Spirited Thought

Lucky Ian Wylie, Fast Company writer, had a ride in BMW’s newest M5 – a 190mph 507hp v10, something you could find in a pimped Honda, but probably not appointed with the same kind of leather and fancy little button that unleashes the last 100hp without artificial accelerant. At 20,000 units per year, the 500 person M division cranks out 40 cars each and results, coincidently, in a 40% higher sticker price (over $100K for an M5).

BMW M cars are created for the auto enthusiast – the BMW early adopter. Today’s M5 informs tomorrow’s 5-series. Impressively enough, BWM assembles the distinguished M models alongside the rest of the fleet. It shows the companies ability to not only develop the next generation bimmer in a skunkworks fashion, but also integrate those innovations into their production process. BMW has long identified consumers willing to pay for leading edge R&D by offering an intentionally modified version of their regular autos – a marriage made in heaven, hopefully one without speed limits.

Creativity is a big deal to me. It is central to how my mind works. For me creativity is playful – there is no question that the kid in me is alive and well, it just so happens that the playgrounds change and I have discovered more of them.

I was musing on one of the author descriptions in The Big Moo – Hugh Macleod. Among other things Hugh spends his time drawing cartoons on the back of business cards. My first thought was, what an interesting use of limitation. Anyone who has taken a decent college level art class will known what I mean.

I remember back to the summer of 2003 when I entered the Rhode Island School of Design pre-college program. My focus was photography, but they expose you to a sample curriculum to help explore the possibilities. One of the best parts was looking at the illustration majors. Every piece of work was enormous, sometimes 5 x 7 feet. It impressed upon me that I did not have to feel confined by someone else’s notion of size – in this case the 19 x 24 Canson Bristol pad. So, Hugh’s decision to work with a smaller format evoked a similar inspiration.

The back of a business card is one of the best places to take notes about anything. It is small, so thoughts need to be crisp – a creative distillation process in of it. If I use my card and it is ever lost, I have a chance of actually getting it back.

What I love most about Hugh’s business card limitation is that is artificial. He can obviously render ideas and I bet has done so on larger pieces of media. It is a creative concept. What happens when we place artificial boundaries around our creative process? Does it help focus our ideas and expressions? Do we lose something that the RISD illustration majors are gaining? If we consciously impose a set of rules, do we need to pop back out to make sure those rules still apply and are helping and not hurting or is it the fact that we are conscious of imposing the rules that keeps us aware that we are not really limited?

Remarkable is my new favorite word, inspired by a new book I picked up, The Big Moo. I never read The Purple Cow, but I have to believe it has to do with being remarkable. A purple cow does not seem to cut it anymore, and so, we have the big moo.

The cover captured my attention, “Stop Trying to Be Perfect and Start Being Remarkable.” It has 33 authors some of which I have read before and others which were foreign. The idea that I would get to read remarkable stories from 33 thinkers, sold it. Opening the book on a cross-country flight reconfirmed it. All the profits go to three charities, the Acumen Fund, Juvenile Diabetes Research Foundation International and Room to Read. Another thing that got me was that readers are invited to copy the pages of the book, similar to open source, helping build a community about being more than good enough.

I never thought of myself as striving for perfection. To be honest, I was never shooting for remarkable either – seems too easy. Godin points out, if you do something that makes someone remark then by definition it is remarkable – see? Too simple. On the other hand I feel the sentiment loud and clear and The Big Moo reminds me to stoke the flame and not mind standing up and out.

The notion that Google does not know what is doing is laughable. Peter Day from the BBC kicked off a recent article with that very premise – that Google’s lack of obvious direction might be the source of their genius.

Everyone can see that Google has enormous ad revenue allowing them to apparently dabble, but there is no way they have lost focus on being the dominant leader of internet search and targeted ads. Google’s management has to have a clear vision keeping their amazing progression on course. Without it, they would be looking to buy General Mills cereal.

