The “Master App” can’t magically make it all work. On the project VRM blog, Doc Searls recently suggested that the killer app for VRM is the “Master App”. In response, on the Project VRM email list, Jim Pasquale suggested it’s … Continue reading →
The “Master App” can’t magically make it all work. On the project VRM blog, Doc Searls recently suggested that the killer app for VRM is the “Master App”. In response, on the Project VRM email list, Jim Pasquale suggested it’s more of a mixing board than a master app. Jim’s right. The “master app” reminds me of what I call “The Sauron business model,” a term I coined after watching over one hundred and twenty 60 second pitches at two different Startup Weekend Santa Barbara events in the last two years. With all of those pitches in rapid succession, the pattern popped right out. For those of you who might not be Lord of the Rings fans, Sauron was the bad guy hell-bent on unifying everything in Middle Earth under his brutal rule, and wanted that hobbit’s ring to do it: Three Rings for the Elven-kings under the sky, Seven for the Dwarf-lords in their halls of stone, Nine for Mortal Men doomed to die, One for the Dark Lord on his dark throne In the Land of Mordor where the Shadows lie. One Ring to rule them all, One Ring to find them, One Ring to bring them all and in the darkness bind them In the Land of Mordor where the Shadows lie. [quoted from http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/One_Ring] What I saw repeated again and again and again in those pitches at Startup Weekend were hopeful entrepreneurs who earnestly believed that if they could just unify all of a person’s [insert unique idea here], they could provide a ground breaking new service that would transform the world. Just like Sauron, all they needed was that One Thing to make it all work… Creating the only singular view of an individuals financials, MyFinances.com will make it easy for people to instantly waste less–and make more–money! Bringing together all of a user’s vendors into one coherent dashboard, people will finally be able to make smart choices that both save money and create more value, while vendors get better access to the right customers at the right time! Giving users control of their identity across all online services will make their online lives simpler and more secure. Sound familiar? The problem with the Sauron business model is that it depends on first unifying All the Things before it generates any unique value. Unless you can provide value FIRST, you’ll never get a chance to unify all the things. Trying to convince or coerce users into doing so makes you look a little like Sauron: delusional, power hungry, and more value destroying than value-creating. What Doc wants sounds great, but starting with a dependency on unification is the wrong framing of the opportunity. As I see it, there are two ways forward for the ambitious market changer: sharpshooting your way into a revolution or teaching a gorilla to dance. <img decoding="async" class="alignleft wp-image-1179" src="https://blog.joeandrieu.com/wp-content/uploads/2015/02/crossing-the-chasm-150x150.jpg" alt="crossing the chasm by Geoffrey Moore" width="125" height="186" srcset="https://blog.joeandrieu.com/wp-content/uploads/2015/02/crossing-the-chasm-201x300.jpg 201w, https://blog.joeandrieu.com/wp-content/uploads/2015/02/crossing-the-chasm.jpg 336w" sizes="(max-width: 125px) 100vw, 125px" /><img decoding="async" class="alignright wp-image-1180" src="https://blog.joeandrieu.com/wp-content/uploads/2015/02/ries-and-trout-positioning-150x150.jpg" alt="ries and trout positioning" width="125" height="158" srcset="https://blog.joeandrieu.com/wp-content/uploads/2015/02/ries-and-trout-positioning-237x300.jpg 237w, https://blog.joeandrieu.com/wp-content/uploads/2015/02/ries-and-trout-positioning.jpg 395w" sizes="(max-width: 125px) 100vw, 125px" />For most entrepreneurs, with limited ammunition and time, finding a way to make every shot counts isn’t just important, it’s vital. Find a niche, nail it. That mantra isn’t new, both Geoffrey Moore and Ries & Trout built business strategy movements on the idea. Focus is everything to the early startup. Do that and you might just be able to become a unifying tool for end-users… you just won’t start out as one. On the other hand, if you’re a player in a big company, with an already ubiquitous presence, then perhaps the opportunity is to make your over-sized gorilla dance like Fred Astaire. Bill Gates orchestrated the myth of Microsoft turning on a dime to take on the Internet. Steve Jobs created entire new categories of devices when he returned to Apple after a forced hiatus. Unfortunately, while most of us don’t have Steve Jobs or Bill Gates levels of genius, even fewer of us are in a position to change existing players as they did. Fighting for VRM, we are rooting for Sean Bohan over at Mozilla, who is fighting the good fight at the organization that makes Firefox, the worlds 3rd most popular web browser. If you are lucky enough to be in a position like Sean’s, go for it. We need visionary change from the top in as many large companies and organizations as we can get. But there are far more hopeful entrepreneurs than change agents positioned at industry giants… In short, beware of the Sauron plan. If you’re imagining your startup unifying all of anything before you produce unique value for your users and customers… you’re probably doing it wrong.
