Posted by Antonio
4 days, 23 hours ago (May 4, 2008)
My old office was above a gas station, in a repurposed low income building where some zoning genius realized that living right above gas tanks was not a life-prolonguing move. There were free roaming mice and occasionally there were water issues. But we had distinct working spaces, large common areas, and the definite feel that it was uniquely ours.
I now work in HP's Marlboro facility, specifically a cube inside the great human veal farm that is at section 18.4 of MRO1, floor 2. Outside of some tweaks that the local real estate crew made on our behalf last year, it's cubesville as far as the eye can see. And from what I've been able to gather from other folks at other big cos, it is pretty much standard for the whole tech industry. This real estate philosophy has accelerated the shift to "remote working" that most of the half million or so workers at HP, IBM, Intel, etc. are taking on to avoid shrinking veal pens (some other genius recently decided that 8x8 feet is spacious and that 6x6 is just fine and that much more affordable).
I paint this bleak picture not to complain, but as a introduction to a great short interview with Brad Bird of Pixar which I came across on GigaOm this weekend. In enumerating the "lessons for fostering innovation," number 6 stuck with me:
Brad Bird: If you walk around downstairs in the animation area, you’ll see that it is unhinged. People are allowed to create whatever front to their office they want. One guy might build a front that’s like a Western town. Someone else might do something that looks like Hawaii…John [Lasseter] believes that if you have a loose, free kind of atmosphere, it helps creativity.
Then there’s our building. Steve Jobs basically designed this building. In the center, he created this big atrium area, which seems initially like a waste of space. The reason he did it was that everybody goes off and works in their individual areas. People who work on software code are here, people who animate are there, and people who do designs are over there. Steve put the mailboxes, the meetings rooms, the cafeteria, and, most insidiously and brilliantly, the bathrooms in the center—which initially drove us crazy—so that you run into everybody during the course of a day. [Jobs] realized that when people run into each other, when they make eye contact, things happen. So he made it impossible for you not to run into the rest of the company.
It strikes me that he is spot on, and that for any creative endeavor the constant physical contact is paramount. However, from what I've learned over this last year, the veal farm model of big companies hurts in two distinct ways: first, the packing of people into tight spaces usually extends into miserable common spaces or "efficient" decisions made around bathroom/kitchen locations that are just not conducive to the right type of bumping into each other. More importantly though, making real estate a cost-center to be managed as non-value add creates such a miserable environment that "working from home" becomes a very attractive alternative. And no matter what telecommuting technologies you favor, like porn, the 2d version is never as good as the real thing.
Pour in a little "offshore fever" and its hard to see how you get back to innovation fueled by creativity in these environs.
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Posted by Antonio
1 week, 4 days ago (April 27, 2008)
I love the premise of Clay Shirky's Web 2.0 talk this year, "Gin, Television, and Social Surplus." Just as gin helped the Victorians deal with the wrenching changes of the industrial revolution, according to Shirky, the modern-day sitcom has helped us deal with the "cognitive surplus" created by rise in free time that 1st worlders benefited from during the second half of the 20th century. It's a great polemic which argues that the participatory nature of the Internet enables us to come out of the content-consumption binge of 20th century television because even if we're blogging about our cats and navels, creating content is inherently more valuable than simply consuming it.
Obviously the idea that any type of content creation is better than simple consumption is a normative judgement. It is one though that lay beneath the foundation of what Tabblo was meant to be from the start, so it is near and dear to my heart. To this day, at the office we argue the merits of Clay's argument on a fairly regular basis, with me most frequently on the side of cat blogs over Desperate Housewives.
That said, I think his attack on "consumption-only" media as just giant suckers of the cognitive surplus is a little harsh. For instance, I'm surprised that Shirky doesn't mention Steven Johnson's wonderful book "Everything Bad Is Good for You" and its analysis of how the best television shows are actually helping to train a whole generation of minds in new ways of coping with ever-increasing complexity of the world.
