Feeling geeky today, so here is a great list of Computer Stupidities to waste time on. My goodness, what people can get themselves into.

ACM Ubiquity just published an interview with me, somewhat misleadingly titled The Economics of Technology Evolution (not that there is anything wrong with that as a topic – but the interview was a little bit of everything).

Anyway – if anyone has any feedback on my two “laws” of the Internet, or anything else, I will be happy to hear about it!

We have an Irish Softcoated Wheaten Terrier, named Midi, much loved, playful and lively and cute. The other day, my wife searched Google Images for “wheaten terrier“. Imagine her surprise when a picture of our very young wheaten terrier puppy showed up as the top image.
With hindsight, it was clear why: I had posted a link to the picture in the manuscript of a speech I had given in Ireland, where I referred to our Irish-ancestored dog in the opening statement. And given the interlinked nature of blogs – or, perhaps, the lack of blogging wheaten terrier breeders – the picture has escalated the list, courtesy of Google’s Page Rank algorithm, which places high emphasis on incoming links.
Dogs grow, of course, and so has our Midi. To set matters straight, I have decided to post a few more pictures – “Wheaten Terrier resting“, “Wheaten Terrier on a walk” – just to see how fast they will move into the search engines. As well as provide some more typical pictures of what a Wheaten Terrier actually looks like…..
PS: Given the introduction of Google Scholar, as well as a recent paper (via Marginal Revolution) on an auction- and citation-driven market for academic publications, the interlinkedness of information attains career-enhancing importance. Now, which mutual-admiration club should I become a member of?
PSPS: Sometimes Midi will show up as number two. Wonder why….
PSPSPS: Aside from their cute looks, playful nature and sunny disposition, Wheaten Terriers don’t molt. Now, there’s a great feature in a dog.

On December 17th, I am participating in a teleconference discussion about new technologies for The Concours Group. The idea is to ask “Which technologies do CIOs need to pay attention to – the next year, two years, five years or ten years out?
I won’t go into the timing details here – but here is a list of technology evolutions that I think will happen in the near future. Anyone with other solutions?
Wireless make cables obsolete, at least for the personal connection. New standards such as WIMAX, 802.11n (gigabit wireless Ethernet) and perhaps Zigbee or (finally) Bluetooth will make a serious dent in the demand for cables.
Telephones will run on the Internet rather than the other way around. VoIP will marginalize the incumbent telecommunications providers, as a classic disruptive technology.
DRM will have modest success in the corporate market but not in consumer space: DRM – which only will work for identifiable and small customer sets – will be used by companies who want to limit access to their corporate information, especially in an era when employees can blog and extranets are the norm. In the consumer space, however, copy protection schemes will be broken and confirmation-based algorithms – the digital equivalent of calling the CD manufacturer and ask permission everytime you play a song – will not work this time either. In fact, never.
Multimedia content delivery over the net will take off. With broadband connections, cheaper digitizing technology, and content companies gradually beginning to understand that going to war on your customers is marketing myopia, delivery of content over the Internet will move from fringe to mainstream. TV stations (especially the public ones in Europe) have already started to delivering more and more of their content over the Internet. iTunes will get new competitors, and podcasting will become a serious alternative to truck-based music delivery.
Webservices will disappear as buzzword and appear as common practice. Enough said.
RFID will be implemented anywhere the privacy advocates can’t see it. After the outburst against RFID. it will be relegated to implementation at the case and pallet level, improving logistics further for the big retail chains. The in-store theft problem – which, incidentally, is mainly perpetrated by employees – will be solved by off-line solutions such as the Vensafe dispensing machines for small, expensive items, activated via plastic cards at the cash register.
The Ipod will move from music platform to information tool. With a 60 Gb hard disk and a small screen, the iPod will be able to store not only music, but also pictures and video snippets – and will become the basic item in a portable personal architecture – connected to cellphone, camera, PDA or combinations thereof.
China just might have the year of Penguin – in two years. Linux on the desktop is, I am sorry to say, a non-starter. Except, perhaps, in vertical markets (grade schools) or in China. Linux will continue to attack Microsoft from above (in servers) and below (as “device frosting” and operating system for the emerging OEM cellphone industry), but will not make much headway against the desktop for at least 3 more years.
Blogs and wikis will go mainstream and corporate. Blogs and wikis and other forms of loosely coupled collaborative software will be integrated into web browsers and email clients (using RSS) and will become the new, relatively spam-free way to distribute medium-intensity information streams.
An IT market for older people will open up, where companies compete on componentization and usability. Marketers will finally realize where the money is, and develop technology for the grey masses – as well as for their grandchildren, and the financial and informational interaction between the two.
Countries will invest in countering digital amnesia. Fueled by continued rapid growth in search engine technology speed and functionality, microfilm- and paper-based libraries will increasingly be put online. We will have the paperless library (and perhaps the paperless toilet) long before the paperless office.
The home office will become the new standard for office technology. Actually, this has already happened. Computers, printers and screens will increasingly be designed for the home office environment – and the corporate office will be designed as a bigger version of the home. This means more plug and play, more miniaturization, maintencance-free wireless and really quiet, inexpensive printers.
and, finally…..
10 years from now, IBM will issue a press release saying that voice recognition is the technology of the future, that the next release of ViaVoice is showing real promise, and that the time to ditch the keyboard is Real Soon Now…..
Well, so far, so good – I am sure I missed a lot, any suggestions?

