Author: JP

Following Suw Charman-Anderson’s post on the subject some months ago, I committed to writing a post about a woman I admire in technology, and to publishing that post today, March 24 2009. So here goes.

I never realised how hard it would be. Hard because there are so many women I admire in technology: I landed up with a shortlist of over 25.

But that didn’t seem reasonable. So I worked on whittling it down. And it was hard. Really hard.

I wanted to write about my wife, whom I admire greatly. We’ll be married 25 years this September. I wouldn’t have amounted to anything without her. I still won’t amount to anything without her. But I guess it would be stretching a point to claim she’s in technology just because she’s married to me and she puts up with me. Thank you Shane.

So then I thought about my first job. My first break came from a woman, Wendy Marlow, who hired me into Burroughs Corporation three decades ago. She was an ex-journalist like me, in fact I wouldn’t have dreamt of applying to a computer firm except for the fact that Wendy went and placed an ad in what was the UK Press Gazette. She encouraged me to dream big dreams, and backed me when I needed the backing. Thank you Wendy.

And my first boss there, my first boss ever, was a woman, Liz Jackson, who worked for Wendy. Between Wendy and Liz they somehow managed to manage me, mentor me, bend me, shape me. I still have immense fondness and admiration for them, because again I wouldn’t have amounted to much without their help. Liz had the harder job of having to deal with me on a day-to-day basis, to coach me and to correct me. Which was hard. [But probably not as hard as having to put up with my playing Board Cricket with her husband Warrick, who’d invented this amazing board-based ultra-realistic cricket game. So amazing that it took as long to play as a real-life Test…. ] Thank you Liz.

My biggest mentor in tech is also a woman, Esther Dyson. Release 1.0 was pretty much a bible for me, and PC Forum was an annual retreat, and for me neither would really have existed without Esther. She didn’t just influence the way I think, she also made sure that I “always made new mistakes”. Thank you Esther.

Then there’s the person who encouraged me to start writing this blog, Julie Meyer. [In fact The Kernel for This Blog was written for an event Julie was putting on]. Julie introduced me to Niklas Zennstrom when he was on the verge of launching Skype, and there were some fascinating conversations with him and her. She also introduced me to the works of Carlota Perez, whose seminal Technological Revolutions and Financial Capital continues to influence me to this day. Julie also got me into thinking about microcredit at a time no one else was, and mobile payments before they became common currency. A key influence and a good friend. Thank you Julie.

So as you can see I’ve been really blessed. My wife. The person who gave me my first job. My first boss. My biggest tech influence and mentor. A big supporter and encourager.

And then there’s all of you, so many women I admire and respect and am proud to count amongst my friends. You know who you are. Your name is Legion, for you are many.

And this is my way of saying thank you to all of you. And to Ada Lovelace. And Suw for giving me this opportunity.

I’ve probably been in love with San Francisco ever since I saw Bullitt as a callow youth. Soon after that I became a Deadhead and the love affair grew; all this without ever having visited the city. Then, maybe two decades ago, I did for the first time, and had the opportunity to visit City Lights. And that, given my love of books, was that. Done deal.

Now, as of today, I have a new reason to keep returning to San Francisco.

Dosa. As in the restaurant on Fillmore named after the South Indian dish dosa or dosai. Absolutely fantastic. Worth going there just for the selection of dosas there:

I went there tonight as the guest of good friends Sabeer and Tania Bhatia, of Hotmail, Live Documents and Nanocity fame. Tania, a Calcuttan like me, told me that the Habanero-Mango Masala Dosa was a must-have. And it was. Absolutely delightful. Good dosa, thin and papery without tasting like cardboard, a fresh potato filling that wasn’t too mushy and liquid-y, a habanero-based sauce to die for, all accompanied by coconut chutney and sambar of a very high order. My starter, the north/south samosas, was also pretty good, but not in the same class as the dosa.

Sadly, the other dish that Sabeer and Tania raved about, the mustard halibut, had done a lateral arabesque off the menu. I hope it returns, at least long enough for me to try it once.

But in the meantime, if you get the chance to go to Dosa, go. It’s worth it.

[And speaking of City Lights: I’ve just found out that Lawrence Ferlinghetti is about to turn 90 next week. And only this week my 17-year old son asked me to get him a copy of Kerouac’s On The Road, which I went and did. I couldn’t find my reading copy. The only other copy I have used to be Robert Pirsig’s; he chose to bind it together with Baron Munchhausen. I found the potential juxtaposition of On The Road, Munchhausen and Zen And the Art of Motorcycle Maintenance too tempting to miss.]

