Author: JP

This time I can’t blame Sig alone, I have to include Malcolm and Dom and Don Marti, and their comments and posts over the past six months. Last night I meandered back to Don’s seminal post of many months ago, on Lightweighting, which I covered here.

Seeing the comments on my post last night, and thinking further about it, I felt it was important to try and understand exactly why lightweighting and opensource and agile programming and social software all have such roll-water-uphill problems in enterprises. They seem to share similar problem characteristics. Again, there’s a lot of rich literature on the subject, so I shall concentrate on just one small perspective.

The power of perception.

When you tell someone that their phone is now also a camera, they have no problem accepting it. They can pick it up and play with it and see that it has a Ronseal about it, “it does exactly what it says on the tin”. It is real to them. [An aside. I am definitely growing old. I cannot for the life of me figure out why someone would want a television display embedded into the facade of their refrigerator. Shades of reading Powerpoint on BlackBerry there….]

When you tell someone that their satellite TV is also a DVD rental shop and a video recorder, they have no problem accepting it. They can fight over the controls and delete unwatched recorded programmes accidentally to their hearts’ content. It is real to them.

When you tell someone that their PC is also a music player and a TV, they have no problem accepting it. Despite all the problems of DRM by accident and by design, they remain relaxed about the experience. In fact, given the traditional reluctance in households to learn anything about setting and operating VCRs in the past, they probably feel some familiarity in experiencing the failures. The experience is real to them. [An aside: I have been singularly uninterested in live TV on a computer, only in replays, and only of snippets and clips.]

I could elucidate more examples, but I think these are enough to underpin my simple point. It’s all about perception.

The examples all include some level of process redesign and innovation, some level of lightweighting, but they come packaged with hardware. And the hardware is real, people can touch and feel it. So the experience is real to them.

When it comes to software, particularly enterprise software, the touch-and-feel aspect is harder. True, we are seeing a move towards the purchase of appliances, where the hardware and software are integrated. But the appliances tend to get embedded in the “infrastructure’. And infrastructure hates lightweighting.

So how do people perceive value in software? Four ways:

• Lots of new hardware
• Big project/licence expenses
• Large teams
• High pain of adoption

Notice I carefully don’t state “People perceive value in software by seeing the measurable business value generated by usage of the software”. This-Page-Left-Intentionally-Blank.

Software becomes real to enterprise people through one or more of these things. When it comes to opensource, to process lightweighting, to social software and to agile programming, we have a problem. And if anything, the continuance of the laws of Moore and Metcalfe and Gilder exacerbate this problem. [An aside: is that why Bloatware is so successful? I wonder]

The problem is that the software isn’t perceived as real unless one or more of those perception triggers are set off. And we don’t want to set them off.

So what’s the solution? I have this uneasy feeling it’s going to be about hardware, especially when you look at the iPod phenomenon.

I think we are going to see all these things embed in enterprises over time: lightweight processes, opensource software, social software and agile development methods. But it may take a new generation of hardware and of platforms before that happens.

People buy the overall experience, like they buy cars. When we have desktop platforms which use opensource software as their basis, that come with agile programming and social software as standard, that support the lightweighting of processes seamlessly, it is then that we will have lift-off.

Our challenge then may become isolated to the design and architecture of these hardware-plus-firmware-plus-enabling-software platforms, concentrating on the user interface and look-and-feel and simplicity and convenience and usability and interoperability. Customers want to be able to touch and feel what they buy, and perceive value through the pain of acquisition. People like us want to reduce the pain of acquisition and adoption, but we’re taking away some of the ways customers perceive value as a result, and making our jobs harder.

I am reminded of Christensen’s Innovator’s Dilemma discussions with respect to Britannica and Encarta:

People did not replace Britannica with Encarta, far from it. They replaced Britannica with a home PC, spending a similar amount of money to assuage their guilt, but getting Encarta wrapped in. The PC was real to them. Encarta was a useful by-product, a Trojan Horsed entrant to their home.
So if we want to embed lightweight in enterprise, we may need some heavyweight Trojan Horses.

