I just got a beta invite for Evernote a couple of days ago and have been playing with it since. I think it does something which is important enough to pay attention to whatever you think of the rest of the features. And that is that it synchronises instantly between desktop software (even several instances running on different computers) and a web version. So, I installed it twice on my MacBook - once within OS X and once within Vista, running on a Fusion / Boot Camp partition. And anything I add or delete in either place shows up within minutes on the other version and on the website, where there is a full copy of everything that is in either place on the computer. This includes both text, screenshots from the web, pictures taken with the MacBook’s built-in iSight camera - whatever.

I think this is a feature we’re going to see more and more in future, because we still want to mix our online and offline worlds. On the whole, I’m going to be creating most of the notes through the online software, likely in OS X. But from time to time I’ll be logged in using the Boot Camp Vista partition and will want to use the software there, and at other times I’ll be away from my computer entirely and will want the convenience of the web version. The desktop versions are both more functional than the web version, but the web version is fine for checking on what’s been created elsewhere and also for creating more basic content.

Other online applications aim to get around this problem by adding offline functionality through Google Gears or similar technology, and this is fine in some respects. But it rarely gives you full functionality in offline mode and you’re tied to a browser in most cases, rather than more fully-featured desktop software. Whereas the Evernote approach really does give you the best of both worlds - full functionality when offline and online (even most of that functionality when not at the home computer), the Google Gears approach only provides the best the online world can offer and a sub-par subset when offline.

There are frustrations with Evernote. The two desktop versions are just different enough to require time spent learning the idiosyncracies of each, something I hope will be fixed when it comes out of Beta. The note editor itself is fairly basic for text editing (no bullets or numbered lists, for example, and I miss the auto-formatting that comes with Microsoft OneNote, which has been my main note-taking program to date). And there is no way (at least that I can find using the limited help function) to mix images and text in a single note.

It does other clever things too - you can take pictures of objects using your webcam or even cellphone and the program will then use text recognition to read and index any text in those images so that it can be searched later. Some people are apparently using this for business cards, plane tickets and other items.

I think the multiple syncing technology is pretty cool in its own right, but the Evernote folks have done enough to make it an exciting product all around too. If anyone wants an invite to the closed beta, leave a comment below.

Oh, and by the way, it’s all completely free, at least at this point.

Billy Bragg is demonstrating why most people should stick to their day jobs - in his case being a musician (and secondarily a socialist activist) rather than an economist. His editorial in the New York Times and the response from TechCrunch owner and blogger Michael Arrington have created something of a firestorm in the blogging world, from all sides of this issue.

I have to assume Billy Bragg is being deliberately disingenuous to make a broader point here, because even he must know that what he is proposing makes no sense. Essentially, this is his argument:

…news reached Austin [where Bragg was attending the SXSW event] of the sale of Bebo.com to AOL for a staggering $850 million. Bebo is a social-networking site whose membership has risen to 40 million in just two years.

Estimates suggested that the founder, Michael Birch (along with his wife and co-founder, Xochi), walked away with $600 million for his 70 percent stake in the company.

I heard the news with a particular piquancy, as Mr. Birch has cited me as an influence in Bebo’s attitude toward artists.

…Mr. Birch came to see me at my home. He was hoping to expand his business by hosting music and wanted my advice on how to construct an artist-centered environment where musicians could post original songs without fear of losing control over their work. Following our talks, Mr. Birch told the press that he wanted Bebo to be a site that worked for artists and held their interests first and foremost.

In our discussions, we largely ignored the elephant in the room: the issue of whether he ought to consider paying some kind of royalties to the artists. After all, wasn’t he using their music to draw members — and advertising — to his business? Social-networking sites like Bebo argue that they have no money to distribute — their value is their membership. Well, last week Michael Birch realized the value of his membership. I’m sure he’ll be rewarding those technicians and accountants who helped him achieve this success. Perhaps he should also consider the contribution of his artists.

