Beginnings: congregations and stories

As long as humankind has existed, humankind has congregated. And whenever humankind has congregated, humans have used the opportunity to follow their passions and dreams, to tell the world their stories, to connect with others to make their dreams reality. Sometimes those dreams went against the grain of the society they were part of: the stories they told were stories of protest and pain and perseverance.

For as long as humankind has existed, we’ve had congregations where dreamers shared their stories, their passions and protests. But for most of that time, the ability to record and share what happened at such congregations has been limited, severely limited. Until very recently, we’ve had to rely on the memory of the people present and their ability to report on what happened. Initially, this was by word-of-mouth, passed on from generation to generation, vulnerable to the vagaries of memory.

The persistence of memory

Once we learnt to communicate in a more persistent form, as language evolved into symbolic representation, the risk of forgetting receded. But that of translation remained, since the conventions we used to represent language changed with time and distance. Contemporaneous accounts of such events do exist, but only where the right to publish the accounts existed as well. Where such contemporaneous accounts exist, they’ve also had to stand the test of time, and of the editors and translators who helped those stories travel.

With the advent of printing, scrolls and codices gave way to books, and the cost of sharing was lowered. It took a while before the cost of illustrating dropped as well, for some time it was done (or at the very least enhanced) by hand. So the stories of what happened at such congregations spread faster and farther.

Then came the eras of newspapers, of radio and of television, sharply reducing the time and the distance between events and the reporting of such events, and radically enhancing the multimedia nature of the reportage. But these were all largely broadcast in construct, with a small number of people at the centre controlling everything; the audience were channelled, not connected. Despite this there was a gentle emergence of voice at the edge, via phone-ins, letters to the editor, public broadcasting, and so on.

Empowered edges

With the advent of the internet, it became possible to connect more and more people quickly and effectively; when the Web was formed, the edge was empowered. Conversations between the connected became two-way. Search engines arrived and evolved: for the first time in human history, it became possible for all forms of conversations (audio, textual, video, face-to-face, telephone, synchronous, asynchronous, instant, whatever) to be persisted, archived, retrieved at will. As the mobile phone entered the fray, such conversations became ubiquitous as well; as the phone got “smarter”, with camera and recorder and GPS and what-have-you, the conversations became richer.

The age of platforms

So it should be evident that the technology used to manipulate, compute, process, display, disseminate and analyse information evolve in leaps and bounds over the past few decades. What is perhaps less evident is the consequential, sometimes parallel, evolution of the way the technology is made available to us. Once upon a time the tools by which we engaged with information were all “proprietary”, to the extent that each tool provider had a unique set; each set contained deeply vertically integrated components; migration between the set of one proprietor and another was not just frowned up but militated against; and the costs of entry, participation and exit were unreasonable.

That began to change as monopolies were broken down, particularly those of AT&T and IBM, and we saw the birth of Microsoft, of the “industry standard architecture” defined by the AT bus, of “open systems”, of clone PCs, of Linux, of open source. A new world emerged, where services were networked rather than hierarchical, horizontally integrated rather than vertical. The empowerment of the edge continued apace. [Some would argue that both AT&T as well as IBM have returned to their proprietary ways and scales, but that’s grist for a different mill, I have this post to complete.]

The emergent openness and horizontalisation reduced costs of entry and participation, with the result that the “stacks” became vulnerable to commoditisation. Aided and abetted by the laws of Moore and Metcalfe, standardisation, consolidation and virtualisation became everyday occurrences; people began to realise that these developments allowed immense leverage to be gained, as the barriers to entry and participation vanished: it became possible to connect very large numbers of people to each other and to the platform that brought them together; people generated information by just being, and added to that information by doing; the information grew ballistically as people started doing things together. The social network, underpinned by the cloud, was here to stay.

The leverage was less in the connections than in the ability of those connections to create and co-create. Which meant that the real value was in the digital fingerprints and footprints, the data generated. Information we never had, information we never knew we could have, information whose value we could only guess at. All this ushered in the age of the API; it made sense to empower communities to create the tools that would convert the information into value.