If there was a kernel for this post, it was probably Sig at Thingamy writing “Forthcoming: documents, schmocuments and Pluto“. At least that’s my excuse and I’m sticking to it.

Anyway, here’s the list. All beginning with S. Just for the heck of it.
Stalinists: Even though there is some doubt as to whether he actually ever said it, Stalin is often credited with saying that as long as people know there is an election, it’s not the people who vote that count, it’s the people who count the votes. A variation of this tends to operate in enterprises, where “power” is vested in the presentation-makers and minute-takers. What social software does is threaten this power.

Sadists: Learning to do things in an enterprise can be painful. Learning to do hard things can be very painful. I have worked in a company where, in order to save on stationery costs, they instituted a process whereby the “stationery cupboard” was only open on Tuesdays between 2pm and 4pm; if that wasn’t enough, no stationery could be ordered unless a form was filled in; and forms were only made available on Tuesday mornings between 10am and 10.30am. Learning how an organisation works is often like growing ear hair. There are no short cuts, it just takes a long time. And causes much suffering. What social software does is threaten to take away this familiar pain, leaving phantom limb sensations.

Stockholmers: Similar to hostages forming an attachment to their captor (despite the invidiousness of their position) there is an enterprise tendency to form deep-rooted and long-lasting relationships with lock-in vendors. This syndrome comes in two flavours: Temporary and Permanent. The Temporary one is less intense, fading when there is a change of management on the enterprise side. The Permanent version is a real feat of engineering, able to withstand multiple changes of management. Nobody gets fired for buying locks. What social software does is threaten to release the hostages from their secure jails.

Second-guessers: Any swarming or emergence effect needs to have a swarm in the first place. One place. With the plethora of options available in Web Too Many Oh, this creates a paradox of choice. Freedom’s just another word for nothing left to choose. Second-guessers can stultify attempts to derive value from social software, by fragmenting the enterprise base in time and space. Space because they ensure multiple options are taken up simultaneously guaranteeing there is no critical mass, no liquidity. Time because they engineer an enterprise change-of-horse-in-midstream, never actually allowing the liquidity to be acquired. What social software does is threaten to take away the freedom of the second-guessers.

Sewer-dwellers: The ploy here is to define the battleground for social software as infrastructure, as plumbing. Even though it shouldn’t be the case, most enterprise buyers treat infrastructure as overpriced, oversold and over. As soon as the argument shifts to sewerage, the enterprise immune system has no problem repelling all boarders. This is despite the fact that social software has minimal infrastructure costs. Why do sewer-dwellers do this? Because it’s their home. What social software does is threaten to take away where they live.

Silobites: These are people who live in silos. Their jobs are to ensure that as much stuff as possible is stored in the silo, the bigger the silo the better they feel. They are defined by the walls. What social software does is threaten to take down these walls, building small connectors between silos.

Look at the things threatened. Power. Familiarity. Security. Housing. Freedom. Enough said.

Now there’s an ironic title. Shades of Charlie Chaplin for sure run throughout this post, so much so I have no problem declaring Fair Use for displaying this still, which I downloaded from Wikipedia to emphasise this story. All rights remain reserved with whoever owns those rights, despite the still being 70 years old….

There I was, relaxing after lunch, sun shining, birds chirping, Jeeves-and-Wooster time. I’d bought the latest Bob Dylan album, Modern Times, admittedly in the dinosaur way (hard physical CD from bricks-and-mortar HMV high street store), and I thought I would import it into my iTunes while listening to it. After all, it was Sunday afternoon.

Fat chance.

It took a long time, much longer than usual, for the iTunes/GraceNotes CDDB stuff to happen, some strange noises but finally it did. Then I started the importing. First track went fine. Then everything died on me. Not a kernel panic, but Not Responding and Spinning Disc and requiring quite some effort before I could Force Quit iTunes in order to eject the CD. And even then I couldn’t eject the CD at first. But finally I succeeded.

