|  
  
August 2005  
  
 _(This essay is derived from a talk at Oscon 2005.)_  
  
Lately companies have been paying more attention to open source. Ten years ago
there seemed a real danger Microsoft would extend its monopoly to servers. It
seems safe to say now that open source has prevented that. A recent survey
found 52% of companies are replacing Windows servers with Linux servers.   
  
More significant, I think, is _which_ 52% they are. At this point, anyone
proposing to run Windows on servers should be prepared to explain what they
know about servers that Google, Yahoo, and Amazon don't.  
  
But the biggest thing business has to learn from open source is not about
Linux or Firefox, but about the forces that produced them. Ultimately these
will affect a lot more than what software you use.  
  
We may be able to get a fix on these underlying forces by triangulating from
open source and blogging. As you've probably noticed, they have a lot in
common.  
  
Like open source, blogging is something people do themselves, for free,
because they enjoy it. Like open source hackers, bloggers compete with people
working for money, and often win. The method of ensuring quality is also the
same: Darwinian. Companies ensure quality through rules to prevent employees
from screwing up. But you don't need that when the audience can communicate
with one another. People just produce whatever they want; the good stuff
spreads, and the bad gets ignored. And in both cases, feedback from the
audience improves the best work.  
  
Another thing blogging and open source have in common is the Web. People have
always been willing to do great work for free, but before the Web it was
harder to reach an audience or collaborate on projects.  
  
**Amateurs**  
  
I think the most important of the new principles business has to learn is that
people work a lot harder on stuff they like. Well, that's news to no one. So
how can I claim business has to learn it? When I say business doesn't know
this, I mean the structure of business doesn't reflect it.  
  
Business still reflects an older model, exemplified by the French word for
working: _travailler_. It has an English cousin, travail, and what it means is
torture.   
  
This turns out not to be the last word on work, however. As societies get
richer, they learn something about work that's a lot like what they learn
about diet. We know now that the healthiest diet is the one our peasant
ancestors were forced to eat because they were poor. Like rich food, idleness
only seems desirable when you don't get enough of it. I think we were designed
to work, just as we were designed to eat a certain amount of fiber, and we
feel bad if we don't.  
  
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.  
  
It's not that Microsoft isn't trying. They know controlling the browser is one
of the keys to retaining their monopoly. The problem is the same they face in
operating systems: they can't pay people enough to build something better than
a group of inspired hackers will build for free.  
  
I suspect professionalism was always overrated-- not just in the literal sense
of working for money, but also connotations like formality and detachment.
Inconceivable as it would have seemed in, say, 1970, I think professionalism
was largely a fashion, driven by conditions that happened to exist in the
twentieth century.  
  
One of the most powerful of those was the existence of "channels."
Revealingly, the same term was used for both products and information: there
were distribution channels, and TV and radio channels.  
  
It was the narrowness of such channels that made professionals seem so
superior to amateurs. There were only a few jobs as professional journalists,
for example, so competition ensured the average journalist was fairly good.
Whereas anyone can express opinions about current events in a bar. And so the
average person expressing his opinions in a bar sounds like an idiot compared
to a journalist writing about the subject.  
  
On the Web, the barrier for publishing your ideas is even lower. You don't
have to buy a drink, and they even let kids in. 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?"  
  
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.  
  
I know that from my own experience as a reader. Though most print publications
are online, I probably read two or three articles on individual people's sites
for every one I read on the site of a newspaper or magazine.  
  
And when I read, say, New York Times stories, I never reach them through the
Times front page. Most I find through aggregators like Google News or Slashdot
or Delicious. Aggregators show how much better you can do than the channel.
The New York Times front page is a list of articles written by people who work
for the New York Times. Delicious is a list of articles that are interesting.
And it's only now that you can see the two side by side that you notice how
little overlap there is.  
  
