Innovation in Software

Almost 18 months ago, I had a little bit of a rant about the lack of vision in the industry. A taste:

I have a problem with “the vision thing” in the industry at the moment. I don’t know where we’re going, or why. The technology – and our insight on how it can be applied – available to us has the ability to change the World, and instead we’re producing pointless crap and obsessing over details of page animations as if they alone will save the World.

If I hear one more wannabe-startup tell me that they plan to change the World and get rich off the back of social networking I will scream. If I see one more aggressive pitch for a site that a teenager could put together in a weekend under the guise of it being “World leading” I will hurt somebody. If I’m asked just one more time to give a quote to develop a site “a bit like eBay but with a social graph” I’m going to quit and go and be a farmer or something.

The response I got from that article was interesting. One reader suggested they had quit their job after thinking through some of the points I made. Mostly people suggested I needed a good lie down, that I was burning out.

We’re now a year and a half in, and I still feel that way sometimes. In that time, iPhone and Android app markets have grown beyond recognition, fewer startups are trying to build up to a point of acquisition quickly by simply AJAX-ifying calendars or todo lists, and the “Web 2.0 craze” seems to have settled down. We’re slowly – but surely – starting to settle down to real work.

We’re still a fair few miles away from where we could be, though. We still are spending too much time as an industry obsessed with entertainment than helping to effect change in some of the biggest problems we face as a society.

However, I’m curious: since writing that article, this blog has picked up thousands of new regular readers, people to whom the Vision Thing is a brand new concept. I’d be interested in hearing what some of you think a year and a half down the line. Are the problems still there? Have I outlived my stay in the sector and it’s time to go and buy that farm? Leave your thoughts below, I’d love to hear them.

A friend sent me a link yesterday with the short description of “Intriguing…”

It was a link to Clay Shirky’s article Gin, Television, and Social Surplus and indeed it is an intriguing article where he sets out his initial thesis thus:

I was recently reminded of some reading I did in college, way back in the last century, by a British historian arguing that the critical technology, for the early phase of the industrial revolution, was gin.

The transformation from rural to urban life was so sudden, and so wrenching, that the only thing society could do to manage was to drink itself into a stupor for a generation. The stories from that era are amazing– there were gin pushcarts working their way through the streets of London.

It’s not a new theory, however I’m not entirely sure it’s completely accurate. Urban life is not a new invention: Rome at one point is reckoned to have had 1 million citizens, and Athens had 300,000 citizens before it. Whilst they both had their debauchery, nobody has ever suggested that Rome needed wine and orgies in order to function as a city.

His parallel starts to get more interesting however:

If I had to pick the critical technology for the 20th century, the bit of social lubricant without which the wheels would’ve come off the whole enterprise, I’d say it was the sitcom. Starting with the Second World War a whole series of things happened–rising GDP per capita, rising educational attainment, rising life expectancy and, critically, a rising number of people who were working five-day work weeks. For the first time, society forced onto an enormous number of its citizens the requirement to manage something they had never had to manage before–free time.

And what did we do with that free time? Well, mostly we spent it watching TV.

I’m not sure the “wheels would have come off”, but there is no doubt that even people on very poor incomes have more free time than people of similar economic standing would have had for many millenia – if ever.

He goes on to talk about this surplus of time as something useful, interesting and powerful. His first example however directly contradicts my thoughts around The Vision Thing:

And I’m willing to raise that to a general principle. It’s better to do something than to do nothing. Even lolcats, even cute pictures of kittens made even cuter with the addition of cute captions, hold out an invitation to participation. When you see a lolcat, one of the things it says to the viewer is, “If you have some sans-serif fonts on your computer, you can play this game, too.” And that’s message–I can do that, too–is a big change.

Actually, it’s a change, but it’s not one we should embrace unless we say it’s the thin end of the wedge. That eventually something useful and interesting is going to happen and society starts working on interesting things. Clay goes on to talk about how if even one slither of that time of staring at the flashing box in the corner is used to do something productive, it means something interesting is going to happen.

Let’s say that everything stays 99 percent the same, that people watch 99 percent as much television as they used to, but 1 percent of that is carved out for producing and for sharing. The Internet-connected population watches roughly a trillion hours of TV a year. That’s about five times the size of the annual U.S. consumption. One per cent of that is 10,000 Wikipedia projects per year worth of participation.

I think that’s going to be a big deal. Don’t you?

To an extent I agree. I don’t know what 10,000 Wikipedia projects per year is going to look like, but there is no doubt that something, somewhere is going to happen of interest.

But what are those 10,000 projects? Do we have the creative ability to do 10,000 useful things every year? Do we have the will to do something more interesting than throw sheep at each other or spending our entire time photoshopping memes? Time will tell.

I bumped into somebody last night on the way home from the shop, and the conversation was an interesting one for me.