I tried again. But no luck, the Mac refused to recognise the CD any more. Kept ejecting it.

So I thought “CD problem”. Went and tried playing it on my Bose. 10 tracks recognised, all playable. Tried playing it on my Sony Vaio, 10 tracks recognised, all playable on Windows Media Player. Tried ripping the tracks using Media Player, also all fine.

So the problem was not with the CD but with something in the DRM space between the CD and iTunes. Specifically between the CD and iTunes. [Please bear in mind that even my worst enemies wouldn’t accuse me of being pro-Microsoft anti-Apple. I like iTunes, I like Apple, I like the Mac, I like the iPod, even if I am frustrated by the DRM. I live with it in the hope that the DRM will disappear, in the belief that the DRM exists because of the music industry and not Apple per se, and that the problem cannot continue for more than a couple of years].

Anyway, I was getting ever so slightly irked by all this.

So I checked if Boing Boing had anything on it, Cory and gang are usually pretty sharp when it comes to DRM idiocies. And sure enough I found this story: Bob Dylan and iTunes sell un-rippable music; update: Cory has placed an amended story now, which you can see here.
I read it, and moved from there to Kim Cameron’s Identity Blog. And, even though I go there often for research on Identity, for once I was motivated to comment.

For which I needed a login. Which I didn’t have, so I sought to get one. Nowhere to get one, or at least nowhere I could see without installing missing plug-ins I wasn’t allowed to install. Smelt like the Microsoft-v-Apple nonsense. I use Firefox on an Intel MacBook running OSX.

So I thought I’d use an InfoCard, the alternative route suggested. How do I get one? I read the blurb. And tried to “click on the movie below to see how Infocards work”. Nothing to click. No movie playing. The Microsoft-v-Apple smell got stronger.

No login. No way to get a login. No ability to comment therefore.

So I gave up and made myself a cup of tea.

And wrote this post.

Modern Times, indeed. People, we’re in for a bellyful of laughs at this rate.

Or a linux-based DRM-free ecosystem for all this.

While the world and her husband argue about what Web 2.0 means, whether they can use the term, what Enterprise 2.0 means, whether they can use the term, and what’s hot and what’s not, and the price of fish, there are some people quietly going about their business using the concepts without worrying about any of this.

Read what Clarence Fisher is up to. See what he is doing in his classroom, as described in this post.

The Personal Learning Network that Clarence speaks of is not just about schools, it has meaning and value in every context where learning is of value. PLNs exist everywhere anyway (except perhaps in real and virtual cemeteries); but the value of having them embedded in social software is something that many haven’t grasped. Which is why, as Clarence points out, there are still drop-out rates for these things.

Clarence is not alone. Take a look at what Kate Simpson and her friends are doing at elgg. Go see what Barbara Ganley is doing. Read everything that Judy Breck writes, either in book form or at Golden Swamp. See what Vicki Davis is up to. Track what Stephen Downes has to say about the subject of learning and social software.

Blogs and wikis aren’t about dollars or rankings or A-lists. They are about people working together on learning and on discovery; about people learning and discovering about working together.

Clarence, or for that matter anyone else I’ve mentioned above, let me know how I can help. I can be contacted at [email protected], I have only today realised that my Contact Me bit went missing after my blog disappeared in May. If anyone out there knows of other sites I should be tracking regularly, I’m all eyes.

While many of us may understand the distinction between Because Of and With companies, there are still many unanswered questions as to the right business models to use for Because Of companies. As with most of opensource (and some will say it should be all of opensource, and I tend to concur), Because Of companies are really about infrastructure and utility.

I have always maintained that With companies undergo a transition to Because Of companies over time, particularly if they are successful to a point of dominance in a given market.

Sean’s post musing on capital structures makes interesting reading in this respect, and raises some critical questions. The particular companies mentioned should only be used as examples to illustrate the point, the issue relates to all Because Of companies.
If you want to understand more about Because Of Rather than With, you may find this post useful.