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Does Web 2.0 invalidate Rosenberg’s Law?

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A book should stand on its own, reviews should stand on their own, and in general, it little profiteth a writer to reply directly to criticism. But at the end of his review of Dreaming in Code in the Journal (which is now available for free at this link), Paul Boutin asked me a direct question. So it doesn’t seem out of line to answer.

The author reluctantly condenses what he’s learned into Rosenberg’s Law: “Software is easy to make, except when you want it to do something new.” Cute, but MySpace and YouTube went from half-baked ideas to billion-dollar businesses while Mr. Rosenberg was writing his book. Is he saying they were hard, or that they do nothing new?

There’s no question that creating software using the Web as a platform provides multiple advantages, and has helped lots of companies, including those Boutin names, roll out products fast and improve them quickly. Web apps can be upgraded and patched without troubling the user and they come with a tight built-in user-feedback loop, so they lend themselves perfectly to an incremental improvement process, which is the smartest way to avoid the software-disaster swamp. They also solve cross-platform issues and provide sharing and collaborative features as an organic part of their environment.

This change in the software landscape is a running theme in Dreaming in Code, and one that the Chandler developers were acutely conscious of. But in today’s Cambrian explosion of Web-based applications, I can’t really think of each service as a discrete piece of software. The teeming startups of Web 2.0 are really each adding a feature or two — photo-sharing! backup! social bookmarking! word-processing! etc. — to the vast application that is the Web itself. (That’s why they make such fine acquisition-bait for the larger Web-platform companies who are competing with arsenals of such features.)

I do not intend any denigration of the huge accomplishments of the creators of both MySpace and YouTube, and I have no idea how hard or easy their development efforts were. But I think of these companies’ achievement as more in the realm of community-building than software invention. Of course they had to develop some software along the way. But their software platforms — for enabling the hang-out-together experience (at MySpace) or the sharing of short videos (on YouTube) — were not the centerpiece of their achievement. Each company refined and elaborated functions already being performed by other services. Each of them triumphed not by inventing novel extensions to the world of stuff you could do on the Web but by making things people were already doing online much easier, particularly for non-geeks.

As for their creation of “billion-dollar businesses”: remember that these are businesses that haven’t seen anything like billion-dollar revenues; they were valued by acquirers at half a billion dollars (in MySpace’s purchase by Fox) and $1.5 billion (in YouTube’s acquisition by Google)– and much of these prices was paid in stock, not cash.

Still, Boutin’s point is that both companies produced significant value quickly, and I’m not going to argue with that. But in each case what the acquisitors valued was less the code than the customers. You can be idealistic and call that “community,” or be cynical and call it “eyeballs”; either way, it’s what Google and Fox were buying.

In any case, my tongue-in-cheek Rosenberg’s Law made no claim to address the relative ease or difficulty of making money in the software business. I was trying to say something about the correlation between the ambition to innovate and the likelihood of ending up with your wheels in a ditch. MySpace wasn’t the first online hangout, and YouTube wasn’t the first video-sharing service. Instead, each of these companies went to school on their predecessors over the last decade of social media on the Web. And good for them! I imagine that what they did was “hard” in its own way — just not in the specific way that Dreaming in Code explores.

Some early returns

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Dreaming in Code isn’t in stores till Tuesday, but there’s already been quite a bit of coverage.

Today saw Paul Boutin’s review in the Wall Street Journal (subscriber-only content, I’m afraid). I’m very happy the Journal chose to assign my book to a writer with Boutin’s experience and expertise in the software world. Also pleased with the review’s length and prominence. And I loved the illustration — a Sisyphus shouldering a boulder of code.

One thing Boutin noted made me smile as I read it: “His goal seems to be to teach non-programming managers not how to fix late projects, but how to accept them.” I can just see myself hanging out the guru shingle and peddling the Zen of project management!

In truth, my goal wasn’t to teach anyone anything. I neither promise nor deliver bullet-points of how-to advice. For me, the best non-fiction provides readers with an initiation into the complexity and fascination of a world that they barely even knew existed. I’m happiest when I hear from a reader who feels that I accomplished at least some of that.