The person concerned – Ikem Nzeribe – did a presentation at BarCamp Leeds last year about mapping that blew me away. It was clear he’d thought through the problem he was trying to address and he’d come up with a social, interesting, useful solution. After the talk I handed him my business card, and suggested we sit down and talk at some point.

So we did. Between then and now we’ve regularly met up and discussed plans either directly or as part of a larger group Ikem pulled together from his networks.

I hadn’t spoken to Ikem since The Vision Thing got rolling, and he clearly hadn’t seen it. I basically summed it up like this:

“There’s a chance I’m going to quit the industry in the next six months”

Two things struck me about that sentence. First, that’s the first time I’ve been completely upfront about where I was heading when I wrote the original rant. His reaction was incredulous, he thought I was winding him up: “You? You are going to quit? YOU?”, etc.

Yeah, me. I’m now thinking the change might not be that dramatic because I can now see ideas forming that address my concerns about how screwed we are right now, but I’m leaving it that open until something more tangible forms.

The second thing that struck me was the word “industry” in there. Which industry did I mean? Web development? Consultancy? Internet business development? Open innovation? Kagtum? Writing blogs and the occasional article?

A very good first step to me trying to stay in the industry is to start saying “no” to proposals, invitations to events, opportunities to comment, and so on. I’m fortunate that so many people want to work with me right now, but it’s stopping me from servicing my current clients and working out how to build great applications that don’t ultimately get monetised through “raising brand awareness” for soulless multinationals who want 75% profit on every unit of sugarwater they sell.

Ikem understands. I hope other people do too. For the record if it’s not one of these or doesn’t directly help one of these, I’m not doing it any time in the next six months:

• Accounts software with Adaptavist (coming to a close soon)
• The “Florida project” (I’ll explain more later in the year).
• My local consultancy project around corporate social responsibility
• The “open innovation” thing with Guy Dickinson and Simon Wheatley
• Kagtum
• Blogging
• BarCamp Manchester
• The occasional co-working day

That’s more than enough for me right now. Please don’t feel offended if I say no to an invitation to get involved in your great idea.

As most of you now know, I’ve spent a lot of time thinking recently. I’ve even been ranting a fair bit. I sound downbeat when I talk about it (as I did at GeekUp this week), but there are small shards of optimism I can extract from all of the discussion, and it’s those I’m going to focus on.

For several years now, an idea has been bugging me. It addresses hard problems, big social issues I care about, and I believe I can actually do something useful, innovative and entertaining in the space. I have called it Kagtum.

The article I found the most upbeat about my rant has actually make me think it’s worth dealing with this set of problems again from a fresh perspective and push the ideas forward into code.

In the years thinking about these problems I’ve spent a lot of time thinking about how to make it happen. I’d spoken to a lot of people. I’d sniffed around investors. I’d watched blogs by people in the same space and saw where they were heading and thought about where they might trip up. I’ve watched people trip up (90% of them by focusing on the wrong thing), and made mental notes.

Today, something clicked. I realised can actually make the beta happen, in my spare time quicker than I thought and not break a sweat whilst having fun. And, even better, I don’t need to drop any of my current commitments around vagueware, idea banks, other business ideas.

That sounds like a plan.

So, it’s time to kick things off. I’m trying to recruit a user base of people interested in news, current affairs and emerging technology against which to bounce ideas off. I’ve started that process by setting up a page on Facebook and CPC’ing people on FB interested in those topics. If you want to become a fan, please do so and you’ll be behind the wall on the first release.

The Vision Thing will continue. However, now I’m going to try and deal with the issues not by complaining, whining, ranting and criticising, but trying to find a way to be optimistic and beat a path. I will aim to show, not tell. Maybe I’ll mess up and people will laugh, maybe I won’t. Should be fun finding out, either way.

So, with just a couple of days of throwing ideas around, some interesting strands are coming together.

Firstly, those who are developers tend to agree with me: we’re a broken industry in need of a fix. Secondly, those who aren’t developers think I personally am broken and in need of a fix. Some think both are true.

With the private e-mail I was getting and IM chatter, I figured it would be better to produce a sandpit where anybody could get stuck in and post things up, link to articles, etc.

http://visionthing.vagueware.com is the current sandpit. We need to give this a better name and identity, but as you can see there is now a little momentum building.

You can also see that a few of us are playing with the idea of a Manifesto. It’s not enough to say what we’re angry about: we should be talking about what we want this industry to be, what we believe it is capable of, to lay a framework down to make sure we look after ourselves, our users and potentially our investors without breaking a fundamental philosophical barrier.

I think it might be worth just touching on a couple of the responses though, specifically those who suggest the problem is me.

OK, I’ll admit it, I’m tired. I need a break. I might not know what I really want out of life (who the heck does?), however those aren’t the problems we’re talking about.

The real problem is the abundance of froth in this industry right now, with no real substance and meaning to it. I am not condemning the entire industry – I just question the meaning of parts of it, and whether we can’t use our collective skills to do something better. This is ultimately a philosophical and political position to take, and it’s one many seem to share with me. We don’t know the details yet, but we know we want to try and hammer them out and at the end say “this is what we believe in”. I don’t expect everybody to agree with that position: a philosophy that has 100% belief isn’t a philosophy, it’s a law of nature.

