Is there a market for the Cloud in the world of Corporates?

(Disclaimer: This is by no means a "definitive guide")

Abstract

I really think that most corporates are on an enterprise level not ready or even suitable to embrace the Cloud. It's the SMB that should embrace the Cloud as it would benefit significantly from Cloud offerings. Why? Because the cloud cannot be part of a policy, it should not be a strategy. Furthermore, corporates tend to only centralize infrastructure architecture and decentralize application architecture and the Cloud is driven by application architecture and business architecture and not (so much) by infrastructure architecture. In fact, it requires you to abandon control over your infrastructure and hand it over to your legal department.

Okay, I admit it, I've been an Amazon fan since I was ordering books and CD's for the whole department from Amazon.com, had them shipped to the office in the Netherlands at least on a weekly basis.
My hero in the corporate market? Jeff Bezos, the man behind Amazon.com. My biggest complaint on Amazon? That they haven't yet opened an amazon.nl store so I can purchase a Kindle Paperwhite for my wife and two sons and save some trees by getting them books in Dutch all digital. I sooooo badly want a Paperwhite myself, to replace my Kindle-with-keyboard, I sent my kids to English class so they could read books in English and I could give them my Kindle and buy the Paperwhite, with 3G of course.
Amazon has always been this very customer centric for-profit company, disrupting the market, any market by a single strategy: improve the ways consumers can spend their money at Amazon.

But this post is not about how awesome Amazon is, it is about whether or not the Cloud is for corporates.

First of all, depending on who you are, your response by now could be a whole heartedly and fully sincere "YES!". In which case you're probably a sales manager or similar person of one of the many companies that sell cloud for the enterprise services.

Second of all, well let me first cover the SMB market;
The SMB market is probably the single one market that benefits most of SaaS, Software as a Service, which is sort of a rebranding of the almost complete failure ASP offerings were. Being a company in the SMB market, you're too small to host many of the software you can get as a service yourself and by choosing the SaaS offering you can benefit from their economy of scale. It totally makes sense.
The interesting part of SaaS is that it is way less a matter of elasticity, which is commonly associated with the cloud (and rightfully so), but the emphasis is on self provisioning. As an SMB you would get services like Office365, Salesforce.com or the Google Apps offerings. All SaaS offerings. Things like IaaS and PaaS are not for you, unless your raison d'etre is a service based on online accessible services. Something called in the early days as a dotcom.
The Cloud is, for an SMB, interesting because the cost model is one based on use and not ownership. Your cloud provider meters your consumption and you pay what you consume. Your costs increase when your use increases and typically that means when you're growing as a business. The model is very fair.
So back to the second of all...

Second of all, the cloud doesn't really exist, it's a substitute word for different offerings, so actually the cloud might be there for corporates but what is the cloud anyway. Generally acceptable as a definition is the one provided by NIST. It also has a nice definition on IaaS, PaaS and SaaS.

SaaS

First SaaS as I already covered some SaaS when discussing SMB's just a few sentences earlier. SaaS is more about economies of scales to reduce costs related to the use of standard(izable) software offerings. For SMB's this is usually a small step as their processes are not that formalized, or at least they're typically rather flexible when it comes to their processes. Because in many ways, SaaS offerings are based on usage based on a best-practice.
Corporates are notorious when it comes to processes and adherence to them. From experience I know that the larger the corporate the more effort it takes to change a process and more importantly, the smaller the chance that their processes are according to best practices. So in this perspective, SaaS can be very cumbersome to implement because it would require a change in the processes of the corporate. Something about teaching old dogs new tricks springs to mind. Although it can be done, read "Who Says Elephants Can't Dance?" by Louis V. Gerstner, not dogs but elephants.

IaaS

So let's continue at the bottom, IaaS, Infrastructure as a Service. Basically what you get is a server, nothing on it, or maybe an OS. You deal with it. There's not a lot more to it and as a corporate you should already be familiar with this. It's what you've done for millennia, you bought new hardware with or without an OS installed and you took it from there. Whole IT departments are in place and ready to support this server. Typically the server is one of a really lot and over time your IT Operations staff has a number of very smart system admins.
The big benefit of IaaS is that you don't have to wait for the delivery of the hardware provided you drink sufficient glasses of water as the server can and should be provisioned during the period that you get up from behind your desk, walk over to the water cooler and get yourself a glass of water. From experience I know that it can take slightly longer when you're not yet a customer with the Cloud provider because you'll need to sign up as a customer. This is not a joke, with the current leading Cloud Service providers, this is the process and the timeframe during which the new server is provided. Will it be a physical or a virtual server? Well you don't know and you shouldn't care. It is the server that you want, with as many CPU cores and memory and bandwidth as you need. It's all provisioned from a seemingly unlimited pool of servers and CPU's and memory and bandwidth. Yup, there's some real magic going on, because the Cloud provider just keeps on providing servers to you, never asking you to stop asking for more.