Beyond Data Ownership to Information Sharing
The question of who owns our data on the Internet is a challenging problem. It can also be a red herring, distracting us from building the next generation of online services. The term “ownership” simply brings too much baggage from … Continue reading →
The question of who owns our data on the Internet is a challenging problem. It can also be a red herring, distracting us from building the next generation of online services. The term “ownership” simply brings too much baggage from the physical world, suggesting a win-lose, us-verses-them mentality that retards the development of rich, powerful services based on shared information. Anyone up for sacred cow cheeseburgers? I’m a member–and a big fan–of Steve Holcombe‘s “Data Ownership in the Cloud” LinkedIn group and I love the efforts of the Dataportability guys and am a big supporter of the Privacy and Public Policy work group at Kantara. There is a lot of good work being done by folks trying to figure out how to give people greater control over the use of data about them (privacy) and gain access to data they use or created (dataportability). Unfortunately, sometimes the arguments behind these efforts are based on who owns–or who should own–the data. This is not just an intellectual debate or political rallying call, it often undermines our common efforts to build a better system. Consider this: Privacy as secrecy is dead Data sharing is data copying Transaction data has dual ownership Yours, mine, & ours: Reality is complicated Taking back ownership is confrontational Privacy as secrecy is dead First, the data is pretty much already out there. The issue isn’t “How do we keep data from bad people,” it’s “How do we keep people from doing bad things with data?” DRM and crypto and related technology as the sole means to prevent data leakage and data abuse are failures. Sooner or later, the bad guys break the system and get the data. Sure, there are smart things we can do to protect ourselves. Just like we wear seatbelts and lock our front doors, we should also use SSL and multi-factor authentication, but we can’t count on technology to keep our secrets. We need solutions that work even when the secret is out. In fact, privacy isn’t about information we keep secret. It is about information we have revealed to someone else with expectation of discretion, e.g., when we tell our doctor about our sexual activities. It’s no longer a secret from the Doctor, but because it is private, we have rules that keep the information from being used inappropriately. Most of the time, with most doctors, it works. Those few who break those rules are dealt with through legal means, both civil and criminal, as well as social approbation. So, because we inherently need to release data to different parties at different times, we can’t control it through secrecy alone. Instead, we need to build a framework for preventing abuse when others do have access to sensitive information. Like in the case with our doctor, we want our service providers to have the data they need to provide the highest quality services. Data sharing is data copying Second, in the world of atoms, there can only be one of a thing, which is the reverse of the world of bits. With atoms, even if there are copies, each copy is itself a singular thing. Selling, transferring, or stealing a thing precludes the original owner from continuing to use it. This isn’t true for information, which can easily be sold, transfered, and stolen without disturbing the original version. In fact, the entire Internet is basically a copy machine, copying IP packets from router to router, as we “send” images, web pages, and emails from user to user and machine to machine–each time a new copy is created whether or not the originating copy is deleted. To think of bits as if they were ownable property leads to attempted solutions like DRM that try to technologically prevent access to the information within the data, which is only good until the first hacker cracks the code and distributes it themselves. Instead, if we build social and legal controls on use, we can give information more freely, but under terms set by each individual when they share that information. Enforced by social and legal rather than purely technological means, this makes the most of the low marginal cost of distributing online, while retaining control for contributors. Transaction data has dual ownership Image via Wikipedia Third, much interesting data is actually mutually owned… which means the other guy can already do whatever the heck they want with it. Consider web attention data, the stream of digital crumbs representing the websites we’ve visited and any interactions at each: all our purchases, all our blog posts, all our searches. Everything. Some folks argue that we own that data and therefore have the right to control the use of it. But so too do the owners of the websites we’ve been visiting. We don’t own our http log entries at Amazon. Amazon does. In fact, in every instance where two parties interact, where we engage in some transaction with someone else, both parties are co-creating that information. As such, both parties own it. So, if we tie the issue of control to ownership, then we’ve already lost the battle, because every service provider has solid claims to ownership over the information stored in their log files, just as we, as individuals, own the browsing history stored on our hard drive by Firefox, Internet Explorer and Chrome. In