Well, I was going to trackback this post, but Nancy doesn’t have that enabled, so I’ll just comment here. Much anger in this one.

The problem with raging about radio is that it’s a *free* service. What do you pay for the time you listen to the radio? Now, of course ClearChannel is pop pap and there’s a lot of consolidation happening in the radio business, with generally negative impacts on quality. Don’t blame CC–they’re just reacting to the mandates of the market. (Your media can be free, diverse, or equal, pick any two.)

If you don’t like that-which-was-KTCL, blame the government for taking a public good and whoring it out without thinking about the consequences or having any more justification than ‘the market always does right.’ If there’s one thing we should have learned from the last couple of centuries, it’s that while capitalism may the least of the evils, it’s still evil. Of course, this isn’t a new thing.

I was at a friend’s house a few months ago and ran across a copy of Harper’s magazine. I’d read it before, mostly in dentists’ offices and such, but I read this one cover to cover. There was an especially hilarious piece, Beware of Dogg by Dr. Ninjaforkian, in the Readings section (which has apparently been posted on /. and MetaFilter). Since then, there’ve been bits on ClearChannel, the food chain, Korean sayings, and the coming election. Eclectic, no?

I just found out that one of my favorite sections is online: Harpers Index displays fascinating facts and gives you the source for every one. Just what you need at parties!

“Percentage of Chinese exports to the U.S. accounted for by merchandise sold at Wal-Mart : 10 [Wal-Mart (Bentonville, Ark.)/Department of Commerce (Washington) ]

Number of factory jobs that China has lost since 1995 : 25,000,000 [Alliance Capital Management Corporation (N.Y.C.) ]”
from Feb 2004

“Number of Canadian prison inmates who overdosed in March on fellow prisoners’ methadone-laced vomit: 2 [Saskatchewan Department of Corrections (Regina, Canada)]

Number of inmates charged with drug trafficking for providing the vomit: 3 [Saskatchewan Department of Corrections (Regina, Canada)]”
from Sep 2003

I didn’t see the sources online, but they’re there in the HTML source, and hence in the cut-and-paste above (I don’t really understand why they weren’t showing up; neither Mozilla nor IE displayed them). Go ahead, read them all.

You have to give the web credit for making information distribution a lot cheaper. Whether it’s a small business distributing forms via the web or BlockBuster distributing rental coupons via email, it’s just plain simpler to get information distributed over the internet.

A friend just forwarded me the expected US budgets for the next 5 years. And then he forwarded me budgets going back to 1996. An invaluable resource, to be certain. What other countries allow you to look at their budget on the web? The UK, New Zealand, Canada, Australia, India, Fiji….

Wow. And all this was found with half an hour of searching. Wonderful!

I went to an ACM meeting last Tuesday at NREL. The topic was “The Role of Computational Science in Energy Efficiency and Renewable Energy Research” by Dr. Steve Hammond. It was an interesting talk–NREL is doing some neat stuff with alternative energy sources (one thing that Dr. Hammond mentioned was an algae that produces hydrogen gas–a possible clean, renewable, easily scalable source of that element).

Now, I definitely don’t want to single out Dr. Hammond. He did a good job explaining the value of computing to energy research, as well as fielding questions that were out of his expertise from nitpicking engineers (are there any other kind?). However, his presentation just drove home to me how easy it is to let PowerPoint drive a presentation. And how doing that really detracts from the speaker’s points. I’m certainly not the first person to mention this. But I just wanted to point out this very very good article about speaking during a presentation, rather than just reading from slides.

Hey buddy, I can probably read those slides faster than you can say them, and it’s a lot less boring for me. Instead, explain the slides to me in a way that makes the talk more of a conversation. Don’t let the technology drive the presentation; it may be easier to read the slides, but it makes for a much poorer presentation.

I know I’ve commented on offshoring before, but I was talking to a friend last night, and he mentioned that his department, which maintained a suite of products for a very large software vendor, was gong to be re-organized. The new boss was the fellow tasked with offshoring. [cue jaws theme]

On a related note, I read this article by Joel On Software about Not Invented Here syndrome. In the article, he makes very good points about giving up control of vital business functions. Actually, Joel puts it very succinctly: “If it’s a core business function — do it yourself, no matter what.”