Once you've got your sever, you're left at your own devices. The Cloud provider will not maintain that server at all. He will just ensure that the server is provided to you at all times and when it crashes that it will be available to you within the time you agreed in the SLA.
Did I mention that you need to take care of everything yourself and that the Cloud provider will not manage your server? It's not the service he provides when talking about IaaS, you are getting Infrastructure as a Service.

So why would you go for IaaS? Why would you go for infrastructure as a service? Well, just like you would go for any other technology; it solves your problem or it can sufficiently contribute to the solution to your problem. Most of the time you don't want to go for IaaS if there's a PaaS solution for you. Read on for the stuff about PaaS.

Onwards, with the things you can get as a service. PaaS, Platform as a Service, takes you up the software stack.

PaaS

So on top of the infrastructure, there is an Operating System and then some. Basically the 'Platform' in PaaS refers to the software layer on top of which an application runs. A lot of people I know are thinking 'Application Server' or 'Middleware' when talking about Platforms, but actually some applications run on the Operating System itself, so the OS might be the platform in PaaS.
Here's a rule of thumb that can help you: a Platform as meant in PaaS is any piece of software that is not a business application (take the term very broad) and is managed by the Cloud provider. Please take not of that last bit!
So in PaaS, the platform is managed by the Cloud provider, just like in IaaS the infrastructure is managed by the Cloud provider. Infrastructure is (virtualized) hardware, Platform is software. Is this arguably the correct definition? Yes, we can argue about it, but it fits the NIST definition, which is convenient.

Oh yeah, don't forget that the Platform in PaaS is a software layer on top of which an application runs. Typically it provides technical services to the business application. This means that typically a DBMS is not a Platform.
An Application Server like a JavaEE container, is a Platform.

Interestingly, the application server in the previous paragraph can be part of the PaaS service, so it is managed by the Cloud provider, or the OS on which it is running is the Platform and managed by the Cloud provider but the application server is not. The key here is what is and what is not managed and it always moves up the stack. So you can't have a PaaS contract where the Platform is an application server that is managed, but the OS is not managed by the Cloud provider. Anyone tells you this is possible, well question their expertise on Cloud, like really hard.

Typically you would want to go for PaaS, because that means that there's a lot managed by the Cloud provider and you only need to manage the contract with him including the SLA's you agreed upon. The Cloud provider will ensure that you've got your Platform and that it complies with the capacity you agreed upon, that it stays available and in case it becomes unavailable, that it will become available within the timeframe agreed upon in the relevant SLA.
You also want to move to PaaS if possible because it means that you'll be drawing on the fact that the Cloud provider has staff that can actually support the platform 24x7 so you won't need that expertise in your organization in the amounts of being able to support it 24x7.

Like with IaaS, a PaaS environment is provisioned quickly. A matter of minutes more likely than days or even weeks and months. And with a shear unlimited amount of resources at your disposal, so click away and get provisioned.

IaaS instead of PaaS

So why would you go for IaaS instead of PaaS, or maybe go for PaaS but only for the OS and not the application server, say? Well that is because you need something that's not standard.
Especially with PaaS, you will have to comply with standards. And these are not your standards at all, these are the Cloud provider's standards. And you're required to stick with them and not deviate from them because that's just not possible because you have nothing to say about the service except for the quality you're getting. The platform is managed by the Cloud provider and not you, remember.
So when you're in need, let's say, for a clustered WebSphere Application Server environment, you're likely out of luck getting that as a Platform, because it's too cumbersome to maintain such an environment. You're likely going to get the OS as a Platform and install you're own cluster of application servers on top of it.
The Cloud provider will provide you with separate, independent servers, or instances. All perfectly managed. This means that you'll need to ensure that the applications running on it support this. That they can deliver the availability requirements by themselves, not relying on the infrastructure.

