What if Oracle's buyout of Sun falls through?

Not likely to survive on its own, Sun would need a new buyer for itself or its technologies

By Paul Krill | InfoWorld

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Today we begin Part 1 of an 8-Part series on building a web application from absolute scratch to a complete product. I am going to kick things off by introducing the idea, and then I will be handling the design, UI, and general front-end stuff. We are going to be going back and forth from here over to my friend Jason Lengstorf’s blog Ennui Design. Jason will be handling the back-end stuff like application planning and database stuff. At the end of the week, we’ll unleash the actual working application for you. Here is the plan:

All Series Navigation

• Part 1 – Planning the App: Basic Idea and Design
• Part 2 – Planning the App: Database Architecture and Development Approach
• Part 3 – Designing the App: Workflow Map and Photoshop Design
• Part 4 – Designing the App: HTML and CSS
• Part 5 – Developing the App: User Interaction
• Part 6 – Developing the App: Adding AJAX Interactivity
• Part 7 – Developing the App: List Interaction
• Part 8 – Security & The Future
• And finally…. the application! Colored Lists

It’s Easy, Right?

What we’re going to create is a “list app”. The idea being focused on simplicity and usefulness. Sign up for an account, and get started making a list in just a few seconds. Sounds easy right? Even the PHP dabblers out there probably could throw something like this together fairly quickly, right? Well the fact is, no, it’s not that easy.

First of all, it needs to work and it needs to work well. That means good back end code that does what it’s supposed to do and well. That means a good UI that is intuitive, helpful, and pleasurable to use. It means keeping the app secure and users data private. None of these things is trivial.

Through this whole 8-part series, we are going to create an app that hopefully does all these things pretty well. We aren’t out to tell you this is the greatest app ever made, but rather, we are going to use this app as a walk-through journey of the app creating process and hopefully do as many smart things as we can along the way.

The Big Idea

This “list app” is going to be called Colored Lists. Lists (in real life), can be for anything: a to-do list, a grocery list, things to bring camping list… As you finish things, you cross them off. Things on a list may be of different relative importance as well. This makes paper lists potentially messy and inefficient. With a list on a computer, we can make crossing off items just a click and we can make rearranging them a matter of drag and drop. For dealing with relative importance, we can use colorization, which could also be used for things like grouping. Computers, and the web, are a perfect place for lists.

Sketch It Out

No need to get fancy right away. Here is a very rudimentary sketch of what the app might look like:

Looks like a list to me. Each list item is a long rectangle, because the big idea here is to colorize each list item, so putting them inside a colored box makes sense. There are some interactive elements to the left and right of each list item. Those are going to be for accomplishing the basic things we intent people to be able to do with their colored list. Lets take a closer look.

Early UI Planning

We don’t necessarily want to be talking about specific technologies at this point, but we should be thinking about how the UI will operate, so we can make choices about technology that can accommodate our UI desires.

• Click-to-edit
• Drag and drop
• Two-click delete
• Automatic saving (after any action)

All this stuff basically adds up to a whole bunch of AJAX. We don’t want to load special screens to do relatively trivial tasks like deleting a list item. That stuff should happen seamlessly, smoothly and with proper feedback in response to mouse clicks without page refreshes. In a sense, we are creating a one-page app, where the majority of interaction with this app happens on a single page. This is certainly by design, and not trying to adhere to any particular fad. Lists are easy and quick, that’s why are useful. If this app is complicated, it’s usefulness is diminished and nobody will use it.

The Screens

Just doing some quick brainstorming of the idea so far, we can come up with quite a number of “screens”, or states the application can be in.

• Homepage
  • Logged out = Intro/Sales Page
  • Logged in = Your list
• Log in page
• Settings page
• Lost password page
• Account activation page
• Emails

Yep, even emails should be considered a part of the “screens”, as they are a vital part of the process and interaction with an app.

“Features”

People love “features”. Things that your app has that other apps don’t have, or that yours does better. This is just as much for marketing as it is for your actual product. All the fancy AJAX this app will have is certainly a feature, but that stuff these days is getting more and more expected rather than a feature. The one feature that we will focus on with this app is “public sharing”. Each list will have a unique URL that can be publicly shared. A visitor visiting this URL can see the list in it’s exact current state, but not interact with it as far as editing/adding/deleting.

