Who is Farhan Lalji?

I was amused to see the article “EU to scrutinise Microsoft’s promise to open up Office” on my feed reader today. Not because I wasn’t expecting it - heck, I was wondering what the heck took the EC so long - but because Microsoft was actually trying to do something good, at least in principle, and was getting nailed for it. The trouble is Microsoft has a history of being bad, being anticompetitive and being closed. So people suspect that when they are trying to be nice that it’s just a front or a ploy or a dishonest attempt to get away with something.

I’m not saying that Microsoft is genuinely trying to open up. Personally, I suspect it is a front or a ploy or a dishonest attempt to get away with something myself. But I think it’s interesting that not many would give Microsoft the benefit of the doubt.

This was the trouble I had with game theory or taking things down to one off games. It’s never a one off or even a zero-sum game. There are never only two players. By being bad and screwing someone or some company or some institution over you’re opening the door to bad karma and some other entity will get even on behalf of the universe.

By being bad you piss off the universe. By being good you open yourself up to good things. I think the harder part is trying to be good when you’ve got a history of being bad. Good luck Microsoft, I truly believe Ray Ozzie wants to be open and good. Whether the whole company wants this and whether the universe believes it and allows it will be an interesting next chapter.

Umair’s been spending quite a bit of time talking about good and evil, open and closed, Microsoft and Yahoo, and Facebook and Google. A very basic synopsis would be that open is good, Microsoft, and increasingly Facebook, have bad DNA and this will prevent them from sustaining success in the long run. Whereas Google has being good in it’s DNA and this will enable them to succeed in the long run. It’s a pretty smart analysis and I think its pretty spot on.

However, one company that has kept its doors closed and managed to succeed is Apple. iTunes has to be the most closed bit of software I know. And DRM is just plain evil, very evil. But yet Apple kills in this market and is showing no signs of letting up.

So my theory is that design can trump good and evil in the short term. If you ensure that users have a great experience, and that it’s simple, efficient and effective users and the community in general will overlook the fact that it’s closed, proprietary and evil - how else would you explain DRM? The iPhone is another example of closed and well designed but yet super successful. The fact that Apple was bricking unlocked phones is another great example of evil but well designed.

Is this sustainable? I don’t believe so. I believe if someone comes up with a really useful, easy, super smooth system that has a wide variety of content and is good, open, basically DRM free, then iTunes could go down. And if someone (RIM/Nokia I’m looking at you) comes up with a phone that meets the standards Apple has set for usability for browsing and interacting online on your handheld device and is open as well, well then Apple could go down there too. It’s not easy, because Apple’s set the design bar so high, but it’s not impossible.

I just finished reading Seth Godin’s the Dip. It was a quick, enjoyable read that’s helped me focus a bit.

The book talks about how anything worth having needs dedication and is usually pretty hard and how quitting a dead end masquerading as an opportunity (or as Seth calls them a “Cul-de-Sac”) is a good thing.

It’s hardly rocket science, I know. In fact the Missus told me “That seems pretty obvious” when I brought it up with her last night. But it’s funny how you can invest a lot of your time and effort into something that offers very little value and not think that you should drop it and focus on something really valuable – sunk costs apply to everything in my opinion. Or on the other hand how you can think something is too hard and forget why you’ve started down the path in the first place. Sometimes you need a kick up the backside to remind you that this is a dip and you need to power through it.

So thanks Seth, it was a good and short read and just what I needed this week.

One of the reasons I love twitter and SMS messaging is that you have a limit to the number of characters you have to get your message across. So you’re constantly thinking about the most effective way to use the limit to get your message across.

Communication formats without limits makes it more difficult to communicate effectively and efficiently. So I’ve started putting limits on other forms of communication.

Cathy brought the 5 sentence rule to my attention a couple of weeks ago, and I have to admit that it’s changed the way I write emails. I have five sentences in my head the whole time I’m writing so I make sure I don’t go on and on which I’ve been known to do as well.

I’m thinking about what would be the optimum framework for blog posts. I hate posts that could probably be cut in a third and would end up being clearer for it. So I’m trying to stick to 3-4 paragraphs and see if my posts are clearer because of it. We’ll see.

Speed accuracy news and people

I’m not a huge fan of some of the tech blogosphere. I think a lot of times there harsher then they should be, and off base with some of their reporting. I won’t name names but you probably know of who I speak. But a lot of time they’re really accurate. This is true for some more then others of course.

But, the timing of stories is incredible and as close to live as you’re going to get. I’ve gone from reading the trade press and find out what’s going on at a week by week level, to not reading the trade press at all. I read the papers the next day skimming through for new pieces of information because I’ve read the main message on the blogs the day before – as it happened.

So I’m making a trade off, preferring to find out what’s happening when it happens rather then getting the insights and super data checked accuracy that comes with newspapers. And that’s okay by me.