Microsoft’s Curious Purchase

May 19th, 2007

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Microsoft’s Curious Purchase

I have to wonder how Microsoft think they can integrate with companies like Avenue A Razorfish, Amnesia and DNA whilst leaving the creative cultures of those companies intact. As someone who is perennially agency-side, I see what many call ‘agency culture’ as something fragile and sensitive to corporate influence. The kind of professional risks that a creative agency habitually must take are hard to fit into conservative balance sheets. It takes a rare breed of management that can scale this kind of business whilst retaining creative integrity. And without that creative integrity it’s hard to hang on to the kind of people you need in an agency. Bear in mind that, to a much greater degree than most, creative agencies’ value lies in their staff. When you empty the people out, there’s precious little left at the bottom of the bucket.

Microsoft has a highly questionable track record when it comes to fostering innovation and creativity. Most of their decent products have come through acquisition, and their current forays into new territory have been haemorrhaging money (Zune + Xbox). The labyrinthine nature of their middle-management bureaucracy is fabled. And it’s evident Ballmer and Gates wouldn’t know good design if they were locked in a room with it. Without Apple as their outsourced user-experience lab, one shudders to think what the state of our PC user interfaces would be today.

Combine this with the usually technology-neutral role of agencies. When a client goes to an agency they want independent advice as to what technology to use. How easy is it going to be for any of these agencies to recommend a Java or open-source based solution for their clients? How long before the zealous sales teams within Microsoft start trying to cross-sell?

I’m really curious how they plan to make this work. I experienced Microsoft first-hand during the original .com boom when they were quietly looking at acquiring agencies in order to push products like IIS and SQL Server into businesses. It didn’t work then, I wonder what is different now?

What this deal smells of to me is that Microsoft had to buy the whole company in order to get the product. I know what this reminds me of. And I note with sadness how only sequels (and nothing new) has come from this.

Chalk me up one ticket for the stalls. If it works it will be something new for our industry, but the risks of failure are high.

End of Folders

May 17th, 2007

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The end of folders?

Oh how I hate folders. They have a fundamental flaw: what happens when a document belongs in several places at once? Since I’m usually working across multiple projects I get unstuck when trying to file stuff (and remember ‘filing stuff’ is just a time sink). Should the document go in ‘strategy’ or ‘.com’ or ‘web 2.0′?

Increasingly I’ve not been bothering, just sticking files into new folders each month and using Spotlight to find them. It’s fast to file, fast to find, and especially removes the ‘mental overhead’ of having to take the time to think about where to file stuff.

Included in Spotlight is the ability to embed metadata within a file. This metadata can then be searched against. However the standard way to add metadata using the Finder is very clunky. You have to select the file, choose ‘get info’ and then type the label into a text field…

I’ve just stumbled upon an application that very nearly solves this. It’s called Tagbot. It provides ‘tag’ management panel that allows you to quickly add tags (ie labels) to files and folders from an editable list of tags. It also provides one-click search to retrieve all files with that tag, plus the ability to tag multiple files at once:

All that’s missing is the ability to apply multiple tags to a file in one step. Coming soon no doubt.

Highly recommended. It’s only a matter of time imho before the metaphor of a ‘folder’ disappears from our desktops (in much the same way that the idea of a ‘structure’ underlying a web site is becoming increasingly nonsensical).

Is Your Civilization Collapsing

May 12th, 2007

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Is your civilization collapsing?

A recording of Jared Diamond’s lecture discussing the themes of his latest book: ‘collapse’, is well worth watching.

In particular I like his discussion of how the core values of a given society that have served it well may need revision when conditions change. He gives the examples of how Europeans began the gradual transition from thinking of themselves as separate nations to being ‘European’ after the second world war. And how the US’s core values that are ‘up for revision’ are its isolationism and it’s consumerism, due to changes in conditions: namely globalization and diminishing environmental resources.

Also interesting is his analysis of how social change takes place. A common scenario is that there is a major issue that benefits a small number of people greatly, and inconveniences a large number a little. Examples are rife, global climate change being one. Only at the point where the consequences of the issue either negatively impact that small group, or greatly effect the common majority, does change occur. This suggests some interesting possibilities for new media technology to increase our cultural reaction times to nascent issues, as mainstream thought is increasingly assailed by the long tail of ideas. Or put another way: reducing the inertia of the mainstream will accelerate the speed at which needed changes in cultural values can occur.

One wonders how his ideas might transfer to online social networks where ‘cultural change’ can shift and re-form orders of magnitude more rapidly that in traditional cultures.

Something for another post, but I do wonder whether social capital could be seen as one of his ‘resources’ that can provoke collapse if exhausted.