Continuing to read “Intention Economy” with great interest.  Chapter 12 (“Free and Open”) on the connection between “free and open source software” (“FOSS”) arrested me.

Searls argues that “…free markets on the Internet depend on FOSS code and development methods”.  I’ll admit that I’m ambivalent about open source.  I made a good living in the ’80’s and ’90’s from proprietary shrink-wrap software on the Microsoft platform.  It was a great platform, chock-a-block with innovation, and we made decent livings while doing work that was fun, interesting, and arguably benefitted society.

Open source has changed all that.  The price of software has been radically lowered, and while in each case users of the software (who typically are developers themselves) benefit from high-quality ubiquitous software, it’s hurt the software coder in general and the American software coder in particular.  (See “Entrepreneurs are the New Labor” for one view on this, for example: Rao doesn’t blame FOSS for the current state of affairs, but he is actually somewhat murky on how it has come about.  His conclusions and my hypothesis may not be inconsistent.)

In any case, Searls describes the FOSS world in something like the same terms Marx used to describe his Utopian vision of communism.  Here is Searls (op. cit., Kindle edition, Location 2286) (quoting Yochai Benkler [“Coase’s Penguin, or Linux and the Nature of the Firm”] as well):

Active and useful FOSS code is social as well as personal, in the sense that the writers of free and open code need to cooperate with each other. Yochai Benkler explains this in both “Coase’s Penguin, or Linux and the Nature of the Firm” and The Wealth of Networks. In “Coase’s Penguin,” he writes,

The central organizing principle is that the software remains free of most constraints on copying and use common to proprietary materials. No one “owns” the software in the traditional sense of being able to command how it is used or developed, or to control its disposition …

I suggest that we are seeing … the broad and deep emergence of a new, third mode of production in the digitally networked environment. I call this mode “commons-based peer-production,” to distinguish it from the property- and contract-based models of firms and markets. Its central characteristic is that groups of individuals successfully collaborate on large-scale projects following a diverse cluster of motivational drives and social signals, rather than either market prices or managerial commands.

And here is Marx, in “The Communist Manifesto”:

Of course, in the beginning, this cannot be effected except by means of despotic inroads on the rights of property, and on the conditions of bourgeois production; by means of measures, therefore, which appear economically insufficient and untenable, but which, in the course of the movement, outstrip themselves, necessitate further inroads upon the old social order, and are unavoidable as a means of entirely revolutionising the mode of production.

In place of the old bourgeois society, with its classes and class antagonisms, we shall have an association, in which the free development of each is the condition for the free development of all.

Both authors have the theme of disruption of old proprietary relations and the establishment of a new order where price, property, and contract do not direct the course of production but rather the overall needs of the community.

I’m not likening the two in order to besmirch FOSS, but rather to draw attention to its utopian character and to probe its actual underpinning.

Just as communism, in practice, required an absolutist state to order “the people” to do “the rights things”, so FOSS, in practice, requires a system of “tithing” where big tech companies — Google, IBM, and others are mentioned in Searls — need to subsidize the open source community by grants of time, money, or both.  The instantiation of communism, of course, was the very opposite of the dream.  What can we say about the instantiation of FOSS?

In the areas where open source has had the biggest inroads — Internet infrastructure, arguably, operating systems — innovation has languished.  We are still playing with VMS and Unix in one form or another, after 30 years.  And the Web stack, despite its creakiness, is not particularly changing.

Compare this to the Big Data area, where innovation was sparked by proprietary projects at Google and others.  We have new approaches, new architectures, and ample innovation.  This innovation is, of course, now spilling out as open source in the Hadoop ecosystem.  It will be interesting to see how much further innovation occurs in the areas that are now open-sourced (as opposed to the application or other layers that are benefitted by the existence of the new “free” stuff).

Jury is still out for me, but I can only offer two cheers for open source.  The vision is swell; the free stuff is awesome.  The net result may be suboptimal.

Your thoughts?

It’s easy to love Henry Baltazar’s work at 451 Research.  He’s technically deep, he doesn’t confuse technology and business, and he speaks his mind.  I always enjoy his thinking.

In July he put out a report “Is it Time to Go All-In on All-Flash Arrays” discussing the pros and cons of all-flash storage arrays as opposed to “hybrid” systems where, essentially, the flash component acts like an accelerator or cache (although vendors of hybrid systems vigorously deny that their systems employ flash as “mere” cache, the differences seem like shallow semantics).

Baltazar suggests that the “all-flash” and “hybrid” systems are actually two use cases: “all-flash” is “performance” and “hybrid” (especially with a SATA/SAS backend) is “value”.  Makes sense.

