Category: Four pillars

Thanks to Jonathan Peterson of way.nu for pointing me at Robert X Cringely’s recent post on Google, Microsoft, Intel and Yahoo, whom he terms “the four pillars of personal computing circa 2006“.

I usually agree with most of what Cringely says. For once I’m not sure.

And it’s not because he uses the term Four Pillars either

What I’m not sure about is the list of companies he’s put forward. Google. Microsoft. Intel. Yahoo.

Why am I not sure? Five reasons:

1. Generation M will define those pillars. And while Four Pillars for enterprise are still some distance away, Four Pillars for personal computing is now. Generation M is about Samsung and Nokia and Canon and JVC and Sony and some Motorola and yes, a lot of Apple from a hardware viewpoint.

2. The platforms that Generation M will use are those that make mixing things, mangling things, moving things around easier. Generation M has already signalled intent with major resistance to current DRM and IPR. I cannot see Microsoft or Intel or even Apple get away with attempts at putting that particular genie back in the bottle. Flash memory and N-AND RAM and Samsung still have stories to tell.

3. Generation M is already about co-creation, taking opensource and democratised innovation to new heights. They are into community, into sharing. They make things like facebook and youtube and bittorrent happen. None of the four companies mentioned is a leading light in the opensource world or in true community creation. Not even Google.

4. Generation M seems to have critical mass in places like India and China, and those markets are different yet again. It’s instructive to watch Samsung and Nokia in there.

5. Generation M is about mobility. And we have yet to see the end of the Net Neutrality and IMS debate. What is certain is that Generation M will reject the deals that regulators and incumbents come up with. Enough said.

Cringely may be right, and maybe I’m being too pedantic. Intel through Apple. Yahoo through Flickr. Google through being the new what-passes-for-a-platform. And Microsoft through XBox……unless Sony, a more appropriate proxy for Microsoft, wins….

 

The latest New Scientist has an article covering some of the discussions at CHI in Montreal recently. And for once it’s not a premium article, so I can link to it here.

It worries me, but for all the wrong reasons.

First, the headline: “Mashup” websites are a hacker’s dream come true. Most mashups are derivative sites and could perhaps reflect the so-called security weaknesses of the originating sites. Sounds like someone trying to sell me more Information Security consulting. I gave at the office.
Then, take a quote like this:

However, the informal manner in which these websites are thrown together means that information displayed on them could be inaccurate or false. Issues such as security and privacy may only be considered as an afterthought, if at all, and there is nothing to prevent people using them to obtain personal information, such as addresses…..

My impression is that mashups work for a number of reasons: they’re easy and cheap and cheerful to create, the hoops to jump through are kept at a minimum; the information they derive teaches us new things or gives us new pleasure or helps us do new things; they are created and co-created by people who love asking Why Not? as well as Why? If these sites can get hold of addresses or other personal information, much of the time it means the information was cleartext opensource available in the first place.

Carry on with a quote like this:

The worry is that mashups could be an accident waiting to happen, according to some delegates at the Computer-Human Interaction conference in Montreal, Canada, last month. Hart Rossman, chief security technologist for Science Applications International of Vienna, Virginia, and adviser to the US Department of Defense, warned that developers of these websites are not taking issues such as data integrity, system security and privacy seriously enough.

…..and it carries on: Central to the problem is the fact that the mashup developer does not own the data being mashed, while the owner neither knows nor cares that their data is being used.
Let me guess who said it. Oh yes, a chief security technologist. Why am I not surprised?

I think this is important. I don’t want to see phrases like “not taking issues such as data integrity, system security and privacy seriously enough”. That’s scaremongering. Selling security consulting. And there’s some of the Emperor’s New Clothes as well. As if these issues were perfectly dealt with before mashups came along. Yeah right.

Read the rest of the article for yourself. There are some very useful bits, but far too much head-in-the-sand-ness for me.

Privacy and security and data integrity are important all right. As are identity and authentication and permissioning which take up the same space.

We need to ensure that the weeds of DRM are not allowed to choke the mashup flowers. Let a thousand mashup flowers bloom. We need new answers to identity and access, but we are not going to get them by constraining new ways of doing things with old ways of stopping things.

That’s like trying to stop a car with a bridle.

New brakes please. New machine tools please.

Ross, I hope you’re reading this

I came across this appeal from the OED/BBC. I quote:

• The OED seeks to find the earliest verifiable usage of every single word in the English language—currently 600,000 in the OED and counting—and of every separate meaning of every word. Quite a task! The fifty words on the OED’s BBC Wordhunt appeal list all have a date next to them – corresponding to the earliest evidence the dictionary currently has for that word or phrase. Can you trump that? If so the BBC wants to hear from you.

And for the life of me I could not figure out why anyone would use an e-mail approach for doing this. Please please OED, BBC, whoever’s in charge, take a leaf out of Wikipedia. Make this a public wiki.

An etymological dictionary with real instances of usage, timed and dated, for all neologisms. Covering the last 30 years say. This has to be done via a wiki. And could be real fun.

It cannot be done any other way. Just cannot.

You’re right. I’ve put the next recap off for a short while, trying to give me enough time to get my head around a few things. An example:
It all started with my attending the Professionalism in IT Conference arranged by the British Computer Society early last week. I’ve been involved with the initiative for a while now, and it’s truly fascinating. Particularly when it comes to figuring out what the profession stands for. What any profession stands for.
Which leads me on to someone I met at the conference, Mari Sako. Fascinating person. She’s a Professor at the Said Business School, Oxford, who has recently written a book called Shifting Boundaries of the Firm. I’d heard of the book, seen the Table of Contents, dismissed it as too focused on Japanese issues for me.