In some sense, that’s what you do when you buy software off the shelf. You trade control for cost savings. I know that in several cases at a former company, we built software on top of a vendor’s platform, but what we were building was so focused that we ended up twisting the platform all out of shape. I think it would have been better to focus the energy, money and time that went to learning and reshaping the platform into understanding the business domain better and building more features on a custom platform.

In general, giving up control of vital business functions is a bad idea. So, offshoring (or outsourcing) customer service is a good idea if customer service isn’t a vital business function (right!). And vice versa.

The question then becomes, what’s a core business function? Ask that question of any large business, and depending on what department you’re in, you’ll get some different answers. I was talking to a guy a year ago who worked for a pipe construction company (you know, water pipes, beer pipes) in the accounting department. We touched on offshoring, and he mentioned that his company was planning to move all of their accounts payable to India, but, “thank you very much, we’ll keep the accounts receivable close to home.” Getting paid is probably vital business function for everybody.

So, where does this leave all of the folks in IT? Well, Bob Lewis writes a lot about IT as a force for business change, and that sounds like a vital business function to me. Where does this leave my friend in the maintenance department? I don’t know.

Customer service, like everything else, has undergone a revolution in the past two hundred years. In the olden days there was a corner grocer who knew people personally and therefore could render excellent, customized service. Then the large department and grocery stores appeared on the scene. These large corporations could offer goods cheaply, but didn’t know or care who their customers were nor what the customers were willing to buy. Now, companies are trying, via software and databases, to recreate the corner store insight and knowledge, but in a scalable fashion. Whether it is frequent shopper cards coupons, or automated recommendations of books, companies are trying to use software to scale their ability to know what the customer wants, and hence give it to them.

This is good for the company, because if companies only try to sell what is wanted, they do not have to spend as much money advertising and maintaining unwanted inventory. In addition, such tactics aren’t as likely to annoy the customer as trying to sell the customer something undesired. This also builds customer loyalty, since the company gives the impression of caring about customers’ perceived needs. This is not a false impression: the company does care about customers’ needs, because satisfying these needs is the only way the company makes money.

This is also good for the customer because it gives them what they want, at minimal fuss. It also makes for cheaper goods in the long run, since companies aren’t spending excessive amounts of money on ill targeted customers; a single twenty something with no children has no need for diapers, and sending them coupons for those diapers only wastes resources.

However, there is a fly or two in the ointment of customer awareness via large databases. In stark contrast to the grocer, large companies are not the peers of their customers, and this inequality can lead to issues. In addition, the quality of the customer service provided by software, while better than no customer service, isn’t a replacement for human interaction. I am explicitly leaving aside the issues of privacy since they are murky and still being defined.

The corner grocer, whom companies are trying to emulate in service, was a member of the community. If he cheated a customer, word got around. If he was doing anything unethical, his peers and customers could apply neighborly pressure in order to rectify his behavior. And, most importantly, the knowledge he gained about hist customers was counterbalanced by their knowledge of him as a neighbor. Few of these constraints operate on modern, large companies in anywhere near the same fashion. I’m not denying that people can affect the behavior of retailers with words, activism and lawsuits. However, changing the behavior of a large corporation is never going to be as easy as changing the actions of a local shop owner.

In addition to the difference in resources and power between customers and companies, it’s also clear that performance suffers. This isn’t strictly related to the gathering of customer data, but the existence of such data inspires companies to cut costs by automating. In general, I believe that the service provided by any software is inferior to that provided by a real live human being. And by building these databases, companies are being seduced by the siren call of reducing human interactions—if software (a [relatively] fixed cost that scales well) can recommend a good book, who needs an employee (a recurring cost that scales poorly). I realize that this may sound Luddite, but certainly in the current incarnation, I’ve found such software doesn’t match up well with recommendations from real people.

In short, I believe that more and more companies are customizing and tailoring the customer experience in order to cut costs and build loyalty. But I also feel that there are significant downsides to such tailoring and I’m not sure that it’s worth it.

