The new “more’s law”!

I uploaded a …. I couldn’t be bothered to …. Eighteen months on, … did just that. This shows there’s some “can I have some more”‘s law of the lazyweb or something, and that you should optimise for laziness and early public whining instead of planning ahead.

     — X

Think thru the consequences of that! Man I wish somebody would do that. Oh.

I have an acquaintance who has a little life-cycle model of firms he enjoys:

• Knowledge: Ideas
• Action: Realization
• Relationships: Market Tuning, Discovery, Creation
• Process: Efficiency, Tuning, Scaling-up

One of his little jokes: During the bubble it became possible to sell companies in the first phase. To be make them fungible. Start a company, have a bundle of clever ideas, and then sell that bag of goods.

Bitching over at Joel on Software brought this up. Microsoft has killed a product he uses. They acquired it’s maker. He quotes all this marketing propaganda:

The existing Lookout product will no longer be available, but its technology will be part of an exciting vision that MSN has for delivering new and innovative search services

I love that idea. You take a real product and you shift it backward into “exciting vision.” Of course there are times that is the best move for a company. Probably even times when it increases your overall valuation. Lose the customers, raise the value – weird huh?

I love the idea because I have so often seen idea lovers, people like me, advocate just that move inside an existing firm.

I wonder, did Microsoft say to the guys at the company they were acquiring. “We want to buy you and turn you into our vision.” “Turn into” we do with the compost pile at my house.

I love this meme.

related

I read my RSS feeds[1] using NetNewsWire, which is great. I see that Apple is use their distribution channel power to destroy that product. They are folding RSS feed reading into Safari

These moments are a real test for a company’s developer network program. They can reward the developers who were early to the market or they can quietly kill them.

Let’s be clear, don’t murder your leading developers! If you kill the ones that begin to succeed; using your hub-power what happens? It will and should frighten off other developers. These days developers have a lot of choices about where to play. In this world a developer network manager to silently kills leading developers on his platform should be fired.

Microsoft wasn’t able to learn this lesson and now they have had to replace a vast army of volunteer developer talent with a huge R&D lab. That won’t work.

Don’t under estimate the value of trust.

[1] Yes, yes, and atom feeds too.

If there was any doubt that Microsoft’s buisness model is at it’s heart a Talent Scrapping business. Consider their slogan.

“Your Potential. Our Passion.”

People often complain that Microsoft doesn’t innovate. Of course not, that’s not the business they are in. It out to be “Your innovations. Our Passion” or “Your innovations. Our Potential.” or “You innovate ’em. We bank ’em.”

It’s amusing to note that the culture of Microsoft is fixated on how smart they are. They are of course smart in a particular way. Smart at talent scrapping. It is a pretty smart thing to have decided to specialize in. But, it must always lead to a bit of self doubt.

If your Microsoft the good news, of 1992, was that you had captured an extremely valuable hub: the OS switching yard, the bridge from desktop hardware and desktop applications. That bridge’s toll generates a steady substantial stream of revenue. The bad news is that those damn innovative dudes, armed with all the weapons that Mr. Moore and his friends can dream up, keep inventing ways around your bridge and off the desktop. It gets worse! Your install base doesn’t like innovation. They want stability. They have real lifes.

The troubles of the rich! The monopolist’s problem. What to do? Seek wasy to temper the forces that seeking a way around the monopoly. The monopolist needs to slow things down. Buy time to captures or marginalize those damn innovations. Give is risk adverse users time to swallow this new stuff.

I call this the forced migration of your ecology. In some industries, like the auto industry, the the ecology moves slowly. But in high tech it can move very fast. In fact high tech moves so fast it keeps pulling slower industries into it’s wake. If you don’t drive your installed base to move forward you’ll get left behind. Mr. Moore and his friends are very hard to negotiate with.

In the accelerating world of high tech keeping the installed base on the move gets harder and harder. You can do it with carrots: “creating a bridge to the future.” You flood the installed base with a vision of how wonderful life is on the other side. You can do it with sticks making the old world less and less habitable. Sometimes you just threaten to pull the plug. Sometimes the only way to get the ecology to migrate is to set the forest on fire.

Apple, to take one example, did an amazing job evolving the original Mac OS over first decade. When they finally started to hit a wall it took quite a few tries to get over the hump. These almost killed the company. But Mac OS X shows them survived.

This is the problem, getting to the future, Microsoft is trying to solve with Longhorn. It’s not the first time Microsoft has had to do this. Recalling that it took them 15 years to swallow graphic user interface illustrates two things. They are persistent. Their installed base is nearly very locked-in. They may not be very good at innovating, but they do know how to herd the cattle.

This essay, which I highly recommend, is Joel Spolsky developer screaming bloody murder that they are setting his forest on fire. Actually he is further along than that. Having notice that the threat of fire he’s trying to work thru understanding what the hell is going on.

Good developers are not cattle, they don’t herd, they hunt. Developers have lots of options about where to go next. High risk choices.

I find it fascinating that while displacement is such a fact of life in the modern world how much effort goes into pretending it is exceptional and then blaming individual actors. This stuff is like plate tectonics. The ground is moving. Vendors and societies strive to temper the rate of change for users. Sooner or later they fail. The result seems like an earthquake.

I like this quote.

