It also sucks, crashes, includes applications with hideous design and usability but so what? So does every other piece of software. With a language, it’s direction is governed by volunteer nerds who use it everyday. That results in an experience far different that what’s produced in a corporate piece of software.

I have no idea how FOSS will fair long term and it’s certainly not for everyone but when it comes to programming languages it seems to make some sense. What other industry designs and builds their own tools? I’m not talking about having a say, like a mechanic informing wrench design, I mean software developers developing software they use to develop software. Wow, too much dr seuss with the kids.

Car designers design cars to design cars?…no
Home builders build homes to build homes?…no
Robot builders build robots to build robots?…hmmm…maybe..

“Roberts notes that the students eventually got to collaboration, but not before they had exhausted the alternatives of authoritarianism and competition.”

They go on to talk about the idea that “people fail into collaboration“. As a result, it’s only the “wicked problems” that ever reach the collaboration stage. I love that quote, “fail into collaboration”. It’s just so true of human nature. We always start on our own and fail our way through several stages on our way to collaboration.

The concept of ‘wicked problems’ reminded me a lot of a great book Mark recommended to me a few years back titled ‘Solving Tough Problems: An Open Way of Talking, Listening, and Creating New Realities‘.

“Scaling up the known collaboration processes to country or world sizes will require significant advances in collaboration tools and networking”. While we’re starting with company not world sizes, this is part of our mission at brainpark. All of it hopefully leading to the “hallmark of successful collaboration is the experience of solidarity and new energy: a ‘we’”.

The article also gets me thinking about the entire *Camp movement. Whether we’re freelancers, early startups, or people working in traditional companies, if we want to move up and start tackling the wicked problems then we have to move beyond information sharing, coordination, and cooperation and on to true collaboration.

With this being #6 I’m seriously concerned about my health. I hope NOT to follow in David’s footsteps. Health-wise that is, fashion wise I’m always scampering along after David.

When I read David’s post on livemesh, I really did try to stay interested but it quickly sounded like, well exactly what Joel’s describing, something built by architecture astronauts that I would never contemplate using.

Bottom line, I know nothing about livemesh beyond what David’s written about but in any case ‘controversial Joel’ is good reading.

“Windows Live Mesh is not just a way to synchronize files. That’s just the sample app. It’s a whole goddamned architecture, with an API and developer tools and in insane diagram showing all the nifty layers of acronyms, and it seems like the chief astronauts at Microsoft literally expect this to be their gigantic platform in the sky which will take over when Windows becomes irrelevant on the desktop.”

“It’s Groove, rewritten from scratch, one more time. Ray Ozzie just can’t stop rewriting this damn app, again and again and again, and taking 5-7 years each time.

And the fact that customers never asked for this feature and none of the earlier versions really took off as huge platforms doesn’t stop him.”

“It sort of bothers me, intellectually, that there are these people running around acting like they’re building the next great thing who keep serving us the same exact TV dinner that I didn’t want on Sunday night, and I didn’t want it when you tried to serve it again Monday night, and you crunched it up and mixed in some cheese and I didn’t eat that Tuesday night, and here it is Wednesday and you’ve rebuilt the whole goddamn TV dinner industry from the ground up and you’re giving me 1955 salisbury steak that I just DON’T WANT.”

While it’s fun to poke fun at the giant I have to say, this can’t be a good sign. I don’t know much about business but I do know that the buck’s have done a great job of making a cup of coffee a non-commodity. People rarely thought of the cost when they hit up a starbucks, it was about the beans, the cushy chairs, the whole experience man… It seems a business such as starbucks would be difficult to keep up if they compete as a commodity.

I know I’ve said this before but synaptic, and apt-get, is the coolest piece of software I’ve come across in years. Finding, installing and maintaining software is a magnitude simpler on ubuntu than any other os. An example is this recent release. I’m about to download, install etc with one click of a button while on a wireless network. A dream.

“Communication is terrible.
When Jeff Bezos’s people said they needed to communicate more within the company, he shocked them by shooting back: ‘No, communication is terrible.’ To promote his decentralized vision of the company, he created ‘two-pizza teams’: highly autonomous task forces with five to seven people — no more than can be fed with two pizzas — who innovate and test new features.”

The key for me is the “highly autonomous” part and I’ve seen that overlooked a lot when this approach is tried. Almost every company I’ve worked for has tried some form of 2 pizza teams, however, none have stuck with allowing them to be truly been autonomous. I’d hazard to guess that a highly autonomous 6 pizza team is still better than lipservice autonomous 2 pizza teams.

What’s my point? No clue, maybe just gratuitous links to old posts of mine? Or maybe something about how disruptive technology isn’t about taking over an industry as much as challenging and building community. Flock’s better because firefox’s better because IE’s better because flock’s better….