I’m currently at the Atlassian Summit catching all the updates to Confluence — one of the most popular enterprise wikis in the world — and generally taking in the scene of a small company that is amazingly open and customer focused.

This morning’s keynote was run by CEO Mike Cannon-Brookes and at the very beginning he ran through the corporate values for the audience of mostly customers and developers. He explained that the values had been set several years into the company’s existence when the management and employees got together to codify what the company was all about.

The results (censored for your protection, though they were out in all their glory in the session):

1. Open company. No bulls#!%.
2. Build with heart and balance.
3. Don’t f*!# the customer.
4. Play as a team.
5. Be the change you seek.

I spoke to a couple of Atlassian employees about the values and it turns out they are more than just vague corporate platitudes; they are often invoked to solve disputes internally, and to push employees to better performance.

Over the last few years customers have become increasingly demanding of their vendors, and are now expecting

• Visibility into the direction of your company
• Community that shares purpose and knowledge
• Influence in the future direction of products they care about
• Opportunity to learn from vendors and peer

The Atlassian corporate values do a nice job of mixing both increasingly demanding customer needs with corporate needs — customers for example don’t care about being the change you seek — and have lead a small technology vendor to an enviable growth rate, out-sized market position, and fantastically loyal customers. I’d say these corporate values are worth emulating; with or without the colorful language, depending on your audience.

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The biggest news in the tech industry the past week has been the rumored IBM acquisition of Sun Microsystems. Like everyone else who follows the tech industry I have spent more than a few hours trying to get my head around all the competitive implications. Needless to say the rumor has made for some interesting hallway conversations, not to mention some lively debates among analysts in the office.

At the same time I have been finalizing the material for the B2B Social Media workshop my colleague Laura Ramos and I will be conducting tomorrow in Foster City, and next month in Orlando. In doing so, I couldn’t help but notice I have a lot of Sun examples of social media done right. IBM holds it’s own, but in the tech industry specifically Sun and Dell are the poster children of social media marketing, and both have been struggling mightily.

A couple of years ago I was on a panel with Toby Redshaw of Motorola, who in the course of discussion confidently declared that the only way to get a Web 2.0 initiative off the ground was to fire the CEO. Since then I have seen just that over and over again: the firms looking to implement Web 2.0 tools for social media marketing — as well as employee collaboration and productivity — are those with a “motivated” CEO, typically one who is fresh on the job. The CEO fresh on the job does not typically find himself at the most successful company.

Which brings us back to Sun and IBM. Let’s take a quick look at their homepages as they stood in August of 2008 (the orange boxes are mine). Notice anything? One has community and social media all over the place while the other offers just a hint. So which one is acquiring which? And is this more than just coincidence?

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I’ve spent a lot of time this past year thinking and talking about mashups. As Dion Hinchcliffe pointed out after the Web 2.0 Expo earlier this year the market has really begun to mature. Of all the Web 2.0 tools and approaches, mashups are the most complex and as a consequence one of the more interesting from a strategy standpoint. In my May report, The Mashup Opportunity: How To Make Money In The Evolving Mashup Ecosystem, I discussed the three major mashup types: presentation, data, and logic. (A brief aside: its amazing how out of date the below graphic looks already, a mere 7 months later.)

When looking at the market opportunities my focus has been mostly on the later two types of mashups. This is where the mashup platform vendors — JackBe, IBM, Serena Software and newcomer Corizon — all play and, ultimately, where the most money will be made. It would be going to far to say I have ignored presentation layer mashups outright, but in all honesty the market there is not nearly as dynamic as in the other two categories and is in many ways indistinguishable from basic portals. The focus is on bringing content near other content, not data transformation or insight which we see in the most complex mashups.

That said, I was reminded this past week of exactly how much room there is to run in the presentation layer mashup and widget space by, of all things, ESPN. I was reading a game recap of the Michigan upset of Duke in Men’s college basketball and came across the simple game recap data presentation at right.

In one simple graphic I saw all I needed to see: it was a close game; there were lots of lead changes; Michigan pulled away with about 7 minutes to go in the second half and never gave the lead back. In other words, there was a ton of information wrapped up in one simple presentation.

Now, lets compare the Michigan/Duke game to another on the same night, Vermont at Pitt. Same chart, new data and we see a very different game. Here we can see that Pitt went on a quick run to start the game and never looked back, shellacking Vermont by nearly 30 points.

These simple graphics — widgets or presentation mashups if you like — provided a ton of information in a very neat package, saving me the trouble of reading the specifics for anything more than details.

In a business context this style of data and content presentation can be tremendously valuable, despite the relative simplicity of the application. Think of this same graphic with sales data versus plan, feature burn down rate, or project milestones over time. This information is available today, of course, however the presentation of that data is not nearly as elegant or accessible. Business intelligence software — which this application most closely resembles — is not yet focused on these simple, business-friendly applications, and thus far no mashup or widget vendors have focused on this type of solution for the enterprise.

It seems to me there there is a market gap here: basic presentation mashups and widgets for the lines of business, surfacing these types of simple data presentations on desktops, intranet pages, and in SharePoint. I would be shocked if Clearspring or Widgetbox couldn’t easily do this today, but neither company seems to focus much attention on the enterprise. And the mashup vendors like JackBe, IBM, and Serena seem much more focused on the lower volume, higher margin business of data and process mashups. Even Lotus Mashups, the business friendly mashup environment from IBM feels a bit too heavy for something this simple but useful.

