Category: Four pillars

Tara Hunt, while commenting on a recent post of mine, reminded me that I needed to revisit Invisible Engines; I’d received the book while recuperating from my heart attack, found it an excellent read, but for some reason never got to pass 2. Big mistake, but corrected now thanks to Tara’s timely reminder. Thanks, Tara!

[An aside. I tend to read management and technology books on a three-pass basis. First pass is a quick skim, taking no notes, just absorbing the feel of the book. If I find one compelling idea in it, the book makes it to pass 2, where I read more slowly, skip entire chapters along the way, but make notes. If I find I make more than three notes, I read the entire book even more slowly, in pass 3. Maybe 1 in 200 such books make pass 3. The Social Life of Information, The Cluetrain Manifesto, Emergence, Community Building on the Web and Smart Mobs are examples of Pass 3 books.]

I quote from the blurb:

Software platforms are the invisible engines that have created, touched, or transformed nearly every major industry for the past quarter century. They power everything from mobile phones and automobile navigation systems to search engines and web portals. They have been the source of enormous value to consumers and helped some entrepreneurs build great fortunes. And they are likely to drive change that will dwarf the business and technology revolution we have seen to this point.

The material in the book is not new per se, but the adjacence of ideas and their sequencing make it something new, at least to me. The authors know their subject matter, present it well, build a compelling story and thereby entice the reader into flights of fancy. That’s the kind of book I like.

In the serendipity that is typical of the blogosphere, I was reading Doc Searls in his latest Suitwatch, titled Thinking Past Platforms: The Next Challenge for Linux. This, while still poring over Platform Competition in Two-Sided Markets, a paper recommended by the Invisible Engines authors. [Thanks, guys!]

And all this reading led me to the following statements, paraphrasing and summarising the bits and pieces I’ve mentioned earlier in this post. Apologies to all concerned if I have misrepresented or misconstrued:

• 1. A software platform is a place. A marketplace.
• 2. This marketplace is multi-sided and can be open or closed; the more open it is, the more “sides” it has.
• 3. Conversations happen between these sides: consumers, software developers, hardware providers, whatever.
• 4. Marketplace participants obtain value from the marketplace provider by sharing services they would otherwise not be able to afford.
• 5. There is an implied long tail in the shared services model, no single participant consumes any significant proportion of the shared services.
• 6. As a result, while the “infrastructure” provided by the marketplace is commoditised, it is used in many diverse ways by the participants, allowing competitors to differentiate themselves, usually on presentation, simplicity, convenience, access and complementarity.
• 7. A marketplace often consists of a series of smaller marketplaces, often overlapping partially.

So far so good. But if you’re like me, you start going into wild tangents at this stage. You start asking questions like:

• Would you go to a marketplace where access depended on the type of car you were driving?
• Would you go to shops that insisted you only wore clothes bought from them?
• Would you build a shop in a marketplace that told you it governed the signage on your shop as well as your employment contracts?
• Would you pay to rent a shop if you were told you had to pay whether the marketplace stayed open or not, whether the lights worked or not, where security was slack and crime was high?

I think the authors of the book have helped me understand something more about what a platform is, and why it is much more of a marketplace than I had imagined previously. For this I am grateful. With that in mind, I realise how much Doc hits the nail on the head:

Linux is the frame construction of computing…….You can make anything with Linux.

Hugh asks how come there aren’t any opensource billionaires. Actually, I think there are a number of opensource billionaires.

When hardware meant money, there were hardware billionaires. They made money Shifting Tin, and gave software away for free. And one day there wasn’t any margin left in hardware.

Software ruled.

When software meant money, there were software billionaires. They made money Shifting Code, and gave services away for free. And one day there wasn’t any margin left in software.

Services ruled.

When services meant money, there were services billionaires. And so on and so forth.

Infrastructure commoditises and is itself commoditised. Otherwise it wouldn’t be infrastructure. When you dominate a market, you run the risk of becoming part of the infrastructure, and margins collapse as people look for differentiation beyond that infrastructure.

This process of active commoditisation takes place in every economic cycle, changing scarcities to abundances and, in the process, creating new scarcities. The latest scarcity is talent, human ingenuity. Not something that is going to be commoditised in a hurry.

Google and Amazon and eBay and Skype may not like being called Services, I just couldn’t find a better word. One thing’s for sure. These businesses created billionaires.

Billionaires who made money because of opensource, not with opensource.

I quote from Doc:

I’m especially interested in exploring what I’ve been calling the because effect. This is what you get when your new business isn’t just about inventing and controlling technologies and standards, but about taking advantage of the new opportunities opened up by fresh new technologies and standards. For example, making money because of blogging, or RSS, or desktop Linux, or whatever — rather than just with those things.

The because effect is a kind of jujitsu. While other people look to make money with something, you’re finding ways of making money because of something.

Prime example, because of search, Google and Yahoo make money with advertising. Another: because of Rivendell, Salem Communications saves money with its core business, which is broadcasting. Because of his blogging, Thomas Mahon makes more money with his tailoring business.

There’s something peculiarly satisfying about starting a post with Hugh and ending it with Thomas Mahon …. feels like a whole nine yards of Savile Row there.

I missed this the first time around, and then only noticed it because I use WordPress. I quote from a Matt post on the WordPress blog:

Looking for something fun to do this summer? All college and university students around the world are invited to apply to get paid $4,500 USD to work on your favorite open source project this summer. WordPress is among the 131 accepted to Google Summer of Code, of more than 300 projects that applied

We have eight committed volunteers who are enthusiastic to mentor, learn, and make WordPress a little better in the process.