We know we’re jaded and tired, but we’re jaded and tired for a reason.

As a group of geeks we hate spin, bullshit, lies, marketing speak and so on. We are an industry moving to a foundation built on those principles rather than the ones we admire: hard problems being solved with skill, and adding value to society. We want to help those with a financial interest satisfy their curiosity, but we want to encourage them to do it with the same sense of purpose that drives us to all-night hacking sessions.

I just had a niggle in my head the other day. Now we have the beginnings of a community prepared to work out how to make this industry better. We’re going to have detractors labeling one or all of as burned out as they look at that angry stare in our eyes when they explain their “social networking for lampshades” idea to us, but I feel all the better for knowing there are people who are thinking about this the way I am, and I hope they feel better too.

I have a problem with “the vision thing” in the industry at the moment. I don’t know where we’re going, or why. The technology – and our insight on how it can be applied – available to us has the ability to change the World, and instead we’re producing pointless crap and obsessing over details of page animations as if they alone will save the World.

If I hear one more wannabe-startup tell me that they plan to change the World and get rich off the back of social networking I will scream. If I see one more aggressive pitch for a site that a teenager could put together in a weekend under the guise of it being “World leading” I will hurt somebody. If I’m asked just one more time to give a quote to develop a site “a bit like eBay but with a social graph” I’m going to quit and go and be a farmer or something.

When I first got into computing, it was because of the potential of what you could do with this technology. When I first got on the Internet in 1996 I genuinely believed we were on the cusp of changing everything. An anarchic communication system where ideas could flow easily, people connect and work together to have a positive impact on society? I’ll take one of those please! Except 12 years later I think we’ve used it for mostly plastic, soulless and philosophically bankrupt ideas because “that’s where the money is”. There are exceptions, but the fact they are by definition exceptional means I feel we’ve taken a wrong turn somewhere.

I know I haven’t made any great personal contribution so am as guilty as anybody, but at least through efforts around BarCamp, Co-working and support of GeekUp I’m trying to get the conversation rolling. Maybe I’m just hacked off we’re moving so slowly. I know we have the collective talent so why are we all – me included – not getting on with it?

Over the next ten years we have the potential to fundamentally change the way the World works. Not just our World, but the Third World too. There are threats, opportunities, risks and rewards – not necessarily all financial – but for me the “vision thing” we should be working towards is about making people’s lives better not by trying to replace TV or other media, not by providing entertainment, but helping enhance people’s relationships – somehow providing meaning. And no, I don’t mean social networking, business networking or anything else where a friendship is defined as clicking on a “Confirm” button. I mean genuine enhancement of whatever it is we’re here to do.

I have spent a lot of time recently thinking about whether I want to stay in this industry. Last week I was ready to serve out the 6-month contract I’m on at the moment and then go and do something else for a while. Over the long weekend something niggled me and I think I know what I’m going to do next. I’ll explain more in coming weeks/months, but right now I want to see if I’m alone in having the niggle.

Comments are still broken here, so maybe I shouldn’t be doing this, but I want to know what other people think of the “Big Picture”. Specifically I’m going to do one of those slightly annoying “tag things” where I point to the people whose opinions I’m genuinely interested in who will hopefully respond to this post with one of their own and then tag another five people and so on so we can try and get this conversation going. Tagging posts with “thevisionthing” with Technorati might help us keep track of where it ends up.

What the hell are we doing in this industry? Why do we spend so much time talking about Ajax and definitions of “Web 2.0” and virtually no time whatsoever trying to work out what people want? Is this just all an aspect of the industry being over-run by complete geeks, or is the industry lacking any sense of philosophy? Are we being over-run by ideas and concepts from the advertising industry and mass media generally, because they’re becoming more dominant in the industry? Should I turn my dev environment off and go and do something less boring instead? I just want to hear what people think.

I tag (in alphabetical order):

• Guy Dickinson
• Matt Lee
• Katie Lips
• Manoj Ranaweera
• Tom Smith

That said, if anybody else wants to respond to this – say, Hugh who sounds about as burned out right now as I feel, Seth Godin who was in the industry way before me, Guy Kawasaki who is simply on the ball constantly, or anybody shoving their feed into NorthPack – I’d love to hear about it. I have a horrible feeling this will fall flat on its face and people will simply suggest I take a holiday (probably a good point), but it’s worth a punt…

Update: we have a few responses in:

• Andy Mitchell makes my point better than I did
• Guy Dickinson broadly thinks I’m wrong
• Tom Smith feels the pain, but thinks I just need a holiday or to do something different

They all make valid points, but there is something here. Via e-mail Andy and Steve Ireland have continued the discussion a little more. I think there is something in trying to advance this a little. Stay tuned.