Author: JP

I’ve been watching news about IE7 quite closely, with a lot more interest than I’d had in prior upgrades. Trying to figure out what Microsoft will do to make up for lost time, something they’ve been able to do reasonably often. Intrigued by the Ozzie factor. Who wouldn’t be?
It was in that frame of mind that I came across Chris Messina’s recent post on the subject; thanks, Chris!. And as I read through it, I noticed Chris’s comment on View Source and followed the link to the Release Notes.

I wasn’t too bothered to find out that Windows SharePoint Server cannot import Excel spreadsheets while IE7 is running; my attitude to Excel is probably such that I consider the inability to import spreadsheets a selling feature.

But no more View Source? Why? This doesn’t feel right to me. Definitely not a feature.
I think it was Paul Graham who first wrote about the value of View Source, how it allowed the curious to enjoy that “So that’s how they did it” moment. How it helped innovation. And now we have this.

Can’t help but feel that there are more “unintended” consequences to come.

Oh well.

Update:I was wrong. As the comments show, it would appear that View Source itself is not disabled, just the back-door approach to using it. That’s what happens when you critique words rather than real functions. Mea culpa.

I’ve just heard from Julie Meyer that Richard Duvall, the founder of Zopa, passed away earlier this week.

I met Richard for the first some years ago, while he was at Egg; more recently, via Julie, we met a few times while he was busy dreaming up Zopa, getting it funded and launching it.

Earlier this year we were both on the same small panel at Ariadne’s 5th Anniversary celebration, looking at Building Society For the 21st Century. In fact the kernel for this blog was written for that occasion.

Richard was one of the people who really got the power of the Web and P2P, and followed his dreams with his inimitable boundless energy. He didn’t just follow his dreams, he made them happen. Effervescent and charming, he was a pleasure to be with.

It’s normal to feel sad when someone close to you passes away. I didn’t know Richard that well, yet I feel really sad. That was the kind of guy Richard was. My condolences to those he leaves behind.

Bruce Schneier has written an interesting piece on how form follows function in any architecture, be it physical or electronic. My thanks to Kevin for pointing it out to me, and to Cory for making sure I didn’t forget about it …. I’ve been rushed off my feet lately….

Schneier’s arguments are simple, brought to life with eloquent examples and anecdotes:

• [Security-driven] changes were expensive. The problem is that architecture tends toward permanence, while security threats change much faster. Something that seemed a good idea when a building was designed might make little sense a century — or even a decade — later. But by then it’s hard to undo those architectural decisions.
• The same thing can be seen in cyberspace as well. In his book, Code and Other Laws of Cyberspace, Lawrence Lessig describes how decisions about technological infrastructure — the architecture of the internet — become embedded and then impracticable to change. Whether it’s technologies to prevent file copying, limit anonymity, record our digital habits for later investigation or reduce interoperability and strengthen monopoly positions, once technologies based on these security concerns become standard it will take decades to undo them.
• It’s dangerously shortsighted to make architectural decisions based on the threat of the moment without regard to the long-term consequences of those decisions.

All this made me think of the QWERTY keyboard. I grew up in a journalist family, with typewriters (the old Remington heavy-enought-to-give-you-a-hernia kind) outnumbering flowerpots at home. And when I first visited our printing press (I must have been nine at the time) I was quite surprised to see an ETAOIN SHRDLU keyboard. And my father explained to me that the QWERTY layout was designed to ensure that adjacent typebars didn’t jam, by separating high-frequency letters; that the layout had the additional “benefit” of slowing typing speeds down as a result. The linotype keyboard, on the other hand, was designed for speed, and therefore followed letter frequency distributions.

