In the late 70s, the Apple II was released, along with Visicalc (the first spreadsheet). Business people began snapping them up. With an Apple II, you could calculate mortgage interest, maintain a small-scale accounting system, or keep customers records: all without having to deal with the long line for new projects at the IT department. The business benefits of these little islands of computing were undeniable, but a more important driver was managers’ dreams of being freed from the shackles imposed by the IT department. A six-month wait for a new IT project was an eternity for a line manager; the unlikely chance that a $2,000 purchase would cut the wait and put them back in control sold a lot of computers.
We’re in the midst of a replay. The internet has proven the value of interoperable, connected, object-oriented networks. Mainstream computing is embracing internet memes. We are evolving an open standards culture that glues all the pieces of business together. We’re reaching the point where users will be able to call the shots.
What does this get us? Flexible business solutions. The ability to grow organically. The capacity to respond to change in real time. A dynamic business and technical environment. A model that applies to all layers of the stack: systems, apps, and business. Shared processes. Loose coupling. Business objects. More intelligent businesses. Like a fractal pattern, the model works at any scale: departmental, enterprise, or ecosystem. It provides us with local control.
Today’s baby steps into “the web as platform” herald the arrival of an era where manipulating information will be a life skill, like driving a car or using a phone. Once this snowball picks up momentum rolling down the mountain, there’s no stopping it. User-control will knock the slack out of developing new applications.
The tech in-crowd is not making much noise about the quiet introduction this week of Google Notebook. If you’ve been blogging for a few years or hacking out your own HTML, Google Notebooks offers nothing you couldn’t do before.
Nonetheless, I sense it’s a major step toward the democratization of computing. With Google Notebook, you can create a web page at the touch of a button. You can easily cut and paste anything you find on the web into your Notebook. You can write in whatever you want. You can have as many Notebooks as you like; they can be public or private. They have a unique address. Google will host them for you. All this is free.
The fervor that infects many new bloggers is about to spread to non-techies. Anyone with a browser and an idea can set up a rudimentary web page. Here’s my first Google Notebook. Why not start yours? Is five or ten minutes of your time too much to ask for your personal sign that can be read by a billion people?
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