Creativity and disruptiveness in a borg company

This snippet from a book quoted in an article in the context of the reorganization we are undergoing in HP Labs really hits home:

In their last chapter, the authors concluded: 'Breakthroughs have come from creative teams that were ignored by their organizations, supported only belatedly by their organizations, misunderstood by their organizations, even assaulted by their organizations. Breakthroughs can emerge just as readily from no organization at all.'

I think *every* project I've worked on in HP and HP Labs since 1996 is summed up by that statement :-). It took me a while to come to terms with this, but now it actually energizes me to have a project in that position. If I'm not ignored, supported only belatedly, and not assaulted by my organization, I take it as a sign that I'm not being creative enough. Ironically the article's author, and I take it some in management, think this is a bug and not a feature. It's not for everyone, but it's how I've evolved to exist in a mega-corporation amidst its unrelenting homogenizing forces.

FYI, for more on the HP Labs reorg, read the whole article at: EETimes.com - Commentary: Will eHarmony work for R&D match-making?

HP's new inkjet web press

I must begin by reminding the reader that "web" in this context refers to a roll-fed printing press, not our dear WWW of cyberspace fame :-).

HP Targets Multi-billion Dollar Graphics Arts Market with New Digital Printing Technologies: Financial News - Yahoo! Finance:

New products and technologies are being previewed this week at a Tel Aviv event for customers, partners, press and analysts. Highlights include:

* A high-speed 30-inch (762-mm) inkjet platform for high-volume production of books, transactional/transpromotional mail, direct marketing materials and newspapers.

If it works, this is a real game-changer in commercial printing. More info on the press:

Leveraging its $1.4 billion investment in Scalable Printing Technology, HP introduced the HP Inkjet Web Press (http://www.hp.com/go/inkjetwebpress), a high-speed color digital printing platform that increases productivity and lowers the cost of printing for the high-volume commercial market.

...

Capable of printing in full color on rolls up to 30 inches wide at 400 feet per minute (122 m/min.), the HP Inkjet Web Press is compatible with a wide range of uncoated media to enable efficient printing of book signatures, full broadsheet newspapers and other documents.

400ft/min @ 30" wide -- I want to see the ink delivery system on this puppy! Driving ink at that rate through ridiculously small nozzles, reliably and durably, takes some serious rocket science.

Coding Horror: Douchebaggery

The funniest thing about this fantastic post by Jeff Atwood, Coding Horror: Douchebaggery, is the number of inflammatory comments to it showing a decided inability to recognize irony. Slashdotters can be *so* entertaining.

I'm a longtime fanboy of Jeff, but I'm pissed that he stole, yes STOLE, my oft-used assessment of computing platforms: "They all suck." Of course he has never met me or heard me, but I do say that all the time :-).

Online ads in a socially networked Web

Esther still hasn't gotten HuffPo to expose a feed of only her articles so I can't simply share this on my Google Reader shared items (oh, the pain of having to actually submit my own blog post). Good thing she put out a pointer on her flickr feed. Anyhow, nice article re: online advertising in the emerging social Web world -- and a bit ominous for GOOG, IMO.

While the spotlight in the online world focuses on Google, Yahoo! and Microsoft, the long-term news is happening closer to home - where users interact among themselves through the Web and through online social networks. Companies with agendas mutter about user 'privacy' as they jockey to promote or prevent industry consolidation - but the privacy discussion will change from 'protection by the authorities' to self-determination as users learn to take control over their own data online. As they spread their 'presence' online, they are looking not for privacy, but for recognition as individuals, by friends and by vendors.

Get the rest of the story at Esther Dyson: Release 0.9: Don't Cry For Me, MicroHoogle!

