microsoft

Mashups mainstream by 2013 according to Forrester

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According to a new report from Forrester Research Enterprise Mashups will reach their tipping point during 2009-2010 and then become part of the general IT landscape by 2013. This means that the old IT gigants like IBM, Oracle and Microsoft will dominate the mashup market and mashup platforms will be part of their offerings. I guess this means that Microsoft Popfly will merge into Sharepoint and IBM Mashup Hub will merge with WebSphere.

Forrester divides mashups into three types:

  • Presentation layer mashups – merge content from seperate sources into one view, the simplest type of mashups.
  • Data mashups – more complex data driven mashups that get data from several sources and present them in one view
  • Process mashups – mixes business processes and users with data from several data sources.

Presentation mashups and data mashups sound very much similar to me, but then again I dont get payed by Forrester… But Forrester has a lot of influence over this so unless Gartner comes up with another definition this is the ones we have to live with.

I am glad to see that Forrester also realized that enterprise mashups will be huge. It is kind of a self realizing profecy – there will be a lot of men in ties reading this report so it is going to help Enterprise Mashups grow. It is really the next wave in enterprise software. And if you are reading my humble blog you are already years ahead of the mashup wave 🙂

For more info about this report see Forrester: Enterprise Mashups to Hit $700 Million by 2013 on ReadWriteWeb.

Predictions for 2008

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Since it is January it is more or less obligatory to write some predictions for the new year. Here are some of mine, they are not really any big predictions about major industry trends and world changing events, but I think that at least some of you might find them interesting:

  • Microsoft Live Search will be integrated into Facebook and the Microsoft-Facebook allience will start to seriously compete with Google for the search market.
  • Enterprise Mashups will be on the top of the hype cycle in the end of the year and big companies will start to seriously invest in it (and not just talk about it).
  • The Web 2.0 bubble will burst, but that really just means that some big famous companies will go bancrupt (bye bye Technorati). It won’t really have any similarities with the .com bubble, instead it will mostly be something created in the buzz obsessed blogosphere and then be writen about in mainstream media.
  • Microformats will be integrated into WordPress, Blogger, Flickr och other major sites, and be the basis for many interesting integrations and mashups.

Some predictions specific for Sweden:

  • There will be a lot of talk about mashups in Sweden, but not much action.
  • Schibstedt will try to make a Swedish social network – “a Swedish Facebook”. Be prepared for a major ad campaign.

You can find more Swedish predictions in the latest episode of the whatsnext podcast (sorry, swedish only).My last prediction is that Digitalistic soon will have a new design and a section all in Swedish, I really hope that I am not wrong about this one!

Is Google more evil than Wal-Mart, Microsoft and Darth Vader combined (or are they as good as ice cream)?

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Googles famous motto is “don’t be evil”, but in reality it is more like an information Pacman and should have the motto “must eat all data”. There is no doubt that Google is the current leader on the internet and one of the companies that really enables the Web 2.0 explosion. At the same time it is also one of the most feared companies, and is more and more being viewed as an evil empire. This is just what happened to Microsoft in the 90s. So is Google acctually more evil than Wal-Mart, Microsoft and Darth Vader?

To be clear this is not another FOG (=Fear Of Google) post, there are more than enough of those out there in the blogosphere, it is more some thoughs about why Google is starting to get the Mr Evil image.

More evil than Wal-Mart?
Wal-Mart relies on huge scale advantages and is famous for killing of small mom-and-pop stores in the cities it invades. The Web 2.0 space has very few mom-and-pop stores, the corresponding would instead be the 2 geek startup that hacked something cool looking together in 2 months using Ruby on Rails and then gets a lot of buzz. These minor startups are very vulnerable to what the Mountain View gigant does. The addition of MyMaps to Google Maps picked of quite a few startups, as did Google Analytics. So I think that small startups that does not really have a full fledged application, but more just a hyped feature (as is the case for most Web 2.0 startups) do right in fearing Google. For them Google is the same as Wal-Mart.

More evil than Microsoft?
Microsoft ruled the desktop, Microsoft ruled the OS, Microsoft ruled the office. This is still true, but the grip is weakening more and more, and Google is the main enemy. When Microsoft was the big bad wolf that dominated every part of business it entered. It was (and is) a real threat to any big and small business. Guess what, the same is now true for Google. To not be aware of what Google does is foolish for anybody in the Internet or Computer industry. With it’s massive userbase and bottom less bank accounts it can enter and dominate almost any market it sets it’s mind to. So that would make Google the same as Microsoft version 1999.

More evil than Darth Vader?
I have never met the Google founders, but I very much doubt that they have a constant asthma attack like good old Mr Skywalker Senior has. Anyway Darth Vader is one of the coolest villans ever, to I do think that comparing Google with him is a bit unfair to both parties. Darth Vader has cool TIE-fighters, Google has a replica of SpaceShipOne in the reception of the Googleplex, but the similarities pretty much end there. Still, comparing Google to Darth Vader makes for a good subject for the post, please forgive me for that.

As good as ice-cream?
So far Google has just been compared to evil things, so let’s compare them to something good instead, like ice-cream! Acctually Google has some advantages over ice-cream – almost everything is free at Google, while most ice-cream shops insist on getting my money. Google is dominating the way they are because they are providing great products that people want. We all use Google Search, and personally I am a total Google Desktop junkie and also use Google Analytics, Speradsheets, Docs etc. So as long as they are not more evil than Wal-Mart and Microsoft combined, and as long as there are not a better alternative I will stay a loyal Google user.

The key thing is of course how Google are going to use all the data they collect, the risk is that they will really invade privacy. But hey, they are fighting Paypal with Google Checkout, so how evil can they really be?