Category Archives: The thoughtful manager

IAD center opening

Monday was exciting – not only was it the Fall workshop for the iAD Center for Research-based Innovation, but it was also the opening of the iAD Lab [Norwegian language story here] – a physical manifestation of the Bjørn Olstad, CTO of FAST, opening the lab research project, as well as an important tool for drawing the researchers from the five Oslo-based participants (FAST, Accenture, Schibsted, UiO and BI) closer together.

Myself, I plan to spend at least one day per week in the lab – there is nothing like physical proximity to get to know an organization and a field, notwithstanding all the communications capabilities, electronic and otherwise, we surround ourselves with.

The lab itself, incidentally, is just six workspaces, a few computers and access cards for researchers. Gone are the days when the opening of a computing center was photogenic, with blinking lights and spinning tape decks. But it will enable us to store sensitive data in a secure environment, have enough horsepower to really analyze them, and provide a natural focal point for demonstrations, prototypes and experiments.

Stewart Brand on cities, nuclear power, and GM food

And yes, he thinks cities are good, nuclear power a solution we need to consider, and GM food completely safe (and a heck of a lot less evolutionary than the microbial gene sharing that occurs within and outside of our own bodies.)

Tune in to this radio show.

Google and network externalities

Here is a bunch of links about Google that I have had lying around for a while – trying to think about the first one and to what extent Hal Varian is right about Google not having a network externality competitive advantage. I think he is wrong, but why is hard to articulate.

So, here goes (note that Google, rather nicely, includes a list of links to each blog post, which is fodder for further discussion):

  • Hal Varian: Our secret sauce, arguing that Google’s competitive advantage is due to experience and innovation, not network externalities.
  • Tom Evslin: Sitemaps and how the rich get richer: Essentially, Google has an advantage because they are the biggest and people adjust their web sites to the Google engine and its various algorithmic quirks.
  • Hal Varian: Why data matters. Brief overview of search and PageRank.
  • Hal Varian: How auctions set ad prices. Brief explanation of Google’s auction system for ads. One interesting effect, not mentioned here, is that the more precisely the user can describe the targeted population, the lower the ad price – thus, Google has both an incentive to make targeting imprecise (to have enough actors competing for a particular keyword/target) and an incentive to make it precise (to increase click rates).
  • Marissa Mayer: A peek into our search factory. Various presentations, with notes, about the infrastructure underlying Google’s various offerings.
  • Udi Manber: Introduction to Google search quality. Overview of what Google does to fight spam, increase precision, and other things. (Reads like a transcript of a talk.)

Here are two articles that everyone trying to understand Google should read (come to think of it, this blog post is starting to resemble the layout for a class):

  • Brin, S. and L. Page (1998). The Anatomy of a Large-Scale Hypertextual Web Search Engine. Seventh International WWW Conference, Brisbane, Australia. (The classic on PageRank.)
  • Ghemawat, S., H. Gobioff, et al. (2003). The Google File System. ACM Symposium on Operating Systems Principles, ACM. Description of the architecture of Google’s index, a file system geared for few writes and very many reads, redundancy, and low response time. PDF here.

A dose of tail reality

The long tail doesn’t work, according to Anita Eberle. Chris Anderson, rather sportingly, likes the article but begs to differ when it comes to determining how long that tail should be.

Maybe it is a tall tail?

Sort of simulated

This interesting article in the Economist shows how American politics is becoming increasingly polarized partially because when people move, they locate in areas with similar cultural preferences – be it granola or shotguns. When I lived in the States, I was always fascinated by the difference between Vermont (Birkenstock and yogurt country) and New Hampshire (main business: roadside hubcap emporiums). As it turns out, this split between liberal and conservative is happening all over the country, and you end up with the curious situation where the United States from the melting pot evolves into a salad, with rather few ingredients.

All this is interesting, but hardly relevant for technology, no? As a matter of fact, not: I am currently working on a research project with nGenera, called BST: Putting Business Simulation Technologies to Work. Simulation allows us to see the aggregate effect of many small decisions.

One of the early books showing the importance of this is Mitchell Resnick‘s Turtles, Termites and Traffic Jams. In this book, Resnick demonstrates a number of simulations programmed in StarLogo (a parallel version of Logo, a programming language originally created for children.)

