Andy's Mind

I have to return to Amazon’s Kindle device for a moment today, because in my last post I didn’t cover some aspects of this device I find disturbing.

Not only it is totally proprietary and binds you to Amazon as the sole source of content – it also opens up a whole new set of possibilities for privacy invasion. First, Amazon knows about all the books you’ve read. And as the device is on-line all the time through a GSM network and knows who its owner is all kinds of things are possible: from gathering detailed statistics of what you read, when you read it, how fast you do it – and what notes you scribble – to tracking your whereabouts. Since the platform is totally closed there is no way whatsoever to verify what the device does and what it doesn’t.

But not only that – it would be also possible to retroactively alter publications. It could be seen as a good idea – manuals could be updated, errors could be corrected – but it can be also used to alter history, by for example removing mentions of someone or something from a newspaper days after it was “published”. This is purely Orwellian – the Ministry of Truth was doing exactly this.

Overall, I find this whole thing and the mindset behind it highly disturbing and dangerous. This can be best exposed by pushing this idea to its limit: let’s imagine it is immensely successful and everyone has one. Then everyone has only the books that come from Amazon, pays them for the right to read, there is no second-hand book market, no libraries too and Amazon knows who was reading what. All that is totally opposite to what a traditional book is – it is yours to keep, forever, no one knows what you read – you can walk into a bookstore and buy one totally anonymously – and you can lend it or give to anyone for free.

I think, in a nutshell, monetizing on everything and locking users into a proprietary platform on which they in fact don’t own anything, just pay for the right to read, is what I find most repulsive. Circulation of the written word has been limited until recently by the physical limitations of the books and newspapers. Now Internet removes those limitations – it should be an opportunity to make more available for free. There is something inherently wrong with the idea that you have to put a dime in for any page you read, any tune you listen to or any picture you see.

Over and over people come up with something they think will replace traditional books. Over and over they are proved wrong. Next in line to get slapped is Amazon’s Jeff Bezos. His Kindle device is not only ugly (and who would like to be seen with something hideous in his hands?) but it also perpetually ties its user to Amazon, them being the only source for purchasing any content for Kindle.

So not only this “e-book” concept lacks all the advantages of the traditional book – no requirements for power or wireless coverage of any kind, durability, ease of use – but it also limits the concept of ownership. If I buy a book from Amazon now I own it. I can lend it or give it to a friend. I can make a copy of a few pages and give it to a friend. Will I be able to do the same with the Kindle-book? I doubt it.

I think the ugliness of the thing together with lack of clear benefits of having it over a laptop or… about 10 or so normal, paper books will be enough to kill it. People who read – and read a lot, otherwise this toy makes no sense at all – are not the same target market as usual gadget-buyers, especially customers who buy modern all-singing-all-dancing “mobile phones” and then waste money on ringtones and wallpapers. People who read tend to think.

There are just a few people who had a very good idea and had also enough luck, connections and execution power to turn it into gold. But even fewer are able to do it more than once. It is nothing unusual to get so immersed in one’s idea that one is not able to see its flaws (happens to me too). The problem is that no one dares to tell the wealthy and powerful people their idea is… less than perfect, to put it mildly. Some may fear for their position, others want to just rip the stupid affluent off.

Clearly no one told Bezos he won’t get far with this and judging by his announcement he didn’t realize it by himself. Yet.

I’m a quite satisfied Mac user. I switched two years ago, never looked back, had two Mac laptops since then and I’ve been overall quite happy with the experience. There is, though, one frustrating point – iChat. It looks so cool when Steve and his colleague demonstrate it during keynote presentations. It has fun (backdrops) as well as useful (theater) features built in.

I really like it but I’ve never ever been able to use. Why? Well, because there is no one to talk to.

It is not that none of my friends has a Mac – some do, even within my company I’m not the sole Mac user. However, no one has iChat open and running. Everyone has Skype. Part of the reason why is not only immensely wider user base, but also the fact that Skype works well over firewalls and iChat fails miserably even over a simple NAT. So it is currently a very nifty, very nice toy which is completely pointless unless most of your friends use Macs and happen to be on network connections with public IPs (rarity today).

Quite frustrating. Rather than waste their resources on putting Safari on Windows Apple should have developed iChat for other platforms. Too late for it now, I think. Maybe they should start talking to Skype then.

I don’t know how many people realize that, but the roots of modern project management are in the early 20th century and stem from heavy industries, military logistics and… civil engineering. Gantt himself was working in the late 19th century steel industry, his chart (in its current form invented in fact by Karol Adamiecki) was used in the major construction projects of the New Deal (like the Hoover Dam). It was long before any software projects that it has become an icon of project management along with a whole set of methods, practices and theories.

There is no doubt that these methods were proven to work for the industries they were invented for. They got refined over the years, getting to the point where they could be considered scientific. A whole body of knowledge was gathered over time, institutionalized in bodies like the PMI, their PMBOK and certifications. Then all that was applied to software engineering, which someone erroneously mistook for another form of engineering or even manufacturing.

The problem is that a typical software project is very unlike an assembly line, but also differs very significantly form any civil engineering construction project. Let’s take my favorite example – building a bridge – and compare it to a software project.

When you build a bridge the environment (layout of the river, hills around it etc.) is largely known and very unlikely to change, as opposed to modern software projects. Also the requirements of the client are very simple, clear and not likely to change – no one sane will ask the bridge to be drastically changed midway into the project. The complexity level of the object being created is much lower than in an even small software project – depending on how you count even a simple software package contains hundreds of functions and thousands of variables.

The human side is also very different. In traditional industries, like civil engineering, organization is based on few knowledgeable individuals having a picture of the whole at the top and a command chain that transmits their design to the workers executing it. A typical construction worker doesn’t have to know the whole design of the bridge, nor is he required to be capable of understanding it. He has to be able to do well some specialized task (like pouring concrete or laying reinforcements) where directed. It doesn’t mean he is stupid – don’t get me wrong – but his training and knowledge are very different from that of the civil engineer who designed the whole structure.

This is quite contrary to a typical software developer who not only has to be capable of understanding the whole of the project he works on, but also has to know and understand the design to be able to effectively contribute. This is why organizing software development with command chains and “architects” leading the (largely ignorant) flock is wasteful and wrong. There is no doubt that developers with bigger experience are better at design and are better suited to lead juniors, but there is no fundamental difference between them.

There is nothing new going on here – humanity has always tried to apply methods from the past to the problems of today. It mostly worked, but sometimes it didn’t and the visible failure of existing methods or assumptions usually led to a positive change. The same is now happening with the software engineering. After realizing that the classical waterfall approach rooted in other industries from another time led to poor quality and even worse predictability the IT industry moves forward with the agile movement.

Agile is now quickly becoming mainstream because it reflects the reality of software creation. That’s why itn most cases it delivers on its promises of delivering better product and increasing teams effectiveness.

Building a bridge is my personal favorite example, because that’s what my father was doing before he moved into materials science.