Category: Four pillars

First they ignore you. Then they ridicule you. Then they fight you. And then you win.

That’s one of my all-time favourite Mahatma Gandhi quotes. [But it doesn’t displace the No 1: When asked what he thought about Western civilisation, Gandhi replied “I think it would be a good idea”].

Whenever I think about paradigm shifts, particularly in the context of those influenced by technological advances, the Gandhi quote comes to mind. Clayton Christensen’s Innovator’s Dilemma covers some of the relevant ground, but doesn’t evoke the emotional dimension quite as succinctly as Gandhi does.

We’ve been in the midst of a massive change in paradigm for some decades now, what John Hagel, John Seely Brown and Lang Davison referred to as The Big Shift. Driven by continued and continuing advances in digital infrastructure, and augmented by liberalisation in public policy, businesses now operate in markets where competitive intensity is increasing, where barriers to entry are reducing sharply, where margins are hard to sustain.

There are many ways to characterise the shifts taking place. Hierarchies to networks. Stocks to flows. Centralised to distributed. Broadcast to peer-driven. One-way to two-way. Command and control to community.

These shifts, in turn, create the beginnings of other, more complex shifts. Markets affected by the Big Shift tend to move to the extremes of hyper global/low touch or hyper local/high touch; the middle ground becomes hard to hold, whether in terms of size or scope.

Industries that relied on “national” boundaries find this very hard to deal with. It is therefore no surprise that media, entertainment, telecoms, banks and airlines, amongst others, feel like they have been caught in a crossfire for a very long time.

There’s a good reason for them to feel that way. A simple reason.

They have been caught in a crossfire. Between hyper global and hyper local.

My friend and colleague, Sean Park, has written about this for some time now, about the effect of digital markets on business. [If you want to learn more about it, you should visit his blog The Park Paradigm. It is also very instructive to read Carlota Perez’s Technological Revolutions and Financial Capital to get a related perspective]. That will be the subject of a different post, probably sometime in January 2013.

In this post, I wanted to concentrate on the subject of platforms. A few days ago, I suggested that 2013 will be the Year of the Platform. Today I want to spend a little more time explaining why.

Connectivity is becoming ubiquitous and affordable, as is access to compute power and storage. Smart mobile devices are everywhere and allowing everyone to connect to everyone else, allowing everything to connect to everything else. Soon it won’t just be our phones that have SIM cards and GPS: so will our pets, our pots and our pans.

The communities that are formed by such connections create new market opportunities. In the past, such opportunities were only accessible to those with the right background, the right connections, the right education, the right socio-economic status, perhaps even the right lineage. Those barriers are weakening day by day as the internet, the web and smart devices are enfranchising billions in new ways. And not surprisingly, those whose power came from the protection afforded by those barriers are seeking to use the remnants of that power to delay the inevitable. That’s why, nearly a year ago, I wrote about why I was so pleased to see SOPA and PIPA and ACTA come and go…. They were so clearly acts of desperation, with unintended benefits…. They helped wake people up, helped educate them about what was at stake.

What we saw last month at WCIT in Dubai had similar characteristics: desperate actions by those who saw their power being eroded, a protest movement in response, publicity about what was going on, education of the man and woman on the street, and ultimately failure of the intended action.

We’re going to see more of this cycle in 2013. Even dinosaurs learn to dance. But the desperate dances are not going to be the main event of 2013.

Because the main actors of 2013 are people similar to you and me, yet subtly different. People who for the first time will be enjoying the power of ubiquitous affordable connectivity, compute power and storage. People enjoying this power wherever they are, whenever they want to, for whatever they like.

That power creates opportunities for people to build markets and communities; this has already
been happening for decades now, but we’re going to see this trend accelerate in 2013.

As more and more people find new ways to connect with each other, they find new ways to create value for each other.

For each other. Important words. I will come back to them.

These new ways to connect and to create value in turn create opportunities for others, to build tools that help people do this.

Platforms.

Platforms come in many shapes and sizes, guises and disguises. A credit card is a platform. So is a car. A mobile phone is a platform. So is the Web. Communities and fora like the World Economic Forum and TED are platforms. So are political parties. An airport is a platform, so is a newspaper.

