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January 29, 2005  The Business of Design

I've always been interested in building things. I love to create products that make it easier for people to pursue their passions, communicate with each other, and learn more about the world. As a result, I also spend a lot of my time thinking about the systems and practices for building products. While I was at Stanford for my undergraduate work, I had the honor of having David Kelley as one of my three advisors. David Kelley used to juggle running IDEO on top of teaching and advising at Stanford. Recently he has stepped down as the head of IDEO and is working on a new project called the d.school. The d.school is a center for design at Stanford University with the mission to "advance interdisciplinary research and teaching, place Stanford at the epicenter of the design field, and strengthen the connection between the university and industry." The d.school has gotten a fair amount of press coverage, including this lengthier Business Week article. The implicit message here is that a center like this is what you need if you want to create products that make the world a better place.

I went to a d.school open house on June 9th 2004. While at the mixer I saw a Venn diagram which I have tried to replicate here (my apologies to David Kelley and George Kembel if the replication is flawed):

The idea is that design innovation is the link that combines the world of business, technology and human values. It also creates a framework to build a curriculum around design innovation. While I was at Stanford I took classes in Computer Science (Technology), Mechanical Engineering (Technology), Human-Computer Interaction (Design & Interactivity), Psychology (Human Values), Sociology (Human Values), and Art (Human Values). I didn't get a formal education in Manufacturing, Business and Organizational Behavior. I've always felt this has limited my ability to get things done in the corporate environment. Design discussions frequently spill over in to marketing issues, and the whole process of building a product is driven by organizational behavior. Because my background is in technology and human values, I typically don't get a seat at the table when business issues are being decided.

Motivated by the d.school meeting, I wanted to learn more about business. One way to do this is to apply to business school, but even the top general business schools (Stanford and Harvard) don't really teach in an interdisciplinary way.

Stanford is ahead of Harvard, but until the d.school is fully geared up, the GSB at Stanford is still a bit of a silo. So is the MBA route worthwhile?

I was talking to Max Levchin about this and he asked me a very important question: of the entrepreneurs that you respect, how many of them have an MBA? I started to go through the names of people that I look up to: Steve Jobs, David Kelley, Bill Gates, Larry Page, Sergey Brin, Walter Hewlett, David Packard, John Warnock, Chuck Geschke... None of them have an MBA. The other unifying factor is that they all started their own company.

So what does this mean for me? Do I apply to the d.school in 2007/2008? Do I start my own company? Do I start a mini company within a larger corporation?

Posted by johnnie at 12:47 PM | Comments (1) | TrackBack

January 29, 2005  Akash K: Aesthetic Minimalist?

Original Post: 04 Jan 2005
Updated: 27 Jan 2005
Updated (no date change) to remove last name

"Good artists copy, great artists steal." This quote is widely attributed to Pablo Picasso. Only someone as familiar with the ethos of postmodernism as Picasso could say something like that and have it make sense. What does this have to do with our friend Akash? Well, it seems that he has taken the words of Picasso a bit too literally. Here we see Akash's site on the left, and mine on the right:





Akash and I seem to have a lot in common. Not only are we stylistically similar, but his XHTML and CSS code is identical in structure to my own. Perhaps imitation is the sincerest form of flattery? But if imitation is so sincere, then why does his website circumvent any mention of this act of kindness? There are many reasons to pull up a context menu and choose the convenient Save Page As... option. You may be curious to see how someone accomplished a particular design. You may be a student and not know any better (although this is a bit of stretch if you attend MIT as Akash does). Or you may be too busy to be burdened by doing the work yourself, and just decide to steal it outright from someone who's already accomplished what you want.

I don't fault people who aren't web designers for wanting to borrow a fully fleshed out website design from someone who's already worked through the details. What I don't understand is the desire to then pass off what you've created as something homegrown, novel, and worthy of admiration, as Akash’s About page does:

"As for the visual structure of this website, I will reiterate my appreciation of aesthetic minimalism. I have always been attracted to the understated power and elegance of simple websites. I will hold my website to the same high standard, and to that end, will attempt to keep all unnecessary clutter away."

Being an aesthetic minimalist such as myself, my recommendation to Akash would be to wrap the script code on his index page with p tags so that the page will validate correctly as XHTML 1.0 Strict. If you're going to steal my stuff, at least don't muck it up.

Update:

Akash contacted me a while back (I was in Brasil and didn't have a chance to respond until now) to apologize. He's taken down his site. He informed me that he was sorry if his actions were construed as nefarious; he was simply using the source code as a way to get introduced to XHTML and CSS layout.

What happened is actually quite common. Greg had a similar experience just the other day.

I told Akash that I hope he gets a chance to do a revision to his website, and to drop the "training wheels" code he was using. I'm even willing to help out. In the end it's important to keep a perspective on all this. In the words of Greg: "Life is too important to waste it trying to understand design and how it relates to intellectual property law." It's time to move on.

Posted by johnnie at 09:23 AM | Comments (1)

January 13, 2005  History of Browsing Web Content

Recently I’ve become interested in the user interface models that have been applied to browsing the Internet. The models that are use by popular web browsers (Internet Explorer, browsers from the Mozilla Foundation, Safari) are, for the most part, identical. But they don’t need to be. How did we get to where we are today?