Bragg makes clear that he and Birch “largely ignored the elephant in the room” - namely the payment of royalties. And yet that was exactly the time to bring up that issue if Bragg thought he and other musicians ought to be paid them when their music appears on social networking sites. If not then, then at the time that he and others actually licensed their music to appear on Bebo. But it appears he passed up on both of these obvious opportunities to discuss this business model with Birch and others. He suggests that somehow this was because Bebo had no revenue to share as such - that may be so, but again, he had the option of signing on for a portion of future revenues or any sale of Bebo.

His next paragraph is the one which makes me wonder whether he is in fact serious, and is also the one which illustrates how shaky his grasp on economic realities is:

The musicians who posted their work on Bebo.com are no different from investors in a start-up enterprise. Their investment is the content provided for free while the site has no liquid assets. Now that the business has reaped huge benefits, surely they deserve a dividend.

Again, the difference is that the investors actually did sign the kind of contract Bragg and his fellow musicians didn’t: one which specifically stated what they would get in the event that their investment paid off. Bragg appears to believe this kind of thing can be done after the fact, which is naivety at its best.

Arrington, predictably, takes the line most likely to cause the biggest rumpus and therefore generate the most traffic to his blog (I am feeding this strategy by linking to and discussing his blog entry here). His headline is as provocative as possible: “These Crazy Musicians Still Think They Should Get Paid For Recorded Music” - something I believe he’s no more serious about than Bragg is about his ideas.

But he uses the article to make some valid points - in fact, some of the same points I make here. But he also takes it too far, especially in these sections:

Social networks have absolutely nothing to do with the decline in music sales. The fact that recorded music can be reproduced at a zero marginal cost is why music sales are declining. You can hate that or love that, but it’s simple economics that drives it.

…

Recorded music is nothing but marketing material to drive awareness of an artist.

Social networking sites do have something to do with the decline in music sales - they offer an opportunity - usually for free - to listen to music without having to pay for it. Now, the other forms of digital music distribution which allow listeners to keep the music and listen to it offline are more to blame, but social networking sites also play a part. The point, though, is that this downside is more than offset by the upside, which is that artists get the kind of exposure they’ve never had before to those who may not know them and often haven’t yet purchased any of their music. Arrington over-simplifies by suggesting economics is driving the money out of the music business - it’s the fact that multiple parties have been willing to enable the illegal distribution of music, and users have been willing to join in the party.

That second point is also stronger than the subtler reality it distorts. Musicians make money from selling their music. Certainly, some artists make a lot of money from concerts, endorsements and merchandising, but the music itself is still the major source of revenue across the industry. Those music sales - and not awareness of the artist - is what those artists are trying to drive, and to suggest otherwise is as disingenuous as Bragg’s assertions.

There’s an important debate to be had here, but it’s not helped by these over-simplifications and unrealistic demands from any quarter, although it is often stirred up by them, and perhaps that’s Arrington’s intention. What is clear is that the music companies, largely led by executives who were running them well before the Internet came along, are slowly adapting to the new realities, and haven’t yet figured out what the new business models are.

They’re experimenting in interesting ways with new distribution models and are focusing in part on the role of physical distribution, which still accounts for the lion’s share of music sales. At the same time, a major focus will need to be on removing the excuse frequently used by file sharers that “there was no other option,” which is sadly still all too true in many cases. The industry is going to have to deal with lower margins, from the record companies to the artists themselves. But it has survived cataclysmic changes before and will do so again. People do still value music, and are still willing to pay for it when the conditions are right. The challenge for the music labels and the artists is to recreate those conditions in the new world we live in.