In the all-flash category, he distinguishes between “high-end” vendors who go all-out for perofmrnace (IOPS and latency) and “midrange” vendors (like our company SolidFire) who aim to build workalike systems (albeit at a much higher performance level) for existing SANs.  Again, a valid distinction (although the term “midrange” for our guys stings :-)).

Worth a read, although unfortunately you need a 451 subscription to do so.

This “Intention Economy” book is terrific.

Chapter 14 deals with “net-heads” (those who appreciate how the network effect powers the ‘net) and “bell-heads” (those who want to extract a toll for operating ‘net infrastructure).  Carriers are, of course, bell-heads.

Carriers are also quite concerned about turning into dumb pipes.  They scrutinize every use of their right-of-way to find extra opportunities for tarriff and control.  They are determined not “get turned into a dumb pipe.”

What @dsearls makes clear is that this very behavior turns them into dumb pipes.  They turn themselves into dumb pipes.  By offering only obstacles to use of their right-of-way, they insure that every interesting use will try to go elsewhere, and that every interesting use will try to minimize contact with them.

I’m not expressing myself very well here, but I think the point is clear: the way not to be a dumb pipe is to embrace the diversity — and the independence — of the various uses that can be made of your pipe, and think of a few of your own.  Neither behavior is a carrier strong suit.

Your thoughts?

I’ve been wisecracking the last few years about “cookie-ing corporations”. The idea is that “they” cookie “us” all the time to see what we’re up to and sell us junk. Why shouldn’t we cookie them, find out what they’re up to, and see whether we want to buy stuff from them or not.

Just read about half of “Intention Economy” on the flight out to the Bay Area, and not only does Doc Searls believe what I believe, he’s founded (or at least given voice to) a whole movement for doing just this, returning power to consumers.

His point — among others — is that this is exactly what the Internet is intended for: interactive exchange of software-mediated negotiations.

I love it. I love VRM (vendor relationship management, the software category which will provide tools to consumers). I love the idea that advertising will transform from yammering into more sophisticated persuasion in niches left over from areas not covered by CRM/VRM interactions.

Read the book. It’s really interesting.

Your thoughts?

I don’t want to be one of those bloggers who kvetches about bad experiences out on the ‘net.  Goodness knows there’s enough of them, but probably not optimal to dwell on them.

But this experience with Zazzle has broader implications, so let me rant a bit.

I’ve wanted to try out business cards with QR codes on them for a few months.  Finally got around to it, using scientific methods (i.e. Google search) to find vendors who could give me a small pack of cards for not too much.

Zazzle had an appealing SEO-friendly name and looked good, so I ordered a pack of cards from them.

You order by typing the card info (name, addr, etc.) into a web form, which also shows a graphic of the QR code that will appear on the card.

I assumed — yes, I know what “assumed” means — that the QR code default would be the text info on the card.

When my first set of cards came, the QR code produced a web page at Zazzle which at first glance looked like an ad for their QR codes.  I sent off a complaint to Zazzle customer service, and they told me:

1. The cards I had were the ones I had ordered
2. If I wanted to change the QR code they would, out of the goodness of their hearts, allow me credit for the deck and re-ship.

I nosed around the Zazzle site trying to find a place to customize the QR code, and slowly realized that the web page that was the QR default was a page for typing in text information that would then build a new QR code.

So I retyped my info into the QR code generator form, and ended up with a QR code which was the digest of my text info from the business card.  Got a new deck.  Happy ending.

I suppose.  Wouldn’t it have been easier to have the default QR code be the info on the card?  Wouldn’t it have better to show what the QR code on the card would yield?  (You could see what it read to, but you had to click to another form to do so.)

Dumb defaults.

Zazzle is presumably a decent company.  They let me re-do the cards.  They answered my customer service inquiry promptly.

But because their product has weak defaults I probably won’t be back.  And I wrote this.

Your thoughts?

Decent article by this title in Electronic Retailer caught my interest, since a big part of what I do is try to be right about what year is “the year” of <Whatever>.

The author looks at iTV as a consequence of 1) video-on-demand increasing and morphing into “appointment viewing” (meaning TV anywhere, anyscreen, anywhen) and 2) direct response technologies like AdWidgets (“bound” and “unbound”: see the article) and, the Holy Grail, a “universal TV buy button”.

She cites a source to the effect that 51% of digital TV households today have “iTV technology available”, which is a somewhat squishy phrase although an impressive percentage.

There’s still something broadcast-ey about this.  You get to pick what you watch and when, but all the interaction is you picking what brands will sell you or pitch to you.  Kind of a corporate picture of “interaction”.

