relentless focus

What’s going on. Why isn’t the west doing anything. To answer that you need to think about assets, limitations and what the goal is. Think about how quickly assets move. Think about Baghdad.

Gadaffi won’t be allowed to remain in power, not even in Tripoli. Obama, Sarkozy and Cameron have major stakes in this game now. So do the Arabs. That is the end game and Obama, Cameron and others have said so quite clearly. Here’s the plan.

First they need to get command & control aircraft in place. This is necessary for directing fighter plane traffic as they attack Gadaffi’s military assets, without command and control in charge there would be military chaos with planes in each others’ flight paths and cross attacking targets and so on. It’s too dangerous for western or arab manned planes to “just attack”, nobody wants pilots on parade in Tripoli!

So step one is get command and control resources in place. I don’t know if these assets will be flying out of the USA or being collected from NATO and Iraq theatre and perhaps elsewhere. Flying from the US they could be in place (with the logistical assets needed to sustain them there) by Sat eve Libya time. If they’re NATO or Iraq theatre assets perhaps several hours quicker. I don’t think any other nation but the USA have the resources to handle the command and control of such a large scale multi-nation attack. Fighter bombers are coming from the UK, France, Qatar and the UAE and possibly Jordan.  They’re probably prepped for action now awaiting orders and flight plans and targets. Without a doubt Arab fighter bomber assets will feature prominent in the attack to come.

Air refueling assets are also being moved in as quickly as possible as well as logistical support that in-air refueling needs on the ground. I think sufficient resources for the attack to begin sat eve Libya time will be in place given the urgency of the situation. Supply lines can be reinforced as the attacks take place.

The attacks will begin with fighter bombers attacking Gaddafi’s anti-air defense system and attacking to disrupt & destroy all military communications as well as State TV. They will aggressively destroy tanks and artillery installations with intensive attacks. Military airfields will be bombed.

Attacks will likely go on all night as intel recon identifies military targets. Night attacks have a shock & awe factor and its intensity will be frightening to mercenaries. By Sunday mid-day large portions of Gaddafi’s military will be gone. Expect rapid defections with only his elite guard left for Gaddafi to rely on. They will circle the wagons around Gaddafi in Tripoli or where ever he decides he’ll make his last stand. He will certainly leave a path of destruction in his wake.

 At the same time the supply streams of munitions and logistical material are being supplied to the rebels via Arab states ultimately supplied by the US. The rebels will be able to advance rapidly against the remnants of Gaddafi’s defences. 

It’s only a matter of time then for the citizen army to take on the elite forces. With air support on the side of the rebels the end game shouldn’t take long. At that point the Libyans are left to sort things out and the military alliance will disband.

as linked to by Kontra on Twitter. Original source unknown. If you know the source please let me know and I will give credit (as credit is due!).

Some people think “open” systems are “better” than closed ones and cite this as a mantra. These are easy terms for fanboys to coalesce around but rather meaningless when you’re a serious business creating products for sale, especially if your goal is to create an extremely user friendly mass market product.

On a more sophisticated level its possible to analyse the problem differently.

In Apple’s case when they started to create iOS they looked back at their long experience (since before 1984) with the Mac. When the Mac was first being developed in the early 80s, Steve Jobs hired a very bright engineer named Jef Raskin, a specialist in Human Computer Interface design to lead the development of MacOS 1. Raskin’s chief idea was that a computer should be like an appliance, like a toaster. People should just use it and not have to deal with all kinds of technical details (eg setting up a wifi network or updating the OS or wondering where you saved files, etc.). Raskin’s used the term “information appliance” for this vision of a computing device.

Raskin was one of the driving forces in the development of the MacOS but in the end, to his mind and to Jobs’s (to the extent that he felt Raskin made powerful arguments for his case), the Mac was (and is) a failure because it’s still too complex for the average joe. An early rallying cry of the Mac was “a computer for the rest of us”. But as we know, the rest of us turned out to be geeks and engineers and designers and illustrators and writers who at least learned to do the more common computer tasks necessary to get some work done.  It’s important not to fall into the trap of thinking that geeks and IT sophisticated people are the majority of potential computer users, they’re not “the rest of us” that Apple has in mind for iOS. 

