Supernova '05 // trPerspective: Jonathan Schwartz

Q: "Not only is the money coming back, but there's something fundmantally new happening, that it's a rebirth of the web - do you buy that?"

A: "some of the original innovations are not just being assumed - connectivity for example. the information age idea was pretty dull and pretty static. we're now moving in different directions into ones where people are now fundamentally participating. rather than just connect india to the network, the more interesting thing is now all the interesting businesses that are starting in India."

A: "We started with the browser, but now Ajax and everything indicates that it ain't anywhere near over. Move towards much more technology moving into the hands of users. Huge amount of contnet, and therefore a huge amount of service revenue and opportunity"

Q: Is it just people making content and uploading?

A: I think it's impossible to predict. Gone from a world where you buy expensive software to a network shift where you pay to access a service to going to a place where the service is free. What's the next step? The service pays you!

Q: Sounds eerily like the dot.com mantra - everything will be free and we'll make it up on volume! {laughs}

A: Enterprise has been slow, the fastest to move has been consumer services. Show me the data centre equivalent of sticking cameras on phones.

"If you wanna do business with these people you have to hit them where their device is".

Q: Isn't there a tension between things getting moved out to the edges and this ideqa that authentication pulls control back to the centre?

A: It certainly argues for standards. There needs to be some level of uniformity. You can't do something different for every model of mobile phone. The rising tide lifts all boats as long as it's all the same tide. One tide per boat and there's a lot left lifting going on.

Q: There are standards and there are standards. There's this unruly culture on the web. "We don't want the mobile phone carrier to tell us what software we can put on our phones".

A: That tension will exist as long as we live. All mobile operators want you to use their search engine, but no one wants to use their search. Eventually one will have an open platform, and then everyone will move to them. 

Q: What have you learned from the experience of weblogging?

A: I've learned a lot of things. If you think about what a leader does, you're fundamentally a communicator. You have to be able to communicate to the marketplace to the people who report to you - there is no efficient way of doing that than using the network - using the internet. If you want to be a leader, I can't see you surviving without a blog. It's like being a leader without having e-mail or a mobile phone. You still find them very occasionally, but it's moving away. It's very rare. 

Authenticity is absolutely paramount. Getting poeple to write your blogs is ridiculous. It's like hiring people to read your e-mail. You MIGHT be able to get away with it, but it's kind of like pushing a rock up a hill...

The traditional mechanism for distributing messages is for someone at the top to tell someone below them and then they do it below them. This is chinese whispers. it's really hard to manage without a heirarchy, but in terms of communication you want to foster a sense of community.

Q from audience: do you communicate different messages internally than externally - do we see the same weblog that your employees will see.

A: I want to do all my communications on my weblog. Put up the best employees stuff externally as well as internally - yes it makes it obvious that your best employees can be pilfered by other companies. But that would happen anyway. Externalise internal communications. Don't have an internal weblog. Wants it to be very transparent. The competitors can see what he's proposing, but also their employees can too - they can decide if he's a more attractive leader! {nice model}

A: (to question about authentication): Think about how simple it would be to have a feature on your mail app that said, 'only show me authenticated e-mail'. If you have that option then you can make that choice. The consumer shoudl be in control.

[Mentions generation differences a lot]