Most articles in the print media are boring. For example, the president
notices that a majority of voters now think invading Iraq was a mistake, so he
makes an address to the nation to drum up support. Where is the man bites dog
in that? I didn't hear the speech, but I could probably tell you exactly what
he said. A speech like that is, in the most literal sense, not news: there is
nothing _new_ in it.   
  
Nor is there anything new, except the names and places, in most "news" about
things going wrong. A child is abducted; there's a tornado; a ferry sinks;
someone gets bitten by a shark; a small plane crashes. And what do you learn
about the world from these stories? Absolutely nothing. They're outlying data
points; what makes them gripping also makes them irrelevant.  
  
As in software, when professionals produce such crap, it's not surprising if
amateurs can do better. Live by the channel, die by the channel: if you depend
on an oligopoly, you sink into bad habits that are hard to overcome when you
suddenly get competition.   
  
**Workplaces**  
  
Another thing blogs and open source software have in common is that they're
often made by people working at home. That may not seem surprising. But it
should be. It's the architectural equivalent of a home-made aircraft shooting
down an F-18. Companies spend millions to build office buildings for a single
purpose: to be a place to work. And yet people working in their own homes,
which aren't even designed to be workplaces, end up being more productive.  
  
This proves something a lot of us have suspected. 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.  
  
The atmosphere of the average workplace is to productivity what flames painted
on the side of a car are to speed. And it's not just the way offices look
that's bleak. The way people act is just as bad.  
  
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.  
  
The basic idea behind office hours is that if you can't make people work, you
can at least prevent them from having fun. If employees have to be in the
building a certain number of hours a day, and are forbidden to do non-work
things while there, then they must be working. In theory. In practice they
spend a lot of their time in a no-man's land, where they're neither working
nor having fun.  
  
If you could measure how much work people did, many companies wouldn't need
any fixed workday. You could just say: this is what you have to do. Do it
whenever you like, wherever you like. If your work requires you to talk to
other people in the company, then you may need to be here a certain amount.
Otherwise we don't care.  
  
That may seem utopian, but it's what we told people who came to work for our
company. There were no fixed office hours. I never showed up before 11 in the
morning. But we weren't saying this to be benevolent. We were saying: if you
work here we expect you to get a lot done. Don't try to fool us just by being
here a lot.  
  
The problem with the facetime model is not just that it's demoralizing, but
that the people pretending to work interrupt the ones actually working. I'm
convinced the facetime model is the main reason large organizations have so
many meetings. Per capita, large organizations accomplish very little. And yet
all those people have to be on site at least eight hours a day. When so much
time goes in one end and so little achievement comes out the other, something
has to give. And meetings are the main mechanism for taking up the slack.  
  
For one year I worked at a regular nine to five job, and I remember well the
strange, cozy feeling that comes over one during meetings. I was very aware,
because of the novelty, that I was being paid for programming. It seemed just
amazing, as if there was a machine on my desk that spat out a dollar bill
every two minutes no matter what I did. Even while I was in the bathroom! But
because the imaginary machine was always running, I felt I always ought to be
working. And so meetings felt wonderfully relaxing. They counted as work, just
like programming, but they were so much easier. All you had to do was sit and
look attentive.  
  
Meetings are like an opiate with a network effect. So is email, on a smaller
scale. And in addition to the direct cost in time, there's the cost in
fragmentation-- breaking people's day up into bits too small to be useful.  
  
You can see how dependent you've become on something by removing it suddenly.
So for big companies I propose the following experiment. Set aside one day
where meetings are forbidden-- where everyone has to sit at their desk all day
and work without interruption on things they can do without talking to anyone
else. Some amount of communication is necessary in most jobs, but I'm sure
many employees could find eight hours worth of stuff they could do by
themselves. You could call it "Work Day."  
  
The other problem with pretend work is that it often looks better than real
work. When I'm writing or hacking I spend as much time just thinking as I do
actually typing. Half the time I'm sitting drinking a cup of tea, or walking
around the neighborhood. This is a critical phase-- this is where ideas come
from-- and yet I'd feel guilty doing this in most offices, with everyone else
looking busy.  
  