It’s Apple’s analysis that although Macs are relatively easy to use by PC standards they are still extremely complicated for a large population of potential users. Typical users don’t know where they saved their files, have a neighbour help them set up their wifi and email, get confused where the app they downloaded went to, etc. What’s more, a lot of people who do know how to fiddle with a computer actually don’t want to, they find it robs them of time they need to do other stuff, either physically or mentally.

It’s Apple’s analysis that if you take away a lot of the complexity of how a machine works, inexperienced users can get to doing real things far more quickly and convincingly and experienced users can be more focused and productive. 

It’s their analysis that If you spend enormous amounts of time working out design details that affect usability, you can make an OS which is both powerful yet simple and which helps users “discover” hidden powers (the Human-Computer Interface Concept of discoverability).

So basically Apple set out to design a new class of computer without the complexity of PCs but with a large proportion of its power. This required a closed system to achieve. Yes you give up that power to tinker with the system but its Apple’s analysis that tinkering is not why people buy computers. When you analyse all the complaints about Apple’s so called closed system for example, that apps have to be approved through a vetting process or you can only buy apps through the app store, etc, you can see that Apple’s goal is to simplify the user experience (avoid viruses, scamware, etc) and make it trustworthy.

That certain people are offended by this approach is obvious though its not quite obvious why its so offensive to them when it comes to computers but they drive cars that are closed systems, shop in shops which are closed systems, route for sports teams which are closed systems etc. 

Steve Jobs said at all things digital that this concept of simplicity is Apple’s bet for what people want. He said, if people think we’re wrong they won’t buy our products. Right now, he said, we’re not getting that message.

So what exactly does the word innovation mean in a business context? Like other words of its ilke like “Art” and “Freedom” there are no agreed on definitions. Define innovation too broadly and you find that every small change or alteration is considered innovative. Just listen to Robert Scoble’s enthusiastic gushing about every new twist in social media and you’ll quickly lose your appetite for the word. The Oxford Shorter Dictionary pins the earliest use of the word innovation in English (1548) to the introduction of novelities and the alteration of existing practices. By (1726) the meanings had come to include “A rebellion or insurrection”.

David Kappos, Director of the US Patent Office spoke yesterday (Sat, 12 March 2011) at SXSW on the topic of measuring innovation. A patent of course is the government’s formal recognition of a new process or technique for achieving some result which differs significantly from earlier ways of doing things. 

“Patent filings do not equal innovation, by any stretch,” says Kappos. While his solution to the problem may not completely satisfy those eager to see the United States move beyond the patent paradigm, Kappos is pressing experts and universities to come up with new measures of innovation, such as job creation and job growth that arise from a particular idea. (as reported in Fast Company).

Innovation seems to have something to do with newness but also some clear result in a change of behaviour or economic activity. It must be a rebellion or insurrection against the established way of doing things with a measurable outcome that is significant. Of course we won’t ever be able to pin down all these parameters: how measurable, how significant, how different?

The UK actually has a department of government known as the Department for Business Innovation and Skills. In a 2008 white paper they define innovation as  “the successful exploitation of new ideas”. Again we see that innovation doesn’t just equal new, it requires the successful exploitation of new.

FutureLab, a UK based marketing agency surveyed 700 SME business leaders in London in the early part of the first decade of the millennium and asked for definitions of innovation and received the usual wishy washy generalisations yet when they were asked to name a tangible product that was innovative, “most people mentioned the iPod”. Matt Rhodes, the author of the FutureLab report went on to say “ This was surprising to me and when we explored why people mentioned this it became clear that they associated innovation with something that was either “not an idea I could come up with” or was “a cool bit of kit that lets me do something I couldn’t before”.

Here we see 2 factors as a measure of innovation, 1) it’s not simply something new but something that redefines our conceptions and 2) it results in a change in behaviour that was not possible before the innovation. Innovation is disruptive both conceptually and behaviourally.