One simulation in particular (caveat: this is from memory, my numbers may be wrong here) is pertinent to the polarization of America: The effect of weak preferences on clustering. Resnick constructs a 100 x 100 matrix where each cell is inhabited by either a black or white dot. Each dot can “think” (i.e., have preferences) for itself, and the simple preference each dot has is the unless it is living in a neighborhood with at least two of its own kind (“neighborhood” defined as the 8 cells sharing a side its own cell) it will move, randomly, to somewhere else. Note that this is not a strong preference: A dot of one kind will happily inhabit a cell where 6 of its neighbors are different, as long as two are the same. (A more thorough description, with images, is here.)

In a surprisingly short time, the initially well distributed matrix transforms into clear clusters (even bands) of white or black. Importantly, this process, when viewed from a distance, seem to be conscious, yet the relatively mild preference exhibited by each individual dot seems rather harmless. It may be tempting to ascribe the segregation to some conscious plot, failed policy or other single cause. It is a very powerful demonstration of the aggregate and cumulative effect of small decisions and weak preferences – and simulation is the only way to make it apparent.

Resnick’s book shows similar uses of simulations to understand ant foraging strategies and traffic jam formation – and some of the insights have been put into use in real life. For instance, traffic lights at on-ramps that introduces cars into traffic flow in an even stream rather than random groups is, as far as I know, a direct result of simulations of traffic jam formation.

In science, business and politics, we are moving from isolating single factors and varying them to understanding interaction patterns between many small components. Simulation allows us to understand this – the challenge lies in understanding where and how this very powerful tool can give insights.

And there you have Vermont and New Hampshire, Virginia and Maryland: The results of weak preferences over time. Perhaps we could simulate some real political discussion at some point?

Open Mobile conference musings

Tomorrow I am giving a talk on disruptive technologies at the Open Nordic Conference, and how that theory applies to open standards and open source in the mobile technology industry. The audience is apparently very technical and I, quite frankly, do not think that open source plays that much of a role – apart from providing available functionality for innovators (mostly at the user interface/user service level) to build on.

The challenge in mobile technology (and in any consumer technology whose aim is to facilitate interaction) lies in establishing a platform for users and business to build on. Right now I am listening to Nick Vitalari analyze platform establishment and growth as part of the nGenera project PBG: Building a platform for business growth.

I am thinking about how platforms get established – and playing with words. It seems to me that the process can be described in terms of four words:

  • Problem (often personal): Somebody has an itch to scratch, something that can be fixed with software, so they do it. (This is what Eric Raymond considers to be the beginning of almost any open source project.)
  • Product (or service): The solution to the problem gets productized, either in a closed or open fashion, using standard or collaborative programming and development processes.
  • Platform: The solution expands both in scale (distribution) and scope (technologies it can run on, added services, links to other solutions) until it is less a solution in itself for others to build on, where customers and users get it less for itself than for the added functionality it provides.
  • Protocol: The platform becomes so open and ubiquitous that it is available everywhere, fading into the background in terms of user awareness. This can happen in many ways – it can expand to become all-encompassing (Google, for instance, maybe Facebook in certain communities, email certainly); it can be modularized with tools that pulverizes the proprietary value proposition (emulation, multiple clients (like Trillian in the chat space, cross-licensing); it can be regulated into a standard (AT&T with telephones, for instance); or it can be subsumed into an underlying functional layer (Microsoft’s embrace and extend strategy).

In the end, it will be forced into some form of openness.

Half-baked so far, but it’s a start.

Will the real security please stand up?

Peter Cochrane has it right – our preceptions of security and risk are way off. The single most dangerous thing I am doing today is probably driving my daughter to school. The most dangerous part of an airplane trip is driving to the airport. And the biggest security threat to your infrastructure is the employee who inadvertently posts your marketing plan on a world-readable wiki or stores his password on a Post-It note under the keyboard.

Michael Pollan says something of the same in In defense of food – that low-fat diets cause you to eat processed food and trans-fats, which are unhealthy. Instead, you should eat fresh, varied and pleasing food.

In other words, use common sense, taste buds, and simple mathematics.

Trouble is, that approach is hard to productize and market…..

The Pigs Ate the Sausage

Tom Evslin quotes Andy Kessler on the explanation for why Bear Stearns collapsed: The Pigs Ate the Sausage.

