I do believe we are living through a momentous change in the history of culture and technology for which, at least in part and currently, 'Web 2.0' serves as a useful, if sometimes over-charged, short-hand. As an educator, I am preoccupied with what this change is and how teachers and schools respond to it. Sir Tim Berners-Lee, in his much bookmarked interview with the BBC, talked of his wish for the web when it is 30 years old: he hopes it 'will be something which is sunk into the background as an assumption. Now, if as technologists develop, we've done our job well, the web will be this universal medium, which will be very, very flexible. It won't, itself, have any preconceived notions about what's built on top.' I am conscious that much of my posting this summer has been a series of soundings into what the web is, where it is going and where it is taking us.
Greater inter-connectedness, of which blogging is a significant feature, alters markets — for better, for worse.
Naked Conversations, the blog of the book that Shel Israel and Robert Scoble have been co-writing, saved me a lot of time when I wanted to put together for my own reference the history of that touchstone example, the sorry Kryptonite affair. In chapter 10 of the book, 'Doing it Wrong', they describe the course of this debacle (and there's a follow-up here). Jason Calcanis talked about the Kryptonite affair at Reboot and it's a story illustrative of the power of blogs in the commercial sphere that everyone should know about, along with the Kensington notebook computer lock story (also in c 10 of Robert's book). Stephan Spencer's recent post about Kryptonite (with its superb visual presentation of the course events took) has these killer conclusions:
10 months later, online Kryptonite still publicly suffers from the aftermath. … it’s not their home page that ranks #1 or #2 for “kryptonite” in Google, but their product recall pages that bloggers had Googlebombed to those top positions. Worse yet, the #5 position is occupied by a blogger (Engadget.com) who rails on Kryptonite, complete with video. … the top Google results for your company name endure long after you’ve been blogstormed.
Recently, I came across this from Adam Greenfield, a more traditional tale of innovation-meets-stone-wall:
The story is that Dyson went about thinking about what a vacuum cleaner should be from the ground up, and, having gone through some fanatic number of prototypes ("5,127" is the figure given on the Dyson site), offered his vision to the leading appliance manufacturers, none of whom were interested. … It was clear to the executives of companies like Hoover that the Dyson cleaner, while offering its users superior performance and a highly-enhanced experience, threatened the foundations of the lucrative business model they had grown dependent on. And what business model is that? The answer is something you have suspected for most of your life, but it's nice to see common sense so roundly confirmed: the appliance makers typically make very little profit on selling the machine. Where they get you...is with the bags. The proprietary-design, mutually-incompatible, hard-to-find-the-kind-you-need bags.
Dyson's innovative design freed the consumer from reliance on bags. Dyson's innovative design pleased customers but spelled headaches for manufacturers addicted to the bag-revenue stream. Said innovator was shown the door. (Have I spent too long in technology if I see a clear parallel here with Sony's continual blunders with proprietary formats and eventual acquiescence, in the face of massive consumer non-interest, to more open standards?)
It seems that innovation is now moving centre stage as a key commercial "virtue". At the beginning of this month, BusinessWeek online reported on the 'Creativity Economy':
What was once central to corporations -- price, quality, and much of the left-brain, digitized analytical work associated with knowledge -- is fast being shipped off to lower-paid, highly trained Chinese and Indians, as well as Hungarians, Czechs, and Russians. Increasingly, the new core competence is creativity -- the right-brain stuff that smart companies are now harnessing to generate top-line growth. The game is changing. It isn't just about math and science anymore. It's about creativity, imagination, and, above all, innovation.
Stanford
University has started 'a design school where managers can learn
the dynamics of innovation. Teaching elephants to dance is never easy,
but that's the task ahead if you want your company -- and your career
-- to prosper.' Will the elephants learn to dance, or will they, rather,
behave like giant sharks, snapping up clever ideas and small start-ups?
By good fortune, I had supper recently with Marc Canter, over here on business and lodged temporarily in England's little version of Silicon Valley (M4 corridor, Reading/Wokingham). We talked about music (Brian Eno — more about that soon) and, of course, technology, microformatting and DLAs. Marc is a walking repository of the history of computing and software innovation over the last 30 years. I learned a lot and ended the evening with a reinforced impression of how tough the entrepreneurial tech world is: the innovative young man or woman with bright ideas may never see their innovation through to full and independent realisation. In this context, it was heartening to hear from Marc about MySQL's honour code "contract" for payment, their great financial results and the 40,000 MySQL downloads per day.
