From Streetcars To Spaceships

The best essay on process management ever written.

A document written by a programmer at Google has recently come to light. Here it is. Read it. Memorize it. use it as a catchecism for any management trainees you've got. Download a copy for local archiving in case this link goes down. This, my friends, is the shit. Much more than internal details about Amazon ad Google. Much more than just a review of implications of service-oriented architecture. This is a parable of how operational philosophy shapes behavior and how the consequences of that behavior also, in a competent organization, shapes operational philosophy.

Read it. Read it now. 

The sleazenuggets at Flickr have just about used up my patience.

I just renewed our pro Flickr account and the process was less than delightful. Oh, I am SO glad that I've finally bought us a copy of Lightroom and am preparing to host our own images on our own domains because I am SO not cool with hosting all our images on Flickr by this time next year.

A while back Flickr switched it over so that to have a pro Flickr account you HAD to have a linked Yahoo account, them being the same company now and all. And because, ya know, people who are serious about images obviously will be wanting to do their email through Yahoo.

Fine. I knew that it was bullshit but I went through the mickey mouse then, created a dedicated Yahoo email account for Streetcar Press, and then was able to renew our pro Flickr account. I then tried to use the Streetcar Press Yahoo email account for little things but, ya know having my own FOUR FREAKING DOMAINS AND A BLOG, each of which I pay for, that was kinda stupid, so eventually I stopped.

So I go to renew today and find that since my Yahoo account is "inactive", they've deleted all of my email there (not to mention contacts and other information, of which there was some) and I needed to reactivate the account. Which they will shut down and delete the contents of again unless I start using it all the time.

Unless I start paying for premium service for this account that I never wanted in the first place.

Okay, let's think about this. Our Flickr account that we've put the better part of a thousand images on and use dozens of times a month is "linked" to an email account that is considered "inactive" by the company that runs them both. A company that keeps insisting that they're providing one holistic set of services.

Kinda trying to have it both ways, aren't they?

When it comes to billing me and requiring me to use several of their services to get the single service that I actually want, oh, yeah, all these things are "linked."

But when it comes to measuring if the email account is active or if they're going to shut it down and delete all the contents, THEN suddenly the standards change and each service stands on its own.

Slime.

Okay, fine. For now they've got me. I paid my twenty bucks in protection money to keep the Yahoo account active. And then went back and paid another twenty-five to keep the Flickr account going.

And we can safely assume that by this time next year they'll have come up with some new "extra services" that I don't want but have to pay for anyway. And when that time comes I intend to tell them to piss up a rope and host our images on our own damn domains.

Now keep in mind, if they were facing some kind of financial issues and needed to raise the Pro account fees as such I'd be bummed but, hey, I'll pay for something that I use and clearly get value from. Flickr is amazing. It's got a fantastic set of tools and an umatched userbase is and a hell of a bargain, by and large, though there are ertainly other things about them that I've long found kinda hinky. But really, it's the sleazy way that they're adding "extras" that are actually mandatory that I'm opposed to. It's like all those banks with "free" accounts which then, after the number of accounts gets big, start adding more and more minimum balance fees and ATM fees and you-walked-past-our-branch-wearing-a-shirt-we-don't-like fees and so on.

I don't like liars. And I certainly don't want to do business with them.

And, of course, with Yahoo mail having been caught censoring emails about the Occupy Wall Street protests, and their oh, so superlative managment team, it's not like I was exactly enamored of them anyway.

Time to go. 

Good thing we were planning to leave already, huh?

 

Apple: Think Diffident. Their corporate censorship, yet another reason a diverse marketplace is important.

This article goes in detail through the ways that Apple's obsessive, narrow-minded, self-justifying censorship of what can be done on or even sold for the iTouch/iPhone/iPad platform has hurt us all. Including, I think, Apple. And, even more importantly, how this dynamic hobbles many other parts of our oligopoly-dominated society.

There is a dangerous tendency on the left, not to mention among Tea Partiers, to try to explain everything corporations cause in terms of what enriches the people at the top. In other words, to presume that when some corporate-caused action hurts our society, the suits somehow gain equivalently to how we lose. If ten of us are in a boat and I pour salt on all the food, nobody gains. On the macro scale, the world is very rarely a place where each gain and loss is tidily evened out. And until people let go of that childish zero-sum game way of looking at the world, they'll never have any hope of accurately seeing what happens or why.

