Liminal states

Wikia‘s an open-source search engine that uses community feedback to improve search results, an approach referred to as ‘social search’, and they released their alpha version today. I briefly discuss the social networking aspects of this and my initial experiences on the Tales from the Net blog and linked out to some initial reviews and discussion. In South Korea, Naver dominates the market via a social search approach; when I was at Microsoft, I strongly lobbied for the company investing in this to complement its algorithmic approaches and try to leapfrog Google rather than catching up, so I’m a big believer in the possibilities if it’s done right.

There’s an interesting debate about Wikia’s intent to be transparent about its search algorithms and implementation: will this give the advantage to people trying to hack the system to put their site on top? Or — because the community as a whole and responsibly-behaving web site owners all have an interest in getting the users high-quality search results — will it instead create a system where search engine optimizers and marketers (SEOs/SEMs) are above-ground participants, and overall results are better? Hard to know … if Wikia starts to get some traction, with luck, we’ll find out.

I picked up this short paperback (by Keith Yamahsita and Sandra Spataro) because I was intrigued with its design; it turned out to be very interesting in general. Unstuck is billed as “a tool for yourself, your team, and your world”, and while most of the examples come from the corporate space, it’s just as valuable for non-profit or political groups.

All leaders, teams, and individuals who aspire to be great, get stuck. That said, not all individuals who get stuck are wiling to admit that they’re stuck…. When you’re truly reaching out to the world, trying new things, and living up to your potential — that’s when you’re most likely to get stuck, because you’re deeply challenging the status quo. Those of us who stay stuck, do so because we’re paralyzed by fear. We’ve learned that getting unstuck requires staring our fear in the face, and relentlessly leaning into it. Staring fear in the face, the challenge then is to find one sliver of opportunity to defeat that fear — and often, that breakthrough is our opening to getting unstuck. From there, it’s about systems thinking, systems thinking, systems thinking.

Indeed. The three sections of the book deal with admitting you’re stuck (or recognizing the symptoms), diagnosing why you’re stuck (getting at the root causes: being overwhelmed, exhausted, directionless, hopeless, battle-torn, worthless, and alone), and doing something about it.

The last section is the longest with 40+ brief ideas for getting unstuck. The practicality and concreteness of these ideas is why I agree with the authors that the book really is a tool: “build a living lab”, “build a haven for radical thinking”, “start with the control points of the systme”, “write a headline from the future”, “make your brand a manifestation of your company’s purpose”, “be careful about which mode you are in”, “give the movement a name”, and “take over the tv station” are just a few examples. There’s also a lot of attention to network-centric thinking and diversity, including specifically calling out how younger employees are often marginalized. I’ve employed most of these techniques at various times (for example, I described a proposal for working on culture by focusing on internal communications as “putting the dissidents in charge of the communication ministry”) and they work well; along with Bob Sutton’s Weird Ideas that Work, this is the best collection I’ve seen.

The navigation through the third part of the book is interesting. Going through the section linearly presents techniques in an order that seems fairly random to me; charts in the identify the paths that correspond to each of the “serious seven” root causes; and most of the pages have one to three links to other pages. For example, on the page for “hold a summit”, there are links called “take to the airwaves” (pointing to “take over the tv station), “what will be the name of the event?” (pointing to “give the movement a name”), and “what will the headlines say?” (pointing to “write a headline from the future”). Particularly since the text of the links is different from the title of the target, it feels like a very wiki-esque organization to me; the excellent graphic design makes it feel very natural, and quite usable, in dead tree form as well.

Strongly recomended.

Tales from the Net.

Stay tuned!

The group blog THREAT LEVEL is one of my favorite things about wired, and Kevin Poulsen’s year-end roundup is a great example of why:

It was a year of soul searching at THREAT LEVEL, every day a fresh challenge to our fundamental beliefs and convictions: Alberto Gonzales made us pine for John Ashcroft; Google made us love roving surveillance cams; and Jammie Thomas’ internet spoofing defense was enough to make us secretly root for the RIAA.

As if that’s not enough, Kim Zetter’s combo of World’s Top Surveillance Societies (covering PrivacyInternational’s report) and FBI Building Vast Database of Iris, Face and Fingerprint Scans highlights why the US is classified as an “endemic surveillance” society along with China, Russia, the U.K. and others.   And Sarah Lai Stirland’s Will push polling become a factor in the early states? rounds up a bunch of stories on a popular social-engineering approach to electoral fraud.

Talk about an end-of-year bonanza!

