Actually, reader, I’m a little tired of all these search posts. But new things keep happening and this one is compelling enough to note. I really miss Google’s notebook feature (actually a lot of people do). It was like BasKet for the Web. It sounds like Yahoo! is about to launch a new app called Search Pad that will be like Google’s notebook but with a teensy bit of intelligence.

This sounds like a right combination. If the search engine can be intelligent enough to figure out that you’re doing some sort of research and then help you with an easy-to-use note-taking, organizing system, fantastic. But if it becomes even more intelligent and can offer even more useful things than just archiving notes, that would be a powerful assistant.

There is some nice potential here. I wonder if Yahoo! will take advantage or underwhelm. Either way Google please take note, your competitors’ efforts to improve how people use the search results they get are becoming more sophisticated and intelligent. Will Wave make up for the loss of notebook?

Search engines initially answered our question of “How or where can I find the information I want?” but in indexing the content of the Internet and providing access, they created a much more troubling problem. That question tends to overshadow another question, which is equally if not more important, “How do I assemble knowledge from the information I find?” That question will be solved by computer-assisted shallow atom assembly, which I think may be a new significant stage of Internet-related development.

Let me open up the problem a bit more.

The ubquity of “search” (whether through an Internet search engine, individual site search, etc.) has given us a more burdensome onus to seek out and gather the right shallow atoms for the knowledge we need. Search engines both enable and testify to this. Although they haven’t come close to solving my second question they’ve become slightly more sensitive to it: search results are not simply lists pointing to likely sources of information sought. Search engines offer more context for the results. They encourage things like voting on relevance, they offer information related to the results but tangential, for example searching for a company’s name will often also offer news about the company, stock symbols, addresses, display ads about related products and services, etc.

Search engines increased the pressure on individuals to find and assemble shallow atoms of information into the knowledge message or narrative answering their need for knowledge. Search engines provided us with functional access to the immense universe of discourse that is the Internet but it’s all based on the unadulterated results of computation. We thus lack intelligent authors to assemble a structured knowledge for acquisition from the content of the Internet. The search engine should morph or augment itself into something that will provide that or come close to providing that (or else be usurped by an alternate application). That will be a great advance.

The Continuum

I’ve been saying that we have a more shallow atoms now and have adapted our attention spans suitably for the labour we must undertake to acquire knowledge. Here’s what I mean.

Although we’ve always had, more or less, shallow atoms for knowledge acquisition, I think that the availability of these has increased in our Internet-oriented era. I see the deep unit and shallow atoms as points on a continuum of methods for knowledge acquisition. Event without electronic means, we have shallow atoms. For example, a poster plastered to a construction site might announce a rally for a political cause. It would likely contain just a few words or phrases about the cause with some pertinent information on the time and place of the rally. Someone seeing this atom would still need to acquire information from other sources in order to develop sufficient knowledge for understanding the issue. Magazine articles too, these lie in a more middle ground of the continuum. They’re relatively short like an atom but they’re structured more closely to a unit.

Virtually, we’ve created so many new types of shallow atoms, not to mention facsimiles of the physical ones I just mentioned. Take the Web concept of linking, which just encourages the shallow atom mode of defining information. Because we can include a link within one shallow atom to another, there is no need to deepen the individual atom. An atom that references something requiring more information includes a link to one or more atoms to satisfy that requirement (and those atoms may include links as well).

Considering this continuum is essential to considering the changes in our methods of knowledge acquisition. Whereas I’m asserting we’ve had various forms of knowledge from the continuum for a long time, I also think that the technology of the Internet and that which branches from it have immensely increased the quantity, forms, and occurances of shallow atoms. The impact on people acquiring knowledge is that while perhaps we maintained a certain type of balance in terms of analysing, interpreting, and synthesizing our information in the past, we’re now taking on a much greater synthesis role before we can engage in the other activities. We lack the authors that formerly acquired, designed, and assembled the knowledge message.

The Onus of Labour

The increase in shallow atoms proportionally requires that we spend more of our knowledge acquisition activities in designing and assembling the knowledge we seek prior to considering it as a whole. We must do more of our own authoring before analyzing and understanding. Previously, with a deep unit, we could accept the assembled whole (I refered to this as the author’s message in my last post), consider it, analyze it, and synthesize our understanding together. The big difference is that analyzing a unit is quite different than analyzing atoms. Synthesizing the knowledge of the unit feels very different from synthesizing that of the atoms, which have to be selected first. I think it is for this reason that search engines must work much harder to help us answer the second question if the companies operating them wish to continue dominating our knowledge acquisition activities.

Consider many of the new technologies being offered on the market. Gadgets like GPS devices do not simply enable mapping and direction giving knowledge, they’re increasingly used within the context of revealing restaurants, stores, etc. I’ve read about technologies being tested to visually superimpose meta information on objects of everyday life: ingredients on food in stores for example. In my own neighbourhood, there were a number of old houses on some streets that had plaques identifying them in a special way that let people know they could dial a number on their mobile phone as they passed to hear historical information about that area. These technologies offering context-relevent atoms, seem to exist in recognition of the need for assistance in assembling knowledge from the quantity of shallow atoms flooding us.

I’m not convinced that what is called “Web 2.0″ advanced our interaction within our world much (it just formalized some of it better). However computer-assisted shallow atom assembly could significantly advance our interaction through substantial knowledge acquisition, on top of the massive problem search engines created on the shoulders of the Internet.

Aside from basic needs satisfied from an atom or two, will search engines cease being simply search engines and instead truly assist users in substantial knowledge acquisition needs? They’re not doing this now but the seeds are already being planted (intentionally or not). Google has seen the need to insert related context links in much of the results it presents and is collecting more intelligent sorts of feedback from its users. Steps in the right direction, sure. Additionally, Google’s push of its OS to mobile devices says something about the need for a search engine to be constantly assisting our lives. Our handy pocket search. But that had better become something that assists me with the multitude of shallow atoms rather than just present me with more of them in an increasing quantity of contextual situations. Facebook with its multitude of information streams (or other current social networks) are early, lucky, symptoms of the desire for what is needed ahead.

A crude example is that search engines could capture the amount of time someone spends reading a page of search results. They could capture the time over the course of multiple “next, next, next” button pushes in a set of results. Each search could be a category within a hierarchy of a knowledge narrative. The search result links prioritized and selected from (for example) Google’s algorithms for page rank and relevence. After several sequential searches, or searches with related topics, the engine could display a page of introduction, body content, and conclusion, that provides a comprehensive knowledge narrative the seeker could acquire.

That system might present a body of shallow atoms in a wholistic message as if by an intelligent author, yet it results as a sympathetic mirror of the user/seeker’s activities. But as I said, that’s a crude example-I’ve neglected many problems and details with how something like that could work. I’m sure there are much more sophisticated things that could be (and must be) done to develop computer-assisted shallow atom assembly.

[side note: after writing this last week, I came across an article about an exciting new application, Wolfram|Alpha that may be a step in the direction I've been describing. Got to go try it out]

Let me delineate a few parameters. I do not intend to make a value judgement on any method of acquiring knowledge. My main interest is to examine current changes in our popular methods of knowledge acquisition and what these mean for our understanding. I’m not thinking of experts in a domain of research (though there are some interesting challenges). Rather, I’m considering the everyday person that wants to learn something substantial about a subject or issue in his or her world.

Prior to the Internet if someone wanted to learn about a subject to any non-superficial degree, one would probably read a book. Documentary films could also provide some solid depth of information (or sometimes television shows, though these may also move us away from the deeper end of the continuum). Each of these examples is a single, self-contained, deep unit covering the necessary amount of information for the layperson to learn a satisfactory bulk of what he needs on the desired subject.

