Ascription is an Anathema to any Enthusiasm

A big AOL: “me too” to Tim Bray’s post.

Dave Weiner took it badly when Apple murdered his/their baby. Dave and Apple had co-developed this really cool thing AppleScript. Dave had built a sweet tool for developing code for AppleScript. Apple bundling a lame programming environment for AppleScript with the OS. That’s a deadly combination, two products can not live on that real estate together, at least not when one is bundled like that. Dave took it badly. Who can blame him?

When he wrote his famous chinese household essay in 1994 he was still working thru his anger. Plenty of reason to be angry. Still is.

Dave’s essay is facinating. He admits there that developers are subordinate to the platform’s they build on. Stockholm syndrome? Nope.

Platform vendors thrive when they can attract lots of developers to their offering. The platform becomes an essential component of their offering; a supplier they can’t negotiate with. They can only plead their case with the platform vendor and hope for the best. The platform is like real estate and the vendor is like the local zoning board. Except that the local zoning board has both democratic goverance and appeal to the judical system as a fall back on when they misbehave. When the platform vendor cuts off your air supply there is no appeal.

Platform vendors can get lots of developers in two ways. The most durable way is to share big part of the jointly created gains with the developers. Dave’s metaphore, love, is better than “share of jointly created gains”. It is a better metaphore because before you can get to those gains you have to climb over a lot of hurdles, developing a successful product takes years. The commitment to climb over those hurdles demand a tremendous amount of trust.

The other way a platform developer can get a lot of developers is by becoming the dominate standard. Then the platform is so essential that if you want to practice your craft at all you have to go thru them. Microsoft, at least on the desk top, is in that position. If you make a peice of hardware, say a printer, you have to develop drivers for Microsoft. Note that sentence doesn’t say “you have to develop drivers with Microsoft”. Same story on the the software application side of the bridge.

Some people believe these problems can be solved with contracts. That doesn’t scale. For a platform to succeed you need to have tens of thousands of clever developers take a stab at making something neat happen. A few of these will succeed, after years of trying. Insisting that a contract is made prior to each one of those experiments is insane.

There are lots of other solutions to these problems. For example the developers could organize into aggregates - call these guilds or unions - until they have enough power to negotiate. Developers could encourage substitutes - call that open-source. Some developers could become powerful enough to become essential and then negotiate on behalf of their brethren - call that Lotus, Netscape, or Sun. The industry could appeal to the law, say the anti-trust law. Developers could repurpose their skills and go work in some other industry - call it the web, or enterprise systems.

Trust is key. Trust between the platform vendor and the developers. Call it love. Call it an understanding about how joint gains will be shared. When it becomes clear that a platform vendor is too greedy then over time the developers will find a response. Developers aren’t powerless. They create the innovations.

Cooperation requires a regular supply of forgiveness, but some people and some firms abuse that. Walk away.

Two small items about attempting to value the network:

• Social Capital of Blogspace
• Social Disutility and Competition in Network Ecosystems

both a little rough, but the first one has a pretty picture.

The most interesting thing about the first one is that it appears that he tried to give an estimate of how many ‘relationships’ of each kind he has in his drawing. I wonder what the statistics of that is? For example how many metcalf’s-law style relationships do I have. How many reed’s-law style relationships do people usually have? Are the distributions different in different venues: cities, towns, cultures?

The question of network valuation is important. Of course it’s important to capitalists, because it’s the driver of great wealth. Owning the platform that supports a planet worth of Reed’s law groups could be even more valuable than Microsoft’s platform.

The question of network value is more important than that. First because it helps to think clearly about what drives the emergence of new tangles of connections. New species of networks. For example it’s reasonably obvious that as technical or regulatory barriers fall and it becomes possible to create new tangles of connections. These processes create joint gains for all the parites involved.

Then, the chance for abuse by any one dominate network declines. The chance that one network can blindly displace the value of other networks is reduced.

Tilly’s book “Durable Inequality” is interesting in that regard.

The risk of the network owners exploiting the participants rises with the reach of what he controls.

When you turn the knob on that capture toward 8 or 9 you get explotation, when you turn it to eleven you you get tyranny.

Tilly has interesting things to say about how catagory boundries evolve over time as the inequality becomes durable. Ideas that brand marketing folks know by other names, when the knob set at less painful settings.

“GUANGZHOU, China, April 15 ? China’s main trade fair” … “‘The last time, you couldn’t even move through the aisles, there were so many people,’ said Saed Qawasmi, a trader who lives here and buys for many distributors of garments and housewares in the Mideast. ‘This time, it’s empty.’”

   – New York Times - Apprehension Deters Buyers From Attending China Fair

“From the department of lame excuses,” … “fishy comments from Novellus” … “‘The war and SARS has had an adverse effect on people’s confidence in the future; so they are very cautious. Asia has been particularly affected by SARS. There is a reluctance to interact amongst our customers … even amongst our employees. We are finding it difficult to continue to conduct training seminars, and needed meetings, in the course of actual business.’” … “Let’s get real. Semiconductor capital equipment is sold based on long-term investment considerations, not how people are feeling at the present moment.”

   – Motley Fool - “Our Take: Novellus Blames SARS”

This story worries me. If the Canadians are having this much trouble keeping the virus in quarantine then it seems vanishingly unlikely that the Chinese have been able to put a lid on it. That implies to me that it will spread sooner or later. Later would be good since that buys time to find a vaccine or treatment, but I have trouble reading that and not concluding that it’s out of the bag in Toronto.

It’s hard to think this thru consequentially. It sure would put a damper on all kinds of activities where people gather: schools, churches, shopping districts, office buildings, public transportation, airplanes, conferences - that in turn would be quite a wet blanket over the entire economy. The thing seems to have a very look course, a 4-6 weeks for those that recover. That’s a lot of people out of the work force. A 3% death rate would be very bleak.

It is amazing though to watch the professional public health people do their job. Over the last few decades the concept of ‘public service’ has come under a lot of negitive PR from the anti-government, anti-regulator, privatizing crowd. Selfish twits.

Here’s a curious fact. The number of dentists per person has risen since the 1960s, and unsurprisingly the wages of dentists have declined, but curiously the number of lawyers has increased and so have thier wages.

One straight forward explaination for this is that each time a lawyer is engaged to prosecute a case it generates work for two other lawyers (the judge and the defense attorney). More if they decide to appeal.

Wonderful! The lawyering proffesion creates it’s own positive feedback. Each act of lawyering can create a positive externality for the proffession of lawyering.

The people that built my house created work for other carpenters, but it took almost a century for before the work began to show up in quantity. I guess you could argue that every time I write a line of code it creates work for other programmers to debug it. But, I’ve yet to notice a profession with as strong a self reenforcing quality as you see in lawyering.

This insight is taken from “The Economics of Network Industries” by Oz Shy.