product management, destroyer of worlds

~ ginsu ~ 3 Comments

God I hate tech hyperbole. And I literally hate the use of “literally” to mean its opposite … but let me explain how bad technology product management can literally lead to the end of the world.

Donald Trump represents an existential threat to humanity. To put such a man at the helm of the world’s most powerful nation is like handing over the controls of a nuclear submarine to a petulant baby. That’s a poor simile only because it’s not an analogy but a nearly literal description.

What can I do about this? I’m just one person, one vote. Moreover, I’m in California, which will surely vote Clinton anyway, so my vote won’t sway the outcome. I could advocate, I could preach to everyone around me, but really most of the people in physical proximity to me already agree with me.

What about technology? I’m in the center of Silicon Valley, I know me some techmology, can’t I do something wizardly to extend the power of a single voice? Nope. I mean, I can write this little essay, and maybe my fifty readers will like it, but those fifty people and everyone they’ll share it with already agree with me.

But about twenty miles from here, there are a couple of dozen people who literally hold the fate of our political conversation in their hands. In fact, it’s been in their hands for quite some time now, and they’ve made decisions which, only in retrospect, appear to have been disastrous for our nation’s politics.

At Facebook, the News Feed is the main stream of information that people see when they use the service. It has become the single most important source of news and conversation for many if not most Americans. It is designed to show people information that they want, which largely means showing people what they already agree with, from people who they already are inclined to sympathize with.

At Google, the search results page answers billions of queries each day, from billions of people. The results are carefully shaped not just with regard to each query, but as much as possible conformed for the particular user, so that the user sees results they are more likely to want to click, which in essence means showing them information they already agree with.

I’m not the first to note that the creation of these echo chambers only serves to reinforce existing biases, and isolate people from diverse opinions that could broaden their horizons and enrich our society. I might be among the first to charge that the product managers who now lead Facebook News Feed and Google Search are failing at their jobs.

On its face that’s a ridiculous statement, as we are talking about two of the most successful products in history, literal world changers. And who could argue against the general strategy of conforming experience to user tastes? But there comes a time in the life cycle of even massively successful products, when the product has attained a use and effect that were never anticipated through all of the prior success. Product managers who do not grapple with what their products have become, in all dimensions, are not doing their jobs well.

News Feed and Search are unique in the landscape of all products. These are no longer simply things that people use, and therefore need to be designed to be as pleasant and popular as possible. These products now form the infrastructure of political conversation, they have become the backbone of our polity, they are the means by which citizens of our nation engage with each other on the essential ideas of community. The success of these products must now be judged on how well they serve beneficial outcomes in our society, especially our politics.

There are plenty of people at Facebook and Google who are deeply invested in denying this responsibility, which is so self-evident to all of the rest of us mere users. They would like to say that their products are designed to be “neutral,” to simply follow algorithms that have no sense of society or humanity. They want to hide their power behind obfuscating explanations of math and probability.

Some of this may be a difference in perspective. Some of this may be benign short-sightedness. But some of it is moral cowardice. I hate to make such an inflammatory charge, but when you have the ability to shape a product in a way that would reduce the likelihood of a fascist from taking the reins of a country with the firepower to end life as we know it, and you deny that you have this power, I have a hard time calling this anything other than what it is.

Facebook and Google know that their products contribute to a stifled political conversation that only hardens lines of hate and allows well-meaning people to isolate themselves in their own safe spaces. Will they continue to build their products in a way that divides our society? Or will they take real moral responsibility for how their products shape our political conversation, and make their products a conduit for uncomfortable ideas that could improve our world? Will they break down the barriers between hardened positions, expose ignorance to truth, measure hatred and inject love? Or will they claim that these goals are too soft, and anyway achieving them is too hard?

When Philip Morris discovered that their product was killing their customers, they hid the evidence for as long as they could, and they denied the truth even after it was apparent to everyone else, all so they could squeeze out the last dollars from their death-dealing empire. When Coca-Cola realized that sugary drinks were contributing to unprecedented rates of obesity, they diversified their product lines to include healthy drinks as well as sugar bombs – not exactly admirable, but at least preparing for a shift where people who could watch out for themselves would continue to contribute to the company’s bottom line. At this point, I would be okay with lesser evils, but I would prefer to see moral courage. Product managers at Facebook News Feed and Google Search: Do Your Jobs.

black and blue

~ ginsu ~ 1 Comment

I began writing this in the morning of July 7, disheartened by the killing of Philando Castile, struggling to make sense of this ongoing slaughter of black lives. I have a lot of respect for law enforcement as well, and I wondered how we will rebalance the scales of justice to make a better world. I sat down to write that Black vs Blue is a literal tradeoff of lives, not just a one-sided injustice, and it will only get worse if both sides cannot explicitly acknowledge this. Then I paused my writing, checked the news, and saw that it’s already gotten worse. I won’t change anything I’ve written so far, and I’ll call out where I paused and restarted …

#BlackLivesMatter is the apotheosis of hashtags, arguably the mark of separation between the Internet as merely united information and the Internet as truly united culture. Uniting the world doesn’t happen with the ties that bind – those ties were always there, if we had the eyes and heart to see and feel them. Unity comes with a force implacable enough to sink us if we can’t acknowledge what’s been there all along.