1990 Tim Berners-Lee creates WorldWideWeb, later renamed Nexus, and introduces a back/next metaphor to navigate through a list of links.
1993 Marc Andreessen creates Mosaic at the University of Illinois which became the first cross-platform browser. Marc introduced the back/forward metaphor to help with navigation of hyperlinks.
1994 Jim Clark and Marc Andreessen create Mosaic Communications, later renamed Netscape, based on the Mosaic product.
1994 Opera developed in Norway.
1995 The popularity of the product helps drive the Netscape IPO--the 3rd largest in Nasdaq history--which creates a $2.6B company.
1995 Microsoft launches Windows 95 and Internet Explorer.
1995 Real Networks, founded by former Microsoft employee Rob Glaser, launches their first player and drives the market for passive content.
1996 Pointcast launched with 1.5M users by the end of the year and a total of $5M in revenue; the company was valued at $240M. Unlike Andreessen's browser, Pointcast used "push" technology that delivered channels of content to the customer's computer without him or her having to navigate, or pull, content from the web.
1997 Rupert Murdoch's News Corp. offers $450M for Pointcast, but the deal fell apart in what has been seen as one of the biggest blunders of the dot com era.
1998 AOL buys Netscape in $4.2B merger.
1998 Microsoft dumps all of its Real Networks stock and competes directly in the streaming media market.
1999 Entrypoint buys Pointcast for $20M.
1999 Internet Explorer surpassed Netscape in market share.
2003 AOL sets up the Mozilla Foundation with a $2M pledge.
2003 iTunes Music Store launched, serving as an example of a successful embedded browsing experience.
2004 Firefox 1.0 launched.

I read an article in Wired last year called Conversation With Marc Andreessen (Feb 2003) in which Wired asked Marc what he would do if he could go back and design the browser over again. Interestingly the one thing he said he would change was the metaphor that he popularized--back/forward. Here is an exceprt:

Wired News - "Ten years have passed since then. Has the browser evolved much in that period?"

Andreessen - "We always figured there'd be a much more sophisticated way of navigating, but no one ever came up with it. Things like the Back and forward button, we never intended that to be a permanent part of the interface. But people get locked into metaphors. You have to be careful with the metaphors you put in front of people because once they click onto one, that's it."

Of the companies that have been working in this space over the last ten to fifteen years, Pointcast was perhaps the most successful at creating a new metaphor but they suffered from user interface problems of their own. When EntryPoint came out many thought that this second attempt would resolve the problems, but in fact things only got worse. EntryPoint gained entry in to the
Interface Hall of Shame:

"EntryPoint preserves the basic features that made PointCast popular... It also includes many new interface problems, reduces usability and 'quietly' eliminated many options and features with no comment... It seems clear little consideration of what PointCast did well or innovatively was carried over by the new design team."

Recently Microsoft has been talking about "smart clients" or "web connected applications" as the hot ticket for the next ten years, which is understandable with their investment in XAML, Indigo and Avalon. The Konfabulator knock-off that Apple is introducing in Tiger seems to serve as a testament to this.

But as Marc Andreessen says "There was a huge amount of browser development from 1993 to 1998, then nothing much happened from 1998 to 2002. Now, there's a huge number of people doing all kinds of things and you've got real innovation going on." Things are just getting started.

Posted by johnnie at 09:35 PM | Comments (1)

January 06, 2005  Rapid Innovation

I met Jon Bruck at Que Tal, a coffee shop on Guerrero at 22nd Street, most notable for amount of natural light that passes through the large windows. Jon wanted to show me the discHUB (his latest project) and talk to me about a concept called Rapid Innovation.

Before I get in to the specifics of Rapid Innovation, let me describe the existing landscape. Today, if you are an individual or a company without deep design resources, or if you are looking to create a new project which has no in-house staffing, you enlist the help of design firms such as Pentagram, IDEO or Frog Design. These firms do work internationally for the Fortune 100 and have a reputation for delivering high quality solutions.

The problem is that these firms are expensive. At the height of the dot com boom, it was rumored that Frog Design was charging $1M for a corporate logo. IDEO will layout a multi-phase plan for research, prototyping and testing, but just kicking off the first phase will run about a quarter of a million dollars. If you are Pepsi and are looking for a new toothpaste tube design, this expense is trivial. But what if you are an individual with a new idea for a way to build CD storage system? You’re not even sure if you really like your idea, so spending a lot of money is out of the question, but at the same time you’d like to explore it a little bit—poke at it for a while and see if there’s something about it that’s worth exploring more indepth. Similarly, if you’re working at a big company and have a small idea that you’d like to explore, you can’t go to your boss and ask for a quarter of a million dollars to work with IDEO, but you may be able to get a small experimental budget of a couple thousand dollars.

This is where Rapid Innovation comes in.

Rapid Innovation is a way of working with people to visualize and prototype a concept quickly and inexpensively. It allows the client to explore ideas and get questions answered without having to make a significant financial commitment. Rapid Innovation is like dating your idea. Going to a firm like Pentagram is like proposing marriage to your idea. In the dating world you get to explore and learn what works for you and what doesn’t. If you find something that clicks, you can propose marriage. But when you go to a big firm for design consulting you have to make such a significant investment of resources up front that it’s essentially like marrying your idea. It’s a serious commitment.

I’ve had the opportunity to work in a nimble, light-weight way at NASA and Microsoft. In both cases, I was able to build a prototype to help them visualize what they wanted in under 3 months. The total cost in both cases was nominal (in the area of $10K). The difference is that back then I wasn’t thinking about a system like Rapid Innovation explicitly.

Now that I’m thinking about Rapid Innovation explicitly, I’ve started to use the technique of delivering fast, low-cost idea visualizations not only with external clients, but also internally at Adobe. With the help of my boss, Bill Bachman, I’ve started to do three week stints with different product teams. I spent some time with the DVA team, then with Mark Hamburg, and most recently on Creative Suite 3. By staying nimble and moving quickly it’s forced me to operate as if I were working with a small budget. For a company like Adobe which is used to the marriage model, this is an approach that runs counter to the cultural norms, but if it proves successful it can help pave the way for a richer culture of prototyping.

Posted by johnnie at 04:44 PM | Comments (1)