del.icio.us (and of course Google!) have emerged, but blogs written and commented by individuals are still a fundamental force. Some may argue that indeed the information in specific blogs written by certain individuals is more valuable, accurate and reliable than that in shared wiki repositories maintained by the amorphous net community. There is room for both individuals and the crowd.

In the race to be successful on the web, the focus is on attracting and retaining users, eyeballs and clicks. For the promoters of a web site - whether a commercial venture, or just a worthy cause for society at large - building and growing a “market” is key. Monitoring usage patterns, listening and reacting to user feedback, all builds momentum: hopefully a tipping point is passed, and the network effect of market momentum reinforces the popularity and acceptance. However: does a mass market strategy play only to the crowd, and not to the individuals therein ?

For Web 2.0 , Chris Anderson introduced the term “long tail” to emphasise deploying:

“customer-self service and algorithmic data management to reach out to the entire web, to the edges and not just the center, to the long tail and not just the head”.

As noted by an Amazon employee quoted by Wikipedia: “We sold more books today that didn't sell at all yesterday, than we sold today of all the books that did sell yesterday” -- read that slowly to yourself again if you hadn’t come across it before..

Further, in his discussion on technology market dynamics, Christensen noted:

“Simply put, when the best firms succeeded, they did so because they listened responsively to their customers and invested aggressively in the technology, products, and manufacturing capabilities that satisfied their customers' next-generation needs. But, paradoxically, when the best firms subsequently failed, it was for the same reasons--they listened responsively to their customers and invested aggressively in the technology, products, and manufacturing capabilities that satisfied their customers' next-generation needs ….But the problem established firms seem unable to confront successfully is that of downward vision and mobility, in terms of the trajectory map….”

Success – at least in some industries, such as the disk drive and earth moving machinery industries which Christensen documents – can equally lay the foundation for failure. Group and individual behaviour can play off each other, creating emerging forces from below.

Combining the Anderson’s exhortation to reach out to the edge, with the warning by Christensen not to be outflanked by emerging disruptive technologies from below, it would seem wise to ensure that a Web 2.0 market strategy explicitly recognises the potential of the individual, as well as the mass market of the group. Even more important is to react to dynamics in the market and to changing tastes. The observation is: that in a global market of mass consumerism, the ability to cater for the vast number of changing individual personal tastes and desires – to personalise and dynamically tailor your products and services – may be much more commercially – and socially – valuable, than volume plays of standard products and services to an anonymous amorphous group.

The long tail changes: it wags. The universe of micro-markets in the long tail is worth addressing – this is Anderson’s observation. In addition, changes in a micro-market may in due course influence the mass market (and blind side you) – this is in essence Christensen’s observation.

Ajit Jaokar was one of the contributors at the Fidelity event in Galway, and he reminded the audience of Tim O’Reilly’s characterization of the Web 2.0 phenomenon:

• the web as a platform;
• harnessing collective intelligence;
• data as the next Intel inside;
• the end of the software release cycle;
• software above the level of a single device; and
• rich user experiences.

I thought about each of these six facets as I reflected on the dynamics of the micro-markets, and list some (not all!) of my observations below: how does Web 2.0 address the wagging long tail ?

One common way of reaching out to the long tail, and monitoring its movements, is “data as the next Intel inside”. Google exploits what its itself calls the ”uniquely democratic nature of the web” to derive data on the click activity of millions of users to drive its PageRank algorithm. I suspect that social networking sites, such as MySpace, Facebook, Bebo and LinkedIn, could likewise exploit their data about networks of people. I’ve always wondered in passing how data regulators, such as the Irish Data Protection Commissioner, view such click gathering and social networking activities…

As Web 2.0 embraces beyond “the level of a single device” – which was Ajit’s theme of his presentation - I observe that telecommunications operators, such as Vodafone, O2 and T-Mobile, collect and record quantities of data, ironically in a large part due to regulatory requirements of data retention legislation in jurisdictions such as Ireland. These vast data archives capture about social communication patterns of populations – it is not just the social networking sites which have such data! There are opportunities, and privacy risks, to exploit these vast patterns to provide commercial value. One can imagine intelligence being generated by mobile phone operators to enable targeted marketing by third parties and content providers…

Quietly collecting mouse click activity, or analyzing phone call patterns and triangularising the locations of their owners, are data driven ways of using to drive for the long tail. Importantly, the data is dynamic and therefore so also is the derived collective intelligence: as trends emerge, or change, so can the offerings tailored for particular sets of individuals. But it seems to me that these approaches may wear a clandestine cloak: there are more explicit ways of using collective intelligence for the wagging long tail.

A successful web site needs stickiness to retain, and track, its audience, including the wagging long tail. A social networking site such as those above in part generates its stickiness because of the network effect of having ones friends, co-workers and colleagues using the same site: most people think it is too cumbersome to re-register oneself and encourage one’s cohort elsewhere. IMHO, the resulting stickiness is in fact rather superficial, rather than systemic: it consequently threatens any purported fiscal value for the site. The SIOC project at DERI in Galway underlines the benefits, and business consequences, of seamless federation of online communities. Stickiness should not be driven by re-registration inertia, but rather by community value and impact - which is one reason why I believe Ammado will succeed.

