…if this technology ever moves from lab to street:
(The reason I am skeptical, is that this is kind of similar to voice recognition and other language processing technologies, which have not had a profound impact on our daily lives yet. Though they certainly have affected standard transactions as well as communication analysis.)
Via Marc Andreesen.
I wish I had the time (and research budget) to get to TED. Reading Jimmy Guterman’s summaries and reflections helps, though. And, of course, there are various other blogs and video sites around.
Trouble with TED, methinks, is not that it fails to solve the world’s problems, as discussed. Rather, I wonder if it doesn’t at some point become a victim of its own success – partly because it may be running out of stunning speakers, partly because when it becomes the cool place to be, the average quality of the participant goes down, a process I am tempted to call conference gentrification.
The upshot? By the time I get around to going, it will no longer be cool. Oh well.
(Third installment in a series of Notes from FastForward 2008)
John Hagel: The User Revolution
(John spoke without slides – what a relief)
The user revolution is about power. Good news, bad news: Most of us are users, so that is good. But most of us are employees of companies, and they are being squeezed. Average lifetime as humans going up, average lifetime of firms is going down (average time in Fortune 500 is now 15 years.) Companies have not yet figured out how to thrive in this environment.
A key limiter has always been shelf space – either in a store or as share of attention of a sales person. This is no longer a scarce resource. The scarce resource now is is customer attention. Second part of the story is the increasing power of talent. Talent is in short supply and increasingly important to company performance – and there are more options for talent to leave. Companies will increasingly differentiate themselves on their ability to develop talent.
Movement from push programs to pull platforms – from tightly scripted activities to flexible frameworks for orchestrating resources. How do we create decentralized resource networks that are highly scalable? The “pull platforms” are about connecting people to resources and to each other. Bill Joy: There are always a lot more smart people outside your organization than inside. Example: Lee & Fong, tailored supply chains for apparel designers. Cisco Connection Online with 40K “partners” around support of products. Facebooks mobilizing application developers.
Push models allowed companies to start and to create effective processes. Manufacturing, education etc. has primarily been in push mode. Push programs treat people as passive consumers, pull platforms treat people as network creators. Search is a critical tool here.
One problem: For any revolution, we need a pragmatic transition path. This requires a new set of performance measures (in addition to traditional measures, not as substitutes):
As customers become more powerful, they want influence over the design of the platform. Allow that to gain loyalty. Customers are looking for partners that can help them become better faster, collaborate more effectively with others.
(Second installment in a series of Notes from FastForward 2008)
Don Tapscott: Wikinomics – setting the stage
Don started by saying that this is not new: Time’s Person of The Year was you, and that is soooo 2006. Mass collaboration changes everything. Buy my book! Now, seriously…
Companies are becoming more professional and peer-oriented, less hierarchical, more meritocratic. This is not new either – Paradigm Shift said this in 1991, and Peter Drucker has said it for a long time before that. Why is it taking so long? The drivers have been missing, but are here now:
Four drivers of change:
1: Technology, particularly 2.0 technologies: Things talking to each other – one friend has his sprinkler system couple to his intrusion system, in case a burglar jumps over the fence. In the new world, you browse the physical world. GPS allows not just positioning, but movement. True multimedia changes what a film is. New web based on XML, the web is becoming a global computational platform. In some ways, search becomes the new operating system, But legacy systems exist and the integration problem will not go away quickly.
2: The net generation: We have this generation that are not afraid of technology because for them, it has always been ubiquitous. We have had boom, bust and echo in demographics, but the echo is larger than the boom – in Asia and South America have tsunami coming along. These kids multitask, don’t use the TV, they are very active with collaborative technology, games and search. Their synaptic connections are actually different, since they have had this during their formative years. They use email technology to send a formal letter of thanks to a friend’s parents.
3: A social revolution: The rise of collaborate communities. XML has overtaken HTML: Flickr beats Kodak, YouTube beats MTV. MySpace has 15,000 bands….. His son created a Facebook group on Wikinomics that exploded and is now placing demands on him….
