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Nick Gall's Weblog
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Monday, April 25, 2005 |
Comparing apples and oranges.Turns out they are surprisingly similar. <grin> This research comparing apples and oranges is going to be a versatile tool in my rhetorical toolbox. I especially like the following meta/recursive/reflective observation:
First, the statement that something is like comparing apples and oranges is a kind of analogy itself. That is, denigrating an analogy by accusing it of comparing apples and oranges is, in and of itself, comparing apples and oranges.
3:51:36 AM 
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Saturday, April 23, 2005 |
Democratizing Innovation.Just came across a wonderful new book on user innovation (aka mass innovation) in Virgina Postel's recent article on same (Innovation Moves From the Laboratory to the Bike Trail and the Kitchen). The book is Democratizing Innovation by Eric von Hippel (MIT Sloan School). And of course, it is downloadable for free. As the following passage from the introduction suggests, this is a must read:
When I say that innovation is being democratized, I mean that users of products and services--both firms and individual consumers--are increasingly able to innovate for themselves. User-centered innovation processes offer great advantages over the manufacturer-centric innovation development systems that have been the mainstay of commerce for hundreds of years. Users that innovate can develop exactly what they want, rather than relying on manufacturers to act as their (often very imperfect) agents. Moreover, individual users do not have to develop everything they need on their own: they can benefit from innovations developed and freely shared by others.
The user-centered innovation process just illustrated is in sharp contrast to the traditional model, in which products and services are developed by manufacturers in a closed way, the manufacturers using patents, copyrights, and other protections to prevent imitators from free riding on their innovation investments. In this traditional model, a user's only role is to have needs, which manufacturers then identify and fill by designing and producing new products. The manufacturer-centric model does fit some fields and conditions. However, a growing body of empirical work shows that users are the first to develop many and perhaps most new industrial and consumer products. Further, the contribution of users is growing steadily larger as a result of continuing advances in computer and communications capabilities.
In this book I explain in detail how the emerging process of user-centric, democratized innovation works. I also explain how innovation by users provides a very necessary complement to and feedstock for manufacturer innovation.
[emphasis added]
This notion of users as solely the provider of "needs" or "requirements" pervades the manufacturing and services industries. Yes, users have needs, but the new approach is to give such users the tools they need to easily and affordably customize generic products and services to meet their own needs. By making the user the key designer we transcend the dichotomy between user and maker.
This applies directly to the relationship between the IT organization and the business it serves. ITOs usually do a terrible job of initially meeting the needs and requirements of the business, much less keeping up with them. Instead, the ITO should focus on providing users the open-ended tools for creating their own solutions.
6:08:46 AM
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Saturday, April 16, 2005 |
The Long Tail.I recently realized that not everyone is clued in to one of the hottest (new) blogosphere buzzwords: the Long Tail. The catalyst was this Wired magazine article. The author of the article, Chris Anderson, now has a site devoted to the Long Tail and is writing a book. Here is his brief description: 
The Long Tail is about how the mass market is turning into a million niches. The term refers to the yellow part of the sales chart at left, which shows a standard demand curve that could apply to any industry, from entertainment to services. The vertical axis is sales, the horizontal is products. The red part of the curve is the "hits", which have dominated our commercial decisions to date. The yellow part is the non-hits, or niches, which I argue in the article will prove equally important in the future now that technology has provided efficient ways to give consumers access to them thanks to the "infnite shelf-space effect" of new distribution mechanisms that break thought the bottlenecks of broadcast and traditional bricks and mortar.
The two big points of the Long Tail theory are these: 1) The yellow part potentially extends forever to the right; 2) The area under that line--the market it represents--may become as big as the hits at the left.
The Wikipedia entry on the Long Tail does an excellent job of expanding on this.
The shift from hits to niches is a rich seam, manifest in all sorts of surprising places. This blog is where I'm going to collect everything I can about it.
As the Wikipedia entry on LT emphasizes that it is simply a popular name for a "long-known feature of statistical distributions (Zipf, Power-laws, and/or Pareto distributions)". Accordingly, it applies to various aspects of all phenomena, including software production.
