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Thursday, June 24. 2010
What turns an Apple fanboi on?
Apple fanboi behavioural psychology
What is it with Apple Fanboi's? The diagram above was drawn with respect to the iPad a few weeks ago, but its all happening again with the iPhone 4 (replace Curry's with Carphone Warehouse in the UK etc etc).
The only conclusion I can come to that describes this odd behaviour is that Apple fanbois get sexual pleasure from queueing in front of Apple stores. Come to think of it, maybe its the only type of sexual pleasure they get in the real world
Wednesday, April 21. 2010
The Strategic Value of Social Networking systems
Rory Sutherland's 2x2 on what makes a difference
Went to the London TED Salon on Monday night - series of interesting talks but the one that stood out for me (in terms of new technology strategies) was Rory Sutherland of Ogilvy. For two reasons:
(i) He is always an entertaining speaker
(ii) He has taken on Behavioural Psychology for Advertising almost as a Pauline conversion. ( We shared a stage in Nice last year and Rory uttered not a peep on it then
)Anyway, as part of his talk he put up an interesting slide (see above) about ways of Making A Difference, a good old 2x2:
High Cost, High Impact - Getting Strategy Right - despite being rude about strategists, he noted that getting the strategy right has a huge impact.
High Cost, Low Impact - Consultancy - A cheap (or is that expensive
) laugh here, but the point is well made - often consulting work is not useful or is ignored. for a whole variety of reasons (a thought - is strategic consultancy therefore marginally more valuable than an other? )Low Cost, Low Impact - Trivia - aka all those campaigns on Twitter, for example
Low Cost, High Impact - ? - Rory's point was this is the area of the cumulative impact of lots of little things. He had no name for it and asked the audience for ideas (trying to avoid calling it a Nudge then, Rory?
). His view is that real organisational success is actually far more due to getting thsi arae right than what the Big Dogs decide, but is downplayed as otherwise said dogs couldn't justify their gravity defying salaries. He called for organisations to have Chief Detail Officers (they are often called COO's, you know.....)
What interested me most though was Joanne Jacobs pointing out later that, in theory, social media and social networks are really optimal for delivering this level of impact. We kicked around why that might be, and conclusions were that Social Media:
(i) Lowers the transaction costs of receiving data about what is required
(ii) Ditto, makes it cheaper/easier for many of these small detailed things to act in collaboration (think of the the very simple algorithms that do complex tings like make a flock of birds or school of fished turn in unison), thus amplifying the impact
(iii) Execution is simplified as it is cheap and fast to communicate actions and get feedback.
So, what to call this quarter then - how about Social Services?
Saturday, April 10. 2010
Behavioural Strategy in a Disruptive World
In recent months we've been working on the the structural changes that Enterprises have to make to deal with disruptive change - new technology driven change is the specific case of most interest. Recently I've started to look at the "null hypothesis" - ie what are the forces that resist change. This article by McKinsey on the problems with learning the Behavioural Psychology lessons in a company is thus very interesting:
In a recent McKinsey Quarterly survey of 2,207 executives, only 28 percent said that the quality of strategic decisions in their companies was generally good, 60 percent thought that bad decisions were about as frequent as good ones, and the remaining 12 percent thought good decisions were altogether infrequent. McKinsey research showed that the hypothetical solution - good analysis in the hands of managers who have good judgment - won’t naturally yield good decisions. The third ingredient - the process - is also crucial. So, what to do? As they note:
McKinsey identifies 5 broad groups of biases
The solution, McKinsey believes, are processes which counter this:
Counter pattern-recognition biases by changing the angle of vision
Anyway, they use an interesting worked example of an emerging area we know well, ie WebTV (in general). Here they are looking at WebTV the company:
Counter action-oriented biases by recognizing uncertainty
In most organizations, an executive who projects great confidence in a plan is more likely to get it approved than one who lays out all the risks and uncertainties surrounding it
Counter interest biases by making them explicit
Strong decision-making processes explicitly account for diverging interests. For example, if before the time of a decision, strategists formulate precisely the criteria that will and won’t be used to evaluate it, they make it more difficult for individual managers to change the terms of the debate to make their preferred actions seem more attractive. Similarly, populating meetings or teams with participants whose interests clash can reduce the likelihood that one set of interests will undermine thoughtful decision making.
Counter social biases by depersonalizing debate
Counter stability biases by shaking things up
They then look at four steps to adopting behavioural strategy in an organisation (I've edited it ruthlessly):
Its interesting as quite a lot of these map closely to the "Anatomy of incompetence" I wrote about last weekend. There is clearly a general set of principles at work here.
The interesting things is to take these and throw them through a massively disruptive cycle, such as say the Old Media is experiencing right now, and see what examples one can find of these behaviours. But that, as they say, will be the subject of another post..........
Very few corporate strategists making important decisions consciously take into account the cognitive biases—systematic tendencies to deviate from rational calculations—revealed by behavioral economics. It’s easy to see why: unlike in fields such as finance and marketing, where executives can use psychology to make the most of the biases residing in others, in strategic decision making leaders need to recognize their own biases. So despite growing awareness of behavioral economics and numerous efforts by management writers, including ourselves, to make the case for its application, most executives have a justifiably difficult time knowing how to harness its power
In a recent McKinsey Quarterly survey of 2,207 executives, only 28 percent said that the quality of strategic decisions in their companies was generally good, 60 percent thought that bad decisions were about as frequent as good ones, and the remaining 12 percent thought good decisions were altogether infrequent. McKinsey research showed that the hypothetical solution - good analysis in the hands of managers who have good judgment - won’t naturally yield good decisions. The third ingredient - the process - is also crucial. So, what to do? As they note:
To use a judicial analogy, we cannot trust the judges or the jurors to be infallible; they are, after all, human. But as citizens, we can expect verdicts to be rendered by juries and trials to follow the rules of due process. It is through teamwork, and the process that organizes it, that we seek a high-quality outcome.
McKinsey identifies 5 broad groups of biases
Action-oriented biases - drive us to take action less thoughtfully than we should.
- Excessive Optimism
- Overconfidence
- Competitor Neglect
Interest biases - arise in the presence of conflicting incentives, including nonmonetary and even purely emotional ones.
- Misaligned personal incentives
- Inappropriate attachments
- Misaligned percepetion of corporate goals
Pattern-recognition biases - lead us to recognize patterns even where there are none.
- Confirmation bias.
- Management by example (remembering recent or dramatic examples).
- Storytelling bias (tendency to believe narrative more)
- False analogies
- Champion bias
Social biases - arise from the preference for harmony over conflict.
- Groupthink.
- Sunflower management (tendency to reflect the top management's views)
Stability biases = create a tendency toward inertia in the presence of uncertainty.
- Anchoring and insufficient adjustment. (Rooting oneself to an initial value)
- Loss aversion.
- Sunk-cost fallacy. (Paying attention to historical costs that are not recoverable)
- Status quo bias.
The solution, McKinsey believes, are processes which counter this:
Counter pattern-recognition biases by changing the angle of vision
Anyway, they use an interesting worked example of an emerging area we know well, ie WebTV (in general). Here they are looking at WebTV the company:
Sometimes, simply coaxing managers to articulate the experiences influencing them is valuable. According to Kleiner Perkins partner Randy Komisar, for example, a contentious discussion over manufacturing strategy at the start-up WebTV suddenly became much more manageable once it was clear that the preferences of executives about which strategy to pursue stemmed from their previous career experience. When that realization came, he told us, there was immediately a “sense of exhaling in the room.” Managers with software experience were frightened about building hardware; managers with hardware experience were afraid of ceding control to contract manufacturers.
Counter action-oriented biases by recognizing uncertainty
In most organizations, an executive who projects great confidence in a plan is more likely to get it approved than one who lays out all the risks and uncertainties surrounding it
Counter interest biases by making them explicit
Strong decision-making processes explicitly account for diverging interests. For example, if before the time of a decision, strategists formulate precisely the criteria that will and won’t be used to evaluate it, they make it more difficult for individual managers to change the terms of the debate to make their preferred actions seem more attractive. Similarly, populating meetings or teams with participants whose interests clash can reduce the likelihood that one set of interests will undermine thoughtful decision making.