The platformisation of our environment

Networks and communities of people have been empowered with tools, largely cloud-based, accessible via mobile multipurpose”smart” devices; the broadcast audiences of yesterday can now interact with others at will; the static living room has been replaced by the ubiquity and freedom of the mobile device; content creation is now democratised, carried out by a much larger segment of the population; the stations and channels of yesterday are now themselves social networks; Twitter and Facebook are not just news feeds but EPGs as well, curated by your own personal social network.

Historically, people who attended specific events formed transient communities, ethereal, temporary, fragile. It is not that easy to bring together the people who were present at Dealey Plaza on 22 November 1963, or at Wembley on 30 July 1966. Today, with the tools we have, these communities are platforms as well.

Modern platform characteristics

• Platforms connect people
• Platforms  facilitate publishing
• Platforms enable protest
• Platforms create value
• Platforms need curation
• Platforms can constrain

The World Economic Forum, viewed from this perspective

The World Economic Forum is a platform, much like Facebook, or Wikipedia, or Mozilla, or TED, or the Olympics. Or even the United Nations. Or the IMF. Or for that matter the Financial Times. WEF brings together a large amount of people, far greater than the three or four thousand who make it to Davos every year, or the similar number who make it to “Summer Davos” in Dalian or Tianjin.

Connecting people

As with any other platform, WEF connects people together. Over the years, the tools that enable people to connect have improved and continue to improve: tools that help you discover who else is there, that help you arrange to meet those you’d like to meet, that facilitate your going to the sessions that interest you. As discussed, the tools have become more mobile, more interactive.

The media often portrays WEF as a “jolly”, where thousands of overpaid people eat, drink and make merry all week long, interspersed with celebrity pontifications from the great and the good, usually drawn from the political and industry-magnate classes, punctuated by the odd real celebrity. Now I can’t blame the media for that; since time immemorial, as with any other industry, the people who run the media seek to make available for purchase what “sells”. In this context, bashing politicians and magnates gets considered a sure bet.

But there’s another WEF, a WEF I wrote about last year, where many of the people aren’t celebrities, where no pontification happens. A WEF where people meet in small groups and try and figure out how to make the world a better place, one tiny little piece at a time. A WEF populated by people like Juliana Rotich of Ushahidi, Carol Realini of Obopay, Daniel Domscheit-Berg of OpenLeaks, three of the people I had the opportunity to spend time with over the past few days. People who are working really hard to give others a chance to have a voice, to be able to produce and consume valuable information at low cost. Information that saves lives in a crisis, information that helps enrich the quality of life even when not in crisis.

Facilitating publishing

WEF at Davos is about hundreds of events, most of which aren’t covered in the mainstream press. In the past, you were unlikely to know about them unless you were there. But today things are different. For example, anyone can visit this site, access, view and download summaries for most sessions. This year, session agendas and summaries were available in electronic form for all delegates, so you could choose a no-trees-damaged version if you wanted. As you would expect, there were mobile and tablet apps for all this as well, along with a small and hard-working social media team covering the facebook, twitter and youtube angles.

Enabling protest

Khruschev banging his shoe on the table at the UN; Tommie Smith at the Olympics; Marlon Brando not at the Oscars; India refusing to play South Africa at the Davis Cup in 1974: throughout history, especially our recent history, regular community events are natural places for protests to take place. If anything, this will accelerate as the tools for dissemination improve.

Of late, a new form of platform has emerged, allowing protest in a different way. The “leaking platform”. Essentially this is a place where whistleblowers can go to and be guaranteed anonymity. Wikileaks is just an example of this class of platform; OpenLeaks makes the concept more easily understandable: a politics-neutral vehicle for people to pass on confidential material to publishing organisations while retaining their anonymity.

Creating value

If you get the chance, take a look at what the Global Education Initiative does and has done. Or what the Tech Pioneers and Young Global Leaders do. Just three out of a couple of dozen initiatives that really define what the WEF is about, rather than the razzmatazz you hear about. Small teams of people working “on the ground” in countries where the conditions are not conducive to ease and relaxation. Not exactly days of wine and roses. Hard graft at the edge, creating value where it counts. Changing lives, sometimes one life at a time. WEF gives these people a platform to meet others, to express their dreams and desires, their concerns and constraints; the connections made help raise funds, influence policy, eradicate barriers, provide mentoring and guidance, swap stories and experiences.

You can find a list of WEF communities here.

