I’ve just finished reading Nicholas Carr’s latest article, The Ignorance of Crowds, in the latest issue of Strategy & Business. (And it’s refreshing to note that Booz Allen Hamilton don’t appear to have constructed the traditional consultant paywall. For this relief much thanks.)

Carr makes a number of points succinctly and eloquently, and peppers them with relevant quotes:

Opensource tends to be “extraordinarily powerful way” to improve things that exist, but tends to be “less successful at creating exciting new programs from scratch”, and as a consequence “it’s an optimisation model rather than an invention model”

He quotes University of Michigan professor Scott Page as saying “when solving problems, diversity may matter as much as, or even more than, individual ability”, and extends this theme by saying “What an unorganised, fairly random group of people provides is not just a lot of eyeballs but a lot of different ways of seeing”

Eric Raymond, who is quoted extensively, is quoted as saying “debugging is parallelisable”;  Carr builds on this, saying “all the debuggers have to do is to communicate their findings and fixes to some central authority, like Linus Torvalds

Based on optimisation not invention. Demonstrating the power of diversity. Depending on the capacity for  parallelisation. Principal characteristics of opensource. All well-made points, not all new but definitely well structured and articulated, and worthy of further analysis.

Carr then goes on to look at what he considers some key limitations, again derived at least in part from Raymond’s work.  He claims that “peer production works best with routine or narrowly defined tasks….. not well suited to a job that requires a lot of coordination among the participants… the crowd’s size and diversity would turn from a strength to a weakness, and the speed advantage would be lost”. He goes on to suggest that opensource “works best when the labor donated or partially subsidised”. He then asserts that “the opensource model — when it works effectively — is not as egalitarian or democratic as it is often made out to be.”

There’s a lot of good stuff in the article, go read it for yourself. I even agree with most of it, and will spend time masticating over the article at leisure. But. And it’s a mid-sized but.

I think there’s one key aspect he misses, or rather doesn’t do justice to. And that is this:

We shouldn’t dismiss lightly the propensity for opensource to innovate, to augment innovation and to accelerate innovation, for the following reasons:

The diversity inherent in the crowd creates long-tail effects, and this causes the bazaar to come up with stuff that the cathedral wouldn’t consider; in cases where the cathedral does consider the innovation, the bazaar is often faster and cheaper; and finally, while tight coordination by central authority seems a worthwhile thing, we should not forget the number of camels designed by committees.

In fact that’s one of the key stanchions of opensource communities. They don’t do camels. 

In a post headed Tara and the Blue Monster, Hugh discusses Tara Hunt’s comments on Microsoft’s adoption of the Blue Monster; Tara’s scepticism is something that is shared by many, and she makes a key point:

… it isn’t as simple as GM keeping Tahoe-bashing ads up on their site longer or Microsoft using a cool Hugh Macleod cartoon on their conference materials.

Subversion isn’t a marketing tool. It’s a path to change. We can’t lose sight of that.

If I’ve interpreted her correctly, she also alludes to another, equally important point: People want Microsoft to change. That is the essence of what made the Blue Monster such a hit, it was a way of people outside Microsoft telling people in Microsoft of the intense need for change, a  point that Hugh makes eloquently. [Disclosure: I have one of the first Blue Monster lithographs, and count both Hugh as well as Tara amongst my friends].

Hugh also refers to the effect that Scoble had within Microsoft:

I am reminded of a big A-HA! moment I had a few years ago when I first realized that the REAL story about Robert Scoble’s blog [when he was still working at Microsoft] was not about how it was changing external perceptions about Microsoft [“Oh, what a lovely blog. I think I’ll stop hating Microsoft from now on.”], but how it was stirring things up inside the company.

I think it’s more than that. When a company achieves critical mass in terms of “external” bloggers, there is no longer an inside or an outside. Blogs do not support hierarchies or vertical silos, they tend to be lateral and networked and and all-over-the-place. Blogs are not respecters of walls, whether inside the firm or at the firm’s boundaries.

Not having an inside or an outside. That’s how tomorrow’s customers will figure which of today’s companies to bless. 

Today’s Evening Standard informs me:

Windfarm owners in the country are used to facing legal challenges and complaints from nearby residents, who claim the ranks of vast windmills are an eyesore. But in Germany — Europe’s biggest user of windpower — it is the windfarms that are suing each other.

At the heart of the complaints is a bizarre but serious question: who owns the wind?

A court in Leipzig is currently hearing a case involving a dispute between two operators. One, whose farm is up and running already, is protesting that a planned bigger windfarm nearby will create a slipstream, decreasing the speed of the airflow to its own windmills.

The unwanted neighbour will, claims the complainant, hit the productivity — and the profits — of the original farm.

If you want to read the whole story, you can find it here, thankfully not behind a paywall. [You do have to register, though].

Intriguing. We have “ancient lights”, an archaic property law in the UK that protects the level of sunlight received by a window; we have riparian water rights as well as prior appropriation water rights, that protect the flow of water; now we have questions of wind ownership and wind rights.

What these three things have in common is something to do with the right to enjoy something that forms part of the commons, the right to protect a level of access to commons that existed beforehand. So if the internet was originally perceived as a commons, then…..

I wonder.

Does anyone out there know anything about the various statements purporting to be Ehrlich’s Law? I was researching a German scientist named Ehrlich when I came across this in Wikipedia:

Ehrlich’s Law:  “People pay way too much attention to things that are easily quantified.”

Seemed a perfectly reasonable thing to say, very John Allen Paulos. So I tried to look into it. Wikipedia drew a blank. Answers.com did the same. So I googled it and found that Ehrlich the quote-writer was a busy person indeed. There wasn’t just one Ehrlich’s Law, there was a litter of them. Included in that litter were:

• The first rule of intelligent tinkering is to save all the parts.
• It is a mistake to allow any mechanical object to realize that you are in a hurry.

Many Ehrlichs. Many quotations. No hard facts. Any ideas out there?

Another quote from Abraham Flexner’s “The Usefulness of Useful Knowledge“, the kernel for my earlier post today:

….Thus it becomes obvious that one must be wary in attributing scientific discovery wholly to any one person. Almost every discovery has a long and precarious history. Someone finds a bit here, another a bit there. A third step succeeds later and thus onward till a genius pieces the bits together and makes the decisive contribution.

Science, like the Mississippi, begins in a tiny rivulet in the distant forest. Gradually other streams swell its volume. And the roaring river that bursts the dikes is formed from countless sources.

Sounds a bit like Doc’s snowballs, doesn’t it? And not a patent in sight.