I call something a deep unit if it is a self-contained gathering of information related to a specific subject. A book that explains the history of Canada, a documentary on the social structure of ant colonies, a television magazine that devotes an episode to the unsafe build quality of a famous auto manufacturer, these are all examples of units about a topic that, anyone familiar with these mediums will recognize provide a well-focused gathering of information structured in a way that the person apprehending the media will be able to learn a relatively deep amount of knowledge about their subjects.

In contrast to the deep unit, consider the shallow atom. I call something a shallow atom when it provides a, discrete quantity of information in a concise scope. Consider an online encyclopedia (for example Wikipedia) entry about Canada, while it will provide some history it will not be sufficient in itself to provide the deeper knowledge the book does.

Consider a scientist’s blog talking about her day-to-day research insights on her observations of ant colonies. Each individual blog post will provide some information but it won’t provide the wholistic depth of a documentary on the subject. Consider, a consumer web site that allows its visitors to vote on the quality of different cars, it may indicate a low rating for a particular car but it won’t identify the systematic administrative cover-ups of safety violations the manufacturer engaged in, it won’t reveal tests confirming the safety problems. These are all examples of shallow atoms.

I would like to emphasize that although I’ve set up what seems to be a comparison between deep units and shallow atoms, it is not a comparison of the value or capacity. Rather I want to identify distinguishing examples. If my theory is right it won’t be because a shallow atom is equivalent or better than a deep unit but because a great, enmeshed quantity of shallow atoms can provide equivalent knowledge as an individual deep unit.

Design and Assembly

There is both a significant qualitative difference and a difference in apprehension, in virtue of the design and assembly of deep units versus shallow atoms. The deep unit is designed by one or more individuals to have a certain continuity of structure. Its entire quantity of information is conveyed via a predesigned (meaning not left to the person acquiring it) conceptual skeleton. The shallow atom, on the other hand is but a bone within the conceptual skeleton and requires that the person acquiring it design his or her own conceptual skeleton for assembling the required information.

To return to my example of the documentary piece on the subject of ant colonies’ social structures. A team of people no doubt developed a well-defined and edited structure for how they’d convey the information to their audience. The documentary would likely have some sort of introduction teasing peoples’ interests as well as providing an overview of the show’s topic. Later the documentary would go further and further in-depth about the issue, probably interviewing different researchers, explaining scientific analyses, connecting commentary to provide a more extensive context to the point. It may discuss parallels with human behaviour or technological innovations, and ultimately it would wrap up with a conclusion and some sort of summary of the its contents. The point is, there is a directed message in the deep unit that those producing it attempt to convey.

Compare that with the scientist publishing a blog about her research on ant colonies. She may post daily, a new observation she’s made while studying her colony. One post might identify a certain behaviour between worker ants and their queen. Another post might discuss the food storage strategy of the colony. These posts would continue for so long as she’s doing her research. It might be tempting to argue that the entire blog, covering the topic of ant colony research is a deep unit but I don’t think it is. Aside from the overarching topic of the blog, it is not a unit assembled along a structure that has been defined to convey a unit of knowledge. In fact, if it were, it would lose its value as a blog.

Each blog post is a more-or-less self-contained entity-an atom. The blog post contains usually, a bit of information about something which encourages people to comment on it or link to it (also a form of interactive commentary). Blogs are designed to encourage conversation. If the blog post was instead a whole book, the threshold for commentary would be much greater. That is, to comment, people would have to invest much more time and effort to read it. However, the blog post’s appeal and success at developing conversation lies in large part with the fact that it has a relatively low threshold to acquire. Someone can read it without fear that he or she is not getting the full picture by not reading the rest of the blog posts. That enables each post to be commented on, as its own discrete unit. It also means each post is only likely to deliver a small portion of information, so if someone wants to acquire knowledge, say about ants, he’ll only get a bit from the blog post. He’ll have to follow its links to videos of the colony, other scholarly publications, perhaps a government-funded research site from some other country, to round out the full scope of knowledge he wants to acquire. Of course, before the widespread existence of all these information media that scope of knowledge would likely have come from a deep unit, like a book.

But what does that mean to the person acquiring knowledge? It means he or she has a lot of additional work to do. There is no one author or group that has designed and assembled the appropriate information into a deep unit ready for knowledge acquisition. I can easily think of a number of tasks the knowledge acquirer will have to do, there are probably many others.

1. must validate the trustworthiness of each atom
2. must decide upon the utility of each atom
3. must select which atoms to pursue for further related information
4. must seek the right sources to use for discovering atoms

What about the message of the deep unit’s author? Is that another thing that the knowledge acquirer must take upon him or herself to develop? I’d argue that any person wanting to acquire some knowledge has a responsibility to do some critical thinking, analysis, synthesis, etc. regardless of whether information comes in the form of a deep unit or a shallow atom. Still, I feel that in the case of the deep unit, the author’s design and build, implicit with its message, is an added value in virtue of the perspective provided by the author. It might also be argued that that muddies the waters for the knowledge acquirer. Now, with all the new methods for communication we’ve developed, that perspective might also be obtained through later discussion.

In any case, the design and assembly of the knowledge acquired through shallow atoms is a very different thing (structure, quality, onus of labour, etc.) from that acquired through deep units.

Have you noticed how those belonging to the generation labeled “millenials” are often accused of having short attention spans? They’re always connected for social and information acquiring reasons. They use mobile phones, Web search engines, type short frequent text messages, maintain instant messenger windows on their computer screens, worship metadata (though not always consciously), use blogs, microblogs, social networks, view short video clips online as opposed to television, mix music in collage fashion from small clips of other sounds, etc. The items I just listed provide instantaneous access to shallow atoms of knowledge.

If we think of how the millenials acquire knowledge with these media, then they have short attention spans by necessity. In order to acquire the knowledge they seek on a subject, they have to pull together many shallow atoms.

Imagining ways of knowledge acquisition along a continuum from the very deep, dense sources to the manifold shallow, smaller sources reveals that people not only are taking advantage of newer technologies and media but also are changing their behaviours in response.

I have more to post about this subject in the next little bit. The implications of how we’re changing our methods for acquiring knowledge extend to information archival, opinion making, our responses to news, certain social interactions, and as I’d like to talk about in another post, the next most important change for the Internet. Search engines accomplished their job. And they created a big problem in helping us find all the shallow atoms we want. But there is an incredible, unexploited opportunity for search engines to evolve into something new, solving the problem they created.

I wanted one of these mini notebook computers for several reasons. First, I was tired of banishing myself to my office when I wanted to work on my novel. It’s winter, I’d rather be sitting in front of a fire, listening to some music, and comfortable on the sofa. Not hidden away from my wife in another room.

Second, when I travel I like to travel light. Normal sized laptops have never seemed convenient to me for carrying onto an airplane. Most laptops are smaller than a regular computer but still big, heavy nuisances. Now that I’m used to my mini, standard sized laptops look like giant relics, the way mobile phones from the early 90s do.

I did a lot of research before buying. I compared the review sites. The main contenders seem to come from Asus, Acer, HP, MSI, and Dell though I’ve also seen a fair amount written on the Lenovo Ideapad and a host of others. Most netbooks come with pretty similar standard specs, like an 8.9″ display (now heading up to 10″), either solid state or regular hard drives, 512MB or 1GB memory, an Intel Atom processor, and a Linux variant (usually Ubuntu, Linpus, or SUSE) or Windows XP. I’m not sure what HP is thinking but their prices are way out of line with the other companies so they were easy to eliminate.

I decided on a system with 1 GB RAM and a 1.6 megapixel webcam for those occasional evenings where I want to have a pint or dinner with some long distance friends via Skype. (Also more pleasant in the living room than the office).