Counter social biases by depersonalizing debate
Counter stability biases by shaking things up
They then look at four steps to adopting behavioural strategy in an organisation (I've edited it ruthlessly):
1. Decide which decisions warrant the effort (Materiality)
- Large, rare, one-of-a-kind strategic decisions eg M&A
- Repetitive but high-stakes decisions that shape a company’s strategy over time (eg R&D allocations in a pharmaceutical company etc)
2. Identify the biases most likely to affect critical decisions
Open discussion of the biases that may be undermining decision making is invaluable. It can be stimulated both by conducting postmortems of past decisions and by observing current decision processes.
3. Select practices and tools to counter the most relevant biases
For instance, one company fights pattern-recognition biases by asking managers who present a recommendation to share the raw data supporting it, so other executives in this analytically minded company can try to discern alternative patterns. (Climate Change data anyone
4. Embed practices in formal processes
One reason it’s important to embed these practices in recurring procedures is that everything we know about the tendency toward overconfidence suggests that it is unwise to rely on one’s instincts to decide when to rely on one’s instincts!
Its interesting as quite a lot of these map closely to the "Anatomy of incompetence" I wrote about last weekend. There is clearly a general set of principles at work here.
The interesting things is to take these and throw them through a massively disruptive cycle, such as say the Old Media is experiencing right now, and see what examples one can find of these behaviours. But that, as they say, will be the subject of another post..........
Friday, April 9. 2010
FT, Foursquare and Me
Thursday, February 11. 2010
Nudging us towards Happiness the Tory Way
Last night David Cameron spoke at the TED event, in London. It was in the stream dealing with Behavioural Psychology and Economics (I covered it here) and his talk was essentially a thesis in how this may be used by a future administration. My notes during the talk:
He started off very well - "politics is showbiz for ugly people"
Then moved to the first point - the central debate of the 21st century is..... global public debt - $32 trillion and counting. So how do we make things better without money?
- Give power to the people
- Go with the grain of human nature
- Use digital technology
There was then the regulatory discussion about the view that people get happier until income hits $60,000 (there must be a UK equivalent, quoth he) and then increased happiness tails off. He actually said that the differences between the middle class and the very rich therefore didn't matter, and took the view that the critical thing was to help poorer people who earn less than this to earn more. He didn't seem to get that if he did that, all that happens is that the "$60,000" number will go up, because its a relative difference.
I also think he's wrong re rich not causing envy among the middle class, but there are clearly Tories who want to believe this one.
There were quite a few other references to Happiness Theory, Behavioural Economics, especially Nudge etc
He also reckoned we have gone from pre-bureaucratic ages local power to industrial age, central power (bureaucratic stage) and we are now moving to ..... People Power.
As part of this, we were going to get Transparency, Accountability and Choice
Also, all government contracts above £20k were to be published online. I delight to see what will happen when We The People see how much they are spending on consultants
He then showed examples of potential mashups of government data, with true Government 2.0 fervour ...which prompted the first concerned Twts:
[Cameron] reveals he plans to publish live crime maps. Won't this lead to vigilantism, panic,fear?
Kevin Anderson has live blogged the whole thing over here.
So, All Good Stuff - Happiness, Nudge, Equality, Government 2.0 - what's not to like?
Here's what:
Firstly. he is picking and choosing his Behavioural Economics - one person picked him up on too much focus on Choice, pointing out that BE also shows too much choice is bad.
Secondly, he seemed to believe that moderation will be done by We The People being vigilant - as questioners pointed out, thats not the way it works now so why would it work online - "the only people who have the time to do this are the media, so we will have rule by media mob" as one questioner put it. (This by the way had many social mediarati grumpy when I twittered it, but I think the worriers may have a point, watching the way Social Media Mob Rule works)
Thirdly, he was dreadfully optimistic (naive?) about the sorts of things people will get up to with all the public's data out there - his approach to all the questions about how to control cheating behaviour, miscreants etc was to believe all people were Good Citizens at heart and to play the "shame on you for believing people are bad" card.
Fourthly, and most worryingly, overall I got the very strong impression that they (the Tories) do not have the inclination to take on the financial sector to get any of the $32 Trillion back. He made no reference to the Robin Hood Tax video that had just been shown before (see above YouTube video), suggesting that 0.05% tax on bank transactions could pay back a lot of what we had given them and solve global warming and poverty to boot. His thesis seemed to boil down to the approach that we should do all this low cost Government 2.0 / BE stuff to keep us happy in our new-found poverty while we rendered the loot unto the Bankers.
In fact, Government 2.0 looked like it was just a way of introducing Feudal 2.0 and BE will Nudge us towards Happiness, which will be the new opiate of the masses. Get ready to tug your virtual forelock to the New Barons Rothschild
(By the way, I am fairly apolitical - "don't vote, it only encourages them" seems as good a motto as any these days, anarchism without bombs works for me - but I got a very strong Brave New World feeling last night, and it would worry me, except of course I believe in the Wisdom of the People to resist it......ummmm )
Speaking of voting, by the way - it looks like Goldman Sachs rigged up a huge campaign to vote against the Robin Hood Tax proposal.
The Cognitive Dissonance of Happiness and Belief at TED
Friday, January 15. 2010
The Data Dozen - A Personal Data Rights Manifesto
Excellent post on Data and Privacy issues at Tech & Law blog . The author is a friend and a lawyer and is doing an MS in IT, so this is Good Stuff in my view. This is a summary, the original is over here (I of course am flattering here by copying ). She notes:
Anyway, my summary of her 12 points:
Thoughts very welcome. I think its a good a starting point for a Digital Data Privacy Manifesto!
). She notes:
Here's a suggested list, the "Data Dozen", of 12 minimum essential requirements for proper privacy-protecting identity management systems. These are just some thoughts - any views would be very welcome.
Anyway, my summary of her 12 points:
1. Correct base information - verification of source info
Authorities need to verify properly the correctness of the information based on which they will be issuing identity credentials. This should go without saying. It's no good having official credentials which verify the identity of the wrong person or bear the wrong personal details. In this regard it's not just tech, it's people and processes too. While nothing can be 100% perfect, it's garbage in garbage out and things could and should be improved in this regard - especially if certain forms of identification, whether online or offline, are to be made effectively compulsory such as identity cards.
2. Good identifiers
Adequate identity data, where it is generated by authorities or other organisations - e.g. identifiers which are to be used linkably as means of uniquely identifying individuals (or other entities or resources), such as ID card numbers or social security numbers, need to be secure, and generated in a secure way. Unlike the US social security number, which was recently found to be guessable from knowing date and place of birth! (See the widely reported paper "Predicting Social Security Numbers from Public Data," by Alessandro Acquisti and Ralph Gross in 2009). Use of identifiers is another issue, discussed at 9 below.
3. What data is disclosed - data minimisation and granularity of user control
Minimal "need to know" disclosure and fine grained user control over what is disclosed (rather than the current "all or nothing" approach) need to be mandated, via both law and technology - in the context of the purpose of the requester in seeking the information, and whether it's truly needed for the transaction in hand - with support for partial identities and pseudonymity, and with negotiation of disclosure & privacy policies.
4. True, informed consent
There need to be mechanisms for proper informed consent, opt in rather than opt out, which ensure it's true consent not engineered consent and which support revocation of consent (see the EnCore work including their publications). In relation to engineered consent it's well worth reading Soft Surveillance, Hard Consent: The Law and Psychology of Engineering Consent from the excellent (free to download) Identity Trail book.
What's "engineered consent"? If you have to give more information than is strictly necessary to access a web site or service or to buy a product online (e.g. your home address, which really isn't needed if you're buying software via download), then it is likely that you will provide the information (and consent to whatever broad uses of your personal information that the site requires - the box will probably be pre-ticked of course!), simply in order to achieve your immediate goal of accessing the site or getting the goods or services you want.
