The emergence of the widget software industry has to be seen as a paradigm shift that will turn the software industry on its head

It didn’t really matter where in the world you lived in the 1990’s, you always knew that the place people made films was Hollywood and the place where people made software was Silicon Valley. But times in the software industry are changing and commercial markets for software are about to turn another corner.

The software industry has always been centred on people that understood how ‘to programme’. These clever individuals that have the skills to type characters into a script and then see the script magically create user interface screens, business logic rules, reports, visualisations (etc.) have consistently got better at serving up tools that non programmers could use to input data and produce documents.

But whatever tools programmers produce, they never appear able to meet all of the discerning demands of modern information workers. The world of competition is simply moving too fast. And this creates a very expensive and ‘high risk’ short-fall in the ability of the creatives, the high performers, the business development people that are tasked with driving corporate growth and cost reduction strategies – at the ‘edge’ of business operation. As global markets are hotting up, ‘old world’ corporations desperately need to release the innovation that exists in these small groups of people, in pockets of the enterprise.

The big change happening today is being described as the ‘consumerization of IT’. The formation of industry standards driven by web technologies and key software industry players like Microsoft means that a new generation of software application building tools are now emerging that require no programming skills whatsoever (see http://www.encanvas.com/, http://www.coghead.com/ and http://www.teqlo.com/). These new applications liberalise IT by making it conceivably possible for non technical people – entrepreneurs, students, housewives and scientists – to develop new ways of gathering, managing, sharing and using information.

Introducing Widgets
It’s not too clear who came up with the term ‘Widgets’ but it’s likely it originated from the work Apple did in developing their loosely coupled desk accessory tools.
Widgets themselves are, at the core, simply HTML files that are displayed within a user interface layer. Widgets are created using Hypertext Markup Language (HTML), Cascading Style Sheets (CSS) and JavaScript. Because the same programming languages are used for creating websites, many web developers can already build them.

When a widget is built, it usually consists of six files:

1. The widget's HTML file, which is the actual file that will be displayed in the user interface layer.
2. The widget's CSS file, which is used for styling the widget (but is called on from the HTML file).
3. The widget's JavaScript file, although it may be implemented directly within the HTML file if the developer desires.
4. The widget's Property List (called “Info.plist”), which is what the user interface uses to load the widget’s properties (i.e.: name, version, HTML file, etc.)
5. The background image of the widget, in PNG format.
6. The icon that is displayed in the menu bar.

Once all of these files are in the root of a directory, it is given a name and the extension ".wdgt" and then it can be opened up in the user interface as a widget.

Widgets are centre stage in the ‘consumerization of computing’. Explore the Oxford English Dictionary and you will find that a widget is described as a small gadget or mechanical device. Today, it is also a term used to describe little applications that people can share and use to create composite applications of their own making. Surf the web and you will find there are already hundreds of Widgets (see http://widgets.yahoo.com/gallery/, http://directory.snipperoo.com/ or my personal favourite www.widgetbox.com/).

What makes widgets so influencing is that they are rapidly creating a new global market for instantly pluggable, ‘atomic’ components of ready-built, ready-to-go software application elements. Instead of having to ask the IT department to develop ‘new code’ or purchase yet another shrink-wrapped software application, information workers are able to contemplate ‘serving themselves’ by creating their own information gathering, managing, reporting or sharing application by ‘mashing together’ a series of ready-made components.

The world of software engineering attracts not only some of the greatest technical minds of our age; it also attracts the very best entrepreneurs seeking their fortune by creating the next .COM boom. The result is that any tiny step forward like ‘the widget’ can soon take hold and create a new wave.
Widgets are coming.

So why will widgets create a new wave in the software industry?
We know by looking back at history that it takes two things to occur at the same time to make a paradigm shift in an industry happen – the emergence of a new thread of demand and the capability of suppliers to service it. The industrial revolution was driven by demands of middle-class people to acquire consumer goods that upper class people enjoyed at a price they could afford. It was the emergence of companies like Wedgwood that were able to identify this demand and respond to it by providing the right product, at the right price, and at the right time (the widget factories of their day).

Widgets democratize IT by giving anyone – not just programmers - the ability to create new types of applications that use information in a way that individuals or groups want to use it. We are beginning to see early seed examples of the tools to make this happen. These new ‘see no code, use no code’ authoring software products like Encanvas means that people accustomed to using MS Word, PowerPoint or Excel can themselves start to develop robust enterprise applications. These products provide the necessary light-weight mash-up software to bridge the gap between the widget industry and the users that want to harness them. They also provide the necessary glue to empower non technical people to gather information in a secure and risk managed way from back-office data sources that traditionally have been off-limits to users.

Where will the new Wedgwood’s of the widget software age be located? It may not be Silicon Valley. The cost of establishing a ‘widget factory’ and gaining entry into this market (ie. To, to start building new components that individuals can embed into their mash-ups) is significantly less than the traditional building of complete shrink-wrapped applications. A self-governing, highly communicative global market-place is already forming for widgets around the world that quickly embraces new innovations.

