[This is a follow-up to the post I wrote late last night; thank you very much for your comments, Likes, RTs, +1s and Shares. Active and visible feedback is a great motivator, and helps me learn to write about the right things and in the right ways].

Where was I? Oh yes. Why am I so excited about 2012? I’ve shared some of the reasons with you already in my earlier post, but there are a few more that I want to make sure I get on to your radar right from the get-go.

I’m excited about what’s going to happen with intellectual property during 2012. Let me explain. First, a bit of recent history. Here’s a quote from something Esther Dyson wrote. [Esther is a friend and mentor, someone I admire greatly, someone who has influenced how I think far more than she perhaps even realises].

The laws of physics seem to change when you enter a new environment, such as the gravity field of the moon — or the Internet and its easy replication of content. In this issue, we argue that the newly revealed physics of information transfer on the net will change the economics and perhaps ultimately the laws governing the creation and dissemination of intellectual property…call it content to avoid the presumption of ownership.

What happens to intellectual property on the net? Perhaps the question is best answered with another: What new kinds of content-based value can be created on the net? We believe the answers include services (the transformation of bits rather than bits themselves), the selection of content, the presence of other people, and assurance of authenticity — reliable information about sources of bits and their future flows. In short, intellectual processes and services appreciate; intellectual assets depreciate.

Esther Dyson, Intellectual Property On The Net, Release 1.0, 28 December

I guess some of you don’t think her views are going to pan out this year. Maybe you think she’s being a bit too futuristic, too optimistic about human ability to change, and the speed of change. Perhaps.

And perhaps not.

You see, I left out a small piece of information from that quote. The year. Esther Dyson wrote those words over seventeen years ago, in 1994. A great read then, and a great read now. [Incidentally, isn’t it fantastic that I could access the archives of Release 1.0 to find the quote, all free-to-air? Thank you Esther for writing it, thank you everyone who’s worked on Release 1.0 over the years for mentoring me from afar, and thank you Tim and Sara for continuing to make it available.]

So I’m excited about what’s happening with intellectual property. You must think I’m mad, what with SOPA and ACTA and Hadopi and DMCA and Digital Economy Act and who knows what else. How could I possibly think that things are getting better when they palpably aren’t? What am I smoking?

For the answer to that, I have to turn to a second friend and mentor, Clay Shirky, as quoted famously by a third, Kevin Kelly.

Institutions will try to preserve the problem to which they are the solution.

Change is never easy, especially if you’re the one being changed. That’s not just true of people but of institutions as well. In many ways, I was not surprised at the way the entertainment industry as a whole pushed back on changing their business models while desperately working on changing their business models. They knew that all they could buy was time.

They’ve bought their time. And the time is running out.

The key word in the Shirky quote is “try”. In the same way that nature abhors a vacuum and water seeks its own level, problems cannot be preserved beyond the paradigm and environment that created them. You can try to do that, but over time you will fail. You. Will. Fail.

And that’s what is happening now. SOPA is a terrible act of legislation because of some of the words used in the bill. Words that were put in by people desperately trying to preserve the problems of the past. And the level of desperation is a good measure of the way time is running out.

DMCA. Hadopi. Digital Economy Act. ACTA. SOPA. Yup, with the passage of time, the level of desperation is getting higher, the clauses are getting less and less workable, making the laws harder to enforce, to prosecute, socially, politically, economically. It gets harder to sponsor them when you have information from sites like Maplight available to all; it even gets harder to support, as GoDaddy found out recently.  We live in a world where trust is an increasingly important currency, and where transparency is the mint that produces that currency.

So it’s over. It may not appear so, but it is.

The culture of the internet, the Web, the communities that build it and shape it, it’s a culture of openness. There will always be people who attempt to build walled gardens in the open spaces, and they can succeed. But only up to a point, and only for a short time. It’s like the app-store and device locked apps taking on those built in HTML5. Faites vos jeux, messieurs, faites vos jeux. Only one winner.

Which brings me to my next reason to be excited about 2012. Open data.

Tim Berners-Lee and Nigel Shadbolt wrote an important piece in the Times last Saturday, on how the information age boosts the economy, makes our lives easier. They called data “the new raw material of the 21st century”. Sadly, unlike the archives of Release 1.0, this article is behind a paywall so I don’t have an easy way to share it with you.