Needing curation

Every community has its 1000lb gorillas, its moderators, its core; just look at any opensource community and you will see what I mean; every platform has its editors, its policymakers, its gatekeepers. So it is with the WEF, and a Davos ticket is therefore hard to get. Now before you go into a tizzy about the costs of a visit to Davos, think about the entry and set-up costs of other global events, such as the Olympics (the next Olympics will cost about £10 billion to hold; if you were to attend the opening ceremony, the closing ceremony and just the finals of all the events, it would set you back about £14,000 per person at published prices); other examples of global events you should think about are the soccer World Cup, the IMF annual meeting, the Doha talks, Kyoto, you name it.

You can’t have six million people at each of these events in person, even if all of them could fit on the Isle Of Wight. So some form of curation takes place, of the attendees as well as the content created and published. Sometimes the curation is based on qualification criteria, sometimes it’s economic, sometimes it’s a ballot. Whatever route is chosen, it’s normal for attendance to be filtered. And it’s necessary.

I made Davos last year, I made it this year. I’ve never been before 2010, and I may not darken their doors again. But it doesn’t worry me. It was a privilege to have been there, to have met the people I met, to have had the conversations I had. I would like to be there again, but not being there would not worry me. What would worry me is the possibility that  people continue to have misconceptions about what Davos is about.

Platforms can constrain

Which brings me to the final point of this post. At Salesforce, where I work, we hold a senior management meeting every six months or so; in the past, staff who weren’t invited tended to think of the meeting as a gathering of the illuminati (to use Marc Benioff’s words). Such meetings used to be like Vegas, with what happened there staying there. This was normal in most companies, because the tools for participation and sharing just weren’t there. Until Chatter came along; now, everyone in Salesforce can be part of the meeting, place-shifted, time-shifted. And the buzz is tremendous, the capacity to create value is considerable.

So it is with WEF. Platforms need to be open. And WEF has come a long way in this, breaking away from the exclusive holy-of-holies mould. Competitions were held this year to allow people to enter based on the video messages they shot; summaries of sessions are available to all; some of the sessions were televised, others shared via YouTube. Bloggers and tweeters were everywhere. More people had access to what was planned, and to what took place,  than was ever the case before.

Conclusion

I’m someone who prefers to look for the good in things, who prefers to “take the beam out of my eye” rather than point out the mote in someone else’s eye. It’s easy to criticise WEF and Davos; if you must criticise, then it is worth doing constructively, in possession of the facts and while providing examples of what good looks like. There are many things I could criticise Davos for, but exclusiveness and gratuitous consumption are not anywhere near the top of my list, particularly when I compare it with any other global events.

I will be writing more about Davos and about what happened there this time, perhaps one or two more posts, primarily on “leaking platforms”. In the meantime, I hope that at least one person out there has a better understanding of what happens there.

A few days ago, I spent some time with James Powell at the Thomson Reuters offices on Times Square. It was just the kind of conversation I enjoy: we covered a lot of ground in a relatively short time, rarely had to explain anything to each other while we went off on tangents and random walks, yet kept largely to subjects of mutual interest.

One of the key topics that came up was that of consumerisation. During our conversation, James raised an intriguing issue: Enterprises have understood that consumerisation is here to stay; lessons are learnt daily, and the learning is applied within firms like ours. So we see the march of smartphones and tablet devices into the enterprise, and the emergent freeing-up of the historically locked-down desktop. We see the adoption of social network/messaging tools like Chatter, Yammer and Quad. [Disclosure: I work for salesforce.com, which makes Chatter]. We can see the learning being applied from hardware and from software per se, but what about the rest? What about the privacy and confidentiality issues faced by the consumer? What about the data portability aspects? Are we learning from them as well? If so where is the evidence? How is it being applied? Corporations have tended to believe that they’re a bit like Vegas: what happens there stays there, and is owned by the corporation. Both James and I agreed that maybe not enough is being done in this respect, and that we would compare notes as we went along, something I’m looking forward to.

illustration courtesy of Idiots’ Books

I couldn’t get the topic out of my mind as I boarded the plane back from New York to London, and I guess this post is the result of those mullings over.Things I’ve perceived while observing the Maker Generation, things that I feel will become important in tomorrow’s enterprise. [If you want to know more about the Maker Generation, I’d recommend you read Cory Doctorow‘s Makers, which I reviewed in the post linked to earlier in this paragraph.]

