Facebook might only provide a Like button on its site, but that hasn’t stopped people from hating on the company in the last few days. There is much glee over the dismal performance of the stock which is now about $10 below its IPO price from a week ago. People mock or dismiss Facebook for a variety of reasons: They don’t like it when the user interface is changed without their consent. Some find the whole social networking business beneath their intellect. So on. Fine, you are pissed and you are happy the stock is tanking. I sympathise.
But, really, enough with the pointers to the stock performance as some sort of rational consequence or symptom of your diagnosis of Facebook’s failings. This is the same market that currently values Apple at a P/E of 13.58 while Amazon and LinkedIn hold such potential that they trade at a P/E of 176.85 and 626.77 respectively.
Really convincing, that market. You are sure you want to hitch your logic wagon to it?
It’s going to be a great week in techlandia:
Imagine an operating system that was conceived and developed as a secondary project, decades before operating systems became a household word. One that its owner (AT&T) had neither the skill nor the legal sanction to sell. One that once out into the wild, forked into a hundred avatars. One that ran natively on (and was sold shrink wrapped for) few or no consumer hardware platforms. A system that was eclipsed in the 90s by the user friendliness of Mac OS and the business savvy of Microsoft Windows. A system that offered (and advocated) a minimalist approach to usage (user interface, programming, etc).
It is now 2012. That operating system is Unix. And everywhere but the corporate IT controlled desktop market, it rules the computing world in the form of GNU/Linux, *BSD, Mac OS X, iOS and Android.
There are I think some very valuable lessons to be learnt from this phenomenal and highly improbable success. Lessons to do with complexity, methodology, motivation… lessons that are in my opinion very much relevant to the obsessions and fashions of today’s technical world, ranging from exotic programming languages to frameworks and platforms like .NET, Eclipse, ClearCase, etc. Any muddled thoughts I might have on these lessons will have to wait. For now, I want to merely enjoy the moment.
The title should really read: Unix + GNU FTW.
Imagine if you had entered college in 1999 and left grad school in 2005. You wouldn’t know much of the dot-com boom and the bizarre billion dollar acquisitions of companies that had not made a single dollar and had no clear chance or plan of ever doing so. The tech boom of 2010 would seem a new and momentous event. The automobile revolution of the early 21st century, not the tulip craze. Should you meet a naysaying curmudgeon from the last decade, and need a voice to counter his pessimism, Don Dodge would be your man. Here he is, talking about the mind-boggling billion dollar acquisition of photo-mutilation service Instagram by Facebook – he will have none of the incredulity over a billion dollar price on a product that can be built out in a week:
Success looks easy from a distance. Technology seems simple if the design is great. Attracting great founders and early employees just means rounding up some of your friends. Raising money is always easy, right? Getting great press stories just takes a few emails. Attracting influential users just sort of happens. Viral growth is a simple formula. Solving a problem that millions of people care about is just luck.
He’s being sarcastic, of course. His point is that it’s not the ability to code up Instagram in a week that matters:
From a technical point of view there isn’t much difference between Instagram, Path, Oink, Hipster, or a bunch of other companies that all do essentially the same things. Mobile, social, photo apps that include comments and some type of friend/follow model. Why is one worth $1B and another shut down with no value? It isn’t about the technology or how long it took to build.
Taken together, these two quoted sections, and the refinements that he offers later in the piece (“first mover advantage”, “design”, “timing and luck”), form Dodge’s defence of Instagram:
Technology can be replicated, timing and luck can’t.
Read the rest of this entry »
Over on GigaOm, Tom Krazit spins an old argument as a new one by characterising as silly the many recent blog posts on how little money Google makes on Android, in fact much lesser than what it makes on iOS (I have made such posts myself). Look beyond the dollars, he says, as if that’s a fresh and non-obvious point:
Not all investments are made with the expectation that a big payoff is around the corner. Google’s decision to bankroll the development of Android was just such an investment, which makes the past week’s back and forth over just how much money Google has garnered from that investment quite silly. […] The mistake is assuming that Google views this as a big problem, as if Android has been a waste of money because Google makes more money from its competitor. Would Google like to make more revenue from Android? Sure. Money is nice. But Android was a defensive move on Google’s part, and one that wasn’t primarily motivated by desire for revenue or profit.
Not all investments are made with the expectation that a big payoff is around the corner. Google’s decision to bankroll the development of Android was just such an investment, which makes the past week’s back and forth over just how much money Google has garnered from that investment quite silly.
[…]
The mistake is assuming that Google views this as a big problem, as if Android has been a waste of money because Google makes more money from its competitor. Would Google like to make more revenue from Android? Sure. Money is nice. But Android was a defensive move on Google’s part, and one that wasn’t primarily motivated by desire for revenue or profit.