In dusty eons past, the world’s knowledge was stored on fragile dried plant pulp, stacked up in schools, libraries, churches and palaces, separated by uncrossable oceans, vast and hostile distances. Fast-forward a few centuries and everything is instantly connected, world knowledge is united, human progress progresses in a coordinated manner that, if not moving in lockstep yet, fairly resembles loosely bound rafts strapped together on a common ocean. At the bleeding edge of the modern evolution of common knowledge, participants in the exchange of information must form a common culture, at least to the extent they are forced to deal with the vast gulf that yet remains between us all despite swimming in the same waters. #BlackLivesMatter is the iceberg that must be reckoned with, ignore it at the peril of having our boats wrecked by the rocky mass underwater. It is a call for the absorption of information at first, but more deeply it is a call to grapple with history, with the experiences of another, with the immediate reaction and grief, the defensiveness and guilt, the raw emotions of others all paddling in different directions to pull our own rafts out of the way of the iceberg, futilely ignoring the unbreakable ropes that bind us together.

… I am hoping that high-falutin’, fantastically florid introduction has gotten rid of the idiots, before I get to the point, if there is one. Because I’m not engaging with the #AllLivesMatter or #WhiteLivesMatter crowd. As entertaining as it can be to methodically unpack the ignorance, fear, guilt and willful blindness of those reactionary hashtags, they are nothing more than the impotent flags flown atop the largest rafts whose inhabitants see the iceberg and ignore it, not seeing that the ropes between the rafts are indeed unbreakable, and no hull or armor will protect their own raft from the sharp rocks beneath the water. #AllLivesMatter and #WhiteLivesMatter are false flags to be ignored. #BlackLivesMatter is the iceberg.

But #BlueLivesMatter is not so easily dismissed, although its standard bearers can seem similar to the false flag brigade, in being across such a great divide of cultural understanding that the good instinct to dismiss false flags casts its shadow over this hashtag as well. And a call to value police lives seems absurd as we watch, over and over again, the deaths of Eric Garner, Michael Brown, Laquan McDonald, Akai Gurley, Tamir Rice, Walter Scott, Freddie Gray, Alton Sterling, Philando Castile … at this point the despair of listing so many names is swamped by the certainty that we need wait only weeks to add another to the list. The volume of clear police crime and misbehavior may lead one to believe that #BlueLivesMatter only defends individual and institutional racism, corruption, appalling training and criminal collusion.

Hashtags, like people, aren’t monolithic. Different people mean different things when they post, tweet, instashare, snapblog, or whatever we do to cry our digital tears in the electronic ether. But in the best interpretation of #BlueLivesMatter, it really does spring from a concern for life, and there are the utmost consequences for the lives that will be affected when #Black meets #Blue. For #BlackLivesMatter to be given its full due, #BlueLivesMatter will have to make the ultimate sacrifice in some instances.

The question here is how to share the burden of mistakes. On my best days, I can imagine a world without racism (or at least, without the level of racism that directly or indirectly leads to death), as idealistic and distant as that world may be. But I can’t imagine a world without mistakes, which are so fundamental to the human condition, and necessary to human progress, that we ought to fear a world without mistakes more than one with racism.

So in a world with mistakes, where we also have deadly weapons and criminals, unless we want criminals to be able to kill with impunity, we must have police or accept vigilantes. And if you have police in this world, some of them must be armed, and some of them will make mistakes. (I suppose we can imagine a world without deadly weapons, or one without criminals, but if all we do is imagine a world without problems, there isn’t much to discuss.) So the police will make mistakes involving deadly weapons, and someone will die as a result. Who should it be, an innocent suspect, or an innocent police officer or bystander?

#BlueLivesMatter says that the innocent suspect must die. This sounds horrible, but it isn’t hard to envision math that makes this seem rational. Say there are 1000 life-or-death suspect vs police confrontations per year. Say that 10% of those confrontations will end in a mistake, so we count up the number of lives at stake as something like:

  • 100 suspects
  • 300 police officers
  • 500 bystanders

Again, we are assuming that all of these actions will be a police mistake, but we’re not yet deciding where the burden of mistakes lies. Let’s say that the mistake in every instance is that the police show up and start shooting – they shoot all of the suspects (100), 10% of the bystanders (50), and 5% of the cops (15). That’s 165 dead, all of them innocent.

Now let’s say that instead, the mistake is that the cops never shoot. They’re unarmed, or even if they are armed, they never unholster. But again, this is a fatal mistake. In this type of mistake, the suspects are not innocent, so all of the cops and bystanders die. That’s 800 innocent dead.

Obviously, this is not the actual data – the point here isn’t to examine the data, but to question the concept. If #BlueLivesMatter is saying that they’d rather see innocent suspects die than innocent police and bystanders, that is not an argument that can be dismissed conceptually. It is at least worthy of discussion. An informed discussion would require actually examining the data. It is wrong to say that #BlueLivesMatter is a conceptually nonsensical response to #BlackLivesMatter, as we can say about #AllLivesMatter and #WhiteLivesMatter. #BlueLivesMatter has conceptual integrity, but lacks data.

Coming out of the conceptual world and back to reality: much of the data that would be needed is never collected, and probably can’t be reliably collected. How exactly do you count lives saved? How exactly do you count mistakes made by police inaction? In addition, the sad reality is that many elements of police culture are devoted to hiding what little data we might have. And then the truly despairing reality is that in the vast majority of innocent suspects who are killed, the victim is black, and some of those killings are less properly characterized as mistakes than as manifestations of direct and institutional racism.

Nevertheless, conceptual integrity matters. #BlackLivesMatter demands that …

This is where I paused. Check news. Eleven officers shot, four confirmed dead. What the fuck was I doing in the conceptual world? What the fuck is happening in the real world? Where the fuck is all this heading?

#BlackLivesMatter demands that we reduce the slaughter of innocent black lives, without explicitly recognizing the treacherous mass of iceberg beneath the surface. In a somewhat more perfect world, one without racism but still with crime and guns and deadly mistakes, to reduce the killing of one set of innocents will increase the killing of another another set. We don’t know if the tradeoff is 1-for-1, 10-for-1, or 1-for-10; we’ve never seen the data and may not be able to get it. But if police officers are trained to be slower on the draw, to err on the side of caution, that means that they must be trained such that more police officers will die. Maybe it’s worth it. Maybe 1000 innocent black lives will be saved in return for 1 police officer’s death. But what do you say to that one police officer’s family?

