I liked mousewords‘ attempt at Liz Strauss’s “25 words” writing project, so I thought I’d give it a go myself:
Use what you stand for to attract customers; use what you do to retain them. Ensure they’re always free to go, and they will stay.
[Extracted and edited from this essay, which forms the kernel for my blog].
For many years I’ve been of the belief that:
You don’t have to be legalistic about it, this is just a rule of thumb and, at least to my warped mind, represents common sense.
The way I’ve phrased it, I may give the impression that the opensource community is incapable of solving vertical market problems. That is not the case. “Generic” is in the eye of the beholder: if there is sufficient scale then the opensource community will respond. It is the scale rather than the vertical-market-ness that determines this response.
Take a look at OpenMRS: a community-developed, open-source, enterprise electronic medical record system framework. It is based on Java, Hibernate, Tomcat, MySQL and XML, and runs via a browser.
OpenMRS is not unique. As far as I can make out, the Collaborative Software Initiative, which I first heard of via Dana Blankenhorn, was founded precisely to build vertical market apps and stacks in environments where the scale was attractive.
It is now a frightening five years since we started talking about “the missing opensource projects“. It is over four years since R0ml Lefkowitz gave his seminal presentation at OSBC 2004. Opensource is gently moving up the stack; gently being the operative word.
I cannot help but think that there is a direct and important correlation between this movement of opensource up the stack and the mushrooming of VRM. The VRM movement needs leverage, and this leverage cannot come from the existing “vendor” community. Of course there are enlightened people within the vendor community, and it is not my intention to disparage them. But you can’t break wind against thunder and expect an equitable outcome.
There is hope yet. The opensource community is moving up the stack, from generic to large-scale vertical. The VRM movement is gathering pace and momentum. Not surprisingly, there’s a lot of overlap between the two “communities”, if you can call them that. There is a difference, though; opensource is in well-established technical execution, while VRM is still moving through the amorphous concept-wrangling stage.
For VRM to get to full-speed-ahead execution, something else needs to happen. And I think that something else is the “verticalisation” of opensource. The good news is that it’s begun to happen.
Views?
Sean Tevis. Information architect. Decided to “retire” his current State Representative. He’s going to win. This is his story (XKCD homage style) so far. Running for State Representative in Kansas. Read the whole story here. Ladies and gentlemen, this is the internet.
Sitting comfortably? Take a look at this excerpt from what appears to be a manual written maybe sixty years ago:
Do you identify with any of it? Recognise those behaviours from anywhere?
Stay seated. Now take a look at the cover page of the manual in question:
Yup. Simple sabotage, as practised and trained for by the OSS. Yes, folks, many large enterprises have been OSSified. Of course it’s not happening in your organisation, or in mine. Of course you don’t recognise any of those behaviours. Of course the shoe’s on the other foot.
And of course that shoe’s made of wood.
My thanks to Sean for pointing this out, for transporting me to Euan’s post before I’d got to it in my feed reader. [And thanks as well to Michael Walsh for sending the link to Euan in the first place.]
I’ve taken a long hard look at the manual in question. Looks genuine. Take a look for yourself, Euan links to it. If it does turn out to be a forgery, in these days of Photoshop, at least it’s a good one.
Some weeks ago, while in the US, I could not resist buying the latest Atlantic Monthly, seeing that Nicholas Carr had written a piece headlined “Is Google making us stupid?”
Incidentally, for some strange reason, the magazine insisted on spelling “stupid” as “stoopid” on the cover, ostensibly to play off the word “google”, but then went back to the normal spelling for the headline of the article itself. Weird. I couldn’t see the point.
But that’s not relevant. What is relevant is Carr’s article, which I read and liked even though I disagreed with a good deal of it. More on that later. That’s not what this post is about.
What this post is about is the responses to Carr’s article in the latest issue of The Edge. More particularly, it’s about an unusually rich crop of pithy statements included in those responses. Here are some samples:
W. Daniel Hillis: While we complain about the overload, we sign up for faster internet service, in-pocket email, unlimited talk-time and premium cable. In the mist of the flood, we are turning on all the taps.
Kevin Kelly: I think that even if the penalty is that you lose 20 points of your natural IQ when you get off Google AI, most of us will choose to keep the 40 IQ points we gain by jacking in all the time.
Larry Sanger: Carr profoundly misunderstands the nature of the problem: to pretend that you can blame others (programmers, no less!) for your unwillingness to think long and hard is only a sign of how the problem itself resides within you. It is ultimately a problem of will, a failure to choose to think. If that is a problem of yours, you have no one to blame for it but yourself.
George Dyson: Nicholas Carr asks a question that all of us should be asking ourselves:
“What if the cost of machines that think is people who don’t?”
It’s a risk. “The ancestors of oysters and barnacles had heads. Snakes have lost their limbs and ostriches and penguins their power of flight. Man may just as easily lose his intelligence,” warned J. B. S. Haldane in 1928.
We will certainly lose some treasured ways of thinking but the next generation will replace them with something new. The present generation has no childhood immunity to web-based stupidity but future generations will.
I am more worried by people growing up unable to tie a bowline, sharpen a hunting knife, or rebuild a carburetor than I am by people who don’t read books. Perhaps books will end up back where they started, locked away in monasteries (or the depths of Google) and read by a select few.
We are here (on Edge) because people are still reading books. The iPod and the MP3 spelled the decline of the album and the rise of the playlist. But more people are listening to more music, and that is good.
Jaron Lanier:
The thing that is making us stupid is pretending that technological change is an autonomous process that will proceed in its chosen direction independently of us.
It is certainly true that particular technologies can make you stupid. Casinos, dive bars, celebrity tabloids, crack cocaine…
And certainly there are digital technologies that don’t bring out the best or brightest aspects of human nature. Anonymous comments are an example.
There are many others. It is worth your reading the original article by Carr and the rejoinders in the Edge.