The original vision for the web might have been great, but reality is setting in, and now were left picking up the pieces, solving all the dirty little real-world problems.
In response to two recent postings by Andy Mitchell, and Paul Robinson, I’m going to lay out my thoughts on what’s been happening in internet-land of late and why. As flattered as I was to be asked by Andy for my take on events, I was reluctant to write any kind of response. In part because I broadly agree with a lot of points that both Paul and Andy raised regarding the current state of the tech industry however, unlike them, I’m neither surprised or overly concerned about it. Where I think we differ is largely a matter of personal belief and expectations, and I’m not sure that combination makes for a great response. As a subject, it lends itself too easily to personal criticism which doesn’t help anyone. Hopefully I’ve managed to avoid that, and managed to stay on topic too…
In his opening paragraph, Paul writes:
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.
I have several problems with that statement, but the one I think really matters is this business of saving the world. The vision alluded to in Andy’s post is not quite so clear, but nonetheless has similar overtones. While i think it is an admirable vision, it’s not one I share. Now, I’m not about to suggest that saving the world isn’t a worthy goal, or that there isn’t a lot of “pointless” cr*p out there on the web, but please. Not every problem in the world requires the services of a superhero. There are lots of problems out there. They come in all sizes, shapes and complexities, and solving them would make someones world a better place. Yes, solving them might not move us closer to world peace, or positively impact every person on the planet, but that doesn’t make them “pointless”. I don’t think that makes either of us right or wrong, but it does mean we have very different expectations, and seeing as how I’m not bothered by the state of things, I think it’s worth a a few words on the subject of expectations before I get to the main act.
Expectations are a tricky tool. You can use them to motivate others, but it often comes at the risk of your own disappointment. Alternatively, you can use them to motivate yourself, at the risk of disappointing everyone else. However, there is one thing about them I’ve found to be true time and again; when I’m regularly getting frustrated and depressed about things, it’s often because my expectations aren’t being met, and when my expectations aren’t being met, it’s usually because my expectations are wrong.
Expectations are a form of belief. Like habits, I think it’s healthy to review your beliefs on a regular basis and make sure they really are supporting you, and not hindering you. This isn’t an easy thing to do. People don’t form beliefs lightly, and if you ever get to the point where you suspect a belief you’ve held is not supporting you, it’s hard to admit this to yourself, and even harder to change it. I don’t know why it’s this way, though I suspect it’s because emotional commitment operates on similar principles to economic commitment – a tendency towards loss aversion means the sunk cost fallacy keeps you from making what would otherwise be the rational choice to abandon one belief and adopt another. I’m not suggesting that we should all adopt new beliefs and lose old ones at the drop of a hat, there’s definitely a trick to knowing when to stick with it and when to change, but it’s also something that everyone should consider when their expectations aren’t being met.
Now, with that out of the way, lets get back to this vision thing.
Although I’m not particularly bothered by the state of the tech industry and where it’s headed, I don’t mean to imply that I don’t place any value on a good vision, far from it. I’ve already explained that where I think we differ is largely a matter of personal belief and expectations, so I guess I need to try and get to the crux of why my expectations are what they are. I’ll start by outlining my assumptions, so first up, a few rules of thumb that have served me well and seem relevant to the question at hand:
- Grand visions go hand in hand with hard problems. Hard problems by their nature are hard, and attract few people to even begin their cause. Even fewer are successful in solving them. Think I’m wrong? Ok, how many people are on the planet? And how many of them are genuinely working on solving problems that would be considered hard? Or world saving? By contrast, so called ‘easy’ problems are trivial, and attract a much greater number of people – this is the generation of convenience, the quick fix, pop-a-pill, unnecessary-surgery, microwave-a-meal generation. None of this is bad or good in itself, it just is. It’s in our nature as humans.
- Visions, like ideas, are worthless unless acted upon. People can think up all the grand visions they like, but unless somebody actually does something to realise them I’m afraid they’re just day-dreaming.
