Making a Living in Languages (Redux) part 7: Give ‘Em What They Want

Last time: “Can’t Make a Killing From Platforms Without Killing the Community,” in which I said that those who develop a platform rarely recoup their cost directly, and so they might look to reduce their cost through open-source efforts.
Now: How do you create demand for a platform?

[This is an excerpt from a Lisp conference talk I gave in 2002.]

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Making a Living in Languages (Redux) part 6: Can’t Make a Killing From Platforms Without Killing the Community

Last time: “Platforms – The New Application-Centric Product Positioning,” in which I encouraged thinking about platforms communities rather than language technologies or standards.
Now: How does a single vendor create a platform community?

[This is an excerpt from a Lisp conference talk I gave in 2002.]

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Making a Living in Languages (Redux) part 5: Platforms – The New Application-Centric Product Positioning

Last time: “The Old Language-Centric Products Categories,” in which I said that the old model for vendors was to specialize in one of either language engine, libraries, or developer’s tools.
Now: What would happen if we generalized this approach?

[This is an excerpt from a Lisp conference talk I gave in 2002.]

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Making a Living in Languages (Redux) part 3: Hidden Special Purpose Languages

Last time: “Every Application Architecture Has Plenty of Languages,” in which we said that IT was full of enough languages to keep any language lawyer busy.
Now: Well clearly there’s room for languages work, but where are the language products hiding?

[This is an excerpt from a Lisp conference talk I gave in 2002.]

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Making a Living in Languages (Redux) part 2: Every Application Architecture Has Plenty of Languages

Last time: “What Do Buyers Want?,” in which I said that employers want specialists in technologies, which doesn’t really help the employers solve problems.
Now: Where does that leave us? Where’s the language vendor in this picture? Where does the language guru go?

[This is an excerpt from a Lisp conference talk I gave in 2002.]

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Making a Living in Languages (Redux) part 1: What Do Buyers Want?

In 2002 I gave an invited talk at a Lisp conference in San Francisco. I was scheduled while I was Technical Strategist at a hotshot Lisp-like company founded by Tim Berners-Lee. I gave the talk right after the strategy department was disolved and I was fired with it. (John was in the same department.)

As I remember, it wasn’t well received. (But I was pretty grumpy at the time and considered myself to be not well received by the world in general.) The writing and speaking wasn’t great, and some of the ideas were marginal. But I think a lot of the ideas have stood up pretty well, and I still believe them. I’m going to serialize it here, so that I can reference it in future blogs.

Abstract

The last few years have seen a lot of new language development, but commercial success has eluded many good language companies. A framework for success is presented, in which language systems are recast as open platforms for some class of application. Multi-tier marketing is examined, in which a free or low cost application enlarges the platform’s community, while revenues are produced on an upper-tier product or service. The presentation will be followed by a fishbowl discussion, in which everyone is encouraged to join the conversation.

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Follow-up on “The Sign”

The first night night after attaching the letter to the political sign against meanness, the sign remained. Someone had pulled it out half way to steal this second sign, but thought better of it.

The second night the same. This time the sign wires were bent, but the sign remained.

Then we went away for two days. The sign was gone. Just the twisted wires remained.

Our friend in the cause brought us another replacement without asking. Actually, she brought two. She had been watching. We’re the first house in the neighborhood and prominent. And this isn’t any neighborhood. It is a mostly green-built conservancy full of kids and parks and porches behind small setbacks. Lots of salesmen and teachers raising kids. It is also the home of the Republican candidate for State Attorney General. A former U.S. District Attorney appointed by President Bush, he funded much of his compain by mortgaging his house.

We left the twisted wires and put in the new sign. Without the letter. Wife Robin had suggested all along that we just keep replacing the sign, and she had suggested — ok, she barred me — from retaliating with email to the neighborhood and letters to the editor. I wondered if the folks who had been told by their pastors to vote against gays would appreciate this example of turning the other cheek.

Anyway, the sign remained. No one stole the third sign. Yet bucking Democratic victories state-wide, our neighbor won his bid for Attorney General, and the people of the state of LaFollette voted to ammend the constitution so as to prohibit the state from ever granting couples rights to a group that Tuesday’s voters disapproved of.

We lost. But in my way I took a stand and I feel good about that. Our next Attorney General didn’t speak out in the neighborhood nor with the press for either private property or private love. But a few folks in the neighborhood have come out and told us about how they feel good about our little play. I feel that the wonderful thing about democracy is not that we each get to cast a vote. Mathematically, that just doesn’t matter. It is that in voting we have to decide. We can just do what we’re told to, but even that is a choice. I feel like we contributed to the inner decision process of a tiny-few people on both sides. That’s not a bad thing.

To the Thief Who Has Stolen My Sign

[Next week’s election includes an amendment to the Wisconsin state consitiution. The amendment excludes homosexuals from whatever protection they might otherwise have, in that it prohibits the legislature from granting any civil union or other benefits except for couples defined on the basis of gender. Specifically, each couple is prescribed to be one man and one woman.

A friend asked me to put up a small sign that reads “A fair Wisconsin votes No …on the civil union ban.” Two days later, the sign had been stolen from my lawn on a non-through street.

I’ve replaced the sign, and attached the following letter.

I welcome comments and improvements, as I think I might share this letter with others, the local papers, etc.]

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You've Got Mail!

I’m sure getting a lot of junk mail lately. In the war between spammers and spam filters, the spammers are winning. I remember Paul Graham speaking five or six years ago at the AI lab about his ideas for Bayesian spam filters. I don’t think there was a single person in the room who didn’t think, “But why don’t the spammers just send their message in an image?” Well, pretty much all mail clients and many institutional filter’s have implemented Paul’s ideas anyway. It worked for a good while, but now of course the bad guys are sending pictures. I feel that I’m missing something important in not understanding why it has taken them so long.

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