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.

How Encanvas could have saved Nationwide £980,000 in a single day

It must be ‘gutting’ to the customers of Nationwide to find out that they will be soon forking out close to £1 million to the FSA as a financial penalty for a lapse in the company’s data security that they had nothing to do with. ‘Doubly gutting’ after being told that their personal information is now somewhere in the ether because it was being held on a laptop stolen from an employee's home in August, 2006!

Those that live outside the corporate world must be thinking how on earth something like this could possibly happen with all of the alleged security protocols that corporations are being encouraged to adopt. How on earth could the personal information of 11 million customers find its way onto the hard-drive of a laptop that could be so easily lost?

I suspect there are many business people upon hearing this story will have a wry smile on their face in the knowledge that holding business strategic data on hard drives is not so uncommon. They probably see the practice going on inside the company they’re working for every other day. In the cold light of day, it becomes almost possible to second-guess how this story played out.

There remains a huge gap between well-organized, highly secure back-office information systems that support business continuity, and the daily needs of corporate workers, starved of the information they need to discharge their roles.

A recent Accenture sponsored survey (Jan 2007) reported that most middle managers found that the majority of information obtained for their work is useless and only half of all managers believe their companies do a good job in governing information distribution or have established adequate processes to determine what data each part of an organization needs.

Small wonder then that knowledge workers like our friend in Nationwide succumb to beating up the IT department to provide an export of the information they need to fulfil their role and walk out the door with the company’s customer database under their arm.

When will companies like Nationwide come to realize that for less than $200,000 a year they could avoid these ‘miss-haps’ by providing appropriate tools that enable workers to access information as they need it - to be as effective as they know they can be?

Business agility software like Encanvas bridges across pockets of information held within the organization (and beyond its firewall) to provide information workers with the ability to ‘serve themselves’ with the information they need within a trusted framework of security. Encanvas formalizes information flows that manage how workers access and use information without being forced to work at arms length.

A saving of £980,000 in one day. That’s quite an ROI.

Google's $10 computing revolution

Google, the fastest-growing company in the history of the world, announced late in 2006 that it was inviting subscribers to register for a personal domain at a flat $10 per year. Whilst it’s not uncommon to find an Internet Service Provider (ISP) that will provide you with a domain for $10, with Google you get much, much more. Infact, the Google offer represents a virtualized data center built for one.

And what do you get for your money?

For starters you get a web-site hosting, web-based IT infrastructure, a personalised portal and intranet, an email service, instant messaging, calendar and scheduling software, web-site design software; and, by utilizing some of the other free Google services you can also obtain web-site analytics, word processor and spreadsheet software along with all the necessary storage, data backups, security and maintenance you would expect from a corporate service provider. And this is no pipe dream. At the time of writing, Google has a market capitalization of $138 billion. The founders, Larry and Sergey, are worth more than $10 billion each.

'Corporate-ready' products like Encanvas that bring the 'mash-up' world of light-weight applications development to the door of corporations, provide a new kind of 'software glue' that turns Google's vision of a virtualized service-led computing platform into a reality for risk-averse corporate buyers.

If the future of business IT is a Google subscription at $10 per person for ‘all that you need’, there will be a whole bunch of software companies in ERP and CRM world wondering what the future holds for them. But then, they've had it good for a long time haven't they?

Double Loop Learning

Double loop learning is really important in business. As Dr. Martin Vasey, Knoweldge Director at EY would say, "It's about doing things differently, not just doing things better."

Academics describe these two concepts as single loop and double loop learning:

“Suppose an organisation manufactures a product X. When the employees of that organisation detect and attempt to correct error in order to manufacture the product X, that is single loop learning; but when they begin to confront the question whether product X should be manufactured, that is double loop learning, because they are now questioning underlying organisation policies and objectives.”

Sourece: Argyris, C. (1977). Double-loop learning in organisations. Harvard business review, 55(5), 115-125.

