Category: Four pillars

This is a Saturday Evening Post, you have been warned. Caveat Lector.

Let’s see what happens when we use the concept of the humble credit card to try and tell the future, albeit a very small part of the future. [If you’re interested, take a look at the Wikipedia entry I’ve linked to, it provides quite a lot of useful information].
The term has been around since the late 1880s, the physical object since the early 1920s, and it’s gone through a whole raft of cultural and social and technical adaptations since then; the credit card we use today bears very little resemblance to its 1920s antecedent; the credit card we will use tomorrow will be even more removed from its origins, yet it will have the same DNA.

Initially the credit card was a fuel card:

• issued by a single entity (the fuel provider)
• used for only one purpose (buying fuel)
• usable in only one place (the fuel provider’s premises)
• available only to a small elite market (1920s automobile owners in the US)

Despite these limitations, it had some interesting characteristics:

• It represented a trust relationship (between the issuer and the automobile owner)
• It identified and authenticated the bearer of the card
• It authorised and permissioned that bearer to do something
• It provided a modicum of simplicity and convenience and mobility

You can imagine what it would have been like. Conversations building and underpinning relationships and then, only as needed, transactions. The Cluetrain was running.

Now let’s look at what happened since:

The card became multipurpose. How? Through intermediation and disintermediation. The issuer was no longer a merchant with goods and services, but an intermediary that provided cash credit. A credit card issuer. A bank or financial institution. One card, many merchants where it could be used. Many things that could be purchased. That process of disintermediation and reintermediation has carried on to a point where all kinds of institutions now issue credit cards. You decide where to get your card from.

The card became ubiquitous. More issuers. More people using cards. More places to use cards. Initially restricted to a few Western countries, the credit card is everywhere now. You decide where to use it.

The card represented different pricing models. The initial card was a fixed term fixed limit charge card. Charge only, pay the whole balance off each time. Fixed payment credit, pay a fixed amount back each time. Hybrid, choose what you want to pay, within certain minima and maxima. Low interest, zero interest, high interest. With an annual fee. Free. All kinds of everything. You decide the funding model.

The card became personalisable. Initially the card was Any Colour You Like as Long as It’s Black. Ford Model T, come back, all is forgiven. You didn’t get to choose what it looked like, how your name would appear on it, anything. You took what you were given. Now you can choose “skins” for the card, select “affinity” programs and wear your card with pride, choose how your name appeared on the card. You decide what it looks like.

The card became an objective carrier of trust and identity. Whether it was credit-rating, credit-score or even deposit-driven, the card became a token bearing trust. Initially it was used to support a delayed-payment transaction. Now you can use a credit card to guarantee things, to underpin who you are, sometimes even to exhibit your Bling status. Centurion cards and all that jazz. You decide the purpose.

The card became a target for criminals. Security became an issue. As the card became ubiquitous and multipurpose and “clonable”, it created a new business opportunity. Crime. Initially this was physical and analog crime. As the underlying technology for the card evolved, so did the technology used by the criminal. Card crime soared. And we kept building new ways of protecting the card from misuse. Today, with signature and chip and PIN and CSV and encryption, cards have become fairly secure. Without making them fundamentally useless or rendering them unusable. You use them simply and safely.

Card production costs decreased sharply. By now it probably costs me more to work out how much a card costs to produce than to produce the card itself. By now much of what makes a card up has reached Made In China status. The ultimate cost-decrease accolade. Now you can have as many as you like, or as few as you like. You decide how many.

Card longevity increased. Original cards had to be replaced often for two reasons: the materials used to make the card, and the process used to read and validate and use the card. As a result, card validity was kept short. Now, with advances in materials technology and reading processes, cards are issued for much longer periods. You decide how long to use them.

Cards became shareable. Initially you had one card, just for you, tied to a specific bank account. Now you can have multiple cards, tied to a card account and not a bank account. You can use the multiple cards yourself, for segregating transactions. You can give cards to family members and to friends. You decide who else can use your card.

You decide. You decide. You decide.

I think I’ve made my point, but there are a few more things, important things, to point out:

Everything that happened, happened as a result of four things:

• innovation through market adoption
• simple and relentless standardisation
• consolidation amongst industry participants
• emergence of global mega-utilities

So what happens next?

We will see cards consolidated even further, as customers push back against proliferation. One credit card underpinned by limits from multiple credit providers. But for this to happen, there has to be a fundamental shift in the concept of card ownership. Today, the card is the property of the issuer, and must be returned on demand. Tomorrow’s card will be the property of the customer, who “mashes up” the facilities and credit lines and limits and affinity rewards. One card.

We will see personalisation taken even further. Make your own skin up. From Flickr if necessary. You will choose your own “number”, but there won’t be a 16 digit thingummybob right across the front of the card. You need some unique handle, but there’s no need to display it. As long as a digital version of it is embedded and readable. Your card.