Similarly, the story of the four year old at the end of the talk who walks around to the back of the screen to "find the mouse" because she expects all media to be interactive struck me as too contrived. As the father of two young boys that straddle the age of his subject (6 and 3), and who are currently obsessed with everything Star Wars, I have a different perspective. Both boys consume Star Wars in at least five different media formats: the original movies, the Lego Star Wars Nintendo DS saga, the Star Wars Guide to Galaxy popup books, actual Star Wars Legos to build and play act, and the games we make up to pass the time in the car. And even at such young ages they have a very nuanced view of when they are supposed to interact and to what degree— but most importantly, they also know when to sit back and just drink in the world that George Lucas has created for them.
Finally, the Star Wars example is also one that spans beyond small children for the following reason: I would be willing to bet that if you took the total amount of "user generated content" that is about, based on, a parody of, etc. the Star Wars Universe and divided it by the total amount of user generated content, you would end up with a meaningful fraction. Which is exactly why we'll always need great story tellers and the mediums which let them shine if we are to take advantage of this supposed cognitive surplus as creators and sharers.
Great talk though— make sure not to miss it!
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Posted by Antonio
1 week, 6 days ago (April 26, 2008)
Could be because I haven't seen a cloud in the sky all week, and it could be because Google was totally inaccessible all morning (at least from Jamaica), but I've got this cloud computing thing on the brain these days. If you really believe that it is a tectonic shift, and that no company will be able to ignore it, read on for my take on the 3 types of cloud efforts, and a couple of associated opportunties:
Core-to-DNA: This is where Amazon and Google fall today. Building out scalable, flexible infrastructure that is up 99.x% of the time is so core to what they do that they just won't be able not to take advantage of the shift in computing. Whether Amazon's more flexible or Google's more prescriptive approach wins the majority of the mindshare is less interesting than the fact that you will always be able to count on these guys' delivering solid solutions. The business opportunity here will be in providing a layer of portability across them so that no one gets vendor lock-in syndrome.
Must-have-for-strategy: Microsoft, IBM, and Yahoo are good examples of this one. Each has a pole position in some previously dominant platform, each knows they have to move in this direction, but because it is not core to who they are, they're not likely to execute well, at first anyway. No matter though, because the folks with deep pockets (Microsoft, IBM) will spend whatever it takes to bring the B/B+ offerings to market. They may not scale as efficiently, and they may not be as reliable, but these guys will find some market-power way of gaining meaningful traction.
Wannabes: EMC, HP, big banks, and other utilities fall in this last bucket. These are the companies that know that this cloud shift is a big deal, have some sort of vested interest in being able to play in this domain, perhaps even have a starting move, but are quite simply finding that "clouds is hard!" As a result some will stay (if it is critical to their survival), some will outsource, and some will fall out clouds (if they can afford to ignore it). For the time being however, they will all continue to half-execute, confusing endusers and keeping developers on their toes. Naturally, the near term business opportunity here is the best, as all of these guys will need software to try to keep their clouds running (GigaOm has a nice post of what some of this software might want to target as initial opportunities).
I have no doubt that there will be plenty of movement from tier 3 to tier 2 and back— what I am less clear about is who, if anyone, will be able to move to tier 1 and join Google and Amazon in what will be a very lucrative market opportunity.
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Posted by Antonio
2 weeks ago (April 24, 2008)
As much as I've come to believe that Paul Graham has now sucked in too much of his own exhaust to write with as much insight as he used to, his latest essay on "being good" as a directing principle for startups has stuck with me like a sharp chicken bone at a barbecue. At first I wanted to dismiss it, thinking of cases like the OLPC debacle, where people's politics and grand visions for making the world a better place get the best of them. But as I let the essay fester, it began to dawn on me that Paul's "doing good" is just another way of saying that you need to have a bigger mission than just flipping to Google, or even just making yet another photo book configurator.
At Tabblo we had this: as Eric (our customer guy) reminded me recently, if you look through our wiki (now buried behind layers of HP VPN goodness), you'll see a number of pages that talk about making people more creative in their self-expression, making them better story-tellers despite the normalcy of their everyday lives. Helping the unwitting blogger, empowering the casual publisher, and all of that other jazz we'd talk about at lunch, late at night, and during those moments when we'd feel like big bad world was crushing us.