Google Scholar is an excellent new service from Google, which combines Googles search engine and page-ranking algorithms with academic citation protocols. I especially like the refreshingly simple and straightforward FAQ that accompanies it.
Now, will we see academically oriented page rank inflation consultancies springing up? Academic Googlewhacking?

IT Conversations has a “fair use” version of Clayton Christensen‘s presentation “Capturing the Upside”, which essentially is a run through his book The Innovator’s Solution. Brilliant style and deep content. Any entrepreneur – open source or not – should download this presentation, get the slides, find a quiet corner and spend the hour and three quarters it takes to listen through it and understand the implications. Then get the book – and the chances that your company will succeed just increased considerably.
I am definitely making this presentation part of my courses – will have the students listen through this while in class, with breaks to make sure they understand the various technologies and terms he uses (which are familiar to technically orented native English speakers, but perhaps less so for Norwegian students.) Come to think of it, it might not be that easy to understand – he uses references to technology and business terms that are relevant and incredibly precise, but hard to understand for folks that are intellectually lazy. Clay’s material is so rich and contains so much useful theory – practical, real theory – that it demands time to study and understand. Time and effort well spent, I assure you.

Interesting idea from Jeremy Wagstaff: What if everything you owned always was for sale? I have a garage full of stuff that would be cheaply available, but the transaction cost of listing it is too high – and I don’t have the conscience to throw it away. On the other hand, if the metadata was taken care of, why not?

GE’s Imagination Cubed is just what you need to justify getting that cool tablet computer – after all, you are at an advantage when you need to outdraw your colleagues, wherever they may be.
Nifty tool, though, would be excellent to have running while having a phone conversation. Let me draw this for you…..
(via Kimberly Hatch, The Concours Group)

Bruce Sterling’s WIRED article on Dumbing down smart objects reminds me of a science fiction short story I read some years ago. I think it was called “A Captive Audience”, and it was possibly written by Ann Warren Griffith in 1953.

The story was that advertising had become embedded in tiny little sound generators, too small to locate and destroy, in all products. Breakfast was accompanied by the cereal boxes singing “Eat me!”, the sofa would bellow “I am soft and comfortable, why don’t you sit down?” and so on.

The key point was that you could not escape: Earplugs had been outlawed as an impediment to commerce and free speech. For some reason, given the current debate about DRM and the recording industry, this doesn’t seem so far out anymore….

Michael Friendly’s Gallery of Data Visualization contains a number of great data displays (and some not too good), including a link to an interesting page on versions of Minard’s map of Napoleon’s march on Moscow. Readers of Edward Tufte’s The Visual Display of Quantitative Information will recognize much of what is here, but it was news to me that Florence Nightingale achieved at least some of her fame from her clever use of Coxcomb charts.
The site suffers from a few dead links, though. One of those that worked is the link to the CyberAtlas project. Enjoy!