Shows the usefulness of a lively (and entertaining) metaphor.

Signatures by fax, and security in context

(this is a work in progress, thought I would write this in public and see what reactions I get)

Bruce Schneier, the world’s leading authority on security, writes well about why we accept signatures by fax – noting that it works because it is done in context, everyone understands how insecure it is (except in the relatively rare instances when they don’t.) One thing is that we tend to think of new technologies in terms of old technologies: The physical signature can easily be faked with a fax, even easier when we start to use scanned PDFs – in fact, gluing in a copied signature becomes the standard way of doing things for most people.

I am currently thinking about security in a next-generation employee computing setup, where corporate infrastructure has retreated behind a browser and the end user can buy whatever he or she desires – be it a Mac or PC, laptop or desktop, cell phone or public terminal. Every user comes in via the public Internet, even if he or she is physically sitting right next to the server park.

From a security standpoint, this is actually a simplification, much as you simplify PC provisioning when you switch everyone to a laptop. Sure, many of the users don’t need a laptop, and a laptop is more expensive than a desktop. But differentiation has its costs, too. And it is much easier to make a desktop out of a laptop – in essence, all you need to do is sit still – than it is to to do it the other way.

If you move to an architecture with corporate infrastructure and personal, private terminals, you remove the inside-or-outside-the-moat distinction companies often naively use as their main security barrier. Instead you must verify everyone’s identity in terms of the information and functionality they can have access to. You need to specify this as a very granular level, and will need a well defined hierarchy of access rules. You will also, like Wikipedia, need to have a way to track who has done what where, and make it easy to reverse whatever changes has been done, should it prove necessary.

I am less certain that you need much of a standard for what should run on the clients themselves – surely we have progressed to a point now (or will in the near future) where end users can take responsibility for keeping their own technology’s reasonably updated and secure? We probably need to rethink security in terms of consequence management, in the sense that we need to make the consequences of poor security become apparent to the end user. The analogy is to car safety – for all the nagging about putting on your seatbelt and monitoring speeding, nothing would reduce deaths in traffic as much as a mandatory large spike sticking out of the steering wheel, instantly impaling the driver should he or she crash or suddenly brake.

(and that is as far as I got before the telephone started chiming, and it was time to scoot off for meetings and other things that eat up your day. I will be back. Comments, of course, are most welcome.)

Scarce Resources in Computing

New essay in ACM Ubiquity: Scarce Resources in Computing, about how we adapt our use and organization of information technology around what at any point is the scarce resource.

Comments welcome!

Formula for spying

Mark Seal has a great article in Wired about how McLaren got hold of Ferrari’s designs and the twists and turns that followed.

What blows my mind is the size of the budgets these guys are willing to throw away. A company like McLaren spends a lot of money and develops technology that eventually goes into production cars (at least, that’s the theory), but with the hundreds of millions spent here, how can anyone recuperate it? Ferrari, at least, has a brand of car to sell, McLaren cooperates with Mercedes, but it still looks like rich man’s game to me.

Anyway, an entertaining story, showing that you better treat your employees right (how could Ferrari management not react before their chief mechanic had spilled the beans?) and do your own scanning if you are hoping to avoid betrayal or getting caught betraying.

Great business cards

42 Awesome Business Card Designs (With Links to 100s More)

I liked the secondhand store card as well. And Kevin Mitnick’s, though his exploits before going legit were rather reprehensible.

(Via Tyler Cowen.)

From Concours to BSG Alliance to nGenera

As can be seen from this press release, BSG Alliance (and all subsidiaries) has changed its name to nGenera Corporation. BSG Alliance acquired Concours Group last year, as well as New Paradigm and various, more technology-based companies such as Iconixx. The name nGenera represents a consolidation of the various acquired companies and signals a focus on the "next generation enterprise" – companies that use collaborative and Internet technology as an internal, native and natural arena for innovation and growth.

Consulting companies are fascinating – forever splitting and forming, driven by changes in content, business conditions and (to a rather large extent) by people chemistry. Though companies may change, the people very often remain the same – in a sense, even if you leave, you never really leave, but keep in touch (and use each other, if need be.) Modern technology underscores this sense of a cloud of people that know about each other and draw on each other when necessary, clustering around companies and ideas as need and economics dictate.