How can we expect widget software industry to mature?
Software widgets today focus on the light-weight tools that consumers might use to improve their blog, or build a social networking website. These attractive clocks, calendar sharing, application links, voting systems, chat and collaborative tools. We are seeing the very early stages of the software widget industry forming. Most of the innovation today is targeted towards the needs of individuals and has a non-commercial context to it. For business people, it is unclear how these new developments can translate into the formation of economic engines that start to make money (Think .COM before the boom).

This new wave is coming into view fast. Companies like http://www.salesforce.com/ with a proven track record in delivering corporate ready robustness and scalability, are offering widgets that bind front-office and mobile workers to the knowledge they need through side-bar widgets able to summarize their hot prospects and link them through to data that would traditionally have been found somewhere on a back-office server. Next we can envisage widgets that are more inter-operable with one another (adding 1+1 to make 3) such as a visualisation widget that can be filtered by a time-lining widget; or perhaps a context search button widget that can be targeted towards internal and external sources of data.

Within the next 2 years we should expect to see eCommerce tools manifested as widgets to add ‘one-click’ payment processing capabilities to websites and blogs. Within this same time-frame we should expect to find new business logic building widgets that again require no code to install into applications and provide a level of business process management that yesterday was thought only possible by using IT programmers.

IT departments remain huddled behind their firewalls feeling very safe and secure from the threat of consumerized IT. But in a similar way to the birth of spreadsheet computing and recent developments in Blackberry-style mobile computing, the personal value that widget computing brings to business people, starved of the right information at the right place and time, means that it won’t belong before these technologies break into the corporate IT glass-house (but probably in the more corporate-ready guise of products like Encanvas that already have track record of corporate deployment and sit on trusted Microsoft technology platforms).

What will the impact be on the software industry?
Traditionally, in order to incubate new software businesses there needed to be a deep regional business services infrastructure and mixture of localised resources including office premises, a constant flow of skilled programmers coming out of colleges, funding sources etc. This was the Silicon Valley deliverable. The advent of widget factories means that the operating model of a cottage industry comes back into play where the Internet becomes the connective tissue that binds widget factories to their market-place, the colleagues and the source of their market insight.

The widget industry creates an open global playing field for software innovation that allows developers in Eastern Europe, China and India to leverage their lower operating costs to bring new widgets to market without needing to tap into deep business infrastructure, heavy-weight resources or multi-million dollar research development war-chests.

Widget software and corporations
It remains unlikely that the first wave of consumerized applications for corporates will be targeted at end-users themselves. This is not because complexity of interfaces or skills of workers will prohibit it, but because of the re-definition of IT departments in corporations. Forward thinking IT heads are already planning the re-modelling of their organizations; to turn business analysts into business process value and improvement managers responsible for key parts of the value-chains that drive corporate success. Organizations like VW already adopt this approach in Europe.

Expect to see information systems designers emerging that have the responsibility of providing light-weight applications for their ‘customer’ departments that perform the important bridging role between business people and IT. In the short-term there are significant benefits in keeping applications authoring in the hands of experienced ‘IT-aware’ people. This is because the generation of computer users today do not resemble the ‘Internet-ready’ generation of my daughter that were raised assuming that the WWW has always existed. The “tweens” of today’s participative age are tomorrows’ computer users and they really won’t need any help to build applications (in the same way that they don’t need to read instructions to use a mobile phone!).

Another good reason to retain the applications authoring interface within the domain of the IT department is because the ability to access data from back-office resources and to organize it into logical structures that ensure good husbandry, are insufficiently mature to be entrusted to non technical users. As corporations develop their infrastructures and tools to empower corporate social networks and virtualize their organizations (ie. Moving to organizational structures that embrace the skills and expertise of independent knowledge workers), the need to chaperone business people during the task of building new composite applications will no longer be an issue.

In Summary

• The Widget Software Industry describes a new kind of software industry that forms its economic engine around the ability to develop world-class widgets that re used by consumers and business people to fashion new ways of gathering, managing and sharing information.
• New ‘see no code, use no code’ composite application authoring environments, like Encanvas, will provide the light-weight glue layer that to make widgets ‘corporate ready’ and rapidly build a market-place for new widgets as they emerge.
• Demand for widgets will come from both consumers and business people who increasingly demand tools that deliver the right information, to the right place, at the right time and find current technologies are unable to deliver the necessary blend of personalization, access to data sources, respond to changing information needs with a rapid build capability, and a commercial model that makes it possible to ‘throw away’ applications once they have delivered their value.
• Supply will come from a global market for widgets from existing software companies releasing their core competency in the form of a ‘widgetized component offering’ and new widget factories that will spring up (enjoying lower cost of entry and all the advantages of “cottage industry” lower operating costs).
  

All trade marks and trade names used in this document are acknowledged.