I also chose the Dell Mini with a 16GB solid state drive (SSD) over a regular hard drive. It seems to me that the price of extremely large capacity external hard drives is so low, that one might as well just buy an external drive to plug into the mini for all the major document storage. Then just use the Mini’s internal drive for the documents, photos, whatever that you want to bring while travelling or doing some immediate work on. Besides if you need extra memory while travelling, a USB memory stick or SD card are relatively inexpensive, very small and portable. A massive regular hard drive in the Mini doesnt’t seem very valuable to me. This choice eliminated the likes of MSI and Lenovo.

I’ve read that SSDs are faster, generate less heat, less prone to failure, and I love the idea of eliminating moving parts in my computer, especially since the fewer moving parts there are, the less noise the thing is likely to make. In fact, noise was one of my primary considerations. Something that sets the Dell Mini apart from every other mini notebook (netbook) I’ve researched is that it has no fan. I hate fan noise from computers, especially when I’m trying to hear some music and immerse myself into a creative state for writing. The Dell Mini, in its lack of fans and moving parts, is completely silent.

Based on reviews I read, it seemed that the Dell Mini’s keyboard size was just behind the Acer Aspire One’s but larger than the Asus Eeepc. Keyboard size is especially important if, like me, you intend to do a lot of touch typing. The Acer is mostly parallel to the Dell in other respects. There are some tradeoffs, for example the Acer has a lower grade webcam. But both the Acer and Asus have fans and when I listened to an Acer in a store it sounded quite noisy. So that pretty much eliminated the other contenders.

Although the Dell designers made a few strange keyboard choices, which require some adjustment the Dell Mini presents no significant problems to extended bouts of touch-typing. Examples of the strange choices? There are functional F11 and F12 keys but they’re not labeled as such. Also Dell chose a glaringly awkward place to put the apostrophe key, which is probably the single biggest design flaw I can think of. I’m adjusting, in time I probably won’t notice. I might even grow to love its placement. Years ago, my first car was an old Saab 900, which was famous for its quirks, like having the ignition on the floor instead of by the stearing wheel. I loved that.

The Dell Mini is silent, more attractive than any other netbook (in my opinion), and surprisingly fast. In a lot of forums, people tend to say that these new netbooks are slower than other laptops or desktops. That’s true in benchmarks I’ve seen. I assume that if you’re using it for heavy gaming or other intense processing the Mini might feel slow. For example, I haven’t experimented with any of my midi or other audio work on it yet but I suspect that the difference in speed will show up in that sort of situation. Nevertheless, for most of what I do the Dell Mini feels indistinguishable from my high-end 64 bit desktop system. Hook up a nice external monitor, keyboard, and mouse and I believe it would be perfectly fine doing double duty as a convenient desktop replacement for most people.

The operating system: here is a criticism of Dell. Dell promotes its Windows version. When I purchased my Mini, I went through the ordering process for both a Windows version and the Ubuntu Linux version. For an identical system, Dell offered a special deal, which strangely brought the Windows version price below the Ubuntu version. I haven’t used Microsoft products like Windows on a home computer in many years. I don’t like Windows and all of its problems. I don’t want to deal with viruses or digital restrictions. In most aspects I also think the Windows user interface is more difficult to use than Linux counterparts. In other words, there’s no good reason for me to pay for a computer with Microsoft Windows pre-installed. I wanted the Ubuntu version.

But Dell was doing a counterintuitive promotion and offering the Windows version cheaper than the Ubuntu version. So I bought the Windows version. When I received it, I immediately booted to an Ubuntu install USB drive and just overwrote the system with Linux. Now that might not seem like much of an issue however, the point is that it took me some time to do that. Dell would be providing a much better user experience if they would allow people to configure systems with Linux preinstalled for the same price if not less than the Windows version. I wonder how many other people did what I did.

The Ubuntu Netbook Remix (UNR) for the LPIA architecture I understand is designed to take advantage of the low-power Intel Atom processor. It doesn’t come with the support for certain proprietary features like flash, but that can be easily added through a related repository.

I’d like to comment on the UNR edition of the Ubuntu distribution. Canonical seems to have put some serious effort and good intentions into developing a specialized interface, I think with a smart goal of better addressing the small screen space available in the netbook size. I tried this new interface and believe that while it has some interesting features (like the way it combines the taskbar with top of the windows), ultimately I chose not to use it. It covered the desktop with all the application icons in a cluttered, segmented menu system and it only allowed me to display one maximized window at a time. While that made the most of the desktop space, in my opinion it did so by removing useful functionality. Like the ability to have a couple windows open and dragging between them. I also disliked what I felt was a high quantity of clutter in the new interface.

Fortunately there’s a fairly simple option to switch back to the standard Gnome interface. If I were Dell, I would shipped the Mini this way. However, the standard Gnome setup in Ubuntu is not well suited to the Mini’s 1024×600 9″ display. The standard Ubuntu Gnome interface has a panel at the top of the screen and a window list panel at the bottom (so two chunks of screen space are always used up). Worse, the menu panel is segmented with lengthy text for each menu. I saved a lot of space by getting rid of one of these bars, removing the menu item text and substituting it with a single menu button icon. Now the only thing on my screen is a panel at the bottom that lets me easily access all my programs or places. I also find that the multiple desktop feature in Linux is more useful on the Mini because it minimizes window clutter on one desktop screen (plus the touchpad will nicely switch between desktops by brushing its top right corner). This solution seems to me like an easier way to make the best use of screen real estate without sacrificing the usability that most people expect. Plus it doesn’t require a whole new specialized interface. It’s essentially the same type of setup that you’d find on a Windows system or KDE interface–I think this setup works better.

I have a preference for KDE and would like to try the pretty new KDE 4.2 on my Mini, but I want to wait until there is an LPIA-specific version. In the meantime, I’ve grown to appreciate Gnome much more than I remembered and with the small changes I mentioned above, find it a totally comfortable, appealing, and usable interface. With Compiz effects installed too, the Mini’s interface is so elegant, it matches its hardware design.

Finally, the Dell Mini’s LED display is clear and bright as others have noted in far more detail than I. Aside from the slick design, noiselessness, price/features, speed, and Linux-capable nature, what else do I like?

Forget the technical aspects, the point is this computer feels, actually, personal. It’s a trusty aid available when I need it without demanding room space or other resources. I sit down in the living room and access whatever I want through the wireless Internet connection. I can write to my heart’s content with the Dell Mini comfortably on my lap (unlike most regular sized laptops). It’s not like an appliance that would degrade the appearance of the room. When I’m done I put it to sleep and toss it on the bookshelf–guests don’t even notice a computer is sitting there.

I’m thinking about this in relation to Shirky’s insightful commentary on the notion of a cognitive surplus, which our era is just starting to come to grips with. He proposes this value that it’s better to do something than nothing. I don’t think I’m comfortable with that. His post highlights some of the ways that people use their time to collaborate on projects through Internet technologies and social media types of applications. The idea is that after the industrial revolution we live in an era with a significant amount of “free time” (I guess that essentially refers to time not spent in the context of a job). For a good portion of when this free time became available to us as a society, we’ve chosen to occupy it by watching television shows. Shirky, if I understood correctly, calls this doing nothing. Now, we’re waking up to the potential of this “free time” and we’re employing it in an active way–that is, doing something. Examples include writing wikipedia pages, contributing to group mapping projects, developing free and open source software, etc.

Actually, I don’t think watching TV is doing nothing. It’s doing something, passively. You let the program come to you and you don’t really direct your intentions onto anything in the world. You don’t act upon anything to produce some sort of an outcome. Since you at least have some perceptions and thinking or whatnot while you’ve positioned yourself in front of a TV, you’ve at a minimum passively-doing. So Instead I’ll refer to this as passive-doing instead of Shirky’s doing nothing, and in contrast to active-doing something (which would be the equivalent to Shirky’s doing something).

