Infovark

One of the recurring themes at E2.0 Last week was the notion of Generational Adoption. It’s the idea that Baby Boomers, Gen X and Gen Y all had an innate relationship with various ways of working, and that these different work habits are a major factor in the adoption of new technology. Jay Hariani at the e2.oh blog has a nice wrap up of the generational adoption meme. Since then, Ross Mayfield, Jeff Nolan, and Larry Dignan have all chimed in, with various cases for and against.

I was lucky enough to share a drink last week with with Rob Salkowitz, Author of Generation Blend: Managing Across the Technology Age Gap, who was presenting at the E2.0 conference. I haven’t read Rob’s book yet, but In the wake of our conversation, I am definitely going to check it out. (Venkat’s Review over on RibbonFarm is also a good read).

The Millenials Are Coming is the new Y2K Bug

I have big problems with using the generational argument to drive adoption of Enterprise 2.0. It feels like another vendor-inspired bogeyman designed to convince companies to buy heaps of software they don’t need. (Install our compliance software or Sarbanes-Oxley will get you!)

The notion that the millennials are going to “demand” some kind of “Facebook” to do their work is just plain rubbish. Think about when you joined the workforce. What exactly did you demand?

When I first left school for the workforce, I wasn’t in a position to demand anything. It took me five years of working within the system before I realized which parts were broken. And it was only because I’d put in the time working within the system that I was trusted to actually influence things a bit.

Generational change happens gradually. There’s not going to be some giant “MySpace Revolution” where “The Kids” take over with their externally hosted collaborative tools. Instead, these people will join the workplace as wide-eyed and impressionable new starters, and they’ll do their best to work within the framework that they are given with the tools that are allocated to them. Then, slowly, their own ideas will become part of the way people work, including their favorite tools and technologies.

Sure, the generational issue is interesting from an anthropological perspective. It’s indicative of a lot of things, most notably progress in society. But as a call to arms for business to rush out and spend cash on some new-fangled social media tool for your enterprise, it leaves a lot to be desired.

(But hey, what would I know. I’m just a disgruntled Gen X’er who has no respect for authority, right?)

We’re in the midst of prototyping the user interface for our Enterprise 2.0 application. I’d been seeking some inspiration, wandering various design and programming sites, when I ran across this phrase: “At some point during every programmer’s career, he or she becomes fascinated by typography.”

At least I think it went something like that. I can’t remember which blogger said it. That’s the curse of having one’s feed reader filled to the brim with interesting things to read.

I must have reached that point in my career, because I’ve spent the last week devouring Thinking with Type by Ellen Lupton. I found a glowing review of the book while checking out the I Love Typography blog, itself a great find during my one of my web wanderings. Now that I think of it, I must have run across the phrase while hunting for the typeface for the infovark logo at myfonts. Or was it fonts.com? Or fontshop?

Ah well, I was doomed to be a typography geek anyway. During my college years I worked on my university newspaper, The Chronicle. If you’ve got even a hint of journalism in your blood, you’re bound to spend a significant portion of your life considering the contrast between tracking and kerning, or pondering the subtle mysteries of grid layout.

If you’ve been bitten by the typography bug, there’s no better place to start than Thinking with Type. In a single slim volume, it gives you an overview of typography from the letterpress of Gutenberg to the Internet of today. Its three major sections touch on the essentials: letter forms, text blocks, and page layout. You’ll find diagrams, examples, and images throughout the entire work. I’ve found it as useful for design inspiration as for reference. The appendix is crammed full salient quotes, useful tips, and the meaning of all those editing marks that used to make my newspaper columns bleed red. To top it off, the inside cover of my paperback edition contained samples of all the major fonts described in the book. Find a place for it on your bookshelf next to Tufte’s Envisioning Information and Norman’s Design of Everyday Things.

Oh, our logo font is ITC Avant Garde Gothic, by the way. And I’ve now decided to program in Consolas, based on sound advice in the Hamstu’s typography of code. Or maybe Bitstream Vera…

Gord says: Ha! I write all my code in anonymous. (Sadly, everyone can still tell that it’s mine…)

Nick Carr was nice enough to send us a copy of his new book “The Big Switch”. In turn, I was more than happy to read it. Here are my impressions.

When I was first invited to open my Gmail account in 2004, I did so mainly out of curiosity. At the time, Web-based software was an emerging trend. Most were unsure as to its actual usefulness. It was like the repeated predictions for the internet fridge — certainly possible, but why would you need it? Nowadays, Gmail is my primary email client. I will never install a client side application to handle my email again.

See how I said “Never” as in “Not Ever”?

That’s the Big Switch.

The central premise of Nick’s book is that what happened to the business of power generation at the beginning of the last century will happen to software publishers at the beginning of this one. Just as in-house power generation was supplanted by large, scalable, remote, centralized power plants, user installed and maintained computer systems will be supplanted by large, scalable, remote computers, hosted over the internet.

Because computer software can be deployed remotely, just like power generation, the infrastructure of the World Wide Web allows companies that specialize in software to offer us their services without users having to understand how these services operate — and certainly without being responsible for their maintenance and upgrade. The days of people who want to write a letter also having to be amateur computer technicians will fade into obscurity. After all, you don’t need to know Ohm’s Law to plug in Mr. Coffee, right?