But certainly I came to the conclusion, based on the evidence, that late software projects are — maybe not forever, but probably in our lifetimes — a fact of life. They are like quarreling among children or rebelliousness in adolescents. These are things we can mitigate, certainly, and learn to cope with better, or even sometimes turn to our advantage. But we are foolish if we think we can “fix” them or eliminate them. Sanity dictates some sort of accommodation with this kind of reality.

Boutin also concluded the review with a question to me about the principle I jokingly dub “Rosenberg’s Law” in the book. I actually have a lot to say about in response. But I must leave that for a post of its own!

Scott Berkun, who unlike me really does have a lot to teach people about how to avoid the pitfalls of bad project management, has also written up a measured and well-reasoned response to the book. And Rick Kleffel has some entertaining thoughts on the topic even before reading the book:

One of the most interesting aspects of my interview with Vernor Vinge was the point where we talked about what might suggest that we were or were not going to experience the Singularity in a manner described by most science fiction writers. Vinge suggested that the failure or success of large-scale software development projects would be a fine way to measure our progress towards the Infocalypse. Judging by the events described in ‘Dreaming in Code’, well, it appears that the Singularity Is Not Quite So Near as one might hope, if one were to hope It Is Near.

Good reads

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I’ve got a little link backlog. Let’s do something about it!

  • Earlier this week Jay Rosen wrote a remarkable essay about the recent kerfluffle in the right-wing blogosphere over charges that AP reporters in Iraq had made up a source. The excitable warbloggers, understandably dejected that they’ve lost the battle both on the ground and in the American public, grew excited at the thought of MSM blood. But it turned out the entire charge was bogus — the source was real.

    Rosen parses the motives and suggests that the warblog crowd would have done their cause a favor by being more critical of the Bush administration’s reality-evasion from the start:

    For Bush supporters who soldier on, the choices resemble what the go-getters from Enron faced: confront the bad accounting that’s gone on for years or adopt even more desperate measures to conceal losses and keep your hand alive. But if the AP had fabricated a source and relied on that source 60 times, maybe the tables could be turned again and the reckoning put off….

    If you really wanted Bush to succeed in Iraq, and you noticed that he could never be wrong or accept that bad news bearers could be right, this was a warning sign that the warbloggers themselves, as friends of the president’s project, should have taken the lead in discussing. Why didn’t they?

    The children of Agnew have been fully on his side, soldiers in his struggle, happy warriors with Bush because they believe in their red state bones the press is biased against them. Like him they also disbelieve the bad news on principle, and then find someone more loyal to look into it.

  • Michelle Goldberg’s recent Salon interview with Chris Hedges on fundamentalism in America and his new book, American Fascists, is also a great read: One passionate reporter who’s immersed in a fascinating subject interviewing another, equally obsessed.
  • Finally — this one’s a month old, but I’m just catching up — Clive Thompson’s New York Times magazine piece on open source spying. Can wikis and blogs really help the intelligence establishment do a better job assessing terrorist threats? It seems outlandish, but it grows on you the more you think about it (and read Thompson’s explanations).

    This passage rung my Dreaming in Code bell:

    The blog seemed like an awfully modest thing to me. But Meyerrose insists that the future of spying will be revolutionized as much by these small-bore projects as by billion-dollar high-tech systems. Indeed, he says that overly ambitious projects often result in expensive disasters, the way the F.B.I.’s $170 million attempt to overhaul its case-handling software died in 2005 after the software became so complex that the F.B.I. despaired of ever fixing the bugs and shelved it. In contrast, the blog software took only a day or two to get running. “We need to think big, start small and scale fast,” Meyerrose said.

    One of the big problems the agencies have, even with their closed networks, is persuading intelligence officers to share information. On the one hand, their desire to protect sources is understandable; on the other, the information doesn’t do the U.S. any good unless it gets circulated to people who can assess its significance.

