Day: 9 April 2006

Thanks to Steven Johnson for pointing out Daring Fireball’s post on this.

There are a zillion analysts out there telling me what Boot Camp means and why.

And most of them, in the end, tell me why they think Steve Jobs has got it wrong again.

But not John Gruber, the person behind DaringFireball. His analysis is the first that makes sense to me, that puts forward a hypothesis that I can understand. And even better, he pointed me at Gavin Shearer’s post and to Chris Clark’s.

For those who don’t want to bother reading all the links, here’s the summary:

• Boot Camp is not an Apple versus Microsoft play. Today.
• It allows the high-end techies that swear by Apple to have access to Windows on an oh-well-if-they-must basis.
• That alone makes it worth it, if it means taking even one percentage point off Windows’ share.
• But it’s more beautiful than that. Given the Intel move, first off it allows Apple to jump in on the high-end PC market big time. This is a hardware play.
• It gets better. What Leopard (or possibly its successor) will do is ring-fence Vista within an OSX environment…and do so not in dual-boot mode but as quality virtualisation. This is an everything play.
  

I buy these arguments in principle. The plan for Intel followed by BootCamp followed by Leopard and by virtualisation-meeting-coolth makes sense to me. I can even see XBox beginning to sweat a little.
The bit I’m adding?

This is all about Jobs taking the iPod halo into the enterprise.

Tomorrow’s enterprise.

Staffed by tomorrow’s people. Generation M.

You see, they’re too young to know that nobody got fired for buying Microsoft. Far too young to know that nobody got fired for buying IBM. Guess what they’re going to buy if son-of-Leopard is around?

I was reading Clarence Fisher’s excellent post on open content and open learning, itself drawing from a fascinating symposium at MIT.

I quote from Clarence’s post:

“Importantly, many of these games remain popular mainly because of user generated content. These games ship with tools allowing the people who purchase them to create their own virtual worlds, their own stuff. The game makers have not locked them down, but instead, many of them take the exact opposite tack, depending on the community that grows around the game to create new content to keep the games interesting and demanding. This will often drive games into spaces where the original designers never intended.”

And this made me think. Nohria and Lawrence, in their four-drive framework in Driven, define the drivers as Acquire Learn Bond Defend.

And (as I am wont to do) I found the Cluetrain Refrain running through my head. Markets are conversations.

What’s an MMOG? A market, a conversation, where people acquire things and bond while playing, maybe do a bit of learning and defending as well.

What’s Betfair? (Although here I am treading into Park Paradigm territory) A market, a conversation, where people acquire things and defend things.

The more I thought about it, the more I realised that every web co-creation experience I see, from Google and Amazon and eBay through to Yahoo and Flickr and last.fm, every one of these is a conversation that satisfies two or more of the drivers.

And then, as I moved again from Cluetrain to Driven, I realised that most of these sites/businesses tended to overlook the same driver. The Learn driver.

Because I cannot help feel that the first people who can really crack a Four Driver model for a business will win. Big.

And if I really feel that this is true, why am I telling everyone? Why am I not keeping it to myself and trying to “monetise” it some way? I’ll tell you why. Because thinking that way keeps patent clerks and lawyers busy, and destroys innovation.

So I’m going to keep reading Clarence. And people like him. To see how the Learn is brought into play. To see Driven become part of Cluetrain.