Rip Van Winkle was a character in a Washington Irving short story who went to sleep before the American War of Independence and woke up twenty years later in an independent US of A. A loyal subject of the British Monarch, he went to sleep to run away from his nagging wife, and woke up to find that his wife had died, his friends were nowhere to be seen and the British Monarch was no longer of any import in his land. So he “saw” dramatic change seem to appear “overnight”.

If, instead, he’d gone to sleep at the end of 1989 and woken up this morning, these are some of the changes he would have seen:

Costs of compute power

A gigabyte of storage

The Mobile Phone

Access to the internet/the web

Windows/The Desktop

The march of AIDS

Climate change: The Arctic Icecap

Just sayin’.

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Life In Transit

Note: My thanks to Orin Zebest for all the photographs, provided via Flickr on a Creative Commons Attribution Licence. Orin, you’re Ze Best. And I’ve left all your original titles in!.

Note: I had some trouble with the photographs when viewed via the permalink. I’ve reloaded each one from a different “source” and with standardised parameters and it seems to work. Let me know if you have any trouble.

2010: The Year of Platforms

I think 2010 is going to be the Year of Platforms. Not Snake-Oil-as-A-Service. Real honest-to-goodness heavy-lifting platforms. The stuff that makes it possible for everyone to have Everything-As-A-Service.

Some of you think that platforms are passe, so 2007. Some of you think that platforms are cloud-cuckoo-land, to be filed alongside the Paperless Office and the Paperless Loo. To my mind there’s something very William Gibson-ish about platforms: the future’s already here, it’s just unevenly distributed.

In 2010, we will see this distribution become more even. We use platforms every day, it’s just not that obvious to us. A credit card is a platform, as Richard Schmalensee and David Evans pointed out so vividly in Paying With Plastic. An airport is a platform. Facebook is a platform, as is Twitter. As is LinkedIn. If you’re using a smartphone to read this, then you’re probably using a platform: both iPhone as well as Android are platforms. If you’re at a desktop and using Firefox and WordPress, as I am, they’re platforms as well. Amazon.com is a platform, as is Force.com. Ribbit, the reason I spend a good deal of time in San Francisco, is a platform. Each with its own ecosystem. Each working with other platforms in a co-opetitive, almost fractal way.

So just what is a platform? A place. A device. A company. An everyday item. Bits of software. All of the above.

When I say “platform” I mean:

• something that is a foundation, an enabling environment, upon which others can build things, make things
• something that exists for a specific purpose (or set of purposes), and which invests in capabilities related to those purposes
• something that then makes it easy for people to use those capabilities
• something that does all this in a commercial model that facilitates the creation and development of new products, new services, new markets, new marketplaces
• something that can coexist with other platforms and ecosystems

Humour me for a minute or two. Imagine what would happen if enterprise IT departments started behaving like the platforms that I defined above. A foundation. An enabling environment. Something that exists for a specific set of capabilities, that executes on those capabilities, that makes it easy for people to use those capabilities, that supports the creation and development of new products and services. You know something? I think many boards would be happy to have an IT department that did just that, that behaved like the platforms defined above.

It’s not just about IT departments. It’s about all shared services. Actually it’s about all services. You see, whenever something gets produced and consumed at the point of production, whenever something cannot be inventoried or “bottled”, there is something quintessentially human about the phenomenon. So we have more to learn from biology than we have from physics, something we’re slowly getting better at. Slowly.

Commuter Service

Dinky Service Station

The importance of trust

Service is a human concept. Human beings concern themselves about all sorts of things above and beyond the “fit-for-purpose-ness” of the service. They care about their personal safety and security, about fairness and equality in the environment around them, about simplicity and convenience of use, about many such things. And they care about the exchange of value taking place, what they have to give up, what they gain for it. Humans want to trust the people who provide them with the services, they want to trust the people who provide the platforms underpinning the services.

