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.

If you ask the clichéd man in the street to describe his clichéd idea of Facebook user, he would remove his cliché kebab from his mouth, put down his cliché can of Carling Black Label, and through the use of awful diction and terrible grammar developed through his awfully clichéd state education he would paint a picture for you:

“Teenager, American or European, kind of person who likes to text a lot, probably quite immature, large group of friends, not much into going out getting sloshed, like wot I did when I woz a kid, innit?”

Well, remove yourself from this yob, and look at the actual figures.

North America and Europe contribute 65.8% of all Facebook users, and only around 10% of their users are teenagers. That means less than 7% of the actual Facebook user base is the cliché most of us – especially those of us in the industry – think of as their user base.

The majority are quite different. And I think once you understand the actual group using Facebook, you start to understand its popularity in some groups (and the derision it receives in others).

Obviously (given its history), people above graduation age are the norm. Most of us (myself included), use it as a platform to keep distant touch with people we ordinarily would not speak to year-to-year, never mind day-to-day or week-to-week. We are a generation of nomads, spreading out across the globe after school and University, keeping in touch with people via the light touch of the status update. Twitter is for people who are perhaps a little more frantic (and for me at least, it’s a great way to keep in touch with my peer group, people who I might not have met, but whose work I’m interested in).

It’s not, however, a tool for teenagers. Not really. They have a social group they see almost every day – they don’t want or need Facebook. Likewise, the people who don’t like Facebook are typically people who see their social groups regularly.

For those of us who are geeks, well our groups tend to be a little more dispersed. I can name friends and family in a dozen cities around the World I wouldn’t keep up with as much if FB wasn’t there. Those people who don’t have such far-flung friends, teenagers included, simply have no use for it: they can, you know, actually talk to them.

For some reason, until seeing that graph, that thought had never occurred to me.

In my last post I said something some may have raised an eyebrow at:

“… I think this year is going to be perhaps the biggest shake-down in the sector we’ve seen since the crash in 2001, but I remain confident that recessions are when the foundations of the greatest businesses are made. Crisis is in the eye of the beholder, as is opportunity. The next few years are going to be incredible for those adequately prepared.”

It seems counter-intuitive to look at the economy right now and see opportunity. Specifically, the software sector seems to have rising costs (in terms of multiple platform delivery), and a general stagnant/tired air to it in 2009. We’ve all seen it before. Investment is harder to get hold of. Loans and overdrafts don’t exist. It seems the situation is made worse by a skills shortage.

This is all a distraction. The simple truth is, what we thought was shiny and new and amazing last year – from easy credit through to slick user experiences – actively worked against innovation.

Yes, you can do more of what you think is important with cheap and easy money to hand. But you really innovate when there is little money about and you have to do more of what your customers think is important.

It’s true that the first time you see it, a web app that responds like a desktop app is interesting. It doesn’t make you produce good ideas and then execute great business strategies though. It just makes you follow what everybody else is doing, it stops you carving out your own niche.

I’m going to be a hypocrite here and offer advice I rarely take myself on my own projects (but hope to buck the trend this year): release early, release often, refine, find out what customers want and need.

The last part – focusing on customers – is always important, but this year is more critical than ever. Just because it’s a recession, it doesn’t mean there is no money around, it just means the spending priorities have changed. There is a near infinite demand for tools that save time and/or money, you just have to create the right value proposition. Historically this has meant people have produced todo list manager. I think there is opportunity for so much more.

Maybe it’s hubris, but I refuse to expect the peak of this decade in the software industry is “Web 2.0” (whatever that is), or an obsession over hosting applications and data with a bookshop (albeit a good solution). Something good is in the air. Watch this space.

Well, I laughed:

The horrible truth is, we’ve become so obsessed with our own jargon, we’re no longer interested in how people really want to behave online.

Or is just that traditional shopping was always broken? :-)

via confused of calcutta

I read some pretty weird stuff out there. You might think it odd given I’m all into innovation that I rarely read the likes of Techmeme or Techcrunch – the truth is, there’s little innovation in either.

I want to look at the guys who spend days lying on their backs staring at clouds and thinking to themselves “that cloud looks just like a better way to moderate pseudonymous online discussions”. I prefer artist coders to mathematician coders: they have more interesting things to say. I’ve said this so many times it’s starting to sound like a cliché: I’ve learned more about software from architecture, art and philosophy than I ever have from my University notes on formal methods.

Occasionally, as I scour the websites of the research labs of the World, I encounter something a little bit “special” in the “let’s look at something unique and apply it to the computer industry” niche. This is no exception.

HP Labs have recently published (only appeared in my RSS today, but it’s dated the 12th July) a paper on the election protocol the city of Venice used to elect its ‘Doge’, or Duke/Chief Magistrate, if you prefer. It appears to have been published in the IEEE proceedings for their 20th Computer Security Foundations Symposium which happens to have taken place in Venice, 6th-8th July this year. It could all just be a bit of an in-joke.

However, there are some really interesting ideas in here.

