Social Mode

The first essay presented in IMPASSES “On Questions and Answers: Some Notes on How To Do Ideas” offers a compelling call to reject all ideologies and to engage in “continued experiments in ways-of-life.” (page 23).

“Ideology is theory that has escaped study” (page 18) is an excellent working definition of ideology. It specifically captures the main issue with any and all ideologies – a truth reduction. Ideologies are not representative of how anything completely works except in only the most trivial of cases. Figuring out what is a trivial case is much harder than one might think. Take an example from mathematics – is arithmetic consistent? Meaning is the whole of arithmetic free of any internal contradictions. It’s still unresolved. Yes, there are a couple of proofs of the consistency of arithmetic but they are complicated and not 100% accepted as final proof. If we can’t be 100% sure of something as “simple” as arithmetic what hope is there of assurance of truth about concepts as vague as God, country, knowledge, etc.

As beings with finite resources (lives and means) we must take shortcuts aka make assumptions and have representations. We wouldn’t get through a day in our life if we tried to work out the complete truth of everything around us. Truth reductions are useful to survival in that we have to behave with imperfect information. But truth reductions can also be extremely dangerous, particularly around complicated issues involving how we relate to the planet and each other. We must always question and re-question what we’ve decided advertently or inadvertently as an acceptable truth reduction. Not doing so may make it such that we miss key information about the world around us and do things that increase suffering and/or reduce the possibility of survival. Consider that for thousands of years slavery was mostly unquestioned and that it took a massive effort in 20th century to educate the population that inhaling tobacco was generally bad for your health.

Our methods of questioning must also be critically analyzed. For a stale approach to questioning may be as misleading as truth reductions. A biased approach to asking questions, such as at a biased university, whose primary objective is to keep operating as a university and needs to “[produce] results that maintain the university.” (page 19) Confirmation biases seep into a huge chunk of scientific research and policy creation (great paper here.). Even when our research is relatively free of flaws we certainly are all guilty of not knowing what we don’t know and are likely not even asking the best questions in which to go research. It seems like a worthwhile approach to “increase our capacity for experimentation.” (page 24).

The essay itself poses a great critical question about methods of study but also confuses the matter with a muddled discussion about Politics and dualism. While certainly useful topics to question and discuss the details covered add little to the main point of the essay other than to be examples of reductionist thinking in a pool of infinite examples. It actually does something I believe the author specifically would like not to do – it politicized the essay a little into a bit of anti-government reduction. There’s simply no need to single out politics as any more reductive and misleading than religion or a billion other ideology laced approaches to going through life.

Math and science as tools comes up a couple of times in the essay and with the questions at the end of the essays. Math and science are also under constant review for their usefulness in not reducing truth. There certainly have been many periods in history where math and science have gone through shocks calling into question their validity as truth seeking approaches. Mathematics, in particular, was shaken very much when Godel unveiled his incompleteness theorems. Far from destroying mathematics as a useful paradigm to form worthwhile questions and work towards useful and true solutions “incompleteness” actually enriched mathematical thinking’s capacity to ask important questions.

The questions at the end of the essay are worth a response. and offer an opportunity to “test out” the ideas of the essay and my own ideations.

1) If theory is merely a tool, how do we prevent it from becoming an apparatus (of control, of power, of ideology) like math and science?

This question seems to misunderstand the main points of the article. The question is reducing the concept of theory established in the essay. Labeling theory with a word phrase like “merely a tool” suggests that there’s something more useful than a tool or that a tool is mere. Theories help us establish models and experiments in which we can go falsify or confirm and refine. The prevention the question asker seems to seek is some prescription for not letting theories turn into ideologies (truth reductions). And it seems the essays answers that quite clearly – always study, always question. In other words there isn’t a single prescription. The prevention of reduction is about re-questioning in every changing ways.

Secondly math and science CAN be apparatuses of control but that doesn’t mean they are a priori. Math and science are various questioning and experimentation approaches also subject to refinement.

2) Academic study (and perhaps this could be said of study more generally) is oftentimes just a regurgitation of previously thought-up ideals. Is novelty as a result of study necessary or is fluctuating between already-done ideas enough?

