The Examined Life

Nicholas Carr’s article on the cognitive style of the Internet has been linked and discussed quite a bit. Ironically, I found that his article was an ostensive refutation of his own point. I liked the article the first time when I skimmed it. But when I read it in detail and thought through it, I think that he was incorrect on most details. I think that the low attention span that he is talking of is actually a manifestation of three factors:

1. It is difficult to read on screen. People’s eyes hurt.
2. It is easy to get distracted when you are on the net. This may be related to point one. If you get physically tired when you read an article, it is easy for your mind to wander and look up something else.
3. People read more actively on the net. Reading paper books is enjoyable. But just because you enjoy something it doesn’t mean that you are thinking. Carr’s article is nicely written and it flows well. If I were reading it on paper, I would be lulled into complacency by the flow. But because I was reading it online, I was also actively thinking about which parts I agree with and which parts I don’t. For example, I was thinking “Hmmm… Jakob Nielsen has written about writing for the web. I should head over to http://www.useit.com to compare.”  It was all I could do to stop myself from giving in to the temptation immediately, thereby proving Carr’s point. (Coincidentally, his current article is on the same topic.)

On the whole, I think that 1 and 2 are bad, while 3 is good - though I suppose that actively thinking without actually reading an article and understanding something is counterproductive.

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Why do Indian websites suck so badly compared to American websites? Not just websites - it is rare to find a software targeted at Indian users that do not suck.
When a country is famous for its exports of “X”, you’d expect that the place to visit to pick up the best and cheapest samples of X is that country. Unfortunately, whether or not you are right in your expectation depends on the nature of X. If X is an agricultural commodity, you may be wrong, because the best examples of X might get exported, leaving behind export-reject stuff. If  X is a manufactured product, you’d probably be right, because there is generally less variation in manufactured products than in products from the farm. Any improvement in quality can be quicky applied across the board, resulting in benefits for all users, including domestic ones.

IT is of course a service. Services vary quite a bit in quality. In this regard, it is more like an agricultural commodity than like a manufactured product. It is interesting to dig a bit into why IT products targeted at India turn out to be of poor quality.

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Google doesn’t like Microsoft’s offer to buy Yahoo, because they are afraid that Microsoft will challenge Google’s dominance in search. 

Wait, that’s not correct. Google thinks that the deal will worsen Microsoft’s  monopoly. I am, like totally confused.

Wired has a good roundup of the news related to the two fibre optic undersea cables snapping. There is also a link to a rather long article on the history of undersea cables written by one of my favourite writers - Neal Stephenson - when the first cable was laid.

And does anyone know why I am not affected at all sitting here in Hyderabad? Neither my home nor my office connection is affected. Office connection I can understand, but home?

The Globalization Institute blog, which I have unfairly neglected for long, has two excellent posts. The first links to a paper that refutes the Peter Principle, which states that individuals are promoted to their level of incompetence.

The WSJ has a rather negative article on Linux penetration in desktops. Apparently Torvalds’ father and sister use Windows.  Far more interesting is the accompanying interview with Torvalds where he points out that desktops simply do not matter any more.

I suspect Vista is doing well enough — I think the problems with it are more indicative of the maturing market than anything else. The desktop market in general simply has a very high inertia, and while a Microsoft update obviously ends up having a lot of the advantages of that inertia, I think Microsoft is also noticing that the inertia can work against them.

So I don’t think Vista will “fail” or anything like that. But if I was Microsoft, I’d realize that this whole “let’s redesign everything” mentality just doesn’t work in a maturing market. And we may not be there yet, but the whole operating system thing is definitely turning into a commodity, not a “bells and whistles” kind of thing.

I think that some time soon, Microsoft will collapse under the burden of keeping its products compatible with previous versions and keeping all its products compatible with one another.  The loose couplings that are the hallmark of  OS software used to be a pain so far, but will soon prove an advantage.

A five page interview. Go read.

I really feel that for somebody who loves software and is a good developer, there’s a lot of benefit to working in a software company, mainly because the things that you know about and are good at are directly aligned with the things that the business is good at and the kinds of things that you get promoted for. But, actually, banking is sort of interesting, because when it comes right down to it, 95 percent of what you’re doing actually is information technology in a certain way. Even a derivative is a form of code in some ways, although there’s a trading aspect to it as well. So it’s actually conceivable in the banking industry that somebody who started out as a developer might be promoted to the point of actually running a bank - and that has happened. So, you don’t feel completely misaligned.

On the other hand, if you go to an entertainment company as a software developer, such as when I was at Viacom working on MTV, or any other kinds of companies such as insurance, you’re really a subcontractor/service provider. The things you think about every day are not the same things that the CEO thinks about writ small; they’re actually a very different kind of thing

…

There aren’t many books on the state of the art in software development and software management right now, which are the kinds of things that I like to write and read about. Unfortunately, we haven’t moved beyond the anecdote phase, and attempts to move beyond the anecdote phase are usually just anecdotes with statistics.

Part of the problem is there really isn’t a science going on here, which is very frustrating. The same applies to an awful lot of business writing. It’s very easy to write a book called, for example, The Starbucks Principle or The Dell Way, and just bring up a whole bunch of random anecdotes and somehow tie them together thematically and pretend that this is a real thing that you can do and be successful at.

And, lo and behold, another moron then is going to try to attempt the same thing in his or her own company. It doesn’t work because it doesn’t apply or because it didn’t work in the original company, either - it’s just an anecdote that somebody pulled out of thin air. That’s one of the problems that this particular field has been suffering from.

…

The interesting thing that I discovered is that people often underestimate. But you might think they overestimate, too, so if you have 10 things to do, just add up all those estimates and some of them will be late and some of them will be early, and you should still end up with the same date. You’ll make up for the late ones by doing other things early.

But when you think about software tasks, when things go wrong, they take three or four times longer than expected. If I told you I’ve got an eight-hour feature, it’s about eight hours of work. Now, could it take eight hours? Yes. Could it take six hours? Sure. Could it take two days? Definitely. Could it take a week? Yes, probably with a 10 percent probability because you’ve discovered some huge problem, and it’s a new thing you have to write code for, and you just completely forgot about it and it’s going to take you a week.

Now, could it take zero? No, that’s impossible. Could it take negative 32 hours? It could never take negative 32 hours. You can go over 32 hours; you just can’t go under by 32 hours because that would cause you to go backwards in time.

The last bit reminds me that I need to read Fooled By Randomness…