In a hierarchical world, with deep vertical integration and end-to-end control, this may have seemed easy. In a networked world all this becomes a lot harder, as vertical integration becomes less feasible, as services become more and more “horizontal”, as end-to-end control becomes a nonsense. In such a context, trust becomes more and more important, a point that Chris Brogan makes eloquently in his book Trust Agents. Let me give an example. People can give me a million reasons why Facebook should be considered “closed” and “evil” and whatever else. But to me Facebook is the place where Dave Morin works, where David Recordon works, where Chris Kelly works. They become the face of Facebook to me, and if I trust them I trust Facebook. I cannot do otherwise. It’s the same with Amazon. Every time I meet Werner Vogels I meet Amazon. Trust agents. If I don’t like something I am free to express it; if enough people express themselves similarly then things change. Customer-driven change, built around trust relationships. That’s the way it is nowadays.

Anything that aspires to be a platform needs to engender this trust. So when you look at “platform APIs” don’t be surprised at what they do at their core. They’re usually about a very small number of things:

• user directories, adding and removing people, grouping and classification
• identity, authentication and permissioning
• service and data inventorying, cataloguing and access
• publishing of things digital
• distribution of things digital

Safety First

The need for openness and transparency

Much of this is done to satisfy the security, safety, privacy and confidentiality aspects of human needs. It’s not about control. It’s about what people want. Of course the platforms can do this more openly, more effectively. But we have to remember these are pioneering times for open platforms. Marty Cooper made the first mobile phone call in 1973. Tim Berners-Lee wrote his Web paper in 1989. Software-based open multisided platforms are relatively new in comparison, and they will adapt to achieving the trust levels necessary.

Back to the IT department. One of the reasons people distrusted the IT department was the smoke-and-mirrors black-box nature of the beast. What was not expressed clearly was not understood. What was not understood was not trusted. Back to the trust issue. Do what you say you’re going to do. Do it. Prove you did it.

This requires something somewhat alien to the command-and-control nature of the traditional firm. Openness and transparency.

Cutaway Canyon

Verifiability

That’s why you can find open, accessible and extensive documentation on APIs in places like the Facebook Developer Wiki. But it goes further than that, because trust works in daisy chains. So Facebook have to say “policy” things like “You must not use a user’s session key to make an API call on behalf of another user.”. Why? So that their identification, authentication and permissioning is seen to work. And seen to work verifiably.

Another example. This is what Apple has to say as part of the documentation for the iPhone Dev Center, under Fast Launch, Short Use:

The strength of iPhone OS–based devices is their immediacy. A typical user pulls a device out of a pocket or bag and uses it for a few seconds, or maybe a few minutes, before putting it away again. The user might be taking a phone call, looking up a contact, changing the current song, or getting some piece of information during that time.

In iPhone OS, only one foreground application runs at a time. This means that every time the user taps your application’s icon on the Home screen, your application must launch and initialize itself quickly to minimize the delay. If your application takes a long time to launch, the user may be less inclined to use it.

In addition to launching quickly, your application must be prepared to exit quickly too. Whenever the user leaves the context of your application, whether by pressing the Home button or by using a feature that opens content in another application, iPhone OS tells your application to quit. At that time, you need to save any unsaved changes to disk and exit as quickly as possible. If your application takes more than 5 seconds to quit, the system may terminate it outright.

So Apple take care of the user experience through the policies and guidelines of their platform.

As I said before, it’s not just about the IT department, I used them as an example. Every firm is a platform. Why stop at firms? This thing is fractal. Aggregations of firms, entire markets, are platforms.

Even governments are platforms. Platforms that identify, authenticate and permission people to use products and services, that allow them to publish services and data, to subscribe to services and data, in a controlled manner. Platforms that allow people to build new services simply and efficiently, that allow markets to form and be formed.

Yes, governments too are platforms. Something that Tim O’Reilly has been driving for quite some time, and something that the current administration appears to be taking seriously. But open government is no simple matter, even with all the heart and will in place. We use terms like collaboration and teamwork and innovation freely, but making them work in a government context is easier said than done.

Model Engineering Ingenuity

Balancing Buddies

Smaller Than Small

Lumber Mill in Miniature

Small pieces loosely joined

Yesterday my daughter wanted me to buy something from AllPosters,, and when I did I was faced with a variety of payment options. Not just the traditional Visa or Mastercard. But stuff like PayPal and Amazon Payments. Sometime before that I was using InstaPaper to bookmark stuff I wanted to read later, and I watched some stuff on Boxee. In both cases I think I used Facebook Connect. Some of you have heard me speak about using last.fm and audioscrobbler and FoxyTunes and TwittyTunes and Firefox and Twitter in a simple chain before.

