J.P. Rangaswami at Reboot
The talk will be in three sections. The first will be how I see technology. The second sectino, which has to do with the cycles in which i fibve this talk. At least in anglo saxon cultures, you speak of the sesssion after lunch as the "graveyard talk" .;.. it;'s not an easy thign to do. So I thought I would talk about htings that I discover in the graveyard: in a few years to come; preferably tomorrow; preferably today. This may irrriatate some people. It may insult some people. I just want to say these are my personal opinions. they are not the views of my bank. And I don't necessarily believe I am right either. I'm not stupid enough to believe my own propaganda. I'm just sharing things that occur to me, things I think must die (laughter). I'm going to end that session with some of the things thsat should live. And I]ll attack the renaissance theme (of the show) by seeing what it is we are re-discovering.
What have we actually seen these last twenty, thirty, forty years? I repeat the theme of markets being conversations. Because it's critical to the rest of this pitch.
About twenty years ago a guy named Kenichi Ohmae, in a book called The Borderless World, spoke of three drivers: globalization, disintermediation and the Internet. But the World Wide Web hadn't been created yet. The idea of offshoring and outsourcing and the world getting flatter hadn't occured yet. The disintermediation that the Web would provide had not yet begun to happen. But Ken was a pretty clever guy, and he could see it. And want you to know that these things themselves are not new. these were not predicted by Nostradamus. but tyhese were drivers that were connected to some other things that were happening.
[Language development at first was by mouth...] This was very hard to scale.... Whenthe written word was created you had some form of persistence. When the printed word was created, you had some form of reproduction capacity. Now with the web you actually have is the ability to transmit and share.
So sharability is at the heart of this place that we call the Web. And point to point interests me not a jot.
You can think of tefchnology history as saying, above and beyond claude shannon, and information theory and where that came from, you caould say "Well, Moore's Law has something to do with the life we live today." If we'd hadn't seen the price performance that Moore predicted in '64, ''65, some of the things we'd talked about doing, some of the things we'd talked about being able to acquire, would not have happened. The concept of network effects and what that means without Metcalfe's law, we would not understand as much. But these are real and active. I'm not going to go into depth about Moore and Metcalfe and Gilder's dilemma, as some people call it, that bandwidth will get virtually free — other than to note that these things, price performance, network effects and virtually free bandwidth, have had an impact on the things we do now, and could consider doing now. I like to htink of information rather than technology, and particular where the two meet, as having, again a sideways view that englebart and kaye and what they did, allowed us to consume structured information. The mouse, the pointer, the concept of the desktop. These things allowed us to go for direct manipulation of information, on a stream. then visicalc and wordstar and things like that allowed us to produce relatively structured information. And I will say as little as possible about unproductivity that those tools have gained us over the last twenty years. I just record the fact that human beings were suddenly empowered to produce structured data.
What the Web did was allow us to consume unstructured data. The concept of the browser, the concept of html, site pages, etcetera, allowed us to stop consuming data that was relatively unstructured in comparison with what we used to call structured data.
And what the blogosphere, the wiki, and social software do, to use Doc's term, is to make the web live. Because now we can also produce unstructured data. Right? We don't have to go to some IT department and find a FrontPage specialist, or take some 80-column card with things punched out for somebody else to encode. The smoke and mirrors are gone. The holy of holies has been torn apart. Because as individuals we have all been empowered to start consuming and producing structured and unstructured information, being able to share it and reproduce it at very low transmission costs, zero marginal reproduction costs. And these things have a lot to do with the empowerment we have.
However, despite all this, unless we understand what drives us, unless we understand the mistakes and errors we have made, we can't really take advantage of where we are going. So as a leader to discussion of the things I think are dead or dying, we need to understand that Maslow is a crock of shit. Fundamentally a hierarchical structured need is, "Frederick Taylor meets human beings."
People are not assembly line things. What makes us different is that we are different. And to try to create standardized norms of us is where evil starts stepping into organizations. It's builds where hospitals where you centralize ill people. Very clever, right? Why would people do that? You know many people die of exposure to illness while they are ill? The last place you want to spend any time is in a central hospital. That place is a production of industrial thought, not human thought.