But lately I've also been thinking about the fact that all of Web 2.0 has been geared towards enhancing self-expression: from Flickr to Facebook and Blogger to Twitter, the whole ride has been about letting people create content that they can (in the best of cases) use as a vector for connecting to other people doing exactly the same thing. In its best days Tabblo did this well because, after all, part of making people feel like creative story-tellers was finding them an audience who was willing to listen and to engage.
As Adam Green has recently pointed out however, greasing the skids of self-expression is just one of the many ways in which the Internet and what we build with/for it can help people. While it is a very good thing that we've all gorged on this particular goal over the last 5 years, the time may be upon us to start thinking about the stuff that is useful and that can actually make a positive impact in the way that everyday lives are being led throughout the world. After all, lord knows we've got enough crises to which we can apply our entrepreneurial energies.
For my part, I've spent quite a bit of time as of late thinking about online group formation and why it is that even on the most "modern" of sites, it still feels so incredibly encumbered, especially when you compare it to the way groups form in the real world. I'm tired of "friending" people, I don't want to "follow" them, and I really could care less about signing up for another "Evite-killer." But I do know that the seeming ease with we can coalesce around a particular task for fun, profit, or just to do good at school, at work, or within our communities is something that still needs a lot of work in the virtual.
This group-forming detour aside, the guys mentioned above may be right— it's time to do something useful, something good and to leave the self-expression behind for a little while.
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Posted by Antonio
2 weeks, 2 days ago (April 23, 2008)
Not much stuck with me from my days at business school, but one of the few things that did was from this wacky book called "The Goal" about manufacturing optimization. In it, the author uses a boy scout troop, and more specifically a fat kid named Herbie, to make the point that in most cases a system is only as efficient as its least efficient component, and that as such, finding this constraint and being obsessive about how to loosen it tends to yield the best results. Pretty obvious I realize, but over the years I've found that it is a great way to think about emerging technologies and new opportunities.
Today Microsoft is taking the wraps off of Live Mesh, a combination platform/service to sync files and application across all manner of devices. It looks like an interesting project, especially because it seems to leverage some form of feed syndication for its transport layer. But apparently it's more than just a project: it is the grand vision of Ray Ozzie and has sucked up about 2 years and 100 people to get to release (which reminds me of Ozzie's previous Project Groove a.k.a Lotus Notes 2.0 which took serious resources to get to sync files between PCs). Despite it being tiny by Microsoft standards, feeding all of those people for all of that time to get file and application preference sync seems a bit excessive to me.
More importantly, are we really at the point where the world now needs Lotus Notes 3.0? Let's see: 1. devices are proliferating, with smartphones leading the pack... check. 2. More and more personal computing is taking place in "the cloud" on websites like Facebook and Gmail... check. 3. There is still a lot of data being locked into the local hard drives of millions of PC users... check. 4. What we are all dying for is a way to sync all of this stuff so that we can stop thinking about desktop or cloud and seamlessly carry on our personal computing tasks from any device anywhere...really?
Back to Herbie the fat kid and the theory of constraints. Where is it that we are really suffering today? Is it in new protocols to sync data across devices? It seems to me that everyone and their mother is capable of designing sync protocols, and that more importantly, Internet pioneers solved this one even before the days of Lotus 1.0. Instead, there seem to be three clear places where we are currently suffering from constraints that might make for "big play" business opportunities: 1. we never have enough bandwidth in enough places (whether it is cable, DSL, cellular, etc.), 2. we don't yet seem to know how to economically store enough stuff in the cloud, and 3. in the case of portable devices, we never have enough power efficiency.
But more sync protocols? Hybrid platform/services that require buying into one vendor's silo? At best, these things seem to me to be band-aids that are trying to get us around some of these constraints instead of through them.
Interestingly enough, normally M&A-allergic Apple today announced the acquisition of PA Semi, a chip company that focuses exclusively on power management in CPUs, seemingly to address constraint #3 in their iPhone platform.
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Hi, I'm Antonio, living in Boston and working this whole net thing out...
