Your correlation between America's war on terror and Microsoft's war on hackers is brillient.

Thanks for the excellent essay.
It also reminds me of Kuhn's talk in "The Structure of Scientific Revolutions"
about the endless trivia incrementing the current understanding
until what he call a paradigm shift happens.

Part of human behavior seems to focus on posturing within
accepted guidelines, even if they run off the road.
I call this the desire to avoid thinking.
Maybe thinking is a new thing and humans are afraid of it.
IMHO, humans believe [mistakenly] that they are safe in their boxes.

Gareth Harris - garethharris1@mac.com

Interesting and enligtening essay (and comments) that conjures up one of those eureka moments when you realise that is what I have been thinking I just couldn't focus clearly enough to put it into words- at least ones that do it justice. I would go further however and say that John is underselling himself on the logic. Taking it to conclusion it pretty much explains the inevitable decline and fall of societies themselves.

Reading this piece reminds me of the old saying that nobody ever got fired by buying IBM. Change and thinking outside the box has always been more difficult than staying the course. I think as we get older, it gets harder to think outside the box and accept change. The true geniuses that I have known have been able to avoid this type of trap and remain receptive to new ideas and new ways at looking at things.

Neal

Thanks for the insightful post! Very much enjoyed that,

Scott

Additionally, if a country/business is constantly in a state of war, the populace/employees are fearful of an enemy and more united toward a common goal, the defeat of the enemy. Think of how rabid many Microsoft and Bush supporters are. The controlling body is therefore given tremendous latitude by the population to do whatever it says is necessary in the name of "security." Ultimately this leads to a populace that lacks critical thinking, due to suppressing cognitive dissonance when evidence arises that the controlling body doesn't in fact want there to be an end to the war.

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Guest wrote:
Additionally, if a country/business is constantly in a state of war, the populace/employees are fearful of an enemy and more united toward a common goal, the defeat of the enemy. Think of how rabid many Microsoft and Bush supporters are. The controlling body is therefore given tremendous latitude by the population to do whatever it says is necessary in the name of "security." Ultimately this leads to a populace that lacks critical thinking, due to suppressing cognitive dissonance when evidence arises that the controlling body doesn't in fact want there to be an end to the war.

Sounds like something George Orwell might have wrote.

It isn't just MicroSoft and Bush supporters that can be fanatical. Sports fans, religious zealots, vegetarians, just about anyone, even some Macintosh users, can act in that manner. I guess it is just like anything, it can be good or bad.

“Fanatics in power and the funnel of a tornado have this in common - the narrow path in which they move is marked by violence and destruction”

Oscar Ostlund

I keep thinking of a quote from Oliver Cromwell

"I beseech you, in the bowels of Christ, think it possible you may be mistaken."

Every time I make an important decision I run this through my head. It's saved me from a lot of mistakes when I was "certain" I was right.

Simply being opposed to Microsft, Bush, Al Frankin, or the Los Angeles Lakers, doesn't make a person any more "right" than being a supporter.

As John points out, the solution to a difficult problem often requires unique and ingenius thinking. When I was a supervisor, I told my employees that when they came to me with a problem, they needed to present a solution at the same time. I wanted to know they had thought the problem through to the best of their ability.

No one in their right mind would suggest to fortune 500 companies they should dump MS and go back to paper and pencil. It's ridiculous. The reason it's possible to dump MS is because a superior alternative exists.

In that same vein, a "superior alternative" is needed for our current military endeavors. However, I hear most detractors calling for a return to paper and pencil, oh, and a sun dial.

Excellent essay, I personally think this captures really well the challanges that microsoft faces today.

Good article. FYI - Michael Kirton, a British business psychologist has built a way to measure a person's pre-disposition to stay within the box or go outside it (way to measure Kuhn). It is called Kirton's Adaption-Innovation Inventory (KAI) and you can learn about it at www.kaicentre.com. It is a well-researched concept and I have found this concept extraordinarily useful in understanding the differences between Jobs and Gates and how each drives their organization.

Michael Weissman
mw@freshperspectives.net

Remember this...?

http://nulookgraphics.com/thinkdifferent.mov

Microsoft thrives because people, in general, are ego-driven idiots; they know we are unable to create an original thought or construct a unique idea. We are comfortable being lemmings lead by money hungry leaders of monster corporations. Need proof? Just look at the popularity of...

Corporate-like Mega-religions.
Unqualified Elected Leaders.
Ridiculous TV Shows.
Superficial Fashion and Fads.
High-fat, Nutritionally-poor, Food.
Atmosphere-destroying Transportation.
War.
Wide-scale Poverty: Vast regions of starving and ill people.

