In my last post I quoted Laocoon from Virgil, and it gives me the opportunity of linking to one of my favourite Rudyard Kipling poems: Et Dona Ferentes.
When I read it as a child, I was incredibly smitten with the image of three-castored grand pianos cantering away… and a little smitten with the rest of the poem as well.
ne credite, Teucri / Quidquid id est, timeo Danaos et dona ferentes
In those days he urged us to beware the Greeks even when they came bearing gifts. I’ve had the chance to detach myself from anything and everything for a few days, and it set me thinking. Looking hard at the laptop I didn’t have, playing with the software that wasn’t on it.
And it occurred to me that much of the software I was using was proudly badged and branded Beta. These Greeks came bearing gifts I liked.
It also occurred to me that these Beta things worked pretty well with each other. And I mused to myself, maybe we’re not in Web n.0 where n is an integer. Maybe we’re in Web Beta, and our goal is Web Sigma.
Web Sigma. An integrated net of David Weinberger pieces loosely joined, with high cohesion and loose coupling, driven by open community standards and principles. Enabling Cluetrain conversations and Johnson emergence. In modern firms that bring together Malone and Semler and Roberts. [Completely irrelevant aside, except to people like me. Apparently the only financier of the happening on Yasgur’s farm thirty-odd years ago was a John Roberts. Anyone know what happened to him?]
Web Sigma. With many of the small pieces appearing to do similar things but with small overlaps and underlaps. With no marginal cost increases as a result of these overlaps and underlaps, this apparent proliferation. [Maybe worrying about proliferation is itself something caused by living too long in locked-in-vendor land].
Changing metaphor and meme occasionally is a good thing for me, helps me think harder about things. I am intrigued by what Web Beta represents, why it’s happening. Is it because software developers have come out of the closet and admitted stuff doesn’t quite work first time around. Or (my preferred take) were software developers never in that particular closet anyway, that we can deal with Web Beta only because we’ve managed to move away from a blame culture?
Web Beta also allows me to give in to temptation, to define things that stop us from getting there as Beta Blockers 
I could include all the bad aspects of DRM and current IPR regimes and IMS and two-tier internets and badly thought out identity or privacy or security. And I like the coherent smooth continuous integration landscape that Web Sigma conjures up.
Something to think about.
This post will attract flames for sure. But with a little bit of luck some of the flames will be of the Axylia putria variety…..
If we want to get Four Pillars right, it is not enough for us to understand and follow Generation M, the demand side of the market. We need to take a long hard look at the supply side as well, the Artists Formerly Known as Vendors (AVs)
Why, you may ask? Henry Ford did not look at what horses ate or did, or how horses procreated, when he figured out how to manufacture cars efficiently. Yet he described what the car could do in terms of horse-power. Even if all that we can learn from AVs is how to describe what their successors do, this is worth doing.
There’s been a bit of brownian motion in the AV world over the last twenty years, as globalisation, disintermediation and the internet (as in the Borderless World of Kenichi Ohmae) met with the opensource movement (a la Eric Raymond and Richard Stallman and Linus Torvalds) got snowball-enriched by conversation and emergence and democratised innovation (as influenced by Cluetrain conversations and the works of Steven Johnson, Yochai Benkler and Eric von Hippel) into the Identity and Digital Rights territory of Larry Lessig, Cory Doctorow and Rishab Aiyer Ghosh. Good feeling to have every reference in this paragraph accessible in Wikipedia. Makes this kind of blogging easier. Who knows, one day Wikipedia may become the Grand Panjandrum of all footnotes and bibliographies…..
Back to the story. Brownian motion. Lots going on. Artists Formerly Known as Vendors wondering what to do. Let’s see what’s happening:
Protocol becomes device driver becomes kernel becomes distro becomes stack becomes ….. you’ll find out after the break.
The opensource community started pushing everyone up the stack.
Hardware guys were already there, they understood that they’d been commoditised. Every now and then things would happen that gave them a chance to get another 15 minutes of fame….. flash memory and NAND RAM, Apple going on to Intel, the iPod halo effect, Skype and IPv6 and SIP morphing telephony into software, all against a backstory of Moore and Metcalfe and commoditisation and virtualisation and service orientation.
