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Lately companies have been paying more attention to open source. Ten years ago there seemed a real danger Microsoft would extend its monopoly to servers. It seems safe to say now that open source has prevented that. A recent survey found 52 % of companies are replacing Windows servers with Linux servers. [ 1 ] More significant, I think, is which 52 % they are. At this point, anyone proposing to run Windows on servers should be prepared to explain what they know about servers that Google, Yahoo, and Amazon don't. But the biggest thing business has to learn from open source is not about Linux or Firefox, but about the forces that produced them.
Ultimately these will affect a lot more than what software you use. We may be able to get a fix on these underlying forces by triangulating from open source and blogging. As you " ve probably noticed, they have a lot in common. Like open source, blogging is something people do themselves, for free, because they enjoy it. Like open source hackers, bloggers compete with people working for money, and often win. The method of ensuring quality is also the same: Darwinian.
Companies ensure quality through rules to prevent employees from screwing up. But you don't need that when the audience can communicate with one another. People just produce whatever they want; the good stuff spreads, and the bad gets ignored. And in both cases, feedback from the audience improves the best work. Another thing blogging and open source have in common is the Web.
People have always been willing to do great work for free, but before the Web it was harder to reach an audience or collaborate on projects. Amateurs I think the most important of the new principles business has to learn is that people work a lot harder on stuff they like. Well, that's news to no one. So how can I claim business has to learn it? When I say business doesn't know this, I mean the structure of business doesn't reflect it.
Business still reflects an older model, exemplified by the French word for working: traveller. It has an English cousin, travail, and what it means is torture. [ 2 ] This turns out not to be the last word on work, however. As societies get richer, they learn something about work that's a lot like what they learn about diet. We know now that the healthiest diet is the one our peasant ancestors were forced to eat because they were poor. Like rich food, idleness only seems desirable when you don't get enough of it. I think we were designed to work, just as we were designed to eat a certain amount of fiber, and we feel bad if we don't.
There's a name for people who work for the love of it: amateurs. The word now has such bad connotations that we forget its etymology, though it's staring us in the face. "Amateur" was originally rather a complimentary word. But the thing to be in the twentieth century was professional, which amateurs, by definition, are not. That's why the business world was so surprised by one lesson from open source: that people working for love often surpass those working for money. Users don't switch from Explorer to Firefox because they want to hack the source.
They switch because it's a better browser. It's not that Microsoft isn't trying. They know controlling the browser is one of the keys to retaining their monopoly. The problem is the same they face in operating systems: they can't pay people enough to build something better than a group of inspired hackers will build for free. I suspect professionalism was always overrated -- not just in the literal sense of working for money, but also connotations like formality and detachment. Inconceivable as it would have seemed in, say, 1970, I think professionalism was largely a fashion, driven by conditions that happened to exist in the twentieth century.
One of the most powerful of those was the existence of "channels. " Revealingly, the same term was used for both products and information: there were distribution channels, and TV and radio channels. It was the narrowness of such channels that made professionals seem so superior to amateurs. There were only a few jobs as professional journalists, for example, so competition ensured the average journalist was fairly good. Whereas anyone can express opinions about current events in a bar. And so the average person expressing his opinions in a bar sounds like an idiot compared to a journalist writing about the subject. On the Web, the barrier for publishing your ideas is even lower.
You don't have to buy a drink, and they even let kids in. Millions of people are publishing online, and the average level of what they " re writing, as you might expect, is not very good. This has led some in the media to conclude that blogs don't present much of a threat -- that blogs are just a fad. Actually, the fad is the word "blog, " at least the way the print media now use it. What they mean by "blogger" is not someone who publishes in a weblog format, but anyone who publishes online. That's going to become a problem as the Web becomes the default medium for publication.
So I'd like to suggest an alternative word for someone who publishes online. How about "writer?" Those in the print media who dismiss the writing online because of its low average quality are missing an important point: no one reads the average blog. In the old world of channels, it meant something to talk about average quality, because that's what you were getting whether you liked it or not. But now you can read any writer you want.
So the average quality of writing online isn't what the print media are competing against. They " re competing against the best writing online. And, like Microsoft, they " re losing. I know that from my own experience as a reader. Though most print publications are online, I probably read two or three articles on individual people's sites for every one I read on the site of a newspaper or magazine. And when I read, say, New York Times stories, I never reach them through the Times front page.