“And that’s the game right now: figuring out how to produce research that is unique enough

Brad DeLong inquires about why he was wrong about Apple.

A decade ago it was very clear what was going to happen. Over time, more and more interesting applications would show up first on Windows and only later (or not at all) on MacOS, as Windows’s superior market share attracted more software development brainpower. Eventually Microsoft’s deep pockets would create a clear quality-and-usefulness edge between Windows and MacOS. And everyone left would–with a sigh–drop the Mac and get Windows machines.

My first bemused thought was “How has France survived?” But actually this is a question that does deserve more careful consideration. It’s a fascinating question. It does deserve a more sober analysis than it usually gets.

One answer is that Apple and Microsoft reached a treaty that exchanged all of Apple’s patent portfolio for access to key part’s of Microsoft’s network; i.e. Microsoft promised to do five releases of the Office Suite. It should be noted that agreement did not include access to Microsoft’s exchange server and calendaring network around castle outlook.

One answer is that the Apple ecology is structurally different and smaller. Both of these make it possible for Apple to evolve in ways that are harder for Microsoft. That in turn makes it easier for Apple to get early mover advantages on the for front of the four: Moore and his friends.

IPod is a nice example of that. The world’s total production of disk drives of the kind needed to make the IPod was appropriately sized for an Apple product; it wasn’t large enough for a Microsoft product. Microsoft needs to work in the footprint of the median commodity PC.

A third answer is that Apple had figured out that the desktop was dead in 1990, or so I’m told. The Internet is the third and fourth player at the game of Moore and his friends. It is beginning to look like the fourth player, the universe of network effects created by group forming on the communication substrate, is more potent than all the other three combined.

These third (exponential growth in communications) and fourth player have created a flurry of ways around Microsoft’s key bottleneck – i.e. disruptive innovation opportunities. Apple and others have begun taking advantage of these.

Since IBM commoditized the PC market Apple has run out in front of the commoditizers. That has scale only if the fecundity of new opportunities out runs the potency of the lock-in created by the network effects around those that play in the standardized commoditized markets. Moore and his friends have seen to that. This interplay between the new opportunities and the older web of complements is at the heart of the competitive struggles around Microsoft.

Job one at Apple is to stay in front of the commoditizers by creating value from the new opportunities. Job one at Microsoft is the keep the complements commoditized while drawing into the hub those proven innovations that might threaten that hub.

As Mitch Kapor said a very very long time ago about the irresistible advantages of the Macintosh v.s. the immovable object of the PC ecology – it’s very interesting.

It’s a fascinating puzzle and it deserves a lot more careful analysis than it gets.

I’ve been continuing to fool around with internet telephony. The last few weeks I’ve been fooling around with the GPL/open-source PBX software called Asterisk. PBX stands for “private branch exchange.” When ever your inside some organization that has phone extensions then there is almost certainly a PBX someplace nearby that is routing the calls from one extension to another and when necessary routing them out to the rest of the world.

It was trivial to install asterisk on one of my basement FreeBSD machines. But it has one of those configuration languages that only a old time phone maven could love. So mostly it’s been pain and suffering to get it do what I want. But I now have voice mail, and can dial out to the real phone system thru it. I keep breaking it in subtle ways or having mysterious lossage. Fun bleeding edge stuff.

This is a facinating example of a new hub displacing an old hub. The old hub; the classic phone system has a set of regulatory organizations that solved the severe coordination problems that the industry faced in the early years; and continues to face. The cost structures of the firms and these regulatory bodies is all in doubt now that the Internet has shown up with an entirely different cost structure.

I spend about 25$ a month on phone service at my house. If I set this all up and shifted my phone service to this new model I could probably lower that to around 10$ or 15$. So may $150 bucks a year. That gives you a sense of what the potential energy is that is pushing this transition. It also make clear that what I’m doing is a hobby and not a wily cost savings.

One part of my costs would be the cost of buying a dependable real world phone number and getting it routed to basement open source PBX. That runs about 5$ or 10$ a month. There is one charitable dude who will give you a free public phone number, but it’s in a different state so it would scare off my local calling friends.

One part of my costs would be the cost getting access out to the real phone system. That runs about 2-3 cents a minute. There are plenty of vendors who sell that service so lots of commodity pricing pressure.

Sometimes you can avoid routing a call into the real phone system and send it for free just over the internet. For example I have a friend who has bought phone service from Vonage and when I call him my PBX figures that out and routes the call directly to him without recourse to the regular phone system. That’s rare right now, but as the old system is displaced by the new system this will become a more common case.

My little hobby PBX in the basement currently doesn’t have any direct connection to the real phone system. It only talks to the Internet. I use services that other people provide. They can connect to the real phone system.

I could connect to the real phone system by buying something and wiring it up to my basement machine. Then when I made calls my PBX could decide if the cheapest route was to use the household’s real phone or to go out over the Internet.

Which brings us to an oportunity for collective cooperative actions. If I had such a card I could allow other folks with basement PBXs to call out thru my household phone. Doing that would require some amount of infrastructure to coordinate the sharing. For example I’d prefer to share my phone only when I knew that there was yet another phone in my region I could share if I needed to make an outbound call. I’d prefer to share my phone with some market aspect so that freeloading is limited. But those aren’t terrible hard problems. Similar systems have existed for a long time for faxing sharing.