the movie Fast Times at Ridgemont High, in a confrontation with Mr. Hand, Spicoli argues “If I’m here and you’re here, doesn’t that make it our time?” Just like the time shared between Spicoli and Mr. Hand, the information created by visiting a website is co-created and co-owned by both the visitor and the website. Every single interaction between two endpoints on the web generates at least two owners of the underlying data. This is not a minor issue. The courts have already ruled that if an email is stored for any period of time on a server, the owner of that server has a right to read the email. So, when “my” email is out there at Gmail or AOL or on our company’s servers, know that it is also, legally, factually, and functionally, already their data. Yours, mine, & ours: Reality is complicated Fourth, when two parties come together for any reason, each brings their own data to the exchange. We need a framework that can handle that. Iain Henderson breaks down this complexity in a blog post about your data, my data, and our data, talking about an individual doing business with a vendor, for example, someone buying a car. “My data” means data that I, as an individual have that is related to the transaction. It could include the kind of car I’m looking for, my budget, and estimates of my spouse’s requirements to approve of a new purchase. “Your data” means data that the car dealer knows, including the actual cost of the vehicle, the number of units in inventory, the pace of sales, current buzz from other dealers. “Our Data” means information that both parties have in common. That could be Shared Information, explicitly given by one party to the other in the course of the deal, such as a social security number so the dealer could run a credit check. It could be Mutual Information, generated by the very act of the transaction, such as the final sale price of the vehicle. Or, it could be Overlapping Information, which each party happens to know independently, such as the Manufacturer Suggested Retail Price (MSRP) of a vehicle (which we found online before heading to the dealership). The ownership of “your” and “my” data is usually clear. However, ownership of the different types of “our” data is a challenge at best. To complicate matters further, every instance of “my data” is somebody else’s “your data”. In every case, there is this mutually reciprocal relationship between us and them. In the VRM case, we usually think of the individual as owning “my data” and the vendor as owning “your data”, but for the vendor, the reverse is true: to them their data is “my data” and the individual’s data is “your data”. Similar dynamics occur when the other party is an individual. I bring my data, you bring your data, and together we’ll engage with “our” data. We need an approach that respects and applies to everyone’s data, you, me, them, everybody. In these complex Venn diagrams of ownership, it is more important who controls the data than who owns it. We’ve already lost the crudest form of control–secrecy–and we are going to continue to lose more as we opt-in to seductive new services based on divulging more and more information: our purchase history, browsing activity, and real-world location data. But we still need to control how all this data is used, to protect our own interests while still enjoying the benefits of the great big copy machine that is the Internet. Taking back ownership is confrontational © Regien Paassen | Dreamstime.com Fifth, we don’t need to pick a fight to change the game. There is a lot of data out there that many of us believe we should have control over. I agree. A lot of people argue that we should have the right to exclude other people’s use because we own the data, because it’s ours in some legal, moral, or ethical framework. The problem is, those other people already have it, and they also believe that they are legitimate owners. In fact, many of them paid for that data, buying it from data aggregators who compile all sorts of things about people, from both public and private sources. This entire ecosystem of customer data is a multi-billion dollar business and every single player “owns” the data they are working with. So if we focus our energy in claiming ownership over that same data in order to take control, we are framing the conversation as a fight, a fight against a powerful, well-healed, well-funded, entrenched bunch of opponents. Most of these “opponents” are the very people we are trying to win over to our way of thinking. These are the vendors we want to embrace a new way to do business. These are the technologists we want to transform their proven, value-generating CRM systems to work with our data on our terms, instead of their data on their terms. Arguing over ownership puts these potential allies on the defensive, when what we really want is their collaboration. From Ownership to Authority, Rights, and Responsibilities Rather than building a regime based on data ownership, I believe we would be better served by building one based on authority, rights, and responsibilities. That is, based on Information Sharing. Who has the authority to control access and use of particular information? What rights does a party have in using and distributing a piece of information? What responsibilities does an information user have to others with respect to that information? Let’s stop arguing about who owns what and start figuring out how we can share information in ways that allow everyone to win. When we collect all