And then very likely you won't get around to going back to the site later to revoke or withdraw your consent, and/or you will later decide that actually you were happy to give your consent in the first place after all, for reasons to do with human psychology (decision theory's discounted subjective utility, prospect theory and cognitive dissonance - see Soft Surveillance, Hard Consent: The Law and Psychology of Engineering Consent which explains those concepts).
So in many senses your consent - whether in relation to the initial disclosure of private data, its ongoing use or the withdrawal of consent - has been "engineered", and is not true, free consent.
5. Secure transmission and storage of the data
A given. And ideally allowing anonymous or pseudonymous communications.
6. Proper constraints on access to disclosed data and secondary usage of data
i.e. access control and the like - including considering properly how the constraints are determined, communicated and enforced within an organisation - and with properly enforced data handling and data release policies that are sticky.
7. Retention and destruction of data when "expired" or on revocation of consent etc
Provision for self-destructing data (along the lines of Vanish) when no longer needed for the purpose consented to. Safeguards and mechanisms for securing or destroying the data are also needed in the event of the change of ownership, sale of business/assets or insolvency of the data-holding entity (consent to one entity doesn't imply consent to another entity, but that is currently assumed). Recall the problems after Verified Identity Pass, which ran the travel security service CLEAR in the USA and held biometric etc information on many US citizens, became insolvent.
8. Accountability and transparency
Through logging and ideally the ability for users to check what's held about them and how or by whom or for what purposes it has been accessed - i.e. systems oriented toward information accountability and appropriate use. See e.g. the Galway report.
9. Better anonymisation techniques, suitable for the individual purpose
- for medical records etc disclosed or accessed for legitimate scientific research, to ensure that anonymization is done as far as possible without (by allowing identification through re-linking) compromising confidentiality or privacy.
Reidentification is increasingly topical lately. In a well publicised paper in August 2009 on the risks of re-identification ("Broken Promises of Privacy: Responding to the Surprising Failure of Anonymization"), US engineer turned lawyer Paul Ohm detailed some well known situations where re-identification had been relatively easily achieved. (And see also An Overview of Techniques for De-Identifying Personal Health Information.)
One famous example involved online movie rental company NetFlix publicly releasing massive datasets about their users for a competition to improve their movie recommendation algorithm. From the data researchers Arvind Narayanan and Vitaly Shmatikov were able to reidentify users including their politics and sexuality.
Despite all this, Netflix are planning yet another similar contest, and are being sued by a lesbian mother for disclosing inadequately anonymized data which could enable her to be outed.
Indeed next time round Netflix want to release even more info about their users including ZIP codes, ages and gender - even though some time ago Latanya Sweeney showed that zip code, birth date and gender combined were enough to uniquely identify 87% of the US population (demonstrated by her pinpointing Massachusetts Governor William Weld's health data from a supposedly anonymised set of state employee patient records)!
It's not just health data that needs adequate anonymisation. GPS data has also been reidentified, even though geo-location data is some of the most private there is, from a personal security and privacy viewpoint (there's a reason why "We know where you live" is one of the most potent threats). Incidentally, location data isn't considered "sensitive data" for which more careful treatment is required under the EU Data Protection Directive, but it ought to be.
Equally important and potentially troubling, social networking users have been re-identified from "anonymised" social networking data too (by Narayanan and also other researchers, see the Broken Promises paper for references).
On identification generally (not just in relation to re-identification of people from released "anonymised" data), Ben Laurie puts it very well that linkability is the key:
"If you view life as a sequence of transactions, then privacy can be defined as
the linkability of the transactions. Absolute privacy occurs when none of the
transactions are linkable, and zero privacy occurs when they are all publicly
available and completely linkable."
10. Checks and balances (both legal and technological) in relation to data aggregation, data mining and profiling and similar techniques
Unique IDs, aggregation and linkability are again relevant here. New techniques for processing data sets to glean and link personally identifiable information will undoubtedly arise over time, and need to be monitored and if necessary regulated.
In the case of Internet search engine usage tracking it's technically possible to use cryptographic tools to distort the profile of users when they use search engines, to preserve their privacy and minimise aggregation of their data (see the 2009 Preserving user’s privacy in web search engines by Jordi Castellà-Roca, Alexandre Viejo and Jordi Herrera-Joancomartí). But are users willing to pay for better privacy, would such technologies be adopted absent a legal requirement for it?
On online behavioural tracking specifically, which is another topical issue, a useful paper is Online Behavioral Tracking and Targeting: Legislative Primer 2009, detailing concerns and solutions from the perspective of the US Center for Digital Democracy and certain other organisations.
11. Improved usability, awareness and education of users and designers & developers
[Must take] into account the various privacy paradoxes, in order to empower users to disclose their data selectively in an informed way in accordance with their individual needs and preferences.
- The privacy paradox: people say that they value their privacy and online anonymity, but then disclose more personal info online than seems consistent with their statements. But there are also more paradoxes:
- The control paradox: "People desire full control on their personal data, but avoid the hassle to keep it up to date. People know that there are technology tools to protect them and think they may be efficient, but they do not use them."
- The responsibility paradox: "While most people believe that it is either their own responsibility, they seem to admit that many users do not have the knowledge to do this effectively."
- The awareness paradox: greater knowledge of data protection rights does seem not to "influence the behavioural intention to adopt digital services based on personal data disclosure".
What explains these paradoxes? It seems to be mainly a question of organisations exploiting elements of human psychology, combined with insufficient privacy (and privacy tools) literacy amongst citizens and consumers.
In this area recently much attention has focused on privacy salience ("Reassuring people about privacy makes them more, not less, concerned"), and it seems that organisations have designed websites around this concept so as to not remind people that there are privacy concerns, given that websites usually want people to be as free as possible with their personal information as their business and profitability depends on the opposite, i.e. getting as much personal data out of people as possible.
(My italics - and also note Facebook culling any software that allows you to cull followers, or see who is unfriending you etc)
.......
I believe all these issues can only be dealt with properly by requiring more privacy friendly design of systems, sites and interfaces (i.e. privacy-preserving default settings, as people do defaults), as well as user education - all of which has to be kept under ongoing review as new potential threats to privacy arise (e.g. facial recognition) through developments in technology and computer processing power and speed, and the discovery or improvement of processing algorithms.
12. Secure and safe delegation of a user's rights
As a practical matter, delegation (a user allowing someone else to exercise their rights e.g. to access data) needs to be properly supported and addressed to deal with the possibility of untrustworthy delegates etc. Possibly even pseudonymous delegation.
Thoughts very welcome. I think its a good a starting point for a Digital Data Privacy Manifesto!
Monday, January 11. 2010
Google proves Sex for Lurve trade-off?
Most used Google searches for "How do I get my B/G Friend to....
The old saw is that women trade love for sex, men trade sex for love. It has been believed and rubbished over the ages, but its been impossible to prove or disprove until the sociological laboratory that is the Web came along. Dan Ariely, who wrote Predictably Irrational (a must read text for behavioural economists among you - actually, for anyone who reads this blog) put up this exhibit above in his post, showing the most popular searches for the term.
QED?
Actually, CES - Technology is getting in the way these days. Historically it has proven easier to build devices to ensure women have no need for men, but cometh the hour, cometh he robotics. Tacked on to every CES is teh Adult TEch show (thats the only reason most people actually attend CES I think, as Paul Carr points out there 's no real need to if its just Tech geegaws you're covering). IN this year's show there are the first:
- Robots that will - ahem - Lurve you, unconditionally. I have already predicted Robotics will take a front seat in 2010. shoulda guessed Porn would be ahead of the game (as it were)
- Devices using Haptics to stimuate your every desire
- iPod/iPhone sound driven devices to stimulate the male...ego. The Beach Boys' "Good Vibrations" will never be the same again
- 3D Moving pictures
This starts a totally new category of Internet User Devices for our value chain models
Monday, January 4. 2010
The Networked Technology world in 2019
On Friday we looked at the 8 big trends in the networked technology space over the last 10 years (1999 - 2009). Today, as promised, we look at the trends over the next 10. In some ways its easier to think about 10 years rather than 2-3 years out as (i) you can see the big trends more easily and (ii) no one will remember this in 2019 unless we're very right .
