Category: Four pillars

I’m really enjoying reading quite an unusual book right now: Maynard & Jennica, written by Rudolph Delson. I’d never heard of the book or the author before; I’d stumbled across it while looking for Mark Andrejevic’s iSpy while shopping at the MIT Coop bookstore earlier this week. And the reason why I went looking for iSpy? I’d seen a recommendation by Daniel Solove somewhere or the other, while researching him as part of re-reading The Digital Person. I’d strongly recommend all three books, actually.

Why do I like Maynard and Jennica so much? I guess I’m a sucker for well-written monologue and dialogue, particularly where there’s a fresh voice. Delson manages much more than that, there are so many narrators, each with a rich and distinct voice, you lose count after a while. Every voice stands out. Delightful. Thank you Rudolph Delson.

What else am I reading?

Queenpin by Megan Abbott : Never heard of her before, picked up while meandering around a bookstore in Coronado Island. Picked up as a result of reading cover reviews by Ken Bruen and Allan Guthrie, two authors I like. Unstarted.

Battle Royale by Koushun Takami: Heard about the film, haven’t watched it though. Wanted to read the book, took time for me to find a decent English translation. Started, unusual, a bit stilted so far.

The Creation by E.O. Wilson: Been reading Wilson ever since he got into Consilience. Read this before, gently re-reading it.

The Design of Future Things by Donald A Norman. Read the predecessor Everyday many times, didn’t know he’d brought a sequel out, looking forward to reading it properly on the plane to Denver en route Defrag. Skimmed once.

The Crime Writer by Gregg Hurwitz. Again a “directed” pick at the Coronado Island bookstore. Picked based on reading cover reviews by Robert Crais and Dennis Lehane. Unstarted.

Code Version 2.0 by Larry Lessig. Read the original, not had time to read the updated edition, now reading it.

[An aside. Why part 142857? Well, 0.142857 (recurring) is the decimal representation of 1/7; I should really have a dot over the one and the seven in the decimal part, but I can’t find a way of doing it. It’s what is called a “circulating decimal”, as opposed to a “terminating” decimal or a “recurring” decimal; so, for example, 2/7 is 0.285714, 3/7 is 0.428571, and so on. The same six digits, gently moving around. Circulating.

Circulating decimals are strange beasts. If you take the string 142857 for example, you get some very unusual behaviours. 14 plus 28 plus 57 equals 99. 142 plus 857 equals 999. 1 plus 4 plus 2 etc etc equals 9. You get my drift.

The length of the circulating string of numbers, as in 0.142857, is called its period; so 1/7 is a circulating decimal with a period of 6.  There are many circulating decimals. For example, 1/97 is a circulating decimal, with a period of 96.

A nested aside: You may enjoy proving to yourself that you cannot have a circulating decimal with a period equal to or greater than the denominator of the fractional representation.]

My apologies to those who’ve been waiting for Parts 9 and 10 of this series; there have been a number of things on my mind, and I wanted to freewheel along, dwelling on other subjects, while pondering on this. It’s like when you want to remember something and can’t ….. the best way out seems to be to let your subconscious “agent” do the work while you move on to something else … striving to remember only makes the problem worse…. you know what I mean.

Anyway. Ecosystem. A big word and probably meaning many things to many people. If I go “define ecosystem” via Google, the first result returned is this:

The complex of a community of organisms and its environment functioning as an ecological unit.

What was that again? [Or, as my primary school PE teacher Mr Deefholts used to say, while cupping his ear, “How much?”). You may have found that definition more helpful than I did, but I doubt it somehow. But then it looked like a “sponsored” result, so I will move on.

The next definition of ecosystem looks something like this:

An ecosystem is a system whose members benefit from each other’s participation via symbiotic relationships (positive sum relationships). It is a term that originated from biology, and refers to self-sustaining systems.

The third definition goes like this:

e·co·sys·tem (Ä“‘kō-sÄ­s‘tÉ™m, Ä•k‘ō-)
n.