of our information into a single conceptual repository, and then share access to it with service providers on our own terms, we create a high quality, highly relevant, curated personal data store. This allows us to bootstrap a control regime over all of our data in a way that creates new value for us and for our service providers. Now, instead of iTunes Genius or a Last.FM scrobbler only having access to our media use with their service, they can provide recommendations based on all the information stored in our personal audio data store. We get better recommendations and they get better data to drive their services. This personal data store is entirely under the authority of the user, sharing information with service providers according to specific rights and responsibilities. The Information Sharing approach neatly sidesteps the complexities involved in privacy and dataportability issues of the information already known by service providers. These remain serious issues, worth addressing. Resolving them will require long term investment in the legal, regulatory, moral, and political systems that govern our society. Fortunately, sharing the information in our personal data store can begin almost immediately once we have working specifications. This controlled sharing of information will dramatically increase our comfort level when revealing our intentions and interests. We would have control over the use–and would be able to prevent abuse–of that information, while making it easy for service providers to improve our lives in countless ways. At the Information Sharing Work Group at the Kantara Initiative, Iain Henderson and I are leading a conversation to create a framework for sharing information with service providers, online and off. We are coordinating with folks involved in privacy and dataportability and distinguish our effort by focusing on new information, information created for the purposes of sharing with others to enable a better service experience. Our goal is to create the technical and legal framework for Information Sharing that both protects the individual and enables new services built on previously unshared and unsharable information. In short, we are setting aside the questions of data ownership and focusing on the means for individuals to control that magical, digital pixie dust we sprinkle across every website we visit. Image by hegarty_david via Flickr Because the fact is, we want to share information. We want Google to know what we are searching for. We want Orbitz to know where we want to fly. We want Cars.com to know the kind of car we are looking for. We just don’t want that information to be abused. We don’t want to be spammed, telemarketed, and adverblasted to death. We don’t want companies stockpiling vast data warehouses of personal information outside of our control. We don’t want to be exploited by corporations leveraging asymmetric power to force us to divulge and relinquish control over our addresses, dates of birth, and the names of our friends and family. What we want is to share our information, on our terms. We want to protect our interests and enable service providers to do truly amazing things for us and on our behalf. This is the promise of the digital age: fabulous new services, under the guidance and control of each of us, individually. And that is precisely what Information Sharing work group at Kantara is enabling. The work is a continuation of several years of collaboration with Doc Searls and others at ProjectVRM. We’re building on the principles and conversations of Vendor Relationship Management and User Driven Services to create an industry standard for a legal and technical solution to individually-driven Information Sharing. Our work group, like all Kantara work groups, is open to all contributors–and non-contributing participants–at no cost. I invite everyone interested in helping create a user-driven world to join us. It should be an exciting future. This material is based upon work supported by the National Science Foundation under Award Number IIP-08488990. Any opinions, findings, and conclusions or recommendations expressed in this publication are those of the author and do not necessarily reflect the views of the National Science Foundation.
This last year (2009) was the most challenging ever for me, both personally and professionally. Good times, tough problems, people that transformed my heart, and ideas that changed my perspective. It wasn’t always easy, but each challenge had its own … Continue reading →
This last year (2009) was the most challenging ever for me, both personally and professionally. Good times, tough problems, people that transformed my heart, and ideas that changed my perspective. It wasn’t always easy, but each challenge had its own reward. I’m looking forward to writing a bit more this year, opening the conversation up about portable contexts and user driven services. My work with Project VRM and the Kantara Initiative‘s Information Sharing and User-Managed Access Work Groups will continue to be a big part of that. I’m also looking forward to some interesting new product and service releases, from SwitchBook, MyDex, The Mine!, and others in the VRM community, as well as updates and innovations from Scanaroo, Kynetx and Azigo and others. Also, Doc Searls‘ upcoming book on the Intention Economy promises to be an intriguing read. It should be a good year for VRM. Best of luck to you and for your own plans for 2010. May it be a stand-out year for all of us.
