The Three Waves: Hobbyists and Employees and Bureaucrats, Oh My! I wrote a series of 7 articles about this back in 2000: They were the most popular articles I ever wrote for that site, read by about 17 million people the first week, and I saved a link to a review by an Australian lady writing for a German magazine. So people liked it. - You can find them here: http://landley.net/writing/#3waves Of course in the past 15 years, I've learned some stuff, so here's an update. - The idea comes from Robert Cringley's book Accidental Empires, Chapter 12 - Book was about computer history, it was a bestseller and the basis of the PBS miniseries "Triumph of the Nerds", narrated by Cringely. - You can watch it online (youtube and vimeo), 6 half-hour episodes. - 20 years later, book's available on the author's website. Chapter 12 is: http://www.cringely.com/2013/03/18/accidental-empires-chapter-12-on-the-beach/ - Analogy between silicon valley and the D-Day invasion of World War II - Three waves of activity: commando, infantry, police - 1) create an opening out of nothing by parachuting behind enemy lines with a backpack full of dynamite and finding something to do. Gather intelligence, blow up a bridge, etc. 2) mass rush to exploit the opportunity (beaches of normandy, D-day), more people, capture ground, push forward. 3) hold captured territory after the front moves on to prevent it from falling back into the hands of the enemy. - Goals of each wave: change, growth, stability - 1) Create change. 2) Exploit Opportunity, 3) Prevent change - Let's map this into a civilian context: - 3 waves are: hobbyist, employee, bureaucrats (operating modes) - startup, core business, conglomerate (organizations) Organizations primarily operate in one of these modes at a time. - Advance through them in sequence as the organization ages - First wave, second wave, third wave - each driven by people who work in different modes People aren't different TYPES of people, they work in different MODES. - Feel differently about different topics - This topic is like mopping floors to me, but on THIS I am SUCH A FAN! - You can have a day job at the post office putting envelopes in slots, then be a stamp collector at home with encyclopedic knowledge and recognizing foxed edges at a glance. - Coulson in the Avengers, "slight foxing around the edges" - Geeking out at work. It's not because of his job, he's a _fan_. - Key and Peele "code switching" video: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=JzprLDmdRlc A couple more books that contributed material to this: - Mythical Man-Month, by Fred Brooks - Book that gave us "Brooks' Law". - factor of 30 productivity difference Between "Average" and "Best" - Most remembered for Brooks' Law (adding more people to a late project makes it later), also for pointing out that productivity scales linearly but coordination overhead scales exponentially (everybody talking to everybody else is n^2 connections). - Open source replaced coordination with editorial review/filtering, so they throw out or repeat a lot of work, but it buys great scalability. - Brooks also found a factor of 30 productivity difference between "best" and "average" programmer. - That was within IBM, back when they required a suit and tie. - He recommended forming "surgical team" where assistants take work off the surgeon (scalpel, retractor). - The Innovator's Dilemma, by Clayton Christensen - Book that gave us "Disruptive Technologies" - which are a better analytical concept than you probably think - 1997 New York Times bestseller, since become a cliche. - Most people quoting it haven't read it, get its ideas wrong. - Lots of MBAs mouthing something will screw it up badly. - If you haven't read the book, read Forbes' article on how its author convinced Intel to create the "Celeron" in the 1990's: http://www.forbes.com/forbes/1999/0125/6302088a.html - Or my review of the book when it came out: http://www.fool.com/portfolios/rulemaker/1999/rulemaker991119.htm - Last article in my original series, above, focused on this book. - The central idea is "disruptive technologies" vs "sustaining technologies" - A new technology that's initially _worse_ than the old one, for the existing users. But it does something the old one can't, which gives it a tiny new userbase that allows it to grow and eat into the low end of the old technology's userbase: steamboats vs sailing ships, transistors vs vacuum tubes, mainframe -> minicomputer -> PC -> smartphone - Hobbyists adopt and drive disruptive technologies. - Workers can be on either side. - Bureaucracies make the "upward retreat" with the old technology Let's start by looking at the people: - The first wave: hobbyists (cringley's commandos) - Change. Novelty. Explore, experiment, play. - eyes light up on this topic, talk people's ear off at the drop of a hat. Tend to have strong opinions, yet can argue both sides of them. - Write fanfic about it! Cosplay! Attend conventions! - Hobbyist sense tingling: SHINY THING! (POUNCE) - "What's it good for?" "I don't know, let's find out!" - Doing stuff you've never done before is great. - Doing stuff nobody's EVER done before is better! - Why? Because it's cool. Gets you excited, or at least holds your interest. - Interest has a gear ratio. "Quiet but intense" is where you go "Hmmm..." and look up and 12 hours have passed and you forgot to eat. - Nobody tells you what to do, you figure it out for yourself. - may have a goal in mind, but often wind up somewhere else - Some guy pouring molten copper into a coconut. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=KngzRyZJGaE - Same guy casting a usable bowie knife in his backyard https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=4l2rbsMTiho - It's a calling. (But callings have facets, invest time in which ones?) - 10 to 1000x more productive than average - especially when doing _new_ stuff we don't already know how to do - In The Mythical Man-Month, Fred Brooks found factor of 30 _AT_IBM_ - When the slashdot was bought by Andover networks, they gave a talk at LinuxWorld Expo in 2000. Two founders (Rob Malda and Jeff Bates) did all the programming, site administration, ad sales, and editorial selection of articles from the submissions. - Andover transferred everything but editorial, so they could focus - The two part-time jobs became ~20 fulltime jobs. - Modern example of 1000x? Sure: Fabrice Bellard. http://blog.smartbear.com/careers/fabrice-bellard-portrait-of-a-super-productive-programmer/ Created lzexe, Bellard's Formula for calculating digits of pi, linmodem, ffmpeg, tinycc, tinygl, qemu, tccboot, jslinux... - That's not his whole career. He's my age. He's still producing. - If you hired a random person off the street to play basketball, and spent ten years and a hundred million dollars training them, they'd still lose to Michael Jordon. (Possibly even the geriatric retired version today) - Emily Dickinson at poetry, Albert Einstein at physics, Isaac Newton at math... - Gordon Ramsey's done multiple TV shows where he as chef and restarauntuer tries to fix other people's attempts at his thing. A few of his "kitchen nightmares" fixes stuck, most reverted and collapsed because they're not him and can't learn to _be_ him. - easily distracted, follow the shiny thing - Can go for depth or breadth (does your attention "lock" or "skip"?) - can get writer's block - Bored now, moving on. Excited about new thing! - goes off on a tangent from a tangent from a tangent... - wind up keeping a lot of plates spinning - "my todo list runneth over" (no shortage of todo items! Maybe someday...) - It's possible to be a hobbyist about ANYTHING https://xkcd.com/1095/ (crazy straws: fractal, no bottom) - knitting, cooking, auto mechanic (kit cars and hot rods) - Oddly enough it's not always _smarter_, it's _persistent_. - At least once your enthusiasm is engated - A thousand ways to fail, still at it. - Most things hobbyists try don't work. Even when they do, not necessarily immediately _useful_. - Text mode quake. https://web.archive.org/web/19990219125446/http://webpages.mr.net/bobz/ttyquake/ - Doom as a system administration tool. "I kill processes all the time. Can I do it with a shotgun?" https://web.archive.org/web/20000815225638/http://www.cs.unm.edu/~dlchao/flake/doom/ - Hobbyists don't do it for the money, they make money to afford to do this. - If hobby can pay for itself, you can afford to spend more time on it - Afford more toys! Quit your day job! - But mostly money is a distraction. Ideal: win lottery and stop caring. - This isn't just your job, it's an important part of your life. - It's what you WANT to do, for fun, when not distracted by something else. - Have ideas in the shower because thinking about it in the shower. - Open source hobbyists often switch employers three times while working on the same project. (This isn't new, the internet just makes it easier.) - How many people _before_ Charles Darwin did