Ross Mayfield's Weblog

Trademark and Fair-play

Tim O'Reilly has said his piece about the Web 2.0 trademark affair, in a way that every entrepreneur should read to understand the working practice of trademark law.

A few years ago I had a consulting company called Mayfield Enterprises.  Makes sense for a sole-proprietorship, my last name and what I do.  Then I got a cease and desist letter from Wilson Sonsini on behalf of the Mayfield Fund, which had recently changed it's trademark to Mayfield (I'm not linking to them in hopes of becoming the one true Mayfield by web standards, but I hope I never beat out dear old Betsy).  At first it was a bit terrifying, big money, big firm with firm verbage.  So I called up the lawyer, let him know my name and what I thought was fair, as in use.  The poor guy was subjected to a history lesson, as the Township of Mayfield used to be South Palo Alto. It's where I was raised and long before that Leland Stanford successfully triumphed over the rowdy bar town outside campus limits.

Just as Tim described, the left hand often doesn't know what the right hand is doing when it comes to trademark.  Later I got to know the partners at the Mayfield Fund.  Whether they have good judgment or not, it wasn't exercised in the fore-mentioned case.  The lawyers were on autopilot in an area where current practice is to fire across the bow.

I believe trademark has valid utility in this world and had significantly greater incentives for cultural production than copyright and patents.  There is more than merit for how it deters consumer confusion.  I wish for a model that was not defensive (file, search, cease and desist), but instead at least a partial preventative model (regular people could easily run a search before first use) or one where the escalation chain was encouraged to use mediation and arbitration for disputes for parties that first meet through conflict.

Lately I've written personal emails to wiki providers that infringe on the Socialtext(TM).  A while ago, someone agreed alter their mark amicably to prevent conflict -- the kind of thing that can happen through conversation to the benefit of both parties with significantly lesser cost.  More recently, the personal approach didn't work with a company in South America and I'm trying to avoid action.  Worse yet, there is a company in Estonia that not only uses a infringing mark, but has copied our product and collateral at every turn.  This saddens me because I know how innovative companies in the little country can be, and I wonder how any self-respecting businessperson could have so little faith in their ability to do something different.  The company obviously knows me, but has never attempted contact.  I'm challenging the infringement, as is my fiduciary duty, but it pains me to do so. 

The practical reality of my growing business is I don't scale, and such activity will be increasingly impersonal.  The primary question to me is if you consider the personal productivity, legal and social costs -- if management can be involved in mediating the cease and desist function.  Perhaps this can be justified if it decreases costly litigation.  But there is a question for if the activity is core or context.

I'm wondering if people can see the side of running a business in the current environment, and if this is fair play.  Particularly if you have been on both sides of the argument.

New Industry Leaders Summit, Japan

Had a wonderful time at the New Industry Leaders Summit in Sapporo, Japan.  On Hokkaido, the northern-most island, it is the non-trademark infringing Web 2.0 event for Asia.  The leading indicator of their latest bubble was the $8k tuna that was reduced to sushi with the efficiency of a Toyota manufacturing line and ritual of the cow sacrifice in Apocalypse Now.

In my presentation, I described Enterprise 2.0 and wikis as consistent with the wabi-sabi aesthetic:

• All things are impermanent
• All things are imperfect
• All things are incomplete

Embracing the constant state of change and finding beauty within the mess is something easier for Easterners than the Western mind-set.  So too is the role of social capital in the enterprise.  And even among strangers, a different pattern of cooperation emerges with social software.  Conversation begins on the Discussion pages of the Japanese Wikipedia and when a draft has consent, it is moved to the Article page.  Not only is there appreciation for initial structurelessness in tools, but in their practices.

The leading edge of location and mobility is being crafted by startups in Japan.  With one widely deployed GPS network, requisite billing systems and advanced consumer behavior -- it is an ideal testbed.  Next year two other networks will provide support for a true mass market and Europe and the rest of world will follow.  Startups are benefiting from a Venture resurgence, with diligent firms remaining after the crash, most subsidiaries of trading houses, and an increasing focus on earlier stage investments.  The funny thing is I don't think these startups are on the Where 2.0 radar, but they have time relative to Valley startups and incumbents, so some are patiently fueled by Angels while prototyping the future.

The Elephant's Dilemma

I'm in Sapporo, Japan, at the New Industry Leader's Summit.  While paneling with Scott Dietzen of Zimbra and Mark Tolliver of Palamida, I had time between translation to think of some ways of describing open source phenomena.