It’s easy to object, “Well how about we just get rid of racism in the police force first, and then go from there? No one here is asking cops to die, dummy!”

Get rid of racism in the police force? Do you have a formula for that? How about we get rid of racism in the classroom, in the workplace, in the legislature, in the entire world while we’re at it? We don’t know how to do this within a group of kindergarten kids, how are we going to do this for the more than 1 million police officers in the United States? Why do police officers bear the responsibility for curing racism more than any other group, how can we ask them to sacrifice even one of their own?

This is not to say that we can do nothing. Of course we can. Of course there is better training, better hiring, better testing, better evaluation, better management. And when there is still racism, there can be better recognition, better correction, better enforcement and true and swift punishment. Nevertheless the package of all of those things is going to mean, in addition to less racism and sundry other benefits: more caution. Saving innocent black lives is about changing the balance of mistakes. It is about erring on the side of caution so that fewer innocent black lives are ended – and it therefore also means that some more innocent blue lives must end.

This is a mortal conflict. It is black lives against blue lives, there must be a tradeoff. I don’t know where the tradeoff is, and although we don’t have sufficient data, I feel we will need to act without all of the data in order to prevent greater carnage. Because if advocates, thought leaders, legislators, and well-meaning citizens on both sides don’t admit this is a mortal trade-off, and make the hard decisions to force those trade-offs, then the formula will continue to get worse. More lives will be lost on every side.

More innocent black men will die. In response, there will be more outrage. We no longer live in a world where this outrage can be suppressed by a combination of obfuscation, brutality and social pressure. It will only grow until there is outright war in the streets. And here is where we are now. Two innocent black men dead this week. Four innocent blue lives ended in Dallas today. This isn’t slowing down, it isn’t blowing over, it isn’t getting better.

That’s all I can manage right now, an uncharacteristically unedited dump of thoughts. #Black vs #Blue is an ever-growing river of red. 

trump card

~ ginsu ~ 5 Comments

Donald Trump is going to be the next President of the United States. And technology is to blame. If you disagree with either of those statements, you just haven’t been paying attention.

Why is Trump about to win the Republican nomination? Do you blame ignorance, stupidity, racism, sheer anger? Do you blame the cynicism and greed of the Republican party over the last 30 years? All of these answers are rooted in an ungenerous assumption about the many millions of voters who have voted for Trump and will continue to do so. You would be saying that these people are fools, ignoramuses, racists. I think that is wrong substantively, but I know for sure that is wrong for you as a person. Always choose to be generous and empathetic in your assumptions about people, so long as that serves you just as well as your lesser instincts toward mean-spirited judgment.

The generous and empathetic view here accepts that the political system of this country is incontrovertibly broken for the majority of people. And since this country is ostensibly a democracy, that majority is understandably willing to vote for the person that most loudly claims that they will revolutionize the existing system. Donald Trump and Bernie Sanders, taken together, represent the vast majority of this country’s voters.

Trump won his party’s nomination (and Bernie will not) because Trump received billions and billions of dollars worth of free advertising. In a democracy, getting the message out to the people is the fundamental lubricant of the polity, which is why for nearly all of our nation’s history, the media have been regarded as the Fourth Estate, an equal peer to our functioning government alongside the executive, legislative and judicial branches.

But in the last twenty years, intensified in the last decade, the media have undergone a tremendous upheaval, all wrought by technology. And here is where we, all of us in technology, have been so proud of how we shaped the future, so unbearably, insufferably proud. We were proud to destroy Old Media, to disintermediate the gatekeepers, to revel in the creative destruction. Pride goeth before the fall.

What we didn’t realize, didn’t take seriously, is the real value of media as an institution in a properly functioning democracy, the Fourth Estate that keeps the others honest. We destroyed the gatekeepers without any foresight that we were replacing them with monsters much more insidious: the tyranny of the click, the plutocracy of the pageview, merciless metrics. Technology has become a dominant force in our culture over the last twenty years, and we as technologists were wholly unprepared for the responsibility.

If you think Hillary Clinton is going to win the general election, you have an optimism that is wholly unsupported by the slow-motion train wreck that has unfolded before our eyes these last few months. What could possibly support that optimism? Would you deny the obvious truth that this is a representative democracy, and that the majority of voters have stated their preference for overthrowing the current system? Hillary is a creature of the system, she cannot win over those voters.

The only hope is that the will of the majority will become disengaged from this election. They will not do so in the face of the billions and billions and more billions of free advertising that the media will continue to lavish upon Trump because they are no longer gatekeeping bastions of the Fourth Estate, but slaves to the clicks and advertising dollars that the technology revolution have left to them as the only form of viability that they have left. Believing that Hillary Clinton will win the presidency is like believing the New York Times is still The Paper of Record.

Bury your head in the sand if you must. I’m making plans for 2020.

greatness and lateness

~ ginsu ~ Leave a comment

The late, great Bill Campbell passed away this week, and there is no shortage of encomia from the technorati about him. He was the greatest coach in Silicon Valley, and the list of leaders that have paid tributes is appropriately star-studded. Some of the most successful people in the business world have benefitted from his wise counsel and friendship. It’s not hard to find stories of some pearl of advice that Bill gave to change the direction of a company, or even a life. I’d like to share a story that’s different, though no less illustrative of his greatness, because it’s a story of what happens when you don’t listen to Bill Campbell.