years of fundraising to take a sailing ship to a remote island on the other side of the planet to collect bugs? (Answer: several.) - The second wave: employees (cringely's infantry) - 9 to 5 workers. Hired to do a job. - You have a manager who tells you what to do. With a schedule. - You can find/make more competent people in this role - Expect 1 times average productivity. Twice is really impressive. - The bulk of most companies. Easy to staff up: Hire and/or train. - Made, not born. - Hobbyists can downshift into this mode when the work environment gives them writer's block. "I could do this work in 30 minutes if I could just FOCUS but I've spent a week websurfing and staring a twitter." - An employee know what to do because somebody told them. - Follow a map to a goal. (They pick the roads but not the destination.) - You can look stuff up. This is mostly known territory. - Might chip away at the unknown a bit, but in a very controlled manner. - advance through Education, Experience, Training, Seniority - get incrementally better by learning things people already know - Employee's real life is not related to their job, except by paying for it. - Leave work at work, quality of life. - If your employer didn't make you do this, you wouldn't be doing it. - In it for the money. What gets you excited about this job? - Raises! Benefits! Paid vacation! Overtime! Promotion! - Getting better at the job isn't goal in itself, in service of those goals - Third wave: bureaucrats (cringely's police) - prevent change, reduce risk. - All the growth happened, we've peaked, it's all downhill from here. - But still profitable. Want to keep doing this. But get old/tired/lazy... So write down what we did out our peak, document everything, codify it into a set of procedures anyone can follow exactly, and rigidly adhere to them to prevent change, or at least slow our inevitable decline. - Figure out what can go wrong. Preventive maintenance. Five nines. - Sustain. Hold the line. Slow the inevitable decline. - Organization they work for is BIG. That causes issues. - Billions and billions served means million to one chances already happened thousands and thousands of times. - virtual impossibility is a regular occurrence. - They have deep pockets for lawsuits to target, large customer pools to recruit class action suit plaintiffs from. - Want to reduce bad outcomes, and CYA against lawsuits by proving the inevitable bad outcomes were not their fault. - apotheosis of bureacracy is the middle manager - say yes to any idea that originates above you, no to any below you. - That's their JOB. - rigid skeleton for large organization, stabilizers (vibration dampers) - employees should be fungible, I.E. replaceable. Interchangeable cogs - ideally you automate them away. Vending machines, assembly lines, etc. - Put any random employee in this job - Can't have special magic people. What if they get hit by a bus? - Credentials. Certifications. - heat sinks for blame. - Delegation of blame, reducing _personal_ risk. - Committees - spread potential blame to homeopathic levels so it doesn't affect anybody - In theory: - If you violate procedure but make/save the company millions, you're still in trouble. The success is a mitigating factor at best. - Flipside of delegation ofblame: Someone else claim credit for success. Somebody who did NOT violate procedure. - In theory, if your actions turn the building into a smoking hole in the ground, but you followed the procedures exactly and can PROVE it, you're off the hook. - Modulo scapegoating, the blame has to go somewhere. But there will be entire committees formed to assign it, and it flows downhill. - CANNOT innovate. Change is against organization's basic nature. - Back to "The Innovator's Dilemma". - Disruptive technologies are poison to bureaucracies. - Closest they can get is wait for the technology to mature and buy a company that does it. We'll get back to this. - In 1991 McDonald's hired 43 PHD scientists who spent 11 months adding "carrot sticks" to the McDonald's menu. - Hobbyist: Here: chop chop chop. Wanna see it again? - Employee: carrot sticks! Open a cookbook, research carrot varieties, bit of practice in a kitchen, spend a day or two finding their best option and writing up a detailed report. A week tops. - Bureaucracy: this is a change. We prevent change. Form a committee to prepare a set of procedures for forming a committee for creating a set of procedures for evaluating whether we