[humanmarkup] Challenges: When Medicine Tastes Bad

[Rex Brooks <rexb@starbourne.com>]

Title: Challenges: When Medicine Tastes Bad

Hi Everyone,

I will send out my meeting reminder later.

First I want to set the stage for one agenda item on tomorrow's list.

I had hoped to be able to report that I would be making a presentation to the CNET Conference in San Francisco Dec. 10-11 that would include HumanMarkup in a minor way, but that would constitute getting our work in front of more eyes. Well, that didn't happen BECAUSE I wanted to mention HumanMarkup in a minor way.

There is, of course, much more to the story, but that really does not have anything to do with HumanMarkup, so I am not going to explain it here. However, what does concern us, and me, greatly, is the extent to which HumanMarkup appears to be a veritable anathema to real world of business, from THEIR point of view.

The point is that  theirs is the ONLY point of view that matters, especially in a recessionary economic environment. If our spec gains no traction in the business world, it will be nothing more than either a footnote in history or niche-filler that may or may not be used by institutions like education, and maybe, if we are really lucky, social services where it may do some good but I wouldn't bet on it since even institutions end up using the tools that the wider society uses.

Like it or not, money talks, good intentions walk.

So THAT is the challenge and we need to be up to this challenge, especially in the current economy. How's that for bad-tasting medicine? Tastes awful!

I am including the rough outline I sent out and which, in the end, proved unacceptable. I really can't say whether it could have been massaged into a more palatable presentation because the other factors at play in this interaction made it so that I was not willing to put in the extra time and effort to make this outline more acceptable.

The silver lining in this storm cloud is that I conducted my part in the proceedings in a way that is not going to color us as anything except well-mannered, well-behaved, and courteous but firmly grounded in the principles of OASIS and the process of developing and honestly promoting open, public standards. If you read between the lines here, you may get an inkling of the background drama. However, that is truly beside the point, since the best our good behavior buys us is a seat in the bleachers.

I don't know about you guys, but sitting the stadium stands, unless I am there to check out the crowd instead of watching the game, bores the pants off me. I'm also absolutely no good at being on the team, but sitting on the bench waiting for my chance.

I would much rather go out and start a new game, and that is what I want you all to think about. We have our first offering out the door right now. We need to get it in front of many, many more eyes.

In some ways we bask in the reflected honor of being amongst a bunch of spec updates and new specs. However, it appears that November releases are tradition of which I was unaware since the only other standards process I have been involved in always delivers its products at SIGGRAPH in mid summer. So, where I thought our timing was propitious, it is really developing into a case of being lost in a crowd, and that is the other bad-tasting medicine which will either cure us of our naivete and get us moving to get a larger portion of the mindshare I speak about in the outline below, or not.

If not, maybe we better rethink this effort. I don't know about you all, but I really don't have the time to spin my wheels, folks.

Ciao,

Rex

---

Outline for Presentation to "Building Web Services Foundation" Conference

Web Services Planning for Development Managers

I. Conference/Track Theme: Applying Web Services from a unique perspective: Yours:
       

     A. The issues you face that I will address:

        1. Tool choices--criteria to choose early/well--best chance of surviving/thriving 20-80%

             Rule--If 20% of a standard or technology serves 80% of the market well you will succeed

        2. Technology standards--XML WSRP Core 1.0 early Q1 2003

        3. Competing vendor platforms--being tested against/will serve .NET, J2EE interoperably

        4. New methodologies and design patterns--starting with Portal/Portlet

     B. My area of expertise is Advertising and Graphic Design focused on the individual end-user

        1. My approach is from end-point or bottom up to Information Source

        2. I joined WSIA from that perspective to serve that purpose, followed through into WSRP

        3. WSIA and WSRP building first specification standard for Core Remote Portal Protocol and

            Interface

        4. HumanMarkup aims to bring human issues and concerns to Information Technology in

             personalization profiling post single-sign-on authentication and authorization/certification

              pre delivery

     C. My Web Services Planning for Development Managers Theme : Maximizing Mindshare

        1. Accuracy--current economic conditions require best decision-making possible

        2. What is Mindshare?

                a. Quickly associating your products/services with category

                     (e.g. Criminal Greed=Enron)

                b. Making quick and accurate secondary association of type or quality in category

                     (e.g., Sping Break Destination=Florida Beaches=Celebratory Excesses)

II. How to get Mindshare: Targeting and Positioning, criterion: horses for courses

       
     A. Anticipating uses of Web Services--what kind of users do your company's products/services

          serve?

        1. One size does not fit all

                a. IT

                b. Intra-Enterprise

                c, B2B-Supply-Chain

                d. Financial Market

                e. Consumer Market--Commodities, Consumables, Food, Clothing, etc.

                f. Institutional Market--Procurement for HealthCare, Pharmaceuticals, Travel

                    Destination, etc.

                g. Governmental/Military Market--Procurement for materiel, spare parts, etc.

                h. Educational Market--Distance Learning, Training, Continuing Education, etc.

        3. You can't maximize mindshare unless you correctly identify the minds you want to gain

             share 

     B. XML is the future

        1. WSDL and SOAP are annointed, UDDI useful but not only, XML Schema likely

        2. .Net and Java both, all browsers

        3. CSS safe

        4. XPath and XForms are getting traction

        5. Wait on XHTML, XSLT, until either browsers become more conformant OR display all

             elements to a better degree of similarity, which is not now the case and it makes little

             sense to have html that is conformant to standard but does not display correctly in a large

              percentage of browsers

        6. U.S. Federal Government moving in this direction for uniformity of all records.

My area of expertise is Advertising and Graphic Design where the most important and most often neglected principle is accurately Targeting the market and Positioning Your product or service within the target market by Focusing on the Individual. This means speaking to the individual, not to a nebulous demographic idea of the market segment.

So we need to build an association of comfort and reliability--trustworthiness to go along with trust/security in the SAML XACML sense, so that our users remember us as the preferred source to which to return for new information or to recollect correctly what we have accessed previously.

-- 

Rex Brooks
Starbourne Communications Design
1361-A Addison, Berkeley, CA 94702 *510-849-2309
http://www.starbourne.com * rexb@starbourne.com