Two Biggest Tech Disappointments Of 2009

A post on ReadWrite web today outlines the “Top 10 Failures of 2009“, and the top 2 are definitely my biggest disappointments also.

Where are the Tablets?
I was hugely excited about various tablet concepts to the point of swooning every time the rumor mill turned, and having been an early adapter of Boxee and streaming net content to your large home theater TV flat screen, I bought into some of the concepts of a flat Apple or Crunchpad tablet becoming the new  couch surfing, home media center, ueber iPhone, controller, e-reader, kindle killer gadget to own.

I’m still excited by the prospect, but Michael Arrington‘s “Crunch Pad”, originally outsourced to Chandrasekar Rathakrishnan’s India company called “Fusion Garage“, evaporated at the 11th pre-launch hour, and is now relabeled  “JooJoo” as part of a completely disastrous falling out between Michael and Chandrasekar. It will likely be rendered irrelevant by years of litigation that is sure to follow the acrimonious, rapid and reality TV worthy meltdown of the US vs. India partners involved in this promising project. Rising from the ashes is not the only thing that has gone up, so has the price. (video on engadget for a high level review)

Jolie O’Dell writes in her original ReadWriteWeb post entitled “Top 10 Failures of 2009“:

All we wanted was a $200-500 flat piece of glass and plastic with some fancy gizmodgery inside so we could look at the Internet from the comfort of our couches. And what did we get? Rumors, Photoshopped gadget porn, promises – lies, all lies. We’d have been better off if we’d spent those months drawing the Yahoo! home page on an Etch-A-Sketch.

Image by Photo Giddy via Flickr

And while fresh Apple tablet rumors resurface every 3 months, all these rumors have done is to move dates from the originally expected mid 2009 time-frame into late 2010, which to me places Apple into a reactionary rather than visionary category, and by which time larger home media market shifts will dilute any innovation, novelty or wow factor.

Wipe-Out: Google Wave

I very much connected with that the web has come a long way since email, which now is 40 years old. The concept with Google Wave was to introduce a new metaphor for communication, incorporating all the collaboration successes and phenomenons of the last couple of decades. The merging of email with forums, wikis, micro blogging, real-time content generation just made so much sense.

Image via Wikipedia

The reality hits home hard, there are few use cases, waves are difficult to manage, and the marriage of asynchronous versus synchronous communication methods in the same tool, and within the same UI, just simply does not work. Is it because the UI is not usable, or is it because there is a lack of use cases? My own hypothesis is that at the center of usability there has to be usefulness, and this is where wave falls short.

Related articles by Zemanta

• First impressions of the JooJoo tablet (seattlepi.com)
• Fusion Garage JooJoo Tablet Hands-On [Joojoo] (gizmodo.com)
• Hands On With the JooJoo, Formerly Known as CrunchPad (wired.com)
• Joo Joo tablet maker says Michael Arrington had ‘flair for the dramatic’ (telegraph.co.uk)

Social Media Predictions 09: IT vs Business

Many organizations are currently evaluating their social media strategy, and some interesting organizational dynamics and internal conflicts that are likely to occur as a result of the declining economy.

IT resources and budgets for internal collaboration and social media tools are declining, yet the business’s need for these same tools is increasing. Now, IT organizations have been earlier adapters of the related technologies, and have introduced wikis and blogs into the organization. Typically this means given their experience, they now also have a more centralized organiztional structure on how they envision these tools for their organizations.

Business lines, however, are only now discovering the hot trend social media tools in their business, and are now increasingly exposed to twitter, facebook and others.

Forrester analyst Gil Yehuda has a perspective of Enterprise 2.0 collaboration and compares the top down approach of IT to the bottom up approach of the business. Here is his take:

I predict that IT-driven internal collaboration initiatives will be squeezed tight: 1. they are usually more expensive than the Tech Populist options. 2. IT is being asked to sacrifice projects, and they would rather cut fat, not bone. Meaning, they’d rather protect their bread-and-butter IT infrastructure from being outsourced. And 3.The business considers projects initiated by IT to be less vital. Remember who pays the bills.

However, for business-driven internal enterprise Web 2.0 collaboration projects, I see growth. Why?  Because the business will find their collaboration needs to grow in 2009, while they see IT providing them with fewer services. Collaboration needs grow as a result of layoffs, mergers, and deepening external partnerships (requiring new infrastructure to collaborate outside the firewall with trusted, external partners).  And this happens while IT’s services shrink as a result of layoffs, a focus on streamlining operational costs, while not taking on new projects.

Who wins? The SaaS based collaboration vendors: folks like Box.net, GroupSwim, Jive, OneHub, PBwiki, SocialCast, Socialtext, and others who provide collaboration services in the cloud for about $5-$15 per user per month, give or take. These products range in functionality, where some focus on the wiki, others on the social network, and still others are more suited for file sharing within trusted groups. But these are easy pickings for business that are looking to circumvent IT and set up a small departmental solution. Especially in departments that are looking to collaborate with a few external partners.

IT implementations have also not enjoyed the uptake or success when compared to business line driven social media rollouts: The McKinsey survey on Building the Web 2.0 Enterprise, indicates that IT implementations had only 40% satisfaction level, when compared to 74% for business initiatives.  Somehow social media initiatives resonate as “more useful” within the business lines, and this had led to both better adoption success, as well as to a greater need for future expansion projects.

Here is how Gil anticipates the battlelines between IT and the Business to be drawn in 2009:

And now, the battle. The story above works for companies that are willing to move to SaaS based products to address near term collaboration need in 2009. But many organizations cannot, or will not, allow themselves to house their intellectual property on someone else’s servers – no matter what the vendor says to assure them. This means that organizations with hard-line IT shops will face a battle between IT and the business for a collaboration solution that integrates with IT’s existing infrastructure, but requires little IT involvement.

It will be interesting to see how IT can work with the business to either accept SAAS solutions or to bring the needed tools in house.