At VoiceCon still today. Two more keynotes early in the day: this time IBM and Cisco. Two more variations on the themes from yesterday. The IBM keynote was very dry, shorn of the visionary stuff from the Avaya and Microsoft keynotes from yesterday. It focused largely on new features and capabilities IBM is adding to its Sametime portfolio. And if anything, the key message was a slightly resentful, “we’ve been doing all this for 10 years, guys - how about giving us some credit?” The lack of vision stuff was probably helpful in reinforcing the perception that IBM is perhaps the most serious about UC, and just boring enough to pull it all off. With the rest, you’re always left wondering how much of what they present is real and how much is just vision and no more.

The Cisco keynote was classic Cisco - bigger and bolder than anything anyone else did, and an attempt to blow the rest out of the water. A TelePresence roundtable discussion between CMO Sue Bostrom, CEO John Chambers, Al Gore and British journalist Lawrence McGinty. I was only able to stay for half an hour but got the gist. The main thrust was climate change, so in some ways it fit nicely with Lou D’Ambrosio’s assertion that UC can save the US economy, and Pall’s suggestion that UC can transform lives and businesses. John Chambers has certainly signed up as a card-carrying member of the save the planet brigade and it looks like he’s signed Cisco up for the program too.

My conversations today confirmed several of my own thoughts. Democratization of UC is all very well as a long term project, but it’s premature at this stage as a concrete goal. Cisco and Microsoft have work to do in order to get their sales people to embrace the vision their executives articulate around collaboration and interoperability. There’s a sense that enterprises are taking a breather at the moment from pushing forward with UC while they wait to see what happens next on the vendor side. They need convincing that the solutions in the market today are mature enough to deploy, and that there is a real business case for UC, probably for individual departments or other smaller user groups in the first instance.

But the UC train rolls on, and all the major companies are planning future releases to provide more functionality, better integration and a broader set of capabilities. In time, we’ll get to first the aristocratic approach and then to democracy itself, but it’s becoming clearer and clear that all this is a long-term project.

I’m at the VoiceCon conference in Orlando at the moment, for the third year straight. We spent a few days as a family in the Tampa area before I headed over here, and caught some fun Yankees games at Legends Field.

The conference itself has evolved in interesting ways during the time I’ve been coming. Two years ago, Cisco made its big Unified Communications launch, and caught everyone by surprise. As I spent time with the other IP telephony vendors on that occasion, they were all scrambling to say that they had been doing UC for some time already and did everything Cisco was announcing it would do. But I came away predicting that Cisco’s entry into the market would completely change things - and it did. Their sheer size and marketing muscle took UC from a non-issue to the top of the IPT agenda, and has kept it there since.

A year ago, Microsoft made its big announcement around UC, with Jeff Raikes staking out the company’s vision for UC, and a prediction that the price of the PBX would halve as software-based communications took over from the old hardware-centric model. Between Microsoft and Cisco, the UC hype machine has only accelerated since then.

This morning’s keynotes came from Lou D’Ambrosio of Avaya and Gurdeep Singh Pall of Microsoft. The theme that was common to both of them was what D’Ambrosio described as the “democratization of UC” and Pall described as empowering all users, not just the few. He used the analogy of attempting to reduce global warming by making every Rolls Royce a hybrid to argue that providing UC to a handful of employees was unlikely to transform any business. D’Ambrosio took his electoral metaphor further by sharing clips of the remaining presidential candidates ostensibly endorsing Avaya’s vision for UC - a clever and entertaining move. He also asked the audience which candidate they favored - Obama and McCain got roughly equally loud cheers in this most unscientific of straw polls, while Clinton merited barely a smattering of claps.

The democracy vision feels a little premature. It is true that in the IPT world, although many companies have deployed IP to some extent, most have not deployed it to all users, and therefore extending it to the masses is the next logical step. But UC is still at least one step behind. It hasn’t been deployed at all in most companies, and the first step is very much to establish an aristocracy of UC power users rather than to launch straight into a democracy, to stretch D’Ambrosio’s analogy. Most companies are unconvinced of the merits of UC and the return on investment they will achieve, and so want to try a few pilots and trials, just as they did with IPT. That is where the focus should be today, with democracy following much later.

