Every year I enjoy writing a post with my predictions for the next year.  It's a nice way to empty the old thoughts from my brains so there's room for new ones.  Plus I leave a trail of blog posts so I can see how my thoughts change from year to year.

In retrospect I've realized that each year tends to have a theme or two, and that the hardest part about making accurate predictions for a given year is identifying the themes that will drive it.

In 2007 the driving themes were social networking and online entertainment.  In 2008 the themes were distributed and mobile communication, with a dash of cloud computing sprinkled on top.

The theme for 2009 is almost absurdly easy to identify:  the economy.  If you thought 2008 was about the economy, just wait for 2009.  You truly ain't seen nothin' yet.  A deflationary black hole is sucking all of the money out of the economy and we haven't even seen the impact yet.

Every time I hear somebody talk about how the market has bottomed and the economy is starting to improve I mentally picture them in this position:

So if we're talking about the economy and you see me chuckle, you know why.

Hope is a great mindset to have and a fantastic slogan for winning Presidential campaigns apparently, but it is not such a great lens to view reality thru when you're trying to make money.

Every once in a while Google comes along with a great idea that really upsets the apple cart.  Lots of other companies and people have these same ideas, but Google has the ability to rock the boat because of its size and visibility.

I've blogged before that I thought that a Twitter clone aimed at the enterprise world would be a stupendous idea for improving team communication and collaboration.  (I prefer to call this form of communication conversation clouds, because that's what they are in my opinion--a distributed conversation with a broad surface area.)  Today I got to take the concept for a spin, and it didn't disappoint.

Nova Spivack from Twine wrote an interesting post over at Read/WriteWeb about the future of the desktop which I'd like to comment on.  It really ties in nicely with what I've been thinking about recently around user interfaces, especially since any hardware innovations will necessarily involve an ACTUAL operating system.

I agree 100% with Nova when he says that everything is moving to the cloud.  SmugMug lets me store my high-res photos in my own Amazon S3 store, Jungle Disk lets me back up everything else to the cloud.  Storage is, for me, a monthly utility expense (and last month it only cost me $3.18, so for me this is much cheaper than hard drive space, backup, backup tapes, tracking everything, and worrying).

Google has access to an AMAZING amount of data.  Every time they crack the access window to that data even just a little bit I get excited about it.

As reported by TechCrunch, their most recent offering in this area is their Google Search Insights.  This site is very similar to one of my favorite toys, Google Trends, but with significantly expanded functionality.  For example, it allows you to fine-tune your search so that you can specify that you're searching for Apple the company vs. Apple the fruit, and it lets you drill down into geographic regions.

Now, I must play :)

First up, unified communications, because it's on an interesting trajectory lately. Let's see what Search Insights has to say about unified communications concepts:  unified communications, unified messaging, and telepresence (Cisco's way cool video conferencing product).

This makes it pretty easy to see that unified messaging has historically been the most popular term, but has been losing ground since 2007 to unified communications and particularly telepresence.  It's actually pretty incredible that unified communications and telepresence have been able to go from zero to popular in just two and a half years.

We can also look at how popular these terms are in different regions around the world:

From this graph I would deduce that if you're selling unified communications products you'd better be putting some focus on Singapore, Malaysia, India, and Australia, because they're looking for it even more than people in the US.  It would also seem that the telepresence and unified messaging marketplaces have not matured yet in Singapore and Malaysia.

We can also see the most popular searches around these concepts:

From this I can safely say that Cisco is spanking the competition in UC at the moment (woohoo!)  But wait, there's more!  Search Insights also shows you the rising stars in related searches:

So while it's safe to say Cisco has a commanding lead at the moment, SBC (?!), Nortel, and Microsoft are starting to gain mind share.  To continue to dominate we had better continue to lead in innovation.

The results for this service are still relative as they were in Google Trends, so you can't see the exact search counts, but this is still a quantum leap forward.  It can really give you some interesting insights--plus, it's really fun to play with :)

TechCrunch just posted a video of a new user interface concept by Adaptive Labs called Aurora.  I'm a big fan of new and unique ways for humans to interact with computers--I think it's one of the best ways to try to get a handle on where the future of technology is going (see: Apple).  I think it's definitely worth a look, if only to get yourself thinking outside of the box for few minutes.