Is value really created, or is it bestowed?

People have used phrases broadly equivalent to “Beauty is in the eye of the beholder” for millenia. Margaret Hungerford is considered to be the first person to have used the precise phrase in print (in 1878, in Molly Bawn). James Joyce, pictured above, referred to the phrase and its use by Hungerford in Ulysses, page 701).  William Shakespeare sought to evoke something similar when he wrote “Beauty is bought by judgment of the eye” in Love’s Labours Lost.

In similar vein, in 1910, Charles Mann and George Twiss (in their book, Physics) raised the question “If a tree falls in a forest and no one is there to hear it, does it make a sound?”. More precisely, what they actually said was:

When a tree falls in a lonely forest, and no animal is near by to hear it, does it make a sound? Why?

Again, the concept evoked was not new even then. George Berkeley, a 17th century Irish philosopher, raised a similar question in his theories of immaterialism, summarised as “To be is to be perceived”.

[My thanks to stock.xchng for the photograph.]

Throughout my life, I’ve  heard the phrase “Perception is reality”, particularly at work. [When I was younger, I used to feel its usage was egregious, and I had to restrain myself from saying “But the perception is wrong. Plain wrong. How can you say that it is real? It needs to be corrected, that’s all.”]

I can hear you saying “Well that’s all very interesting, JP, but just where is all this going? What point are you trying to make?”. I’d better get on with it then.

It’s like this. For some years now I’ve been wrestling with the implications of our moving from “scarcity economics” to “abundance economics”. Maybe I’m getting obsessed by it, I cannot tell. You tell me. But when I look at issues to do with DRM and IPR, I think to myself “scarcity versus abundance”. When I see institutional pushback on social software in enterprises, I think to myself, scarcity versus abundance. When I see government immune systems keep finding ways to circumvent “freedom of information” legislation, I think to myself, scarcity versus abundance.

My thoughts on this probably go all the way back to Cluetrain. [I find it hard to believe it was all of ten years ago. Incidentally, there is a special, updated, 10th Anniversary edition due out later this year. Couldn’t be more timely.] More recently, they’ve been influenced by all the discussions around Vendor Relationship Management.

And this is where I am at present. I think that there’s a shift taking place everywhere, a shift that strikes at the very root of industrial-age “value creation” concepts. I think that these concepts were meaningful when monopolies and oligopolies were common, a consequence of ownership of factors of production in the industrial age. Scarcity was often real, or at worst could be manufactured through hoarding or cartels. The creation of value was closely tied to the creation of scarcity.

The World Wide Web celebrated its 20th anniversary last Friday. We live in a digital age: it is no longer that simple to create scarcity, particularly when the asset in question is digital in nature. Anything that can be copied will be copied. As I’ve said before:

Every artificial scarcity will be met with an equal and opposite artificial abundance

[There’s a simple way to avoid all this. Make sure the asset is never available in digital form. But then you have to give up the idea of making money “selling” the asset in digital form.]

Physical things become scarce. Digital things become abundant. That is their nature. And when things become abundant, I think we shift from an era of value creation to one of value bestowal. Value is no longer created as a result of scarcity (real or artificial); value is bestowed upon something by the purchaser, the viewer, the listener.

Which is why we have phenomena like Kutiman. Amazing stuff. Here’s his wikipedia entry, and here’s where you can find the videos he’s made. But what’s really telling for me is this statement on the website:

Now that’s “abundance economics” in action. “Check out the credits for each video – you might find yourself…”

Scarcity economics is being attacked from many directions in the digital space. People are realising that, as something commoditises, “ownership” decreases in value. So suddenly access becomes enough. This spawns a series of useful business models such as LendAround and Spotify.

There will always be a premium paid for real scarcity. Creators of valuable things will always be able to receive reward for the value they create. But the marketing and distribution models associated with real physical scarcity cannot be imposed that easily on the digital world.

• Not because everyone’s born a criminal, wanting to “steal” “content”, whatever that might be.
• Not because everyone has stopped wanting to be part of an “audience”, whatever that might be.
• But because value is bestowed, not created, in an abundant world.

Does this mean that many things that used to be expensive will now become free? Not necessarily. The only things that will tend towards “free” are those things that were abundant in nature (i.e. digital and copyable) yet were artificially constrained to being scarce.