A little digression, if I may. Bill Gates once said that things change more slowly in 2 years than people (and their business cases) want, but far faster in 10. My observation is that this is very true in consumer technology, less true in business technology, less again in the public sector, and public behaviour and structures change but slowly. We also have a model that says technology merely provides opportunity, its the economics, user behaviour and legal restrictions that drive uptake,
For example, VOIP was technically feasible in 2000, but it was only in 2003/4 that enough people had good enough bandwidth, and PCs were cheap enough, for it to "piggy back" on top of pre-paid for assets (your broadband connection, PC with microphone and speakers etc).
Anyway, enough of that - what what happens to the 8 trends we saw in the previous decade rolling forward? They were:
1. Bandwidth will carry on expanding
Given we have had a c 30x increase in the last 10 years, projecting that forward implies a mean of c 60 Mbps by 2019 in the UK. From about 20 Mbps per home upwards, you are talking multiple streams of HD video into a household so that allows the exciting prospect of everyone indoors watching their own HDTV channel, instead of TV channel as they do today. Plus ca change.
More to the point is that expanding bandwidth will drive richer applications, which we comment on below in points 2-4.
Critical to this will be whether the "frontbones" - the networks to the home - can take it. In countries where Government diktat has ruled rollout, this will happen. In those using "the market" it will (probably) happen - but later. The Digital Britain hoo-ha pretty much showed that the market will want to sell to the (urbanised, wealthy) 1/3rd of the population off its own bat, may then expand to the next 1/3rd but won't want to touch the last (poorer, rural, older) 1/3rd. Towards the mid 20-teens ("Twenteens"?) even the most market oriented of Governments will realise that to be competitive they need universal high bandwidth access and will force the issue.
2. Talking to each other will remain the Killer App
We don't know with certainty what New New Platforms will come after Twitter or Facebook, or what the successor of Web 2.0 - sorry, Web-squared - will be (though we have some ideas - see below). But what we do know is that it will revolve around P2P - person to person - communication. Always has, always will.
So, we will predict that whatever new platforms, technologies, etc etc emerge - and despite the resurrection of the standard old advertising and e-commerce use cases (see "you can find a great restaurant with your friends" below) - the killer application will remain enabling small world social networks of people to communicate.
This of course does not mean it will make the most money directly, as we saw in the 'Noughties that game went to being able to place low cost Ads against weak buying intention signals. But comms will still be the killer app driving people onto end to end platforms.
3. Our "Social Networks" evolve onto whatever the best platform of the moment is
An inevitable corollary of 2 above - given talking to each other is the killer application - the next need is to enable a "clearing system" to find people you want to talk to. The rate of change of Social Networks in the last 10 years - from email groupware to near real time video chatrooms - has been fairly predictable big picture (same function, different bandwidth), but - as always - it's hard to define at a detailed UI level just which design will succeed. The mayfly like existence of each new social network (2 year half life) means that (i) there is still massive innovation going on and (ii) the ones we have now will pass too.
The next 10 years will see more bandwidth, and more flexible social market-making. Twitter is the current design leader as it is asynchronous, asymmetric and ad-free (for now). Superimposing this on current platform trends we imagine more fixed/mobile convergence, more attempts to link metadata, more attempts to compromise privacy for searchability. Also, there will not be a "Paradigm Shift" - The users will migrate onto the "New" new platforms while maintaining use of the old (we still use email and SMS) - in fact we predict the ability to run "Unified Comms" systems will be increasingly critical.
In addition, as social networks get bigger and marketing zombies invade them, and signal to noise ratio falls, the ability to filter in the stream will be increasingly critical to its uptake - it is our view for example that Twitter clients will increasingly look like email clients (and vice versa - look at the new Mozilla Raindrop ) as the required functionality is proven over time. Another approach to filtering will be to increase the niche-ness of individual networks (this is what happens to the AltNet and GroupWare) - this story today about BeautifulPeople.com firing 5,000 userswho had got too fat over the holidays illustrates this quite well
4. All useful technology and applications commoditise over a 3-5 year cycle.....
Its worth looking at what is commoditising now to get a view of the main trends in the first half of the 20-teens. Low resolution video, fixed-mobile comms and devices, social media (or at least some aspects of it - group comms and basic profiling), the underlying protocols that Web 2.0 kicked off, text search, and even (near) real time services are busy commoditising. Its also easier to make simple payments now than ever before. The most powerful emerging services of the early decade will be built on combinations of these, as its going with the flow. We will be getting more interconnection of commoditising layers (ie the "walled gardens" will forever be climbing up the added value stack)
This is going to really hurt (ie bankrupt) some industries that have existed because parts of the value chain have not commoditised in the past. Those based on expensive physical delivery of data that can be delivered digitally will be under terrific pressure in the next 5 years, there will be major creative destruction there. Think newspapers now, and TV/Films etc as bandwidth increases. Ditto knowledge industries that have avoided global labour cost arbitrage owing to degrees of difficulty of moving the information to and from the markets. Say goodbye to Hollywood, say hello to Bollywood - and will Silicon Valley still have a hegemony in 2020?
The Cloud will be renamed at least twice in the next 10 years, it is coming, but at present the combination of relatively low system reliability, lack of decent SLA protection and too many competing platforms without sufficient plug and play and interoperability will keep it as a niche sport, and users in the 20-teens will mainly opt for hybrid models of Cloud + Own Equipment - though the niches will grow steadily. As with Electricity, the Cloud will have to be "tried and tested" at each layer before widespread adoption. Services on it - the ASP/SOA/SaaS/Whatever the next Acronym is layer - will continue to develop with bandwidth, penetration and sheer cycles of code-writing. Friction will be provided ny attempts to run wllaed gardens (it was ever thus)
Another part of the commoditisation story is the march of Moore's Law (or similar). By and large in this space you get twice the power at half the cost and size every 2 years. This won't change anytime in the next 10 years, and a 2**5 = 30x reduction is a useful tool to think about 2019 with - imagine iPhone and basic PC like functionality for $10, in devices the size of an iPod Nano for example! This is going to drive two other trends onwards:
5. .....but People are Still People. The more things change, the more they stay the same
The technology changes, we talk and interact with each other in new ways, but what we do remains the same. The human condition will remain to hatch, match and despatch, some will always want to seek power and money, and while running this never-ending circle of life we will still try and scrabble onto higher planes of Maslowian existence, and try and keep ourselves entertained in our downtimes. And being human we will still try and get something for nothing so the dreaded parasite that is advertising will, like death and taxes, remain with us for a while yet. So here are some things that this implies:
6. Hype (and dodgy economic theories) spring eternal in the human breast
In 1999 there were high priests of the New Tech Age then as now. Anyone churlish enough to be a "New Age Economics Denier" was castigated, lambasted and told they "didn't get it". By 2002 the sceptics had been proved largely right as the dotcom bubble deflated to complete limpness. But by 2004 the New "New Economics" of the Internet was on the rise again with Wikinomics (allowing me to calculate that New Economic memes have a c 2 year refraction time) and by 2009 in full swing with various flavours "Free" etc etc which. We predict most of this will be largely discredited by 2011 and a 2 - 3 year period of a Return to Rational Economics will ensue (it has already to an extent).
Companies built in this period have historically been strong, simple because they are built on solid fundamentals.
Ecclesiastes Law however states that, by c 2014 there will be a new inflationary bubble in something, and cometh the hour, cometh the man (or woman). A new generation of Tech Wonderfulness will thus be declared, that is of course quite unlike anything before, and it will of course herald in a New Economic Paradigm which (oddly enough) will promise to allow you to get richer with less effort, and that people who don't "get it" will of course be labelled as crusty old farts.
