Author: JP

Form follows funding

I was looking for Doc’s D-I-Y IT article in Release 1.0, couldn’t find it in a shareable form and went for a ramble on the net as a result. Found Doc’s IT Conversations piece on the same subject. Read it. Again. And I saw the Stewart Brand quote again.

Form follows funding.

Fascinating.

So, when we buy opensource, what form will the output take?

I shall work on this. And delve deeper into Stewart Brand.

A coda: Doc has seen the fact that I am struggling to find the Release 1.0 article, and has sent over a copy. I hope to be able to link to it soon.

Four Pillars: Preparing the Foundations: On opensource

As part of Foundation and Empire, I have already signalled that I wanted to look at the impact of opensource on the IT construction industry (something Doc Searls covered in detail a few years ago in Release 1; I hope to link to it sometime tomorrow).

Humour me and come along for a slight detour.

In a recent post, I tried to connect up TheManInTheDoorway with Ed Byrne and Hugh Macleod, emphasising the need to de-commoditise. And today I came across this in Aqualung. DefDiff or the Definition-Differentiation model.

Now the debate really intrigues me, and will influence how I write the Foundation and Empire piece. Because there’s something I don’t understand. That’s when I can learn something.

Why do we need a model that helps us throw away internally built components and replace them with externally sourced ones, as a means of moving from differentiation to commodity? Why should we worry about the “legacy” constraints of existing APIs and formats?

I’m not questioning the process. I’m questioning the need for a new model. I think we already have a valid model.

It’s called opensource. I have always believed that opensource should never be about deep differentiation, in fact that opensource works best when the problem being solved is shared by many. When the problem is a commodity.

Maybe it’s me that’s warped. I want to commoditise the problem. Then the solution must of course be commoditised.

Once people realise that opensource is the new outsource (yes I know I’ve said it before, but so what?) then this becomes easier to grasp. [An aside: Wouldn’t you just love to go to your boss and say you’ve outsourced 50,000 part-time jobs s/he never knew you had?]

Platform and device and UI/browser independence come as standard when you buy opensource. So you don’t worry about legacy conflict, provided you have the right principles in place in the first place.

You know, sometimes I think we can rewrite enterprise IT strategy to just one line:

Make it demonstrably easier to consume opensource day after day.

You get the ability to throw away the commoditised. You get to lower maintenance costs on the soon-to-be-commoditised. If someone else gets there first your costs of acquisition are lower. You can keep concentrating on that which differentiates you.

Which leads to an interesting corollary: Only keep the problems that are unique to you. That’s a whole new subject in itself.

More later. In the meantime, Malc, Ric, thanks for taking me somewhere else in my quest for the Foundations.

Opinions, comments and flames welcome. Almost requested.

The Importance of Being Average

Or not, as the case may be.

One of my favourite pieces of apocrypha. (Ex-boss, -) if this is not true, blame Stu Berwick). And even if it is not true, it should be. So there. Ex-boss of mine on stage somewhere, part of a panel. Some other member of panel unwittingly says something like “With this tool you could raise average programmer productivity by a zillion per cent”. Moderator says “And what do you think, Mr Ex-Boss?” And he replies “When I find an average programmer I fire him“.

Read Ed Byrne on How to De-Commoditise Your Product. Read Hugh Macleod on Your Job is Not to Sell. Your Job is to De-Commoditise.

And then read The Man in the Doorway on Moving Up the Value Pyramid.

Run from being average. Get fired for what you believe in, not for being average.

Four Pillars: More on search

I was pretty upset at not being able to make PC Forum this year (conflicting priorities at work). Nevertheless I kept in touch with it by reading what I could in Release 1 and in Rafe  Needleman. [Esther: I’ll still try and make Flight School on my own time and money, it was great last year].

Take a look at this from Rafe. Google meets Technorati and Page You Made. To me this makes a fundamental point about the Four Pillars. They are nothing more than pillars, they are tomorrow’s infrastructure. But co-created and collaboratively-filtered dynamic adaptive infrastructure is hard to get your head around. So I’m building it piece by piece.

Continue reading “Four Pillars: More on search”

The downside of posting as often as I do

…is that people who update their aggregator subscriptions only once every three or four days (which is likely) get incoherent posts from me (which is less than desirable from my perspective). Apparently I can make this problem better or worse by changing settings my end. Thanks to Charlie Wood for setting me right on this. I have taken up the size of my feedfeeder to 50.