    Is this the sort of information that is safe to share widely in an online network? Many in the intelligence agencies suspect not. Indeed, they often refuse to input sensitive intel into their own private, secure databases; they do not trust even their own colleagues, inside their own agencies, to keep their secrets safe. When the F.B.I. unveiled an automated case-support system in 1995, agents were supposed to begin entering all information from their continuing cases into it, so that other F.B.I. agents could benefit from the collected pool of tips. But many agents didn’t. They worried that a hard-won source might be accidentally exposed by an F.B.I. agent halfway across the country. Worse, what would happen if a hacker or criminal found access to the system?

[tags]journalism, fundamentalism, intelligence, open source spying[/tags]

Reality-checking Bush, and editing him

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On the Times op-ed page, Anthony Cordesman offers a devastating reality check on the Bush speech — made all the more withering for its even-handed calm.

Too bad that, in the print version, the type is so tiny; and in the online version, the critique is literally hidden from view until you click. This material should be highlighted, not buried.

The president’s speech offered the administration’s first grudging admission, after four years, that things aren’t as they should be in Iraq. But the phrasing was classic CEO buck-avoidance:

“Where mistakes have been made, the responsibility rests with me.”

Consider the different emotional impact of applying a simple Strunk and White transformation to the statement:

“We made mistakes, and I’m responsible for them.”
[tags]president bush, iraq, new york times, language, usage[/tags]

Bush exercises the Cambodia option in Iraq

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As of yesterday the Bush administration has definitively moved from the phase of “let’s pretend to explore all our options honestly, given how badly things have gone” to the phase of “let’s do everything we can to change the game with reckless expansion of the war that we now realize we’ve pretty much lost, so we don’t have to admit that we’ve lost it.”

This phase is deeply and painfully familiar to those of us who remember the arc of Vietnam. Richard Nixon and his henchman Henry Kissinger arrived at it in 1970, when they decided to invade Cambodia. It was a slap in the face to Americans who’d elected Nixon because he promised he had a secret plan to end the war; instead of peace, they got escalation. Protests erupted across the United States; during them, unarmed American students were fired upon and died at Kent State.

Today’s talk of a “surge” now looks like only a small part of a larger picture that involves expanding American operations in the Middle East with moves against Syria and Iran. As William Arkin puts it in the Washington Post, “Clearly the Vice President’s office and the hardliners scored a major victory.” Or, as Josh Marshall puts it, “The Veep’s office and the nutjobs are still running the show.”

With Kissinger whispering in the president’s ear today, I guess we shouldn’t be surprised at this nightmarish historical loop. The theory, then and now, was that the problems inside the country (South Vietnam or Iraq) stemmed from the influx of supplies and troublemakers from neighboring countries; cut those supply lines and the insurgency will dry up. It was a disastrous failure in Southeast Asia, and there isn’t the slightest indication that it will be any different in Iraq.

Things look like they’ll get a lot worse before they get any better. And this administration seems to be positively eager to wash its hands in more blood.

Lulu forecasts, Amanda approves

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Lulu, the innovator in online self-publishing of printed materials, has an amusing little tool up at their site: you plug in a title and it tells you that title’s likelihood of becoming a bestseller. Is it an algorithm? Is it magic? Or is it just a silly online trick? I don’t know, but here’s what I learned about my prospects of bestseller-dom — far better than I’d expect for a book about software development and programming!

While we’re goofing around, here is a very brief clip recorded by celeb videoblogger Amanda Congdon. After she left the Rocketboom gig but before she graduated to the major leagues, she stopped in to hang out with Ed Cone, who had my book on his desk because he was preparing to interview me. Ms. Congdon picked up the book, and here’s what she had to say. (The full-length original clip that contains this excerpt is here. YouTube embedding seems funky in some browsers so: here’s the direct link to the clip on the YouTube site.)

[tags]dreaming in code, amanda congdon, lulu, ed cone[/tags]

The backwardness of “New Way Forward”

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Tonight President Bush will tell us about his plan for a “New Way Forward” in Iraq.

