Author: JP

Four Pillars: New layers of lock-in

wren.thumbnail.jpg

There’s an apocryphal story about India, prohibition and unemployment, one of my absolute favourites. It goes like this:

1977. Elections, out with the old, in with the new. Prime Minister’s a teetotaller, declares the country “dry”. And so it is, except for the odd exception. You could drink if you had a permit. You could only have a permit if you were (a) a foreigner spending welcome foreign currency or (b) if you had a medical condition that required alcohol, and a doctor’s certificate to prove it.

So there was a new industry. Government departments busy churning out permits on the back of doctors busy churning out certificates on the back of patients busy claiming unusual alcohol-requiring medical conditions and underpinning their claims with unwanted soft-currency rupees.

A few years later, everyone’s had enough of this game. The dialogue changes. Let’s remove prohibition. You cannot be serious.  Do you realise how many people work in the permit offices? What are we going to do with them? We cannot shut down the permit offices. Ergo prohibition must continue.
Wisdom of Solomon moment. Archimedes and tub and Eureka. Paul and Road to Damascus and scales from eyes. Newton and apple headache. Lightbulb. All that jazz.
I know.

Don’t shut the permit offices down. From tomorrow everyone can drink.

But everyone needs a permit.

Time for another apocryphal story.

An august group of people concerned about intellectual property rights debate whether to create a new one, a right with a difference. This new one will be designed to benefit people who cannot get a copyright, because a work belongs to someone else (the person or group that created it), or because the information is in the public domain. The new right is not a “copyright,” but a “broadcaster” or “webcaster” right.

I only wish it was apocryphal. Sorry, it’s happening now. Please read James Love’s post on the WIPO meeting, which you can find here. I have a lot of time for what James Love has to say about IPR in general.

The implications are worrying.

Middleman rights that increase the very transaction costs that the web seeks to decrease. Middleman rights that make distribution a bigger source of lock-in than ever before. Middleman rights that enforce the orderly transfer of savings generated from lower distribution costs to… the distributors and not the customers.

Some years ago I remember reading about attempts being made to patent the curative powers of turmeric, ginger, garlic, chillies and the like. Attempts that failed. Attempts that will succeed if WIPO do what they are thinking of doing.
[Gordon, thanks for the tip-off which I saw while travelling.]

Jane Jacobs 1916-2006

I was sad to learn about the death of Jane Jacobs last week.

Her books and approach were (and continue to be) significant influences on me, particularly when I seek to understand how communities work. What damage can be done by (often well-meaning) politicians, developers, financiers and industrialists.

How to keep remembering the humanity that is, and should remain, at the heart of everything we do.

Thank you Jane Jacobs.

A segue from Laocoon

In my last post I quoted Laocoon from Virgil, and it gives me the opportunity of linking to one of my favourite Rudyard Kipling poems: Et Dona Ferentes.

When I read it as a child, I was incredibly smitten with the image of three-castored grand pianos cantering away… and  a little smitten with the rest of the poem as well.

Four Pillars: Time to say goodbye to Laocoon

ne credite, Teucri / Quidquid id est, timeo Danaos et dona ferentes

Laocoon ( in Virgil’s Aeneid)

In those days he urged us to beware the Greeks even when they came bearing gifts. I’ve had the chance to detach myself from anything and everything for a few days, and it set me thinking. Looking hard at the laptop I didn’t have, playing with the software that wasn’t on it.

And it occurred to me that much of the software I was using was proudly badged and branded Beta. These Greeks came bearing gifts I liked.

It also occurred to me that these Beta things worked pretty well with each other. And I mused to myself, maybe we’re not in Web n.0 where n is an integer. Maybe we’re in Web Beta, and our goal is Web Sigma.

Web Sigma. An integrated net of David Weinberger pieces loosely joined, with high cohesion and loose coupling, driven by open community standards and principles. Enabling Cluetrain conversations and Johnson emergence. In modern firms that bring together Malone and Semler and Roberts. [Completely irrelevant aside, except to people like me. Apparently the only financier of the happening on Yasgur’s farm thirty-odd years ago was a John Roberts. Anyone know what happened to him?]

 

Web Sigma. With many of the small pieces appearing to do similar things but with small overlaps and underlaps. With no marginal cost increases as a result of these overlaps and underlaps, this apparent proliferation. [Maybe worrying about proliferation is itself something caused by living too long in locked-in-vendor land].

Changing metaphor and meme occasionally is a good thing for me, helps me think harder about things. I am intrigued by what Web Beta represents, why it’s happening. Is it because software developers have come out of the closet and admitted stuff doesn’t quite work first time around. Or (my preferred take) were software developers never in that particular closet anyway, that we can deal with Web Beta only because we’ve managed to move away from a blame culture?

