They’re risky (unknown territory leads to unforeseen outcomes) and a very recent phenomenon. A kid dropped off at pre-school, a new boss, a food you’re not familiar with. None of this was common for most of pre-history.
When the transition occurs, we’re tempted to direct our anxiety at the details of the new situation. The boss is a close talker, the air in this new place is humid, the appetizers aren’t quite right and our guests are almost here…
It’s productive to name the actual cause instead. Time spent on the details won’t do a thing to make the transition easier.
Instead, when we address the actual issue, when we name the fact that it’s the transition that’s bothering us, we can get back to the reason we’re transitioning in the first place.
A cup of coffee costs far more than a glass of water.
That’s true even though we can’t live without water. (Most) people can live without coffee.
It’s true even though creating the infrastructure to purify and deliver clean water costs billions of dollars.
The critical reason for the difference is marginal cost.
To deliver one more glass of water costs the town virtually nothing. Less than a penny.
To deliver one more cup of coffee, though, requires more beans, more roasting, more electricity, more cups, more oats, more cows, more staff… add it all up, and Starbucks couldn’t possibly profit from selling coffee for a nickel a cup.
The first thing to understand about free software is that the marginal cost of one more email, one more download, one more bit is vanishingly low, close to zero.
Given the low incremental cost of another user, it’s likely that if that were the only factor, most software wouldn’t be a very good business, because it costs a lot to develop but market forces would keep pushing the price low.
The second factor is lock-in. Unlike coffee, software rewards users who stick with it. Over time, the software you use becomes more familiar, it opens the files you created yesterday and it becomes harder and harder to switch. As a result, companies that make software work to create the conditions where people are encouraged to start right now, and only later discover that it’s difficult to switch.
But the real miracle of modern software is the network effect. Simply put: the software works better for each user when other people use it too. The network effect dramatically rewards head starts. You want to use the same word processor as your peers, because opening their files is part of your job. You want to be on the same phone system, the same social network, the same protocols.
Sometimes, software is built in community, by teams, and often called open source. These projects exist to solve a problem and serve the user. But sometimes, software is a business.
A community-built open-source project can thrive on free. But software can also do a lot of good work when the software creates enough value that people will choose to pay for it.
And a business-led software project has similar choices to make.
And when all three pieces come together, we’re left with two extremes most software businesses face:
Free software is the best way to get a head start. The low marginal cost of new users means that you can get big fast (100,000,000 new users for Threads in one week!). But, and it’s not just a but, it’s the whole point, some companies then choose to treat these new users not as customers, but as the product.
Lock-in makes it hard for them to leave, the network effect keeps the system growing and now you can make money from other means. In particular, you make money by serving someone other than your free users. As you get bigger and bigger, you make the product just a little bit worse, rewarding your sponsors or your agenda as you go. (Important exception: when your nearly free users pay enough, in enough numbers, that you can happily offer them the support and service they need…this takes relentless focus and care.)
Expensive (not free) software rarely gets you magical world-sized scale. But it requires you to be in complete alignment with your users, who are also your customers. That’s the point. Instead of locking people in, you can focus on rewarding them for staying. This is how just about every other business in the world works, and it can work for software too… if we decide we’d like to be in alignment with the people who use what we make.
For a business, then, there’s the path of free or nearly free, with the goal of making money some other way, or the path of expensive, which aligns the company’s decisions with those of its users.
And for community-driven software, there’s the magic alignment that comes from open source.
There’s not an obvious answer, but there is a clear choice to be made.
The waters of Buck Lake are cool and clear and restorative. All summer, it’s tempting to go for a swim.
But it’s also a hassle. You need to change your clothes, find someone to guard, bring a towel and most of all, gasp at the transition when the cold water hits.
And yet… no one ever regretted going for a swim in Buck Lake. After a swim, everything is better.
There are lakes, large and small, that we avoid because of the transition.
There are no city buses with just four seats. And none with 400 seats.
We get to leverage the driver’s effort if we put in a few more seats, but add too many and the bus is too big to make a turn–and soon we’d have to add conductors and cleaners and then the bus economics no longer work.