Most I find through aggregators like Google News or Slashdot or Delicious. Aggregators show how much better you can do than the channel. The New York Times front page is a list of articles written by people who work for the New York Times. Delicious is a list of articles that are interesting. And it's only now that you can see the two side by side that you notice how little overlap there is. Most articles in the print media are boring.
For example, the president notices that a majority of voters now think invading Iraq was a mistake, so he makes an address to the nation to drum up support. Where is the man bites dog in that? I didn't hear the speech, but I could probably tell you exactly what he said. A speech like that is, in the most literal sense, not news: there is nothing new in it. [ 3 ] Nor is there anything new, except the names and places, in most "news" about things going wrong.
A child is abducted; there's a tornado; a ferry sinks; someone gets bitten by a shark; a small plane crashes. And what do you learn about the world from these stories? Absolutely nothing. They " re outlying data points; what makes them gripping also makes them irrelevant. As in software, when professionals produce such crap, it's not surprising if amateurs can do better. Live by the channel, die by the channel: if you depend on an oligopoly, you sink into bad habits that are hard to overcome when you suddenly get competition. [ 4 ] Workplaces Another thing blogs and open source software have in common is that they " re often made by people working at home.
That may not seem surprising. But it should be. It's the architectural equivalent of a home-made aircraft shooting down an F- 18. Companies spend millions to build office buildings for a single purpose: to be a place to work. And yet people working in their own homes, which aren't even designed to be workplaces, end up being more productive. This proves something a lot of us have suspected.
The average office is a miserable place to get work done. And a lot of what makes offices bad are the very qualities we associate with professionalism. The sterility of offices is supposed to suggest efficiency. But suggesting efficiency is a different thing from actually being efficient. The atmosphere of the average workplace is to productivity what flames painted on the side of a car are to speed. And it's not just the way offices look that's bleak.
The way people act is just as bad. Things are different in a startup. Often as not a startup begins in an apartment. Instead of matching beige cubicles they have an assortment of furniture they bought used. They work odd hours, wearing the most casual of clothing.
They look at whatever they want online without worrying whether it's "work safe. " The cheery, bland language of the office is replaced by wicked humor. And you know what? The company at this stage is probably the most productive it's ever going to be. Maybe it's not a coincidence.
Maybe some aspects of professionalism are actually a net lose. To me the most demoralizing aspect of the traditional office is that you " re supposed to be there at certain times. There are usually a few people in a company who really have to, but the reason most employees work fixed hours is that the company can't measure their productivity. The basic idea behind office hours is that if you can't make people work, you can at least prevent them from having fun. If employees have to be in the building a certain number of hours a day, and are forbidden to do non-work things while there, then they must be working. In theory.
In practice they spend a lot of their time in a no-man's land, where they " re neither working nor having fun. If you could measure how much work people did, many companies wouldn't need any fixed workday. You could just say: this is what you have to do. Do it whenever you like, wherever you like. If your work requires you to talk to other people in the company, then you may need to be here a certain amount. Otherwise we don't care.
That may seem utopian, but it's what we told people who came to work for our company. There were no fixed office hours. I never showed up before 11 in the morning. But we weren't saying this to be benevolent. We were saying: if you work here we expect you to get a lot done.
Don't try to fool us just by being here a lot. The problem with the facetiae model is not just that it's demoralizing, but that the people pretending to work interrupt the ones actually working. I'm convinced the facetiae model is the main reason large organizations have so many meetings. Per capita, large organizations accomplish very little. And yet all those people have to be on site at least eight hours a day. When so much time goes in one end and so little achievement comes out the other, something has to give.
And meetings are the main mechanism for taking up the slack. For one year I worked at a regular nine to five job, and I remember well the strange, cozy feeling that comes over one during meetings. I was very aware, because of the novelty, that I was being paid for programming. It seemed just amazing, as if there was a machine on my desk that spat out a dollar bill every two minutes no matter what I did. Even while I was in the bathroom! But because the imaginary machine was always running, I felt I always ought to be working.
And so meetings felt wonderfully relaxing. They counted as work, just like programming, but they were so much easier. All you had to do was sit and look attentive. Meetings are like an opiate with a network effect. So is email, on a smaller scale. And in addition to the direct cost in time, there's the cost in fragmentation -- breaking people's day up into bits too small to be useful.
You can see how...
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Research essay sample on What Business Can Learn From Open Source