Check out our ideas for projects, or propose your own. You must apply
by March 24. Good luck!

Somewhere in that statement is the reason why any form of wage arbitrage is a short-term game. The $4500 on offer is to students worldwide. Worldwide. There isn’t one rate for India. a different one for China, yet a third for Brazil, and so on.  The sooner we learn that going global is not about wage arbitrage but about the war for talent, the better we will all be.

Of course there are significant local variations in demographics and environment and context and culture. That’s like saying there are significant local variations in temperature and humidity and rainfall. In the same way as we speak of “global” warming, in the same way as we realise there is only one ozone layer out there, we need to understand that there is one global expertise market. One market worldwide, with its health, education and welfare challenges. The web was  meant to be about the death of distance, and one day it will be.

Global is not just different from local, it is different from international; global, at least to me, translates to “the same everywhere”. Opensource communities are global, the “price’ paid for effort expended and outcome gained is the same everywhere. Something worth bearing in mind.

When I was a kid growing up in Calcutta, many things amazed me. [Actually, in this respect, not much has changed. I continue to be amazed by what I see. I guess I must be easy to amaze…]. One of the things that amazed me as a child was the way Indian mechanics kept things working. Wherever I looked, I could see antiquated and decrepit machinery.

Cars, lifts, pumps, cranes, a pantheon of gods mechanical, grunting and squealing their way to the next day. Antiquated, yes. Decrepit, yes. Yet working.

When I talked to the mechanics, their language took some understanding: the air was black with terms like radiowater and jugger-bugger and ishpark plahg; I got to radiator and spark plug easily enough, but to move from jugger-bugger to shock absorber took a little time….

Where was I? Oh yes, creativity and cannibalism. Let me not drift off point.

You see, what made these Indian mechanics of my youth special, gifted, talented, was their ability to contrive pragmatic solutions to real problems. They would find a way of getting the machines to work. Partly because they had to, partly because they could. And partly because they really enjoyed the effort, they got a thrill out of making the gubbins work.

To do this they cannibalised. Borrowed parts from other machines. Fashioned parts out of things destined for other purposes, things that now had new destinies.

When they did this cannibalising, everyone applauded. They had no manuals, no local showrooms and distributors and agents and what-have-you. Just themselves and the dead machines. And they brought these machines back to life; quite often, the machines would outlast the cannibal mechanics.

Now the odd thing about all this is the word “cannibalising”. Where I grew up there was nothing derogatory attached to the term, in fact the opposite was true. Someone who excelled at such cannibalising was looked up to.

Hold that mindset and perspective. When you are able to fix something yourself, without reference to manuals and without having access to lock-in intermediaries, this is a good thing. When no one comes in your way during your attempts to do such things yourself, this is a good thing. When you can substitute parts freely, fashion parts out of almost-random raw material, this is a good thing.

This is what Bob Frankston has always reminded me of, reminded me again lest I forget. Thank you Bob. This is what Doc Searls has always reminded me of, every time the conversation drifts to D-I-Y IT. This is what Gordon Cook’s mail-list conversations drive towards.

The kernel for this post was this post on Appropriation of Mobile Media in South America by Howard Rheingold. There’s this wonderful quote:

The appropriation process fundamentally is a negotiation about power and control over the configuration of the technology, its uses, and the distribution of its benefits

Any technology obtains value through adoption and usage, “appropriation” in the context above. Appropriation is a process, a negotiation of power. For decades, perhaps centuries, the balance of power has been with the provider of technology rather than its consumer. What we are seeing now is a shift in that power, something that has been happening over decades, something that is crescendo-level now.

Let the seller beware.

One of the more unusual things I’ve noticed about the blogosphere is the way that discrimination disappears. The people I read, the people I link to, the people who read this blog, whatever cut I choose, everything seems to level out. Barriers to entry are low, and, despite recent blogosphere events, threats to personal space are also low. This is something enterprises strive to do, yet it happens naturally on the blogosphere. The power of volunteers.

Maybe that’s why the concept of unconferences really caught on. Not because people wanted to rebel against the establishment per se, but because the traditional conference process had the traditional discriminatory walls built in.

BTW, the kernel for this post was a comment by Hazel on a recent cricket post of mine. And here’s something I couldn’t do before, point Hazel towards a knitting blog that I’ve visited a few times, one that appears to be received well. While I’ve never met the author of the blog, we have a connection. Children at the same school. How did I find out? Conversation over dinner with other parents whom we’re close to.

So there’s something else that blogs help me do. Connect people I’ve never met with people I’ve never met.

It’s been a great week for me, a week where I could connect with old college friends while they were playing a reunion gig thousands of miles away. Yes it could have happened with snail mail or telephone, but it didn’t. It happened because of blogs. [Thanks, Chukti. It was great to be able to speak to Bertie and Fuzz, though I missed Mel].

Update:

Saw this, serendipitously, via Boing Boing:

Multiple surveys confirm that females outnumber males online in the US, with “no significant gender gap in internet usage”.

I believe Pew was signalling this anyway, but I’d be interested in seeing the statistics about gender or age or nationality and their relationships with blogs. Dave the LifeKludger has made the point of the enfrachising power of the web before, and powerfully.