- The difficulty of a problem is not always reflected by the value of a solution. Just because a problem is easy to solve, does not mean the solution can’t have significant value. The opposite can also be true. I think geeks (and I consider myself one), often forget this. Geeks tend to value intelligent, innovative solutions over kludgy hacks that just work. The key words in that last sentence are “Geeks tend to value…”, whereas the truth is that, unless you’ve taken the time beforehand to discover what your customer (or boss) actually values and then worked hard to deliver it, you’re both going to be sorely disappointed – it’s those pesky expectations again. Good enough is often, good enough.
- Shiny new things tend to be more interesting than old dulled ones. Think back to the last time you started a sizable new project, one that would take some time, but had really great potential, nothing was set, you could do things right, make a real difference and you were really enthusiastic about it. Remember that feeling? Now fast forward about 70-80% of the way through it – still feeling as enthusiastic about it now? Or more likely issues have cropped up along the way, reality has set in, and you can’t wait to get this thing out of the way cause you’ve got this really really great new project lined up just as soon as this one is finished. And so it repeats. There are a number of reasons for this, psychological and otherwise, and I’m not going to go into them here. Suffice to say, the same applies to the web. It’s not the brash young thing it once was. Over the course of it’s young life, lots of shiny, new fields kept appearing like nanotech, biotech, ecotech etc… that are much more attractive to a new (and old) generation of visionaries than some tedious web programming job that’s probably only going to get off-shored anyway. They’re much more attractive simply by virtue of their newness, their potential, because like the early web, there is so much basic stuff to be solved and created that it’s almost hard not to have a significant impact on the field. There is, it appears, more than one way to “save the world”.
With that in mind, what broad trends have led the industry to its present state?
- Web development is being commoditised. Thanks to the frameworks built on the likes of Ruby, Python, and PHP, the explosion of low cost hosting options and highly scalable cloud computing, it’s becoming cheaper, faster, and easier to get a simple web app onto the web. The kinds of applications most amenable to this sort of environment are not world changing, not solving hard problems (and thus more amenable to copy-cat, me-too knock-offs), but they are often viable businesses, in the sense that they generate more in worth than it took to create them. I find it kind particularly ironic that Paul singled out Guy Kawasaki as one of the people he’d like to see a response from, considering Guy’s last two web app efforts; Truemors and Alltop – both of which have been decried by the majority of the tech crowd as falling squarely into the “pointless” category. But are they? They solve a problem for a whole bunch of people and are likely to make Guy some money in the process. So does that really make them pointless?
- Here comes everybody. With a broad tip of the hat to Clay Shirky’s book of the same name, more people are online than ever before. And guess what? They’re not geeks, techies or web designers, they’re “normal”, everyday people. They don’t obsess over web apps, Getting Things Done, or grand visions and they don’t think about “saving the world”. For the most part, they just want to book a holiday, read the latest celebrity gossip, chat to their mates, or escape to YouTube from the boredom of a zillion tv channels with nothing interesting on any of them. “Wisdom of the crowds” isn’t the same as popularity, instead the web is changing to reflect the societies who use it. In short, the web is “dumbing down” from it’s original roots, and starting to resemble the technically challenged majority, not a tech-savvy minority. That’s life. Get over it.
- Here comes business. The masses heading online represent a new, untapped market, and where there’s a market, there’s an opportunity for profit. With the huge explosion in the numbers of people online, commercialisation of large parts of the web seem inevitable. Until things change, regardless of your politics, somebody has to pay for all the infrastructure & content, and everyone still has to make a living. Last time I checked, not many businesses had “saving the world” as part of their mission statement. I’m not saying that’s right or wrong, just pointing out another reality.
- Change is slower in the “real world”. If you you want to “save the world”, sooner or later you’re going to have to deal with everything that’s not the internet i.e. the real world. For geeks, things seem old fast on the net, even before 99% of the online public have even heard of them, and change in the real world happens even slower still. You may be able to send a tweet to 5000 people instantly, but changing long held real-world beliefs, traditions and bureaucracies happens on a different, much much longer timescale.