Moving On

Now that we have the idea in place of what we want to build, in the next part we’ll dive into looking at what this is going to take in terms of server-side technology.

Series Authors

Jason Lengstorf is a software developer based in Missoula, MT. He is the author of PHP for Absolute Beginners and regularly blogs about programming. When not glued to his keyboard, he’s likely standing in line for coffee, brewing his own beer, or daydreaming about being a Mythbuster.

Chris Coyier is a designer currently living in Chicago, IL. He is the co-author of Digging Into WordPress, as well as blogger and speaker on all things design. Away from the computer, he is likely to be found yelling at Football coaches on TV or picking a banjo.

1. Creating a Web App from Scratch – Part 6 of 8: Adding AJAX Interactivity
2. Creating a Web App from Scratch – Part 8 of 8: Security & The Future
3. Creating a Web App from Scratch – Part 4 of 8: HTML & CSS
4. So Your Client Has This Idea…
5. Design Refresh (Version 5)

4 New Insights Into the Psychology of Search

Posted by Daniel Flamberg on November 09, 2009 at 07:00 AM PDT

Psychological research conducted by Kevin Wise, Assistant Professor of Strategic Communication at the University of Missouri School of Journalism, and published in the Journal of Media Psychology, suggests that how you find information online affects your reaction to that information. The implication for marketers and publishers is that you have to anticipate how people find you and address audiences differently on the basis of their glide path.

This notion is significant because on any given day about 1/3 of all Internet users either search for something specific or come across content by random surfing, according to the Pew study on the Internet and American Life. People invest different types of energy and emotion into finding content online. Surfers undertake what academics call "ritualized" use of media. They flit from thing to thing, sorting one against the other until something catches their eye or captures their imagination. This is a random process that requires less intention, investment and brain processing.

Searchers are "instrumental" users of media determined to seek out and find a specific content and evaluating search engine results against each other to figure out which is most relevant, on-point and worth reading first. Evidently this requires more attention, brain power and more functions from each searcher's CPU. 

To prove this Kevin and his team wired up 92 freshmen in an introductory advertising class to measure heart rate, skin conductance (sweat to us) and electro-magnetic activity (a surrogate for brain processing power). They set up a site filled with awful photos and descriptions of a shooting rampage at an elementary school in Utah. Apparently disturbing images prompt more distinct responses and can be better mined for content, recall and reactions.

Having run earlier research studies to understand the inter-play of getting there versus being there or in regularspeak --finding stuff versus reacting to stuff -- Kevin wondered if how you got there influenced what you found, remembered and how you reacted. Here's what he found:

Heart rates for searchers accelerated more than those of surfers. Purposely looking for content cranks up your ticker faster than stumbling across things. Maybe this suggests a greater investment in the process which leads to an eagerness to find and consume the content.

Searchers remembered more details than surfers. You expect the directed searcher to pay more attention and care more than the casual surfer.

Searchers had more skin response. Searching and finding gets you more hot and bothered than coming across something worth checking out.  There's probably a lesson for keywords in here. Though the result isn't shocking; it's the directed dude versus the laid back dude. Ditto for EMG activity.

Searchers were more disturbed by what they found than surfers. They rated the content as more unpleasant. People looking for something specific add a dose of intensity to their reading or understanding of the searched object? Could this be a self-fulfilling prophecy because we invest ourselves more in the stuff we've invested time and energy to find?

The data suggests that different ways of getting there drive how people react and respond online. The implications are that marketers have to weigh the intensity of searching versus the serendipity of surfing as they design and display information and/or craft keywords and phrases. Assuming intense and invested searching behavior puts the impetus on copywriters and designers (not to mention SEO jockeys to hyper-serve searchers while spreading around enough bait to reel in the random surfer.

Innovation Is Back, Says Accenture—Or Is it?

Posted by: Michael Arndt on November 11

Nearly two years after the U.S. tumbled into a recession, business is starting to think about ways to grow again. And for many, this means spending more money on innovation, says a new study from Accenture. In a survey of 630 execs in the U.S. and the U.K., 48% said their companies had upped their innovation budgets from six months ago. A third said innovation outlays were flat.

There’s a gray lining in these numbers: One in every five companies is still cutting spending on the development of new products or services.