It always takes time to understand how to use a new technology – and my Tablet PC is no exception. I have tended to see the tablet facilites as a cool feature with limited use. But recently, I found a way to use it that takes advantages of the new features – partially inspired by John Seely Brown‘s “handwritten” Powerpoint slides.
Yesterday, I did a presentation at a Concours Summit at Gleneagles in Scotland. Like most presenters, I use Powerpoint from a laptop, and then use paper flipcharts to capture what the audience says and to facilitate interaction. That combination is not ideal: With electronic slides, you easily get bound to one particular sequence and pre-defined content, which is not very flexible. With paper flipcharts, you typically have to stand over on the side, with limited space for writing, and the audience, if large, can have problems seeing what you do. My idea was instead to use the Toshiba Tablet PC, with Windows Journal as an electronic flipchart. Aside from larger projection of what you are writing, it means you have captured the notes directly.
To make it work, I had to fiddle with some details:

• when in tablet mode, the Toshiba has three programmable buttons available – and I set them to “arrow up” and “arrow down” (to flip Powerpoint slides) and the middle one to alt-ESC (to jump between Powerpoint and Journal). (Incidentally, I tried with alt-TAB, which is what I normally use to jump between applications, but Powerpoint will screw that up when in presentation mode)
• set up Powerpoint in presentation mode, changing the cursor to a pen with some vivid color, such as red
• get a lectern, so that the laptop is at a comfortable level for writing – you need to see the audience, not lean over your computer
• set the screen to landscape mode, and pay attention to orientation, so that the picture does not end up upside down or sideways on the large screen
• close down all other applications except Powerpoint and Journal
• lock the on/off button to avoid accidentally hitting it and suddenly shutting down the computer
• PRACTICE! (to make it look natural)

The main advantage of doing presentations this way is that you naturally (at least after a little practice) get into a more relaxed way of presenting, using the pen to circle details on the slides, and flipping over to Journal to capture notes and make drawings or diagrams to illustrate points that you don’t have in your presentation. A side benefit was that I could quickly tidy up the notes after the presentation, print them as a PDF file, and e-mail them.
The whole exercise worked well enough that I will do presentations that way in the future. It makes for a much livelier and more flexible presentation style, and can be a way to generate interaction with the audience. While the technology initially may get a little in the way, since it is unfamiliar to the audience, Journal and the tablet PC writing tools are sufficiently similar to paper writing that the “wow” effect quickly subsides.
And, of course, it looks cool. That’s not unimportant….

Dan Bricklin‘s elegant essay on the lessons for system design and use of on-line and other information sources (Learning From Accidents and a Terrorist Attack) is very informative and makes some excellent points around the ability and availability of the general public as a participant in disaster recovery. It nicely validates what every IT prophet has been saying, in one form or another, since the early 90s: Increases in communications and information processing capability will lead to more consumption of that resource, enabling organizations to quickly respond to outside changes – indeed of “spontaneous” organizations to quickly form to address issues. We communicate rather than plan, and can mobilize quickly. Dan makes some great points around what this means for systems and component design.
However, there is one problem with using open tools, such as RSS feeds, blogs, wikis and open conference calls: Their very openness makes them a path for a future terrorist. A group of terrorists wanting to do something akin to the 9/11 action could now learn from what happened then, and include a number of on-line participants with a role in spreading misinformation, increasing fear and diverting resources. There were instances of misinformation during 9/11 – I remember news items about a carful of bombs being stopped on some bridge in New York for instance – and the news channels normally apply some form of fact-checking. While the Wikipedia model works great when there is time – and people check changes against a contributor’s past behavior, I think we should be careful with too much openness in a time-pressured situation. Some form of validation needs to be in place, perhaps some form of peer-validation that draws on the public’s increased communications capability one wants to tap into in the first place.
(Also posted at RISKS Digest 23.52)

Steve Fox’s request for IT myths made me remember something my students tell me whenever I talk about the beginning of the Internet: That it was designed to withstand an atomic attack (through redundancy and automatic rerouting.)
That is a myth which refuses to die – and it may be that the fact that Internet and messaging worked after the September 11, 2001 attacks may have something to do with it. Though Paul Baran mentioned this as a side effect in a paper on packet switching, it was not a factor in deciding on creating Arpanet – until someone came across Baran’s paper and created the myth years later. (Reference: Hafner, K. and M. Lyon (1996). Where Wizards Stay Up Late: The Origins of the Internet.)
The main motivation for the Internet, according to the same source, was getting rid of the need for multiple terminals – that is, if you were using a remote machine via a telephone line, you had to have a dedicated terminal to it. Initially the hosts were going to interface directly, but for performance reasons, a dedicated subnet with PDP-8s was set up. BBN got the contract.
And the rest, as they say, is history. But I have to convince my students. Every year.