7. There is a Google or two in every Decade
In every decade a dominant New Media New Entrant emerges at a new layer that they make their own. In the past they have tended to be West Coast US companies (access to the worlds largest ubiquitous markets for risk capital and customers has pretty much guaranteed that). In the 80's it was Microsoft, in the 90's it was arguably AOL (and maybe Yahoo), in the Noughties it was Google.
Ten years later the last decades Cool Kids are nearly always still around, but now as large corporate entities rather than cool young companies. They are no longer the Innovators of the emerging "new" New Media and typically strategically buy innovation, and try and spoil it elsewhere. The ones for the 20-teens all exist already, the issue is spotting which has 10 year legs. In Social Networking I'm betting that Facebook is the New Yahoo, and something else will be the New Google. Maybe Twitter, maybe something in left field still.
Re Google in particular, we think that their search algorithms are going to be increasingly less useful over the decade - in a way a self inflicted goal, as by adding value to links means an entire parasitic SEO ecosystem has emerged. Given that Google funds itself entirely on its link economics, but subsidises many other ambitions, this is going to make its activities in other arenas harder over time. (I see John Battelle of all people, has come to similar conclusions)
In the next 10 years it will probably still be West Coast US companies that rule, but it will be less certain. China represents another huge, fairly homogenous market with its own barriers to entry, and Baidu seem to be able to hold off Google.
Others that are interesting are around the disruption of very big industries today - the growth of online video (Hulu), the disruption of Olde Print Media (Huffington Post, Techmeme) and the emerging Non-bank Banks (unless they get regulated sooner). Also the change to digital in the basic Telco layers implies the emergence of "Soft" Telcos (Telecoms companies that own no direct assets) - Skype is the first wave.
8. Planet Mobile will always overestimate benefits and underestimate time to get them
Planet Mobile runs on the perennial "You can use your mobile to select a great restaurant nearby for you and your friends" business case. It's been used to flog everything from m-commerce to location and augmented reality based services over the last 10 years. Three things have changed for the 20-teens though:
Well, that is the projection of the Noughties going forward, but there are a bunch of "Intersection" technologies (those at the intersection of some of these" and some newly emerging trends which will help reshape things too. In the spirit of keeping things Prime, here are 5 we see emerging
9. Privacy (and a related issue, Trust) will become a bigger and bigger factors.
We thought Privacy would hit the headlines after Beacon, but it didn't - however, right now the buzz about Privacy is higher than its ever been. We expect nuanced Privacy to become a major issue in the design of next generation Social Nets, Web Services and eCommerce systems. Online Trust will see huge leaps forward in quantification, simply because without it a lot of the transactions (social, financial, political, etc) that we take for granted in the real world won't happen online very easily above a very basic level. It will require solving a wide combination of Social Capital, Behavioural Psych/Economic and good old Ownership issues. Plus Privacy, of course.
For this reason, by the way, I am less bullish on Location Based services - they are a privacy timebomb waiting to happen, and you just know some overenthusiastic and under-ethiced entrepreneur is going to build the short-cut system that gets accused of facilitating robbery, rape and worse.
(I rather liked Greg Battle's post and his comment that "there will be a sea of people paying for a decade of crimes of youthful oversharing. Credit services will ingest social profiles/footprints as a behavioral overlay to your FICA score and a new industry of removing those indiscretions will be born."
10. How Green was my Valley again?
The sheer amount of money being thrown at Eco-Science todasy - whether you believe in it or not - will ensure that all the networking technologies we know and love will be thrown at trying to make us, our goods and chattels, and by extension the planet, Greener. Some innovations will be very valuable, some will be total Greenwash. Most will come and go and be superseded by newer, better stuff as its very early days for most ICT based Greentech.
If I were to make a guess, its that the Greenwave will be more prevalent in the next few years and recede towards the end of the decade. This is because I (personally) believe much of the current climate change/AGW hoo-ha will be seen to be over-egged and the massive rampups in funding its had over the last 10 years will recede. Bt 2015 the colour of Green will be more "classic"
Anything that makes more efficient use of existing energy assets (renewable or un) is probably a real win. There is also so much money and interested vested in the whole Carbon Trading arena that no doubt many maths PhDs' time will be spent adapting systems from the financial industries to game this one.
11. Enterprise 2.0 will be rebadged with a Three Letter Acronym by 2011.
No one implements big new systems in corporates without a TLA Besides, Enterprise 2.0 as it stands is too limited. It reminds me of Office Automation in the 1980's - a great set of new technologies that aren't yet quite hitting the really big economic levers of the business. By the time Enterprise 2.0 is attacking the big levers - sales effectiveness (CRM), business operations efficiency (TOC, JIT), Churn reduction and Customer Satisfaction (TQC, 6Sigma), reducing CAPEX bills (BPR) and massively improving information flow (MRP2, ERP, OODA) then it will need a new name.
This is not to say that Enterprise 2.0 is not relevant, just that its still a very early day story with immature technology. What comes after is (literally) a 64-billion dollar question.
The Enterprise 2.0 movement will stand or fall on its ability to do 3 major things
12. Government 2.0 will be a slow train coming
There are no doubt efficiencies to be gained by moving Governments services onto teh Web, however we believe it will be slower than many anticipate as:
13. The Internet of (Moving) Things
Aka Robots. The combination of Moore's, Metcalfe's and .... Law means a lot of ICT power can be put on a fairly sophisticated yet inexpensive moving frame today. The Internet of Things is not the endgame, some of these things will be quite smart, some will move, some will do other fairly complex, unpleasant tasks (like fighting foreign wars, cleaning houses and dealing with low price service needs).
Anyway, that concludes a heroic set of guesses. I should add of course that our methodology is to write scenarios, calculate critical paths, milestones and "points of no return", attempt to understand the game theory of the scenario - and revise it every so many cycles with new evidence - so we will have changed our minds in a years time
.A little digression, if I may. Bill Gates once said that things change more slowly in 2 years than people (and their business cases) want, but far faster in 10. My observation is that this is very true in consumer technology, less true in business technology, less again in the public sector, and public behaviour and structures change but slowly. We also have a model that says technology merely provides opportunity, its the economics, user behaviour and legal restrictions that drive uptake,
For example, VOIP was technically feasible in 2000, but it was only in 2003/4 that enough people had good enough bandwidth, and PCs were cheap enough, for it to "piggy back" on top of pre-paid for assets (your broadband connection, PC with microphone and speakers etc).
Anyway, enough of that - what what happens to the 8 trends we saw in the previous decade rolling forward? They were:
1. Bandwidth will carry on expanding
Given we have had a c 30x increase in the last 10 years, projecting that forward implies a mean of c 60 Mbps by 2019 in the UK. From about 20 Mbps per home upwards, you are talking multiple streams of HD video into a household so that allows the exciting prospect of everyone indoors watching their own HDTV channel, instead of TV channel as they do today. Plus ca change.
More to the point is that expanding bandwidth will drive richer applications, which we comment on below in points 2-4.
Critical to this will be whether the "frontbones" - the networks to the home - can take it. In countries where Government diktat has ruled rollout, this will happen. In those using "the market" it will (probably) happen - but later. The Digital Britain hoo-ha pretty much showed that the market will want to sell to the (urbanised, wealthy) 1/3rd of the population off its own bat, may then expand to the next 1/3rd but won't want to touch the last (poorer, rural, older) 1/3rd. Towards the mid 20-teens ("Twenteens"?) even the most market oriented of Governments will realise that to be competitive they need universal high bandwidth access and will force the issue.
2. Talking to each other will remain the Killer App
We don't know with certainty what New New Platforms will come after Twitter or Facebook, or what the successor of Web 2.0 - sorry, Web-squared - will be (though we have some ideas - see below). But what we do know is that it will revolve around P2P - person to person - communication. Always has, always will.
