By Gavin Clarke in San Francisco for The Register.
This article has been reproduced with permission.
Tim Berners-Lee, the individual credited with inventing the web
and giving so many of us jobs, has become the most prominent
individual so-far to point out that the Web 2.0 emperor is naked.
Berners-Lee has dismissed Web 2.0 as useless jargon nobody can
explain and a set of technology that tries to achieve exactly
the same thing as "Web 1.0."
According to this
transcript, Berners-Lee was reacting to an IBM developerWorks
pod cast interviewer who'd categorized Web 1.0 as connected
computers and making information available, and Web 2.0 as
connecting people and facilitating new kinds of collaboration.
Those who remember the empowering effects of Netscape and the
moment email became more than just borrowing your mate's CompuServe
account at work will also recognize such blanket assertions of
historical revisionism for what they are.
Berners-Lee's words come as the hype around all things Web 2.0
reaches a zenith. Entrepreneurs hoping to become the next Google or
Salesforce.com acquisition, marketing types desperate for a home
run, analysts segmenting the market to sell research, and
opinionated bloggers have, at the latest count, attached the phrase
"2.0" to 12 other "concepts" or technologies.
We have: SOA
2.0, enterprise
2.0, grid 2.0,
VoIP
2.0,
voice 2.0, BPM
2.0, Office
2.0 and – outside of pure technology – advertising
2.0 and
marketing 2.0 (both – naturally – taking advantage of
Web 2.0's social networking technologies), business
development 2.0 and – subverting the genre –
hidsight 2.0 and lunch
2.0.
There are two common problems with Web 2.0 and its derivatives.
The first is the desire to characterize Web 2.0 as unique
technology with unique consequences for business.
Web 2.0 relies on technologies that have been around for years.
Berners-Lee pointed out the things that drove Web 1.0 also underpin
Web 2.0 – the document object mode, HTML, http, SVG, web
standards and – because he's old school "Java script of
course." Free Software Foundation chief legal counsel Eben Moglen
recently concurred at this month's LinuxWorld, saying Web 2.0 owes
its existence to software and development methodologies already
established in open source.
"The phenomena of the empty buzzword called Web 2.0 can only
exist because of the real layer for free and open source software
underneath," Moglen said, letting the Web 2.0 crowd down
gently.
Web 2.0 is, in Berners-Lee's definition, purely a blog and wiki
thing. Reinforcing that idea is Andrew
McAfee of the Harvard Business School, who is actually credited
with creating the phrase Enterprise 2.0. Enterprise 2.0 wraps up
wikis, blogs, RSS and Ajax, according to McAffee. While the
ingredients that makes this stuff have been lying around for years,
what makes things so different is the way it's all coming together
right now. Services are affordable, services are morphing to create
social networks, and tools are helping filter blog and wiki
content.
While enterprise software is indeed evolving thanks to blog and
wiki technologies - well, at least so far as adding RSS to things
like Microsoft Outlook and Windows goes – Enterprise 2.0
simplifies the complex history of, and relationship between,
business and technology. Remember the PC revolution? Or what about
remote working? Or e-commerce? Genuine milestones in the evolution
of business because they fundamentally changed companies'
structures and cultures. Yet these rate as incremental product
version numbers somewhere between Enterprise 1.0 and Enterprise
2.0, apparently.
It's interesting to note Web 2.0 poster child Wikipedia may
expunge
Enterprise 2.0 for a second time after the phrase was resurrected
from the digital dead.
The other problem if you peak behind the Web 2.0 blog and wiki
curtain is that you'll find the man pulling the levers is either an
enterprise vendor or an analyst eager to sell to business
customers. Of special interest to businesses should be SOA 2.0 and
grid 2.0.
Weeding through the philosophizing on these buzzwords typified
here
and here,
you'll find some common themes: essentially that version 2.0 goes
further than the original idea and also creates a greater degree of
flexibility. Specifically, SOA 2.0 is about an event-driven
architecture, not just a "client/server relationship", and uses
"deeper semantics" pulled together "mechanically." Grid 2.0 is
about sharing networks and storage resources, and data not just raw
computing power.
While there is no single definition for SOA, the general thesis
from the start was for systems to discover each other and work
together reliably. That's why IBM, Microsoft, Oracle, Sun
Microsystems and other companies large and small sweated through
standards groups and the Java Community Process to devise the WS-
specifications and Java APIs for asynchronous communication, secure
and reliable delivery of messages, federated identity, and the
development of enterprise services busses.
Grids have been around for years, mostly in academic and
high-performance computing environments. Groups like the Global
Grid Forum, backed by Oracle, Hewlett Packard, Intel, and AMD among
others, and Globus Alliance have been working to make grids
something businesses can also tap by devising standards, best
practices, middleware and tools. The inherent problem with grid 2.0
is the philosophy behind grids has always been about harnessing
distributed computing power. In other words, grid 2.0 is grid 1.0
because it re-treads an accepted concept by just adding more
stuff.
What's really driving SOA 2.0 and grid 2.0 is hollow,
buzzword-based marketing by companies trying to stand out in
overpopulated and immature markets. On SOA, we have a general,
high-level consensus in the absence of a single standards-based
definition. Specifications for both SOA and grid are still being
devised, and where specifications exist they are not fully
implemented by all vendors.
This has therefore created a vacuum in which vendors and
analysts make hollow and partisan marketing claims to stand out.
So-far, only Oracle, backed – curiously – by Gartner
believe in SOA 2.0. Systems heavyweight IBM, making its own hollow
claims of having dominant market share in SOA, its number-one
rival BEA Systems, and SOA cheerleader SAP do not appear to share
the Oracle and Gartner view.
Judging by its staid LinuxWorld keynote, Intel is the only one
banging the grid 2.0 drum. Oracle, the software grid champion, and
possibly IBM would – you'd have thought – be among the
first to recognize an evolution in grids if one existed. Not a chip
manufacturer experiencing growing competition from grid evangelist
AMD.
You should thank Tim Berners-Lee. Not just for giving us the
web, but for articulating what's gone wrong in the lexicon and
thinking of Silicon Valley. Hopefully, his standing in the web
community will serve as a rallying cry for right-thinking
individuals and true visionaries, and mean Web 2.0 is put in its
proper context.
© The Register 2006