Another strategy to capture the long tail wags is “harnessing collective intelligence” – another of O’Reilly’s Web 2.0 facets. One explicit way is to allow individuals to define their own collections of interesting items, and then to share and discuss them with other like-minded souls. A simple way to do this is just by tagging items: for example, photos tagged with “Galway” on Flickr will appeal to certain people. But tagging rather quickly loses its impact when trying to find items with a combination of tags, requiring tedious trials of various search criteria; and tag synonyms are a problem in a global world: try “football” in del.icio.us as an example – or even “Galway Hooker” in Flickr!

Rather than expecting people to work out the correct search and query expression across a set of tag values for what they actually want, another way is to let people explicitly define and share their own collections. Hobbyists – such as stamp collectors – have been doing this for years, and a craft worker likewise learns what the set of right tools are for the job from the experiences of his trade. Enabling individuals – and micro-markets and even the crowd - to share what works well together when, is a positive tactic for managing the wagging long tail, and which I wrote about recently in the context of software configurations and Cloudsmith.

When doing a little research for this blog entry, I came across Dan Bricklin’s interesting blog entry on When the Long Tail Wags The Dog. His theme is that “must have” items have more value than those which are less likely to fit the job at hand; and that general purpose items are likely to have most value since they can entertain the dog as well as its long tail. While I don’t disagree, my thoughts about the dynamics of the long tail, and how to work with within it, are a slightly different emphasis.

Reinforcing Bricklin, being relevant to the individuals and small groups in the long tail requires customization and tailoring of general purpose offerings. In the enterprise software space, software vendors have traditionally worked with systems integrators to tailor more appropriate solutions to different niches of the market. With componentization in the software industry, in principle useful aggregations of different constituent parts can more likely be used to tailor specific solutions. Collective intelligence can be harnessed by explicitly sharing these aggregations, as I indicated above.

However, once delivered, installed and put into use, assemblies of software components in production environments have in the past usually been relatively static. The challenge is that the long tail wags: micro-markets and even mass markets change, and production systems need to more easily do so too. One promise of the dynamic module environment of OSGi is to enable dynamic evolution: if collective intelligence can be dynamic as trends emerge, or change, and then suggest new offerings tailored for particular sets of individuals, then perhaps also can production software assemblies in business and enterprise environments be dynamically adjusted. This is a theme which we are working upon in IONA, particularly in the context of our highly dynamic plug-in architecture for Artix and our open source FUSE offerings – see Eric Newcomer’s blog.

But if the world is dynamic, and contains a universe of micro-markets as well as a mass, can offerings not only be tailored so as to be a good fit, but also be priced attractively for each ? What when micro-markets change ? As I wrote about, one industry which faces these challenges is the mobile/cell phone operators, for whom intelligent and responsive bundling of services (SMS and MMS and call rates and roaming charges etc) is competitively critical. The ability to generalise this approach into the world of software components and packages is of interest and relevance to the wagging long tail. LeCayla is one company building a common approach to the issue of dynamically rolling out new charge and billing rates so that software vendors can competitively foster specific micro-markets.

Let me summarise: the internet as a platform enables a global market to be addressed. Web 2.0 uses collective intelligence to play in both the mass markets, and the long tail of numerous micro-markets. There is room for both individuals and the crowd, and group and individual reasoning can positively feed off each other. – creating the ever lurking possibility of being disrupted from below. Scalably addressing both the mass market and the long tail is however not the complete issue: markets change, the long tail wags, and scalably addressing dynamic markets is even harder – but possible.

Footnote: my 7 month old Alsatian, Charlie, has yet to grow into his long long tail. He wags it a lot.

Cloudsmith

An upgrade to the web site at www.cloudsmith.com – more features, particularly so that you can easily map your own repository, better documentation. The site is generating considerable interest in both the open source community, and some commercial firms seeking interesting new ways to distribute and support their software.

Note that the next major release of the Eclipse development environment – the Ganymede release - will be built using Buckminster: the team behind Buckminster also have built Cloudsmith, as I discussed in some earlier posts..

Science Gallery

Opening in Feburary next, with the LIGHTWAVE festival and showcase, and getting some good coverage eg in Nature and the Irish Times recently. Watch the blog at www.sciencegallery.org for further news and announcements.

UNICEF

A great new video at http://www.youtube.com/user/UNICEFIreland - featuring Irish children with Irish celebrities Andrea Corr, Colin Farrell, Marian Finucane, Stephen Rea and Ryan Tubridy. Our UNICEF colleagues in the US Fund produced a similar (US centric) video last year, and the Irish National Committee have borrowed their idea, with permission.

“Every single child deserves to live”.

Like some other teenagers of my generation in the seventies, one of my hobbies at the time was faithfully constructing scale models from plastic kits from Airfix, Revell, Historex etc. As I developed my skills and interest, I took great pride in adding extra levels of detail – particularly for ship kits. Eventually I converted particular kits so as to model an aircraft, ship or vehicle not directly available as a standard kit, by moulding balsa, crafting acetate sheet and so on – for example building a twin engine, triple tail fin Avro Manchester from the Airfix kit of the successor four engine Lancaster. The monthly Airfix Magazine was a great source of designs and examples, and I still have a shelf full of back copies here in my office at home.

When I was an engineering student, I took a similar interest in building my own, albeit fairly simple, analogue electronic circuits – the usual things such as oscillators, radios, fire/smoke detectors, etc. Of course, as with converting plastic kits, having a good stock of spare parts - scavenged from broken electronic circuits – was useful. I used to keep them sorted into empty margarine tubs on my shelves.

