I was taken there in usual blog-serendipity mode while reading Amy Jo Kim. Definitely worth it. The SMS revenues piece alone made it worth while. So I’ve linked to it. Thank you Amy Jo and Ajit.
Research is what I’m doing when I don’t know what I’m doing
That’s a quote from Wernher von Braun, and one of my favourites. This post was, yet again, triggered by one in Accidental Light, about choosing the least wrong. [And yet again, Malc, I should be co-commenting, I know, and I will be, soon. When I install it]
Investment in R&D is something very few people seem to get right. Yes, you get all the usual pap about people being our most important resource, and intellectual capital being highly valued, and and and. And then, every time the going gets tough, training budgets get trashed, graduate entry programmes go into black holes, and attending conferences is an absolute no-no. I’ve worked for large corporations most of my life, with many intelligent and talented people, and always wondered why this was so. Fossilfools again.
And it’s not as if this was ancient history. I sense there are people the world over who want Google to fail. Not because they’re young. Not because they’re smart. But because the 20% skunkworks that Google admit to doing openly is far too dangerous, too offensive to the current world organisation order. “Decent people don’t spend time doing “stuff”, where would the world be if we allowed that to continue?” And all that jazz.
We know how to deal with risk. But not with uncertainty.
Getting back to the point Malc makes in his “non-axiomatic” post. There was a guy called (Howard?) Schneiderman who ran R&D at Monsanto in the 1980s, who said something along the lines of:
When a board turns down a request for R&D funding, they’re right 90% of the time. Since this is a higher degree of accuracy than they achieve in any other class of decision, they feel good. But. And it is a big but. The 10% they get wrong? They lose the company.
So, while it is good to be less wrong in cases where being right is difficult, we need to be careful. It doesn’t work for some classes of decision. Particularly R&D.
Open, but not as usual
…goes the headline of the Economist’s Special Report on opensource business. And how nice, I can actually link to it and you can read it for free.
Lots of good stuff there. Like “A world in which communication is costly favours collaborators working alongside each other; in a world in which it is essentially free, they can be in separate organisations in the four corners of the earth“.
One thing I disagree with. “….even though open-source is egalitarian at the contributor level it can nevertheless be elitist when it comes to accepting contributions. In this way, many open-source projects look more hierarchical than the corporate organograms the approach is meant to have torn up“. Not true. So not true. The role of the core, moderator or 1000lb gorilla is nothing at all like that of the manager in a hierarchy. The core does not decide where resources are to be applied or prioritised, cannot direct the time or work of the (usually voluntary) contributor, has neither carrot nor stick to wield, and does not waste time in mangling or mutating weak signals down the “hierarchy”.
There is no hierarchy if there is no lock-in, no ability to rule, no reporting relationship.
What Sun did with Java looked like that to begin with, hierarchical opensource. It didn’t work. Sun gave up. And then it worked.
Quite all right
The Man In the Doorway’s question on the usage of learnt versus learned reminded me of one of my favourite books, Fowler’s Modern English Usage. Here are two examples why:
Page 522 of my version, when discussing the use of respective(ly) goes on to say:
- B. FOOLPROOF USES
- The particular fool for whose benefit each r. is inserted will be defined in brackets. Final statements are expected to be made today by Mr Bonar Law and M. Millerand in the House of Commons and the Chamber of Deputies respectively (r. takes care of the reader who does not know which gentleman or which Parliament is British, or who may imagine both gentlemen talking in both Parliaments). …….[excerpts edited]…Each of the Rugby first three pairs won their r. matches against opposition not to be despised (the reader who might think that one of the Rugby pairs had won a match between two of the others).
Wonderful stuff, especially in 1926. His article on quite is also worth reading:
- The colloquial form “quite all right” is an apparent PLEONASM, quite and all being identical in sense; “quite right” is all right, and “all right” is quite right, but “quite all right” is all quite wrong, unless indeed all right is here used in its sense of adequate but no more, and quite is added for reassurance.
Now how do I convince RageBoy to choose his favourite excerpts from that edition (not the Burchfield follow-up) and have them illustrated by gapingvoid? Make for a great book.
This book is permanent: Musings on trust in the 21st century
I went for my usual Saturday morning constitutional, a walk into town, coffee (lots of) and a browse through the charity shops, I think they call them thrift shops in the US. Probably only to be found in the “West”, I can’t remember ever seeing one in India.
And I bought a secondhand copy of Rime of the Ancient Mariner, illustrated by Gustave Dore, published by Dover. While savouring the full-size engravings over coffee, I glanced at the Dover statement on the back cover….excerpted here: “Books open flat for easy reference. The binding will not crack or split. This is a permanent book.”
This is a permanent book. What a wonderful statement. And I realised that for forty years, I have trusted Dover as an imprint and a publisher. I have memories of my earliest schoolboy Pillow Problems and my Sam Loyds being Dovers.
Now I have no idea who owns Dover, how many people it employs, what it does. What I do know is that I trust Dover, and I will often buy Dovers even when I’ve never heard of the author or the subject. Just because it’s Dover.
The same happens with Kirkus Reviews. If Kirkus say a book is good, then I buy it. Period.
Again, I have no idea how big Kirkus is, who owns it, whatever. I just know that when Kirkus says it’s good, I tend to agree.
I trust Dover. And I trust Kirkus. And this trust has been gained over a long time over a large population of recommendations. These examples are about books, something I grew up surrounded by, something I remain immersed in, but probably irrelevant to the next generation of workers. Nostalgia ain’t what it used to be and all that jazz.
This whole episode of Coleridge and Dore over coffee then made me think about that next generation, what their Dovers and their Kirkuses will be. So here are my musings:
- They peer into the future
- Unlike our generation, used to centralised reference points and quality attributions, the youth of today rely on aggregated peer reviews and ranking. Distributed rather than centralised, networked rather than hierarchical. And they are used to interacting peer-to-peer
- Their world is flat
- We’re used to paying by the yard, by the pound (yes I am showing my troglodyte nature). More and more, they’re used to flat fees. Not transaction pricing. Unlimited use. No hidden charges. No creeping taxes crawling out of the woodwork.
- They’re always on
- The DSL Tivo iTunes Messenger mindset thinks differently. They don’t do dialup. They don’t switch things off and on, they switch themselves off and on. But the things stay. And they’re a mobile generation, used to doing things on the move
- They don’t lock doors here*
- They’re used to easy access and egress, and have little tolerance for things like format mismatches and compatibility checks.
What have these things to do with trust? I guess I’m drawing a warped line from values and experience through to expectation, and suggesting that the only things they will trust are those that fulfil those values and expectations. And somewhere in the dark recesses of my head, I can’t differentiate between their expectations of a firm that wants to employ them, a device they use to experience entertainment, an institution that helps them learn. All the same to them.
So to win them over we need to get with the program. Theirs. And the Dovers and Kirkuses of their generation will be the firms that meet that expectation. Peer-reviewed and recommended, not Mcluhan-advertised. No hidden costs or charges or lock-in. Supporting mobility and always-on-ness.
*A variant of one of my favourite lines from one of my favourite movies: Local Hero. I just love the scene where the young upstart turns up very late at this pub in the middle of nowhere in Scotland, starts banging on the door and waking everyone up, and the landlord finally puts his head through the window and says “We don’t lock doors here”.
I want to live in a world where we don’t lock doors anywhere.