What? I can't rely on the infrastructure for ensuring I meet my availability targets and RPO and RTO and stuff like that? That's correct. You cannot.
The separate, individual servers will be available and when not, they'll be available shortly. It's the managed part that will be made and kept available by the Cloud provider. The Cloud provider is not going to do whatever he can to keep the application available. Not at all.
So there's a strict divide between what the Cloud provider will take care of and what you'll have to take care of and there's little collaboration to be expected.
So if you need that business service to be available at all times so your customers can get access to critical information at all times, your application needs to be robust and resilient in a way that it does not rely in any way on the infrastructure it's running on, it cannot make any assumptions as to how the infrastructure works and whether or not there's anything specific running to keep the infrastructure resilient.
Well, that's a lie, there is something you can assume. Something you actually have to assume: The Infrastructure is a piece of crap and it will crash over and over and over and you have no control over it.

Why are IaaS and PaaS tricky for the corporates?

That's a good question, because they are actually very well suited to move to the cloud, the problem is in perception. The cloud is a technology, it's a means, it's a tool to solve a problem. It's a tool that has an impact on the organization of the corporate when employed. It also significantly changes the way a corporate will deal with it's IT resources. Control is achieved by means of contracts because the handson option is gone to the extent of the service provided to the corporate. So all of a sudden the legal department is the one that does Systems Operations, those men and women that have no clue what IT is, are required to draw up contracts and SLA's that are the equivalent of what the IT department used to do by means of actually doing stuff. This is for many corporates a huge paradigm shift, that requires a significant amount of maturity not only in its IT department but across the board. Something that is kind of not existent in traditional corporates.

Another issue is that from an (enterprise) architecture level, the Cloud is a strategy. It's something that should be used across the enterprise, but never put as dogma(*). It's not a generally applicable tool and it requires a very thorough understanding about what Cloud is, when it is to be applied and what the restrictions are. Interestingly it is quite different from for example stating that all systems should be on either Linux or Windows, or that all in-house developed applications are to be developed in C# using Visual Studio. Using the Cloud or however you want to call it, should never be considered an architecture principle. Because it isn't. This is very weird for large companies. I haven't seen many companies that understand this.

Something to take with you

One important aspect of IaaS and PaaS is that both are revolving around infrastructure, almost solely around infrastructure. But the decision to go for IaaS or PaaS or actually going cloud has nothing, well hardly nothing, to do with infrastructure, it is an application driven decision. There is absolutely no point in considering the cloud when your application is not ready. When it is not designed in a way that it can assume that the infrastructure is a piece of junk, when it is not designed in a way that it takes care of its own resilience instead of relying on the infrastructure you shouldn't consider the cloud.
The Cloud provider will not go beyond the service he provides, so he will not take care of your applications that are running in the cloud. He will simply just not do it. This is a good thing, because its not his area of expertise. In fact, application support is very labor intensive, it needs humans to do proper. And the Cloud provider is always looking for eliminating the human factor and do as much in an automated manner as possible. So the humans you would need for support are eliminated by the Cloud provider, in a non-felony way of course, in most cases.

Hope you enjoyed this post,

Iwan

*: Dogma is typically for those that have no clue what they're doing and just do because it's dogma. As most people are happy if decisions are made by others, because it would mean they don't have to think and they don't have to assume responsibility, dogma as easily embraced.

Communicating while working - Message in a bottle... kind of

Hi fellow architects and other readers,

Over the coming period I will make an effort to post weekly an article on communication in the digital realm and its implication on architecture and the role of an architect. The articles will be diverse in terms of tone, topic and angle. This was my intention at the time I wrote the first article in a series on January 17th, 2013. This has been weeks, well months, ago and this is only the second installment of a multi-post item on communication. Shame on me.

Last time I have been discussing my experiences with online chatting from a personal level. It was a historic overview of me using various programs and media to digitally stay in touch with friends and family.

This time I'm taking it into the office and will discuss the the digital means of communication in the workspace. I talked about VoIP last time as for the consumer it was revolutionary, but in this post I will not touch upon it at all as VoIP in the office is a mere technology to have a phone system in place. Although digital, it is still the traditional way. (Leave your opinions in the comments because there's a lot to say about VoIP in the office not being just a traditional means of communication like the regular phone).

