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The book Getting Real – written by the web-company 37signals – there are many interesting things to be found. Many of those things can be interpreted very philosophically, even tough this book is all about practice. The key concept in Getting Real is building a successful business using simplicity.

The recent years I’ve been doing a lot of software development. As most young learning-developers, I would look back at my six month old work and say: Hmmz, why the hell did I do it like this? I’m convinced that all software developers go to several stages during their careers and I’m also convinced that it takes you at least X amount of projects to reach a senior level. One of the phases I could qualify myself in two years ago was the ‘solving the meta-problem phase’. This is a known phenomanon in the IT where people not solve the actual problem but the problem to a problem. (For example building a message delivery system while the customer wants a simple email form.) The past year I’ve started to actually listen to one of the oldest software wisdoms out there: KISS: ‘Keep It Simple Stupid’.

Getting Real gave me another push towards ‘simplicity’. And now, I finally saw the light :)

One of the most ming bogging examples of simplicity is the phenomenon of emergence. The best example of this is DNA, a simple set of instructions which grows to something complex which is adapted to the environment. Also, making your software’s code more simple creates many advantages for both developer and user.

Simplicity isn’t just something we find in the architecture of life and systems but it’s also something we can apply to human society. Today, I went to the Ginza Apple store where I let my girlfriend buy a MacBook. In the back of the store there were two big elevators. One for going up, one for going down. There was no button to call the elevator, we just had to wait. Once the elevator came, we got in and were kind of confused, no buttons? Yes, just wait and it will stop at all floors. Now in a way this elevator can be considered very unfriendly since we had to wait. But the next time we got in, we didn’t spend any energy on thinking! There was no choice. And that’s another interesting point, choice.

Also in Getting Real, which is mainly about web applications. They demonstrate how their products outdo their competition because they are way more simple and therefore easier to use. I think choice is another important factor. As you might have read before, it’s a fact that choice is one of the main psychological contributors of unhappiness. This is well-explained by Barry Schwartz on TEDTalks

These two aspects, simplicity and the social effects of it, make Philips Electronics’ statement really profound: ‘Sense and Simplicity’.

After playing around with the Macbook and after riding the AppleStore Elevator, I believe. Sense and Simplicity.

ReadWriteWeb has just posted their Web predictions for 2007 [1]. I think it’s nice that they omitted ‘2.0’ in that title. Just like in the first bubble, the Web has two types of trends, the potential and the hype. This has several consequences for 2007.

Andreas Kluth writes that the Web 2.0 hype will die down in 2007 [2]. Thanks to private equity, this bubble burst will be fairly discrete compared to the 2000 burst [3]. I think this will happen too, especially since US’ economy is becoming less optimistic. The first ones to go are probably some of the 400 social-networking alternatives or rounded-cornered BullshitR websites. However, this is just the ‘hype’ part of Web 2.0, not the potential/abstract part.

‘Don’t bet against the Internet’ is what Eric Schmidt advices. In his article in ‘the Economist’ he states: “The past few years have taught us that business models based on controlling consumers or content don’t work. Betting against the net is foolish because you’re betting against human ingenuity and creativity“ [4]. Indeed we have seen profound results of social-content websites like Wikipedia [5], another example can be found in the defeat of portals by search [6]. I think this is the ‘potential’ part of the new web, which can be summarized by a set of ground principles:

• clouds rather than trees
• simple rather than complex (KISS, Keep It Simple Stupid [7])
• loose rather than tight
• open rather than closed

references:

• [1] http://www.readwriteweb.com/archives/biggest_web_trend_2007.php
• [2] “When the hype dies down”, The Economist, 21st edition, page 26
• [3] http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Dot-com_bubble
• [4] “Don’t bet against the internet”, The Economist, 21st edition, page 124
• [5] http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wikipedia:Size_of_Wikipedia
• [6] “The Search: How Google and Its Rivals Rewrote the Rules of Business and Transformed Our Culture”, John Battelle
• [7] http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/KISS_principle

My English vocabulary is relatively small since it’s not my native language. Often I read materials on the Internet and sometimes I have to lookup some terms. If I wouldn’t lookup these new words, I will never learn them.

Secondly, it often happens that I know the meaning of some concepts, but I would like to know more about them. Lookup everything takes a while, which will disturb your mental model while reading.

This is why I started working on a little project to embed the knowledge of the Web in the reading process. I’m developing this thing in a pragmatic way using RubyOnRails. The main objectives are: I’ve just finished these objectives, which required writing a little HTML parser and an interface to use the Python NLP toolkit (which is far more superior then Ruby’s).

• Providing the content with a simple piece of code that can make any piece of HTML smarter.
• Using Natural Language Parsing (NLP) to pick out the important words.
• Using Princeton’s WordNet to explain basic concepts.

NLP screenshot	Wordnet screenshot

At the moment I’m refactoring the code so it can be distributed as a RubyOnRails plugin. For the near future the following features are on my TODO list:

• Interfacing with the Wikipedia encyclopaedia.
• Detecting concepts like ‘Software Engineer’ rather then detecting ‘Software’ and ‘Engineer’.
• Looking for alternatives forms of user/reading interaction.

