Summer Reading

I read two strong books last week, and when someone remarked on the quality of my recommendations, I thought I remembered they were found on a blog post.

Sure enough, they were the first two picks on Seth Godin’s Summer Reading List.

Steven Pressfield’s The Profession is a near future social fantasy, much like Makers. These books can take our current situation, extend it, and show probable results.

The concept I took from The Profession is that we are all essentially family first, then tribe, and only the most fortunate get to anything bigger than that. Americans have been lucky to have a national idea, even from before de Tocqueville wrote about it.

Professional diplomats desperately want to see a larger, more civilized view of human aspiration (full employment for diplomats), the trouble occurs when they consistently expect something that isn’t there.

Steven Levy’s In The Plex How Google Thinks, Works, and Shapes Our Lives is my third major Google book. Like John Battelle’s The Search: How Google and Its Rivals Rewrote the Rules of Business and Transformed Our Culture and Ken Auletta’s Googled:The End of the World as We Know It, In The Plex covers the early innings but also adds insights and stories into Google’s six front war. I was reading Levy’s definition of Google +1 just as I became aware of it, History showing the future!

In The Plex has stories of more than a dozen of Google’s top contributors, and we see them going from project to project, how they attack and solve never-before-solved problems, which sometimes work and sometimes don’t. Overall, the side with the bias toward action is the side to bet on.

It’s harder to write about the positive aspects of a situation. Much easier to trash Google’s aspirations because they aren’t complete yet. Still, a lot of Google projects are becoming understood, and even supported by subsequent projects, so the success of setting out to harness the world’s information is becoming evident.

You have to do more work to figure out what is working. In doing so, Levy is also providing a coherent picture of why Google wins, with lessons to emulate.

I am deep into Google, and I was saddened by the “we all know” dismissal of Buzz. I use the heck out of it, it’s a major part of my arsenal, because I’ve figured out what Buzz can do for me that I can’t get anywhere else.

I guess some people have a fear of being too positive, but I now look on any Google failure as “not done, yet.”

Reading In The Plex reminds of the mantra of that football team from Green Bay. “Nobody beats the Packers. Sometimes the clock runs out on them.”

HTML 5 - Google at AOL

Last week, AOL hosted the National Capital Area Google Technical User Group.

In AOL’s lobby, they had HiDef video presentations, the kind AOL has been perfecting since the 1990s. They are getting sharper with new technology and better production values, but the use of post-TV video has been an AOL feature for as long as I can remember.

Google’s Arne Roomann-Kurrik and AOL’s Dave Artz were giving HTML 5 demonstrations, HTML 5 – The Wow and the How, HTML 5 Rocks, and HTML 5.com. It was diverting, flapping graphics and wavy type.

I couldn’t see the value, although I have seen enough new stuff to realize I am somewhere between a late adopter and a reluctant adopter.

The next morning I was watching the TV advertisements interrupting the weather and saw the same flapping graphics and wavy type I saw as HTML 5 the night before!

Cable companies are doing a fantastic job of driving people away from TV. (“With the shift to HDTV you will need a cable subscription,” “The problem is you need to buy a new computer,” “You will need to buy a different service if you want the same basic channels on both televisions sets,” “Your service has stopped as a result of our upgrade,” “During our maintenance we removed your information from our server...no, that won’t affect your billing,” and “Would you like to purchase a premium channel package today?”

As people are driven to reliable post-television entertainment, AOL has the programming, and HTML5 has the low bandwidth way to provide the industrial light and magic we are used to watching on TV. Be nice to see AOL winning in a different niche.

I am sure there are other benefits, but for me, HTML 5 increases the entertainment options from computers.

Comments?

Come to the Capital Technology Management Hub, June 14th, for Sales Lab Rainmaker #6: ‘Networking - Are You Being Served?’ 

Changing Computing Paradigms

I am observing two paradigms of how to use computers, one new, one old.

The old one, call it the Microsoft Paradigm, is You can compute with the support of a paid expert. A friend called the other day and asked if I knew someone who could fix her computer. I asked what was wrong? Nothing, but her old expert was no longer doing that work.