A lot of young hopefuls out there, then, aiming to catch an innovation fast train. This is the age, we say, of mass amateurisation, of web content by and for the masses, of mass collaboration shaking up business, a new architecture of participation, the Pro-Am Revolution.
Paul Graham, in his latest essay, 'What Business Can Learn From Open Source', is very upbeat about the bottom-up economy of innovation:
… ideas can bubble up from the bottom, instead of flowing down from the top. Open source and blogging both work bottom-up: people make what they want, and the best stuff prevails. Does this sound familiar? It's the principle of a market economy. Ironically, though open source and blogs are done for free, those worlds resemble market economies, while most companies, for all their talk about the value of free markets, are run internally like communist states. There are two forces that together steer design: ideas about what to do next, and the enforcement of quality. In the channel era, both flowed down from the top. For example, newspaper editors assigned stories to reporters, then edited what they wrote. Open source and blogging show us things don't have to work that way. Ideas and even the enforcement of quality can flow bottom-up. And in both cases the results are not merely acceptable, but better.
I more than warm to this, but I also share Matthew Gertner's caution:
Paul is spot-on in his assertion that open source (and, less convincingly, blogging) has achieved prominence because it harnasses the same forces more efficiently than a rigid corporate hierarchy. His prescriptions, however, strike me as facile. He suggests, in essence, that we should all quit our day jobs and start our own companies. He sidesteps a host of potential objections by assuming that his audience is composed entirely of “young hackers”. Fair enough, it probably is. But having quit my day job and started my own company, I can say with some confidence that it isn’t for everyone. People have different personality types, and some are better adapted to the endless excitement, but equally endless stress and uncertainty, of the start-up lifestyle.
There's an infectious and beguiling utopianism about Web 2.0 talk that, without successful start-ups, will disappoint. There are three necessary "parts" to the Web 2.0 experience, as summarised in Wade Roush's Social Machines, MIT's Technology Review's cover story for August:
The arrival of continuous computing means that people who live in populated areas of developed countries (and increasingly, developing ones such as China and India) can spend entire days inside a kind of invisible, portable “information field.” This field is created by constant, largely automated coöperation between
1) the digital devices people carry, such as laptops, media players, and camera phones,
2) the wireline and wireless networks that serve people’s locations as they travel about, and
3) the Internet and its growing collection of Web-based tools for finding information and communicating and collaborating with other people.
(Gene
Becker comments: 'In your definition of continuous computing, you might
consider adding: 4) and the devices they encounter along the way, such
as situated displays, networked entertainment systems, printers, and
connected vehicles.' We are just around the corner from these situated
networked devices becoming active participants in our digital
experience. I wonder if you also want to pull in physical-tagging
notions [RFID, bar codes, semacodes, visual tags, etc.] as the physical
hyperlinks that bring everyday objects into the digital mix. In the
same spirit, GPS and other location technologies are starting to make
physical place a first-class element of the digital experience'. See
also Jyri's post). All three have to fly. To quote Gertner again: 'Open source development principles may mirror those of the market
economy, but without real capitalism in the mix they’ll never fly on a
large scale'.
I can't end without quoting Wade Roush's conclusion, which takes us full circle, back to Sir Tim's remarks (above):
… this, in the end, is what’s truly new about continuous computing. As advanced as our PCs and our other information gadgets have grown, we never really learned to love them. We’ve used them all these years only because they have made us more productive. But now that’s changing. When computing devices are always with us, helping us to be the social beings we are, time spent “on the computer” no longer feels like time taken away from real life. And it isn’t: cell phones, laptops, and the Web are rapidly becoming the best tools we have for staying connected to the people and ideas and activities that are important to us. The underlying hardware and software will never become invisible, but they will become less obtrusive, allowing us to focus our attention on the actual information being conveyed. Eventually, living in a world of continuous computing will be like wearing eyeglasses: the rims are always visible, but the wearer forgets she has them on—even though they’re the only things making the world clear.