The mistake in Krazit’s own thesis is that he sees discussion of Google’s revenue as an independent and sole criticism of what Google is doing with Android. That is not the case. The fact that Google does not derive profit from Android but gives it away for free to handset makers and telcos (not users, less than 2% of whom can upgrade to the latest version of Android released many months ago) is part of a larger argument or analysis of the nature of Android vs iOS. Since Krazit wants to rehash these points as if new, I will repeat my criticism which is a bit different from that of famous iOS defenders like John Gruber. Read the rest of this entry »
Everyone quotes Steve Jobs but nobody wants to follow him. I suspect there are two implicit or even explicitly profered conceits behind that: maturity and safety. Maturity is the grown-up pragmatism that a business leader (for this post, a CIO) needs to juggle conflicting criteria: cost, variable preferences over individuals and time, interoperability and compatibility, security, so on. One cannot willy nilly pursue perfection, but instead one must seek the golden middle. Safety on the other hand is the fear expressed in that old saw “Nobody ever got fired for buying IBM equipment“. Once a narrative, a legacy value or even mere habit gains hold, it assumes the power of a hard science, and can often be displaced only by a revolution from below (the positive case) or an en masse migration of the field to a newer set of buzzwords (the negative case). Read the rest of this entry »
There was a time when Google and Apple were sitting on the forbidden tree… or something like that. Google CEO Eric Schmidt appeared on stage at Apple events and sat behind the scene on Apple’s board. Together they drove Microsoft out of our lives. Then Google decided to enter the mobile OS market out of fear of losing access to mobile phone users. And what better way to challenge Apple’s iPhone and its alliance with AT&T than to offer up the Google mobile OS Android for free to Verizon (and other telcos including AT&T)? This Google defined as “open”. Predictably Android provoked the ire of Steve Jobs who took to the company town hall to decry the terrible evil that had been done. The relationship turned sour and today the two giants are slinging lawyers at each other through intermediaries and proxies (heck, Google went out and bought an entire company, Motorola — a small step for Google but a giant leap for the science of lawyering up — while Apple coupled up with friends like Microsoft to buy patents from the defunct Nortel and others).
Building the Google-telco-user relationship around the free Android OS has led to a high level of fragmentation, lack of access to new features/updates for users (less than 2% of Android devices run the latest version of Android) and strangest of all: Microsoft makes more money than Google on Android (thanks to patents) and Google makes more money on iOS than it does on Android (thanks to Apple’s use of Google services).
There was another way this could have played out. As John Gruber writes today, “Google made a mistake by deciding to oppose rather than ally with Apple on mobile”. This is all the more the case given their complementary strengths and weaknesses. Google’s good at big data and infrastructure and poor at user experience. Apple’s infrastructure capabilities are only now being tested (iCloud) but they continue to write the book on user experience. Google it appears is unwilling to yield the user to others, lest it be cut out of the loop at a later date. It is not an illegitimate concern from a business perspective. From a user perspective, however, the rivalry is a net loss. Oh well.
PHPFog is an excellent PaaS (platform as a service) that offers a free version with a limit of three apps. One of the apps they provide is WordPress. What is nice about this is that unlike the free version of WordPress.com, an installation of WordPress on PHPFog has no restriction on the themes, plugins, or other similar customisations you can perform. Backed up by their seemingly solid software stack/infrastructure, they offer an attractive option to host your WordPress blog for free. You can still get advanced reporting for free by using Google Analytics or WordPress’s JetPack which includes WP Stats.
I am strongly considering moving one of my blogs (perhaps this one?) to PHPFog.
This week’s Internet bruhaha finds designer Dustin Curtis at its center. Just yesterday, sensing that the field suffers from a supply deficit, Curtis announced a new blogging platform called Svbtle that addresses the “uninspiring” nature of today’s blogging platforms. Forget the plugins, the markup, all those distractions, cries Curtis. What you need is a minimal interface that helps you get on with the main task at hand: writing something interesting and edifying.
… or is it Vanity?
Curtis tells us that the idea soon progressed from a personal solution for his own blogging needs to a “network” of independent bloggers. Turns out you are not one of them. You see, this network is for “creative, intelligent, and witty people”. And before you get affronted, if you are really honest, you will admit that you and I don’t posses even one of those virtues, let alone all three.
Why the announcement? I am guessing Curtis, unlike Jonathan Franzen, is a lot less selective when it comes to the readership. Understandably so. The Svbtle network might “vet” its contributors, but unless these contributors happen to be named Deepak Chopra or Ayn Rand (masters of the art of squeezing cash money from respective ends of the social spectrum), it’s still all about the eyeballs.
All good, so far.
Then, within hours of Curtis’s post announcing Svbtle, an enterprising gent by name Nate Wienert had implemented an Open Source equivalent of Svbtle which he has wittily named Obtvse. Hacker News erupted with indignation and defence. Some took umbrage to Curtis’s choice of words (“arrogant” as he described it) while others found fault with the appropriation of his idea by Wienert.
