Dont Be Evil

Here are things you need to know about them

#1

What we see of google on the out side is just the tip of the ice burg. For every idea that gets turned into product they make a 1000 that stay on the inside … this is the innovation methodology

#2

The google Microsoft story is the same as the Microsoft IBM story, to find out what happens to google next read a book.

#3

Google are forcing telcos to behave as a dumb pipe but the Telco’s are not going down without a fight, their response  is IMS.
Both outcomes are anti consumer !

#4

Google are kicking arse in the enterprise space
Google Search appliances are flying off the shelves to the big companies,
For the Small companies the rate of signup to google apps is astonishing
In the education sector they will soon be standard ! especially in higher education. Google K2 is free for this sector and in UK market schools are switching from RM so fast that RM cannot keep up with demand to turn off their services.
The hand that rocks the cradle …

From my  perspective …

Googles applications are great,
how they run their company is great
their attitude to embracing odd balls and weirdos is great.

I just cant help thinking that Its a pathetic that they choose to waste their dreams, talent and creativity on such a pathetic goal as taking down Microsoft

Google if you are listening, another way of saying Don’t be evil, is to say love everyone, and that includes the small state run telcos in little socialist european countries, the developers who want to make a living selling software and microsoft.

Sort it out … you can do so much better that.

On Tuesday I went to the Amazon Web Services startup event in the wonderful British Museum, for a five hour cloud computing pun festival. Here are some of the shocking attempts at humor that I recorded, more out of a perverse curiosity rather than recording the humor for posterity
Where do you go after the Planet … the Cloud
The Sky is the limit
You’ve got Clouded vision
Flying through the Clouds

The event was excellent, well run, great content and good bunch to network with. And because there was no alcohol I didn’t make a complete chump of myself. What I think Amazon have done that truly amazes me is how they have hooked up everything you need to make a media product with the existing amazon market place and sales tools needed to derive a revenue from it. Whats more they have codified all the processed necessary to make it happen.

There was an interesting audience make up of around 1000 in total, I counted down my row and worked out these percentages.

• 20% Suits
• 20% Business casual
• 10% Casual
• 2% Female
• 3% Bald
• 5% Flamboyant media types

Whenever I try and make, or launch something I dread the endless conversations with the operational team (Luddites more resistive to change than a glacier) to persuade them to commission a new box or worse still … change an old one. Well amazon have really thought about this, and have provided both a web UI and an API to do it. This means that I can get development code into production faster, and If I can do that … it means that I can either demonstrate that an innovation fails or derive revenue from it with a smaller expense (my precious time).

I do have a concern that this inevitable migration to large cloud providers will ultimately create an even larger dependency on a shrinking set of suppliers. In the end this is anti consumer, maybe its time for a state run or even UN owned cloud?

Note:
For those of you who are into sustainability, when someone asked the question “Will Amazon be using renewable energy sources for its servers” there was a big laugh and a stumped speaker.

This poster reads “A bomb won’t go off here because weeks before a shopper reported somone studying the CCTV camerars”.

This poster has been made by a professional media company, and has been placed in public places throughtout Britian. The chosen image is deliberatly amature and familiar so that you the viewer will engage with it. Quite simply it feels like you are in the image, doing an every day thing. The CCTV camera and the lamp post have an equal placement in the photo. Both objects are shown as depicted as benevolent helpers to our society. This poster is designed to invoke an emotional reaction. You look at the picture, not noticing the physical environment. Then as you read the text you realise that our society is at risk, and you feel fear, then as the cerebral message is delivered you realise that its safe because of CCTV … phew!

This poster reads “Secure beneth watchfull eyes”. Again this poster is very clever. The image shows an eye with the london transport logo in it floating above a typical london city scape. The design is in the style of art deco and suggests some kind of modern shiney metroland. The floating right eyes hover over us like friendly flying saucers.

Whether you believe CCTV is a natural progression for the bureaucratic need to protect our society from groups that have marginal interests or a state sponsored invasion of privacy is not important. What is clear is that state funded organizations are spending considerable money trying to show you that CCTV is being deployed to make you safe.

If you attend to a car accident, the victims who are making least noise are in the most trouble.
If you look at an engine its the alternator that makes the least movement but has the most control.
If listen to a choir the loudest voice is not always the best.

Social Network Analysis is being heralded as a tool that can help managers identify key communicators within their operation, If cost saving they can work out where to cut, if looking for growth they can look where to reinforce.

however …
You simply cannot just look at the volume of communication

But the current bread of social sensory software, or SNA tools cannot distinguish between noise and value.

We all know how the team dynamic changes when someone important (to the team) leaves. Could the SNA measure the amount of problems that these people solve, or create, simply by looking at traffic volume?

The SNA computer program could identify the person who internally promotes a new technique and communicates it to others, But could it find the person who innovated it?

Here is a sample conversation,
Tom: Have you seen that idea that Dick has for making the production line go faster.
Harry: Yeah, its really cool. I don’t know how he does it.
Tom: Dick should be in head office we could do with that kind of innovation in the management team.

A stupid SNA would score like this
Tom -> 2
Harry -> 1
Dick -> 0

If the SNA could semantically understand message content then you would have something of real value, for example
Tom -> 2
Harry -> 1
Dick -> 111 (1 for the mention) (10 for the positive response) (100 for the endorsement)

My thoughts are this …

Is on line anonymity dead? The read write web think that the ground breaking case of the US state vs Lori Drew implies that the behaviour of Impersonating (Imping) is now illegal. I think this raises a bigger question,  does human kind have a right to anonymity? and if so, is the behaviour of the judiciary, the bureaucracy and commercial organizations in exploiting new technology to find out even more about us infringing on that right?

The secret ballet is an essential balance in the mechanism of democracy, and as such there is at least one piece of anonymity that a judiciary must protect. However society must be protected. Some might say that anonymity is a privilege rather than a right and that it is the individuals responsibility to guard their own anonymity. If the individual chooses to engage in a criminal activity such as grooming then they relinquish their rights.

My fear is that state will be slow in its response to technical innovation, there is no point shutting the stable door once the horse has bolted.