the executive summary:
Nutshell: if you’re a law firm considering hiring me, and you stumble across this blog, please don’t get nervous. Instead, talk to me, and/or read the rest of this post. I’m eager to explain why I blog, and why I think it may make me a better lawyer and a good addition to your firm.
[Image by Hugh Macleod of Gaping Void fame; used with permission under the Creative Commons BY-NC-ND 1.0 license. For more on why Hugh licenses his images this way, see here.]
the full story:
Three good customer service experiences I’ve had of late:
From the Vermont corporations statute:
(26) “Meeting” means any structured communications conducted by participants in person or through the use of electronic or telecommunications medium permitting simultaneous or sequentially structured communications for the purpose of reaching a collective agreement.
It scares me that not only is this now comprehensible to me, but that I can understand the basic thought process that led to it being written that way. Doesn’t mean I like it, though, except on the odd chance that some day I’ll be able to torture my enemies with it.
I was asked after the Deep Fried Bytes podcast why I said on the podcast that I pretty much like Office 2007’s user experience and hate OOo. I could go on at length, but here is a short version of the most important part of it.
Three full years ago Microsoft shipped a beta build of Office that announced “the office suite’s menus have become so cluttered and badly structured that users find it impossible to locate certain functions.”1 Their solution, the Ribbon, does a really good job of grouping important functionality together in a discoverable manner, and made it very easy for me to go from zero (prior to this year, I had not really used Office since 1998, and was far from a power user at that time) to relative power user (which I’ve had to be for various school tasks this year) in a matter of weeks.
Contrast with OOo, which has suffered from the same menu and functionality problem for nearly as long as Office has. OOo has finally started thinking about the problem, three years after Microsoft had already thought about it long enough to propose a pretty darn good solution. In the meantime, accessing OOo’s basic functionality is usually clunky at best, painful in many cases, and impossible for mere mortals at worst.
OOo 3.0 takes significant steps in the right direction in terms of speed and feature quality2, and I’m very excited to hear that the OOo folks are going to take the important step of doing automated collection of menu and feature usage data- an important step that many free software projects should consider taking. I certainly wish them the best of luck in coming up with a solution and implementing it; I will always use it when I have the choice. But in the meantime, for those who haven’t used it- rest assured that unlike Win98->Vista, Office98->Office07 is a huge jump in usability and quality- one that OOo has only begun preparing to follow.
things I did not expect to do Friday: buy an album because I saw a music video. I’m not sure I’ve ever done that, even when I went through an MTV-watching period in my teens.
(Tangent: how come I didn’t know there was a last.fm creative commons station?)
Dan: my goal in ranting is to increase the amount of innovation being delivered to users. So if the idea is 30 years old, but I can’t use it because I’m not part of this ‘bunch’, please carry on ;)
More seriously, I do hope the process of producting a new gnome-shell provides an innovation model we can build on- it would be terrific to see conscious thinking about building a repeatable process as well as the code. So far the process seems to be admirably JFDI-based, and the javascript does seem to be lowering the barrier to participation, which is terrific. I did hear suggestions that there was a dispiriting amount of bikeshedding in the conversations which took place at Summit, so maybe we still need to develop better norms and practices around that. And I’m not sure where (if?) there is a place for designers in the process- some of the ideas seem to have come out of RH’s internal design folks, but I’m not clear on that.
Of course, this looks a lot like bikeshedding itself, doesn’t it, so maybe those guys should just ignore me altogether. Dan, please unsubscribe from my blog ;)
(Tangentially: it is completely awesome to click on Dan’s video and have it Just Open in my firefox nightly. Big thanks to the firefox folks in taking the jump to include <video>- I’m not sure it is ‘innovation’ per se but it is pretty awesome :) Now, we just need to work on the production side…)
[NB: this could easily have been titled 'the software industry's innovation problem', since the problem applies broadly to all sorts of software development, and what I'm talking about as 'change' is often referred to as 'innovation', a word that has been twisted almost beyond recognition. I'd like to focus on this little corner of the industry today, so the linux desktop's change problem it is for now.]
A couple things recently (combined with writing this post the other day) made me think about the difficulties in bringing change to the linux desktop.
This isn’t to say that resistance to change is always a bad thing. Plenty of people have brought fairly cracked out ideas to the GNOME table that deserve to be shouted down; Sugar would certainly have been helped by better communication about their vision, a strong dash of pragmatism and a better sense of how to pick your battles; and Pyro might have been better received if the presentation at GUADEC hadn’t been frequently described as ‘condescending.’ But there is a theme here- lots of shouting down of new ideas is being done. Sadly, you can even make a fairly good argument that this is the default reaction to new ideas.
