The soundtrack to Fortunes of War has inspired a life long quest to find a certain kind of gypsy music. The latest stop on my journey is a very satisfying one. If you don’t know about A Hawk & a Hacksaw, click on the video above and listen. NPR’s The World also ran a nice story on the group. They hail from Albuquerque, but the music is in the tradition of the Hungary and Romania.
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We tend to think that certain things will be around forever. Brands we love, bull markets and governments all act as though they will continue indefinitely. Dominance intends that its dominance persist, but everything comes to an end. If all your personal data lived in Google’s cloud, what happens when Google goes out of business? How are you going to get your data out? Is cloud-based computing being built with the assumption that all of the players will exist forever? The more locked in your data is to proprietary formats, the less liquid it is.
Money, cash in particular, has become data; and the speed with which it can move and transform defines its liquidity. How liquid is our personal data? Those financial institutions that custody our financial assets cooperate so that we can move our holdings from one institution to another. How do the web institutions that custody our personal data measure up?
Marc Canter has talked about having a “DeBabelizer” for personal data. That’s a tool we used in the old days to translate graphic file formats to work with our local platform and toolset. It was essential in the days before consolidation and cross-platform graphic software. The prospect of having to unscramble my personal data is not comforting. The only reason to have a DeBabelizer is that one is surrounded by Babel.
Movements like data portability are largely a matter of metaphors and memes. The technology has to be very simple to actually work. The extent to which the meme is highly contagious within the general user population is the extent of the movement’s success. My contribution to the conversation is to measure the liquidity of personal data. For instance, I can imagine trading liquidity for higher value. But I’d like to know when I’m entering into that contract.
One CommentAs someone trapped in the locked down world of enterprise software during the working day, I often think about the nature and rationale for the lock. Generally, people adapt to whatever environment they’re in, and I’ve adapted to the limited, crippled environment in which I have to get work done.
More and more, applications that used to be written in-house are being brought in from the outside, particularly around employee benefits, expense tracking and performance reviews. These are general business functions where outside shops always provide a better software solution than the in-house one. All of these vendor provided solutions are Web-based and are integrated into corporate network identity management systems. In many cases, employee data is stored with the outside vendor. This is a trend that will only accelerate.
One of the locks on the corporate desktop is Microsoft. MS Office rules the roost, it’s the conduit through which all work and communication occurs. A consequence of the lockdown is that change and innovation happens at a very slow rate. In part, this is due to the installed software model of most corporate desktops. Managing tens of thousands of geographically dispersed desktop computers is a highly complex task. Complexity is reduced by simplifying the systems, and eliminating outside influences.
Imagine how much cost and complexity could be reduced if all enterprise applications were delivered via the web. The economics dictate that installed corporate applications must migrate to the web. Or to quote Steve Gillmor from 2005, Office is dead. Some version of this story is at the bottom of the business case for Ray Ozzie’s Office Live. Many have made the case that this software delivery model only makes sense for the SOHO market. Actually it makes even more sense for very large corporations.
So how does this relate to Yahoo? Years of operating in the highly constrained enterprise environment has drawn the boundaries of Microsoft’s imagination. Microsoft needs Yahoo to teach it how to dance to that crazy new music all the kids dig. Once enterprise applications are delivered via the web, the speed of innovation will increase. The surrounding web-based consumer application space is already filled with more powerful tools than the enterprise, particularly in the area of collaboration and knowledge management. Flickr and Delicious are tremendous knowledge management tools. Ray Ozzie sees the change is gonna come, and makes the big move that will help them get ready.
Nicholas Carr’s Big Switch makes the case for the move from the hard drive to the cloud and Matt Ritchtel’s piece in today’s NY Times summarizes. Can Microsoft trade in its lead boots for a new set of led boots? Perhaps Curtis Mayfield and Sam Cooke said it best: People get ready, a change is gonna come.
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I liked this article by Kevin Kelly so much I thought about copying the whole thing in this blog post. And I suppose I could have taken credit for it by changing the font, or maybe the color of the font, and calling it appropriation like Sherrie Levine or Richard Prince. Copying, reproduction and appropriation are tricky concepts, but Kelly makes some nice progress in thinking through value in the age of digital reproduction.
I particularly liked this quote:
When copies are super abundant, they become worthless. When copies are super abundant, stuff which can’t be copied becomes scarce and valuable.
When the product is digital, it is in its core, super abundant. Kelly’s essay looks for value in other places, in what he calls the “generative.” He defines these as kinds of things that can’t be copied, like trust, immediacy, authenticity, etc. For instance, we will pay for the container that we like. A book exists in many forms, sometimes the traditional hardcover format is just what we want. Other times a digital version is what we need when we’re searching for a particular piece of text. The actual book doesn’t exist outside of its containers.
One reason to posit this range of new manifestations of value is to stop the legal crusades against consumer in an attempt to enforce the economics of scarcity with digital products. If we allow the digital to be abundant, what can we sell? What will have value? Television is freely distributed, it aggregates audiences and sells advertising. Most of the content sites on the web work based on this age old model.
The problem with scarcity is that it’s undemocratic. A scarce resource, if there’s a market for it, sells for a high price. Few can afford it. Mass production and mass consumption of the affordable is where real money is made. It’s that jump from industrial production and low prices to digital reproduction and no price that is confounding. Mass production and digital production will need to combine into a seamless stream of the free and the cheap.
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