In yet another Daring Fireball-inspired tract, Charlie Wood asks why Apple appears to escape the "innovator’s dilemma" presented in Clayton Christensen’s eponymous work. The idea is a follow-on from Christensen’s earlier depiction of ‘disruptive technology-cum-innovations’ and how they evolve within a market (similar to Kuhn’s structure of scientific revolutions). Once the disruptive paradigm has established a beachhead, its progenitor often overdoes its development and in turn loses out to second-tier players that leapfrog it by adopting the innovation at a ‘good enough’ level, undercutting the market leader. Yet Apple, at least in its current incarnation, seems to avoid that pitfall.

Moonwatcher: Why Doesn’t Apple Face The Innovator’s Dilemma?

Wood argues that this is in due to Apple distinguishing itself by design, which appeals to taste and is harder to usurp than a typical feature matrix. This certainly helps explain why, for example, the iPod has utterly eclipsed any imitators (which add features at the expense of usability) and why the iPhone was able to dominate mindshare so quickly in an established smartphone segment (which has always buried functionality behind clunky interfaces).

However, another straightforward business answer is that Apple acts to undercut itself rather than leaving that to a competitor. For example, when the iPod Mini was the bestselling flash-based music player, they discontinued it and introduced the Nano, which reconsidered the Mini in both design and features rather than just making minor changes. With the iPhone less than a year old, already intense speculation mounts about a likely successor with enhancements like 3G wireless, effectively hamstringing competition which may already have 3G-capable handsets. To re-iterate: even the rumor of a future iPhone feature is somehow perceived (at least in the breathless press coverage) as superior to other brands already in the field.

Perhaps even more apt than Wood’s own rationalization is the observation made in a comment by Martin Pilkington that:

"the problem with most companies once they become larger is

a) they become more bureaucratic
b) everyone starts to protect their own territory
c) marketing takes over or they ignore marketing"

This you may recognize as a business-specific case of systemantics, where the business effectively ends up at war with itself in unconscious internecine competition for resources. He also adds the specific point—which has also been espoused by Steve Jobs in interviews about the Apple design philosophy—that they do not add features to products merely to reach feature parity in reaction to competition, or through typical focus group artificiality, but through something more akin to user cases. That is, they imagine how people want to use a device, and then build a feature to make that possible in as intuitive a way as possible. As far back as 1998 (when their resurgent success was much less assured), Jobs told BusinessWeek that:

"It’s really hard to design products by focus groups. A lot of times, people don’t know what they want until you show it to them."

Is there a better shorthand for product innovation than ‘thinking of what people want before they knew they wanted it’? 

In an article last February on software development culture, eWeek’s Peter Coffee made reference to a maxim on complexity: “Complex systems usually operate in failure mode.” The source was John Gall’s 1978 work called Systemantics, a kind of satire of General Systems Theory that simultaneously mocked and catalogued the tendencies of systems to create their own problems. With its title taken from a mash-up of systematic, semantic, and ’system antic,’ the book laid out a quite illuminating series of ‘laws’ that afflict systems in the same fashion that the Peter Principle underlies corporate hierarchy, Conway’s Law outlines the effect of committees, and Murphy’s Law describes probability—in fact, one law is that “a complex system can fail in an infinite number of ways” which essentially encapsulates Murphy. Gall also ventures into policy, arguing for a much broader understanding of global concerns as being generated by underlying systems:

“The religious person may blame it on original sin. The historian may cite the force of trends such as population growth and industrialization. The sociologist offers reasons rooted in the peculiarities of human associations. Reformers blame it all on ‘the system,’ and propose new systems that would, they assert, guarantee a brave new world of justice, peace, and abundance. Everyone, it seems, has his own idea of what the problem is and how it can be corrected. But all agree on one point—that their own system would work very well if only it were universally adopted.

The point of view espoused in this essay is more radical and at the same time more pessimistic. Stated as succinctly as possible: the fundamental problem does not lie in any particular system but rather in systems as such. Salvation, if it is attainable at all, even partially, is to be sought in a deeper understanding of the ways of systems, not simply in a criticism of the errors of a particular system.”

Other references to Systemantics include excerpts of the 3rd edition (renamed The System Bible) via Amazon’s Online Reader—for example, you can browse the entire “Index of Horrible Examples” from Czar Alexander to Three Mile Island and the Titanic—and collected references via del.icio.us. Regrettably Amazon does not actually sell any of the 3 editions, but another company called General Systemantics advertises copies for sale (via a default MS FrontPage theme, itself fodder for a whole article on system failure) along with the brilliantly epigrammatic praise by William Safire that “Work books gall, but Gall’s book works.”

More contemporary parallels to Gall’s work include Donella Meadows’ Twelve Leverage Points which describe a scale of effective places “to intervene in a system,” alternately thought of as levers by which you can affect the workings of a complex system; Edward Tenner’s book Why Things Bite Back on the ‘revenge effects’ or unintended consequences of technology; Jared Diamond’s book Collapse on possible causes of failed societies; and Anti-patterns, an outgrowth of Design Patterns that have been utilized in fields like architecture and software design to find well-solved problems and re-use them. Most anyone who’s held a job can probably relate to one or more organization or management anti-patterns, which also includes longstanding concepts such as “moral hazard” from economics and “scope creep” from project management.

[EB: Systems Engineering]

Nick Paumgarten’s piece on “the lives of elevators” starts and ends with the tragic tale of Nicholas White, who spent 41 hours trapped in an elevator back in 1999. But the story is really about the science of vertical people-movers, which enable the high-rise and thus urban architecture itself – “two things make tall buildings possible: the steel frame and the safety elevator.”

