Category: Four pillars

What is the first thing that comes into your mind when you come across the word “platform”?

For me, there is only one answer: Howrah Station in Calcutta. Where I first learnt the joy of “platform tickets”, the practice of paying to see your family and friends off somewhere, or that of paying to welcome them back. When I was young, we didn’t think twice about piling into a car and taking a long journey (by Calcutta standards in those days), spending interminable amounts of time stuck in traffic crossing the bridge, queueing up to buy said platform tickets, then finally skipping daintily over questionable (and often smelly) wet patches. All for what? For the privilege of being pushed and jostled while waiting for a friend or family member to arrive or depart. We loved it. There was a “just for the crack” carefree madness to much that we did, and I will never forget those days.

Howrah Station platform: Picture courtesy of www.anothersubcontinent.com, a site I wander into every now and then.

Not everyone is as confused as I am. When you see the word platform, perhaps you see what Dave McClure sees:

Dave blogs over at Master Of 500 Hats, another site I wander past every now and then. My thanks to Dave for the illustration.

Maybe you’re not like me, and not like the others either. Maybe you’re like Hugh Macleod, who visualises platforms this way:

Note to self: Never trust a techie who shouts in capital letters…. (and thanks, Hugh)

People mean many things when they use the word “platform”. In days to come, we are going to have to get more and more used to seeing some other terms crowd around the platform. Terms like open and multisided; terms like apps and widgets; terms like community. Older terms like architecture and component and reuse and standardised will still continue, will become even more important, but will have morphed into something less central-control and more democratised.

That’s not going to be easy.

For people who are used to terms like proprietary and business model and billable event, it’s going to be even harder.

But just for now, we don’t have to worry. The path to the platform is blocked, by people fighting over what it means to be private in public.

So if you get bored over the Christmas break, here’s something to ponder about:

What does it mean to be private in public?

As a child I used to devour statements along the lines of “now they know how many holes it takes to fill the Albert Hall“. Whenever I was presented with information of sufficient abstraction or scale, I tried to transpose the context or scale in order to help my comprehension. I would look out for stuff like “if you unpacked the number of carbon atoms in the full stop at the end of this sentence, and arranged the atoms in a straight line, then that line would stretch all the way to the sun”. [An aside: I dragged that from memory, must have read it somewhere when I was young, never bothered to check it out.]

With this in mind, I really enjoyed this video, additionally available here in Spanish, French and Portuguese. I quote from the Miniature Earth site:

The idea of reducing the world’s population to a community of only 100 people is very useful and important. It makes us easily understand the differences in the world.
There are many types of reports that use the Earth’s population reduced to 100 people, especially in the Internet. Ideas like this should be more often shared, especially nowadays when the world seems to be in need of dialogue and understanding among different cultures, in a way that it has never been before.

The text that originated this webmovie was published on May 29, 1990 with the title “State of the Village Report”, and it was written by Donella Meadows, who passed away in February 2000. Nowadays Sustainability Institute, through Donella’s Foundation, carries on her ideas and projects.

Donella Meadows’ original “State of the Village Report” may be found at:
www.sustainer.org/dhm_archive/index.php?display_article=vn338villageed

The text used here has been modified. The statistics have been updated based on specialized publications, and mainly reports on the World’s population provided by The UN, PRB and others.

The Miniature Earth website was first published in 2001, since than it has been seen by more than 2 million people around the globe and linked by more than 20.000 websites.

I found it particularly instructive at a time like this, when much of the West is taken up with conspicuous consumption. My thanks to erstwhile friend and colleague Andrew Pullman for bringing it to my attention.

I’ve placed it in my VodPod as usual, but it may take a little time to show.

Yesterday, while working on a reference for a particular post, it came to my attention that O’Reilly have “opensourced” all the back issues of Release 1.0.

