No.

It appears, though, that toast may be patentable, especially if what is toasted is a sandwich.

McDonald’s have filed a patent in the US and Europe for “simultaneous toasting of a bread component“. I thought I would have better things to do than to read the whole 55-page document, but I may be tempted. How else would I come across terms like “bread component” and “sandwich delivery tool“?

How else would I learn that “Often the sandwich filling is the source of the name of the sandwich; for example, ham sandwich?” Wow. I shall wait eagerly for the powers-that-be to apply that logic to a hamburger.

Maybe I have it all wrong. Maybe I shouldn’t be striving to get the IPR and DRM processes radically changed. Maybe there’s a better way.

Maybe I should come up with a new business plan. Buy up all the rights to the publishing of patents. And start a new journal, publishing them.

In the humour section.

Now if we could convince Hugh Macleod to do the artwork, we could have a 21st century Heath Robinson, with all the raw material coming from the patent filings. Hugh? Anyone else? Borat Sagdiyev maybe?

Thanks to Cory for the tip-off.

Take a look at what Sean’s been doing with The Intention Economy. I’ve tried to cover some of that space over at Shane Richmond’s blog; if you’re interested, read this piece on Customers and Differentiation.

All this brings to mind a wonderful photograph I saw over at Christopher Carfi’s Social Customer Manifesto, which I reproduce here. [thanks to Chris and to Carlson C, who did the original upload].

Looks like a few people like NewtailBlog; as Dave points out, people have tried it before, with varying levels of success.

Not everyone likes it, or maybe Sid was making some other point. That’s a prerogative that every one of us must have.

Stephen’s comment, following up on Sid’s, mentions the “rehearsal” attraction of blogging. I think that’s what Doc Searls meant when he said that blogging was provisional. For sure I use blogs to help me think things through, to improve my understanding of things, to learn from the bouquets and the brickbats.

So anyway.

Staying with newtailblog. I was privileged to have quite a few really talented bloggers at the last place I worked, and want to use this opportunity to introduce them to you:

Sean Park A great read for all kinds of subjects, but particularly on digital markets
Malcolm Dick Malc is one of the most thoughtful people I have ever known, objective and dispassionate
Phil Dawes He was the first real external blogger at the bank, and is a tour de force on the semantic web amongst other things. An absolute must-read for those more technically minded
Dominic Sayers Like Malc, a very thoughtful guy with real insights on aspects of IT, well worth tracking

Can’t remember where I saw it, but I recall someone describing Einstein as having real trouble with understanding things that others considered obvious.

Maybe that’s what real curiosity is. Having trouble with understanding the obvious, while having the passion to do something about it.
That’s what Sean, Malc, Phil and Dom do. And they’re my NewTailBlogs for today.

One of my favourite Homerisms:

“Aw, people can come up with statistics to prove anything, Kent. Forfty percent of all people know that.”

Yes, forfty [sic]. In years to come, I’m sure we will hear about people studying the works of Matt Groening to figure out the deep philosophical meaning behind forfty. People do these things. Reminds me of the raging debate thirty years ago related to why Jim Morrison intoned the words Mr Mojo Risin at the end of LA Woman. There was wailing and gnashing of teeth. Much pontification. Theories to do with magic and sexual prowess and whatever. Until Jim’s childhood next-door neighbour wrote in and said “My husband used to call young James that. It’s an anagram of Jim Morrison”.

Incidentally, Groening is probably the most prolific living neologism-creator, following in the footsteps of Lewis Carroll, Ogden Nash and PG Wodehouse. There’s a good summary of his Homerisms in Wikipedia; sadly, unless we convince the powers-that-be otherwise, the summary is set for deletion. So read it while you can.

Incidentally, why do humourists and comedians dominate the neologism space? Perhaps you have to have a level of noncomformism and a willingness to be laughed at as well as with, that strange almost-vain vulnerability that all good comics have.

Back to the point of this post. Surveys and measurements. Would you believe that 100% of the readers of LinuxWorld.com use Microsoft IE as their browser? Well, take a look at Don Marti’s post on the subject. In fact take a look at any of Don Marti’s posts, he’s usually worth it.

