Netizen: Cluetrain Manifesto

Showing posts with label Cluetrain Manifesto. Show all posts

Wednesday, June 10, 2009

JP Rangaswami, Utterly Confused Of Calcutta

JP Rangaswami of Confused Of Calcutta is the guy who introduced me to Twitter, one of my biggest discoveries of 2009: I Get Twitter. He just so also happens to be the CIO of British Telecom that has a presence in over 173 countries. After I exchanged a few emails with him a few months back, I googled him up. Up came a list in some magazine that had Eric Schmidt as number six. JP was number 12. He is big.

Before I even googled him up I brashly suggested he think in terms of coming along to be the Resident Adult on my corporate team: Google's Newest Venture: Google Ventures. Our own Eric Schmidt, I said. And that was before I saw that magazine article that says he is like Eric Schmidt.

The final thing I said on that note was I have no formal offer to make you until my round three. Even then I will only make an offer if I think what I am offering is better than what you got.

My startup raised round one money, most of which walked away in February, just completely pulled out. No thank you, Great Recession. So I have to raise round one money all over again. Raise and burn round one, raise and burn round two. Win the Nobel for the Nepal work. And with round two work and a Nobel under the belt, raise round three. That is the gameplan.

I have been following a few leads for round one, making a few moves. Raising money is an exercise in statistical anomaly. You follow many bad leads to end up with one good one. And there is no way to skip the bad leads.

This is not an exercise in naming and shaming but here is a recent email to Joe Trippi, the Dean 2004 campaign manager.

JP is going to be in town this month later. I just might be able to have some coffee with him. It will be a treat.

Jobsworth

Confused Of Calcutta

About this blog it is only a matter of time before enterprise software consists of only four types of application: publishing, search, fulfilment and conversation ...... identity and presence and authentication and permissioning are in some ways the new battlegrounds, where the freedom of information flow will be fought for, and bitterly at that. ....... we do live in an age of information overload, and that we have to find ways of simplifying our access to the information; of assessing the quality of the information; of having better tools to visualise the information, to enrich and improve it, of passing the information on. ....... Moore’s Law and Metcalfe’s Law and Gilder’s Law have created an environment where it is finally possible to demonstrate the value of information technology in simple terms ..... simplicity and convenience are important ...... we have to learn to respect human time. ...... I have a fervent hope that through this blog, I can keep the conversations going and learn from them. About me I’m JP Rangaswami. 51 years old, married (my wife’s called Shane), three children (Orla, 22, Isaac, 17 and Hope, 10 ). I was born in Calcutta and lived there for nearly half my life before emigrating to the UK in 1980. Much of
Image via Wikipedia
that time was spent at St Xavier’s Collegiate School and College; I was there from 1966 to 1979. Originally an economist and financial journalist, I’ve been an accidental technologist for over a quarter of a century. I’ve spent most of my adult life working in that strange space where finance meets technology, for a number of very large firms. Since 2006 I work for BT, as part of BT Design.......... I’m passionate about the things that interest me. My family. My local church and community. A retarded hippie at heart, I listen primarily to music made in the mid sixties to early seventies. ...... A Fellow of the Royal Society of the Arts and a Fellow of the British Computer Society. A Freeman of the Worshipful Company of Information Technologists. ....... I keep thinking of setting up a school from scratch. Which is partly why I’m chairman of The School Of Everything. ....... how work is changing: the paradigms created by globalisation, disintermediation and the web; the implications of virtualisation, service orientation and commoditisation; why publishing and search and fulfilment and conversation are the only “applications” we may need; how telephony becoming software and the wireless internet interact with mobile devices; the terrors of poorly thought out IPR and DRM; the need to avoid walled gardens of my own making; how children now teach me about work; the socialising of information, how it creates value by being shared, how it is enriched, how it is corrupted. ........ Which is partly why I’m chairman of Ribbit. ....... Ever since I read The Cluetrain Manifesto I have believed in the “markets are conversations” theme ...... democratised innovation