It so happens that I don’t watch much TV. I know, that sentence raises an irresistible temptation to stereotype me as one of those people who gloat and speak in a pedantic voice about how they never watch TV. That’s not what I’m aiming for here. I like a bit of TV and think it serves an important role (don’t want to get into that in this post though). Nevertheless people often identify excessive TV-watching as problematic. In my case, TV just rarely is my thing, and not because of what I’m doing through the Internet (though I definitely occupy myself that way too). I tend to have other activities or projects that I do (a lot of the time they don’t even involve electricity, like sometimes I’ll write with pen to paper. Sorry, did that support the stereotype?). Active-doing something and passive-doing are not doing nothing.

What’s wrong with doing nothing? Sometimes, I just sit, without a TV, and let my thoughts wander but I don’t do anything in particular. I don’t produce something or bring about some sort of change in the world (in the common sense). In fact these days I feel like I don’t do nothing often enough. I’m sure I’m not the only one as I can’t help but notice there appears to be an increasing interest in meditation–talk about doing nothing. I tend to think, as a society we’re very concerned with maintaining states of constant occupation.

This notion of a cognitive surplus points to the cultural phenomenon exploding via digital technologies. We’re waking up to what we’ve begun, socially, to do to ourselves with the Internet. And it’s amazing. Shirky’s idea seems to be that we’re just now starting to figure out how to handle all this free time. Why is it a “surplus”? Can we have such a surplus?

Surplus leads me toward supply and demand, production and resources; it feels rooted in commerce. The television watcher that Shirky implies was doing nothing (passive-doing) was a consumer of free time. But according to Shirky this has changed, now this same person can be doing something, in other words producing something via the Internet and social applications, or else some other modicum of digital living. Shirky says

“And I’m willing to raise that to a general principle. It’s better to do something than to do nothing. Even lolcats, even cute pictures of kittens made even cuter with the addition of cute captions, hold out an invitation to participation. When you see a lolcat, one of the things it says to the viewer is, ‘If you have some sans-serif fonts on your computer, you can play this game, too.’”

I ask, why is it better to do something than to do nothing? Why should that be a general principle? Why the grounds for how we occupy our free time?

What about an evening occupied at a playhouse? In a sense this is quite similar to TV. Except we tend to consider the play an art that is outside the realm of television. It’s still essentially as passive, in the sense of doing, as watching TV. Some plays involve audience participation but these are hardly the norm–perhaps there is a reason participatory plays aren’t more popular. Sometimes we need to not occupy ourselves with producing. With being “on” and actively involved, our intentions trained on doing.

If the regular consumer of free time shifts his consumption from one of TV watching (passive-doing) to one of researching, debating, and writing Wikipedia entries (active-doing something) then doesn’t he become a producer? He’s consuming his free time by producing (intentions and energy trained at doing something), which is exactly what so many Web 2.0/social media enterprises are hoping will make their business models successful. Shirky is right in more ways than one to make his industrial revolution/gin stupor comparison to our current day digital tech & Internet/TV situation.

I wonder if we’re losing our ability to develop the mental dexterity which enables us to wander through an open-ended forest of perspectives on what we do do. The notion of reflection could be lost. If we always occupy our free time by doing something, we’re occupying ourselves out of time we might otherwise occupy in, for example, meditation. If using the cognitive surplus means we take up the value that doing something is better than doing nothing, I fear we may create a problem as unhealthy as the excess in passive-doing known as watching TV.

“One drawback is security. Much of the hype around wikis concerns their ability to place everyone from the receptionists to clients to chief executive officers on the same virtual playing field.”

The key phrase above is that it puts people “on the same virtual playing field.” Useful things take place when people are uniformly able to document their activities, collaborative or otherwise. Simplicity is a defining aspect of wiki applications–they make it incredibly simple to collaborate on developing, publishing, or otherwise contributing to company information, documents, in some cases products, etc. I’ll talk about an internal wiki only, as I realize that one open to clients as well may present a slightly different set of issues. Still, I’d argue that in most cases the somewhat loose security issue is more of a benefit than a drawback. Let me illustrate this with how the company I work for, uses one.

Some time ago, frustrated with the problems of repeatedly sending mass e-mails to everyone in our company, I set up an internal corporate wiki. A wiki is excellent for work that is in constant flux or must be accessible by everyone in the company.

• communicate important news or announcements
• inform about policies that must be adhered to
• distribute documents
• collaborate on work issues
• capture and disseminate the day-to-day knowledge that employees develop

I think these things fail through e-mail but work with a wiki. I think most of these things are usually (though not always) too encumbered with hierarchy structures, metadata entry, and access controls to be the most effective for the types of things I mentioned above. Even when people save e-mail messages, they must make repeated archaeological expeditions through their e-mail histories. If announcements need to be referred to in the future, there’s no guarantee people will be able to find them in an inbox. Policies and problems that have been solved are likely to be forgotten if they’re not easily present and visible, as they are in a wiki. Ensuring that people always use the most up-to-date versions of documents means making them easily accessible and that is so nicely accomplished with a wiki. Using e-mail to collaborate on projects can become a nightmare of criss-crossing information, which often leaves people out of the loop. If people are in the habit of working with a wiki on all sorts of general day-to-day tasks, it becomes an automatic, company-wide storehouse of employee knowledge.

Using a wiki facilitates these activities. For example, at TEC, internally we use the fantastic, open source Wikka Wiki application. It’s simple enough that people can be productive with it after about five/ten minutes of instruction. It doesn’t confuse with over-sparkly and burdensome features. It’s fast–takes fractions of a second to access and edit in a web browser. It doesn’t require manipulating difficult access permissions. These are all important features because they make it at least on par, if not sometimes easier than sending an e-mail or accessing a DMS. If you want to change peoples’ work habits from constant e-mail use, then I think the alternative ought to be at least as easy and efficient or else offer something so incredibly good as to compel its use.

Before the wiki, people would forget what an important policy might be after six months. Now, even if forgotten, it can be easily found for reference. Before the wiki, frequently used documents were sometimes difficult to disseminate in their most up-to-date form. Now they’re updated, in short order, on their corresponding wiki page.

Before the wiki, information about projects that different groups in the company had to collaborate on, was spread across different people’s e-mails. There was the risk that someone wouldn’t get all the information s/he needed. Now it gets collaboratively updated on pages that anyone within the company can see, which has the added benefit that sometimes people without an obvious, direct connection to the project can discover it and contribute or use it in positive ways that nobody would have imagined previously.

I don’t think a wiki replaces a DMS or vice versa. A DMS might sound like it is designed to capture and better enable such collaboration but I don’t believe that is necessarily its strongest point. I think a DMS is probably better-suited to developing documents that require tight version control, traditional hierarchy structures, and cannot necessarily be developed as content within web pages. A DMS might be more useful for archival purposes or for documents that are sensitive and absolutely must have special access controls. But a DMS tends to be more cumbersome in the security and access area, and thus loses utility in the area of capturing and disseminating employee knowledge.

Spreading the wiki. In the past, people sometimes would tell me about some sort of project they needed to work on or information they wanted to store in an easily usable way. I’d recommend they try the wiki to facilitate it. So they’d ask of course, “what’s that?” and I’d spend five/ten minutes explaining it. The interesting thing is that then they go off and explain it to other people on their teams, then the different teams work on things with the wiki, word-of-mouth makes its use spread. I’m sure this isn’t a 100% effective way to promote its use but I was pleasantly surprised that after implementing the wiki and announcing it, people started pushing its use of their own accord.

A system that requires a lot of security, perhaps needing more of a top-down approach, wouldn’t permit this type of usage to happen. Setting up access controls, accounts, and maybe designing structures for how a company uses its systems of collaboration and knowledge sharing may be time-consuming and ultimately not do the job for which they’re intended. On the other hand, a wiki method allows this to self-organize. The chaos of knowledge that frequently gets developed and lost throughout a work place gains a facility in which to reside and that attracts use.

