Category: Four pillars

Today’s Economist carries comment and analysis of the iTunes business model following the recent attempts by France to prise open iTunes. You can find the entire article here, thankfully weedless i.e. not DRMed to submission.

I’ve never bought anything from the iTunes store; my children have, by the clickload. I am different from them; I’d already invested considerable sums in acquiring more than a thousand CDs, and what iTunes gave me was a simple, convenient way of unlocking the physical assets I’d already paid for and making them available for mobile use.

And an excuse to buy another Mac (or three) and pretty much every iPod ever released. As if I needed an excuse.
So, for people like me, ITunes represents something quite different. It represents freeing up music I already had. It represents a powerful way of managing the music I already had, in terms of finding tracks, creating playlists, transferring them to mobile devices, listening to the music, sharing it all with my kids.

Think of it as Four Pillars all at once. In ITunes I have syndication, I can publish the music to devices and people around my household. In ITunes I have search, for tracks, artists, albums, whatever, however. In ITunes I have fulfilment, in terms of the capacity to acquire the music and videos. And via iTunes ecosystem pieces like last.fm, I can sustain conversation about all of this. Soon I expect to see presence and IM and videochat more seamlessly integrated into the iTunes experience, either directly by Apple or via last.fm and pandora and members of that ilk. Soon I expect to see more seamless mashing capabilities as well.

And for the present, I’m prepared to pay the price of lock-in, where I can only listen to these tracks via an iPod. Yes it is a jail, but at least it’s an elegant one.

And I have the belief, possibly benighted, that Apple will do the right thing on FairPlay. Within the next two years. And guess what? I’ll probably go buy another iPod to celebrate. It’s about freedom to choose; you don’t have to exercise the freedom, you just need to have it. And if the product is good enough, you will keep buying it.

The Economist article asserts that the music store is a “loss leader” that serves only to boost sales of the iPod. I would make one more assertion. That there is a high correlation between tracks sold via iTunes and physical CD sales. Maybe the music industry needs to understand this as well, that, for certain market segments, iTunes extends and augments hard CD sales rather than substitute and depress such sales.

A related topic. I read what Malc had to say today, about the framing problem with taking Apple head-on in this space. He’s absolutely right. His stance reminded me of this article on The Transition Away from Microsoftness, from the Linux Journal.

Nobody in his right mind will try and compete with Microsoft Office head-on, it has a dominant position in the market, its users swear by it the same way drug users swear by their drugs, they don’t care about the lock-in, etc etc. What Nicholas Petreley has to say makes complete sense. If the opensource world wants to take Microsoft Office on, it will not be by making a cheaper/faster/better Office, but by providing something completely different. Something so different that people will buy it for new reasons, and land up reducing their commitment to Office almost as a byproduct.

I see the syndication/search/fulfilment/conversation tools doing just that. Today. Office is more likely to die by a million small cuts than by a NetScape/Internet Explorer war.

If nobody in his right mind will take on Microsoft Office, it begs the question why people think iTunes can be taken on that way.

Not within their frame of reference. Not around their anchor-points. Not on their battlegrounds and playing by their rules. iTunes cannot be beaten by jTunes or MTunes, that is madness. Breaking wind in the face of rolling thunder.
Spot on, Malc. Hope you enjoy the Linux Journal analogy.

Go subscribe to Doc Searls’ Suitwatch, his July 6 newsletter is well worth reading. You can subscribe here. It’s free. [Update: If you don’t feel like subscribing, or want to take a quick look, you can now go to a webified version here. ]
There are a small number of issues out there today where non-participation is not an option. You have no choice.

You can start with the survival of humanity and with improving the lot of humankind. Move through the abolition of poverty and more equitable distribution of food, clothing, shelter. Migrate from there to better healthcare and education and personal security. Arabesque yourself into world trade and protectionism and global warming and consequences. Stop again at health via epidemics and near-epidemics, dip your toes into natural and manmade disasters and their prevention and cure.

These are some of the big issues. It is tempting to philosophise and move into belief systems and beliefs themselves and the implications of breakdown of family and community cultures, to get my sleeves rolled up for a creation-versus-evolution battle. But this is a blog about information, so I’m not going to go there for now.