In more recent years, I became more and more involved in computers, from the digital gates and circuits up to microcode, assembler, compiler/interpreter systems and finally full systems and applications. I was fascinated when they became affordable as home systems, and played around adding extension cards and interfaces to my first PC. I was initially really impressed by Dell when I saw their range of alternative pre-configured systems for direct order across the internet. Dell used to have a plant in Bray just a few miles away from my home, and I have bought many systems over the years from them for home, school and charitable use.

But I’ve often thought there must be quite a few people out there like me who aren’t quite happy with a specific system they buy from Dell (or indeed any other supplier). Although I carefully chose a configuration before buying, still afterwards I frequently tailor my purchase further with additional cards, expansions and options. I also wonder whether somebody out there has already built the perfect system for creative digital photography, or multi-screen home media management, or whatever. Or whether anyone would be interested if I could publish my own designs and configurations. Or whether any configurations would be commercially interesting, for example for specialist systems such as creative digital media design.

Reflecting on my fads above, the common aspects are a desire to build interesting variations of basic designs; from additional parts either built myself, or stock-piled somewhere (not necessarily in margarine tubs!), or purchased elsewhere; to look at designs published by others, and perhaps even to publish my own.

Well, that’s what Cloudsmith is doing for the world of software. One way to think of Cloudsmith is as a derivation of Dell’s world, for software. You can browse an online catalogue at Cloudsmith and see what “distros” – configurations - of software components are available. If you want to chose any particular one, you click it and it “materializes” – ie downloads its parts, and then automatically assembles them together – onto your machine. And like getting a system from Dell, the different components of your configuration will usually come from different “repos” (repositories - think Dell sub-suppliers) around the world. So rather than just a single download of a binary file, a materialization will usually automatically fetch multiple files, from multiple places, and assemble them automatically for you on your machine as a complete system. The distro is thus “virtual”: it is not monolithic (like an old download) and its parts are not hosted at Cloudsmith (any internet repo can contribute).

If you like what you find, you can send others the “Cloudlink” you used. When they click it, the same components will materialize from the cloud of components available in multiple repos across the internet, and assemble and install on their machine too. So, you can materialize something specific without having to yourself connect to the Cloudsmith site and without having to search the online catalogue for it – just get the Cloudlink for it from someone else via an email or blog or whatever, and the magic will happen when you click.

Whats kinda nice about the Redhats of this world is that they pre-assemble a large collection of software components for you as a full Linux system. Whats nice about Cloudsmith is that if you build your own interesting set of software components, then you can publish that configuration at Cloudsmith, and reliably make it available for other people to use. It need not of course be as complex as a full operating system: just a nice application or tool or subsystem for a particular use which you have put together, using your own design or as an interesting derivation from somebody else's published distro. You can publish novel and interesting things that you’ve done, for others to take a look at and possibly use – no longer are you or they tied just to the pre-assembled varieties which the software equivalents of Dell provide. And if you have components from a new repo which Cloudsmith does not yet know about, you yourself can simply add that repo to Cloudsmith’s map of the world – it is the Cloudsmith software equivalent to introducing Dell to a new sub-supplier.

Why hasn’t a service like Cloudsmith existed up to now ? One reason is that although there has been a proliferation of useful re-useable software components developed and published around the world in many online repos, there has equally been a proliferation of software version control, make and build systems. It is difficult to justify re-engineering everything globally to use the same version control and build technology. IMHO it is impossible to impose one build or version control technology, or one IDE, on everyone: and it is short-sighted to expect everyone else to use the one that you happen to think is best. However, with some thought and help, it is possible for systems like Cloudsmith to automatically, on the fly, interpret the meta-information in all these version control and build system technologies, and thus automatically derive a global perspective and capability across many different repos.

But how do you know that somebody else’s published configuration is any good, and trustworthy? Well how does a plastic modeler or an electronics hobbyist know that somebody else’s design is any good ? Part of the answer is the popularity of the design – how many others are using it, and what do they say about it – and part of it is the reputation of the designer. Social community sites on the internet in general work because most people are ethical, and many people can watch, observe, comment and mend where necessary information which is incorrect.

Assembling and publishing new configurations of components is fun. Is it however just for hobbyists and software hot-rodding ? I believe that many commercial organizations will find interest in discovering and contributing to software configurations and assemblies that add real value in their business domains. I think enterprise managers will find reassurance not only in the popularity of certain distros, but also because they can be reassured that precisely the same distro (and bill of materials) is reliably installed on every machine under their control, and because component updates can be notified and controlled. I think vendor product managers and technology strategists will find interest in the concept of being able to build their own private “cloudspaces” for their licensed customer communities, to manage and distribute software in a controllable way.

Now, let me put my hand up and confess that all of this isn’t yet as smooth as we would like at Cloudsmith just right at the moment: it is an alpha version for the community to experiment with and give us feedback on. The materialization wizard, the wizard to build a cloudlink are IMHO both pretty good and straightforward to use. Private and public cloudspaces are ready to use. But today, the publishing wizard and the wizard to register a new repo are IMHO a bit clunky: we’re improving them right now and we expect better versions within a couple of weeks. Our online documentation is being improved. However, if you’re interested, contact us and we’ll talk you through online and get you involved in the Cloudsmith community.

