> Hari M wrote: > >I was wondering if posters have a road map on > >where they think CMS is going. > > > >What features will be added, will it be more > >open, standardized protocols?
James Robertson responded: > Hi Hari, > > This is obviously a difficult question, one > that keeps people like Gartner nice and rich. ;-) > > My quick thoughts: My thoughts on your thoughts: BRILLIANT! Wholeheartedly agree. > * Content Management Systems will become a > "commodity" over next couple of years, leading to > falling prices and standardised features. My elaboration: As recently stated on this list, it's incomprehensible the prices currently seen for licensing today, especially since all products are imperfectly designed, understood, or applied in any environment (hard problem, young industry). Costs of development are an artifact, not a valid (nor even correlated) justification for the prices seen. It's merely an indication of profound desperation by users, thinking "anything" will be better than their current suffering. Alas, it's not always true that "anything" is better (for desperate decisions are often very expensive in so many ways, far moreso than the "do nothing" option that so many executives refuse to acknowledge as an option). > * Many of the current CMSs will go out of business > in the process. We're talking about the *big ones* here, too. (I'll cover all bets on this.) > * Many of the current projects will fail, due to the > current > poor standard of implementation, and lack of > understanding > of usability, information architecture, knowledge > management > and content issues. We saw the same thing for initial application of OO technology. OO ideas started forming in early 1980's. C++ showed up in 1985, big revision in 1987, and major OO initiatives failed more than succeeded until the middle 1990's when we finally understood what it was. Now, some five years after that awkward fifteen year introduction, OO is the "no-brainer" decision for major efforts (after its rocky initial start). BTW, that's pretty normal for computer science technology, right down to 15 years being a strong number that repeats in redefining industries (it's the amount of time for an academic to say something, the student enters the world, eventually becomes a manager with authority, screws up, and then later gets it right having been molded by thoughts from school some 15 years earlier). We saw this for structured programming, relational databases, and lots of programming languages. Alas, I see many lessons being learned in content management, but very few "unifying principles" have yet shown up (just many examples of "don't do dat"). > * The field of "content management" will continue to > mature > over the next few years, to (hopefully) achieve a > higher > level of consistency, repeatability and > professionalism. Yes, true for existing products; but also, new products will be (surprisingly) become more mature than existing products. Related threads on WWAC lately on this regarding security for distributed content development. Private organizations can build a *superior* space shuttle at 1% the cost of NASA's space shuttle (not a metaphor... that's true). > * The move to open (or industry) standars for CMSs > is > obviously desirable, but there seems few > immediate moves > towards this. I would guess that this will take > at least > 5 years to occur. I'd double the time, or triple it. As a developer, I know your product can be eclipsed in less than a year; but despite some smart starter, years go by in an industry with virtually no change to technology. Especially for CM, cost of entry is high, and many existing players are big and slow, and it seems like a desert when looking for new appraoches (yes, some interest in .NET). But, that's for "standards" (it will take a while to figure out what *should be* "standard"). OTOH, I'll bet on a major shakeup with lots of death, chaos, and destruction within the next five years. There will be blood on the walls and ceiling, and new players will stand up with tendons dangling in their teeth, ripped from the joints of today's Goliaths. > * Sooner or later, there will have to be a merging > and > rationalisation between content management, > document > management and records management. This will be new approaches, not reworkings of existing products, IMHO. Also, I place little value on further merges (despite that's the favorite thing for executives to do, since they have no idea how to build something better). Mergers don't provide significant technical or even business advantage, as most of the existing technologies will merely be obsolete (mergers don't provide ROI for a constantly depreciating technology). > This is just my $0.02, Good stuff. I'd like to add the idea that yes, we'll see more acceptance of commodoty "standardized protocols" like ssh2 and other security that's well understood, but *not* in content handling (we haven't found a model that's really efficient or generally applicable in diverse areas, so all the current models are flawed, and the models are so different because everyone is looking). There will be more ideas, and one or a few will become vastly superior, and everything will fall away while a new industry is created around the one or few new models. An analogy is that it *used to be* very costly to ship meat overseas, because refrigeration equipment was heavy, which made transport by aircraft expensive (ships or other transport methods are too slow, the meat spoils). Industries worked to make lighter refrigeration equipment... very difficult, very expensive, only incremental improvements. Then, one guy figured out it's cold up in the sky, so it was stupid to bother with refrigeration equipment at all. Dump the refrigerators, carry more load with that weight, put some dry ice in the plane to keep it cold until takeoff, the dry ice sublimes so that weight isn't there in flight. It was perfect (optimal), especially since it meant that you don't buy *any* capital equipment, and you immediately ditch the expensive crap you were maintaining. Many factors of efficiency were achieved overnight. You can guess what happened to the big, stable companies that specialized in manufacture of lightweight refrigeration equipment for aircraft. I'm placing my money it goes down like that. I'm tired of the phrase, "paradigm shift", but that's what's comming. We have all the factors: lots of money spent, lots of customer desperation (big need), and a decreasingly efficient set of current industry vendors (no offense intended to anyone, the consolidation to large organizations is never as efficient because they are bigger and slower and more bureaucratic, and the parts from the merged [purchased] sub-companies never fit together as well as was assumed). No, none of these thoughts will be advocated by most vendors (especially the big ones) because it means they must describe the "new world" to the prospective customer, which probably nobody is ready to do (we don't know what it is yet), and these ideas will increase resistence to purchase decisions. Sorry for the long post. --charley [EMAIL PROTECTED] __________________________________________________ Do you Yahoo!? Yahoo! Mail Plus - Powerful. Affordable. Sign up now. http://mailplus.yahoo.com -- http://cms-list.org/ trim your replies for good karma.