An ecological community together with its environment, functioning as a unit.

Elsewhere I found this:

a functional unit consisting of all the living organisms (plants, animals, and microbes) in a given area, and all the non-living physical and chemical factors of their environment, linked together through nutrient cycling and energy flow

And this:

a community of living things and the environment in which they live

Why am I spending so much time on this? I think that there’s a lot for us to learn, a lot for us to understand about what makes a virtual community tick. And we’re going to have to arrive at a common view as to what an ecosystem is, in the context of communities and social networks.

danah boyd, in a related context I was privy to, recently said “I don’t think that you can evaluate a system’s technological worth out of the context of its users and their intentions and expectations”.

I think danah’s bang on the money, as usual; I really like her insights. [danah, I hope you don’t mind me quoting you “out of context”].

Where I work, we’ve been going through the laborious process of bringing together our network, process, product and IT skills into one coherent “converged” unit. We did this because we believed that was the only way to get real focus on improving the customer experience. A customer experience that is comprised of the platforms, the people, the processes and the customer alignment.

Too often, people tend to think of the “platform” as the ecosystem. I think this is wrong. So let’s try and define ecosystem again, in the context of Facebook and the Enterprise, drawing on some of the definitions earlier:

• An ecosystem is a community, an integral functional unit.
• An ecosystem consists of living organisms as well as physical and chemical environmental factors.
• An ecosystem promotes the flow of nutrients and energy.

It is in the context of this definition of ecosystem that I want to look at Facebook and the Enterprise. Most people are comfortable with the social network and community aspects of all this; many are also comfortable with the idea that there are many overlapping communities, and that a person belongs to more than one community.

We have to get used to the fact that every enterprise is a community. That the boundaries of the enterprise extend. That this extension encapsulates the enterprise’s customers, partners, supply chain and customer chain. That neither customers nor supply chain participants “belong” to just one enterprise.

There was a time when enterprises had platforms, the platforms were proprietary, and as a consequence the ecosystems were proprietary as well. In fact we had siloed platforms and siloed ecosystems. That was over a quarter of a century ago. As systems became more open, so did platforms, and as a result the ecosystems became more open as well. This openness created a lot of value, drove a lot of the economic growth we have witnessed, created many new winners and a few new losers. The entire opensource movement is an example of the value generated by open ecosystems.

Take the case of the Indian offshore software industry. When I started working in software, everything was proprietary and siloed. Way back in 1980, there was already a well-established offshore software industry. But it wasn’t much use. The model was broken. So you had things like Tata Burroughs Limited, providing proprietary offshore services to Burroughs customers, only available through Burroughs onsite services, with everyone well and truly locked in. Most of the value stayed with the vendor not the customer, and growth was stifled as a result. Then along came the break-up of Ma Bell, the emancipation of System V, the (coincidental) emergence of the PC, the AT bus and the clone, of X-Open and POSIX and a zillion flavours of Unix, and voila, even before Linux, the seeds had been sown. And today you have Infosys and Wipro and Tech Mahindra.

And IBM, with its zillion different proprietary operating systems and its departmental silos, struggled to continue. Found itself needing to reinvent itself. And did. Around Linux. [By the way, ten years ago, who would have believed that the day would come when Apple would be worth more than IBM? Other than Steve, of course :-). Incidentally, Apple’s case is fascinating in the context of what makes an ecosystem open or closed, why such a “proprietary” stack succeeded. Why Apple themselves appear to be telling the world that 25% of the purchasers of iPhone intend to hack it and use it for a network other than the one it was tied to. Why the dinosaurs of the music industry unwittingly helped Apple along. All to be covered in a separate post. ]

Back to ecosystems. While there have been significant technological advances over the past few decades, one of the biggest barriers to the ecosystem model is itself technological.

The firewall.