I just read this post from Mike Clark. Now, I agree with some of what he says. It’s true that it is a whole lot easier to remember terms you were searching for than a URL. Words and concepts are just plain easier to remember than strings where the slightest mistype will give you a 404 error. That’s why we use DNS rather than just typing in IP addresses everywhere. However, IP addresses work almost all the time, even when the DNS server is down or misconfigured. If I know the IP address of a mail server, then I can still check my email even when I can’t resolve its domain name.

This is true of the search engine/URL dichotomy as well. Have you noticed the size of the uproar when Google changes PageRank? Every time a search engine changes its ranking algorithms, it will throw into havoc any sites you’ve memorized via search terms. And search engines change their systems more often than DNS goes down. But cool URIs [URLs] don’t change.

Another issue is that when it’s so easy to search vast amounts of information, you don’t end up looking anywhere else. This rant, which circulated a few months ago, highlights that issue. It’s almost like, if you can’t find something online, you can’t be bothered to find out about it. I do it myself. Even results of search engine queries don’t get fully explored. How often have you viewed anything other than the first page at google?

I understand the power and love of search engines, but folks, including myself, need to be sure to understand the implications of using them as shorthand for permanent links and/or shortcuts for true research.

I don’t know why, but my post on yahoo mail problems is my most popular post thus far. I suspect it got picked up in google, or some other search engine, and is now serving as a place for folks to gripe about the free Yahoo! mail service. (Incidentally, I’m the second “Dan Moore” in google now! Meri has some interesting things to say about this intersection between the internet and real life.) This is interesting (and a bit amusing) to me for several reasons:

For one, there’s no helpful content on that posting for these folks problems. In fact, I don’t even use the free service from Yahoo (I pay extra for storage). And the posting concerns the short term problems a client of mine had with the new Yahoo mail interface, and how outsourcing exposes you to those types of risks. The comments are not germane to the posting.

Or should I say that the posting is not germane to the comments? As is ever the case on internet forums, this posting has been hijacked by people who want to complain and share possible fixes to a very real problem–they can’t get to their email (I’m cranky when I can’t to my email, after all). I don’t begrudge them the use of my site; this just reinforces what Clay Shirky wrote about social software–people will twist software until it does what they need it to do, and fighting that is a lost cause (and has been for 20 years).

And that’s not just true for software, but for technology in general. After all, I doubt anyone working on radar thought it would someday be used for re-heating leftovers, and I’m sure that Daguerre (the inventor of photography) would be shocked at some of the pictures I’ve taken at house parties.

I’ve been doing some thinking about offshoring recently. For those of you not in the IT industry, ‘offshoring’ is jargon for outsourcing of white collar jobs to developing countries like India and China. There’s been a lot of talk about this phenomenon: Salon (1 and 2), The Economist [sorry, it’s a pay article], InfoWorld, and CNET News.com have all commented recently. In addition to reading these articles and others like them, I’ve also talked to folks in the software industry, as well as friends who work in aerospace and packaged good manufacturing industries. And I’ve come to the conclusion that a certain amount of offshoring is inevitable, since the labor cost differential is so great.

However, like any other business fad (or any fad, for that matter), there are external costs that haven’t simply are not fully understood. Among these are

1. Loss of customers
The constant mantra of folks who are trying to tell IT workers how to adjust to losing their jobs is ‘retrain, retrain’. But retrain for what? What job isn’t offshorable? Nursing is the only one that comes to mind. If allvirtualizable (i.e. can be done without face time) service jobs where there is a price differential get pushed overseas, that’s millions of jobs lost. The American economy has been the engine for most of the world’s growth over the last 10 years, sucking up exports from other countries to the tune of billions of dollars. What happens when the consumers of the USA don’t spend money, either because they are out of a job, or afraid of losing their job soon? It takes a visionary like Henry Ford to realize that if you grow the amount of folks who can buy your products, you grow your business.

2. Loss of future business leaders
If you export big chunks of your IT department, perhaps keeping only senior folks who can help manage external projects, then you win in the short run. However, eventually those folks will retire (ask NASA). And if you haven’t brought any entry level talent in, where will you go to replace these needed folks?

