Coop's Corner

SAN FRANCISCO--So there was Marc Andreessen, scaring the bejeesuz out of the crowd at the Web 2.0 Expo here with talk of a "nuclear winter" descending upon techdom. Maybe it was the Lex Luthor resemblance that made it seem extra sinister.

Marc Andreessen: Watch out or...kaboom!

(Credit: Seth Rosenblatt/CNET Networks)

For the record, this line is becoming old hat for Andreesen--in a blog post he wrote after Ning raised $60 million net in a private round of funding, Andreesen said the money would "enable us to keep scaling given our accelerating growth (more than 230,000 networks on Ning now, growing at over 1,000 per day) and to make sure we have plenty of firepower to survive the oncoming nuclear winter. At current growth rates, we don't need it to get to cash-flow positive, but having lived through the last crunch, it's good to be conservative with these things."

Nothing controversial about being conservative in uncertain times. Still, a nuclear winter? Author and Oxford professor Jonathan Zittrain followed Andreessen onstage--via a recorded transmission --by pondering grim Internet scenarios lurking just over the horizon. The odd thing is that I've heard similar hedge-your-bet comments all week. This is a crew that survived the last bubble and they know from firsthand experience that a lucky rabbit's foot won't be enough to get by in case lightning strikes twice.

The knock against Web 2.0 is that it's chockablock with me-two, doodad makers, companies fated to blow away like prairie grass at the first sign of a storm. Some of that is true. But when you walk the floor at Web 2.0, you see that this year's conference is dominated by serious companies with serious products: Disney, IBM, Intuit, Microsoft, Cisco-Webex, Oracle, Juniper, Google, EMC--well, you get the idea. (You can find the full list in the program guide.)

Barring a real nuclear winter, I expect they'll still be around for quite some time.

So why the lingering insecurity?

"I think it depends on your perspective--that is, where in the market you are in terms of the growth curve and users," said Kaku Srivastava, general manager at Flickr. "From where we're sitting, we're bullish."

That's true. It's also true that many of the smaller companies are ready to grab the first good offer that comes their way.

"You look at CPMs for a lot of the social-media platforms we work with and you wonder about the CPMs," said an executive who asked to remain unidentified. This guy was one of the smart ones: he took the money last year and decided to hang around the mother ship--at least for the foreseeable future--and run the division. "Unless they run a very small shop, it's going to be really hard for them to make serious money. But that's the dream that drives everybody so, why not?"

Why not, indeed? After all, it worked for Andreessen.

SAN FRANCISCO--Jonathan Zittrain recently published a terrific book with the suggestive title The Future of the Internet--And How to Stop It. But as I settled into my seat to report on his talk at the Web 2.0 Expo here Thursday, the Internet stopped me.

Jonathan Zittrain

Dead in my tracks.

It was a confluence of events. In a switcheroo, what we witnessed was actually "virtual Zittrain." The good professor--he teaches Internet governance and regulation at Oxford University and is the co-founder of Harvard Law School's Berkman Center for Internet & Society--appeared on the big screen in a brief pre-recorded disquisition about the state of Internet computing.

The show organizers did arrange with Zittrain to follow up with the audience on a Meebo chat room. (You can follow the archived chat conversation). Unfortunately, the wireless connectivity here at Moscone Center has been flaky all morning, and I spent half of the duration of his presentation trying to get a live connection. So was my welcome to Web-minus-2.0.)

Zittrain covered familiar ground from his book, starting off by noting that his writings may make many of the people in the audience "dyspeptic." (I'm sure that word sent half the people here scrambling for online dictionaries.)

He painted a troubling picture of the direction in which technology is heading. Zittrain's main concern is that consumers may inadvertently be making surveillance of individuals easier for companies and government agencies.

In his writings, Zittrain has raised a red flag over the hidden price paid by consumers who willingly adopted so-called closed devices in return for a promise of stability. Also, he has concerns about the trade-offs involved when smaller applications developers agree to terms set by big platform makers.

Zittrain suggested that we're at "a constitutional moment" akin to the founding of the United States. "The original plan--U.S. 1.0--was: everyone's really nice, and if not, we'll just move west. The framers of the U.S. Constitution--U.S. 2.0--saw that not everyone could get along, and needed a system of checks and balances."

He raised an interesting analogy by pointing out the separation-of-powers doctrine famously articulated by James Madison (and I should add Alexander Hamilton and John Jay in the Federalist Papers), which articulated reasons to avoid investing in any single institution with too much power.