Current code: laboratoire_nuage-101206.tar.gz (or browse)

Requires: Python-NLTK, Ruby-Linguistics, Ruby-WordNet and RubyOnRails

Have you used one of those office tools on the Web? (for example: Writely, Zoho) As you will probably agree, these tools work horribly if you compare them to traditional software like MS Office or OpenOffice. I discovered this a few weeks ago when I wanted to write a fancy presentation for school.

Let me tell you something about S-curves:

This is the traditional view of 2 technologies overlapping. As the performance (value) of technology 1 improves it will first go rapidly, but after a while it has reached it limits. For example the efficiency of an ordinary light bulb. As technology 2 is in it’s development peak, the performance of technology 2 will intersect technology 1. In the case of light bulbs technology 2 can be the LED or the gas-discharge lamp.

In the book, The Innovator’s Dilemma, Clayton M. Christensen proves that this S-curve graph is incomplete. This is because both technologies are not used in the same market (or value network):

For example, if we would replace market A with ‘the flashlight market’. Technology 1 will be the ordinary light bulb. Market B will be ‘light indicators in electrical equipment’. Technology 2 will be the LED. In the red marked circle one can see that the performance of the LED, which was mainly used as a simple indicator, is now mature enough to be used in flashlights. This has a profound impact on companies producing flashlights and their suppliers. Market B can be a very small market or even a bunch of nerds (no market). This makes it hard to see the new technology coming, hence it’s name ‘Disruptive Technology’.

If we would look at Market A and Market B in the case of software, we can define the following markets (better term: value network).

• Desktop Software: achieving productivity with the computer, boxed software (MS Office)
• Web Applications: collaboration, access anywhere, e-commerce, serviced software (Writely)

Web applications will soon match the values of the desktop software, it might take a while, but from the looks of it this will happen: Techniques like DHTML, AJAX and Flash make productivity/usability better in web applications Internet connections are getting more common throughout the world (and mandatory to achieve productivity in the Desktop Software market).

As ‘The innovator’s Dilemma’ proves, there is a common failure when faced with a disruptive technology. In the case of the Hard Drive industry, 15 out of 84 companies survived when faced with the new disruptive technology. Now, this happened not simply because they didn’t see the new technology coming. The main reason is that an organization’s structure and workings are shaped for their own value network. Therefore, the best known strategy for dealing with the disruptive technology is starting (or buying!) a new separate company to deal with the disruptive technology.

As the Office division of Microsoft is busy preparing for their web capable Office Live, other independent small companies are building their Web-Office products (Zoho, Writely). According to the Innovator’s Dillema, Google has the obvious advantage, because it owns a small separate company, called Writely.

Zo ongeveer 10 jaar geleden is in het kleine land Hong Kong de Octopus kaart ingevoerd. Deze RFID-kaart, het FeLiCa product van Sony, is voor het eerst op grote schaal succesvol toegepast. Miljoenen mensen gebruiken het al jaren iedere dag om hun ov-kaartjes en frisdrank te kopen. Dankzij deze technologie kunnen mensen gewoon hun telefoon of portemonnee over een lezer heen halen om te betalen. De naam Octopus staat symbool voor de vele OV-armen waarin de kaart gebruikt kan worden.

In Nederland is men nu ook bezig om een Octopus kaart in te voeren, de OV-Chipkaart. Dit project, berucht om zijn onduidelijke planningen, is gebaseerd op de Hong Kong Octopus. Hong Kong SAR, nu een beschermd onderdeel van China, is geografisch klein met een zeer dicht bepakt OV-systeem. Dit maakt Hong Kong extra makkelijk om zo’n systeem op grote schaal in te zetten. Het soortgelijke SUICA systeem in Japan laat zien dat ook grote landen het kunnen. Uiteraard is het nog lang geen Hong Kong, voor de metro heb je bijvoorbeeld nog andere betaalmiddelen. Toch is het een goede hoop voor een klein behoedzaam rijk land als Nederland.

Deze droom is in Japan al werkelijkheid waar men in de winkels de telefoon of chipkaart over de toonbank heen haalt. Dit is slechts het alternatief voor de ongemakkelijke verouderde chipknip. Er is namelijk nog veel meer mogelijk als men iets verder kijkt dan OV (alle informatie over de ‘open architectuur’ wijst uit dat hier totaal geen rekening mee wordt gehouden).

Er is enige twijfel over de mate van privacy die de OV-chipkaart biedt. Als mensen echter dit document goed doorlezen dan ziet men dat er ook anonieme kaarten te verkrijgen zijn. De kaarten op naam, die dezelfde privacy issues brengen als een pinpas, bieden interessante mogelijkheden. Het is de bedoeling dat de kaarten op naam gekoppeld kunnen worden aan een rekening zodat het saldo automatisch verhoogt kan worden. Als er verder gekeken wordt dan het OV paradigma dan zijn we eindelijk van die magneetstrip af! Een prachtig alternatief voor de pinpas en creditcard

De overheid pompt miljoenen euro’s in de ontwikkeling van dit systeem. Bij het bedenken van dit systeem is echter geen rekening gehouden met de komst van een nieuwe generatie betaalsystemen. Ik hoop dat er hier niet een overduidelijke fout wordt gemaakt die grote mogelijkheden van innovatie tegen houd!