Clay Shirky has a great essay up, “Newspapers and Thinking the Unthinkable.”

Back in 1993, the Knight-Ridder newspaper chain began investigating piracy of Dave Barry’s popular column, which was published by the Miami Herald and syndicated widely. In the course of tracking down the sources of unlicensed distribution, they found many things, including the copying of his column to alt.fan.dave_barry on usenet; a 2000-person strong mailing list also reading pirated versions; and a teenager in the Midwest who was doing some of the copying himself, because he loved Barry’s work so much he wanted everybody to be able to read it.

One of the people I was hanging around with online back then was Gordy Thompson, who managed internet services at the New York Times. I remember Thompson saying something to the effect of “When a 14 year old kid can blow up your business in his spare time, not because he hates you but because he loves you, then you got a problem.” I think about that conversation a lot these days.

Gives new meaning to “Killing them with kindness.”

Obviously, there’s the Business Risk aspect of this all–when your biggest fans are the worst enemies of your business model, you’ve got a serious problem. The problem with the model is probably that it’s based scarcity, and scarcity is no longer the basis of a business model for anything but physical commodities.

Now, I’m starting to wonder what the next business model to succumb to the Marginal Cost Of a Copy Approaches Zero. I’m going way out on a limb, but I think the next model will be basic IT services.

What?!, you’re probably thinking. Work with me here. The incremental cost of adding a row to a database has been essentially zero for some time. When I was working in online dating, the cost of adding a new user was close enough to zero that it almost wasn’t meaningful to try to accurately measure it (too many variables to wind up with a value that was both meaningful and accurate except at the highest aggregate levels). We effectively had a fixed cost which we then distributed across our subscriber base.

Gmail, Yahoo mail, and Hotmail email all brought a similar cost model to email. As the cost of adding an account fell, the variety of options for generating enough revenue fell with it. I think I pay less than five dollars per year for email hosting of my domain, and that’s for something like 25GB of storage and unlimited inboxes. The key is that email hosting is no longer costs enough that I consider it worth tracking.

The challenge today is not about finding the next digital asset or service whose marginal cost-per-copy is zero at one copy. It’s about determining how to manage the risk that it happens in some way that your firm is not well-positioned to adapt to (or, more honestly for most firms, attempt to prevent), either because it’s taking money out of your pocket as a provider or costing you competitive advantage because your competitors are better able to take advantage of the situation than your firm.

Extra credit to all of those who know where “][” comes from, even if it has only the most tenuous relationship to this post.
Photo from Boston Globe’s “Big Picture”

I forgot to point everyone to Cory Doctorow’s essay in Harvard Business Review, “The High Priests of IT — And the Heretics,” but it should be mandatory reading for anyone who manages or deals with the IT group in a corporate environment.

The dirty secret of corporate IT is that its primary mission is to serve yesterday’s technology needs, even if that means strangling tomorrow’s technology solutions. The myth of corporate IT is that it alone possesses the wisdom to decide which technologies will allow the workers on the front line to work better, faster and smarter — albeit with the occasional lackluster requirements-gathering process, if you’re lucky.

The fact is that the most dreadful violators of corporate policy — the ones getting that critical file to a supplier using Gmail because the corporate mail won’t allow the attachment, the ones using IM to contact a vacationing colleague to find out how to handle a sticky situation, the incorrigible Twitterer who wants to sign up all his colleagues as followers through the work day — are also the most enthusiastic users of technology, the ones most apt to come up with the next out-of-left-field efficiency for the firm.

Like I quoted from Barry Schwartz’s TED Talk, “Rules prevent disaster, but what they guarantee is mediocrity.”

Entertaining and informative reading, Ethan Zuckerman’s notes on his talk at ETech, “The Cute Cat Theory”.

A couple of excerpts to draw you in, but you should go read it for yourself.

Web 1.0 was invented to allow physicists to share research papers.

Web 2.0 was created to allow people to share pictures of cute cats.

and

Based on my Tripod experience, I’d offer the hypothesis that any sufficiently advanced read/write technology will get used for two purposes: pornography and activism. Porn is a weak test for the success of participatory media - it’s like tapping a mike and asking, “Is it on?” If you’re not getting porn in your system, it doesn’t work. Activism is a stronger test - if activists are using your tools, it’s a pretty good indication that your tools are useful and usable.

When I was working in the online dating space, I assumed the deluge of porn was a function of our being the intersection of people who were single/horny and willing to use their credit card to buy things online. Now I’ll have to re-think that assumption, something I probably should have done long ago based on the presence of porn comments in my spam filter.

I don’t recall any activism in the dating business, but maybe it just never made its way over to me since I was focused on security and fraud.

