The Power of Portals
I did a webinar last week on portal technology. A recording can now be found on the Shared Insights/DCI site. (In about 90 days or so that might become invalid, and an SAP link might replace it.) The registration form is the usual name/address aggravation, but nothing in the vein of “To within the nearest 5, how many pairs of SIMMs have you influenced the purchase of in the past 13 years?”
On that webinar, I promised to post a link here to my whitepaper on third-generation analytic business processes. Done. (Scroll down to the bottom of the page.)
The webinar was pretty fast-moving, so I’d encourage you to replay it if you have a bit of time. But if you want to know just the tippy-topmost key points, the list is something like this:
- Portal technology can play a variety of different roles.
- Portals can be like an inhouse Yahoo, for static pages and knowledge management and self-service types of apps.
- Portals can be the best framework for “secondary” or “ad-hoc” operational apps and business processes, as an even lighter-weight technology than composite app development tools.
- Portals are an ideal base technology for dashboards.
- There should be much more BI-based collaboration going on, and portals are the obvious enabling technology for this.
| Categories: Analytic technologies, Business intelligence, Enterprise applications, Usability and UI | 1 Comment |
When bloggers get silly
I generally find blonde jokes to be stupid, demeaning, and above all incorrect (I’ve known plenty of very smart blondes). So in the face of very limited competition, I am inclined to agree that this is probably the best blonde joke ever.
Apropos nothing, I don’t think I’ve yet shared with blog readers my favorite glossary entry either, originally from the documentation to Inference Corporation’s expert system tool ART and gleefully plagiarized in my Application Development Tools from A to Z:
Recursion: See recursion.
Hear Curt Monash online – three times!
The world has hardly suffered from a lack of opportunities to hear me speak. I first appeared on radio and TV in 1973, first taught a college course in 1977, and have rarely shut up ever since. But until recently, I hadn’t gotten involved with the various forms of Web broadcasting. Well, that suddenly changed, and this month alone you have three different opportunities to hear me hold forth.
1. John Gallant put me on “The Hot Seat” at Network World’s offices, discussing a few provocative questions about the direction of the software industry. The video/audio may now be found on their site. Sadly, while I could quibble and say the camera angle was a bit unflattering, in essence that is what I really look like these days.
2. I participated in a Webinar for SAP called “Beyond Transactions: The Power of Portals.” The theme was that if you want to build or buy an app that’s mainly about data flowing back and forth between parts of the computer system, traditional technologies are fine. But if you want an app that has rich human contact with information, portals are often a superior technology.
I am told a link will be available within the week. Watch this blog for details.
3. On Wednesday, January 25, at 11 am EST, I am participating in – indeed, doing most of the talking for – a Webinar on Memory-Centric Data Management. The host is Applix. The focus will naturally be on the part they care most about (in-memory MOLAP), but it will also be the first time I speak about an area on which I’ve done a considerable amount of recent writing and research.
You can register for this Webinar here.
| Categories: DBMS vendors and technologies, Enterprise applications, SAP | 1 Comment |
Fat clients, thin clients, segmentable clients
My columnist colleagues Frank Hayes and Mark Hall are having a friendly dust-up about fat clients vs. thin clients. If forced to choose, I’ll side with Frank’s view:
Whether or not IT wants to take fat clients away from users, it can’t.
And that’s one of the big reasons I like the idea of solid-state-memory-based PCs. In essence, they segment a PC’s disk, with strong air gaps to protect one part against the others. And if you do that, SOME of IT’s problems go away.
| Categories: Diskless PCs, Hardware | Leave a Comment |
Click Here, You Idiot!
One of the better online spoofs in quite a while has come along, in the form of a lengthy marketing letter. CLICKhereYOUidiot parodies all those marketing letters that are directly deprived from newsletter promotions. And yes, I know about the latter, having been in the subscription newsletter business once …
Like all parodies, it can be a bit heavy handed, but it’s worth a visit and skim.
And it reminds me — does anybody have a copy of the classic site Hey Idiot? That one had the most star-studded creative team of all: Larry Ellison, Mitchell Kertzman, and David Roux. If memory serves, Larry came up with the idea, Mitchell came up with the name, and David wrote the copy. The basic idea was a company that sold only one product — it’s own stock. And there was one rule — each sale had to be at a higher price than the last previous sale …
Here’s all that’s left of Hey Idiot on archive.org. If anybody has more of the site saved, I’d love to see it.
| Categories: Fun stuff | Leave a Comment |
The Google PC could be a winner
EDIT: News reports are now carrying vigorous denials of the rumor. Oh well.
The Register is highly skeptical of the rumored Google PC. Admittedly, it’s playing in the intersection of several areas with bad track records, including:
- Non-Windows PCs
- PCs special-branded for mass-market retailers
- PCs branded by search vendors
Even so, I think there’s a lot of potential for this idea.
To see why, please consider that there basically are four major uses for home PCs:
- Work-at-home
- Gaming
- Internet/communication
- Schoolwork
Presumably, people won’t look to get their work-at-home or gaming PCs at Wal-Mart. That leaves internet/communication and schoolwork. Well, Google is one heckuva heavyweight in internet/communication. If you want a machine to do web surfing, email, instant messaging, and so on, why exactly would Dell/HP/Microsoft be more attractive suppliers than Google?
And how does one do schoolwork on a PC? There’s a lot of internet use, some lightweight use of word processors and other personal productivity tools, and occasionally some use of specialized software (e.g., development tools if you’re learning programming, or various kinds of educational java applets in all sorts of disciplines). Any good machine for communication can meet all those needs perfectly well.
What about IE-only websites, you might ask? Well, the only reason those survive outside Redmond is either total idiocy on the part of webmasters, or a smug reliance on the fact that everybody has IE available at least as a backup browser. But the thing is — they don’t. Mac support for IE has been dropped, and there still are a bunch of Macs out there. IE-only sites, already on the decline, can be expected to dwindle away fast. This is no longer a serious barrier to non-Windows PCs.
Another change from the past is the role of ISPs. These days, there is no role for ISPs, at least in the US. Internet connectivity is being taken over by the telephone and cable TV companies. And they’re just as (in)capable of supporting non-Windows PCs as they are of supporting Windows connections.
Most likely, the Google PC will fizzle at first simply because neither Google nor Wal-Mart really knows how to market it. Besides, the idea of Google as a complete provider of Microsoft-alternative software is slightly futuristic. But if they take their lumps, come back with Version 2 quickly, and then follow Microsoft-like with a kickass Version 3, Google could make a serious dent in Microsoft’s market share.
So that’s the Google threat to Microsoft. Coming soon (I hope) — a post on the Microsoft threat to Google.
| Categories: Google, Hardware, Online and mobile services | 1 Comment |