We told you that widgets were coming, and now two powerful icons of the online world and the corporate network – Google and IBM respectively – have combined in an agreement to share 4,000 Google Gadgets with millions of WebSphere users.
Widgets
are small software applications that are little more than services –
they perform nothing more than very specific tasks, certain routine
computations or retrieving data from larger databases, for example.
Google calls its collection of these widget services “gadgets”. Perhaps
the most famous one right now is Google Maps. There is a bewildering
variety of Google Gadgets.
The
Web is the largest network in the world, and the perfect place for
tightly specialized interest groups and individuals to generate these
specifically focused services, and then offer them to public utility.
The Web is now monetized to quite a degree of sophistication – with
Google’s ad-serving capability as the forerunner and most obvious
engine. This makes a great software market for the low scale of
development involved in widgets.
The enterprise network is
monetized differently, wherein all its users receive a paycheck to
participate. To a great extent, the market economics required to
generate widgets (with the Darwinist elimination of many failed
concepts along the way, at no real cost to the network) can’t exist on
the enterprise network. In-house IT can only create so many custom
utilities. Both worlds need each other, and the corporate net can
afford to buy the cream of the Web’s produce.
“These include practical business applications such as
maps, language translators, package delivery trackers or instantly
updating weather and news services, audio search or Wikipedia.
“These sites are not just valuable to consumers.
Businesses want the same content. Why would we keep these two universes
separate?” said Larry Bowden, vice president of the IBM Lotus division for portals and Web services.:” IBM to pipe Google gadgets into company sites
IBM will release a version of WebSphere Portal that allows users to search Google’s library of gadgets and configure them to run on IBM’s software. Google exposed its gadget library to IBM
in APIs (application programming interfaces) that enabled the software
company to build its own tie-ins to its secure networks. WebSphere
users, secured behind the corporate firewall and management control,
can reach out across the Web to thousands of services that bring data,
without breaching network security.
IBM’s decision to build native integration with Google Gadgets into its popular platform (approx. 30% market share according to Gartner)
is a masterpiece of leverage, with Google’s global eyesight and reach,
deep pockets, and its gravitational pull for innovative services and
edge developments from the visionary Web world. In IBM’s words:
“Users can choose from nearly 4,000 Google Gadgets
such as language translators, package delivery tracking, Podcast
searches, Wikipedia information, YouTube postings and more. These smart
features can be easily offered through a company’s portal with just a
click of a button. By integrating Google Gadgets into WebSphere Portal,
IBM is extending the reach of Google’s
Internet-based resources and adding to the thousands of role-based
business-centric portlets that IBM already offers—such as customer relationship management (CRM), collaboration services, and enterprise resource management” IBM
How valuable is Google’s library of Gadgets, in
terms of adoption, and delivery of data? And how big is the widget
world in general? If you’d like to know more about Google, start
with their release of metrics that show the Value of Google Gadgets. O’Reilly Radar has a nice summary Google’s Gadget Numbers Revealed. For more widgets, take a look at Yahoo Widgets, Apple’s Dashboard Widgets,Widget Blog – Sexy Widget, and Widgetbox.