According to the article, Diebold claims the office of the secretary of state failed to choose the best voting machine. My first inclination is to assume that of course Diebold would say that, it’s the competition. Presumably the office of the secretary conducted some sort of selection process and based on whatever factors it defined for the decision found that the AutoMARK machines were better suited to its needs.

Assuming there truly was a fair and accurate selection process that led to the purchasing decision then Diebold appears out-of-line. However, what was that process? The article doesn’t discuss it. Wondering if it was made public, I did some searching but didn’t have much success finding any public record of what that might be.

Sometimes one can find public RFPs but there are many different methods used in government procurement processes. Perhaps if government selection processes are conducted well, with a verifiable trail of due-diligence, they should also be consistently made a matter of public record. That would ward off the impression that anything/anyone had undermined the selection process and improperly awarded a contract.

Chatting with one of my colleagues about this issue yesterday, he mused that our company often has an easier time offering our selection methodology services and tools to “developing” nations’ government organizations than to the “developed” ones. He came from a region that might yet be considered to have a developing nation status. I asked what he meant, and to paraphrase, he replied that often when you look at nations where the government has undergone a lot of upheaval, the public has a strong perception that government corruption needs to be brought under control. So these government organizations may be more easily willing to implement selection methodologies with well defined trails for due-diligence. Whereas countries with long-standing stable governments may employ officials that don’t feel quite the same pressures.

I suppose that’s only one person’s speculation but it reflects an important point: without a well-defined and documentable selection process, you open-yourself to the impression of bias or corruption. Based on information in the Boston Globe article, I don’t think we can assume anything corrupt necessarily happened within Massachussetts’ selection process. But it seems to illustrate a fine reason for why organisations (government or not) should carefully document processes, priorities, factors for decision-making, and respondents’ capabilities during their complex selection processes.

1) Virtualization. According to Jeff Jaffe, executive vice president and chief technology officer at Novell, “As a result of this collaboration, customers will now be able to run virtualized Linux on Windows or virtualized Windows on Linux.” But this is not accurate. Customers are already able to run virtualized Linux on Windows or virtualized Windows on Linux via applications like VMWare, Parallels, and others. So the virtualization hype produced in this announcement sounds a little much, at least on the surface. Perhaps the two companies will produce something exciting and effective but the customers’ ability to do what they’re saying is not coming as a result of the Novell/Microsoft collaboration since that ability already exists.

2) Web services. “Microsoft and Novell will undertake work to make it easier for customers to manage mixed Windows and SUSE Linux Enterprise environments and to make it easier for customers to federate Microsoft Active Directory® with Novell eDirectory.” Ok, that sounds good. Though what does it portend for the future? Mitch Ratcliffe comments from ZDNet:

“I’m not saying Microsoft is evil, only that it makes these interoperability deals to defeat its partner, not help them. In the 90s, when both Windows and Novell Netware were under assault by IP networks, they tried to co-exist. Microsoft started making Netware-compatible versions of its local area network management and operating system software.”

One wonders if this is a matter of history repeating itself.

3) Document format compatibility. This seems to focus on improving the compatibility between Microsoft Office and OpenOffice (as Novell distributes it anyway). Err the document formats these applications use. Considering OpenOffice defaults to the Open Document Format (ODF) standard and Microsoft has been under increasing pressure to adhere to that standard or at least support it in addition to its own formats, this doesn’t really seem like huge news. This move toward compatibility has been ongoing anyway.

4) The thing that gets repeated over and over throughout the press release is the mutual affirmation not to kill each other over patents. And this is what I find a little weird about the whole thing. For the number of times this was mentioned and the lack of detail in why this is so important, it feels like a red herring to me. I wonder if this was designed to ward off or compromise on certain actions the companies may have been considering against each other. Here is a point on the monetary side of things from the press release

“Under the patent cooperation agreement, both companies will make upfront payments in exchange for a release from any potential liability for use of each other’s patented intellectual property, with a net balancing payment from Microsoft to Novell reflecting the larger applicable volume of Microsoft’s product shipments. Novell will also make running royalty payments based on a percentage of its revenues from open source products.”

Jason Matusow writes in his blog:

“What it really means is that customers deploying technologies from Novell and Microsoft no longer have to fear about possible lawsuits or potential patent infringement from either company.”

I wonder how much customers really had this fear. It seems like such a fear surfaced for a little and a number of companies began offering indemnification programs for open source solutions. But that faded rather quickly. Perhaps because the threat isn’t real enough to pick up many clients. I don’t remember exactly how this went, but the last LinuxWorld Expo I attended, there was a session in which conversation shifted toward the legal aspects of just how real or likely such lawsuit threats were. The opinion seemed to be that they were mostly FUD. Considering how “successful” ones like the SCO case are, it doesn’t seem like this has had a huge impact to many customers. Yet here Novell is, apparently ready to make royalty payments to Microsoft based on open source solutions it sells and so I am reminded of Mitch Ratcliffe’s comments again (which I cited above), where he likens the agreement to Dracula’s modus operandi.

In all of this, nobody hesitates to point out that this may be, at least in part, a response to Oracle and its recent Red Hat move–competitors to Microsoft and Novell. Steven J. Vaughan-Nichols of Linux-Watch has an insightful write-up about this. If there’s going to be a dominant enterprise Linux platform, Novell would certainly rather have SUSE be the one and I’d expect Microsoft can only stand to gain by appearing aligned with a strong distribution that could give it comparable access to enterprise customers using Linux.

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Addendum – 22:51

The red herring of this deal that I mentioned I suspected, may have been revealed by Bruce Perens. He theorizes that this is actually a means for Microsoft to set up the conditions for an environment, which enables it to sue. It would seem to need some “correct” paths available before pursuing patent suits against Free software systems.

“Even if everyone were to be protected regarding software that Novell distributes, there’s the tremendous collection of Free Software that they don’t distribute. A logical next move for Microsoft could be to crack down on “unlicensed Linux”, and “unlicensed Free Software”, now that it can tell the courts that there is a Microsoft-licensed path. Or they can just passively let that threat stay there as a deterrent to anyone who would use Open Source without going through the Microsoft-approved Novell path.”

That’s quite a strategy. Except there is some question as to whether Novell would still be able to even offer something under a GPL license. Furthermore, I have a hard time seeing how this could ever truly be that effective. A GNU/Linux system has many heads, which appear in a widely dispersed environment of physical and virtuals realms, governed by a multitude of laws that are not all US-based, and embraced by many people that just don’t need to care. I don’t see them all being cut off.

The article notes that “By lowering the price of Windows, the demand for Linux shrinks to the point where Linux is not a threat to the survival of Windows.” If I understood correctly, I don’t think that their study was intended to look at issues outside the scope of their economic model. Thus, the following is not criticism but rather some extra thought on the matter. I think there could be other issues that might make Linux a threat to the wide-spread survival of Windows.

For example, perhaps this is unlikely but if Windows exploits, viruses, etc. increased to the point where nobody could realistically use the operating system safely I would imagine totally different sorts of reasons compelling people to adopt Linux, namely privacy or safety concerns. Some time ago, I presented an article on how I thought a lean OS delivery strategy could really impact user adoption. I don’t see Microsoft able to do this, I think it is something that only a FOSS OS could accomplish because of the nature of the FOSS development/community/business models.

And what does the study discussed in the article illuminate?

The article discusses FOSS “demand-side learning” in which the development cycle is shorter because users have the opportunity to improve the software by modifying the code or contributing ideas. This may give the impression that FOSS, by virtue of increasing demand-side learning, would displace the position of proprietary software. However, the study’s authors note that their economic model does not show that to be the case.

They point out that “…the value of an operating system depends critically on the number of users, traditional software has an advantage…” that is, its usage is already spread far and wide. This first-mover advantage seems critical, according to their model, in what would prevent Linux from overtaking Windows.