3. Difficulty of managing far flung teams from different cultures
This is difficult in two ways. One is the logistical aspect. If you want a teleconference, you have to adjust either your schedule or theirs. And if the country is on the opposite side of the globe, possibly both folks need to be in the office at an awkward time. The second difficulty is related to quality. Just as the Japanese products in the 50s and 60s were thought cheap and low quality, some of the work done overseas today is a lower standard than expected. This is true of all software of course, but it’s harder to control the quality when you write a spec and throw it over the wall.

In short, offshoring is in its infancy. More of it is coming down the line, but, as the hidden costs are discovered, the benefits of local teams will come back into focus. I can do much of my consulting work from my house, yet I still find that most companies want me to come into their office. Why? To some extent it’s control (should be careful not to blog my way out of a job here), but it also is because communication, in each direction, is easier with someone who’s on site. There’s extra effort expended in any kind of virtual communication. And by meeting me, the customer and I build a relationship, which is perhaps more important for trust in business than anything else.

I also want to address Michael Yuan’s comments:

“3. Coding is a dying profession in the long run. If the jobs have not been outsourced to developing countries, the new generation of model-focused automatic code generation tools will eliminate the need for basic coders anyway. The jobs that have a future are system designing and architecting (the real engineering jobs). I think the ability to design end-to-end systems using whatever tools available is an important skill for the future.”

I’ve commented enough, I hope on, the idea that all coding work will or should be outsourced to developing countries. But I think that the idea that ‘the need for basic coders’ will be eliminated due to improvements in ‘automatic code generation tools’ is foolish for a number of reasons.

1. If you don’t understand basic coding on a system, when the automatic tool doesn’t do what you need it to, the means you’re screwed. Basic coding is not something you can pick up at school–you need to be out in the real world, working on crufty systems that are too expensive to change and older than dirt, to really appreciate what automatic tools can and cannot do, and what systems can and cannot do. In addition, easier code generation means more code out there, not less. And, easier code generation means more code out there. And, the easier the code is to generate, a la Visual Basic, the more likely the person doing the generation won’t get it right, or won’t document it, or won’t understand why there’s certain behavior exhibited. In this case, someone who has a deep, visceral understanding of the system and language will be called in.

2. Yuan talks about architecture and system design being the ‘real engineering jobs.’ I’ll agree that those are more stimulating and challenging than coding, and also have a higher value add. But again, how many folks are system architects right out of school? I certainly wouldn’t want to work on a project that had been designed by someone with exactly 0 years of real world experience. If you abolish entry level positions, you eat your seed corn, as I mention in my comments about offshoring above.

3. There is no silver bullet. The hard part isn’t writing the software, it’s determining what software needs to be written.

4. Someone’s got to write the tools. I remember an old science fiction story, by Isaac Asimov I think, about a world of taped learning. You took a test at 18 that determined what your skills were, and then you listened to a set of tapes that taught you all you needed to know. The protagonist was distraught because the test just didn’t seem to fit him–he was outcast and ridiculed for not knowing his profession. Of course it turned out that the folks that couldn’t be tape educated were exactly the folks who were able to write the tapes. Someone’s got to write the tools. (I don’t pretend, however, that anywhere near the same number of folks are needed to write tools as to use them.)

Michael and others are certainly correct that things are going to change in the software world. It’s not going to be possible to just know a language–you have to be involved in the business and maintain relationships. But change is nothing new for IT workers, right?

In short, it appears that Neal Stephenson was correct. I leave you with an excerpt from Snow Crash:

“When it gets down to it–talking trade balances here–once we’ve brain-drained all our technology into other countries, once things have evened out, they’re making cars in Bolivia and microwave ovens in Tadzhikistan and selling them here–once our edge in natural resources has been made irrelevant by giant Hong Kong ships and dirigibles that can ship North Dakota all the way to New Zealand for a nickel–once the Invisible Hand has take all those historical inequities and smeared them out into a broad global layer of what a Pakistani brickmaker would consider to be prosperity–y’know what? There’s only four things we [America] do better than anyone else

music
movies
microcode (software)
high-speed pizza delivery”

And none of the four above are guaranteed (except perhaps the high-speed pizza delivery).

Happy New Year.