The Elephant's Dilemma is when two or more large incumbents face disruption and need to cooperate to get out of the door, one at a time.  But their instinct is to fight with each other, while little guys run through their legs (some get squashed).

The analogy proved tough to translate. 

It also dawned on me that when Tim O'Reilly talks about how many people use open source if they use Google, that's using open source infrastructure.  Firefox is an example of using open source applications, of course.  But the interesting thing is how simply using open source infastructure or application contributes value.  Although at a lesser scale on the power law of participation, each new user to a given platform is an attactor for developers to contribute to it.  Much more virtuous than dancing with elephants.

Nick Carr is the New Dave Winer

First Nick Carr said Wikipedia isn't like open source because there isn't hierarchical gate-keeping, and then he said Wikis won't work because they don't favor experts. Now the claim is Wikipedia is dead because it is giving up it's open editing ideals, trending towards hierarchy and gate-keeping.

Sensational stuff as always, but factually wrong as usual. Go see Jimmy Wales' comments and then amaze yourself at how Nick is sticking to his guns to fulfill his mission:

My interest here, in case it's eluded anyone, is very simple: making sure that people know what Wikipedia really is and what Wikipedia really isn't.

The great thing about sensationalism is that it energizes debate within the network. I'm sure the mission is being fulfilled -- more people now know Wikipedia continues to fulfill it's ideals -- and despite sticking to his public guns, I think Nick secretly admits that's the real case. Thanks Nick, for making it fun, happy to give you some link love.

Apologizes for any ad hominem, simply makes for a sensational headline.

Written on a plane from Tokyo to Sapporo for the New Industry Leaders Summit.

Firefox the Nokia Open Source Browser

Nokia is open sourcing their mobile browser, potentially great news for users and developers.  But what if they made the Mozilla Foundation the trustee of this code?  Not only would they gain neutral stewardship, but potentially a large base of developers to solve the really large problems.

Speaking of Nokia and open source, I'm a judge in a developer contest for the Nokia 770 Tablet platform.

Tokyo Sights

  Kobayashi-san 
  Originally uploaded by Ross Mayfield.

In between meetings today, I had a chance to take pictures like a Japanese tourist. 

Here's the set. 

Hat tip to my host.

Time is Short, Chances are Shorter

When I was a younger buck, I'd swallow my fears and introduce myself to the most important person in the room.  There was little to gain except a handshake from Clintons and Gorbachevs, or sparking a lesson with the right question of perhaps lesser historical figures.  The encounters back then were simply experiences.

Over time there has been more to contribute to and more to gain from real conversations with very busy people.  As I became more busy, I realized how valuable the time of leaders is more valuable.  Now, you always have the opportunity to learn more by listening from learned men.  Making an impression does not come from sheer expression or superego, but an economy of words that comes from you.

A mistake I seem to make these days is to believe that chances are abundant.  At a given event, a knowing glance or quick hello instead of conversation, thinking that later in the event there will be chance and time.  But the second chance doesn't come when you are past impression, or not.  When you watch a learned man or knowing woman be social, recognize the richness of first conversation.  Valuing chance makes time more valuable.

From the plane to Tokyo, where I have lots of time.

Enterprise 2.0 is Made of People

And one of them is a legal person.

SAPPHIRE Blogger Corps

Attending SAPPHIRE as a credentialed blogger was not only a wonderful personal experience, but perhaps a watershed moment for how enterprises engage in social media. 

Dubbed the Paris Airshow of enterprise software by Vinnie, SAP's mega-conference represents all that is good and bad about the industry.  Good in that a significant amount of business gets done this way within the ecosystem of the largest enterprise vendor.  Bad in that half of the cost of enterprise software is sales and marketing. 

The competitive anti drives this spend, but a good part of the industry has moved towards SaaS, open source distribution, and ad hoc events as alternatives.  Initially this happened because of necessity (SAP itself froze such spending just before the bust, .pdf).  Hasso Platner once remarked that one day buyers will simply serve themselves through their site.  Beyond self-service, community models are beginning to support this shift.