Ever since I was first connected to a computer network, there has been a form of email system. The digital equivalent of a regular letter. Back in the late eighties early nineties these were proprietary systems, confined to the network you were on. Although there was an open system implemented on UNIX and we used it in university.

Email has been around forever and it is the primary means of communication between people in the digital realm, well in most cases. Email is the predominant identification of a person on the Internet, it is reasonable to state that everybody with an Internet connection has at least one email address. Many, like myself have multiple addresses. Email is faster than postal mail so it is very convenient to most people. With the advent of broadband, emails have become richer in content as well, and the Internet email protocols have been adopted by all email systems and there are hardly any proprietary systems in use any more, but for very specific situations. Most of these are dealing with specific security circumstances. Email is not secure by any means, it is arguably significantly less secure than regular mail as the email can be opened and read by anybody with sender and receiver ever being aware of this. This is hard to accomplish with an "analog" letter as you would notice the envelope being opened when you receive the letter.

This security aspect of email has been a concern for many, especially companies that deal with confidential data are extremely aware of this.

Another important security issue is that it is very simple to send an email pretending to be somebody else.Since the email protocol works on clear text, anybody that can intercept an email can change the email before sending it along its way. And since the premise of the internet is that it is a highly redundant network that can withstand a nuclear attack, anybody can sit in between any two parties that send an email. But more importantly, the internet is a mesh network of point-to-point connections. It's a graph where every connected computer is a node. The connections are know because every node has an address, its IP. And these IP's are structured in a hierarchy.
On top of that, pretty much all connections are wired connections, because these are reasonably reliable and cheap as well. This also means that continents are connected by, literally, just a few wires. Put your computer on one of these wires and you're in the middle of all continental communications. Including email. Although very simplified, this is actually scary accurate.
So it's easy to pretend you're somebody else when sending an email. Just as simple as to write another name at the bottom of a letter. And the solution to prevent this is analogous to the analog letter; Signing the letter with a signature that is hard to fake. And here's another analogy with the analog world, how do you know what signature belongs to whom? In the physical world, this is handled by big books with names and signatures and when you get a letter that's signed, you open the book and compare signatures. And this is not a joke, this is how it's done. And in the digital world, we do the same. We have digital books (registries) with the names and the digital signatures that belong to these names and this is how we validate the authenticity of a signature. It's that simple... and really complicated. Because bits are only of the value 0 or 1 and therefore very easy to recreate. Do it in the right order and you can make a perfect copy of a signature. So we've got all kinds of mathematical schemes to ensure that it is as hard as possible to recreate the order in which the bits are written. And we distribute the signatures using a key infrastructure.
The tricky part of this is that you need to trust the person sending you his signature to be the person he claims to be based on the signature. Consequently this is not a solution to be used on a large scale where nobody knows anybody.

The key with email is, that its use and its validity is completely based on trust. But there is always plausible denial as an option for the "sender" when he inadvertently sends an email he never wanted to send in first place.

By the way, this previous part of this post is about half of what non-repudiation is all about. You just can't get non-repudiation without diverting to a small group of people you want to exchange emails with that should not be able to deny to have ever send an email.
The other half, denying you ever received and opened an email is the other half. This is like registered email (delivery receipt) with or without a signed receipt. Typically only enterprise grade products like Lotus Notes and Microsoft Exchange to name the two biggest email systems for the corporate have the option to automatically reply to the sender that the email was delivered to the recipient's inbox and again when the email was openen. Systems like Hotmail and GMail don't support this. So it's of little use to be honest in today's email eco-system.

But there's still a valid use of email in the enterprise. It's one of the most efficient ways to inform large groups of people about something that concerns them all. Because everybody is familiar with emails, it's adoption as a means to convey a message is massive. The analogy with mail helps of course.
The ability to add attachments to an email is of course also of huge benefit. One can send a large document or documents, which could be anything ranging from a text file to pictures or schematics or videos or music tracks, as an attachment where the email body is just an introduction to the real goodies in the attachment.

