A few days ago, stimulated by the level of recent noise on the internets about open and closed and apps and HTML5 and walled gardens and governance models and why someone hates <pick one from Google/Apple/Microsoft/Facebook/the world/themselves>, I wrote a post asserting that it’s over, asserting that the waves won’t be turned back, that the genie won’t go back into the bottle, that the changes we’ve seen over the past three or four decades are here to stay, that the trends will sustain.

Some of you tweeted me your responses, some of you commented on facebook or Google Plus, some of you even wrote to me giving me your feedback. Some of you went further and sent me links and references to follow up. My thanks to all of you, I appreciate the feedback. Most of what you had to say was positive; and almost every comment I’ve received was constructive. Collectively, you’ve spurred me on to write this post.

I thought I’d spend some time sharing with you why I think it’s over, rather than just blandly making that statement.

 

1. Soon everyone on earth will be connected to the internet

We can argue till the cows come home about the quality of the connections or for that matter what can be done with those connections. The fact remains that the number of people with internet connectivity has grown by nearly an order of magnitude over the past decade or so; it is possible for over a third of the world to read this post if they so chose.

2. People choose how they connect to the internet

Gone are the days when customers were forced to use a particular device on a particular network, as mobile service operators desperately fought to differentiate themselves that way. Mobile phone unlocking services are now a dime a dozen, cropping up everywhere like nail salons. Soon I expect we’ll be able to get phones unlocked at nail salons or shoeshine stands “while you wait”. In fact, it appears that you can even buy mobile-unlocking franchises on eBay now.

3. People choose how they will engage with “content”

There was a time when you had to sign up with a particular service provider to gain access to a particular content service. This is being challenged at multiple levels. In some countries, the regulator is insisting on a level playing field, ruling that content must be made available from all providers.  A Portsmouth pub landlady has gone further, challenging the right of the content provider to tell her where she has to acquire the content from: the case is now at the highest levels of the European Courts. There are even some studies suggesting that content is not really premium anyway, that it’s commoditised, that what customers pay for is convenience of access and ease of use across multiple devices and locations.

4. People choose where they engage from (even if it’s not where they really are)

Artificial scarcities are being met by artificial abundances. DVDs with region codes; phones locked to networks; music and film with DRM; every time someone comes up with a technique to “channel” a customer, others come up with techniques to remove that control. This has been happening for decades. People choose the location they’d like to pretend to be at, obviating regional constraints.

5. It’s getting harder to pass bad law

Connected people tend to get informed more effectively. Connected people have the power of acting collectively. Companies, legislatures, even governments are being challenged if they seek to act in ways that constrain connected people.

6. It’s getting harder to stop people connecting and congregating

7. The possibilities are infinite

Connected informed people represents immense possibilities, as we learn how to use this new power to solve problems we’ve not been able to solve before. Problems with responding to climate change, energy, disease, nutrition, wellbeing, poverty, problems that have dogged us for centuries. People will find ways we’ve never imagined, never been able to imagine. Things we’ve spoken of for years will start bearing fruit. Newish things like linked data, open data, the semantic web; the continued evolution of open source; 3D printing; the internet of things. And oldish things like democracy.

8. New paradigms, new problems, new solutions

The promise of the new comes with pitfalls. So we’re going to learn how to deal with abundance of intention and scarcity of attention, abundance of freedoms and scarcity of privacies. New tools will emerge. New laws will be passed. New rights will be argued for. Rights to be remembered, rights to be forgotten. Please-track-me-now, don’t-ever-track-me.

Guerrilla ways of providing tools and connectivity and access will continue. And we will sputter “terrorist” and “cybercriminal” and whatever else comes into our minds…. while our children get used to the new tools as a way of life. Witness BBM.

9. People still make shoes, not money

One of my favourite Peter Drucker stories. This is what he had to say:

No financial man will ever understand business because financial people think a company makes money. A company makes shoes, and no financial man understands that. They think money is real. Shoes are real. Money is an end result.

It’s never easy going extinct. Dinosaurs were probably distinctly uncomfortable with their lot, and the little furry rodent-like mammals probably found out about it.

Millennia later, the little furry rodent-like mammals have continued to evolve. Without the dinosaurs.

And that’s the way it’s going to be with business models. There are lots of ways of making shoes. They’re just new ways of making shoes. And if you’re good at making shoes, then you’ll make money. Just not the old way, that road is the route to extinction. Read Kevin Kelly’s outstanding Better Than Free if you want to know more.