The Freakonomics Blog has an interesting report by Stephen J. Dubner on innovation. He breaks the concept of innovation into 3 sub categories: 

1) Incremental Innovation (“cheaper, thinner, faster and, of course, more features.”)

2) Architectural Innovation (which involve a restructuring of the very building blocks of a product family, industry, or infrastructure). Examples include VOIP which restructures the traditional packet switching telephone technology and Flash memory and SSDs which restructure computer memory based on writing to a physical media in motion.  

3) Disruptive Innovation (which alters the social practices of society)

Of the 3rd they go on to say: “Many students of innovation question if something can even be called a real innovation if it doesn’t end up altering social practices.” They cite mobile phones, digital cameras, personal computers and the world wide web as examples of disruptive innovations. While there may not be an agreed on set of metrics to measure these innovations, its clear that each has changed our relationship to the life we live and society in general on a mass scale.

While the article goes on to explore ways of measuring innovation and the difficulties that arise and whether the lines between Architectural Innovation and Disruptive Innovation don’t perhaps blur at the edges one thing seems clear to me, innovation is either incremental or disruptive. 

I have to agree with those critics who question the value of attaching the word innovation to incremental change (thinner, faster, cheaper) but see great value in using innovation to mean disruptive change to how we live our lives.

In an earlier essay I brought up the issue of tablet computing and posed the question was it Microsoft or Apple who were innovators in tablet computing and I think I can now clearly show why I think it was Apple even though Microsoft first came up with the term and a product. Microsoft’s product never sold well and was really based on the earlier paradigm of the personal computer using the same conceptual architecture and operating system as in their traditional laptop computers. Apple redefined both the conceptual architecture and the operating system of their tablet and as a result came up with a product with immediate customer appeal (the first or second fastest growing product in history according to people who measure and record these sort of things) which disrupted previous markets and is changing both how we use computers and the role they play in our own lives.

As Steve Jobs said on the introduction of the iPhone on 9 January 2007

“Every once in a while a revolutionary product comes along that changes everything. “

Patrick Copeland, Google Director of Engineering, gave the keynote at QCon in London this morning (topic innovation) and is reported to have called gmail innovative. Really? 

Hotmail (a free email service) was founded by Sabeer Bhatia and Jack Smith, and was one of the first webmail services on the Internet. It was commercially launched on July 4, 1996 (Wikipedia)

gmail was launched in 2004.

The word innovation is used so loosely at times that the word becomes meaningless. Some people use it liberally (and inappropriately) to mean refinement or incremental change in how things are done. 

Copeland is reported to have said:  

building the right “it” is more important than building “it” right. If what you build is the wrong thing, it will not succeed, whereas the right idea will sometimes succeed despite poor implementation.

Was Microsoft more innovative than Apple in regards to tablet design?

To me, innovation is about large scale disruptive change in how we do things. Speeding up the Chrome web browser to be incrementally faster than its competition is an incremental refinement, its not innovative. Desireable? Yes. Innovative? No.

Figuring out and implementing a strategy in which you give away cool stuff that others are selling in order to disrupt their business model and attract large numbers of their customers to your free version of their services in order to quietly collect mountains of personal data on your rapidly growing number of users for the purpose of monitising that data through the selling of targeted advertising leading to a massively profitable corporation within a very short time is innovative.

Google strategies on running server farms are innovative. Google Search was a refinement over Yahoo but Google’s strategy for monitising search was innovative. 

Buzz and Wave were interesting experiments but they didn’t catch on, they didn’t disrupt old patterns or change people’s behaviour. They were failed experiments. After Picasso how we saw the world and thought about Art was changed forever. Picasso didn’t invent painting, he didn’t invent modernism. But what he did influenced a century of thinking about Art. Wave and Buzz were more like New Coke, an asterisk in cultural history.

Many people point out that Microsoft “invented” tablet computers. They had some of the notes but they didn’t quite write the song that people would sing. It took Apple to figure that out.

If a picture replaces a thousand words, here’s the rest of my essay (courtesy of Counternotions)