Alec Saunders SquawkBox

Late last week there was quite a bit of commentary on a new utility from Microsoft Research called SNARF, or Social Network and Relationship Finder.  SNARF uses relationships to help you sort and categorize email — the same thing iotum does for incoming voice calls.  The promise of SNARF is that you will get to the most important email first. 

Interestingly enough, most of the commentary was from people who had read about SNARF, but not used it.  So, I downloaded it and installed.

It’s easy to see why this came from Microsoft’s Research Group, rather than a product group.  At this point, it’s a science experiment.  SNARF shows immense promise, but it’s wholly unfinished.  For instance:

1. The initial scan of my email took nearly 10 minutes.  Thereafter, it was a wait of one minute when Outlook loaded.  Way too long!
2. The UI is clunky is a clunky mix of pull-down drawers and pop-up tree views.  It’s not something an ordinary person would use.
3. It’s not possible to jump from the relationship view directly to a REPLY mode in email.  As a result, SNARF displays interesting information about your email relationships, but doesn’t allow you to act on them.

Some time ago I wrote an Outlook filter that compares FROM email addresses to my address book, and slots those folks I don’t know into a low priority folder.  I’m already getting 80% of the value that SNARF might offer.  If you want to have a look at what that might evolve to, and what a social model of email filtering might be like, then SNARF is a tantalizing glimpse of the future.  Just don’t expect to get any real work done with it. 

This morning, iotum and FWD announced an agreement to provide the iotum Relevance Engine to FWD customers.  FWD is Jeff Pulver’s pioneering VoIP community.  We’re VERY pleased to be working with the FWD team. 

Triggered by the piece I wrote this morning on Skype’s platform business, and Andy’s and Om’s postings, Jim Courtney took the time to write a lengthy piece illustrating how Symantec’s approach to Microsoft won the day over Quarterdeck’s approach.  

As Jim points out in his piece, a successful ISV is both tied to the platform vendor, and innovating a generation or two ahead of the platform vendor.  If your business is building small featurettes that will shortly be subsumed into the platform (as some Skype ISV’s have done), then you really don’t have a business.  You’re a prototyping shop, showing the platform vendor which features to build.

This is well worth reading.  Thanks for writing it, Jim. 

Andy continues to dig for dirt on Skype.  In this lengthy post he reveals his talents as a full blown investigative reporter!  The integration problems I speculated about previously seem to be real.  I would imagine that these are unavoidable, in any merger.  But Andy’s right that it’s going to take a close relationship between top management in the UK and top management in the US. 

As a result of Andy’s post, I went back and reread Om’s post on the Skype 2.0 beta.  One point Om makes is that Skype continues to gobble up ideas that independent developers bring to the table:

The Video calling feature seems great, except when it starts getting mass adoption, it will start to choke the upstream part of your broadband, and for some odd reason that really makes incumbents mad! It also raises some crucial questions about the future of independent developers. As Skype continues to subsume great ideas implemented by its developer community, is it running the risk of alienating the very community that made it great. Today three companies that offer Skype plugins get impacted - Video plugin maker Festoon and DialCom that offers Video4IM. Skype now offers a new Microsoft Outlook toolbar which impacts another independent developer, the Skylook.

This is the perennial problem every platform maker faces — how to enhance the platform while impacting ISV’s the least.  A stark example of this would be Microsoft’s inclusion of IE in Windows.  At the time, the Mac had a browser called Cyberdog, and IBM had WebExplorer for OS/2.  Windows, without a browser, was simply uncompetitive.   We knew it, and we licensed the Mosaic code base from Spyglass in the fall of 1994. Then the phenomenon called Netscape happened.  So, should Microsoft have remained uncompetitive because an ISV had already implemented the feature?

If you intend to be an independent developing software for a platform you don’t control, then you need to be constantly vigilant about what the platform maker might do.  Some companies have successfully executed this strategy for years — Symantec is a great example.  Symantec is so valuable to Microsoft that Microsoft routinely consults them on all new major OS features.  This is especially valuable to Symantec because they get to see competing features long before those features are released, which provides ample opportunity to build competitive new features.

And similarly, the platform vendor needs to ensure that early information and builds are available to the ISV community.  In the case of this video release, Skype should have released the video components to developers early, and solicited feedback on API’s etc that would have increased the value of video to the ISV community, rather than compete directly.  It’s a small, but important, step in building a thriving ISV community.