10. It’s over

It’s over. If you want it.

More of us are getting connected every day, on a host of devices, in a variety of ways. We choose. We choose when and how we connect, whom we connect, why we connect, what we share. What we produce, what we consume. We choose.

Some people don’t like that. So they try and restrict the choices. Lock the device. Lock the content. Lock the connection. Lock the data.

Lock the person.

It’s not working.

Nothing’s perfect. The internet was not designed to be perfect, there’s something organic and evolutionary and always-temporarily-flawed about it. So yes there are those who believe this is not what was meant to be. There are those who believe we have to break it all down and start again. There are those who believe it will all end horribly.

And then there’s us.

It’s over.

If we want it to be.

For a time I thought that the US and UK and Western Europe wanted it to be so. Before I saw how deeply ingrained the incumbent lobbies were, understandably focused on protecting past power. So they’ve managed to hold up progress, but at a cost. Some of them could have become furry rodents if they’d tried hard enough. Now there’s only one future for them, filed under Dinosaur.

For a time I thought that India and China would make all the difference, as they came online and changed the dynamics and the economics. That’s happening now.

But more recently, I’ve begun to believe that the real transformation will show up somewhere else.

Africa.

Not the Africa of Arab Spring.

Africa.

The continent of Africa may well be the first place to realise the true potential of the internet and the Web and all that they represent.

Alan Kay once said, probably around 1968, “The best way to predict the future is to invent it”. When I met him some years ago, he’d changed his mind: he amended his words to “The best way to predict the future is to prevent it”.

The West has been in the business of preventing the future for a long time now. They’ve gotten pretty sophisticated at it.

The East runs the risk of following in the West’s footsteps. I hope they don’t. But they could.

Which leaves the stage open for Africa. A land of incredible need, incredible possibilities. A land that may show the rest of us what the internet is really about.

Because they want it. Maybe they want it more than anyone else. They. Us.

It’s up to us. West or East or anywhere else for that matter.

It’s over. If we want it to be.

Cartoon courtesy the ’09 archives of the LA Free Press

How much do you make? Have you ever contemplated suicide? Are you now or have you ever been…? Are you aware of the fact…? I have here before me… […]information devices for universal, tyrannical womb-to-tomb surveillance are causing a very serious dilemma between our claim to privacy and the community’s need to know. The older, traditional ideas of private, isolated thoughts and actions — the patterns of mechanistic technologies — are very seriously threatened by new methods of instantaneous […]information retrieval, by the […] computerised dossier bank— that one big gossip column that is unforgiving, unforgetful and from which there is no redemption, no erasure of early “mistakes”. We have already reached a point where remedial control, born out of knowledge of media and their total effects on all of us, must be exerted. How shall the new environment be programmed now that we have come so involved with each other, now that all of us have become the unwitting work force for social change?

A powerful global conversation has begun. Through the internet, people are discovering and inventing new ways to share relevant knowledge with blinding speed. As a direct result, markets are getting smarter — and getting smarter faster than most companies.

These markets are conversations. Their members communicate in language that is natural, open, honest, direct, funny and often shocking. Whether explaining or complaining, joking or serious, the human voice is unmistakably genuine. It can’t be faked.

By now some of you would have recognised some of the words above. They form part of the opening paragraphs of the Cluetrain Manifesto. Written all of thirteen years ago, in 1999. A very long time ago.

You’ve read Cluetrain, but you don’t recognise the first paragraph? Not surprising. It’s not from Cluetrain. It was written well before Cluetrain. Thirty-two years before Cluetrain, in fact. By Marshall McLuhan and Quentin Fiore in The Medium is The Massage. A very very long time ago, in 1967.

The wires have been buzzing these past few days, with dozens of stories about openness and closedness, about walled gardens and the open web, about HTML5 apps versus mobile apps, about the app internet, about someone’s turn to be evil, in this case Google. [Sometimes, at conferences, I wake people up by saying “it took IBM 40 years to become evil; Microsoft took 20; Google 10; Facebook 5; Twitter 2.5. But that’s for another post some other day].

This post has a simple message.

It’s over.

We can all argue till the end of time about how many angels can dance on top of a native app, but it won’t change a thing.

It’s over.

