What is the key to allowing large companies to move fast? Build great platforms. I first heard this insight being persausively argued in Mark Zuckerberg’s interview with John Battelle and Tim O’Reilly at Web 2.0 in 2010 – an age ago in internet time.
In this clip he tells how he urges his people to “be fast and be bold”. He then talks about what it means to be agile. While small start-ups can do it easily, the larger you get the harder it is to move fast. But, he says, people can move quickly on top of a robust platform built on “solid abstractions”.
I also remember being impressed with the speed that Yahoo! teams were able to build strong features on the back of solid APIs to things like single sign-on, maps and Flickr photos. Because the APIs are easily internally available, teams are able to function on the innovation rather than the plumbing.
Amazon is perhaps the supreme example of a company build on the power of the platform. Jeff Bezos has built a platform which can quickly turn its hand to selling just about anything. There was an accidental post by a Google engineer Steve Yegge which famously demonstrated the pain it took getting there, but there is no doubt that the platform approach is one of the main underpinnings of Amazon’s huge success. That same post argued that Google was, incidentally, some way away from the ideal which illustrates eloquently just how hard it is to get it right.
Tag Archives: technology
The second half of the chessboard
I’ve just come across a very interesting concept in a podcast of Peter Day interviewing Erik Brynjolfsson and Andrew McAfee, the authors of The Race Against the Machine.
They mentioned the famous legend about the origin of chess: When the inventor of the game showed it to the emperor of India, the emperor was so impressed by the new game, that he said to the man: “Name your reward.” The man responded that he was a humble man with simple wishes: “Give me one grain of rice for the first square of the chessboard, two grains for the next square, four for the next, eight for the next and so on for all 64 squares, with each square having double the number of grains as the square before.” The emperor agreed, amazed that the man had asked for such a small reward – or so he thought. After a week, his treasurer came back and informed him that the reward would add up to an astronomical sum, far greater than all the rice that could conceivably be produced in many many centuries.
In fact, according to Wikipedia, the total number of grains would equal 18,446,744,073,709,551,615, which is “a much higher number than most people intuitively expect”.
Brynjolfsson and McAfee point out that the effect in the second half of the chessboard is much more dramatic than the first: in the 32nd square the amount of rice is still relatively manageable. But after that each square doubles an already large number and quickly this outstrips human intuition.
Brynjolfsson and McAfee say this same effect is happening with technology. Moore’s Law says technology power will double every 18 months or so and the effect of this again gets very much more significant “in the second half of the chessboard”. They calculate that we’ve had around 32 “squares” of exponential growth in technology and that now the 18 month advances are very much more dramatic than previously and this effect will increase dramatically (dramatic squared, if you like!).
This is the reason behind the really quite remarkable advances in computing and robotics which is having the effect described in their book. “How the Digital Revolution is Accelerating Innovation, Driving Productivity, and Irreversibly Transforming Employment and the Economy”, as the subtitle puts it.
Our technological future: dystopia or utopia?
What will the world of the future be like given the inevitable march of technology? This is a question which pops up, unsurprisingly, quite a lot. Last Sunday the Observer became exercised enough about the question to devote a lengthy op-ed piece about it. And their take was decidedly pessimistic.
The outline that’s emerging is a troubling one. Computing and its associated technologies are becoming so powerful that we are having to rethink decades-old assumptions about what machines can and cannot do. Ten years ago, the idea of self-driving cars would have been regarded as fanciful. Ten years from now, they might be on our roads – and insurance companies may rate them as lower risk than human-controlled vehicles. The advantages of the technology are obvious: fewer deaths and injuries, more efficient use of roads and junctions, less time wasted driving to work and so on.
Less obvious – but just as real – are the potential downsides. In particular, what happens to the millions of people who currently earn a living from driving? The prevailing narrative regards them as the casualties of progress, the victims of the destructive side of Schumpeter’s wave.