Four pillars: The disaggregation and reaggregation of search
Four Pillars: Taking the Empire out of Foundation and Empire
Four Pillars: Digital Equivalents of Opposable Thumbs
Four Pillars: On the record conversations
Exchanging queens: Reducing complexity in IT
Four Pillars: Snowballs
Four Pillars: Like a smoke ring day when the wind blows
Reciprocal and recursive Cluetrain: Markets are conversations are markets
Four Pillars: More on Opposable Thumbs: Thoughts on Identity
Four Pillars: A postscript on anonymity
Four Pillars: Foundation and Empire: Like a flame to a moth
Four Pillars: Time to say goodbye to Laocoon
Four Pillars: New layers of lock-in
Four Pillars and Marketing’s traditional 4 Ps
Four Pillars: Digital rights and wrongs: “IP leakage”
Four Pillars: Learning from my children about Generation M
Four Pillars: Opposable Thumbs: Machine Tools and Safety: A Long and Winding Post
Four Pillars: For Want of a Nay, Kingdoms are Lost
Four Pillars: More on Exchanging Queens: Preparing for another Recap
Four Pillars: Google versus Microsoft: Avoiding, not exploiting
Four Pillars: Thinking about Empires: Open and closed information
Four Pillars: We need a Hippocratic Oath
Crying out for a wiki approach
Four Pillars: Trusting information
Four Pillars: More Pillars
Four Pillars: Manipulating information: Look Ma…. Hands
Four Pillars: Fulfilment: Amazon Online Reader
Image via Wikipedia
Four Pillars: Preparing for Generation M
Four Pillars: The Road From Damascus
Four Pillars: Nickieben Bourbaki Rides Again
Four Pillars: Thinking about Generation M info consumption models
Rumours of this blog’s death……. I don’t like blame cultures, nor am I intrinsically litigious. These things happen and I must move on. Covenant not contract. ...... blogs are conversational and relational, not transactional...... Finding out what I can recover from feedburner, from newsgator, from the Google cache. And setting about restoring the blog piece by piece. .
Four Pillars: On doubts and certainties
Four Pillars: On savouring knowledge en passant, and more on blogs as the opensourcing of ideas The blogosphere becomes the CollabNet, the SourceForge of ideas........ we’re all in the business of building and certifying idea stacks.
Four Pillars: Some musings on enterprise search
Four Pillars: Competing for Identity
Four Pillars: Of markets and conversations
Four Pillars: Of treasons, stratagems and spoils: A sideways look at search and music
Four Pillars: Venezuela: One way to get people to think Opensource
Four Pillars: EAI and DRM
Four Pillars: Thinking about enterprise architecture
A sideways look at the effects of the Scoble announcement
Four Pillars: Unintended consequences of bad software design
Saving the Net, Virtually
Four Pillars: On Social Aspects of Technology
Four Pillars: Glimpses of Generation M
On Hackers and Painters and Education and Bonding and Risk and Nanny Languages
Four Pillars: On learning and opensource: A long post
Four Pillars: On the use of social software in risk management
Four Pillars: On cricket and copyright and DRM
Four Pillars: Does Social Software help Enterprises Dumb Down?
When in doubt, castle
Four Pillars all-at-once: The iPod/iTunes business model: a minority report
Four Pillars: Life on the Edge
Four Pillars: Of trains and planes and automobiles…. and the internet
Four Pillars: On enterprises and complexity bias
Firefox marches on: A leading indicator for a culture’s willingness to adopt opensource?
Thinking about multitasking
Snakebitten A preview “audience” that intervenes and changes scripts and scenes (partly via web competitions) until a PG-13 becomes an R rated film. Extra footage shot as a result. A veritable Hollywood of related and snowballed material sprouting out of the web, particularly at Youtube and similar sites. Mock advertisements and trailers and film snippets, mock mock trailers and snippets. And a statement by the lead actor that it will win best film at next year’s MTV awards.
Four Pillars: On the borderless blogosphere Many financial institutions banned staff access to internet mail. So the staff used proxy sites. Then they banned (or at least tried to ban) proxy sites. So the staff used Google to get to the site. Then they banned that (or at least tried to). So the staff used Babelfish or its equivalent.
Sleeper spam
Thinking about Snakes and Planes
Four Pillars: On snowballs and seeds and digital rights
Four Pillars: Thinking about social software
Four Pillars: Generation M and e-mail
Four Pillars: On analog and digital lives
Thinking more about innovation and path pollution: A long post
On rebels and deviants and counterculturals
The kernel for Confused of Calcutta the subject of information and its enabling technologies, paying particular attention to the enterprise context........ The nature of asset creation has also changed, with intangibles forming a growing proportion of GDP worldwide; we now impute monetary value on talent and skill and knowledge and network and brand and reputation. .......... The Information Age heralded the dawn of a true Services Revolution as human capital grew in importance and communications costs reduced sharply. ........ a war for talent. Institutions have found it increasingly difficult to attract, retain and develop talent. ........ When you look at