What people need to understand is that the three i-battles for information: the internet, identity and intellectual property rights, these three battles need to be won. Won in such a way that we can make use of the tremendous technological advances we have made, and thereby solve some of the problems listed above.

That’s why you have no choice.

Here’s the coda from Doc’s latest piece:

• Right then I realized that Net Neutrality is just another name for a clear
  digital path between devices. Regardless of how near or far away they may
  be. And that there is an incalculable sum of money to be made in clearing
  those paths and putting them to use. Also that I won’t live to see the job
  finished.
• “Broadband” is like “long distance”: just another name for transient
  scarcity. We want our Net to be as fast, accessible and unrestricted as a
  hard drive. (And in time even that analogy will seem too slow.) The only
  way that will happen is if the Net becomes ubiquitous infrastructure —
  something which, in a practical sense, nobody owns, everybody can use and
  anybody can improve.
• There is infinitely more business in making that happen, and using the
  results, than Congress can ever protect for the carriers alone. And guess
  who is in the best position to make money doing that?
• Right: the carriers.
• Will somebody please tell them?

We’ve all heard the phrase that control has passed from the centre or core to the edge. But for some reason we spend too long believing that the edge is about new devices and even new software.

The edge is about people. Control has passed to individuals.

Doc quotes the Bob Frankston view of the internet as a path. Much of our diatribes against carriers and IPR and identity is to do with people trying to insert, sometimes reinsert, control points in that path. And the compelling need to prevent this.

[Incidentally, both Bob and Doc have helped me really begin to understand the importance of all this, along with a wonderfully open set of people brought together by Gordon Cook of the Cook Report]

Connected-Not-Channelled means a clear path between the people connected. Not the devices connected. Not the software on those devices or on the “edge”. And not anything in between either. Especially not anything in between.
When control (of digital rights, of identity, of antivirus, of spam, of whatever) is truly in the hands of empowered individuals, we will see real value emerge. Value that can change lives and life.

When I buy a book or a CD or a DVD, responsibility for managing that physical asset within the law passes to me. And I can choose to stay within the law or break the law. Or change it.

The same has to be true of digital assets. The responsibility is mine. If I break the law I am accountable for it. I must either stay within the law or change it.

Any attempts to create nanny controls between the endpoints, while understandable in concept, has too many undesired and unintended consequences. And a few intended but undesirable ones.

I can foresee a world where all these controls people are trying to impose or interpose continue to exist. But not on the path. But at the individuals connected by the path. Personal firewalls and personal encryption and personal antivirus and personal antispam already exist. And we will see more of these personal things in the identity and privacy and confidentiality arenas, and they will leak over into IPR and DRM.

If individuals choose to create personal walled gardens that’s OK.

What is not OK is when people pollute the path.

Path Pollution is a crime against the cyber ecosystem, with too many undesirable consequences to bear thinking about.

It cannot happen.

A colleague of mine, Mike Persaud, pointed me at this report from IBM, the Global Innovation Outlook 2.0. [An aside: Preparing for this post, I Googled “IBM GIO”. And got nearly half a million results. The first three all related to what I was looking for. Which is good. But the first entry was titled Global Initiatives Offering despite leading to the Global Innovation Outlook. Which is less good. Two different expansions for GIO in one referenced link? I thought IBM had left all that behind.]

The report is 40 pages long and can be found as a pdf via the link above. [Hey IBM, how about a linkable referenceable document the next time around, one where I could point to individual sections or paragraphs? Forget that, I’m just grateful for a simple free download :-)]. Read it, it’s worth it.

Rather than spend time telling you what I agree with, I thought it apposite to focus on my key disagreements. Let me concentrate on just one this time around.

The report quotes Spherion‘s 2003 Emerging Workforce Study as saying “45% of workers want to change jobs at least every three to five years“. [They’ve released the 2006 version, but I have yet to read the bits that are easily accessible].

I see a lot of discussion about this increased mobility of the workforce, and its impact on the firms of the future. The more I think about it, the less I am sure this is the way things will go.