Back when Linden Lab was one of the most hyped companies in the world, in the interregnum between Google and Facebook, we had typical growing pains that were no less painful for being typical. Through the extraordinary pleading of one of our board members, we had the good fortune to receive some time from Bill Campbell. It was a tough time to get his time. He’d recently found out that his close friend was suffering from a terminal disease, and he knew that supporting his friend and his friend’s family would soon becoming an all-consuming task. He could not agree to a team-wide mentoring relationship. But even in the face of this tragedy and his many other commitments, he agreed to spend some one-on-one time with our CEO in several sessions, and just one round of discussions through the rest of the exec team.

I was very excited when my turn came, having known not only of The Coach’s legendary reputation, but having heard and seen his sharp advice to our CEO implemented on a few occasions in our company already. We sat down in a fishbowl conference room, centrally located on the company’s main floor, with a view out across the desks on an otherwise normal day. As I began responding to his initial questions about my background and context, I saw his attention drawn sharply away to the window.

In just a few seconds of observation, he saw something he didn’t like outside the conference room. “Do you see that?” he asked me. Yes I did, I responded, I knew exactly what he was talking about. “What’s it about?” he probed. I gave my best explanation, no doubt biased, certainly incomplete, filled with my caveats and allowances for things that I perhaps did not understand completely. “Nonsense,” he said, “Your job is to take care of that situation. Do you think this company is going to make or break on the new markets you’re after, on the business deals you’re trying to swing? No. You are here for that, no one else on the team is going to do it. Fix it. That is your most important job.”

I’m sorry I’m being vague about the details of the problem that Bill saw. The details don’t matter in this particular telling of the story. What matters is how quickly Bill could see a critical problem in barely more than a glance, how few questions he had to ask to understand the nature of the problem, how firmly he could direct action where it was needed, how incisively he could assess character and roles on a team. That he could do all this in seconds was simply stunning.

The sad, though hopefully instructive, remainder of the story is how poorly I executed on his insight. Fixing the problem immediately would require an extreme action that would disrupt the company in a sudden and unwelcome manner. I thought that the safer course of action was to confine the problem to a tight but explosive space, allowing it to self-destruct in a formidable container, like a bomb going off under a fortified blast dome. In retrospect, of course this was the wrong choice. The problem lingered longer than it should have, was not completely isolated or contained, and rather than have an explosion in the air that the winds could blow away, I had poison in the ground that was now part and parcel with the soil on which the company was built.

I wish we’d had more time than we got with Bill, I don’t think I would have handled things the same way with just a little bit more counsel. It was not the difference in our company’s success or failure, but it was the best advice for the moment and for the team in place. The lesson, I suppose, if there must be a lesson here, is that when you are fortunate enough to access the wisdom of the great, act on it decisively before it’s too late.

magnificent seven

~ ginsu ~ 1 Comment

Tomorrow Oculus Rift is taking consumer pre-orders for its heralded VR headset, and many people are wondering whether 2016 will be the year of virtual reality … just as they wondered in 2015, and 2014 … as they wondered in 2009 when I left Second Life. At that time, I remained certain that virtual reality was the future of online interaction, but that it would be at least 10 years before the field could achieve mass consumer success. Virtual reality actually has many decades of history as a technical project, as well as a rich history in fiction that demonstrates the enduring attraction.

People keep mistaking “THE year” for virtual reality because they fail to properly assess the progress in each field required to make a truly compelling VR experience. Observers see great progress in just one field, and they assume that it’s enough to break open mass consumer interest. But in fact there are SEVEN fields required for VR success – “the year of virtual reality” won’t happen until every one of these fields has progressed past the minimum development threshold. Here’s a brief rundown of each field, WHAT it is and WHY it’s important, and WHEN it’ll be ready for a truly compelling VR experience.

1. GRAPHICS COMPUTING POWER

WHAT: The most obvious requirement is that a computer needs to be powerful enough to make a compelling simulation of reality. Now, what’s “compelling” is open to argument, and I would argue that some relatively primitive figures can comprise a compelling environment if they move, interact with each other, and react to you in an engaging way.

WHY: I guess you could have virtual reality without computers, just as you can have it without compelling graphics. I mean, that’s called “storytelling” and it’s pretty cool. But that’s not what we’re talking about here. Some minimum level of simulated graphics is required.

WHEN: Sufficient power exists now, and has existed for at least seven years. But if your requirement for visual fidelity is very high, then you might think that even today’s computers aren’t powerful enough.

The technical measurement discussion isn’t too interesting, so please skip this paragraph and the graph below if you’re not inclined to pick over this kind of detail. There’s no single measure of computing power, but as a rough analogue I’d pick FLOPS and say that to simplify further we should talk only about GPU FLOPS, noting that there’s CPU-equivalent performance. Because I believe that an experience comprised of rough primitives can be compelling, I’d say that even one GPU GFLOPS is sufficient to support a compelling experience, and we’ve had that in home computers since 1999. But giving room for argument, I can raise the requirement to 500 times that, and still we’re talking about 2007-8 as the time when consumer-level computers had enough power to make virtual reality.

cpu-vs-gpu

2. PERSONAL COMPUTING DEVICES

WHAT: Unlike the first field, this is less about predicting the power that computers have than it is about predicting what type of computer people will use. “Personal computing” used to mean desktop computers, but now people actually carry computers on their persons. Today, the type of computer that is most commonly in use is the mobile smartphone.

WHY: Philip Rosedale frequently said that when he started SL, he underestimated the time that it would take to get to mass market use of virtual reality, because he was only looking at the increasing power of desktop computers. He didn’t predict the shift to laptops, which happened in the early 2000s. Using smaller computers generally means using less powerful computers, so although desktop computing power was sufficient to simulate reality by the mid-2000s, the computers that people actually used were laptops, which were not powerful enough. Today, the computer that most people use is a mobile phone, which is even less powerful.

