Shawn continues on where I started and asks Are business plans really evil?.

He’s got some great links to various resources about why traditional business plans aren’t necessarily the best way to go.

Heading south on Rt 101 from San Francisco to Silicon Valley, windows open, 27 degrees Celsius outside, the sun burning my face, La Kalle 105.7 on full blast with a kicking Reggaeton/Merengue mix going to first project meeting of a very cool new project (Ruby on Rails all the way).

Yes I’m enjoying being in the Bay Area!!

Unfortunately we still can’t quite tell you 100% of what we are doing, but we are pretty much spelling the beans here on our overall goal:

A global virtual shanty town of geeks

Our goal is not just isolated about us either. I really think us entrepreneurs and geeks play an important role in the future in more ways than you might think. Again read the post for more.

At the last Copenhagen.rb meetup in November we discussed how to get Rails in to our enterprise customers.

I am thinking more and more that lets use it with the one or two visionary enterprise customers that exist. But let’s not kill ourselves trying to get it in to the enterprise. Subversive uses are great, but we won’t see any major projects for a while.

Listening to the audio book of Seth Godin’s Small is the new Big last night he gave an example of the employees in a large company being concerned more with doing stuff to appear to be doing the right thing in the short run while knowing the strategy wouldn’t work in the long run. I thought it pretty similar to the choices that enterprise software customers make.

• The pick non production ready “enterprise software” like Websphere and my current hell Oracle Application Server as it won’t get them fired. This even though they will need to invest a lot of money in man power and hosting iron to get it to a state resembling usable.
• They pick architectures like J2EE, SOA, .NET etc. as again no one will ever be fired for it, even though the costs are considerably higher and the technologies themselves are extremely risky.
• Prefer to use either “low paid” regular programmers rather than the hotter than shit programmers, who’s needs may be a bit different than the norm.
• Go with large “unproven” (their projects almost always fail) consulting firms rather than smaller more responsible firms (like the ones doing rails)

There is no way competing with quality and speed that good rails developers have in this field, because quality and speed are irrelevant. Rather I am a big believer in taking them on directly as competitors and not customers.

First time I mouthed off about this at a Copenhagen.rb meetup I had no idea that I was preaching to someone who is actually doing just this. Robert and Arkadiusz are doing just that with their startup FairRates. Rather than figuring out how to get in and sell Rails to Danske Bank they took them on. They will be launching Denmark’s first social lending platform for which I am long fully waiting my beta invitation (hint, hint). While the Danish banks will probably pretend they don’t exist, they have a potentially good market for something like that in Denmark.

The Danish investment bank SaxoBank also went down a special purpose technology track and are cleaning house world wide right now. Saxo Bank uses .net technology, but have some really smart tech people behind it. They also decided to not stick with the god awful status quo that is traditional enterprise systems.

So please don’t kill yourself trying to get Rails into the Enterprise. The ones that deserve it are an easy sell. The ones that are a hard sell probably don’t deserve you or even care if they deserve you or Rails. They are more interested in their own short term career goals.

Surely we should understand these identity technologies for our new hot web 2.0 app. This is most likely something you have thought if you have a web application. The easy counter statement I would like to give you is don’t you already maintain the required identity for your application?

This post is the second part of The truth about identity.

The fact is you probably already have all the necessary identification technology you will ever need in your application. There might actually be a case for removing some of these identifying factors without causing you any further risk, but with the added benefit of lowering the cost/hassle to your users/customers.

For the sake of simplicity I will define Web 2.0 apps here as web apps with the purpose of creating, managing and collaborating on electronic information. I will cover identity in e-commerce in the next part of the series, so this is about the identity necessary for the core purpose of your web application. While there are financial web 2.0 applications out there, the risk levels are a bit different – see further discussion a later piece.

So lets examine the identity requirements here. Remember my definition above of a web 2.0 app. There are two separate types of identity needed to fulfill this.