There is elegance in Google’s ability to appear so unfocused. I have to think some of that is due to their accelerated growth – strong ad revenue, acquiring top talent and strategic market positioning decisions that help explore future opportunities.

Most large IT companies are able to spend money on acquiring companies and research and development. Not all of those investments reveal aspects of the company’s strategy. Google’s current business is heavily focused on internet ads. If they were not investing in ad supportive technology, talent / intellectual property or market position opportunities they would have a problem. Their stock price is all about the oil field they tapped into and the promise that they will continue to be a company of bankable innovation. I have no doubt they will, but spending any time thinking that this is all by accident, that Google does not know what its doing, is foolish.

I have always been torn about adding HTML to my blog posts. Clearly, there are times when you need it to point off to an image or to format text for emphasis. I know other markup exists, like Markdown, Textile or even Wikitext, but those carry the same undesirable characteristic – content ends up being marked up. It is probably not that big of a deal, it all stems from the question of if I will ever want to extract the content and place it in a context where <insert your favorite markup> is not interpreted. My goal is to automatically tag keywords with the right URLs, reducing the amount of HTML markup in my posts and better, more centralized, link management.

Being a WordPress and PHP newbie, I thought I might write a plug-in to help accomplish this goal. I went through the “How to write a simple WordPress plugin” tutorial and realized it would be pretty simple to use that approach the problem.

I had a feeling that I was not alone in wanting such a plug-in so after I did a little coding, I did a search and found SH-Autolink. I was both bummed and excited – I really wanted to use writing the plug-in to get more familiar with PHP and after reading some comments about the plug-in, I was not going to have to write it from scratch! Stevie’s plug-in had the same issue I first ran into, if the text of the post included the keyword as part of existing anchor tags, then the string replace would break the markup.

So, I merged my code with Stevie’s to get the best of both worlds – my better string replacement and his data management / administration interface. (As a side note, I do think it is curious that he decided to specify the protocol of a link, but maybe I am not thinking the whole problem through.)

My first real introduction to email was a local BBS run be a local users group in Connecticut ~1990. In 1994, I went off to college and was, excitedly, one of less than a dozen PC users on a Mac dominated campus – email was a given and I remember being able to reach out to friends who were now scattered at other institutions. By ~1999, email was no longer my favorite medium.

My once eager relationship with my mail reader is no longer – the technology supporting email has stalled. The software community has failed to solve the real problems of information overload and left it to the users to develop information management skills – the process of scanning, deleting, staring, sorting, archiving, categorizing, building filters, workflows and, of course, reading. We have made huge improvements on reducing malware, viruses and spam before the email even reaches the In Box. However, between email, news and the million other things that suddenly have content syndication, current tooling fails to deliver necessary increases in productivity.

In November 2005 issue of Communications of the ACM, Business Email: The Killer Impact says there is no problem, with only 2% of people saying it is prohibitive to their job. I would argue that people tend not to know how productive they can be. The article is worth the read, it is a great survey of how people use and perceive email.

IBM has plenty of know how and research in the space. Contrary to popular belief, Lotus Notes is actually not an email client, but a platform on which database driven applications can be developed, it just so happens that world class email, calendaring and other collaborative tools have been built upon it. Lotus Notes email has the usual email management accoutrements (e.g. folders, filters, search etc.) and tons of other things that most clients lack. For example, wearing my developer hat, I can easily hack up my In Box view to categorize emails based on if it was sent only TO me, to me but CCing others, or if my email address was in the CC. But all of this rich customization and workflow management does not solve the real problem. At the end of the day I am modifying a client so I can filter more efficiently.

Projects like Remail (reinventing email) identified some core challenges and proposed some ideas to help induce a course correction. So, there is no lack of thinking in this space – IBM is not alone.

Google’s release of GMail highlighted at least three really important design points. First, highly interactive, simple, web applications should be what people strive for. Second, stop deleting and managing mail, just save and search. Third, and most pertinent to this line of thinking, collapse the In Box, collapse the conversation. GMail uses a "stack of cards" approach to viewing a threaded discussion, showing the most recent email only with easy access to each email that came before. In the In Box view conversations are displayed as one entry instead of individual back and forth transactions in a date/time sorted view. There is something delightful about it – different from the threaded view in Lotus Notes which has never done much for me. The tool is prescribing a best practice of helping me filter.