It’s an attractive proposition. To me, storing your personal photos on a local machine seems risky — why not store them at flickr, or Picasa? They have far better data security than you do, unless you have armed guards patrolling your house. Online file storage services, like box.net and the Windows Live services are also spearheading this drive of consumer applications into “the cloud”

The historical parallels between electricity and software wear thin at times. Electricity is not like software in many ways. Electricity doesn’t have bugs. It has a binary success/fail metric: Either my lights are on or they are off. Software has a wide array of places were things can go wrong. In the case of cloud computing, the artifacts sent over the wire are not as replaceable as a few watts — as anyone who’s ever lost a perfectly composed blog post knows. The computer engineers working on this information shift have vastly more difficult problems to solve than the electrical engineers of the 1900’s.

At the same time, the similarities are striking. Of particular relevance to the growing Enterprise 2.0 crowd is the frame of mind of the early electricity pioneers like Thomas Edison. Edison expected to sell systems for generating electricity to millions of companies and governments all over the world. He didn’t grasp the notion of centralized power plants until it was too late. (General Electric, his company, had to re-invent itself on the consumer side of electricity.) Now there is a new wave of innovation being born right now in the field of enterprise software, largely spurred by what Nick calls “The World Wide Computer”. It’s an exciting time to be working on this problem.

The Big Switch is a book about change, and how entrepreneurship and innovation lead people to deal with it. It thoroughly investigates the impending shift from a historical, economic and ethical perspective. It uses clear, concise language that steers clear of technical jargon and clearly delineates between past, present and future. Reading it provoked much head-nodding and agreement. It’s a well written, well researched, and very timely book.

If you have a manager or colleague who is still clinging to the notion that “The Internet is a passing fad” or dragging their feet on your latest web project, this is an excellent book to give them in order to spur them along.

(If they adamantly refuse to read it, this one might be a better choice..)

Prior to starting infovark, I read everything I could get my hands on regarding the Web 2.0 phenomenon. Even though I felt immersed in the trend already, I wanted to make sure I understood what other people were reading about it. I also wanted to make sure that I was hearing directly from the primary sources, rather than indirectly through blogs or reviews.

I recently loaned our principal investor several of those books. After putting together the reading list, it occurred to me that I ought to post it to our blog as well. I plan for this to be the first part of an irregular series. To start us off, we have two essential books: The Tipping Point by Malcolm Gladwell and Chris Anderson’s The Long Tail.

Feeling a Bit Tipsy

The Tipping Point describes a contagious situation where a system rapidly changes to a new state. The tipping point can be a “didn’t see that coming” moment, when something finally achieves critical mass and explodes onto the scene. Whether it’s a sleeper movie that suddenly becomes the film of the year, or a previously obscure product that’s now a household name, the Tipping Point describes how that dynamic transition occurs. It’s the classic snowball effect: Each flake, on its own, adds an insignificant amount of mass to the rolling ball. Over time however, those changes can compound into an unstoppable avalanche.

Figure 1: The Tipping Point

The Tipping Point is relevant to Enterprise 2.0 in two ways. First, obviously, is that software companies like infovark want to create a tipping point situation in the adoption of our products. But Gladwell’s book is a description of the phenomenon, not an instruction manual.

The second, more important reason, is that systems that gather, store and search data often experience network effects. Most Enterprise 2.0 systems fit this category, and ours is no exception. Our products need to scale rapidly so that we can harness these effects to return meaningful, relevant results. The crucial trick for getting the adoption rates we want is our ability to employ statistical tricks (and a few smart guesses) to bring that tipping point moment — the moment when someone says, “Wow, this thing is reading my mind!” — as close as possible to the out-of-the-box experience.

…And Pussycats

The second graph-based book, the Long Tail, describes a major shift in the way retailers think about selling their goods. For the last 50 years, product manufacturers have focused on the hits — those few products that achieve mass-market success. In today’s Internet economy, the cost of sales and inventory are dramatically lower. Retailers don’t need to be as choosy about their stock, opening up a large space for niche products to flourish. Taken as a whole, there can be as much money in niche products — in the long tail — as in selling mass market goods. Companies that have figured this out can derived tremendous value from serving these previously under-served consumers.

Figure 2: The Long Tail

The catch is in the phrase “taken as a whole.” To get the benefits of The Long Tail, you have to have a meaningful and interesting way of aggregating the preferences of many, many niche markets. And in this case, the market for information is little different than the market for products. Wikipedia succeeds as an aggregator of information by trading authoritativeness (scholarly writing and professional editing) for an unmatched breadth of articles contributed by the general public. You won’t find many articles related to animated television series in a typical encyclopedia, but you can find details about Josie and the Pussycats on Wikipedia, including their signature lyric: “Long Tails… and Ears for Hats!”

The Long Tail also holds lessons for us. Creating enterprise portals, automated workflow systems, and other broad-brush systems is an Enterprise 1.0 approach. Enterprise 2.0 systems must recognize that organizations are composed of teams of specialists. Each team and each individual will have a different view of the organization, and each is responsible for making different contributions to the collective effort. An Enterprise 2.0 approach must tap the Long Tail of corporate knowledge and expertise and deliver custom-tailored results.

(P.S. Thanks to Brian Shaler, whose CrappyGraphs.com helped illustrate this review.)