So, we will predict that whatever new platforms, technologies, etc etc emerge - and despite the resurrection of the standard old advertising and e-commerce use cases (see "you can find a great restaurant with your friends" below) - the killer application will remain enabling small world social networks of people to communicate.
This of course does not mean it will make the most money directly, as we saw in the 'Noughties that game went to being able to place low cost Ads against weak buying intention signals. But comms will still be the killer app driving people onto end to end platforms.
3. Our "Social Networks" evolve onto whatever the best platform of the moment is
An inevitable corollary of 2 above - given talking to each other is the killer application - the next need is to enable a "clearing system" to find people you want to talk to. The rate of change of Social Networks in the last 10 years - from email groupware to near real time video chatrooms - has been fairly predictable big picture (same function, different bandwidth), but - as always - it's hard to define at a detailed UI level just which design will succeed. The mayfly like existence of each new social network (2 year half life) means that (i) there is still massive innovation going on and (ii) the ones we have now will pass too.
The next 10 years will see more bandwidth, and more flexible social market-making. Twitter is the current design leader as it is asynchronous, asymmetric and ad-free (for now). Superimposing this on current platform trends we imagine more fixed/mobile convergence, more attempts to link metadata, more attempts to compromise privacy for searchability. Also, there will not be a "Paradigm Shift" - The users will migrate onto the "New" new platforms while maintaining use of the old (we still use email and SMS) - in fact we predict the ability to run "Unified Comms" systems will be increasingly critical.
In addition, as social networks get bigger and marketing zombies invade them, and signal to noise ratio falls, the ability to filter in the stream will be increasingly critical to its uptake - it is our view for example that Twitter clients will increasingly look like email clients (and vice versa - look at the new Mozilla Raindrop ) as the required functionality is proven over time. Another approach to filtering will be to increase the niche-ness of individual networks (this is what happens to the AltNet and GroupWare) - this story today about BeautifulPeople.com firing 5,000 userswho had got too fat over the holidays illustrates this quite well
4. All useful technology and applications commoditise over a 3-5 year cycle.....
Its worth looking at what is commoditising now to get a view of the main trends in the first half of the 20-teens. Low resolution video, fixed-mobile comms and devices, social media (or at least some aspects of it - group comms and basic profiling), the underlying protocols that Web 2.0 kicked off, text search, and even (near) real time services are busy commoditising. Its also easier to make simple payments now than ever before. The most powerful emerging services of the early decade will be built on combinations of these, as its going with the flow. We will be getting more interconnection of commoditising layers (ie the "walled gardens" will forever be climbing up the added value stack)
This is going to really hurt (ie bankrupt) some industries that have existed because parts of the value chain have not commoditised in the past. Those based on expensive physical delivery of data that can be delivered digitally will be under terrific pressure in the next 5 years, there will be major creative destruction there. Think newspapers now, and TV/Films etc as bandwidth increases. Ditto knowledge industries that have avoided global labour cost arbitrage owing to degrees of difficulty of moving the information to and from the markets. Say goodbye to Hollywood, say hello to Bollywood - and will Silicon Valley still have a hegemony in 2020?
The Cloud will be renamed at least twice in the next 10 years, it is coming, but at present the combination of relatively low system reliability, lack of decent SLA protection and too many competing platforms without sufficient plug and play and interoperability will keep it as a niche sport, and users in the 20-teens will mainly opt for hybrid models of Cloud + Own Equipment - though the niches will grow steadily. As with Electricity, the Cloud will have to be "tried and tested" at each layer before widespread adoption. Services on it - the ASP/SOA/SaaS/Whatever the next Acronym is layer - will continue to develop with bandwidth, penetration and sheer cycles of code-writing. Friction will be provided ny attempts to run wllaed gardens (it was ever thus)
Another part of the commoditisation story is the march of Moore's Law (or similar). By and large in this space you get twice the power at half the cost and size every 2 years. This won't change anytime in the next 10 years, and a 2**5 = 30x reduction is a useful tool to think about 2019 with - imagine iPhone and basic PC like functionality for $10, in devices the size of an iPod Nano for example! This is going to drive two other trends onwards:
- ubiquitous multimedia, at least in the OECD (this TED talk by Patti Maes is a sign of things to come)
- the Internet of Things - never mind a billion new mobile users, think a trillion new dumb devices. Say hello to Mrs Fridge!
5. .....but People are Still People. The more things change, the more they stay the same
The technology changes, we talk and interact with each other in new ways, but what we do remains the same. The human condition will remain to hatch, match and despatch, some will always want to seek power and money, and while running this never-ending circle of life we will still try and scrabble onto higher planes of Maslowian existence, and try and keep ourselves entertained in our downtimes. And being human we will still try and get something for nothing so the dreaded parasite that is advertising will, like death and taxes, remain with us for a while yet. So here are some things that this implies:
- We have a hypothesis (based on our reading of behavioural economics as it stands today) that genetic imperatives drive time value of attention, so people will pay real money for things that help them match and hatch. Anything that increases privileged access to mates, money, status, nest building etc will be seen as valuable. Entertainment media is by and large lowest value time (if you had better things to do with your time, you'd do it) so will continue to struggle to fight free models. Its a volume game with low prices.
- Advertising will move over to online media as attention shifts, but owing to the lower audience sizes and almost infinite inventory, the mean (and I mean "mean") rates will stay lower. Over the decade the best empirical metrics will emerge and establish a better economic basis, so by end 20-teens we expect Online Advertising to overtake "trad" advertising in revenue, if not in profitability (Yes, that means hitting c 50% of value by c 2017 or so). Some of this will be from growth, some will be from decline in the overall market as Advertising is just less relevant in a networked, interactive digital world.
6. Hype (and dodgy economic theories) spring eternal in the human breast
In 1999 there were high priests of the New Tech Age then as now. Anyone churlish enough to be a "New Age Economics Denier" was castigated, lambasted and told they "didn't get it". By 2002 the sceptics had been proved largely right as the dotcom bubble deflated to complete limpness. But by 2004 the New "New Economics" of the Internet was on the rise again with Wikinomics (allowing me to calculate that New Economic memes have a c 2 year refraction time) and by 2009 in full swing with various flavours "Free" etc etc which. We predict most of this will be largely discredited by 2011 and a 2 - 3 year period of a Return to Rational Economics will ensue (it has already to an extent).
Companies built in this period have historically been strong, simple because they are built on solid fundamentals.
Ecclesiastes Law however states that, by c 2014 there will be a new inflationary bubble in something, and cometh the hour, cometh the man (or woman). A new generation of Tech Wonderfulness will thus be declared, that is of course quite unlike anything before, and it will of course herald in a New Economic Paradigm which (oddly enough) will promise to allow you to get richer with less effort, and that people who don't "get it" will of course be labelled as crusty old farts.
7. There is a Google or two in every Decade
In every decade a dominant New Media New Entrant emerges at a new layer that they make their own. In the past they have tended to be West Coast US companies (access to the worlds largest ubiquitous markets for risk capital and customers has pretty much guaranteed that). In the 80's it was Microsoft, in the 90's it was arguably AOL (and maybe Yahoo), in the Noughties it was Google.
Ten years later the last decades Cool Kids are nearly always still around, but now as large corporate entities rather than cool young companies. They are no longer the Innovators of the emerging "new" New Media and typically strategically buy innovation, and try and spoil it elsewhere. The ones for the 20-teens all exist already, the issue is spotting which has 10 year legs. In Social Networking I'm betting that Facebook is the New Yahoo, and something else will be the New Google. Maybe Twitter, maybe something in left field still.
Re Google in particular, we think that their search algorithms are going to be increasingly less useful over the decade - in a way a self inflicted goal, as by adding value to links means an entire parasitic SEO ecosystem has emerged. Given that Google funds itself entirely on its link economics, but subsidises many other ambitions, this is going to make its activities in other arenas harder over time. (I see John Battelle of all people, has come to similar conclusions)
In the next 10 years it will probably still be West Coast US companies that rule, but it will be less certain. China represents another huge, fairly homogenous market with its own barriers to entry, and Baidu seem to be able to hold off Google.