To me this is fantastic news. On a cursory glance, every issue from 1983 to 2006 appears to be available for digital download, free of charge. I had been a subscriber to Release 1.0 for a number of years, and I’m happy to acknowledge my debt of gratitude to Esther and the team. They led the field in identifying key themes and topics, providing a reasoned and in-depth introduction to the topics, giving a truly detailed bibliography and contact information, and doing all this aeons ahead of the competition. They gave me early perspective on many issues that later turned out to be critical.

I’ve had the privilege of meeting a number of the contributors over the years, and count many of them amongst my friends. If you were a subscriber then you know what I’m talking about. If you weren’t, then it’s worth taking a look.

Let me know what you think.

I guess most of you have already seen the debate, as captured here,  here, here, and here. Is enterprise software sexy? Should it be? Can it be?

The entire debate is worth a read, the polarisations are fascinating. As and when I finish my Facebook series, I will get around to commenting on the avalanche [nb as per Doc Searls and his conversations with George Lakoff, a blog post is a snowball; it starts with the poster, but then gathers life and pace of its own accord; when this happens with many branches and forks, it seems reasonable to call it an avalanche.]

In the meantime, a few things stand out to me:

1. Outside-in design is an absolute must. We have spent far too long insisting on a distinction between what the employee uses and what the customer uses; as the walls of the organisation increasingly get porous, the distinction becomes false. Where I work, we are spending time and energy seeking to converge the two views, so that the customer and the employee exercise the same codebase. A goodly number of my guys are restricted to having the same applications access as our customers : how else will we know what our customers face?

2. Consumerisation amongst employees is a today issue. Tomorrow’s employees will insist on an applications experience at work that is at least close to the experience they have at home. Tomorrow’s employees will insist on using their own devices and choosing the way they want to interact with their apps. Platform and device agnosticism, with customisable UIs and skins, are must-haves, not nice-to-haves. In order to prepare for tomorrow’s employees we have to act today. Which is what we are doing.

3. Simplicity and convenience can be had at the same time as reliability and security. While Moore and Metcalfe and Gilder have acted in concert to provide us significant productivity gains over the past few decades, human longevity has not moved at anywhere near the same rate. As a result we are far more jealous of our time, and therefore things like boot sequences, boot-up times, management of screen real estate, all these things have really begun to matter. Today. That’s why many enterprises are spending considerable time on user centred design. Where I work, we’ve even changed our internal form and structure to cater for this. We don’t have network, product, process or IT departments. We are a Design department, focused on the user experience.

Searching for things within the humongous database that is the enterprise; searching not on a deterministic basis but on a probabilistic one, with heuristics and learning, preferences and profiling. Syndication or subscription, where individual information element changes are pushed out as if by RSS, rather than through formal structured enquiry screens fullof sound anf fury, signifying nothing. Fulfilment processes that don’t distinguish between booking a meeting room, a flight, a hotel room or a contractor. Conversational support covering blogs and wikis and IM rather than just snail mail and its often appalling electronic counterpart. These are the Four Pillars of the enterprise applications of tomorrow. Using any device, anytime, anywhere, with whatever modality of communications best suits purpose. Collaboratively filtered, rated and ranked. Learning and teaching.

Enterprise 2.0 is already upon us, providing us attractive, usable, reliable and secure applications. We just haven’t made the move to adopting it. But it’s happening now, with Generation M, mobile, multimedia, multitasking and here. Now.
An aside. It would appear that much of Web 2.o, from a consumer perspective, is about music and films and entertainment and gaming and pornography.  So what’s the enterprise equivalent of all these? What gets enterprise people’s rocks off?  Spreadsheets and presentations and databases. Go figure.

Enterprise Blue Zero is upon us. More later. I need to prepare for Le Web tonight, given that I intend to be watching Led Zeppelin tomorrow night. 

Another illusion I came across via StumbleUpon. There’s a face hidden behind the lines. If you can’t see it, move back a bit. And watch what happens. I’m a sucker for illusions, I guess it says something about me. Sadly I cannot find the site where I first came across it, all I know is that I Stumbled there. [If you do find the original site then do let me know so that I can thank them properly].