They’re not alone in this: I’ve heard Tim O’Reilly wax lyrical about the importance of Open Data, Vivek Kundra show his support and appreciation, people like Wendy Hall and Noshir Contractor at the Web Science Trust (working with TimBL and Nigel) have worked very hard to show what can be done.

Again, it’s a question of timing. There’s a tipping point. And the tipping point is now.

Why? It’s simple. As I said yesterday, we’re beating up on the banks for lending too much and too unwisely, and we’re beating them up for not lending and for lending too slowly. Who would be a banker nowadays? It’s not that easy for governments either, particularly those in the West. Borrow less. Spend less. Perform these miracles without putting people out of work.

If it were only that simple.

Erik Brynjolfsson and Andrew McAfee have written a very interesting book on the economic impact of modern technology on society and work. If you haven’t read it, please go out and buy the e-book. It’s called Race Against The Machine. I had the chance to talk about it with Andy a few months ago, and it’s fascinating.

Many of the current white collar jobs are disappearing and will continue to disappear. And this is where, in my opinion, open data can help us in incredibly powerful ways. How do I love Open Data? Let me count the ways:

One, there’s a lot of data out there that is paid for by the public purse. Governments don’t have to do very much to release that data. In a few cases commercial arrangements have been made about closed private exploitation of such data, but these can be reviewed, often reversed. It’s only a matter of time. The key is that the data is publicly owned and not difficult to make publicly accessible.

Two, when that data gets released, three things happen:

(a) people learn that they can build businesses around that making that “open” data useful to a wider body. The point that Esther Dyson was making in her 1994 article, about people paying for accessibility and ease of use, is coming home to roost. Incidentally, Andrew Savikas wrote a very worthwhile piece on the subject of Content as a Business fifteen years later, you can read it here. People will package and repackage and mash and create useful and valuable services, given the chance. After all, the infrastructure needed to process and distribute the services are now available for peanuts.

(b) people learn that they can build businesses around cleaning up the data, making it better, more accurate. There’s a new form of curation needed, new curators, people with the passion and the domain knowledge and, in all probability, unintended “cognitive surplus” through unemployment. if you think you’ve seen a firehose of data, just you wait. A change is gonna come, as the song goes. 21st century curation is big business, particularly for open data.

(c) as the data gets better and more accessible, there are second-order payouts for the economy and for society. More informed decisions. Less waste.

Of course there are problems to overcome, particularly when it comes to personally identifiable information. John Perry Barlow has been telling us for some time now that the very concept of privacy is changing, that social mores and values will change as well, as we move from a world where we regulated access to personal information to one where we regulate usage.

Whenever there is change there is a mess to deal with. There is an immune system response, an inertia, an attempt by the incumbents to preserve their very existence.

Whenever there is change there is a mess to deal with. There is misinformation and disinformation, as incumbents do everything they can to confuse and befuddle customers. [I work for salesforce.com, and I see the dinosaur dances of dying incumbents every day; if it wasn’t for the terrible waste of resource and energy caused by the dinosaur incumbents, I would probably find the whole thing quite funny.]

We’re at a critical inflection point in our existence, surrounded by problems often of our own making, and needing to adopt new ways of thinking in order to solve them. There are barriers that prevent us from doing that, some legal, some social and conventional, some down to pure skulduggery by those who would prolong their survival.

Sometimes I think that if Henry Ford were alive today, he would find that all he could build was “faster horses”. Because the horse industry would have grown another hundred years, grown to a point where it served seven billion people, grown to a point where it had permanent access to K Street, grown to a point where it could arrange for legislation to protect its very existence.

Alan Kay used to say “The best way to predict the future is to invent it”. I met Alan some years ago at a convention in San Diego, and he was affected by the experience of the decades that had passed since he said that. Now, he thinks the saying should be “The best way to predict the future is to prevent it”.

Well, people have been doing just that, trying to prevent the future.

And for a time, they’ve succeeded.

But it’s over.

2012. The Show-Me Year.

 

 

 

I don’t think I can remember a New Year’s Day when I’ve been more excited about the year to come.

Let’s start with the political landscape. You all know about the year we’ve had, the long-standing governments that have tumbled, the despots and terrorists who are no more, the growth in measured nonviolent protest. It’s been a year of change, and all the signs are that there’s a lot more to come.

