The number one problem for Microsoft is regaining the trust of the companies that build the products that complement their offerings.

Developers need platforms to play on. Linux, the Internet, the game boxes, the Symbian, etc. etc. are all platforms. When deciding were to play a developer wants a few things. He want’s a big market. He want’s lots and lots of oportunities, since scarcity of oportunities means he’s likely to have to compete with some other developer. Why bother? It’s hard enough to get things done and satisfy customers.

He want’s a fair game. The anti-trust case made it painfully clear that Microsoft doesn’t offer a fair game.

But Microsoft rarely gives up. So we can be pretty sure they will be bringing another round of opportunities to market and attempting to sell them to developers.

Against that background it’s probably a good idea to read this story.

”
Microsoft handed over the e-mail messages on a disk, and when Burst’s lawyers had printed all the messages they filled 140 boxes. That’s a lot of messages, but not surprising for Microsoft, where the business culture of the company literally happens on e-mail.

When Burst’s lawyers put the messages in order by date and time, they claim to have noticed a peculiar phenomenon. There were literally no messages from approximately one week before until about a month after all seven meetings between the two companies. This meant that either Microsoft completely suspended its corporate e-mail culture for an aggregate period of 35 weeks, or there were messages that had been sent and received at Microsoft, but not divulged to Burst.”

A friend at work brought my attention back to a delightful essay Rodney Brooks wrote back in the late 80s.

Talking about how to get your robot to get to the right possition he outlines two approachs. One approach achieves solid top-down control, the other is extremely adaptive and dynamic. He is and was a strong advocate of systems with their design centered in the second approach and ridcules the first approach:

“Manipulator to payload mass ratios of 100 to 1 are almost the rule and ratios of 1000 to 1 are not unheard of. Compare this to the human arm.”

Some institutions are like that.

I interviewed for a job many years ago. A job I really wanted. These folks were working on what I, at the time, considered the most interesting problem on the perimeter of personal computing. How to empower users to author, not just use, software. The problem of how to drag programming out of the ivory tower and into the hands of the unwashed masses.

I knew withing 30 seconds of the first interview that I wasn’t going to be taking the job. The first question, the first interviewer asked: “You know .. You didn’t fold your letter correctly?”

As a dyslexic I knew that was that was the end of that that. I’d played that role way too many times. Folks in that role get shot in the first act to demonstrate for the audience the seriousness of the situation.

I have friends who find a story like that incomprehensible. They are outraged, bewildered – this is very nice.

But, in point of fact, it’s entirely straight forward what’s going on there. I can even be sympathetic, to a degree. The
dude, having recieved your resume, email, essay, article, solicitation, whatever in the mail, has zero information with which to judge it. So before giving it any expesive close analysis he takes short cuts. He makes a quick breadth first sweep to collect what little data he can. He takes note of the paper, the typeface, the layout, etc. For most people spelling and grammar are included in that sweep.

For most people the skill of picking out errors of grammar and spelling is as costly as noticing a lump of coal on a bed sheet.

The goal of this quick pass is to save time, to decide if further deeper consideration is worth the bother. This low information decision making about
when to further connect is – i think it is now clear – what creates the perferencial binding that gives rise to power-law distributions. It is the micro-payment of predjudice.

So consider this fragment off somebody else’s blog.

I have spent a lot of my life learning to smile and move on in the face of such rants. My blindness to the lumps of coal on a bed sheet leads other people to label me an idiot. Presumably their generosity is intended to inspire me to better myself. The goodnews is technology is devaluing this skill. From both ends. The skill is, it turns out, reasonably easy to mimic with computers. The skill is becoming far less valued as the foundations of the ivory tower of hyper-editted copy are undercut in the flood of fresh content.

I often spend Saturday mornings at the Boston Public Library. I read books from the reference library’s collection. On sunny days when the air’s not too cold you can sit outside in the courtyard in nice winsor chairs. Today outside the the city was preparing for the Boston Marathon. The building was progressively becoming encased in stands, TV equipment, huge wedding tents, police barriers, and portable toilets. Inside things were just like always.