Coding Horror: The Trouble with PDFs

Over the past few years I've refrained from posting my own rant, tentatively titled "PDF is the problem, not the solution". I was a bit surprised to see a similar rant coming from one of my favorite developer blogs:

But I have a problem with PDF files (Coding Horror: The Trouble with PDFs)

Jeff Atwood lays out a few of his issues with PDF, and the reader comments include a more extensive and lively discussion of others'. I think most people confuse PDF with a web format, but a few of the commenters have it right: PDF is a print publishing format, but one which is reasonably friendly to web-based distribution. It is not a suitable web publishing format for so many of the reasons listed in Jeff's post and the reader comments, but it is fine as a print format for web distribution.

My rant is actually a bit different from Jeff's, coming from the perspective of commercial digital printing. PDF is a major inhibitor to the development of dynamic, data-driven print because of its static nature. (Regarding "dynamic data", what I mean is a content formatting process equivalent to what happens on virtually every web site today, where each page is generated dynamically and customized to certain context). PDF was not designed to support dynamic data, but that is the future of print publishing. PDF is good at what it does, but the market needs to be re-educated about PDF and the constraints it imposes: it is not an adequate solution to the production of high value customized digital print. Commercial print is stuck in the dark ages, perhaps the only major information-centric industry that has not been transformed by the Web.

Dynamic commercial digital print is a huge market opportunity, so you can bet this problem will be solved. But I'd also bet that today's PDF will only be a footnote in the solution.

Book or magazine?

Fray Busted Demo, originally uploaded by fraying.

I'm not sure printed publications are going to be so easy to classify as either book or magazine in the future. Derek's Fray is an example.

This demo was produced on an HP Indigo 5000 commercial digital press:

Finding Everywhere

Finding Everywhere, originally uploaded by Telstar Logistics.

The cold reality of the newsstand. I bet there will always be newsstands, but as mags become more niche, there is obviously a challenge with the format. There isn't enough physical space to represent even a small fraction of the marketplace of magazines. We need some newsstand innovation.

Putting the touchy-feely into Web 2.0

A few quotes I like from Christina Wodtke today:

"In other words, Web 2.0 is made of people."

"...you begin to see how social networks can be as effective in solving retrieval problems as data networks (i.e. taxonomies, controlled vocabularies, etc.)"

"I notice how terrified we in the technology business are of the human aspects of our work. This theme will come up later, as we look at the question "does technology matter to virtual community building", but for now let's note it's hard to use "peace" and "love" these days without irony and a certain amount of distancing. Are we so scared of aspirational emotions? If we are going to talk about social systems, we are going to have to face the fact that terms like Love and Caring and Friendship are probably going to come up, so stop giggling."

Put these together over at: "What is Community Anyway?" from IA? EH.

HP Labs as "hit factory"?

HP Labs has been working its way through a fairly major reorganization the past few months, and the PR machinery is using that to raise some visibility in the press. This Fortune article has a nice quote that sums up my feelings pretty well:

"Along the way, there are many things that could go wrong. Chuck Geschke, who left Xerox PARC with his friend John Warnock and 25 years ago co-founded Adobe Systems, notes that no one has yet cracked the unique code for making advanced research consistently pay off. “There must be something special, because not everyone’s able to do it as well as they anticipate,” Geschke says. And perhaps there is no perfect formula at all. “You have to accept the fact that if you’re really pushing the envelope, some of what you do won’t work out.”"

FORTUNE: Big Tech Turning an idea farm into a hit factory

I think Geschke pulled his punches and really should have said "because nobody ever does it as well as they hope to." But his skepticism, like mine, is clear.

Any very large company like HP has evolved countless systems to protect against risk, and there are countless employees who carry out that mission. HP is now a $100B company, and if you divvy that up that means there are theoretically >1000 (!) $100M businesses in themselves, each of which will try to defend itself from any perceived threats. If a disruptive incubation cannot steer clear of all of these, in addition to the corporate-wide functions (legal, finance, etc) that represent them all, that project is doomed. Thus the odds of success for incubations in a BigCo would appear to be tiny. In my mind this is the biggest difference between a BigCo incubation vs. a small independent startup. The BigCo may think it gives autonomy to the incubation, but in practice it never does.

