Last month I attended IBM’s 10th Annual [Steve] Mills event, when industry analysts converge to hear what Software Group has been up to, and where its going. There is always a ton of content, which makes it hard to summarize, so I won’t even try. But there are a couple of key narratives I want to capture, and I will use separate posts for them.

The first narrative is Get Simple.

Generally IBM doesn’t understand simple. IBM likes to create systems that are infinitely configurable, to meet every possible “need” that an enterprise might ever think of. As I like to say: IBM never met a requirement it didn’t like. But configuration is expensive – it requires consultants (go IGS!) and a lot of time and unnecessary pain.

I had a number of conversations at the Mills event however, which indicated IBM is getting a feel for the new simple. Rather than telling customers they can have all their old complexity and cloud operations too IBM is going to start being opinionated about system images. One of the first IBM products built to this way of thinking is the new Intelligent Operations Center, used as the basis for IBM Smarter City and water management plays. Customers can basically acquire the IOC in four different versions… large on-prem, large SaaS, small on-prem, small SaaS, and that’s pretty much it. But more products are likely to take the same approach.

When I have spoken to IBM Distinguished Engineers and senior managers in the past they have tended to believe that complexity could be abstracted, but after the failure of models such as Ensembles, it seems a new pragmatism at work. I talked to Jason McGee and Rob High, both DEs, and they both talked to the new simplicity as a better way of doing things.

IBM of course isn’t the only one with the config problem – its practically definitional for Enterprise software. In 2006 I said “Microsoft servers are a configuration fetishists’ wet dream”.

Unlike the enterprise however the Web thrives on simplicity – certainly on the config and operations side. Ruby on Rails, the favorite framework of many web developers, is based on a core concept – Convention over Configuration.

The idea is summed up pretty nicely here:“Design a framework so that it enforces standard naming conventions for mapping classes to resources or events. A programmer only needs to write the mapping configurations when the naming convention” fails.”

Or in my rambling fashion:

Ruby on Rails is interesting because it forces constraints on developers… and they like it.

Rails is about freedom in the Kantian sense-development has a categorical imperative – what you do should be morally applicable to anyone else in the same circumstance. Its about responsibilities rather than rights. The responsibility to ease of use.

Abstractions are aspects or constraints of the framework itself, rather than veneers to hide code behind and allow ever more configurations to be applied. Freedom comes from accepting and working within constraints. Beautiful code comes from limitations, not being able to configure everything in sight.

A related way of thinking is lesscode.

lesscode.org is a place to advocate, discuss, and practice the art of using less code to get more done. We shun complexity and challenge the status-quo when it impedes our ability to simplify our development tools and processes. We appreciate Python, Ruby, LAMP, REST, KISS, worse is better, and talk like a pirate day.

Back in 2006 (that year again!) I asked David Heinemeier Hansson, inventor of the Rails framework, if lesscode also meant less maintenance. He was good enough to offer a thoughtful response, which I will include in full.

“So my experiences would tell me that conventions of reward (“do it like this and you’ll get that for free”) has a really long shelve life. I remember when I worked in PHP, I would always tweak the configuration approach a tad going from app to app. This would lead to the code base of the previous project feeling really old really quick.

Rails applications don’t suffer from the same notion. Yes, we keep adding features and tweaking APIs to make the common stuff easier, but the majority of core conventions has been stable for a very long time now. It gives all applications a common culture and fix point.”

Java culture (more JAR JAR, more WAR WAR) is a long way from Rails culture, though early Spring (and latterly Roo) made some valiant efforts to make Java more of a convention oriented system for development.

Now I don’t want to go down a Rails is more maintainable than Java rathole, especially because Web Companies seemingly turn into Java shops when they grow up (Twitter, for example, recently took a seat on the JCP). As Eric Baldeschweiler, founder of Hortonworks and the guy that hired Doug Cutting to build Hadoop for Yahoo, told me recently he learned to love Java precisely because it allowed Hadoop to evolve, because of its maintainability.