Curtis doesn’t see the problem with Wienert’s reimplementation. Quoting Picasso, he writes: “Great artists steal”. All works borrow from previous works and what matters is putting something out there that “will defy authorship and turn into a shared experience for everyone” (Curtis quoting Frank Chimero). It’s all about “value” to put it in used cars salesman pitch.
A good time has been had by all and this time the affair closes with all parties in good humour. I do wonder though what Curtis might mean when he writes about bringing the strengths of newspapers to blogging. A blog network of self-similar and successful individuals (in the case of Svbtle this seems to be a group of male designers and developers) might reliably produce interesting technical content but does not necessarily satisfy general interest nor guarantee accuracy. This may not be what Curtis means in drawing an analogy to newspapers, but nevertheless, what would be timely is the emergence of a blog or blog network that brings technology analysis by talented writers (among them sociologists and legal scholars) to the general public.
The New York Times has a profile of Bell Labs (full disclosure: my home!) by Jon Gertner that I highly recommend (despite the glaring absence of Unix in Gertner’s list of Bell Labs’s greatest) . The conclusion of the piece (emphasis added):
But what should our pursuit of innovation actually accomplish? By one definition, innovation is an important new product or process, deployed on a large scale and having a significant impact on society and the economy, that can do a job (as Mr. Kelly once put it) “better, or cheaper, or both.” Regrettably, we now use the term to describe almost anything. It can describe a smartphone app or a social media tool; or it can describe the transistor or the blueprint for a cellphone system. The differences are immense. One type of innovation creates a handful of jobs and modest revenues; another, the type Mr. Kelly and his colleagues at Bell Labs repeatedly sought, creates millions of jobs and a long-lasting platform for society’s wealth and well-being. The conflation of these different kinds of innovations seems to be leading us toward a belief that small groups of profit-seeking entrepreneurs turning out innovative consumer products are as effective as our innovative forebears. History does not support this belief. The teams at Bell Labs that invented the laser, transistor and solar cell were not seeking profits. They were seeking understanding. Yet in the process they created not only new products but entirely new — and lucrative — industries. There’s no single best way to innovate. Silicon Valley’s methods have benefited our country well over the course of several decades. And it would be absurd to return to an era of big monopolies. Today’s telecom industries are thriving, and customers likewise have access to a dazzling range of affordable devices and services, which most likely would not have been true had the old phone company remained intact. Though it had custody of the world’s most innovative labs, AT&T introduced new products and services slowly, and rarely cheaply. As Time magazine once put it, “Few companies are more conservative; none are more creative.” But to consider the legacy of Bell Labs is to see that we should not mistake small technological steps for huge technological leaps. It also shows us that to always “move fast and break things,” as Facebook is apparently doing, or to constantly pursue “a gospel of speed” (as Google has described its philosophy) is not the only way to get where we are going. Perhaps it is not even the best way. Revolutions happen fast but dawn slowly. To a large extent, we’re still benefiting from risks that were taken, and research that was financed, more than a half century ago.
But what should our pursuit of innovation actually accomplish? By one definition, innovation is an important new product or process, deployed on a large scale and having a significant impact on society and the economy, that can do a job (as Mr. Kelly once put it) “better, or cheaper, or both.” Regrettably, we now use the term to describe almost anything. It can describe a smartphone app or a social media tool; or it can describe the transistor or the blueprint for a cellphone system. The differences are immense. One type of innovation creates a handful of jobs and modest revenues; another, the type Mr. Kelly and his colleagues at Bell Labs repeatedly sought, creates millions of jobs and a long-lasting platform for society’s wealth and well-being.
The conflation of these different kinds of innovations seems to be leading us toward a belief that small groups of profit-seeking entrepreneurs turning out innovative consumer products are as effective as our innovative forebears. History does not support this belief. The teams at Bell Labs that invented the laser, transistor and solar cell were not seeking profits. They were seeking understanding. Yet in the process they created not only new products but entirely new — and lucrative — industries.
There’s no single best way to innovate. Silicon Valley’s methods have benefited our country well over the course of several decades. And it would be absurd to return to an era of big monopolies. Today’s telecom industries are thriving, and customers likewise have access to a dazzling range of affordable devices and services, which most likely would not have been true had the old phone company remained intact. Though it had custody of the world’s most innovative labs, AT&T introduced new products and services slowly, and rarely cheaply. As Time magazine once put it, “Few companies are more conservative; none are more creative.”
But to consider the legacy of Bell Labs is to see that we should not mistake small technological steps for huge technological leaps. It also shows us that to always “move fast and break things,” as Facebook is apparently doing, or to constantly pursue “a gospel of speed” (as Google has described its philosophy) is not the only way to get where we are going. Perhaps it is not even the best way. Revolutions happen fast but dawn slowly. To a large extent, we’re still benefiting from risks that were taken, and research that was financed, more than a half century ago.
The original article: Innovation and the Bell Labs Miracle – NYTimes.com.