Platform. A term that means so many things to so many people. Yet when you look at platforms from a digital perspective, some common elements emerge:

Platforms are open. Of course some platforms are more open than others, as barriers to entry are retained, often by incumbents, often, sadly, with the assistance, sometimes even connivance, of regulators. Incumbents tend to have considerable financial power until they cease to exist.

Open means open to competition. Open means allowing participation by all. And this has implications on standards, on prices, on prerequisites, on the cost of entry and the cost of exit.

Platforms are adaptive to the environment. They’re elastic, allowing participants to scale both up as well as down. They’re responsive to change: cost of change is as important a measure as unit cost in a market where change is a constant. Adaptation and scaling take place at speed, allowing creativity to operate at the pace of the market, not the incumbent.

Platforms enable ecosystems. They are “multi-sided” like exchanges and marketplaces, focused on simplifying interactions between participants.

As David Weinberger said recently, the smartest person in the room is now the room.

In 2013, there’s going to be a room born every minute. A very smart room.

Those rooms are going to demand support for their interactions and their creativity, as they change the way they live. That support is going to come from platforms.

Platforms. Open, adaptive, enabling. Allowing ecosystems to be formed and to flourish.

Technology vendors understand platforms. Even incumbent technology vendors understand platforms. But many of them are tied to hardware or processor licensing models, the DRM of the computer industry.

Apple’s climb to the stars has made some of these vendors relive their dreams of yesteryear, allowing them to believe that the money’s in hardware.

The money’s not in hardware.

It’s in ecosystems. (And if the ecosystems support elegant and well-designed hardware, that’s great.)

But it’s the ecosystem that matters, not the hardware. I think it was James Gosling who described OSX as “Linux with QA and Style”. No ecosystem, no hardware sales, no hardware margins.

People forming communities to do magical things together; people building infrastructures that enable this to happen: people creating value individually and collectively across the whole spectrum: in education, health and government; in business and in the arts; in personal lives as well as in community.

All this has been happening for a while, in a William Gibsonish future’s-here-but-unevenly-distributed way.

But a change is gonna come. This whole space is going to get injected with “quantum energy” as the number of empowered people gets to critical mass.

2013. The Year of the Platform.
The Year of the Open Adaptive Platform.

Happy New Year to all of you. Thank you for spending time visiting this blog, reading what I have to say, commenting on it, helping me learn, helping me share.

As usual, comments welcome. But I may not respond straightaway, I’m largely offline for the next week or so.

If you haven’t had a habanero mango salsa dosa, you haven’t lived. But then again, if you had a habanero mango salsa dosa, you may not have lived to read this. It’s lethal.

Image courtesy of A Foodie’s Rhapsody. Worth reading the post that went with it.

A habanero dosa. A classic South Indian dish, the rice and daal pancake, infused with one of the most potent symbols of Amazonas and ancient Mexico, the habanero chili. In-your-face hot from the get-go, enough to make your ears pop. Once you get over the initial shock, you learn how to navigate the dish: a small mouthful, dipped in sambaar or chutney, a sip of water, and off you go again, savouring the taste and buffeted by wave upon wave of endorphins. Serious stuff. And remember, if you wear contact lenses, wash your hands thoroughly after eating the dosa. Thoroughly.

In its own way, the fusion is a renaissance. Columbus went to find India to get to the spices that the land was famed for. He missed by a bit, but so what? He found spices nevertheless, and brought them back. Amongst the spices he brought back was the chili pepper. Vasco da Gama then took that spice to India soon after. And now India produces most of the world’s chillies, and consumes most of it as well. Odd, isn’t it, that Columbus, looking for spices to bring back from India, inadvertently landed up taking a spice to India, one that is now synonymous with the cuisine of the country.

Image courtesy Wikipedia, what a wonderful resource. Please donate to the Wikimedia Foundation.

As you’ve probably noticed by now, I love food. That at least partly explains why I gave this TED talk, and why I’m busy writing a book on related subjects. As I mention in the talk, Calcutta was an incredible place for food, particularly street food. If you want to get an idea of the incredible choices available there, Heaven’s Garden has a good summary. My all-time favourite remains the Nizam’s kati roll, but the puchkas, the shingharas, the jhal moori, the aloo tikki, even the dry roasted peanuts with chillies and onions are dishes to be reckoned with. They’re all described in the post I referred to earlier.