Image courtesy of Stephane Guegan

For much of my life, my attitude to post-facto regulation has been somewhat Oliver Hardy-ish, a sense of “here’s another nice mess you’ve gotten me into“. I tend to prefer principles we can debate and improve and refine before we hit problems, so that the regulations are truly fit for purpose.

So, when it comes to the entry of the Maker Generation into the workplace, I’d like to propose five principles:

1. The person will select the “task”, rather than be given the “task”. Ever since the inception of the modern firm, people were given tasks to do in a prescriptive, deterministic manner. Initially this made sense, since firms were built on industrial-revolution models, and linear workflow was the norm. But that was for a different time, and the environment has changed completely. Talent is at a premium. There’s no point in hiring smart people and then telling them what to do, that makes no sense whatsoever. The most precious asset of the knowledge-worker enterprise is the knowledge worker, her human and social capital, her relationships and her capabilities. It makes more sense to expose knowledge workers to problem domains and then giving them the resources and tools to solve those problems.

2. Tasks will be non-linear in nature, rather than assembly-line. When someone new joins a firm, the experience is going to be very similar to that of playing a modern video game. The new joiner will spend time in some form of sandbox or training ground, learning a number of key things: the “game mechanics“, the values, rules and principles by which the firm operates; the “game controls“, how you navigate around the workplace, how you discover things, how you acquire learning and other assets to deploy, how you “save” your work, how you “replay” or “continue”; and the “game dashboard“, the tools that let you see the environment, your powers and authorities, feedback loops on position and progress, primarily team rather than personal, though both are visible.

3. True team-based work will become the norm, not the exception. For decades we’ve been talking about teamwork in the enterprise, but that’s what it’s been for the most part. Talk. For teamwork to become part and parcel of everyday enterprise life, small, self-organising multidisciplinary teams must be allowed to exist, crossing many historical boundaries. Teamwork is meaningless unless the team is given work to do that is suitable for doing as a team. There’s no point in calling a bunch of individuals a team, just because they report hierarchically to the same point in the organisation, or because they have the same broad skills. Work is normally carried out by people in multiple parts of the organisation, belonging to different departments, putting to use their disparate skills. The “team”, in practice, is distributed across different departments, functions, locations. And the very structure of the firm militates against teamwork, since these departments, functions and locations tend to optimise within the department, function or location. That optimisation is often underpinned, even accelerated, by the reward system in place, which places a premium on the results of such local optimisation. Interdepartmental cooperation and collaboration is, sometimes unintentionally, sometimes very much on purpose, made difficult.

It’s actually much worse, since the teams spoken of so far are all within one enterprise domain. The teams of the future will include members from trading partners, the supply chain, and (perish the thought) real, live customers. It’s no longer just a question of misaligned incentives: we haven’t really figured out how to do this. Collective intelligence and crowdsourcing will have nothing more than a small number of hackneyed poster children to show if we don’t learn from this and do something about it.

4. Cognitive surpluses will be put to use sensibly, rather than discarded. We have to get away from the idea that knowledge work is smooth and stable and uniform and assembly-line in structure and characteristic. Knowledge work is lumpy. Period. There will be peaks. And there will be troughs. The current thinking appears to go something like this: “If we have troughs it will look like we don’t have enough work to do, so we need to pretend to work. Let’s fill our days up in advance with things that don’t depend on market or customer stimulus, things we can plan well in advance. And let’s call these things meetings. Then we can look busy all the time.” Such thinking has produced some unworthwhile consequences: layers of people who excel at meetings, who know how to game the process of meetings;  the agendas and minutes and presentations and whatnot. Which then leads to the creation of a class of signal boosters, who summarise meetings and fight over who can carry the signal to the next level within the organisation, who slow work down by constantly asking questions designed to boost their signal-booster reputations, who work as the enterprise equivalent of K Street, unseemlily knocking each other over as they rush to “brief” their superiors in the hierarchy.

The solution to all this lies in recognising that cognitive surpluses can and do exist, and should be put to sensible use. Investing in wikipedia-like projects, dealing with definitions and jargon explanations and data cleansing and question-answering and the like.

