Category: Four pillars

You may remember that in a recent post of mine, I linked to an essay by Paul Graham on What Business Can Learn from Open Source. Fascinating essay. I hadn’t read much of Paul since his LISP days, just the occasional wander over to his site. My bad.

Reading that essay made me go out and buy his latest book, Hackers and Painters. It’s not often that you get a book endorsed by people as diverse as David Weinberger, Chris Anderson, Larry Lessig, Andy Hertzfeld and Commander Taco. I had to buy it and read it.

I’m still reading it. Very. Very. Slowly. I like it that much. [An aside: Endorsements on book covers may be old-world ways of acquiring collaboratively-filtered ratings, but they do work. For example, I would read any book endorsed by John Seely Brown. Even a telephone directory.]

Why do I like Hackers and Painters that much? Here are a few extracts from the book (all in italics and judged to be “fair use”, annotated with some comments from me:

Paul on hackers:

What hackers and painters have in common is that they’re both makers. Along with composers, architects and writers, what hackers and painters are trying to do is make good things. They’re not doing research per se, though if in the course of trying to make good things they discover some new technique, so much the better.

…………………

Sometimes what the hackers do is called “software engineering”, but this term is just as misleading. Good software designers are no more engineers than architects are. The border between architecture and engineering is not sharply defined, but it’s there. It falls between what and how: architects decide what to do, and engineers figure out how to do it.

What and how should not be kept too separate. You’re asking for trouble if you try to decide what to do without understanding how to do it.

My comments:

This is important. Too many firms, too many IT departments in firms, think everything is about process. Past-predicts-the-future assembly line. They get egged on by efficiency experts masquerading as consultants (or is it the other way around, and who cares anyway).

Software development is first and foremost a creative process, trying to find unique solutions to a firm’s unique problems. Those that aren’t unique problems can and will be solved by the opensource market, so contribute and participate, but stick to your knitting. Your job as an IT professional within a firm is to find those firm-unique solutions to firm-unique problems.

Take the creativity out of an IT department at your peril. Soon you will pay firm-unique prices to implement solutions to other people’s problems, not yours. Treasure your hackers. They’re like the nerds at school, more interested in being smart than being popular. Use kid gloves with them, there is a war for talent out there. And Generation M will make it even harder.

You want D-I-Y IT, treasure your hackers, they’re the only ones who care enough. Who stay up nights trying to figure out the best way to solve a problem. Who find those solutions that are appropriate to your firm.

You want Because Of IT, treasure your hackers. They are Because Of material.

Treasure your hackers.

Paul on smart kids and popularity and education:

Why are smart kids so consistently unpopular? The answer, I think, is that they don’t want to be popular…… [they wanted] to be smart. Not simply to do well in school, though that counted for something, but to design beautiful rockets, or to write well, or to understand how to program computers. In general, to make great things.

………………………….

The main reason nerds are unpopular is that they have other things to think about. Their attention is drawn to books or the natural world, not fashions and parties. They’re like someone trying to play soccer while balancing a glass of water on his head.

……………………………..

… I think the main reason other kids persecute nerds is that it’s part of the mechanism of popularity. Popularity is only partially about individual attractiveness. It’s much more about alliances.

…………………………………………

What bothers me is not that the kids are kept in prisons, but that (a) they aren’t told about it and (b) the prisons are run mostly by the inmates…… a world ruled by a caste of giants who run after a brown oblong ball….

My comments:

Again, some very telling insights. But Graham is not despondent, he recognises that we as adults, parents and teachers, can do something about it. The article on Why Nerds are Unpopular set off a whole pile of Searlsian snowballs around me. Why children from some cultures do so well at school, their will and wish to be smart rather than to conform to popularity. Why some children have the emotional intelligence to do this and others don’t. And so on and so forth.

What gets me excited is how much impact social software can have on this arena, as teachers and parents help children bond and collaborate, help children want to do beautiful and creative things, rather than just waste their lives wanting to be popular, and becoming miserable in the attempt.

Good teachers (and there are many) have had an uphill fight for many years, trying to get the talent they can see to become something, and watching that talent atrophy before their very eyes because of peer pressure and popularity contests and what Graham refers to as “court hierarchies”. But now we have tools to help the good teachers, tools that can help children bond and learn without the fear of the popularity contests.

This is worth a separate post sometime soon.

Paul on Risk and on Languages:

When I grew up, it felt as if there was nowhere to go, and nothing to do. This was no accident. Suburbs are deliberately designed to exclude the outside world, because it contains things that could endanger children.