...each item existing because it can be used to make a quick buck for a select few and then cheaply cloaked and forgotten by superficial reasoning; we're too lazy to make our own decisions and allowing big business to tell us what we should care about.

We desperately crave the "hero", because we are too unwilling, lazy, cowardice and/or stupid to make the change ourselves.

We deserve what we get. If we completely wipe ourselves out from a nuclear explosion, global climate changes or wars, then nature is doing a good thing by eliminating such destructive DNA on the planet so more intelligent and caring species can prosper and ADD to the universe, because we obviously aren't bright enough or hold the moral fiber to be responsible enough to remain.

We are only as good as the treatment we give the least of us, those that are suffering. Worried about $1 bottles of Evian and cooking the prefect soufflé, while millions thirst and starve. "I've got mine, screw you! ...or at least change the channel so I don't have to think about it."

Isn't time we all start to "Think Different"?!!
What are we waiting for?

People have probably evolved to NOT innovate, at least not too much. For much of human history, "thinking differently" would lead to your early demise. If you decided to go look for game in the middle of the desert, rather than where it had been before, you'd die. If you ate some plant that no one in your group had eaten before, you might die.

Even today, the vast majority of "innovators" or, as the commercial called them, "the crazy ones," are dismal failures. I am currently president of Oregonians for Rationality, a "skeptics" group. At least once a month, I get a letter or email from some person who has found the "secret" to something--communicating with alien intelligences hidden in microscopic particles was the latest--and not the most off-the-wall. Most "inventions" don't make it past the paper or prototype stage. Most startup businesses fail (often miserably). Why?

A propensity toward innovation is not sufficient, nither for survival 100,000 years ago nor for success today. Some luck is involved--one guy goes over a mountain and finds a fertile valley; another finds a barren landscape. More often, though, it is a matter of having the knowledge and skills to be able to not just come up with a "new idea," a "new theory," but a GOOD idea or theory, one that will work.

Einstein succeeded with his Theories of Relativity because he knew enough math to be able to do the necessary analysis. If he hadn't understood non-Euclidean geometries, he would not have been able to come up with the General Theory. Rutherford "succeeded" in calculating the age of the Earth via a very innovative, clever method--and was off only by a factor of 1000 or so because he (and everyone else, at the time) didn't understand radioactivity.

Innovation isn't enough in science or business. It requires good/skillful implementation (e.g., working out predictions that can be tested, coming up with a product that can be manufactured), tenacity (Einstein worked for years as a lowly patent clerk--a very dull, mind-numbing job--in order to support himself and his family while he worked on his physics), support (Einstein got a lot of math help from his first wife and his friends; a lot of smart startups fail because they lack capitalization and simply run out of money), and, most important, the ability to admit that you're wrong and change direction (Einstein related some of his missteps and errors--he even made a mistake in the calculations for the first experiment to demonstrate General Relativity--the apparent shift in the position of a star when its light passed near the Sun).

It's also almost surely the case that, as a society, we cannot survive if everyone is an "innovator." Who will be the plumbers, the schoolbus drivers, the musicians in orchestras, the programmers for Apple or Microsoft? The vast majority of people probably are--and should be, primarily followers. That does not mean that these people don't have valuable contributions to make in innovation. (Ask Tom Peters: these are the folks who often understand the failings of the status quo better than anyone, even if they can't come up with the best solution.)

Jobs's genius is actually fairly simple: he knows when to say, "No." He has a lot of innovative, creative people working for him, some of who are probably figuratively talking to those microscopic aliens. 3M is--or, at least, used to be that way: employees could get a small amount of funding for wild ideas, but they had to actually produce something in a reasonable time. Otherwise, the money was gone. DARPA (the Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency) works pretty much that way, funding lots and lots of small, often wild-eyed ideas--but only for so long.

More later ... gotta run.

FWIW: I'm also a "former Air Force officer," though I expect that I spent a few more--22--years than John. Being a former Air Force officer is not much of a qualification for much of anything except being a former Air Force officer. It would be better to know just what that former Air Force officer actually did in the Air Force. I spent my 22 years in R&D, program management, Test & Evaluation, long-range (>5 years) planning for space systems, and teaching engineering at the US Naval Academy.

This was a brilliantly thought out article. It speaks to how great success is usually the result of thinking outside the box, not by making things better through incremental change. I do believe Apple does this beautifully. This is why their products tend to work so well. Only by taking a similar approach -- that is thinking differently and outside the box -- can large gains be made in manufacturing, product design and other aspects of our lives. Doing things incrementally simply leads to gradual and sometimes frustratingly slow change that in the end makes little difference.