It’s where things are going. Sets of small horizontal services doing simple but important things, with the customer having a level of choice at each stage rather than being faced with lock-in. Platforms have to be about choice, no one wants to learn the AOL way again. Walled gardens do a prison make.

It’s not enough to be open, the platforms have to focus on open innovation. As the saying goes, none of us is as smart as all of us. Whatever set we belong to, the aggregate of smart people outside the set will usually overwhelm the aggregate of smart people within the set. Innovation takes place most effectively at the edge where two well-bounded domains meet, and collaboration becomes even more important as a result.

I guess all of this strikes some of you as utopian and rose-tinted and overly optimistic, but I urge you to look for yourself. Think about mail. Think about publishing. About “sharing”. About bookmarking. About paying. About watching. About reading. In a digital context you have choice for every one of these activities. Sure there are dominant market leaders. And sure there is immense resistance to their dominance. Monocultures will not be tolerated, not by the public, not by the regulators, not by the competitors. It’s only a matter of time.

Which means that interoperability and standards become very important.

Shipping Container Junction

Interchange

Switchboard Railyard

Interoperability, standardisation and convergence

It has taken a long time for people to figure out that the data centre and the exchange are like Kipling’s Judy O’Grady and the Colonel’s Lady, sisters under the skin. The very concept of cloud computing, and of cloud services, has been a long time in the making. And we’re going to need a lot of work done to get interoperability right, to get the standards right. And the standards aren’t just about formats and protocols, they’re about the data. Which is why microformats are going to grow in importance, why Linked Data will become critical, why the Web Science Trust set up by Tim Berners-Lee is such an exciting proposition.

As all this takes place, we have to keep reminding ourselves of the biggest change that has taken place as a result of the Web. The power of Us.

Graffiti Yard

Doc's Diner and Saloon

Customer power and rights

Anybody can build a digital bookstore, but they can’t get millions of reviews overnight. Anyone can build a photo site, but not get a bazillion tags overnight. Anyone can build an auction house, but not get millions of buyer and seller ratings. Anyone can build a social network, but not get yottabytes of user-generated content stored with them. In today’s world, 20 million is a public beta and 500 million the table stakes for entry into global marketplaces. People will come where they can deposit their data easily and take it out as easily. They know that they are instrumental in creating value. So initiatives like Doc Searls’ VRM will become very important. [Sometimes people get hung up about the name. Don't. The concept is important, not the name.]

Warehouse for Mountains

Scale and its implications

As I said before, all this is taking place at scales where we’ve never operated before, or even conceived of operating before. Skype, Apple, Facebook, Amazon, PayPal, they’re all showing us scale in a way we’ve never seen before. But up to now much of the scale has been achieved in some sort of walled garden. That’s going to change. Google. What we’re seeing with OpenSocial and Android is not to be taken lightly, what we’re seeing with Facebook Connect and Amazon Web Services is going to get bigger and bigger.

Platform-based scale has its effects on cost points and price points, on coverage and availability. And the changes have already taken place. It takes nearly nine minutes for light from the sun to reach us. Something similar is happening with platforms. Platforms beget scale. And ecosystems.

IT departments will have a choice. Firms will have a choice. Governments will have a choice. To paraphrase Gandhi, they can be the change they want to see. Or fossilise watching.

Health. Education. Welfare. Communications. Transportation. Welcome to the world of platforms. Or…..

Sidelined

End of The Line

Back to the old IT department. Creating and operating an enabling environment. Handling the directories and catalogues and relationships. In some cases operating Apple-like and “certifying” the applications, in other cases taking a laissez faire approach like Facebook does. Leaving the choice of device to the individual. Letting that individual select the services she wants. Relaxed about the hosting of those services, making that the responsibility of the application provider. Focusing on doing the core things well, in an open multisided marketplace.

So what’s wrong with the picture?

Folds In The Sky

Yup, the sky’s got a fold in it.

If we don’t get the cloud computing environment right, we will hold all this up for a few more years. Which would be a terrible waste. A waste of energy, of scarce resource, of money, of time. Of everything.