In spite of demand-side learning, technically better software, and cost advantages, they note that without strategic buyers (such as governments or large organizations that choose to do wide-scale Linux rollouts). It’s not likely that Linux will overtake Windows. Because of some those factors, they also note that Microsoft ultimately gains from people copying and distributing the Windows OS, even when MS doesn’t receive payment for the copies.

I also thought their points on societal welfare were interesting, in that they find “…a monopoly of Linux is always preferable…to a Windows monopoly…” but that it’s “ambiguous whether a duopoly Linux-Windows is better than a Windows monopoly.” I don’t think this takes into account issues like the importance of freedom within the context of modern technical societies. I would like to know more about what they considered in societal welfare.

Finally, among their recommendations for Microsoft, if it wishes to remain competitive (and I guess “remain” is the correct word since we do see sizeable Linux increases in demand-side learning as well as the key strategic buyers they identified, taking action) is one that MS increase its demand-side learning. The thing is, how could Microsoft do that? The study recommends a number of methods. However, I don’t see a way for proprietary vendors such as Microsoft to seriously increase their demand-side learning enough to be competitive with FOSS communities, unless they themselves go FOSS.

Even though some sites have reported on this study from the perspective that Linux cannot overtake Windows, rather I think that so long as MS stays proprietary, the study points toward the direction of Linux.

——

Update: Dana Blankenthorn at ZDNet commented on this study as well. Dana brings up some other ideas that weren’t addressed in the study, like “…the idea that open source isn’t filled with clever entrepreneurs…” which I suppose heads toward something I was trying to show, that there are outside factors, which may be unexpected and could contribute to the competition in wholly different ways.

However, Dana seems to argue that the Harvard article is filled with conjecture and overreaching conclusions. I didn’t interpret it that way. I had the impression that the Harvard conclusions were drawn for only a very specific set of parameters as defined in their economic model. I don’t believe the conclusion was that “Microsoft will always beat open source.” in fact, while I saw that quote in Dana’s commentary I can’t find it in the original article.

Rather the original article seems to provide conditions that could lead to either side gaining or losing ground. The article says “Ultimately, the authors believe, neither side is likely to be forced from the battlefield” which is a rather different conclusion. The authors also hypothesized the following if MS set the price of Windows to zero “…Thus, we conjecture that even in this case, there would be people developing and using Linux…” and I don’t believe that conjecture helps support Bankenthorn’s interpretation of the article.

Why do I bring this up? Simply because I don’t think the original article was prophesying the future so much as examining what might happen under different conditions.

The point here is that with Free and open source software, frequently one is at a loss trying to get a development community to respond to particular business issues when the issues are peripheral to the development of the software. The reason is not because the development community is basking under the dream of an intoxicating four-leaf clover high grown in artificial pleasure pods, but because it’s outside the scope of what they’re pursuing and toiling at, namely developing the software. Such business functions are often taken up by other service organizations (which are generally a part of the development community too) that do focus on implementing, supporting, customizing, etc. the software.

Why address the letter to an ITBusiness.ca article? I’m not entirely clear on that, however I do see the sense in linking the issues. Various other ITBusiness.ca articles report on the change in procurement processes as involving a decrease in the number of qualified suppliers, perceived increase of barriers to SMB providers, and introduction of methods such as electronic reverse auctions, which some people seem to be claiming would emphasize low initial costs at the expense better long-term purchase strategies. If I understand correctly, I think that what the Clue article proposes fits with what would work well for the channel partners of large vendors (whether they’re open source or not). It recognizes that channel partners provide valuable services, which risk being slashed from the procurement process (if the ITBusiness.ca articles’ various representative quotes are accepted). These services actually may be valuable toward saving taxpayers’ money in ways that could not be accounted for if the government focuses on purchase costs with only a few vendors directly. So these channel partners are essentially the equivalent to the general open source type of business, which is about providing value-added services around a typically, zero-cost product. They naturally share a goal here.

On the one hand the proposed procurement process change sounds like it may favour FOSS solutions because of upfront cost factors. But if these solutions cannot even be considered because the actual providers can’t get the opportunity to be part of the process, it’s moot.

Paul Murphy posted a thought-provoking piece concerning consulting bias (plus), called Corporate loyalties and the temporal disconnect. He calls attention to the idea that people cannot really claim to be unbiased. We are wise to disclose bias so that we know how to deal with it and how it affects the decisions we make. I understood Murphy’s point to address more of the way people compare, for example, a product now with their experience of it in the past not taking into account the context of the comparison being “now.”

“…the memories haven’t changed, but circumstances have – and basing actions on comparisons in which one side is frozen in time is therefore intellectually dishonest.”

He elucidates this conclusion with several situations in which types of temporal bias would affect a decision. The post mostly is being asserted as the viewpoint of a consultant and clearly it is supposed to focus on a particular type of bias–the temporal sort, but of course there are other types of bias to take into consideration. That’s why I liked his point that

“The whole bias issue generally represents a fundamental mis-understanding of the problem evaluation process: open bias is often a positive thing…”

So, in thinking about these points, I had to reflect on TEC (the company for which I work). Our site frequently proclaims that we’re “impartial” and we attempt to present analysis of software data without bias. Is that really possible? On the one hand, I’d like to say yes because the way we evaluate the functionality of, say, an open source ERP vendor against a proprietary one is based (this is the most rudimentary way of saying it, actually it’s more involved) on a program that calculates features supported against those not fully supported. In other words this should take out the human bias that might be present in a consultant trying to recommend a system to its client. The consultant may be susceptible to the temporal situation pointed out by Mr. Murphy or, more likely, might be involved in a certain business relationship with vendors that provides an incentive for recommending those vendors’ solutions. Our company on the other hand, has no alliance to any particular vendor.

However, I have to think that using a program to weigh functional capability and a lack of alignment with specific vendors, do not necessarily equate to a lack of bias. At some level we could probably discover some form of bias. For example, as our analysts model the criteria on which to evaluate vendors because they rely on their research and experience they probably introduce, however innocently, certain biases. I can think of one simple example right away. Before open source software became a well-known enterprise commodity, many of our analyses did not include criteria for open source database support, thus in some ways, perhaps proprietary solutions had a form of advantage.

I would hesitate to call this criticism but rather I think this may highlight a reason why analysts, consultants, etc. have to be constantly self-critical, constantly trying to reflect on why they conclude certain criteria are applicable toward software comparisons and merit further research or recommendation. Thinking on the processes we undertake to form these analyses, comparisons, or conclusions may also be enlightening toward trends of the times. And that comes back to Murphy’s point on the changing circumstances of temporality.

The main thing that interested me was its discussion the companies that provide accounting solutions for open source platforms, most of those recognized in the article, actually seem to fall a bit short. Indeed, to quote a comment from an ACCPAC reseller presented in the article

“…Beck says most Linux installations involve running IBM DB2 database on a Linux server while running the accounting application on a Microsoft system.”

I wonder why that is? Shortly after, the article states the following

“Sage Accpac, which supports both Windows and Linux, estimates this year that as much as 20 percent of its installations were on Linux, up from 12 percent a year earlier.”

If that’s the case, I wonder why they’re not putting the complete system on Linux as opposed to setting up a mixed environment? Some of the arguments presented say that “the midmarket is not asking for it.” Is it that straightforward? I wonder if that means they’re only considering people that specifically say they want Linux. What if people want benefits, cost, support levels, functionality etc. that may be provided by a Linux platform but have not thought specifically to demand that via Linux? I have the impression that answering “the midmarket is not asking for it” seems a little incongruous with the rest of the stats about its deployment. I’d like to know how these match or do not match.

Finally, although the article highlights some proprietary financial apps that run with Linux or MySQL, it doesn’t mention a single financial application that is, itself open source. They exist though, perhaps I’ll follow up on this in the future.