Isn’t it amazing, how ingredients and dishes and even whole cuisines migrate all over the world pretty much without let or hindrance? Every one of us can choose where we enter the process of making food. We can buy the raw ingredients and “make everything from scratch”. Fresh herbs and spices, fresh vegetables, fresh meat (if we’re on the carnivorous or even omnivorous side). Fresh everything. If we felt so inclined, we could buy some of the ingredients pre-prepared, as purpose-built modules, with different levels of preparation. Ingredients that have been cleaned, peeled, diced, chopped, pureed, minced, whatever. Ingredients that have been combined with other ingredients and parboiled, part-cooked, cooked. Whole dishes. Whole meals. You can watch the dishes being prepared from scratch; you can buy them frozen; or you can even go to a restaurant and have someone else do all the heavy lifting. And you have a choice of restaurant, from the fast-food pile-them-high-sell-them-cheap to the Michelin-starred see-and-be-seen oases of luxury.

There are few barriers to learning how to do all this. There are no laws that prevent you from watching someone cook something, and then proceeding to copy that process from start to finish. I know many cooks quite well, and without exception they’re eager to explain, to help, to teach. And to learn as well, they listen to your views and your criticisms and not just your praises. Some of the cooks write books about cooking: I have maybe 50 such books at home, signed by the author/cook. Many of them were given to me gratis; and in almost every case I landed up buying many copies of the book to give to others. The web is also a great place to learn how to cook: there are amazing recipes available via most search engines, great videos on YouTube, and wonderful sites like epicurious.

Access to ingredients at multiple levels. Access to instructions and advice at multiple levels. The right to change and vary and adapt at will. The right to observe and learn and imitate. The ability to propagate all this. And the continued and continuous choice as to where precisely you want to enter the process of finding, making, preparing, consuming.

Much of life is about performance. What you do matters.

Much of art and culture is also about performance. What people do matters.

In some ways, cooks are like musicians and filmmakers and artists and novelists and poets. But at least in one way cooks are different…. they make money principally by performing regularly, not by performing once and using the power of once-meaningful and now-corrupt law to enforce a market.

Our children, and their children, are growing up at a time when ubiquity of access to connectivity, compute power and storage is transforming their lives, enfranchising the disenfranchised. And that’s causing a lot of disruption to hitherto stable markets. The response of many of those markets has been to try and hold on to the past for as long as possible, often by using their lobbying power, a power the new generations don’t yet have.

But they will have, soon, and those companies that choose to control and suppress the maker generation will find it hard to sustain their business.

Empowered people expect to operate in spectrums of choice, much like we see in the world of food. Businesses will have to learn how to provide those choices of access, entry, and participation. Businesses will have to transform themselves into organisms that reflect natural platforms and ecosystems, allowing their customers to engage with them in a variety of ways, with the freedom to come and go as they please. As in the rest of life, choice comes at a price. Change comes at a price.

Tomorrow’s successful companies will be those that understand this need to focus on the cost of change; for too long, we’ve built monolithic structures where the cost of change soon exceeds the value of change. Instead, companies will now have to concern themselves with building open ecosystems where customers, partners and staff can all engage and adapt at the speed of the market they’re in.

The Maker Generation have been doing this for a while, disrupting the music and TV and film and publishing businesses, and having to put up with a whole slew of responses, ranging from the introduction of short-term frictions like DRM all the way to the structured and focused criminalisation of entire generations that is the aim of the SOPAs, PIPAs and ACTAs of yesteryear.

The Maker Generation are now in the marketplace, and they’re transforming business in every market. They know what they want, they know what to expect, they know how to change what is offered to what is needed.

The Maker Generation are about Making. They’re about making in complex adaptive ecosystems. They’re about making in platforms, particularly multi-sided platforms, open wherever possible.

2013. Welcome to the Year of the Platform. [More to follow].

Yesterday I spent some time thinking about how advances in transportation technologies affected the very fabric of village and town society, and about how advances in communications and computing technologies are helping us re-create the village structures we had lost. A number of you commented, on this blog, via Twitter, via Facebook and via Google Plus. Thank you, I appreciate the comments, they help me learn. [Incidentally, I experimented with a number of commenting systems to protect against such fragmentation of conversation, and then went through a purge some years ago after hearing that they may have inadvertently caused some of the DDoS attacks I’d faced. Any advice on what I should do? The default is I go and install disqus.]

