Reinventing the wheel
I was recently chatting with my colleague Etan about how it’s ludicrous that some of the bigger tech companies in Silicon Valley (and beyond) build all software in-house. This means that while everything from file sharing, to collaboration, to idea generation and money tracking are all viable web-based services, tech monoliths basically take it upon themselves to reinvent the wheel, time and again.
Think back 15 years or so, and there were definitely good reasons for all this: firstly, many of the highly useful online services simply didn’t exist back in the day. No doing your taxes online with Turbo Tax, no chatting with your colleagues via Yammer, and certainly no checking in with Foursquare. The same applies to back-end magic, too: no WordPress for blogging, no Drupal or Joomla for content management, and no Ruby on Rails for rapid webapp development. So it’s definitely understandable that as different needs arose, companies took it upon themselves to step in, foot the bill, and very often push the envelope.
App ubiquity
But no longer. We’re in the 21st century, people, and every need that can be conceived of has a matching web service or tool out in the ether. Yes, there really is an app for that.
Which is why I find it so ridiculous that companies are clinging to legacy file sharing systems, totally clunky conference call services, and outdated and burdensome security protocols. In an age where two guys in a garage can make Goliath-slaying software, it simply doesn’t make sense to hold on to old – and let’s face it, expensive – tools when better options are out in the wild. There’s no need to reinvent the wheel when evolution is just as good, and freely available.
Acquire me this
Let’s be fair to the big guys, though. Many companies do identify a need and end up buying a smaller company (or two) that fills it. This is good thinking: why invest time and energy when someone else has already done it? Everyone from Amazon to Cisco to Google to Intuit to Schlumberger to Yahoo does this, often to great success – but often ending up with a sprawling network of badly integrated portfolio companies and a more confused consumer offering.
When integration works, it’s great: I still use Turbo Tax and couldn’t give a hoot that it’s now owned by Intuit (:: yawn ::). Similarly, Flickr still runs well under Yahoo, and Zappos hasn’t visibly changed post-Amazon takeover. When it doesn’t work, though, it can be a disaster, and the oil industry (aka Schlumberger, BP and others) is a case in point: I know for a fact that oil analysts often have to deal with dozens of data streams coming from different sources, often badly integrated, most oftentimes not. And while it’s easy to point a finger at big oil, other industries suffer from this bloatedness as well: certain film industry companies suffer from 6+ month training regimes for new employees, simply because the range of different, clunkily-integrated tools that need to be learned is so vast. Definitely not efficient.
Security? Whatever.
Another main reason I hear that companies build stuff in-house – even buying companies and rebuilding their product offering from scratch – revolves around security. Data security, uptime security, offline security, web security; you name it, the reason for not just using an outside tool exists. But here’s the thing: it’s not like we aren’t already using web-based tools to transmit, monitor and manage sensitive information, because we are. Turbo Tax knows all about my 2009 income, Mint has a window into everything I own, and HighRise has a finger on the pulse of my deal flow. So is there some argument that my individual security needs are not the same (or as important) as those of a company on the Fortune 100 list?
Puh-lease.
Centralization and issues of scale (the most common big company needs) made sense in a time when hardware was scarce and security protocols minimal. But now the opposite is true: hardware is free, information is totally decentralized via the web, and it takes no more effort to secure one person’s information than it does 10,000. Sure, sometimes logging in to multiple online services can be a pain (and assumes you’re online to begin with), but it’s not that big of a drag – is it?
Organizations large and small would do well to jump on the webapp bandwagon and prevent the needless reinvention of the wheel. Evolution is where it’s at.
Living in San Francisco it’s all too easy to get wrapped up in the social media bubble. There’s always a new service to use, an iPhone app to try out, a social network to join – it’s a constant game of catch-up, and I have to be honest that some days I positively hate it.
That said, I’m constantly learning about myself and my friends (and total strangers) by being so immersed in all this web 2.0 stuff. Who knew that I’d love broadcasting short messages to the world about what happens to be on my mind (good and bad)? Or that I’d feel compelled to log each entry into a cafe, office, or surf spot with one of my location-based apps? If you’d asked me 2 years ago, the answer would be have been a definitive “not me!”
But things are different now, and as I adjust to a life where I’m always connected, I’m starting to rub up against some social “seams” I had totally ignored. For example, it turns out that not everyone I know on Facebook wants to know when I’ve “checked in” to a bar or cafe – especially when I change locations a half dozen times a day. Equally surprising is that my friends who use Google Buzz complain about the same, which is weird because it means that they monitor Buzz religiously since I barely ever notice new Buzz notifications!
So while I’m theoretically meant to use these tools with abandon and feel free to send out the minutae of my life to anyone who cares to pay attention (which isn’t always that many people), it turns out that what I actually have to do is carefully tip toe through the social media minefield, censoring myself as I go.
I wonder if social media tools will eventually take into account the social seams they’re potentially bowling right over, and try to maintain a little social order and sensitivity. For now, I’ll be sure to tread lightly…
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It’s almost as if the speakers and panelists at South by South West 2010 had all prepared together beforehand. Time and again, no matter what the topic of the panel, the same theme came up again and again:
Gaming is where it’s at.
From the more obvious cases, like Dennis Crowley’s location-based Foursquare app (effectively a multi-player game replete with rewards and badges), to the more esoteric, like crowd-source astrology platform GalaxyZoo, more and more examples of game-based platforms are popping up.
While it’s clear that certain web-based services can benefit from a game-like component given that typical incentive structures simply aren’t there (like the social need to be recognized as a “local”, represented in Foursquare as becoming “Mayor” of a particular place), it gets really interesting if/when applied to other examples. Like tacking on a game component to a hospital’s internal report tracking system to encourage nurse diligence, or rewarding taxi cab drivers for picking up fares on time, or rewarding kids for reading newspaper articles online – the list is endless, which I have to admit is slightly scary.
In the Augmenting Maps with Reality panel, one of the audience members asked what the endgame (pun intended) of this “life as a game” is meant to be: will every part of our lives be represented as a game? Will I be competing – with myself or others – when I go shopping for groceries (10 points for buying kale!), buy a drink at the bar (minus 5 points for the carbs), or meet 3 new people in one day (You’ve received the social butterfly badge!)?
The panelists’ answers were mixed: Dennis Crowley thought it was totally fine that social interactions are rewarded through a game platform, while Flickr information architect Kellan Elliott-McCrea felt that games are an intermediate step – that a world where we need such explicit, constant incentives to do basic activities is likely the poorer for it. Casey Stengel’s quote, “Most games are lost, not won” comes to mind, along with apocalyptic visions of our Pacman-like future.
Thoughts? Is gaming here to stay, and if so, is it a good thing?
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