Take a look at what’s currently happening in Russia, what people like Alexey Navalny are up to right now. [Esther, thanks for pointing this out to me]. Now there’s a little part of me that wonders whether Alexey Navalny could do in the US what he’s doing in Russia, given the signing of the latest NDAA into law, but right now it’s only a little part: I still have considerable faith in democratic process however flawed it may look at times.

Why do I have faith in democratic process? Let me tell you a story. When I was 18, India was placed under a State of Emergency that gave the Prime Minister the power to “rule by decree”; she herself was quoted as saying she’d brought democracy to a “grinding halt”. Which she proceeded to try and do, for 18 months, before calling for elections. At the point of calling the elections, this was the set-up:

• Her father, Jawaharlal Nehru, was the country’s first prime minister, loved and revered in Indian memory.
• Her surname, Gandhi, resonated in the land of Mohandas Karamchand “Mahatma” Gandhi, even though she was in no way related.
• Her party were the only ones to have won national elections….ever.
• Her family had won her constituency seat since time immemorial.
• Her opponents were either in jail or in hiding.
• She’d been in dictatorial control for the previous eighteen months, with her young son acting as the ebullient enforcer.

You get the picture. Putin would have pouted his pleasure; Mugabe would have murmured his admiration. There could only be one winner to the 1977 election.

And yes, there was only one winner.

Democracy. Amazingly, while the opposition bayed and bleated “Fix”, the results proved otherwise. Congress lost the election. Indira Gandhi lost her seat.

Bad law can be passed. Bad law will be passed. Sometimes good law gets passed with bad bits added on by those who know how to game the system. And it takes time.

Democracies can’t be gamed. Not then, not now. Delayed, yes; disrupted, yes. But only for a time.

You can’t look at the changing political landscape without being aware of the immense social changes going on, many of which influenced the political changes. Following the success of OWS, people are really beginning to think how things are distributed today, how things were distributed before, how things may be distributed in future. Arab Spring and OWS could represent the beginning in a long journey of enlightenment of how a global society will learn to operate. Take a look at this diagram:

Figure courtesy td-architects

 

The 86%.

The 99% and the 1% represent inequalities in wealth distribution, perhaps in income distribution as well.

The 86% have other things besides wealth and income on their minds; things like food, water, disease control, energy, education, to name a few. There is so much to be worked out: figuring out how to get the right balance between growing food for people to eat, and growing crops that will help solve the energy and climate crises; learning how to battle new diseases, diseases accentuated by the global nature of modern trade and migration, while coping with the return of old ones, as antibiotics lose their oomph; treating water as the precious resource it is, taking care not to make it a Missile Crisis level problem as countries argue about riparian rights; dealing with those who would Balkanize the ocean depths and lay claim to large swathes of ocean and all the natural resources represented (sadly, I can already imagine a world where fish have “passports” branded on them); negotiating how to overcome the imbalance of a world where apparently 40% of new patents come from the US, where Liechtenstein is ranked 9th in the world league table for innovation, and where China, India, Brazil and Russia are notably absent. I have nothing against Liechtenstein, but puh-leeze.

Figure courtesy GOOD.is

The problems cited are not easy problems; they represent a whole new class of problem for humanity to face, global in their construct, immense in their complexity, and they’re going to need new classes of tools to help solve them.

My thanks to Vintage Lulu for the amazing photo above

Some tools aren’t appropriate any more. So we need new tools, tools that allow people to collaborate with low cost of entry, low cost of operation, low cost of change, low cost of exit; tools that work globally, consistently, across culture and geography and language; tools that are device- and location- and scale- (and for that matter socio-economic grouping-) agnostic.

Tools that have emerged, tools that continue to emerge, tools that make me realise that humans are wonderful beings. Tools that gave computer gamers the ability to solve a ten-year old puzzle related to AIDS research; tools that helped volunteers restore tsunami-damaged photographs to do their little bit in alleviating the suffering of those affected by the tragedy in Japan last March.