WHEN: Using the same standards above, smartphones will be able to simulate a compelling VR experience in 2017.

(Boring, skippable paragraph follows.) As above, this assumes the requirement is 500 GPU GFLOPS, without arguing too much about what that number really means. A high-end smartphone today can do about 180 GPU GFLOPS, with more power coming soon. (For comparison, a PS4 game console can do over 1800 GPU GFLOPS.) Taking Moore’s Law narrowly and literally, it will be 2017 before smartphones will get over 500 GFLOPS.

But should we even be talking about smartphones here? Forget about “PC” meaning desktop – the truly personal computer has moved from your desk to your lap to your pocket. Where is it going next? On your wrist, on your face? This is a question about the intersection of device use and power, not either one alone. The precise question is, “When is the type of computer that most people use every day going to be capable of 500 GFLOPS?” I still think this is a question about smartphones, but who knows?

3. VISUAL DISPLAY

WHAT: A computer just simulates the environment, you need to be able to see what the computer is simulating. For many years, the way most people see a computer’s output has been through a monitor. Now, Oculus Rift and other goggles are coming into the mass consumer market, and these are so good that they’ve ushered in the current wave of excitement about VR.

WHY: Sight is the most important sense in giving people a feeling that they are somewhere other than where they’re sitting. It’s not the only required sense, but without seeing a virtual environment, most people cannot begin to immerse themselves in the experience. I used to think that a flat monitor of sufficient size and resolution could provide a compelling enough VR experience, but using the most advanced VR goggles today simply blows away the monitor experience.

WHEN: The major unsolved problem with VR goggles is that using them for too long induces nausea. Although Oculus and others have made a lot of progress on this, it’s only to the point where nausea is delayed rather than eliminated. A product that makes you puke is never going to be mass market. Based on nothing more than a rough guess based on many years of observation of consumer hardware cycles, I’m going to say that it will take three years to sufficiently refine VR goggles to smooth away the nausea and other early problems, so it will be late 2018 before this field is really ready for mass consumption.

4. AUDIO FIDELITY

WHAT: Properly spatial audio means that sound should be directional, you should be able to hear where a sound is coming from, and more than just direction, you should be able to distinguish sounds from each other even when they are coming from the same direction or obscured by ambient sounds. This latter goal is called the “cocktail party problem” – even in a noisy cocktail party, you can focus on and hear a single speaker who isn’t necessarily louder than the party noise.

WHY: Seeing may be believing, but hearing is confirmation. The audio experience is often overlooked and undervalued, but the sound of being in a space is crucial confirmation that your brain can believe what you see. It’s possible that the nausea of the VR goggles experience is due to insufficient confirmation from other senses, and hearing is probably the most important and easiest sense to add to the virtual environment, though some might advocate for smell or taste (uh, yuck).

WHEN: “3D audio” has been around for many years, but the cocktail party problem remains unsolved despite recent advances. Still, the current state of the art in spatial audio is very good, and probably good enough without fully solving the cocktail party problem. I think we’ll see really excellent integration of audio fidelity with VR goggles even before the VR goggles are fully nausea-free, so let’s say that the audio component will be ready by 2017.

5. 3D INPUT PERIPHERALS

WHAT: This is the most important area that not enough people are talking about. Virtual reality requires a host of new technologies for allowing a whole body to interact in a 3D space: hand and finger movement, body position, eye-tracking, multidirectional treadmills. Every single one of these is a new Oculus-size opportunity in the making.

WHY: A keyboard and mouse or trackpad are not designed, and not sufficiently adaptable, for a person to move easily in three-dimensional computed environment. The only innovation in input in mass computing devices that we’ve seen in the last 20 years has been multitouch on a smartphone or tablet, and that doesn’t help much for 3D.

WHEN: We have yet to see a breakthrough product here, despite many promising efforts. The field is extremely varied and diverse, and it could take many years to sort out the winners. Somewhat arbitrarily, I guess it will be at least 2019 before we have mass consumer products that enable all of the tactile, visual and auditory input needed for compelling VR.

6. BANDWIDTH

WHAT: Though it’s easy to imagine a VR experience that is entirely created by a single computer at a single place (somewhat like watching a movie at a theater), it is much more likely that many computers will need to talk with each other over distance, and that requires access bandwidth to communicate (like the Web).

WHY: The design of the particular VR experience that defines success really comes into play here. For example, this post assumes “mass market VR” will be enabled by personal computing devices and that multiple people can share a VR experience from different locations. That means that larger computers will perform important tasks and coordinate communication with the smaller computers that people have. The amount of bandwidth required can vary greatly depending on what demands the system is making on the computers involved.

WHEN: If you think that VR is going to get to mass market through smartphones or whatever successor computer that we carry around with us, then you’re bottlenecked by the state of wireless cell networks. Although high-speed data connection is broadly available in major metropolitan areas, it is unreliable even there and unavailable outside of the most densely populated areas. Given the slow rate of evolution of cell networks, it would be at least 2022 before bandwidth is sufficient for VR everywhere.

Many VR enthusiasts picture mass-market adoption through desktop computers, gaming consoles, or other specialized hardware yet to penetrate mass market, but all of which would use wired connections up until the wireless access point, so for that camp, we could say that bandwidth is already sufficient.

7. LATENCY DESIGN

WHAT: The delay in computers communicating with each other is sometimes related to bandwidth, but this field is included as a separate factor to encompass other network quality issues as well as the sheer physics of data traveling across large terrestrial distances.

WHY: Some amount of perceptible latency is unavoidable as a matter of physics if we are talking about communication across the world. So to the extent that the VR experience relies on real-time interaction with a global population, acceptable latency must be designed into the experience, mediated somehow to make the perception of latency acceptable.