I call it the Microsoft Paradigm, not because Microsoft did anything wrong, but because 30 years ago, Microsoft was the open computing system. They offered freedom and our whole computing expectation grew up around Microsoft products.

Your option back then? Punch your program on the cards, desk check, and take it to the mainframe. You'll get it back...sometime.

That computing with a retained guru is being replaced by the Google Paradigm, Go ahead, figure out how to do it by yourself. Google Paradigm because there are already too many Web 2.0 Paradigms, and Millennium Paradigm is too broad to apply to computing.

The older paradigm, You can compute with the support of a paid expert, became highly developed, with help desks, escalations, trouble ticketing software, three tier support, and other rites. It made computing everywhere. I admire the druids of this paradigm, they had magic skills, and they like me.

What bothered me was six druids would come up with six fixes for the same problem...and they all worked. Instead of the One True Fix, were we worshiping false fixes?

Eighteen months ago, I wrote how the largest government contractors were already forecasting the end of this paradigm. If we spend our time looking at other people's websites, how much fix can we do?

Over the past 6 years, my paid support got less and less supportive. Often when my computer was bust, I would go back to old notes and propose a previous fix to my druid du jour. It was often new to them. I remember one year when we launched three commercial websites and each time I had to remind the developers to uncheck the box that made it available only to Microsoft Explorer. By the the third website, I could solve that problem in a minute.

For my personal productivity, I had to become fluent in Gmail. For years, the one thing Microsoft Outlook could do that I couldn't do in Gmail was email merge. There were supporting programs, but I wanted the elegant solution.

This winter, supporting a tribe of 200 scientists and technologists judging school Science Fairs for the Washington Academy of Sciences Junior Academy, I used three different methods all native in Gmail. The slickest was Create a Mail Merge with Gmail and Google Docs which had me complete a mailing, from a cold start, in fifteen minutes. Four minute video, and then I panicked, where was the spreadsheet he used? A link, two paragraphs down, and I was good to go. We now have useful technical documentation standards for the non-technical, overcoming the old standard, “Of course it is hard to understand, it was hard for me to program!”

The newer paradigm, Go ahead, figure out how to do it by yourself, is aided when users put their knowledge on the internet, and other users are able to find and use it.

Last night I went to a Google Technical User Group meeting, where Chida had arranged for Google's Saurabh Gupta to show us , Google Apps Script - Begin To End. Google Apps Script allows each user to build what they want, in less time that it would take to explain it to a paid professional.

Naturally, the first time confidence is an issue, but even in The Mythical Man Month, the advice is when building a system, plan to build two, and throw the first one away. Google Apps Script allows you to build and test in minutes, fine tuning in a few more minutes.

Saurabh's parting advice defined the new paradigm. “Apps Script Documentation is great, the Forum is active, the Gallery is large, and the Blog is always changing.”

Join us!

Hal Varian, Google's Chief Economist, On How The Web Challenges Managers

Google’s chief economist says executives in wired organizations need a sharper understanding of how technology empowers innovation.

“What is it that’s really scarce in the Internet economy?” And the answer is attention. [Psychologist] Herb Simon recognized this many years ago. He said, “A wealth of information creates a poverty of attention.”

Interview transcript and video published in the McKinsey Quarterly

http://www.mckinseyquarterly.com/Strategy/Innovation/Hal_Varian_on_how_the_Web_challenges_managers_2286

Ben Huh on Copyright

Ben Huh, CEO of Cheezburger Network (LOLCats, FAILBlog, IMMD, Totally Looks Like, etc) spoke at a Google DC Talk.
Three gems on copyright:

• The US has been extremely productive at the creation of culture. New culture has a relationship with previous culture. The laws don't reflect that.

When asked how would he like it if someone downloaded one of his websites and printed a book out it?

• That's not a theoretical question. Someone did and the book hasn't sold well. Our audience supports us, we are all part of a community.

and

• If we can't beat a copycat at our own game, we suck.