The Directory Paradigm and Digital Me....
Excuse me for pontificating once again. I get excited about business models - less the nuts and bolts and more for the power behind the metaphors and paradigms that support them.
Forgive me, but this will probable end up as a long winded thought about the business model I see for NDS. In very simple terms, investors need simplicity, metaphors, and images - whatever it takes - to understand the incredible power behind Directory-based technologies.
1) Directories represent the next platform foundation that will support the "next wave" of internet-based technology growth in this emerging server-centric world.
2) Directory-supported apps will enable THE INDIVIDUAL - not the corporation or eyeball portal - to control the keys to the virtual kingdom.
3) Directory-based technologies represent the next higher layer/level of evolution in bandwidthdom.
A Simple View of the Current State of Technology and Networks -
The world is still trapped in BOXES that limit, restrict and prevent individuals from exercising the full power, freedom and potential of their inner and outer worlds. Directory technologies will enable individuals to "open up" without being bought off, chained down, and factored in as companies attempt to claim the Holy Grail - the end client relationship.
I'm a firm believer that TRUST, RELATIONSHIPS and SERVICE matter. When given the choice, I'd much rather listen to the collective wisdom of the Common than where a virtual yeahoooo.com or msftvirtualpryamid.com wants to take me today. Fact is, the suggestions, ideas and pointers that have found there way onto today's internet have an embedded price attached: freedom is restricted as information is filtered. Worse yet, I have to give out pieces of my critical personal and economic persona to play this game. Someone is getting eyeball juice everytime I submit my name, email and street address every time I sign up as a "registered user" and hundreds of sites on the net.
I'd much rather store all of my critical information in some ISP-sponsored Digital-Me electronic vault in return for my fealty. But I want that choice to be earned by examples of service, relationship and trust BEFORE I take my business there. And I DO NOT want my Digital Me information available to anyone, including the ISP.
If that ISP's trust and service model is breaking down, then I can pack up my Digital Me vault and have it parked at some other ISP, etc. When a move takes place it will be done in a highly automated, regulated and secure environment - not unlike an ACATS (for securities, etc.) transfer in the brokerage industry. Better yet, in addition I can use Digital Me to change all my buying and selling relationships on the fly.
As an individual I want the power to choose, transfer, change my allocations of personal digital trust and supporting business at the click of a mouse. Example, if I were given the choice, I want to click my mouse and move ALL my securities from Schwab to Ameritrade NOW - not 2-4 weeks and mountains of papers, faxes and calls later.
The Latency Feast Raises Golf Handicaps
World enterprises are feasting, living and thriving off of the embedded latency and restrictions of existing systems. Our world is full of systemic latency, which puts the individual in products and services - AND KEEPS THEM THERE - for simply the extra work it takes to change things. My family buys from a premier Life Insurance company - NOT because I'm impressed with the rates - which are higher - or the service - my agent is a disappearing Playboy, 80% of his clients are women and he couldn't care less about me, AND I didn't pick him in the first place (my original rep was a friend of a friend who dropped out of the business years ago). But, if there was some broad-based technology that gave me the ease of choice WITH the power to change - WITHOUT all the hassle and uncertainty behind the change - I'd switch Life Insurance companies in a heartbeat.
Which brings us to another deep question. If so much business is being factored day in a day out on the WRONG cues - i.e. all these embedded, trapped, latent customer accounts - how secure will these enterprises be when the individual is able to use the Internet to more freely postion and allocate a new firepower in the marketplace: business relationships that are built from a platform of technology-enhanced FREEDOM and TRUST?
The movement, factoring and securing of this "end game" of personal information ONTO the internet is what will make the next phase of growth really EXPLODE. Right now the net is littered with a lot of replication, duplication and redundancy as companies fish for the Holy Grail of personal trust among individuals.
SWITCHING GEARS: Historically speaking....
All growth and development in this world come from the further refinements and expression of the energy behind freedom and truth. From a long-term perspective, this continual process of refinement creates new power and growth for the individual. All of this growth is "going higher" - where the expression of ideas become more open and fluid in an environment where people begin to understand that true power come from givers who understand that giving unselfishly gets them MORE and takers hit egocentric dead ends in the pursuit of power for they know they their model returns less so they have to take and steal to think they are getting more. "Going Higher" simply means that you are in a higher position to see others, help them, etc. Technology that enables us to do this is where the growth is.
Our country was created by people who "went higher". The US was formed by people who were more inclined to give and risk and who wanted freedom to worship and do what they wanted without the power of the King dictating things. Our forefathers followed their spirits in their quest for freedom and "went higher" across the sea.
