Author: JP

Ross, I hope you’re reading this

I came across this appeal from the OED/BBC. I quote:

• The OED seeks to find the earliest verifiable usage of every single word in the English language—currently 600,000 in the OED and counting—and of every separate meaning of every word. Quite a task! The fifty words on the OED’s BBC Wordhunt appeal list all have a date next to them – corresponding to the earliest evidence the dictionary currently has for that word or phrase. Can you trump that? If so the BBC wants to hear from you.

And for the life of me I could not figure out why anyone would use an e-mail approach for doing this. Please please OED, BBC, whoever’s in charge, take a leaf out of Wikipedia. Make this a public wiki.

An etymological dictionary with real instances of usage, timed and dated, for all neologisms. Covering the last 30 years say. This has to be done via a wiki. And could be real fun.

It cannot be done any other way. Just cannot.

You’re right. I’ve put the next recap off for a short while, trying to give me enough time to get my head around a few things. An example:
It all started with my attending the Professionalism in IT Conference arranged by the British Computer Society early last week. I’ve been involved with the initiative for a while now, and it’s truly fascinating. Particularly when it comes to figuring out what the profession stands for. What any profession stands for.
Which leads me on to someone I met at the conference, Mari Sako. Fascinating person. She’s a Professor at the Said Business School, Oxford, who has recently written a book called Shifting Boundaries of the Firm. I’d heard of the book, seen the Table of Contents, dismissed it as too focused on Japanese issues for me.

I was wrong.

I’ve now ordered the book. What Professor Sako did was to connect some important dots for me, dots that matter in Four Pillar Land.

I was expecting a presentation on global sourcing, which I got.

• I was not surprised to hear about corporate functions being disaggregated and reaggregated.
• I was not surprised to hear about the effects of outsourcing and offshoring.
• I was not surprised to hear about a constant pressure on IT professionals to repackage their skills and knowledge.

And then I had a Road to Damascus moment …. when Mari Sako  mentioned Andrew Abbott and his System of Professions. Some of the things she said resonated differently in my head. Two key examples:

• Technology and corporate restructuring have led professions to redraw their knowledge boundaries.
  
• Change in content of professions is as significant as change in location of jobs.

Now, I’d read Abbott before, and for sure I liked what System of Professions was getting at, and thought I understood where he was going. But hearing Professor Sako speak of it in a different context many years later, I began to see something else.

Wonderful what conversations can do.

In the past I’ve interpreted Abbott as an extension of the old priests and lawyers and doctors arguments, and railed against IT  “professionals” who play the This-Is-Complex-You-Don’t-Understand-And-Never-Will card.

What I saw this time around is that social software and collaborative tools represent a real threat to those knowledge-hoarding “professionals”. A clear and present danger that they have to deal with. And keep dealing with. Which explains the reaction of a number of professions to blogs and wikis.

I’d love to see a profession-by-profession analysis somewhere. Accountancy. Law. HR. I guess you can call them professions.

I’m also of the opinion that the ratios these professions exhibit within a firm vary by culture and by market segment, bringing a different dynamic into play. So it would be interesting to see this reaction broken down not just by profession but also by geography and market.
My final twist. Maybe the Abbott to Sako to me snowball explains something else to me.

The Four Pillar world is not for people who are professionals in the traditional sense.

It is for people who have a vocation, a calling.

It is only when you have that calling that you feel comfortable with sharing information, with giving information away for free. I guess those readers who are teachers or doctors understand where I’m going with this. I could not imagine a doctor not sharing his knowledge, his expertise, his information hoard, when a life may be at stake.

We need the equivalent of a Hippocratic Oath. About ideas and sharing. About patents and intellectual property. About identity and privacy and secrecy. There’s probably something in what Larry Lessig has already been doing, something in what Cory and  John Perry Barlow et al have been doing, something in what Rishab Aiyer Ghosh et al have been doing.

We need a Hippocratic Oath.

You may have read my previous post on Google versus Microsoft. I wish I could link to the whole article and share it with you, but it’s been DRMed out of existence. The link to the teaser stub is to be found here. You may prefer to read the firecat, a special report on Google in the same issue, which for some reason is OK for me to share. To be found here. The special report is worth reading, but how I wish I could reproduce the entire leader as well.

Which brings me to the point of this post.

In my previous post I averred that Google and its ilk will succeed because of their adherence to community standards, rather than despite those standards.

Yes, I do own up to using the phrase “pinko technologies” when talking about social software. [Thanks Andrew !] But that doesn’t mean that my assertion was just a cheap shot at Microsoft.

It’s more important than that.

When we started getting real traction with blogs at the bank, one of the key questions that came up was whether we should keep blog content open or closed.

And I had a very strong hunch that we had to start with everything being open, and then  selectively closing bits as needed, in order to comply with chinese walls, prevent market abuse, respect customer confidentiality and good things like that. This was generally accepted and so it happened that way.

Start with open. Then close only when absolutely needed. This is no longer about operating systems or architectures, about protocols, about standards.

It is about information.

It is what Four Pillars is about.

It is what this blog is about.

We cannot possibly justify even using terms like “data mining” or “enterprise applications integration” in this day and age; these are constructs of closed-closed-closed approaches to walled garden design and build. And not even elegant ones at that. we have to do these things only as a result of prior bad decisions. Decisions involving building walls around our own information. Decisions we should not be repeating.

It’s our information.