It’s not just tools, human beings are making breakthroughs in waters hitherto uncharted; Ronald Ross (incidentally the first Indian-born man to be given the Nobel Prize)  “discovered” the parasite behind malaria while Queen Victoria was still on the throne. Yet it was only last year that people started speaking of a proper vaccine for malaria, a disease I know something about, having had it more than once. Similarly, I’m very excited about what Irit Sagi and team have been doing in Rehovot, experimenting with vaccines for Crohn’s disease and rheumatoid arthritis, amongst others. I have two members in my close family with Crohn’s.

I’ve just listed a small number of reasons why I’m excited about the year to come. Of course there are major challenges. The West is going to have to spend less and save more, something the West may not know how to do. The East is going to have to spend more and save less, something the East may not know how to do. Perhaps the East and the West, between them, have the answers.

We’ve chastised banks, and bankers, for lending too much, for lending to the wrong people, for investing in the wrong things. We continue to chastise the banks. We’re also chastising banks for not lending enough, for the credit squeeze, for holding up growth. In fact we’re doing so much chastising of banks they’re finding it hard to hire and train people to do the things we’re asking them to do. Hmmm. Something’s gotta give.

We’re going to have to understand more about economic growth, what it means, whether it is desirable or not, when it is desirable, when it isn’t. We’re going to have to understand what relationship that has with jobs, and what that means for society. We’re going to have to understand the role  played by what we call today a country, with its strangenesses of political and economic borders, how that changes.

As we enter 2012, there are many things that appear uncertain, starting with the economic, social and political landscape; this is true wherever we look.

Everything is up for change.

And you wonder why I’m excited about 2012?

And you know/the darkest hour/is always/always/just before the break of day/

And it appears to be a long/appears to be a long/appears to be a long/time/

Before the dawn.

David Crosby, Long Time Gone. Crosby Stills and Nash, Crosby Stills and Nash.

I made this collage up for the previous post. Some of my favourite albums from that time. See how many you can guess without enlarging the photo.

Born in 1957, raised as part of a liberal and progressive family in Calcutta, schooled by the Jesuits from 1965-66 to 1978-79: there is much in my background to explain why I espouse many of the beliefs of the Sixties. It begins with my family and my faith; it manifests itself in how I’m passionate about community and in communal activities, in a participative society, in a collaborative workforce. It underpins my interest in the “maker society”, in open source, in emergent behaviour, swarming, and servant leadership. It is to be seen in my attitude to ownership of material goods, it is to be seen in my attitude to ownership of ideas. It affects how I think about nature and the environment, and informs my beliefs in stewardship. It defines my approach to tolerance and to forgiveness, to war and to peace.  It even influences the way I read and write, what I eat, what I cook.

And it influences the music I listen to. Take a look at the image below:

It’s a collage of 100 album covers, and represents the first 100 albums I would buy in vinyl if they were available at a reasonable price and in reasonable condition. I’ve “owned” these albums before, sometimes multiple times. I’ve paid for them time and time again, in vinyl format, on prerecorded cassettes, as CDs, as 25th-anniversary-with-extra-tracks-you-never-knew-you-needed-(and-you-were-right!), sometimes even in DVDs. Do I hear you say “sucker”? Yup, that’s me.

I’ve managed to buy quite a few of them on mint vinyl already, not as reissues but by being in the right place at the right time. But.

But given a chance, I would buy them as a single transaction, a job lot, a bundle. Even if there was some further negotiation to be done with respect to the sequence in which I would receive them, and the time over which that would happen.

It’s not just about music. I travel a lot. And I’d love to go to an airline and say, I’d like to buy 100 flights. Return. Most of them are on sectors you fly. I will use those flights up in a year. It may not be just me travelling. I will vary the class of travel, “turning left” for longhaul business travel and for at least one family vacation.

It’s not just about travel. I read a lot. And I’d love to go to a bookstore and say, I’d like to buy 100 books. Most of them are on subjects you stock. I will use up those credits in a year. It may not be just me doing the buying, I will vary the class of book, “turning left” for signed numbered limited editions occasionally and for at least one set of family presents.

Music. Travel. Books. Clothes. Eating out. In some ways it’s all the same to me. I want to tell someone what I’m in the market for, build a relationship between that “person” and me. Tell them how much I’d be prepared to spend and over what period and for what class of thing. Work with them to figure out the sequence, frequency and timing.

And expect them to invest in that relationship as a result, be my friend, guide, partner through that process.