In the ProjectVRM Standards Committee discussions, we’ve talked quite a bit about a “One Night Stand” use case, where a personal data store is used with an online retailer and all personal data is erased–as much as possible–after the transaction. … Continue reading →
In the ProjectVRM Standards Committee discussions, we’ve talked quite a bit about a “One Night Stand” use case, where a personal data store is used with an online retailer and all personal data is erased–as much as possible–after the transaction. Teleconference 2008 06 18 Teleconference 2008 07 02 Teleconference 2008 08 13 Teleconference 2008 09 24 Teleconference 2008 10 08 Face to Face 2008 October The premise is simple: if users know they are safe giving personal data, they will give it more freely. Limits on long term data mining (and its attendant offensive behavior of junk mail, spam, and telemarketing) paradoxically increase data sharing and enhance the ability of vendors to provide more meaningful engagement at the moment of the transaction. Less long term data retention leads to more real-time data provided by users, resulting in better customer experiences, and more profit for vendors. Until recently, this was a theoretical argument, a belief by those of us promoting VRM. As Doc Searls puts it, “A free customer is more valuable than a captive one.” Now we have evidence of just how valuable that can be. Jared Spool shares with us the real-world example of a redesign in the direction of the “One Night Stand” that created $300 million in value in the first year: [excerpt edited for brevity. see full article for details] The form was simple. The fields were Email Address and Password. The buttons were Login and Register. The link was Forgot Password. It was the login form for the site. It’s a form users encounter all the time. How could they have problems with it? The problem wasn’t as much about the form’s layout as it was where the form lived. Users would encounter it after they filled their shopping cart with products they wanted to purchase and pressed the Checkout button. It came before they could actually enter the information to pay for the product. “I’m Not Here To Be In a Relationship” We were wrong about the first-time shoppers. They did mind registering. They resented having to register when they encountered the page. As one shopper told us, “I’m not here to enter into a relationship. I just want to buy something.” Some first-time shoppers couldn’t remember if it was their first time, becoming frustrated as each common email and password combination failed. We were surprised how much they resisted registering. Without even knowing what was involved in registration, all the users that clicked on the button did so with a sense of despair. Many vocalized how the retailer only wanted their information to pester them with marketing messages they didn’t want. Some imagined other nefarious purposes of the obvious attempt to invade privacy. (In reality, the site asked nothing during registration that it didn’t need to complete the purchase: name, shipping address, billing address, and payment information.) Not So Good For Repeat Customers Either Repeat customers weren’t any happier. Except for a very few who remembered their login information, most stumbled on the form. They couldn’t remember the email address or password they used. Remembering which email address they registered with was problematic – many had multiple email addresses or had changed them over the years. When a shopper couldn’t remember the email address and password, they’d attempt at guessing what it could be multiple times. These guesses rarely succeeded. Some would eventually ask the site to send the password to their email address, which is a problem if you can’t remember which email address you initially registered with. (Later, we did an analysis of the retailer’s database, only to discover 45% of all customers had multiple registrations in the system, some as many as 10. We also analyzed how many people requested passwords, to find out it reached about 160,000 per day. 75% of these people never tried to complete the purchase once requested.) The form, intended to make shopping easier, turned out to only help a small percentage of the customers who encountered it. (Even many of those customers weren’t helped, since it took just as much effort to update any incorrect information, such as changed addresses or new credit cards.) Instead, the form just prevented sales – a lot of sales. The $300,000,000 Fix The designers fixed the problem simply. They took away the Register button. In its place, they put a Continue button with a simple message: “You do not need to create an account to make purchases on our site. Simply click Continue to proceed to checkout. To make your future purchases even faster, you can create an account during checkout.” The results: The number of customers purchasing went up by 45%. The extra purchases resulted in an extra $15 million the first month. For the first year, the site saw an additional $300,000,000. Now that’s real money. Hat tip to Abhijit Nadgouda of iface thoughts.
Happy New Year! I am looking forward to 2009. There has been lots of change, both professionally and personally, this year, putting me (and SwitchBook) on a trajectory for amazing things in the year ahead. One of my New Year’s … Continue reading →
Happy New Year! I am looking forward to 2009. There has been lots of change, both professionally and personally, this year, putting me (and SwitchBook) on a trajectory for amazing things in the year ahead. One of my New Year’s resolutions is to create–and help to create–the world’s first VRM applications in 2009. There are more than a few in the works, at various stages of development. After a long gestation, I believe several are ripe for coming to market. It’s fun working with a community of like-minded folks to create something grander and better than one could have alone. That’s a big part of the joy of open source and it is a huge part of what Doc Searls brings to Project VRM. It’s a great crowd. I’m excited about what we’re doing together and I hope you’ll join us in 2009, in some way, large or small.