The problem with email is actually its wide adoption and its low threshold usability. Resulting in spam, unsolicited marketing garbage that clutters the corporate email inboxes with irrelevant emails that prevent people from doing their jobs. And then there are all the jokes and department party pics that keep people away from their work as well. Due to the little effort it takes to write an email to somebody, it's asynchronous nature, the improper use of any means to make an email more urgent, to raise its importance has caused over the last 5 years or so a transition of the enterprise from email based communications to something else.
Many enterprises are still searching for a good replacement. With a lack of alternatives to email that have all the good stuff and none of the bad stuff, email is still the prime means of collaboration in enterprises.

In the late nineties I was working at companies of all sizes where their email systems were limited to the extend of the enterprise and then there was the personal email. With systems like Compuserv and MSN (both were at that time a proprietary alternative to the web) one could send emails to other users outside your own organization. This changed when the internet-bubble started to grow around 1999. Hotmail was the big advocate for internet based email and with websites popping up like corn grains in a popcorn machine wanting to send you information, email grew rapidly and enterprises started to understand the importance of email to communicate with possible customers.
Interestingly enough, email turned into the most prominent and important way to communicate with the rest of the world along side with websites, but internally neither the intranet nor the corporate email systems took over this role from internal circulations, flyers handed at the door and the surprise brochures you stumbled upon in the morning when getting at your desk. For some reason we still don't see email as a viable means to communicate internal stuff and we still rely on the hard copy of the same message.
I noted myself that I am more likely to read a piece of paper left at my desk the night before than an email containing the same information left in my inbox around the same time. The reason behind this I don't know. The piece of paper is more intrusive, no question about it. It's typically placed on my keyboard so it prevents me from doing my work. The email in my inbox is easily ignored. It just sits there being unread. Maybe this is why I read the piece of paper, I have to pick it up and put it somewhere else before I can do my job. But still I can move it aside without reading it. So I guess it's more a matter of habit, a piece of paper is to be read. This is what I was brought up with. Books, papers, magazines, flyers, brochures, pamphlets. They are all pieces of papers with words on them, picked up by me to be read. I have to read it, it's the natural course of things. Email is not like that. I am more likely to think an email is too long to be read than a double sided printed memo about the same.

Based on this, I don't think that email will ever be as effective as paper. Not in the corporate, not to inform people. Yes you can use it very effectively to get your point across, but nothing more than your point. We, the working people, are not yet ready to use an all digital format to inform each other. We're still too analog. And when we're ready, email will not be that format. Why? Because it's too much like mail without an 'e'. What that other format will be? Intranet, document management systems, social media for the enterprise, chat programs? Well, I'll venture into those areas in the next installments of my blog, and I seriously will make it an effort to not wait this long again for my next post.

Untill my next post...

Iwan

Find me on LinkedIn or Twitter

Chatter through history...

Hi fellow architects and other readers,

Over the coming period I will make an effort to post weekly an article on communication in the digital realm and its implication on architecture and the role of an architect.
The articles will be diverse in terms of tone, topic and angle. This time it is all about me as a user staying in touch with the rest of the world, or at least my world, in the digital realm.
The means of communication between two or more people over the last 20 years has changed significantly. The rise of the mobile phone has changed the way we stay in touch as well as the ubiquity of the Internet. We see people dropping their landlines in favor of their mobile phone and the good old analog letter is loosing ground to emails. Even faxes are not that common anymore. I can't remember the last time I send a fax other than to keep my online fax number alive.
With the advent of social media, the way we are communicating is even further changing. All of a sudden everybody is an author and a publisher. Blogging, tweeting, Facebooking, all are relatively new ways of staying in touch with each other.

In this post I am touching on the topic of chatting, the more or less synchronous way of communicating in the digital world.

Here's a short history of my chat experience.

It's 1993, I'm an intern at the Turing Institute in Glasgow and sending emails back and forth with a friend of mine in Amsterdam. It's like chatting, mails are delivered within minutes. Meanwhile my girlfriend and I are sending letters back and for the, on a weekly basis, because it takes that long to send a letter to her and receive her answer back.

It's 1997 and I just started using ICQ, the only real chat program for those that are not on Yahoo Messenger. All of my friends are on ICQ and there is no point in even checking out Yahoo's competitor as I don't have any friends on Yahoo.

It's 1999 and I started using MSN Messenger, but why? It's functionality is limited and none of my friends are on it. Only 1or 2 colleagues are on it and I don't see a reason why I would chat with them after work. ICQ still rules, there's no reason at all to even check out any competition.