I've been involved with several incubations in my years at HP, most of them in HP Labs, and the main impediment to success has always been other parts of HP, not external competitors. Unless a makeover like this includes a dramatic revamp of how the disruptive activities interface with those countless existing functions inside the BigCo, you will likely end up with the same end result: a lot of frustration all around.

Call me skeptical, but I've always wanted to make this work inside HP, and intend to keep trying :-).

Wagazi � Google is heading into the business of magazines

Jonas at Wagazi comments on the Google patent application that has been making the rounds this past week:

While it seems a bit unclear what exactly Google is aiming at with this patent I’m interested in whether or not they will present a software that will make it easier and cheaper for independent magazine publishers to reach out to a bigger audience. Like Blogger or Wordpress did for bloggers. I’m not sure whether this will work with ordinary print magazines but more likely it could be a hit within digital magazines.

Wagazi � Google is heading into the business of magazines

It's not clear what "this" is that you are not sure will work with ordinary print magazines, but rest assured that something like "this" will. The world of digital commercial printing is just starting to take off, and the printed magazine world is in for a rebirth.

Inundation

So I'm just 14 hours into this day and my work email has received 93 messages already. It is not even spam, as much as I would like to call some of it that.

Publisher Gets Web Readers to Fill the Pages of Its Magazines - New York Times

So who is naive enough to eat this, hook, line and sinker? "Oh sure, we would have no problem getting as many ads as Vogue, we just don't want to take them.

8020 tries to make the magazine more readable by limiting advertising. Web ads are subtle — no pop-ups. The dozen or so advertisers in the print issues are limited to the first few pages, the back, and sponsorships of special sections. Adobe Systems, Sony, Epson, Audi and Virgin America have bought ads. 8020 can afford to limit advertising because, Mr. Minor said, it does not need it to make a profit from them. It says it makes money on each subscription and newsstand sale — the opposite of the traditional magazine business.

Publisher Gets Web Readers to Fill the Pages of Its Magazines - New York Times

8020 has a good idea, but it could be a lot better.

"Launching a Magazine the Un-Dumb Way"

Derek has inspired me to crawl out of my coding dungeon for a moment or two with this:

The magazine business was built on gatekeepers. To get a magazine into a store requires working with a chain of middlemen, each adding to the final cost. The math just didn’t work unless you have huge numbers. So to get them, you dumb down the content and pray for ads. In the end, the magazine becomes more about securing eyeballs for advertisers than serving the community that inspired it in the first place.

The internet allows consumers and creators to connect directly. So for the first time, it’s possible to skip those middlemen. Putting ink to papers is always going to be more costly than putting pixels to screen, but now that a group of talented people can collaborate, create, and sell directly to consumers, it’s actually possible to jump the middlemen - a community can support its own content creation. (This is a lesson the record labels, TV execs, and WGA members are in the process of learning right now.)

Derek Powazek – Launching a Magazine the Un-Dumb Way

I love this. And we can say similar things about many businesses, not just the magazine business (though how the mag biz has avoided the crushing inevitability of Web-enabled opportunity thus far escapes me).

We should remember, though, that gatekeepers and middlemen don't appear out of mere greed, but also need. Where there are barriers in place, entrepreneurs (aka, middlemen-wannabes) surface to overcome them. In today's Web world it may be hard to imagine that some of the old-business gatekeepers actually added value, but they did make things possible that weren't before.

We just happen to live in the time of the emergence of the Web. The Web makes it easy to overcome certain kinds of technical challenges (access to markets, services, distribution), and make certain classes of middlemen obsolete. However when certain hurdles are overcome, we know we will inevitably come upon more. The new gatekeepers may be young but they are gatekeepers nonetheless, and in time their previously empowering value will be seen as a limiting form of control. Google? eBay? Amazon? Gatekeepers.

