Edwin Aoki is a technology fellow at AOL, and an alumnus of Netscape — where he worked on enterprise products as well as the Communicator browser — and Apple.
Aoki spoke on Thursday at the Future Of Web Apps (FOWA) conference in London, alongside figures such as Digg's Kevin Rose and Facebook's Mark Zuckerberg. In his speech, Aoki urged developers to create applications out of passion and for the community, rather than just doing it for money.
ZDNet.co.uk spoke to Aoki just after his speech, to talk about the impact web applications have had in the enterprise and what trends are emerging.
Q: In the speech you just gave, you suggested that developers should develop applications out of passion, rather than for money. Is this not an idea that is more applicable to the consumer, rather than the enterprise, developer community?
A: Folks have been able to take whatever their passion or their expertise is and apply the technology to writing that, or to disseminating that, through whatever organisation their interest is in. We see that a lot in non-profits, but we also see that a lot in the enterprise.
Wikis are a great example of a technology that often comes in because some folks inside the enterprise want a more efficient way of spreading knowledge and information, and all of a sudden it becomes this great corporate resource. Messaging is another example of something that, we found at our AIM network, often starts with people wanting to have a better way to communicate inside the enterprise. They bring that in, and all of a sudden they find it's a way they can communicate not only inside the intranet, but also with customers and suppliers as well.
A lot of these things start off as an idea and all of a sudden the organisation realises, hey, this is really helping, this is a great productivity boost
I think it is one of these things where the ubiquity and the low cost and the ease of deployment of these technologies really is the supreme environment where you can bring that into an enterprise, just as you can bring that to consumers or even a non-profit.
Those are examples where a trend started in the consumer sector and moved into the enterprise. Is that going to continue?
I think that enterprise software is a slightly different beast. I used to do some of that in my time at Netscape and typically they have fairly long sales cycles, they're centrally administered, they are deployed by an enterprise IT department on behalf of a company, and a lot of those folks are starting to embrace those technologies and bring that in on a corporate level as well.
But I think the rapidity of adoption really does start with individuals. It may start from a consumer focus, and it may start from more of a professional focus, but the common thread is that it does tend to start with a person or a small team or a department that is really interested in deploying that technology.
How much do you think the global financial crisis is going to hit the developer community?
We're already starting to see, in some sense, the capital markets and some of the venture funding start to be more cautious. Certainly in [Silicon] Valley, there is still an outgrowth of the lessons learned during the first dot-com bust. People are being a lot more cautious. They're scrutinising the balance sheet a little bit more; they're looking more for those revenue ideas.
At the same time, a lot of the things I was talking about are fuelled really not out of money, and they don't cost that much money to start. Both within AOL and with a number of the folks here at the conference, they just start something on a weekend. And they say well, they'd love to just try out how that works. And they find that it's an idea that catches on, and it's an idea that resonates with people, and all of a sudden they're writing something that is larger than they imagined it would be.
We had products that were launched that way in AOL, from the initiative of an individual engineer. We've had enterprise initiatives that have launched that way, because somebody said there's got to be a better way to… whatever.
Such as?
Well, I mentioned wikis earlier. Our internal wiki was started by one of our engineers as a way to incorporate a more decentralised approach to documenting the kinds of things that we do. It's been completely embraced by the organisation — hundreds of thousands of pages — and it's now an IT-supported function. We have an internal search agent that goes through our intranet that helps aggregate and organise all the information from our myriad sites — that was an employee-started function.
A lot of these things start off as an idea and all of a sudden the organisation realises, hey, this is really helping, this is a great productivity boost. How can we bring this in, how can we help manage that, how can we incorporate it into our corporate systems...