In the 70s I was a postgraduate student at TCD Computer Science, and interested in digital satellite networking and local area networking technologies. I spent some time studying the design of the Cambridge Ring and other token ring networks. I was then completely inspired by the emergence of CSMSA/CD Ethernet algorithm (in turn derived from the earlier ALOHAnet radio broadcast network) whereby instead of carefully synchronized access to the shared medium, senders are optimistically allowed to transmit whenever they wish: if interference occurs on the medium because of simultaneous transmission, then a randomized backoff procedure allows the system to recover.

I was reminded of all this when I was chatting last week to Lawrence Cowsar, head of Bell Labs Ireland and CTO of the CTVR initiative (I'm chair at CTVR). Sometimes interesting systems result from relaxing constraints and encouraging established taboos to be challenged: for Ethernet, the taboo of careful synchronized access was replaced by unconstrained transmission initiation.

Lawrence, over dinner, was bemoaning the fact that academic research funding is usually and inevitably given for highly focused, highly specialist, uni-disciplinary research. As a result, although the majority of postgraduate researchers, PhDs and post-doctorates may have some experience in team work, that team work is only within the constraints of their own particular research area, under the guidance in most cases of an appropriately myopic faculty member.

By contrast, in general in industry, and in Bell Labs as one example, researchers pro-actively participate in inter-disciplinary teams. This in general seems to be in complete contrast to most academic research. One reason this seems to be is that in general it is difficult to find funding agencies willing to invest in real inter-disciplinary projects, for which multiple research laboratories and multiple terminologies and backgrounds are involved – in general proposals for such research are peer reviewed by research specialists who in turn emphasize uni-disciplinary and singular focus as the best way that their own particular state of the art can be advanced.

I was also reminded of the inertia towards “interference” of disciplines and research when chatting to Lawrence about the technology and algorithms of co-channel management for mobile phone (cellular phone, if you are US) networks. In today’s mobile networks, transmitter masts are carefully erected across a city or landscape so as to minimize interference between masts which reuse the same radio frequencies. This co-channel management challenge is usually resolved by map-colouring algorithms, which allocate frequencies to masts during the network design so as to minimize interference. Sometimes, I smiled to myself, do research proposers seeking financial support from various funding agencies use a map colouring algorithm to minimize the overlaps between their work and so optimize their chances of funding ?

CTVR, and the other CSETs funded by SFI, really are inter-disciplinary: multiple laboratories, academic and industrial, with a very large set of skills and backgrounds. Terminology and a common ability to communicate and collaborate were definitely a problem in the early stage of CTVR. However, we are now seeing highly interesting results which IMHO could only have emerged specifically because of the inter-disciplinary nature of CTVR.

One example is collaboration between the thermal (heat) management research team in the University of Limerick, the radio frequency (RF) and dynamic spectrum research team in NUI Maynooth, the software radio team in TCD, and finally the constraint and optimization analysts at UCC (a full list of CTVR partners is here). It turns out that the taboo of pair-wise interference minimization for co-channel algorithms for mobile (cellular) phone networks can be broken. In fact, channels need not be carefully separated, and interference can be allowed. Using insights from “temperature interference” in thermal management systems, instead of pair-wise constraints between transmitters, a single constraint can be applied to all transmitters whose signals can still be reliably discerned by a receiver. Channels can then be allocated in mobile networks in such a way that has the commercial benefit of reducing the numbers of transmission masts and equipment required.

Who would have thought that research into heat management would lead to an interesting new way of allocating channel frequencies in a mobile phone network ?

Another example of multi-disciplinary work is the application of well understood results in the radio frequency and dynamic spectrum field to the relatively younger area of photonics and management of light, for next generation 100Gigabit Ethernet – work being led by Tyndall at UCC, but for which the NUI Maynooth RF engineers have been able to bring remarkable insight.

In my view – and I believe I speak for Lawrence too – some of the ablest and best researchers which industry can hire come from those postgraduates and post-doctorates who have truly experienced and innovated in inter-disciplinary research. Taboos can sometimes be best challenged and overcome by researchers from outside the immediate specialist domain in question. And yet, world-wide, much academic research seems structurally resistant to such ways of working.

As some of you may know, I regularly holiday just outside Roundstone in Connemara. I’ve just come back to Dublin yesterday after some time there again.

If you haven’t yet been to the west of Ireland, I think one of the most striking things is the web of small stone walls that embrace the fields, pastures, meadows, boglands and tracts. Each is made by hand, and almost always as dry stone walls without mortar. They usually are as a result of clearing granite stones and rubble from the fields, and are economic: not requiring mortar, they do not suffer from frost attack, and so little maintenance is needed. At first sight, they all appear similar, but in fact there are different construction styles, with single, double and combination walls as the basic classification. They are malleable: walls can be easily moved and re-configured – gates are not strictly necessary since a few stones can easily be removed and put back again to, for example, let cattle through. Patrick McAfee’s book and website are a very readable commentary.

From ground level, the profusion of little stone walls can appear as a complex pattern, perhaps even fractal-like. But viewed from a high point, perspective reveals the logic of the landscape and the paths – the boreens – lined with walls either side, gently meandering to distant places.