5. Radically different tools and processes will be needed as a result, time-shiftable, place-shiftable, multimedia. Because, as Einstein is reported to have said, we can’t solve problems using the same kind of thinking we used when we created the problems. Tools that view privacy differently, that view confidentiality differently. Tools that recognise the existence of the individual within the firm, the existence of multidisciplinary, sometimes multi-organisational, multi-location as well. Tools that are intrinsically multimedia, allowing text to be augmented with image and voice and video. Tools that are platform and operating system agnostic. Tools that are mobile, self-examining, self-healing. Tools that can be replaced with ease, using the synchronisation power of the cloud.

Albert Einstein at the age of four.

Exciting times. Times when we have to make radical changes to concepts we have held for a long time. Concepts like identity and privacy and confidentiality. Concepts like teamwork and sharing. Concepts like sinecures and benefits and contracts of employment. Concepts like the theory of the firm and scarcity economics and rational individuals and linear workflow. Times that celebrate diversity, that celebrate divergent thinking, that celebrate the creative.

And how are we going to know what to do?

We won’t.

Isn’t it good that there’s a new generation who can solve that for us? A generation who aren’t as hidebound as their predecessors and their predecessors and their predecessors.

The Maker Generation. Choosing what they do. How they do it. Whom they work for. What do they look for? Choice.

So what should an enterprise do?

As I said in the kernel for this blog, six years ago:

One, make a clear stance on values and ethics.

Two, allow relationships and collaboration to take place, rather than control the relationships.

Three, intermediate to enable trust and fulfilment rather than channel towards lock-in.

Four, recognise that the customer wants to create and co-create value rather than just receive.

Use what you stand for to attract the customer. Use what you do to retain the customer’s trust. Ensure that the customer is always free to leave, and paradoxically he or she will stay. Who is this customer? Your family. Your friend. Your employee. Your business partner. Your client. Your citizen.

As we put the principles in place, as the Maker Generation enters the workplace in volume, as the values and ways of working evolve, we will know what policies and guidelines we need, what laws we need. It’s a matter of time.

Over the next few weeks I intend to flesh this out and write a series of posts on the Maker Generation in the Enterprise, looking at the issues from a number of perspectives. Your comments will help me make this a more valuable exercise.

A whole generation of people grew up in the belief that using the C-word in public was just not done. So they avoided doing so. A good thing.

At the same time, unrelated to the original C-word, they’ve managed to obscure and obfuscate a number of other C-words. Not a good thing.

This post is about those other C-words.

Let’s start with “convergence”. Ever since I first saw the 1972 Steven King video, Computer Networks: The Heralds of Resource Sharing, and absorbed it in the context of an earlier, 1968, Doug Engelbart video, often referred to as The Mother of All Demos, I’ve believed in the convergence of computing and telecommunications. Yet, forty years after those events, and at least 20 years since I was being told convergence is happening, we still live in a world where behaviour suggests otherwise. People still try to analyse and regulate this converged world as if computing and communications were distinct and separate. At least that’s the impression I get when I see misguided, often impractical, attempts to regulate aspects of the internet and the web. When are we going to see convergence take place more holistically?

Then let’s move on to “collaboration”. Ever since I left university and started work, the idea that teamwork and collaboration are important have been drilled into me, even drummed into me. Yet, thirty years later, it is still rare for me to see objectives, processes, systems and incentive schemes that reflect this. Yes I’ve seen team objectives and scorecards, but team behaviours remain singularly singular and attempts at team bonuses and reward structures are usually greeted with sniggers and derision. Ricardo Semler wrote Maverick in 1993, chronicling events that took place in 1981, nearly 30 years ago. Yet collaboration, openness and transparency are largely buzzwords in most enterprises, and a culture of secrecy, behind-the-scenes lobbying, whispering campaigns and “briefings” tend to be the norm. Much of what we’ve seen in the wake of Wikileaks suggests that cultural acceptance of collaboration and sharing is low amongst the powers-that-be. So how long before collaboration stops being a concept and moves towards becoming reality.

