The Relativity Theory of Information - Why Microsoft may be Doomed

Note: This is a long post that is continued here.  It is the second of my mindmap series.

Why do people hate Microsoft?  Why do people seem increasingly impatient?  Why do people build up companies and then rip them down?

This is what I am pondering in this week's mind map.  It may be that as we move further into the digital age, the closer to light speed information becomes.  As we experience this we surpass the Tofflerian Information Overload and actually go into something akin to rapid information aging.

I started down this path due to a few ponder points. 

Old Books - I was looking for books in Amazon and was discounting some because they were written more than 3 years ago.  As if the important stuff has just risen to the top recently.  Is this techno-hubris?  No, I don't think so, I think it's because information becomes misplaced so quickly in our current age, simply due to its abundance, that 3 years ago seems like 25.   But the calendar, that's some pretty recent writing.  But because I am receiving information an nearly light speed, when I notice it again it seems old.

Microsoft - Why can't they dig their way out of their PR hole?  Why is Google rapidly losing their consumer good will?  Well, I not only receive information faster now, I receive stuff faster as well.  Ask Friendster about brand loyalty.  Three years ago, they were MySpace.  One day they weren't cool any more.  MySpace was.  Friendster had millions of subscribers in what was thought to be the stickiest of on-line applications -- social networking.  Then it all went away.  Microsoft is a bit stickier, as they have desktop applications that are expensive to replace.  But, as much as I hate Writely, Writely, wikis and blogging show that the desktop application market - while never replaced - will soon rely on how it integrates with external web  based applications and not on their market share.  Hint to Open Office or Novell - wanna kill Word?  Integrate blogging, wikis and file sharing into your apps (by Christmas 2006).

These thoughts raised a lot of issues about brand loyalty, product quality, information overload, the speed of change, sustainability and on and on.  I have pulled this all into this mind map.

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The Branches

Culture is Learning

At heart here is how we receive and process information. How old we feel is based on the information we have received. Someone isn't "seasoned" until they've learned the ropes. That takes time, but that time is relative. I recently received a resume from a coder with four years of experience who said in his cover letter "I'm not sure if you are looking for someone as senior as me." Youthful indiscretion? Sure. But on top of that, his four years have seen massive changes in business management, technology, and world politics. To everyone, but especially people like this young man, time is moving faster than ever. Four years is the new ten.

I am a big believer in the value of conversation for healthy growth. One thing to consider is that we may be changing our relationship with conversation as the source of primary knowledge to the processor or filter of primary knowledge. As information becomes more voluminous, we begin to count more and more on search conversation to wade through it. We guide each other through the vast stores of information. Any more I rely more on people like Sam Rose or Alex Pang to bring me information than I do Google or the media. This isn't because of a lack of trust - it's because as we get deeper into Information Overabundance - the coping mechanism to minimize overload is trusted filtering. And that level of trust is the piece that Brin and Page cannot automate.

And you might ask yourself, well, how did I get here?

The Evolution of Existential Entropy

The Age of Agrarians

The agrarian age had a flow of information no faster than a hand could write it or a horse could carry it. Brand information was very slow and highly trusted. Choice was limited, but most things were user serviceable. Books came infrequently and were printed with type set by hand. Conversation was the main mode of communication. Newspapers were conversation starters and information filters.

People had very thin streams of primary information and relished detail for the things they found out about. Leaders understood the value of oratory and it was their primary method of gaining votes.

In this age, the speed of information is far from the speed of thought.  The cost of change for goods is very high.

Conversation Meets Communications

Conversation exploded when it met the communication age (I know I'm skipping the Industrial Age - but there's enough overlap here). We could initially send telegrams and then shortly thereafter make telephone calls from the phone company and in the blink of an eye from our homes.

Time sped up.  We had radio, the television.  This brought information into our homes as it happened.  We could listen to the Hindenburg disaster. We heard World War II at home and watched it in the theatres.  We watched Viet Nam on television.

With this new medium, we received rapid information but it was linear. One channel at a time, one word at a time. The value of conversation was diminished as suburbanization removed people from social neighborhoods and isolated them in distant suburbs. We had gone from adults reading the newspaper and having intelligent conversations to children being told condensed stories.

And we loved our second childhood. We had lots of information, the ability to travel quickly in our cars, the ability to fly. We had our information delivered to us by parental figures we trusted, we had new toys and we didn't have to cook our own food thanks to canning and frozen foods. Brand loyalty migrated to quality good. Brands were stable.

The cost of change is reduced here by the provision of nearly identical commercial goods (three companies making canned beans, three companies providing nightly news, four companies making automobiles, popular culture exploding, movies, television, music). Time sped up. From listless to exciting.

The key here is that while the cost of change for the consumer diminished, it was still very expensive to introduce a new product or source of information to the market.   So the fight for marketshare was usually between large manufacturers.