I came back to Dublin last night, and this morning read Martin Banks’, of Reg Developer, excellent overview of Buckminster. Since I first wrote about Buckminster, the team has considerably improved the tool, including the documentation kit. Martin’s article makes use of a bricklaying analogy, and I guess I hinted in my own blog entry that if you are to build structures from re-usable bricks, then it might be useful to have a web site somewhere at which various designs could be published found and compared…

Well, also while I was away in Connemara, www.cloudsmith.com went live. Many of those on the Buckminster team have collaborated to put the site together, and the initial incarnation of the site certainly turned out to have richer functionality than I myself expected in a first iteration. There is a fairly detailed overview on the About Cloudsmith page, but in summary:

• Cloudsmith keeps meta-data about assemblies of software components.

• Software components can be sourced from any number of public and private repositories worldwide. Of course, components from private repositories are only available to those duly authorized to use them.

• Cloudsmith does not store the components themselves: but it knows where they are worldwide and how it can access them in the appropriate repository formats.

• A software publisher – an individual, project, or company – can register one or more specific software component assemblies with Cloudsmith.

• A software consumer – an individual, project, or company – can search and browse for available assemblies; and can readily download and install any particular one – “materialize” in Cloudsmith-speak – onto his local machine (or indeed another machine if appropriately authorized).

In effect, Cloudsmith is building a global map of software components (in various forms: source, binary, versioned, and optionally with test suites, documentation and license agreements). Professional software developers - individually or in a community project or working on a commercial offering – can publish interesting new assemblies of components, sourced across one or more repositories.

One of the neatest capabilities of Cloudsmith is a Cloudlink. A Cloudlink is simply a URL: it can be sent in an email, or given in a blog or whatever. When a Cloudlink is clicked, the software assembly which it denotes is then materialized without further intervention, onto the local machine. This gives a very simple download mechanism: publish a Cloudlink, and anyone clicking on it within a recent-vintage web browser can download your software. In practice, when a Cloudlink is clicked, behind the scenes the Cloudsmith site is contacted, and it resolves the differences between the assembly of software components identified by the Cloudlink, and those already available on the local machine, and then fetches (as appropriate from various repositories worldwide) and downloads the missing components.

Cloudlinking in turn enables “virtual distributions”. A software publisher can create a virtual distro, whose components reside across multiple (eg open source) projects and repositories: materializing a virtual distro requires nothing more than a web browser.

If your project is looking for a simple way to make its software available to the worldwide community; if your project is itself using software from multiple sources and multiple projects; if you want to keep your community regularly updated with patches and extensions; if you want to manage installation and distribution processes; then Cloudsmith should be worth taking a look.

Software components, and configurations and assemblies of them, are very malleable. It is relatively easy to define new interesting configurations, as well as new components. Looking at the world wide activity, and the multitude of repositories and projects, it is easy to become overwhelmed. It is possible to detect patterns, and different styles of construction, but sometimes it can be very confusing to see overall themes, to understand how other people are using configurations, and what changes have occurred.

I’m reminded of Connemara’s dry stone walls. They are numerous, wonderful, simple, easily changed, easily re-built, easily maintained, and as a result have lasted for decades. But in the landscape and up close, they are confusing to absorb and see the overall picture. The perspective of height gives clarity.

Cloudsmith is giving clarity to the construction of assemblies of software components.

What should be the justification for software patents ?

Software patents are now emerging as a major influence on open source software. In 2003, there was SCO’s threatened litigation on Linux. Last November, Novell and Microsoft signed a major agreement in which Microsoft undertook not to dispute use of Microsoft’s patents in Novell’s SUSE Linux technology. More recently, Microsoft has claimed that Linux and open source technologies infringe 235 of its patents.

Major open source organisations like Eclipse and Apache scrutinise contributed source code to try and ensure there are no patent infringements. Furthermore, under some contribution agreements, an individual contributor may become personally liable if (s)he successfully inserts infringing code into such collaborations.

IMHO, software patents are sometimes granted by national patent offices with insufficient scrutiny regarding their originality. A patent should pass the “obviousness” test: the principles claimed in a patent should not be immediately obvious to normally skilled practitioners in the field at the time that those claims are made. Having said that, it is clear that many software patents do pass this test, and are sufficiently original.

It is also illuminating to note that even when a patent is subsequently over-turned by a national patent office, as being “obvious”, a litigant may still be successful. I understand that Research In Motion (who brought the Blackberry to market) settled their purported patent infringement case with NTP for over half a billion dollars, even after many of the patents were overturned by the patent office concerned: the Judge involved would not reconsider his judgement in the light of the overturning of the patents by the patent office.

While thinking about these issues, I was interested to see developments in the use of patents in the global pharmaceutical industry, in a recent Economist article, and wondered about parallels in the software industry.

Recently, the Government of Thailand invoked the compulsory licensing mechanism of the Agreement on Trade-Related Aspects of Intellectual Property Rights (TRIPS), negotiated globally as part of the Uruguay round of the World Trade Organisation.

Under TRIPS, a government can invoke compulsory licensing (see article 31 “Other Use”) in the interests of national emergency or extreme urgency, such as arising from national health concerns, and if efforts to negotiate with the patent owner (for example a pharmaceutical multinational) fail. As a result, a generic drug replacement for a patented drug can either be manufactured domestically, or imported from a third country.

A quick aside, just in case you are unfamiliar with generic drugs. A generic drug contains the same active chemical ingredients as its patented original, but is distributed without a brand name. It is bio-equivalent to the original. A drug patent publishes a chemical structure, which then readily copied as a generic: alternatively, a patented drug can be fairly easily reverse-engineered to produce a generic. Of course, normally a generic drug can only be legally produced once the patent for its original expires, or in territories where the patent does not apply. Compulsory licensing under the TRIPS protocol yields a further way of legalising the use of a generic drug within a specific country.

