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A while ago I wrote an article about Agile and Scrum and wanted to write another one following my recent experience with Agile. However, somehow I couldn’t add anything of that great value to my original post that would be worth a new one.

And now I know I don’t have to. In this fantastic post, Gwaredd takes a deep look into all failures and successes of Agile, with the common misconceptions of believers and decision-makers. In the end, the so called “Post Agile”, is just plain common sense.

A long time ago I read an article about some dangerous psychological studies in the 70’s. It’s funny to think that, at that time, things that we don’t even consider doing, were acceptable.

Can you imagine yourself with a periscope counting the seconds some truck drivers take to piss in a public toilet? Or pretending to rape a girl and risk getting shot (especially in the US)? It’s not just ethically incorrect, it’s dangerous!

Recently, I read an article about some students monitoring 350 million mobile calls just to figure out if the callee’d call you back. Not only in the 70’s that would be nonsense, but people would explode in rage, as it’d be just enough to prove all conspiracy theories at that time (not to mention the cold war).

This is not the first research using “unnamed” data from carriers or websites, nor will be the last. I myself proposed something similar to Yahoo! when I worked there to get the trends and act on the average (rather than tag individuals), and I see now that it’s becoming acceptable to allow research groups to openly read entire databases that before was considered private.

I don’t particularly dislike such type of research, especially when they’re done by universities, but the slight paranoia feeling creep up my spine sometimes. I guess that’s one of the issues that is dividing people into two very distinctive groups: those that ignore completely the privacy for the sake of comfort, and those that ignore comfort for the sake of privacy.

I am in between the two groups, but I can’t say I’m exactly average. I think I’m an extremist on both sides. I don’t mind storing my private emails on Google but I disable all Facebook add-ons and restrict access to all my personal data. I pay everything on the internet with my credit-card but I’ll refuse to the end of my days to use the biometric passport or iris recognition at airports.

There is no logic, really, it’s just the kind of thing you stick with. It is true that governments have more power to dig your data when they want, while Amazon will probably only have my credit-card number. But it’s also true that no government in the world can dig everyone’s data all the time, so it’s pretty improbable that someone is monitoring how many times I cross the Heathrow border.

In the end, only one thing makes out as logic in the whole scene: during the recent years, it was far more likely the government loosing all banking details of everyone in the country than some hacker invading Amazon to get my credit-card. Maybe that’s what’s keeping me from accepting IDs and biometric passports… or maybe I never will…

Ever since 1995 I hear the same phrase, and ever since 2000 I stopped listening. It was already the year of Linux in 95 for me, so why bother?

But this year is different, and Linux is not the only revolution in town… By the end of last year, the first tera-electronvolt collisions were recorded in the LHC, getting closer to see (or not) the infamous Higgs boson. Now, the NIF reports a massive 700 kilojoules in a 10 billionth of a second laser, that, if it continues on schedule, could lead us to cold fusion!!

The human race is about to finally put the full stop on the standard model and achieve cold fusion by the end of this year, who cares about Linux?!

Well, for one thing, Linux is running all the clusters being used to compute and maintain all those facilities. So, if it were for Microsoft, we’d still be in the stone age…

UPDATE: More news on cold fusion…

There was a time when the gods were bored to death, but because they couldn’t actually die, they started writing down all their knowledge to pass the time. Virtually everything known to them was written on the ancient manuscripts and organized by topic, cross-linked with other topics, in a very simple yet complete language that described everything to the last detail.

Time passed, universes were created and in some of them, creatures developed critical thinking. With that, came science and with science, the logical conclusion that gods didn’t actually have to exist was inevitable. So inevitable that finally, without delay, the gods actually died. For the curious minds, that fact is based on the quantum principle that, if no one sees it, it doesn’t actually exist.

Yet, for the great benevolence of the Universe, the manuscripts were kept and for billions of (Earth) years (relativistically speaking, of course), they were forgotten. But everything that is lost is waiting to be found, and in a very small speck of dust, in a completely irrelevant galaxy on the (multi-dimensional) margins of one of the universes, a yet-to-be intelligent race found a way to the manuscripts. However, their intelligence was not enough to uncover the whole truth. They could only gather hints and pieces of what once was the complete knowledge of everything.