But its inarguable that reducing configuration options makes support and maintenance easier. You can’t automate your way out of complexity.

That’s the real lesson of the web. How does Twitter support a user population of hundreds of millions of people with such a small ops team? The answer is limiting the range of deployment options in terms of servers. The same is true of any of the major web firms.

As I wrote recently, VMware seems to understand this trend lessons of the web: on vmware, cloud and what comes next. I have to say its good news to see another client, in the shape of IBM, thinking the same way. The Web can teach the enterprise something about Cloud Computing – after all, that’s where it came from, right?

Am I saying that all IBM products are now easy to install? Of course not. This will be a multiyear effort with missteps along the way. But consider- when you build a new data center you don’t retrofit it with a bunch of old intel gear. You build out for scale, with the latest hardware. That’s the kind of model we need to move to in software.

As much as anything, I think its worth calling out that IBM is thinking this way.

IBM is a client, and paid T&E to the Mills event.

Interesting post from Fred Wilson at Union Square Ventures today: he is worried investments are happening without due diligence… but the war for development talent is the real issue for startups and investors.

We are also seeing a massive talent war for software engineers going on in Silicon Valley and it is spilling over into other regions. The story by Mike Arrington this morning about a Google engineer is just one example. There are many more examples of poaching by companies driving up salaries, equity packages, and stay and join bonuses.

You might say, “this is good for entrepreneurs and software engineers, they are finally being valued what they are worth.” Maybe. But I think both of these situations are unsustainable. And anything that is unsustainable will eventually stop happening. And when it stops happening, there will be a dislocation event that will cause people to change their behavior.

Arguably the new normal is a healthier state of affairs than the days when startups would drop a bunch of money on Cisco, EMC, Oracle and Sun gear – before even getting started building an application. Developers should be celebrated, and frankly great developers are worth it: they are the new kingmakers.  But of course for investors spending big on talent rather than gear is scary – because talent can always up and leave. The Silicon Valley startup scene is beginning to look like the Champions League.

RedMonk fundamentally believes in sustainable business models – we always saw open source as a great enabler, but not the source of easy margins. We think the Billion Dollar Barrier is Irrelevant. Rather the margins come in the packaging for user experience, with the addition of proprietary elements- just ask Apple. Certainly since his infamous Inflection Point memo Twitter has been filling holes, more or less successfully – taking a more Apple like view of the Twitter platform. But it seems to me that its precisely by filling the holes that developers become more expensive. If devs have to join the company in order to play, there is a fee associated with that.

It seems to me that the for web companies and future USV investments, and in fact VC and angel investment more broadly -  one answer is already part of the mix – Open Source. Google, Facebook, Twitter are all increasingly contributing code to open source. So what about hiring? Let the developers own the code, and their bonus expectations are likely to be lower. Does @hugs want to “take all”, or make Selenium the best, most widely deployed testing framework out there? Jason? A company only really needs to own the user experience. The new patronage economy and open source. Back in 2007 I wrote:

In this view of the world, open source, Creative Commons and Open Data, are even more important, because it may be that the only way the talent is willing to hand over its intellectual property is in the form of shared community assets. If code is open source I can work on it regardless of who I work for at any given time. Otherwise if I leave I have to leave my baby behind. The talent potentially has a lot more control. In the music world this might translate into a refusal to allow record companies to DRM-hobble works. And if companies want to buy the talent’s IP outright they may find that rates start to go up considerably.

Seems I was right. If winner takes all, then developers are the winners. Data Protectionism increases margin opportunities, and developers aren’t stupid. If companies want to deflate the bubble they should open up their code and their data. Commercial open source is a decent model – with lots of happy (reasonably paid) developers building amazing things. The message is pretty clear.