I must have been 11 or 12 when I first heard the term “global village“. At the time, I’d just about heard of Marshall Mcluhan, but hadn’t read any of his books. And it was a good twenty years before I’d read anything of Robin Dunbar’s works. Why do I bother giving you this context? Because I hope you will understand a little more of what went on in my mind then, and how it influenced me since, and as a result your comments and opinions will be more useful to me, will help me deal with my anchors and frames.

I lived in a village for many years. That village was called Calcutta, now Kolkata. Today it is claimed that around 4.5m people live in the city proper (70+ square miles) with another 10m in the metropolitan area (700+ square miles). One of the biggest cities in the world, 7th in cities, 3rd in metro.

As I said, a village.

Let me explain why.

In the 23 years I lived in Calcutta, I knew three homes. One, where I was born, 116A Lower Circular Road. It was my home for perhaps three years. I then spent a decade at 70C Hindustan Park, Ballygunge, leaving there in 1969 to move to 6/2 Moira Street. It was from Moira St that I made my first (and last) foray abroad, in 1980.

The precise places are immaterial, unless you know Calcutta; what matters is the area and the density.

It so happens that I can be very precise about both the area and the density.

Area: My world. Density: Everyone I knew.

For 23 years my “world” could be fitted into a space that was an isosceles triangle with a height of maybe 4 miles and a base of 3 miles. In terms of the map above, my entire life in India could be mapped and documented into the red and yellow areas in the centre, and for that matter largely in the southern half of that area.

Tiny.

A village. My entire world, everyone I knew, largely lived within walking distance, a mile or two. The longest walks I could possibly undertake were of the order of four or five miles.

Three generations of my family spent time in that village; some still live there. It housed the buildings we were born in, the schools we went to, the businesses we were part of. Everything. All in a few square miles.

Today that family is spread across at least four continents. We use a new-fangled telephone and telegraph system to keep in touch. It’s called facebook.

When I think about my school, I think “village” again. I’m still in touch with many of the people I went to school with, in 1966. Nearly 50 years later, over 70 of us from that “batch” remain in contact with each other. And I make it that, like my family, my classmates are in at least four continents.

We lived in a village. It may have been one of the largest villages in the world, but it was still a village. Where everyone knew everyone, where they came from, what their parents did, where they lived, what they did. We knew who’d been born, who  had died, who’d gotten drunk, who’d been promoted, who’d got married, who’d got divorced.

We knew everything.

About everyone.

So when I heard the phrase “global village”, I didn’t think that suddenly I would be connected to everyone in the whole world. I didn’t even think I would be connected to everyone in Calcutta.

But I did think I could be connected to everyone I knew. My world. Regulated by Dunbar’s number.

And so it came to pass. Abu Shafquat, one of the first friends I can remember having, was in touch with me only a few weeks ago. He’d heard that a close friend, Gyan Singh, had passed away. We meet every now and then. A few months ago I met Vir Lakshman, another close friend, in Beijing. He lives in Dusseldorf now. A month ago I connected with but could not manage to see Vishnu Shahaney; he lives in Singapore now, but we both happened to be in Melbourne for a day. I’m a trustee of the Web Science Trust; there aren’t that many trustees, yet I went to school with one of them. I’ve met classmates and schoolmates on every continent except for South America. I’ve never been to any part of South America. I will, one day. And when I go there, I will go to Sao Paulo, and see another classmate.

A global village.

My global village.

Distinct and different from my local village, the one I grew up in. Distributed over time and space. Consisting of many villages, each of which I continue to belong to. My family, my friends, my schoolmates, my colleagues, my neighbours, my acquaintances. My facebook friends. My twitter followers and followees. My LinkedIn connections. My Google+ connections. Many villages.

Many villages, each of which I belong to. Villages that I live in, using different tools and technologies to support and enable that existence.

When I think of the digital world, I also try and think of the physical world that it augments. Not replaces, augments. Because I can learn from that physical world.

A world where I had a finite number of relationships with people I trusted, a world where I was free to share my likes and dislikes and preferences with the people I gave my custom to.

More later.