And there are other findings that suggest that companies really haven’t kicked their recession habits. While new products or services have the biggest potential to generate sales and profit, 74% of the respondents told Accenture that their companies were pursuing incremental advances, like line extensions. (How many varieties of Coca-Cola will we really drink?) Along the same lines, 66% said their companies were more interested in short-term gains than long-term ones. (Same question.)

In the U.S., at least, companies may not be getting better at innovation, either. Accenture said 73% of American respondents said their employers didn’t learn from mistakes. (In the U.K., only 30% were such slow learners.) Respondents blamed failed innovation mostly on inability to meet customer needs, being late to market, and incorrect pricing.

What’s going on at your companies? Are you seeing any lift in innovation allocations?

Open Source CMS market share report 2009

The 2009 Open Source CMS market share report was released a couple of weeks ago. The report concludes that WordPress, Joomla! and Drupal maintain a large lead on the rest of the pack, and that they are the dominant players in the market.

Despite the rather lengthy nature of the survey, more than 600 persons completed the question set. The demographic data gathered shows the survey group to be primarily composed of senior IT professionals working for smaller organizations of 1 to 5 people. More than 80% of the participants had heard about Joomla!, Wordpress and Drupal, though most of them were more familiar with Wordpress and Joomla!.

© 2009 Open Source CMS market share report by Water & Stone and CMSWire.

Last year’s report found little to differentiate the three systems, at least in terms of market share. This year it appears that Joomla! gained a lot of market share relative to WordPress and Drupal. For example, the report shows that Joomla! has more books in print than Drupal or WordPress, and that Joomla! is used more than WordPress and Drupal -- at least by the participants in the survey. The results also show that Drupal has the highest abandonment rate of the three, that is, the rate at which systems are tried, then abandoned in favor of another system. The survey concludes that while the race is far from won, it does seem like Joomla! is starting to take the leadership position. On the flip side, the survey participants seems to more positive about Wordpress and Drupal, than they are about Joomla!. All things combined, the data suggest we should be able to win over many users if we improve the Drupal experience.

© 2009 Open Source CMS market share report by Water & Stone and CMSWire.

All in all an interesting report that matches my perspective on the market. It is great to see Drupal come out strongly, but it also suggests that we have a lot of work to do. I'm very bullish about Drupal's future -- I think Drupal 7 can change the game for Drupal, especially combined with other successes like Whitehouse.gov using Drupal, Drupal being promoted to Gartner's 'visionaries' quadrant, as well as important initiatives as the Drupal.org redesign, Drupal Gardens, Buzzr and more. Exciting times!

Will Microsoft become the General Motors of software?

November 6, 2009 9:01 AM

It has near-monopoly status and nimble, disruptive competitors. We’ve seen this movie before.

By Jay R. Galbraith, president and founder, Galbraith Management Consultants

Galbraith questions Microsoft's resolve to change. Image: Galbraith Management

The more I learn about the current situation in software, the more Microsoft’s position seems to mirror General Motors’ position in the auto industry a few decades ago. Like Microsoft (MSFT) today, GM was an icon in its industry, held a quasi-monopoly, produced eye-popping profits and was often distracted by antitrust lawsuits. When a company experiences this kind of environment over a couple of decades, it eventually loses its competitiveness. Of course, Microsoft would vigorously deny any such comparison. The top executives in Redmond, Wash., claim to be on top of the trends in the industry. They are confident they can develop all the software they will need to be competitive.

My concern is not with the leadership of Microsoft; I am sure Ray Ozzie, the chief technical officer, will stay on the cutting edge of the technology. But its 15,000 to 20,000 middle managers have never been through a downturn (assuming they’ve worked only at Microsoft). And to me, you are not a real company until you have been through a downturn. Growth and high margins are very good at covering up a company’s bad habits and unresolved issues. When a downturn hits, all of the flaws come to the surface and the company purges itself of its bad practices. A  3% decline in sales in 2008 – Microsoft’s first ever – during the worst recession in decades will not wake up Microsoft. The bad habits will persist.

Microsoft’s Options

The best thing that could happen to Microsoft would be successes by Apple (AAPL) or Google (GOOG) that cause a significant loss of sales and market share. The shock would create a sense of urgency and cause the leaders to clean house. The worst thing that could happen is a success with Windows 7, which would reinforce management’s focus on the desktop. Then, as customers move away from the desktop to smartphones and other devices, market share will decline. But if share declines slowly, maybe a point or two a year, the drop will not be enough to overcome the pride that comes with high margins and high profits. Over time, the desktop mafia will experience a shift from pride to hubris. Welcome to the General Motors scenario.