Our Local Correspondents: Up and Then Down: Reporting & Essays

The essay covers the safety features and record of elevators, their basic construction, their efficiency of design and energy. Their role in media, even the dearth of elevator poetry, are mentioned (along with a perfectly appropriate use of ‘vertiginous’), with the observation that as a plot device, it serves:

“…to bring characters together, as a kind of artificial enforcement of proximity and conversation. The brevity of the ride suits the need for a stretch of witty or portentous dialogue, for stolen kisses and furtive arguments. For some people, the elevator ride is a social life.”

We learn of the elevator variant of claustrophobia and behavioral elevator therapy. We meet vertical transportation consultants like James Fortune, who engineer a building’s ‘elevatoring’ – its handling of ‘human traffic.’ The science of elevator planning is built on physics of space and psychology of time, plus the probabilities of human behavior. The elevatoring plan of a building must keep wait times at a minimum, while allowing for cultural constraints on human proximity (measured by calculations such as the average ‘body ellipse,’ which vary between Western and Eastern even as they do between urban and rural notions of ‘personal space’) and using as little room as possible to impact the building’s overall architecture. New innovations such as ‘destination dispatch’ pre-program floor routing based on rider pools, but at the cost of the illusion of user control over elevator movement. Meanwhile, fundamental limits such as cable length – any climb higher than 1700 feet and the hoist rope will snap under its own weight – require innovations like sky lobbies to act as transfer points midway up towers that can now scale a mile high.

Outside of the article, Paumgarten also recently appeared on NPR’s Talk of the Nation where it’s mentioned that his ongoing assignment is to cover ‘journeys’ which at least explains how traveling up and down got coverage.

For my part, the only operator-run elevator still in service I can recall using is at the San Francisco Rasputin’s music store, where the upper floors are only accessible by rattletrap conveyance operated by precisely the kind of adjunct indie clerk you’d expect to work in a SF music store. So instead of only feeling defensive when you check out, you also have to weigh checking out another floor’s genre against the calculated disapproval you may detect in the implicit scoff of their pressing the button.

As for the science, elevatoring has already made a notable appearance in two games – the original SimTower (scheduled for re-release on Nintendo DS!) and its sequel, Yoot Tower. Many of the stated tips for good vertical building design – keeping cafeterias at ground level, adroit use of stairways and escalators – factored into gameplay, and key to success was sufficient elevatoring. Too few, and lines would grow at each floor’s chokepoint, and your sims would rapidly turn red; or your maids wouldn’t be able to clean all the hotel rooms and turn them before the next check-in; or, heaven forfend, your fire escape plan would fall short. Too many ‘vators and you blew your budget for that top floor cathedral. Perhaps all those hours I spent trying to ferry customers from a 40th floor cinema to the 3rd floor gift shops without affecting the hotel clientele has a practical outlet after all.

[Somewhat apropos, I just had a track by concept band Towering Inferno - not to be confused with The Towering Inferno - play while writing this.]

A recurring example of the self-defeating nature of political handling of economics is the looming insolvency of Medicare and Social Security. Like energy issues, the problems have been identified for decades but political will favors short-term spending to gin up reelection support at the expense of long-term planning. So the government borrows against the programs’ surplus during flush times to support present concerns such as corporate subsidies and defense spending, leaving the difference to be made up during someone else’s term. The demographic event of Baby Boomer retirement will also strain the system precisely when incoming payments will see a dramatic decline. The current projection has Medicare insolvent by 2019 (Social Security will hold up until something like 2041), and the growth of the two programs would eventually consume all federal revenue (a parallel to the growing weight of interest on the national debt). Yet any proposal to address the underlying factors by raising taxes, reforming health care, restricting or delaying benefits, or rolling back subsidies or other spending all have unpleasant political consequences, hence the characterization of Social Security and Medicare as the ‘third rail’ of politics.

The $53 trillion asteroid

The comments to the article fall into two, largely partisan groups – those who place the blame on Republican spending and rail against the establishment, and those who blame Democratic spending and call for tangential conservative planks such as expelling illegal immigrants, repealing the Teachers’ Union, etc. More instructive are comparative discussions of programs in Canada and Australia and how they’ve dealt with their own respective shortfalls.

Subtitled “The power of boring technology,” referring to the tiered distribution of new technologies and how they achieve their greatest impact once they’ve passed from the ‘cool’ stage to ubiquity. Shirky argues that the current wave of communications technologies are working to flatten hierarchies, expand communities of interest, and re-cast the media divide from the prior broadcasting model.

Ars Book Review: “Here Comes Everybody” by Clay Shirky

The review is followed by an interview with Shirky, including more on the concept of the ‘Coasean floor’ and its intersection with ‘the Long Tail.’ I’m also heartened by the recognition of interdisciplinary study as a catalyst for creativity.

Lately, I see systems. This is less Sixth Sense and more Little Man Tate, although without the glowing blue lines or floating numerals. Simply put, subjects that previously held no interest for me – politics (particularly political rhetoric), international relations, macroeconomics, business organization – are suddenly fascinating because they share a common platform of complex systems. This revelation ought perhaps to come as little surprise, given the predilection among the geek set for the systematic and ordered. In a post detailing aspects of the nerd psyche (with workarounds!), Rands describes the obsession with systems as a coping mechanism. For example, the nerd “sees the world as a system which, given enough time and effort, is completely knowable. This is a fragile illusion that your nerd has adopted, but it’s a pleasant one that gets your nerd through the day.” This system-centric perspective is also broadly attributed as the cause for abnormal geek socialization, since most social conversation is not directly results-oriented (I once gave up on conversational segues, much to the bewilderment of my interlocutors, before reading S.I. Hayakawa’s Language in Thought and Action). Likewise it could explain the attraction of conspiracy theories, which neatly knit together compelling fact or fact-like statements to make a reassuring whole that explains some otherwise puzzling event.

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