It was much more of a coincidence, really, that so many of those beings would channel the truth through their fingers and type them, guided by the manuscripts themselves, on a remote system that all the other beings would go and search for knowledge. Some would misguide them, of course, and others would fight over the truth, for no one really know how to interpret such manuscripts. Seeing such confusion and regress, the Universe decided to create a game, on which such frivolous beings could channel their good side instead, even if not consciously knowing so.

The Game

The game is very simple and is meant to beings with very limited mental and social capacity.

The younger member starts by clicking on the “Random Article” link on any Wikipedia page, or by choosing a subject from the main page. After that, the following rules must be repeated until the players are tired or bored to death:

1. The current player must explain (out loud) what the article is about and think of a related subject. The relation can be of any kind.
2. The other players would then decide if the relation is valid and the player should then go to the related page.
3. If the relationship is valid and approved, the points are counted on the following manner:
   • 1 point if the article exists, +3 points if the player enhances it.
   • 3 points if the article doesn’t exist, +9 points if the player creates it with a stub.
4. The player on the right goes next.

Of course, at least one access to Wikipedia is necessary, but many can be used simultaneously. It is considered foul play to tamper with the contents of the pages just to get extra points (remember, the gods won’t be pleased at all!).

In between games, there is a way to get extra points for the next round. If the player proves that he/she enhanced Wikipedia pages quoted from a previous game (change logs suffice), he/she gets +3 points at the start of the next game for every considerable change (10 or more words) in a single page. Multiple changes in the same page counts as one change and the points can only be counted if the change happened between the last game and current, so the same change cannot be considered twice. Creation of new pages related to the subjects mentioned also count as change.

The Winner

The winner of the game is obviously the one that gets most points, but the real winner is the society. Knowledge has no owner, no boundaries, no limits. The more you share, the more society benefits. Knowledge is power, and you can give it for free, as easy as writing an email… to the world.

Most game-changing scientific discoveries had a lot of logic and critical thinking, but also a bit of luck involved. As most scientists, I don’t believe in luck, so the definition of luck here is being the right person in the right place at the right time. As most (good) scientists, I don’t believe, I state, hypothesise, prove, refute, so the definition of belief here is also obvious.

My point is that evolution wouldn’t have been formulated if Darwin hadn’t gone with the Beagle, genetics wouldn’t be so solid if Mendel hadn’t believed the contrary so fiercely, Plank wouldn’t have found the quantum if there wasn’t a major argument about the black-body spectrum and Einstein would have won the Nobel prize for any other thing if he hadn’t been so drawn by God playing dice.

My story today starts in a similar way, but in a much more mundane problem… I lost my keys.

There is nothing I hate more than loosing my keys, especially in the 25th of December when we’re going to hit the road in the 27th. I lost all my keys, car, house, even my USB key. These modern car keys are not easy to replicate, I’d have to buy the whole thing again and loosing your front door key is not the kind of thing you let pass with a simple copy, you have to change the whole set, especially when you’re going away for a week.

Well, after despair came fear. After fear, despair again. We searched the whole house, inside, outside and in between. Nothing. Brute force wasn’t helping, but that hadn’t stopped me to do it once in a while again, just in case. In between the despair brute-force moments, we decided to be logical about the situation and think, rather than search for the answer.

First point, we had a spare of either car and house, so at least we could still travel and come back home. My worries were, in fact, what would we find when we came back home… If I had lot my keys outside or had left them hanging off the front door’s key hole (happened more than once), it’d be just too easy for someone to clean the house while we were away.

