clean machine
It’s the middle of the week and I’m trolling for news for Friday’s recording session with the Gang. For months I’ve been honing a news gathering system built out of loosely connected pieces: Instapaper, Digg Deeper, Nuzzel, iOS Reading List, Techmeme, NY Times, Wall Street Journal. The Times mostly flows automatically into Instapaper via IF(TTT) while I dump Media ReDEF stories from Safari by selecting right click/Instapaper from the context menu. Google InBox rounds out the tools, where an Instapaper bot lurks several clicks down in Chrome.
Where this breaks down a bit is in having to take extra steps after the fact to push a useful story into an Instapaper folder. Getting value out of something mostly gives me the interest in finding another useful nugget; archiving the old one feels like extra work so far. But the reward for archiving first and read later is that I get a broader view of the information base from which to prioritize the hunt. What I’m really looking for is the elusive Zeitgiest of the day or week, one or several that will serve me as I try to nudge the show this way or that during recording.
Right now the relentless search for unicorns is causing most of the noise in the system. Certainly it makes all the difference to the Valley’s core business, the central theme of which is that since 90% of investment is doomed, there has to be these big lightning strikes to keep the VCs and the media in business. But that’s different than what we ostensibly care about: the rapid march of innovation, empowerment, and riches driven by technology R&D and economic reinvention. It may be good for the VCs, but is it the only path to growth?
Another consequence of this unicorn view is the idea that this is good for two groups: the young and the wealthy. The kids get to mass around apps while living services like app food and online cars thrive on surge pricing affordable by already well-off time-constrained digital slaves. Is this true? Sure, but more true is the broad expansive wave of capability emanating from the interactions flowing in and out of our phones. Just because millions are not engaged in specific apps doesn’t mean that is the only way to measure or extrapolate from to derive value in much smaller contexts. Look carefully and you’ll see micro-communities at work regardless of size or reach.
How many people seriously impacted on the Apple Watch, for example. Hard to know though Apple does. But it’s a good bet that the core team was somewhere in the 20–50 person number, as the problem domain is identified, allocated for, and siphoned into a set of deliverables where each have their own similar microcommunities branching out. The easiest way to figure out the dynamic is to probe for the visibility across the team laterally. As hierachy crystallizes from top to bottom, the flat cross talk gets concentrated in special communicators whose primary role is to keep those sinews open and supple. It’s no surprise that Steve Jobs was seemingly autocratic in style, but particularly in his transcendant success had evolved in choosing his team for their cross-colleague abilities.
Even years after his death, Apple continues to deliver a sense of inexorable momentum, even as the demise of the Apple TV is touted. What persists is the sense of purpose as the horizons shrink, the way touch, response, feedback, balance, and other cybersensual nuances spread across the Watch, the new MacBook, the 6 Plus, and hopefully an Apple TV refresh and App Store gateway. These all add up to a template for notification-driven computing delivering enterprise services at consumer level quality and utility.
What the Unicornists miss is that the strategic value of this suite of software-burnished hardware advances will fuel success in the middle of the spectrum where volume plus margin equals massive growth. The quick retort is that it’s a winner-take-all world, that there’s Facebook, then Twitter/Instagram/Uber/ or Android/Amazon, then the rest. But the kids don’t care what the app is, just that it works in aggregate with the others on the leaderboard. And they’re right. I don’t use any of these tools because it’s better, just because it’s better in some areas and this one is better in others, and around and around in overlapping services. Micro-services, if you will.
The microservices around Apple’s suite aren’t mature enough to really matter; Continuity is a hit-or-miss proposition on the Watch. I don’t want to look at a notification that “plays” the content on the phone; if I want to pick up the phone I’ll do it myself thanks. But as the software advances in the choice of actions you take, I’m looking for more and more third parties to help me with the newsgathering at the top of this. Thanks, Nuzzel for the tip on Alexia going back to school, now put it in Instapaper and bundle it in with AOL-Verizon stories. In fact, make me able to force-press a link that moves those articles too. The net result is a series of actions that produce Watch notification design that accelerates adoption by other apps based on engagement metrics. I love Instapaper’s Watch ability to launch “Speak” of an article saved from Digg Deeper, where Bluetooth takes it from the phone to the car system.
At some point these cooperating services transcend being efficient and become an emotional haven for the notification storm. Today we are binary in our reaction — convinced of their value or looking to pull the plug outright. If we don’t figure it out, the advertisers will. Most likely there will be some implied or explicit contract with us, an offer to receive notifications in return for some value for our cooperation.
Once the flow of notifications and metrics emanating from them reach a critical mass, we have what Paul McCartney called a clean machine. The Gang when it’s working is such a machine, where the mix of information, banter, and deflection deliver a sense of the boundaries of an issue, a strategy, a roll out, a capitulation — and hopefully some context to begin the process over again with a new set of branching teams.
The fascinating segment on the last Letterman show of a typical production day showed a fluid organization working across various teams to tease out the elusive “joke” or narrative with that sly sense of humor and rueful arrogance. For a large microcommunity it worked; for the Unicornists, absolutely not. Eventually the Not-so-silent minority outlasted the rest, and in the process revealed the depth of the “humor”. More correctly termed magic. Maybe not for everybody, but tell me what’s better.