4: An economic revolution: You are getting new companies: Digital conglomerates. Google is the fourth largest broker of hardware in the United States. Microsoft, Yahoo, Google, amazon.com, ebay – these are not some blips. Coase: Transaction costs is really cost of coordination and contracting. From industrial companies to extended enterprises to business webs, and now we will have mass collaboration. Example: Goldcorp, a mining company ready to be shut down, because the geologists cannot find gold. So they put their geological data on the Internet, hold a competition on the internet, $500,000 prize money, 75 submissions find $3.6b worth of gold. Many of the best submissions came from people who where not geologists.
How do you harness mass collaboration? 7 things:
“New paradigms cause dislocation, conflict, confusion, uncertainty. New paradigms are nearly always received with coolness, even mockery or hostility. Those with vested interests fight the change. The shift demands such a different view of things that established leaders are often last to be won over, if at all.” (Marilyn Ferguson).
Saint-Exupery: We should welcome the future because it will soon be the past.
We should respect the past because it was once all that was humanly possible.
(First installment in a series of Notes from FastForward 2008)
Andy MacAfee: Enterprise 2.0: What will it take to bring about a world of change
MacAfee talked about what it takes to bring about change – Enterprise 2.0 (corporate use of Web 2.0, as I see it) has moved from the what through the why to the how. He looked into some of the factors that seem to be connected with success, grouped into technology, initiatives and culture.
Technology must have intuitive and easy tools (meaning that it needs to work with email, for one thing), the tools must be egalitarian and freeform, the borders must seem appropriate to users (meaning that you need some borders and confined spaces), at least some of the tools must be explicitly social, and the toolset must be quickly standardized.
The most difficult part lies in the intuitiveness – avoid feature creep! The egalitarianism and the freeform part has more to do with bosses than with technology. Bosses are not comfortable with letting loose the process definition part – they need to work hard to get out of the way, at least initially.
Initiatives usually involves incentives – they exist, and they should be soft. Not just T-shirts and nerf toys, but not much more, and not monetary. Goals need to be clear and explained – being interested in Enterprise 2.0 is not good in itself. Many companies don’t have a goal – the US Intelligence community is an example of an organization that has one. Most important: You need incentives; having evangelists, and having official and unofficial support from the top. You also need excellent gardeners, bottom-up energy and activity, and clear and explained goals. The CEO Blog is a good thing – Marriott has one, dictates it and it is not created by the PR team.
Most difficult: Getting the incentives right, and getting the excellent gardeners – people that accelerate the emergence of structure in wiki environments. In any population there are not enough of them.
Culture: Some important issues are that people should be trusted, there should be slack in the workweek, helpfulness has been a norm, top management accepts lateralization (turns out it is very hard for companies to accept even light user commentary, for fear that it might be negative, even though all statistics show that it it is very powerful – most of it is going to be positive, and the negative comments make the positive ones more valid), there are lots of young people, and there is pent-up demand for better sharing. Most important: trust, lateralization, and pent-up demand for sharing.
Most difficult: Trust, slack in workweek, and top management accepting lateralization. You need spare cycles!
Conclusion: enterprise 2.0 is going to increase differences among companies – technology accentuates differences, and this one will. The data is accumulating. The reason lies in willingness to embark, sincerity of effort, and ability to execute. These differences will matter – it will not be the end of the hierarchy, but it will help companies become more responsive, help capturing and sharing knowledge (particularly as the demographic bulge is leaving the workforce) and then there is this vague notion of collective intelligence. Groups and committees, geographically dispersed, can do spectacularly valuable things with this technology.
<span flame="on">
For once, a thoughtful post and not too bad discussion about Vista, Linux and All That Jazz over on Slashdot. Bennett Haselton discusses his experience with Vista in terms I agree with. Yes, it is a beautiful interface, but it deviates from what I am used to (for no apparent reason), runs somewhat slower and certain features (FolderShare, for one, which is a Microsoft Live product but only works if you employ some rather tedious workarounds) don’t work at all. Which creates a problem for me – we have a bunch of computers at home, mostly XP, but two Vista laptops. They are used by my wife and youngest daughter, which means I am Chief Troubleshooter on a system I don’t use myself (my employer uses XP). The main problem with them is that what I thought was a rather smart system setup with reciprocal backups, dependable networking and orderly file structures becomes unmanageable because Vista hides so much of its inner workings from view. In contrast, my middle daughter recently got a MacBook and is self-sufficient (and, for her, Foldershare works).
