Business of Software Blog

I predict a riot: facebook, social groups, symbols and jargon

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It’s a human instinct to form groups. Whether it’s families, football teams, churches or schools we have an in-built urge to group together and connect with others. We are social animals: this is why social networking sites are so popular. It’s not due to technology; it’s because they fulfil a basic human need.

We do more than simply passively form groups though. We adopt symbols to identify group members. Whether it’s through clothing, anthems or jargon, we encourage the cohesion of our group and are hostile to outsiders. We over-emphasize the similarity of people within our group, and exaggerate the differences of those outside it. Blacks and whites, Catholics and Protestants, Yankees and Red Sox: there’s much more similarity between – and less within – these groups than we want to admit.

Facebook, myspace and other social networking sites let us form groups in new ways. As we group in new ways, we’ll find new ways of marking out our groups and defining them in opposition to others. Initially, this will just reflect hostility and competition in the real world. Soccer club Everton have an ‘Anti-Everton People’ facebook group (‘for all people who hate the TOFFEES throughout the world’), presumably populated by fans of rival Liverpool. Manchester United’s captain has a facebook network dedicated to him. The ‘Gary Neville is a Wanker’ network has 14,413 members and 3,115 wall posts.

As the internet makes it easy to form groups, it also makes it easy to subvert them. Anybody can pretend to be a member of your group, and harm it from within. The ‘Anti-Everton People’ group is now a closed one because of attacks from Everton defenders.

The fragility of social groups makes jargon and symbols more important. You need to distinguish those who really do belong from those just pretending. If you’re a paedophile sharing child porn then you want to be very sure that your friends are who they claim to be and not federal agents. Customs, symbols and language are one way of doing that.

As technology catches up with human behaviour, we’ll find new ways to antagonise as well as befriend. We’ll also find new ways of protecting our groups from outsiders, and to infiltrate others’ groups.

Here’s one thing that might happen. Currently, networks on Facebook are defined by individuals who have self-selected. You place yourself in the groups you think you belong to. In real life, there is another way to form groups: other people can categorise us. Sooner or later, this will happen in the virtual world too. We will have individual, private tags (an enemies list, for example). We will also be able to socially tag others. If enough people place you in a particular group, then you are tagged. If people consistently label you as ‘asshole’, ‘Manchester United supporter’ or ‘fun to be with’ then that label will stick.

Right now, words are the weapons of choice for competing social groups. But who knows what Facebook widgets, APIs and other new tools will bring. I predict a riot …

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Porridge, Wonko the Sane and restrooms: the good, the bad and the ugly of user assistance

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In the fourth book of Douglas Adams’s Hitchhiker’s Guide to the Galaxy trilogy, Wonko the Sane is a hermit who lives on Santa Monica beach. He has flipped the world inside out. He lives on the ‘outside’ in a small room, while the walls of his room contain the rest of the world on the ‘inside’

Why does he live there? Here’s an extract from the book:

Hold stick near centre of its length. Moisten pointed end in mouth. Insert in tooth space, blunt end next to gum. Use gentle in-out motion.

‘It seemed to me,’ said Wonko the Sane, ‘that any civilization that had so far lost its head as to include a set of detailed instructions for us in a packet of toothpicks was no longer a civilization in which I could live and stay sane.’

This is a good example of instructions at their worst. Bad instructions are superfluous, cluttering and patronising.

Instructions can be necessary though. They’re often needed to recover from bad design. Here’s the sign above the washbasins in the rest rooms of the Pitt building in Cambridge:

Doors with instructions to ‘pull’ or ‘push’, washing machines and telephones all are common examples of products whose failed design forces necessary but cluttered instructions for everyday tasks.

While we shouldn’t need written guidance on how to open doors or use taps, there are tasks we can’t reasonably expect to work out from first principles or by trial and error. In these cases, we need written instructions.

Designers often avoid text almost pathologically, but written instructions are a good way of communicating complex, conditional and interdependent tasks. A sentence can be worth a thousand pictures, as you’ll appreciate if you’ve ever tried to build Ikea furniture.

At their best, instructions are simple, elegant and built in to the design. They’re not glued prominently on as an afterthought or tucked away somewhere that nobody can find them.

Making porridge is a good example of an infrequent task that requires instructions:

This is an excellent example of good instructions. They’re where you need them: directly on the packet so they can’t be separated from the porridge. They’re clear, well laid out and tell you what you need to know. Also, note the ‘pour milk to here’ mark. The instructions could just have said ‘add 180ml of milk to your bowl’ but a bit of thinking and good design means that the instructions go beyond telling you what to do; they actually help you do it.

So how does this translate into software? First, don’t include instructions just because you can. Every extra word is clutter: if you don’t need it, cut it out. Second, instructions are sometimes a work-around for bad design. This happens, but clearly it’s a last resort. Third, good instructions are often part of the product. Rather than simply telling you what to do, they help you do it or even do it for you.

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The inevitable death of the ecosystem

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Ever since James F Moore’s 1993 article in the Harvard Business Review it’s been fashionable to talk about business ecosystems. A good example is the Microsoft ecosystem. Microsoft is the shark and third party tools are the pilot fish that eat Microsoft’s leftovers.