Today I came across a splendid post about corporate communications at last week’s SAP Influencer Summit by Barbara French, of SWAY blog. Barbara is a really smart thinker on new influencer models for business to business communications. The post should be essential reading for anyone that runs events for influencers – whether they be financial or industry analysts, bloggers, customers, software developers or folks with a 100k twitter followers. So I asked Barbara if I could replicate it in full here…  she graciously agreed. My recommendation? Read this post and subscribe to SWAY. You might also check out this companion post from SAP’s own Timo Elliott. And this one from @gapingvoid, which is as relevant as it ever was.

Oh yeah: one last point from me. Don’t have anything under NDA unless it needs to be. Identifying your trade secrets before the event will help sharpen up your messages. Blanket NDAs prevent useful feedback.

Barbara Says

The SAP Influencer Summit dominated tech media and Twitter backchannel conversations about SAP all week. The event offers a good example of real time influencer relations management. If you’re planning an influencer summit for 2010, consider these 3 points:

1. Open discourse. Several tech providers nixed live blogging and live micro-blogging (Twitter) during their influencer events this year. SAP set an important precedent by keeping all social media channels open and participating in conversations in real time. Live sessions were blogged, reported, tweeted and debated by people in attendance and by virtual attendees around the world. Follow SAP’s example: Limit NDAs to the situations where they make sense, such as the strategy development work leading up to an event like this. When the content doesn’t mandate an NDA, don’t curb use of social media.

2. Employee engagement. Many SAP employees expanded on speaker and audience comments via Twitter. Creating a wider circle of employee commentators makes perfect sense. And you know what? The press, analysts and consultants were likely to contact their “unofficial” employee sources anyway. It’s a much better idea to involve more employees by design, than to pretend that exchanges are limited to the featured spokespeople and handlers in the room.

3. Diverse attendees. SAP invited a diverse group of influencers to participate. Among tech industry influencers, big brand analysts and media dialogued side by side with solo opinion leaders and every size in between as well as customers and bloggers. Gathering diverse opinion leaders together to share the same information at the same time at a flagship event is smart on several counts. One, it’s efficient. Two, it sets up diverse, multiple touch points with marketplaces. It also helps build enough momentum to flow directly to offline conversations. In other words, no single point of failure and lot of juice.

For more on the SAP Influencer Summit, check out:

• Timo Elliott, an evangelist for SAP. He offers light commentary on what was going on behind the scenes here.  He also links to a PDF document of Twitter feed from #sapsummit.
• Jonathan Becher, SVP marketing at SAP and official SAP blogger for the event, posted here.
• R Ray Wang, an analyst with Altimeter Group, offers one analyst’s summary of the event themes and SAP’s performance here.

Update December 14th: Adding 2 more links to analyst reactions. Please feel free to add more attendee links in the comments. – B

• Jon Reed, a fellow with PAC , weighs in on the experience and resulting expectations among attendees here
• James Governor, analyst with RedMonk, gives a candid analyst viewpoint that was widely accepted among other analysts here

A while ago I put forward Asymmetric Follow as a name to describe one of the key phenomena driving Twitter adoption – the asymmetrical nature of the model, which suits the kind of scale-free networks we see on the internet, and the architectural pattern of publish and subscribe. The idea evidently has legs. When even a cynic like Dare Obasanjo uses the terminology, rather than leaving your guts in a puddle on the floor, you’re probably onto something.

But since I wrote the piece something has been bothering me-namely that the real power comes from Asymmetric Reply rather than Follow. If the root node never replies, then the phenomenon is far less interesting. Its fairly easy for me to track people that reach out to me with direct messages or @replies on twitter- after all, I only have five thousand followers. But what if I was @wossy (150k) or @stephenfry (301k) or Scobleizer (72k)?

The A in A-list probably stands for “administration”. Everyone wants a piece of you. Ping. Ping. Ping. I still believe that the whales can reply in order to build a rich conversational community. But its hard.

Scobleizer, for example, pushes as much traffic to FriendFeed as possible, because he strongly appreciates the filtering mechanisms there. Stephen Fry puts forward a tortuous lottery scheme for the chance to be included in his twitter stream.

