The 7 Cs of software
Collective, while still privileging the individual. The best software of the future will bring together the work and goals of many people without subordinating each person’s knowledge and expertise to the dominance of the group, as happens with group think.
For example, prediction markets produce a collective judgment from individual opinion. Facebook provides for each person to declare his or her own group and network affiliations, but never subsumes the individual beneath the group. Blogging allows conversation across sites with individual perspective and taxonomies, rather than forcing discussion into a communal site and format, as bulletin boards and forums do.
Collaboration is seen as a key to the future of software, and it is — so long as the collaboration doesn’t come at the expense of individual identity, knowledge, and expertise.
Connected, to the web of people and information and computation. The obvious example is browser-based applications like Google Office or del.icio.us social bookmarking, but another important category is connected desktop applications like iTunes and instant messaging aggregators.
Cyborg, bringing human and computational intelligence together. Google Search aggregates human behavior in linking and describing pages into a measure of page relevance and importance. Amazon’s Mechanical Turk makes human intelligence tasks algorithmically available to computer programs via APIs (application programming interfaces). Spam filters incorporate human judgment about what constitutes spam into ongoing computation.
Closed and open at the same time. Mac OS X is based on open source Unix, but is offered as a traditionally-licensed proprietary operating system. Facebook allows external applications to be integrated into their web platform but doesn’t use open web standards and doesn’t make it easy to get information or interactions out of the Facebook world. Google uses proprietary algorithms to offer free services.
Composed by a broad population not just engineered by an elite set of computer programmers. The people formerly known as users can now build their own websites and web applications, using freely available platforms like the WordPress blogging system with plugins and widgets, web-based application development environments like DabbleDB and Coghead, or desktop mashup platforms like Proto.
Choreographed into workflows to make you more productive and effective. For now you must make do with browser tabs to maintain an information flow and task context, with minimalist links between your personal organization system and email where so many tasks come in, and with cobbled together reminder systems by SMS or bookmarking or sticky notes. For now, you are the agent that choreographs your work routines — but it doesn’t have to be that way.
Future workflow systems might carry you through your projects and your workdays, highlighting what you might otherwise forget to do, finding items of greatest potential interest to you, and doing the work of carrying tasks and information across various applications.
Cognizant of what you mean or what you want. Semantic search engines want to do a better job of understanding what you mean when you enter some keywords, instead of just blindly applying algorithms to those words, regardless of meaning.Google offers personalized search that tries to give you better results based on what you’ve searched for in the past. And research efforts are underway to make email systems know what you’re talking about, so they can automatically take action on your behalf or cluster emails according to topic and priority.
Anne Truitt Zelenka is a writer, web technologist, and blogger. She serves as editor of Web Worker Daily.
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[...] her kick off post, Anne Zelenka talks about the 7 Cs of Software. The software is “increasingly collective, connected, cyborg, closed and open, composed, [...]
The things you are talking in the article are features. In my opinion you need look the software market from software stack perspective and effects of new business models on the stack. Then you look at players in each layer of the stack both in vertical and horizontal space. Looking at features you really don’t address the market space at all.
[...] really wanted to like this series, I did. But the lead post, The Seven Cs of Software, in my opinion, warms over shopworn and weary platitudes and Conventional Wisdom into a very [...]
Ramana,
You make good points, and as the series unfolds, you will see we address the issues in coming days. thanks for your patience.
Hi Anne - for some holiday reading I’m dipping into ‘Understanding Media’ by Marshall McLuhan, even though it’s written 40 years ago the insight in today’s media landscape is bang up to date. It would be interesting to analyse the future of software from the perspective of all media are extensions of human activity: hand, arm, foot, eye, nose, ear, skin and central nervous system.
Ramana: these characteristics are not features; they are thoroughgoing changes in how software works and how it’s architected. An example of a feature is the ability to do a free text search over all invoices.
Considering software as stacks ignores the higher level changes unfolding — the tying of many disparate systems on the open web into integrated offering, the integration of human intelligence into algorithmic computation, the choreography that could occur if only we had good tools for it.
“Looking at features you really don’t address the market space at all.”
As I pointed out, these aren’t features, but at any rate the topic of this post is the future of software, not the future of the software market.
[...] WordPress.com The Future of Software - GigaOm Series Wednesday August 01st 2007, 8:40 am Filed under: Innovation, Marketing GigaOm is kicking off a month long series on the future of software. [...]
“… but at any rate the topic of this post is the future of software, not the future of the software market.”
Which is an excellent focus. I’ve been noticing how hard it is to find sites that actually talk about what’s happening with software from anything but a business perspective. I’m not anti-business, but especially in the Web 2.0 realm, it’s as though the entire ecosystem has been taken over by the manufactured pop star view of the world. I’m looking forward to seeing what else comes up here.
Philip: thanks for the suggestion, I haven’t read any McLuhan in a while… will check that out. Media as extensions of human activity? That fits right in with Richard Ogle’s book Smart World that talks about the extended mind, how our thinking actually occurs across the tools and people we interact with, not just in our heads.
Audrey: Yes, for example, I’ve noticed techmeme has been taken over by business talk. It’s not unimportant, but it only tells one side of the story.
[...] WWD as editor at large as well as doing occasional work on other GigaOM sites, such as my recent The 7 Cs of software at The Future of Software. This gives me time to focus on other projects including finishing the [...]
[...] the next month, they are going to write about “The Future of Software” — covering everything from features, to platforms to the business of software. This should be [...]
[...] inaugural post is written by Anne Zelenka of Web Worker Daily and outlines “the 7 Cs of Software”. While this [...]
Very good article!
I´ve resumed and translated your ideas to portuguese, in a brazilian blog about technology and other things… I hope you don´t mind. All the credits are there, of course.
[...] The best approach now is somewhere in the middle: a combination of open and closed, or what, in The 7 Cs of the Future of Software, I called “clopen” — though I’m very open to other [...]
The homogeneity of “Collective Cognizant” is replacing primal knowledge at a logarithmic rate.
Today I witness my “SixtySecond Spin round the sun!” On January 3, 1946 there were less than 40,000 video displays on Earth. Today there are in excess of 5 billion such displays.
At Videography Lab we figure that primal knowledge disappears in inverse proportion to the number of video displays in a selected universe.
Welcome to the world of “clopen”