It's 2000 and I'm still only on ICQ, I've got some new friends I never met. One girl from Singapore and a guy from Beijing. Their English is pretty good and we chat a lot. My fiancée and I are mainly sending emails, 6 hours time difference is awkward when chatting. At this point in time I'm getting used to synchronous (chatting) and asynchronous communication (email) in the digital realm. What I find is that the casual communication is through chatting, the more comprehensive interaction is by email. Emails are back to being letters and chats are like being talking with friends about nothing in particular, is if being in a cafe.

2001, MS Messenger is added to my list of chat programs used on regular basis, mainly because more and more of the people I meet are on it. Including my dad. Why? I wonder aren't they using ICQ, it's so much easier in use, less resource hungry and more feature rich. There's no real reason I can think of at first, but then it dawns on me, it's the sign-up procedure and the identification of users once you use the program. MS Messenger issuing your hotmail account for sign-up and so, those that have Hotmail don't have to sign up. And you can find people by searching for their Hotmail email address. It's unique. Gone are the days of looking for that one specific "John Smith" on ICQ. I'm starting to use Trillian, a chat federation program, it allows you to use one program for all your chat buddies. You can't chat across services, but now I only have to run one program instead of two. I also had a Yahoo account, because I had some friends on Yahoo as well.
Because of the ubiquity of Windows I am loosing more and more friends on ICQ as they are migrating to MS Messenger because their friends are on it as well.

In 2002 I have my first foray into social media... Really intentionally that is, as I become part of an online community with friends all over the globe. By means of Xbox Live. Back are the days of Roger Wilco, but now I'm playing and chatting with people from all over the world, people I've never met, I don't even know their age or gender or anything else.

In 2003 I stop installing ICQ on my new laptop. I'm now only on MS Messenger and there's a new kid in town; Skype. It's VoIP, so calling people via the Internet. Not my first VoIP experience though. In 1997 my buddies and I were using a small little program called Roger Wilco to talk to each other while playing Forsaken. It was a pretty good quality and had this authentic walky-talky feel to it, including the noise. At that time we are playing almost on daily basis Forsaken and Half Life. Across the Internet, talking to each other via Roger Wilco. It took some time to sync, so we used the normal phone for that, but once set up, it worked. Now there's Skype, it's 2003 when I first use it, I think. All my friends are on Skype as well, and Skype has a chat option as well. Hardly anybody is using the chat option, we still use MS Messenger, I don't know why. But I find that I'm hearing the voices of my friends significantly more often due to Skype.

Over the years since 2003, I find myself use Messenger less and less and I'm back on actually talking. Through Skype when at home as I spend significant time behind my PC and on my mobile phone otherwise. I also spend more time with my friends in the real world. I was never really a 2nd Life adept. The interesting part is that my land-line is there because it is still more expensive to call mobile numbers than land lines, so I keep it around to facilitate mainly my parents and parents in law. The land line is mainly used by people to call my wife, so I don't pick up when it rings. Answering machine does a better job at taking a message than I do anyway.

Fast forward to 2010. The biggest impact on the way I'm communicating with people happens in this year. I register for Twitter and Facebook. Note that until than I am still chatting occasionally using Skype and Messenger. I find that Skypenis more convenient when my friend has Skype as well, because when we get tired of typing we can VoIP. I believe Messenger had a VoIP option as well, but I never got around to use it.
In 2010 I left the community I lived in behind me to work abroad. My family and friends stayed behind so communication turned out to be even more important. Low cost VoIP through Skype allowed me to stay in touch with my family and even see them through the video conference functionality. Email was initially the chosen way to stay in touch with others. That changed into blogging pretty fast. I already registered on Facebook and Twitter before I left for Egypt, but while in Egypt I found the value of both really obvious.

Twitter is now my preferred way of contacting a company's customer service department. Especially KLM is very well equipped to handle my inquiries through Twitter. I guess they have a pretty sophisticated CRM system and a pretty good tool to skim all of the million tweets send every second. Random tweets about my flight experiences are replied on randomly when it concerns KLM, but inquiries or cries for help are always picked up and answered. KLM's way of using Twitter to help their customers is exemplary for how social media can fit in a business model. The DM option in Twitter, a way of chatting privately is used extensively between KLM and me to exchange more sensitive data like my ticket-number when trying to reschedule a flight.
 