Entrepreneurial opportunities are safe for a while, I think :-).

Dilbert violates the community

So in what contemporary Web world does a blogger get away with removing user generated content so he can publish it for his own economic gain? I love Scott Adams, but I cannot *believe* he is getting a free pass on this! I guess anyone whose comment was included in the book is a big enough Dilbert fan that its inclusion is sufficient payment. It probably would be for me.

Did you notice that the The Dilbert Blog archive suspiciously disappeared last spring? A big publisher agreed with your frequent suggestions that I should turn the funnier posts into a book. So I did, and as part of that deal removed the book content from the Internet.

The Dilbert Blog: IT'S A BOOK!!! IT'S A CONTEST!!!

You know you've been coding too much lately when...

...this brilliant comic for SQL geeks cracks you up. (Scarily, it also reminds me of something my team needs to do soon!). If this is all gibberish to you, congratulations, you still have a life :-).



xkcd - A webcomic of romance, sarcasm, math, and language - By Randall Munroe

Is The Net Good For Writers? - 10 Zen Monkeys

There are many gems in this Q&A with 10 writers by RU Sirius. If you want to figure out the future of print, this is a great place to get some insight into the challenges and opportunities created for print, by the Web. I'll leave you to read the whole thing on your own, but here's a particular quote I could not resist, from Mark Dery:

Is The Net Good For Writers? - 10 Zen Monkeys

Shrewdly, magazines like The New Yorker understand that print fetishists want their print printy — McLuhan would have said Gutenbergian — so they're erring on the side of length, and Dave Eggers and the Cabinet people are emphasizing what print does best: exquisite paper stocks, images so luxuriously reproduced you could lower yourself into them, like a hot bath.

I've been working for a couple of years now on a system to dramatically change print production. The trite way I describe it is "to marry commercial digital print and Web 2.0,", and most people draw a predictable conclusion from that. "Oh, you are going to print blogs!" The emergence of the Web, and digital commercial presses, has created huge opportunities to revolutionize print publishing, and let me be the first to shout, "IT'S NOT ABOUT PRINTING BLOGS." Please, people, don't diminish the value of our trees by shoveling our blogs onto paper. Though we will learn that lesson soon enough -- like after printing one blog :-).

People create content with the medium in mind. Content written for print does not generally translate seamlessly to the Web, and certainly content written for the Web does not translate seamlessly to print. When print publishing is revolutionized, which I hope is soon, those who succeed first will recognize, like Mark Dery above, what is significant about the print medium, and use it to its strengths.

For instance, I predict the re-emergence of a form of print publishing that was popular more than a hundred years ago, and which can become popular again: the serialized book. This dawned on me in 2003 when I subscribed to the re-issue of Dickens' Great Expectations, by the Discovering Dickens project at Stanford University. Print publishing evolved over time to make that form of publishing impractical for various reasons. The emergence of the Web and commercial digital printing has rewritten the rules again, only the current publishing industry is not in a position to act upon these changes. I think the next installment of Great Disruptions is going to be written over the next few years.

update: Slashdotted

Snapshot-less photography

Snapshot-less photography:

The simple question I asked Phil was “what does Digital Photography mean to you now?” Phil’s answer was that the explosive growth and future of photography is in the combination of personal, community, and professional content that is professionally fulfilled. For Phil, the photography part of “digital photography” is where change is happening now. It’s a new creative medium, not just a way to capture a snapshot. I can see that.

Photography is not about stacks of 4x6's, I wholeheartedly agree. Photos for most people are simply artifacts from our life experience, and we use them, along with other information artifacts (from friends, references, commercial sources) to construct the stories of our lives. It is in these life stories where personal value lies, and photography products should be looking to help enrich those stories. One specific example: GPS sensors should be embedded in all cameras so we can add a location to each photo that is taken.

