Some people seem to organize thier standards body to almost assure a hold-up.
Some people
Leave a reply
Monthly Archives: October 2003
This is a stick-up!
One fear, the fear of a hold-up, hangs over all cooperative enterprises. In it’s rawest form you invite a couple folks over for a pleasant potluck dinner and in the midst of the meal one of them pulls out a gun and threats to commit mayhem if everybody fails to turn over their wallets. In fact you could argue that this fear infects any gathering.
In industrial standards bodies the fear is that you will invite a number of experts together to set standards that enable your industry to grow faster and one of them will quietly slip a patented bit-o-technology into the standard. Later after everybody has adopted the standard he will then demand license payments. At worse he may ask a court to grant an injunction to prevent certain parties from using the standard if they don’t pay up.
Of course you can get held-up by folks you didn’t invite to the party. Burglars can climb in the window. Third parties can have patent rights that read upon any standard. The current situation with the Eolas patent is a fine example of a hold-up.
The primary reason we engage in cooperative activities is that they generate positive externalities for the participants and their communities. What is offensive about a hold-up is how the criminal can arrange to steals the value that was collectively created. In the patent examples it is entirely possible that the patent would have been close to valueless if the standard had failed to become widely adopted.
Consider a simple scenario. We want to design a standard electrical plug. Obviously, there are thousands of possible designs. So, we just pick one. Now a few years pass and millions and millions of plugs and sockets are now deployed worldwide. This standard is a success.
Because that installed base would be nearly impossible to switch (see immovable installed base) to some alternate plug design it is fun to imagine that you just happen to own a patent on the pattern used for that plug. That would make you rich! Particularly if the courts can’t see that a) the patent was valueless prior to the success of the standard and b) that standard’s success owes little, if anything, to the particular pattern selected or that even if it does the community would have designed around it to avoid the risk of hold-up given the least chance.
Of course, teasing out the value of the standard’s wide adoption, and what portion, if any, of that value arose from the patented bit is an extremely difficult the puzzle. Doing so in the face of dozens of claims is even harder. Such claims arise not just from the patented bits but from the many other elements contributed to the standard making process.
All modern industrial standards bodies include a clause that attempts to clarifies the terms that participants will have to accept before they participant. A common clause states that they will offer to license any IP rights under reasonable terms. And of course there have been court cases to argue if these “reasonable terms” are defined before or after the standard succeeds.
The hold-up problem is found in all cooperative activites. For example organizations, foundations, and web sites that aggregate the contributions of numerous volunteers such as FSF, Apache, eBay, Epinions, LinkedIn, etc all have this issue lurking in the background. The participants believe, at some level, they are at a potluck. The fear that some party will abuse the gathering and engage in mayham, even if that mayham is limited to a few pop-up ads, hangs over the party.
Solving these problems isn’t as simple as demanding that everybody be fair and reasonable.
tag lines
Put these on some flash cards. Practice. There will be a quiz.
Visualize peas
Peaceable Assembly
Flash Mobs are kind of a limit case of the first amendment’s right to peaceable assemble. I have no idea if they have similar constitutional protections in India. I seem to recall that Gandi was a fan of mass nonviolent resistance because it was a practical solution to pent up disaffection, better than violence.
Meanwhile I highly recomend the short story Larry Nevin on Flash Crowds, it’s in the book “Flight of the Horse.” His solution to this class of denial of service attacks was laws – to date I’ve don’t think I’ve seen another solution that works.
Economics: your marginal utility
Brad De Long is hearing voices, and they are talking about the distribution of wealth.
Agathon: “That means that the market system, in weighting utilities and adding them up, gives you a much lower utility than it gives Richard Cheney. In fact, if marginal utility of wealth is inversely proportional to the square of lifetime wealth, the market system gives Richard Cheney about 400 times as big a weight as it gives you.”
Glaukon: “That’s sick.”
Agathon: “And it gives Bill Gates a weight about 400,000,000 times as big a weight as it gives you.”
Glaukon: “That’s sicker.”
