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"E-commerce is just a fad. Lots of people are just throwing money at it, getting their fingers burned. When things settle down, it'll be back to basic business principles."Imagine a Rugby schoolboy saying: "I'm not going to pick up the ball. I'm just going to kick it, like my father and grandfather before me. I'm sure this handling is just a fad, and then we'll settle back down to good old kicking."
If you want to stay in the game, you have to understand that the rules have changed, are changing, and will continue to change. If you have enough power, proximity and interest, you may try to change the rules of the game, or at least influence them. (Changing the rules of the game is itself another game.)
The removal of exchange controls permanently changed the basis of investment and international trade, and led to a situation where the currency and options markets are swamped by speculation. (For every businessman who wants to swap yen for euros to settle a debt, there are dozens if not hundreds of sharp kids playing the money markets.)
That's why e-commerce, e-business, and all the other e-stuff, are important - because the basis of competition has permanently changed. Sure, there are more losers than winners - but that's competition.
The thinking behind call centres was that customers would respond favourably to a friendly voice on the end of the phone. Market research indicated a preference for Scottish accents, as conveying an impression of personal, friendly and efficient service.This strategy has backfired - because the service isn't really personal, friendly or efficient - in other words, the strategy was an inauthentic one, based on an inauthentic relationship with the customer, and an inauthentic selection of staff by an attribute falsely connected to genuine friendliness or efficiency. Nowadays, when I hear a Scottish voice on the other end of the phone, my heart sinks - another bloody call centre.
In this metaphorical use, to eclipse is to surpass. (According to the OED, this usage goes back to the 18th century, although some of the early citations seem laden with irony.)
But of course, literally speaking, the moon eclipses the sun. This means that a small dull lifeless body comes in front of a much larger luminous body, for a very short time.
The proper emotional context for this phenomenon is envy. (For a detailed analysis of envy, see Jon Elster's latest book.)
In a large department store, I expect to find toothbrushes next to tubes of toothpaste in one department, and paintbrushes next to tubes of oilpaint in another department. It would be most odd to find all the brushes together in one department, and all the tubes together in another department.
Imagine a department store grouped by material. A metal department, containing cutlery (silverware), screwdrivers and hammers (without handles), tin whistles, buckets and bicycles. A wood department, containing furniture (without upholstery), woodwind instruments, some toys, and a large assortment of handles. Blankets and jumpers in the wool department; trousers and tablecloths in the linen department.
This would take us back to the middle ages, when trade was dominated by the craft guilds, each specializing in a different material. Blacksmiths played an important role in the early bicycle industry - was this because of their metalworking skills, or because the bicycle was a substitute for the horse, or both?
So should there be software shops, or software departments in large department stores? Surely software is merely another material. And as this material becomes more pervasive, it also becomes assimilated into normal trade.
If I want office software, I should go to the officeware department, where I can also buy office furniture, filing cabinets and stationery. If I want games software, I should find it in the games department. Educational software goes with educational books and toys. And so on.
A similar dispersion (or perhaps I should call it rearrangement) is taking place with old-fashioned books. I do regret the decline of the traditional bookshop, but this decline is caused not only by the rise of the large chains and the internet, but also by the increasing ease with which specialist retailers in other sectors can sell books. Thus a cookery shop may sell cookbooks alongside saucepans; a garden centre may sell gardening books; and a music shop may sell biographies of Mozart and Freddie Mercury. And if you need advice about which book to buy, the people in the specialist shops may well be more helpful than the people in the bookshops.
This thought was triggered by a student, who emailed me for help in finding a software component to perform some statistics. I was unable to provide the specific help he requested. My advice was that he should seek this help from people who know about statistics, and should not expect much help from people who only know about software.
This also has implications for university education and graduate employment. Under what circumstances would I want to employ someone who only knew about software?
Look, I'm receiving help from someone I've never met, someone whose book is open on my desk. Someone on my network (and I still don't know who) passed the message on, and it reached him, and he responded. The power of networking.
I also noticed that the book references in his reply were coded to direct me to the amazon.com website, with some further coding to ensure that, if I bought the books from Amazon, someone would receive a commission. A small recompense for helping me, without costing me anything. If I do decide to buy these books, I should make sure I use his links.
