Web Services for Everyone Will Prove Challenging
I remember when I first saw a post from Jeff Nolan about his joining Teqlo as CEO after his time at SAP Ventures. The concept of Teqlo I found very intriguing at the time: mash-ups and web services for everyone, the commoner…no development experience or understanding necessary.
The promise of being able to develop applications by leveraging web services without having to code was something I would find personally useful and on first blush, thought could be a category killer. At the same time, I had my share of skepticism about the plausibility of achieving such an objective. To clarify: I’m not saying it isn’t doable, everything is doable. But we are so early into the mash-up world, being able to provide ALL users a layman’s environment to develop applications using web services without technical knowledge seemed a bit far-fetched.
My initial skepticism was confirmed with my experience with the Teqlo alpha. There were still too many variables and panels that you had to deep dive to understand what they did, even simple attributes such as panel width/height. My experience caused by to really focus off of the “coolness” of their promise and think more about the user value. And it brings up an interesting question:
What is the value proposition of providing web services to the average individual so that they can build personal applications?
It sounds inviting. Build an app that pings the airline for flight status, brings directions to the airport right to your desktop and perhaps hits some APIs to get the traffic reports for that route. The question is what is the demand for this? How many people really have the need to do things like this? And does that number justify the investment to develop a platform that will gets wide enough adoption to have positive ROI?
Today, the circle completes with Jeff Nolan’s announcement that he is changing course and moving on. His reasoning:
Teqlo is a fantastic concept and a potentially very disruptive business but it became clear that it needs more time in the oven in order to further develop and, more importantly, package the service. Spending 6+ more months in development before re-entering the market is not what I want to be doing
Teqlo definitely could be on to something but we won’t know until they re-emerge with a fresh coat of paint. However, the technology is solvable. The question is whether there is a market.
There is an old joke from the Fifties about Skinnerian operant conditioning. One psychologist says to his colleague: “I am really impressed with Skinner’s results. Using operant conditioning I have now trained my son to do anything I want? Now, what is it I want him to do?” For me this sums up “the value proposition of providing web services to the average individual so that they can build personal applications!”
The whole philosophy behind service is that we want someone else to do things for us. The operative part of that sentence is the human agent, and it is the one most frequently ignored. The highest-ranking executives still have human assistants, ostensibly because they have better things to do with their time. The rest of us get software; and, unfortunately, most of us have more important things to do with our time than configure Web services (or, for that matter, open source code modules)!
The joke about operant conditions gets to the heart of why this is such a problem. More often than not, we really do not know what we want, not, at least, in terms of a formal specification, which, whatever the interface, is the only “language” that Web services technology understands. If I am a high-ranking executive, I make it a point to have an administrative assistant who knows my behavior well enough to understand and/or anticipate what I want without my having to express it explicitly. In a position like that, if I had to be explicit about everything I wanted, I would be up a creek without a paddle! Not being able to say what you want is part of being human, but these days it seems to be a luxury for the rich and powerful!
Completely agree, I don’t think most people want to be self-sufficient and build personally satisfying web services to make their daily lives easier. Perhaps really technology focused individuals, the real early adopters. But the everyday person, it is unlikely. In my experience, people do not typically adopt a lot of new things even if there is advantages to doing so.
How many people adopted Franklin Covey tools? How many still use them today? I honestly have no idea but when I was first introduced to them, it seemed too challenging to get over the curve of being productive with it than how much beneficial it would be to me to do so.
Again, someone will eventually find a way to solve problems with this where it will be adopted. This is very early so we should not be too harsh. But right now, it seems more of finding a solution with a technology and the early adopters could very well be a very small market size (which means the chasm will be gigantic).
Lou, I can give you a single data point on Franklin Covey tools, the one person I know who adopted them. He was a pretty awesome development geek, and I would not be surprised if he dreamed in Eclipse! I knew him for about a year and a half. He was an early adopter of the tablet PC and used Franklin Covey on his machine for all the time I knew him, but I stopped seeing him regularly at the end of 2005!
Covey was definitely innovative. I remember when I got my first Covey organizer. There is no doubt that taking the time at the beginning of year, beginning of the month/day would force you to have more focus and really prioritize what is important and helps one achieve their goals. But almost all I spoke with at that time all said the same thing, the upfront continuous set-up at the individual level was a deterrent to adoption.
And I have no doubt that he and others lived by the product. If you know of any up-to-date adoption stats of his solution, I’d be interested in hearing them.