Zittrain finished up with a call for ad hoc "bottom-up" citizen community-based models to take the lead. Otherwise, he cautioned, we deserve the future that's otherwise heading our way.

SAN FRANCISCO--One of the biggest booths at the Web 2.0 Expo here belongs to a very un-Web 2.0-ish kind of guy.

Remember Steve Perlman? He's one of those tech wunderkinds who piled up a laundry list of achievements over the last couple of decades--to the point where their predictions about technology carry more weight than most mere mortals. In his case, the highlights include leading the Apple development team whose technology led to QuickTime and later co-founding WebTV (later sold to Microsoft for a half billion or so.)

(Credit: CNET News.com)

Perlman has been working at Rearden, an incubation firm he founded in 2000 that has some cool companies in its network, including Mova and Moxi Digital. Perlman was at Web 2.0 to show the corporate flag and sign up new talent. Though neither he nor his team would say what was on deck, they were playing it up as quite a big deal.

"At least two of the technologies we have are getting ripe on the vine," he said. The big tease. (By the way, Tom Paquin, who ran engineering at Netscape, does the same at Reardon.)

Interestingly, Perlman isn't very impressed by most of what falls under the rubric of "Web 2.0." Coming from someone with his technical pedigree, I was intrigued when he added: "Most of what you see here will be obsolete in three or four years."

Unfortunately, I was already running late when he offered those bons mots at the end of my interview and didn't have enough time to get into that. Hopefully, I can reconnect at the company's party this evening.

******
I did manage to catch up with Perlman. Here's what he had to say (over the din of a pounding electric-muzak like attack on our eardrums.)

"What we've been seeing is a huge change in the way people manage their data and the way applications handle data. We've been working on the assumption that the gold standard for communications was a 1.5 megabit T-1 line. Like, you had it made! Well, today, that just sucks. Most people can get 3 to 6 megabits. So you're seeing richer flash animations on pages and that's beginning to change the way people think about stuff."

Such as?

"They're adding new things as the Web becomes richer. But a lot of the sites you see out there tend to be very static. You go from one static page to another static page. They may call themselves Web 2.0 but it's Web 1.0 in terms of interactivity....I was walking around the floor (at the conference) and asking myself, `Where is the video?' It's not there. And that's going to have repercussions."

Over the years, Microsoft has taken different approaches to offering online support. Some of you may remember Microsoft Bob, a bizarre software desktop replacement whose personal guides were supposed to offer personalized help.

Unfortunately for Microsoft, the product went nowhere and is now better-known as the answer to the trivia question, "What was Melinda French's claim to product fame?" (Of course, Melinda French later went on to fame and fortune as Mrs. Melinda Gates.)

Most computer users are more familiar with the Clippy, the office assistant Microsoft put into Office 97 that offered advice to user queries. The feature was subsequently panned by Smithsonian magazine as "one of the worst software design blunders in the annals of computing."

(Credit: Microsoft)

But Microsoft is now about to take another stab by rolling out an updated natural language search tool it acquired when it bought Colloquis in 2006. The company this week is giving private demonstrations of Automated Service Agent, or ASA, a hosted online customer service technology, which makes its official debut next month.

Microsoft envisions ASA as a tool companies will deploy to help reduce costs associated with call centers or internal help desks. The way it would work, a user engages in a chat-type session asking questions in conversational English. The system then would tap into a knowledge base to find the most fitting answer.

"We see this as offering a lot of advantages over FAQs or keyword searches," said Clinton Dickey, director of Microsoft's Automated Service Agents. "When you have an FAQ, a customer still has to go through the a long list of possibilities to get the answer--if they get it at all. We see this as driving self-service on the Web where ASA can provide very particular answers. The beauty of ASA is that it can ask questions in natural ways and will link answers from a knowledge base that expands over time."

Among other things, Microsoft asserts that:

• ASA will offer direct answers to even the most technical questions.
• The service will be available 24/7.
• Microsoft's Knowledge Modules will include terms and phrases germane to different industry niches.
• ASAs can serve as a training tool for new employees or for retraining existing staff.

At this point--and for the foreseeable future--Dickey said Microsoft does not intend to use ASA's technology in a consumer search application. That's likely the smart move. Routine in-house questions that go unanswered waste time and money. Any technology provider that can reduce costs at call centers or other internal support centers will find no shortage of takers among the corporate set.