But for some vendors, the shift appears to be irreversible. To counter this, many are beefing up their services capabilities - many vendors that are expecting headcount to remain relatively flat state that they are, however, looking to increase their professional services resources. Others are looking to acquire professional services firms catering to their area, as evidenced by an upturn in the number of mergers and acquisitions involving services firms this year.
5:04:35 PM    comment   

Clay asked, a few days ago, for the first use of the term "social software".  I seem to recall the term being used in something written by Murray Turoff and Roxanne Hiltz many many years ago - late 70's - but I can't quite seem to pin it down.  Maybe someone can find it.

As Clay noted at ETCON, I feel that much can be learned from past work in this specific field if people would just take a few hours here and there to read and explore.  It was great that Coates and Rheingold - a tremendous pioneer in his own right - mentioned Engelbart.  I sadly don't see Lick mentioned very often, but as Doug he really saw (and sketched) where this was all headed in the late 60's, e.g. the internet, messaging, spam, and linkedin

I strongly recommend that people join the ACM and use its Digital Library and read some of the things that influenced all of us in the CSCW discipline, e.g. Turoff's early work in conferencing, Flores' work on speech acts/workflow, etc.  It's never been more relevant.  Now that people have realized that we need to move beyond the Web, there are tons of ideas ripe for the picking in terms of innovative architectures for interpersonal communications & cooperative work e.g. awareness & event notification architectures, real-time & replicated architectures, etc.  Explore SIGGROUP papers; head down to Group '03 this fall, and blog what you hear.

What's incredibly exciting to me is that a confluence of factors e.g. ubiquitous computing, networking, web and RAD technologies, the state of the job market - in essence, loosely coupled systems and loosely coupled minds - have created what amounts to a petri dish for experimentation in systems for social network formation, management and interpersonal interaction.  An exciting time to be exploring what may happen to social structures, to organizations and to society when the friction between our minds can be reduced to zero ... to the point where we can truly have superconductive relationships. [Ray Ozzie's Weblog]
4:02:26 PM    comment   

To summarize, rather than count the shocks, I prefer to see recording industry troubles as part of a larger process. New technology's attack on the status quo has weakened or destroyed three of the four pillars of the recording industry's business model. Of the four -- finance, manufacture, distribution and marketing -- three have been irrevocably weakened or made irrelevant by technology. Only marketing remains, and it too is vulnerable. Now the recording industry is losing marketing power to newly powerful big-box stores and corporate conglomerators like Clear Channel, as well as to performers who use the new technology to reach fans directly. Meanwhile, on the demand side, listeners are finding new things to which to devote their time and attention.

Read the whole thing...
3:30:48 PM    comment