The truth is even worse. Much of what they do hurts even them. Sometimes choices are made out of fear or confusion or simple transitory power games that will be forgotten next week but whose consequences will live on for years or even decades.

And while we can happily natter on about how corporations "should" be virtuous or how we "should" be able to regulate them into pursuing the public interest, as far as I'm concerned, that's a side discussion. The most important response to the anxious, power-grasping, meddling of corporations in how a given market works is to fight that control. The control ANY small number of buyers or sellers or distributors have over that market. To create a market with many buyers and sellers and distributors.

If one company controls a market, that market will become inefficient, even for the profit maximization of that corporation. Same thing if two or three corporations share that control between them. Any detailed review of the finances of American car companies illustrates this very, very well.

My conclusion? When I see one company dominating a market, I am opposed to it. Same thing for two orthree or four companies. I don't care if it's Google or Ben&Jerry's or Apple. Oligopoly hurts the public interest. Every time. EVERY time.

It's the engineering, stupid.

I was just pointed to this article by my friend Erik Smykal. If it doesn't scare the ever-living piss out of you, you're not paying attention. Unless, that is, you're Iranian or Chinese or Indonesian or whatever and you're sitting there right now feeling smug.

A nation without productive capacity is a hot-house orchid and will not endure. A nation whose citizens don't understand the workings of its machines and homes and organizations is, well, 1990 Kuwait just waiting to get used, abused, and broken by the first people capable enough and self-justifying enough to do it.

And, oh by the way, programming and engineering and factories that make real salable goods are the keys to great buckets of money and them what don't know it or do it don't get that money.

If you have children, raise them to be competent. Raise them to be able to understand how wood shrinks when it gets dry and what makes a plant grow tall. Raise them to understand Boolean algebra and why languages are built the way they are. Raise them to understand their world.

Because our nation is wealthy and indolent and rude and has pissed a hell of a lot of people off on a regular basis for a couple of centuries now. Unless you want our future to look like that of French aristocrats circa right about 1760, then do your part.

And even if you don't have kids, you're not off the hook. Ask yourself, what have you done to make the next generation competent, honorable, and strong? If you don't a solid answer right on the tip of your tongue then it's time that you started doing your share.

Put half a pound of equipment in orbit for $8,000.

Seriously. The PongSat and the CubeSat have been succeeded (joined?) by the TubeSat. You can find the Slashdot thred here. What better proof do we need that the cost to orbit of all kinds of goods is going to way down? At the very least, the kind of expertise that comes from this many iterations will be wonderful and will help more people make a living and build credentials in helping get humans really living out past the earth's surface. Which, among other things, makes more obviously viable a nobody-owns-it successor to the internet, with groups of techies just shooting up an open-protocol sat or three whenever they get some cash put together. Tell that to the big telcos and government bluestockings.

Ya know, there's just no way that anybody could have anticipated a thing like this.

Oh, yeah. Right. I did. Over ten years ago.

To all of you MBA-types, techies, and cocktail party sages who took considerable and condescending glee in "explaining" to me that I "just didn't understand how the real world works", allow me to take this chance to say, once again, fuck you.

-Rustin

Consumating, we loved ya so.

Starting in 2005 and a bit into 2007 I was very active on a social networking site called Consumating. I'm still convinced that it was head and shoulders the best design, the best community of users, and the best dynamic between users and owners of any social site in existence. By far.

But then the idiocies of dot com mahooah stepped in and the founders sold the site and every asset connected to it to CNet. CNet then proceeded to f*ck things over royally, though it can't possibly have helped that the founders, not long after the check was signed, open-sourced the code into a project called Clonesumating. And since CNet had evidently mostly just wanted the IP in the first place, they then proceeded to leave Consumating to drift, unfunded on a flaky server, with nobody in charge. It then continued, orphaned and crashing, until it was eventually shut down and the domain turned into a redirect for another CNet property.

At some point I may yet come back and tell this whole story in conventional fashion. But at the moment I'm created this post because I just ran across the history of Consumating that I wrote while I was there. It seemed a shame that such a massive work of maniacal geekery should be offline so this post exists to let me get it back somewhere that it can be seen by the web. I just looked it over and have now expanded it to (somewhat) address the last months of the site.