As for the following inescapable Linux discussion (yes, I am IT literate enough to run and sometimes also configure Linux. My family isn’t. My workplace doesn’t do it. I can’t afford to throw out everything and go with Macs, partially for work compatibility issues, partly because Apple doesn’t have a Tablet laptop. Unless (hint) Apple decides to upgrade the whole family for free in the hopes that I will vax poetically about it here.)
I think Blindspot nails the future for Linux in a comment titled Innovation is the Killer App:
STOP TRYING TO MAKE LINUX BE WINDOWS!!! People already have Windows, they don’t need a replacement. That’s why they don’t switch. The "replacement Windows" idea was already tried: it was called OS/2 Warp for Windows, and we know what happened there. (Never heard of it? Bingo.)
Look at where Linux’s successes are: Servers and mobile devices – places where Linux doesn’t try to emulate Windows. Places where developers actually innovated instead of just copying. The robustness, versatility, and stability of a Linux server – that’s the killer app for servers. The portability and the ability to do unique interfaces like those on the XO or the Eee – that’s the killer app for devices.
It doesn’t just work for Linux. Apple too sees the most success where it has tried to take the lead: the iPod, iPhone, MacBook, etc. In this case it’s the simplicity and/or distinct function-meets-form interfaces that provide the edge. If they made the iPod be like every other MP3 player, and the MacBook like every other laptop, Apple might not even exist now.
Don’t try to beat Microsoft at its own game. You can’t. The way to beat them is to change the game entirely. I’ve been saying this for years, but sadly developers still waste tons of time and effort trying to make Linux be Windows. If only they instead put this into making the next big breakthrough in user interface or computer design using Linux as the platform. Something that 15 years for now will make us say "I can’t believe we used to use a desktop window interface" in much the same way we now talk about dumb terminals and typewriters. It’s gonna happen anyhow, so why not do it on Linux
<span flame="off"> Or whatever. </span>, I suppose.
Goodness, I must have overdosed on this delicious coffee on a nice Saturday morning. But the points, whatever they are, stand. And now we return to our regular programming….
I am currently re-reading Robert Pirsig’s Zen and the art of motorcycle maintenance, and came across this section, which is one of the best explanations of the scientific method I know of (explained in terms of motorcycle maintenance, of course). So, here goes:
Nicholas Carr: The Big Switch: Rewiring the World, from Edison to Google.
In his excellent book Holidays in Hell, P. J. O’Rourke visits Future World (an attraction at Disney World) and says that it is "like opening a Chinese fortune cookie to read, ‘Soon you’ll be finished with dinner.’"
I get the same feeling reading Carr’s book (an advance copy) – it is well written, stylish and easily recognizeable like Disney World – and understandable to the masses. The main message of the book is that because of faster networks, computing will be centralized and made accessible like electric power. Carr even draws a line back to the history of electric power provisioning. All very well, we already see this happening with Google applications and Gmail. But I first heard this prediction in 1990, spoken not as a wild speculation of the future but as a likely and not particularly exciting outcome by my thesis advisor, professor Jim McKenney at the Harvard Business School.
The centralized and ubiquitous computing future Carr eloquently predicts is, in principle, a return to shared mainframes accessed over telephone lines, only cheaper and faster by orders of magnitude. The mainframe lost dominance to the PC because people wanted control of their own computing and their own data, so they chose a cheap, weak and unreliable computing platform over one that offered stability, performance (at least in the aggregate) and reliable backups. Otherwise known as a disruptive technology.
Many hard disk crashes and viruses later, a significant portion of the populace have not yet moved their files to Google Docs and are unlikely to do so. For that matter, I would venture that more information and computing is still done on mainframes than on Internet-accessible servers. That is not where the innovation is, true, but new computing platforms come in addition to other platforms, not as replacements.