In general, bringing a new drug successfully to market requires extensive trials, under a rigorous procedure closely supervised by a national drug regulator. This is both time consuming and costly for the inventor, and hence patents are valuable in enabling their owners recoup not only the research and development costs involved, but also the costs of the clinical trials and regulatory procedures. Correspondingly, because a generic drug is bio-equivalent to its patented original, a generic can quickly gain regulatory approval, and therefore its cost is significantly lower.

The trade-off in invoking the TRIPS compulsory licensing mechanism is between a short term gain to obtain a beneficial treatment at lower cost, and a medium to long term disincentive for the industry to invest in research and development for new drugs, particularly for diseases more prevalent in the third world and emerging economies. Equally, the full costs of bringing a new drug to market will be even more met by those countries which do not invoke compulsory licensing: in practice, by the markets of the more wealthy nations.

It is also significant that a middle income country like Thailand – rather than an impoverished country – has invoked compulsory licensing. It is rumoured that other such countries – for example Brazil, India, and Malaysia – are also considering the mechanism. Some of these countries – in particular India – have their own blossoming drugs industries, including investment in research into new drugs: it will be very interesting to observe how a strengthening domestic industry in such a country can be reconciled with compulsory licensing.

Back to the software industry. I found it interesting to consider what if compulsory licensing under TRIPS were to be used in the software industry as well as the pharmaceutical industry ?

If this were the case, a national government might invoke TRIPS compulsory licensing of one or more software patents, in the national interest. This would probably be primarily as a result of economic and/or social, rather than health, concerns. Compulsory licensing might be seen as a legitimate response by a government to punitive action threatened by an aggrieved patent holder against users of a patented technology, whether those users be in nationally strategic industries, the civil service itself and/or the national education system.

The technical consequence of compulsory licensing of a software patent is clearly not equivalent to compulsory licensing of a pharmaceutical drug. As I noted above, a generic drug can quickly be derived as a bio-equivalent of a patented drug. It is not nearly as easy to produce a software program which is equivalent in all respects to another program which is built using one or more patents, assuming that the source code of the patented work is unavailable. That is, there is no direct software analogy of generic drugs. Nevertheless, compulsory licensing of a software patent would remove the ability of the patent holder to impose punitive licensing terms on infringing software, including in particular infringing open source software.

If there were no intellectual property protection, would there be innovation ? Some open source protagonists would claim ‘absolutely, of course there can be’. I personally think that although there can be innovation in software without intellectual property, nevertheless so far, innovative and intellectual property free open source software is unfortunately rare. More frequently, open source software is a replacement for well established main stream technology: Linux, JBOSS and MySQL are all examples.

So, if there were compulsory licensing of software, would commercial software organisations become disenchanted with investing in innovation ? I started this blog entry by musing what should be the justification for software patents ? In my view, the pharmaceutical industry points the way for us in the software industry.

Consider. In the pharmaceutical industry, a new drug has to be extensively proven in trials, before the national regulator will permit that drug be sold. The resultant product is thus reasonably expected to be safe and to address the medical problem for which it is claimed. In return for this investment and careful procedure, the drug inventor can be awarded a patent.

By analogy then, should therefore a software patent only be awarded once the software products which exploit it, are carefully proven to be safe and effective, via documented testing and trial use ? Should there be national Software Administration Agencies, to which a prospective software patent holder should apply, providing extensive evidence of testing and trials under an auditable procedure to verify that use of the technology described by the prospective patent is effective and safe ?

As I think about testing software, I recall a comment to me by Andrew O’Sullivan (the VP at IONA responsible for professional services) last week. The willingness of enterprise customers to accept even a single bug in a software product today is substantially less than during the late 90s and the frantic dotcom era. Today, software is fully expected to work first time, and every time: any bug which comes to light seriously adversely reflects on the vendor concerned.

So: maybe software patents should only be awarded to verified high quality software, in the same way in which patented drugs have to first prove themselves in trials.

If this situation were ever put in place, what of the role of compulsory licensing ? Could a software patent be overturned by a compulsory license issued by a national government for national social and economic reasons, despite the investment made by the patent holder in proving that the software concerned was safe ?

In the pharmaceutical world, the equivalent is happening today to patented drugs. However in the software world, we would not obtain the same result. If a software patent is compulsory licensed, the associated software program(s) exploiting the software patent would not in general be as readily reverse engineered as is a patented drug to a generic drug. Instead, compulsory licensing would inhibit litigation potentially taken by a software patent holder against alleged infringements by other software programs (including open source). But these other software programs would not be identical in effect as the patent protected works – unlike a generic drug which is bio-equivalent to its patented original. In particular, these other software programs would not, by virtue of the compulsory licensing alone, be implicitly as verifiably safe as the regulated products directly using the patents.

In summary, there are some interesting similarities but critical differences between software and pharmaceuticals. It appears to me that there is merit in only awarding software patents to verifiably tested, safe and effective cases. It also appears that there could be an argument for compulsory licensing of software patents. Unlike the pharmaceutical industry and generic drugs, a compulsory licensed software patent would not enable an exact equivalent to be produced. Thus compulsory licensing would simply remove the threat of litigation against infringements. The patented software would be verifiably “safe”: the infringing software would not necessarily be “safe” since it would not necessarily have been subject to the full rigor of regulation. In my view, the outcome would be that commercial enterprises would remain incented, perhaps even more so, to produce patented products, and to ensure that these are safe and fault-free.

