Ascription is an Anathema to any Enthusiasm

For about the last six months I’ve been observing etsy.com with some interest. To first order it is a classic two sided hub, so naturally I’d be interested.   A market place in this case.   It aggregates a large number of small sellers of handmade goods and their buyers. Providing shops, search/browsing, transaction orchestration.

As a business they are not built to flip, but rather to last.  That is always risky and thus more respectable. Over all they are a rough but solid operation.  It’s no wonder that they have attracted some very high quality folks as advisors/investors/coders.

For me the most interesting aspect of esty might be called their branding.  But boy that is far too bloodless.  Worse, it leads to a misunderstanding. Etsy is entrepreneurial in two or more ways. They are building a business. One that can turn out to be a quite significant retailing hub.  Thus, they are classic business entrepreneurs with all that implies; much of which is unfortunate.

Success in creating that hub would be significant.  As a rule internet hubs aren’t good for small enterprise.   I am conflicted about that conclusion, but there it is.  Generally the internet has accelerated the hollowing out of small business.  The Internet’s power to create major intermediaries and thus break and thin out the connections between producers and consumers ain’t a healthy development for us all.

I’ve written before about my hypothesis about how to help counter that. You need to create more connections horizontally between parties. Which I call small group forming. These are hard to create in scalable ways.  But  when created they shift social and economic flows downward on the distribution of wealth rather than upward.

So should Esty succeed in doing what, say OSCommerce has failed to do, it can create a bloom of vibrant small business activity inside of the Internet.  That, in turn, it would help shift the curve. That could be a real help tempering rather than worsening the distribution of wealth.

Which brings us to the second kind of entrepreneurship that Esty is trying to execute on. It is a kind of social entrepreneurial activity. An effort to change the nature of the economy. You can hear that in some of their communication. For example talking about creating a more adaptable or robust economy is one sign of that.

This two for one kind of entrepreneurial activity is hard to execute on. There are powerful systemic forces in play that tend to hand the power to economic rather than the social side of the balancing act. There is a wide spread presumption (a fair one!) that firms talking about the social side of the game are only playing a branding game. That they are the capitalist version of a corrupt politician who uses populist rhetoric.

But, Etsy is taking a interesting swing at the problem. Surprisingly practical. For example if you look at the list of things that make businesses resistant to consolidation (franchising, chain store, mail order, etc) the Esty target market (handmade goods) is a good choice. For example their efforts to encourage their sellers to engage in local organizing is another sign of taking seriously the puzzle of how to strength, rather than suck the life out of local and small business.

Quite a few times over the last months I’ve found myself talking to somebody with a lot of customer relationships to manage.  Actually it is more accurate to say a lot of relationships.  As a certified power-law nutter I presume that some of these relationships are deeper than others and the distribution is highly skewed.
There was a short period, years ago, when I was the benefit of Apple’s out reach to their high value developers.  Somebody from Apple would appear at my office door.  We were well fed while on nice junkets.

In the conversations I’ve been trying to tease out how various people and firms organize to address this highly skewed set of relationships.  My guess, call it my hypothesis, is that they do not treat everybody equally.  That what emerges as they adapt to the highly skewed distribution is a two headed strategy.  One approach for the high value relationships, and a second approach for the rest.   This puts, for example, a new light on Apple’s old slogan: “A computer for the rest of us.”   In many cases the strategy for the rest is a kind of populism.

Letting my hypothesis run out of control I assume that firms, as they grow are consciously, or more typically unconsciously, rebalancing the resources they devote to one or the other of these.  For example Google certainly began by having very very light relationships with millions of web sites, and then as they built out more traditional sales and marketing organization for relating to the largest websites.  Possibly they did that consciously, but it’s just as likely the environment they found themselves in forced that.  Presumably the same scenario happened to eBay.

The way you execute on these different kinds of relationship is obviously very different.  For the high value relationships you can afford to assign labor, travel budget, etc.  For the vast number that make up the rest you expend money making self service web sites, doing targeted advertising, and engineering effective, but cost effective, customer support systems.

This problem, how to manage the resource allocation across a highly skewed set of relationships, is scale free.  Individuals have this problem just as do huge firms.  The address book, the rolodex, and social networking sites are all schemes to give individuals tools to manage the rest of their relationships.

Any group has this problem.  For example open source projects tend to many tiers of contributors.  Ben Laurie recently was reacting to a common accusation we encounter from outside observers about open source that we “don’t care about users.”  That word “care” is about relationships.  The accusation is that the open source project fails, somehow, to do it’s part in the relationship with users.  I’ve often heard this complaint from product managers in traditional consumer software companies.

The product manager in a traditional consumer software firm exists because the firm needs and funds labor to manage the relationship between the firm and the vast diffuse pool of users.  I.e. the product manager is labor of the second kind - the long tail kind.