So we will move into the Cloud, but for social computing, collaboration, and information lookup. People will still want their local storage and (at least perceived) local control. And will end up with a three-tiered personal computer architecture: Traditional centralized computers for transactional systems that demand global recalculation (like airline reservation systems), personal storage and processing for the very personal (where are you going to store those photos, you said?) and cloud-based computing for stuff we want to find and share.
Oh well. This is not news. I know Carr’s book is written for the great unwashed, and I admire his language and clarity of examples, but it is like Tom Friedman’s The World is Flat: If you have been reasonably awake and facing in the right direction the last 10 years or so, you will not find any surprises here.
And that’s a pity, for I read books for ideas, not for summaries. And this one, for all its elegance, had me dozing off more than switching on.
The Atlantic is following the New York Times lead (or, rather, example) and tearing down its paywall so that even non-subscribers can access its articles and archives. This is yet another indication that in the media world, the choice is now between not-quite-penniless relevance and no-longer-so-profitable obscurity, and that the scale is tipping further and further over from the latter to the former.
The point, of course, is that The Atlantic now is linkable, debatable and taggable in this Next Generation Enterprise of ours. I will celebrate by linking to two classic Atlantic articles by Tracy Kidder: Flying Upside Down and The Ultimate Toy, both of them from The Soul of a New Machine (1981), still the best case study (and, come to think of it, introductory text book) on leading techies I have ever read.
Enjoy. And link.
(Via The New York Times and Undercurrent.)
Seth Godin has a brief yet thoughtful take on the digital movie rental market.
Just about the first thing you learn in microeconomics is that over time, given competition, the price of a product will come close to its marginal cost. Understood by economists for hundreds of years, but not yet understood by the movie industry. Over time, their machinations will make as much sense as the British red flag laws (mandating a person walking in front of motorcars with a red flag) at the beginning of the 20th century. Until then, it seems the content industries will make the same mistakes – first the music industry, then movies and TV, then book publishing.
Frustrating, yet seemingly inevitable.
One of the things I used to wonder about was what would happen when the theory of disruptive innovation (see various articles by Clayton Christensen) became known. Would the effect disappear, like a Heisenbergian attempt at measurement, because managers now knew how it worked? After all, if you understand and recognize a pattern of development you can anticipate it and create a new business model. That is, if you are smart enough to read theory and willing to apply it to your industry rather than find excuses.
I think we see the answer in what is happening in the media industries – a truly disruptive innovation will ruin your business even if you know about it, because (as Weick phrases it) companies select and enact their environment. In other words, they choose what they want to see and discard anything that indicates a deviation of their prejudices. The death-spiral of the RIAA is but one example, with its desperate attempts to turn back time and preserve an anachronistic business model.
At least we now know that disruption is real, hard to prevent, and, for companies with no current stake in the business, a great opportunity, exploitable less for the novelty of the innovation than for the blinkers of the incumbents. Fun.
Andy McAfee has a good post on how to make people use wikis – use it as a tool to do their work (in-the-flow) rather than document it (above-the-flow).
I have used wikis in classrooms situation for a few years now, this is a call to move more of the activity over to the wiki and away from traditional papers and email.
Twitter is one of those things I should know about but can’t be bothered to investigate deeply. Luckily, Tom Evslin has written up a short description.
Incidentally, I am officially on Twitter, my tag is http://www.twitter.com/espenandersen.
Steven Berlin Johnson uses Amazon’s text statistics service to compare some of his (and mine) favorite authors. We are getting closer to Pandora-style book selection by the minute….
Chris Anderson, editor of Wired, has had it with lazy PR hacks sending him all kinds of irrelevant junk and publishes his kill file on his blog for the rest of the world (including spammers) to pick up. Way to go!
The comments are really interesting, from the single-company photographer who finds himself blocked because he trusted a mailinglist company to Kevin Kelly chiming in as former editor of Wired (10 years ago, the spam still coming). I liked the idea of "tost" or perhaps better, "corn flakes" as a term for spam that is sent by literate but inconsiderate PR hacks. Cereal filters cannot be far behind….