It is an interesting time for the world of “Software As A Service”.

At some sort of cerebral level, Dell has been an inspiration for those contemplating a SaaS go-to-market strategy. Dell was renowned in the PC industry for largely avoiding the cost of enterprise sales and retail distribution channels, by instead connecting directly to end purchasers – whether domestic, small/medium business, or enterprise – as much as possible. It is very interesting thus that last week Dell announced, for the first time in 15 years, a retail deal: this time, with Wal-Mart to put some of its low end products directly onto the retailer’s shelves, as its “first step” into a retail channel. Dell apparently needs a distribution platform – and a retailer which 90% of American shoppers use is more attractive than most other retailers – through which to advertise some of its products.

Also this week, Ray Ozzie of Microsoft has stated that it is no longer about “Software As A Service” but “Software And A Service”! He was speaking at the Mix07 developers conference, and primarily promoting the Silverlight technology for Rich Internet Applications. Silverlight will be a runtime for .NET in various browsers – IE, Firefox and Safari – and compete with Flash, AJAX and Javascript to – in Microsoft’s view – provide a much richer video and interactive graphics experience for end users. Ozzie noted that (“fat”) client software not only supports offline usage, but also offers “privacy, empowerment, anonymity and freedom” compared to the “monitoring, auditing and creepy behaviour” of some online services. I guess this was a swipe in particular at Eric Schmidt at Google who is currently promoting substantially enhanced search experiences for end-users, albeit with the consequence of maintaining (private) information about each user.

An interesting part of Ozzie’s presentation was his announcement that Microsoft Live is offering a Silverlight Streaming service providing 4Gbytes of free storage per Silverlight developer, so as to encourage the development and hosting of Silverlight applications. So, if you are a S(as/and)aS developer or independent software vendor (ISV), Microsoft is potentially offering you a rapid way to scale up to address a massive online audience, based on MSN and now not just IE but other browsers as well: up to 1 million unique end users can access your application for free (above that, its 25c per unique user). It will be interesting to see how Google responds..

IMHO we will continue to see a mix of pure software-as-a-service applications (with thin clients); online services with companion client applications (including rich internet access), and fat clients accessing remote services from time to time. There will continue to be a spectrum of configurations.

Regardless, I believe that a critical aspect of S(as/and)aS applications is the ability to scale self-service. Whether you use Silverlight Streaming, Google, Salesforce.com’s Apex or even Wal-Mart (as Dell is doing) to reach a potential audience of millions, I believe that a S(as/and)aS application will be unsuccessful if scaling of its adoption requires manual intervention for every transaction.

Self-service is key to S(as/and)aS – whilst at the same time ensuring that the customer’s experience is happy and helpful. Dell’s appearance in Wal-Mart may in part be due to reports of poor customer service with a purely online self-service store.

One example of online software self-service is of course the open source community. What could be more self-service than downloading source code, and playing and building it yourself ? A common open source business model is to extend self-service with technical support and training. But in turn, this customer support will best be implemented by at least some degree of self-service: witness IONA’s various support offerings for its Celtix family of open source products, including a self-service knowledge base alongside telephone and email support.

LeCayla’s self-service philosophy goes further. In providing SaaS metering and billing, LeCayla’s technology has to address two audiences. The first is end-users of SaaS offerings: LeCayla measures usage, and generates bills and invoices according to actual usage, and in accordance with specific business rules defined by a particular SaaS ISV or application software provider. Naturally, it is desirable that each end-user may use a self-service interface: eg to check her usage, or to change billing information such as a credit card number.

The second audience for LeCayla is the ISVs who want to use LeCayla to meter and bill for use of their software products. Each such ISV registers business rules (eg pricing information, usage tiers, etc) into LeCayla. Furthermore, each such ISV may wish to subsequently change its own business rules at any time – for example for a pricing promotion of a particular product within a particular geography. Naturally it is desirable that not only should end-users have self service to their own usage and billing information; but also that each ISV should also likewise have self-service to its own business rules, as well as to its market adoption metrics and usage information.

For Cloudsmith – the third software company in which I am involved – self-service is also key. As I noted in a previous posting, “sometimes creative developers have different configurations that they seek, or want to define, share and publish to the world. Can interesting new virtual distributions be rapidly defined, communicated and materialized ?”. Cloudsmith will enable developers to self-service find and use interesting software configurations, each frequently materialised from different software repositories (and sometimes using widely different repository technologies and build/make systems). Equally, publishing a new configuration, either to the entire world or to a private community of collaborating developers, will be a self-service activity.

Self-service seems to be intrinsic to scaling software services offered over the internet. Self-serviced services must naturally be scaleable: poor customer support and dissatisfaction will otherwise result. In a self-service, service oriented world, multiple business models are IMHO possible: for example, free access with optional paid-for support and consultancy (IONA’s approach with Celtix as per above); metered usage (LeCayla’s approach); or community based (Cloudsmith’s). I believe that scalable self-service underpins any viable service oriented business model.

Not all S(and/as)aS transactions should be self-service. But unless your S(and/as)aS business model facilitates self-service, then you may be scaleably challenged!