Again here the questioner assumes too much. Where is the source of this novelty? All thoughts and knowledge are the evolution of previous thoughts and/or responses to the environment. The novelty suggested is emergent over time through the transmission and mutation of information. It’s a non question when thought/ideas are viewed that way and it’s a confusing question period without a definition of thought and ideas.

3) Is study solitary or communal? What is the relation between “spreading anarchy” and others participating in critical studying? Is there a set of values being set up around study whereby those who don’t participate in it (or participate in the “proper” ways) are seen as less credible, or is the questioning of this itself falling into the trap of movement-building?

This is a juicy set of questions. Study is both a solitary and communal (and environmental activity). We are all people within a world of other people. I think it would be useless contradiction to define proper way of studying. There are an infinite number of ways to explore this world. The end goal being finding ever changing experiments on ways-to-live. Particular methods of study might be viewed as inconsistent or improper within their method but it doesn’t invalidate them in the general idea of “studying”. Fiction is a useful critical synthesis of the world. So is non fiction and a painting or a music piece or a poem or science experiment. The keys seem to be participation and being ever critical. The more variation the more possible a real exploration of possibilities.

Response to “On Questions and Answers” from IMPASSES

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Oct 27
Recently, ~~the collective members of~~ MonkeyWrench Books and Pallaksch Press in Austin, TX published a set of essays in book form called “Impasses.” Here I intend to respond to the essays and the questions directly and indirectly posed.

There are a great deal of questions presented in the short volume so this will not be an easy nor quick effort. The volume is an impassioned but far too brief exploration of several important threads. I’m afraid my responses to the questions will end up with a bunch more questions due to the condensed source material. Or rather, i have many questions for the authors so i can better understand the ideas and the backdrop for the essays.

Before I dive into the specific essays I have to start at the title of the book and the introduction. I’m unclear about what is at an impasse and exactly what the functional definition of an impasse is.

In our studied patience we may be able to discuss what others pass over in silence: the generalized impasse which is our situation. In a moment when the old ways of engaging seem not to be having the anticipated effects, we offer both some meditations on what it means to be where we are and a gesture toward new ways of understanding and resisting. Each of the five conference pieces sets out from a stalemate where all options seem exhausted and all avenues explored. For us, to confess to an impasse is not to admit defeat, but rather to acknowledge we have reached a critical point the continual process of thinking and refining our ideas. If we are still discussing, still figuring out how to speak with and listen to each other, then the spark of resistance is not extinguished.

Here i’m unclear whether the impasses are such that the authors believe there is a real impasse or whether this is just a literary device to inspire discussion. In one sense they are suggesting there is a general impasse for the overall situation in which they exist. Then later they suggest that instead they are still figuring things out, so not at an impasse.

The title and overall structure suggests that the authors believe there is an actual impasse and that they have a possible method, this book and its questions and the process that generated this book, to move past these impasses.

I’m digging into this because the clear statement of whether there is a real impasse has material impact to the the interpretation of the book.

I hope to engage the authors in a conversation to iron out this initial point. From there i will proceed to answer, from my perspective, the questions posed at the end of each essay and then dig into the contents of each essay. I will then make a general response to common themes and overall anarchist philosophy and tooling which is lightly touched on in the appendix and through out each essay.

I believe the spirit of the book and the collective, based on the authors’ website, is about engagement. Nothing more and nothing less. In that regard that spirit is alive and well with me.

Impasse Rebuttal Preamble

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Oct 25
As learners, Skinner said, “we are automatically reinforced when we successfully control the physical world (ibid:75).” Teaching implies the identification of desired outcomes and precise planning of strategies for facilitating “the arrangement of contingencies of reinforcement which expedite learning (Skinner,1959:15).” The educator prepares the students for situations not yet risen by bringing discriminant operants under the control of stimuli expected to occur in those situations. The child is forewarned and forearmed with powerful tools for controlling nature, the very exercise of which provides reinforcement. Because of this, the natural payoffs inherent in the subject matter are the teacher’s chief allies (Hutcheon,1996:413). Skinner maintained that educators who recommend external means of motivating learning have got it all wrong, noting that “the sheer control of nature itself is reinforcing (Skinner, 1959:102).” As he reminded us, “The motives in education are the motives of all human behavior … We appeal to that drive to control the environment that makes a baby continue to crumple a noisy paper and the scientist to continue to press forward with his predictive analysis of nature (Skinner, 1948:124).”

from a very nice paper on Piaget and Skinner.