View Larger Map
mobile phones, texting, instant messaging, downloads, Skype, the iPod and iTunes phenomena, multifunction devices, the standards for these are all set by youth. ....... a real change from institutional to individual capitalism; not having been exposed to how organisations worked and not caring about how governments operated, youth began to set the agenda. ........... Peer respect became more important than the power of hierarchical authority; relationships and trust returned to prominence after a long time in the wilderness; there were no longer any taboos about asking why things were the way they were, and challenging the status quo. ....... Today is their Sixties. And, in a vicarious way, ours too; The Age of the Individual. ........ Empowered and free from hierarchy, jealous about personal time, keen on relationships and trust, inquisitive about values and ethics, with the power of the web to change their perceptions of time and distance and organisations and government. ......... historical carrots and sticks have no meaning to the new generation ....... Do ask what your country/company will allow you to do for them, before choosing. ....... The assembly-line approach that characterised our schools, hospitals, companies and governments is failing, as people choose to be different. .......... The web is about diversity, individuality, personal-ness. People want to be connected, not channelled, to choose their experiences and to co-create them with peers they respect and trust. ......... Diversity is no longer suppressed but celebrated. ......... Alumnus gatherings didn't always work and were often lifeless ........ All we have left is subscriptions to syndicated content ...... a framework to enable trust and collaboration. ....... Governments and firms are left feeling helpless, as central control diminishes and the power of the individual rises, and they need to recognise that bell curves now have very long tails. ......... with individual capitalism and the subversion of institutions, we need new business models. ............ the customer wants to create and co-create value rather than just receive. ....... the customer is always free to leave, and paradoxically he or she will stay. Who is this customer? Your family. Your friend. Your employee. Your business partner. Your client. Your citizen. ......... Connected, not channelled.
Image via CrunchBase
If you (re)build it they will come
On going “ping” rather than “ka-ching”
On education and digital rights and the internet
Musing about collaboration
More on Control and Complexity and Big
Truth and fiction and strangeness
Thinking about path pollution in the context of the developing world
Why I blog about what I blog about A dollar of trade is worth a hundred times a dollar of aid. It is better to teach a man to fish than to give a man fish. ...... the only way we can deal with sectarian issues and even with terrorism is via education and enfranchisement. ..... a formal education in economics, and ...... a career of over twenty-five years in technologyopportunities we have never had before. Opportunities provided by the continuance of Moore’s Law and Metcalfe’s Law and Gilder’s Law. Opportunities provided by the Ohmae Three, Globalisation, Disintermediation and the Internet. Opportunities provided by the democratisation of innovation and the availability of social software. Opportunities provided by telephony becoming software. ......... The opensource community will find a way around the messes we create, the constraints we put in place, the barriers we raise. ......... information need no longer be trapped by its enabling technologies, information can begin to have the social life it was meant to have ......... I don’t read blogs to find out things faster than anyone else; I don’t read blogs to find things to link to and comment on before anyone else; I don’t read blogs because I can’t find any books to read. .......... I read blogs because they’re participative, they are accessible, they help me learn. I write blogs because I want to participate. In a community. ....... conversations can be about events, people or ideas ......... When it comes to ideas, the blogosphere is hard to beat.
Things I have been able to do Because Of my blog Blogging for Dollars. ...... people who read my blog and comment on it are more likely to be interested in the same things as I am .......... relationship-making, going beyond the connection ..... The process is not an automated matching of profiling and preference information, but something far more elaborate. I now have relationships with people I did not know, and have had the good fortune to meet a number of them face to face in places as disparate as Copenhagen and Amsterdam and San Francisco and Boston. And there are many more I will make a real effort to meet in person, because the conversations have been that worthwhile. ........... people who don’t necessarily share the same views as me, they are people who share the same interests ......... Book recommendations that are far more accurate than an Amazon or a Google ....... People I should meet, places I should visit, things I should do. ....... You make yourself vulnerable when you blog, you can’t hide behind titles and walls and what-have-you. ...... you’re baring your mind ...... no relationship of value can exist without that vulnerability in all parts of that relationship
