August 14, 2005
Paul Graham Nails It
This essay has been linked to a lot, but I got to reading it just this weekend. It's very worth a read if you're into the kinds of forces which are conspiring to make a company like FM viable.
Paul is the author of "Hackers and Painters," among other pursuits. This essay is called "What Business Can Learn from Open Source" but don't let that title scare you off, it's not a rant about OSS. Instead, it's more about new and old models for communication, new and old models of working, and new and old models for media. IN the essay, Graham begins with a look at the words "professional" and "amateur":
There's a name for people who work for the love of it: amateurs. The word now has such bad connotations that we forget its etymology, though it's staring us in the face. "Amateur" was originally rather a complimentary word. But the thing to be in the twentieth century was professional, which amateurs, by definition, are not.
That's why the business world was so surprised by one lesson from open source: that people working for love often surpass those working for money. Users don't switch from Explorer to Firefox because they want to hack the source. They switch because it's a better browser....
....On the Web, the barrier for publishing your ideas is even lower. .... Millions of people are publishing online, and the average level of what they're writing, as you might expect, is not very good. This has led some in the media to conclude that blogs don't present much of a threat-- that blogs are just a fad.
Actually, the fad is the word "blog," at least the way the print media now use it. What they mean by "blogger" is not someone who publishes in a weblog format, but anyone who publishes online. That's going to become a problem as the Web becomes the default medium for publication. So I'd like to suggest an alternative word for someone who publishes online. How about "writer?" (Editorial note: At FM, we call our partners "Authors.")
Those in the print media who dismiss the writing online because of its low average quality are missing an important point: no one reads the average blog. In the old world of channels, it meant something to talk about average quality, because that's what you were getting whether you liked it or not. But now you can read any writer you want. So the average quality of writing online isn't what the print media are competing against. They're competing against the best writing online. And, like Microsoft, they're losing.
Paul then goes off on the concept of the workplace and in particular the 9-5 office.
....The average office is a miserable place to get work done. And a lot of what makes offices bad are the very qualities we associate with professionalism. The sterility of offices is supposed to suggest efficiency. But suggesting efficiency is a different thing from actually being efficient.
....Things are different in a startup. Often as not a startup begins in an apartment. Instead of matching beige cubicles they have an assortment of furniture they bought used. They work odd hours, wearing the most casual of clothing. They look at whatever they want online without worrying whether it's "work safe." The cheery, bland language of the office is replaced by wicked humor. And you know what? The company at this stage is probably the most productive it's ever going to be.
Maybe it's not a coincidence. Maybe some aspects of professionalism are actually a net lose.
To me the most demoralizing aspect of the traditional office is that you're supposed to be there at certain times. There are usually a few people in a company who really have to, but the reason most employees work fixed hours is that the company can't measure their productivity.
I'm proud to say our office is in an in law apartment above a garage. We're looking for new space, but it will not be in a traditional office building, that's for sure. Great bands never made their music in a high rise.
And finally, he goes off on the idea of how the best stuff comes from the bottom up, a key idea at FM - we don't tell authors what to write, we watch the best stuff rise up and then build support around it.
...The third big lesson we can learn from open source and blogging is that ideas can bubble up from the bottom, instead of flowing down from the top. Open source and blogging both work bottom-up: people make what they want, and the best stuff prevails.
Does this sound familiar? It's the principle of a market economy. Ironically, though open source and blogs are done for free, those worlds resemble market economies, while most companies, for all their talk about the value of free markets, are run internally like communist states.
...So these, I think, are the three big lessons open source and blogging have to teach business: (1) that people work harder on stuff they like, (2) that the standard office environment is very unproductive, and (3) that bottom-up often works better than top-down.