All living things learn in response to their environments. And living things are part of the environment. All living things relate to their environments, even when in the same environments as other living things, uniquely. All living things have enough genetic difference, even when in the same species and born in the same “family”, to have unique responses (developmental and learning) to the world around them.

This is a very simple set up and yet has enough power to cover the bulk of how we all learn. When thinking about what approaches to educating children are more or less effective I evaluate how seriously an approach considers these basic principles. Every environment is a learning environment – it’s a matter of figuring out, and this is complicated, what is learnable in that environment. Each person, even a young child, is a complex mix of genetics, epigenetics and environmental history. Some environments build on this concept and others resist it.

So what is an ideal environment? What is the best “classroom” for a child to learn?

First, it’s important to figure out what it is we want a child to learn. And, of course, this is no easy question. Broadly the goal of any “education” (in the formal school sense) is to provide strategies for survival (and thriving).* Effective strategies for survival is by no means a fixed target. As long as the world changes so will the strategies that best ensure survival. So in some sense what we want a child to learn isn’t one particular strategy but a way to derive strategies in response to a changing environment. We could call that critical thinking, synthesis, and problem solving. In short, we want children to learn how to learn – to be more aware of the world around them, to be able to process information efficiently and effectively and to manipulate the environment as needed.

Is anything else needed to be taught? No, not strictly. There’s no need to preach a particular curriculum as fundamental. Yes for certain paths in life and in our culture knowing a particular skill or piece of information could be beneficial. If mathematicians make more money than other professions and making more money provides better means for survival then it is likely a child taught mathematics should survive and thrive. That is, as long as the child finds mathematics interesting and so forth enough to actually pursue it and develop enough skill. Even in that example one can get to the point of survival without assuming a priori that there’s intrinsic, universal value to mathematics. Everything worth knowing is in relation to the person knowing it and their relation to their changing environment. The essential learning necessary for a person s being able to evaluate quickly enough to matter whether a strategy is effective or not. The strategies themselves should be viewed as experiments – behavior-response experiences to see what is worth doing and knowing.

Based on this the ideal environment is not a singular environment. it’s not a classroom, it’s not a gym, it’s not lecture hall, it’s not a playroom. The ideal environmentS are different for everyone. Some children do very well in a traditional classroom, others do not. Some prefer being alone, others in nature and so on and on. Just as discussed in the what is worth learning, environment staging should be viewed as an experiment – contexts to see what reinforces successful strategies for survival.

Combine strategy testing and environment building and exploration and you get the whole equation of education. For certain children maintaining a steady environment that induces effective exploration of strategies might be best. For other children varying environments may be the key to the building up of strategies.

The goal of education can be refined from above as: increase the repertoire of behavior** in order to identify and execute strategies to survive and thrive.

This probably sounds horribly inefficient. Is possible to educate a family, village, country, and world of children on a completely individual basis? Yes! That’s exactly what happens anyway. It is LESS efficient to make the assumption that this isn’t what is actually happening and so to be unaware how everyone responds differently. To use the same textbooks, same computer programs, same schedule for everyone makes an assumption that it’s “optimal enough” for any given child. Who knows what potentially incredible strategies are going unexplored.

The world has now developed a sufficiently robust set of tools to uniquely educate, without compromise, every child. Tablets and laptops can be obtained for less than $100, be connected to a free wifi at libraries and other community zones, and provided access to millions of free books, free websites, free Ivy League virtual classrooms. Obviously, there is more to it than a computer and the Internet. More and more networks of volunteer organizations, sports, after school programs, book clubs, excited artists, professional musicians are available for almost anyone (in the US) to join/connect with/create. With the social network inter-connectivity of the world with more than a billion people connected, likely by less than 6 degrees of separation, identifying communities to join, people to talk to, and new environments to join has become much more possible.