Agathon: “But it gives you about 40,000 times the weight it gives your average Bengali peasant, who thus has about 1/16,000,000,000,000 the amount of the market system’s concern as Bill Gates has. Will you teach that?”
There are 10E14 cells in the human body. You shed more cells every few moments than 1/1.6E13th. Good thing those cells can’t hijack a plane.
Bragmansia
Weak Methods and Small Wins
I found an idea in this piece on Social Entrepreneurs provocative. Let’s accept that entrepreneurs are a class of people who create value in a manner that is both creative and destructive. (An idea usual credited to Schumpeter.) The social entrepreneurs do a similar thing in the sphere of social value. Some people get all fixated on the destructive side of the equation, the way that a successful entrepeneur often seems to destroy the vested interests – i.e. Microsoft (and the desktop PC) displaces Digital Equipment (and the mini-computer).
I found that provocative since recently I was reading a some stuff about small wins which are a design pattern for political activism. The theory of small wins is that a successful social movement gets that way not by kicking the shins of the giant of vested interests but rather by a series of small wins. Each small win has a positive feedback effect on the movements self confidence. It that creates cohesion for the group that both strenthens and enlarges it. Focusing on small wins allows the group to be light on it’s feet – cherry picking successes. The focus on small wins also decreases the chance that the immune system of the vested interests will mount an effective response. First because the wins are often small enough not to trigger the immune system. Secondly because the creative cherry picking makes the movement’s next act hard to predict.
One of the reasons that folks that have been successful in large companies employees often fail to thrive in entreprenural settings is that they are used to having and executing on longterm big plans. In a very small entrepenurial firm the plan, the product, the market, the customer often change once or twice a week. The small firm is actively searching for a series of small wins. That series will then deliver three key things: a team that has confidence it’s ablity to execute, an offering that has adapted to the market, and possibly most importantly a proof that the niche exists where other market players won’d eat you alive.
At first I thought these ideas were already familiar. Long long time ago I learned a species of problem solving techniques, what Simon and Newell called ‘strong methods’, that could be applied to any problem. For example you can always solve a problem by generate-and-test: you generate an solution, test if it works, repeating that until you find a solution. This method is strong in that it works for absolutely any problem. It is, of course, a lousy method because it may take an infinite amount of time and expense to generate enough solutions to find the one you need. At the other end of the spectrum from the strong-methods are the weak-methods which only apply to a limited range of problems: for example that to avoid getting bits of egg shell in your breakfast you should crack the egg on an a flat surface is both a weak but extremely effective method. Evolution is a strong, but lousy, method.
One of the weak methods (well almost) is hill climbing. You start with generate and test and then you modify it slightly by scoring your successes and then when it comes time to generate the next possible solution you try something that seems to head in the same direction as the solutions that got good scores. You try to climb up hill to the peak score; where presumably you’ll find the solution. This obviously won’t solve all problems; your not likely to get to the top of Mt. Everest by just walking up hill from where every are.
Small wins and other tools of entrepeneurship are not just hill climbing. Because they must create a virtious cycle that feeds the strength and enthusiasm of the team, the movement, the organization. By generate real value with each win, value that addresses the actual goals of the organization, that validates and strengthens the organization – they are social money in the bank. The process inherently search out the places in the problem space where the problem has some give, places where the vested interests are less likely to fight back.
All this tends to suggest that step wise is often a dominate strategy compaired to revolution. Which is curious since entrepeneurship is often cast as a revolutionary act. That’s true, it is revolutionary, but only if you get fixated on the destruction side of the value creation. You rarely revolutionize vested interests by taking them head on, usually you just quietly displace them.
The Mob
Sadly I can’t find where I read that some 20th century sociologist divided the world into three parts: the elites, the mob, and the masses. The elites are those who transparently have great power: kings, monopolists, olograrchs, leaders of powerful political parties, mayors, senators, etc. etc – e.g. the top of this or that power curve. The masses are typically unwashed, undifferentiated, and come in great numbers – e.g. the tail of the power curve.
The mob is the interesting one. The mob are the artists, the disaffected intelectuals, the revolutionaries, the entrepeneurs. I suspect these are the upper-middleclass connectors in the power-law graph.