WHEN: Arguably, this is a problem that is solved now for many types of VR experiences, but I include it here just because I’ve seen many VR proposals that don’t consider how latency must be designed into the experience. We’ll see some common design patterns in the first year of release of the current crop, and they’ll formalize into best practices by next year, so we’ll call this solved by 2017.

So, when will “The Year of VR” really be? My rough guess is 2019 at earliest, 2022 for the more ambitious visions of mass-market VR that include mobile computing.

My point isn’t to be right on the prediction though; here I just wanted to give a more rigorous framework for making predictions of mass market success. When people claim that this or any year will be the year of VR, they should be clear on what the state of progress needs to be on each of these seven pieces. Considering progress in just one field alone has led to many, many mistakenly optimistic predictions.

dear prudence

~ ginsu ~ 2 Comments

When I joined Google in December 2010, my friends didn’t think I’d last six months. I’d been working in startups for over a decade, and my experience and predilections had given me an enormous appetite for chaos, joyful appreciation of uncertainty, and incorrigible disdain for authority. Joining the world’s largest Internet company didn’t seem like a long-term move.

I lasted five years. It’s still a bit of a wonder to me how I stayed so long, but the attractions are undeniable. Google is routinely ranked as the best place to work, and it’s all true: market-leading products, smart colleagues, admirable leaders, outstanding perks and outsized pay. The list of reasons to work at Google is long and enviable.

Usually “great culture” is on that list, but it’s not on mine because no culture is great for every person. Only insane zealots would seek to impose a monoculture on the world, and to claim there’s just one way to have a great workplace culture is similarly indefensible. If chaos makes you hungry, if uncertainty brings you joy, if authority makes you want to punch up – you probably don’t want to work in a culture of extremely refined processes, luxurious reaction times, and deference to position. None of these are bad qualities in the abstract; it’s not inherently disadvantageous to be wild or deliberate, only the context makes it so. The context can vary from company to company, and even within companies.

I was in the right context, even at Google, for the first couple of years. Then I spent three years learning valuable things that nevertheless weren’t skills I wanted to have. Despite all the benefits, I feared becoming dependent on the enormous generosity of the leviathan, reduced to a remora suctioned to a whale for so long that it forgets how to swim. Unfortunately, I’m constitutionally incapable of adopting the prudence required to enjoy stability and luxury. I don’t think I’m irrational, I just value the parts of my personality that strain against these bounds. Prudence is expensive, unbearably dear, when it comes at the cost of your hunger, your joy, even the double-edged sword of your pride.

So finally, I’m out of the longest and most comfortable work relationship I’ve ever had, finally a fish without a host in the ocean, flapping the atrophy out of my fins. The water is deep and wide, filled with fearsome predators and cold currents, and the friendly coves are as yet hidden to me, but still it feels like home.

dan the man

~ ginsu ~ 2 Comments

The last time I saw Dan Fredinburg, he was heads-down in a tray of food at the cafeteria. I tapped him on the back as I passed by and mumbled some routine hello. A reflexive “Hey we should catch up” caught in my throat when I saw his haggard stare and the robotic shoveling of food into his mouth. He wasn’t really there, and that was very unlike Dan, who was usually so present, so effervescent with pleasure at seeing people and connecting with them in the moment.

I thought I understood: he was about to leave on his second attempt to summit Everest. The first attempt had ended in the most lives lost in a climbing accident on the mountain, when sixteen sherpas died in an avalanche that befell a commercial expedition in April 2014. Dan was acutely aware of the difference in risks for sherpas and expedition customers, and I think he’d been haunted by his contribution to the burden carried by the men who had died trying to help him achieve a dream. I saw the difference in his training this time around, when I’d occasionally spot him in the gym – he moved the heavy weights with a serious sense of purpose, dedicated to raising himself to an even higher level of fitness, without the jokey repartee that we had shared during his training the previous year. This time the journey was about more than just getting to the top because it’s there, more than making the world’s highest StreetView.

Dan died in an avalanche on Everest last Saturday, triggered by the powerful earthquake that now has a death toll of over 4000 people. The cynical will ask why anyone should remark on just one death among these thousands, just the death of a rich, powerful, famous playboy.

Dan wasn’t rich in money. Of course anyone with a good job in Silicon Valley may have wealth in comparison to much of the less fortunate world, but Dan wasn’t a jackpot entrepreneur flaunting his success with expensive hobbies. Instead he was rich in spirit, a wealth far beyond the norm even though it’s accessible to all. He was rich in vision, seeing a way to make his job into his passion, pursuing personal enrichment that’s not about money at all.

Dan wasn’t powerful in the org chart. A talent like Dan could never be a mere cog in a giant machine, but he wasn’t an executive commanding thousands of peons to do his bidding. Instead he was powerful in his presence, in his sheer joy at living, in the force of his will to live deep and suck out all the marrow of life.

Dan wasn’t famous in the media. He happened to date an actress, but he never saw people as what they did for a living; he responded only to who they are inside. The memory of Dan will live like a star in all who knew him, surviving well beyond the transitory and dull illumination of the names and faces of the merely famous.

Pablo Neruda often told an anecdote about a hole in the fence of his childhood backyard. It was just a hole in a fence, a tiny view into the landscape beyond, until one day there suddenly appeared a boy’s hand. When he got closer to the fence the hand had disappeared, but in its place was a gift of a marvelous little toy, and this toy touched his heart so much that he left his own in return. The chance view, the momentary and partial encounter with another emerging spirit, the exchange of common but magical gifts – the great poet marks this as the beginning of his understanding that there is a bond between strangers that is greater in its way than the bond between intimates.