I’m not suggesting that everything is perfect and that education has been solved! Quite the contrary. The space of possibilities is now MUCH greater than it ever has been. It’s not even more vital to explore this space of educational possibilities in search of better and better strategies. There’s no right or wrong way to go about this. There’s more or less effective strategies for you and your children. And there’s an infinite number of strategies possible and we all have finite energy/resources/means.

I suppose if I had to conclude or provide some closure on my point here it’s that the ideal education is really whatever works for you. And what “works” is a complicated mix of means and goals and values. There are so many options available and yet to be created and that seems to me to be a great thing. Ideal really.

*It’s relatively straight forward to assume that’s the goal of almost any education, formal or not. Though would could say in certain situations we are trying to teach someone to suffer and die, such as in the case of prison

**repertoire of behavior doesn’t imply a broad set of behaviors, it could be the case that become a master in a particular skill set becomes a necessary strategy. That is, experts often demonstrate a very wide and deep set of strategies/abilities within a given discipline.

The Ideal Education

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Oct 4
I’d say it takes a lot of guts to directly educate your children……except that it doesn’t. It actually takes far more guts to entrust your children to the bizarre, antiquated system of education that exists today in America.

I was educated at a great public school. I had more than one amazing teacher that took interest in me and helped me do more than get by. This is not the average experience. It’s not even the common experience. I was VERY fortunate.

Here’s reality…. only 17% of the adult US population gets an undergraduate college degree. The textbook industry is worth over $12 billion / year in the US (or here if you prefer). And 18% of kids in k-12 are obese. and I can find sooooo many more facts to support the idea that having kids sit in classrooms obsessing over shitty textbooks under the pretense of getting into college is one of the WORST IDEAS EVER.

The fact is I’m a guy (a uchicago guy too) who has hired and fired a lot of people in the working world. I’ve hired more and more people over ODesk, Amazon MT, and other crowd sourcing options than the typical prep school, college, intern feeder system. AND i’m a parent of an 8 and 10 year old. The gig is up. The typical way to make a living isn’t worth it any more.

The conclusion.

Either we’re teaching kids to figure it out on their own or we’re not. Teaching them the same old system and the same old “this is how my dad it” is a recipe in futility and poverty. The new world order is about access and tooling and synthesis, not facts and testing. Our kids need to learn how to not just problem solve but set up the problem. Our kids need to learn what problems matter at all.

And that takes experience and time. If you are trying to teach them courage for the sake of courage please do keep them chasing rote knowledge that we will automate before they graduate. Then we’ll see if they can survive against all odds.

For me, I’m playing the odds and teaching my kids to understand the odds and their own responsibility for their education.

The Guts it Takes To Educate

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Sep 30
Last week hanging out with some coworkers in the middle of a heated philosophical conversation someone paused and asked me (paraphrasing), “Why do you ask all these questions? why ask about what matters all the time?” In immediate response i simply said, “It’s the strategy I’ve learned that works for me to navigate the world.”

The question stayed with me over the weekend. While I believe my immediate response was accurate I wanted to better understand why it’s accurate – why is relentlessly asking “what matters? why does this matter? etc” an effective strategy (in my eyes) for navigating the world?

I believe the answer is FREEDOM. not free will, not free beer. but freedom of behavioral responses. Asking big questions opens perspectives and opens up new patterns of behavior. If one isn’t questioning assumptions and existing mythologies/fictions (and everything is somewhat of a fiction) then it’s hard to develop new strategies should new information come to light. Also, power is often a result of others knowing something you don’t. Not developing a question-based strategy gives into that aspect of power and over time it can be very deep conditioned helplessness.

I might even conclude this is the only strategy to achieve actual freedom.

Why?

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Aug 5
In Defense of The Question Is The Thing

I’ve oft been accused of being all vision with little to no practical finishing capability. That is, people see me as a philosopher not a doer. Perhaps a defense of myself and philosophy/approach isn’t necessary and the world is fine to have tacticians and philosophers and no one is very much put off by this.

I am not satisfied. The usual notion of doing and what is done and what constitutes application is misguided and misunderstood.