The operating system and language and database guys were pretty cool about things, they understood it was free-as-in-freedom-not-free-as-in-gratis, so they played along. Except for a few.
ERP and SCM and CRM systems started becoming opensource as well, so the only answer for those guys was to use defences like “confidentiality” and “privacy” and “DRM” to stop the empires crumbling. So they moved higher up, permutating and combining with each other and seeking to make strange bedfellows of their erstwhile competition. And this largely worked, but not in such a way as to sustain them for the long run. A few tried variants based on software-as-a-service, but this was hard to sell against the backdrop of confidentiality raised by them a few years earlier.
Traditional systems integrators and midsized consultants hurriedly rebadged themselves as package vendors, putting loads of lipstick on generic pigs. IT departments were too busy getting beaten up for doing exactly what the customer wanted (spend too much money in the 90s) so a few of the lipstuck pigs made it to the next generation. A few good ones as well.
The squeeze was on. Everyone moving up the stack. Oh if only things were that simple. Because the aforesaid IT departments were holding the top of the stack down, and pushing even harder down.
Something had to give. Something did. The Grand Panjandrum consultants got pushed out, and went after more productive markets. Healthcare. Public sector. Anywhere where it wasn’t that easy to get fired or sued. [That was then. Now even that market’s crowded].
Oh yes. I mentioned stack. Before the break. Let me continue.
What happens to a stack when it grows up? It becomes a utility.
Utilities can be geographical. They can be industry-sector-agnostic as well. But from a computing perspective, my hunch is that the best value comes when the utilities are designed around specific vertical markets.
There will be a sign, a way for us to recognise that we are moving into the vertical utility stage. That sign is when we see IT departments of competitors in a given market start to merge, explicitly for commodity services.
Opensource is all about designing to commoditise, not designing to differentiate. It needs smarts to do the simple things.
And when this starts happening, we will finally have ecosystems that make sense. With participants differing in scale and size and speed, but working symbiotically with each other. With community driven standards of connect and authenticate and presence and identity and share.
The AVs will need to adapt to this, reinvent themselves, work out new ways of creating value and exchanging value. Not suing and countersuing on patents and DRM.
The rest of the ecosystem is already there, and will only grow. As they move up the stack even more, inhouse IT departments will stop pushing back and allow new things to emerge.
With new Foundations and Four Pillars. New ways of visualising things. New ways of learning, of training, of transferring and sharing knowledge, of enriching knowledge. New ways of increasing presence and mobility and location-sensitivity. New ways of enhancing the user experience, of co-creation. New ways to tag and microformat, to mash and mutate, and emerge and re-emerge.
One of my favourite films of all time is Local Hero. And not just for the Knopfler soundtrack, which apparently continues to outsell the movie. I like many things about it.
There was a Road-To-Damascus moment for me while watching the film way back in 1983. This MBA-clad oilman arrives at a Scottish village, stands in from of the pub he’s meant to stay at. He’s hours late, and it’s yay in the morning, and he proceeds to wake up the dead.
The pub landlord, a character named Urquhart, finally sticks his head out of an upstairs bedroom window, and says:
We don’t lock doors here.
That’s the way I feel about many things. I don’t want better locks and sharper razor wire and more CCTV and alarm systems.
I want to avoid having to lock things up.
Thanks to David Benbennick for the Zen koan-like sight of one thumb opposing.
Whenever you’re in a conversation about identity, two things come up regularly:
I, for one, am distinctly underwhelmed by the arguments for either of these things.
If these things were obvious, then I guess there would be less need to blog about it. Conversations where people have undiluted, potentially dogmatic or even bigoted certainty can be pretty boring. There’s a Baconesque doubts-to-certainties vulnerability about blogging. And all I am doing here is sharing my doubts, to try and set a few more snowballs off.
Why am I doubtful about confidentiality and privacy and secrecy and their relationship with identity? Here’s the thing. Of late I see that people start speaking of disaggregating information to unit pieces, associating each unit piece with a sell-by-date and a time-stamp. And I smell a rat. Why?
