Beyond Telecom: Bob Frankston looks past the past

DS: You've started talking about The Opportunity Dynamic. Can you unpack that for us?

BF: Value comes from creating opportuntity, which can anticipate any specific solution. So you have to build oppoertunities into your plans. What you discover is that people don't really solve problems. They find problems to match the solutions they already have.

It's like if all you have is a screwdriver, everything looks like a screw. But if you have a lot of screws, you discover that a screwdriver is a very useful tool. The best approach comes from creating opportunities to use all kinds of tools, any way you want. You create abundance, and the opportunity follows.

DS: Let's go deeper into the dynamic as you're now describing it, by taking the example of frame construction. Specifically, Augustine Taylor in 1833, building St. Mary's church in Chicago. Cut nails had been invented in the late 1700s, and were cheap by then. Lumber was essentially limitless in the U.S. Lumber milling had also been invented. Wood could be milled into boards from logs, but boards were then thought more useful for finishing than for structure. For stucture the defaults were still mortice and tenon, notching and securing with pegs, or working with masonry and rock. Taylor replaced those with the 2x4s, 2x6s, and nails, building a frame in a way similar to what we still do today. He did it cheap and with DIY carpenters. It caught on. Suddenly one could frame anything with studs, joists, and cross members held together with nails. Old time builders called it balloon construction, because they thought it would blow away But it didn't. Instead it revolutionized construction by letting anybody build anything cheap. You want to build Tudor, or Prairie, or an office or a cabin, you'd frame it up. Now construction is perhaps the largest industry in the world. And nobody "owns" it.

BF: Right. So let's look at how you do that.

First, you can't see the opportunity unless you de-couple interpretation. Instead of saying "I need a tudor house", you say "I need a board". Now you've de-coupled. That way the board people can focus on doing the best job making boards. And the builder can concentrate on making the best house, whatever the style, or the other materials. And many kinds of manufactureers can concentrate on what they do best. And the market opens up. The old way with businesses like telecom was top down, and highly coupled. It's like deciding what the protocol is before you do anything else. All other work stops. HTML succeeded because it was good enough, and easy to adopt. If we started by trying to do that right, progress would have stopped.

Second, there is a subtle but important point here about standards, and standardization. And a good illustration with the Spanish Armada. In his book ???, ??? explains that the Spanish lost in part because their cannons were not standardized. It turns out that every ship needed cannons that matched cannonballs, and that they didn't have time to get that all sorted out before they went into battle. Meanwhile, England had standardized the mobile cannon. They designed their fleet for mobility and standardiszation. This relates to David Landis book, The Weath and Poverty of Nations (?)... (fill in here)

So standardization isn't about standards. Everybody seems to think standards rise out of people asking "what's the spec for the standard?" But it doesn't. It rises out of practical use, and the need to open opportunity. Who cares whether a 2x4 is exactly two by four? What matters is that you can nail boards together. It's not about somebody saying "We will sit down and find the right standard." The whole point of standardization is creating opportunity by decoupling the interpretation. You want to be able to do anything, not just one thing.

To take a current example: the USB power supply. Because power could be supplied through USB, it became widely used as a power supply. There was no other candidate. Nobody was in a position to say "this is the standard." It's not an ideal solution. In fact it's quite bad in some ways. But as a power supply for your phone or whatever, who cares? It works because nobody aimed at the power supply ideal in the first place.

DS: What are the roles of the IEEE, the IETF, or whatever? What is it that allows the innovation to occur without being constrained by official bodies?

BF: An example. IEEE vs. IETF vs. ICANN and the ITU.

IETF says "here's a stack. comply or don't. If you don't, please tell us." But it's okay if you don't. The beauty is that people have to be flexible. What organziation design protocols with the ? comm,and ?. That's SMTP. So things connect even if you don't ___. You can conform, but if you don't like it do something else. (need to clarify... I get the point.

DS: Not surprisingly, SMTP and other simple and flexible email protocols are what got adopted.