The library attracts a wonderfully random sample of the Boston population. Disheveled academics, elderly, and homeless who often hard to distinquish from each other. Families of numerious language groups scouring the shelves of foriegn language titles. Kids of all ages doing their homework or their research. Intense young men surounded with large piles of books on all kinds of topics: military history, islam, biblical studies, crockpot recipes… Occationally small groups are gathered in animated conversation. Today two volunteers in the young adult room were discussing budget cuts.

This month they have a wonderful art exhibit consisting of – oh – a thousand very old typewriters imprisoned in heavy wire cages. You can reach thru the wire to manipulate the typewriters. A few typewriters sit on a table in a corner and people type short notes on them.

The library has a few guards that wander about. This leads to one of those high school grade ethical problems since they often pause to study the current art exhibit; or to page thru a book lying on a now abandoned table. Today a huge guard, seven feet tall minimum, paused before the shelves labeled “Oversided Books.”

Some good news.: “He was a mere 1.5 metres from the brink of the falls.”

“He could have reached out and touched the brink of the falls with his hand,” said John Jacoby, battalion chief of the Niagara Falls Fire Department.

Maybe he was decided the time had come to move to Canada?

Some people this happens to are fools.

Some people are just plain crazy and do this on purpose.

Some people even survive to tell their story, including audio recordings from inside the barrel.

Over the last few years a number of people attempting to cross the border
from Canada have decided to swim across the river down stream from the falls. Unaware that the currents are incredibly strong and violent they are drawn underwater and drowned.

The socialogist Kieran Healy writes on her blog about how a rental car entrapped her into embaressing a stranger.

Back in 1984 one of the things I noticed about the Mac/PC dialectic was that the PC community was entangled in a network of mutual aid. This ran from the seemingly minor detail that no moral could use the system with out a community of people to come to their aid continously thru to a bewildering industry of bandaids and keyboard overlays to aid and abet the suffering users. That entire community – banded together in common cause to make the whole thing even marginally usable.

The Mac threated this. It threated the people who sold the bandaids, and these
were the people I first noticed because they got angry. At a glance they could
see how the Mac was going to put them out of a job. In an instant they suddenly discovered they didn’t know how they were going to
send their kids to college.

That was just about the time I became interested in economic displacement.
That’s the process were market or technology shifts pull the rug out from
under populations, communities, and cultures.

The second thing I noticed about the Mac’s impact on the emotional life of
people in the PC community was the way it threated that culture of common
cause. But this one didn’t manifest it’s self as anger. This one unfolded in a more subtle way.

The scenario that Kieran outlines would repeat it’s self over and over again.
The PC person would helpfully offer aid. “Did you know that if you hit the meta-coke-bottle-P you can fry the foozle!” I’d be forced to explain, that “Oh
thanks, but that’s not a problem for me.” Helpful person: “If you set the auto save, here let me show you.” Me: “Oh, very kind, it autosaves automaticly, fact is you there isn’t even a setting for that.”

Each one of these exchanges would embaress the helpful person, and hieghten the divide between the Mac and PC community.

Finally I noticed that in the Mac community the smooth nature of the
experiance meant that we didn’t develop a culture of mutual aid as robust
as that in the PC community. No gild of helpful IT guys. No sense of solidatiry
against a common enemy – our beloved machines.

From all that I came to believe that in designing a product you want to
walk a fine line between smooth and rough. The rough edges create a place
for community’s of common aid to appear. In their absense your users maybe
happy, even loyal, but they aren’t linked to each other latterally across the
market.

These days I’m reasonably confident that latteral linking is the source
of a huge amount of clever activity that is incredibly valuable for the
product. Clearly in the case of the PC it was a part of what made it so
difficult for the Mac to displace it. The Mac didn’t have to displace the PC,
it had to displace the PC community.

Imagine now Kienan’s discomfort. She rents a car. She is a stranger in town.
A native of this place offers her aid. The presumably helpful car arranges to
compound her outsider status. Worse yet it threatens the native’s community of mutual aid. You gotta love technology!

I spent last week in Las Vegas at a conference.

Las Vegas is a very strange place. It disturbs me on a viceral level. It is a climate where nothing grows. The shubs and palms around the hotel each had their own individual water pipe. Up the road from the hotel there was a large lot. Somebody there had stopped the water that fed some trees. They now stood large and barren of leaves in a dust grey field.

