The warm up acts

I love the notion that the last forty-odd years of computer revolution were only significant in the sense that they represent a necessary journey we had to undertake in order to get to the world of technology we have today.

We simply had to endure the floppy disk, monochrome displays, dot-matrix printers, command line interfaces, modems, virus attacks, Palm Pilots, Internet Explorer 6, Flash based websites and Windows Vista. For without them we couldn't have made it this far.

And by this far I mean specifically the confluence of mobile, cloud, digital, social and data which together form the underlying platform for what we increasingly think of as the computer revolution proper.

"Six decades into the computer revolution, four decades since the invention of the microprocessor, and two decades into the rise of the modern Internet, all of the technology required to transform industries through software finally works and can be widely delivered at global scale." - Marc Andreessen

For a while we were only able to regard something as innocuous as a browser based web app as being simply a convenient and trivial offshoot of the internet connected desktop PC. However understandable it may have been to see the world that way fifteen years ago, today such a simplistic assessment seems more like a classic 'can't see the wood for the trees' misreading as we watched it break free from its host and then progressively begin to consume it.

And for all the technology businesses and software companies who grew to dominance during this initial phase, as successful, impactful and necessary as they were while they conveyed us to this new world, mere conduits are all they turned out to be.

The warm up acts who recognised their bridging role in this longer term revolution too late to adequately reconfigure themselves for the main event. Giants like Novell, RIM, Nokia, possibly now even the great Microsoft and countless others upon whose shoulders we gratefully stand but whose corporate bodies are now slowly decomposing to form just another layer of historical sediment.

The canary in the coal mine

Apparently there's a direct correlation between the growth in construction of tall buildings and the imminent collapse of an economy. In short, apparently just before an economic crash there's so much slack cash swilling around that the only thing left to spend it on is ridiculously tall skyscrapers.

There's another portent of doom. Ridiculous job titles.

During my tenure at Microsoft I met a number of people whom had appropriated for themselves job titles that sounded cute but bore no relation to their actual responsibilities - at least in comparison with their real world contemporaries.

This morning on Radio 4's Today programme they interviewed a chap from Microsoft UK who had the job title of "Chief Envisioning Officer". 

There's likely to be a form of deep malaise in an organisation that thinks its sensible to do this kind of thing. Not least because apart from making you sound ridiculous, it completely detaches you from the reality in which your customers operate - sales training 101 says it's important to build empathy with your customers.

Stupid, juvenile job titles do not empathy build.

Past examples of this kind of behaviour at Microsoft have taken on almost mythological status; the one I can recall most readily was when a PR spokesperson called himself "Chief Storyteller".

It's funny for about five seconds until you realise they're serious about it.

Get a real job (title).

Monopolising An Idea

It's somewhat remarkable that in this socially mediated age a brand can now be perceived as occupying a monopolistic position of something as abstract as an idea or concept long before any material monopolistic value can be ascribed to it, if ever.