A father’s wish on your Bat Mitzvah

My dear Rebecca,

Soon you will become focused on the urgent distractions of teenage life, not to mention imminent partying and dancing. Before that happens I would like to steal five minutes and make a wish for your future.

You were born with extraordinary gifts of character. You are responsible to a fault, a tad too literal for your own good, and you possess a natural tendency to aspire to do more than necessary. It was no surprise to your mother and I that you performed beautifully today at your Bat Mitzvah. We are very proud of you.

I sometimes joke that you are a very low-maintenance child. I may regret saying this at some point, but I would like to give you permission to stop being low-maintenance – at least for a little while. It is time for you to lose some of your innocence and grow beyond mere instinct.

Think of it this way. You already possess a keen ear for honesty and graciousness. Without much effort those traits will blossom as you grow up, turning you into a responsible and conscientious adult. Experience can help you bloom further, developing other traits you also possess, such as patience and generosity.

Consider patience. You have been endowed with an abundance of it. It enables you to step back from impulse, to reflect thoughtfully, or look beyond the merely ephemeral. However, it also has a downside. Patience fosters endless waiting if it lacks a well-specified aim and if it goes adrift.

As an adult you will face decisions that will try your patience. This is particularly so with choices over whether to give up or stay the course. These can be the most difficult in an adult life. So here is my first wish for you: to learn to refine your patience with your gifts for honesty and grace.

Now consider generosity. While you already are kind, generosity goes further. It is the foundation for the grandest form of human charity, whether it is writ in a large selfless gift or a small nurturing gesture of love.

As an adult you will see the fruits and failures of your generosity, how generosity leads to great achievements and disappointments. So my second wish for you is this: to learn to become aware of the fear of disappointment, to learn how not to make it central to your actions. Give to those around you in the most graceful way possible, with warmth, without expectation, and honestly.

Here is what I am trying say. Patience and generosity together, offered honestly and graciously, enable partnership and love, and many of the mature behaviors of grownup life. But these character traits do not arise by themselves. They develop during experiences, and most such experiences fall outside the routine. Some can be painful. I wish that you will have the courage to face these experiences as an inexorable part of growing up, and learn from them.

I have one more wish, and it starts with the hope that you do not take this advice too literally. This is just advice, not a rule. If you come up with a thoughtful answer to life’s riddles in your own unique voice, then it is your prerogative to use your gifts as you wish. So this is my last wish: whether or not you give these words any more than fifteen seconds of thought, please take a moment and share your thoughts with your mother and me. We would like to know your thoughts as you grow. I hope we can have a conversation.

And with that, it is time to party. Let’s start the party with a toast to life. L’chiam.

Technology market awards for 2011

What better way to mark the end of the year than to give out a dozen awards! This post contains a baker’s dozen. They go to firms and managers who took notable actions in technology markets in 2011.

There are three criteria for these awards. It had to involve something in 2011. It had to involve information and communications technology. It had to be notable.

The winners do not give acceptance speeches. The awards come with no prize other than a bit of dry sarcasm, which is dished out at the same time as the awards.

That is about it. If I missed any juicy events, feel free to make suggestions for additional awards this year.

Enough said. Let’s start the fun.

Steve Jobs and the Economics of One Entrepreneur

There are no second acts in life, but the American system of entrepreneurship has provided many second chances. That flexibility is, perhaps, one of the greatest strengths of the US system of value creation. For example, a less-flexible system would never have given Apple’s late CEO, Steve Jobs, an opportunity to have much impact later in his career. A market dominated by rigid organizational structures would have denied him entry.

To appreciate this point, it’s necessary to move beyond the managerial maxims many recent eulogies have used to describe Steve Jobs. These have displayed a disappointing degree of plasticity. Look, as a youngster, Jobs displayed a penchant for brashness, impatience, and needless confrontation, just as he did later in life. Two decades ago, the old consensus held that Jobs succeeded in spite of himself, while the recent consensus ascribed Jobs’ commercial success to his passion and attention to detail. The common analysis reassessed superficial traits based on outcomes.

That interpretative flip is a symptom of a deeper schism. Different conceptual frameworks underpin and frame distinct perspectives about the role for entrepreneurs in American business. Steve Jobs’ career can illustrate these perspectives.

Internet Hysteria Index

<sarcasm alert> Tired of the self-referential and self-important? Then do not attend a conference on communications policy in Washington D.C. (or watch the latest debate among the Republican candidates for president). What is the next best anecdote to that tone? A bit of humor to punctuate the bubble, of course! <end of alert>

Need some humor right now? Then read this post about the Internet Hysteria Index, entitled, “Internet hysteria — Are we Losing our Edge?” Written by Scott Wallsten and Amy Smorodin of the Technology Policy Institute, it takes aim at some of the *ahem* excesses of communications policy discussions today. In particular, it aims at its excessive hype.

And a warning to those of you with a tin ear for a joke or merely a complete lack of sense of humor… before reading this post be sure review the meaning of deadpan humor and understated sarcasm.

Enjoy!