Pall’s presentation at least provided a compelling argument for why eventually empowering all users with UC was a worthy vision. He talked about the transformative power of UC - both in companies and in people’s lives. To illustrate the latter point he shared the example of a hospital which has used Microsoft’s Roundtable videoconferencing solution to allow a young cancer patient to virtually attend school from his hospital room. He gave IT managers a reason (or several) why enabling UC was more than just switching on a few cool features for some power users, and encouragement to see its full potential. Again, I think the fulfilment is several years away, and this vision should not distract from the reality of the first few tough wins today, but there’s no harm in pinning up the democracy goal as a long-term objective.

Looking forward to more interesting speeches and meetings tomorrow.

I was asked recently during a call with a client about the prospects for enterprise mobile social networking. My first response was that I thought two other things had to happen before that could become a reality - successful mobile implementations of social networking, and successful uses of social networking in business settings.

Having had the opportunity to think about it some more, I think that initial reaction is still the right one. Only once those two things are well established can the combination of the two really occur in the form of mobile enterprise social networking. And those aren’t insignificant barriers.

Ironically, even though I think the opportunities are far greater in some ways for mobile social networking, enterprise social networking actually seems to be taking off more quickly, in part because there are companies with the right assets to take the job on. Oracle, IBM and others are taking the lead in creating enterprise-grade social networks with the appropriate structure and controls for the business setting. They have the software expertise and the credibility and knowhow in business to make it work, and they are already doing so, both for internal use and for use by customers.

On the mobile side, most of the players only have half the story to tell - the social networking companies have the SN knowhow and the customer base, but not the mobile knowledge or operator relationships to really make things happen. The mobile implementation of Facebook (both the mobile website and the BlackBerry application) is limited at best and doesn’t do a lot of the things you’d want it to in order to be really useful. Mobile operators, who have many of the other pieces needed to make things work, don’t have the credibility as social networking providers in their own right, and so need partnerships with SN specialists to make things work. In time, the two groups will come together in such a way that mobile social networking is enabled in a more mainstream way, but we still have a long way to go.

Only once both of these trends move a lot further down the road does it make much sense to expect mobile enterprise social networking to take off. But that doesn’t mean that the various stakeholders shouldn’t start thinking about how it might work now. Both the Oracles and IBMs and the mobile operators and social networking sites should be actively working out how they will take advantage of this future opportunity today. But that shouldn’t prevent them from staying focused on nearer-term opportunities in both mobile and business flavors of social networking individually.

Just had an intensely frustrating experience trying to activate a copy of Microsoft Office OneNote. I have been through quite a number of laptops one way or another over the last few months, and thus have reached the maximum number of activations I’m permitted (five). So now, whenever I install this program on a new laptop (as I’ve had to several times on my new MacBook) I am forced to call into the helpdesk (which appears to be in India) and get them to activate it for me.

This involves entering or saying a 54-digit string of numbers before I can even speak to a human being, and then having to repeat some of those numbers to the human being, before they give me a 42-digit string of numbers which I have to type in in order to activate my product.

This latest time I am forced to reactivate because I activated OneNote within the Fusion environment and am now trying to use the same instance of OneNote from within the BootCamp environment. This apparently triggered a “hardware change” which necessitates reactivation (I’m guessing this provision is designed to prevent people copying an installation of the software from one computer to another, which of course I haven’t done - this is actually the very same installation on the same spot on my hard drive).

So I called Microsoft for the third time in a week to activate my product. I find that typing the numbers in is quicker than speaking them, but unfortunately I went too quickly for the system and so it put my through to a human being. He then needed me to speak them to him, but had so much background noise in the call center that he was unable to hear me, so it took ages.

Once we finally completed the process, he asked me what product I was trying to activate. When I told him he told me that their servers (running Windows, no doubt) for activating Office products were down, and would I please call back in half an hour. Unbelievable. Good old Microsoft - a joy to work with from start to finish.