The universe is determined yet unpredictable (see complexity theory, cellular automota). Everything that happens and is has anticedents (see behaviorism, computation, physics). Initiatial conditions have dramatic effect on system behavior over time (see chaos theory). These three statements are roughly equivalent or at least very tightly related. And they form the basis of my defense of what it means to do.

“Now I’m not antiperformance, but I find it very precarious for a culture only to be able to measure performance and never be able to credit the questions themselves.” – Robert Irwin, page 90, seeing is forgetting the name of thing one sees

The Question Is The Thing! And by The Question that means the context or the situation or the environment or the purpose. and I don’t mean The Question or purpose as assigned by some absolute authority agent. It is the sense of a particular or relevative instance we consider a question. What is the question at hand?

Identifying and really asking the question at hand drives the activity to and fro. To do is to ask. The very act of seriously asking a question delivers the do, the completion. So what people mistake in me as “vision” is really an insatiable curiousity and need to ask the right question. To do without the question is nothing, it’s directionless motion and random walk. To seriously ask a question every detail of the context is important. To begin answering the question requires the environment to be staged and the materials provided for answers to emerge.

There is no real completion without a constant re-asking of the question. Does this answer the question? Did that answer the question?

So bring it to something a lot of people associate me with: web and software development. In the traditional sense I haven’t written a tremendous amount of code myself. Sure I’ve shipped lots of pet projects, chunks of enterprise systems, scripts here and there, and the occassional well crafted app and large scale system. There’s a view though that unless you wrote every line of code or contributed some brilliant algorithm line for line, you haven’t done anything. The fact is there’s a ton of code written every day on this planet and very little of it would i consider “doing something”. Most of it lacks a question, it’s not asking a question, a real, big, juicy, ambitious question.

Asking the question in software development requires setting the entire environment up to answer it. Literally the configuration of programmer desks, designer tools, lighting, communication cadence, resources, mixing styles and on and on. I do by asking the question and configuring the environment. The act of shipping software takes care of itself if the right question is seriously asked within an environment that let’s answers emerge.

Great questions tend to take the shape of How Does This Really Change the World for the User? What new capability does this give the world? How does this extend the ability of a user to X? What is the user trying to do in the world?

Great environments to birth answers are varied and don’t stay static. The tools, the materials all need to change per the unique nature of the question.

Often the question begs us to create less. Write less code. Tear code out. Leave things alone. Let time pass. Write documentation. Do anything but add more stuff that stuffs the answers further back.

The question and emergent answers aren’t timeless or stuck in time. The context changes the question or shape of the question may change.

Is this to say I’m anti shipping (or anti performance as Irwin put it)? No. Lets put it this way we move too much and ask too little and actual don’t change the world that much. Do the least amount to affect the most is more of what I think is the approach.

The question is The Thing much more than thing that results from work. The question has all the power. It starts and ends there.

The Question is The Thing

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May 23
Operational Definition of the “purpose” of various constructs and concepts that may or may not matter to you, me or anyone else.

Big Data – Due to reduction in resource costs and improved technique, use and applications of data are no longer required to be defined before collecting data.

Business – sell goods and services for more than it costs a business to produce and deliver them in order to survive

Education – teach and learn strategies to survive (navigate the changing environments of our lives)

Technology – make established processes more efficient or enable previously impossible capabilities

Project Management – getting a project done with highest satisfaction evaluation

Career – a narrative about why you do what you do so that it makes more sense to those that might pay you to do more of it
Why state these?

A) it’s fun

B) too often people get confused about the details/specifics of an instance or implementation of said things. The problem this is thinking the instance is the thing. It’s the whole Forest / Trees thing.

C) consequences matter

What’s the Point

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Apr 23
#BostonMarathon

Been thinking about this since I got off a plane from vacation today. Tonight I came home after dinner to NBC News doing a special on what this recent bombing at the marathon means for public events in America. How trite.

Are we all still asking these trivial questions like this in the global community? We are the last country/culture to deal with all of this reality.