This White House is not well-versed in history, so I don’t suppose the people who fashioned the slogan thought much about its similarity to the verbiage the totalitarian leaders of the 20th century hung over their policies. Bush plans for But the choice is in keeping with Bush administration iconographic bombast of the past: check out this photo from November, 2005, when Bush was touting one of the “New Way Forward”‘s many predecessor blueprints for success in Iraq.

Whether you call it a “New Way Forward” or a “Great Leap Forward,” the idea that sending 20,000 more troops to Iraq is going to transform the reality of U.S. defeat reflects the self-delusion of a dictatorial mind. Bush’s approach to Iraq is as out of touch with reality as the command-economy follies of Joseph Stalin or Mao Zedong: the resemblance lies in the determination to force a theory down reality’s throat no matter what the cost in human suffering or damage to national interest.

The particular peculiarity of Bush’s fiasco is that he is wrecking the American military, and prolonging a doomed fight, on behalf of the abstract notion of Iraq’s in potentio democracy — while flagrantly and petulantly ignoring the thunderous outcome of America’s own democratic process last November, which delivered a clear verdict on Bush’s war. (And that verdict was not “Escalate now!”)

No matter. Our Maximum Leader knows better than his generals and better than the people. Tonight he will address us from the royal balcony. A few toadies will applaud, but the rest of us will be counting the days till we can throw him out of office.
[tags]president bush, iraq, new way forward, totalitarianism[/tags]

iPhone: the interface’s the thing

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The Wall Street Journal asks whether people will buy Apple’s slick new iPhone for $5-600. Of course they will — if it’s as good and as easy to use as it looked in Steve Jobs’s presentation. (Here’s some coverage: David Pogue’s test-drive; John Markoff’s story; Lev Grossman in Time; Farhad Manjoo in Salon.)

The original iPod came in at a similar price point and pundits asked similar questions. The value of Apple’s innovation pretty much obliterated the price sensitivity of the market, and by the time the early-adopters all had their iPods and Apple started going after a wider market, it was able to bring the price down some (and add more value by continuing to improve the product).

No, the question about the iPhone isn’t, “Will people pay for it?” It’s simply, “Can it really be as easy as Jobs made it look?”

Mobile-device interfaces are such a total disaster today that many of us simply never learn to use more than a fraction of their features — and even when we learn them, we tend to forget them immediately. Phones have become so disposable anyway, why waste your time learning all their dumb menus? Blackberries and Treos are considerably better, but they’re still full of compromises, and they typically do a lot less than the iPhone — which in effect is a tiny Macintosh optimized for phone and music functions.

If the iPhone interface is as intuitive as Jobs promised, then people will line up to get it regardless of its hefty price. It will have succeeded, to paraphrase Alan Kay’s famous utterance about the original Mac, in being the first cellphone interface good enough to be worth criticizing.
[tags]apple, steve jobs, iphone[/tags]

An interview and a profile

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A few weeks ago I had the pleasure of being interviewed by Ed Cone about Dreaming in Code. I first met Cone years ago when he was organizing the panel I spoke on at the first BloggerCon. I’ve always enjoyed his work; like me, he’s someone who is equally interested in politics and technology, and blogs about both of them.

The Cone interview is now up at CIO Insight. It was fun to talk about the issues in the book for a relatively expert readership, where I could skip over some of the basics and jump right to the harder questions. Cone did a great job of drawing me out and then trimming the verbal excess from my responses.

CIO Insight: Are we just being impatient with a branch of knowledge that is still fairly new? Or is there something inherent to software development that makes it so weird and vexing?

Rosenberg: You get one perspective that says, hey, we now have a computer on every desk that does things that were unimaginable 20 years ago, and they’re all connected in this network that gives us instant answers and instant connections. These are miraculous things. And then you find other people who say, you know what? We’re still writing code basically by picking out characters one at a time, we still have programs that are laid low when a single bug creeps in, we still have projects that take ten times longer than they should, we need to rethink everything from the ground up.