Don’t get me wrong, the mashup platform vendors are right to look elsewhere when committing development and marketing resources; this would have to be a volume business and a tough one at that. But at the same time there is real value here for either the widget vendors, a start-up, or (more likely) the BI vendors who will use this kind of presentation mashup to drive license use and application stickiness.

What do you think? Has anyone seen these sorts of simple presentation mashups and widgets in action in a business context? Are the BI vendors farther along this path than I am giving them credit for?

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I find it hard these days not to glaze over when I see article after article about the death of the newspaper industry. It’s an industry in what looks like a death spiral, and has been for quite some time. Surprisingly though the news seems to get worse nearly every day.

So it was with much sadness that I read today (in the Wall Street Journal online edition delivered via RSS) that the Detroit News and Detroit Free Press, the two remaining daily newspapers in Detroit, are expecting to stop delivering physical newspapers all but three days a week. My normal response would have been to note this as yet another sign of the death of the industry — as I imagine most everyone else has — but this one struck close to home; literally.

Though I live in San Francisco now I was born and raised in the Detroit suburb of Grosse Pointe — where my grandmother, parents, brother, and extended family mostly still live — and grew up reading the Free Press. My parents have subscribed to the paper for as long as I can remember and it was my first introduction to newspapers, current events, and becoming an informed citizen. My mother worked for both the Free Press and the News as an art director, and many of my parent’s closest friends still work in the industry. It would be fair to say the the paper was a constant presence in my life, though in many cases it went unnoticed, only remarkable when there was a protracted labor dispute in the 90’s, a frame worthy front page when the Red Wings or Tigers won a title, and when Mitch Albom stopped writing a daily sports column.

But like most newspapers those in Detroit have been hit hard by the systemic changes in the industry, namely the Internet, and more accurately Craigslist. It has been hard not to notice the impact. A couple of years ago I had the pleasure of coming downstairs one morning around Christmas to see my father — who is 6′4″ — sitting in his usual chair straining to read a paper the size of a comic book. And now the companies are planning to stop delivery of those comic books all together, save Thursday, Friday, and Sunday, the most lucrative of days. Though I believe strongly in the power of the Internet, business efficiency, and progress, its hard not to feel disappointed.

From a strategy standpoint the newspaper industry is serving as a stark reminder of how nasty the innovators dilemma truly is — though calling the News and Free Press “great companies” may be a tad hyperbolic. Its clearly difficult to walk away from profitable businesses in favor of the inevitable future. But what I find more interesting here is not the destruction of long standing institutions but the lack of a viable economic alternative to take its place. While Craigslist is wildly popular it does not come close to matching the revenues of the newspapers it is leaving in its wake. Yes, Craigslist doesn’t even try, but I have a hard time believing it could if it wanted to.

If we were to be perfectly honest though newspapers have always been a strange beast: a forced bundle of journalism people were willing to pay a bit of money for and classified ads which pulled in the real cash. All with advertisements tossed in on top for good measure. The Internet has blown that bundle to pieces — as it has done with the musical anomaly called the “album” — and they have all been sold off at the lowest possible prices; reporting is free (with ads of course) and classified are mostly free (save a few select ads and a few select markets that subsidize the rest of us; thank you San Francisco job postings and erotic services).

I’m all for killing off inefficient industries, but in this case we don’t seem to be taking inefficient resources and capital and moving them to more efficient uses. Maybe its because I think citizen journalism is a sham, but real journalism practiced by newspapers is a critical part of how our society stays on track and nothing seems to be coming up to take its place. This despite the fact that it is an incredibly valuable service. Just this week we’ve seen a corrupt governor go down in no small part because of intrepid reporting from the Chicago Tribune. Ironically The Tribune Company filed for chapter 11 at exactly the same moment they filed the story; its hard to believe the governor would be on his ass today if the Tribune was already gone.

The simple problem is that We The People have been conditioned to think of journalism as a free good. This is not a new development; over the last hundred years the price we pay for journalism has been slowly coming down as it was subsidized by classifieds and advertising. Mostly what people pay for in a newspaper subscription is the convenience of delivery and the pleasure of holding a physical object. Now the News and Free Press are left with just the reporting as a viable offering but have priced themselves out of a business model. Further, nothing short of ‘free’ will work for anyone else trying to provide journalism. We’re not even willing to pay to remove the ads!

Frankly, I don’t see an easy way out. We’re in a situation which, in economics, we call path dependent. The newspaper industry started down this road years ago making rational choices, but now is unlikely to survive as more than a shell of its former self because of those very choices. And the rest of us appear to be screwed, as we have been trained to expect free journalism so no viable replacement business model is apparent. There are a lot of very smart folks looking at how to save journalism and it appears the numbers just don’t crunch.

So, consider this a warning to other industries: bundling is a thing of the past. You must assume hyper efficiency in the future and prepare for it today. Its the only way to stop yourselves from becoming path dependent.

As for this post, consider it a love letter to my hometown newspapers, or at least what is left of them. And a recommendation that they buy a few more servers; at least make it a fair fight.

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