That having been said, here it is for your (?) enjoyment.

The Saga of Consumating

First there were the geeks, and from the geeks was born the prank.

But lo, the prank did generate the mana called traffic and that even more seductive power, coolness.

So, yea, the geeks did work and bitch and much caffeine was consumed and much disputing was done, and from the form and bones of the prank was born the site, and it was good.

But, even so, the site was imperfect, being imbued with too much of that dangerous ingredient, snark. So, as time did pass, the site was drained of some of its snark, which, sadly, brought the mundanes. But lo, from the mundanes came even more traffic and even more were the founders uncertain of their right path. Coding was done and much arguing by the bageled one, and from the users of the site came both pleasure and frustration.

And through it all the site did build.

And then came the time of the coming of the emissaries of vast empires, and over the site did fall the shadow of many empires of the web and, indeed, uncertain did the future appear.

And from the shadows came substance as the site joined the empire known as CNet and much was the rejoicing and yet even so of gnashing of teeth as the people did wonder, even unto the seventh business analyst and graduate student, would the site best be seen as a primitive of the tag cloud species or a renegade of the social network species or, as it presented itself, a simple place of meeting.

And even so, changes would occur. It was found that the people pushed down most excessive fierce with their thumbs, so the use of their thumbs was rendered slower if used in bitterness.

And one night the site did shake and falter and at first the people did cry, "lo, the code, yet again we are punished and our interfaces riven by the flaws in the code", but no, it was a new site, similar to the old, but in some ways a considerably more subtle creature, dressed in the rainments of old but with new skills, skills of toys, toys which, to they whose sight was keen, were not the mere baubles they appeared, but tokens of considerable power.

And many were delighted with the toys, for even as baubles they had use and the scant times that their deeper powers, powers to change a place or seemingly, power to represent the ever-important points, indeed, flashes of mighty possibilities did occur.

And even as it was with the toys, so was it with images, as first one simple image was all the face of a citizen of the place, and then several, and then many. And even yet, the people could use first just pictures and then even pictures with motion and sound as parts of their home grounds.

But even as these things gave the people new voices, even so, were also added voices of what many heard as a sour note, voices of crass trade in their place of communion. And, worst of all, it did seem at some times, hard to distinguish the voices of the rulers from those of alien and mercantile bent, voices seeking to insinuate themselves into this haven, once an agora only of ideas.

And so it became. The rulers of the site, still striding through the domain of their creation but now vassals of a greater power, had brought in the merchants. Discussions took on a strange dual face of many puerile talks of PEEEN! and much sententious talk of "Great Issues" familiar to most only from bleary-eyed college nights. Tokens of unknown possibility brought pleasure and spread far and wide, creating habits of unknown consequence.

Tens of thousands joined, but only a small fraction were present while an unknown number visit, having never done more than anonymously lurk. Some have met here and passed into matrimony together. More have met here and passed only into acrimony together. But most were tentative but content, and did not look likely to change much for now.

But, indeed, the shadows of doom in the screen of dread yellow, which came ever more and drove away the users. For the masters of CNet had decided that the site was like unto an orchard whose fruit was unfamiliar and passing strange, naught more than an expense and an embarrassment, filling not the CNet purse and yet needing irrigation and gardeners. So Cnet did say, "we take back our gardeners. We cut off the waters. Many are our orchards, what need have we of one so strange to us? So, unlike our other lands?

And then did the site begin to wilt, to suffer. And the users did wander off, even though, now and again, more wanderers would discover this still special place. Wanderers who found the fruit of the place sweet and the other orchard denizens welcoming.

Protests were made unto CNet and yet none found solace in the cold, dismissive scraps they got in return. Plans were made to found new orchards, orchards that would follow the plan of the other but better, on safe ground in loving hands.

But as the last days approached the orchard dwellers dispersed, some to the the new orchards of the designs meant to evoke their old home. Some to the vast nations of Facebook or MySpace.

But most just left. many, like your scribe, after some small time in the new places, time found to be unsatisfying, for where the old lands gave rise to fecund feasts, the new lands overflowed only with many cartloads of grasses and roots.

Someday perhaps a new gathering will occur. And great and wondrous this would be.

But such is not the way of our world and our times.