In the mornings I would awaken at 6 or 7am east coast time. That’s 3 or 4am Las Vegas time. I’d get in my car and go look for breakfast. In the east I know to never eat in a mall. In the west it there is rarely any commerce outside of a mall. Most of my breakfasts were in aging franchises. I like a bit of age on my environment. The signs that people have inhabited a place. The ways they have customized it.

One bagel place I ate looked like it had originally been some sort of lodge themed resturant. It had a cheap wood beam look with two stories of seating. They had ostracized the non-smokers to the secon story. Some elderly patrons, who I suspect spend most mornings there, were smoking and reviewing which casinos they had never stuck their noses into. All the windows were decorated with snow-in-a-can christmas scenes.

Except in the tourist neighborhoods, almost nobody walks in Las Vegas, Angry young men can be seen walking purposely to nowhere. Prostitutes wave as you drive by. I saw only one group of four kids walking someplace. Single people are occationally seen walking to their jobs, a number of these – in the early morning hours – are carrying a single sleeping child.

On a landscape of walled communities the car and the mall are the dominate life forms. Large video signs decorate the roadside. The University of Nevada has one at the mouth of the main roadway entering the campus. One outside a golf store advertises that financing is available. There are a lot of financing, loan, and check cashing stores.

The conference was in a hotel I found delightful. An old (meaning 1950 or 1960) huge two story motel wrapped around a simple court yard with three pools which nobody used. Everything a little worn out. Nice furniture. Friendly people. No gambling.

In most hotels in Vegas gambling machines outnumber the guests. The gambling machines are programed to make a series of noises designed to force you to give them attention. The people sitting at these machines don’t seem particularly cheerful. Their attention deficit disorder feed by a continous stream of stimulation. I suspect you could bankrupt a hotel by dumping a little Ritalin into their water treatment facility.

Things are getting very weird very fast in the “do you know where your XYZ is” front.

There are lots of strange applications already out there that combine the satellite based global positioning system with radios or cell phones. You can track your dog, track you children, or track your criminals today.

While people still have some right to privacy things don’t. There is a fever pitch of activity around “radio frequency id tags” or RFID. These are small chips that respond to (and are powered by) a radio transponder and report back some identity info. Most people have encountered these in garage passes, or turnpike toll devices. They are used to track cattle, and I’m actually surprised they aren’t installed in every car already.

Since RFID chips are just integrated circuits they are getting cheaper really fast. Very soon they will be a nickle a peice. Before the decade is out they should be practically free. At that point stores like Walmart say will start putting them into everything they sell – just to reduce the cost of doing inventory. The Europeans have indicated they will put them into their currency

I have a fantasy that we will put a transponder on the cat. As he wanders the house he will take inventory and when he wanders past the computer that inventory will get uploaded. No more lost socks?

Karen Pryor is the author of the marvelous book “Don’t shoot the Dog”. That’s about the craft knowledge of animal training and how to apply it to everyday life. She wrote a number of other books.

One of the things I learned from Karen’s books: You push inanimate objects but you must entice smart animals. Organizations are neither smart nor inanimate. They are so much harder.

In her book on managing an aquatic animal park she talks about the lessons she learned as a manager. Here’s a fun one.

She had a complainer/trouble maker in her group. He was smart and capable, but a real pain. Finally she couldn’t stand it anymore and she fired him and her reward was to learn this valuable lesson. That job is a role. In all groups somebody will take that job, or somebody will get volunteered to fill it.

I’ve often watched this pattern since then. The group is discussing what color to make the widget. After a while the boss Mr. B goes for the close. “Ok, blue sounds good.” There follows a pause. The team looks at each other. Finally Mr. A volunteers “Well, you know red is nice.” The audience relaxes ‘Ah great they all think – this will be fun to watch. ‘Debate is the sign of a healthy process that reaches good decisions.’ There follows a tiny debate between A and B and the audience urges them on in subtle ways.

Next time the boss says ‘Ok, lets do it.’ Everybody in the room leans back in their chairs and glances at Mr. A. Given this encouragement he finally draws himself up and falls into the role of defender-of-whatever.    ‘Well, you know …’.

I learned a lot from Karen. I highly recommend “Don’t shoot the Dog”.  By the way it explains how to avoid this problem, or if you’ve failed to avoid it how to resolve it.