Why GPS, and not some other feature? One would be misguided to answer that with, "So I can plot my photos on Google Maps." GPS is the most important feature because location does more to support storytelling than any other feature you can add to a camera. True to its box-maker heritage, HP traditionally focuses on technical features like red-eye removal or image sharpening -- features which only improve the quality of the individual artifact-- while investing almost nothing in where the greater value of the photo lies: in the story behind it. Location, on the other hand, is a link. It provides context that leads to more information than the camera could ever record, and ultimately to richer stories.

I could continue on this subject for a looong time. My friends and colleagues will attest to that! I gave this talk many times inside HP while trying to move our digital photography businesses from the old mind set of "print 4x6 photos" to one that is more informed by why people take photographs. I gave it repeatedly at O'Reilly's first Where 2.0 conference at the Where Fair. And I finally gave up on this work two years ago, after pursuing it with no upper management support for five years. Yahoo! and Flickr are now the standard bearers for this kind of work, HP has no place in it -- pun intended :-).

The irony, of course, is that my work was all done under the org chart of the one who now says, "I can see that." My last two years have been devoted to incubating something much bigger, a digital publishing project, which has a similar lack of upper management support. I hope for our customers' sake that we can break through the typical HP barriers to bring this to you now (before Christmas!), and not 3-4 years from now when our execs finally understand what we are doing.

Designing Magazines | Blog Archive | The Children’s Crusade

Hear, hear! What a fabulous post by Jandos over on Designing Magazines.

Designing Magazines | Blog Archive | The Children’s Crusade

Would an Editor at RealTime want a reader trained to read on the children’s version? Does the spoon-feeding of demitasse portions of content and brain-dead imagery send the message that magazines provide value?—that would seem a question of more than passing interest to the folks at Time, Inc., why else would they put this out?

To paraphrase fearless leader, “Is we teaching our children to read a magazine?”

First of all, don't mis-paraphrase our fearless leader! It's "Is we teaching our childrens to read a magazine?" And the sad thing is, we must level the same criticism at magazines for the older set. Even a mag like Sunset with good content still manages to screw up with crappy design and poor execution of advertising.

Continuing:

Kids magazines certainly weren’t always as bleak as the current versions. The magazines I remember loving in my childhood—Ranger Rick, Dynamite—a pop culture journal from Scholastic with a snarky (by 5th grade standards) sense of humor, and Mad all featured stories that sustained for pages, a comparatively challenging vocabulary and more sophisticated (and toned-down) color pallets and typography.

I believe there is plenty of creative talent out there to produce this generation's Ranger Rick and Dynamite, and even better. The first step is to do an end around the current magazine production process, and empower those people to do it. If the Web is good for anything, it is in making it easy to create alternatives to archaic processes and relationships.

Date Of Apple Backlash Set For March 21, 2008 | The Onion - America's Finest News Source

Date Of Apple Backlash Set For March 21, 2008 | The Onion - America's Finest News Source:

'At the current rate, we believe that at this time a sea change will occur in which people will look down at their glossy white or black devices and feel a sense of embarrassment and gullibility,' Goldman Sachs analyst Steven Shore said. 'They will realize that, despite all the sleek design, they got caught up in a wave of hype that made them shell out additional hundreds of dollars for options and features they didn't need. Until then, I would like to point out that my iPhone is awesome.'

I've always found Apple interesting as the place where fashion meets geek. I don't understand why someone would pay so much for clothes, and I don't understand why someone would pay so much for computer stuff.

Official Google Reader Blog: Breaking up isn't hard to do

They say here that Google Reader has moved on from Google Labs, which I guess means it is no longer Beta:

Official Google Reader Blog: Breaking up isn't hard to do

I'm a bit befuddled by the fact that GMail is still Beta. Talk about perpetual Beta, GMail is the poster child for that. Google needs to step up and take full responsiblity for GMail as a non-Beta app and quit the hedging already. C'mon, even *flickr* is out of Beta for Pete's sake!