Sure, there may be many differences between the operation of FOSS-based companies and their proprietary counterparts. For example, Linux distributors have all kinds of organizations, processes, and ways to facilitate community participation, which they not only rely on for their well-being but also put great effort into nurturing. Doesn’t this go hand-in-hand with the idea behind a cooperative? I thought Strategy+Business Magazine’s recent article, A Cooperative Solution, was incredibly interesting and enlightening on just how successful co-ops can be (perhaps I’m naïve–the scale, power, and apparent efficiency that some have, hadn’t dawned on me before). Not only did it explain, in-depth, how massive organizations like the Dutch Rabobank or Italian retail COOP thrive (sometimes even moreso than their traditional counterparts), it also focused on how beneficial the co-op structure is to its communities of participants.

Here is a quote from the article concerning thousands of people involved with Rabobank. I’ll make two points about it.

“The members of the bank took part recently, for example, in voting on whether to merge some of its branches. That is the kind of crucial decision usually made by top management. But at Rabobank, it was the focus of long debate among all the members. It took Rabobank’s central organization nine months, many personal discussions, and two general assemblies to build consensus throughout its vast constituency on the consolidation issue.”

First, doesn’t that sound similar to how things often take place in Free and Open Source Software communities? Second, while it may sound like it took a long time, the article later details why some of these group decision making processes, while on the surface sound like they’re hugely inefficient or time-consuming, end up actually making the company, as whole, much more lean and responsive down the road. The Strategy+Business articles explores these co-op features:

• Consensual decision making
• Better communication
• Leadership development in the company and community
• Long-range planning and experimentation
• Opennes to learning best practices
• The social dimension

The processes they evolve to facilitate these areas and the effort they put into doing things “right” in the first place, tends to flatten out all kinds of problems that other non-cooperative organizations face.

Co-ops greatest strength are their constituents. The co-op is, by nature, for the interest of its members and the communities those members constitute. So while a public company might, for example, have to constantly be on guard to increase its earnings every quarter and thus satisfy share-holders (who are likely to have motives outside the scope of what is good for the employees/communities affected by the company), a co-op doesn’t face that problem. Even though (as is the case of the co-ops profiled in the Strategy+Business article) they may be very successful, co-op money flows to its communities, to its own success.

Lastly, in Tim O’Reilly’s recent blog post, Four Big Ideas About Open Source, his second point concerns the way open source companies have an ability to change the rules of the game. I suppose I argued for this advantage too when I wrote about what I thought a Linux distributor should do to in order to gain the typical mass customer mindset for choosing an OS (change the whole rules of the game). Mr. O’Reilly said

“One of the most powerful things about open source is its potential to reset the rules of the game, to compete in a way that undercuts all of the advantages of incumbent players. Yet what we see in open source is that the leading companies have in many ways abandoned this advantage, becoming increasingly like the companies with which they compete.”

And he concludes that these companies should be Web 2.0 companies. Ok, that might be the case, I haven’t formed any intelligent or unintelligent thoughts on that yet. However, I can’t help but think that maybe this is a chance for the dispersed, open, development model to wed its counterpart in business, the co-op. It would certainly be unlike the competitors. I have a smirk on my face just imagining the article fallout that would happen with all the proprietary vendors crying “see, we told you FOSS is communism!”

After the overview, the article provides an interview with the reports’ authors. One point that I thought was insightful came from RFG’s Chad Robinson. In discussing good and bad Linux deployments, he mentioned

“The people that go into Linux with their eyes open tend to be the most successful, because they don’t try to make Linux fit the old model. When you deploy Linux, it’s not enough to just to put a new operating system out there, because you’ve added an operating system to your mix, and that increases complexity. If you just drop Linux in as a replacement and you expect it to behave exactly the same way that your old operating system did, then you’re going to do a little worse than a little better.”

I think that makes a lot of sense. I frequently read articles that talk about advantages or disadvantages to deploying Linux, maybe whenever discussing these advantages or disadvantages there should also be a discussion on the ways these relate to and change the existing work environment. One might make a transportation analogy. Say, I have a car that I sometimes drive to work. Yet there is a cultural push to start riding bicycles instead. Perhaps this could be viewed as adding complexity because the roads must accommodate cars and bikes. However, when I ride a bicycle, I never go to a gas station to guzzle at the pump, it would be pointless (well if I was already feeling pointless I might make this a different story and have sip or two). The two different modes of transportation do not have the same requirements. The advantages of one (it reduces pollution and saves money) would be counteracted if everyone stuck to the same old, unnecessary model by guzzling gas from atop their bicycles. Quite a catastrophe.

To me, there’s no contest, GNU/Linux systems have been offering more innovative, stable, easily productive, and pleasant desktop systems (KDE for example) for years. However, that’s not enough to move Linux to a place where it challenges the automatic momentum both Microsoft and Apple enjoy within the mindset of the general population (at least in North America–perhaps elsewhere this is different). The mindset of the user/customer environment is what is needed to turn it into the year of the Linux desktop–Novell isn’t making much of a dent in this regard.

Jem Matzen wrote why specialized systems as opposed to fancier eye candy would be a better answer to move in this direction (that’s my very over-simplified paraphrase). I appreciate that notion in part; I’d like to suggest something else though, something which I think would give GNU/Linux and FOSS applications a real poignant way to shift the public’s mindset toward their adoption. Even better, it’s a business model that could only, really work in its entirety within a Free and open source ecosystem. What I’m suggesting, is essentially like something James P. Womack and Daniel T. Jones recommend in their book, Lean Thinking, except applied within a FOSS ecosystem.

To catalyze the required mindset shift–and this may appear plain at first glance, let me flesh it out–if a customer could easily buy a computer system, stacked with the desired hardware, configured software, support expertise, update service, backup service, in addition to having automatic access to a range of web services (like music stores or VoIP services) optionally pre-setup, it would be a completely compelling solution. What’s so special? Don’t we see that from the likes of Apple or Dell? Not really. No company that I’m aware of actually does this to the degree I’m proposing but a GNU/Linux OS distribution is the one that would fit this model and allow it to work, now. I’ll continue by talking about what such a fictitious GNU/Linux solution provider would do and I’m going to refer to this fictitious company as Fictux.

A full computing solution should come from a company that pre-bundles everything its customers want, consistently supporting it, for the duration of ownership. It should not require anxious intervention from the owner when the owner desires a new component or new system, and the new system should have all data and applications from the old system installed, setup, and accessible upon delivery.

1) Getting the computer. It’s not impossible to find a company on-line that will sell a computer set up with Linux. There are some hardware vendors offering compelling Ubuntu and Linspire preinstalled systems. Every now and then you even hear about a big box store selling some Linux PCs. Some companies, like Dell, even let you pre-configure the hardware components to varying degrees. Fictux would make this selection easy, it would have pre-tested the hardware to be sure it all works together in combination with the applicable software. This is not a new idea but it must be combined perfectly with the rest of the service.

2) The right software, configured right. The system cannot simply be preloaded with a Linux distro! From the point-of-view of most average users, there probably isn’t a cognizance of getting anything extremely compelling from an OEM with Linux preinstalled, they might as well have Windows. Worse, getting a new system with the standard OS leaves too much effort to the user to seek and install all their desired applications (this is true of Windows, Macintosh, and Linux). Most standard Linux distributions get a running start (bundling thousands of apps) compared to Windows or Mac systems, but sometimes too many apps are a detriment. Worse is when the user gets apps targetting what s/he wants but they’re not necessarily the specific ones s/he wanted (say I want Kopete while my distro automatically gives me GAIM).

A long time ago, when I was a dedicated Mandrake (Mandriva) user, I remember suggesting (and I don’t recall if this was in a user forum, an e-mail, a comment form, or what) that they let users select every software package they want, in advance to downloading an installation ISO. Then the user could download a totally custom version of the distribution. That’s to say that Fictux would offer custom versions of its distribution, tailored to exactly what the user wants the instant the system is turned on. This must be done at the time of purchasing the hardware.