Whilst single loop learning makes improvements possible, double loop learning provides the opportunity for step-change which is a fundamental characteristic of successful 21st century businesses.

When Capitalism Was Cool

When I look out of the kitchen window to over-filled refuse bins that are brimming with the often unnecessary packaging of our food and consumer products - it’s easy to forget that at one time capitalism and the consumer society was cool!

Consumerism was great fun in the 1950’s with snazzy kitchenware, pink Hoovers and cars for the average Jo. Industry in the UK was already starting its slow decline but the advertising sector was finding its feet. The 1950s was the age of the consumer. The post-war boom meant that in 1950, average household income was double or triple what it had been in 1935 and this brought massive changes in the home; it was out with the old and in with the new. Open-plan living was introduced, and the fitted kitchen with its brand new appliances was every housewife's ambition.

The ‘VIP’ world

Did you ever see the great 1961 blockbuster film comedy featuring Rock Hudson and Doris Day called ‘Lover Come Back’? Rock and Doris are rival advertising executives with different views on how to conduct business. Carol Templeton (Doris) thinks Jerry Webster (Rock) is unethical in his business practices and while trying to catch him at it is also trying to steal his next account. The plot gets more complicated and entwined until eventually a mistake is made and one of the agencies launches an advertising campaign to promote a product called ‘VIP’ that doesn’t even exist - so Jerry has to make it up.


The film is a parody of the late 1950’s style and consumerism. It was born of an age that industrialists believed that with good advertising and public relations you could pretty much sell anything – such was the desire for new commodities from a public trembling with anticipation for the next new kitchen gadget, cosmetics product, automobile or garden tool.

The 1950’s started in the UK with housewives queued on icey pavements with their ration books and neared the end with Prime Minister Harold Macmillan's phrase 'never had it so good'. Pent-up demand for goods and services and the unexploited supply of new technologies combined to bring a nearly unprecedented wave of radical change that painted new colours over the drab walls of the 1940’s. This was where suburbia began, and rejuvenated the idea that we all needed to have one of everything to improve our social status. The brands of the moment were Marlboro (cigarettes), Colgate (toothpaste), Hoover (vacuum cleaners), Heinz (beans), Kodak (cameras), Wrangler (Jeans) and Electrolux (electricals).

The 1950’s was a period when the western world wanted to let its hair down and have some fun in a post-war world that was reinvigorated by the power of capitalism. It was a time for fun, design flair, advertising and must-have consumer products.

Demand appeared to be without bounds. This was hardly surprising. More women (around 34%) were now working in the labour force, introducing the two earner nuclear family model that is common today. Family sizes were in decline. More people owned their own home. Confidence in the banking system was high, appreciation of inflation was low and average household incomes in some places were 6 times what they were in 1901. No wonder people were spending their money.

50 Years On We See The Raw Deal of Capitalism

Today, new generations see the relationship between capitalism and society moving further out of balance and sliding ever closer to a fatal point of failure.

The expectations of society are evolving apace as new generations expect more and are less prepared to buy into the human consequences of capitalism. An ever growing shortage of skilled labour means that the educated population of the western world is beginning to demand a better deal; a more balanced way of life that blends work and play, work-life and home-life, to mirror their personal aspirations of what a good life should be like.

It’s true capitalism isn’t perfect. But that’s no reason to think it’s sour to the core and believe that we should throw it away like sour fruit. The way that markets work and the power balance between buyer and seller can change over time. These are the natural market forces that describe the true essence of capitalism. Capitalism isn’t owned by industry or by governments. The foundation of capitalism is the ability to maintain a free market that is influenced only by the market forces of supply and demand. The opportunity for capitalists today, and tomorrow, is to supply what people will pay for. Commerce and market forces can and do make a positive impact on the quality of life for millions of people.

Those of us born into a world where capitalism dominates find a way to live with the uncomfortable marriage. Sometimes we fall out of love - but we never leave. It’s a familiar friend; a nightlight that reliably burns and protects us from the scary ghosts of scarcity, communism, political interference and dictatorship.