We can debate about whether the “app internet” will destroy the Net, or whether the internet will “route around obstacles” as it is wont to do. It won’t change a thing.

It’s over.

We can point fingers at Facebook or Google or Apple or Amazon and find ways of convincing ourselves that their particular brand of evil signals the end of the world as we know it, but it won’t change a thing.

It’s over.

Now that doesn’t mean you shouldn’t read what people are saying. So do read the recent Pew Internet report on The Future of Apps and Web if you want to understand what’s happening in that space. Do read GigaOm’s Cloud Services and The New Platform Wars if you want to be informed about that particular aspect. Do read Gizmodo’s The Case Against Google if you want to learn more about why all this kerfuffle is coming up now. And while you’re at it, read Jonathan Zittrain’s The Future Of The Internet and How To Stop It. Don’t stop there, make sure you read The Master Switch by Tim Wu; and while you’re at it, please ensure you include Eli Pariser’s The Filter Bubble.

These are all good articles and books; I’ve read them all, and I’ve learnt from them all. Learnt. But not worried.

Because it’s over.

No going back.

People are empowered now; they’re connected, not channelled, as I wrote in the Kernel For This Blog seven years ago.

They will choose whom they spend time with, what they spend time on. They will choose which devices they use, when, where, how; they will choose how they are connected and for how long; they will choose whom they trust with what they make, and whom they trust with what their friends make. They will choose what they pay for, how, to whom and why.

They will choose.

And when someone tries to stop them, they will choose to let that someone know what they think. Individually and collectively. Severally and jointly. Vocally. Very vocally.

So while the kerfuffle continues unabated, I’m spending time reading up on other things. Things you may prefer to read.

Things like Open Garden.

Imagine, instead, if all of the smartphones in any location could use their formidable processing power to share access to the Internet. The result would be an open garden – one without walls. Our handsets would be free to guide each other to the nearest available Internet offramp, regardless of whether it’s a wifi hotspot, a 4G base station or a femtocell.

Things like Ringmark.

The Ringmark test suite has been developed by Facebook and Bocoup, with a huge debt to prior research from the web community including projects like Modenizr, caniuse, Are We Playing Yet, and the W3C tests. We will be open-sourcing Ringmark in the coming weeks. Eventually, we hope to contribute Ringmark to the Core Mobile Web Platform Community Group, a W3C community group tasked with creating mobile browser standards and testing tools that will make the mobile web easier to build on and support.

Life has not been easy for incumbents in traditional “publishing” industries: books, magazines, film, television, music, software, they’ve all been affected. Radically. And irreversibly.

Attempts to re-create the lock-ins of the past are understandable, even predictable. Although it does make me smile when Microsoft comes along and claims the answer to the “end of software”: hybrid clouds. It sort of even makes sense in a Soockholm-Syndrome way:

If you’re a prisoner, then even limited parole looks like freedom.

You can’t blame the monopolists. Native apps and app stores turned out to be runaway successes; the mobile web exacerbated this success; and suddenly they thought Mummy was right, everything was going to be all right.

Wrong.

The genie is out of the bottle.

Elvis has left the building.

 

 

 

Little Milton. That’s the nickname given to Gerald Bostock by the village of St Cleve, after he’d been presented with a poetry award when he was about 8. We’re given to understand that the award was revoked after he was heard uttering the word “g—-r” during a live television broadcast. [I’m not going to spoil it for you by telling you what he actually said. DM me on Twitter if you really want to know and can’t be bothered to find out. I’m @jobsworth over there.]

Gerald Bostock. The child prodigy who “wrote” the poem that formed the basis of one of the finest parody-concept-albums ever, Jethro Tull’s Thick As A Brick.

St Cleve. The village that published the paper that became the cover of the LP. If you look carefully, you may be able to recognise “Little Milton” receiving the award prior to it being revoked.

 

 

All that seems a very long time ago, because it was a very long time ago.

Gerald Bostock turned 50 earlier this year. He lied about his age in 1972.

How do I know that? Because the St Cleve Chronicle, Covering Linwell, St Cleve and Little Cruddock, has moved with the times, and is now purely online at stcleve.com.

Gerald has also moved with the times. He now has a Facebook page. A twitter account.

In fact, Gerald and St Cleve have outpaced Jethro Tull, whose web sites jethrotull.com and j-tull. com both appear to be showing the age of the band rather than the web.