Could Microsoft or Apple get agreements, permanently ongoing agreements, from the thousands of potential proprietary software vendors a customer might want to have installed? Could Microsoft or Apple charge a humane price for such a system? It doesn’t seem plausible. However, a Linux-based manufacturer can do this because of its FOSS ecosystem.

If I was the customer, obviously over the computer’s lifetime I’d want to occasionally install something new, but currently when I, for example, install a Kubuntu system for the first time, I have to search through a package repository interface (though it’s an easily unified one) for whatever I want to install, then tell it to install–the consequence is that every time I set up a new computer with the operating system, I spend half a day just adding the applications I want and configuring them. Yet a Linux distribution is already a carefully selected collection of Free software applications, tied and tested together into a whole system. Why is practically every distribution offering its common system (sometimes there is a server or business version) and then asking the user to install all the options? Fictux would ask the options first and make the distribution, the user’s distribution. It could be an audio work-oriented distro, desktop publishing distro, file server distro, immediately upon powering on, and according to the user’s taste. Furthermore, and I’ll expand this when I get to backups, it should already be populated with the information about the user, his/her preferences, and files.

3) Provide the support expertise. Plenty of companies, especially in the open source world, have chosen a business model of providing support services. Why is this often an independent company from the hardware, software, or other services? Of course they’re not all independent companies, but Fictux, in providing each point I’m detailing here would also be the point of contact for any support-related issue. Software questions, hardware failures (even to the point of arranging pickup and delivery replacement service), possibly even in agreement with the ISP.

4) Manage the update service. If there is some sort of hardware recall, Fictux would be responsible. As new technology is available, Fictux stays on top of it and folds the new tech into its service. It’s got to preemptively know which hardware will best support new software and be able to let the user know, without requiring the user to research all kinds of options and configurations. I think the transparency of the many test releases in open source development might be especially helpful in this regard. As fixes for software bugs, security holes, and new versions become available, the company must manage these and make them simple for the user to be aware of and apply. This is essentially a no-brainer for Linux distributions, most of them already do this on the software side, it’s a matter of making this process as effortless on the hardware side. For example, current excitement is the Novell sponsored xgl/compiz combo. It requires certain graphics hardware. Fictux would offer this alongside its software update service so that the user immediately and easily understood what would be needed to get the latest fun features. Linux systems generally are able to support the hardware I throw at them (often more easily than Windows), though some exceptions stand out–as Linux systems gain in popularity, I expect this issue will continue to decrease.

5) Make the backup service easy and more useful than just a data backup. A number of different Internet-based backup services have been sprouting up, both for business and the regular home user, but these don’t interconnect as an integral part of the rest of the products and services I’ve mentioned for Fictux. Backing up data should come easily and automatically. It should be secure and accessible. But let it do more than just back-up data. It could be used for preconfiguring a system. Save all the configuration data throughout users’ computers’ lifetimes, even as new applications are installed. When it’s time to buy a new system, the customer won’t have to reselect all of his/her applications (like the first time) because it would already be known to Fictux. Even better, the computer system that the user receives would include all of his/her data, settings, bookmarks, etc. Many of these could even be imported from non-Linux systems at the first order. This would be like a dynamic “ghosting” system for companies that continually have to order new computers for employees. I’m sure there are vendors that already deliver similar services for large organizations but again, I’m not aware of a company that does it in conjunction with all of the rest of the items I’ve detailed and by scaling from one to hundreds or thousands of units.

6) Pre-setup web services. Deals used to come bundled by some manufacturers, months of AOL at a discount, just click the icon to activate it. Instead, allow the user to select the web services they use or would like to use (say VoIP services, on-line music stores, and even free services such as favourite Internet radio stations) in advance to receiving the computer, it would just be another configuration the company could easily arrange for its customers before the customers even start using their computers and more importantly it would allow Fictux to include the appropriate hardware to support these services (audio file player? headset?, etc.). It may be argued that these services are too vast to manage, but I think Fictux could find a way to bundle a service distribution in much the same manner it bundles the thousands of Free software applications in its repository.

Finally, as I said at the beginning, none of these ideas are necessarily new in-and-of themselves, they just haven’t all been offered together by one company. If each can be done by some company, why can’t they all be done by a single company? It should appeal from a business perspective because each provision of service or product helps the company further its sales effort within its own solution chain. The more important point, however is the customer/user. Each step of buying a computer, using it, managing to obtain and use software, hardware, and services, and finally, after a few years, buying a new one, is accompanied by anxiety, research efforts, and ultimately wasted time by the customer/user. A company should eliminate all of that extra effort. Most users only undertake these efforts because they have no choice (read, these steps themselves provide no value for the customer/user). As I mentioned in my second point, only a FOSS vendor can adequately offer such a solution. Furthermore I think a FOSS vendor would be especially suited to do the other steps well (such as the web services/hardware pre-configuration integration) because of its existing expertise in packaging complex and diverse software configurations.

A single vendor that can accomplish all of these steps would be offering something incredibly appealing for the masses (neophytes and computer experts alike) because it would be offering the only solution that is valuable from the start, with a minimum of wasted customer/user effort. I think this kind of solution would differentiate a company enough to challenge the automatic momentum Microsoft and Apple enjoy within the mindset of the general population. When it arrives, it might even shift the gradual gain in Linux adoption to a more pronounced, year of the Linux desktop.

I think the news feed reader is taking the place of both some browsing activity and some e-mail activity. People ought to be viewing blogging and news feeds not as the “extreme edge” mentioned in the interview but rather a notable shift in the way people discover and retrieve information from web sites.

Lee Gomes (the interviewer) asked why Nielsen prefers an e-mail newsletter over a news feed. It brought up a few points on the focus of a newsletter but Nielsen cautioned “Unless a newsletter is very good, people will just say, ‘Oh no, more information.’” And I find that to be my case. There are a few newsletters I like reading but the majority have too much garbage to wade through and simply clutter my e-mail inbox. I’m hesitant to subscribe to anyone’s newsletter now that I’m invariably offered the option during any web site registration. Over the years, site after site, has reinforced the notion that once I subscribe, the subscription will balloon into unwanted mail and it will be difficult to remove myself from the lists. Even when that’s not the practice, there is that suspicion. Abuses have made that impression the general state.

Many years ago I attended a conference held by a local phone company, which was trying to convince its corporate clients to build corporate web sites (and hence they needed fast Internet connections). The conference had a number of very informative sessions highlighting the benefits a web site could bring to a business. One of the points I recall, was how much emphasis they put on having a clear and easy sign-up page for a company newsletter. They made the case that a well-designed newsletter, would help a company stay in contact with its customers (of course that lends itself to all kinds of wonderful marketing activities).

Now I hear similar arguments for the business benefits of blogging. Except the nice thing about blogging and hence blog news feeds, is that the subscribing user has complete control over whether s/he subscribes to it or not (unlike what happens when you release your e-mail address to the clutches of some unfamiliar internal machinations of a company you probably have little reason to trust).

One last thing. On the conversational aspect of blogs (which seems to be, at least in part, commentary on who actually is reading/using them), Nielsen comments that it works for fanatics “…who are engaged so much that they will go and check out these blogs all the time.” I’m inclined to agree temporarily, but it is a shortsighted viewpoint if that is where it ends. True most people I know, haven’t got a clue what a news feed reader is much less a blog, though since I’ve been using these for a while, they’re familiar concepts and tools for me. However, all technology uses tend to be that way. When I went to the conference I mentioned previously, an e-mail newsletter seemed like something only a small percentage of the population would ever use. That changed. Now that I regularly use a news feed reader to read articles, I use my web browser less frequently. That is a major shift in the way I access Web content.