And you know/It makes me wonder/what’s going on/Under the ground

Do you know?/Don’t you wonder/What’s going on/Down under you?

We have all been here before

David Crosby, Deja vu (Crosby, Stills, Nash and Young : Deja Vu)

 

 

Imagine a world where everyone knew you. There was no privacy. Everyone knew who you were, what you did for a living, who your parents were, who your siblings were. They knew your family tree.

When you went out with friends, everyone knew who they were. Where they came from, who their parents were. What they did. Who else they knew. They knew your friend graph.

When you went shopping, the shop staff knew you. What you liked, what you disliked, how often you shopped, where else you shopped.

When you fell ill, everyone knew that too, not just your doctor. Your financial adviser. Your postman. Even your next door neighbour.

Imagine that world.

We used to have that world.

We called it “a village”.

There was a time when people were born, lived and died all within a ten-mile zone. In those days you didn’t need Facebook. Which was a good thing, because Facebook hadn’t been invented yet. Neither had the computer. Nor the television. Nor advertising. Nor even the telephone.Nor the post.

Nor the plane, or train, or car. Not even the bicycle.

Just two hundred years ago.

Humans, however, had been invented. Homo sapiens had already been around for three or four hundred thousand years. And so there were relatives and friends and neighbours. And eating and drinking and parties. And shopping. And Singles and Marrieds and It’s Complicateds.

And then everything changed.

Because transportation began to improve in leaps and bounds, with the bicycle and the train and the car and the plane. All in very quick time.

Until then we had feet and horses and horse-drawn vehicles and boats of different sizes. Other than the feet, many of the other things were largely out of reach of the common man. So there were migrations: navigators, explorers, seafarers. Those migrations created new settlements and new trade routes. But these were still principally the gift of the rich, and included those patronised by the rich.

As that began to change, as man began to be able to afford ways and means to travel long distances, everything began to change. The stable fabric of village society began to tear, and continued to tear; the process of conurbation, which had been idling along for centuries, now went into a new gear.

As man accelerated his ability to migrate, and exercised that ability, something new began to happen. Man discovered privacy. Now humans could hide in plain sight, live where nobody knew their past or their present, their likes or their dislikes, their habits, their patterns. Now humans could revel (?!?) in the new-found ability to not know your neighbour. If you wanted to live quietly by yourself, it became possible.

With this ability to migrate everything began to disaggregate and in some way or form become smaller. Families. Homes. Villages. Relationships. There were fewer large homes being built, because the need wasn’t there. Two-up two-down. Apartments. Flats. Studios. Pieds-a-terre.Time and distance were being inserted into traditional relationships and structures, and modern privacy was being formed.

While all this was happening, something else was happening.

Telegraphy and telephony and radio and television and computing were getting invented and getting better all the time. They too went down the path of getting smaller and disaggregating.

The digital age was being born. And as a result many of these things began to converge. Because they could.

There were many results as a result of this digitalisation, this componentisation, this disaggregation, this later convergence. It disrupted many things, and continues to disrupt many things.

People separated by space and time were slowly getting connected again; initially, this was like the early ships and horse-drawn vehicles, the early bicycles and trains and cars. Too expensive for the common man. So while people were getting connected again, the impact wasn’t necessarily that great or that visible.

And then suddenly it all became affordable and ubiquitous and always-on.

The villages formed again.

This time, though, the villages weren’t physical. They were logical: the villagers could be anywhere in the world while being connected and able to act as a village.

To know close connections and friendships and security. To know the deep relationships hewn out of the oak of time. To know the joys of camaraderie. To know the pain of openness and transparency, the guilt of gossip.

We have all been here before.

Or, on the 32nd anniversary of John Lennon’s tragic death, perhaps I should just say “Imagine“.

[To be continued].

 

 

Twitter friend and HR/Talent guru Gautam Ghosh is known for his sense of humour; I had the chance to observe that close at hand when he called me “the Yoda of #socbiz”. Talk about making me feel old! Old enough to know he meant it as a big compliment!

I *had* to reply in kind.

So I said the first thing that came to mind in mutated (mutilated?) Yoda-speak:

When you look at the social side, careful you must be ….. for the social side looks back

I’ve thought about it since. And you know something? Yoda’s right. Companies would do well to bear that in mind.

The social side looks back.