But I digress…

The real point of the talk is about activism, not porn, and more specifically about how activists effectively use social networking tools to align the interests of people who share pictures of cats, drawing in the cat sharers of the world (who far outnumber the activists) as collateral damage.

That’s not to say this approach is perfect–he explains how the Chinese government has engaged in a game of measure and countermeasure censorship, but in general, it provides an interesting example of how activist signal benefits from cute cat noise and the unintended conseqences of both.

John Robb theorizes that the current global depression is a stress test for nation states:

Nation-states are now caught between two irresistible and strengthening forces:

1. A dominant, turbulent, and uncontrollable global super-network, that is pressuring/weakening/buffeting nation-states from above.
2. Super-empowered individuals/groups rising up from below that are ready to pounce on or exploit any demonstration of nation-state weakness.

So far, the vast majority of thinking re: the response to the stress test has been a revival of early 20th Century methods/theories of activist government. I’m fairly sure that this is a sterile response to the challenge.

From an Information Risk perspective, corporations are like nation states here. The overall economic situation is pushing companies down and driving budget cuts and weakening the companies’ ability to act from above. Meanwhile, poor morale and accumulated/earned disloyalty is pushing up in the form of ignorant/unconcerned, negligent and malicious employees.

Bob has raised some really good points, so I’m going to throw my own thoughts on the pile here.

First, while we, as corporate citizens, talk about cost, we’re really talking about “need” versus “want.” For example, with email,

The time when an enterprise can afford to supply email from internal system has left us.

Sure, once upon a time the only way to have email was to run the servers yourself. But not any more. Unless a company has some regulatory or contractual reasons why email data cannot be put at risk of third-party access (in which case, it’s probably airgapped), then it can be moved to The Cloud. It’s about “need” versus “want.” Companies need email. They want to have it in-house. Even if many large entities now have it pseudo-in-house, meaning they pay for the servers and the people, but it’s all outsourced.

All if which is a long-winded way of asking, “So why are we still paying for a Very Large (==”Enterprise”) version of a departmental mail server? Why not just go buy it as a service? We can get the exact same set of eatures, for a lot less money if we’re willing to be honest with ourselves about how much of keeping things “in house” is about control and passed off as risk management. Sure, we’re going to ask a bunch of very responsibility-averse decision makers to now accept risks that they ignore/live in denial of (i.e. accept) today. But making the senior leadership feel better about themselves should not be why a company exists. In theory, they’re paid the big bucks because they’re the least afraid of these decisions. In reality, I’d argue they’re walking examples of Loss Aversion in action just like everyone else, aggravated by the fact that the losses would be direct and personal but the gains would be to the company.

Similar arguments can be made for most of the services Bob listed. Throw in the fact that if these things go away, the people go away with it, and making the hard decisions become that much harder since very few people are going to voluntarily to make themselves redundant or reduce their budget and prestige, even if they know it’s the Right Thing to do.

The enterprise need to change how it provides services to the desktop.  What services do the users really need from us and how can we continue to provide them?

Internet/Intranet Web Services

More and more of the services we use are based on the big bad Internet standard W3C.  The enterprise needs to deliver these services with out proprietary tools that limit what computing systems they can be run on.    see: http://www.anybrowser.org/campaign/.  Oh and maybe we should start moving some of this out of our costly data centers and on to systems like Amazon EC2.

Email

The Internet community has developed email standards that serve millions of accounts.  IMAP/POP and SMTP deliver email to client computers with lowest cost and in the most effective manner.  The time when an enterprise can afford to supply email from internal system has left us.  Tools such as Gmail/Postini or Zimbra can deliver email without the need for any infrastructure or staff.  Just move the MX record folks.

Calendaring

Calendaring is an interesting problem.  The enterprise seems to think that Notes or Exchange can deliver the goods, yet neither of these can deliver free/busy to the extended family that is our supply chain.  Since standards such as CalDev are not deployed, we have to fall back to something like Salesforce.com and Google Calendar or Zimbra to fix this now.

Instant Messaging

Instant Messaging is both the bane and the boon for end users, we hate it but we have to have it.  What works out in the real world: XMPP / Jabber.  You can put your own in and link out or just use what is out there depending on your needs and fears.

Desktop applications such as word processing, data management, etc..

The desktop software industry would make you think that you have to run Windows so that you can have the applications you need.  While I am a bit of a Mac fan boy mostly due to a bit of ego and the enjoyment of fine hardware the software that Apple supplies fills the needs of many many individuals.  The only issue for Mac in the 2009 enterprise is the fact that we have to run on the existing hardware that we cannot afford.  While there are some who  actually need Microsoft Office as well as some who need Photoshop, the vast majority do not.  Open Office is the great wedge we have to fill this gap.  Open Office is also a big stick and being a large software package it needs significant support.  Systems like Google Docs are now good enough for most work and the collaboration tools they provide go way beyond anything commercially available.