I bought a MacBook a week and a half ago and have been playing with it since with a view to making it my main work computer. Since we normally run Windows XP and Microsoft Office, this meant I needed to have some form of access to those Office applications. I already own a copy of Microsoft Office and have found that the Mac versions of the Office applications can be problematic in some cases, including the fact that Entourage is an imperfect substitute for Outlook, so I decided to go the route of adding a Windows OS to the MacBook instead. I read up about the two main virtualisation options - Fusion (from VMware) and Parallels, and eventually decided to go with Fusion, though by all accounts the two are pretty similar in terms of performance and functionality. I also purchased a copy of Vista Home Premium - I was going to have to buy some version of Windows anyway and I had been curious to try out Vista after all the criticism of it since its launch.

So I’ve now been running Windows Vista and Mac OS X Leopard side by side for a few days, and have a good way to compare the two. Vista’s performance has been impaired by the fact that I’ve been running it on a virtual machine instead of as a booting OS, so the “Aero” graphics features of Vista have been missing in action because Fusion doesn’t allow the Vista virtual machine full access to my graphics capabilities. In addition, I’ve had network connectivity issues and also a relatively recent problem with windows minimising and maximising at random while I’m working in them.These things aside, Vista hasn’t been that bad. The constant security nagging is easily my biggest beef (you click on an application or a component of Control Panel and are asked whether you want to continue, every time - didn’t I just say that’s what I wanted to do?), as well as being told periodically that I need permission (what permission? from whom? and how the heck do I get it?) to move a file from point A to point B on the hard drive, within the Windows environment.

These are serious flaws, and from what I can tell (see below) they’re not solvable, even outside the Fusion environment. There are some changes from XP and other previous editions in terms of naming (the word “My” is dropped from Documents, Videos, Music, Downloads etc.), structure (the Start Menu is now kept in place rather than expanding to the right as you drill down into the folder structure) and functionality (Vista has built-in Contacts, Calendar and Mail applications). So there’s the usual learning curve that you have with a new OS, but none of these things is either dramatically difficult to get to grips with or dramatically more useful than the old way of doing things. You get the sense that Microsoft has learned from Apple that new releases need new cool stuff, but they’ve tinkered at the edges with things that don’t really matter instead of really making the experience truly better.

The new Mac OS, on the other hand, feels like an incremental improvement, but a real one in certain ways, over Tiger. The search function is better, the whole Time Machine concept is a good one, although I don’t have a separate hard drive large enough to test it, the iLife applications are better than in the previous iteration, and overall it feels like the OS has moved forward in small but measurable ways. The whole option of running two operating systems on the same machine is, of course, a huge bonus too, and includes the built-in Boot Camp option of running either OS from bootup as well as the Fusion and Parallels paid-for virtualisation options.

Today, I installed Vista again, this time using Boot Camp. I had been frustrated with the limitations on Vista’s new features imposed by running it in the Fusion environment, but also by the nagging network connectivity and other problems I was experiencing. I now have the full functionality of Vista (Aero included) in the Boot Camp version, and will likely delete the original Fusion virtualisation and replace it with a virtualisation of the Boot Camp version (which will still be crippled but will work well enough for the most part when I don’t want to go Windows-only).

It’s been an interesting exercise in comparing and contrasting the Windows and Apple experiences. Apple really seems to have improved things, while Microsoft seems merely to have changed things, including in some cases for the worse, although mostly in an indifferent direction. However, the mere fact that I’m virtually forced still to use Windows and Microsoft applications because they are the standard at work is the biggest reason why Microsoft survives and thrives despite all this. It works well enough and, for now at least, it’s still dominant.

Mashable has a guest post this week from “Drama 2.0” (an anonymous tech blogger), titled, Data Portability is boring. It’s a response to comments made by Tim Berners-Lee in this interview a while back, including the following lines:

I think, it is a very grown-up thing to realize that you are not the only social networking site. When you do that, it is like a website that all of a sudden… otherwise it is like a website which doesn’t have any links out. In the Semantic Web similarly, if you don’t have any links out, well, that’s boring.