So we tracked down every place we went, every thing we did. By logic, I couldn’t have lost them in the city or anywhere I would have gone by car. Nor I could have lost it inside the car, so at least we knew that it’d be either inside the house or around it (including the key hole, unfortunately). I almost cancelled our trip because of the key hole probability, but Renata, very logically, convinced me that everything we did could not have caused me to leave it there. It was very, very unlikely. So we went…

However very unlikely, that still bugged me the whole week and I felt a bit of panic when we got home. But to my comfort, the house was exactly the way we left. That was, in a twisted way, another indication that the key was not left in the key hole. It had to be inside the house. I went back to work, still using the spare keys, but always thinking about it, wondering wherever it was. Sometimes, just in case, I’d imagine that I would look somewhere and see the key there, and be very surprised I haven’t seen it there before. That feeling never came.

This week I thought enough was enough. I had to continue with my life, change the front door keys and buy the very expensive key set from the car’s manufacturers. I put a to-do in my mobile: “call toyota, landlord wrt keys”. It was then that luck stroke with an impeccable logic. I felt like Darwin finding the platypus or Mendel smashing peas.

I looked at our bag of snow jackets, hermetically sealed for the next winter (Cambridge has only one chance of snowing each year, and that was before Christmas), and thought: “If the keys are in there, we’ll only find out next winter.” The simple logic led me to think it’d be much cheaper for me to re-open the impossible-to-close-hermetically-sealed bag now and not find the key than to wait until next winter and have spent thousands of pounds for nothing. The risk assessment was positive, and that led me to the next piece of information that closed the gap: it was snowing before Christmas! It had to be there!

I opened the bag and tapped my jacket, nothing. But the logic was impeccable, I couldn’t be wrong. I wore the jacket and trusted logic above my own despair. Gently sliding my hands inside the pockets, as I always do. The pockets are deep, and I felt nothing at start, but that didn’t stop my trust in logic. Spock would have laughed at me if I did, it’s that serious, a vulcan could actually laugh. It was not out of faith or belief, it was the ultimately trust that scientists lay on logic above all feelings, common sense and general knowledge, that kept me going until I finally felt something…

I have recently joined the IETF Smart Grid group to see what people were talking about it and to put away my fears on security and privacy. What I saw was a bunch of experts discussing the plethora of standards that could be applied (very important) but few people seemed too interested in the privacy issue.

If you see the IEEE page on Smart Grids, besides the smart generation / distribution / reception (very important) there is a paragraph on the interaction between the grid and the customers, being very careful not to mention invasive techniques to allow the grid to control customer’s appliances:

“Intelligent appliances capable of deciding when to consume power based on pre-set customer preferences.”

Here, they focus on letting the appliances decide what will be done to save power, not the grid or the provider. Later on, on the same paragraph:

“Early tests with smart grids have shown that consumers can save up to 25% on their energy usage by simply providing them with information on that usage and the tools to manage it.”

Again, enforcing that the providers will only “provide [the customer] with information”. In other words, the grid is smart up to the smart meter (that is controlled by the provider), where inside people’s houses, it’s the appliances that have to be smart. One pertinent comment from Hector Santos in the IETF group:

“Security (most privacy) issues, I believe, has been sedated over the years with the change in consumer mindset. Tomorrow (and to a large extent today) generation of consumers will not even give it a second thought. They will not even realize that it was once considered a social engineering taboo to conflict with user privacy issues.”

I hate to be pessimist, but there is a very important truth in this. Not only people are allowing systems to store their data for completely different reasons, but they don’t care if the owner of the system will distribute their information or not. I, myself, always paranoid, have signed contracts with providers knowing that they would use and sell my data to third parties. The British Telecom is one good example. He continues:

“Just look how social networking and the drive to share more, not less has changed the consumer mindset. Tomorrow engineers will be part of all this new mindset.”

There is no social engineering any more like it used to be. Who needs to steal your information when it’s already there, on your Facebook? People are sharing willingly, and a lot of them know what problems it may cause, but the benefit, for them, is greater. Moreover, millions bought music, games and films with DRM, allowing a company control what you do, see or listen. How many Kindles were bought? How many iPhones? People don’t care what’s going on if they have what they want.