I started working in research-based consulting with Index, which was acquired by CSC, in 1994. I then moved on to work with Concours (which was formed by ex-CSC Index people plus some of their friends.) That relationship has lasted since 1999, and now it is time for nGenera, with an increased focus on collaboration technology (both in theory and practice) and an emphasis on what the future will be as well as how we will get there.

Stay tuned – a company that spans from Wikinomics to simulation technology promises exciting ideas and much to learn, while keeping a basis of solid IT management models and practices and a deep knowledge in talent acquisition and development. Stay tuned.

Ubiquity interviews Vaughan Merlyn

John Gehl of Ubiquity fame has interviewed my pal Vaughan Merlyn, a stellar IT management consultant and all-around good egg who shares some of his experiences and views. Vaughan writes a fine blog and is extremely good at navigating the rather tricky no-mans-land that still lies between business and IT. He has spent much time and effort extending and deepening some of the strategic models of IT supply and demand that we rely on in this business, in light of advances in technology and IT savvy (or, as Vaughan calls it, IT maturity) in large organizations:

When I say business IT maturity, that is a short hand way of saying business demand maturity and IT supply maturity. I think that in the majority of cases, i.e., more than a half of the situations we see – there is a reasonable degree of similarity between the business ambition and the IT ambition. For perhaps a quarter of the cases, there is a CIO who is well ahead of business. And those are the most frustrating cases. The other case is where the business is well ahead of the CIO. And that usually sorts itself out pretty quickly because sooner or later there is a change of CIO.

Here is some hard-won experience on what advisory consulting is all about:

[…] I often find that what [clients] think is the problem they are looking for help with is quite different from the actual problem they are experiencing. And very often I find some of the most important work that we do happens before the engagement begins. I think it was Jerry Weinberg, one of the great wise men of the early IT days pointed out that one of the problems with project management is when a project officially starts, it’s already been going several months. It just hasn’t yet been called a project. So there is a lot of baggage already there. I think similarly, when you sit down with a client to frame up an engagement, I find the actual act of getting clarity on what is the issue, what would the outcomes be if we successfully solved this issue, that often is enormously helpful for the client – obviously it’s important for the consultant because you can easily spin wheels trying to solve the wrong problem. But I have seen the light bulbs go on with my clients – not just little glimmers of Christmas tree lights. I mean massive flashbulbs go off as you take them through a process of issue clarification. And they realize that perhaps the problem that thought they had isn’t the real problem. So I think that is a value that a good consultant brings to the table – helping to clarify what the real issues might be.

Budding consultants, take note!

How free is the Internet?

Semi-liveblogged notes from a seminar at the Nobel Peace Center, Oslo, arranged by the  Norwegian Board of Technology. I ran out of battery towards the end, and had to leave before the final session. (On the plus side, the Nobel center has free and available wifi, which I deem a Very Good Thing indeed):

Introduction: Bente Erichsen, head of the Nobel Peace Center: Parvin Ardalan, one of the founders of the One Million Signatures initiative to protest discrimination against women, could not come as her passport has been confiscated by the Iranian government and she is not allowed to leave Iran. Ingvild Myhre, Chairman Norwegian Board of Technology: Increase in state-sponsored censorship on the Internet.

Jonathan Zittrain, professor of Internet Law at Oxford and founder of the Berkman Center:

Filtering the Internet is hard compared to most other networks, because of the "best-effort" routing, otherwise known as "send-and-pray". Impossible to filter in the cloud, but at the point of the ISP you can filter. Examples include geographical filtering (movie releases, newspaper articles in the US about British law cases, Google.de removing neo-nazi material from the index, videos about various things at Google Video made unavailable by the uploaders (check-box solution)). In China, Google states that due to local law, some search results are withheld. ChillingEffects.com now gets the letters that Google receives with take-down notices. Microsoft implemented a filtering of their msn blogging system to satisfy the authorities (though it leaks like a sieve). This "check-box" form of filtering at the source is likely to increase. This not need to be measurable at the net itself: In Singapore, your expressions can cause you to lose our house to a defamation suit.

