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Maybe it's the 'nt name Ev points to a piece in Forbes that sticks a fork in Lucent and declares it done. Several years ago, when Lucent was very hot stuff, I found myself sitting next to one of their top trouble-shooters in an airplane. He was on his way to Thailand or someplace, where he would hunker down and help the local office finish delivering a "solution" or whatever. When I made some kind of complimentary remark about what a great company Lucent turned out to be, he dismissed the flattery and proceeded to tell me why the company was toast, long-term. "They have people who walk backwards," he said. "Backwards?" I replied. He nodded, and then filled me in on what the Bell Labs culture was all about. Seems that Bell Labs, which was spun off as Lucent, was more than the greatest pure science laboratory ever funded by a giant corporation. It was a habitat for misfits, one of the most wacky of which was this guy who had been walking backwards — all the time — for years, as part of a scientific experiment or something. And he wasn't that unusual. There were lots of guys like this. Brilliant, strange, valuable people for whom there was no other conceivable employer in the world. This was a wonderful thing, the guy told me. But it wasn't great building material for business. Bell Labs was a big, fat, very weird cost center. And it had the misfortune of coming into the world as Lucent with lots of products for which there was near-infinite demand. It lived in the bubble of its own reputation, which the stock market valued very highly, and which actually made money, in spite of enormous legacy overhead. Immediately the company mistook transient market values for a long-term strategy, and continued to leverage the best and worst of both the old AT&T culture and the Bell Labs all-science core employee constituency. "Just watch," he said. Now we see. I'm not hopeful, unless Lucent can find something inherently company-like about the laboratory it came from. Every company has its own DNA — its own immutable nature. This is where the company comes from, no matter where it's going. Where a company can't help coming from is what positioning is really all about. It's the guts of the company. Its honest innards. Its soul. That's why Nordstrom will always be about shoes, and why Apple will always be about art. Follow that link down to The Couple and see why Novell lost its soul when Craig and Judith Burton left. (Also why Craig carries so much authority with those — like me — who watched him operate at Novell Bell Labs discovered the Big Bang and pumped out a zillion patents. But how far can it go walking backwards? What's with the grain?
Anyway, I do see that there are 28 pages that contain the phrase the grain +of +the Web. The top one is one of my blogs, which points back to the Strange Bedfellows DaveNet from September 29, 2000. So that's the sucker I'm bookmarking. But wanting to find the best link-to page — one that highlights the quote — makes me think it might be good to start compiling, somewhere, a list of quotes that speak to the nature of the Web. I would guess that quite a few should come out of David Weinberger's work, not just with JOHO — the Journal of the Hyperlinked Organization — but also his new book, the sourcework of which is exposed at its title site, Small Pieces Loosely Joined. David's essay The Longing, which serves as a chapter by the same title (not in HTML anywhere) in The Cluetrain Manifesto, begins by asking What is the Web for? This is the deepest question we can ask, and keep asking. It cannot help but bring needed perspective to the argument Larry Lessig has been trying to focus. (By the way, I just added a little something to the SPLJ discussion around David's first chapter draft.) As often as I can, I quote something Tim O'Reilly or I said during a phone conversation in which we followed the derivation of information from the noun to its root verb inform to its root verb form to the conclusion that to inform is to form and that therefore we are all authors of each other. That's the quote. So now I'm thinking about the difference between information, which we conceive as content, and authority, which we conceive as a virtue. I don't think we've paid enough attention to either one, even though we use the terms every day. When we call information "content," we reduce it to the commodity we call data. This lets us conceive it as something we can ship. We can packetize it, move it, open or restrict access to it. We can treat it as property. These are industrial concepts that deny the nature at information's deepest roots, which is the power to form, to author, another human being. Authority is cleaner. To be an authority is to be one who authors — who forms — others. It is authority, perhaps even more than information, that increases in value the more widely it becomes known. When we grant authority to other people, we give them the right to form what we know, and who we are. Speaking of ends Nice piece about end-to-end here at the nicely-named NoGateKeepers.org. Interesting to discover, when I went hunting for a page where Larry Lessig explains end-to-end architecture, that the #2 link in my Google search is this interview I did with Craig Burton, who now explains the same issues at greater length at his new blog. The bogs trap Since I wrote the last line of the item below, I have starting to like calling unlinkable pages bogs. Like blog without the L. They're link-hostile. Against the grain of the Web. A sand trap among the golf links of cyberspace. A place where connections get bogged down. Blog2Blog Julian Bond has posted lots of notes from the O'Reilly P2P conference at his blog, Rogue Moon. Later they'll also be here. Lots of good stuff, like these three lines from Larry Lessig's speech: The architects of the Internet had no idea what this network would ultimately be used for. It was architected so their ignorance wouldn't stop it from developing. This principle is the foundation of what made the revolution possible! The idea was decentralized control, to empower ordinary users--all of whom have different ideas about how the Internet will work. The issue is not about copyright being evil. It's about how we balance this new set of interests with the extraordinary opportunity of the Internet. I'm still looking forward to the full text of Larry's speech, which is covered to some degree here. Maybe Larry's speeches are in HTML somewhere, but if so I can't find them. Most of the ones here (what I think is his main site, even though a Lessig.org exists and is clearly Larry's) are PDFs, meaning you can't link to them. The site design is also awful. Click on It's the Architecture, Mr. Chairman (v1.0) and it brings up text in a frame. But the text is a graphic. You can't link to it. Click on Architecting for Control and you'll start downloading a PDF. There is no way of knowing, before you click on either, what will happen. There isn't even a clue in the bottom of the window when the arrow hovers over a link. So hey, Larry, you should know that (as Dave puts it) links are the grain of the Web. You've been talking about the "end to end" nature of the Web for a long time. Give us a means to your ends. These aren't ends here. They're bogs.
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