Month: April 2006

High speed fossilisation

I grew up in Calcutta. (And yes, I still spell it that way; habit, I guess). One of the things about growing up in Calcutta was that you learnt the price of being first. Things decayed. First-mover disadvantage. The cost of upgrading in a brownfield environment was high and therefore put off wherever possible.

This affected many things. Sewers, electricity, water supply, cabling, transportation, communications, you name it. Usually utilities of one sort or other.

But nostalgia was good in those days. Things that drifted into obsolescence did so at glacial speeds. You could enjoy your time as first movers.

Now, I read stories like this in the Hindu. Headlined “Which Indian city will ‘unwire’ first?”  And I quote from the story:

….But the so-called “leaders” among Indian Information Technology destinations — Bangalore, Hyderabad, Chennai and the satellite towns of Noida and Gurgaon around Delhi — have been conspicuous laggards in taking the benefits of such technology to their citizens.

I find this fascinating.

Technology fossilisation in the past was all about the cost of moving from one generation of technology to another, and the skin-graft-like difficulty of making the move in a live environment.

Today, when I see things like adoption rates for public wi-fi and the madness that surrounds telecommunications regulations in many so-called developed countries, and when I see quotes like the one above from the Hindu, I realise something else is happening.

Fossilisation is taking place at faster and faster rates. Because of just one thing.

Greed.

I can find no other explanation. It reminds me of the way opensource in Europe was so reliant on the emerging economies of central and eastern Europe; they were the only ones who were motivated to create and use opensource because they had no other choice. And they weren’t evolved enough to have bureaucratic governmental, corporate and municipal greed.

Fossil fools.

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!]