If you’re going to bet your company on a platform, pick the open one. That was my advice last month at the Caltech/MIT Enterprise Forum on Platforms. It turned into a lively debate (you can check out the audio for … Continue reading →
If you’re going to bet your company on a platform, pick the open one. That was my advice last month at the Caltech/MIT Enterprise Forum on Platforms. It turned into a lively debate (you can check out the audio for the June 8 2008 event), almost inevitably pitting me against Peter Coffee of Salesforce.com, with Marc Canter rallying the forces of small business and openness in his inimitable style: caustic, irreverent, and sourcing no small amount of passion. One small side effect of the debate was that, at times, it slipped unavoidably into a referendum on Salesforce.com rather than an insightful discussion of the merits of open verses closed systems and how companies can reasonably navigate their choices. Pulling back from that focus on Salesforce left more than a few unanswered issues. Peter Coffee contacted me after the event and asked to keep the conversation going, which sounds like a great idea. So, here’s a reprise of my presentation on June 14. Open Platforms and Standards Level 4 Platforms FTW This article is about open platforms and what an entrepreneur should think about when choosing a platform for their business. Two Questions When choosing a platform, you’ll want to consider two major questions: Will it do what you need? Will it last long enough for you to do it? The first is a matter of features and functionality, and must be evaluated on a case-by-case business for each business. Since I don’t know your business, I won’t spend much more time on this question. The second question is about longevity. Will the platform itself be available as long as your business needs to use it? Will it be stable and robust enough on a moment-to-moment basis? Is there a self-sustaining community of developers and integrators to help you continue to help your company adjust as business needs change over time? In other words, will the platform continue to be able to provide value for your business in the long term? What it means to be Open In talking about open platforms, I want to be clear what I mean by open. An open platform, for the sake of this article (and as far as I’m concerned, for the purposes of understanding the revolution of open systems), is one that adheres to the principles of N.E.A: No one owns it Everyone can use it Anyone can improve it If a single entity or group owns the platform, it isn’t open. If there are barriers preventing users from accessing or developing on the platform, it isn’t open. If you can’t, with reasonable effort, improve the platform itself, it isn’t open. Every platform is open to some degree. After all, that is the point: platforms open proprietary systems so that third-party developers can innovate and create value beyond the scope, resources, or expertise of the platform creators. But truly open platforms allow anyone to improve the actual platform, not just develop within its constraints. For example, SSL, the secure sockets layer used to secure web access, was developed in the early days of the world wide web when a small group of innovators figured out a way to automatically encrypt information transmitted between a web browser and a website. They didn’t need to negotiate a contract or get permission, they simply implemented their solution and made it available to everyone, changing the platform of the World Wide Web itself. When you bet on a closed platform, you are betting that the future of your company fits into the future as designed by the platform owner. When betting on an open platform, you bet that someone, somewhere, will be able to evolve the platform to meet your continuing needs. NEA is a concept from World of Ends. What the Internet Is and How to Stop Mistaking It for Something Else by Doc Searls and David Weinberger, written October 2003. Marc Andreessen’s Three Platforms In September 2007, Marc Andreessen, one of the enablers of the World Wide Web, wrote an article titled the The Three Platforms You Meet On the Internet. I’m going to revisit those platforms visually, and introduce a fourth kind of platform that Marc missed. Because the text may be hard to read, here’s a legend of the elements present in all four graphics. User Interface Developer Application Platform Enabler Platform Service Provider With that, let’s look at Marc’s three levels of platforms. Level 1 Access API Level 1 Platforms allow third party developers to access the platform via a well-defined and documented API, typically using HTTP or SOAP. This allows developers to create their own applications, running anywhere the developer chooses, with access to the data and services running on the platform. Twitter, eBay, PayPal, Flickr, and Del.icio.us all support this type of interaction. Level 2 Plug-in API Level 2 Platforms allow third party developers to create their application anywhere, with specific, limited ways to affect the user interface running on the platform. The key shift here is that the platform provider controls the overall user experience, but allows the developer a way to create value within their interface. Photoshop, FaceBook, Firefox, Internet Explorer, and Outlook are all applications which act as Level 2 platforms. Level 3 Run-time Environment Level 3 Platforms let develpers create applications that actually run on the platform. That means the code written by third-parties executes directly in the platform context. The overall user experience is still controlled by the platform, but compared