My picture of interaction is more like the Web: you get to “surf”, you get to yak with others, you get to do goofy time-wasthing stuff that doesn’t transact or present you with a brand “message”.  When will iTV get to that milestone?

The news that littleBits — a Maker startup which sells “mashup” hardware electronics kits for children of all ages — got a $3.65M investment from True Ventures and others was terrific.  And well-deserved.  Ayah Beir is a visionary CEO in the mold of Steve Jobs and Bill Gates, although, to be fair, the canvas seems smaller.

And that’s the problem.  It’s terrific for a Maker startup to get funded, and to get interest from the likes of us VCs.

But I keep coming back to an analogy.  1977 or so.  The Homebrew Computer Clubs are all over.  Hackers are hacking hardware and software.  Scoffers are scoffing that it’s just a hobby.

Two things happened: The Steves built the Apple II, and Dan Bricklin built VisiCalc.

The original “killer app”.  Suddenly the $2000 price tag of an Apple II didn’t seem so egregious.  Suddenly the work of getting an Apple II to work didn’t seem so onerous.  It had a purpose.

I love littleBits, and I love kids and the hacking imagination.  I don’t think it’s the purpose of Making.

I don’t think 3-d printers are the purpose of Making either.  They’re very cool, and they are a kind of vivid logo for the movement.  But they are not what will make Making indispensable, that will make the costs not seem egregious, what will make the set-up not seem onerous.

What will?  Don’t know.  Looking for it.

Thoughts?

When we went from PC apps to Web apps we lost a bunch of things, but the worst was: the UI and UX went to hell.  Even with all the rich interaction add-ons, Web apps today are just not as (for want of a better word) delightful as native apps were, and won’t be for some time.  That’s probably reason #1 for mobile apps today: they are much more delightful than anything achievable through a web browser.

There’s an analogy with Big Data: the paradigm of distributing computation to the storage (which I talked about a bit last fall) is pretty powerful, but it’s a step backwards in terms of storage.  There were all kinds of good reason to centralize storage (or at least decouple it from computing), and while putting compute next to storage makes all kinds of sense, you now have the move the data into the storage that’s near the compute before you can compute on it.  Not bad, perhaps, if you have to do a whole passle of computing on a relatively static batch of data, but a real non-starter in near-real-time or even regularly-changing batches of data.

Which should be leading some teams to think from the ground up about how to design a storage and compute system that manages to distribute storage with respect to computing but centralize it with respect to locality or reference and management.

We’ve seen a couple of ideas in this area, and would like to see more.

Your thoughts?

I retweeted a very thoughtful post by Fred Wilson on “Free vs. Paid.”

Wilson argues that free and freemium (a term he invented; I had no idea) are not the enemies of the consumer, and advertising is not evil.  Key quote:

This post is in reaction to the idea that services should be paid to ensure that they are appropriately focused on the consumer/user as opposed to the marketer/advertiser/sponsor.

Let’s start with advertising. I do not believe it is evil. In fact, I believe it is a fantastic way to support services that want the broadest adoption and want to be free. 

This is true, but not completely relevant.  Advertising is not evil, but it’s conflicted.  If a business is supplying a product or service to you, and someone else is paying for it, you will receive a suboptimal product or service whereever your interests and those of the payor diverge.

We see this in online, in politics, in television, in video, in audio.

And not just in ad-sponsored businesses.  Think of auto-body work and health insurance, for instance.  Anywhere that Jill pays for a service that Joe consumes, conflict can arise.

So the point is not to avoid ad-sponsored businesses, but to make sure that everyone understands, in plain and simple terms. the points of conflict and the quidae pro quo (if that’s the right plural).

Thoughts?

David Card, as usual, has a very thoughtful post on the troubled adolescence of social media advertising.

The problem, as I see it, is figuring out the right way to introduce advertising into what is essentially a bunch of conversations.  The current approach is tantamount to stepping up to a couple of people talking and saying, “Your teeth will be whiter if you brush with Pepsodent”.  It’s moronic.  How can something like that be an effective approach?

(And it doesn’t get much more effective if you have a video of someone singing “You’ll wonder where the yellow went/When you brush your teeth with Pepsodent”.  It’s the jarring disconnect between the conversation and the ad that causes trouble.)

A better approach: wear a t-shirt with the ad as you talk to your social mates.  They’ll ask about it: “What makes you so hot for Pepsodent.”  And then you tell them, “It makes my teeth whiter.”

A lot of vendors are going after this sort of thing (FULL DISCLOSURE: our portfolio company Adaptly is one of them), but no one’s figured out yet how to work an ad into a conversation in just that natural a manner.  Big unsolved problem.

Your thoughts?