Yeah, I don’t work there any more, and I’m practicing saying “they” instead of “we”, but I still think that Microsoft’s situation is extremely interesting from a strategy perspective. So as a companion to Mini’s What’s going well?, MSFTextrememakeover’s Will this dog ever hunt again, Joe Wilcox’s Definitive, unsolicited advice, Slashdot’s Microsoft’s biggest threat, and no doubt a jillion other posts, I figured I’d start up a thread specifically on the topic of opportunities for Microsoft in the upcoming year.

To kick things off, I’ve highlighted a few I think are particularly compelling: put the user truly in control of their information, make Live the best front end to the network-of-networks, and abandon DRM — it’s too late for that to help Vista, but think about the effects on Zune and Windows 7.0 “now DRM-free”. Discussion of those is welcome, as are other ideas. And please try to keep the focus on the opportunities; of course there are plenty of things wrong, but the threads elsewhere are already covering those.

The two months since I left Microsoft have been low-key recharge-and-relax time: catching up on sleep, visiting my mom, reconnecting with friends, doing some writing (blogging, poetry, the fictional The anomaly and the goddesses), and hanging out with Deborah. It’s been great. My friends consistently tell me how relaxed I look and sound (my Facebook status messages apparently give the same impression), and that’s exactly how I feel.

Continue Reading »

Who da’ Punk’s got a new post up on MiniMSFT with a great, and somewhat out-of-character, topic.  Most of the commenters thus far appear to have missed the request “I’d like to know what you honestly think is going well, too”, but it’s early days yet.  The areas Mini lists as going well in his/her/their opinion include competition, a surprisingly good experience with Zune, translucency (as opposed to transparency), the potential for a solid VS2008, signs of edging away from the dead weight of DRM, and getting past the “evil empire” reputation.

A fine topic indeed.  Worth thinking about … so please, jump in!

I usually love my Mac, but right now is a big exception.  When I got a new MacBook Pro earlier this year running Tiger (10.4), the migration over from my previous (two-ish year old, running 10.1 or 10.2 I think) machine went incredibly smoothly with the minor exception of no longer being able to print from the HP printer in SF.  I could still print on the Oki in Bellevue; and Deborah (who had been running a later version of the OS than me) didn’t have any problems.  So I assumed it was a pretty minor compatibility problem and that I’d just have to do something like reinstall drivers.  Irritating, but no big deal.

Last night, six months later, I finally needed to print something in SF.  So I googled the warning message and got a nice  page in Apple’s forum which in turn pointed me to the HP issue page describing the incompatibility between 10.4 and my printer.  I followed the 50+ step manual uninstallation process on the page, rebooted as instructed, found the download page (not linked to from the issue page), downloaded the 27MB installation file that matched the one on my CD, and installed, rebooted, went through the HP Setup Assistant’s configuration of the phone line I never use [if you leave it out, the printer doesn’t work] and was rewarded by a different error message.   I tracked it down, and discovered I had overlooked one step in the uninstall (resetting the disk protections); oops, my bad.  I uninstalled, rebooted, reinstalled, rebooted, configured, and got to a new and worse state.  Hmm.  So I once again uninstalled again, this time more meticulously; downloaded the newer 56MB “all-in-one executable” or whatever it’s called … no change noted.  Since by this point it was 1 a.m. I gave up and mailed the link to Deborah who was kind enough to print it out.

And then when I opened up the computer this morning I was greated with the popup from the HP Setup Assistant.  AAAARGH!

Sometimes all you can say is “feels a heck of a lot like Windows to me”.

Slashdot’s linked to a bunch of good stories on computer security recently. Squirrelmail repository poisoned has the catchiest title, and plus it’s about squirrels, so it goes first.

What happened was that an intruder got into the site where you download Squirrelmail, and introduced a very subtle change in the code that would allow somebody who know about it (the intruder or anybody he/she told or sold the secret to) to “an arbitrary code execution risk” aka “pwning” both of which are security speak for “doing whatever you want to on the system”.

YOW! Dreamhost, my ISP, provides a nice one-click install for Squirrelmail (“webmail for nuts!”) and I use it on a couple of my domains. Maybe somebody’s used this to hack in — and that’s why my colors keep intermittently changing from pink to blue! Hmm, well, probably not … although other than the unsatisfyingly generic “intermittent software bug” it’s the best explanation so far.

Imagine, though, that this was a political candidate’s blog; and that the hack gets exploited to delete a random 10% of mail from potential supporters and voters. This might not get noticed for a while … and if it went on long enough, it could easily lead to enough impact to swing a close election. Or suppose there’s a mass-mailing from the account to everybody in the district the day before the election: “This account has been hacked, can you really trust this bozo?” Hmm. Talk about your social engineering attacks.