LT is fundamentally based on the dialectic between "convention and invention": when a process becomes very convenient and affordable through commoditization, this enables more unique needs to be met through invention.
A great software example of this that I just ran across is machinima: "a new form of filmmaking that uses computer games technology to shoot films in the virtual reality of a game engine." (See also the Wikipedia definition of machinima.) In this instance, the "convention" is a commoditized "game engine" and the invention is the variety of scenes that individual "artists" create with it. Red vs. Blue (movies created with the Halo engine and images) is the most popular example of machinima, but check out the growing number of examples, including an MTV machinima video at machinima.com.
Mass customization is how large corporations can address the LT, but mass innovation (aka mass amateurization) shifts control from the seller to the buyer: the buyer customizes the product or service without the participation or even the approval of the vendor, cf., the recent NY Times article on the relationship between Nike and sneakerheads who customize its sneakers. (See also my collection of mass innovation links.)
The most WS-* related example that comes to mind is Greasemonkey: "a platform for running scripts that inject new functionality into web interfaces. If you're a UI designer, this might frighten you. What it means is that any kid with a bright idea and a knack for DHTML can create a new interface for your site, and it will probably be better than yours. (There's a lot of bright kids out there in the world.) Why should you get paid when the bright kids will do your job better for free? The key to survival will be going meta: design for the bright kids. Create a flexible, modular set of APIs and a well-documented example UI or two that shows how they are used. Learn from Amazon and release your grip on the end-user experience. But developments like Greasemonkey disrupt more than just job descriptions: they disrupt business models too. For example, I will never see a Google AdSense ad again, thanks to a handy Greasemonkey script." [Greasemonkey Stole Your Job] Greasemonkey enables anyone to "reprogram" Firefox to filter and transform any and all web interactions ON THE CLIENT SIDE. Now the "look and feel" of a site in no longer in the hands of the site owner, but in the hands of the browser owner or any intermediary.
BTW, my fellow blogger Tom Murphy has a nice link to Long Tail thinking applied to specifically to software.
7:30:48 AM
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Monday, April 11, 2005 |
Ambigrams. I love the serendipty of the web. I was looking at a paper on the economic impact of P2P file sharing on CDs at First Monday, so I looked at the table of contents while I was there. Another paper entitled On becoming a Web site by Punya Mishra intrigued me, so I skimmed it and then followed the link to the author's home page. This is where I discovered the Ambigram!
Ambigram n., - a word or words that can be read in more than one way or from more than a single vantage point, such as both right side up and upside down. (from Latin: ambi=both + gram=letter).
Here is the beautiful example of an animated ambigram on Punya's home page that caught my eye:
A good example of a natural ambigram is MOW, which spells mow either way you flip in (i.e., rotate by 180 degrees). What's really cool about ambigrams is that with some creative calligraphy, any word or phrase can be rendered as an ambigram!
In fact, there is an automatic ambigram generator called Ambigram.Matic. Here is my first name, Nick, rendered as an ambigram:    
Here are my first and last names, Nick Gall, rendered as an ambigram: 
Here are three great resources for more fun with ambigrams (with much more elegant examples than my automatically generated ones): Ambigram.com, Inversions, Visual Wordplay Gallery.
BTW, ambigrams are also known as inversions, designatures, and symmetricks. Funny how the same mulitiplicity of synonyms affects ambigrams as affects antagonyms.
6:07:13 AM
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Saturday, April 02, 2005 |
Goodbye META, hello Gartner.I haven't written much about my life at META Group, Inc. in this blog, because I like to keep my avocation (Information Technology, Philosophy, Evolution) separate from my vocation (IT Industry Analyst).
I make an exception today to commemorate my nine years with META (April 15th would have been my 9th anniversary) and to announce that I have accepted a position at Gartner as part of its acquisition of META Group.
I will continue to blog as always, with one restriction. In light of Gartner's brand-management policies, other than this posting, I will not discuss Gartner or my activities at Gartner. As an ex-attorney, I appreciate bright lines.
3:59:00 AM
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