However, there is another more optimistic take on the possibilities of automation. Father and son writing team Robert and Edward Skidelsky argue in their book that leisure time should increase with automation and wealth creation.
“In the 1930s Keynes asked the question: what will life be like in 100 years time. Given the march of technology and the economy he predicted that we would be four or five times as rich as we were then. And because that amount of production would be obtainable as a very small fraction of the effort which was then being employed, because of automation and things, he thought that we wouldn’t have to work more than 15 hours a week.”
Edward Skidelsky says in a Royal Society of Arts talk on the subject that Keynes was almost exactly right about growth. But he was entirely wrong about working hours. Why is this? Firstly, wants are not finite. Wants are insatiable and the reason they are insatiable is because they are relative. Secondly pressure to consume, largely because of advertising, has become overwhelming.
Capitalism is failing, he says, because it is not supporting the Aristolean notion of the “good life” – basically stopping the continual drive to have more once a comfortable state has been attained. If we could overcome the urge to continue increasing consumption indefinitely then things such as job sharing to reduce hours worked and increase the quality of our rapidly automating life could become a reality, he says.
The Observer isn’t convinced.
Delicious omelettes cannot be made without the breaking of eggs. Anxieties about the impact of automation are not new and, in the past, automation has often led to economic growth and increases in employment. But there are worrying signs that this time things might be different. The new capabilities of machines enable them to replace not just human muscle and dexterity, but even some aspects of human cognition. Jobs that were hitherto not at risk, including many white-collar occupations, are now becoming vulnerable to computing. Or as the economist Paul Krugman puts it: “Smart machines will end up devaluing the contribution of workers, including highly skilled workers whose skills suddenly become redundant.”
But does it need to be that way? What about spending our time in other ways? Take the development of MOOCs (Massive Open Online Courses). Perhaps people with more time on their hands could spend it in continuous education – for the sake of it, rather than for specific career enhancement, for instance?
It is incredibly difficult to predict the outcome of technologies we can’t even anticipate. As Ben Hammersley illustrated perfectly in another recent RSA lecture Moore’s Law makes it impossible to understand the technology that is coming. It is popular to say that there is more computing power in the phone in your pocket than in the computers that took the Apollo mission to the moon. In fact, he says, there is more computing power in your washing machine!
He recounts how he has been advising Ministry of Defence planners looking at the implications of the technology which will be around in 2045 – a hopeless task. “The computing power you will have in your pocket will be 2.42bn times as powerful as the phone you have in your pocket today.” This will lead inevitably for the first time in history to “a future where we will be surrounded by technology which we cannot imagine.”
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| http://www.flickr.com/photos/albertfreeman/ |
Perhaps the dystopian vision of the future outlined by the Observer will instead by replaced by one more like the Culture, as described by Iain M Banks where superintelligent “minds” do all the hard stuff, leaving human(oid)s to get on with whatever takes their fancy? Let’s hope so.
The Long Nose of Innovation
I came across a very insightful article by Bill Buxton in Business Week called The Long Nose of Innovation which basically argued that innovations which make a difference are in fact based on technologies which have been around for a while. Buxton argues that innovation is really about the application of things already in existence as much as it is about inventing entirely new things.
This resonated with me as I thought about something Ray Kurzweil, the futurologist, said in a recent lecture (which I can’t now find!). He argued that since technology is growing exponentially, if you are building something (in his case computer translation software) you should design for what computers will be able to do by the time you are ready, now what they can do now.
It seems to me you could distill some good advice from these two: look for technologies and capabilities that are around now, but which have failed to reach their potential because computers or mobiles aren’t powerful enough – then design something which will be truly impressive once the power catches up – which it will.
Augmented reality – likely to be all the rage in 2010 – falls into this category. The technologies have been around for ages (camera, compass, GPS), but it wasn’t until they were combined into relatively cheap, powerful phones like the iPhone and Android that they could take off.