Others that are interesting are around the disruption of very big industries today - the growth of online video (Hulu), the disruption of Olde Print Media (Huffington Post, Techmeme) and the emerging Non-bank Banks (unless they get regulated sooner). Also the change to digital in the basic Telco layers implies the emergence of "Soft" Telcos (Telecoms companies that own no direct assets) - Skype is the first wave.
8. Planet Mobile will always overestimate benefits and underestimate time to get them
Planet Mobile runs on the perennial "You can use your mobile to select a great restaurant nearby for you and your friends" business case. It's been used to flog everything from m-commerce to location and augmented reality based services over the last 10 years. Three things have changed for the 20-teens though:
- The rogue entrant that re-sets the game for the next round has emerged (Apple and the iPhone). (Rogue Entrants use the technology available to build the "obvious gaping hole" system that the incumbents for various commercial reasons refuse to build). Going back in history, Apple always enters a poorly structured game with a well defined complete - and closed - solution, capturing about 15 - 20% of the more profitable market while the rest is then duked over by the guiants, and the lower economics usually means 1 dominant player emerges (Microsoft). Google Android is the early pretender for the Microsoft role in this industry, but its still early days and the shoe (and penny) still have to drop for the incumbentsSo, does this mean that Planet Mobile is now about to enter its (much heralded) decade of hegemony? Yes, it will be a lot better than in the Noughties, but... the rule of thumb of dividing all Planet Mobile projected benefits by 2 and multiply time to get them by 2 is probably as useful now as 10 years ago. apply.
- Pricing and network mean that the other billion or so of mobile users will come online this decade (Mobile penetration in Africa is now similar to the UK in 2000), but they do not have the economic value. Their entrance, however, will transform the market for follow on services (and quite a number of other Olde Industries in these locations)
- Smartphones do more stuff - which means that (i) a bunch of things PCs and other single purpose devices did will be taken on board, and thus (ii) a whole raft of new fixed/mobile applications will emerge. But "Mobile" will stop meaning "Phone" and mean anything from Handy via Tablet through Netbook to Laptop and whatever else comes along that can connect to the mobile nets (Mobile TV sets anyone?)
Well, that is the projection of the Noughties going forward, but there are a bunch of "Intersection" technologies (those at the intersection of some of these" and some newly emerging trends which will help reshape things too. In the spirit of keeping things Prime, here are 5 we see emerging
9. Privacy (and a related issue, Trust) will become a bigger and bigger factors.
We thought Privacy would hit the headlines after Beacon, but it didn't - however, right now the buzz about Privacy is higher than its ever been. We expect nuanced Privacy to become a major issue in the design of next generation Social Nets, Web Services and eCommerce systems. Online Trust will see huge leaps forward in quantification, simply because without it a lot of the transactions (social, financial, political, etc) that we take for granted in the real world won't happen online very easily above a very basic level. It will require solving a wide combination of Social Capital, Behavioural Psych/Economic and good old Ownership issues. Plus Privacy, of course.
For this reason, by the way, I am less bullish on Location Based services - they are a privacy timebomb waiting to happen, and you just know some overenthusiastic and under-ethiced entrepreneur is going to build the short-cut system that gets accused of facilitating robbery, rape and worse.
(I rather liked Greg Battle's post and his comment that "there will be a sea of people paying for a decade of crimes of youthful oversharing. Credit services will ingest social profiles/footprints as a behavioral overlay to your FICA score and a new industry of removing those indiscretions will be born."
10. How Green was my Valley again?
The sheer amount of money being thrown at Eco-Science todasy - whether you believe in it or not - will ensure that all the networking technologies we know and love will be thrown at trying to make us, our goods and chattels, and by extension the planet, Greener. Some innovations will be very valuable, some will be total Greenwash. Most will come and go and be superseded by newer, better stuff as its very early days for most ICT based Greentech.
If I were to make a guess, its that the Greenwave will be more prevalent in the next few years and recede towards the end of the decade. This is because I (personally) believe much of the current climate change/AGW hoo-ha will be seen to be over-egged and the massive rampups in funding its had over the last 10 years will recede. Bt 2015 the colour of Green will be more "classic"
Anything that makes more efficient use of existing energy assets (renewable or un) is probably a real win. There is also so much money and interested vested in the whole Carbon Trading arena that no doubt many maths PhDs' time will be spent adapting systems from the financial industries to game this one.
11. Enterprise 2.0 will be rebadged with a Three Letter Acronym by 2011.
No one implements big new systems in corporates without a TLA
Besides, Enterprise 2.0 as it stands is too limited. It reminds me of Office Automation in the 1980's - a great set of new technologies that aren't yet quite hitting the really big economic levers of the business. By the time Enterprise 2.0 is attacking the big levers - sales effectiveness (CRM), business operations efficiency (TOC, JIT), Churn reduction and Customer Satisfaction (TQC, 6Sigma), reducing CAPEX bills (BPR) and massively improving information flow (MRP2, ERP, OODA) then it will need a new name. This is not to say that Enterprise 2.0 is not relevant, just that its still a very early day story with immature technology. What comes after is (literally) a 64-billion dollar question.
The Enterprise 2.0 movement will stand or fall on its ability to do 3 major things
- gain new customers/users/donors/whatever,
- keep them
- service tham at lower costs than current and "Good Enough" new systems will.
12. Government 2.0 will be a slow train coming
There are no doubt efficiencies to be gained by moving Governments services onto teh Web, however we believe it will be slower than many anticipate as:
(i) Those with power hate giving power away.
(ii) Governments, by and large, do not have stellar records in adopting new IT systems early, nor in rollling them out fast and successfully. Potential cost savings will be counterbalanced by the costs of purchase and implementation in cash-strapped public services. There will no doubt be Digital Inclusion lobbies arguing for 100% access to new services - a worthy aim, but it will serve to further slow things down. But full inclusion is expensive - however, so long as there is not Digital Inclusion, you can't take the savings. This is the Catch 22.0
(iii) Privacy is a major headache with public data, and current 2.0 systems are far from secure
(iii) Also, current networked systems are too simplistic to deal with the 5% of unpleasant people who will lie, cheat and scam. We can easily design Government 2.0 systems for the 95% of (usually) honest citizens (95% of the 2/3rds of the population who will have Broadband access) , but to do so will be to accept higher risk, and probably more collateral damage from the bad guys. And given how risk averse and lawsuit-keen We The People are en Mobbe, it will be hard for governments to do this. Even if they wanted to, which they don't
13. The Internet of (Moving) Things
Aka Robots. The combination of Moore's, Metcalfe's and .... Law means a lot of ICT power can be put on a fairly sophisticated yet inexpensive moving frame today. The Internet of Things is not the endgame, some of these things will be quite smart, some will move, some will do other fairly complex, unpleasant tasks (like fighting foreign wars, cleaning houses and dealing with low price service needs).
Anyway, that concludes a heroic set of guesses. I should add of course that our methodology is to write scenarios, calculate critical paths, milestones and "points of no return", attempt to understand the game theory of the scenario - and revise it every so many cycles with new evidence - so we will have changed our minds in a years time
Tuesday, December 29. 2009
The 11 most useful books on Social Networking / Media I have read
I was inspired by Deirdre Molloy's reading list for Social Media to list the books I've read to date that I have found most useful. As is the fashion, one has to have a number - well, I counted the ones that were very useful and that I'd recommend to get up and running fast - and there were 11
Firstly, Background Reading to get the evolution and big picture to where we are today:
1. The Victorian Internet - Tom Standage
A good analysis of the rise and eclipse of the telegraph, and the "online" social communities it formed. Many parallels with the Web, the 'Net and Social Media
2. Non Zero - Robert Wright
Examines how and why human society is learnin g to co-operate in larger and larger numbers, from small related groups of early cavemen to supra-nation emergence today. Its essentially a treatise in the evolution of behavioural psychology of co-operation.