Social software and education
Musing about social software in enterprises
On Lanier’s Digital Maoism
Image via Wikipedia
Dreaming of clothed emperors
Peer reviews and elitism
To link or not to link? Chance would be a fine thing
On social software and consensus
Musing about perfect markets, perfect information and rational behaviour
Musing again about nurture versus nature and India and soccer when I left India in 1980, I’d only seen a TV programme three times. And I could remember each occasion vividly..... As a child I’d been told that India had actually qualified for the World Cup Finals in 1950, only to be disqualified later for refusing to put boots on....... The willingness and motivation may be there, but there needs to be much much more. Opportunity. Availability...... That’s why the web and social software excite me so much. Opportunity. Availability..
Lilliputians encircle the Gulliver of IPR: Part III, Stiglitz in the New Scientist
Musing about information and power via privacy and identity
Dreaming of Second Life and enterprise architecture
It’s OK to say good things about people
On collaboration and Prisoner’s Dilemmas and the Power of Many
Heated arguments
The Because Effect and the future of Marketing and IPR and maybe even the Net
What would happen if the Patent Office burnt down?
Musing about search
Things I have been able to do because of my blog: Part 2 Can you imagine googling for a poem without knowing author, title, first line, in fact any line, date, and so on?
More musing about search: The role of the “livebrarian”
Things others have been able to do because of their blog the conversational richness that a blog community represents, how natural-language amorphous requests and queries resolve themselves beautifully “given enough eyeballs”.
Things I’d like to be able to do because of my blog I’d been looking for the poem for a very long time, without knowing author, title or first line. Yet it happened. Because of the blogosphere....... Maybe there are too few dinosaurs like me who like poetry.
The destination not the route: A sideways look at “agile”
Musing about the value of social software
Musing about information warfare and judo techniques
Musing about project management and communications
More musing about project management and communication
Want passionate users? Get passionate employees first, and nurture their passion
Image via Wikipedia
Testing, testing…..Things you can do with a blog… I have always wanted to change the way people “procure” software, using blogs. Why can’t I just post “Is there someone out there with something that does this?” and see what happens. Relationship and conversation before transaction. Intention Economy compresses search and transaction costs....... what kind of industry are we? Why do we use terms like procurer and user?
Work in progress: Responding to feedback on improving this blog
None of Us is As Smart as All of Us
On filmmaking and software development: Part 1
Varieties of Work-Changing IT
Three lies about social software
On hurricanes and windmills and independent bloggers yet another ritual of mine, checking incoming links to this blog....... fixing Catholicism with Protestantism, or fixing Windows with MacOS. ....... I have a FaceBook and Flickr and YouTube and Second Life account, just to try and understand what’s happening. No different fro
Image of JP Rangaswami
m trying out eBay or Amazon a decade ago, or Mosaic or Netscape before that. You have to try things out. .... in a gold rush sell spades. ..... When You’re in a Hurricane, Build Windmills.
On A-Lists and Linking to New Bloggers and The Intention Economy link to new bloggers that we haven’t heard about yet
Given enough eyeballs…..
Musings on Learning and Blogging I am a bibliophile. ...... One of the genres I collect is Science and Technology. And, wherever and whenever possible, I try and get first editions, signed to me, by the author, usually when I am standing in front of them. ..... “We may take heart in knowing that a part of the genius of Albert Einstein was his inability to understand the obvious”. ....... blogs are fantastic. They demolish the barriers to entry that are often present in society, barriers that affect curious people. Barriers that are primarily social in nature. Barriers like “I don’t want to appear stupid, but….”. .......... Many times, when I check something out via Google or via Wikipedia, I’m asking a stupid question. ......... Blogs are often written by people who are passionate about something, something specific. ........ I get maybe 300 regular readers ....... All bloggers. All readers of each other’s blogs. All commenters on each other’s blogs. ........ Blogs are conversations. Two-way.
