The Sun BabelFish Blog

the limits of a free flickr account

I took some time, but I just hit one of the limits of my free flickr account. Here is the message I am seeing at the top of my account:

You've run into one of the limits of a free account. Your free account will only display the most recent 200 photos you've uploaded. All of your photos beyond 200 will remain hidden from view until you either delete newer photos, or upgrade to a Pro account.

None of your photos have been deleted, and if you upgrade, they'll all come back unharmed.

To get a pro account I need to shell out $24.95 per year. This is not unreasonable, but it is making me pause and think how much I want to continue with this service...

What are the alternatives? Well I have my own server at bblfish.net. I am already paying for that service, so I might as well use it more fully, and upload my pictures there. But pictures take up quite a lot of space so this is not going to end up being cheaper, as it will use up more space and force me at some time to either increase the space on my rented server or even buy my own server. What would I get for that price? I would certainly get more control over my work, but at the cost of more work on my part. Publishing photos could be done simply with an improved BlogEd, which can push those photos to the file system. This would make publishing easy, but would not give me the interactive collaborative features of flickr, where people can directly add notes to the pictures, tag them, etc... Adding that functionality is not a huge amount of work, but it makes maintenance of the service more difficult, which means costs in developer time, which has to be paid somehow too...

What is the price of freedom? Owning your content at URLs you control may long term be worth quite a lot, a bet Tim Bray clearly is making, by hosting everything on his own server...

Posted at 09:16PM Sep 08, 2007 [permalink/trackback] by Henry Story in Art  |  Comments[13]

Purple Ocean Strategy

A few weeks ago I read through "Blue Ocean Strategy: How to Create Uncontested Market Space and Make the Competition Irrelevant", By W. Chan Kim and Renée Mauborgne of the Insead business school. This book has sold millions of copies since its publication. It is very easy to read, and contains a lot of clear and entertaining business cases by way of illustration, from the growth of the Cirque du Soleil via the story of the turnaround of crime in New York under the leadership of Bill Braton, all the way to Apple's phenomenal success with the iPod.

The Blue Ocean the book refers to is opposed to the Red Ocean of competition in well established markets where optimization and distinction on well understood, standardized criteria matter. The Blue Ocean stands for the new markets created by businesses where there are no predefined standards, no predefined audience, where no industrial feet have yet been placed; in short the sought after space where there is no competition, where huge fortunes can be made. One of the very nice things about this book is how it shows just how much the blue ocean markets can be created in every walk of life, not just where one expects it the most, in technology driven industries.

The aim of the book is to show how these oceans of innovation are created. The tools it develops to make it possible to understand this are very easy to grasp, and make a lot of sense. One point it makes, and that every creator knows, is that you cannot find a Blue Ocean by asking your customers what they want, or by doing simple market studies. Of course these spaces are created by responding to something people really wanted, and feeling for your customers is an important aspect of seeing new possibilities emerge. But the business owner, the entrepreneur - as opposed to the manager ( the book does not make this distinction ) - is the creator of a new value space which cannot be comprehended by the market ahead of time. More so even since by creating something new, the entrepreneur is redefining the boundaries of the established market, and so redefining the audience. The Cirque du Soleil for example changed both the definition of what a circus was and what theater was. In doing that the Cirque du Soleil became a competitor of not just theater and circuses, but also other night time activities people might have enjoyed in their place. The Cirque du Soleil did that but seemed also to appear out of nowhere.

Blue is the symbol of Liberty. The French flag is blue, white and red: Liberty, Equality, Fraternity. Blue in Europe is also associated with conservatism. The history of color associations in the USA is more complex and currently has the reverse association in part due to the stigma attached to the color red in the battle against Communism. Just as with the colors the book presents what are probably very complex ideas in an amazingly simple way. It separates the strands of thought the way a crystal separates light. Like a beat of electronic music it drums these distinctions into the readers mind, so that there is probably no need to re-read the book twice: reading it once is to read it three times. So my following criticism or thoughts will probably be just very facile remerging of what was separated for clarity.