Much harder to measure surveillance than blockages. China has experimented with various measures. For a while, Google.com was redirected to a Chinese University search engine. Blocking access to content is a "parking ticket" offense, Various sites are blocked (drugs, pornography, religion, some political issues.) Saudi Arabia has a pretty clear filtering policy, quite open about it, not much fervor.

Filtering at the device. Access is shifting from PC to cell phone and other locked devices, and many of these new endpoints are controlled by vendors and thus open to pressure.

Many technology companies are at the horn of a dilemma here – witness Google’s dilemma going into China. Sullivan principles offers a middle way (started out with apartheid in South Africa), now written into American law (at precisely the time Sullivan repudiated them.) Are there ways to work with the government to concede to some of the restrictions while doing the ethical thing?

Many other services: Livecastr allows direct filming from cell phone, LiveLeaks, WikiLeaks, psiphon – allowing people to see Internet the way you see it. Automatic translation now at the point where it allows chatting between two speakers.

Jimbo Wales: Can Wikipedia promote free speech?

Wikipedia is a freely licensed encyclopedia written by thousands of volunteers in many languages. Now the 9th most popular website on the web. 12th most popular in Iran. How global? Follows Internet penetration, basically – large in English, only 15,000 articles in Hindi despite 280 mm speakers of Hindi.

Wikipedia in China: First block June 2-21, 2004, then September 23-27, 2004, then from October 19 2005 until now. Lately, BBC and Wikipedia in English has been unblocked, unclear why, probably Olympics. Wikipedia in Chinese has more than 170,000 articles, 12th largest of all Wikipedia. More Chinese speakers outside of China than there are Dutch people anywhere. Mistake to think of this as written outside China – the firewall is porous and of the 87 administrators, 29 are from mainland China.

Censorship in China is discreet and done at an industrial level, the aim is not at individuals. Most youngsters know how to get to Wikipedia. If you set up a mirror you will be shut down, but the Chinese authorities have avoided having sad stories about people being arrested for reading Wikipedia.

Core point: Wikipedia is free access. You can copy, modify, redistribute, redistribute modified versions, and you can do this commercially or non-commercially. Baidu redistributes Wikipedia (except the pages they censor) in China (though they put "all rights reserved" on it).

Quality? German Wikipedia compared to Brockhaus, in43 out of 50 articles, Wikipedia was the winner. Not an archive, not a dump, not a textbook. Not a place to testify about human rights abuses, but the place to document human rights abuses in a neutral way. Want to be an encyclopedia, access to knowledge should not be censored, therefore Wikipedia does not take the middle ground and refuses all kinds of censorship. Jim thinks Google does a huge mistake, but theirs is a considered decision and they are sincerely trying. As customers, we should put pressure on Google. Force Google to tell us what they are doing in China to change the policies they now have to abide by.

Every single person on the planet? Available in many languages, but many of them do not have many articles. Showed a video of Desanjo, the father of the Swahili Wikipedia, wrote day an night, recruited people, now 7000 articles. Have now started the Wikipedia Academy in Africa, will start many of them.

How do you design a space where people can engage in conversations? Make it open – like a restaurant that people want to be in.

Discussion: 

(I didn’t catch all of this discussion, partially because I participated in it. Notes a bit jumbled, will edit later.)

How powerful is Wikipedia? JW: More powerful than we like, especially a problem with bios of living people. We have the flag "The neutrality of this article is disputed", which I wish some newspapers would adopt.

Can you have a neutral point of view on human rights? JW: You can represent something in a neutral way, representing the different views. For instance, you can be neutral on abortion, saying that according to the Catholic church, this is a sin.

Things going in the right direction? Zittrain: Hard to say, social innovations such as Wikipedia tend to overcome attempts at censorship?

(My question, which was only partially answered.)What are the power implications over time for Google and Wikipedia. Both are on the ascendant now, profitable and popular, but does there need to be a different contribution model for a more stable wikipedia, and what happens when google no longer is running at a huge profit?

Mark Kriger: What worries you about the Internet five years out, at the edge of chaos? Zittrain: At the edge of chaos is suburbia: The tame, controlled online lives where things are OK, there is no reason that one bad apple can spoil everything. Jim Wales is now working on Wikisearch, more transparent about the search ranking. You don’t have a lot of investment in your use of Google, it is easy to switch, but that is not the case with many of the other services that are out there. Some regulatory interventions would be good about giving people the right to leave and easily take their information with them.