But Ian Anderson, synonymous as he is with Jethro Tull, appears to have done all right. There’s a decent YouTube video out. And this metafilter post gives you a good idea of what else is happening. [Thank you @marxculture].

I first heard rumours about a “sequel” maybe eight or nine months ago. Started looking for information about a Jethro Tull tour immediately, and purchased my tickets for the April 27th concert six months ago. Now, with so much more known, I know I’m in for a real treat. The whole of the original Thick As A Brick. And the whole of the sequel.

I found out about the concert via a Ticketmaster alert, and bought the tickets via them. Was told about the way the story was unfolding via a community blog, the link for which was @messaged to me by a friend via Twitter. Wouldn’t have been able to write anything meaningful here except for Wikipedia.

Little Milton is 50. And how his world has changed.

 

 

Have you read Haydn Shaughnessy? If you’re interested in the social enterprise, you should. I haven’t yet read his recent book, The Elastic Enterprise, but I will: I intend to read it as I cross the Atlantic on my way to SXSW later this week. (I’m speaking there on the Saturday, on Massively Multiplayer Work, and at least 12 people have said they’d turn up for it).

Following on from a post he’d written in January, headlined Understanding Social: An Infographic of a New Business Idea, Haydn continued his train of thought with a post today: Why Social Business Will Fail (And How To Save It).

Haydn argues that for businesses to become truly social, they must be transformed, and radically at that. This transformation takes place in three dimensions. First, there is a change in how people are connected and how they communicate, both within the enterprise as well as beyond the enterprise, supply chain and distribution network, all the way to the customers themselves. Second, this transformation affects the very fabric of the industries involved, its participants, structures and processes as they evolve into open platform-based ecosystems rather than vertically integrated silos. These two facets, when taken in combination, then yield the third dimension: a genuine focus on the creation and evolution of shared value.

I’m a long-term Cluetrain devotee, so I’m not about to start arguing with those views. [Disclosure: Chris Locke, Doc Searls, David Weinberger and Rick Levine are good friends of mine. And the 10th Anniversary Edition of the book contains a chapter written by me.]

Maybe some of you haven’t read Cluetrain as yet. Please do something about it. Now. Read it here. Go buy the book. Scan the teaser I’ve stuck below here, listing the first 16 of the 95 “theses” that make up the book. Do something. Now.

 

Amazing, to think that all that was written maybe 14 years ago.

Haydn uses the examples of Apple and Amazon to explain how a truly social enterprise changes industrial landscapes irreversibly, how the ecosystems evolve, how participants create and share value. Again, I couldn’t agree more, other than to point out that the radical transformations that Apple and Amazon have wrought, they result in at least one effect that doesn’t get mentioned: the slimming down, exit, sometimes even extinction, of many of the incumbents in related industries.

The separation between customer and employee, as evinced in the pre-Cluetrain world, is blurring. In a true social enterprise, the informed, connected, empowered customer is now engaging with the informed, connected employee: it is no surprise that the value created is truly shared.

Haydn also makes the point that the implementation of a social media layer on existing operations and processes is not what makes a business social.

Social is about sharing. And about the creation of shared value.

Social is about business transformation, albeit a renaissance of sorts.

Social is about a radical restructuring about the relationships and flows within a market.

Social is about changing the way we work.

The social enterprise represents an inflection point for the very concept of enterprise.

That’s why the vision of Marc Benioff and his team makes sense.

And that’s what attracted me to join the company.

 

 

Serendipity is a wondrous thing. 

Yesterday, as I did my leisurely trawl through the three hundred or so people I read regularly, I came across Tom Foremski’s intriguing post. Is Skype A Social Network? That set me off on a gentle, aimless wander on what makes a network social.

Then, a little while later, I noticed that Anne Zelenka, another person I read regularly,  had written a fascinating piece about mashed-up selves. And by the time I finished reading that, I was off on tangents of delight, ruminating about what makes a networked human social.

In our family, we have a simple routine when it comes to birthdays. As long as you’re in town you’re expected to make Sunday lunch, with the venue chosen by the person whose birthday it is. Today was one such day, and the cuisine chosen was Greek. We had meze, a family favourite. And it gave me the chance to observe, yet again, how wonderful it is for friends to sit and break bread together.

