Tier Three Design
Lots of really fascinating stuff is happening in my world lately. Some of it is a bit unusual. For instance, my wife now refers to me as the Hannibal Lector of Microsoft -- I'm not going to pursue that other than to report that I don't actually bite.
Anyway, half of what I've been working on is what I've come to refer to as "Tier 3" design. From this perspective, what we sometimes think of as Web 2.0 is in part the next level of abstraction of the internet: from physical; to content; to people.
The diagram might look like this:
It might not look like much of an insight, and perhaps it's not, but the ramifications are significant. For instance, if this is accurate, then MSN Spaces would not be Microsoft's consumer social networking offering. All of MSN/Live would be our social networking "solution". The same could be said for Sharepoint and Enterprise 2.0.
In other words it means a re-visioning of online experience generally.
The question then becomes, how do we accomplish this re-visioning? I'm keeping some cards to myself for the time being, but I will share this, when we applied this thinking to product support and troubleshooting we came up with a much different solution than we see in place today, or hear discussed, across the industry.