Doctors discovered that a solo practice made it hard to care for patients seven days a week, not to mention the benefits of sharing overhead with a few other professionals. On the other hand, a practice of fifty or a hundred doctors often begins to struggle in the face of management and structural issues.
Trees can’t grow to four hundred feet because the amount of pressure needed to bring water that high can’t be produced.
Most projects have a right size and technology and communication networks have changed the best ‘right size’ for many organizations. If you’re struggling, it might be because you’re fighting the laws of organizational physics. Radically transforming the size of an organization changes more than we would think. We can begin to right size by asking the question.
A six-hundred-year-long organ recital is going on, and today marks a change in notes. If you miss it, the next one is in two years.
We’re used to the rapid increase in speed in just about everything around us. Absolutely positively overnight is mostly too slow for many industries now.
It takes discipline, then, to commit to going in the other direction. To deliberately embrace time instead of racing it.
In the US, [next Sunday] is a major holiday. The Superb Owl, with nachos, commercials and beer. People who don’t even watch football watch this game, and it’s one of the largest audiences each year on TV.
For a certain kind of mass marketer, a Super Bowl ad has been the gold standard for 40 years, ever since Lee Clow and Jay Chiat did the original Mac ad. As a result of advertiser demand, the per-viewer cost of running an ad for this mass audience is actually more than it would cost to run targeted ads at only the people you actually want to reach.
To put this clearly: advertisers are paying extra to reach people who don’t care and won’t take action.
Because it’s big. Super. Easy.
A few brands can actually justify these ads with results. They make beer and chips. For just about everyone else, mass isn’t your friend. Mass means average, and the average person isn’t ready to sign up, talk about it or switch. That’s because change always happens at the edges.
The same thinking drives companies to advertise on the biggest podcasts, exhibit at the biggest trade shows and hire at the biggest colleges. Not because it’s effective, but because there’s a crowd.
The pitfall of Big Game thinking is our lack of focus. We are distracted by what others are doing, have decided is important or chosen to value, instead of doing the rewarding work of focusing on the change we seek to make.
Noise is a generalized function. Messages are specific.
PS in a shocking display of my cultural awareness that also reveals how little I care about football, the big game is next week.
“Why did the chicken cross the road” tells us a bit about jokes. It’s a joke about jokes. The first half is a setup, reminding us that an absurd question creates tension, which is then relieved by the punchline.
But the second half undoes this by refusing to release the tension. “To get to the other side” is banal. There’s no point to this Q&A. And so we sit, empty, unsure about what happens next. The absence of a punchline reminds us of how much we care about punchlines.
On the other hand, “which came first, the chicken or the egg,” isn’t a joke at all. Instead, it’s a false paradox based on a misunderstanding of Darwinian evolution and taxonomy. The only thing that can be born from a chicken egg is a chicken, whereas something that’s almost a chicken could lay a chicken egg. In fact, that’s how we got chickens in the first place. The egg came first.
But that’s not the reason for the question. The question exists to create instability, to cause us tension as we seek to find our footing in the face of an infinite loop.
Conversations and interactions become more than rote performance precisely because we can create, seek out and relieve tension.
Along the way, folks have talked about “niching down” as a way to help a project find focus.
But that’s backward.
When we identify and embrace the smallest viable audience, we’re moving up. Up the quality hierarchy. Up in responsibility. Up in the likelihood that we’ll make an impact.
To niche up, identify the smallest group of people that would be enough to sustain the project. That group, the group you get to choose, what do they have in common? What do they want? What would they miss if it disappeared…
This puts us on the hook, because if they don’t like it, the work needs to be improved.
And it gives us the foundation to kindly recommend alternatives to people who aren’t in our group. Instead of hustling for more, we’re focusing for better.
[PS today is one of the calendar’s great universal holidays. Hugs to all groundhogs, of any species.]
If we’ve got tenure, a lifetime appointment or simply a really secure gig, what should we do with it?
One option is to race to the bottom, to chase short-term self-focused outcomes and to see how much we can get away with. (Probably, quite a bit).
The other is to take this rare chance to race to the top. To do things simply because they need to be done, not because we have to do them.
The thing is, for all of us, our tenures are simultaneously more secure and more fragile than we realize. Might as well act accordingly.
February 1, 2024
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