Secondly, the theory of Social Networks:
3. Linked: How Everything Is Connected to Everything Else and What It Means - Albert Barabasi
An early - and still very good - primer for social network analysis - enough theory to get you going so you can tell why and how say Twitter, Facebook and Linked In are differently architected. There are later and more complex books, but this is a good starter.
4. Six Degrees: The Science of a Connected Age- Duncan Watts
The first - and still one of the best - works on how the "Social Media" age will evolve. Its useful today as you can compare what was thought in 2004 to 2009 and see where reality has devolved.
Thirdly, how Social Media works
5. Here Comes Everybody - Clay Shirky
Even Shirky would probably now admit the book is a tad optimistic, or at least does not examine the dark side enough, but it is still an excellent summary of the whole space
6. The Wealth of Networks: How Social Production Transforms Markets and Freedom - Yochai Benkler
Hard going and aged in parts , but like Shirky a good coverage of the overall macroeconomic landscape of social networking. Also like Shirky, probably too optimistic (or politically naive, looking at how China censors Social Networks) but a good summary nonetheless
Fourthly, the critics and sceptics - the promoters tend to be on the optimistic side, but to get a balanced (realistic) view its necessary to pick up the views of informed critics:
7. The Future of the Internet And How to Stop It - Jonathan Zittrain
This is more about the struggle for control of the Internet, but the discussion has huge implications for social media services that sit on it, and touches on emerging issues like privacy abuse that tend to be glossed over elsewhere.
8. The Cult of the Amateur - Andrew Keen
The most vehement (and long standing) critic, who took the opposite side to Shirky et al. Lambasted frequently by many for his continual pessimism, he forms the counterweight. By 2009 it was clear that Social Media was in a middle ground between his views and Shirky et al.
Fourthly, the state of the art today. Sadly, (in my opinion) too much of the stuff that has come out in the last 2 years has been rushed out to satisfy a market demand (there are a plethora of new books essentially promising that you can make your fortune in Social Media - avoid!) rather than go into much depth to explain what's actually going on. Ones that I have been most impressed with are:
9. Groundswell: Winning in a World Transformed by Social Technologies - Charlene Li and Josh Bernoff
I don't agree with everything they say (We've had more than a few shots at their thinking on Broadstuff) but being "proper" analysts their writing gives you a rational and structured view of their hypothesized ecosystem, so you can see how they come to their conclusions - and they are comprehensive and up to date.
10. The Blogosphere
The latest stuff is not in books yet, I have been watching a number of disciplines as they are being applied to online social networks - emerging topics such as Digital Anthroplogy, Social Graph Theory and Behavioural Economics, and research reports from a range of sources such as McKinsey, the Pew Institute, the EFF, and eMarketing for example. Techmeme is a useful source if you ignore the obvious product pimps from the digital megacorps, and The Economist is often an early-up with a business angle. Its also useful to look at whats being talked about at SXSW last year and next - not so much by the well known names in the main panels, but the emergent topics in the group sessions.
And lastly, the emergent future - there are futurists, there are science fiction writers, and there is Cory Doctorow who is both a commentator on the Social Media scene and a Sci Fi Author, so the primer is:
11. Down and Out in the Magic Kingdom
An analysis of Social Capital (which he calls Whuffie) which is partly story, partly science fiction prediction, and partly satire. He has a large body (of work) and its a useful starting point.
Now you will all feel that I have left some books out, and how dare I include say Andrew Keen but - in my view anyway - these are the ones that are original contributions, and still largely on target and allow one to get an overall picture to separate sincerity from snake oil (becasuse there is a lot of that around - in fact familiarity with the Gartner Hype Curve is essential in this space). Anyway, feel free to criticise, commend or create your own list.
Firstly, Background Reading to get the evolution and big picture to where we are today:
1. The Victorian Internet - Tom Standage
A good analysis of the rise and eclipse of the telegraph, and the "online" social communities it formed. Many parallels with the Web, the 'Net and Social Media
2. Non Zero - Robert Wright
Examines how and why human society is learnin g to co-operate in larger and larger numbers, from small related groups of early cavemen to supra-nation emergence today. Its essentially a treatise in the evolution of behavioural psychology of co-operation.
Secondly, the theory of Social Networks:
3. Linked: How Everything Is Connected to Everything Else and What It Means - Albert Barabasi
An early - and still very good - primer for social network analysis - enough theory to get you going so you can tell why and how say Twitter, Facebook and Linked In are differently architected. There are later and more complex books, but this is a good starter.
4. Six Degrees: The Science of a Connected Age- Duncan Watts
The first - and still one of the best - works on how the "Social Media" age will evolve. Its useful today as you can compare what was thought in 2004 to 2009 and see where reality has devolved.
Thirdly, how Social Media works
5. Here Comes Everybody - Clay Shirky
Even Shirky would probably now admit the book is a tad optimistic, or at least does not examine the dark side enough, but it is still an excellent summary of the whole space
6. The Wealth of Networks: How Social Production Transforms Markets and Freedom - Yochai Benkler
Hard going and aged in parts , but like Shirky a good coverage of the overall macroeconomic landscape of social networking. Also like Shirky, probably too optimistic (or politically naive, looking at how China censors Social Networks) but a good summary nonetheless
Fourthly, the critics and sceptics - the promoters tend to be on the optimistic side, but to get a balanced (realistic) view its necessary to pick up the views of informed critics:
7. The Future of the Internet And How to Stop It - Jonathan Zittrain
This is more about the struggle for control of the Internet, but the discussion has huge implications for social media services that sit on it, and touches on emerging issues like privacy abuse that tend to be glossed over elsewhere.
8. The Cult of the Amateur - Andrew Keen
The most vehement (and long standing) critic, who took the opposite side to Shirky et al. Lambasted frequently by many for his continual pessimism, he forms the counterweight. By 2009 it was clear that Social Media was in a middle ground between his views and Shirky et al.
Fourthly, the state of the art today. Sadly, (in my opinion) too much of the stuff that has come out in the last 2 years has been rushed out to satisfy a market demand (there are a plethora of new books essentially promising that you can make your fortune in Social Media - avoid!) rather than go into much depth to explain what's actually going on. Ones that I have been most impressed with are:
9. Groundswell: Winning in a World Transformed by Social Technologies - Charlene Li and Josh Bernoff
I don't agree with everything they say (We've had more than a few shots at their thinking on Broadstuff) but being "proper" analysts their writing gives you a rational and structured view of their hypothesized ecosystem, so you can see how they come to their conclusions - and they are comprehensive and up to date.
10. The Blogosphere
The latest stuff is not in books yet, I have been watching a number of disciplines as they are being applied to online social networks - emerging topics such as Digital Anthroplogy, Social Graph Theory and Behavioural Economics, and research reports from a range of sources such as McKinsey, the Pew Institute, the EFF, and eMarketing for example. Techmeme is a useful source if you ignore the obvious product pimps from the digital megacorps, and The Economist is often an early-up with a business angle. Its also useful to look at whats being talked about at SXSW last year and next - not so much by the well known names in the main panels, but the emergent topics in the group sessions.
And lastly, the emergent future - there are futurists, there are science fiction writers, and there is Cory Doctorow who is both a commentator on the Social Media scene and a Sci Fi Author, so the primer is:
11. Down and Out in the Magic Kingdom
An analysis of Social Capital (which he calls Whuffie) which is partly story, partly science fiction prediction, and partly satire. He has a large body (of work
) and its a useful starting point.Now you will all feel that I have left some books out, and how dare I include say Andrew Keen but - in my view anyway - these are the ones that are original contributions, and still largely on target and allow one to get an overall picture to separate sincerity from snake oil (becasuse there is a lot of that around - in fact familiarity with the Gartner Hype Curve is essential in this space). Anyway, feel free to criticise, commend or create your own list.
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