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CIPS Connections
World Renowned Entrepreneur, Distinguished
Software Architect/Designer/Developer, Noted Speaker, and Widely Acknowledged
Technology Expert This week, Stephen Ibaraki, ISP,
has an exclusive interview with Bill French, co-founder of MyST Technology
Partners and Global Technologies Corporation, and a world-renowned, widely
respected entrepreneur, software architect/designer/developer, speaker, and
technology expert. Bill authored or co-authored more
than 36 software products sold to millions of customers worldwide, including
some of the best award-winning software tools like dBRIEF, Multi-Edit’s Evolve,
LapLink and QuickSite. dBRIEF, an editing environment for database programming,
captured more than 80% market share before being acquired by Borland and
together with Evolve has won the Database Advisors’ Readers Choice Awards for 9
consecutive years. Released in 1994, QuickSite, the first web-publishing system
for small businesses utilizing database technology with site management
capabilities, has achieved in excess of 800,000 installations. QuickSite has
garnered a host of awards including IT Excellence and PCWeek Analysts’ Choice.
With 16+ million customers, LapLink, created in 1985, a desktop-to-laptop
information move utility, has won multiple awards for the last 15 years. In the past, Bill’s roles have
included Chief Architect for Starbase Corporation, Chief Architect for Site
Technologies Inc., and Controller/VP Finance for Veldkamp’s Floral
Corporation. Bill is currently a regular
contributor to IDG’s Information age with past regular articles featured in DBMS
Magazine, Database Advisor, and Lotus Notes Advisor. Due to his internationally
recognized expertise, he has lectured to software developers in more than 16
countries. With an AS in Marketing and a BS
in Business Administration, Bill has led a career of extraordinary successes.
Note: There is a free public experience
platform is open to anyone that wants to experiment will Bill’s
technologies. http://myst-technology.com/mysmartchannels/welcome Here is the publicly accessible
address for this interview using Bill’s technologies. http://myst-technology.com/mysmartchannels/public/blog/14494 Here is an RSS feed for it: http://myst-technology.com/mysmartchannels/public/rss/14494 … and here’s the full XML content
for it should one want to present it on another site using XSLT: http://myst-technology.com/mysmartchannels/public/channel/14494?model=none Discussion: Q: Thank you for taking time out
to do this interview! A: It's a pleasure to have this
opportunity to express my ideas and talk about by background. Indeed, I learn
something useful from every interview. Q: How has your marketing and
accounting background contributed to your career? A: When I was young, I had no
intention of going to college. I was on the professional Freestyle skiing tour
making good money, but my dad suggested I study business. The only way he
convinced me to engage in undergraduate studies was at a school high in the
Colorado Rockies where I could teach skiing during the weekdays, study at night,
and compete on the weekends. I went on to finish my studies at Colorado State University, but it was Colorado Mountain College that helped me understand there was
more to life than skiing. Accounting and marketing provided
me with just the right balance of business acumen necessary to start my own
consulting practice that involved software development. My interest in computing
was purely an accident; I was the accountant for an ABC television affiliate
that had some engineers that had built one of the first Heath H-80 (Z80) systems. The general manager of the
television station assumed that my accounting skills were sufficient background
to write accounting software, and so my software career was born. Q: You have had incredible
success with the software packages you have developed. What motivated you to
produce each of these tools? A: Oddly enough, laziness and
accidents have played big roles in the development of many of my products. LapLink was an accident - originally it was intended to
provide a way to move documents easily between two competing desktop PC's (the
IBM
PC, and the Victor 9000). My partner and I (Mark Robbins) were simply
interested in making it possible to exchange data files via serial connection
because the disk drives were incompatible. The Victor 9000 used a variable speed
drive to compact data at 1.2mb per 5.25" floppy diskette. The IBM PC was capable
of storing 320k per floppy, so there was no way to interchange the diskettes.