should do this at all and testing possible approaches. - What can go wrong? Sourcing, preparation, packaging, transportation, safe storage, allergens... We have to train people to do this, we have to staff a training program and design training materials and schedule employee time... We need an accounting budget to work out the cost of the employee time spent in training for this, worldwide! So let's look at Organizations, starting with for-profit companies. - startup, core business, diversified conglomerate - startup - Hobbyist founders want to make their hobby pay for itself. - Quit your day job, spend more time on your hobby, afford toys - Get rich so you don't have to "work" anymore. Hobby isn't "work". - Often experimentally finds a business opportunity - hobbyists spin off tangents! Sidelines to supplement income... - faceboot was an online yearbook - flickr was an online game, developed photo sharing sideline... - Hard to scale. - finding more hobbyists difficult. Born not made. You may know a few but are they busy, do they live nearby... - Not all startups ever do grow beyond their founder. - dental practice, lawfirm. "mom and pop" home business. Hobby pays for itself?, life is good. Except you have to run a business. Marketing, sales, billing, taxes... Hire people to do that for you? - Hobbyist(s) get along with employees! - "Surgical teams" from Mythical Man-month. Hire people to keep the lights on and the bills paid while you do your thing. - Brooks recommended pilot and co-pilot, maybe a dozen assistants - But as you staff up, hobbyists become minority. Employees outnumber them, corporate culture changes... - Part of the reason 80% of all startups fail, this transition is HARD - core business - growth. We know what we do now, let's do more of it. (More of the same) - trim unrelated sidelines - hobbyists get bored and wander off - Technical co-founders retire when their net worth hits $100 million. - psychological milestone, never have to "work" again. - Jim Manzi at Lotus, Paul Allen at Microsoft, Steve Wozniak at Apple - working here was no longer the best way to pursue their interests - Non-techie co-founder stays because they're still engaged. - hobby interest still served, larger company lets them do more of it - hobby may have lots of tangents but usually some central metaphor - Bill Gates was playing poker. Beating other companies, cloning their technology, acquiring them, locking them out of the market with exclusive distribution channel contracts. Money = way of keeping score - Monkey Boy was an old poker buddy from harvard. - Steve Jobs was a salesman. More/better products to sell to more people - helped him recruit: famous pitch to Pepsi guy: "do you want to sell sugar water for the rest of your life or do you want to come with me and change the world?" Sold him on the job, on being first wave - His skills as a product designer were because he knew what made products easier to sell (happy loyal customers) - Venture capital got him kicked out, company rolled to a stop without him until they BEGGED him to come back. - He had moved on. NeXT! Pixar! Disney! He was a movie producer now. - They appealed to his vanity. - Grow to market saturation... then what? - investing profits back into business becomes a waste of money when there's no more growth to be had. Run out of new customers. - raising prices opens you to competition, price yourself out of market - lowering costs cuts into quality - Company can kill itself trying to squeeze blood from a stone - But still profitable. So now what? - Need to find new areas of growth OTHER than core business. Diversify. - conglomerate - Multiple indepenent business units each produce profits. Milk the cash cows and grow by acquisition. Collect them at the central office and occasionally pull the trigger on a new acquisition, which becomes a new independent business unit. (You can sell them too.) - Berkshire Hathaway: textile company bought shoe company, insurance, see's candy... each new company was profitable and self-managing, became independent business unit - warren buffet is a hobbyist, but investing IS his hobby. - His metaphor is gardening. He's growing a mighty forest of companies - harvest, prune, replant... - Bigger berkshire gets the better it serves his hobby, he's there for life. (But then what? He's not fungible...) - One place for a hobbyist within a bureaucracy is at the top. Outranks the bureaucracy, doesn't apply to them. Yes to ideas from