Following the internet and computer industries I have noticed an element of the relation between red and blue that this book fails to make. As our CEO Jonathan Schwartz often mentions on his blog, it is not because one is in a commodity market that one cannot make a huge profit. The electric plug in your house, voltage, wire sizes and many other parts of the electricity industry are standardized. Those are commodity markets. Yet companies like General Electric or Siemens that produce huge generators for large dams or other electrical installations are in some very profitable markets. Without the standardization of the plugs and voltages, the electricity industry could never have grown so big. Standardization I have noticed, can be a stepping stone to building a Blue Ocean, the blue can build on the red.

To illustrate let me take one example from the book: Apple's huge success in recent years. One of the conceptual tools put forward by Blue Ocean Strategy, is that one has to create a new value curve. Remove some aspects of cost and value from a product (no animals in the Cirque du Soleil), change other aspects of value (price), create something new (artistic dance show). One way Apple reduced cost was by adopting open standards. By building on the Unix Operating system developed and used in Universities world wide they removed the major research cost of developing an Operating System whilst gained a huge pool of ready and highly qualified experts worldwide, and all the software that had been built in an Open Source way over time. The default compiler of OSX is Gnu CC. Think of the huge cost reductions that flow from being able to build in such a way on the works of others. By adding the one thing that had been missing from that system, an artistically coherent and beautiful end user experience, Apple gained those people's hearts and support and gave them a unique value proposition, bringing a very important community to Apple that would never have touched it before. By building on these open standards Apple also brings value to the community, if only in the existential example that it can be done, but certainly also over time in feeding back the improvements to the community. Simon Phipps explains how this works in full detail in "The Zen of Free". The same forces at work also lead Sun Microsystems down a similar path to its logical conclusion: by Opening up all of the software stack. As a result Sun and Apple are able to cooperate in numerous ways that would otherwise have been impossible. By working on a standard base Apple can gain award winning technologies such as ZFS at very low cost, allowing it to focus on differentiating itself where its user base's value is: simple packaging, beauty and fluid end user experience. Apple's switch last year to Intel is a similar move, building this time on an industrial de facto standard.
In all these cases reducing costs is not removing something completely from the system as proposed by Blue Ocean (removing the lions), but building on the commoditization and standardization of one layer, thereby bringing the costs down to close to zero. Building on the Red Ocean of community ownership a Blue Ocean of innovation and creativity, in a way that respects the value of the Red Ocean, is what I would like to call here, on my little blog at the end of the universe, Purple Ocean Strategy.

Having gotten this far it may be necessary to enlarge the notion of what is Red all the way to Green. If Red is what is socially established, fraternal ownership, then further along there is what is common to all living things, the biosphere, the Green. A strategy that took this into account would be looking for how to use and build in a sustainable way on that space. It is clear that not taking this into account can be extremely damaging, as the unfolding drama of Beijing Olympics is revealing. How to take it into account effectlively, may get us to the Turquoise Ocean Strategy.

Posted at 11:09AM Aug 20, 2007 [permalink/trackback] by Henry Story in Philosophy  |  Comments[0]

Cognitive Capitalism

After visiting the Louvre on Saturday, I wandered into a bookshop and picked up a book called "Le Capitalisme Cognitif, La Nouvelle Grande Transfromation", by Yann Moulier Boutang, which would translate in English into "Cognitive Capitalism, The Next Great Transformation". The book has a good section on the GNU/Linux free software movement, which must be unusual for a book on economics and so cought my interest. Better still it claimed to put forward a theory that would explain the emergence of such a phenonmenon. I was sold, and spent the rest of the weekend reading it, proving the point that the cognitive economy knows no 35 hour boundaries. When you find something interesting how can you let go?

According to this book we need nothing less than to postulate a third stage of capitalism, starting 1975, following the two previous stages which were the mercantilist stage which led to slave trade, followed by the industrial stage of which the car and Charlie Chaplin's Modern Times are the symbols. The transformation of the economy by the Just in Time production Techniques (The Machine that Changed the World), the advent of computers and then the internet, moved industrial capitalism to a position of having to value knownlege more and more heavily. Whereas the industrial revolution fed off the movements of illiterate peasants into towns, and so emphasized the simplicity of repetitive tasks (Ford was proud that it would take a week to at most a month and a half to teach someone the ways on the assembly lines), so the cognitive revolution spurred by diminishing returns of mass produced goods, the breaking up of markets into ever narrower micromarkets and pulled by the power of computing and the network, is requiring people more and more to make decisions depending on knowledge accumulated in networks.