That is the true meaning of sedated privacy concerns. It’s a very distorted way of selfishness, where you don’t care about yourself, as long as you are happy. If it makes no sense to you, don’t worry, it makes no sense to me too.

Recently, the Future of Privacy Forum published an excellent analysis (via Ars) on the smart grid privacy. Several concepts that are easy to understand how dangerous they can be, became commonplace to not think about it or even consider it a silly worry, given that no one cares anyway.

An evil use of a similar technology is the “Selectable Output Control“. Just like a Kindle, the media companies want to make sure you only watch what you pay for. It may seem fair, and even cheaper, as they allow “smart pricing”, like some smart-grid technologies.

But we all have seen what Amazon did to kindle users, of Apple did to its AppStore, taking down contents without warn, removing things you paid for from your device, allowing or disallowing you to run applications or contents on your device as if you hadn’t pay enough money to own the device and its contents.

In the end, “smart pricing” is like tax cut, they reduce tax A, but introduce taxes B, C and D, which double the amount of taxes you pay. Of course, you only knew about tax A and went happy about your life. All in all, nobody cares who or how much they pay, as long as they can get the newest fart app…

Star trek seems a long way and yet, a few news had made into the headlines exposing some achievements that might lead us closer to Roddenberry’s universe.

Some research just found anti-matter in an unusual place: lightning! It might be easier to produce a warp core that we originally thought. Given, of course, that sub-space exists and can be reached by an matter/anti-matter reaction.

Another research, from the University of California, has just found a way to create a medical tricorder. That, for me, is the best achievement so far. Not to mention time travels, teleportation, quantum computers and faster-than-light communication already achieved since the series was created.

Finally, the University of Canada just made the first phaser. Though, it’s still only set to stun…

But I have to say that I’m a bit worried. The Temporal Prime Directive might be needed a bit sooner than the 29th century…

The Wikimedia Foundation has just launched the first release of the Hitchhiker’s Guide to the Galaxy. I hope the next version they’ll use sub-etha to update the contents automatically. It could also come with a babel fish or a Federation tricorder…

To start a new idea and make it profitable is much more of an art than logic. There is no recipe, no fail-proof tactic. The most successful entrepreneurs are either lucky or have a good gut-feeling. Hard work, intelligence and the right idea are seldom useful if they don’t come with luck or a crystal ball. After you have started-up, however, they’re the only things that matter.

I may not know how to start a business and succeed, but I do know how to make them fail miserably. I have done it myself and seen many (many) friends fail for different (but similar) reasons. Yet, I still see other friends trying or the same friends still thinking they could’ve done better next time, so this is my message to all of them.

Do you have a crystal ball?

I really meant it, those that really work they way they’re supposed to. If the answer is no, think twice. Seriously, I’m not joking. The only people that partially succeeded were the ones that had nothing to loose, as they had enough money to get them going for years, but (unfortunately) they’re not filthy rich today. The rest are employees somewhere in the world…

Hard work

One thing they all had in common is the idea that they could do it with hard work and a good idea. How wrong they were… Let’s put it simple: if hard work took you anywhere, the world would be dominated by dockers. If good ideas had any impact, the world would be dominated by scientists. But the world is dominated by bankers… Q.E.D.

Working hard won’t help, you have to work just right. That usually means very little in the beginning, a bit more afterwards and later on and finally hire some hard-workers to do the work for you. Simple, stupid.

Picture this: a salesman comes to your door to sell you a pair of scissors. You have many at home, but he assures you it’s the best pair of scissors in the world, that it has twenty patents and the guys behind the design like to work very hard on their ideas. Would you buy it? No! On the other hand, lots and lots of people go to the supermarket and buy scissors just because they’re cheap (and they assume they lost their own).

Don’t expect people to understand your hard work, they couldn’t care less for how much you do work, they just care for what benefits you can give them. The supermarket scissors give them the benefit of being cheap and “be there”, the salesman is already annoying by definition. No matter how good yours is, they simply won’t buy it.

