Rachel posted such an interesting comment on her experience of using Office2.0 technologies at the recent Society of Archivist’s conference that I thought it deserved picking up in a separate posting.

Rachel is absolutely right in pointing to how reliant the ‘dream’ of Office2.0 is on the nuts and bolts of technical infrastructure and quite correct that at the moment that infrastructure is not yet sufficiently developed to turn the dream into a reality. However, I suspect the phrase ‘not yet’ is really key here. In response to Rachel’s experiences I think I would offer the following points (aside from a hearty ‘well done’ for the whole experiment!).

The infrastructure is still developing, but developing fast. I know (from bitter experience!) that relying on wifi access for internet access when on the road can still be a very patchy and frustrating experience. But, what I would say is cast your mind back 5 years or so and then compare it with today. Five years ago I couldn’t even get a mainline broadband connection for my rural home. Today, not only do I get a reasonable BB connection, but I actually first read Rachel’s comments on my Blackberry whilst walking the dog round a field this morning…

Similar evidence of progress can be seen around the country, whether it be wifi hotspots in stations and coffee shops or the increasing number of hotels that are now offering connections (including an increasing number providing free access). Of course this isn’t the same as being universal and I suspect that it will be some time – perhaps another 5 years or so – before coverage begins to approach this. But I find it hard to believe that it won’t happen soon – just look at the rise in mobile phone coverage over the past decade.

Incidentally, Rachel may have had more luck with a 3G card than she suspected. I’ve used one for several years now and though not without their own frustrations, do mean that access to the internet is possible pretty much anywhere you can get a mobile signal (at least at GPRS speeds, if not 3G).

It might also be worth checking out the potential of Google’s Gears. I’ve not yet got round to trying it myself, but the logic of a piece of software which enables offline access to services which are normally only available online (including Google Docs and Zoho) would seem a potentially valuable means of plugging this temporary gap as seamlessly as possible.

So, I guess in summary its worth saying that this blog is called ‘futurewatch’ for reason! The reality of the universal, seamless access to the web that is required to fully realise Office2.0 may still be a little way off, but personally I still have no doubts that it is the direction in which we are heading.

When I first started hitting the conference circuit and blogsphere last year with my concerns regarding what the rise in Web2.0 and particularly Office2.0 solutions might mean for the future of records management, many I spoke to thought it would never happen to their organisation. So whilst it may have been an interesting theoretical exercise, many dismissed much of what I said as being largely irrelevant to their organisations and their circumstances - particularly if they worked in the public sector. Even at the RMS conference in Edinburgh last month many I spoke to were still clinging to this belief.

But all the while the signs are that this is the direction in which we are heading. Whether this be the use of YouTube to conduct public consultation, as addressed earlier this week, or Paul Dodgson’s post on the RMS Blog discussing how Leicestershire County Council is already ‘dipping its toe’ into Google Apps to explore its potential. Certainly in the Higher Education sector things are moving a pace. Whereas this time last year there were only a couple of examples of institutions wishing to outsource their email to externally hosted services there are now dozens with most IT departments currently at least exploring the pros and cons.

Make no mistake about it: this is something we, as records and information professionals, need to come to terms with and quickly - and not just by paying lip service to it, but by developing new approaches which meet records management objectives in radical new ways.

Very interesting post on Techmeme about Google investing in subsea cable:

Google is working with a consortium of carriers planning to build an intra-Asian submarine cable system. The new cable, dubbed the Southeast Asia Japan Cable (SJC), would link Unity’s landing station in Japan to Guam, Hong Kong, the Philippines, Thailand and Singapore. The cable is still in the planning stage, and the consortium has yet to announce a supply contract. ‘Given the current flurry of undersea cables under construction, the SJC cable will probably not be ready for service until 2011 at the earliest,’ said TeleGeography analyst Alan Mauldin

This follows huge investment in quite a number of other distribution plays, including wireless spectrum. So why do this? Now part of this requirement is clearly to move traffic between datacentres, but to say the least, its unusual for a media aggregator and Ad server to want to be a major global Telco.

So, a thought experiment - Google’s business model initially was to allow users to find content they want on the internet, and to pay for this it monitors their behaviour in order to optimise adverts it serves to them. Over time the model has more become about selling advertising by capturing various strands of user data, of which search is now just one component. Strategically, Google “pwns” the content market by making it easy to find it. Its market dominance allows it to “pwn” the consumer market in many ways. However, the one area it dows not “pwn” is the distribution function. But that traffic travels over the assets of some of the few companies in the world who are both rich enough and smart enough to give them a run for their money. Google gets a “free ride” right now as operators are (i) charging users for pipe and (ii) subsidizing it to grow traffic, so that their fixed costs are amortised over more people (and they get more subscription). But what if the Telcos thought the upstream players should also help pay for the next upgrades, especially those pumping out the video that is filling their pipes?

Our hypothesis is thus that Google’s greatest strategic Achilles heel is in internet distribution. This is the one area where it faces a major competitive threat, as the distribution companies (mainly Telcos and ISPs) can control Google’s traffic, and extract value from that. AT&T made this point very clearly when it showed that it too can monitor internet behaviour. And when it comes to who has the whip hand, its the Telcos in the final analysis. They own the means of distribution.