Not very well phrased, but the essence is that if you’re a social networking site and you don’t do data portability, that’s boring (annoying might have been a more appropriate adjective).

Our drama queen says that, in fact, data portability itself is boring. By this he means that, even though bloggers, entrepreneurs and geeks get all excited about it, mere mortals couldn’t care two cents:

From what I’ve seen, it’s really only a small but vocal portion of the Internet population comprised primarily of technologists and Web 2.0 kool aid sippers who are beating the drum for data portability.

The truth is that the average mainstream Internet user doesn’t look at Facebook as a warehouse for data… I’m sure users wouldn’t complain if there was an easy way to take certain data from one service to another, but by in large, I think the technologists pushing for data portability are trying to supply something that there isn’t a whole lot of demand for.

I think this is true for many users today, who are perfectly satisfied with Facebook or MySpace (or some other platform of choice). But what happens if their current platform starts to move in a direction they don’t like, or something measurably better comes along? One doesn’t have to be a power-user of social networking applications to want occasionally to move from one to another or to establish a presence on more than one at once. And data portability serves that need just as well as it does those of the uber-social networkers.

Ultimately, I go back to my own main beef about all this which is that the lack of data portability is simply an artificial barrier to exit, allowing companies to rely on the ownership they have of people’s data rather than on positive competitive differentiation in order to keep their customer base “loyal”. As such, it’s a sign of insecurity as much as anything else. And for that reason alone, it should be highlighted and criticised. Now, if data portability does become available for more sites, it will disproportionately benefit the power users. But it will also benefit the mere mortals who might find the concept “boring” but will appreciate its effects.

Sprint held a call with industry analysts on Tuesday, during which it reiterated its commitment to its Nextel network, which is based on the iDEN technology and provides the Direct Connect push-to-talk service which Nextel is famous for. Sprint runs the Nextel network in parallel with the Sprint network, which uses CDMA, and has been losing subscribers for over a year.

As long as two years after the Sprint Nextel merger was announced, the company was saying that it planned to decommission the Nextel network, possibly as early as 2011 or 2012. For a couple of years after the merger completed, the company certainly acted as if it had made its last significant investment in the Nextel network, and the result was that churn rose steadily in its iDEN business. Network congestion drove blocked and dropped calls up, and customers quickly started to notice. The network effects associated with the relatively exclusive push-to-talk service magnified the results even further.

Around a year ago, Sprint’s management began to get to grips with the problem and invested heavily in the Nextel network again. They also began launching new handsets again after a hiatus of 18 months, as part of a bid to resurrect the Nextel network. But customer desertions have continued, and iDEN subscriber losses have dragged down the company’s performance as a whole even as CDMA subscribers appeared still to be growing.

One of the possible strategies which could have been adopted by new CEO Dan Hesse was to accelerate the demise of the Nextel network. This would be facilitated by the fact that Sprint is about to launch the CDMA version of its Direct Connect service, which is based on Qualcomm’s Q-Chat technology. The company claims that it has been able to replicate the Nextel push-to-talk experience on the Sprint EVDO Rev A network, and as such this should provide a good substitute for many customers.

However, Tuesday’s call made clear that Sprint is committed to the Nextel network for the long haul, and has no foreseeable plans to decommission it. Instead, it continues to invest in the network, and has just re-launched the Nextel application development team in support of that effort. It is hoping that it can reinvigorate performance on the Nextel side of the business in order to turn around overall performance.

There are good reasons for keeping the Nextel network alive. The company doesn’t want to instigate forced migrations from the Nextel network to the Sprint network, and public safety organisations rely on the iDEN network and latterly its interoperability with LMR services. But these reasons – though valid – mean that Sprint has to continue to invest in what by all appearances seems to be a rapidly declining user base of just over 17 million. And this at a time when growth on the CDMA side of its business appears to be flagging too. Morgan Stanley estimates that the company added just 3,000 net new customers to its CDMA network in the fourth quarter of 2007.