Platforms and a visit to Japan

During the first week of December I visited Tokyo, Japan, and spoke about platforms. This was my first visit to Japan.  Accordingly, this post mixes commentary with a bit of travelogue.

Platforms are reconfigurable base of components on which participants build applications. Platforms have a long history in computing and electronics, with examples going back to IBM, Microsoft and Intel, among many others. Google and Apple are recent practitioners, and their prominence has renewed interest in platform strategies. It is, however, not entirely transparent to a non-expert how the (newer) discussions about platforms relates to the (familiar) analyses of standardization. My talk pointed out some of those links.

Background to set the scene: I stayed at Hitotsubashi University (on the left), a lovely campus in a residential neighborhood a train ride out from downtown Tokyo. I traveled there at the invitation of Professor Reiko Aoki, a professor at the university, and a member of an advisory group for the government on technology policy. She arranged for a presentation at the university, and another at the Research Institute for Economy Trade and Industry (REITI), a part of METI, the government agency with many experts in industrial policy. Professor Aoki and I both share an interest in standards. Sadao Nagaoka, also from Hitotsubashi and an expert in technology policy, provided commentary. We are pictured together at REITI at METI (at the top).

Mobile mergers and insider baseball conversations

Here is a fact. The FCC recently announced it would move to have a hearing about the AT&T and T-Mobile merger. In response, AT&T withdrew its application from the FCC, delaying the hearing indefinitely (or until AT&T resubmits the application).

What is that all about? At a procedural level it is just a detail — the FCC reviews mergers involving the transfer of licensing. The Department of Justice (DOJ) has a review process too, but just a different standard of review. The DOJ uses antitrust, while the FCC considers whether the merger is in the “public interest.” Even if the FCC delays its review, the FCC must continue to do its review. The first hearing in front of judge takes place in February.

Today’s post provides a little insider baseball about these reviews (The Wiktionary definition for insider baseball “Matters of interest only to insiders”), trying to explain the chess moves to a wider audience. Seemingly small procedural moves provide a window on the likely outcome of this merger. To paraphrase Robin Bienenstock and Craig Moffett of Bernstein Research, AT&T has not thrown in the towel, but they are acting like a firm who understands the odds of success are low. I prefer to think of it this way: economic substance does matter. This requires a brief explanation.

Word of mouth and pepper spray parody

For better or worse, a decade of development in web technology enables the fast sharing of imagery. “Word of mouth” used to occur verbally, but some part of it now occurs online.

What has moved online soonest? Things that are easy to share with one click. It tends towards the quick hit: Pictures that tell a story, recommendations that require little elaboration, snappy and quick quotes or retorts, and other self-explanatory links.

I reserve a special place for parody, or humor with wide appeal, or sarcasm with gotcha-to-it. This happened during the Royal Wedding, for example. That was a situation where an event captured the attention of virtually the entire online world, and the parodies of the pictures spoke to a common perception.

A new image has recently made the rounds. It is interesting because it speaks to an event that occurred at University of California, Davis, in a protest that grew from the occupy movement. Some of the police used pepper spray.

Limits to broadband diffusion?

The National Telecommunications Information Administration just published the findings from its latest survey about Internet use within US households. In case you missed it, here is a summary: broadband adoption among US households went up, but not by much.

Actually, that is not entirely fair. Viewed at short intervals, broadband adoption will appear to be a slow moving process. However, a little stepping back from the short run headlines reveals good news and bad news in this report. That is the point of this post.

Richard Rosenbloom, in memory.

Richard Rosenbloom passed away on October 26^th. He was a gentle soul, a wonderful person, and a insightful scholar. He will be missed. I will miss him.

I had the great fortune to meet him several times. The first of these meetings occurred when I was a student. Those first meetings were informal because his son and I were friendly. He showed up on campus one day, because – as his son said – his father was on sabbatical. I did not appreciate that Rosenbloom was one of the preeminent scholars in the study of innovation. He was merely the father of the person with whom I had studied for comprehensive exams. We shared an office. This was his Dad. There was a family resemblance.

Richard Rosenbloom eventually gave a seminar during that year – it was research about the development of VCRs. I still remember it today. It influenced my views of competition between standards. It came at a formative moment.

I would like to honor his memory in this post.

The Wi-Fi Journey

Behind every successful technology lie many quirky stories showing how it grew like a teenager or barely averted disaster. With the passage of time, most of those stories fade into obscurity or, at best, become parts of verbal explanations accompanying countless resumes. The few events that find their way into public discourse, if any do at all, normally get stripped of context and nuance, losing the contours that actually mattered to those who participated.

Perhaps that’s why those who developed Wi-Fi decided to write a collective memoir, bringing much to the fore that would otherwise fade. What the world today calls Wi-Fi began as experiments with wireless LANs, and became embedded in IEEE Standard 802.11, and only then did it explode into a plethora of products and services. Every stage involved numerous quirky events and lessons.

The resulting book, The Innovation Journey of Wi-Fi: The Road to Global Success (Cambridge University Press, 2010), involves almost a score of contributors, including many influential voices in the Wi-Fi world. For a certain kind of reader, this is a great book. Are you that kind of reader? Let’s find out.