Form follows function. Just look how long QWERTY’s lasted. [An aside: It’s always amused me that the longest word you can form using the letters of the first line of the QWERTY keyboard is …. TYPEWRITER. What an unintended consequence. or was it? Maybe Grassy Knoll designed it]

We live in a world of many many cyber threats, some real, many perceived. I like the points that Schneier and Lessig make, particularly the pace-of-change one. There is always a temptation to take corrective action against security threats, both real and perceived; it is best to avoid that temptation altogether; but if we do give in, what we must ensure is that the corrective actions we take are designed to be as temporary as the threats; that we take care to make the response easily reversible, dismantlable, removable.

Imagine what would have happened if the recent ban on liquids on airplanes was enacted as law. Stupider things have been known to happen. In fact some part of me is actually surprised that the No Liquids rule didn’t become law.

Imagine what we’ve been doing to ourselves in building walls around our own information, within our own information. Actually paying people to build the walls, then paying people to drill through them, then paying people to fill the holes in…..

Now they know how many holes it takes to fill the Albert Hall.

Let’s keep those paths unpolluted.

For most of my adult life, I’ve been bemused, perplexed, sometimes irritated and occasionally completely taken aback by the error messages spewed out by the applications we build and use. Over the last twenty-five years or so, I’ve watched them improve, but at speeds that make glaciers look agile.

Today, while looking at technorati, I saw this:

Something is wrong! We know about it, and are working furiously to fix it. Please check back later and probably everything will be back up and running.

Great stuff. You may not think it’s perfect, given that it doesn’t actually say how long it will take to get fixed. But I like it. It is open, conversational, simple, honest and brief. I tend to think that the uncertainty implied in the message is actually a good thing; it made me think … could we expect to see error messages that are Agile in nature, improving by iteration as better information emerges/is discovered?

Who knows, this may be a leading indicator of the paradigm shift taking place in the applications and services space today.
My thanks to all at Technorati.

James Governor pointed me at this Kathy Sierra post before I’d trundled my way there (Thanks, James!).

The picture below says it all:

Kathy’s one of those people who creates extreme reactions amongst her readers, and I’ve seen raging arguments about some of her earlier posts. I can’t help but feel that at least some of the reactions are because she touches raw nerves. Which is why I love reading her stuff.
Three quotes stand out for me:

“If that person shakes us up, gets us to rethink, creates a little tension, well that’s a Good Thing”, the CEO says. riiiiiiiiiight. While I believe most CEOs do think this way, wow, that attitude reverses itself quite dramatically the futher you reach down the org chart. There’s a canyon-sized gap between what company heads say they want (brave, bold, innovative) and what their own middle management seems to prefer (yes-men, worker bees, team players). “

The management-middle management gap/reversion is something that has been commented on in depth before, and is by itself nothing new. What makes it new is that we have three new(ish, anyway) factors acting on the enterprise: a real war for talent; a real move from hierarchy to network; a real battle between professions as historical lines continue to blur. On to quote 2:

Of course some argue that exuberance on the job is not necessarily a good thing. That too much passion leads to problems. I say BS on that one. Real passion means you love the profession, the craft, the domain you’re in.

And I guess this is where the problem becomes more acute, as Abbott’s System of Professions evolves into its not-so-subtle conflicts. No single profession has an inalienable right to passionate people; middle management tends to be full of “professional” people; the passion for their profession creates considerable conflict, and can result in their looking for robotic slaves out of sheer frustration. And so to quote 3:

If you knock out exuberance, you knock out curiosity, and curiosity is the single most important attribute in a world that requires continuous learning and unlearning just to keep up. If we knock out their exuberance, we’ve also killed their desire to learn, grow, adapt, innovate, and care. So why do we do it?

Maybe we do it because we can’t find a way out of the professional conflicts and tensions Abbott refers to.
All is not lost. Kathy herself provides the answer, as much in her blog as in her post. Create passionate users.
We need to find a way to unite the professions. And there is a way. We’re just not very good at it, and keep getting in our own way.

Don’t focus on the profession. Don’t even focus on the firm. Focus on the customer. Focus on the customer. Focus on the customer.

A firm that unites around the customer unites all it does.  And becomes a formidable force.