ADD remains one way to keep abreast of stuff (that’s my strategy!). Lots of self-searching etc.

Well last week I had a chance to walk in the fan’s shoes, and of course I learned a lot, while trying to build buzz for our charitable efforts for Red Nose Day. I have to admit I hated it. I *really* wanted to get the attention of @wossy or @stephenfry. Could I? Of course not. These guys have day jobs…

But it was only on spending a lot of time surfing around user profiles to check for spambots that I discovered how profoundly depressing the celebrities on Twitter phenomenon can be. It was coming across profiles of Twitter users following ten or so celebrities on Twitter (and nobody else), wondering why their questions weren’t being answered. Why are they ignoring me, I keep asking them questions? After I saw a few of these profiles I felt a little depressed.

Just as we can’t expect celebrities to understand all the tools they can use with Twitter to build relationships with fans, so as Twitter hits the mainstream, and millions more users join the network they aren’t going to know the “tricks” of Twitter relationship building. Lets face it I know these tricks pretty well, and I couldn’t get attention when i needed it, even for a BBC charidee event.

It was sad to see people defining themselves by their disappointments. I can only hope that as more people use twitter they can discover that the real beauty of Twitter is that “ordinary” people are awesome, interesting and entertaining. (As if twitter could teach this lesson!). I follow around 700 folks, and the celebs would be the first to go if I had to cull my list.

I loved this post from solobasssteve today.

The celebrity bit of twitter is a fairly pointless sideshow within the grand scheme of things. That there are people who spend all day trying to get an answer from Jonathan Ross or Stephen Fry says more about them than it does about twitter. It’s the same people who hang round outside film premiers. And they don’t reflect badly on cinema as an art form.

Steve continues:

It’s an entirely permissions-based system. So if you want to get a comment out of Dave Gorman or Will Carling or Demi Moore, you’ll have to engage them the way you would anyone else. Celeb obsessives notwithstanding, Twitter is a great leveler.

What is my point? Not exactly sure. But publish is as important as subscribe, and reply is as important as follow. We’ll all learn a lot about this over the next couple of years.

Magic City by London Shop Fronts

I saw a tweet from @glynmoody today, referring to a link at the Londonist.”It is difficult to speak adequately or justly of London. It is not a pleasant place; it is not agreeable, or cheerful, or easy, or exempt from reproach. It is only magnificent. You can draw up a tremendous list of reasons why it should be insupportable. The fogs, the smoke, the dirt, the darkness, the wet, the distances, the ugliness, the brutal size of the place, the horrible numerosity of society, the manner in which this senseless bigness is fatal to amenity, to convenience, to conversation, to good manners – all this and much more you may expatiate upon. You may call it dreary, heavy, stupid, dull, inhuman, vulgar at heart and tiresome in form. I have felt these things at times so strongly that I have said – ”Ah London, you too then are impossible?” But these are occasional moods; and for one who takes it as I take it, London is on the whole the most possible form of life. I take it as an artist and as a bachelor; as one who has the passion of observation and whose business is the study of human life. It is the biggest aggregation of human life – the most complete compendium of the world.”

— Henry James

Great stuff. I am reminded of the great phrase from Samuel Johnson:

“Why, Sir, you find no man, at all intellectual, who is willing to leave London. No, Sir, when a man is tired of London, he is tired of life; for there is in London all that life can afford.”
— Samuel Johnson

These days of course there is no need to visit the coffee shops of London to take part in all of these conversations. Just up periscope. Twitter is the new London.

I got an email from an old chum today asking: “Are you alright? 3 weeks without blogging is too long”.

Ian – you’re absolutely right. Its very clear that like many others a lot of the stuff i once would have blogged is now getting twittered instead. Twitter is where much of the conversation is, but Monkchips The Blog is an important part of my conversation with the market and I have been neglecting it.

I am therefore now announcing a new service level – I will now create a least two posts a week. I am also going to think about ways to harvest some of the twitter juice and use it here.