I’m no expert, but to me the firewall was designed to form a perimeter around an enterprise, a thou-shalt-not-pass barrier with intensive checks. The concept of the firewall seems to be based on the world consisting of disconnected islands of enterprise. This will change. This must change. The overlapping communities model that is emerging requires it to change.

The borders of the enterprise will have to get more and more porous, until a time comes where the border has disappeared. People will belong to multiple communities, those multiple communities will overlap in many and varied ways. Innovation will blossom at the edges of the communities, as professions collide, as the distinctions between some of the professions continue to blur. And it is up to us to ensure that technology does not become a barrier for such creativity. The historical firewall is just an example of such a barrier. The concept of the firewall will continue, but perhaps it will become more personal. Like identity. Like authentication and permissioning.

I will write more about ecosystems. In the meantime,  I thought I’d share some ecosystem principles, again in the context of Facebook and the Enterprise:

• 1. The ecosystem does not constrain its people, processes or platforms; they are free to enter or leave at will.
• 2. The ecosystem is nourished by information. Information that is created by the actions, conversations and transactions of its people. Information that helps define, shape and grow the ecosystem.
• 3. People must be free to take out whatever they put in. Just like people make deposits and withdrawals in the banking sector, people should be able to make information deposits and withdrawals in such an ecosystem.
• 4. In addition to being nourished by information, the ecosystem thrives on an alternate source of energy. The interactions between the people. The information derived from those interactions, information that is not available except as a consequence of those interactions. This energy is unique to a given ecosystem, and is jointly and severally “owned” by the ecosystem and its participants.
• 5. These interactions are themselves encouraged and intensified by applications. Applications that are built on to open multisided platforms that form the heart of the ecosystem. Applications that are meaningless without the people who use them, or the information they create.  Applications that catalyse value within the ecosystem and assist its growth.
• 6. Within an ecosystem, there’s a lot of NEA about. Nobody owns many things. Everybody can use many things. Anybody can improve many things. There’s a lot of personal responsibility (as in what you say and do and make available) as well as communal responsibility ( as in what actions a community takes). Facebook, in this context, is a provider and enabler of the environment in which an ecosystem is built. It is not the ecosystem. But, in my opinion, it’s a good enabler of ecosystems.
• 7. Within an ecosystem, there’s a lot of YOYOW about as well. You own your own words. You own your own apps, their configurations, their environment, their capacity, their performance, their bugs and their fixes. You own your own data. You own your own relationships.

You own your own you. And with that ownership there comes a set of rights as well as duties. Liberty, not licence.

More later. I’ve rambled on enough. Time for some feedback.

In part 9b I will use the feedback to leaven my heretical mutterings, bringing together the disparate strands of Apple’s success, the role of opensource, contract versus covenant, all in the context of Facebook and the Enterprise. As soon as time permits.

I love guitars. In fact I love musical instruments in general, they fascinate me. Not that I know how to play any of them; they get used by my children and by my friends, and that’s fine by me. While I love music, even my worst enemy wouldn’t accuse me of being particularly talented, musically speaking.

You can recognise talent when you see it. Like in this video. Wow. Amazing guys.

Dandleword: A word or short phrase that conveys depth and richness of meaning, a richness completely out of proportion to the size of the word or phrase. [Don’t bother trying to research this, I made the word up. After all, it’s Sunday.

Those of you who knew me in Calcutta may also remember that I had a signed vinyl copy of the Stan Getz/Charlie Byrd Jazz Samba, signed by Charlie when I saw him play at the Academy of Fine Arts sometime in the late 1970s. “Had” is the operative tense, I have no idea where it is now, and I guess I don’t particularly care …. as long as someone is enjoying it. When you pack 23 years of life into two small suitcases, strange things happen. Must try that again sometime, there is something cathartic about reducing one’s possessions.

Great album, I really loved it, but Stephen’s right: today, thirty years later, what lives in my memory is the enjoyment of the live performance. Not the hundreds of times I’ve listened to the album.  Now that album has many fantastic tracks, but the one it is probably best known for is Desafinado. Which is the kernel for this post, aided and abetted by Kevin Marks’ comment re kangaroo.

