“Broken Windows” Isn’t Just for the Offline World

A seminal 1982 article by social scientists James Q. Wilson and George L. Kelling.put forth that investing in “order” on a purely aesthetic level (cleaning up vandalism, fixing broken windows) would curb the appetite to commit further crimes. Or put another way, disorder begets more disorder; so best to avoid disorder in the first place.

In the 90’s New York City’s Transit Police Head William Bratton put the theory into action by executed a clean up of the city. A block with a bunch of broken windows is going to lead to more crime. A block/building/subway car etc that is well-maintained tends to instill a desire to keep things nice and neat.

Putting aside the sociological/criminological/neurological debate about the strength of the theory as applied to the outside world; I think there is no doubt it applies to the online world. Online, there is less social control, less risk of embarrassment, of actually feeling the scorn of fellow human beings when misbehaving. There is anonymity, a sense that consequences are less tangible.

And yet many online business live or die by the data and community they possess. If there is not an intense focus on making sure people are considerate about how they approach your product or service; things will trend towards disorder. If you need proof of the natural entropy inherent to user generated data, just take a quick look at YouTube comments.

On the other hand, a well-cultivated culture of being considerate and thoughtful, could start a virtuous cycle. Look at Wikipedia.

Back to Blogging

I’m back. Archive (best of) below. New thoughts to come.

Better Demand Visualization

When developing a new product, entrepreneurs shouldn’t strive to get to where they can imagine people using it, but instead to where they can’t imagine people NOT using it.

Any new product can promise some benefits and sometimes that is enough. But if utility remains unchanged when I DON’T use it, then there is an impasse.

Assuming that people typically take the path of least resistance; they will typically not proactively pursue products that increase utility with use, but that don’t affect utility one way or the other with non-use (early adopters aside). One way around the predilection towards inaction is to market the hell out of a product. If you manage to penetrate the consumers’ psyche with sheer virility or cleverness, then you can overcome the inertia towards action. However this is often beyond the budget or marketing savvy of many startups.

As an aside, this happens to be the “Hollywood” method: spend X on the product/content itself, and then spend multiples of X on firehosing the public with exposure. Once you do that, you can have a crap product and still pack the theatre. This isn’t conjecture, this happens all the time.

Another way around the tendency towards inaction is to arouse advocacy from early-adopters who are willing to proactively pursue higher utility, and are highly respected by others.

I prefer to create a product that is so compelling there is actually a disutility to not using it. This ups your odds dramatically. Typically a new product that exhibits a network effect (utility to a given user grows exponential as a function of network size) but that actually increases productivity/makes life better rather than detracts from it. This will have the ingredients necessary to get to where the founder justifiably “can’t imagine people not using it”

Disutility can come in many forms. If you would be objectively better off when using a product, and are made aware of the benefits of such, then there is a disutility to not using it directly stemming from the awareness of what you are missing out on. The social ecosystem (or echo-chamber) has amplified “the fear of missing out”. If the product is cool enough that people weave it into their vernacular, dropping clues everywhere; then FOMO might drive someone to trying it out, because not knowing what friends/coworkers/strangers are talking about is a disutility in itself.

Bop is Life

Watching Bud Powell breeze through “Anthropology”, inadvertently made me think of bebop anthropologically.

A Powell is in his later years, having suffered drug addictions, nervous breakdowns, and harsh incarceration, quite epitomizes what bop is about; never stop swinging.

And if you listen closely, you can hear Bud crassly singing out lines and ideas that he is playing. Non-wind jazz musicians (guitarists, pianists etc.) do this to ensure that they are playing what is in their heart, and not what contained within the muscle memory of their fingers. Melodic lines flow and bounce seemingly never ending. And that is precisely what distinguishes bop…

The diatonic scales in classical music are primarily composed of seven notes But when you’re bopping and swinging through 4/4 time, you want to be able to run through multiple bars without cutting a thought short. So that addition of the “bebop” tone makes seven into eight. Not that running through scales is an encouraged method of improvisation, but it builds a foundation that even the underlying scales emphasize an endless sense of flow. With one extra chromatic “passing tone” the scale is able to play a passing tone on the upbeat, and a chord tone on every downbeat.