There’s a serious point here. We now use the web for all sorts of surveys and measurements and polls. Soon we will enter an age where serious companies make serious decisions based on the information. And they have no idea how flaky all this is. How rankings can be gamed. How readership and audience figures are weak at best and downright wrong at worst. Why a world of IP addresses and corporate proxies and RSS readers and aggregators lead to such weird results. Why location information and map-related mashups don’t always work.

Maybe it’s time to educate people about all this. Otherwise we will have a repeat of something that nearly killed me the first time around: the number of people who believe that Excel is industrial-strength. There’s a lot of them about. Still.

And maybe forfty per cent of them believe that Excel never lies.

For many years now, I’ve had the joy (?!?) of being involved in argument and debate about sharing in the enterprise. Sharing what? In the old days it used to be time on mainframes, as departments or even firms clubbed together to do things they couldn’t otherwise afford to do. Then it became space in data centres, as people figured out that having mainframes in office buildings wasn’t the brightest thing to do as office rents rose. By the time the PC came along and destroyed every vestige of “centralised control”, nobody was into sharing.

Every tinpot business unit became its own IT department, because it could. This disintermediation was a good thing, it stopped the tyrannical behaviour of the MIS guys, with their waterfall models and their GANTT charts and their PERT charts and their Thou-Shalt-Nots. Users could get their own staff to build things rather than wait for the bureaucratic processes of SSADM and PRINCE and whatever else their IT department was using. They could do what they liked. Heaven.

Or was it?

When they defenestrated the bathwater of 19th century project management, many of them threw the baby out the window as well. The baby of simple good practice, such as keeping notes of what you had and where you had it; what you had to worry about when you wanted to change things; how to upgrade; what to do when the sun stopped shining, or when you hit a problem.

Simple disciplines. Simple things to do that kept problems at bay. But it was too late, baby went with bathwater.

And there were consequences. Consequences such as the Year 2000 panic. My personal estimate is that less than 10% of the expense associated with Y2K had anything to do with code. It was all about replacing the disciplines and controls that used to be there. Strange things happen when you mix panic with consultants.
But that was a long time ago. Since then, terms like consolidation and virtualisation and service orientation and utility computing and grid computing and a bunch of other things have come out and bred like rabbits, rabbits whose sole aim was to prove Fibonacci wrong.

And in between, we’ve learnt a little bit about component architectures and re-use. And every time we do this, we land up with the same objectors, the same objections. You see them everywhere:

• The Reuseniks: These are reuse refuseniks, conscientious objectors to code-sharing. Habitual wheel-reinventors. Sometimes seen brandishing terms like privacy and confidentiality and competitive edge, even within organisations. Scary. Be afraid. Be very afraid.
• Freasy Riders: These guys will do anything, provided they don’t have to pay. Close relatives of the Credit Grabbers, they jump on sharing bandwagons only after all the hard work’s been done and the entry costs have come down. They then employ an army of checkers to nickel-and-dime their shared-service bills. Woeful.
• Cyclopaths: These guys get on the shared-service bandwagon without any ado, and then get stuck on it. They are fundamentally unable to cooperate with the rest of the platform users, objecting to every plan to change the status quo, using specious operational risk or even ROI arguments. They act as drag factors on the rest of the shared-service population, and often create an environment where, one by one, the others just leave. Which creates its own problems, as the shared-service bills get doled out over a smaller population.

Of the three, the cyclopaths are the most dangerous, because they seem to believe, because they seem to cooperate. Insidious.
How do we deal with them? In the end, I think it comes down to economics. Not accounting, economics.

As things commoditise, the ability to consolidate increases; there is an implied pace of standardisation, and over time there’s an incredible scaling effect. A tipping point is reached, and the shared-service models get traction.

All this is easy to say, but we’re some way from that destination. We may be on the last lap, but we’re not there yet.

Which is why we need to spend time thinking about the economics of shared-service models. How to price the utility. How to prevent first-mover disadvantage. How to dissuade freeriders. How to get leavers to pay their fair share.

A number of you must have done research on all this already. Why not share it with the rest of us? Comments welcome.

In the meantime, I shall busy myself with reading more about game theory and Talmudic wisdom and prisoner’s dilemmas. And dip every now and then into The Numbers Guy, Carl Bialik. [If you haven’t discovered Carl, I strongly recommend you do, he’s a fun read. Sort of Asimov-and-Gamow-meet-John-Allen-Paulos].

Starting with Three Economists Get Into A Cab.