I Dunnut Theenk She Cun Handul Much Moer Captain!

Meet Your Digital Master

As we enter the digital age, we see the possibilities of speed meeting with the constraints of flesh. We ushered in this era by placing Buzz Armstrong in a beer can and shooting him at the moon. (Or by shooting Yuri Gregarin into orbit).  Either guy went up with his cheeks nearly coming away from his face.

The last 40 years have pretty much looked that way for civilization. At the close of Viet Nam, the world underwent a rapid transformation that many others have chronicled much better than I can here. Suffice it to say, suburbanization continued, the world saw good spells of peace followed by increasingly frightening and disappointing conflict. And information flowed. And it flowed more.

And in the 1980s people began to get concerned.  As The Well and Earthlink and Compuserve were just dawning, people were already seeing the stresses of too much information being provided to a population that had, over the preceding generation, devalued conversation. We were being given the raw materials but didn't value the means to process it.

Then came the Internet.  And suddenly it was good to talk again! It felt like our reward for spending the previous 30 years being constantly scared of the Soviet Union. The USSR is gone and you get a free Internet!

And people talked.

And talked.

And talked.

Some lost their jobs because they liked to talk on the Internet so much. Because on the Internet you never had a mole on your cheek.

But the Internet gave us more acceleration. The communication age still made you wait until 6 pm to watch the news. In the digital age we had cable news, we have billions of web sites to search, we can read any newspaper on earth any time of the day.

The Internet also accelerated business. We can sell things 24 hours a day. We can buy things 24 hours a day. We can work naked at home at 3 in the afternoon.

Working at home started to become necessary because we had spent so much of our resources building suburbs and living in them that we just couldn't be bothered to drive to work -- because the traffic was so bad. So the office, which was quickly becoming the last bastion of interpersonal conversation started to lose relevance as well.

The cost of change shrunk to a new low. Outsourcing, advanced production techniques and the rise of intellectual property as the new highly coveted thing to produce made products hyper plentiful. Anything from canned salmon to computer software can be obtained from many suppliers.

In this world, Microsoft came of age. The grew with the industry and profited mightily for it. But now we see a shifting of the business model. We see more and more applications being developed open source. We see more applications having both desktop and on-line features. We see an industry-wide resistance to proprietary technology.

We see the utter destruction of brand loyalty. When the cost of change is nearly zero, brand loyalty becomes zero as well. Microsoft is therefore trying to reassert the value of their brand in an era where branding is becoming meaningless. They may succeed, for a time, but what is sticky now is negativity.

A brand is something others use to hang criticism on. Why? Because no one trusts quality. Quality in fact may be irrelevant for the same reason I was discounting the necessity of reading books written three years ago: The assumption is the newer is better and the older is rife with "known issues".

This is the crux of what I have called The Relativity Theory of Information

As we move faster, we perceive time differently.  Brand Loyalty is transient, cynicism is immediate.  It's a very emotional state - because people don't value the time it takes to really get to know something.

That society notices these issues is obvious. A search of Amazon for books dealing with Information Overload presents a stunning 44,313 results.

The Potential Good News

We are recognizing these issues.  We know we can't filter through all the information out there.  Google and Ask and Microsoft are all working to make search more relevant. But, it seems to me, that Search is a lousy term. Search implies that once you get a result (once you have "found") that you have reached your end state.

And that is a communications age result. NBC wanted you to feel that when you tuned in, you had "found". Suburbanization wanted you to believe that "home" was a place with a closed door. And it's that thinking that supercharged the entropy of conversation.

We have the Internet to "give" us a voice - to let us blog, to let us tell other Amazon users how great with think Richard Russo is (he is pretty great) - but that's half our journey. And it's all of Microsoft's problem.

Our "voice" on the Internet is a highpoint of convenience.  If it says something that makes us uncomfortable we can flame with impunity or we can shut the computer off. Neither increase our problem solving or diplomacy skills. They both, unfortunately, increase our devaluation of human opinion and thought.

As people we rely on each other and need to with the Internet here even more than before.

 

Comments

[David Anderson]

I think Seth Godin explains the branding thing better - the brain seeks efficiency. Once a choice is made, the brain does not want to expend energy re-evaluatuating that choice. Hence, brand loyalty is strong because the brand helps with identification efficiency. Branding therefore re-inforces a choice. My brain chooses a brand not just for the logic of the immediate selection criteria but the long term efficiency of ease of future recognition and lack of need to re-evaluate the choice.

David

[Sam Rose]

Wow, thanks for this increadible post, Jim! GREAT STUFF!

I have a lot of feedback actually,so much that I am going to just create a blog post about your blog post.

[panasianbiz.com]

While no one would dispute that Microsoft has caused a great deal of resentment, mostly related to its basically creating a monopoly, I'm not sure that it's really in danger, at least not yet. It will be interesting to see what happens.