Which brings me on to “community”. Something that goes back a tad more than the thirty or forty years I refer to in earlier points. Somewhere along the line, many of the concepts of community: shared ownership, collective empowerment, joint accountability, these have somehow become attached to concepts like communism or at least anti-capitalism, and as a result there are regular outbreaks of pseudo-McCarthy-like behaviour, as if belonging to a community should have you investigated by the House Un-American Activities Committee. You only have to look at the tirades that were launched against opensource; you only have to witness the behaviours exhibited against sharing-related tools like Napster or BitTorrent; you only have to gape at the porcine beings wearing the lipstick of “intellectual property rights”. At which point did individual rights become so much more important than community rights? What will it take to reverse that process?

Let me move on before I get too much on that particular high horse. Next word. “Consumerisation“. Something that’s been around for at least a decade. But not if we are to look at how our corporations behave. With the advent of the millenial generation, consumerisation is no longer theory. It has happened. Yet we still try and convince ourselves that consumers are different from businesses, that staff are different from partners, that partners are different from customers. These distinctions are just not tenable any more, it’s like saying “IT” and “business” are distinct and separate, that “living” and “breathing” can be treated as isolated things. When will we realise that people are people, that putting labels on people doesn’t change that fact?

I could go on and on, but won’t. The point is, things are changing all the time, and the pace of change is itself accelerating. The edges of many things we held as distinct and separate are blurring: the borders between countries, the lines between market segments, the boundaries of firms, the separation of consumption and production in a world of service, the distinctions between staff member, partner and customer. The devices we use are blurring. The professions we follow are blurring. The definitive differences between political parties are also blurring.

Everything is blurring, and at a rate of knots. This is not a new thing: over fifteen years ago, Kenichi Ohmae referred to aspects of this in The Borderless World, five years later Chris Meyer and Stan Davis kept with the theme in Blur, and more recently, John Hagel, John Seely Brown and Lang Davison took it yet further in The Power of Pull.

People don’t know what a country is any more. People don’t know what a political party stands for any more. People don’t know where a company starts and where it ends.

There is some confusion out there. Because the rules for so many things are changing.

But some things are not changing, some things are resolutely refusing to change. The way we account for things. The way we try and manage things. The way we report on things. Stuff like that.

Predictable, in a way. Because we cannot solve the problems of new paradigms using the tools of the old. And we haven’t yet built the tools of the new. Because so many of the things that are changing attack the very basis of power of so many people in incumbency.

So they try to hold on. Not by paving over the cowpaths, which would be inefficient and wasteful, but by trying to make cows out of cars.

A very confused state. One full of opportunity, and of pitfalls, as a result.

Which is why we get valuations like we get for Facebook. The truth is, no one knows what the real valuation of Facebook, or of any post-Web firm for that matter, should really be.

At times like these, there’s a tendency to go back to first principles. Where the behaviour of markets are based on momentum, confidence, fear and greed.

Exciting times.

There has been a lot of debate as a result of recent announcements about Goldman Sachs investing $450m in Facebook at a valuation of $50bn, and planning to raise another $1.5bn at the same valuation, apparently by attracting wealthy private investors into a special purpose vehicle at high speed.

Much of the debate is about the valuation, with talk of Bubble 2.0 (and even 3.0, I lose count nowadays).
The valuation doesn’t surprise me, however dark the art of valuation may have become. Why? Because Facebook is the new new telco.

What do I mean? Let’s start with the original telco, which comprised of the following components:

• A population of subscribers, aggregated into a directory, with relevant personal contact information (addresses, telephone numbers)
• Reduced search costs within those directories as a result of classifications and groupings: alphabetical (A-D, E-H and so on) geographical (London, Birmingham and so on) and functional (white, yellow and so on)
• Multiple modalities of communication between the subscribers (post, telegraph, telephone)
• A record of changes, published regularly as errata and addenda

Original telcos provided services via fixed devices and spent vast amounts of money on infrastructure. They sought to justify monopoly positions by pointing to the infrastructural expenditure required.

For over a hundred years, all we had was original telcos.

Then, just over two decades ago, came the new telco. The best-known member of this class is Microsoft.  And the new telco extended the componentry:

• Personal contact information now included e-mail and IM addresses
• Directories became online, searchable and downloadable (personal and public address books)
• Modalities of communication now included email and IM
• Changes were now applied continuously to the directories, but were not published.
• And some new components were added: it became possible for subscribers to schedule meetings between each other, and to use general-purpose devices like computers and smartphones to do all this.