Citing Elie Wiesel: The opposite of good is not evil but indiffernence. Do not see the Internet as a shopping mall, keep it moving.

Part II: Ce
nsorship on the Net

In the absence of Parvin Ardalan, a movie from Iran about the million signatures movement was shown. It calls for equal rights for women in terms of judicial protection, divorce, inheritance and so on. A number of women have been arrested for collecting signatures. Parvin Ardalan was one of the organizers of this movement, and she has been arrested for this and has received a 2 year suspended prison sentence. She could not come, but the actor Camilla Belsvik delivered the speech for her:

  • Internet censored in Iran, but remain the most active medium for discussion of women’s issues. It has given women power, which has upset the power balance in families and between wives and husbands, and given them a mean of entering the public sphere.
  • On the Internet, women can connect and find a place for expression about their private lives. Especially for young women, using blogs, this has been especially important. They can talk about their romantic and family relationships, power structures, violence and sexuality.  This was a revolutionary development for them.
  • Some women have attained public identities even though they write anonymously.
  • Internet came to Iran during the reconstruction area in the 1990s and became more available during the reform years starting 1997. Women’s activism has been there, but in small groups. The reform period allowed more freedom of expression, but press permissions for women were few, especially for secular women. The reform period ended, and many were shut down. Many publications then turned to the Internet, as did NGOs were women were active.
  • Issues of feminism and sexuality are taken more seriously online. Gradually, filtering and blocking has become more severe. In 2004, the Ministry of Information technology ordered the words "women" and "gender" to be filtered, with the excuse of blocking pornography.
  • A large problem is self-censorship on politically and culturally sensitive issues. Women’s rights is politically as well as culturally sensitive.
  • There is a lack of laws, meaning that much of the censorship is arbitrary and haphazard. It is normally left to the judge to decide, since there are no clear laws on what is permitted and what is not.
  • The One Millon Signatures campaign was launched in august 2006. It aims to collect one million signatures on a petition to the Iranian government asking for equal rights for women in Iran. It has done much to focus the efforts on women’s rights in Iran.
  • The changeforequality web site has been blocked more than ten times, but each time a new domain name is registered and it continues publishing. Four of the activists have been arrested, but the struggle will continue. The action can serve as a model for movements in repressed societies everywhere.

Zittrain: Comments on censorship in Iran. (dicsussion with Helge Tennøe)

Pervasive censorship in Iran, web sites have to be licensed, many topics are not allowed, such as atheism. ISPs can be held responsible for criminal content. Very precise censorship, the ISP is responsible. The government is not monolithic, there are struggles inside the government, first they were excited about broadband, then you need a license to have anything faster than 128 Kbps.

Why do they have Internet in Iran at all? Very few states explicitly rejects modernity – Cuba and North Korea are some of the very few. Most states want the economic effects of the Internet. It is rather haphazardly enforced, though. Iran filters more stuff than China, but China tries harder to filter the relatively few things they filter.

The US government has actually contracted with Anonymizer, to provide circumvention software for Iranians, and for Iranians only. Rather primitive, and filtered, of all things, for pornography (the stop word "ass" means that usembassy.state.gov was filtered)

Radio Tibet – a radio in exile

Øystein Alme – started broadcasting in 1996, the Chinese have been jamming. Still the program is getting into Tibet. Øystein got involved as a backpacker many years ago, came back home and started reading up on Tibet, started Voice of Tibet. Now has fifteen employees, one in Norway, the rest is in Pakistan and India. Main channel into Tibet is shortwave radio, in China it is the Internet. Have spent a lot of time studying how to avoid Chinese jamming of frequencies, which are reserved for Voice of Tibet.

China is a repressive state, where the party dominates despite only having 6% of the population as members. (If you strip off those who are members because they need the membership to get a promotion in their job, not many remain). China has signed up to the articles on Human Rights, but break their promises with impunity.

Internet use in China is growing dramatically. China’s Internet police number 50,000, censoring made possible with foreign technology companies such as Google. One journalist, Shi Tao, got ten years for an article criticizing the government – and he was found thanks to information provided by Yahoo.

But the Internet is also the hope for change – with it we would not have the images from Tibet, for instance.