Hence a content aggregation and search company is making such a play in becoming a pipe owner.

Google is in the NYT for managing its cost base via cutting subsidies for child care facilities and evening canteen services, and this apparently implies it is losing its Mojo (via Slashdot):

Actually, we noted the first sign of MoJo loss was when it bought YouTube, which we believe was its “Netscape Moment”, for 3 main reasons:

- It was clear Google could no longer innovate and build their own service in this major new space, ie we could see their strategic and technical limits (just as Microsoft’s limits were exposed when they had to crash Netscape)

- It was a defensive acquisition, to prevent a major competitor from gaining an advantage.

- The price paid was thus not what a smart acquirer with market power on its side would pay.

At the time (18 months ago) we reflected that from now on a number of other behaviours are predictable, such as:

(i) Increasing reliance on acquisitions for making up revenue growth, and paying increasing premiums for them…;

(ii)….but these then often being strangled by internal politics, which usually becomes both more vicious and petty

(iii) Increasing difficulty in attracting and retaining “the best”

Another classic sign of the “End of the S Curve” and the move to utility is cost management by perks removal. This usually implies two things are going on in the business:

(i) It is unable / unwilling yet to confront where the real main cost wastage is, so “easy” targets (ie no Baron owns them) are hit first - aka reshuffling or removing “Deckchairs on the Titanic”

(ii) Decisions are probably no longer being made by line operatives or by involved top management, but by management admin / staff types (aka “Suits with MBA’s” rather than “Shirts with MSc’s”).

For those who have been around the corporate block, this sort of behaviour is very predictable owing simply to the amount of times its been seen before in the last 50 years or so (at least). These are classic signs of slowdown of margins, even if revenue is still growing. That’s due to the flattening of the growth curve as the business moves into its Utility phase. Other signs are typically a shift in reliance from technological innovation to economic (acquisition, price crashing) and legal means to gain competitive advantage.

This is not good or bad per se*, merely a stage in the growth of any major enterprise. Google is becoming the new Microsoft. Microsoft is now the new IBM. IBM is the new GE….

So who is the new Google?

*The daycare ploy here is a little bit more cynical than most, however, as by reducing subsidy it raises annual daycare prices to $50k+ per annum, thus limiting it to more senior (ie powerful) employees:

Google may be providing the greatest day care ever, but so what? It doesn’t matter how good the day care is if only its wealthiest employees can afford to use it. If Google had really wanted to do something path-breaking about its day care crisis, it would have spent less time creating elitist day care centers and more time figuring out how to “scale” day care for everybody no matter what their salaries.

In other words, the net effect is that junior new mums are taking the brunt (and maybe being managed out the business, as they are both expendable and no longer able to sleep under their desks on all nighters?). Maybe not Evil, but definitely not a nice way of doing things.

We’ve been checking our DNS servers at Broadsight in view of the recent vulnerability to the DNS system found by Dan Kaminsky. In a nut shell, the vulnerability means that unpatched DNS caches can be “poisoned” into remembering the wrong IP address for a server. If a person, company or their ISP is affected, any or all Internet applications can be redirected to a malicious server. This means that email, web, IM or even software updates could be subverted. For more info, see Bruce Schneier’s Blog

This issue set us off thinking about trust and identity on the net, which is something we keep coming back to. The interesting thing about the DNS problem is that the DNS system is not meant to be very secure. If you want to check who you are talking to on the Internet (or any untrusted network) there are perfectly good technologies to do just that e.g. X.509 certificates, SSL, SSH, etc. The problem is that people are not very good at using them. For example, there are plenty of phishing scams that obscure the real server identity, simply by showing a “fake” address in the visible part of the hyperlink. Many people have revealed their banking passwords in spite of the fact that the certificate must have been invalid or missing. Of course, it’s not all the fault of the users. Many websites that handle sensitive data don’t use SSL (LinkedIn is an honourable exception, by the way). I guess this is partly cost and partly ease of use. Security always takes some time and effort.

So, supposing that your DNS is working properly, all that it tells you is that you are connected to a server that is registered with the name it’s registered with. You don’t really know who runs it or whether they can be trusted. Obviously, many user stick to well known brands like Google and Amazon for this reason. They may trust recommendations via word of mouth (off net or on discussion boards.) There are also some sites that rate other sites, but who guards the guardians? We can see scope for a system of federated delegation of trust, so trust can be securely passed on via social networks. Of course, there are sites that do this internally (notably eBay) and that has been very successful, but is limited to the site in question. It’s also quite one dimensional. Trust should be a richer concept than that. For example, I might trust my accountant to do my taxes and my doctor to diagnose an illness, but not the other way round.

As more of life is conducted on the net, it will more and more become important to present identity and trust in ways that users can understand and use appropriately for the task at hand, from reading wibble on a discussion board right the way up to eCommerce and banking. I think it will be the mid-range activities that will be hardest to get right. Already, the banks are locking down their security, so criminals will be looking for softer targets e.g. pump and dump. Think how effective that would be if someone had subverted the website at the Financial Times?