Ingenious crafts

Now, at this point the friends I mentioned are certainly thinking: “but my product was much better. It was new, there wasn’t any one like that in the market”. The truth is, who cares?!

Novelty doesn’t sell, quality doesn’t sell (at least not yours, anyway). If Apple start selling toothbrushes, people will buy by the millions, if you sell a crystal ball that actually works, they’ll ignore completely. Who are you, anyway? Unless they have some kind of value, and their friends (and other posh people) are doing too, they won’t even bother.

If your product is really good, you have to put a high price for it. Poor people won’t buy it, rich people will buy from the fancy brand. You sell it cheap, poor people won’t buy it (because it’s not fancy nor necessary) and rich people won’t even see you. Poor people only buy superfluous stuff from fancy brands (or fakes) and rich people only buy from the real (sometimes fake too!) brand.

If your item is not an every-day necessity, like food, you are in deep trouble. Being the best is not enough, ordinary products sell more than state-of-the-art ingenious crafts.

Do the right way ™

Some of my failed friends (no hard feelings, ok?), that are now really pissed off, are thinking: “But I didn’t put all that effort, and my product was clearly better than any other, and it was for free! How could it go wrong?”. Capitalism 101: No demand, no production.

Don’t yell just yet, when I say demand, I mean demand by desire. There was always a demand for the internet, but people never desired it before a few decades. There was always a demand for a decent search engine, but no one desired that much after all the failed attempts from Yahoo, AltaVista etc. When there was a desire for instant communication, email was not enough, that ICQ had its chance.

Doing it right is not enough, you need to do it at the right time. The right time is not when there is no other option like yours, this fact is irrelevant. The right time is when many others are failing. This, my friends, is the crucial point. You can have a million of ideas, if none of them coincide with the utter failure of one or more other ideas, it’s worthless.

Don’t trust your brain

The recipe for disaster is simple: trust your brain. Trust that your intelligence will lead you to success. Trust that your ideas are better than others’ and that will lead you to success. Trust that hard work wil lead you to success. People that trust their empire is unbreakable, are already breaking. To trust, is to fail.

The most simple rule for success, as I picture it, is to use other people’s failures for your success. If someone is doing it wrong and people are complaining, there is a high demand by desire for that particular thing. If you can identify it and do what they want, it’s likely that you will succeed.

Again, don’t do more than what they need nor better than you have to. Keep it simple, keep it stupid. Hard work won’t lead you anywhere, remember? You have to be fast, noisy and some times ridiculed. It’s part of the game. Good buzz and bad buzz are both buzz, and buzz is good anyhow.

In a nutshell

• Minimum work, maximum opportunity: Do as little as possible before the window opens, make connections, prepare demos and mockups of several different projects, multiply your chances.
• Wait for a major failure: Investigate where others are failing and take action immediately, put anything on the market, no matter how ugly or failing, Beta is always Beta (thanks Google!).
• Don’t let the window close: After you got your opportunity, work hard as hell, buzz, spam, be ridiculous.
• Don’t use your brains too much: Good ideas are no better than bad ones, your idea is no better than any other. Failing ideas are important, non-existent ideas are irrelevant.

So, my failed friends, it is very simple: You will fail, unless you step on top of other people’s failures and don’t let them do the same to you. Now you understand why I won’t ever try again… This is absolutely not my style at all! I rather have friends than be rich.

A bit of history

Nothing better than a good bit of history to show us how important is people’s failures in other people’s success…

Microsoft’s success

IBM was dealing with Digital Research to put CP/M on it’s new architecture, the PC. Digital was sloppy, negotiations failed, Microsoft (so far completely irrelevant) got a CP/M clone and called it MS-DOS and gave to IBM. You know the rest…

Microsoft had previously worked on a Unix version for micro-computers, called Xenix which was then sold to SCO who ported to PC, which failed. Unix is, as we all know, the best ever operating system in the world. There was no Unix for micro-computers, it was a perfect market, right?

Wrong. The first move (on top of a failure), and not the second (with a bright idea), is what made Microsoft the number one software company in the world today. For bad or worse, they won big time.