The election of the Doge was – in modern terms – quite absurd. It consisted of 10 rounds of voting, and at the beginning the entire electorate (the Grand Council of oligarchs who were all men over 30) was eligible. Each round was alternately a random lot draw, and then an election. There is an outline of the process given in the paper, and you can see how long it must have taken to elect anybody.

Where the authors (Miranda Mowbray and Dieter Gollman) take it is to show that there are some qualities it would be sensible to consider when designing computer-based election procedures. Specifically they argue that consensus in asynchronous systems, recovery after network partitioning or indeed any scenario where a ‘lead’ has to be taken by some node might be all processes that benefit from such a system. Whilst absurd to us now, it has the virtues of stability and resilience to ‘gaming’ or corruption.

There are some real gems in here as they draw parallels between modern day computer security and this ancient electoral system. Part of the protocol required for a random ballot to ensure that the drawing was fair, was that the person doing the draw would be selected as “the first boy seen after prayer’s at St. Marks” by a particular member of the Council. Mowbray and Gollman describe releasing a young boy into the square at just the right time as a “protocol attack”. They go onto describe the protocol’s arduous and drawn out procedure as “security theatre” – something that anybody who has looked at recent anti-terror legislation is all too familiar with.

They go onto propose a slightly simpler protocol that could be used by computer systems and I’m left with a mind whirring with possible applications. This is the kind of paper that makes me wish I’d got the main Vagueware application online as I can suddenly find myself thinking of applications in search, auctions, community building and more.

This is what I mean when I talk about innovation in software.

Real innovation in this space is not about taking something you’ve seen on the Web and doing it slightly differently like thousands of others. It’s about taking a piece of politics, art, theatre, humanity, and finding something in it – a tiny piece of inspiration – that gives you an idea of how to make software better.

In the current Web-wacky-world, money is a curious talking point. Everybody, at some point, needs to think about ‘monestisation’. It’s not even a real word, but the general plan for most companies seems to go something like:

1. Get funding for an idea
2. Build it
3. ???
4. Profit!

The fact that this is a business plan stolen from Slashdot shows you just how weak it is. Slashdot remains (to its credit?), a bastion of unprofessionalism.

Step 3 – making money – is something I believe should actually be in there at step 1. You should have a plan right before you start. Most developers are so excited by the idea they want to build that they take the easy route out: “we’ll put some ads on there”.

Big mistake.

Firstly, advertising is what I rather emotively call “brain rape”. It has no other intention than to disrupt users so their emotions can be manipulated into working with your advertiser. The idea Google had for Gmail is to my mind insane: I want to read my e-mail when I check my e-mail, not be distracted into doing something else.

Secondly, advertising is about to get a great deal more innovative, and the truth is: advertisers don’t need you any more.

Steve Bowbrick has written a great article this morning inspired by a trip to a bunch of creative types experimenting with online media campaigns.

The point is this: it is no longer enough to stick a 30 second ad spot in between your favourite shows, or to place a banner advert on a site they don’t control. The next generation of advertising is to build online media presence that people hunt down. A series of videos on YouTube, a wiki, a group on Facebook discussing the product.

Advertisers have talked for generations about establishing a relationship with the consumer. This has been to date complete poppy-cock. It is only in recent years with the advance of loyalty cards that they’ve really been able to get under our skins and look at what brand of sanitary towel or condom we prefer (in order to establish a correlation, if any, with our choice of toothpaste and breakfast cereal), but the plans for the future are ones for direct audience participation. It will not be enough for them to tell us what we should think of their product: we will, as a form of passing the time, be helping tell them what their product means to us.

Never before has this been possible, because never before have we had the means to be able to allow media to be consumed, shared and ‘user-generated’ the way we have now. The innovators were the artists, and now it’s getting mainstream it’s time for the ad men to get involved.

I shall leave it for another day to point out just how debased we become as a civilisation when we seek out sales people as entertainment, but for now I just want to point out one thing: unless you’re building something advertisers can use as a platform in itself like video or social media, they’re planning to cut you and your app out of the loop within 3-5 years. They don’t want to give you money unless they have to, and right now they’re starting to think there may be a way out.

Out of all the areas that I research for this blog and the site (at the time of writing, down for a week awaiting a new build of some code), the one that intrigues me most is the economics of software. I have watched – painfully at times – as we have turned from an industry dominated by license fees and support contracts into one trying to find a way of announcing that washing machines are half price this weekend next to our elegant user interfaces.

I for one welcome the anticipated shift in advertising away from banner ads and disruptive behaviour. I think it will completely destroy entertainment, but that’s another problem to be solved when people get there. What intrigues me right now, is how are we going to get software development funded.

• Open source doesn’t have a real business model outside of the FUD enterprises hear, that goes away when you dual-license your code
• Users don’t want to pay subscription fees
• We are no longer in an age where license fees have a viable future, particularly with web software
• Advertisers are getting ready to avoid as many people as possible

All of this points to something that could burst. Not a bubble, not something where there is an inflation that is out of synch with reality. But an adjustment. A shift of priorities. Something which we need to start thinking about now, because within a few years we won’t have any way to make money from this industry with 95% of the apps out there and that means we’re going to need to rethink everything.