For a long time, this problem didn’t matter that much to the linux desktop. There were plenty of problems to solve just to get usable at all, competitors put out shoddy products, innovation by others happened very slowly if it happened at all, and there was no disruptive change in the basic model for delivery of apps. This basic state of affairs lasted for nearly 20 years. But now things have changed- the linux desktop has matured to the point where the answer to ‘what next?’ can at least sometimes be something other than ‘fix bugs’, Apple is doing real user experience innovation, Windows is feeling price and quality competition (say what you will, but XP and Office 2007 are miles better than Windows/Office 98), and the web is simultaneously revolutionizing how people collaborate and how almost all modern end-user software is developed and delivered.
It seems like a critical question for the linux desktop, then, to figure out how to make radical change happen, since our competitors are eating away at our traditional advantages while making radical change themselves. It can’t be just incremental change (gradually improved usability) or additive change (bolt on a11y on top), because competitors are delivering all those things and then some. Freedom helps here, especially in the very, very long term, since end-user modification and individual control are not features that Apple and Microsoft can ever offer, and which web services can offer only with great difficulty. But that is a very long term solution. In the mean time, if you don’t want to just imperfectly clone everything they do and then wait for freedom to work its magic, merely being as easy to use as OS X or as accessible as Windows won’t help- something bigger and more substantive has to change.
The question is how to do this change, given the resistance I’ve already suggested is rampant? I’m afraid I have no magical bullet to resolving this resistance to change, but I have some suggestions:
It would be great if this post started some serious discussions of the problem and solutions; I certainly don’t pretend that I’m an expert in innovation or that I’d have all the answers even if I were such an expert. And at the end of the day, the #1 reason there isn’t much ’serious’ innovation- anywhere- is that innovation is really damn hard. That I can’t solve either… but some of the other issues should be resolvable as well.
[Ed. later: I removed some childishly snide KDE links, and apologize for the snarky tone therein. I do think that KDE 4's 'innovations' are a prime example of confusing 'shiny' with 'innovative', but I should have said that flat out rather than doing it the way I did. Note that that may well be a better way of failing to innovate than complaining about- and killing- new ideas before they ever get to the user; either way I think both GNOME and KDE have a real problem here, which is why I said 'linux desktop' and not GNOME in the title.]
Lots of the tech news sites are up in arms this morning about this Wired story, (1)(2), reporting that ‘Apple says you’re a fool to believe our ads’ (to paraphrase the title.) While not strictly incorrect, this post really deserves some context.
First, Apple made this claim in an answer to a complaint. The complaint1 is a very comprehensive, but vague, document saying ‘here are all of my potential arguments in court.’ If the court doesn’t like the plaintiff’s complaint, the court can say ‘go away’; if the court doesn’t like the defendant’s response, he can say ‘lock them up.’ If both sides persuade the court that there are serious, important points where reasonable people can disagree, then you start on the road to a trial, where details are added and arguments fleshed out. So you want to throw the kitchen sink in there if you’ve got it, and this defense is one of those kitchen sinks. It isn’t unreasonable to think that this system is a little weird- Germans, for example, would ask a court to filter this kind of claim more aggressively- but it is the system we’ve got.
Second, and more importantly, this particular kitchen sink claim (’no one would believe that‘) is a very standard defense against claims of advertising fraud, called ‘puffery.’ The idea behind puffery is that some ads are inevitably a little outlandish (’best X ever’), and that reasonable people should be able to tell the difference between those kinds of claims (the ‘puffery’) and the serious claims that we’re supposed to base our purchasing decisions on. We use juries to figure out what is ‘reasonable’ in this situation- does everyone on the jury think that ‘twice as fast’ was just bluff, or does the jury think that this was a Serious Claim that was intended to deceive? Admittedly it seems a bit stretched to this non-expert to call this particular ad ‘puffery’, but it isn’t insane, particularly at this early phase of litigation, when both parties are prone to outlandish claims to make sure that they get their day in court.
There is one other thing about this article that is worth mentioning, and which particularly irritates me- the reporter clearly only barely read the pleading. Wired quotes a paragraph, but ignores the title of that paragraph- ‘puffing’. If the author knew what puffing was, they wouldn’t have written this piece, or at least not in this way. If they didn’t know what puffing was, a simple google search would have lead (first link!) to a definition explaining the basics, and it isn’t far from there to understanding it. So file this under ’sloppy, lazy ‘journalism.”
Of late, I’ve been reading my friend Dave’s regular Berkman Lunch transcripts with a certain wistfulness. Ironically, his last lunch post was about a Columbia law prof.1 I’ve always cited the lunches as the best part of Berkman, but the further I get from it, the more I realize that the lunches were just one exemplary facet of what made Berkman a great place.