I followed Eirik Newth‘s recommendation and listened to the Gillmor Gang’s discussion of the ramifications of Microsoft’s announcement that Longhorn will be missing the WinFS file system when it comes out in 2006. Setting aside that this is further evidence that Microsoft has become 1980s IBM (including the practice of preemptive announcements and the time-honored “midlife kicker”), an interesting comment made by one of the particpants intrigued me: That Microsoft by having this delay may give away a large market to Google.
Despite having worked with computers for quite a while now, I still have problems getting used to what we can do with abundant processing, storage and communication. Google’s 1Gb Gmail, coupled with blogging/wikiing/blikiing technology and (still for a while) graphics processing at the desktop, can presumably mean a return to the mainframe topology – that is, all your apps and all your data can be on Google.
This is not as far-fetched as it sounds – essentially, the problem of storage is not size of files, but duplication. I have hundreds of presentations, but probably also hundreds of copies of my favorite slides. A networked information format, with component-based information items linked together to form documents – across users, accounts, and organizations, could conceivably be stored on the 100,000 and counting servers that Google has. A very clean Wiki-based interface could be the preferred way to go for those of us who want deeply functional, simple software.
Many years ago, Lotus had a wonderful product called Agenda – text-based, freeform, lightning-fast (and, apparently, still available). The problem was unsupported file formats and limitations on content size – and the product eventually was abandoned in favor of the elephantine Lotus Notes. Imagine an Agenda-style software, stored in one place, with little duplication and a very simple interface. XML-based content, separation of content and display, sensible design choices and global search.
Well, one can dream, but I think this is getting a little closer to reality once we let go of the client-centric model of computing we seem to be clinging to. Fun.
Incidentally, I will listen more to the Gillmor Gang and the other stuff at ITconversations.com. Interesting stuff, picked up in a format that reminds me that all these bloggers and digerati out there are real people, available for a teleconference if only the topic and the audience is interesting enough.

I thought I was living digitally (wireless network at home, teleconferences and cellphones, blogging and wikiing and teaching electronically), but Joi Ito has a degree of connectivity that is couple of standard deviations further out.
In the end, he asks whether he is a freak, or whether this is the way people will work. I think he a bit on the edge, but less for his use of technology than for the disjointed way he works, jumping from one conversation to the other, because he can. In the end, more people will use the technology, but most people will not jump between conversations the way Joi does.
New technology will always be used first by those with the highest need for it. Joi Ito is a venture capitalist and a technologist – and as such, may need to talk to three groups of people as soon as he wakes up in the morning. The first users of a technology also shape its design – and the introduction of the ability to talk to many people fast means that more of us are going to talk to more people, fast.
The interesting thing, as far as I am concerned, is how we can use the technology in the slower lane. Realizing that increases in quantity and convenience is a quality in itself, how can the technology help us increase the quality of our conversations?

The Guardian has a story about how Microsoft has lost money and reputation because their employees don’t know geography (via Techdirt).
In all fairness, I didn’t think these mistakes were that bad. First of all, they have little to do with geography, and more about political history and culture. Secondly, for a company that does as much software as Microsoft, over so many years, this isn’t really that much, and the mistakes not that huge. And with a workforce to draw on that does not know where the Pacific Ocean is (you would in Redmond, or at least in Seattle), it is pretty much a wonder they manage to do anything international at all…..
Not that the Grauniad themselves have that much to brag about….

I am currently staying at the New Orleans Marriott. Like most American business hotels, each room is so standardized that for an experienced business traveller, turning on the light is not really necessary – everything is where it always was, the only variable being whether the bathroom is to the left or to the right.
However, this hotel has a big plus: The Marriott chain – and most other US business hotels – have understood something that most European hotels have not gotten into their heads: That business travellers want connectivity without paying through their noses. European hotels have shoddy and expensive Internet connections and fleece you on the telephone bill even if you are calling free-phone numbers.
This hotel has no hotel charges for 800 numbers, meaning you can have long telephone conversations with your loved ones using cheap calling cards. But even better, they have a 10Mb Ethernet connection (as well as a USB option for those who don’t have Ethernet on their laptop) available for the entirely reasonable fee of $10 per 24 hours. It works beautifully, can be activated straight onto your room bill without fiddling with credit cards, and as an extra bonus the work table isn’t bad either. Meaning I have been able to edit course pages, down- and upload course material, and in general spend the jet lagged early hours of the morning, when you can’t sleep anyway, very productively.
I am just longing for the day when European hotels, business or not, will understand that connectivity should not be a revenue generator in itself, and instead a service that works to make you choose their hotel next time. Hotels should be hassle-free. This hotel is. Bravo.
Highly recommended.