I was the Chairperson of the Irish Management Institute a few years back, which was a little strange because I have no formal background whatsoever in business management, economics or finance! One of the raging discussions we had at the board level of the IMI was what should be the future of executive education in Ireland, including the relevancy or not of business school teaching to the needs of modern entrepreneurship and global business development. I found The Economist article thus particularly interesting, since it alluded to discussions about whether international business schools have lost their way and value.

Then, by coincidence, Monday’s Financial Times had a supplement on Business Education, including its international ranking of the top global executive education schools. It carried several very interesting articles suggesting that the top schools have changed their product from business education to business advice, and almost to management consulting. Customisation of curricula and classes lead to faculty not so much teaching, but instead providing insight in a discussion about specifically how to address issues within a client company, and/or specifically how to apply a particular idea or theory within a client company.

One of the things I had asked myself during my years at the IMI was whether there can be such a thing as a management profession. A profession, by definition, implies some core knowledge, which may be expanded and refined over time by appropriate research and in the light of experience; a way of asserting that an individual has attained a particular level of competence in that knowledge, and therefore can be admitted to the profession; and a code of ethics particularly as to service to the public, including appropriate disciplinary actions if these should be broken (The Economist article makes similar comments). As a professional engineer in Ireland, I am comfortable that Engineers Ireland operates our national engineering profession accordingly. The medical and legal professions are of course similar examples.

But can there be a management or business profession ? Is there a body of knowledge, an admissions procedure, a code of ethics and a disciplinary mechanism ? Can there be a guardian organization for the profession ? In fact should there not be one, so as to protect the public and including shareholders and investors ? However would such an organized profession stifle innovation and entrepreneurship ? As The Economist observes, Bill Gates dropped out of university and would presumably never have made the grade to become a “professional business manager”.

Hmmm. So what is executive education all about ? Can business management ever become a profession ?

I hesitate to comment further in general for all industries, but I do have some views more specifically as applies to the software industry.

In the mid 90s I had the sincere pleasure of having John Cullinane on the board of directors of IONA. John, as I am sure you know, founded and ran the first software company to file an IPO, the first billion dollar software company, and the first company to do a Super-Bowl ad! His company Cullinet was well known during the 1970s and 1980s. John has written an excellent summary of some of his lessons from those years, which I believe are as applicable today to software companies as they were then, in his book “The Entrepreneurs Survival Guide: 101 Tips for Managing in Good Times and Bad”.

One of the things John said to me early on as a board member at IONA was “You know Chris, managing a software company is actually easy”. I did a double-take when he said this to me, but he explained what he meant and I now basically believe he is right. Certainly compared to companies with manufacturing operations, managing a pure play software company would appear easier. I personally believe – and I sure some may wish to disagree with me – that the key operations of a software company (in no particular order) - engineering and software development processes; distribution channels and sales management, including compensation structures and channel conflict resolution; market segmentation analysis and product marketing; product management; professional services fulfillment; pre-sales technical support; after-sales support; product maintenance and upgrades; financial management, including financial planning and administration; internal IT systems; HR management, staff compensation, and gaining staff commitment; corporate marketing and PR; corporate governance; board procedures; management metrics and key performance indicator analysis; customer care and stratification; even M&A post-integration – in summary, all the functions of a modern software company are now reasonably well understood. There is – arguably – a body of knowledge out there which I suspect many of us in the industry would agree represents best practice in the industry, accumulated over the several decades of the pure play software industry since Cullinet. Listening and participating in the year long Leadership for Growth Programme here at Stanford has re-enforced my view. Perhaps somebody should write a book some time to capture this current body of practical knowledge – how to run a software company.

I guess if what I suggest above is true, then in principle two rival companies with very similar product offerings, and very similar strategies, and of very similar sizes, in principle should be unable to out-execute each other. That is a controversial claim, since execution is key to the success of any software company: but I do believe that a professional experienced software CEO is unlikely to make mistakes in execution, since what is needed in execution is actually now reasonably understood across the industry.

Competitive advantage then in the software industry is increasingly unlikely to come from execution alone. Instead, in my view, advantage comes from strategic insight and analysis, from new products and new business models. Advantage comes from understanding the current state within a particular segment of the industry, and leveraging that to introduce new products and services, perhaps in new ways, and which add sufficient value to motivate the market to invest and customers to buy.

“Success is 10 per cent inspiration and 90 per cent perspiration” said Edison. I think that the 10 per cent inspiration to conceive of a new idea is perhaps right; the 90 per cent comes not from actual execution, but from analysis and consideration of whether that new idea is actually worth executing upon – building a strategic plan and getting comfortable with it. If the strategic plan is worth executing on, then the steps to actually execute, given the body of knowledge about modern software company operations, are reasonably straight forward to identify: it should be reasonably obvious what needs to be done, and it becomes a matter of trying to actually do it.

An accepted body of knowledge will not, in my view, stifle innovation. Bill Gates would not have suffocated had such a pragmatic tome been available to him.

Perhaps I’m just representing a personal bias. I get excited by discussions on the state and direction of the industry, and where the current leverage points and opportunities are. I get less excited by discussions about operational issues, which of course are important and critical, but reasonably obvious in what needs to be done. Innovation in the industry creates competitive advantage; sheer execution is increasingly unlikely to do so.

I’m open to counter-persuasion. Flame suit on. What do you think ?