A couple of thoughts:
- American communities have FAR TOO MANY anniversaries and “never forget” events. We celebrate our victimhood and wonder why other people (in and out of this country) hate us to the point of wanting to kill us.
- Executing mass violence in America is a trivial exercise. Not because we lack security infrastructure but because our culture celebrates violence and thinks we should always exact justice always. It’s so 1850s Cowboy bullshit. And hasn’t it always been this way in this country?
- We focus on “event protection” as opposed to a THOUGHTFUL, REFLECTIVE CULTURE. Our culture is about immediate reaction instead of reflection and consilience. We glorify the act. We spectate and consume the adrenalized moments.
- We consume far more than we give. This has consequences. We haven’t learned this yet, not nearly enough.
- We spend far more money on checking my shoes for bombs at the airport than on making sure everyone has access to the Internet and life changing literature.
- Praying does nothing. It’s self serving. Try reducing violence through education, arms reduction and/or other real ways. God doesn’t exist so lets stop pretending he/she/it does and wasting precious time and energy on God.
- I have no idea who did this, why they did it. I almost don’t care. This will keep happening until it doesn’t. And I really don’t know how gun violence and bombing and wars are going to stop. It’s probably more likely to happen once we stop trying to own every thing, every person, every idea and we stop lying to each other about how it all works. Religion is crap and false. Most things we push unto children and our cultures isn’t about truth or love but instead is about making sure certain people stay in power and amass riches. Try really investigating and learning about animal / human behavior and the other bodies of knowledge that help us get closer to getting it and maybe we can all have a real dialog. For now this is getting really fuckin old, all this killing people for ridiculous reasons and in cowardly ways here and abroad
I’m saying to myself tonight. Get involved. Make this world better in non-violent ways.
Boston, America, and Violence

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Apr 15
Here’s a lovely piece about how curiosity has less CPU horsepower than an iPhone5.

The very cool thing I key on here is the clever solution to this incredible technical achievement of having a rover on mars doing all this science:

Each day, after the lander downloads the latest batch of data to the 100 scientists watching her movements, the team determines what they want her do next and make sure that their goals align with Curiosity’s capabilities. Then the software team writes the necessary script and sends it off via uplink. Because of the roughly 14 minutes it takes for the instructions to reach Mars, all of this has to be done within the window, when Curiosity is sleeping.

The technology is actually a dance. A dance between all the information going between the red planet, Curiosity, the void, into the earth bound computers, into the scientists brains, back out into the computers, back to the void, back to Curiosity…. a musical remix ever evolving. The team behind Curiosity didn’t attempt to program the be all and end all of Curiosity. Instead they came up with some building blocks and a language to communicate and agreed to dance.

And the bigger idea here is that everything is connected. To work on interesting, important, useful problems the approach is an interplay between humans, machines, software – it is rarely a steady state solution or even a discrete solution.

The Art of Technology Problem Solving

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Feb 4
The aim of most businesses is to create wealth for those working at it. Generally it is preferred to do this in a sustainable, scalable fashion so that wealth may continue to be generated for a long time. The specific methods may involve seeking public valuation in the markets, selling more and more product directly profitably, private valuation and investment and more. The aim of most technology based companies to make the primary activity and product of the business involve technology. Most common understanding of the “technology” refers to information technology, bio technology, advanced hardware and so forth – i.e. tools or methods that go beyond long established ways of doing things and/or analog approaches. So the aims of a technology company are to create and maintain sustainable, scalable wealth generation through technological invention and execution.

Perhaps there are better definitions of terms and clearer articulation of the aims of business but this will suffice to draw out an argument for how technology companies could fully embrace the idea of a platform and, specifically, a technological platform. Too often the technology in a technology company exists solely in the end product sold to the market. It is a rare technology company that embraces technological thinking every where – re: big internet media still managing advertising contracts through paper and faxes, expense reports through stapled papers to static excel spreadsheets and so on. There are even “search” engine companies that are unable to search over all of their own internal documentation and knowledge.

The gains of technology are significant when applied everywhere in a company. A technological product produced by primitive and inefficient means is usually unable to sustain its competitive edge as those with technology in their veins quickly catch up to any early leads by a first, non technical mover. Often what the world sees on the outside of a technology company is The Wizard of Oz. A clever and powerful façade of technology – a vision of smoking machines doing unthinkable things. When in reality it is the clunky, hub bub of a duct taped factory of humans pulling levers and making machine noises. If the end result is the same, who cares? No one – if the result can be maintained. It never scales to grow the human factory of tech facade making. Nor does it scale to turn everything over to the machines.

