Every day’s main challenge

September 7th, 2006 Robert Bosman

Even the most complex things
need simplicity as a fundament

It is Ray Ozzie, Bill Gates successor at Microsoft as ‘Chief Software Architect’, who addresses (on his understandebly not that active weblog) one of the most challenging subjects for the future of the Web.

‘For years, as many of you, my work life has involved significant travel. As significant bi-coastal coordination has now entered into the mix, things have gotten even more complicated for me, for my wife, for my assistant and hers. In order to stay on the same page, each of us has the need for (limited) visibility into aspects of each others’ calendars and schedules. Each of us has a mix of private, shared, and public events and meetings that we’re tracking. Some of these we edit privately and publish to others. […] It’s tough because we use a mix of different email/calendaring systems – corporate as well as non-corporate, web-based as well as client-based. And to each of us it makes sense to want to edit the calendar in our own PIM application of choice where we do all our calendaring and scheduling work. […]
And the same goes for contact lists. In our case, each of us has a mix of private, shared, and public ‘address books’ or ‘contact lists’ that we’re managing. At work I deal with contacts in my enterprise directory as well as my own private contact list. But I share [also] two completely different contact lists with my wife – one that is our “home rolodex’ with plumbers, doctors and the like, and one that is our “family rolodex” with friends & family. And I know she has other contact lists she shares privately with members of groups she’s working with.
As an industry, we have simply not designed our calendaring and directory software and services for this “mesh” model. The websites, services and servers we build seem to all want to be the “owner” and “publisher”. ’

It appears to be a simple, every day’s problem. But it hits the essence of the matter. First of all it illustrates that our present approach doesn’t fit with even the simplest and most common tasks in every day’s life. Secondly, it shows the interaction of multiple agenda’s, multiple contacts, and the public vs. private aspect and the publisher/owner dimension. Moreover, it deals with the incompatibility of today’s systems. What Ray doesn’t mention but certainly is part of the same problem, is that of all accounts on all that separate web portals, everyone with its own requirements for username and password. So, Ray’s problem is that of all of us.

As long as we don’t have a solution for these ‘simple daily problems’, we’re far away of a profound new architecture for the next web. I would even suggest making this problem the first one to be solved, before even trying to go on with everything else.

Ray’s solution by the way, based on Simple Sharing Extensions (SSE) is a very clever one for the present web; but I’m sure he and his team are working behind the scenes on a more fundamental solution for the future. For me it’s very clear that the final solution will start with an architecture based on Euler’s Graph Theory. Just because that’s the only fundamental approach to any kind of network.

Technorati Tags: web2.0, CRM, simplicity, simple daily problems, Ozzie, SSE, practosophy

Entry Filed under: Internet 4.0