I love the way communications from others pop up unobtrusively, and seamlessly transition from text to voice.  As I've often said, a message is a message is a message.  This demonstrates that concept well, and is an excellent demonstration of the true spirit of unified communications in my opinion.

The graphic elements are nice and fluid, I really see this as the future of design trends.  Well, somewhere between this and the current Web 2.0 "standards", because I really like the simplicity which is emphasized in the current crop of Web 2.0 applications.  This Aurora concept is FAR too cluttered in my opinion.

"It's gotta be here somewhere" - LOL.  Yes indeed.  Notice that the woman spends about 3 minutes looking for the information she needs.  Although not as pretty, Gmail implements this function right.

I really like the idea of search results appearing in a visual thumbnail tag cloud format.  I think for applications where you know exactly what you're looking for (because you've seen it before) this works very well.  However, if you were looking for a concept ("novel ways to tie my shoelaces"), it would suck.

The mouse interactions are contrived in my opinion.  The weird mouse contraption the woman is using is big and clunky, much less elegant than a Wii-style 3D control.

Not only that, but I fail to see where the 3D capabilities are even being used at all in this video.  It seems like it's there just for the sake of being different, just like this unhelpful "radial" context menu:

This menu, while looking pretty, manages to provide LESS information than the standard context menu we have today.  If anything we need to work on letting browsers provide context menus that actually apply to the application being used rather than letting us view the page source or save the HTML to disk.

One thing I really LOVED was the way authentication was done--via fingerprint on your mobile device.

This is, I think, the way ALL authentication will eventually be done, and I'm glad to see it somewhere, even if it's only in mockup form.  This is the future.

Overall this is a very nicely done mockup, they presented some novel new ideas in a thoughtful way.  The R2D2 sound effects were especially nice :)  I really enjoy videos like this because they force you to think outside the box and ponder a future that might seem far-fetched at the current time.  Plus, they're fun.

The other day I wrote a post about unified communications, and how I feel the term "Unified Communications" (UC) is in danger of becoming too fuzzy to be practically useful.  While anecdotal evidence suggests that the term is gaining momentum at incredible speed, I noted that its definition seems to be becoming muddied in direct correlation with its popularity.  Don Price does a good job of summing up my view on this topic:

"It is interesting and I tend to agree in a perverse way [that] just about any application could be part of [a] UC experience. Once convergence is complete for all IT services then the boundaries where a person communicates and where they are just using IT systems will be hard to distinguish. Yet without clear  definition of a label, and what it applies to, it is very hard for us to move a concept forward."

Bingo.  My post answered the question of what UC means to me (a consistent communications experience transparent across all communication channels, emerging from a unified online identity), I was curious what UC means to others who use it on a regular basis.  So I posed the question to the UC Google group, which is made up of UC analysts, vendors, customers, and consultants.  They had some interesting input on their definition of UC, almost none of which jived with mine :)

• "My initial opinion is that the definition of UC should involve a key reference to Presence which to me seems a key component of the UC." - Mike England
  • My take:  I agree with this assessment, and presence seems to come up repeatedly from various people.  This makes me believe that XMPP will be a fundamental technology in UC, especially considering that it's baked into the new iPhone.
• "UC to the end user is about knowing who is available when and how AND then having the tools easily available to reach them from within a unified interface... [and] leveraging network and telephony infrastructures to utilize economies of scale to reduce costs." - Herb Pyles
  • My take:  Presence by any other name sounds just as sweet.  The idea of a unified interface to utilize many different forms of communication is just now becoming viable with widespread adoption of smart phones, especially the iPhone.  (If you start to get the idea that I think Apple will be a big player in the UC space you'd be right!)
• "In a perverse way, essentially [every] piece of equipment connected to the IP network is UC and any application running on those devices [is] UC." - Kip Heuertz
  • My take:  I agree, and that's the main reason I started this discussion.  If the definition isn't nailed down fast, UC is in danger of becoming meaningless.
• "UC is a vision or philosophy that leads to solutions - it is not a product." - Blair Pleasant
  • My take:  This makes a whole lot of sense from an English standpoint, however the "UC as a product" train has already left the station.  "UC as an architecture" DOES in fact make more sense than "UC as a product", but when MAJOR companies are selling "UC as a product" I think that's a battle that will not be easily won.
• "You cannot call a communications vendor and buy UC as a product - no SKUs I know of. It is a solution, not in the sense of the traditional sense of a 'vertical solution'. This solution is made up of multiple "features" that can be viewed in a modular sense." - Herb Pyles
  • My take:  This is one of my favorite definitions.  Or rather, anti-definitions.  UC is the sum of its parts, which enables the UC philosophy.  That makes a lot of sense to me.
• "To be unified means the services are accessible (not Section 508) from any of the elements... Whatever the underlying technology used to support accessibility it is [a] set of services which make such interchanges work as demanded by the user." - Don Price
  