(Via Boingboing).
Update: Chris follows up with a mea culpa when it comes to paper-based spam – that is, all those cards that come inside magazines. Not that he promises to stop the practice or anything… I wish The Economist would see the light here – they have gotten rid of the tear-out junk that destroys your copy, but retain that stupid little card that gets thrown out without at much as a glance.
Daviu Brooks comments on how more and more of what he had to know now is available as a service.
Of course, there is an academic term for this as well. It is called “cognitive reapportionment” (there is an article somewhere, but I don’t have access to Google right now…). Or, as Brooks calls it, outsourcing your brain.
Two interesting articles from the latest Economist:
Business by numbers about the inreasing use of algorithms in business. While the examples are a bit trite (the Lune algorithm for credit card number check, for instance, which as far as I know has largely been replaced by a modulo 11 control in Europe) it is a nice overview.
The Death of Expertise, review of new book by Ian Ayres called Super Crunchers, about how more and more decisions are automated (since computers can do them better than humans) and how humans can be reduced to providing input parameters for automatic decision making. (Incidentally, the title was chosen with help from Google). First para: EVERY time a world-class chess player loses to a computer, humans die a little. In this book Ian Ayres, a professor of law and management at Yale University, explains how in many less high-profile endeavours, human intuition and flair are more easily beaten. The sheer quantity of data and the computer power now available make it possible for automated processes to surpass human experts in fields as diverse as rating wines, writing film dialogue and choosing titles for books.
This is something we have talked about in my research project on search: How approaches based on improving decisions based on capturing user reactions (such as the music site last.fm) win over categorization-based schemes (such as pandora.com) even though the former sometimes make stupid decisions (such as grouping music together because the artists come from the same city.).
Cory Doctorow does a great speech (at his usual motormouth speed – and he doesn’t even drink coffee) at Google. My favotite line, by far:
”Making DRM just legitimizes this consensus hallucination about the copy-proof bit”
Aaaahhh, if only more presentations and debates were conducted at this level of engagement and lucidity.
…is in release 1.0 (blogpost) and available here. Haven’t checked it out yet, but I will – collaborative spreadsheet authoring would seem a great tool for research use, and perhaps also for making data available for public analysis.
The relational database model, initially formulated by Codd in the late 70s, is the dominant way to store structured data at present. However, queries to a relational database are fairly slow compared to complex queries towards a search engine index, which (in addition to the poor user interface of relational databases, often mapped directly to the table structure) has meant that search engines are now competitor for the job of extracting subsets from structured data. This, as well as the difficulty of mapping object structures onto a relational database leads me to wonder if not only the query interface, but in fact the whole concept of the relational database may soon face a disruptive threat from simpler structures.
A conversation at a Concours brainstorming session set me dusting off vaguely remembered concepts such as hierarchical and network databases, as well as the old difficulty of storing a multi-component concept with class attributes in a relational database (once characterized by the Economist as trying to store a car by putting the wheels under "W" and the engine under "E"). I found an good introductory text to the associative model of data by Simon Williams here (registration required), which also sums up the differences between the various data models pretty well.
Long-term, systems will be simulations of the reality they are to manage, but realities will also be influenced by the differences in processing capacity between humans and machines. A great example of the latter is the concept of random pick, which is well explained by Chris Anderson’s post about the shoe company Zappo’s, which stores shoes randomly (with each pair’s UPC scanned) as they come in. The result is a less optimized pick, but the total effort is less than sorting pairs coming in. Another effect, of course, is that they spend the least amount of effort on those products that move the least. (Though I love the comment about whether they occassionally have to defragment the warehouse.)
My apologies for this nerdy detour, I am writing a paper on, among other things, search technology, as well as participating in an interesting Concours project on Enterprise Architecture.
With that, back to our regular programming…
Excellent article by Roy Rosenzweig on Wikipedia and history. Very good discussion of the importance of synthetic writing in history, and to what extent the Wikipedia model can provide it. This is at the heart of the coming discussion of whether textbooks and other material for traditional learning can be created through social production.
(Via Paal Lykkja)
Applied Abstractions 