When Charlie Parker first stumbled upon (and thereby invented) the bebop vernacular he described it as “learning to fly”. Discovering a more liberated version of what is now canonized as the “bebop scale” (described above); Parker realized he could play anything he wanted on the upbeat; as long as he resolved (occasionally) to a chord tone on the downbeat. And so Bebop embraces the odd path; it has high expectations, but does not care how you get there. It encourages all paths so long as they resolve.

The human condition involves constant adaptation with only a few structural certainties to rely on (at the very least empirical “givens” such as the effects of gravity and otherwise). Bebop as well has a foundation of the audience’s and musicians’ expectation, the structure of the song itself as well the timbre and range of the instruments; however it embraces unexpected circumstances.. In contrast to earlier forms of jazz, each band member (even the rhythm section) improvises in bebop, and will take full solos (this helps to explain the smaller ensemble settings in bop; typically quartets). Even while “comping” (accompanying) the pianist may alter or substitute a chord or two in the progression. The rhythm section may instigate a double-time, or provide unpredictable accents to encourage more intensity. And of course the soloist can take the melody to places that have literally never been heard.

“Anthropology” the song, is a great example of this adaptation. It all began with a tune written by Gerswhin, “I’ve Got Rhythm”. It was a great compelling platform so Ellington built upon it with “Cotton Tail”, even “The Flintstones” theme is based around the structure. Then Bebop unleashed a flurry of tunes based on embellished forms of the structure. Some of these include Gillespie and Parker’s “Anthropology” (which you are hopefully now listening to on the Powell video), Parker’s “Moose the Mooche” and “Dexterity”; Thelonious Monk’s “Rhythm-A-Ning” and the list goes on.

And if Jazz is borne of the human condition; (suffering, the blues, cultural clash and so much more) Bebop is almost a Meta form of this human condition. It processes and confronts its lineage in the blues, classical tradition, and the American Songbook but in an often ironic fashion: digesting it, analyzing it, breaking it apart, making fun of it, and dignifying it. Bebop is a true musician’s language. Rhythm and melodic motifs substitute for words, phrases, and colloquialisms.

That language evolved. Its etymology is rooted in the blues and early work song, the poly-rhythms of the Caribbean, and the complex melodic forms of the European classical tradition. By the time bebop swung around, the prose became more eloquent and the vernacular more specific.

Thus Bebop is about swinging in the face of change and uncertainty. During jam sessions, these giants of jazz would beckon each other with ever faster tempos, and esoteric keys. And yet they prevail. It is the triumph of man over uncertainty, randomness and artistic stasis.

In a world where models such as “Moore’s law” predict exponentially faster rates of technological (and thereby social) evolution; bop is arguably more apropos than ever. And yet the nation’s ears are dominated by repetitive and predictable songs that don’t swing. Perhaps it is the very rapidity of technological and societal change that helps to explain people grabbing for the familiar. People don’t want to introduce yet another variable into their lives. However I propose that it is one of the finest sources of wisdom and meaning for understanding a rapid world. It has a steeper learning curve, but the rewards are vastly disproportionately greater than the effort.

I tune in each and every day, and feel a rush of unadulterated joy when one of the giants comes in with a soaring bebop run, or blistering blues line that quite literally reinvigorates my soul. It makes a chaotic city (and world) seem sensible. I honestly do wonder how people can do without it.

Bounded by the sometimes jaded avante garde, and the naive swing era; bebop is just right. It quite literally is the human condition.

