Making better products

For over quite some time now, there has been a great interest in using Web 2.0 concepts withing the enterprise. The whole concept of Web 2.0 has been evolving and has gained iconic status in business and technical worlds alike.

Web 2.0 has many concepts associated with it - blogs, wikis, mashups, social networking, RSS, content tagging and many more. Most of these concepts are based on an user centric approach where the user is the focal point of action/attention. Enterprises are hence realizing that it makes a lot of sense to replicate these concepts within their organization to improve collaboration and communication and hence improve productivity.

However using Web 2.0 concepts within an enterprise requires a drastic mind shift within people. Information is now openly available, and people can easily express their views on the same. This will need to go hand in hand with a good change management and user education process.

Below is a diagram that I find very intuitive about Enterprise 2.0, courtesy Dion Hinchcliffe from ZDNET

The idea here is look at enterprise 2.0 from two prespectives - Internal facing and extrernal facing. Here’s my take on the most important faces of Enterprise 2.0

1. Collaboration 2.0 - An unoffical term for the collaboration strategies within the enterpise, this seems to be gaining a lot of traction within enterprises. The ability for multiple people to work on a document and then have preset workflows which get kicked in, are very useful and can play a key role in improving efficiency and productivity. SharePoint (or Microsoft Office SharePoint Server 2007) is a product which I think holds a lot of promise in this space and clearly there is a lot of traction around using MOSS 2007 within large enterprises and ISVs.
   Other collaboration tools which are popularly used within enterprises include Wikis, which hold a lot of promise for easy information sharing and editing.
2. Syndication/RSS feeds - This would enable everyone to keep in touch with items most important to them through notifications, feeds etc
3. Informal modes of communication  - This has led to the use og instant messaging services, SMS, etc for communication with the enterprise.
4. Rich User Experience (UX) - This is becoming ever so important in the Enterprise 2.0 era. The ability to engage users and have them get their work done easily is of primary importance. Some examples include Rich Internet applications built on AJAX, Flex, Flash, and Silverlight. Other concepts such as Office Business Applications (OBA) enable pulling in data from Line of business systems and surface them up in portals with a rich user experience.
5. Employee blogs - Blogs are an ideal channel for employees to showcase their ideas and also put up their questions, opinions etc. Blogs are also being used as marketing tools where companies primarily use their blogs/ employee blogs as showcase pieces or even to break some important news about product releases etc to the world.
6. Software as a Service (SaaS) - Desktop software is becoming passe` in the web 2.0 world and running softwares on the network (or cloud) is potentially one of the best software models which has a lot of potential.

I burnt my t-shirt last weekend. I was ironing it and in between I had to run to the door and then I got a call and thus completely forgot about my t-shirt until I smelt something burning and there was my dear GAP t-shirt with a nice big shape of an iron embossed right in the middle. This will definitely serve as a grim reminder to not leave the iron face down on anything.

This made me wonder why people never thought about this while designing an iron. This is a very common scenario - that the iron must not burn the cloth under if left unattended.

Couple of ways by which I think this can be tackled

1. Having a temperature sensor in the surface that touches the cloth to detect the common burning (ignition) temperature of fabrics so that the iron can shut itself off within a predetermined range of temperature values.
2. Detect human presence, mainly by having some kind of pressure sensors in the iron handle, and if there is no touch detected for more than ‘n’ minutes or seconds, have the iron shut itself off.
3. Have the iron automatically change orientation when burning/charring is detected.

This led me to search for some commercial products which suffice this need. Well, I did find an iron by Oliso, which uses an Auto-Lift System™ to prevent burning.

I am thrilled.

Any other ideas to solve this problem ? Let me know, leave me a comment.

The undo problem is one key aspect I am hoping future web apps will support. I just deleted all my mails in my hotmail inbox and I need to ‘Undo’ but I can’t do it. If this was a desktop application I could have done this in a jiffy.

This is a huge problem in web apps, though they are not covered too much and not many people talk about them, as we are now pretty much used to this kind of behavior. Web apps work excellent, they store all our data, enable us to access them from anywhere and give us no worry about licenses etc.

But as we move towards looking at a cloud or what some people call as a ‘cloud OS’ it becomes increasingly important to have all the desktop paradigms on the web. This problem was probably not thought about by people because when the web started it was more a data storage medium where documents, files etc were stored and people would read from it, so probably there was never a need for offlines access or storing states. But as we move towards having a cloud OS, and making the web a operation system, it becomes very very important to look at such issues.

John Dowdell from macromedia has some interesting thoughts on storing states where he basically argues as to whether the Back button on the browser needs to smart to capture these changes and also talks about capturing states in web apps.

Having an undo functionality brings about a sense of simplicity in the user’s mind - “What the heck, I can always undo it” and hence brings more confidence. This will play a vital role as people from different age groups, degrees of tech saviness etc start using the web to perform very important and secure activities like paying bills, making purchases online etc.

What’s your solution to this problem ? The best answer gets a special feature on this blog.

Microsoft has finally officially announced the release of Silverlight 1.0 with Linux support. Silverlight is Microsoft’s direct reply to Flash and is expected to play a big role in the future of Rich Internet Applications (RIA).

Microsoft’s Silverlight will be supporting Moonlight, the Linux implementation as part of the their partnership with Novell, which was signed earlier this year. They have some really cool partners including Entertainment Weekly and the WWE.

According to Miguel de Icaza, vice president of Developer Platforms and leader of the Mono project at Novell. “Novell is excited to work with Microsoft to extend Silverlight beyond Windows^® and Macintosh to Linux with Moonlight, so Linux users everywhere can enhance their rich media and interactive experiences on the Web.”

Most RIA enthusiasts are however looking for the release of Silverlight 1.1 which will support the Common Language Runtime (CLR) in .NET and make writing applications for the web much easier.

However this is going to be a very interesting period, with Microsoft penetrating into the Linux user base and enhancing their experience and with Adobe working on various improvements to flash at the same time.