Monthly Archives: January 2004

Gold!

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On Paul English‘s recomendation I’m reading Ship of Gold. One bit near the beginning caught my imagination.

Four days after he found the yellow lump in the millrace, and five days before the United States signed the treaty with Mexico, Marshall set out on horseback throught the snow for Sutter’s Fort. There he pulled Sutter aside and bade him retire to a small room and lock the door. Once they were alone, Marshall unrolled a cotton cloth and displayed the lump; he thought it was gold, but he didn’t know. …If this was gold, it appeared to be all over the site.

…Sutter concluded that indeed Marshall had found a nugget of gold, but rather than being joyous , he seemed concerned. On fifty thousand acres, he gazed twelve thousand head of cattle, ten thousand head of sheep and two thousand horses mules and kept one thousand pigs. If the lump he now held was gold, he envisioned his ranch hands fleeing into the foothills, leaving the crops in the fields and the stock to fend for itself; he forsaw thousands of crazed miners overrunning his peaceful valley; …

What a beautiful example of how the vested interest reacts when the breakthru arrives, changing everything about the game at
hand. His first reaction is not, “Oh, happy day!” but “Oh hell! This is going to disrupt my business model.” It’s a natural reaction, if your already on top.

In this case his labor supply, among other things, is about to be disrupted. How you gonna keep’m down on the farm after they seen these bright lights?
The Internet bubble did similar things to the labor supply as did cheap the land in colonial America. That destroyed primogenitor.

To the entrepeneur it’s always the land of opportunity. Meanwhile

Rivalry destroys open

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Tim O’Reilly want’s it:

I wish that the various web services data vendors (including Amazon, Google, EBay, Salesforce.com, and many others) would realize that they comprise the building blocks of a future “internet operating system”, and act accordingly, engaging with each other to interoperate. It seems to me that the original Unix/Linux architecture, and the architecture of the internet, are based on a model of “small pieces loosely joined” (to quote David Weinberger). Web services can also operate on this model. However, there are alternate visions, including .Net and J2EE, in which there is a quest for “one ring to bind them all.” There’s a history in our industry in which application vendors mark out new territory, but then lose that territory to someone who figures out how to control that space with platform-level APIs. If instead, we can consciously keep to the current open standards model of the internet, we will continue to leave opportunities for new innovations, and new market entrants. Unfortunately, I worry that the competition between Amazon, Google and EBay will lead them rivalries that make them forget the foundation of their success in the open internet. (But I’m hopeful that the companies in question are smart enough to avoid this trap.)

Demand for Features

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Clay Shirky writes:

(I remember, a decade or so ago, someone asking on a newsgroup  “How do I post to all the soc. groups at once? soc.* doesn’t seem to work – surely I don’t have to enter all the group names in _by hand!”)

What a delightful example of something I’ve been thinking about recently about how inside of community membranes, where trust exists, queries over the community become more approprate.

The rest of Clay’s posting, about how open enables increased innovation while the capture of that innovation is an orthagonal issue is the tip of a big iceberg!

I learned in Cornes & Sandlers very academic text on public and club goods that there are two interesting edge cases in managing the boundary of a club that can be characterized as how the membrane filters it’s inputs – does it take the maximum or the minimum over the inputs?

Consider the example of trying to find the cure for cancer, a clear example of innovation. In that scenario we want a lot of people searching for the cure, but all we need is for one person to find that cure. In this case the club searching for the cure wants to be maximially open, it wants to filter out the maximal or best cure.

Now consider the example of the club that trying to maintain the leeve along a river. Each property owner along the river contributes to the effort; but the quality of the effort overall is decided by the minimum contribution. In this case (a safety example?) the club’s quality is defined by the minimum over the contributions.

That insight was one of the reasons I became very attracted to the club good cartoon of open source. Open source projects need both. Consider Apache’s HTTPD. It’s like the levee in that any flaw creates a security hole that allows hackers to pour in. It’s like a cure for cancer in that we never know where on the planet some web master might create the next delightful and useful innovation. So the club boundary around the server project has to manage to both maximize the innovative contributions and minimize the bogus ones.