It would make a lot of sense at this point to cap investment in the Nextel network, build a robust replacement Direct Connect product on the CDMA side, and invest there instead. Then, in time, either shut the Nextel network down or sell the rump to a specialist public safety provider. What Sprint needs now more than anything is focus on the one hand and a single network, single brand and single device portfolio to drive some serious synergies and efficiencies on the other. Keeping the Nextel network alive indefinitely feels like an act of desperation at this point.

I’ve been struck of late by a tendency in enterprise telecom technology towards a bell curve representing complexity over time.

When products first launch, they often have few features and are simple for the customer to manage. Think of the first cellphones (and the second and third too, for that matter). These were basic devices used only for voice. Companies merely had to decide whether they were going to pay for these devices for their employees, and if so, up to what amount. There was no real management required as such - simply a binary decision and a second only marginally more complex decision.

But then smartphones came along, and promised far more features. Unfortunately, they also provided many more potential headaches for employers, who now had to worry about security risks, deploying software to devices, troubleshooting and helpdesk services and so on. We are now at the point where simplification (both in the form of managed services, which really just remove this complexity one step from the customer, and in the form of management consoles such as RIM’s and the relatively new Microsoft equivalent, which provide customers with tools to manage the complexity). At this stage, simplification is a differentiator, and provides real value to customers.

Finally, we get to a stage (not reached yet in the mobile world) where that simplicity becomes a built-in feature of pretty much every product available in that market, and goes away as a differentiator. This is then a mark of maturity, and may well lead to a new complexity cycle in a successor product which either substitutes for or complements the current one. The complexity which grows in the first half of the cycle isn’t necessarily a bad thing per se, or at least it’s often a price worth paying because it is a side effect of increased functionality.

There’s often a big opportunity around the peak of the curve for companies to come in and make money from the simplification process, and certainly my recent conversations with major carriers about their plans for managed mobility services suggest that we are reaching that point in the case of enterprise mobility. Right now, there’s an opportunity to charge significant amounts to manage this complexity on customers’ behalf, although over time (probably not for several more years in this case) simplicity will start to be built into solutions and this opportunity will erode until few customers need it (or are willing to pay for it).

Although this thought first occurred to me in the context of mobile services, it has broader applicability. IP telephony is another good example: early PBXs, while not necessarily simple, were at least largely standalone voice devices without huge complexity. But with the introduction of unified communications solutions built around IPT, the picture becomes much more complex: more piece parts are involved, often procured from several vendors. In many cases, companies will find that complexity to be more than they can (or are willing to) handle, and so they will seek simplicity through outsourcing management to a third party - an integrator such as Dimension Data, or a carrier such as BT or AT&T. The ability to manage the complexity will be a great opportunity for a period of time, but over time products will become differentiated on the basis of simplicity, with such options as being naturally interoperable, self-installing and -discovering.

Sometimes there is a tension between this cycle and another - sometimes companies start to simplify very early on, attempting to drive the curve down rather than up from the outset. The current trend towards Web 2.0 approaches to enterprise telecom technology is an attempt in some ways to allow customers to self-provision technology, create their own mashups and so on, and Cisco for one wants to enable that trend. But at the same time Cisco is trying to drive its services business which relies on managing complexity for customers. These two opportunities depend on trends which are moving in completely different directions, a fact which I pointed out to John Chambers a while ago when he described both of them in a single talk without discussion the contradiction.

He didn’t have an easy answer - there isn’t one - but this is something all companies have to think about as they develop technology for the enterprise. Is it worth driving the complexity curve up in return for increased functionality? Or is it worth sacrificing some of that increased functionality in the hope of driving up simplicity instead early in the cycle? Ideally, of course, you achieve both at once, but that’s something of a holy grail at this point.