Collaborating in the Cloud

Unlike newspapers and televisions, collaboration on cloud has democratised information dissemination and enables ordinary users to become creators!

Sometime in the year 2000, John Gage of SUN Microsystems came up with this monumental phrase: “the network is the computer”. When I heard it for the first time, I didn’t get it. How can a connecting device be compared to a programmable device?

What he actually meant was the computer can realise its true potential only when it is connected to a network. Just like a telephone connected via a telephone line. A telephone means nothing without the telephone line. Today, the same is true for the computer. The network, that is, the Internet gives meaning to the computer. A number of services we use today such mailing, chatting, blogging, tweeting and document editing rely on the Internet. These are popularly called as cloud services.

These services were earlier part of the computer itself. To use them, you had to install them in your computer. From the user standpoint, this might be more convenient than accessing them via the Internet. You don’t need Internet connectivity and it will also be faster to assess this software on your computer. Then, how did users accept cloud services in the first place?

Clayton Christensen, in his book “Innovator’s dilemma”, explains this phenomenon through “solar energy”. He explains why alternative energy like solar power is struggling to succeed, even though big companies are spending billions of dollars on research. Even though solar energy is cheaper and greener, it can never be as reliable as fuel energy (thanks to rainy days). So, people who are used to the reliability of power generation stations and fuel energy will not accept solar power in advanced markets such as the United States.

On the other hand, solar panel TVs (stuck on glass instead of silicon) sell like hot cakes in Mongolia, because half of Mongolia’s population has no access to electricity. They don’t mind if they couldn’t watch TV on a rainy day, because watching TV itself is a bonus. In other words, when a new technology does something that was not possible earlier, it will succeed, even if it is inferior to the existing technology in some other criteria like reliability.

Similarly, Cloud might be less reliable than installed software, because it needs the Internet to work. But it enables something that was not possible earlier – Collaboration. It will be difficult for Google docs to compete with mature software like Microsoft Word on feature richness. Instead, it enables something that was not possible in Microsoft Word – collaborative document editing. Collaboration is not just a feature of cloud. It is the differentiator that completes the prophecy: “the network is the computer”.

Collaboration on cloud – Who? & How? Who collaborates on cloud?

Cloud is used by two broad categories of people – consumers and the enterprises. Consumers use cloud to collaborate with other consumers, that is, with their social network. Enterprises use cloud to collaborate with employees and partners who are related to that enterprise.

How do they collaborate on cloud?

Both consumers and enterprises collaborate on the cloud as creators or as users.

• User-to-user collaboration is similar to traditional communication channels like telephones, that they communicate in the same capacity.

• Creator-to-user collaboration is similar to broadcast channels like newspapers and TV. It enables creators to have one-to-many communication with users and puts them above users.

However, unlike newspapers and televisions, collaboration on cloud has democratised information dissemination and enables ordinary users to become creators. You don’t have to be a superstar to be able to broadcast information. The new media revolutions like the recent Lokpal campaign and Egypt revolution are a standing example of consumer collaboration, where ordinary citizens have become broadcasters of an idea.

On the enterprise side, collaboration is taking democratisation to a new level. In most enterprises, the IT department is an expensive bottleneck. Getting them to make you a simple web form could take months.

• Google Forms has made this process of creating web forms simple enough for ordinary users. Now if the marketing department wants to put together a form and get an opinion about a market idea from their employees and partners, they can do it themselves in a matter of minutes.

• Similarly, Orange Scape allows process owners to build processes themselves and publish it to their department users. You don’t need sophisticated tools and infrastructure to do this anymore.

This creator-user collaboration is bound to explode and liberate users to experience the full benefit of technology on the cloud.

Utility value of collaboration

In 1980, Robert Metcalfe proposed Metcalfe’s law which states that the value of a network is proportional to the number of connected users of the system. For example, a single telephone is useless. Two telephones are useful only for each other. But the value of every telephone increases with the total number of telephone in the network, because the total number of people with whom each person can talk increases. Every collaboration network works as the telephone network described above. The greater the number of users with the service, the more valuable the service becomes to the community. Deriving from Metcalfe’s Law, every new “friend” accepted or added on these social networking sites makes the user’s profile ever more valuable in terms of the law.

An interesting corollary of this law is that the cost of the network decreases as the number of users in the network increases. When we have two users on the telephone network, the cost of the network has to be shared be those two people. But when it is used by millions of people the cost of network is shared by millions of people. This increasing utility value, but decreasing cost of collaboration, is the characteristic that makes cloud a sustainable business model. It has also given birth to the free and freemium business models that were never possible earlier.

Network effect – the vendor’s honey trap

Google and Microsoft struggling to create a social networking service that can rival Facebook and Twitter is no accident. Once a service achieves mass adoption, it is difficult to beat that service by feature-set. Today, even if Google or Microsoft comes up with a better social networking service, it will be an uphill task to convert a Facebook user to a Google+ user, since all the users’ friends and collaboration history will remain in Facebook. Think about having to reconnect with all your professional contacts in LinkedIn in another professional networking site. That’s the reason for the huge valuation of LinkedIn and Facebook.

Thus, collaboration creates a natural stickiness even without user’s realisation. This can create a huge entry barrier for other vendors to enter the market. But, this is the key for cloud Service Company’s future. Companies such as Google and Sales force are trying to offer Google+ and Chatter as a collaboration add-on with their existing cloud services for the same reason. And it will be interesting to watch which honey trap will attract the maximum number of consumers!