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Tuesday, July 23, 2002 |
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Knowledge workers, information workers
Microsoft's rechristening of the "knowledge worker" as an "information worker" -- which has been the Jeff Raikes message for a few months now -- keeps surfacing from a corner of my mind at odd moments. At the Fusion event in LA, Raikes suggested that "knowledge worker" is an elitist term, and positioned "information worker" as, basically, the rest of us.
To a first approximation, I suppose information workers are those 100 million souls who have yet to abandon the Win9x codebase. People whose use computers and software to do their jobs, but who do not consider themselves creators, or repositories, of knowledge.
I understand and appreciate the rationale for this shift. But it also troubles me. People are the creators and repositories of knowledge. All kinds of people. That is what we do as a species, and networked software is taking the game to a new level. It's the impulse that weblogs tap into. I loved the fact that this was (at least implicitly) woven into Microsoft's message. To turn knowledge into some kind of deprecated highbrow fantasy seems a terrible shame.
11:39:45 AM 
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OASIS and WS-Security
Under the OASIS umbrella, more folks are linking arms to support WS-Security:
The OASIS standards consortium has organized a new technical committee to advance the WS-Security specification. WS-Security provides a foundation for secure Web services, laying the groundwork for higher-level facilities such as federation, policy, and trust. Through the open OASIS process, providers and users will come together to extend the functionality of WS-Security, which was originally published by IBM, Microsoft, and Verisign. [OASIS]
I plan to attend a forum ("co-sponsored by OASIS and W3C") in Boston on Aug 26 to hear more about this. The picture is still quite fuzzy, frankly, but it does appear we're in a market-making let's-all-work-together phase.
PS: Maybe that shouldn't be surprising. According to today's NY Times, we are wired to cooperate, and doing so lights up the pleasure centers of the brain.
10:43:41 AM
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Flash Communication Server
I wrote up my impressions of the Flash Communication Server here:
It's a feast for the Macromedia community, which is still digesting the latest Flash and ColdFusion offerings: a programmable streaming-media toolkit, a distributed event system, a collaboration framework, a persistence engine, and a real-time gateway that can deliver Web services to the desktop. [Full story at InfoWorld.com]
Mike Chambers will be stress-testing an app tomorrow, should be an interesting event. As I mentioned in my story, although streaming audio/video is the headline feature, the multiway event broadcasting and persistence engine are really intriguing.
9:03:33 AM
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© Copyright 2002 Jon Udell.
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