I was wrong.

I’ve now ordered the book. What Professor Sako did was to connect some important dots for me, dots that matter in Four Pillar Land.

I was expecting a presentation on global sourcing, which I got.

• I was not surprised to hear about corporate functions being disaggregated and reaggregated.
• I was not surprised to hear about the effects of outsourcing and offshoring.
• I was not surprised to hear about a constant pressure on IT professionals to repackage their skills and knowledge.

And then I had a Road to Damascus moment …. when Mari Sako  mentioned Andrew Abbott and his System of Professions. Some of the things she said resonated differently in my head. Two key examples:

• Technology and corporate restructuring have led professions to redraw their knowledge boundaries.
  
• Change in content of professions is as significant as change in location of jobs.

Now, I’d read Abbott before, and for sure I liked what System of Professions was getting at, and thought I understood where he was going. But hearing Professor Sako speak of it in a different context many years later, I began to see something else.

Wonderful what conversations can do.

In the past I’ve interpreted Abbott as an extension of the old priests and lawyers and doctors arguments, and railed against IT  “professionals” who play the This-Is-Complex-You-Don’t-Understand-And-Never-Will card.

What I saw this time around is that social software and collaborative tools represent a real threat to those knowledge-hoarding “professionals”. A clear and present danger that they have to deal with. And keep dealing with. Which explains the reaction of a number of professions to blogs and wikis.

I’d love to see a profession-by-profession analysis somewhere. Accountancy. Law. HR. I guess you can call them professions.

I’m also of the opinion that the ratios these professions exhibit within a firm vary by culture and by market segment, bringing a different dynamic into play. So it would be interesting to see this reaction broken down not just by profession but also by geography and market.
My final twist. Maybe the Abbott to Sako to me snowball explains something else to me.

The Four Pillar world is not for people who are professionals in the traditional sense.

It is for people who have a vocation, a calling.

It is only when you have that calling that you feel comfortable with sharing information, with giving information away for free. I guess those readers who are teachers or doctors understand where I’m going with this. I could not imagine a doctor not sharing his knowledge, his expertise, his information hoard, when a life may be at stake.

We need the equivalent of a Hippocratic Oath. About ideas and sharing. About patents and intellectual property. About identity and privacy and secrecy. There’s probably something in what Larry Lessig has already been doing, something in what Cory and  John Perry Barlow et al have been doing, something in what Rishab Aiyer Ghosh et al have been doing.

We need a Hippocratic Oath.

You may have read my previous post on Google versus Microsoft. I wish I could link to the whole article and share it with you, but it’s been DRMed out of existence. The link to the teaser stub is to be found here. You may prefer to read the firecat, a special report on Google in the same issue, which for some reason is OK for me to share. To be found here. The special report is worth reading, but how I wish I could reproduce the entire leader as well.

Which brings me to the point of this post.

In my previous post I averred that Google and its ilk will succeed because of their adherence to community standards, rather than despite those standards.

Yes, I do own up to using the phrase “pinko technologies” when talking about social software. [Thanks Andrew !] But that doesn’t mean that my assertion was just a cheap shot at Microsoft.

It’s more important than that.

When we started getting real traction with blogs at the bank, one of the key questions that came up was whether we should keep blog content open or closed.

And I had a very strong hunch that we had to start with everything being open, and then  selectively closing bits as needed, in order to comply with chinese walls, prevent market abuse, respect customer confidentiality and good things like that. This was generally accepted and so it happened that way.

Start with open. Then close only when absolutely needed. This is no longer about operating systems or architectures, about protocols, about standards.

It is about information.

It is what Four Pillars is about.

It is what this blog is about.

We cannot possibly justify even using terms like “data mining” or “enterprise applications integration” in this day and age; these are constructs of closed-closed-closed approaches to walled garden design and build. And not even elegant ones at that. we have to do these things only as a result of prior bad decisions. Decisions involving building walls around our own information. Decisions we should not be repeating.

It’s our information.

As we move towards greater co-creation, as we accelerate towards better remakes of IPR, we need to bear this in mind. Information must start open. And then get closed only when it’s an imperative.

I am not surprised that “Google’s market share in search has fallen from a high of around 80% to around 50% today”, as the Economist states in its article. Google can remain market leaders even if their share falls to 15%. Why? Because the world of information is still growing exponentially as people mash and rip and co-createl. And exciting things are happening in search, reasons to be cheerful. We will have specialist blog search tools. We will have specialist image search tools. We will have specialist video search tools. Not all these will be Google. Very few of these will be Google.

And I don’t think Google are upset about it. Which is good. If they succeed with generic search (which they have) and either Gmail (which looks good) or Google Maps (which looks better) or Google Earth (which looks even better) then they will be able to go after mobility plays.

And their approach to innovation will mean that they’re only as good as their next Beta from their Lab. Which is great. Probably what keeps them motivated. Staying ahead by doing new things, challenging competition, not suppressing it.
As the Economist leader points out, Google has strong competition in pretty much every field they’re in. Which, according to many experts, keeps them on their toes and healthy and all that.

It’s not about the competition. It’s about intent. Intent to coexist with other participants in an ecosystem.

When I can’t find a flickr reference via google; when I can’t find a youtube reference via google; then I will begin to worry. Maybe.
Remember that Four Pillars support something. They are a means and not an end.

I promised a recap. Next recap tomorrow.

[Even if Liverpool lose to West Ham. I hope they don’t. I predict 3-1 to the ‘Pool.]