I don’t have an answer between them. My personal temperament is more towards the optimistic. In the end, what you’ve got is this industry that’s been conditioned by Moore’s Law, and by its own fantastic financial success, to assume that the curve is always an upward curve, that everything gets better at an exponential pace. That’s the experience of the technology industry. You have that smacking up against the reality of human experience, of creativity, of people working in teams. We have these basic human factors, psychology, the limits of the conceptual capacity of the human brain—things that do not move at an exponential pace. They simply don’t. They tend to move linearly, if they are improving at all. People in the technology industry are loath to accept that.

This theme is also at the heart of another piece that occupied me for a considerable part of the fall — a profile of Charles Simonyi that is on the cover of the new issue of Technology Review. I covered Simonyi and his Intentional Software project just a little bit in Dreaming in Code, and I’m grateful to Jason Pontin at TR for giving me the chance to look at him, and it, more fully.

The first part of the profile, “Anything You Can Do, I Can Do Meta,” is up at the TR Web site now; the second part is slated to go up tomorrow. Since the piece was written as one integral whole, you might want to wait till you can read it all at once — I’ll post the link. It was fun to be writing for print again, and Technology Review is looking very spiffy these days, so this is one that you just might be better off reading on paper.
[tags]charles simonyi, ed cone, technology review[/tags]

Can you send a file to the Internet?

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I’ve always thought of the Internet not as a place but as a means of connecting other entities — sites, servers, people, etc. (Hey, in that sense maybe it is “a series of tubes”!) From its beginning in the antediluvian mists as what was known as a “network of networks,” connecting pre-existing but now-forgotten networks with a common set of protocols, the Internet was not a destination but a means of transport between other destinations.

So for me, the phrase “on the Internet” isn’t ideal, but it makes some sense as shorthand meaning “on one of those other things that is on the Internet.” But recently I’ve noticed a couple of usages that caused me to stop short. Both were in the New York Times, and from writers who are as or more steeped in Net lore than I am.

In an otherwise highly useful recent roundup of backup services, David Pogue refers to “online backups, where files are shuttled off to the Internet for safekeeping.”

Files “shuttled off to the Internet”? I can picture files that are shuttled across the Internet, to some server or disk array or whatever. But what happens to a file that’s sent to the Internet? I get this picture from the old Star Trek episode in which Captain Kirk took a trip through the transporter and didn’t come out the other side; his molecules got scrambled in interstellar space. If I send my file “to the Internet,” I’d really worry about those bits just sort of dissolving into the void.

Similarly, John Markoff’s fascinating piece on botnets from Sunday’s Times, Attack of the Zombie Computers is a Growing Threat, begins with this sentence: “In their persistent quest to breach the Internet’s defenses, the bad guys are honing their weapons and increasing their firepower.”

Does the Internet have any “defenses” at all? Individual Web sites and corporate networks and ISPs do, of course, and they are all scrambling to deal with the torrent of spam being produced by these bot-infected zombie computers.

In a sense, I suppose the Internet has structural defenses, in the form of the relative security of the protocols and conventions users rely on (like encryption), and social defenses, in the form of the people who work hard to stymie the stuff that bad actors do. But these are not really “the Internet’s defenses”; they’re things that people do to defend their Internet-connected computers.

This probably sounds like nitpicking, but I think there’s something at stake in how English usage shapes how we think about the Net.

The great thing about the Internet is that — unlike its “walled-garden” predecessors — it is not a single place with one set of “defenses.” In the memorable words of the “World of Ends” manifesto by Doc Searls and David Weinberger, “No one owns it; everyone can use it; anyone can improve it.” (And, as the botnets show, anyone can try to wreck it, too.) When it comes to descriptions of the Internet, I am instinctively biased towards language that embodies these principles, and my brain registers a little squawk of concern when it encounters phrases that don’t.
[tags]world of ends, language, usage, internet, john markoff, david pogue[/tags]