New telcos provided services via fixed and mobile devices, delivered principally to corporates, and everyone spent vast amounts of money on infrastructure, much of it on-premise. Personal customers were nibbled at via email and IM, but the thrust of the new telco was at the corporate.

For a few decades now, all we had was original telcos and new telcos.

Then, six years ago, Facebook arrived, the leader in a new class of telco, the new new telco. Again, the componentry was extended:

• Personal contact information became enriched to form profiles, user-editable
• Classifications and groupings of people within directories were enriched as well, user-creatable networks and groups emerged
• Modalities of communication now included, or will soon include synchronous and asynchronous audio and video
• Scheduling of meetings now became more pub-sub in structure, via the use of open and closed events
• Changes weren’t just applied continuously, they were published continuously. This record of changes was called a News Feed.
• All this was done on a user-creatable, user-editable, personalised-access-and-view basis
• And the whole shebang was then carefully bundled and exposed as a platform upon which other people could build services, viral, social, mobile

New new telcos provided multimedia services across multiple types of device using multiple modalities of communication. And they did everything “over the top”. No infrastructure costs. No on-premise software.

And to top it all new new telcos had new new assets, information about relationships and flows. What Facebook call the Friend Graph.

So let me see. Facebook has more customers than most original telcos put together, more customers than most new telcos put together. It offers more modalities of communication with lower transaction costs, higher end-user empowerment, personalisation and customisation. It does not have to invest in communications infrastructure, in customer premises equipment, in devices, in on-premise software.

600 million active users. A “subscriber base” larger than any country bar China or India. Revenues growing from $777m to $1.2bn between 2009 and 2010, with net income up from $200m to $355m.

The new new telco. Now think of the valuations of old telcos and new telcos, then look at the difference in costs, in scalability and globalness, in revenue and profit opportunity.

Let’s put this into context.

I have a lot of time for a Boston professor I’ve known since the nineties, N. Venkatraman, Venkat to his friends. Around a decade ago, across a number of conversations, Venkat convinced me of a critical change that was taking place in business as a whole:

He said that businesses used to be hierarchies of business units whose assets were called customers and products; that they are changing into networks of business units whose assets were called relationships and capabilities.

New new assets. Relationships and capabilities. Social capital. Human capital. Assets we have carefully avoided learning how to value. Assets we have refused to value, however much we speak of the importance of talent and knowledge and collaboration.

That’s where the new new value is.

New new telcos are not just for consumers, there is immense value to be created by and for businesses as well, from the sole trader through to the megalith. And with the continuing growth of consumerisation, the distinction is blurring more and more anyway, there’s a singularity approaching in this context.

Facebook is concentrating on the pure consumer play, and that’s fine. They can afford to experiment with their market and learn from their experiments: the profile, the news feed, Beacon, the privacy settings, there’s been a powerful suck-it-and-see mentality, coupled with an excellent responsiveness and adaptiveness to feedback.

Businesses are social as well. Markets are Conversations. As Doc Searls immortalised in The Cluetrain Manifesto (Disclosure: I count all four authors as my friends, and contributed a chapter to the 10th Anniversary Edition of the book).

So companies need better ways of evolving, enhancing and exposing their capabilities and relationships, making it easier for their customers to do business with them.

The Rolodex was the tool of the trade in the times of the original telco.

The on-premise customer information system was the tool of the trade in the times of the new telco.

What I could see was the potential for Chatter to be CRM on steroids, cloud-based, community-driven, multimedia, both synchronous as well as asynchronous, extending beyond the enterprise and supply chain to the customer.

What’s happening is that the stuff we called CRM is blending subtly with the stuff we called knowledge management, accelerated by the publish-subscribe mechanism of collaboration tools like Chatter, enriched further by the multimedia mobile, social, viral aspects of all this and delivered at speeds and price points made possible by cloud technologies.

All just in time for a generation who cannot remember a time before the web, a time before the mobile phone.
All just in time for a generation for whom “rent” means more than “buy”, for whom “share” means more than “own”.

All just in time for a generation who have rediscovered community.

That’s why the Facebook valuation does not surprise me.
That’s why I jumped at the chance when Marc Benioff asked me to join Salesforce.

New new times.

Exciting times.

[Incidentally, some of my posts are now cross-posted into The Cloud Blog, where I write alongside my colleagues at Salesforce. Here’s a link to the first post I wrote there.]