Ben who embraces the accusation by highlighting the deep relationship that open source projects have with their developers.  That’s right, but at the same time some open source projects develop a second kind of relationship management that is modern substitute for product management.  For example the editors at Wikipedia are that. Most open source projects learn, after a while, that they should devote significant resources in support of the vast number of very low value relationships.  But they tend to devote those resources to making it easier to download and install the software (easy on ramps) rather than to better customer support systems.
But in most cases the question reflects a category error about what kind of institution an open source project is.  For most open source projects there is a long tail only to the extent that the easy access to the resulting code acts as a shout out that may attract addition developers, i.e. high value contributors.  Rather than a well funded call center broadcasting that “Your call is very important to us.” your  more likely to encounter a “Eh what?  Oh, sorry, gotta run.”

I’ve greatly enjoyed much of Richard Gabriel’s writing over the years.   Though I’ll admit I haven’t read anything he’s done in the past few year.  In any case I happened to I listened to this interview he gave at OOPSLA to Software Engineering Radio.  The interviewer wanted to learn about this thing, Lisp, and he asks a series of questions to dig into the matter.  While for me this was pretty dull Richard does tell retell a story I’d not heard in recent years.   That got me to thinking about a model of how ideas used to flow from the academic research labs into programming community at large; and in particular how the Lisp community didn’t use standards in quite the same way as other language communities.

Lisp is a great foundation for programming language research.  It is not just easy to create new programming frameworks in Lisp.  The pie chart of where you spend time building systems has a slice for framework architecting and engineering.  Lisp programmers spend a huge portion of thier time in that slice compared to folks working in other languages.  In Lisp this process is language design, where as in other languages it’s forced into libaries.  There is a tendency in other languages for the libraries to high cost, which makes them more naturally suited for a standardization gauntlet.  In Lisp it’s trivial to create new frameworks and they are less likely to suffer the cost and benefits of becoming standardized.

You get a lot more short term benefit in Lisp, and you pay latter as sweet frameworks fail to survive.  They don’t achieve some level sustianance because they don’t garner a community of users too look after them.

Back in the day this was less of a problem.  And thereby hangs the tail that Richard casually mentioned.  He was sketching out how a pattern that was common during the AI’s early golden age.  Graduate students would aim high, as is their job, and attempt to create a peice of software that would simulate some aspect of intelegence - vision, speech, learning, walking, etc. etc. - what aspect doesn’t really matter.  In service of this they would create a fresh programming language that manifested their hypothisis about how the behavior in question could be manifested.  This was extremely risky work with a very low chance of success.  It’s taken more then fifty years to begin to get traction in all those problems, and back in the day computers were - ah - smaller.

Enticing graduate students into taking huge risks is good, but if you punish them for failing then pretty soon they stop showing up at your door.  So you want to find an escape route.  In the story that Richard sites, and which I’d heard before, the solution was to give them a degree for the framework.

Which was great.  At least for me.  All thru that era I used to entertain myself by reading these doctorial thesis outlining one clever programming framework after another.

What’s facinating is that each of those acted as a substitute for a more formal kind of library standardization.  They filled a role in the Lisp community that standardized libraries played today in more mainstream programming communities.  This worked in part because individual developers could implement these frameworks, in part or if they were in the mood in their entirety, surprisingly quickly.  These AI languages provided a set of what we might call programming patterns today.  Each doctoral thesis sketched out huge amount of detail, but each instance of the ideas found there tended to diverge under the adaptive presure of that developer unique problem.

So while a doctoral thesis isn’t a standards specification it can act, like margarine for butter, as a substitute.  Particularly if the consumers can stomach it.  Lisp programmers like to eat whole frameworks.

Speaking of Google he says: “They create absolutely nothing!”

While I personally think that moderns tend to be amazingly cavalier and disgustingly disinterested in costs of displacement, there are days when it is very hard not to just chortle.  Some people totally deserve to be displaced.

He’s got a suit, but no clothes.

Off and on I wonder a bit about how quickly standards can change, and what it would mean if we could change them very quickly.  My usual example for this would be highway speeds.  There isn’t much point in driving 70 mph 15 miles down the highway just to join a 3 mile blockage of stop and go traffic.  The authorities could, presumably signal everybody upstream that it’s in their best interests to drop down to 45 mph.

Of course you can see also the traffic calming ideas, the architecture of control ideas, some of the ideas about calming traffic via the intervention of individual drivers.  Obviously such a systems can be implemented along the lines of libertarian paternalism.

Dynamic standard setting is like dynamic pricing.  IT tech makes it easier to implement.  You could replace all the speed limit signs with electronic signs much as the store I was in the other day had replaced, in the shoe department, all their price labels with electronic ones.  Of course pricing and standards have changed dynamically long before we had IT.  Other stores just put up 30% off signs.  I don’t doubt that if the highway authorities communicated that “southbound travelers on 128 are advised that to practice 30% reduction in speed” much of the benefit could be achieved.
These musings are triggered by an idea the California regulators have floated to do something analogous with the thermostats in new buildings.   The scheme would allow them to signal the buildings to back off on their electricity consumption when the traffic jams occurs in the electricity distribution network.  Lauren Weinstein’s reaction to this suggestion is delightfully over the top.