Then it occurred to me that I have several book recommendations on my website. I have therefore decided to set up similar links to Amazon, providing a simple service to the people who access my website. (If I earn anything from this, it will almost certainly be spent on more books.)
The success and popularity of Amazon. The power of networking.
The minister argued that a gap of a certain size was widely accepted by scientists as adequate for the production of "pure" seeds, which means no more than a fraction of a percent impurity. Therefore a gap of this size should also have been adequate for prevention of the spread of GM pollen.
It is interesting how, once a control or performance measure becomes established for one purpose, it gets applied for an entirely different purpose.
He asked who made the decision to set the unit of replacement at the level of the rear light cluster. Was it a production engineering decision? Surely the marketing role would not have misrepresented customer requirements so badly?
Sadly for us consumers, the key question for many marketing departments is not
(Perhaps the most skilled marketing departments are those that manage to put an A-style presentational spin on a B-style decision. In other words, they can persuade the customers - and even the industry analysts - that they put the customers' interests above their own. And then there's Microsoft.)
Another industrial analogy is the mobile phone. Most of us have good-looking phones, with lots of features, but with an almost unusable menu structure, with strange interactions between the features of the phone and the features of the connection service (I have not succeeded in sending a fax from my phone yet) and no upgrade path (I cannot use some of the accessories that are available for my type of phone, because my phone has an earlier version of the software). As long as we consumers tolerate this, the manufacturers have no incentive to improve these aspects of the product design.
The relevance of this for software components should be obvious. Any software vendor (or consortium) that designs a component architecture that is not driven by their own business advantage is naive and therefore strategically vulnerable. One of the most important jobs for industry analysts is to highlight the potential advantages and disadvantages (for the purchaser) of various architectures.
When Jeremy Clarkson reviews expensive German cars on BBC2, does he mention the rear light assembly? Or does he concentrate on the sexy corners and go-faster stripes? If the Jeremy Clarksons of this world were genuinely concerned about insurance and maintenance costs, wouldn't the car manufacturers would start to take them more seriously too? What are the hard questions I should ask my car dealer, next time I buy a car? What are the hard questions I should ask my software component dealer?
The envelope is addressed to: "Richard Veryard, Unknown". I take this to mean that the name of my company is unknown - to them.
As a technical expert, I can immediately jump to conclusions about the database structure and data processing system that have produced this result. And I might reasonably assume that the vendor's own tools were used to design and implement this system.
As a business adviser, I would be more concerned about the potential effect on customer relationships, and the apparent failure to regard this as worthy of anyone's attention.
Of course, such technical oversights are all-too-common. Usually I just smile and toss the envelope into the recycling bin. But when it comes from people who claim expertise in the area - who ought to know better - I am rather more critical.
One can sympathize with their motives, of course. The old names might have seemed restrictive, or potentially offensive. But at the same time, the loss of meaning may be regretted.
Long in shape, short in duration. This could also be the definition of an ideal consultancy assignment. Large enough to get your teeth into, but intense enough to provide quick satisfaction.
Once upon a time, computer programmers could easily recognize spaghetti code by the presence of one word: GOTO. It was considered harmful; programming languages were developed in which GOTO was unnecessary or impossible; generations of programmers were trained to resist anything that resembled a GOTO. But the pattern or meme mutates, and reappears in a new form, designed to bypass our programmed resistances. Large complex computer systems are now being developed; each software component may be impeccably designed and coded, but these software components are wired together (using some form of scripting language) into something that we can only regard as a new manifestation of spaghetti.
The use of good patterns, and the avoidance of negative patterns or anti-patterns, can easily become trite or obsessional. An interesting pattern mutates, evolves, morphs. We must be alert to every new manifestation.
The global economy now seems to be managing a recession quite nicely thank you very much, with no help from software at all. How humiliating - even when we think we've really screwed up now, the rest of the world has much more serious problems than software to worry about.
As genetically modified plants become more widespread, it may not be long before disaffected or disengaged biotechnicians start producing plant viruses, specifically designed to attack the modified genetic material. Such viruses may cause much wider devastation than previous plant diseases, because of the wider circulation of the genetically modified organism.
Or then again, perhaps Nature will manage the job much better.
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