………………………………………….

People sometimes send me mail saying “How can you say that Java won’t turn out to be a successful language? It’s already a successful language”…..When I say Java won’t turn out to be a successful language, I mean something more specific: that Java will turn out to be an evolutionary dead-end, like Cobol. This is just a guess, I may be wrong. My point here is not to diss Java, but to raise the issue of evolutionary trees and get people asking, where on the tree is language x? The reason to ask this question isn’t just so that in a hundred years our ghosts can say, I told you so. It’s because staying close to the main branches is a useful heuristic for finding languages that will be good to program in now…… I have a hunch that the main branches of the evolutionary tree pass through the languages that have the smallest, cleanest cores. The more of a language you can write in itself, the better.

My comments:

I think Paul is on to something here, although I quote from different parts of his book. It is something about Nanny States and Nanny Environments and Nanny Languages.

Human beings, yes this includes children, should never be insulated from risk. Trusting is all about risk. Bonding is all about risk. Learning is all about risk. Love is all about risk. Even faith is all about risk.
We need to empower everyone to take risk and be accountable for the consequences.

You remove the risk, you remove the accountability for consequences. And the incredible value that can be gained from that vulnerability.

I am not preaching anarchy. As a parent you have responsibilities for your children, as a leader you have responsibilities for the people you lead. But. You should be letting those “under your charge” find their potential, develop themselves to that potential and then exceed that potential. To dream dreams and see visions.

You have to discharge your responsibilities with care, but I don’t think you can do this by preventing risk, you do this by connecting risk with consequences and accountability for those consequences. And allowing people to take risk commensurate with their ability, that’s where the wisdom and leadership comes in.
So children do come off bikes and burn their hands and hit their heads on rocks. And they have to be allowed to, in order to learn. There are bikes and fires and rocks at work as well, and people have to be allowed to learn about them.

The important thing is to make sure that everyone is made aware of the likely consequences, and to take responsibility for those consequences.

In Nanny Environments, when something goes wrong, people look for someone to blame. Because they know it’s not them. Because we made it so, by removing risk and accountability.

And you can have Nanny Languages as well. Languages that prevent you from doing “wrong”, whatever that wrong may be. In the benighted belief that you should be stopped from making mistakes.

More later. Go read the book.

Sean pointed me at this post by Dave Morin. People who walk away from plum jobs because we won’t let them work the way we taught them to. People who expect to be able to IM and use internet mail at work. People who will expect to bring their own laptops to work, it is part of what defines them.

I was still getting over it, realising for myself that this Generation I’m busy preparing for is already here. Now.

And when I got home, I had a chat with Isaac, my 14 year old son, the upshot of which was that he’s going to upgrade digital cameras and I’m going to get his old one.

Yes, the Hand-Me-Up Generation is here. Now. And I am part of that Generation.

Generation M will hand things up to us, not wait for us to hand things down to them.

Smart companies try to commoditise their products’ complements.

So said Joel Spolsky in an article on the economics of open source four years ago; if you haven’t read it, you can find the article here; it can also be found in that excellent collection of articles published as Joel on Software.

I’ve been musing on stuff recently; stuff raked across the ashes in my head, raked as a result of spending time with Doc Searls in Copenhagen, revisiting Because of Rather Than With; raked as a result of re-reading Stewart Brand and Christopher Alexander (again!); raked as a result of the painful debates on Net Neutrality.

And the phrase “Smart companies try to commoditise their products’ complements” kept coming back to me. I’m getting older now, and it took me a few days to remember where I first came across it. And no, I didn’t feel like googling it, I wanted to remember all by myself :-)

And I began to wonder.

Smart companies have products with associated complements. As long as they can drive the cost of the complements down, they can raise the price of their products. But to do this, they must ensure that the complements remain complements.

They have power only so long as complements are With. When complements become Because Of, they are no longer complements, and the power erodes. This is scary for “content owners” and for their complements, the owners of distribution mechanisms. Which may explain the behaviour of studios and publishers and telcos and cablecos.

For many years they were comfortable with the prices of their complements dropping as a result of Moore and Metcalfe and Gilder. It helped them sustain profitable prices and margins for their products. But they needed the complements to remain With.

What they didn’t realise is what happens when the cost of the complements starts tending towards zero, when the commoditisation is so vast that With becomes Because Of.

Then people find out that the Emperor has No Clothes.