The precursor to the watershed moment was when the blogger corps gathered for Port and Cigars on the first night.  Many met for the first time, some old friends, similar to the usual suspects feeling at Web 2.0 conferences.  We didn't know what we were in for, but formed a tight knit community with conversation built upon conversation.  The next morning we arrived to the Blogger's Corner within a Press Room that took up half a wing of the Orlando Convention center.  We had tight schedules of one-on-one interviews and immediately shared them to create the right many-on-one encounters.

There is certainly camaraderie within a press corps, an experience I've had from the days in politics, but there is definitely competition that prevents such productive behavior.  From second-hand feedback, we even outperformed the core.  How often is it that a journalist has hands-on experience as an ISV, an analyst has no commercial bias, or even an employee that has a reputation that in some cases trumps bias?  Every scheduled interview, time a SAP executive stopped by the blogger's corner or casual encounter with one at a reception -- the conversation was more than bargained for.  Either rigorous domain expertise was applied, or a cutting edge Enterprise 2.0 perspective sliced through  well curdled butter.

When I was briefed on Duet (enables a more usable interface to SAP within Microsoft Office), I argued that the same old structured thing within Outlook doesn't make it as simple as email and asked if Duet would be as open to develop upon as NetWeaver.  I met the guy who runs Open Source within SAP and was pleasantly suprised at their level of engagement.  We had a wild conversation with a guy representing Enterprise 2.0 within SAP that boiled down to a debate over scarcity vs. abundant thinking, that made me realize the need for shared language.  I got to see the concept of a true Enterprise 2.0 app by a designer that if productized could enable SAP to be more than the process company.  This proof point was important because the thrust of formal presentations was SAP's focus on becoming more usable and collaborative.  But the news of the event to me was that SAP isn't just some stogy massive German company.  If course, I know this because of the work I do with folks in the Valley, but that was the takeaway from the conversations.

The greatest contention I have with the more formal message came from Bill McDermot who runs SAP America, a cute soundbite that Best of Breed does not Breed.  Well, Best of Show is a Dog.  First of all, the longstanding claim against a diverse vendor population is that if proliferated results in complexity unwanted by IT.  Second, this contradicts the NetWeaver vision of SoA reducing the need to standardize on a software stack and enabling ISVs to deliver value.  Third, it's the ecosystem that wags the dog into needed change.  Fourth, why would software be the one area of spending that shouldn't adopt a portfolio strategy.  Fifth, when I look at the industry today I see substantial innovation.  I'm harping on a soundbite out of context, and the comment was probably more directed towards Oracle.

Perhaps the funniest moment was when a guy from a Canadian newspaper came over to the blogger's corner and got in an argument with me about the quality of blogging and trustworthiness of Wikipedia.  It didn't start that way, and one of the better guys for such a debate, but while explaining the basics I showed him how his newspaper had 40 inbound links, compared to others with 400 that week -- his simply claimed he didn't believe it.  He'll probably go off an write a damning article on the bias and quality of the blogosphere, to complete his own circular reasoning, but I'm sure he discovered something new.

Perhaps the best moment for me in the newsroom was talking with Don Tapscott, who happened to be in the press room, about wikis and economics.  Don does some SAP stuff and research with Next Gens these days, and definitely gets it.

But the watershed moment was more likely Niel Robertson's encounter with Henning Kagermann, the CEO of SAP.  He was pulled aside from a reception by a man who had genuine interest in the new, probably what got him to where he is, a genuine conversation occurred.

Now think about what SAP accomplished, with credit to Jeff Nolan, at relatively little cost:

• The leading enterprise bloggers participated in the conference.  They didn't feel handled and while there was a bit of controversy in posts, nothing became a crisis.
• A wiki with open editing was used responsibly as the center of activity, without an edit war
• Executive interviews and exposure resulted in conversations beneficial for all parties
• A blogger corps convened as an exercise in easy group forming that leveraged a backchannel to make sense of complexity in a constructive way
• The quality of blog posts, rare with any event, was substantial and gained outside coverage
• The same blogger corps now has a shared experience around the SAP brand that will probably influence future opinions

All this took was a little trust and access.  I'd venture that other enterprises will follow suit.

Enterprise 2.0, SoA and the Freeform Advantage

Andrew McAfee, who first mentioned the term Enterprise 2.0 to me on December 1st 2005, provides a definition:

Now, since I was the first to write extensively about Enterprise 2.0¹ I feel I'm entitled to define it:

Enterprise 2.0 is the use of freeform social software within companies.