My essay on whether the Microsoft of today has become the IBM of the late ’80s was just published in ACM Ubiquity.
Unfortunately, Ubiquity used an early version of the essay, and there is at least one factual error: The spray-painting IBM employees were not arrested, they just got in trouble with the SF Dept. of public works. There are some misses in language, and the references didn’t make it – so I will include them here:

• “Gates flawlessly executed…” see the excellent reportage by Stratford P. Sherman (1984). “Microsoft’s drive to dominate software.” Fortune (January 23): 82-90, an article I give to my students to explain to them why strategy matters.
• Accidental Empires: Full reference is Cringely, R. X. (1992). Accidental
  Empires: How the boys of Silicon Valley make their millions, battle
  foreign competition, and still can’t get a date. Harmonsworth, Middlesex, England, Penguin Books. The title alone is worth it…..
• …manager from outside… IBM’s new CEO was Lou Gerstner, and his book Who Says Elephants Can’t Dance? Inside IBM’s Historic Turnaround. New York, HarperBusiness (2002) is actually rather readable, at least for people with IBM experience – something which you cannot say for most CEO autobiographies.
• The story of IBM people getting in trouble in San Francisco can be found at www.cnn.com.
• Neal Stephenson’s excellent extended essay In the Beginning….Was the Command Line is available as a book, but also free of charge at his Cryptonomicon website.

As for the content – I think Microsoft is beginning to turn – their dividend payouts and Windows update policies are signs of maturity. But is it a real change of character?

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One of the perks of straddling the academic/practitioner divide is that sometimes you get to meet, bask in the reflected glory of, and have interesting discussions with luminaries in the same space – sometimes several at once. One such occasion for me is the next Academy of Management conference in New Orleans, where I will proudly lead an All-Academy symposium titled Executive Leadership and Information Technology: A Fragile Dance. (If you happen to be at the conference, it is in the New Orleans Marriott, 10:40am – 12:00am, Monday August 9 2004)
There will be two presenters and two discussants: Presenting the business viewpoint will be James (Jim) Cash, retired professor at the Harvard Business School and now on the board of General Electric and Microsoft (as well as working with the Concours Group). Weighing in for the technology side will be John Seely Brown, former Chief Scientist of Xerox Corporation and Director or Xerox PARC, and now a celebrated author and speaker on new roles and uses of information technology. The first discussant, from the viewpoint of IT economics and outsourcing, will be Vijay Gurbaxani, professor of IT at UC Irvine. A viewpoint based in strategic leadership processes will be given by Mark Kriger, professor of strategy at the Norwegian School of Management.
The idea with the symposium is to examine the role of information technology and executive leadership in a world of increasingly pervasive and standardized use of technology – or, to be more blunt about it, not discuss whether IT is important or not, but perhaps try to understand why the question even comes up.
Some initial questions I have posed to the presenters are:

• Can IT and IT use still provide competitive advantage?
• How is the relationship between IT and executive leadership influenced by
• Increasing standardization of the technology?
• Increasing proliferation of the technology?
• Increasing outsourcing of the technology?
• Increased consumerization and personal familiarity with the technology?
• What is the role of IT, both myth and reality, in creating actionable knowledge in organizations?
• What are the dance steps – the organizational practices and procedures necessary – to make the relationship between business and IT work proceed fluidly and elegantly?

I think this will be a very interesting discussion – and would welcome comments and questions on any of these aspects, the better to sharpen the viewpoints and backgrounds – what do you think of these issues out there? What questions and issues would you see brought up in a discussion on the relationship between IT and strategic leadership?

Dan Bricklin (one of the inventors of the first PC spreadsheet, Visicalc) has written a very interesting essay entitled “Software That Lasts 200 Years.” He argues that we should take the same approach to software as we do to public infrastructure: Openness, standards, inspection, public inquiries to learn from failures – and not relying on volunteerism alone.
Dan’s writings page is a pleasure to peruse – for instance, he wrote an essay on the future of the music industry in 2002 ago which shaped much of my thinking on the subject – especially the notion that record sales may be down less for downloading than because youngsters were spending their disposable funds on mobile phone services. Enjoy.