I’ve written about this before, but it’s worth repeating. Kevin Kelly, in his seminal article Better Than Free, does a great job of showing us how to make money in such environments. His thesis is fairly simple: if you want to make real money, find something that’s not easily copyable. Or, when things are abundant, make sure your business model is about the new scarcities that emerge.

It may not feel like it, but we’re moving to the Age of Abundance. Value is going to be bestowed, not created. And our business models will have to reflect that. And our laws. It’s just a matter of time.

There’s something analogous to Stockholm Syndrome when it comes to the adoption of opensource, where people in IT departments prefer the perceived security of being held captive. This is something I’ve touched upon before here and here.

As I’ve grown older, I’ve tended to move away from concepts of ownership to concepts of stewardship in many contexts. As a human being, a citizen of Earth, I am a steward of natural resources. As a parent I am a steward of my children. As an employee I am a steward of corporate assets. As a member of society I am a steward of social and cultural values. In fact I think of everything I “have” as a consequence of God’s grace, even the mantle of stewardship.

Of late there’s been considerable debate, especially in Europe, about Government purchasing/procurement policies and opensource. As you would expect there’s more than one view, to put it mildly. And whenever I see such rampant polarisation, it makes me think.

And here’s where I’m at. What would happen if software vendors had to sign some sort of “tenancy agreement” as part of a delivery contract? Let me show you what I mean. Here’s an extract from a cookie-cutter tenancy agreement :

10.1 The Tenant shall keep the interior of the Property in good repair and condition and in good decorative order and in particular shall take all reasonable steps to keep the Property aired and heated and to prevent water pipes freezing in cold weather.

10.2 The Tenant shall be responsible for the professional cleaning costs at the end of the tenancy.

10.3 The Tenant shall not bring any hazardous materials into the Property and shall take all reasonable steps to avoid danger to the Property or neighbouring properties by way of fire or flooding.

10.4 The Tenant shall be responsible for cleaning and keeping free from all blockages and obstructions all baths, sinks, lavatories, cisterns and drains and in particular shall take all reasonable steps not to pour oil, grease or other damaging materials down the drains or waste pipes.

11 Communal Areas

The Tenant shall take reasonable care to keep any common entrances, halls, stairways, lifts, passageways and any other common parts clean and fit for use by the Tenant and other occupiers and visitors to the Property.

12 Garden

The Tenant is responsible for the maintenance of any garden areas and for keeping such areas neat and tidy and free from weeds, with any grass kept cut, subject to the Landlord providing and maintaining appropriate garden tools for this purpose.

13 Nuisance

The Tenant shall not (nor allow others to) cause nuisance or annoyance to the Landlord or his Agent or any neighbours.

14 Damage

The Tenant shall not (nor allow others to) cause any damage or injury to the exterior, structure or any part of the Property.

15 Alterations to Property

The Tenant shall not (nor allow others to) make any alterations, improvements or additions to the Property, including the erection of a television aerial, external decoration and additions to or alterations to, the Landlord’s installations, fixtures and fittings without the prior written consent of the Landlord. The Tenant shall not (nor allow others to) remove any of the items specified in the inventory (if any) or any of the Landlord’s possessions from the premises.

16 Repairing Damage

The Tenant agrees to make good any damage to the Property or the common parts

There’s something about this approach that really appeals to me. The software vendor becomes responsible for maintaining the area being tenanted; has to respect common areas; needs permission before carrying out alterations; must repair any damage caused; must leave the area as it was when he/she entered it in the first place.

I know it’s not perfect, but I think it can be worked on. I think it’s meaningful for proprietary as well as opensource software, I think it’s meaningful both in the specific procurement context as well as in general. I also like the idea of the environment being treated as a commons, even if we have to conjure up the concept of “private commons” and “public commons”. I know that it sounds unwieldy, but it’s a start.

We have to figure out what the common areas are, what needs to be cleaned, what needs to be kept clear, what constitutes a nuisance. What things should look like before and after.

Putting the onus of migration costs is not a new thing. I think I am proposing something more than that, I want the costs of decommissioning to be covered. Which in turn means people have to build stuff that is plug-and-play by design; not just plug-any-play, but plug-and-play while agnostic to the environment.

Enough blathering. Views? Comments? Am I on to something? Or has it all been done before? If so where and when?