This analogy is wrong. Microsoft isn’t the shark - it’s a greedy fisherman. With one hand it throws bread crumbs to encourage the little fishes to grow while with the other it trawls the bottom of the ocean for fish large enough to eat. It catches the fish, but its nets scrape the ocean floor bare, ruining the ecosystem for decades to come.

Microsoft have abandoned their benign tending of the ecosystem. They have moved from helping it flourish to harvesting it. You can see this in many areas. In the developer tools market, rather than providing a set of core development tools they’ve decided to try to flog us bug tracking, source control, unit testing, load testing, enterprise modelling and collaboration suites. These were markets already well served by good, affordable third party tools. For the sake of a few thousand dollars per seat off enterprise customers too lazy or scared to investigate the other possibilities, Microsoft have shut down that part of the ecosystem.

In SQL Server, Microsoft are open about this, at least in private. Senior people in the SQL Server team have always made it clear to me that they want to put everything any SQL developer or DBA could ever want in the box. This will inevitably shut down the SQL Server ecosystem too.

Red Gate - the company I work for - is in a better situation than most. We’ve been going a while, we’re profitable, our revenues are growing and the people who work here are outstanding. Microsoft’s intentions, however, are clear: they want to own the entire SQL Server ecosystem. Anybody left standing in 5 years time will be there despite Microsoft’s efforts, not because of them. Although some companies - Red Gate among them - will survive the cull, many won’t. I do not envy the fragile companies in this market.

Microsoft’s actions are as futile as they are frustrating. They will trawl with their nets, destroy the ecosystem but reap little for themselves. Business intelligence, gaming, mobile phones, business accounting, CRM, development tools and SQL Server third party tools are all areas where Microsoft are now competing with their one-time partners. Judging by their current efforts, Microsoft will not win in many -if any - of the areas they are competing in.

The ecosystem won’t be destroyed overnight: it will wither slowly. Third parties will start to leave the ecosystem and they won’t be replaced. When entering new markets, companies will think about joining the Microsoft ecosystem and then won’t. By the time Microsoft realise what is happening it will be too late.

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The Golden Guy (Kawasaki) on what he funds, how Truemors changed him, and his Microsoft fantasy

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There’s no truth to the rumor that there are bracelets circulating around Silicon Valley inscribed with WWGD (What Would Guy Do), but it’s not inconceivable. Guy Kawasaki has an uncanny knack of being at the right place at the right time with the right strategy. He describes it as “Guy’s Golden Touch: Whatever is Gold, Guy Touches.”

Considering the traffic on his “How to Change the World” blog, and the success of his Truemors site, a lot of people are hoping the Guy Touch rubs off on them.

Guy will be a featured speaker at Business of Software 2007, October 29-30 in San Jose (www.businessofsoftware.org). He was kind enough to answer some questions from Business of Software on the current VC environment, evangelism, and what he would do if he was on the Microsoft board.

BoS: You write and speak extensively about innovation. Where are you seeing innovation today in the software industry?

Kawasaki: Most of the innovation is happening with "two guys/gals in a garage" creating web sites with MySQL, Ruby, and other open-source tools.

BoS: Where is the software industry in most need of innovation?

Kawasaki: Innovation is needed everywhere you look. It's just that some places look like they're already "owned" by large companies. That's a fallacy.

BoS: You’re a VC. If two guys/gals in a garage came to you and said they wanted to create a new search engine, would you fund them if they were persuasive enough?

Kawasaki: Based on the Google phenomenon, we'd certainly take a look at it, but it would be an uphill battle because there's already Google. Of course, there was already Yahoo! and Inktomi when Google was starting. This is the conundrum of venture capital: You never know.

BoS: What attributes are you looking for in terms of technology and management for companies you fund?

Kawasaki: I look for unproven people in unproven markets with unproven business models because this is where I think the big hits occur. However, I've yet to prove this theory.

BoS: You set up Truemors for $12,000. Presumably you have people telling you similar stories and asking for millions in return. How has your experience with Truemors changed your behavior as a VC?

Kawasaki: I certainly know now what can be done in two months with $12,000. If an entrepreneur tells me that he or she needs $1 million, five engineers, and a year to build a social networking or user-generated content site, I will throw them out.

BoS: Would you have funded Truemors?

Kawasaki: No. It didn't need enough capital, and the CEO has a dubious amount of management experience.

BoS: Are we in a bubble?

Kawasaki: You bet we are. Isn't life great?

BoS: So why are you still investing?

Kawasaki: Because hope springs eternal and because venture capital firms are not set up to short private companies. Just because we're in a bubble doesn’t mean that every company will fail.

BoS: You are perhaps the world's best-known evangelist for your work at Apple. Is evangelism still effective?

Kawasaki: More so than ever because more companies are starting with smaller, if not non-existent, marketing and advertising budgets. When you have $20 million to introduce a product, you seldom rely on evangelism.

BoS: You often make fun of Windows in your speeches. But Apple still isn't one of the top 5 PC manufacturers in the world, and you won't see many IPhones replacing the Blackberry on Wall Street. You've already worked at Apple (twice), so suppose you were on the board of Microsoft sitting on your 90%+ market share. What would you do?

Kawasaki: I would be wondering whether I should buy a house in Montana or the south of France --or maybe both. Or which Gulfstream would look best in my hangar. And why the company whose board I sit on can't seem to hire designers despite the infinite money it has.

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