Day: 20 June 2006

A sideways look at the effects of the Scoble announcement

From Alexa’s Movers and Shakers:

8. up 1,100% ~ Weekly Traffic Rank: 6,726 (was 82,338)

Podtech.net
(No description)
www.podtech.net – Site info

9. up 260% ~ Weekly Traffic Rank: 3,089 (was 13,507)

Scobleizer.wordpress.com
(No description)
www.scobleizer.wordpress.com – Site info
And if you’re bored, go visit John Sadowski’s site, it was an unusual entry in the top 10 so it got my attention. The mere presence of that site on the Top 10 Movers list bears out one of Hugh Macleod’s axioms.

Four Pillars: An open source essay worth reading

It’s not that often that I am by myself in a strange city away from the usual attractions and distractions of life, and one of the things that lets me do is catch up on my reading. [Yes, I know I read a lot and don’t sleep much, but I mean a different type of reading, more like StumbleUpon meets The Big Library in the Sky].

You may know the kind of reading I mean. When you go through your indecipherable notes listing the things you wanted to catch up on when you had the time. And that’s what I was doing, researching some of my pet subject areas, when I came across Paul Graham’s site. And I found some really great stuff there.

Here’s a small sample of excerpts from an essay entitled What Business Can Learn From Open Source: Each quotation is shown in bold and italicised. My comments intersperse the quotes.
A recent survey found 52% of companies are replacing Windows servers with Linux servers. [1]

More significant, I think, is which 52% they are. At this point, anyone proposing to run Windows on servers should be prepared to explain what they know about servers that Google, Yahoo, and Amazon don’t.

My suspicion is that the 48% are all Not-Invented-Here IT departments, and that this number is dropping. It may actually be lower than 48% already, but there’s still a tendency NOT to claim you run Linux, for fear of being considered radical, insecure, pinko, UnAmerican, whatever. So what do we know that Google, Amazon and Yahoo don’t? Probably that our jobs are less secure than theirs, so we act out our secrets and lies.
Like open source, blogging is something people do themselves, for free, because they enjoy it. Like open source hackers, bloggers compete with people working for money, and often win. The method of ensuring quality is also the same: Darwinian. Companies ensure quality through rules to prevent employees from screwing up. But you don’t need that when the audience can communicate with one another. People just produce whatever they want; the good stuff spreads, and the bad gets ignored. And in both cases, feedback from the audience improves the best work.

Paul makes the Good Snowballs Can’t Be Suppressed point a whole lot more elegantly than I did. And touches on the Covenants versus Contracts bit as well.

….the business world was so surprised by one lesson from open source: that people working for love often surpass those working for money. Users don’t switch from Explorer to Firefox because they want to hack the source. They switch because it’s a better browser.

Key point. It’s all about better. As the saying goes, first you need a good doctor, and if he or she is cheap then that is also good. You don’t need a cheap doctor.

As in software, when professionals produce such crap, it’s not surprising if amateurs can do better. Live by the channel, die by the channel: if you depend on an oligopoly, you sink into bad habits that are hard to overcome when you suddenly get competition. [4]

Protectionism Produces Poop.

And finally, a longer extract:

To me the most demoralizing aspect of the traditional office is that you’re supposed to be there at certain times. There are usually a few people in a company who really have to, but the reason most employees work fixed hours is that the company can’t measure their productivity.

The basic idea behind office hours is that if you can’t make people work, you can at least prevent them from having fun. If employees have to be in the building a certain number of hours a day, and are forbidden to do non-work things while there, then they must be working. In theory. In practice they spend a lot of their time in a no-man’s land, where they’re neither working nor having fun.

If you could measure how much work people did, many companies wouldn’t need any fixed workday. You could just say: this is what you have to do. Do it whenever you like, wherever you like. If your work requires you to talk to other people in the company, then you may need to be here a certain amount. Otherwise we don’t care.

I want to meet this guy. Anybody know him and can set it up, please do. And if he is in the Bay Area, please let him know I’m here till Friday 23rd. Just in case.

Paul makes one other important point. Bloggers are writers. To some people, the word “blogger” conjures up something cheap and nasty, and organisational DNA kicks into immunity overdrive. Much like the effect of the word Wiki.

So I salute a writer who’s been around for a while, but who’s only just come to my notice. I shall be linking to your essays, Paul. Thanks for sharing your thoughts.

Four Pillars: More on enterprise standards

I thought it was worth picking up on the comments made by Kris Tuttle and by James Dellow on my previous post. We’re all driving towards the same place.

First, on the reason why enterprises choose to reduce proliferation of architectures and their components, why formal standards made sense. I believe this was for three reasons:

One, procurement. You could bring purchasing power into play by selecting and standardising on one. Even if you kept a second waiting in the wings, the threat of switching was a powerful incentive for vendors to keep their prices sharp. That kind of thinking is the basis of the story of the Amdahl salesman who walked into a major buyer’s office, put an Amdahl mug down on the guy’s desk and said “There. Just let it stay there and you’ll save a million bucks”, or words to that effect.

Two, EAI. All the “big” consultants in the world were eager to tell you that IF you standardised on operating system and database and language and whatever else, THEN you would have reduced costs of application integration. They could then shift to selling data mining and business intelligence consulting while you manfully tried (and failed) to extricate your data from your systems.

Three, resource planning and hiring. By reducing the skillsets you needed, you had a better definition of the pool of people you had to have, with high resource fungibility. Then they came along and sold you the resources you didn’t have for the skillsets you were told you didn’t need. Usually augmented by arguments about “time to market” being the reason to deviate from the standards they helped you implement.
It’s always been about cost reduction. And all three reasons, if true, would have yielded cost reductions.

But unfortunately the cost reductions were hard to come by. The vendor of choice had a million ways of ensuring that you kept paying more, because you made them a strategic partner and gave them access to all your plans and thoughts and ideas. So now they could lock you in at your request and make you feel good about it. Random upgrade cycles came your way, always selling some new sizzle you didn’t need, but thoughtfully marketed to the people you gave them access to. The vendor relationship managers even went to the extent of camping in your offices at your cost, ostensibly for your own good.  And they were there to shift tin. And bodies. Owned or brokered. And they did it well.

I’ve already said enough about the resource argument and the EAI argument, both horribly flawed.

What we are discovering is that the standards are about an ecosystem, an ecosystem that is not closely held but community-managed and driven. And thankfully we are seeing such ecosystem standards emerge. That’s what I meant by the BETA generation meeting opensource.

Separately, when James mentions research reports claiming that institutions will ask employees to bring their own devices in, and the consequent challenges for IT departments, I think the answer is right but the reasoning of the research firms is wrong.

It’s not the institution who will tell employees to bring in their own devices; it’s the employees who will tell institutions that they insist on using their own devices. Stickered and personalised and skinned and whatever. [I wrote a post a long time ago about the fallacy of forcing people to use the firm’s devices, an action akin to telling people that they could only write using company pens….]

Any device you like. Wherever you like. Whenever you like. Connected whichever way you can. Everything recorded and archived and searchable. Everything open to begin with, then selectively closed to reflect real privacy or confidentiality issues, usually protected by law or regulation anyway.

Using just four classes of application: Syndication Search Fulfilment and Conversation. With a plethora of plugins and extensions from a similar plethora of sources, working within an ecosystem approach to standards, market-driven, market-maintained, community-enriched.

With the right things done in terms of identity, permissioning, authentication. Which affects our current concepts of IPR and DRM and Security and Confidentiality and Privacy. Which is why I spend so much time thinking about these things.