to Level 2 platforms, Level 3 applications typically customize the user interface more extensively. Salesforce, Ning, OpenSocial, Windows, Java, EC2, and Google Apps are all Level 3 platforms. Common Assumption All three levels share a common assumption. You might notice it if you consider the three levels together: All three levels assume a single platform service provider: Just one pink triangle. Of course, we can assume the number of developers is unlimited… that’s the point of a platform. However, all of the systems described above are built to enable access to one single platform, a platform owned and controlled by its creator. When Marc wrote his article, I emailed him and asked “What about the World Wide Web?” It doesn’t fit any of his models, yet is clearly one of the worlds most widespread, most successful, and most relevant platforms in history. On the World Wide Web, there is no central server, no platform provider. It is a different animal altogether. I call it a Level 4 Platform. Level 4 Open Protocols Level 4 platforms allow developers to build applications anywhere–on a website, on your desktop, even on your cell phone–and those applications can talk to any number of platform providers without restriction, using standard open protocols. Many of us have heard of the most successful protocols: SMTP, POP, HTTP, HTML, TCP/IP, RSS, but most users know these by the applications they enable: email, the World Wide Web, the Internet, blogs. Level 4 platforms are truly open, even as each piece of technology is provided by separate for-profit companies. It wasn’t until the World Wide Web opened online services to literally any company with a modicum of technical capability that the world began to enjoy the power of ubiquitous interactive services. As long as CompuServe and AOL and AT&T controlled tightly integrated one-stop-shop subscription services, the number of third-party developers was inherently limited. To launch a new service on AOL, you had to negotiate your own contract, all the while knowing that AOL could already be working on something similar and would never allow you to compete directly. The web changed all that, allowing literally thousands upon thousands of entrepreneurs to explore their own (perhaps crazy) ideas of how to create value for people. No longer limited or burdened by a central platform provider, the pace of innovation exploded. Certainly, most of those ideas were crazy, but we couldn’t have known which were which without trying them first. The open nature of the web as a platform allowed exactly that. The whole point of a platform is to encourage third party developers, so that everyone gets more value–value which is inherently beyond the purview of its creators. As long as a platform is closed to some degree, it is limiting the possibility for innovation. Limiting the innovation limits value to users. And limiting value to users limits the success of the platform. Choose Open When Possible The only guarantee for longevity is if you have options. Multiple Service Providers allow you to switch if you need to. You never know if your provider will continue to meet your needs. They may even start to compete with you. The freedom to move to another standards-compliant provider gives you control. Just like you have over your web hosting company and email provider. Source Code allows you, or developers working on your behalf, to improve, fix, simply maintain the platform your business depends on. If an open platform breaks, source code access keeps you from depending on the platform provider for a fix. Just like you can with Apache, Linux, Joomla, or Drupal. Intellectual Property Use Rights assure users and third-party developers that you are free from fear about changing licensing terms and future lawsuits. You can’t always choose an open platform. Sometimes it is worth it to develop on a proprietary platform because it helps you get to market faster, with more features. Depending on your needs, you might be better off building on a closed platform. But, if you can, I recommend choosing an open platform whenever possible. Note on VRM In case folks are wondering why I am talking about Level 4 Platforms, it is because that is precisely what we are working to build over at Project VRM, where I am the Chair of the Standards Committee. VRM is the conceptual reciprocal of CRM, Customer Relationship Management. Instead of large-scale enterprise software that helps big companies extract more profit from every customer, VRM is about tools for individuals to create more value in their relationships with vendors. Our mission is to enable both buyers and sellers to build mutually beneficial relationships, where everyone benefits from the zero-distance network that is the Internet. Our approach is open standards and open source development. Our goal is a level 4 platform of the kind described above for user-driven online commerce. If you can make it, you are welcome to join us at the 2008 VRM Workshop next week at Havard’s Berkman Center for Internet and Society. Bonus Link: Michael Cote on Platforms As A Service and Lock-in with Force.com
Pricing for Charities: Pay-What-You-Want and VRM
Charitable giving has an intriguing relationship with rational pricing theories. The supply of charitable products is essentially inexhaustible. Price of a charitable gift is not based on supply and demand, with curves meeting at an efficient clearing price. And yet, … Continue reading →