We will see both online and offline behaviour supported. Cards will work even when you’re not connected, but in Safe Mode. Lower Limits. Fewer places to use them. Always On.

We will see more virtualisation. The physical card will not be the only game in town; you will have virtual cards, logical extensions to current payment models like PayPal and WorldPay and even Grameen. Virtual and physical.

The credit card. Multipurpose. Ubiquitous. Personalisable. Plug and Play anywhere anytime for any purpose. Based on open standards. Solving pieces of the identity and authentication and personalisation puzzles. Safe and secure. Shareable. Mashable. Highly mobile, simple and convenient to use and manage. Your device. Your terms and conditions.

Did I say credit card? I’m sorry. I meant to say personal computing device. Your PC. (Or, if you’re like me, your Mac.).

Just musing. On a Saturday Evening :-)

There’s a strange kernel to this post. Recently I posted something about Agile error messages, and Kevin Marks, while talking to me about it, took me on a tangential journey to a post at chuqui 3.0, headlined Why Do Businesses Shy Away From Open Source? [If you have the time, take a wander round Chuqui. Chuq van Rospach seems an interesting guy; and any blog with a tagline saying “And I’ll keep reinventing myself until I get it right” has got to be worth a read. Thanks for the heads-up, Kevin].

Here are a few quotes from the Chuq post:

• Open source requires you, as a manager of IT, or as a staffer, or as the CIO, to be willing to commit to being responsible for fixing a problem, and therefore, be responsible for the problem itself.
• The support contract is not about fixing the problem. The support contract is about allowing you to shift responsibility for the problem. It is the tool that allows you to go (as the IT person, manager or organization) to the customer, or your manager, or the CIO, or the VP of whatever organization is pissed at you for the problem, and say “we’re doing everything I can, but we can’t fix it until we hear back from the vendor”.

And that got me thinking hard about the importance of accountability. I’ve always felt that rights come with duties, power with vulnerability, empowerment with responsibility. Something to do with my upbringing, I guess. There’s nothing original about it, it’s been half a century since Peter Drucker maintained that organisational change was about accountability, not empowerment. Which is why organisations find it so hard to change; many “organisation men” learn to survive by wearing Teflon, nothing ever sticks. Empowerment without accountability. A very dangerous combination.

I’d never considered the possibility that people would try and patent software; the Drucker reader in me couldn’t see how anyone could claim the rights of “patent” without the duties of “fit-for-purpose”. Unless the software always did what it was supposed to do, and unless you could sue for damages when it didn’t, I couldn’t see software as patentable. Rights without duties. Dangerous.
While thinking about all this, I recalled a seminal article on the subject by Helen Nissenbaum over a decade ago, well worth a read. [I managed to find the reference, but it’s hidden behind a paywall. An ACM paywall. Oh well. You can find the abstract here, and if you have an ACM account, you can get to the whole thing via the same link. Incidentally, Nissenbaum, who used to be at Princeton, is now at NYU and writes some very interesting stuff on trust and identity].

Nissenbaum argued that computers were actually removing accountability, and wrote eloquently about the unfairness of rights and ownership without liability or responsibility. I didn’t agree with every detail in her arguments, particularly when she seemed to assert that collaboration and teamwork reduces accountability. But what she said stuck with me.

And it was only years later that I realised she was right. The way we used to work, in vendor-lock-in worlds, did remove accountability. But it wasn’t the teamwork that did it, it was the vendor-lock. IT departments tended to shift responsibility (and blame) to the vendor, because they could. In fact sometimes they had no choice and felt cool about it, a weird variant of Stockholm Syndrome.

In an opensource world there’s no place to hide. You take responsibility. You’re naked in front of your peers. And you behave responsibly because of that peer pressure, aided and abetted by the motivation you get from peer respect and recognition.

So maybe there’s something about opensource I’d never considered before:

• I’d bought the Given Enough Eyeballs All Bugs Are Shallow argument
• I could touch the value of Free as in Freedom 
• I could see the democratised innovation and emergence and serendipity payoffs
• I’d understood the function flexing and future-proofing and cycle time advantages.
• I could work out the “outsource your maintenance costs” value.
• I could even appreciate the “you attract talent because of open source, not with it” benefit.

But I’d never considered the Opensource Makes You Responsible concept.

Until I’d read Chuqui’s post. [Thanks, Chuq]

Unless we feel responsible and accountable, we don’t build Right First Time. Unless we feel responsible and accountable, we don’t consider the Customer Experience. Unless we do that, there is no emotional asset transfer. And business (as Drucker so beautifully put it) is about attracting and retaining customers, nothing else.
So become responsible. Use opensource. Not just as a tool or an enabler, but as a mindset. 