The market for FireFile (the original name of the transfer toolkit) dried up
when Victor Technologies filed for bankruptcy in the early 80's. FireFile
collected dust for a few years until the first laptops appeared and I sent a
letter to Mark Eppley at Traveling Software in the mid-80's. dBRIEF
(which was eventually sold to Borland in the early 90's) was built exclusively
by me and for me. I was tired of typing dBASE commands and needed an easier way
to create custom code faster and with greater accuracy; indeed, I was lazy. The
editor of Data Based Advisor asked me one day how I was able to produce
so much code and a few articles later, and the rest of the dBASE industry knew
they wanted the same collection of macros. As an add-on product to both dBASE,
Clipper, and FoxPro, we managed to garner an 85% market share in just a few
years. I learned that most programmers were lazy as well and dBRIEF was born of
both accident and laziness. Q: What stories can you tell from
your rich experiences? A: There are lots of them, but
one of the best was attempting to convince Grid Computer
Corporation that FireFile (eventually renamed to LapLink) was the perfect
complement to their laptop system. I recall one of their executives commenting,
"We don't think anyone will ever want to move more than 360k of data between a
desktop and laptop system." This thinking is right in line with the way most
people think; even seemingly well-versed technologists in this era. If I said that palm-sized pc's
will soon sport storage systems capable of multi-terabyte repositories, most
reactions would be negative. Many people would immediately seize upon the
unlikely ability to manage that much data. It's coming though - in a few years
we will wonder how we ever managed with iPAQ's less then 100gb's in size. Q: Any funny stories? A: Yes. I once presented to a
group of IT professionals in China and at the time, I had assumed that everyone
understood a fair bit of English. During a tour through many regions of Asia, I
encountered only a few places that required interpreters, so I was expecting my
Hong Kong audience to understand my opening remarks. I was perplexed to see that
100% of an audience of 500 developers responded with their hands raised when I
asked "How many of you use NotePad to write your dBASE code?". 100% response
seemed very unlikely. I then asked "How many of you use BRIEF and dBRIEF?".
Again, 100% of the attendees indicated they did. So in an attempt to see if they
were raising their hand because I was, I decided to ask "How many of you want to
be a fire engine?". Once again, a 100% response. I quickly shifted to a
graphics-oriented presentation and later found out that the audience was
composed of software developers that had been bussed in from mainland China. Q: What are the vision, mission,
strategies, goals and values of your current companies? A: At MyST Technology Partners, my partner Andy
Seidl and I have created a mission based on a long-view vision - the idea
that software architectures can (and should) outlive their intended objectives.
Very few software developers consider their designs in terms of longevity. Andy
and I are building a platform that can be relied upon to provide enough
flexibility to solve IT problems this year as well as in 2005, 2007, and in
2009. In this regard, we believe that the MyST platform is capable of sustained
disruption. What makes MyST and MySmartChannels disruptive? At a glance, MySmartChannels looks
like an ordinary content management tool, or perhaps a blog application with
some unique design aspects. But it's quite a bit more than that, and I suspect
it's a lot more than even I can comprehend. I believe that channel innovation
will come from the pervasive availability of URL-friendly APIs that support
unintended consequences. By exposing the collection, management, and output
methods of channels via APIs or as XML and RSS feeds, MySmartChannels users are
plugged into a network of content innovation. This is an innovation network
where the potential outcomes are beyond the imagination of any individual
participant. I think this is specifically why this platform is disruptive; we
have spent the most amount of time on the most important disruption trigger -
the architecture and making it extremely agile. In addition, this architecture
is well positioned to solve problems that are far beyond today's intended
objectives and quite possibly tomorrow's requirements. Q: How will these evolve over
time—two, five, and ten years? A: Global Technologies will
continue to serve as a place where ideas unfold, and MyST Technology Partners
will most likely always be a place where ideas are implemented and
monetized. Q: What role will you play? A: The benefit that I bring to
these companies and our clients is simple; clear thinking about technology to
produce high business value. I've been focused on issues such as productivity
for most of my professional career and I plan to keep doing that. Q: Describe in detail your
current work. A: Sure - the MyST platform is a
very abstract space for solving many types of IT-related problems. It provides