Google recently offered a feed reader, Google Reader, which is actually very nice. Simple, direct and lets a user scan their news quickly. It lacks any real filtering. I have to believe they will introduce some of text analytics and theme clustering aptly found in their Google News offering.

Assuming the rate and volume of information will continue to increase, the industry really needs to change the “users will learn to filter” approach. Successful people learn and build strategies to thrive in the information loaded world, but why should they have to? More importantly, instead of approaching the problem with our Darwin hat, why not enable any user, especially users who lack computer savvy and information triaging strategies, to consume thousands more new pieces of information every day. The Internet allows everyone with a PC and a network connection the ability to author. The challenge is to empower everyone with the ability to read it all.

Ambient devices are seductive. They seem like they would have so much potential. I have an Orb from Ambient Devices – currently listening to a stock market index – currently yellow green. I got my dad the Executive Dashboard, also from Ambient Devices, which lets you slide in different displays in a very retro needle display. He can actually monitor three different channels, while I can only deal with one. Philips has been advertising some of their new vision for the future with flat TVs with Ambilight – where the dominant color on the screen is projected to the sides of the TV.

The thing about ambient information is the need for context. My Orb, at best, is relevant to me, because I know what the colors represent and what channel it is listening to. When visitors come over and check it out, they have no idea what it represents. So in this case, the primary owner provides the context.

Now, my dad’s Executive Dashboard has three channels that can be switched up by changing the little card which both tune the channel but also provide the visual meter. For example, he can monitor local traffic congestion by slipping in the display/card. The problem here is that there are three places to insert the card and all cards look similar and all the needles look similar. Suddenly you need to actually read which card are you viewing, what is the scale of the card (temperature, percent, high, low etc) and then where the needle is pointing on that scale – we moved further away from ambient to get a more retro matter of fact feed listener. This device loses all the intuitiveness of the Orb, where as the owner, I provide context to the meaning. In my dad’s case, his device provides the context, but the user needs to actually help build the context by reading what is being displayed – hardly ambient.

Philips Ambilight offers a better application than either of the above. Philips is actually running an algorithm (pretty simple) to pull the dominant color and use LEDs (guessing) to virtually extend that color off the edge of the display and on to the surrounding wall. I have seen this ad in print and on TV and said, “that is dumb.” Then I start looking around and realizing, they might actually have something. First, the context is provided by the TV. Second, the viewer does not need to interpret the ambient information. The context is set by the media playing on the display, the display provides the ambient interpretation and the viewer simply does what they have always done. I bet a month after the owner buys one of these TVs, they no longer notice the ambient effect. I certainly do not look at the Orb all the time to get the current pulse on the stock market, but I know when it has changed.

Ambient information is a challenging space. The fundamental question is, what can be projected to a user that enhances their experience. Clearly, the better the ambient effect ties into the context of the activity the user is experiencing the more useful and apt to be used it is. Additionally, the easier it is to interpret the information the better. Context might actually help here, but if the ambient display takes too long to read (in this case not just text, lets include taste, touch, smell) then it is really more of a dashboard which shows you information around a given context but still requires you to make sense of it. (e.g. a stock trading dashboard will show you the indexes, your portfolio, the trends, the market, the news etc. but it is up to the trader to make sense of it) There is a sweet spot in making ambient information palatable and while we have examples today, none of them have really penetrated the global psyche.

I always find it interesting when internal memos allegedly leak. It is like reality TV, what actually happens inside of those corporate walls. So Microsoft’s Bill Gates and Ray Ozzie star in this most recent memo exposure where “Internet services” services are seen as the next serious disruption.