above... - GE made light bulbs and washing machines, had aerospace division, had a home mortgage arm, and owned NBC television. All at the same time. - Firewalls between divisions to prevent vice president of light bulbs reaching over and making programming decisions at NBC. Even powerful people must go through channels or the company tears itself apart. - Transition 2->3 is just as hard as 1-2, but you can get acquired. Conglomerates always looking to buy new profitable business units. - Culture change: must abandon core business, old identity as "company that does X". - Microsoft's core business: basic -> dos -> windows. - Incremental upgrades. - Could NEVER diversify beyond that. MSN? MSNBC? X-Box/live? Bent back into a defense of Windows because that's what they DO. - Larry Ellison tried to get Oracle to do "thin client" (xterms). Nope. - buying corpse of sun's diversified them a bit, but they see it as a platform on which to run their databases. - Old core business dying due to technology shift undermining it: http://landley.net/writing/database.html - Dying business models explode into a cloud of intellectual property litigation. (Think "SCO".) - OraTroll. Patent trolling android, suing over Java patents for a slice of someone else's success. Ossification, hobbyist organizations become jobs, becomes bureaucratic. - not just for-profit corporations Linux Foundation is a bureaucracy, like Usenix before it. http://landley.net/notes-2010.html#19-07-2010 Tone Deaf to Hobbyists, leading to constant missteps: http://landley.net/notes-2010.html#30-08-2010 Aging population circles the wagons against whippersnappers, becomes a guild http://www.linux-magazine.com/Online/News/Graybeards-Are-Kernel-Developers-Becoming-Extinct http://www.zdnet.com/article/graying-linux-developers-look-for-new-blood/ Linux Kernel summit: invitation only http://www.linuxjournal.com/content/linux-kernel-summit Creation of Linux "greybeards" list in 2013 https://lwn.net/Articles/571995/ - invitation only, no public web archive Not sure ANY hobbyists still involved, rewrite history to claim never were What Makes a hobbyist: https://lwn.net/Articles/563538/ Reply from the Squashfs maintainer: https://lwn.net/Articles/563578/ Linux contributors 14.6% hobbyist in 2012, 11.8% in 2014... http://www.networkworld.com/article/2885168/linux/torvalds-people-who-start-writing-kernel-code-get-hired-really-quickly.html - compatibility Hobbyists get along with employees - "Surgical teams" from Mythical Man-month - employees get along with bureaucrats - Follow the procedures and you can get a raise and/or promotion. hobbyists and bureaucrats DO NOT GET ALONG. - create change, prevent change - loose cannon - Unpredictable. Does not meet schedules, does not follow orders. - Not fungible - empty suit - I could literally be a THOUSAND times as productive by ignoring this clown - When the suits come in, the hobbyists leave Common story: corporation looking to grow by acquisition tries to get in cheap, buys company before it hits market saturation. Buys too early, hobbyists are still there, still driving. Hobbyists meet bureacurats. Hobbyists leave. - Microsoft's acquisition of hotmail: Cringely: be careful what you wish for [LINK] Buy technology, people leave. Oops, we needed the people. - It's not thatthey WANT to crush and mangle a potential competitor, they want to keep it and profit from it! They just screwed up. - It wasn't ripe yet. But if they waited for it to get ripe, somebody else would buy it or it would get too expensive to afford. Ossification, hobbyist organizations become jobs, becomes bureaucratic. - not just for-profit corporations Linux Foundation is a bureaucracy, like Usenix before it. http://landley.net/notes-2010.html#19-07-2010 Tone Deaf to Hobbyists, leading to constant missteps: http://landley.net/notes-2010.html#30-08-2010 Aging population circles the wagons against whippersnappers, becomes a guild http://www.linux-magazine.com/Online/News/Graybeards-Are-Kernel-Developers-Becoming-Extinct http://www.zdnet.com/article/graying-linux-developers-look-for-new-blood/ Linux Kernel summit: invitation only http://www.linuxjournal.com/content/linux-kernel-summit Creation of Linux "greybeards" list in 2013 https://lwn.net/Articles/571995/ - invitation only, no public web archive Not sure ANY hobbyists still involved, rewrite history to claim never were What Makes a hobbyist: https://lwn.net/Articles/563538/ Reply from the Squashfs maintainer: https://lwn.net/Articles/563578/ Linux contributors 14.6% hobbyist in 2012, 11.8% in 2014... http://www.networkworld.com/article/2885168/linux/torvalds-people-who-start-writing-kernel-code-get-hired-really-quickly.html Think Tanks - special business unit built to hold hobbyists - Hire a second waver to provide minimal adult supervision, give them a vague goal and let them play. "basic research" - Extra-thick firewall keeps bureaucracy out, so hobbyists and suits never come in contact. - Unfortunately it keeps the ideas IN. They have an easier time getting to the outside world than the rest of the company. - Xerox Parc - The "paperless office" threatens our copier business. Invent it so we can study it. - "Done! Behold the future!" "How does this help us sell copiers?" - Steve Jobs came along and offered them a path to commercialization, intern who had worked there told them about it, he offered Xerox a pre-ipo investment in Apple stock if they gave his engineers a tour. - Xerox made many millions on that. Could have made billions if they'd been able to commercialize the technology themselves, but couldn't so settled. - Gates then copied Apple without giving xerox a dime. - Xerox Parc engineers left, founded 3COM and so on. - Bell Labs - Regulated monopoly, 1957 antitrust consent decree, _must_ license. - Invented transistor! AT&T replaced vacuum tubes in phone network, Sony invented transistor radio, Ken Olsen applied them to computers and founded Digital Equipment Corporation. - http://landley.net/history/mirror/interviews/olsen.html - Invented laser! Upgraded phone network with fiber optics! - Everyting from CD player to laser surgery. AT&T left out. - Invented Unix! Ah-HAH! Booming computer market, wanted in, allowed breakup in 1984. Commercialization here we come! - Nope, still a bureaucracy. Internet based on BSD not SYSV, BSDi won lawsuit to prove independence, Coherent already first clone in 1980, Minix begat Linux... - Bell Labs spun off, became Lucent, sort a fizzled on its own. - IBM Boca Raton facility was an accidental one - Facility halfway between Palm Beach and Ft Lauderdale in Florida. - Someplace to hold annual meeting on a beach with a margarita. - Rest of the time, who cares? So ignored by bureaucracy, accumulated hobbyists. - This let them do the PC! But then they attracted attention to themselves. - No procedures keeping them safe. No firewall. Bureacuracy came, saw, executed prime directive: prevent change. - IBM PS/2 based on patented proprietary micro-channel bus clones couldn't use, so they didn't. Followed Compaq's lead instead. - The year's supply of 286 processors, ball and chain. Other big failure mode: company gets too big for ANYBODY to buy, then has to transition ITSELF to third wave which is really hard and slow and painful. - Intel. - The x86 processor company, except their real strength is fabs (Chip design: ia64. x86-64 came from outside). - Network cards? Motherboards? Sort of creeping outwards... - Bought StrongARM back in the 90's and... spun off Marvell. Not x86! - Trying to diversify the company burned out Andy Grove, retired. - Microsoft. - Singing the "I won't grow up" song from Peter Pan. - Traumatized by IBM circa 1981, original PC. [KLOCS] - Vowed to never become like IBM - Ballmer interview about KLOCs in Triumph of the Nerds (PBS miniseries based on Accidental Empires, available on youtube) - Startup in 1975, BASIC for Altair - but first hardware product was tim patterson's 8080 board. run micro-soft basic on an Apple II! (Later he sold them QDOS. Friend of Paul Allen's, Seattle local where they grew up.) - developed core business (basic), leveraged that to do to DOS, then bundled windows with DOS. Core business transitioned but they always had one. - Paul Allen left in 1983 (hodginks lymphoma, but didn't come BACK) - Had $100 mil and gates had screwed him over multiple times... - 1/3 vs 2/3 stock - discussing in next room with Monkey Boy how to get stock back - BASIC hit market saturation in 8-bits. DOS hit market saturation on PCs (>90% share) in mid 80's. (CP/M-86, OS/2, DR-DOS...) - They became 3rd wave! But the market they were _in_ was growing so fast this was disguised. - transitioned it to windows because first 32 bit API (deskpro 386 in 1987) - win 3.0 in 1990, beat OS/2 2.0 to market by ~2 years. (1.0 for 286) - IBM PC-AT try to be clever, buy entire first year production of 286! - Apple showed people GUI, Amiga copied it ~1987. Needed parity. - Both