Charitable giving has an intriguing relationship with rational pricing theories. The supply of charitable products is essentially inexhaustible. Price of a charitable gift is not based on supply and demand, with curves meeting at an efficient clearing price. And yet, there is a competitive marketplace connecting patrons and charities. From schools and radio stations to global conservation and intervention, millions of charities compete for attention and dollars. In my last post, I argued that markets are about more than prices. So too is the world of charities. Today the NYT reports on current research by John List and Dean Karlan investigating how and why people give, and what makes them give more or less to a particular cause at a particular time. A good read. The research highlights several unique influences on charitable giving, with many lessons about which conversations matter most. In particular, people give for that “warm glow” rather than for any perceived material return. Perhaps that isn’t a surprise, but when connected to economics it changes the conversation. It turns out that matching donations, from employers for example, are valued more as a social trigger than as an economic motivator. People give until the trigger is reached–until they’ve met the socially determined mark for making a difference–and they don’t give more just because a match is a greater multiplier, even though economic theory would suggest the greater multiplier would create more giving. So one of the questions for charities is how then do you maximize the warm glow and the amount of giving it triggers? And not suprisingly, ROI calculations and traditional economics have little to do with it. At Project VRM, we’ve talked a lot about how markets are more than transactions, more than just prices. Markets are conversations and relationships. That makes much of List & Karlan’s research applicable to all of VRM, and especially for Doc Searls‘ efforts to reinvent our relationship with Public Radio. Radiohead and Nine-Inch-Nails have already broken ground with commercial Pay-What-You-Want product launches, which is in practice a lot like the Public Radio mantra that turns 10% of listeners into subscribers every year. Both bands’ efforts were huge successes as promotions, although the jury is still out on the longer term impact. (It should be noted that Nine Inch Nails was more of a “freemium” model as they offered limited editions and additional tracks for a fee.) As digital products become “free” to distribute, it may be that artists can generate more interest, greater goodwill, and greater profit, by thinking more like charities and less like lawsuit-wielding rabid dinosaur music studios. In which case, it behooves them to read up on List & Karlan’s research. And apropos for VRM, it behooves us to do so as well.
Tufte would be proud–the world through new (data) eyes
Rarely does presentation of statistical data make me say “wow” out loud. This did. Hans Rosling talking about the state of the world: third world, health, wealth, changes over time. Great data. Great presentation. Worth thinking about. In addition to … Continue reading →
Rarely does presentation of statistical data make me say “wow” out loud. This did. Hans Rosling talking about the state of the world: third world, health, wealth, changes over time. Great data. Great presentation. Worth thinking about. In addition to the impactful visualization of the worldwide transitions in wealth & health since 1960, Hans also makes extremely clear the dangers of averaging over too large of a data set. I can only begin to highlight how critical that is in understanding the future of the web, search, and Internet services. Centralized views of the world, such as those underlying Google’s PageRank and the Semantic Web, presume too much about finding the “one true answer”. For Google, it means trying to find the “best” results for a simple keyword query–for some verson of “everyone”. For the semantic web, it means trying to connect all the meta-data and data on the web to provide one true verson of reality that can be reasoned over. And yet, we know that trying to make all of the people happy all of the time is a recipe for failure: it can’t be done. Hans makes this clear in terms of dealing with the ails of the world: poverty and life expectancy. Planning for HIV in the top quartile of Africa needs to be profoundly different than how we deal with it in the bottom quartile. So beware of average approaches. Beware of universals. Instead, find the solution that is properly contextualized, preferably customized for each individual. That’s the direction of VRM (Vendor Relationship Management), by the way. Figure it out for the individual user first, then find ways to use technology to scale efficient solutions. Averages need not be applied. Monolithic approaches to marketing and product development need not apply. Micro-focus at a mega scale. Tip of the hat to Noah Brier for the Hans Rosling presentation at TED.
Europe continues to lead privacy conversation with IP ruling
The EU is years ahead of the US in user rights and privacy. For a VRM example, see the UK’s Buyer-Centric Commerce Forum. Now, according to the Washington Post, an EU judge has pushed the privacy envelope even further, saying … Continue reading →
The EU is years ahead of the US in user rights and privacy. For a VRM example, see the UK’s Buyer-Centric Commerce Forum. Now, according to the Washington Post, an EU judge has pushed the privacy envelope even further, saying “IP addresses are personal data“: BRUSSELS — IP addresses, strings of numbers that identify computers on the Internet, should generally be regarded as personal information, the head of the European Union‘s group of data privacy regulators said Monday. This will be interesting to watch…