Platforms are the way forward. Platforms can and will happen. Platforms are happening. We just have to make sure that the infrastructure for the platforms is done right. Infrastructure in terms of compute cycles, storage and bandwidth. Infrastructure in terms of interoperability protocols, standards and guidelines. Infrastructure in terms of duties and rights and regulations. Infrastructure in terms of sustainability and affordability.

If I had to choose one word for 2010 it would be Stewardship.

Stewardship made possible by open platforms on reliable infrastructure.

Have a great 2010, everyone. Especially if you got this far reading this post.

My thanks again to Orin Zebest for all the photographs, provided via Flickr on a Creative Commons Attribution Licence. Orin, you’re Ze Best.

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Some of you may have noticed that I like my cricket. And one of the things I like about cricket is the cricket story; the history of cricket is festooned with anecdotes and tales and apocrypha, filling a very large number of books. As with most other stories, over time, these stories gain a life of their own, with a series of embellishments and accoutrements; this is particularly noticeable when the story is about  larger-than-life characters, something that cricket’s cup runneth over with.

One such story involves one of the largest of the larger-than-life characters: Freddie Trueman.

The story goes like this:

Trueman bowls. Batsman is trapped plumb LBW. Trueman appeals. Not out.

Next ball. Trueman ever-so-slightly irritated. Trueman bowls. Audible snick, ball deflects and sails upward, caught behind. Trueman appeals. Not out.

Third ball. Trueman a little more irritated now. Trueman bowls. Through the gate, stumps spreadeagled, middle stump uprooted and cartwheeling. Trueman turns to the umpire and says with a wry smile “We nearly had him that time, didn’t we?”

We nearly had him that time, didn’t we?

Actually that’s the way I feel about recent discussions to do with downloads and filesharing in the UK.

First we had the Digital Britain Report. Lots of hard work, lots of interviews, lots of people given a chance to express their views and opinions.

The report had an entire chapter on Creative Industries in the Digital World. The chapter headings were Towards a New Framework for Content; Protecting and Rewarding Creativity; The Legislative Proposals; Legislation to Reduce Unlawful Peer-to-Peer Filesharing; Other Rights Issues: Fair Use; Modernising Licensing; Intellectual Property Office’s Copyright Strategy; Orphan Works;  Matched Penalties for Physical and Online Copyright Infringement; A Role for Rights-Based Funding Mechanisms; Interactive Content: Converting Creativity into Value; Digital Test Beds to Trial New Products and Business Models; Extending Existing Interventions to Interactive Content; Virtual Worlds; Digital Britain: Film, Cinema and Literature; Literature; Case Study: Retirees.

From that line-up, you would think that serious consideration had been given to most aspects of what is essentially a complex subject. The fact that we’re entering a new world, with new products, services and business models. The case for change. The legislative implications of that change, needing to reward creators while protecting the principle of fair use. And so on and so forth.

When it comes to legislation to reduce unlawful peer-to-peer filesharing, the report had this to say:

The key elements of what we are proposing to do are:

• Ofcom will be placed under a duty to take steps aimed at reducing online copyright infringement. Specifically they will be required to place obligations on ISPs to require them:
• to notify alleged infringers of rights (subject to reasonable levels of proof from rights-holders) that their conduct is unlawful; and
• to collect anonymised information on serious repeat infringers (derived from their notification activities), to be made available to rights-holders together with personal details on receipt of a court order.

Ofcom will also be given the power to specify, by Statutory Instrument, other conditions to be imposed on ISPs aimed at preventing, deterring or reducing online copyright infringement, such as:

• Blocking (Site, IP, URL);
• Protocol blocking;
• Port blocking;
• Bandwidth capping (capping the speed of a subscriber’s Internet connection and/or capping the volume of data traffic which a subscriber can access);
• Bandwidth shaping (limiting the speed of a subscriber’s access to selected protocols/services and/or capping the volume of data to selected protocols/services); and
• Content identification and filtering.

This power would be triggered if the notification process has not been successful after a year in reducing infringement by 70% of the number of people notified.

Remember, this was the outcome of a long period of formal consultation with people from all parts of the industries involved. Seemed a decent piece of work. And then what happened?