Remembering Confused days in Calcutta I don’t actually differentiate between the time I spend surfing the web, commenting on other blogs or posting to this one. It’s all one to me. ....... Life was such a haze as I left Calcutta with everything packed into a single suitcase after spending all my life there, six months after my dad died, all of twenty-six years ago
a period of inactivity
on locked in devices
Thinking about communities and blogs more recently, having a heart attack and then having a pacemaker fitted
Massively parallel reading I’ve noticed that my tendency to read more than one book at the same time has, if anything, increased since the Web. ...... I am fascinated by the way the science-religion battle is taking shape. I’ve never had a problem with believing I was created.
Thinking about Four Pillars and enterprise software the Syndication/Search/Fulfilment/Collaboration model for enterprise software ....... But JP, what’s it going to look like? It all sounds like airy-fairy theory to me. Do you really expect SAP and Oracle and Excel and e-mail to disappear? Go get a life. ...... My answer is simple. It’s going to look like Netvibes.
More on Four Pillars and Enterprise Software
Musing about Digital McCarthyism and Digital Nonviolence
UnGoogleAble Cricket Questions
The disaggregation of the desktop and what happens when lock-in disappears
On Identity and Argumentative Indians and a few other things Identity and Violence, Professor Sen makes an assertion I found staggering at first sight: that much of the violence we see in society is driven as much by confusion as by anything else. Confusion that takes many shapes, ranging from ignorance and illiteracy to t
Image via Wikipedia
hat driven by the classic fear, uncertainty and doubt. ........ No substantial famine has ever occurred in any independent and democratic country with a relatively free press. ...... I have rarely seen a sentence that touches upon so many of my interests at the same time ...... the importance of social capital
10 reasons for enterprises to use opensource
Learning from the comments people leave on my blog
Musing about opensource billionaires Because of his blogging, Thomas Mahon makes more money with his tailoring business.
Shift Happens: Globalisation and the Information Age and I try very hard to stay as a “thinker” blog rather than a “linker” blog.
The Mother Of All Demos The Mother Of All Demos ..... I had the opportunity of attending a Doug Engelbart seminar at MIT, and the incredible privilege of having a private dinner with him, courtesy Tom Malone and the MIT Center for Collective Intelligence ...... the man who, along with his team, gave us the mouse, hypertext, and the precursor to today’s GUI.
Freewheeling on organisations and platforms and Facebook Ever since 2004, I’ve found Facebook to be fascinating
Musing about nouns and verbs
two webs or one?
of relationships, conversations and transactions Being Indian, and having lived there for half my life, I’m used to people chatting for a while before getting down to business, as it were.
Cory Doctorow on the Information Age Author@Google I’ve known Cory for a while now, not particularly well but well enough to know that we share common viewpoints on many things. Cory Doctorow
Musing on organisations and platforms the possibility of each firm becoming an open multisided platform. ...... I’ve landed up spending far too much time at airports .... got me thinking. ...... Maybe open multisided software platforms are like airports. Maybe soon many organisations will look like airports as well. ....... In the old days, airports were fairly basic, there was no concept of customer or service or time or quality. In the old days, airports were about the primary purpose and nothing else. ....... There’s a lot we can learn from airports, things we can apply to software and to organisation. .... Open. Multisided.
An aside about airports Movie
21st century technology adoption curves and Facebook and innovation after 40 you were past experimenting and having fun, you spent all your time in the paranoid timewasting that characterises so much of large-organisation behaviour. ....... mobile multitasking multimedia generation ...... the explosion taking place in Facebook Applications
Getting my tastebuds going What you’ve got to remember about us Bengalis is that we’re only really interested in three things: educating our children, reading books, and food. ...... Ghugni (spiced-up chickpeas), Shingara (Pastry pyramids with spiced potato/vegetable filling)...... and Maacher Jhol (serious Bengali fish curry)
Musing about risk management
Failing at the edges of the network Bruno Guissani ’s commentary on Aula2006, including his coverage of Clay Shirky’s session. ..... The cost of failure is carried by the individuals at the edges of the network, while the value of the successes magnifies and value to the whole network. ....... opensource people tend to solve problems first and foremost rather than develop complex business models