It's hard to see how bad some practice is till you have something to compare
it to. And that's one reason open source, and even blogging in some cases, are
so important. They show us what real work looks like.  
  
We're funding eight new startups at the moment. A friend asked what they were
doing for office space, and seemed surprised when I said we expected them to
work out of whatever apartments they found to live in. But we didn't propose
that to save money. We did it because we want their software to be good.
Working in crappy informal spaces is one of the things startups do right
without realizing it. As soon as you get into an office, work and life start
to drift apart.  
  
That is one of the key tenets of professionalism. Work and life are supposed
to be separate. But that part, I'm convinced, is a mistake.  
  
**Bottom-Up**  
  
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.  
  
There are two forces that together steer design: ideas about what to do next,
and the enforcement of quality. In the channel era, both flowed down from the
top. For example, newspaper editors assigned stories to reporters, then edited
what they wrote.  
  
Open source and blogging show us things don't have to work that way. Ideas and
even the enforcement of quality can flow bottom-up. And in both cases the
results are not merely acceptable, but better. For example, open source
software is more reliable precisely because it's open source; anyone can find
mistakes.  
  
The same happens with writing. As we got close to publication, I found I was
very worried about the essays in Hackers & Painters that hadn't been online.
Once an essay has had a couple thousand page views I feel reasonably confident
about it. But these had had literally orders of magnitude less scrutiny. It
felt like releasing software without testing it.  
  
That's what all publishing used to be like. If you got ten people to read a
manuscript, you were lucky. But I'd become so used to publishing online that
the old method now seemed alarmingly unreliable, like navigating by dead
reckoning once you'd gotten used to a GPS.  
  
The other thing I like about publishing online is that you can write what you
want and publish when you want. Earlier this year I wrote something that
seemed suitable for a magazine, so I sent it to an editor I know. As I was
waiting to hear back, I found to my surprise that I was hoping they'd reject
it. Then I could put it online right away. If they accepted it, it wouldn't be
read by anyone for months, and in the meantime I'd have to fight word-by-word
to save it from being mangled by some twenty five year old copy editor.   
  
Many employees would _like_ to build great things for the companies they work
for, but more often than not management won't let them. How many of us have
heard stories of employees going to management and saying, please let us build
this thing to make money for you-- and the company saying no? The most famous
example is probably Steve Wozniak, who originally wanted to build
microcomputers for his then-employer, HP. And they turned him down. On the
blunderometer, this episode ranks with IBM accepting a non-exclusive license
for DOS. But I think this happens all the time. We just don't hear about it
usually, because to prove yourself right you have to quit and start your own
company, like Wozniak did.  
  
**Startups**  
  
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.  
  
I can imagine managers at this point saying: what is this guy talking about?
What good does it do me to know that my programmers would be more productive
working at home on their own projects? I need their asses in here working on
version 3.2 of our software, or we're never going to make the release date.  
  
And it's true, the benefit that specific manager could derive from the forces
I've described is near zero. When I say business can learn from open source, I
don't mean any specific business can. I mean business can learn about new
conditions the same way a gene pool does. I'm not claiming companies can get
smarter, just that dumb ones will die.  
  
So what will business look like when it has assimilated the lessons of open
source and blogging? I think the big obstacle preventing us from seeing the
future of business is the assumption that people working for you have to be
employees. But think about what's going on underneath: the company has some
money, and they pay it to the employee in the hope that he'll make something
worth more than they paid him. Well, there are other ways to arrange that
relationship. Instead of paying the guy money as a salary, why not give it to
him as investment? Then instead of coming to your office to work on your
projects, he can work wherever he wants on projects of his own.  
  
Because few of us know any alternative, we have no idea how much better we
could do than the traditional employer-employee relationship. Such customs
evolve with glacial slowness. Our employer-employee relationship still retains
a big chunk of master-servant DNA.   
  