Has anyone yet defined what is a "large gain," and "incremental?" If not, then you are leaving out what these are compared to.

...I totally agree ....

That was a really well thought out and presented article. The parallels with world events are certainly there, but there is also a fundamental difference. Technology products are often debated on their merits and shortcomings. Even the most radical MS or Apple supporter admits the other camp exists and that some members of that camp have genuine reasons for their choices. There is no factual basis for declaring one belief system better or worse than another.

Neither side of the so called war on terror can ever hope to win. Changing your thinking cannot solve problems that exist because others refuse to change theirs.

i think the article is interesting ... but "over the top"

AAPL is thinking different ... and I like thatr... but business and MSFT will stay the same. It's home entertainment that will change for AAPL

aryugaetu, I sure appreciate your comments. You put into words what I feel so often these days. One would think that with humanity's capacity for reason, we would not be facing these problems to this extent. It seems to be an unfortunate charactersitic of our society. Additionally, it doesn't seem to be getting better with time. Where alternatives exist (degrees of freedom we could choose to take) society chooses the same old course of action. Little surprise then that results end up being the same.

The problem... Einstein never got the noble prize because his theory of relativity was nothing more than than the application of other physicists theories to the new methods of experimentation, also developed by other physicists, for these sets of problems.
Not because he wasn't recognized. On the contrary, he was a international scientific media star beyond anything anyone had every known to that date.

The nobel awards jury rebuked the prize, despite the fact that the prize was considered already awarded to Einstein, because proof of prior knowledge presented to the jury by a board European and American Physicists and Mathematicians, was overwhelming. There was nothing in Einsteins work that could properly be called original - the jury decided on a policy of silence rather than a charge of plagurism....due to the fact the public recognized and associated the theory with Einstein with a great deal of fanfare
.
Consider, in the most basic terms, Liebnitz's theorum 'u=uv square' ,concerning the interrelationships of force, velocity and mass. Now consider Einstien's ' e=mc square' concerning also the interrelationships of force, velocity and mass. It is as blatant as that even at it's most fundemental level.
Professor Einstein is a scientific media star, a sage and a cypher and a great teacher and spokesman for science. However Einsteins science, outside of his claimed theory of general relativty, was flawed. The 'Unified Field Theory' for which he did win a noble prize, has been disproven and is at it's most basic, self-aggrandizing.
It's interesting how when we work to understand the basic question of why we think the way they do, why does the mass have a taste for banality? We invariably reach for metaphors, tools, which in themselves are the roots of that problem.

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Guest wrote:
The problem... Einstein never got the noble prize because his theory of relativity was nothing more than than the application of other physicists theories to the new methods of experimentation, also developed by other physicists, for these sets of problems.
Not because he wasn't recognized. On the contrary, he was a international scientific media star beyond anything anyone had every known to that date.

The nobel awards jury rebuked the prize, despite the fact that the prize was considered already awarded to Einstein, because proof of prior knowledge presented to the jury by a board European and American Physicists and Mathematicians, was overwhelming. There was nothing in Einsteins work that could properly be called original - the jury decided on a policy of silence rather than a charge of plagurism....due to the fact the public recognized and associated the theory with Einstein with a great deal of fanfare
.
Consider, in the most basic terms, Liebnitz's theorum 'u=uv square' ,concerning the interrelationships of force, velocity and mass. Now consider Einstien's ' e=mc square' concerning also the interrelationships of force, velocity and mass. It is as blatant as that even at it's most fundemental level.
Professor Einstein is a scientific media star, a sage and a cypher and a great teacher and spokesman for science. However Einsteins science, outside of his claimed theory of general relativty, was flawed. The 'Unified Field Theory' for which he did win a noble prize, has been disproven and is at it's most basic, self-aggrandizing.
It's interesting how when we work to understand the basic question of why we think the way they do, why does the mass have a taste for banality? We invariably reach for metaphors, tools, which in themselves are the roots of that problem.

So many untruths, so little time. Einstein did, indeed, win a Nobel (not "noble") prize, but not for the Theory of Relativity. At that time, the Nobel committee did not award prizes for theoretical work, only for experimental work (or explanations of experiments). Einstein won for his explanation of the photoelectric effect, which laid the foundations for quantum theory and Bohr's theory of the structure of atoms.

Einstein's theory was revolutionary, just as Darwin's had been, even though pieces had been around (e.g., the Lorentz transformations, which were a way to try to hand-wave around the results of Michelson-Morley, without abandoning the idea of "ether."