Continue reading “Opensource makes you Responsible”

I’ve been watching news about IE7 quite closely, with a lot more interest than I’d had in prior upgrades. Trying to figure out what Microsoft will do to make up for lost time, something they’ve been able to do reasonably often. Intrigued by the Ozzie factor. Who wouldn’t be?
It was in that frame of mind that I came across Chris Messina’s recent post on the subject; thanks, Chris!. And as I read through it, I noticed Chris’s comment on View Source and followed the link to the Release Notes.

I wasn’t too bothered to find out that Windows SharePoint Server cannot import Excel spreadsheets while IE7 is running; my attitude to Excel is probably such that I consider the inability to import spreadsheets a selling feature.

But no more View Source? Why? This doesn’t feel right to me. Definitely not a feature.
I think it was Paul Graham who first wrote about the value of View Source, how it allowed the curious to enjoy that “So that’s how they did it” moment. How it helped innovation. And now we have this.

Can’t help but feel that there are more “unintended” consequences to come.

Oh well.

Update:I was wrong. As the comments show, it would appear that View Source itself is not disabled, just the back-door approach to using it. That’s what happens when you critique words rather than real functions. Mea culpa.

I’ve just heard from Julie Meyer that Richard Duvall, the founder of Zopa, passed away earlier this week.

I met Richard for the first some years ago, while he was at Egg; more recently, via Julie, we met a few times while he was busy dreaming up Zopa, getting it funded and launching it.

Earlier this year we were both on the same small panel at Ariadne’s 5th Anniversary celebration, looking at Building Society For the 21st Century. In fact the kernel for this blog was written for that occasion.

Richard was one of the people who really got the power of the Web and P2P, and followed his dreams with his inimitable boundless energy. He didn’t just follow his dreams, he made them happen. Effervescent and charming, he was a pleasure to be with.

It’s normal to feel sad when someone close to you passes away. I didn’t know Richard that well, yet I feel really sad. That was the kind of guy Richard was. My condolences to those he leaves behind.

Bruce Schneier has written an interesting piece on how form follows function in any architecture, be it physical or electronic. My thanks to Kevin for pointing it out to me, and to Cory for making sure I didn’t forget about it …. I’ve been rushed off my feet lately….

Schneier’s arguments are simple, brought to life with eloquent examples and anecdotes:

• [Security-driven] changes were expensive. The problem is that architecture tends toward permanence, while security threats change much faster. Something that seemed a good idea when a building was designed might make little sense a century — or even a decade — later. But by then it’s hard to undo those architectural decisions.
• The same thing can be seen in cyberspace as well. In his book, Code and Other Laws of Cyberspace, Lawrence Lessig describes how decisions about technological infrastructure — the architecture of the internet — become embedded and then impracticable to change. Whether it’s technologies to prevent file copying, limit anonymity, record our digital habits for later investigation or reduce interoperability and strengthen monopoly positions, once technologies based on these security concerns become standard it will take decades to undo them.
• It’s dangerously shortsighted to make architectural decisions based on the threat of the moment without regard to the long-term consequences of those decisions.

All this made me think of the QWERTY keyboard. I grew up in a journalist family, with typewriters (the old Remington heavy-enought-to-give-you-a-hernia kind) outnumbering flowerpots at home. And when I first visited our printing press (I must have been nine at the time) I was quite surprised to see an ETAOIN SHRDLU keyboard. And my father explained to me that the QWERTY layout was designed to ensure that adjacent typebars didn’t jam, by separating high-frequency letters; that the layout had the additional “benefit” of slowing typing speeds down as a result. The linotype keyboard, on the other hand, was designed for speed, and therefore followed letter frequency distributions.

Form follows function. Just look how long QWERTY’s lasted. [An aside: It’s always amused me that the longest word you can form using the letters of the first line of the QWERTY keyboard is …. TYPEWRITER. What an unintended consequence. or was it? Maybe Grassy Knoll designed it]

We live in a world of many many cyber threats, some real, many perceived. I like the points that Schneier and Lessig make, particularly the pace-of-change one. There is always a temptation to take corrective action against security threats, both real and perceived; it is best to avoid that temptation altogether; but if we do give in, what we must ensure is that the corrective actions we take are designed to be as temporary as the threats; that we take care to make the response easily reversible, dismantlable, removable.

Imagine what would have happened if the recent ban on liquids on airplanes was enacted as law. Stupider things have been known to happen. In fact some part of me is actually surprised that the No Liquids rule didn’t become law.

Imagine what we’ve been doing to ourselves in building walls around our own information, within our own information. Actually paying people to build the walls, then paying people to drill through them, then paying people to fill the holes in…..

Now they know how many holes it takes to fill the Albert Hall.

Let’s keep those paths unpolluted.