an abstract model for persisting associative meta-data. What differentiates MyST
from any Web services enabled data store is the object model - it embraces
topic-map concepts (XTM) through an association object that deepens the
possibility of managing complex information sets as ontology rather than a rigid
taxonomy. In so doing, we recognized the importance of business terms and
conversations because information systems fundamentally lack a context for
describing and organizing business content. The MyST platform embraces
information objects as a collection of structured symbols (i.e., topics) in a
sea of mostly unstructured business content (i.e., occurrences). To demonstrate some of the
benefits of such a platform, we decided to build MySmartChannels - a demo
application built on the MyST platform. MySmartChannels enables
individuals and organizations to easily create and organize pools of information
around the MyST Web services platform, providing a variety of features
including, secure weblogging, intelligent searching, automatic Office XP smart
tag generation, news feed generation, and much more. Users can publish and
organize thoughts, ideas, and writings about any topic that's important to their
areas of expertise. Colleagues, co-workers, and business partners can be invited
to subscribe or collaborate on relevant topics. Our platform elevates the role of
knowledge-workers through an open and flexible environment for creating highly
focused and accessible information about their specific work topics. This
enables management and employees to recognize and naturally promote expertise
within the organization. The objective - your company can grow in terms of
business intellect, awareness of rapidly changing information, and the velocity
with which informed decisions can be made. All of this is possible, of
course, with combinations of other technologies - the difference with our
platform is the agility factor; the openness and flexibility of creating and
purposing content for any need without fully understanding or comprehending
future IT requirements. Here are a few examples: The point - agility - the MyST platform provides a formidable array of
architectural possibilities without any additional development. Q: Any additional predictions about specific technologies, future trends,
winners and losers; “killer apps?” A:I have lots of ideas concerning
future "killer apps", but one that I'm certain about is a phone call will
continue to be the killer app for a cell phone. A wireless high-velocity verbal
interchange is tough to beat. Seriously though, there are likely five additional
killer apps that will be introduced in the next 15 years. I don't know
specifically what they are, but I'm pretty certain significant innovative
advances are about to leap forth. Q: Web services are gaining a
solid foothold and your international expertise in this area is considerable. *How do you create a successful
business model for Web services? What are the required steps, processes, and
actions? In my view, a Web services
approach to a solution is an implementation detail. However, this detail can
have a profound impact on the possibilities of generating revenue. There's no
secret or proven method to creating a successful business model based on Web
services because so few people have done it. It's synonymous with asking how you
create a successful business model for Corba, ODBC, or dCOM, isn't it? *What specific new ways of
thinking about business will come from the planning and implementation of Web
services? That business processes must
become loosely coupled. Web services architectures cause you to think about
information systems in very disjointed ways. This naturally transforms your
thinking about business processes that are supported by them. In many cases, you
need to have rigid processes, but in others, agility may allow other
(operationally efficient) processes to emerge that were never considered
before. *Please detail the top
traditional business models and the impact Web services will have on each of
these models. For starters, I don't know what
the top traditional business models are, but I do know that Web services have
already started to impact areas where core competency decisions are key in
building businesses. For example, our MyST platform is very good at a number of
things, but extremely good at creating, managing, and hosting RSS feeds. Since
our platform is based solely on a Web services model with a complete SOAP
interface, we are in a unique position to provide core RSS competency to
companies that need to integrate it seamlessly into their own products and
services that can benefit from our RSS capabilities. Web services will allow
highly focused technologies to flourish through relatively low-cost
licenses. *What are the current impediments
to the planning and implementation of Web services today? When Web services appeared on the
scene, everyone thought they would be simple and cheap to deploy. They are far
from cheap, and the security aspects alone cause them to be complex at times.