were "keeping up with the joneses", responding to outside world - money they invested in "growth" was mostly wasted. - DOS 4/5/6 weren't really any better than DOS 3. - Windows XP was _worse_ than Windows 2000* * Because they couldnt' build 2000 anymore after permatemps fired. - Build system was low status! Not in source control! Machines recycled/wiped the instant they left the building. - Windows Millennium team backported bits of 2000 to NT4 base, "make it look pretty". - The Longhorn death march, became Vista. - everything they did was bent back into a defense of windows because that's what they did, that's who they were. Could not diversify away from their core business when it was providing their corporate identity - The antitrust trial breakup would have been a GODSEND. But they bribed their way out of it. Too powerful be forced to take their medicine, so instead they stagnated (Windows Vista)... - Buying nokia gave them a second business unit! They shoved Windows down its throat until Nokia bought itself back and ran away screaming. - Then Gates retired. (Saw 64 bit and transition to smartphones, wasn't sure he could win, decided to fold his cards and become a philanthropist because he could win at that. Like Carnegie hall.) - New CEO slowly changing company. Ubuntu on Windows. Can he diversify? - We'll see. Better than monkey boy. (Sycophant to Gates, frat boy college friend.) - Google. - Recruited, exclusively, hobbyists. Giant pile 'o hobbyists. - 20% time! Spin off everything. [LINK] Graveyard of google products - Core business: google.com! But market share saturation circa 2002. - Stretched to "search" - gmail searches your email. Google maps searches the earth. - Ok, got them. Now what? - Stretched further: attaching advertising to stuff. Youtube, translate.google.com... - self-driving cars? (Ok, frees up time to watch advertising, but...) - Android smartphone? (Ok, couldn't let microsoft or apple control the platform people view through, but dragged into a lot of diverse areas.) - Multiple operating systems! Android and Chromebooks. Teams reach across and interfere with each other, poach people, fight over agenda... - Google developed Microsoft Disease. It was called "Google Plus". - Shoving stuff down customers throats that they didn't WANT, because it's all integrated and everything must tie back to our core business. - It was a problem. They realized it was a problem and went "oops". - Yeah, it took them a while. - Google's a giant think tank with bureaucracy AROUND it. - Their hiring policy is procedures and committees out the wazoo. - But once inside it's a giant melting pot with free lunch and 20% time. - keep trying to change that, but hugely unpopular with the hobbyists. - Youtube was an acquisition. Android was an acquisition. Melting pot. - So Alphabet. If can't split up the giant think tank, then create a new container and put google UNDER it. Then chip off what you can (starting with self-driving cars, least-related stuff), and keep new acqusitions separate by putting them in alphabet, not google melting pot - Smartphone replacing PC. mainframe -> minicomputer -> PC -> smartphone - USB powered hub, keyboard, mouse, HDMI adapter. Rest is software. - self-driving cars: imagine an app like uber or zipcar/car2go. Press button to summon car, starts countdown timer to when car arrives. Pulls up google maps, enter destination address. Care arrives, you get in, drives you to destination, drops you off, drives away. - It can be electric. 2 chargers per city? Charge itself while empty! - Why would you OWN one? Change your own oil and windshield wipers? Drive it to the mechanic and babysit it? No, car becomes a SERVICE. When Apple begged steve Jobs to come back they made him CEO. - Venture capital got him kicked out but when they rolled to a stop without him they BEGGED him to come back. - He had moved on. NeXT! Pixar! Disney! - They appealed to his vanity. - Only place for him, he outranked the bureaucracy so it didn't apply to him - orders come from above. Company respected him (Founder! Glorious past!) - Once Harlan Sanders (KFC) or Dave Thomas (wendy's) are comfortably dead, they can be venerated without causing uncomfortable new changes. - Apple was desperate, then had momentum. - But Jobs new stuff was NEW. He'd gone to Hollywood (pixar!), wanted to do movies and music now. - iMac was rebadged NeXT box, to him it was old hat. - iTunes, iPod, video iPod, then iPhone could access iTunes live!