Then, the Secretary of State for Business, Inn0vation and Skills, announced plans to discard the proposals in the Report, and rather than go through a year-long trial period with non-technical measures, accelerate the move towards technical measures. Measures that ISPs have been united in opposing, for a plethora of reasons: rationale, lack of fairness, affordability and effectiveness being the main ones.

I thought to myself, when I read the Digital Britain Report, the hawks were plumb leg-before-wicket. They were out.

But no, the Secretary of State decided “Not Out”.

A little while later, I read another official document. This time it was the All-Party Parliamentary Communications Group, reporting on an Inquiry called “Can we keep our hands off the Net?”

This was another duly appointed committee going through its orderly business, seeking to answer five questions:

#1 Can we distinguish circumstances when ISPs should be forced to act to deal with some type of bad traffic? When should we insist that ISPs should not be forced into dealing with a problem, and that the solution must be found elsewhere?

#2 Should the Government be intervening over behavioural advertising services, either to encourage or discourage their deployment; or is this entirely a matter for individual users, ISPs and websites?

#3 Is there a need for new initiatives to deal with online privacy, and if so, what should be done?

#4 Is the current global approach to dealing with child sexual abuse images working effectively? If not, then how should it be improved?

#5 Who should be paying for the transmission of Internet traffic? Would it be appropriate to enshrine any of the various notions of Network Neutrality in statute?

There were ten conclusions regarding Question 1. Conclusions of an All-Party Committee duly set up to look at this issue. And what did they say? Here are some extracts:

We believe that voluntary arrangements would be the best way of tackling this issue and
note with approval the initiative which is already under way in Australia. Accordingly,
we recommend that UK ISPs, through Ofcom, ISPA or another appropriate
organisation, immediately start the process of agreeing a voluntary code for
detection of, and effective dealing with, malware infected machines in the UK.

2. If this voluntary approach fails to yield results in a timely manner, then we further
recommend that Ofcom unilaterally create such a code, and impose it upon the UK
ISP industry on a statutory basis.

We conclude that much of the problem with illegal sharing of copyrighted material
has been caused by the rightsholders, and the music industry in particular, being
far too slow in getting their act together and making popular legal alternatives
available.

We do not believe that disconnecting end users is in the slightest bit consistent with
policies that attempt to promote eGovernment, and we recommend that this
approach to dealing with illegal file-sharing should not be further considered.

We think that it is inappropriate to make policy choices in the UK when policy
options are still to be agreed by the EU Commission and EU Parliament in their
negotiations over the “Telecoms Package”. We recommend that the Government
terminate their current policy-making process, and restart it with a new
consultation once the EU has made its decisions.

Let me repeat one of those conclusions. ” We conclude that much of the problem with illegal sharing of copyrighted material has been caused by the rightsholders, and the music industry in particular, being far too slow in getting their act together and making popular legal alternatives available.

So this time I thought to myself, definitely caught behind. But the Secretary of State for Business, Innovation and Skills had other ideas.

He’s announced that formal three-strikes legislation will be in place for April 2010.

Not out.

But it isn’t time for us to give up hope as yet, despite the presidentially non-consultative hide-head-in-sand approaches in evidence. Very recently, I saw the possibility of help from a most unlikely quarter: Disney.

Here’s a quote from the CEO of Disney:

The business model that underpins the movie business is changing,” Bob Iger told the Financial Times in an interview published on Monday. “If we don’t adapt to the change there won’t be a business — that’s my exhortation to my team.”

The newspaper said Iger advocated a fundamental rethink of the costs associated with movie production and marketing.

And I thought to myself. What a shame. Britain could have led, should have led, the world in a complete rethink of the principles, practices and legislation required for a thriving digital world. Instead, we’re about to take ten steps back while Disney, of all people, move forward.

Good for Bob Iger. Good for Disney. Someone has to change.

And, as I saw the wicket spreadeagling, I turned to the Secretary of State and said, wryly, “Nearly had him that time”.

Credits: Trueman photo hanoiswans; leg-before-wicket photo Wikimedia Commons; caught behind photo cricketweb.net; wicket spreadeagled story tribuneindia.com.

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