Continuing to learn from my children I’ve always believed in “filtering on the way out rather than on the way in”. .... but the practice gets harder as the firehose grows in diameter and I get older. As a result, I’m always on the lookout for different ways of visualising things.
How risk management affects agile approaches overgrowth of risk management and the distrust of agile management techniques ...... people act as if they know the risks they face despite not knowing them; they then disparage people who act to discover and potentially mitigate hitherto unknown risks.
Prince-ly returns from the Because Effect When something that was originally scarce starts becoming abundant, something strange happens. You find that you start making money because of that thing rather than with that thing. That’s the Because Effect. ..... Digital downloads are abundant. Concert appearances are scarce. He makes money because of his CDs and not with them. ..... abundance economics
From care to caring: when Web 2.0 meets customer service as we move from “customer care” to “caring for the customer” ..... Philip Rosedale from Linden Lab and Toni Schneider from WordPress, two of my favourite companies. ..... I use WordPress exclusively for my blogging ..... scanning the blogosphere and responding to comments and events.
Yeah Yeah We Speak Perfect English, Just Serve
Musing about being a Calcuttan The Bengal Renaissance, as it is known, is central to the pride Bengalis feel about their city, and a litany of names, most unfamiliar in the West, are known to everyone in Calcutta. Social reformers, educationalists, poets and nationalists became, and remain, household names in Calcutta, in a manner unknown in most other major cities of the world, but which seems entirely natural in Calcutta ...... Bengalis have long been addicted to the adda, a group gossip and discussion session that can last for hours, and the printing press and periodicals allowed more Bengalis to participate in virtual addas. ...... Between 1818 and 1867 there were some 220 different periodicals published in Calcutta, mainly in Bengali, freely discussing politics, culture and spirituality.
Facebook and the enterprise: Part 1 A very long time ago. Two shoe salesmen make the long journey by boat from England to Africa. Coach. Very tired. And on the first night there, despite their tiredness, they both send urgent telegrams home. One says “Nobody wears shoes here. Catching next boat home.”. And the other says “Nobody wears shoes here. Please send reinforcements”. ...... Banning Facebook is the equivalent of banning coffee shops and water coolers and loos. ...... Facebook is different. ........ Nobody goes there any more. It’s too crowded. ........ Ye shall know them by their fruits ......... In a hurricane, build windmills ...... When I look at Facebook, I see Four Pillars in action. I see Syndication of Content. I see Search. I see Fulfilment. And I see Conversation. ....... Enterprises need to embrace porousness, need to connect with their customers and their partners and their supply chain. ...... Enterprises need to understand and adopt this Start-open-then-only-close-what-you-must mindset. It is an essential ingredient of collaboration, a spirit that every enterprise needs to foster. ...... Enterprises need to understand and embed themselves into this record-everything-archive-everything-search-everything-retrieve-everything mindset. ..... I’ve met Mark Zuckerberg briefly in 2004 .....
Facebook and the enterprise: Part 2 an almost-accidental feature, messaging, that really took off and later became the reason why people flocked to Bloomberg in those days ....... they got Cluetrain, that markets are conversations. They got Doc’s Nigerian pastor, that relationships come first. They got the Middle Eastern souk approach and tied these things together: relationship before conversation before transaction. ........
Facebook and the enterprise: Part 3 For many years people have not wanted to share their “little black books”, their contacts and addresses. For whatever reason, some people appeared to feel that they were defined by the raw data rather than the relationships. Sad but true. ........ our generation has not always wanted to share, to collaborate. To learn and to teach ....... Facebook has a rich array of relationships, from Friend to Group Member to Network Member and even Cause Supporter, all the way to Event Participant. And they’re all non-hierarchical and nonexclusive. This is very powerful, since it mimics real-life relationships far better than organisation charts and hierarchies. ............ Facebook allows a wide range of conversation types ...... mimics organisational real life far more than the straitjackets of email-only deprivation zones. .......... If I had something like Facebook functionality within an enterprise, I could ........ plot out the routes that real information took, subverting hierarchies and tunnelling under garden walls. .......... mentors and buddies and role models. ..... relationship maps ...... today’s post EAI post DRM nightmare, where Sharing is a Miracle. Or a lie.