E=mc^2 does NOT concern "interrelationships of force, velocity and mass," but the equivalence of mass and energy, which is a natural consequence of the Special Theory. In truth, neither does Leibnez's "theorem"--neither contains "force" as an element.

It has exactly nothing to do with "kinetic" energy (mv^2/2, or u=v^2/2 per unit mass). Nothing. Nada. Zip. Zero. It says that a bit of matter has energy merely by its existence, regardless of its (relative) velocity in some frame. It is that "rest energy" that is tapped by nuclear reactions. E=mc^2 also shows that energy (e.g., photons) also has a "rest mass," i.e., m = E/c^2. In fact, a gravitational field, which has energy, has its own mass.

Special Relativity also has results that are non-intuitive and outside the realm of normal experience. (For example, if you were to travel at a high percentage of the speed of light by a line of telephone poles, the poles would appear to bend toward you.) Thinking in special relativistic terms requires changing your normal perspective and applying a few principles and simple transformations. It's not beyond the freshman level of physics, if taught well. (It was half of the second-term freshan physics course I took at MIT. The other half was "Vibrations and Waves." I've also taken General Relativity at MIT.)

FWIW, it was Einstein who reconized that Maxwell's equations implied that the speed of light was constant and that the Lorentz equations represented the only transformation for uniform linear motion under which Maxwell's equations would be invariant. (That was not the case with Newtonian mechanics, which said that a simple x' = x + vt Galilean transformation should apply.)

General Relativity has been recognized as one of the 4 or 5 most significant advancements in physics since Aristotle, along with basic quantum theory, Maxwell's work in electromagnetism, and Newtonian mechanics. General relativity is rather complicated and can involve difficult math, unless you restrict it to some simple cases. (It may be surprising, but an isolated black hole is such a simple case, though the math does use basic differential equations.)

Our guest should, perhaps, read an introductory text in Special Relativity, including the effect on Newton's laws (e.g., F = ma, Newton's Second Law).

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emersiveone wrote:
Excellent essay, I personally think this captures really well the challanges that microsoft faces today.

Microsoft, hell! These are the challenges that face us all, every day.

Well said, and as iJack says it applies to us all too. A quibble about Vista equating to OS 9.3: the rather uninformed perception I have is that Windows NT4 onwards has much more solid foundations than Classic Mac, probably comparable to OS X, but for just those reasons under discussion they then put in an underbuilding to make it compatible with Win95 etc which is riddled with the same old problems, particularly regarding security. Vista should improve their security, but will also be under an enormous pressure of attack. The vulnerabilities found in OS X haven't been exploited as far as I know, partly because it's hard to, partly because the big money is in attacking Windows.

Apple's freedom delights, but can also put off businesses who, understandably, value (perceived) business stability over short term advantages. But then, Apple's doing very well without courting the cheap beige box market.

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gslusher wrote:
So many untruths, so little time.

I'm not a physicist. I took a few classes once upon a time, but my photography and design studies and work have largely crowded out what little I remember of physics. Yet with my rudimentary-at-best understanding of Einstein's work I knew that there was much to be corrected with the guest post. I'm glad there was someone here qualified enough to handle the rebuttal.

A man I admire once said something along the lines of, "As educators it is our responsibility not only to inform, but to be certain we do not misinform." Or maybe it was more like "it's not so important that we give someone an understanding as it is that we don't give them a misunderstanding." Something like that. (The irony that I can't relay an exact quote on this of all subjects is overwhelming.)


- Jon

It's amusing that Unix, conceived nearly 40 years ago by unsupervised programmers for their own convenience, is finally climbing to the top of the heap, supplanting countless far better funded alternatives. By being the Cinderella OS in the intervening decades, it's managed to grow up into a healthier adult than all the others, decked out in its leopardskin ball gown!

Fear of the unknown seems like a plausible answer.

Kudos for the Rodney quote, it would have been great to have his take on the last several years. He's deeply missed

Excellent! This is a truly erudite and informative essay marred, in my view, by its and its commentators narrow parochialism.

As so many contributors have drawn parallels between Apple v. MS and the war in Iraq I would like to make the following observations.

Please remember that the USA did not go to war in Iraq on its own but with a number of allies, principally the British. As a former Royal Marine and candidate for RAF aircrew (failed by virtue of a burned retina and the hide-bound belief of senior RAF officers that my shooting down civilian aircraft by mistake might redound to their discredit) I consider that to be the one and only GOOD and RIGHT decision made by our Prime Minister Tony Blair, who is otherwise perceived by me and many of my countrymen to be a slimy, sleazy, smug, self-satisfied and sanctimonious piece of ordure.

