Welcome to the 21st century, an age of collaborative working, coworking, crowd-funding, crowd-publishing, a new dawn of communistic creation, an open source world of limitless opportunity. Or is it.
In 1991 a young Finnish student
studying in the US released the kernel of a computer operating system
that came to be know as linux. Since then it has become the world's
largest open-source project. Thousands upon thousands of coders,
testers, translators and graphic artists have worked together to
create an computer operating system to rival Windows and OS X.
Unfortunately, what we now have are hundreds of operating systems
that for one reason or another have not
even managed to replace each other, much less Windows
or OS X.
Maybe the second largest example of
people power, Wikipedia, is an incredible accomplishment of
crowd-sourcing knowledge, yet were you to cite it in an academic
paper you would be laughed out of the classroom. Wikipedia itself
discourages the citing of its articles and is well aware of the flaws
in its content.
Then there is my personal favourite,
democracy. Everybody gets the chance to chose the people who they
will blame for messing up the country and the economy for the next
4-5 years. For the most part their decisions are based on family
loyalties, class bias or worst of all, the media. Making an informed
political decision is just about impossible.
Just imagine, and I know, that some
actually exist, a school where pupils have equal say in the syllabusand the running of the school. A family where the kids get to tell
Dad what to do. Some of these ideas of egalitarian rule may make you
cringe or tingle with joy but it is obvious that some institutions
and domestic groups should have clear leadership.
So obviously, according to me,
open-source, crowd-sourcing and collaborative projects are a complete waste of
time.
cool but confused |
Well no. There are some problems with
people-power but most of them can be addressed. And indeed many
already have. In October 2004 yet another linux distro was launched,
Ubuntu. Ubuntu, its name means a philosophy of humanistic
interdependence in a Bantu language of Southern Africa, was
established by Mark Shuttleworth, a British/South African
entrepreneur. Ubuntu gained market share year on year with some
netbooks coming preloaded, even Dell and Samsung released a range of
linux machines. The commune coders were gaining ground, even on OS X.
Then, Google picked up linux as a base
for for their Android OS and now Linux is on more smart phones than
windows mobile or iOS. The first android handset was released in 2008
and two years later it was the leading smart phone platform. Still
open-source, still user developed but managed. Just like a strong
headmaster nurtures a productive school or a strong Dad, or Mum, will
head a confident and happy family. And maybe there is the key.
Apple produces more desirable things
than Dolce & Gabbana, Jimmy Choo or Aston Martin (in the case of the last example I must express passionate personal disagreement) and have the
most valuable stock in the history of money. Yet, the iPhone is so
closed-source you can't even change the battery. Jobs famously didn't
listen to many people, he refused to use focus groups because he
couldn't trust public opinion and his idea of public product
appraisal was taking the thing home for a few weeks.
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You WILL buy my brilliance! |
In order to achieve innovation, true,
brilliant game-changing innovation you need leadership, blind
autocratic leadership. If you put a hundred really smart people in a
field they will run around in a hundred directions with one's
smartness cancelling out another's. Linux is perfect proof of this.
The total being much less than the sum of its parts. Ubuntu is an
awesome OS and so are so many other linux distros, linuxmint and Fedora to name just two. They look great, boot fast and programs are just a
couple of clicks from installation, not to mention the safety of
being behind an environment that has few known predators which allows
you to click merrily on links and open emails that would make you
shiver with fear in a windows environment. The thing is that every so
often things just don't work. Hardware won't play ball, web services
lag or jitter. This is because there is no-one to drag someone into
their office and say “Make it F@#king happen, or else!”
According to reports, Jobs would fire people in the lift if they simply annoyed
him.
Vision is a great and valuable quality
but production and development comes from action, hard work and direction. If you want to
get somewhere, you must first decide who's driving then get behind
them and pedal your heart out.
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“In a hyper-real postmodern world, fact and fiction have become confusingly indistinguishable” Hunter S. Thompson
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