Ed Yourdon on Web 2.0

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Last night (March 7, 2007) I (Andy) went to hear Ed Yourdon talk about Web 2.0, and it was fantastic. It wasn't that I got much out of it, but that he gave it to a room that so definitely needed to hear it. I couldn't have been happier by the end of the night.

Ed Yourdon is one of those big guys in software development who was around back when I was getting started in the late 80s and early 90s, so I was excited to go see what he had to say about Web 2.0, a subject near to my heart. Would this guy who was a mainstay of big entrenched software development understand the agility of Web 2.0. He was brought to Chicago by the C-SPIN and the CQAA, two organizations that are big on Software Development Process, so I was a bit wary.

I needn't have worried. His talk was called What IT Departments Need to Do About Web 2.0 in 2007 to Avoid Being Irrevocably Left Behind, and it was not an overblown title.

There were about 100 folks in the auditorium, most in their 40s and up from what I could tell. Ed started in asking how many people are familiar with the concept of Web 2.0. "One, two, three, four... OK, about 13.7% of you", and I would agree with that estimate. Precious few hands were in the air. And then he let corporate IT in the Chicago area get some immersion therapy in the way of the web of today.

He started out plugging his blog, http://www.yourdon.com/blog/, and encouraging people to read it, as well as reading blogs in general. He also explained that there were no paper handouts because paper's not clickable, and he's on revision 28 of his talk anyway. Best of all, he didn't use slides. He used a mind map of his talk, using a package called Mindmap Pro from http://conceptdraw.com. Everything was dynamic, the way it should be. (See his blog post "Sayonara Powerpoint" for more.)

Again, this is standard for most of us, but for this group of professionals, it wasn't.

Notes and quotes from the night:

  • Most senior IT managers can't imagine why they should use blogs. They're seen as communism. Or pornography. Or both. "Just think what those peons might say!" Made a couple of mentions of The Cluetrain Manifesto.
  • Only a half dozen people in the room had blogs.
  • "If you don't know what a wiki is, you should." After Yourdon's publisher declined to publish his book about design patterns, he put it up as a wiki, http://yourdon.com/strucanalysis/>, under the GFDL. "It's up there for you to change. I don't have time." There's always been skepticism about wikis: "Clearly a wiki can't work. It is going to collapse. But we have the existence proof of Wikipedia."
  • "I don't care if you believe any of this or not. But it's going to wash over you anyway."
  • Kids are entering the workforce with a much different attitude than we did. Today's kids were born after the advent of the PC. Talked about some guy from 30boxes.com: "We're not aiming our products at the IT department. We're aiming at high school and college kids. The average college kid has never seen Microsoft Outlook." Outlook makes assumptions about our lives, like that the most important part of life is email. When most of us old guard get up, we think "I'll read my email". Today's kids think "Where are my friends?"
  • Anything interesting pre-2001 will be in a book. Post-2001 it'll be in a blog. Opened up his NetNewsWire and showed the blogs he follows and how a feed reader makes it easy to keep track of what you've read.
  • Political commentary on YouTube is going to become more and more relevant. All the presidential candidates have web presences.
  • Architecture of consumption vs. creation. I'd not heard of that distinction before, but it's so obvious. Community is now active, not passive.
  • Mentioned how JotSpot got bought by Google, as an indicator of the legitimacy of wikis.
  • Handful of people have heard of the Long Tail. 95% of Netflix' DVDs have been rented at least once. 100% of iTunes' 2 million songs have been downloaded at least once.
  • Socialtext got a mention in the "Wiki phenomenon" section.
  • Mean time to repair an error on Wikipedia: 4 minutes. I'd love to know where that number comes from.
  • Summary recommendations to the audience:
    • Ajaxify
    • Wikify
    • Empower employees, customers, hobbyists, retirees, alumni, outsiders
    • Let 1000 blogs bloom
    • LongTailify
    • Find new products, services, customers, markets
  • Re: "Ajaxify" above, someone in the audience pointed out that people use snazzy web apps at home, and use crappy old IT-department apps at work.
  • "Assume that it's real even if it's overhyped." Brilliant, I love it. I'm going to use that next time I say "Think win-win" and someone rolls his eyes because it's a cliche.

Afterwards, I went up to thank him for giving the talk to a group that needs to hear it, and undoubtedly respects what he has to say. I wish others of such noble standing in the software development community would take time to explain it as well as Yourdon did last night.

A few days later, he replied to my original post: http://yourdon.com/personal/blog/2007/03/09/talkin-about-web-20-in-chicago/

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