Discussion: Zittrain, Alme

Alme: Companies such as Yahoo, Google, Microsoft and others should join forces and together resist the policies of the government.

The Chinese government also use the Internet proactively, to push their point of view.

Zittrain: These companies could also offer business reasons for privacy, for instance offering encrypted accounts for business conversations.

Movie from Iran: a recording studio with bombs going off outside. During the Israeli siege of Lebanon, hit by 15000 missiles, a country of 4 million people under siege that we hear very little about. Zena el Khalil is an artist currently based in Beirut. Her blog from Beirut during the siege of Lebanon in 2006 was followed by a number of people as well as newspapers, who found it a valuable addition to official sources.

She talked about how her blog and others both changed the world’s perspective on the war and documented it: Lebanon is lacking in history since so much of it is rewritten by the warring parties. She also documented how Israeli attacks on a power plant created an ecological disaster, as oil spread as far north as Syria and even Turkey.

Cellphones against poverty

Excellent article about how cellphones reduce poverty from New York Times Magazines.

Paperlessly so

Messy officeI have an essay in ACM Ubiquity called Time to Get Serious about the Paperless Office, borne out of endless frustration with the communicative and legal aspects of paper. I think we are slowly getting into the situation where paper is the exception rather than the rule. As I stress in the essay, we will not get rid of paper until we get rid of it as metaphor.

I just can’t wait…

(And no, the picture you see here is not from my office, but from a company that apparently specializes in helping people tidy up….)

Mainframes and other survivor technologies

Good article on why technologies survive – largely due to adaptation. Mainframes are still around, but they are no longer mainframes.Radio is still around, but is now “audio wallpaper” for the car rather than the focal point of family nights. I wonder how TV will change (maybe it already has and I haven’t noticed) with the advent of Internet-based entertainment.

Do be evil

Wired has a good article on Steve Jobs’ management style and how that and Apple’s focus on tightly integrated, closed-down platforms has made the company successful despite violating almost every tenet of high tech management wisdom.

I don’t think this is much of a surprise, really – and that the success of Apple is pretty well explained by disruptive innovations theory. Apple is focused on the end user experience – the creative end user, at that – and demands control fo the entire platform in order to micro-manage that experience. (Actually, they are focused on the job the user wants to do, which is different from end user focus in that it gets you out of the segmentation trap.) As long as users want more of whatever they deliver – and they do – Apple will do fine, and the culture underscores that by keeping them focused on the customer’s interaction with their products rather than what anybody else is doing.

Where Apple will get in trouble is when they either deviate from what the users want (and the lack of Tablet functionality in the MacBook Pro is one such instance) or start to develop products in response to what others are doing. All of Apple’s markets will eventually shrink due to competition from more open platforms – such is technology evolution, after all – but as long as the company can continue to focus on areas where things still aren’ t working the way they are supposed to, I think they will do just fine. (And if you want an example of a company that did ont do that, but instead prettied up technology that others had created, check out the fall of the once mighty Bang & Olufsen, which increasingly are looking like an unbearably expensive Sharper Image.)

Platform building

I am right now participating in BSG Alliance teleconference on business platform strategy – a business platform being not just an information technology system that the extended enterprise can use, but also a set of processes and people which allows creating a business playground, an area for doing business together. This has been around for a long time – SABRE, Retaillink, AHS, and other famous cases were information systems that became bases for transactions and coordination.

The difference now lies in how the technology has progressed. First, the functionality is much better – you can now do collaboration – even co-creation – around products and services. Secondly, the price, both in investments and in time and people, of establishing a platform is going down significantly, perhaps to the point of not being a platform at all, but a set of interfaces for information exchange.

Within the software and hardware industries, platform thinking has been around for a long time – witness Steve Ballmer famously dancing the point 7 years ago. The winners in the software industrye – and in hardware such as workstations, PDAs and mobile phones – are those that can get their users to also become developers, to share their uses of their offerings in a form reusable by others. The goal is to get your business partners to do business not just with you, but through you, trying to establish and exploit network externalities – virtuous cycles where the size and composition of your customer and supplier set matters for new customers and suppliers.

Strategy is about to change – to the point where you not only have product, price and distribution to play with, but also the interrelationships between those you do business with. Operating in this space is complicated and difficult (and that is good, otherwise everybody could do it), but potentially very rewarding.