Web Beta also allows me to give in to temptation, to define things that stop us from getting there as Beta Blockers -)  I could include all the bad aspects of DRM and current IPR regimes and IMS and two-tier internets and badly thought out identity or privacy or security. And I like the coherent smooth continuous integration landscape that Web Sigma conjures up.

Something to think about.

Four Pillars: Foundation and Empire: Like a flame to a moth

 

 

This post will attract flames for sure. But with a little bit of luck some of the flames will be of the Axylia putria variety…..

If we want to get Four Pillars right, it is not enough for us to understand and follow Generation M, the demand side of the market. We need to take a long hard look at the supply side as well, the Artists Formerly Known as Vendors (AVs)

Why, you may ask? Henry Ford did not look at what horses ate or did, or how horses procreated, when he figured out how to manufacture cars efficiently. Yet he described what the car could do in terms of horse-power. Even if all that we can learn from AVs is how to describe what their successors do, this is worth doing.

There’s been a bit of brownian motion in the AV world over the last twenty years, as globalisation, disintermediation and the internet (as in the Borderless World of Kenichi Ohmae) met with the opensource movement (a la Eric Raymond and Richard Stallman and Linus Torvalds) got snowball-enriched by conversation and emergence and democratised innovation (as influenced by Cluetrain conversations and the works of Steven Johnson, Yochai Benkler and Eric von Hippel) into the Identity and Digital Rights territory of Larry Lessig, Cory Doctorow and Rishab Aiyer Ghosh. Good feeling to have every reference in this paragraph accessible in Wikipedia. Makes this kind of blogging easier. Who knows, one day Wikipedia may become the Grand Panjandrum of all footnotes and bibliographies…..

Back to the story. Brownian motion. Lots going on. Artists Formerly Known as Vendors wondering what to do. Let’s see what’s happening:

Protocol becomes device driver becomes kernel becomes distro becomes stack becomes ….. you’ll find out after the break.

The opensource community started pushing everyone up the stack.

 

Hardware guys were already there, they understood that they’d been commoditised. Every now and then things would happen that gave them a chance to get another 15 minutes of fame….. flash memory and NAND RAM, Apple going on to Intel, the iPod halo effect, Skype and IPv6 and SIP morphing telephony into software, all against a backstory of Moore and Metcalfe and commoditisation and virtualisation and service orientation.

The operating system and language and database guys were pretty cool about things, they understood it was free-as-in-freedom-not-free-as-in-gratis, so they played along. Except for a few.

ERP and SCM and CRM systems started becoming opensource as well, so the only answer for those guys was to use defences like “confidentiality” and “privacy” and “DRM” to stop the empires crumbling. So they moved higher up, permutating and combining with each other and seeking to make strange bedfellows of their erstwhile competition. And this largely worked, but not in such a way as to sustain them for the long run. A few tried variants based on software-as-a-service, but this was hard to sell against the backdrop of confidentiality raised by them a few years earlier.

Traditional systems integrators and midsized consultants hurriedly rebadged themselves as package vendors, putting loads of lipstick on generic pigs. IT departments were too busy getting beaten up for doing exactly what the customer wanted (spend too much money in the 90s) so a few of the lipstuck pigs made it to the next generation. A few good ones as well.

The squeeze was on. Everyone moving up the stack. Oh if only things were that simple. Because the aforesaid IT departments were holding the top of the stack down, and pushing even harder down.

Something had to give. Something did. The Grand Panjandrum consultants got pushed out, and went after more productive markets. Healthcare. Public sector. Anywhere where it wasn’t that easy to get fired or sued. [That was then. Now even that market’s crowded].

Oh yes. I mentioned stack. Before the break. Let me continue.

What happens to a stack when it grows up? It becomes a utility.

Utilities can be geographical. They can be industry-sector-agnostic as well. But from a computing perspective, my hunch is that the best value comes when the utilities are designed around specific vertical markets.

There will be a sign, a way for us to recognise that we are moving into the vertical utility stage. That sign is when we see IT departments of competitors in a given market start to merge, explicitly for commodity services.

Opensource is all about designing to commoditise, not designing to differentiate. It needs smarts to do the simple things.

And when this starts happening, we will finally have ecosystems that make sense. With participants differing in scale and size and speed, but working symbiotically with each other. With community driven standards of connect and authenticate and presence and identity and share.

The AVs will need to adapt to this, reinvent themselves, work out new ways of creating value and exchanging value. Not suing and countersuing on patents and DRM.

The rest of the ecosystem is already there, and will only grow. As they move up the stack even more, inhouse IT departments will stop pushing back and allow new things to emerge.

With new Foundations and Four Pillars. New ways of visualising things. New ways of learning, of training, of transferring and sharing knowledge, of enriching knowledge. New ways of increasing presence and mobility and location-sensitivity. New ways of enhancing the user experience, of co-creation. New ways to tag and microformat, to mash and mutate, and emerge and re-emerge.