I have been a lucky man. To feel the intimacy of brothers is a marvellous thing in life. To feel the love of people whom we love is a fire that feeds our life. But to feel the affection that comes from those whom we do not know, from those unknown to us, who are watching over our sleep and solitude, over our dangers and our weaknesses—that is something still greater and more beautiful because it widens out the boundaries of our being, and unites all living things.

That exchange brought home to me for the first time a precious idea: that all humanity is somehow together… This is the great lesson I learned in my childhood, in the backyard of a lonely house. Maybe it was nothing but a game two boys played who didn’t know each other and wanted to pass to the other some good things of life. Yet maybe this small and mysterious exchange of gifts remained inside me also, deep and indestructible, giving my poetry light.

People say “I’m sorry for your loss” when they hear that someone you know has died. It was really something to know Dan, but I’m not among his closest friends, family and loved ones, so I cannot truly grieve as they do, I have not lost as they have. For me, Dan was a gift spotted through a small hole in the fence that separates us from each other as we wander through our own life paths. I came close enough to see the joy he made of life, and to understand that we are united by something deep and indestructible inside of all of us. I’m grateful for the gift, lucky to have it, and determined to give it to all who pass by and see that these fences are truly no barrier at all.

the flitcraft parable

~ ginsu ~ Leave a comment

The “Flitcraft Parable” is in Chapter 7 of The Maltese Falcon, titled “G in the Air” with unsettling personal aptness. In condensed form:

Flitcraft lived a comfortable life of routine. Married with two kids, financially secure, without secrets or unruly inner demons. One day he disappeared, without warning, without trace, like a fist when you open your hand. His wife hired a private detective to find him, and find him he did. Confronted in the detective’s hotel room, Flitcraft had no feeling of guilt, as he felt his disappearance was utterly reasonable. His only bother was knowing that he couldn’t make that reasonableness clear to the detective, so he tried to explain.

Walking to lunch on the day he disappeared, a giant construction beam accidentally fell right beside him. He was uninjured, but after he recovered from the initial shock, he knew that the falling beam had shown him that life was fundamentally not the clean, orderly, sane, responsible affair he’d been living. Good citizenship, stable family, fortunate business – none of these things changed the fact that people lived only while while blind chance spared them.

He left that day with only the clothes on his back. After a couple of years of wandering, he settled in another suburb not far from the one he had left. He married another woman who didn’t look much like his first wife, but they were more alike than they were different. He wasn’t sorry for what he’d done, it seemed reasonable enough to him. He wasn’t even aware that he’d settled back into the same groove that he had left. He adjusted himself to beams falling, and then no more of them fell, and he adjusted himself to them not falling.

Since my last post, I left the dessicated shell of my marriage, leaving the house and most of my possessions, reassembling my life without the structure and goals that had been the foundation of my adult life. Among the many material things I left behind, I regretted nothing except that I did not bring the book that had been my reference for the Gatsby project. I had pored over each page of that book, carefully underlining the one phrase or sentence that would form the kernel of each post in the project, which was just under halfway done. I asked for the book’s return, to no avail. I thought I couldn’t start again without that exact book; but the edition was not a common one, and even if I could get it, of course it wouldn’t have my underlined markings, the toil of years.

For a long while I was furious that I could not get my book back, and that no one seemed to care how much it mattered to me. I stopped writing, because the Gatsby project had become my favorite warmup to writing, and my reliable fallback when words would not flow on other efforts. I was blocked – emotionally, creatively, spiritually blocked.

Finally I picked up another edition. Although I knew the pages wouldn’t match, that the project wouldn’t be the seamless tapestry I’d once imagined, I was ready to embrace the wisdom that you can start any new path you want, so long as you don’t require that it proceed on a straight line from the one you’ve been on. New edition in hand, I loaded the Gatsby project from the first page, freshly underlining the sentences I’d already posted about, expecting to run into the page that didn’t match. It didn’t come in the first chapter, or the second … or any that I’d done. I reached the final page of the project to date, and each sentence that I had selected in the old book landed neatly on the same page of the new book.

He adjusted himself to beams falling, and then no more of them fell, and he adjusted himself to them not falling.

I’m ready to write again.

real time

~ ginsu ~ 4 Comments

At Second Life, we occasionally debated the merits of virtual reality vs augmented reality. In caricature:

Virtual reality was the core dream of SL, same as the core proposition of Snow Crash, the Holodeck, the Matrix – the idea that a computer simulated world could have all of the sensory and intellectual stimulus, all of the emotion and vitality, all of the commerce and society, of the “real” world (quotations necessary because virtual reality would be so real that non-simulated reality has no better claim on the term).

Augmented reality said that the virtual realists dropped too much acid in their youth. A fully simulated environment might be escapist pleasure for the overcommitted few, but computers would show their real power by adding a layer to our existing lives, not creating entirely new ones. Computers would sink themselves into our phones, our clothes, eventually our fingers and eyeballs and brains, not in the service of making another world, but enhancing the world we live in.

If that debate sounded ridiculously theoretical to you, then I hope that was yesterday because today it’s as real as it gets.

Google Glass is the vanguard of augmented reality, and obviously important to the company.* Google’s mission has always been to organize the world’s information – not to create a fantasy world but to organize our world.

Second Life had its heyday after Google established itself as the new tech titan, but before any serious challenger had risen up behind it. We spent a lot of time trying to convince people that SL could be the next big thing … trying to explain that people wanted to have an online identity, instantiations of themselves that would interact with other online personalities, creating tiny bits of content that might not have individual value, but would have enormous value as a whole fabric of an online world where people would go and interact every day …

I was laughed out of a lot of buildings after explaining SL. Who wants to live online? Who wants friends that they see only in a computer? Who wants to spend their leisure hours pecking away at a keyboard and looking at the cascades of dreck that other non-professional users create?