As a subplot of my musing about what gives a standard momenteum I’ve got to thinking that the mob is a third group you need to get on board. If the mob are the folks that enjoy reengineering how the connections in the power-law graph are made, then these are folks you need on your side if your attempting to engineer a new standard.
In some sense this is convential wisdom. Even the marvelously vapid Crossing the Chasm points out that an emerging company begins by working with the innovators who’s have both the vision and the foolhardiness to take the insane risk implicit in being the first to get on a new bandwagon.
But even much smarter folks have noticed how critical to innovation members of this class are.
Reading Paul Graham amusing rant about Java’s ‘cover’ is a wonderful example of just how cranky and substanative this class of players is. Paul is a perfect example of a member of the mob; a very wise somewhat bitter refugee from a great now nearly dead subculture of the software industry[1]. Paul’s essay, written circa 2001, argues that much about Java sets off his inner-radar in a manner that suggests he should run away.
His radar is made suspicious, for example, by the DOD’s enthusiasm for Java. DOD’s track record with language enthusiasm’s has been pretty lousy. I think that the mob is always a little suspicious of emerging standards who’s claim to fame is the enthusiasm of the either of the other two groups. The mob is suspicious of the masses, who tend to hysteria. They don’t trust the elites for two reasons. The elites often need a stern talking too and the mob loves to volunteer to do that; the so called ‘speak truth to power. But also, the mob is trying to restructure the connections in the web that creates the power-law and in doing that they fully intend to threaten the existing elites, aka the vested interests.
In anycase, if your attempting to get an emerging standard to take hold you do seem to need to tackle all three of these audiences. The skills approprate for each audience are amazingly distinctive. I have a first order theory about were the skills to do that becoming industrialized.
[1] One can dis one’s own kind.
Quicksilver
I’m almost done reading Quicksilver and it has certainly delighted me. There are any number of very delightful passages. I particularly liked a passage that appears early in the book were a price negotitation in a marketplace is intermediated by negotiating the value of each coin that will be used in the transaction. Each coin has any number of attributes that temper it’s value: the metal it’s minted from; the nation that made it; the extent to which it has been quartered, shaved, and worn; and it’s provance. The merchant and buyer can discuss all these attributes rather than discussing the actual price of the goods to being exchanged. Toward the end the merchant accepts a particularly lousy coin as part of the trade since, he explains, he owes a debt to a gentleman he dislikes and it would please him to pay off the debt with such a joke of a coin.
People forget, money is like that.
It’s a mystery to me why there are so few books about the middleman, the intermediary. Quicksilver isn’t quite about that, but it does touch on a lot of the issues. Like communication, money, encryption, the function of knowledge and secrets in making markets, the emergance of the edge between church and state – that all come into play around the role occupied by the middleman.
Quicksilver is also extremely funny. It brings back the funny undercurrent that gave Snowcrash it’s glow. That glow seemed to dissipate in Diamond Age (which I’ve always felt reflected the author’s horror at waking up one morning with an infant child in the presense of his clear vision of the the world our technology is creating).
I read many many years ago in some high end Optics Society journal about what I came to think of as “the white light.” The article argued that if one extrapolated the patterns in communication there would come a time when the cost of routing information around the network vs. the cost of broadcasting everything everywere would cross and at that point the end points on the net would see everything and just pluck out just the bits intended for them. In contrast to that I came to think of the birth of the web as creating a kind of great darkness; that every bit of knowledge that exists prior to the creation of the web is outside the web inaccessible. That the ease with which out can get knowledge in the web is so high – bathed in the bright light – that knowledge outside the web has, in effect gone dark.
Reading Quicksilver is a wonderful generator of examples of this. There are hundreds of tiny historical facts in Quicksilver. For example that after the Duke of Monmouth failed to overthrow King James the rebels were sold into slavery – i.e. English citizens were made into slaves. If you want to know more your going to have to go into that dark place to find this and most all the other facts in Quicksilver certainly aren’t out in the bright light of the web. Well, not so far.