Yahoo vs. Google

In the beginning, the internet was a bunch of Gopher sites. When it turned to HTTP and people started using HTML and the commercial boom came in, it was impossible to find anything decent.

Several people started doing directories of cool websites, but it was Yahoo who consolidated it into one big site. They bought several other companies, most notably for their directory contents and search engines. No matter how hard they tried it was still too bad. In 2000 they were to close a search deal with Google. For a short time, Google actually provided search results for Yahoo, but the pride was bigger and they bought Inktomy (who?) and dropped Google’s techology, which obviously brought no value at all to their users.

The search was still no better than Google’s, which saw Yahoo’s pride as their biggest mistake. Google started low, using basically the word of mouth as buzz and making really cool (but stupid, simple and easy to implement) features. Even their search engine was not novelty, as others had done similar in the past and they spent their college time doing it.

Yahoo’s mistake was Google’s take. They now have more than half of the internet passing through them, left Yahoo with second (or third) class, outdated products. The company is now finally destroyed.

To make things even more interesting, Microsoft tried to compete with them, but failed miserably. Their products were even worse than Yahoo’s and, to cement once and for all Yahoo’s mistake, they’re now using Microsoft’s technology as their search platform.

There are obviously many more stories of failures and successes, but I let this as an exercise to the reader. My final and most important point is: commercial success has nothing to do with quality, only with timing and a good deal of bad behaviour.

Why is it so hard for the game industry to get the online experience? I understand the media industry being utterly ignorant about how to make sense of the internet, but gaming is about pure fun, isn’t it? The new survey done in UK is more than proof of the obvious fact that people will use all resources of the internet to get what they want, whether it’s illegal or not.

After all, who defines what’s legal and what’s not? The UK government already said that it’s OK to invade one’s privacy for the matter of general security, even when everybody knows that any government has no clue on what’s security and what’s not. Not to mention the Orwellian attitudes of certain US companies seem not to raise any eyebrow from the local government or the general public…

That said, games are a different matter. Offline games still need have some kind of protection, but online games should rely on online commerce, and that can only be complete if the user has a full online experience. So, what do I mean by full online experience?

You don’t always have access to your own computer. Sometimes you have just a remote connection, sometimes only your mobile phone or a web browser. Sometimes you have an old laptop with no decent graphic card and those golden times when you have a brand new game machine with four graphic cards. 10 years ago, mobile phones were not as today, but even though my current mobile has a 3D graphic card in it, it’s closer to the lower end when compared to desktops or even laptops.

So, what’s the catch? Imagine a game that you can play exactly the same game irrespective of where you play it.

There are lots of new online games, so called ORPG (online RPG) or the bigger brothers (MMORPG, massively-multi-player ORPG), but all of them rely on a Windows machine with OpenGL2 and DirectX 10 to play it, even though not half of it really need that kind of realism to be fun.

Moreover, when you’re at the toilet and you want to keep playing your battles, you could easily get your mobile and use a stripped down version with little graphic elements but with the same basic principles. When you’re at your parent’s and the only thing you have is dial-up, you can connect via SSH and play the console version. At least to manage your stuff, talk to your friends or plan future battles.

The hard part in all this, I understand, is to manage different players playing with different levels of graphic detail. Scripts on online games are normally prohibited because it eases too much cheating, and that would be the way of battling via a SSH connection… Players with better graphic cards would have the advantage of seeing more of the battlefield than its friends with a mobile phone, or even using a much better mouse/joystick and a much bigger keyboard (short-cuts are *very* important in online gaming).

With the new mobiles and their motion sensor and GPS interfaces, that wouldn’t be a much bigger difference, as you could wave the mobile to have a quicker glance and even use voice-control for some features that is still lacking support in desktop but it’s surprisingly popular in mobile devices. All in all, having at least three platforms: high-end and low-end graphics plus a mobile version, would be a major breakthrough in online gaming. I just wonder why game makers are not even hinting in that direction…

The console version is pushing a bit, I know, I just love the console…

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