'Freeform' in this case means that the software is most or all of the following:

• Optional
• Free of up-front workflow
• Egalitarian, or indifferent to formal organizational identities
• Accepting of many types of data

'Social' means that there's always a person on at least one end of the wire with Enterprise 2.0 technologies.  With wikis, prediction markets, blogs, del.icio.us, and other Web 2.0 technologies with clear enterprise applications people are doing all the interacting and providing some or all of the content; the IT is just doing housekeeping and/or bookkeeping.

I'm in agreement, and find it easier to be than naming debates of the past (and reminiscent at my first stab at naming: “Social Software adapts to its environment, instead of requiring its environment to adapt to software”).

If there is debate, it will be on two fonts: the role of organizational identities (Egalitarian) or an emaphasis on technology over social dynamics.  McAfee focuses on the second, that of Enterprise 2.0 vs. SoA:

Jeff Nolan insightfully points out that Web 2.0 is greatly aided by things like scripting and REST architectures, and I agree that Enterprise 2.0 applications are a lot easier to use if users can drag and drop and do other cool AJAX-enabled things from within the browser.  But to me these components aren't even enabling technologies, since Enterprise 2.0 could happen without them. They're clearly accelerating technologies, but keep in mind that the first wiki was built in 1994 and put on the Web in 1995, well before the initial XML spec was submitted.

Programmers could build fully-functional wikis, blogs, tagging systems, and prediction markets by carving them out of solid COBOL and serving them through the first Netscape browser.  They'd be clunky, but they'd work.  And I bet they'd draw users, too, because they'd tap into our desire to use technology to interact with each other, and also tap into the good stuff that emerges when we do so.  As I wrote earlier, I think of Web 2.0 as the era when technologists really woke up to this;  Enterprise 2.0 will be the era when business leaders join them...

Claims about the power and benefits of SOA and its predecessors have been running ahead of reality for years.  Claims about the power and benefits of freeform social software, on the other hand, mostly cropped up in the wake of real-world examples...

A second difference between SOA and Enterprise 2.0 (which I think is closely connected to the first one) is that a service oriented architecture has to be imposed up front, while an Enterprise 2.0 environment emerges over time...

The second front, that Enterprise 2.0 is Egalitarian, or indifferent to formal organizational identities, not only flys in the face of enterprise culture and convention, but previously encoded political bargains.  For example, a primary property of social software is easy group forming -- but most enterprise systems expressly prevent it.  To form a group, you not only need permission from IT, but complex configuration and in many cases even software development.  Beyond applications, ever come across an LDAP implementation that supports easy group forming?  This runs counter to the way many enterprises actually work today, where ad hoc cross-functional teams drive more than professional services organizations.

A second example is fine grained security.  Content management, document management, portals and poorly designed wikis highlight per object/page permissioning.  Certain expert users have the ability to control access and rights for a specific document.  This harms productivity -- when a user needs to access a document to perform a task and has to incur the overhead that can unlock it, plus the overhead of locking (structure upfront) and unlocking itself.  This harms knowledge sharing -- documents go undiscovered and are decidedly static, despite how the knowledge in the document is never finished.  This harms competitive advantage -- any system that exhibits inertia compromises a firm's ability to adapt to it's dynamic environment.

While .pdf is where knowledge goes to die, there are some documents that benefit from being static.  But they are a fraction of the documents in a given enterprise.  And with the discovery afforded by hypertext and tagging, documents have the potential to exist in a social context.  Even a locked down document, if viewable, can be annotated through linked messages. 

Imagine how useful Wikipedia would be if a handful of admins could lock down links to articles indefinately and without oversight, their ability to be discovered through Google, let alone edit them.  Then imagine the same thing behind the firewall, where there is less risk (you can presume a greate innocence of users and know their identity).  Utility is decidedly compromised. 

This is why enterprise systems have low adoption rates, little user generated content, high quality metadata and email is used for everything.  Every sacrifice made for sake of control reduces network effects, assumes a static environment you can design against and is designed by supposed experts outside the context of use.  Contrary to the most disruptive pattern of social software -- sharing control creates value.

UPDATE: Traditional KM Systems Compared To Print summarizes a post by Jeff Jarvis (The Book is Dead) in related terms:

1. Enterprise 2.0 defreezes knowledge.
2. Enterprise 2.0 enables knowledge churn & flow.
3. Conversations are central to Enterprise 2.0 and incidentally knowledge resides in conversations.