With a lot of very interesting references back to literature I am only superficially aware of, quoting the economic thinkers from Adam Smith, Marx, Keynes, Adorno, building on commentaries by Lawrence Lessig and Eric Raymond, there is no doubt that the authors are serious about their subject. Placing Open Source and the Free Software movement at the center of this revolution plays well to my prejudices. The French was at times hard to read for me, who am not used to the economics language, and the point of view definitively a bit local at times.

But there is something oddly missing in the book that reaches sometimes right up to some recent news (such as a couple of gaffes made by Sarcozy during the election campaign), and that is that there is absolutely no mention of Open Solaris or for that matter of Apple's open sourcing of their OS a few years ago (with some recent worries it is true) . The only thing that is taken from the Open Source movement is the free source movement, and the lesson taken from it is that open exchange of knowledge produces better goods than closed proprietary ones, and most of all that they are free. But detailed analysis of these ecosystems would be useful. How did they emerge? What is the interest in Standard Operating Systems (Unix), to start off with? How did the crowd of GNU/Linux developers finance their work? Why is there work at all in this space? These are real questions, and I have heard many interesting ideas and views on their answers. The answers will be complex, just as the explanation of why ants build their nests the way they do, and how that relates to the ecology of the forrest surrounding them. In the OpenSolaris case we know Jonathan Schwartz's answers: "There are two types of people, those that must pay and those that won't pay". Those that must pay are those that need liability coverage. They have other businesses to run, and they pay Sun for the guarantee that things will work well. It is just the continuation of the logic of outsourcing. Those that don't pay are researchers and other institutions that increase the value of the platform by using it, providing feedback and enthusiasm.

So the conclusion of the book which makes the jump from the power of free to the unsustainability of free without revolutionary government intervention, which certainly feels like a very French idea, is not at all convincing. The last chapters of the book are thus very dissapointing. As I read them I suddenly had the feeling that the whole previous thesis was built up later in order to defend the pre-established conclusion, increase and further the minimum salary to every branch of french society. An interesting idea, but that is a hell of a jump to make. Where did it go wrong?

Well for one I think it is clear that Open Source has found a way to sustain itself in a capitalistic economy, and it can only do this if those contributing are getting rewarded in some way for what they are doing. That one should find ways to improove the incentives of developers and contributors will clearly be in the interest of the firms that are building their reputation on top of them. So the question is how can firms develop on top of something free? Ask that to the bottled water salespeople. The amount of knowledge we can accumulate is it is true, as opposed to petrol for example, clearly limitless. But the amount of live knowledge and organisational knowledge humans can have is limited to the amount of brains in existence, complimented by computers of course. Now brains take time to grow, and thought take time to emerge. You cannot build a kernel engineer in a couple of weeks, a couple of months or even a couple of years. Neither is this a skill that comes as naturally as say going to the cinema, so there is not a large pool of such people around. Furthermore the world is constantly changing, and code is dead knowledge. There is always a need to adapt the kernel to some new device, add some improovemeents, or make some other changes. Finding the people that make the right changes is not going to be easy. Finally there are only 24 hours in a day, and even hackers can't be working all the time. The attention economy does no apply only to consumers. Developers themselves only have limited attentions. Paying them helps alleviate other problems they may have, such as finding food. In the end therefore demand for their services should create a sustainable ecological space for their work. And so for the rest of Open Source. If governments have a need for it, such as because they want the computers running their armies to be run by software understood by their own engineers, and that they can only get those if those courses are studied at Universities in a free and open way, then governements will and should contribute, as indeed they do. Indeed it could be argued that this is one of the largest forces behind the birth of Unix.

So it is not because software is free that nobody will pay for it, and so the argument in the last part of this book collapses pretty badly. But that we have entered a new world, very distinct from the Fordist era, that I am in no doubt.

Posted at 12:09PM Jul 30, 2007 [permalink/trackback] by Henry Story in Philosophy  |  Comments[0]