BF: Yes. Contrast that with X.400, from the ITU. The great intergallactic mail standard. One hundred percent of the telcos were behind it. Everything is terribly complex and incredibly coupled. Very fixed and hierarchical. Very typical of a standards body driven by the narrow interests of giant companies in locking down a future business before it even starts.

X.400 came before XML... (bunch of tech details I wish I could get). X.409 was a halfway step toward XML. It was self-parsing... (someting about parsing and text). The X.400 API committee... (garbled but important). ... said it had to go over X.25. (note... which was created by telcos so they could bill by the packet, as I recall) It was ridiculous. It was all about having to keep customers in the right silo. You couldn't move to another silo. And you had to do evedrything exactly right. This is why the X.400 business went nowhere and only a few pieces are still around.

Meanwhile, we have simple universal mail because it came out of the RFC process. (Bob, I'm winging this here, but we need to say where what we actually use came from.) No big standards bodies involved. Pure standardization.

DS: Back to standards bodies. What about ICANN?

ICANN says "Do it this way, period." You have no choice, no flexibility. It doesn't support an oppportunity dynamic. The business it opens up is minimal.

DS: IEEE?

BF: Very byzantine. Look at faux digital TV standards, which is what I call "FDHD". There's stuff in there left over from what the Media Lab did a dozen years ago. It's on top of an analog lauyer, below an analog layer, all one-way. You've got QAM. All this stuff is incredibly coupled. It's built for a few suppliers during a narrow piece of history. And it's a disaster.

DS: So we're talking about telecom here. What works and what doesn't. Like standardization vs. Standards.

BF: Yes. Standardization should arise out of what you do, with strong leadership coming from somewhere.

DS: Such as

BF: Take smart hardware makers. They design so you can put whateveer you want on something, and put it to whatever use you want. You want Windows? Fine. Linux? Fine. They make "whatever" possible.

DS: I hd a good time talking at CES to VIA people -- both people the company and customers — about all the ways their mini, micro, pico and femto ITX boards are used. They're agnostic about it, and their stuff is everywhere.

BF: On the other hand with telcos there's no eqivalent. Because they do it all. They communicate on your behalf. They build out a whole city and you pay rent to live in it. They're like Celebration — that city Disney designed and built in Florida. It was their idea of perfect living. But it was top-down. How many others of these are there?

Take cell phones. They were originally conceived as business instruments. Mobile car phones for business. You could misuse yours by making personal calls, but they were for business. In fact the whole telco distinction between work and play, is wrong from the start.

DS: This arbitrary distinction between business and home categories is antique and crazy. I know it's all about having a "premium billing event", but that's not what the market wants. And it prevents more business than it supports.

BF: You should be able to decide what service you want. But they don't allow that. They know what's best for you. And that's scarcity and lots of billing events.

DS: So let's get back to decoupling. If you're not trying to find solutions, you can change the problem you're solving. That is, you're free to solve whatever problem you like. That gives you opportunity.

But this flexibility is anathema to the old businesses that want to control it all. Look at container shipping, and all the business it supports. Yet the old shipping companies opposed it.

DS: Assignmment to readers: look up container shipping and see how it happened.

BF: And how it not-happened. It's an obvious idea, so why didn't it happen sooner? Well, the shipping companies wanted to charge differentially for content. They wanted one price and method for corn and another for a different sum of stuff. Sound familiar?

The analogy today is that the telcos want to build canals across the ocean.

This history of communications is still going on here. There was a time you weren't supposed to read the bible by yourself. The printing press created an opportunity dynamic. What you printed didn't matter.

Look at wired communication. Why wasn't there home telegraph?

DS: Why?

BF: (garbled) Remember Al Bell was supposed to be working on the harmonic telegraph. It was about multiplexing signals on a telegraph wire. It never got off the ground. Meanwhile telegraph companies were charging by the word. They could do that, because they owned the wires, and the facilities.

Before that there were the railroads. They were carriers, and established the carrier model for the wires that ran alongside them. Providing transport as service and selling it makes sense. Railroads didn't have serious competition until the 20th century. But at least you had the idea of roads expanding independent of railroads. So the railroads couldn't control that. Roads and highways could be built without having to worry about what it did to the railroad business. But what's important in terms of this is the idea that there is a service that funds transport as part of the service.