I dislike being on either end of it. I'll work my ass off for a customer, but
I resent being told what to do by a boss. And being a boss is also horribly
frustrating; half the time it's easier just to do stuff yourself than to get
someone else to do it for you. I'd rather do almost anything than give or
receive a performance review.  
  
On top of its unpromising origins, employment has accumulated a lot of cruft
over the years. The list of what you can't ask in job interviews is now so
long that for convenience I assume it's infinite. Within the office you now
have to walk on eggshells lest anyone say or do something that makes the
company prey to a lawsuit. And God help you if you fire anyone.  
  
Nothing shows more clearly that employment is not an ordinary economic
relationship than companies being sued for firing people. In any purely
economic relationship you're free to do what you want. If you want to stop
buying steel pipe from one supplier and start buying it from another, you
don't have to explain why. No one can accuse you of _unjustly_ switching pipe
suppliers. Justice implies some kind of paternal obligation that isn't there
in transactions between equals.  
  
Most of the legal restrictions on employers are intended to protect employees.
But you can't have action without an equal and opposite reaction. You can't
expect employers to have some kind of paternal responsibility toward employees
without putting employees in the position of children. And that seems a bad
road to go down.  
  
Next time you're in a moderately large city, drop by the main post office and
watch the body language of the people working there. They have the same sullen
resentment as children made to do something they don't want to. Their union
has exacted pay increases and work restrictions that would have been the envy
of previous generations of postal workers, and yet they don't seem any happier
for it. It's demoralizing to be on the receiving end of a paternalistic
relationship, no matter how cozy the terms. Just ask any teenager.  
  
I see the disadvantages of the employer-employee relationship because I've
been on both sides of a better one: the investor-founder relationship. I
wouldn't claim it's painless. When I was running a startup, the thought of our
investors used to keep me up at night. And now that I'm an investor, the
thought of our startups keeps me up at night. All the pain of whatever problem
you're trying to solve is still there. But the pain hurts less when it isn't
mixed with resentment.  
  
I had the misfortune to participate in what amounted to a controlled
experiment to prove that. After Yahoo bought our startup I went to work for
them. I was doing exactly the same work, except with bosses. And to my horror
I started acting like a child. The situation pushed buttons I'd forgotten I
had.  
  
The big advantage of investment over employment, as the examples of open
source and blogging suggest, is that people working on projects of their own
are enormously more productive. And a startup is a project of one's own in two
senses, both of them important: it's creatively one's own, and also
economically ones's own.  
  
Google is a rare example of a big company in tune with the forces I've
described. They've tried hard to make their offices less sterile than the
usual cube farm. They give employees who do great work large grants of stock
to simulate the rewards of a startup. They even let hackers spend 20% of their
time on their own projects.  
  
Why not let people spend 100% of their time on their own projects, and instead
of trying to approximate the value of what they create, give them the actual
market value? Impossible? That is in fact what venture capitalists do.  
  
So am I claiming that no one is going to be an employee anymore-- that
everyone should go and start a startup? Of course not. But more people could
do it than do it now. At the moment, even the smartest students leave school
thinking they have to get a job. Actually what they need to do is make
something valuable. A job is one way to do that, but the more ambitious ones
will ordinarily be better off taking money from an investor than an employer.  
  
Hackers tend to think business is for MBAs. But business administration is not
what you're doing in a startup. What you're doing is business _creation_. And
the first phase of that is mostly product creation-- that is, hacking. That's
the hard part. It's a lot harder to create something people love than to take
something people love and figure out how to make money from it.  
  
Another thing that keeps people away from starting startups is the risk.
Someone with kids and a mortgage should think twice before doing it. But most
young hackers have neither.  
  
And as the example of open source and blogging suggests, you'll enjoy it more,
even if you fail. You'll be working on your own thing, instead of going to
some office and doing what you're told. There may be more pain in your own
company, but it won't hurt as much.  
  
That may be the greatest effect, in the long run, of the forces underlying
open source and blogging: finally ditching the old paternalistic employer-
employee relationship, and replacing it with a purely economic one, between
equals.  
  
  
  
**