But it needs them to think differently, in order to view what they do differently, move from the product perspective to the customer perspective.

Without that fresh perspective, we’re going to continue to see abominations like region coding on DVDs. Which customer was that designed for?

Let me give an example of something that does not work.

Let’s take Premiership football in the UK. Most grounds have capacities in the 30-50,000 range, with a few clubs below 30,000 and a few above 50,000. All of them have fan bases that are multiples of that number, large enough fan bases to warrant the payment of very large sums of money to acquire “exclusive” rights to the live games.

And then someone chooses which games are broadcast live in the UK…. it would appear that if you didn’t live in the UK, you can watch pretty much all the games live. So my brother in India gets to watch his choice of UK-based Premiership game live, while I can’t. Go figure.

OK, so the hardened supporter buys a season ticket to go to all the games. Guess what? Analog is scarce, so there are waiting lists for many of the clubs. [That’s true for most sports at an analog level, and why touts make real money: Lord’s, Wimbledon, Twickenham, the O2, the story’s the same.].

Since I can’t get an analog season ticket, the smart thing to do is to buy a digital one, right? Wrong. Because you can’t. You’re only the customer. Someone else decides what bundle of matches you get to watch, a bundle designed to disappoint every customer.

Which brings me to the nub of this post.

Customers are fundamentally unpredictable.

In the eyes of people trying to sell them things, that is.

Why is this? It’s because customers want to buy things their way, in terms of the nature of upfront commitment, the choices represented, the frequency, the sequencing, the bundling and the discount. And the ability to change everything.

I want to be able to buy 100 books or flights or albums. Or 10. Or 1000. I want to be able to buy it all from one provider, even if that provider has to source some of the services from elsewhere. I want to be able to choose what and when and how. And to change my mind. Of course, if I do change my mind, I will have to pay for it. But only as and when I exercise that “right”.

I don’t want a buyer’s market, I’m happy to see the service provider make a turn on the service provided. Everyone’s got to eat.

The trouble is, it’s been a seller’s market for far too long. Based originally on natural scarcity and monopoly, now more often based on artificial scarcity, regulatory arbitrage, ploys and schemes you don’t want to believe. All designed to ensure that business becomes more predictable….. at the cost of customer service, service quality and even freedom of choice.

This will change.

Customers will choose to make long-term commitments with companies that give them simplicity, convenience and freedom of choice. In many industries, the early movers have provided simplicity and convenience but not freedom of choice, as a consequence of which there are people who believe that the freedom of choice is not important. That’s a big mistake.

A time is coming when the customer decides on the bundle of products and services to be acquired, not the provider. In fact, that bundle will comprise services from more than one provider…. the services themselves will commoditise, but there will be a premium payable for simplicity and convenience, payable to the “prime” who constructs the multiprovider bundle. The customer chooses the bundle.

A time is coming when the analog components of that bundle will last, as they used to last. Cars. White goods. Entertainment systems. All examples of analog goods that used to be built to last, and are now designed for rapid obsolescence. This won’t be tolerated any more. Planned obsolescence will no longer be accepted.

A time is coming when everything, as a result of commoditisation: every bundle, every analog item, every digital item, will come with a published cost of change. The cost of change will be payable in two forms: an “option price” for the right to change, and  an “execution price” to make the change. The penalty for change must be published upfront.

A time is coming where the maintenance and repair of what is purchased will also be commoditised: where you can choose to go where you like for analog spare parts or digital equivalents. A time is coming when every customer will have the right to look under the hood, to tinker with the product or service, to make changes personally, A time is coming when the current warranty system will be overthrown, when the principle goes back to “fit-for-purpose” rather than “will work for a year or so”.

A time is coming.

Why has this time not come already? Because companies have designed products and services with the overriding principle of aiding predictability rather than meeting customer needs. 

A time is coming.

 

 

 

 

 

If you haven’t heard about Big Data this year, please tell me your secret. Tell me how you managed to avoid hearing about it. I want to know. Really. There are days when I want to be in a place like that. Desperately.

For some time now we’ve been hearing about device proliferation. A classic 10x market. People tell me that mainframes are numbered in the tens of thousands, minicomputers in the hundreds of thousands, PCs in the millions, smart mobile phones in the billions. Smart devices in the tens of billions.