And then I went to Wembley to watch the Carling Cup Final. And everywhere around me there were people taking photographs. All kinds of photographs. The stadium. The teams. The play. And one other thing. The “We were there. Together” version. Mark Hillary’s photo showing Mark and Angelica with friends at an Oasis concert there a few years ago is a classic example of the genre.

Photo courtesy Mark Hillary

Being at Wembley today was like being surrounded by an avalanche of social objects. Which is where my mind turned to as I headed home on the train. And when I got home, what do I find in my twitter stream but a reminder of Hugh MacLeod’s excellent post some time ago, on social objects being the future of marketing. I could not possibly write about social objects without making reference to Hugh, and to Jyri Engestrom, the originator of the term; the two of them have really helped me think about this area.

I know, I’ve linked to quite a few posts already, all dancing around the theme of sharing. If all you do is to read those posts, then it’s been worth my while writing this one.

And for those who’d like to venture further, here’s where my head is at.

1. For anything to be social, it must be shared. The essence of “social” is in sharing. It doesn’t matter what you’re sharing: food, views, experiences, journeys, cars, computers, beds, whatever. It don’t mean a thing if it ain’t got that sharing swing.

2. Sharing, the act of making social, happens because people are made social. No man is an iland. [I couldn’t resist the temptation to link to Joan Baez’s reading of the Donne poem Meditation XVII, I’m a big fan of both]. People were born to share. Even something as apparently “individual” as identity is a concept steeped in sharing, in being part of a social environment. [This post on identity, written six years ago, may help you think about why].

3. Sharing is encouraged by good design. It’s easy to share meze. It’s a lot harder to share steak. Meze is designed to be communal, to be shared. I have some very close friends in New York, they live on the Upper West Side. And when we meet as families, we make every effort to eat at Carmine’s. They say their family style restaurant is legendary, and for good reason. It is. Family style. Designed to be shared.

4. When you share physical things like food, sharing reduces waste. You need less to go around. There’s a sort of portfolio effect in place, so when you have large groups eat at places like Carmine’s, you tend to leave less food on the plate and on the serving dishes. [Perhaps not the first time around, as you learn to cope with “legendary” helping sizes; but then the waste is a function of poor estimation, not poor design.]

5. When you share non-physical things like ideas, sharing increases value. As George Bernard Shaw is reputed to have said:

photo courtesy Wikipedia

If you have an apple and I have an apple and we exchange these apples then you and I will still each have an apple. But if you have an idea and I have an idea and we exchange these ideas, then each of us will have two ideas.

 

Sharing is serious business.

Very serious business.

And sharing has very serious consequences for business, especially if your business is modelled on not-sharing.

When people share physical things, they need fewer of them. And the net effect is to reduce the overall size of the market. Ever wondered why hardware manufacturers don’t like talking about the cloud, preferring to use terms like “private cloud”? Because a private cloud is a data centre under another name. An expensive, private, data centre. Ever wondered why some software companies also emphasise the need for “private clouds”? Why they use every excuse under the sun (and a few more suited to moonlight and darkness) to defend against the cloud? Simple. Because their licensing models are tightly coupled with the hard, physical, “analog” market of hardware and processor. There endeth the lesson.

Non-physical things have been shared for aeons, long before the digital age. Take the insurance market. Today you can contract to cover or protect against many types of risk; the insurance market exists to let you do this, ostensibly for peace of mind, ostensibly a sign of being prudent with your assets. But there was a time when the bearer of the risk was your community, a time when the premium you paid was participation in that community. If your house burnt down, your neighbours got together, sheltered and fed you, then worked with you to help you start over. There was a time when adults didn’t contract with their employers or their insurance companies for their pensions. They already had solid pension schemes: children.

I have never seen an assisted-living/retirement development/old-people’s-home/whatever you want to call it in India. Perhaps they exist. But I had never even heard of one during my time there, from 1957-1980.

Progress. Strange, the things we do in the name of progress.

[This train of thought always reminds me of the dialogue between Mahatma Gandhi and a journalist. When asked what he thought of Western civilisation, he is said to have replied “I think it would be a good idea”.]

People, we live in challenging times. Times when we need to be good stewards of the resources we have. Times when we have to ensure we don’t waste resources. Times when we have to learn to be less selfish. Times when sharing becomes more important, when the ability to share becomes crucial.

Whatever you’re doing, whatever you’re thinking about, whatever you’re faced with, remember who we are. Or, as friend Hugh MacLeod put it:

Remember who you are.