Tech Talk: AJAX and Simplicity

A great piece from John Sumser today. John was the first to talk about AJAX (Asynchronous Javascript and XML), which will change the RMS industry forever within 3 years. While John has been very kind in talking about my tech talk, I believe that John is really the one that consistently uncovers the good stuff.

But my love of John's piece today drives me to quibble with his piece yesterday (and it is just a quibble, because his main point that trust drives community is dead-on). At my old company (Euphorion) we actually created and demonostrated an XML / Javascript platform in 2000. Everyone thought we were nuts. My point is that things never happen as fast as you think they will, and they were never as slow as they appear in hindsight. Kurzweil seems to miss that creativity is not what drives innovation - adoption is. RFID has been around for over 20 years. Looks like a miracle now, in fact just Walmart finally coming around to the obvious. And much as I would like to think that ATS will be a dinosaur in 5 years, I have to deal with the fact that there are still companies that run on old D&B mainframe systems (which should have died out with the advent of client/server in the early 80's).

But there is something really cool that is happening in tech right now, and I believe we will look back at it and see it as a revolution (which may prove Kurweil right after all, come to think of it). Most technology adoption has been driven by companies that are looking to baffle the customer (including Web 1.0). Baffling the customer makes for a good maintenance contracts and lots of annuity revenue. Today's Web 2.0 technology is being driven by people who love the possibility of elegance in technology: simplicity, ingenuity, community. As John has been saying for years, software will increasingly become less valuable due to this. It will just be a platform to incorporate creativity, knowledge and process.

Getting more employees focused on those areas will be the key to competitive advantage. The CIO should start thinking about becoming the CPO (Chief Process Officer).