Nitin Nohria ... created something he called the Four Driver model. Which I feel personally a lot more comfortable with. That man is born with a drive to acquire, man is born with a drive to defend, man is born with a drive to learn, and man is born with a drive to bond.
This capacity to bond was denied us because of the divide-and-conquer garbage that we were exposed to, probably for the last four or five hundred years -- and made a lot more sophistacted through the any-color-you-want-as-long-as-it's-black assembly line production factory approach to humanity. And it doesn't scale. It doesn't work.
We've been living with things we shouldn't have been living with, which were the contstrainst of thinking and technology over the last 150 years or so. The thing that Nohria did, that was different than Maslow, is that he didn't say this was sequential. These work in parallel. Or drives to bond, learn, acquire and defend all act at the same time. And they consist of different intensities at different times of the day.
So understand that that's what we are. That bonding — being able to have feedback loops for what other people think of us, being able to rate, getting the peer respect. These are not brand new things that our children have discovered, or that the open source movement have discovered. We used to have it: the instinct to bond. But we were denied it. We were isolated. And through that usilation we discovcreatedered a whole lot of other vey painful things.
Three things that I believe are going to hold us up, which I will not spend any time on because they are not easily classifiable as dead — and I want to talk about dead things — are:
First, the Internet, in terms of Net Neutrality. If we allow the evils that people think of today, as to how to make the network stupid or not stupid as the case may be... But rather than the network saying where information goes, we decide, and tell the information, which the tells the network, which is essentially stupid. But unless you buy that and understand that... again, this is not new. David Isenberg, it's probably fifteen years, at least ten years since he wrote that. We seem to have forgotten it since we have gotten used to vendor lock-in. We got used to not being able to do things and believing that is normal. Actually the renaissance is more important than rebirth. It is not nascent or something new. it is actually getting back to us as a community the things we used to have. Because technology has caught up, and the price points and performance points are there. Now we have the opportunity to engage.
The second element is identity. If you go to many eastern countries, identity is not about who I am, because the I is very unusual,. Identity is about what I belong to. Identity is a statement of the community that I belong to. Identity is a statement of things that I will associate with me, that empower me as a result of bvelonging to something. Identity is not individual. And I will come to privacy as a result of that because this becmes an issue.
There are many things you can use identity for. But if you understand that even a passport, three hundred or four hundred years ago, used to say "I know this person. Will you please look out for him." Not "These are his permissions and these are the things he can do and this is what he needs a visa for." None of that stuff. It was elective to say, "Since I know you and I know this person, look after this guy. He's a good guy." It was a trusted domain-type statement. And then say, "If he needs anything, if he's ill, if he needs some food, if he needs shelter, help him out." That's what the passport used to be. Look what it's become. And we've allowed this to happen. We've allowed things to be taken away from us, rather than saying "Let's build new things." I only want us to get back what we had.
Okay, that's number one. I'm now in the graveyard.
The first death is device lock-in. Imagine today most of you have phones. But when I was growing up in India, it was bakelite, black... any color you like as long as it's black. It was rented from the phone company. I couldn't even buy that device. And it took some years before it became color. I could choose to have a pink phone, or a white phone. It became years before I could say I could buy my phone, because I could only buy it from the phone company. And so over a period of something like thirty years — from "you can only rent it from the phone company" to "you can buy it at a service station or a supermarket." That is a change. But there are still countries today where the only phone you can get is from the phone company, and you don't own the title. This device lock-in is evil.
At our bank we tell people it doesn't matter what PC you are using or what laptop you are using, we will sort out the security, we will sort out the firewall, the confidentiality etcetera. Instead of having to say "Thou shalt not use anything except my computers." This is what has changed.
Can you imagine my telling people, "You cannot use your own pen." Or, "You can't use your own voice."
The devices that people are going to have, that people will elect to use — PDA vs. phone vs. laptop, palmtop, desktop or whatever — (are going to be) what people are comfortable with. We have to design software that is agnostic to that set of devices. That is agnostic to the nature of the connect. Whether it is hard lines, whether it's wireless, whether it's Wimax or alphabet soup. It shouldn't matter — Bluetooth, greentooth — what you provide as a device (should be like) a person's own pen. You want to use a fat fountain pen ... you use what you are comfortable with. We have to stop this process of communications devices being locked in either to a form of communication or to a vendor.