Patents 101 and Why Our System Should be More European

DISCLAIMER: NONE OF THE FOLLOWING CONSITUTES LEGAL ADVICE

If you are a patent lawyer, get to the point by skipping to “my argument” below

A little background

Patents are granted based on what is “claimed” in the applications. Claims are heavily scrutinized, short sentences that are the sole source of all that the patent protects; all the other details in a patent merely provide evidence for how to construct the language of the claims. So you could imagine there would be a large incentive to make the claims as broad as possible, while still being able to get the application approved by the US patent office. However the caveat is that any “prior art” invalidates the claim. “Prior art” can be any public info—whether magazine article, scholarly publication etc— available more than a year before the application was filed that would have rendered the subject matter of the patent obvious to someone in the business. Drafting the claims broadly is a catch-22. One the one hand you can cast a ridiculously wide fishing net and catch more “infringers” than you ever could with a narrowly construed claim. On the other hand, you are also catching more invalidating “prior art” with the wide net than you would with the small net. A judge once said that the stronger the patent the weaker its protection, and the weaker a patent the stronger its protection.

My Argument

The US patent office is completely overwhelmed with applications, some of which can take 3 years or longer to get an initial review. So the time spent reviewing each application is necessarily limited. And while they have specialized expertise in construing claims, they are simply incapable of reviewing the entire prior art the way an interested (read: with money at stake) party would. So what happens is that a lot of patents that should have never seen the light of day actually have a small chance of being granted, usually with a good deal of amendments.

Can a patent examiner really search on Google and find a paper on SSRN written by a university professor in Vienna, five years before that is valid prior art, when she is first coming across the subject matter of the application and has only an hour and a half to review it? There’s no way.

So she will do a reasonable amount of diligence during the review, and grant the patent as presumptively valid.

Now fast forward a few years when the patentee is waving their patent around to try and sue a few infringers. Once the case gets to court, then and only then does the patent REALLY get scrutinized for validity. That is when the interested parties (interested in not being held liable for patent infringement) have every incentive to tear down the reams of all prior art, and finding every piece of damning evidence they can to invalidate the patent as having been obvious to “persons having ordinary skill in the art”. The overly broad claims can then be invalidated.

All is well and good except that the patentee got a day in court they never deserved, and wasted everyone’s time and money; save for the IP lawyers on both sides, who get to have a fun time playing patent ping-pong together.

So we have a situation where the only time a patent’s claims is zealously scrutinized on both sides, is once it is actually being litigated. The US Patent Office is outsourcing due diligence expense to the litigation process, and forcing private individuals and companies to bear the brunt of the cost.

To make matters worse, many patentees will sit on broad claims they know is not worth a penny pursuing an infringement claim for, but they figure that if anyone should have the patent, it should be them. This perpetuates a cloud of uncertainty about what is valid and what isn’t while never truly getting to the heart of whether the patent is valid.

Granted, good IP lawyers can provide a reasonable degree of certainty as to the enforceability of individual provisions; so with good counsel the visibility can be quite good. Patent litigation has merely become a cost of doing business for successful technology companies.

A solution

Before the tea party comes knocking on my door, no, I am not advocating increasing government spending so that we have a well-endowed patent office with superstars spending 20+ hours on each application while fiddling with Herman Miller chairs and catered lunches.

When a patent is granted, there should be a 6 month window where anyone who is interested in shutting it down with prior art can come forward and show their cards. A process akin to a preacher asking if anyone objects to the marriage. Interested individuals and companies can come forward or forever “hold their peace”. It is almost like litigation in advance, without excessive cost of uncertainty.

That’s my two cents.

Just as a side note; there already is a method for sending in prior art to the patent office while an application is being processed, but good IP lawyers would advise NEVER to do this, because what might not be fully appreciated by the overworked folks at the patent office, will likely be highly appreciated by a reviewing court. However if the patent office notes that they have already looked at the prior art and granted the application in spite of it, then it is useless in court. You basically have to keep your cards up your sleeve; even when you know with 100% certainty you can play them and win.