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The business plan for the Web 2.0

Posted by daniel on October 6, 2004 at 10:07 AM EDT

I got up this morning around four and made a pot of coffee. At home we grind the coffee just before brewing (and often roast it in the week before grinding) and have an assortment of brewing devices to choose from. On the road it's a drip coffee maker with filter bags full of ground coffee. Yesterday Jeff Bezos of Amazon.com was the first speaker at the Web 2.0 conference. Disjoint as those thoughts seem, coffee bags and Bezos' talk are related. Although, you should be warned that I'm writing this at 4 am before drinking any of the coffee.

Bezos said that web 2.0 is "all about making the internet useful for computers." As he showed the results of opening up much of the Amazon.com platform through web services, he also returned again and again to having a business model for your offering. This was different than many of the O'Reilly gatherings with alpha geeks. Here, even during technical presentations earlier in the day, people were asked how they would make money off of what they were describing.

So, many years ago a group of us were hanging around drinking coffee at our local coffee shop and musing on why there are tea bags but not coffee bags. We spent a weekend experimenting with different grinds and weights of filters. It came out pretty good and we were convinced it was a great idea, and then we went back to our everyday lives. I was a graduate student, someone else sold music, another was a plumber, and a fourth was a lawyer. None of us traveled and so we didn't understand that there was a potential market there.

I don't think that developers value the business side of the house enough and I know the business side doesn't value developers enough. One business guy emailed me after Bill Joy left Sun and said "that's a good thing for Sun. There was never any way to productize his ideas." Geeks like me are dumbfounded by such comments. We understand that programming can't just be "art for art's sake" but ...

I have said before that it is good for a company to have someone solid "driving the bus". Jeff Bezos communicated an understanding of the intersection of technology and business. He said that there is a lot of value in Alexa and that they are already telling people they will be charged for the service when it comes out of beta. The fact that they haven't figured out how to charge for Alexa has not kept them from developing it and releasing a beta. Any thoughts on this balance between the needs of technologists and the bottom line?

Alex Toussaint asks if SpaceShipOne is using Java-related technology in today's Weblogs. Meanwhile, and more down to earth, Chris Adamson explains Why Mac Developers are Concerned About the J2SE 5.0 Wait. He explains why "there's some fear that being able to do your Java development on a Mac is a tenuous situation."

In Also in Java Today , Remote management is critically important when you've deployed your application to the field. As Sean C. Sullivan writes, "When your team has to support a mission-critical application, you can't afford to wait for users to tell you that the application is having problems. You need to be able to detect problems as soon as they occur." One simple solution is to extend your logging system to send log files back to you when serious problems are logged. In Reporting Application Errors by Email, Sean shows how to set up log4j and java.util.logging to do this.

"Generic types in Java and C# introduce more expressiveness at the source code level and move type checking from run-time to compile-time when inserting objects into generic collections." Richard Wiener provides Some Examples of Generics in Java 1.5 and C# 2.0 in the Journal of Object Technology. He concludes that "the design decision to use code specialization for value types in C# has paid off in performance benefits. The wildcard semantics in generic Java appear to provide a more straight-forward mechanism for expressing complex generic constructions than the equivalent C# implementation."

In Projects and Communities , you have a release of your java.net project ready, now what? In Install me you will see the importance to impatient users of a good installation experience.You have a release of your java.net project ready, now what? In Install me you will see the importance to impatient users of a good installation experience.

Download version 0.3 of the JDDAC framework, which contains a "first draft" of the classes from the Java Measurement Calculus Interface along with a demo application.

What is the best way to protect your IP? In today's Forums, Java Kiddy writes "While Godfrey Nolan apparently makes much of Java's (supposed) inability to project our intellectual property, he fails to recognise that by actually publishing his book in a readable form he is endangering his own intellectual property to a much greater extent. Surely he should have encrypted his text first, to prevent plagiarism? Better still, written it in invisible ink...?"

JWenting adds "If your code is so secret noone should ever have a chance to try and decompile it you should keep it in house. Become an ASP and give people only the result of calling the program, not the compiled binary."

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