We've seen it happen with writing. We've seen it happen with phones. It is only a matter of time before it happens with computers. It has to happen. So the first death is that of device lock-in.
The second death may irritate some people. It is the death of marketing. Where is Hugh when I need him in case I'm wearing his shirt. This is (garbled). We can go from this concept of customer relationship management (CRM), which is just a nice way of saying "customer exploitation". To say it's not targeted selling we need. We need targetted buying. We have to invert that pyramid to say "I, as a consumer want to able to discover things that will help me buy. And not have you sell to me." The role of sales is to make it easier to buy. (Garbled.) What does that really mean?
[Power supply went out.]
The issue is that, more than anything eslse, when I want to buy something, then I want recommendations. I am far more interested in knowing what people I trust think about something and aggregating that, than I am in some central control of inventory telling me what I would expect them to tell me, which is "Everything in my inventory is good". We've had that problem with independent financial advisors (for ages). We've had that problem with, when you go to a car lot and the only thing they'll sell you is what they've got there.
It changes. It changes because of the Web. It changes because your cost of discovery is that much lower. It changes because you can get many opinions that you could not get before. But marketing then, from a central "We will put these messages out and you will listen" (perspective) has fundamentally died.
The next element that has died, and this may irritate more people, I'll give a quota on marketing. Because again it is about how all marketing up until now has been about attention, picking up your eyeballs — how people can get their product acrss to you, rather than how you can get your intentions known to them. And again, this is something which, the man himself is sitting out here, or at least one of the men himself.
But this is important because we used to be able to do it. When you sat in a small community, and you didn't have mobility, you didn't have written words, how did you buy things? How did you trade things? You traded things by talking to people you trusted — markets are conversations again — they recommended things, they gave you their experience. And then you bought. The process of making the trade, when you buy the hole and not the drill, because you are not interested in that drill yet — you are telling other people you have a hole, and other people tell you "I'll solve that hole this way" or "I created that hole this way" and that's what you buy.
We've got it all mixed up. And this is post-Taylor, post-MacLuhan nonsense. Because this is the way the last hundred years have rolled out. Technology has caught up. We don't have to do this any more.
The next thing that has died is privacy. I am sick to death of seeing articles in the press telling me that the Semantic Web is going to kill the individual and his privacy because suddenly we have made it easier to connect the bits that have already been out there. You tell Generation M, the twelve-to-twenty year olds or whatever, that they should be worried abour privacy, that they shouldn't be posting their personal photos on Flickr, they shouldn't be talking about their interests in Facebook, they shouldn't be saying what music they listen to on LastFM. They don't think that way because they don't have this convoluted idea about privacy.
If you go to India where they sleep six, seven people to a room, because they don't have the same physical flat or accommodation space, yes,your concept of your own personal space and your privacy is different. We only had one PC, if that, to cover a whole community, and everyone used it. Then you wouldn't be sitting around and making these assertions about individual space the same way.
And people didn't have this in the past, when they lived in smaller houses, when they didn't have personal storage space identified. There is a big reason why I am worried about (this) and why these concepts of personal privacy have died. Because the garbage of digital rights management (DRM) is being sold to us a lot at a time, in order to create walled gardens of information that we didn't want to build walls around in the first place. What is the risk of some of this information being made available? Because I am choosing to put it out there. If I choose not to, that is my choice.
If you want to keep a secret, don't tell anyone, right? (Laughter.)
To build a way that says "Information starts closed" and then you open it out selectively, sells chips, sells storage, sells software integrators, etcetera. Data mining. The idea of integrating between two vendors' systems, and you pay money to take your own information out of one vendor's system to pass through another, and they make you feel bad that you're trying to do this in the first place... It's your information! We should not have had this lock-in. Not when our community standards would not have allowed this to happen. We paid for it because of the past. But we don't have to pay for it any more. We have to rethink about what privacy means.
It doesn't mean that everyone's medical records are put out on the Internet. And