First, a note on what Berkman didn’t succeed at. When a well-meaning Columbia prof asked me (early in my second year here) what Berkman did well, my answer focused on the negative- what Berkman didn’t do. In particular, I focused on the difficulty of translating great ideas into practice at Berkman. This is, I imagine, still a difficult problem, and there are a lot of reasons for it. Certainly while I was there I was part of the problem; I didn’t have quite the right skill sets and my short tenure created problems. In addition, the reality is that all faculty are not by nature product oriented people- they tend to think in terms of ‘what theory are we implementing’ rather than ‘what problem are we solving for real users’, which not surprisingly leads to lame products sometimes.2
I think in the past few weeks I’ve finally been able to snap out of a focus on that negative aspect and come to a better understanding of what really makes Berkman so great.
First is critical mass. There isn’t just one faculty member, there are a throng. So they are always talking and throwing out ideas. And as a result of money from the Berkman family, and their physical concentration in one place, they can act on those ideas. And that snowballs. Lunch exemplifies this because the food is free and the conference room large. I doubt speakers are given honoraria, but I guess some are flown in. These things are all obvious, though- smart people + money + a building usually = fun. What else is there? What can you do if you don’t have space?
The second thing is the faculty’s focus on Berkman as an institution. For a variety of idiosyncratic reasons, the Berkman faculty are very committed to Berkman-as-Berkman. For perfectly understandable reasons (mostly tenure), most faculty are committed to their own publications first, the law school second, and then whatever else a distant third. For the current Berkman faculty, these three things tend to be on roughly the same priority level, and are also always intertwined- if you publish, you think about how publication will turn into a Berkman project; if you think about the law school, you think about how to help it by getting students more involved in Berkman; etc. As a result, Berkman always has things going on- projects, events, stimulation of some sort. Outside commitments occasionally block individual events or projects, but those commitments never systematically prevent or reduce involvement in Berkman events. That is invaluable- it is faculty commitment that makes anything on a university campus go, and Berkman has that commitment in spades. (Tie to lunch? Faculty actually show up, pretty much every week.)
The third thing is Berkman’s openness. Contrary to Harvard’s reputation that the only smart people on earth live in 02138, Berkman deeply believes that there are lots of smart people out there that aren’t at Berkman, and the instinctive response is to invite them to swing by. Hence Dave’s lunch summary. There is always someone interesting, on a weekly basis, being invited to join the discussion. (And they are discussions, not lectures, as you can see from the extensive Q&A that accompanies every lunch transcript.) And the discussions are open to everyone- you can literally walk in off the street if you want; lots of the participants are students or fellows (who often aren’t academics, but come from other walks of life.) As a result of this openness Berkman is always getting new ideas, and being challenged to think about the old ones- it isn’t just the handful of ideas of the faculty that are getting recycled.
The last thing is the commitment to real world impact. As already mentioned, this commitment has limits that stem from the structure of the place (Harvard is the ivoriest of ivory towers, after all), but the constant commitment to trying new things- despite the daunting odds of failure- is really admirable. The core theory goes like this- a faculty member writes a paper; then they write a book for the popular press based on the paper; and in tandem with those, they start thinking about projects that will bring the core ideas of book and paper to the world in some tangible sense. H2O was an outgrowth of Zittrain’s ideas about pedagogy, Stopbadware an outgrowth of his ideas about generativity and the ‘net, the music project I worked on an outgrowth of Terry Fisher’s ideas on the future of music licensing, and I presume much of John Palfrey’s work as law school Dean of Libraries will be an outgrowth of his book Born Digital. (Berkman likes to take credit for Creative Commons as one of these ideas->books->real world projects as well, though that is more tenuous ;) Are any of these projects world-shakers yet? Not really, and many won’t be because a law school is a difficult place to make product focused, as I already said. But the attempt is noble.
So all in all… yeah, I’m a little nostalgic. All things considered, I’m pretty happy at Columbia, but Berkman is a unique place that other institutions would do well to consider and emulate.
I’ve fixed the mail problem that was causing mail to @tieguy.org to bounce for the past several hours; please resend if you’ve sent me anything to @tieguy.org since around 11pm EST last night.
Following Greg’s recent posts on Sugar, I’m playing with running it a bit; might even try to use it as my dominant platform for a while. Some thoughts, all written from within Sugar:
Two major observations I take away from this:
Unfortunately, I don’t think I can use Sugar full time yet (there are a few apps that I need that won’t run under it, as I understand things) but for those of you who are slightly more flexible it seems like it might be a worthwhile project to use and get involved in.