File storage

There are two major needs for file storage: First is for end users to keep stuff around for others and to share.  Second is for backup of local data.  While it is a grand vision to keep all of your data in the Cloud with Google Docs, Dropbox, or Backpack; users will make files and want to manage and keep them.  The enterprise must provide services to manage that data.

Computing to support the above items

As you can see from the above list of services the actual desktop does not really matter that much.  If it supports a standards based browser such as Firefox, an email client like Thunderbird and some sort of networking you are in the the pink.  Today the key is the cost of ownership and what you need to support that desktop are where you get hit!  What do we really need to do in the enterprise, Count-em, Authenticate-em, Update-em. We have to stay away from targeted solutions that limit the OS we are using.  Looking at the existing hardware in the enterprise we are limited to something that is x86 based.  In the final analysis Linux is the right tool for the time.  You need very little to be a Linux shop:  LDAP, SYSLOG, maybe SAMBA, and wine for the needy.  For now, no viruses, no spyware, etc.; how much money and time does that save?

Pull down Ubuntu 8.10 and install it!  Start a project to really save money in your enterprise!  The savings here are real as are the productivity gains, the improved user satisfaction, and complexity reduction.  Overcoming the inertia and thinking differently about your services is hard.  The morass of legislation along with corporate governance rules may scare some off of this but simplifying your environment and freeing up resources to improve the speed of the enterprise is the goal here.

If you do this please help by contributing resources to the community.  It pays you back instantly!

- Bob

The current enterprise infrastructure is expensive, designed and based on the need to preserve the status quo rather than deliver optimal services. Thinking in terms of services we must deliver, the platform becomes less and less relevant. Look at the percentage of services we can get from the Cloud (both external and internal), the platform becomes nearly irrelevant.

We have to “buy” the most cost-effective platform. Microsoft Windows is not cost effective — it requires its own set of services just to provide a minimal platform. No, it will not all go away with Linux, but many of them do, or become a much smaller problem and require a lot less engineering & architecture to provide required services.
Change happens in volatile times.  This is a volatile time…

Bob

Hello,

My name is Bob; Chandler and I have known each other and worked together for several years. He kindly invited me to be a guest author on the Cubicle. I have been spending a lot of my time in IT Security thinking around alternate computing styles and ways to get the cost out. With the modernization of the Internet, broadband access expansion, and high speed wireless data gives us some interesting new ways to run a business. This is the first in a series and I hope a good discussion around new computing models.

If you still have a small amount of credit in this crazy market you can build and mobilize your business without building big buildings, data centers, or buying lots of new computing hardware. So lets build a business! And buy a few new toys.

If you have an office you have to equip it with Internet access and I would make it wireless. Get the best, it fastest Internet service you can afford. Buy a decent router that has at fast wireless For around $500 get a good double sided color ink-jet printer that has wireless, fax, scanner,etc. You will need one real land line and a REAL phone that does not need batteries. Note that you can maybe save some money and hassle if you set what is called e-fax or electronic fax. (more on this later, there are alternates!)

You need email , the world uses email to do business. For $50 per year per user you can get a Google email account with your own custom domain, web hosting, calendaring, document, storage, and on-line editing. Add a few dollars and Google will provide you advanced features in email controls, filtering, and archiving. Good solid enterprise class tools, storage off of your local computer to keep your data safe and a decent environment to work in.

Now how are you going to access all these fine tools and data? I am a big fan of mobility so I would issue laptop computers and cell phones. But lets be smart about this.

In keeping with the lower cost model (the machine has to have WIFI) lets get a bit lower tier laptop and here is the shocker; run Ubuntu Linux on it. Most of your day to day work will be in Firefox as it works very well with Google. When you need offline access Ubuntu has Open Office and make sure you have the 3.0 version so you are more compatible with all the Microsoft stuff out there. For almost all of your needs you will not need to purchase ANY software! Over time we will talk about applications that will just get the job done for you.

We still need telephones and in today’s world I feel it is important that everyone have a telephone. This is going to cost you a bit of money but the productivity is worth it. With all that nice Google stuff out there you need your email, calendar, and data access on the phone. Well guess what Google got together with some other folks and built a phone operating system called Android and with HTC and T-Mobile made the first Android phone. The phone is good, T-Mobile is getting better all the time so for around $150 for the phone and around $75 per month you have all you need. When you get the phone you sign into your Gmail account and it pulls down your email,contacts, and calendar in just a few seconds.

So now you have the basic end user computing hardware and software you need to operate. No software licensing costs, better performance and best in class communications.

Oh hey maybe a business plan would be cool, but you knew that already. Welcome to Enterprise 2.0 and End User Computing 2.0.