Furthermore, there is no AMERICAN War on Terrorism (pace geoduck), there is a War on Terrorism and we in Britain have been persevering through it and suffering from it throughout the 1970s, 1980s and 1990s courtesy of the IRA's murderous attacks on our children (Warrington 1993; Omagh 1998) and its support from the Irish lobby in the USA and the pro-IRA fund-raising in South Boston and elsewhere. [Our terrorists = your freedom-fighters, eh?]

We in Britain continue to maintain troop levels second only to the US in Iraq and Afghanistan, and higher than any other country. For my part I am content that we remain your loyal ally and continue with our commitments, despite the clamouring for disengagement (from our commitments and from yourselves) by our chattering classes. As a former Royal Marine you may rest assured that I, too, am 100% behind our soldiers, yours, and all those of the "Coalition of the Willing".

But enough of politics.

I mention these matters to emphasize my perception of the nature of this publication. It is an Apple Mac publication and Apple obtains somewhat more than half its revenues outside of the US. It might, therefore, be worth contributors' time to consider the wider world when writing.

Reverting (after my little tirade) to the article, I was impressed by John Martarello's analysis of the differing approaches to problem-solving adopted by Apple and Microsoft. The degrees of freedom he attributes to Apple and its concomitant flexibility, energy, adaptability and superiority is similar to the same degrees of freedom I have seen in managing brand new application software developments. These manifest themselves by the blank-sheet-of-paper syndrome. There is nothing that will be damaged if we make a mistake right now and we have all the freedom we want to explore alternative approaches.

Only when such systems go live are we in a situation where incremental engineering becomes the norm. Such systems are not static, once and for all time builds, they are living manifestations of the businesses they model. As these businesses change so must the systems. However, to make changes to working systems requires a detailed knowledge of the impact of the change and rigorous testing to prove not only that the change works as expected but that it does not introduce unexpected and unwelcome results elsewhere. This is why testing has become a specialism within the information systems community and why incrementalism is a necessary approach.

For Apple (as for the rest of us) the "paradigm shift" had to come when the classic OS proved to be almost un-navigable for maintenance releases and the attempts to re-build it had cost too much time, money and reputation. In many ways this time (before the 2nd coming of SJ) was the time of the incrementalists. OS X was the freedom that Apple needed and got. But now even OS X must be further developed incrementally.

It's not the first time that Apple have done this. The adoption of the GUI for the original Mac (via Lisa) was a paradigm shift away from the command line OS. Even if the original ideas were developed at Xerox PARC Steve Jobs recognized the importance and made it happen! Moving from the Motorola 68000 chipset to the AIM Power PC architecture was another; OS X, of course, another; and now the Intel re-architecture yet another.

Over the same timescale Microsoft has been revealed as bullying, oft-convicted monopolist that makes a marginal contribution to the industry we occupy or the customers of that industry. Its special skill is in creating connexions and contracts that make it more and more separable from its regulators. For example, it "bought" the whole print run of The Times in the UK to celebrate the launch of Windows 95. While I was glad to receive my copy of the paper that day free of charge (wow, saved me probably 25 pence!) I consider that The Times is no longer a credible independent commentator on software products that compete with Microsoft, as is demonstrated most recently when it ran two articles heavily critical of Apple's involvement in the options issue, flanked at top and to the side of the online edition by Microsoft ads! This coincided with the announcement of the Zune!

Optimistically, I believe Apple has a better chance of winning enterprise business today than at any time since the inception of the Mac. This will require that IT managers or their underlings are brought into line by a more cost-conscious and risk averse business management than has hitherto been the case but the auguries are good for a number of reasons.

First, the known security advantages of Unix put MS products in the shade, and the reputational advantage of having the US military choosing Mac servers for that reason cannot be overlooked. Secondly, the open source community have now produced Office products that are on a par with MS Office ands can read from and write to MS Office format files. This means the advantages of office productivity software are available licence-free. Thirdly, Vista is late and looks as though it will require a significant and costly upgrade to existing desktop inventory, both in hardware terms and potentially in re-licencing software. Finally, with Intel and Bootcamp the transition to Mac is now easier than it has ever been.

Sadly, I share John Martarello's view that entrenched interests may prevail. It is already true that a number of our Civil Service initiatives in open source have failed for reasons that appear to support the suggestion of either project sabotage or uncooperative "project support". Well, I suppose the turkeys can't be expected to vote for Christmas.

There is more hope in the productive sector, particularly in investment-related firms where security is a massive issue and massive bonuses a more massive issue still. Long live greed as a way to a better Apple future.

And if Microsoft shares fall in value, time to replace them with Apple stock!