  • My take:  Aha!  A PRACTICAL definition of UC!  I really like this, in fact.  It is a practical definition which is usable when setting a strategy.

I really like Don's definition.  It is actually USABLE in the sense that you can build an architecture around it, and it adheres to the "philosophical" definition of UC as defined by many others.  UC as an architectural philosophy demands that all of the elements of the communications network be usable by any other element and they work together in the manner that the user desires.  In that sense it is an extension of both the Web 2.0 "make everything re-usable by the user" philosophy and the service-oriented architecture "expose your functionality on the network" philosophy.

The one thing that nobody but me seems to care about is the online identity aspect.  This is so key, in my opinion, but I could be off base here as I'm the only one talking about it.  However, I don't think I am, and I think this idea going to enter the discussion in short order as Apple is quickly forcing the issue.

I was recently asked what I thought about the future of voicemail.  I had to give this some thought.  Voicemail isn't one of those things I think about often.  In all honesty, I try to avoid voicemail.  I regard voicemail as a nuisance.  In fact, I haven't even set up my voicemail box at Cisco yet, and I've been working there almost a year.

But why does it have to be this way?  Surely there's value in hearing someone's voice rather than forcing them to type out a message (especially if they're a hunt-and-peck'er).  Not only can I catch the nuance in their voice and potentially derive more information from the message, but it's much easier on the person who's sending the message, especially if they don't spend much time in front of a keyboard.  Voice, by its nature, has a much lower participation premium associated with using it than text does.  There must be a solution to this problem, because there is value to be added there.

For one thing, there's the unified communications issue.  I hate multiple phone numbers.  My online identity is already fragmented enough, I don't want to be forced to deal with multiple phone numbers as well.  I have a phone, it's my cell phone.  Anything beyond that is superfluous and a hassle.  I never, EVER use my office phone, except for outgoing calls when I'm sitting at my desk.  I don't use my home phone, either.  I don't even know the number.  The ONLY number I ever give out anymore is my GrandCentral number.  A device is just a conduit to my online identity, which is my connection to the network.  That's my definition of unified communication.  I don't care if it's my desktop, my laptop, my desk phone, my mobile phone or my refrigerator, I am still me.  I only need one point of contact, the device is just a consequence of my location.  Don't force me to remember more than one identifier.  In the short term I'm ok with separate identifiers for data, email and voice, but that too will converge (see:  XMPP!)

So why do I use GrandCentral as my sole phone number?  Because I can point it at other phone numbers that I don't then have to remember, so if I have to switch mobile numbers at some point it's no big deal.  No need to send out updates to my entire contact list, they already have it.  And because I tell GrandCentral how to handle the call.  If the caller is one of my VIP contacts they can get through to me at any time.  If they're not, I can set up rules around what times they're allowed to contact me before they're sent to voicemail.  If I don't know the person calling (they're not in my contact list), GrandCentral will ask them to identify themselves before asking me if I want to take their call.  This saves me time, my most precious asset.

Beyond that, GrandCentral extends what I can do with a voicemail.  The voicemail I get with my mobile provider is dumb.  All I can do is check it, save it, delete it, and forward it (if I'm lucky, this has never actually worked for me).  Look at all the things GrandCentral will let me do with a voicemail:

There's a whole slew of things I can do with this that adds value to the voicemail beyond the original message:

• Flag it for followup
• Add the caller to my contacts
• Send the voicemail via email
• Map where the call came from
• Embed the voicemail on a Web page

The only thing missing is to send the voicemail via instant message or Twitter!  Well, that and speech-to-text.  I really love personal voice recognition, and Jott has really gotten me spoiled on it.  There are times, like when I'm driving, when I can't type something easily and the only data input method I have available to me is voice.  At these times there is no alternative to voice if I want to send someone a message.  HOWEVER, they might be like me and would rather read the message in text form instead of voicemail.  Speech-to-text allows me to take a voice message and insert it into the global data stream, whether that be the internal email system, Twitter, or an application.