One interesting thing with telegraph is that they didn't try at first to solve the problem of getting more signals on a wire. Turned out their problem wasn't multiplexing signals at all. It was simultaneous connections. So they just ran more wires. Bigger bundles. So all this work to solve the harmonic telegraph went on, when the solution was just to run more wires. The important point is, that all is (something) a service.

So the radio came in using its own wires. And the video came in using its own wires. Then we have coupling with those. And coupling becomes the problem. Now the business is coupled to the wires. And todays telcos are like the monkey with its hand in the jar. They can't release themselves to pursue other opportunities. They're stuck.

DS: Craig Burton told me a long time ago that the most important thing for a company to learn — and the hardest — is when to leave money on the table. You're saying telcos need to do that.

Below are items from other talks... use if we find a way...

[ piont here about unicode and websites... too garbled to decipher.. worth keeping?]

BF1

How the Internet accidentally happened.

In class we studied ALOHAnet.

you know Mike Hammer? Reengineering. He knew Dan Bricklin from ? back in Israel. He and I had a seminar in some topic.. Anyway, we studied Alohanet. Very simple . asymmetric. radio one way, dial up the oher. no idea that a line was guaranteed. failure was assumed.

so metcalfe and some other people I knew put it on co-ax. and that was a class project. I sat next to ?Bob. We got 2.99 megabits. and we did some math to show that the throughput estimate was low. but who cares? the real idea was to see what you could do with it. what is it you're measuring against? what's important here is reliable connections ofver an unreliable medium, with nobody making promises. that proved out ideas that would be an Aha for the internet, as opposwed to the arpanet.

What we found was that putting a reliabhle network in the middle acftually became difficult. circuits were expensive and slow.

Using an unreliable transport solved many problems of designing for interconnecting lans. When you're crossing all these protocols, you can say, Well, we'll just ? around it. this ws a powerful idea.

We used BCPL, basic CPL, a probgramming language, very simple, with Multics, as opposed to the very complex PL1, which was mostly a commercial language.. Bhy the way, our PL1 with Multics compiled much faster than IBM's PL1. If you mash BCPL with PL1, you get C. That's what Dennis Ritchie did.

We were plaing with multitasking, and multithreading to make Multics. From our perspective, they cut a lot of corners to make Unix. It was a good tech bed for ideas, even though at first it wasn't up to tne kind of computing that multics was.

On the selling side, the Honeywell salee people made a machine muchmore expensive and complicated. If they hadn't, history would have been much different.

DS: Why Honeywell?

BF: They bought the GE Multics group. And they proceeded to completelymiss the point of multics. And that's why Multics is now of historic but not practical importance.

The problem was that Honeywell made money from memory, and chaged at the base price rather than the marginal incfremental price. Made it more expensive, when it should have been cheaper. Also Multics was made to run on a simple machine, and honeywell made theirs complicated.

BF10

maximize opportunity by focusing on all these things that might work and bet that if you do enough, something will.

DS: How do yoiu move from home networking to internetworking outside the home?

BF: Composited connectivitt from the edge. We composite the roads, right? You have to recognize that when you buy so-called broadband, you do financing in a way that you can never repay the debt. So you never get a chance to say "W've got this abundance. We paid for it. Now we've got these bundles of fibers and we'd like to use them.

You pay $50 a month and after a few months or years you've paid for the cost of installing the fiber to your house. But we keep paying on a loan that never gets paid off. We spend all this money for interenet, TV and phone, and never stop spending it. That's because we live in a cmpany town. It's like that old song "Sixteen Tons": you get another day older and deeper in debt.

DS: What do you think of Net Neutrality and other legislative efforts?

BF: If you're looking for legislation you're asking the wrong question. Net Neutrality is a syjmptom. We should address the basc problem. Which is that we've handed over powers that operate at cross purposes with our need to communicate.

you've got to understand where you get moore's law, and where you get hypergrowth. You can't just take some of Adam Smith and say the free market is going to take care of everythingt.