One of the greatest impediments to rapid adoption is the viewpoints of
developers in general; thinking about applications as loosely-coupled components
is not an easy leap if you've been involved in traditional application
development for a few decades. *What steps are necessary, how
would you plan, create and implement a long-term business model for Web
services—one that will have a positive ROI? The key to any long-term model
for using Web services rests on the overall information architecture. This is
why we created the MyST platform; a completely abstract place to build knowledge
and content-related applications with Web services. The platform itself makes no
assumptions about your requirements except that you must be able to: - persist and retrieve content
through Web services transactions; - manage security and
permissions; - transform information objects
in any presentation model. Q: What are the hottest areas in
IT? A: In my view: - ontologies; - search, discovery, awareness;
- security; - just-in-time learning
systems. Q: What are you top recommended
references and resources for business people and IT professionals? A: Today - Google
and newsreaders like NewsGator. Tomorrow - I really
don't know. But even so, my answers are tempered with personalized needs that
include certain Weblogs and other information sources that are important from
time-to-time and depend on real-time awareness of what other people are
thinking. We have now entered a phase of
the Internet where it's no longer important to pick specific information
resources and peruse them periodically or manually. Rather - it makes more sense
to rely on semantically tagged information to feast on a diet of information
that's relevant and important based on your current project or focus. For
example, I monitor about 75 RSS feeds that are frequently modified to tilt in
favor of my present information needs. The feeds I use are based on a
wide variety of information sources including Waypath, Google,
BlogLines, and Feedster. MyST also serves as a
significant management tool in formulating my information diet because we've
created a concept called channel gears. Gears make it possible to aggregate a
channel with content items from many information sources at regular intervals.
This allows me to essentially build my own personalized crawler. This is the
future of information research and peppered with the process of harvesting the
semantic web is the use of ad-hoc search processes that integrate with your own
information space. Q: Where do you see yourself in
two, five, and ten years? A: In two years I plan to be
building the middle phase of the MyST platform (the "teen years"). By then, MyST
will have reached a maturity stage where it will be the basis for a few dozen
products and services through OEM relationships. In five years I'll still be
deeply involved in MyST but it will be at a mature stage; a phase that will
require lots of tools and planning for broader adoption; specifically in the
area of finding information easily. In ten years, I suspect I'll be deeply
involved in building something new - perhaps a product that has no user
interface. Q: Describe your computer
setup? A: It's rather simple – I develop
applications on a Gateway 2.4gHz workstation with 1GB RAM, and a 120GB drive.
This is the same system I use for all my business-related activities. I also
have a dedicated T1 at my home in Keystone delivered wirelessly from a
tower across the valley. I use a D-Link wireless router with BlueTooth support
and also use various mobile devices around my home and office for development
and productivity purposes. Q: If you were to do it all over
again? A: I actually spent some time
thinking about this exact question more than a year ago. - I would look farther and wider
for people to work with that understand what disruption really means; - I would focus more on (and
invest heavily in) technologies and ideas that I have to cram down people's
throats - because that's the sign that you're really on to something hot; - I would send fewer BCC's; - I would spend more time on
architecture, and less on second-generation prototypes - there's never time to
do it right, but there's always time to do it again (and again...); - I would never make time in my
schedule for stupid people; - I would work more while on
vacation; - I would spend more time
focusing on the word "focus"; - I would spend more time
thinking about core competency; - I would manage my contacts list
more diligently; - I would purchase more
real-estate. Q: Bill, with your outstanding
career, we will continue to watch your future projects, writings, and successes
with interest. Thank you for sharing your considerable knowledge and experiences
with our audience. A: It's truly a pleasure to
think about questions like this because it provides a opportunity to reflect on
the triggers of innovation. I encourage your audience to contact
me with their thoughts, ideas and questions. http://myst-technology.com/mysmartchannels/public/blog/14494
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