Voicemail is just another type of message.  The method I use to put the message into the network should be irrelevant, whether it's a keyboard, my voice, or a video camera.  All that matters is that the recipient receives the message and that it is EASY for him to use it (not just hear/see it, but USE it).  If there is even a momentary hesitation because he has to think about the steps to retrieve it or remember a password or a number, the message delivery has FAILED for all intents and purposes.  And once he has the message, it should also be easy for him to re-use the message in another system as he sees fit, delivery should not be the end of the message's useful life.

So that is my thinking on voicemail in the traditional sense.  I call you, don't reach you, and leave a message.  I think this type of voicemail has somewhat limited value.

In another sense, however, voicemail can be extremely powerful.  If you think of it as voice MESSAGES instead of voice MAIL, a whole new world of opportunity opens up for it.  Instead of a verbal sticky note, the voice message is freed to do all kinds of things that the voicemail paradigm doesn't really allow.  GrandCentral hints at this, but there is more.

For example, consider the traditional voicemail publishing paradigm.  It is almost always one to one.  One sender, one recipient.  But this is not always how a voice message SHOULD be distributed.  If you crack this nut open and allow voice messages to be broadcast to a wider audience, it becomes much more powerful.  Instead of simply saying "call me back", you can use the power of voice and video to convey the nuances in a conversation and text just can't capture.

Podcasting hints at this, but the participation premium is too high.  You must have a podcasting system set up, and very few people will take the time to rehearse a podcast and polish it until it's ready for distribution.  If it's quick and easy to broadcast a rich media message to the people who want to hear/see it, however, much more content will flow and communication will improve.  This is the Twitter philosophy and it applies to voice and video as well as text.

I'm thinking of real-time, rich conversations here.  Virtual meetings save time and money, yes?  Why must it always be a scheduled meeting?  If I'm working with one person in San Jose and another in Timbuktu, why should we have to schedule a time to meet when somebody's going to have to get up in the middle of the night?  Instead, let's inject our thoughts into a real-time rich-media conversation.  If I'm working on it and have a thought about something, I should be able to use a Jott-like application to send that thought in verbal form to everyone who wants to hear it, instead of trying to figure out a way to remember it for the next meeting.

The traditional meeting is broken in a bad way, and the whole concept needs to be rethought.  It just doesn't work well for widely distributed teams (let alone small, local teams--the potential for abuse here is just mind-boggling).  It's inefficient and it's not ENOUGH interaction.  Instant messaging helps, but it doesn't scale well, and it relies of people to take the initiative to tell everyone who needs to know what they're saying.  What's needed is a multi-media conversation cloud, and what better way to approach that than with the tool that's been used for conversations since the 1800's, voice?  Yay, we'll be back in 1890 again someday soon! :)

"Unified communications" is one of the hottest buzzwords I've seen in a while.  Everyone is jumping onto the unified communications (UC) bandwagon these days:  Cisco, Microsoft, and several small players have all got the UC religion.  And, I believe, Apple and Google are sneaking in the back door.  It's interesting because I can literally see the buzz growing around this in real-time.  Google's starting to send a substantial amount of traffic to my blog from UC-related queries, and I now belong to a LinkedIn group and a Google Group focused solely on UC.

However, the definition of UC still seems fuzzy.  Depending on who's using it, it can mean:

• Using the same network for voice, video, and data, or...
• Using the same device for all forms of communication, or...
• Mixing media types (audio + video + data combo) in the same stream of communication

And there are probably other definitions as well.  In fact, I think unified communications is in danger of becoming a fuzzy buzzword just like Web 2.0 is--its definition can be changed to suit your immediate purpose.  Not that there's necessarily anything wrong with that, fuzzy buzzwords seem to have a way of being what people want them to be, so they can be good from a marketing perspective.  Position yourself as a leader in UC and you're a leader in just about anything you can label as UC.  But it also makes it tricky to craft a coherent strategy, because a strategy implies definition and measurable goals and numbers to meet and so forth.  Anyone care to identify a measurable goal around a Web 2.0 strategy?  (Thought not.)