These tens of billions of thingummybobs are getting busier and busier as they sense and observe and record everything and everyone around them, saluting the things that move and painting the ones that don’t.

In a perfect world, this would mean that there’s a lot of good data being produced, data that should prove useful to improve our lives. So that means there’s a market for software that helps us crunch the data into something useful, find the data we need, see the data in ways that can help us extract meaning and act on the meaning.

Even though this world is far from perfect, I’m glad to see that all that is happening. VCs have been plunging into Big Data for a while now. Data visualisation tools continue to get better, better and better. And search is beginning to do something about its verb-based future.

And yet……

And yet I have this sense of unease.

You can have lots and lots and lots of data, Big Data. You can have wonderful Big Data Crunchers, tools to help you do something with the data. You can have the world’s best visualisation and search tools.

But they all mean nothing unless you can act on what you see.

Innovation takes place through adoption into practice, and not just through invention and disruption. Until something is being used, nothing actually changes.

Big Data becomes useful when it leads to action.

That action takes place across a wide spectrum. At one end the actors are all machines. And we run the risks that Kevin Slavin alluded to in his TED talk, How Algorithms Shape the World.

At the other end all the actors are human. Shouting from the rooftops about overload, seeking to convert firehoses into capillaries. With limited success.

As Clay Shirky so memorably pointed out, there is no such thing as information overload, it’s all about filter failure. We need better filters, something I’ve been writing about for a while now.

Between the two extremes there’s a universe of space where we have a lot to learn. The more I read about the Air France tragedy the more I feel the need to look deeply into this, how human beings cope with decision making amidst such complexity. Just reading the IEEE blog coverage here and the Popular Mechanics coverage here gives us pause for thought.

My concerns get heightened when I realise major segments of the industry I’m part of can’t stop rubbing their hands with glee as they intone “big data, big big data, big on-premise servers, big on-premise storage, big processor licences, big profits…. Christmas is every day”.

That causes new problems related to the quality and reliability of the big data, as multiple sources take snapshots at different times. When I worked in capital markets, working on out-of-date data could cost millions in seconds flat; it became very very important to know how “live” the data was, and to keep checking that the data was real and up to the second (or even millisecond).

So we have the risk that there’s a lot of Big Wrong Data.

But you know something? These things can be solved. We can learn how to process the data more effectively, present it for visualisation more elegantly, check for its validity more ruthlessly, use the best software and services to do all this, use machines to filter and humans to curate. We can do it all.

And find ourselves in a situation where all we do is “wait faster”.

Because there’s one more thing we have to change. And that is this: the way we make decisions. And then do something.

Some years ago, I remember a story that was used to illustrate the importance of a particular book. [Sadly, I can’t remember the book any more, other than it may have had something to do with Price Waterhouse and may have had a yellow cover]. The story asked a simple question. Five frogs on a log [Aha, that was the title. Five frogs on a log!] Where was I? Five frogs on a log. Four decide to jump off. How many are left?

And the answer was… five. Because, as the authors point out, deciding isn’t doing.

The way we’ve allowed email and calendar to become part of our work lives, decision-making seems to be perennially poor in large, often still hierarchical, organisations. Email chains fragment and break and become divergent infinite loops. “Snooze, you lose” gets stated sometimes but rarely acted on. Getting the right people together has become harder and harder, process delays begin with scheduling time. Everything is at priority one in the scheduling process. If compromises are sought on the quorum front, they are temporary, evanescent. Infinite loop problems recur.

Big Data can have Big Effects.

That excites me.

Big Data can create Big Problems, sometimes with tragic consequences; we need to take extreme care.

Big Data can lead to Big Waste in on-premise activity, and we need to take care here as well.

Big Data can have a Big Positive Impact on industry, on education, on healthcare, on jobs (the subject of a separate post I will try and write this week) and even on government. People like Tim O’Reilly, Tim Berners-Lee, Nigel Shadbolt, Wendy Hall et all have worked hard to get everyone to understand what is possible here, and I am a convert.

But the cultural changes that have to take place in institutions should not be underestimated. Institutional immune systems can render all the big data useless by rising up to slow the processes down, make decisions harder to take, make action harder to initiate, make outcomes harder to achieve.

Big Data means Big Changes.

It’s Not How Big It Is, It’s How You Use It.