Facebook: Open or closed? archival and retrieval and regulation and privacy and confidentiality and all that jazz. .... The Too Closed crew concentrate on issues like absence of RSS, API restrictiveness, inability to export stuff out from Facebook, and so on. ...... The median age for Too Open is probably Generation X. The median age for Too Closed is probably Generation Y.
Comments on my Facebook posts Language, like ideas, must remain free, and its evolution does not take place in a vacuum.
On Facebook and wasting time Wikis were whined at, blogs were barracked and now we have social networking sites (particularly Facebook) getting slammed. ..... There were people playing with Visicalc, and they were followed by people who played with Excel. Digging around to find out how it worked, using it for all kinds of purposes. And all around them, people stood accusing. Accusing them of wasting time. Spreadsheets weren’t real work. they said. ........ Phase 1: Bunch of people start playing with software. Nobody cares. Phase 2: Large bunch of people start playing with software. Now everybody cares, and the Wasting Time card is played. Phase 3: Slowly, more and more business uses emerge. But still no enterprise adoption. People get more proficient at using it, though. Phase 4: Proficiency gets higher, enterprises begin adoption. Site licences emerge. Phase 5: Users break up into three groups: SuperPower, Effective and Don’t Care. Phase 6: New tools emerge. Play begins again.
Build versus Buy versus Opensource “unless you’re lead dog, the view never changes” ....... In the old days, the guys who ran Management Services Divisions just had to build everything, there wasn’t a software industry around. ...... in the days before we had high-faluting titles like Chief Information Officer, there were two alternatives. Build. Or Buy. Now, with the advent of opensource, we have three choices: Build, Buy or Opensource. ........ For common problems use Opensource.
For rare problems use Buy.
For unique problems use Build. ........ the primary reason why “proprietary” companies get upset with things like opensource is because they’re fighting a losing battle. They want us to pay a premium for the solutions to our common problems, because that’s their business model. The trouble is, the opensource movement is bigger and more effective in solving common problems ......................... Build unique solutions to unique problems. Buy rare solutions to rare problems. And participate in the opensource community to solve communal problems. Esther Dyson used to sign off her e-mails with “Always Make New Mistakes”.
Global digital inclusion and debt and corruption Maplecroft map of digital inclusion. .... Smart Mobs
All dressed up with everywhere to go: More musings about Facebook in the enterprise It’s not about the applications. It’s about the people. ..... For sure we will see the number of applications rise. And crash. And consolidate. And when they consolidate, the final “stable” number may well be measured in the low thousands, because these apps will represent a long tail of usage. ......... let’s not make the same mistake that the IT profession has been making for decades. It’s not about the apps, it’s about the people.
Facebook and the Enterprise: Part 4: Four Pillars I still think Publishing, Search, Fulfilment and Conversation are the Four Pillars of enterprise software. ....... Assume there is no Facebook. What do I want to see in enterprise applications? ..... A small number are prepared to consider the possibility of actually having customers in that directory. ...... people in the extended enterprise as partners and supply chain, and we have customers .......... Those are not relationships. They are irritants. ...... I am prepared to change my mind on this, the day I meet a customer who cares about what department I work in or whom I report to. Hasn’t happened in three decades. ..... Who would recommend you for anything? Why? ....... Who will stand with you in a tight corner? These things are relationships. ....... I have described them appallingly, but it’s better than departments and reporting lines. ....... Relationship information is absolutely critical in solving authentication and permissioning problems, in solving privacy and confidentiality issues. ......... in most service industries, people appear to “work” by doing four things .......... They are even known occasionally to talk to each other face to face without use of technology. ........ Publishing or syndication is done using reams of paper producing reams of reports that no one reads. Mainly because it is done in elephant-sized chunks rather than bite-sized chunks. We need to be able to subscribe to changes in data elements rather than whole humongous lumps of data. ....... Syndication. Search. Conversation. Fulfilment. ........ petri dishes like Netvibes and Facebook. ....... the Three Is, Identity, Intellectual Property and the Internet. ..... A world where so much can be digital, can be archived, can be searched, can be shared, can be retrieved. ......... the Wisdom of Crowds ..... how we can make use of the population to create increased collective value. ........ Long Tail approaches rather than Hit Culture approaches. ....... openness and transparency ... privacy and confidentiality. ....... network effects and scale, the sheer challenge of the number of people and devices that are going to be always connected. Moving to a real-time world. ......... a world of global sourcing, global markets, global customers. And global talent. Which needs global collaboration.
More on Build versus Buy versus Opensource one thing’s for sure, the current model’s busted. ....... free-as-in-gratis, but opensource to me remains free-as-in-freedom ..... these conversations are snowballs ....... You start them off and soon they have a life of their own.
Sounds Like 2.0? Or, What I Really Want From Search I guess I was younger and more hot-headed not that long ago; I remember being quite irritated when I heard that Microsoft had bought MongoMusic ...... I’d nurtured real belief that we were on the verge of a breakthrough related to search, albeit rooted in music in the first instance.
Young heretics and pioneering spirits Science is organized unpredictability. ..... Neither heretics nor pioneering spirits do well in risk-averse cultures. ...... Web 2.0 is about young heretics, and about a pioneering spirit.
Musing about thundering herds this video
Musing on scalability and hit cultures and long tails and all that jazz "Our ability to reproduce and repeat performances allows me to listen on my laptop to hours of background music of the pianist Vladimir Horowitz (now extremely dead) performing Rachmaninoff’s Preludes, instead of to the local Russian emigre musician (still living), who is now reduced to giving piano lessons to generally untalented children for close to minimum wage. Horowitz, though dead, is putting the poor man out of business." ....... Instead of a very small number of winners and a very large number of losers in a very big winner-takes-nearly-all pool, we now have many pools, many winners, albeit in smaller pools. ........ The same is true for blogs and wikis and films and books. ..... We’ve always had crap. Now we have the opportunity to allow stuff that’s not crap to rise to the surface.
Facebook and the Enterprise: Part 5: Knowledge Management So they tried to keep the bulbs in artificial cold, and bingo the tulips had been time-shifted. ....... when I made the decision, some years ago, to open up my mailbox to my direct reports. ...... Most of them were far more interested in my “sent mail”. ...... People learn best by watching what you do. Not what you say. ......... Knowledge management is not really about the content, it is about creating an environment where learning takes place. ....... reducing the cost of, and simplifying the process for, letting someone watch what you do. Nonintrusively. Time-shifted. Place-shifted. Searchable. Archivable. Retrievable.
Thinking about enterprise budgeting processes …. and Facebook many people avoid getting into any form of management in order to avoid becoming spreadsheet jockeys ........ And all cash. No mumbo jumbo. No enterprise kiting. ...... That’s what I’ve always wanted. That’s what I’ve never had.
Facebook and the Enterprise: Part 6: Musing about Role-driven Induction

Down the line I am going to need someone with great, global experiences who will take care of all the fundamental business processes, so I can be the big picture person, the face of the company, the spokesperson, the visionary leader, the guy who reinvents the company once every four or five years.

It also helps that JP is so into social media. He gets it. He has a passion for the word like I do. He is from Calcutta. Bengali and my first language Maithili are the two closest languages to each other in the grand family of languages, and both are large languges that show up in the UN's list of the 100 biggest languages in the world. My father was a dealer to the Santosh Radio in the 1980s that came out of Calcutta. Amitabh Bachchan was in Calcutta before he moved to Bombay to take a shot at acting. I grew up watching Amitabh, I used to imitate his hairstyle. Calcutta and Mumbai are in a class of their own. I eye the two cities for my global ambitions for internet access for the masses. They would be great places to polish up business models.

The difference between JP and me today is he wonders how and why someone ends up with half a million followers on Twitter. I take it for granted some day I will, some day soon, in a matter of a few short years. Insa-allah.

The beauty of globalization is JP and I can have our maach bhaat (fish curry and rice) and internet too.