As we move towards greater co-creation, as we accelerate towards better remakes of IPR, we need to bear this in mind. Information must start open. And then get closed only when it’s an imperative.

I am not surprised that “Google’s market share in search has fallen from a high of around 80% to around 50% today”, as the Economist states in its article. Google can remain market leaders even if their share falls to 15%. Why? Because the world of information is still growing exponentially as people mash and rip and co-createl. And exciting things are happening in search, reasons to be cheerful. We will have specialist blog search tools. We will have specialist image search tools. We will have specialist video search tools. Not all these will be Google. Very few of these will be Google.

And I don’t think Google are upset about it. Which is good. If they succeed with generic search (which they have) and either Gmail (which looks good) or Google Maps (which looks better) or Google Earth (which looks even better) then they will be able to go after mobility plays.

And their approach to innovation will mean that they’re only as good as their next Beta from their Lab. Which is great. Probably what keeps them motivated. Staying ahead by doing new things, challenging competition, not suppressing it.
As the Economist leader points out, Google has strong competition in pretty much every field they’re in. Which, according to many experts, keeps them on their toes and healthy and all that.

It’s not about the competition. It’s about intent. Intent to coexist with other participants in an ecosystem.

When I can’t find a flickr reference via google; when I can’t find a youtube reference via google; then I will begin to worry. Maybe.
Remember that Four Pillars support something. They are a means and not an end.

I promised a recap. Next recap tomorrow.

[Even if Liverpool lose to West Ham. I hope they don’t. I predict 3-1 to the ‘Pool.]

Bogoljubow is endlessly optimistic. He always hopes to find new strength for his creative endeavours deep in his rich natural talent.

That’s Alexander Alekhine speaking about Efim Bogoljubow, probably my favourite chess player of all time. Bogoljubow, together with Alekhine and Capablanca, became the Triumvirate, the Taylor Vardon Braid of chess at a time when chess was glorious. And, oddly enough, around the same time as TVB.

I love Bogoljubow, and not just for his chess playing. The Alekhine quote is a window into his attitude to life. Here are two of my favourite Bogoljubow stories:

When asked how many moves he “thought ahead”, Bogoljubow pondered for a second, flashed his teeth and said “Just one. The best”.

Commenting on a recent run of victories, he said “When I play white I win because I play white. When I play black I win because I am Bogoljubow.”

He knew something about simplification and about simplicity, while retaining style and elegance and brilliance. Without the corruption of marketing.

And maybe that’s what we need more of in IT.

A recent post by Don Marti about lightweighting, and a not-so-random walk following the honey trail from there to Rageboy and via him to David Isenberg’s Stupid Network, made me think harder about simplicity within Four Pillars. Thank you Don.

I quote from Don’s post:

What’s going on is that we’re somehow, against all odds, collectively giving ourselves permission to eliminate bullshit. And one example of lightweighting breeds another. Eben Moglen writes, “wrap the Internet around every brain on the planet; spin the planet. Software flows in the network.” In that example, the lightweight Internet standards process creates an environment suitable for peer production of software. And now lightweight software processes are enabling lightweighting of business processes that depend on that software and are increasingly embodied in it.

Permission to eliminate bullshit. Simplification.

I went on to remind myself of what David Isenberg had said in his famous essay, and was RageBoyed into the remake, which can be found here. Again, worth quoting from to illustrate the point I’ve yet to make:

Under the heading Stupid is Better, David says:

Stupid Networks have three basic advantages over Intelligent Networks – abundant infrastructure; underspecification; and a universal way of dealing with underlying network details, thanks to IP (Internet Protocol), which was designed as an “internetworking” protocol. Some key “two-fers” emerge from these basics: Users gain end-to-end control of interactions, which liberates large amounts of innovative energy; innovative applications are rapidly tested in the marketplace; and innovative companies attract more capital and bright people.

Critical points. All of them.

The abundance of the infrastructure issue is at the heart of the Net Neutrality debate. And is not about pino lefty politics or tree-hugging Ice Age predictors. Without this abundant infrastructure, we cannot gain end-to-end control of interactions, as David says. New forms of intermediation are fine provided value is created, derived and shared. Parasites and leeches are not fine. Neither is making scarcity out of abundance any sort of virtue. Without end-to-end “control” we cannot create the reliability and consistency of customer experience we need. And with end-to-end control, we can prevent the pirates of DRM from boarding our good ship. Yes, they are the pirates.
The underspecification issue is also critical. It is somewhere in the community standards and microformats spaces, a way of preventing vendor corruption of the standards process.

As soon as we have these two things, abundant infrastructure and underspecification, it becomes easier for us to scale things. Add things. Take things away. Something the digital world has promised but rarely made easy. Not because we wanted to prevent it, but because the lock-in merchants needed to.

Now maybe you get an idea as to why I was so hung up about the internet and net neutrality and identity and DRM and IPR and and and.

We have to solve these. Make the Machine Tools we need. Avoid building the safety devices and harnesses in the wrong place and for the wrong reasons and protecting the wrong people.

Then we have Foundation. With the right approach to Empire. A scalable way of providing the Four Pillars. With innovation as a way of life in the rooftops. With consistent and reliable service and fast time-to-market applications. Providing products and services the customer wants, co-created by the customer in the first place.

More later. To Be Continued.

I feel another Recap coming. After I see what comments I get from this post, what snowballs begin, what honey trails I have to follow.