They point to a variety of threats to Microsoft’s Windows and Office franchises, from advertising-supported Internet businesses like those being pursued by Google and Yahoo to, as Mr. Gates notes, a new "grass-roots adoption and popularization model" that has made it easier for start-up companies to reach large audiences at low cost. John Markoff, November 9, 2005, New York Times

It amazes me that everyone thinks this movement is about advertising. Advertising is the bread and butter for a Google or a Yahoo. It is not how they will grow the company. The key, which is alluded to by Gates is in the grass-roots activism garnered by the survivors of the dotcoms. Google owns the minds of the people – no one hates them or their products. I have heard people refer to companies like Google as being young and destined to a crawl like everyone else, a fatal miscalculation in my opinion.

Companies like Google happen to have sizable revenue streams because of the relevant impressions they deliver for advertisers. Those impressions have also captured an intent audience, performing intimate tasks like reading email, sharing photos, searching their desktops and instant messaging. Small companies can stir up hype like no other. Large companies have to work harder to show they are nimble. Microsoft is a big company. The notion that they missed the AJAX ship is foolishness. Anyone in the space can point to the technical underpinnings at least as far back as five years. So this is not about technical capability either. There is more to Google than AJAX. There is more to “Internet services” than the servers or middleware running on them.

The document written by Mr. Ozzie, titled "The Internet Services Disruption," criticizes Microsoft for moving too slowly to capitalize on technologies it developed and for failing to capitalize on industry trends. John Markoff, November 9, 2005, New York Times

The ability to capitalize on industry trends is something larger companies do in strategic commanding ways – as leaders of the industry. Big companies are like the US military, ready for two full scale wars on two different fronts ready to deploy at any time, they rally the battalions and drive a strategy that in 12-24-36 months time they own a significant portion of the mindshare and cash flow. In the mean time the world is infatuated with Google and their lab offerings, their impressive ability to attract talent and substantial bank account. The best part of where Google sits is that they can actually dabble in these disruptive activities without losing their core business, ad revenue.

Google is disruptive, but in the best way possible. We might actually drive to a new model of simplicity that makes IT really useful.

I wonder, how scared is Microsoft of facing Google as a competitor in the services arena?

So it looks like the iPod Nano lawsuit has gone global, and yet, they seem to be flying off the shelves. Does that mean I can buy a Nano today and join the lawsuit? Who doesn’t get protective shells for this stuff anyway? I mean, it is razor thin (0.27 inches) and partially made of plastic!? So light that you might leave it in your pocket and run it through the wash.

“Apple’s iPod Nano has sold in record numbers around the world, just as it did in the US,” he [Steve Berman, lead attorney] explained. “It seems that wherever the Nano is sold, problems with the defective design soon follow.”

“If I had known the truth about the problem, I would never have purchased a Nano,” he [Ben Jennings, one of the named plaintiffs] said.

Jennings wanted to know the truth about the problem – I don’t know that he can handle the truth. The truth is that sometimes products do not perform exactly as expected. I just checked out one of my old cellphones – cracks, scratches and paint chipping off. I promise I never used it as a hockey puck. Maybe this was a case of mismatches expectations. Apple is well know for delivering a superior product with world class experience. Jennings seems to have experienced less than that, which I agree is bad, but there seems to be tons of people who do not care – they are buying them anyway.

Maybe I need to buy one so I can relate.

Sirringhau’s research is in the area of organic transistors – plastics. Right away you would think, how will this ever be mass produced? Two words, inkjet printing. This kind of stuff is fascinating.

“One of the things you learn when you transfer technology out of a university and into a commercial environment is that it’s more difficult and takes longer than you think,” says Mr. Serringhaus. “And it’s not always the things which work in the lab which makes sense for a company.” - Lab Talent: Henning Serringhaus: Going Organic, Red Herring, Oct. 24, 2005

The challenge of moving technology out of the lab and into the commercial world is shared by many. Barring issues with the innovation itself, it should be easier. The fact that it is not screams opportunity!

Mental todo: How can we accelerate the shift from lab to enterprise to deliver merging technology sooner – speeding time to value?