the little things

Sometimes a word or two are enough for a thorough aha!-experience.

One is the connection between (software) architecture and strategy researched by Carliss Baldwyn at Harvard Business School. Related to the research on user-driven innovation, they note that modular software architectures, by giving users more options, lead to more outside participation, and thus more innovation.

Michael Tiemann (VP and Grand Unification Theorist at RedHat), whose blog pointed me to this research, notes:

Can these effects be accomplished without open source software? Yes, to some extent, but why do things the hard way? Are there other things besides innovation that determine the success or failure of a high-tech company? Of course--management competence being one big one. But in my book, efficient, high-quality, long-term innovation is the fundamental competitive challenge in building a sustainable technology business, and thus the profit-maximizing strategy is one that encourages innovation, rather than extinguishing it.

Another one is Rohit Khare's idea to model failures as price shocks. In his presentation, he gives the example where the failure of a RAM chip leads to a higher "price" for storing things, which could incentivize programs to use different ways of achieving their goals, e.g. recomputing data each time instead of storing it in RAM. The basic idea is to arrive at an "invisible hand" architecture that doesn't require pre-planning for all possible contingencies.

Comments

[Darius Bacon]

Those ideas from Khare's paper were mostly already in Miller and Drexler's (referenced by Khare) -- I don't remember if they mentioned hardware failures specifically as a source of price shocks. As far as I remember, Khare's paper was clear on that; I just wanted to make it clear here too.

If you haven't read Miller & Drexler's agorics papers yet, please do, they're awesome.