It’s also another interesting example of the “security as a social science ” theme — and more specifically, the process issues for web services that came up in How’d that get through QA? Something that’s really encouraging here is that in both cases the software providers did exactly the right thing here, including being transparent about what had happened — Squirrelmail’s blog shows how quickly they reacted, announcing immediately and getting the fix out within a day.

Recently somebody who’s interviewing around Microsoft told me that they had brought up Ad Astra in an interview context as a way of demonstrating that they understood viral marketing: “Remember all those hot pink Mashup posters around campus? Well, here’s how we approached it; this was my role; this is what I learned.” And it worked out well!

It’s a great way of framing it, because even though we didn’t do a great job of marketing Ad Astra in general, Mashups were something we got a lot of people to notice and talk about. And best of all, it had measurable results: attendance at Mashups steadily increased by 50% monthly, using techniques like this, emailing, leafletting, … classic viral marketing.

For those of you who haven’t spent time on the Microsoft campus, there are posters everywhere, mostly in blue brown and gold, occasionally in other colors — but never any pink. So these stud out And we put up a lot of posters; in March, the guy who runs the internal postering service told me that we had already put up more posters than Windows or Office had in the previous 12 months. [I pointed out that they had better existing name recognition.] So (at least in the Redmond area) the reasonable odds that the person either heard about it, or knows somebody who has, are pretty reasonable.

Thinking about it afterwards, I realized that there are probably 50 to 100 people who were involved in various aspects of marketing Mashups. Most of them have no previous marketing background; all of them now have at least one anecdote that they can use to show their awareness and understanding of this kind of marketing. That’s kinda cool.

Yay us!

Over the last couple of days, I had very similar conversations with a couple of people who are looking for a new job. They found my perspective helpful, and so I realized it might be more generally useful. [Caveat: since both of them are ex-Microsoft people (who have good reasons for considering going back there) the first paragraph is somewhat skewed in that direction; the underlying prinicples are more general.]

It’s important to keep in mind that you are the scarce commodity here: there are more jobs at Microsoft that need somebody with your skills than there are people with your skills and who already have experience at Microsoft. your goal should be to go back in at a substantially higher level than when you left; and to go into a job that takes you in the direction you want to go in your career and life.

It’s useful to spend time thinking about what your dream job is. For example, if spending time with your family is important to you and they live elsewhere in the country, your dream job may well be located closer to them (or involves a lot of travel there, if you don’t mind traveling). If you’re into making sexy products, it’s more likely to be consumer-focused than infrastructure or enterprise-focused; conversely, if you’d rather be behind the scenes working on the nuts and bolts, think about who does that kind of stuff in a way that you really respect. For some people, it’s in a particular field (“I want to work on innovation”) or scope (“strategic”) or discipline (“a software developer”); for others, the environment might be more important (“I want to work in a gender-balanced organization which has good female role models”).

You probably won’t be able to get your dream job in your next job; what you want is something that’s noticeably closer than where you are now, and makes it a lot more likely that the following job (at Microsoft or elsewhere) has even more of the dream job characteristics. Of course even that “on the path” job might not materialize; and I’m certainly not saying to hold out for perfection.

Still, thinking about where you want to be going will let you make better decisions about the jobs that do come up — and about where to invest your effort looking and networking.

Thoughts on this? How else do people think about this kinds of stuff? etc. etc.

jon

In  a comment in the Power vectors thread, Vanita said:

You were useless (I met with you several times at Microsoft) and it looks like you still are. I am glad to hear you are gone – it made no sense for Microsoft to pay you a hefty salary given the “work” you were doing. All this high level bullshit…

I let the comment through because it’s a great illustration of the kinds of attitude and environment that’s disappointingly common at Microsoft these days, unwilling to take the time to understand new ideas and so threatened by anything “high level” that might actually lead to a change in the system, that the response is to hide behind the cloak of anonymity to spread around virulent negative abuse in completely inappropriate situations.  Yeah, that’ll help.

Imagine working in an environment where this kind of behavior is widely tolerated.  When I was at Microsoft, I got reactions similar to this from maybe 5-10% of the people, and so on large mailing lists or with the 200+ people who attended a mashup the odds were extremely high that somebody would jump in with some garbage like this — with superficially more polite phrasing if their names were associated with it, but still the same mix of knee-jerk uncomprehending rejection and personal attack.

And bear in mind the impact this has not just on the person receiving the abuse (me), but all those witnessing it.  No wonder so many people at Microsoft are unhappy and frustrated.