…there’s gonna be some changes tomorrow, it’s gonna be a brighter day

Jim Croce, 1943-1973, “Tomorrow’s gonna be a brighter day”

Again, one of my favourite singer-songwriters. I can still remember my shock at learning of his death the very day I bought my first Croce album. It was 29th September 1973, and as I was walking out of the record shop the manager said “Did you know he died a week or two ago? “. I was devastated.

Sometimes people tell me that I’m too optimistic, that my ideas and thoughts and beliefs are too utopian, that I look too often for good in people.

And guess what, I’m going to stay that way. Rock on, Jim.

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.

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.

 

…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.

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.