Desafinado. What a lovely word, and what a lovely meaning. Slightly out of tune.

Dandle. Another beautiful word.  Majestically conjures up images of babies and knees even before its sound has stopped reverberating in your ear.

When I was a child, there was a lot of Tamil spoken at home. [In fact, I used to think I knew Tamil pretty well. Until I came back to India for the first time, in 1981, and the Indian Airlines air hostess on the domestic leg to Madras said “Nandri”, a word I’d never heard before, not in 23 years of thinking I knew Tamil. Since then I’ve had that particular experience hundreds of times ….. realising I know a lot less than I thought I did.]

Where was I? Oh yes, speaking Tamil at home. As a child, I was fascinated by the amount of information carried by Tamil nouns that described relatives. Words like “periappa” and “chithi” and “athimber” and “ammanji”. They were amazing words. A single word could tell you: the sex of the relative in question; whether that person was related to you via your mother, or via your father; it could even tell you whether the person was younger or older than the parent through whom the relationship was obtained.

[An aside: I guess these words are examples of what they call self-describing packets nowadays. And, given the garrulousness occasionally exhibited, you could even say they were self-interpreting. Incidentally, if words like “periappa” and “chithi” mean anything to you, you may enjoy reading this post, suggesting, of all things,  that Ambi Mama is the leading Brahmin relative. ]

Have you go any favourite Dandlewords? I’d love to hear about them.

A few days ago, I posted something about The Becuase Effect (sic), referring people to Graham Barrow’s question in the Feedback column of the New Scientist. Graham was asking about the frequency of common misspellings, particularly typos, and in a comment on my post he mused about the way such words enter language, whether “becuase” could become an “internet” word.

And that in turn made me think about words or phrases that enter language as a result of an error.

Take the word “hoodlum”. I’ve read many suggested etymologies for the word, but the one I prefer is given below. Sadly, I have not been able to verify it online as yet, but I stand by it, it’s the best one I’ve come across :

Sometime in the second half of the 19th century, I think it was on the West Coast, there was a journalist in the US writing an article on  urban crime, and he wanted to refer to a particular unsavoury character named Muldoon. Not wanting to name the miscreant outright, for fear of immediate retribution, he wanted to try and disguise the name. The particular disguise he chose was a simple one; he wrote Mr Muldoon’s name backwards. So the article was meant to refer to Mr Noodlum. The typesetter could not read the journalist’s writing, and interpreted the “N” in noodlum as an H, so the name appeared throughout the article as Mr Hoodlum.

And everyone was happy, and the world gained a new word to describe an unsavoury character.

It’s not just words that enter the language as a result of an error. Sometimes it happens to the names used to describe city landmarks:

There’s a piece of apocrypha about the way a bridge in Madras got its name. Apparently it was called Hamilton Bridge to begin with; locals could not pronounce the name, so they rendered it “Ambattan” Bridge (dropping the aspirate and the “l” and adding a “b” after the “m”, all very believable). A visiting dignitary heard the bridge referred to as Ambattan Bridge, and asked what “Ambattan” meant. Coincidentally, “ambattan” meant “barber” in Tamil. The dignitary was having none of this vernacular nonsense, so he immediately decreed that the bridge be referred to as Barber’s Bridge.

I’ve never seen the “hoodlum” story rebutted, although alternative explanations have been given. As far as the Barber’s Bridge story is concerned, I have seen a number of articles suggesting that the etymology was suspect, given the dearth of suitably qualified Hamiltons in Madras history. The construction of the bridge seems to predate the existence of any Hamilton associated with the city; at least one suitable Hamilton has been found from a later date, but no Barber. I haven’t checked recently, but I believe Hamilton Bridge continues to exist today. From my viewpoint the etymology I suggest still seems possible, given the prodigious proclivity of planners in the sphere of name-changing. This post gives you some of the views.