I am not concerned about Microsoft developing the software. They always have. My question is whether they will develop the new business models. As computing moves away from the desktop and onto small mobile devices, the industry moves away from Microsoft’s strengths. Consumers are driving computing now, though, and customer-centricity is not a Microsoft competence. Steve Ballmer, Microsoft’s CEO, will have to give a lot of his famously YouTube-worthy stage performances to convert the middle managers who are currently enjoying monopoly profits.

Microsoft’s Path Ahead

Microsoft also suffers from the incumbent’s curse during a technological transition. The curse is well described in Clayton Christensen’s research. Cloud computing, in which software and other applications are housed in a central location and delivered over networks to end users, could lead to a shift away from desktop-based computing and from complicated operating systems. As Microsoft adapts to it, will it promote cloud computing or protect Windows? Will the team leading Microsoft’s Azure cloud computing business have the freedom to cannibalize the desktop? Or will it be integrated into Windows, where the desktop mafia will slow, modify and dilute the efforts to convert to a new business model?

The General Motors scenario does not have to happen. Ballmer can focus inward on transforming the desktop mafia to the new computing paradigm. Or, better yet, appoint a hands-on, change-experienced chief operating officer who can do it with him.

Galbraith is founder and president of Galbraith Management Consultants, an international consulting firm that specializes in solving strategy and organizational design challenges.

Microsoft To Offer Application Marketplace In Sharepoint 2010

Written by Alex Williams / November 6, 2009 4:00 AM / 1 Comments

« Prior Post

Microsoft will offer an application marketplace within Sharepoint 2010 that shall integrate with third-party applications from its partner network. No date has been set for the marketplace lauch but it will evolve from "The Gallery" a feature that provides Sharepoint 2010 users access to templates.

In an interview we did at Enterprise 2.0, Christian Finn said Microsoft will offer the marketplace for vendors who want to sell their products through the Sharepoint platform.

"We will have a route to market for vendors who want to have applications and add-ons available," Finn said.

Conceptually, Finn said, you think about a marketplace idea. Customers will navigate from the Sharepoint interface to see what web parts are available for a trial period.

Finn said that from their perspective, collaboration is mostly on-premise. Customers are starting to move to the cloud. "We are seeing early customers starting to move. When we see that bell curve adoption we will definitely be there."

But collaboration services are increasingly cloud-based. MindTouch, SocialCast, Socialtext and a host of other companies are offering best-of-breed-services.

The availability of a marketplace brings up a lot of questions about the role that partners will play with Sharepoint. But it also raises interesting competitive questions about the role of Sharepoint as a cloud-based service. It almost looks like it will be more of a Software-as-a-Servce (SaaS) than the on-premise platform it is today.

The Sharepoint application marketplace will evolve out of The Gallery, a resource within Sharepoint 2010 that serves as a central place for templates. Microsoft will initially offer their own web parts through Gallery. Eventually the service will take a different name and migrate to offering partner services.

We asked Finn what the model will look like. Will it be pay per use? How will the application marketplace be administered? Finn said most of the details are being worked out in Redmond.

The service will have IT safeguards. Finn said that IT managers will have a level of control over what applications users may integrate.

What Finn describes sounds similar to application platforms now commercially available.Salesfoce.com is the obvious example. TheirForce.com platform is a full development environment. AppExchange is the platform for building third party applications on Salesforce.com CRM.

Dazzle from Citrix also comes to mind. It is an iTunes like service that is all about making IT more consumer friendly. Employees may choose the applications that they want to purchase. The service is set up as a store front that can automatically stream the application on a virtual desktop to a Windows PC, a Mac or an iPhone.

Details are few about the application marketplace that will be offered through Sharepoint. But it does point to the increasing significance of third-party applications for the Sharepoint platform and how the service may evolve as cloud computing becomes more prevalent.

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Interesting: chart of broadband speed, penetration, and price

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by Devin Coldewey on October 28, 2009

Just an interesting visualization of the broadband situation out there. Statistics get a bad rap, probably because they’re always in spreadsheet form when they should be in an infographic. Click away for the full-size version.