In my opinion, Microsoft was the first with a truly unified communication product with Exchange, which unifies your calendar, contact list, and inbox.  Lotus has similar functionality, although the database features of their product get in the way of a clear marketing direction.  GroupWise is also in this space to some degree.  But all are primarily fat client and none have any concept of a mobile platform.  There's also not much in the way of voice or video there, although Microsoft is starting to address that.

There seems to be a lot of emphasis on converging communication channels, but not enough on the user experience.  I would argue that if there isn't a benefit to the end-user all you're doing is commoditizing the pipes that carry the information.  That's nice because it brings significant cost savings, but then you're competing on the cost of bits and bytes.

The real interesting and somewhat neglected aspect of unified communications is at the end user.  While communication is starting to flow over a single channel, the user experience is still very fragmented.  I counted 7 distinct products on Microsoft's UC Roadmap.  If you have to stick it together with duct tape is it still Unified?

I'm probably in the minority here, but I see unified identity as the linchpin to unified communications, and I see Apple taking the early lead here.  Microsoft, while they have yet to unify their customer experience, gets this identity bit in the enterprise space--it's the basis of Active Directory.  But Apple, they get it in the consumer space.  Mobile Me is a big deal, it's Apple's foray into the UC space starting from the identity up.  (Don't forget that Apple has existing patents on the iPhone to enable video conferencing!)  Notice how they bill Mobile Me as "Exchange for the rest of us".  I've been saying for years that the first company to launch an Exchange clone for the common man will make money hand over fist.  When my friends and family first saw my Blackberry and all the cool things it could do they thought it was REALLY nifty.  They can have it now with Mobile Me.  (RIMM is effectively dead, by the way... unless they pull a BIG old rabbit out of their hat.)  Bringing this capability to Joe Public is going to create some interesting changes in the market as consumers get used to a unified communications experience and start to demand change when they see an experience that's inherently fragmented.  The line between enterprise and consumer is going to blur whether enterprise companies want it to or not.

Apple and Microsoft both have their weaknesses in this space, and they're related to being closed and locking users in.  Mobile Me is not open--like everything else from Apple it's closed and controlled.  Fine.  It's better than what we had before outside of the enterprise (nothing).  Exchange is also tightly controlled, but it's from a licensing perspective.  The most they've done to open up Exchange in all of the years it's been available is to host Exchange on the Web recently.  Microsoft is clinging tightly to the family jewels, and while they do that they're leaving the window open for new and hungry competitors to boot them from the top of the mountain.  Now, if they were to open a consumer-facing Exchange-based competitor to Mobile Me, THAT would be a big deal.  However, they'll never do it because Exchange is such a cash cow for them.  (If I were Ray Ozzie I'd bake Exchange into the next version of Windows--it might already be too late, but it's worth a shot.)

Google, I think, is a wild card here.  They certainly have the beginnings of a UC product line.  With a Google account I can now get email, chat, instant messaging, and voice chat.  And I use their GrandCentral product to front-end all of my voice communications because I love the way it ties in with my contact list and acts as a virtual personal assistant.  The key will be what they end up doing with their mobile Android operating system.  If they manage to get traction with that it could be an interesting way to both unify the communications experience and, eventually, penetrate the enterprise. 

There seems to be a unified communications "stack" emerging here, and I don't think any player addresses the whole thing yet.  You have the device, which Apple owns at a consumer level (barring an Android revolution) and is completely fragmented at the enterprise level (Microsoft is pushing the desktop--ick--and everyone else is pushing devices).  Then there's the identity layer, which Microsoft owns in the enterprise but Google and Apple are starting to break into from the consumer side.  And then there's the network, which everyone owns.  (It is interesting that Google recently tried to purchase wireless spectrum, to me this implies that they're trying to own the entire stack.)

The real question, I think, is whose vision is the most ambitious and most aligns with the future.  I have big doubts about Microsoft, they're stuck trying to defend the desktop which is a losing proposition in the long run.  I'm just speculating about what Google is doing.  But I was really impressed when I saw Steve Jobs unveil Mobile Me a few months ago, it really shows Steve Job's vision.  My reaction was "he really gets it".  It'll be interesting to see how each of these visions pan out.  Gentlemen, place your bets!

P.S.  I'm not going to comment on Cisco's strategy because I'm not sure what I legally can and can't say--so I just stay away from it.