Industry Commentary – Page 347 – IS Survivor Publishing

Managing real-space like cyberspace (first appeared in InfoWorld)

The world of ideas is a very fractal place.

Fractals, you’ll recall, are geometric constructs in which the same forms recur at different levels of magnification. At close range boulders look like mountains, rocks look like boulders, and grains of sand look like rocks. You have a hard time recognizing which scale you’re looking at.

Ideas are like that too. The same notions and forms recur in wildly different situations, scales, and contexts.

Years ago I read an article contrasting polling and interrupt-driven protocols. I remember little about it other than that the two, although different from an engineering perspective, led to the same user experience when implemented.

Here’s an idea you can take to the bank: Two radically different ways of doing things can sometimes lead to indistinguishable results. It’s enough to make you stop worrying whether Ethernet or Token Ring is better.

What’s that? You’ve already stopped worrying? That’s great, because you can pay closer attention to another fractal recurrence of the polling/interrupt question: the hype over “push” technology.

Pull/push is just polling/interrupt all over again. (I could be wrong, but I doubt it, as Mike Royko used to say.) Push is an interrupt-driven protocol – it’s intrusive. Pull, in the form of offline browsers, is polling – your system initiates the request. Either way you get new information, sorted into channels (another the-name-is-new-and-not-much-else concept), without your having to manually intervene. The only difference I can see is that offline browsers adhere to existing Internet standards instead of introducing proprietary technology.

Push technology should have some network engineering advantages, but even here the situation is pretty blurry. You can implement pull technology so it has no more impact on bandwidth than push, by designing your Intranet so employees stay inside your firewall. The logic behind this is to treat cyberspace the same way we deal with real space.

When William Gibson introduced the term “cyberspace” in his groundbreaking novel Neuromancer, he gave us a valuable way to look at what we do (sadly, the cyberspace metaphor has since been beaten into a cliche). When employees interact with their computers, they are working in the corner of cyberspace we happen to manage.

Let’s compare how we approach company real space and cyberspace. In real space, we pay attention to color schemes, cubicle height, ergonomics, file storage, and some of the aesthetics. We expect employees to personalize their space, recognizing that they spend a lot of their lives inside. Dilbert, and sometimes even this column, get put on the cubicle walls.

In cyberspace we begrudge employees the right to select their own wallpaper, screen resolution, screen savers, and reading matter, calling it “futzing.” It’s supposed to be a colossal corporate expense, and we gripe around the coffee pot about users wasting corporate bandwidth surfing the Web.

Here’s a new mission statement for you: Your job is to turn your company’s little corner of cyberspace into a rich, fulfilling, pleasant, productive place to work. Set up your Intranet so employees don’t want to go to a PointCast server. Give them the news, weather, stock prices, and commuting times. Heck, try designing mission-critical systems so they’re fun to use.

Before you fly off the handle, put yourself on the receiving end of the deal. Who do you want running your company cafeteria, a chef or a dietitian? You have to eat there; employees have to work in your part of cyberspace.

Yes, I know we’re talking about a “waste” of company resources. So is your company newsletter. And employees could survive by eating duckweed salad and tofu burgers (yuck!) in the cafeteria, too. The same idea applies in more than one context: If making your cafeteria a pleasant environment isn’t a waste, then making your corner of cyberspace pleasant isn’t a waste, either.

We seem to have forgotten one of the basics: Making the time employees spend at work pleasant and enjoyable can reap large benefits, whether or not accounting can tally them up in the general ledger.

Should employees really be spending their time reading Web pages that don’t directly relate to their jobs? I don’t know, but I do know that lots of executives spend company time reading The Wall Street Journal, and I’d bet that time has more impact on their career advancement and personal investment portfolios than it does advancing the company strategy.

Zoning the Internet (first appeared in InfoWorld)

When I was a kid growing up in the Chicago suburbs I loved westerns. Maverick was my favorite, of course, and James Garner — along with Mad Magazine, Rocky and Bullwinkle, and the Cubs — did a lot to shape (warp?) my personality during my formative years.

When I grew out of Mad Magazine I graduated to the Chicago Daily News and Mike Royko. I remember one column in particular, in which Royko took an alderman to task for complaining that teachers earn less than garbagemen. Royko favored better pay for teachers but complained about the comparison with garbagemen. After all, he pointed out, if garbagemen walked off their jobs the city would be rocked by disease, whereas if the city council walked off its job the city would be rocked by applause.

Royko taught me to respect everyone who does something useful. The Daily News went to the great beyond years ago, and now Mike Royko has followed it. Requiescat in pace.

Good westerns are mostly a thing of the past too, so today’s youth don’t know much about the fencing in of the Old West. Since Hollywood scriptwriters take care to ensure historical accuracy, I can say with confidence it was a tough and dramatic time. Cowboys were the last rugged individualists, and closing off the range with fences durned near killed ’em.

Life weren’t worth livin’ no more in the Old West once those fences went up, but even so, I think we need to seriously consider fencing in the modern equivalent of the Old West, the Internet.

The Internet’s technology has proven remarkably scaleable. The Internet’s culture, like the Old West’s, has not. Anarchy can’t survive population growth, because you just don’t want your neighbor building a slaughterhouse right next door, and you’d rather not have to kill him to prevent it.

The signs of cultural breakdown are everywhere on the Internet, from spam-based marketing schemes to trademark disputes to the most recent and telling symptom: lawsuits over hypertext links.

Ticketmaster, for example, has sued Microsoft. Ticketmaster claims that Microsoft’s link dilutes the value of sponsorship on the Ticketmaster Web site. Ticketmaster is undoubtedly right, and since it costs money to run a Web site this is serious business.

On the other hand, it is the unrestrained ability to put in hypertext links that gives the World Wide Web its charm and value. Having to ask permission may be a perfectly reasonable requirement when two corporations interact, but it is the antithesis of the Web.

It’s time to enact zoning laws for the Web. Zoning is an appropriate reward for businesses on the Web, which have been an ungrateful bunch anyway. Every time I hear criticisms and complaints over the Internet’s poor security, lack of guaranteed packet delivery, and so on, it sounds like someone’s wealthy Aunt Petunia who moves in, demands breakfast in bed every day, and then complains about the cooking.

So let’s zone off a section for businesses. They can set up rules, regulations, and conditions for lawsuits and arbitration. Each site in the business section can include a page of terms and conditions, and visitors will be held responsible for understanding the restrictions before entering or linking.

Then we’ll fence off a Hobbyists’ Free Zone (HFZ) where you can do anything except spam or transact business. Here’s where you can pretend to be the Christian Coalition Home Page, complete with thousands of pornographic images showing only really ugly people and text explaining in graphic terms just how awful it is that “you can find pornography like this all over the Internet!” It’s okay in the HFZ, because Internet users know that for reliable information they should set their filters to the Trusted Information Providers’ Zone, or TIPZ, which will have its own rules and standards.

For the most part, this zoning could be accomplished without government intervention, with each zone established as a for-profit business by various enterprising Internet service providers.

All the feds would have to do is accept each zone as a private community and recognize the right of adult Americans to engage in acts of anarchy within the privacy of their own zone.