I actually use Twitter's DM every now and then when sending a link to my wife to check out a new piece of designer furniture we might buy or a new project on Kickstarter.com that seems investing. But I only use Twitter's DM function for this, because I want to send my wife and just my wife a link or other piece of information while I'm on my laptop or iPad. More on that later.
 
The other 800 pound gorilla in social media is Facebook. I believe I registered in 2009, might be 2010, just to see what all the fuss was about. Facebook turned out for me to be the way to find long lost friends and get back in touch with them and to stay in close(r) contact with my friends.
Ever since I actively stated using Facebook I feel that I am more awae of what's happening with those friends that you don't see often enough to be able to keep tabs on what's going on in their lives but you would like to. And the other way around, it allows me to update those around me to be updated on what goes on in my life. Facebook works perfectly in this regard, unless, of course, your friends are not on Facebook. As it turns out, I tend to loose touch with some of my friends because they're not active on Facebook, but only a few. Others I revert back to alternatives, like chatting and Skype. I guess this is natural selection.
 
For your information I don't have accounts on any other social media site like Facebook other than Google+. Google+ is dormant in my case though. I don't see the added value of Google+ over Facebook, and it takes two much time to be active on both. I do have an account on so.cl, Microsoft's social search experiment, but I'm not using it. Bing is connected to Facebook in my case, but I haven't seen the benefits of this yet.
 
But this post was going to be about chatting.
 
Like stated before, I've resolved to only using Skype.... Well actually this is not accurate. Three years ago I got a BlackBerry from my employer and with it BBM, BlackBerryMessenger. A free chat app for BlackBerry owners, one of the reasons by BlackBerry did very well with teenagers. It was way cheaper then sending SMS messages. Most of my friends were on BBM if on a chat system at all. Chatting for me was still on Skype, as I had ditched MS Messenger completely after moving to Egypt. I stated Tweeting a lot, and started DM'ing on Twitter as a means of chatting. It's a poor mans chat.

Then came Whatsapp the revolutionary cross-platform chat application, totally free. But only on mobiles. That's why I'm using Twitter's DM to send my wife a link when on my laptop or iPad. Because I can't copy-paste the link into Whatsapp and send it to her that way. And she doesn't read her email regularly enough to be effective.
 
There are currently many alternatives for Whatsapp that do the same, but there is no compelling reason to switch, they don't have a game changing feature that will not only make me switch, but more importantly my friends as well. Because if only I switch over to another app, it's only me that will be talking, nobody listening.
 
There are two alternatives that might be viable as they are ubiquitous like Whatsapp and this is Twitter's DM, but it's too cumbersome to use and the 140 character limit is killing for chatting. The other one is Facebook's chat function. And really I don't know why it's not overtaking Whatsapp. Well actually I do; it's not a serious feature of Facebook. On the website it's this little corner of the screen that's a nuisance when you're reading your newsfeed. On mobile devices it's hidden somewhere in the Facebook client.
Maybe Skype can take over from Whatsapp, but not just now. It would need a better integration on the mobile platform's environment.
 
What Whatsapp has done right is that it filled a niche with an adequate product, gained critical mass to become the 800 pound gorilla in terms of market share and stuck with what it does, no unnecessary features that divert the user from what he wants to do in the first place. But they are very much mobile centric. Authentication when signing up is by having an SMS sent to the mobile phone you're installing it one and the app verifies that it receives the SMS. This binds Whatsapp to the mobile number, not the user. It also limits the use to devices that can send and receive SMS's.
For me this is a nuisance as I have two mobiles, with each their own number and when my wife wants to send a Whatsapp message she doesn't know which one to send it to. To get around this, I created a group with her and my two mobile numbers. We send our messages from and to the group, to ensure I get all her messages. Downside, I also get all of my own messages. Whatsapp is an alternative to texting, not chatting. But since we started using SMS as a chat medium, an expensive one, Whatsapp managed to capture our hearts and our mobile phones.
Meanwhile I'm using mainly Whatsapp, Skype for those that are not my friend on FB and FB Messenger whenever somebody contacts me using FB and Twitter when I need t send a link or text to my wife while not on my mobile, or I need to copy something.
 
So what are you using to chat with people and why? Let me know through the comments.

Promise, I'll make it clear why I posted on chatting and chat programs and touched on social media in future posts in this series.




Iwan