Second Life missed the mark for a lot of reasons, but not because we were wrong about online life. Facebook came along, and gave us all of the virtual life that the Web could really handle – only 2D, status updates instead of atomic 3D content, kitten pictures instead of furries – but Facebook succeeded in creating a virtual world.

And now they’ve acquired Oculus VR. If it wasn’t clear before – and perhaps it wasn’t clear even to them – they have now taken a side in that old debate, the same side that they’ve been on since the beginning. Facebook is going to go more and more towards virtual reality, while Google expands further and further into augmented reality.

 

*I don’t work on Glass, have no special knowledge of the product or strategy, and actually have never even tried it.

like a boss

~ ginsu ~ Leave a comment

“Zappos says goodbye to bosses” is a recent entry in a long string of articles about decentralized management practices. In the popular press, the implicit message is that decentralization is a nonstandard practice compared to strict hierarchy (if it were standard, why report on it at all?) – and if there is a comment section it is often filled with bitter vitriol about the dumbass management hippies who would rather chant kumbaya than actually do the hard work of telling employees what to do.

Almost 10 years ago, Thomas Malone wrote a book called The Future of Work that summarized twenty years of research on organizational structure, concluding that decentralized management was, well, the future of work. This is no longer a controversial theory, and many different kinds of companies have instituted varying degrees of decentralization with great success. So why are there still so many critics, and why are some of them so bitterly opposed?

One reason is that decentralization isn’t always the right choice. Most employees probably work in enterprises for which a strong degree of hierarchy is a better choice, or at least not an obviously worse choice. This is because the majority of employees in many countries work in SMBs (small-to-medium sized businesses), where there is often little difference in outcome between decentralized and hierarchical management. When you have, say, 5 equally committed people working in the same room together, the information they receive is so similar, and the communication between them so frequent and unmediated, that the employees would probably make the same decisions with or without formal management. In addition, the single largest employer in many countries is the government, where hierarchy is highly beneficial or required due to the nature of the service or because of laws and regulations.

So most people work in SMBs that don’t need decentralization even if they have it, or in large organizations that benefit from a lot of hierarchy. This leads to the common misconception that decentralized management doesn’t scale. “Oh sure, rinky-dink startups and mom-and-pop shops can get by without managers, but when you get to the really big efforts, you gotta have hierarchy to be a great company.”

That is not just wrong, it is perversely wrong. Decentralized management is, for certain kinds of enterprises, actually required in order to scale. The right way to decide whether your company needs decentralized management is to ask yourself these two questions:

How many people are required for my company to achieve our vision?

You have to have a pretty strong idea of your vision to answer this, which is harder than it seems, but let’s assume you know your vision. If you need less than about 150 people (because that’s Dunbar’s number), then decentralized management isn’t required. It might be more fun, more engaging for everyone involved, but it’s not required – unless you’re on the extreme side of the next question …

How well-known and stable is the path to achieving our vision?

If you know exactly how to get to the mountaintop, and that path is set in stone, then you have no need for decentralization. A single leader can just tell everyone what to do. A lot of decentralization could also work, so long as everyone is aware of the well-known and stable path – and this would probably be more fun for everyone involved, but it’s not required. However, if the path is unknown, or even if it’s known but subject to change before the full vision is achieved, then decentralized management is required. Failure is guaranteed under these circumstances due to the Innovator’s Dilemma – in large organizations, strict hierarchy will inevitably serve the needs of the current business model, leaving the company open to disruptive innovators that eat the large company’s future. The only hope to avoid the dilemma is to have decentralized management: employees with enough freedom to ignore the dictates of management might – with the right resources and a lot of luck – find the disruptive innovation within the company before it’s found outside.

So, to summarize in the obligatory 2×2:

decentralized management 2x2

I’ve noted the fun factor because it’s an important driver of employee criticism of distributed management. It’s not hard to find people who worked in places with “no bosses” and absolutely hated it, comparing the experience to high school and worse. And the truth is, in a large organization with an unknown and unstable path to a big vision, distributed management is definitely not fun for the employees, because:

  1. It is intellectually and emotionally draining. If everyone is supposed to make their own decisions, a lot of information and communication is required, and there is no way of getting around the time demands that this imposes, especially compared to the job you would be doing in a hierarchical company. Worse, making so many decisions is very stressful for most people, especially when you believe in the vision and you are close to your colleagues. You don’t want to let down your dreams and your friends, and it is very hard to face the possibility that every day may be the day you screw it all up for everyone.
  2. It is unrewarded by compensation. People start to think, “Hey waitaminute – I thought managers were supposed to make these decisions. If I’m making them now, why aren’t I being paid like a manager?” Most companies do not adjust their compensation schemes to account for this additional responsibility, because doing so would likely require a complex mechanism for collecting all possible projects, allowing everyone in the company to contribute to decisions on which they are knowledgable, and rewarding both successes and noble failures with monetary compensation commensurate to the effort of the people who implemented the project as well as those who contributed decisionmaking weight to the project. An attempt build this kind of compensation scheme would be regarded as insane, both internally and externally to the company. So most companies don’t try.
  3. The rewards for this kind of system extend beyond the likely employment period, possibly even beyond the lifetime of the employee. The Innovator’s Dilemma takes a long time to become a real threat. A small company first has to grow to a market leader and have such dominance that it is blinded to the threat of disruptive innovation – that can take years, possibly better measured as generations. So people are doing hard, uncompensated work, for the benefit of preventing a problem that might not happen during the lifetime of anyone that works at the company. That is a tough, tough ask of anyone. Even employees who understand the problem wish that the company could be hierarchical until the problem is apparent, and then switch over to this distributed bullshite. But the problem of course is that at that point, it’s too late.

So … should you like a boss or be a boss? Should you like your boss, and should that even be a question when your boss is you?