There’s a cause-and-effect issue here. I don’t think people want to change jobs for the sake of changing jobs. I think they change jobs for two reasons: One, they are dissatisfied where they are. Two, they can change jobs, something they couldn’t do as easily in previous generations.

So when we see nearly half the workforce wanting to change jobs, it is a consequence of their being dissatisfied, not a driver in itself. At least that’s my contention.

I am reminded of the motherhood statement that an existing customer is nine times more efficient to maintain than a new one, I think it was Bain and Co who said that decades ago. The same is true for staff and even for supply chains.

Change for change’s sake hasn’t really become a workforce goal. We see higher attrition for a variety of reasons: lower transportation and migration costs, more extensive conurbation tendencies, the breakdown of the traditional home and family structures, the relative ease with which one can change jobs.

Let’s lump all of this together and call it reduced switching costs. It is a reason why people change jobs, not the reason. And people would not change jobs if they were satisfied where they were.

Dissatisfaction stems from a number of roots, some of which I list below:

• A breakdown of the trust relationship between employer and employee, with downsizing and leftsizing and rightsourcing and a variety of euphemisms du jour for firing people. No more sinecure or tenure. So when employees can leave, they do. [There is an employer variation of this as well, where employers have held on to staff because they haven’t had the choice, in a number of jurisdictions. And in these cases, as employment law eases or workarounds (firearounds?) are found, there is a pendulum swing effect.]
• Lack of choice in the first place. Someone may have taken a job they didn’t want while waiting for the right one to come up. This is as true for sector as for location. Not all dissatisfaction stems from omissions or commissions by the employer.
• De-skilling or its blood relative, removal of empowerment/discretion. Often caused by poorly-thought-out restructuring of 19th century organisations. A stealth version of this is found in over-use of external consultants and advisors. Like having a dog, preventing it from barking and hiring an Aibo to do it at enormous expense, then being surprised at the mechanical mess created.

I remember bringing my management team together in Paris in August 2001, trying to work out the best way of delivering very challenging cost reduction targets in response to adverse market conditions. And Malcolm said “You should never hire anyone that you can’t promise a job for the next ten years“. Wise words. We need more hundred-year managers, we seem to excel as a society at creating one-minute versions.

I don’t think people will want to change jobs every 3 to 5 years. That is paving the cowpaths.

People will want to hold 3 to 5 jobs at the same time. Different communities they enjoy being part of. Different communities they enjoy working with. Different communities they are in covenant relationship with. And occasionally, two or more of these communities may exist within the same extended enterprise.
A person’s working lifetime is not going to disaggregate sequentially, but in parallel. Many jobs yes, but at the same time, not one following the other.

Generation M is already doing this. Today. As we speak.

This has significant implications for the way films and music are created, two industries we can learn from and teach at the same time. More later.

So said Kurt Vonnegut Senior, as reported by his son Kurt Jr in A Man Without A Country. Unusual little book, a perfect antidote to the pain caused by listening to that mp3.

I love chess quotes. There’s something about them, this weird juxtaposition of images.

Malcolm is a close friend of mine. As is Sean. And recently, kicked off by Sean, we started becoming last.fm friends as well.

Malcolm’s genteel response to me was something along the lines of “Happy to accept you as a friend, but no way do I want to be associated with your taste in music” :-)

I think there’s a serious and worthwhile point in his comment, despite his taste (?) in music. As we learn more about the use of collaborative filtering in Four Pillars, we will discover ways of performing Boolean operations on many “lists”. Give me only what is common between Sean and Malcolm. Show me only what they differ on. Give me a Top 10 and a Bottom 10 of my last.fm friends’ interests.

For music read books, for books read wiki pages, for wiki pages read stocks and shares, for stocks and shares read enterprise data. The principle’s the same. People who did this also did this which you didn’t do. Would you like to see the common bits or the uncommon bits?

Search as a means of data cleansing and repair. Syndication as a means of determining leading indicators, pull-from-the-future. Conversation as a means of testing morale. All with Add A Subtract B Venn Diagram CDE. The possibilities are endless.
Enterprise blogospheres tend to go quiet when the political environment is tense, unlike external blogospheres which go into orbit. I have many ideas as to why, but I need to watch for a while and work it out. Currently the information pool on such events is thin.