We broke the back of tyranny and established the first FREE country. The industrial revolution exploded soon there after and we experienced evolutions of progress along the way - Morse code, telephone, mainframe computer, birth of private internet, PC, the break-up of Ma Bell, new fiber backbones, the birth of the public internet, faster modems, ISDN, DSL, broadband, wireless, satellite - we are continually "going higher" - inching our way out of things that constrain and restrict and evolving toward an environment that more productively and efficiently allocates control and power more directly and fluidly on the new KINGS of this world: individuals.
Gates made his money by enabling this evolution during the PC era which is gradually fading from view. Like the King of England he doesn't appreciate the freedom his subjects are expressing in these new worlds - Java, the internet, JINI, smart devices and appliances - unless of course these people travel in HIS cars (apps) along HIS tracks (Windows) or even his future vision of some Bandwidth-Server Gulag in the sky.
The OEMs that have been feeding on the Wintel monopoly are like the political leaders who ran the colonies - profiting mightily from their featherbedding and fence sitting between England and vast potential of FREEDOM that existed in colonial America - a freedom that could have been claimed earlier but wasn't articulated. It took Paine to articulate this force of freedom and truth in Common Sense before the popular will of the masses got aligned against England.
I don't want to overwork this analogy, but before BIG change can get underway on the net, the popular will of the masses needs some metaphor, some stepping stone that helps us understand the individual essence of the meaning and implications of these BIG paradigm shifts.
FREEDOM and TRUTH are the forces that drive the Internet. For the first time in world history individuals have the power, freedom and flexibility to claim ownership and responsibility of a new domain where THEY are KINGS.
The Internet is now experiencing rapid consolidation of these new portals of power based on eyeballs and clicks. The problem is that the BIG companies have quickly begun to realize that for them to preserve their "old power" they HAVE to have a piece of this "new power". So a process is underway where these "BIG JOHNS" are simply attempting to mirror their old - energy taking - business models onto new virtual domains.
I happen to think that without the proper technology to align and factor the power of the individual, these new power grabs WILL succeed in "capping" the growth of the Internet through a quick virtual evolutionary Walmartization of sorts.
Left unchecked, this stage could enable the BIG JOHNS to buy us out - to the point where we are all given PC's, digital cell phones, Palm Pilots or whatever.... These efforts sound good but, bottom line, they will restrict our freedom and flexibility in return for making a bargain that locks in the individual. The lease vs. buy choice.
My feeling about all this is that this money and power grab will enable these potential White Elephants of this "new space" to survive. But, only if these Directory Technologies DO NOT take off.
An NDS-supported Digital Me is the masterstroke killer app that should ignite new fires of technology-enhanced freedom which will place the individual in a unique position of declaring HIS/HER right to buy/sell/review/checkout/share products and goods WITHOUT having to drop drawers every time we make a transaction or desire to be put on an email list.
In the spirit of Thomas Paine, Digital Me just makes a lot of Common Sense. It will give me the freedom, power AND security to take ownership and responsibility for this virtual world by defining "my space" without giving up my identity and freedom in the process.
Digital Me will reverse the trend away from the OId Model portal power grabs that are going on. The Barry Dillers of this world still believe individuals can be sliced, diced, factored and marketed like so much cattle. The Old Business models carry a deep disdain for the individual - their ideas, rights, etc. The world is full of "Bills" who know this all too well. Their products are expressions of this disdain, but sometimes the FIX gets lodged BEFORE we know what happened.
Concluding Thoughts
1) Directory-technologies have the power to break down these structural FIXES.
2) Directory-technologies will be the undoing of all companies that still operate in the Old Model - take energy, spin, turn, threaten, intimidate, don't show your cards, walk over others, my win is your loss, it's a cruel dog eat dog world.
Well nobody controls the Internet - YET. Before anyone or world government entity tries to control the Internet, Directory-based apps like Digital Me should be allowed to see the light of day and thrive.
Directory-apps have the potential to become the virtual halls of FREEDOM and security for individuals in this "next wave" of the Internet - Wave 2.
This all just makes Common Sense. Let's start the virtual fires of truth and freedom burning NOW!
Sorry for soapboxing and losing everyone in my little forest, but I feel very passionate about these things.
GO!
PS - If Novell wants to Light a fire under Directory technologies in a BIG way they better know which side of the business model fence they are aligned with - Old vs. New. Their future is NOW. Embrace the revolutionary Freedom-app developers and the sky is the limit. Half-bake this thing and the golden handcuff technology power grabbers will win. |