At a recent conference in Las Vegas, Cisco President John Chambers is quoted as saying “I’m proud to be a plumber“. I wasn’t there to hear what he said, and I haven’t seen any complete transcripts, so I will restrict my comments.

Chambers is also quoted as saying that 40-50% per cent of future productivity gains will come from collaboration, that Cisco is moving from transactional communications to collaboration, and that “the future will be about any time, place, screen, service, device and network”.

So let me get this right. A Because Of company that is comfortable with being a Because Of company. Proud to be plumbers. A company that sees itself as moving from transactional to relational. And a company that sees a high level of agnosticism and freedom in the layers above.

It’s easy to be cynical about large companies. I’m going to give Cisco the benefit of the doubt here, and see what happens. I’m going to believe that they want to be, and to stay, a Because Of company, and that they’re happy selling to everyone in the layers “above”.

Which makes me think about monopolies at the infrastructure level. There is some evidence that monopolies are actually good for you (or at least near-monopolies) when operating as infrastructure. There is some evidence that problems manifest themselves only when the infrastructure player gets bored with being an infrastructure player, yielding one of three bad outcomes:

• Monopoly Choice: Any colour you like as long as it’s mine. This is where the incumbent provides some facility and prevents the use of competing facilities. Examples would be if Vista blocked the use of iTunes and insisted on WMP only. Or the other way round. Called Choice because it is usually sold as a means of increasing consumer choice. I have never understood that, how they could call it choice.
• Monopoly Magic: Any colour you like, but mine’s faster. This is where the incumbent provides a facility that always appears to work faster or better than others. In the past I used to understand and tolerate this, muttering to myself “oh well, of course native always works better”. Now I am far more intolerant. Examples would be if Safari worked better than Firefox on OSX. Or MSN Messenger worked well only on Windows family. I used to be able to understand that, but today it gives me a reason to walk away.
• Monopoly Money: Any colour you like, he who pays the most wins. This is where the incumbent provides tools that allow firms to push the layer of lock-in up a level, such as what was rumoured with the ViiV chip. It is where the monopolist is happy to have a monopolist customer who does not believe in the same principles of platform agnosticism.

I think it’s OK to be a monopoly player in infrastructure, provided none of these three common corruptions are allowed to exist. What Cisco needs to be careful about is Monopoly Money.

In a strange kind of way, this mirrors the opensource movement, and needs to follow the same principles:

• Concentrate on commoditisation of the infrastructure
• Move this commoditisation up the stack organically
• Provide tools to help others continue this movement
• Ensure that when others use these tools, they have to follow the same principles, akin to GPL

Mr Chambers and Cisco have a real opportunity. I have to believe that they will be looking at tools to do with identity, with authentication and permissioning, with digital rights management. If Cisco can avoid the lock-in minefield and provide tools for these that cannot be used to create lock-in, they would have done the industry and the world a real service.

More later.

Ron Silliman recently linked to me and stated in his blog: One technology blogroll I like a lot – because it focuses to a surprising degree on the social implications of technology – belongs to J.P. Rangaswami, whose blog is Confused in Calcutta.

Ron, I appreciate the feedback. But it made me think. Am I unusual in this? I think not, except perhaps as a result of the extent my thoughts are influenced by the following books: The Social Life Of Information, The Cluetrain Manifesto, Emergence, The Tipping Point, The Future of Work, The Modern Firm , Open Sources 2.0 , Technological Revolutions and Financial Capital, Community Building On The Web, How Buildings Learn, 109 Ideas for Virtual Learning, The Cathedral and the Bazaar, Maverick, The Borderless World and Blink.

I could have made the list bigger, but this is enough to make my point. These are some of the most important books ever written about how information flows within an organisation, how to make the flow better, how to organise around it, how to get the best value out of people.

IT is about Information and Technology. ICT is about Information and Communications and Technology. Enterprises and markets are made up of people. If we don’t concentrate on the social aspects of what we do, we don’t do our jobs.

If only I had the data to defend the statements, I would say:

• 90% of the cost of implementing systems is about the social aspects
• 90% of the reason projects succeed or fail is to be found in the social aspects
• 90% of the value to be derived from ICT comes from the social aspects
• 90% of the joy of working in ICT comes from the social aspects
• 90% of the challenges in ICT come from the social aspects.

Well, I’ve said it anyway. So I might as well go further. If ICT was a new discipline today, it would (and should) be classified as a social science.