Ascription is an Anathema to any Enthusiasm

Ted’s having fun in old fart mode singing the nostolgic praises of OpenDoc.

Back in the late 70s folks got excited about the idea of tying applications together. Why have two applications: a word process and a spread sheet why not have one unified application? Lots of people tried building these grand unified apps. Lotus 123, Symphony, ThinkTank, ClarisWorks, and today Office are example in that design space - but there are a lot of others.

One reason this idea is compelling, for the vendor, is that he gets positive network effects across the suite of functions. The UI is similar, the data formats are similar. Possibly most importantly is that he needs only one sales channel and he needs to close only one sale.

A delightful side effect, for the app. vendor, is that this denies your competing app-vendors turf where they might create a competing product. For example at one point in the evolution of the desk top applications business a new catagory of applications suddenly emerged and a number of really nice products appeared. Microsoft then entered that market with a weak offering, but since it was tied to office it slowly drove off all the competing products. For old farts like me we still remember wonderful features that the old products had that Power Point still doesn’t have.

These unified applications were a huge threat to the platform vendors. One key
goal for a platform vendor is to be sure that a rich population of complementary
products forms around your platform. That makes your platform attractive. You
want these products to compete with each other so you get lots of innovation
and cool stuff happening - that makes your platform exciting. What you don’t want is for a complementary product to emerge that has such huge market share that they are tempted to just swallow the operating system.

As the unified applications started to emerge the platform vendors reacted in two ways. Microsoft slowly decided that they would just go into the business
and the result was office. That’s the pattern they followed when Netscape
began to look like a similar threat - i.e. when Netscape started to get between
them and their users for too many hours per day.

Apple’s attempt to solve this problem was OpenDoc. They attempted to create
a framework that would allow the users to have the experiance of an integrated
application but to enable the individual elements of that to be minature applications. This of course threatened the business models of all the successful
software developers around their platform. That make it way hard for them
to get much adoption. But to be clear, when things fail there are many reasons.

These industry issues don’t go away, but these days it looks like the inter-machine issues are more important than the intra-machine ones. Particularly with the confusion created on two fronts: dedicated purpose devices (appliances, phones, routers), and the internet/telecom network of pervasive computing.

I’ve always liked this little B-School scatter plot. It compares different businesses showing how risky they are vs how much capital it takes bet on that venture.

In this example we have lawn care in the lower-right: low-risk, cheap-to-start-up. Generally low profits too. My canonical example for the upper-right is Motorola’s Iridium project; an adacious plan to
transform the entire telephone industry by floating a huge mesh of satilites into low orbit.

This is a gambling game board. An economic entity (i.e. a person, a household, a small business, a rich man, a goverment, etc.) always decides how to spread it’s capital on the board. Even a poor man can usually buy a lottery ticket on the upper left. We are all allowed to take more risk than we can bear.

If you split your capital up you can diversify your risk somewhat. In exchange you get a more complex problem managing the risks. You can hire
other people to do that for you, but that’s just a different kind of risk.

Motorola’s bet on Iridium hasn’t worked out and they have asked the court for permission to destroy the system. “Exit strategy.”

No man is an island so we all get to share in the jointly created gains and costs of this game. Iridium has certainly been very rough on Motorola and it percolates thru to the rest of the businesses under the Motorola umbrella.

I’m very much enjoying reading Chuq Von Roshpach chew his cud on the issues around running online groups. He is saying a lot of things that
people who do this know. But which I don’t think are written down much. This is the kind of social knowledge that Phil Agre complains that smart
people are often sadly entirely unaware of.

For example I like this peice about a technique he’s tried for drawing forth the folks on the long tail of the power-curve.

It reminded me of a story told to me by a friend about the community
theater group that one lucky day managed have a famous actor offer to
join the company. But, when it came to perform the play the famous actor’s
presense on the stage was so powerful that everybody else seemed to
disappear into the back ground.

That’s not good for you community.

I don’t think I can recall any group I’ve ever been in were this kind of
imbalance didn’t begin to be a problem at some point. Where the slope on
the power-law curve grew to severe. Sometimes that lead to the long tail
just drying up and the group evaporates. Sometimes a way around the
problem is found. I’m surprised how often it resolves by the sad device
that the ‘famous actor’ get’s increasingly peeved that people are not respecting
his role as leader dude or he complains that they are falling further and further
into the background of the stage set. Finally he resolves the problem by
walking off in a huff.

The famous actor problem is yet more subtle when you have a cabal of famous actors at the head of your group.

Notice this, an interesting species of standards war.

The companies in the ZIP file compression business seem to have decided to play a few rounds of MAD (Mutually Assured Distruction).

For your Rat Holes every group needs a few Rat Terriers, but then it’s also good to know that others may have been dragged stuff out of that hole before. It helps to prepare the mind: what comes out of a rat hole is typically a dead rat.

My opinion? Well leaky abstractions are good. Diversity is good too. Another good principle: generate strictly, accept generously. Interning any symbol from an outsider is subtle work. Crossing cell boundries always is. We will be evolving very complex cell walls around our organizations. In the internet the money is at the gates and the intermediaries.

Namespace versioning would be nice.