Back to Cluetrain and conversations. Back to Doc Searls and African pastors. Back to Middle Eastern souks and Indian bazaars. Relationship before transaction. Relationship. Relationship. If I trust someone then I am willing to converse with that person and share confidences, in the knowledge that the information will not be misused. Period. And if there is any granularity or continuum to find, it is in the relationship and not the information. Which I will come to later.
Granular time-sensitive information feels like a myth created for bad DRM and bad IPR and bad IMS. People who want to control things because they can. Not consumer or community driven, but vendor-directed.
It’s like itemised billing for telephone calls, and no different from region-encoding on DVDs. We need to be very careful here.
I want to make calls. And if I were to design how I want to be billed for them, I would choose always-on eat-as-much-as-I-like call-anytime call-anywhere call-anyone. I do not need itemised billing for this.
The only reason to have itemised billing is because someone else, not me, wants the ability to charge me by item. Not because I want to pay by item. I want to pay on an unlimited basis. [ A tangent: I can visualise the possibility of there being different levels of unlimited, much like Cantor’s different infinities. As long as we keep it simple, it could work].
Just see what happens when you allow such thinking to continue. Before you know it, you have people employed in organisations whose raison d’etre is to check other people’s telephone bills. Because they can. Not because there is any value in doing it. There is no value in finding out that John Smith spent $5.83 on personal calls using his business cellphone in March 2006. The statement is a function of the existence of itemised billing. If John’s employers had a contract with unlimited calls for a fixed tariff, the statement would not exist.
It’s the sort of thinking that will install bugs in watercoolers and coffee shops and lifts. Because they can. You, sir, have been found guilty of discussing the merits of Liverpool Football Club in the lift at 1.49pm yesterday. How do you plead?
What tosh.
More worryingly, as soon as you allow people to impute “confidentiality” and “time” to a piece of information, you allow for differential charging at every point in the process. Processor and chipset. Connection and network. Software.
And all for no value. Exactly like region coding of DVDs.
Confidentiality is about trust. When the merchants of Lombardy sat on their benches and conversed and transacted, what held them together was relationship and trust. My word is my bond. Semper fi for the financial community. Not granular or selective. Covering the entire relationship.
And when trust was unacceptably broken, the relationship was over. Not a transaction, the relationship. All nine yards of it. The bench the guy sat on was broken. The banco was rutto. He was bankrupt.
So. About confidentiality. I am all for confidentiality, but at the relationship level, without granular information and without time decay. What you share you should be able to share unconditionally. And guess what? Relationships are about covenants, not contracts. They do not understand time the same way computers do. And don’t want to understand time that way either.
Confidentiality within the relationship is important, even crucial. Parent-child. Teacher-student. Pastor-parishioner. Bank-customer. Attorney-client. Doctor-patient. Journalist-source. Copper-nark, or policeman-informant. Even whistlelistener-whistleblower. And in a perfect world, government-citizen.
The confidentiality should cover the entire relationship. That is what trust is about, what builds trust and what trust builds. And I cannot for the life of me figure out what anonymity has to do with it. Here be dragons.
Allowing anonymity to be protected creates a whole new set of problems for us. These are tactical responses that in Michael Hammer speak pave over the cowpaths. Digital anonymity cures the symptom and not the disease.
Once we start worrying about showing who we are, we cause new problems. Even prisoners of war gave out their name, rank, serial number. Todd Beamer did not seem worried about his privacy of identity when he challenged the terrorists on board Flight 93. And he could not have paid a bigger price. But he did the right thing. And will remain an inspiration for me for the rest of my life.
You cannot tackle cowards with anonymity. They will keep returning, whether as terrorists or control-freak states or even schoolyard bullies.
When people ask for anonymity, we are better off trying to fix their reason for fear, not hiding the people in digital equivalents of witness protection.
I could be wrong. But my gut feel is that confidentiality and privacy and secrecy cover entire relationships and not pieces of them.
Relationships are always-on. Unlimited use. Not transaction-priced. And identity needs to be designed to understand this, not to support vast emperors-new-clothes edifices of transaction pricing and false concepts of anonymity.