What’s contemplated here is a clever and emergent interaction of human and machine technology and how a company goes from merely using technology to becoming a platform. Consider an example of a company that produces exquisite financial market analysis to major brokerage firms. It may be that human analysts are far better than algorithms at making the brilliant and challenging pattern recognition observations about an upcoming swing in the markets. There is still a technology to employ here. Such a company should supply the human analysts with as much enhancing tools and methods to increase the rate at which human analysts can spot patterns, reduce the cost in spreading the knowledge where it needs to go and to complete the feedback loop on hits and misses. There is no limit to how deeply a company should look at enhancing the humans ability. For instance, how many keystrokes does it take for the analyst to key in their findings? How many hops does a synthesized report go through before hitting the end recipient? how does the temperature of the working space impact pattern recognition ability? Perhaps all those details are far more of an impact to the sustainable profit than tuning a minute facet in some analytic algorithm.

The point here is that there should be no facet of a business left untouched by technology enhancement. Too often technology companies waste millions upon millions of dollars updating their main technology product only to see modest or no gain at all. The most successful technology companies of the last 25 years have all found efficiencies through technology mostly unseen by end users and these become their competitive advantages. Dell – ordering and build process. Microsoft – product pre-installations. Google – efficient power sources for data centers. Facebook – rapid internal code releases. Apple – very efficient supply chain. Walmart – intelligent restocking. Amazon – everything beyond the core “ecommerce”.

In a sense, these companies recognized their underlying ”platform” soon after recognizing their main value proposition. They learned quickly enough to scale that proposition – and to spend a solid blend of energy on the scale and the product innovation. A quick aside – scale here is taken to mean how efficiently a business can provide its core proposition to the widest, deepest customer base. It does not refer solely to hardware or supply chain infrastructure, though often that is a critical part of it.

One of many interesting examples of such platform thinking is the Coors Brewing company back in its hey day. Most people would not consider Coors a “technology” company. In the 1950s though it changed many “industries” with the introduction of the modern aluminum can. This non-beer related technology reduced the cost of operations, created a recycling sub industry, reduced the problem of tin-cans damaging the beers taste and so on. It also made it challenging on several competitors to compete on distribution, taste and production costs. This isn’t the first time the Coors company put technology to use in surprising ways. They used to build and operate their own powerplants to reduce reliance on non optimal resources and to have better control over their production.

Examples like this abound. One might conclude that any company delivery product at scale can be classified as a technology company – they all will have a significant platform orientation. However, this does not make them a platform company.

What distinguishes a platform technology from simply a technology company is one in which the platform is provided to partners and customers to scale their businesses as well. These are the types of companies where their product itself becomes scale. These are the rare, super valuable companies. Google, Apple, Intel, Facebook, Microsoft, Salesforce.com, Amazon and so on. These companies often start by becoming highly efficient technically in the production of their core offering and then turn that scale and license it to others. The value generation gets attributed to the scale provider appropriately in that it becomes a self realizing cycle. The ecosystem built upon the platform of such companies demands the platform operator to continue to build their platform so they too may scale. The platform operator only scales by giving more scale innovation back to the ecosystem. Think Google producing Android, offering Google Analytics for Free and so on. Think Facebook and Open Graph and how brands rely on their facebook pages to connect and collect data. Think Amazon and its marketplace and Cloud Computing Services. Think Microsoft and the MSDN/developer resources/cloud computing. Think Apple and itunes, app store and so on.

It’s not all that easy though! There seems to come a time with all such platform companies that a critical decision must be made before it’s obvious that it’s going to work. To Open The Platform Up To Others Or Not? Will the ecosystem adopt it? How will they pay for it? Can we deal with what is created? Are we truly at scale to handle this? Are we open enough to embrace the opportunities that come out of it? Are we ready to cede control? Are we ready to create our own competitors?

That last question is the one big one. But it’s the one to embrace to be a super valuable, rare platform at the heart of a significant ecosystem. And it happens to be the way to create a path to sustainable wealth generation that isn’t a short lived parlor trick.

Technology and Platform Companies

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Jan 8