Jobs targets Generation M at Work

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?

Empowering communities: Driven meets Cluetrain

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.

Info Libre

I’ve been re-reading Promises to Keep by William W. Fisher III. An absolute must-read for people interested in digital rights and in alternative compensation models.

An excerpt from the inside front cover:

If the available technologies were exploited fully, the cost of audio and video recordings would drop sharply, the income of artists would rise, many more artists could reach global audiences, the variety of music and films popularly available would increase sharply, and listeners and viewers would be able to participate much more easily in the shaping of their cultural environments.

Utopia maybe. But a utopia I believe in and one I will do everything in my power to help create.

Which brings me to the point of this post. I was reminded of Canto Livre, the digital library of Brazilian music, while reading the Fisher book. I have no idea how it is doing, and would love pointers.

Is there anyone out there already creating an opensource pool of free-to-net material? Free because of three possible reasons: out of copyright; copyright owner provides it into pool free; copyright owner agrees to place in pool for alternative compensation.

Tom Maddox and Dom Sayers have recently asked me to provide free-to-net versions of stuff I own. Where can I place this stuff for posterity?

If enough people placed stuff in a pool like this, and the pool collected donations, would we not subvert the need for a tax-based compensation system?

Someone please tell me where my stuff should go. Even Google is an answer. Or Creative Commons. I just want to know where to put the stuff, a virtual place where no one can later claim copyright….

Why would you want to turn [customers] away? Alan Rusbridger on walled gardens

Another example of how the web works. I have to be on vacation in India and reading Steven Johnson’s blog to find out about something Alan Rusbridger said recently………

I quote from the Rusbridger speech, via Steven:

The more of a wall that you put around, whether it’s a wall of payment or a wall of registration, the more you’re repelling people rather than building an audience for the day when we hope that advertising will come in like the cavalry and rescue us. So I think at the moment, the smarter thing to do is to make your content available everywhere and to have it aggregated and linked to like mad by everybody in the world, because that way you will reach a gigantic audience. And that matters journalistically. If you’re in the business of journalism for influence, and because of the Guardian worldview that you believe in, it’s terrific to have an audience of 14 million instead of 400,000. That’s wonderful. So why would you want to turn them away?

I have often felt that there is no such thing as a bad customer, just a customer who does not fit your business model. And in the past, businesses have spent time discarding customers as “not relevant to the business model”. And one firm’s rejects became some other firm’s Most Valuable Customers, as many airline and credit-card “bottom-feeder” businesses have shown.

This does not make sense. If you want a sustainable business, then adapt the business model to suit your customers, not the other way around. It is the relationship that matters. And you will work out a way for all parties in a relationship to gain as a result. Otherwise it is not a relationship.
You can find the Steven Johnson post here, with links to the original speech audio as well as some very useful comments. [And yes, Steven, I am looking forward to reading Ghost Map!]

Contract versus covenant

A few days ago, Doc Searls wrote another of his trade-mark thought-provoking posts, this time on business as morality. And the Lakoff-Searls snowball took off in style after that, with a number of conversations and posts taking the ideas and making it their own.

Doc also told me about the relationship-before-conversation-before-transaction model he learned from an African pastor, something he refers to in his post and something I have always believed in. Following on from that original post, Doc pointed those that were interested to a post from AKMA, which  “affirmed the priority of grace (generosity, gratuity and giving) over other modes of interaction”.

This reminded me of something I have often discussed with my pastor, and something that in my mind brings together what Doc said and what AKMA posted.

For mode of interaction read type of relationship.

Contract versus covenant.

Both types of relationship use conversation as a basis to extend the relationship and to discover potential transactions. But there the similarity ends.

In a contract relationship, at the first sign of breach you look for recourse: What am I going to be get as a result of his error, how can I make money from his failure?

In a covenant relationship, at the first sign of breach you look for ways to fix it: What are we going to do together to solve this problem?

Covenant relationships exist between parents and children. They exist between family members, between people who have known each other for many years (such as schoolmates or past neighbours) between people who have shared life’s pleasures as well as pains.

When you work with a  start-up, having a contract relationship makes no sense at all. So when I experimented with young companies, it was always about “how to fix it” rather than “how to kill them”.

I used the same terms to think about relationships at work. Contract versus covenant. And I realised that some of my relationships were contract and some were covenant.

Now, as the years have passed, I wonder. I wonder why people have contract relationships at all.

If you can’t commit then don’t call it a relationship. For a relationship to exist there must be commitment on both sides.
And if you can commit and do commit, then live by grace.