- Conways law applies to the web too. Briefly, Conways law states that “Any piece of software reflects the organizational structure that produced it.” If you’ve ever written software in a large company for any significant length of time, you’ll know just how true this adage really is. Time and again the same mistakes and bone-headed decisions can be seen across numerous unrelated systems, and a significant proportion can be traced back to corporate politics, structure, hierarchy or some other control structure. The web may not be a a single software system, and it may not be produced by a single organsiation, but that doesn’t make it immune from politics and power struggles. Look at the effect music and movie companies practices are having as they try to protect their failing business models, or the net neutrality debate. The internet has already become a very different place in reaction to these kinds of battles. Whichever side of these debates you are on, one thing is clear, whichever side wins out, the internet will be a very different place afterwards.
Now, these are by no means the only trends influencing the direction of the web, and personally I don’t find that any of them are great predictors of what’s round the next corner, but between them they do go a long way towards explaining why it is where it is for me. Interestingly, after I wrote all of that, I went and looked up Tim Berners-Lee’s original vision for the web:
The dream behind the Web is of a common information space in which we communicate by sharing information. Its universality is essential: the fact that a hypertext link can point to anything, be it personal, local or global, be it draft or highly polished. There was a second part of the dream, too, dependent on the Web being so generally used that it became a realistic mirror (or in fact the primary embodiment) of the ways in which we work and play and socialize. That was that once the state of our interactions was on line, we could then use computers to help us analyse it, make sense of what we are doing, where we individually fit in, and how we can better work together.
In many respects, I think you’d have to agree that TBLs original vision is coming remarkably close to being fulfilled. Truly remarkable, given that it’s only been around for 19 years. It’s true that not every part of the world is represented fairly or equally on the internet, but perhaps you could also argue that in that respect it actually does mirror the organisation of society, however broken you think that society be? I speculated earlier that Conways law applies to the web too, but perhaps it’s a variation on the law; Any global system reflects the social structure that produced it?
Oh, I nearly forgot, it was all going so well too, but alas there’s another, more insidious trend that’s becoming more and more apparent, and if there is a reason to be pessimistic about the tech industry right now, I think #10 is it
- Geeks are stuck in a open-loop system. An open-loop system is one where “there is no direct connection between the output of the system and the actual conditions encountered”. As geeks we’ve built the tools to publish our thoughts, ideas and comments in long-winded rants & near-realtime to all who will listen. We’ve also built tools to consume more & more of this same stuff. And guess who uses both sets of tools the most by far? That’s right, the same Geeks who created it all – not normal, everyday people. Geeks commenting on geeks commenting on geeks commenting… and so on and so forth. If that’s not a self-inflating ego bubble waiting to burst, I don’t know what is.
And I’m not alone. Fortunately, as Dave describes, the cure for this is fairly simple remedy – a little cold turkey, and a lot of re-focusing on what’s really important.
So I’m going to end this piece by writing about something important I lost touch with and had to painfully relearn over the last 12 months – things change, people change, everyone looses their way at one time or another and needs to get back in touch with whats important to them, what they need to have in their life. Take some time out for some deep introspection, there’s no hurry, and it’s important to get it right. Stop worrying about the competition, other people, and setting your worth based on their values & interests. Figure out what motivates you, and do that. It’s not rocket science (unless that’s what motivates you, then it is I ‘spose). When you’ve figured out those 2 or 3 things that motivate you like no other, then refocus like a laser beam on those and only those things – cut out everything else that doesn’t in someway support or enhance those areas, and eat, sleep and breathe the stuff that does. Cut back your Tech RSS feeds, prune your tech contacts on twitter & IM, stop going to so many barcamp, foocamp, geekery whatsits. Pay yourself first, and be sure to spend some time on doing your own thing every day. Spend some time with real people, talking about real issues, solving real problems.
Sure, it’s no quick or easy remedy, but the best ones never are, and I guarantee it will get you back on track & all fired up like nothing else.
p.s. If you’re bit of a bookworm like me, then I’d like to recommend a few books that might help you on your journey…
“Getting Unstuck” (Timothy Butler) – this helped me to see that it’s quite normal to loose your way, to loose sight of what’s important, and gave me some useful tools to get back on track.
