Michael Kordahi (aka The Delicate Genius) delivered the keynote at REMIX10 back in June and will be opening the proceedings at TechEd Australia 2010. We caught up for a wide-ranging conversation, touching on trends in application and web development, online security and privacy, social media and innovation, cloud technology and why devs and IT pros just can’t do without each other.
JB: In the IT Pro community, whenever there’s a new management tool introduced which contains a lot of backend smarts, there’s often a feeling that technical knowledge has somehow been lost. With the latest release of the Expression Suite, is this also true for designers and developers?
MK: From the days of Assembler, every generation abstracted away from its predecessor, which meant that every new generation could solve bigger, more complex problems. Controls are a great example of this – instead of working out how to capture text in a box, it became far simpler to create a control which handled all the necessary logic. Scenarios based around capturing and manipulating data are the same. We don’t want our developers to have to worry about writing their own algorithms to move objects around a screen or play videos; we want them to think less about that and more about what they can create.
Interestingly, this abstraction does not stop someone from being a developer. As a developer, your skills evolve along with the technology; you can go back and write in Assembler if you want to. To me, developers and coders are amongst the greatest artists around, and it simply makes sense to give such creative people richer and more complex problems to solve.
Developers now have a suite of tools available to them which allow them to think more about the creativity and implications of the user experience rather than worry about basic problems, and this is why people like Shane Morris are in such high demand.
JB: In his REMIX10 presentation, John Allsopp discussed the evolution of technology, and how it progresses from simplicity to complexity and back to simplicity, even though the new simplicity is built upon complexity (eg: Google’s homepage). Also, Steve Jobs gave an anecdote when delivering a graduation lecture, about his time spent sitting in at calligraphy lectures at university, and then implementing that knowledge later in Apple products. Given that Microsoft is working to abstract certain complexities away from developers, are you seeing these arguably abstract skills starting to feed into the world of application design and development?
MK: Yes. A mistake which many people make is to assume that a new suite of tools replaces its predecessors. For example, that now we have Expression, there’s no further need for Visual Studio, or that because Visual Studio has a design canvas, that you no longer need HTML.
The value of new technology like HTML5 and CSS3 is when libraries are built on top of them. For example, web developers who work with JavaScript are really working with JQuery rather than JavaScript. They’re not interested in the fine details of what JavaScript can do, but rather want to exploit functionality with other people have already worked out. Those people are just as good developers as the person who built the library, but they’re working to solve different problems.
JB: Another example would be that if you’re an architect, you don’t have to go back and work out Pythagoras’ theorems from first principles
MK: Exactly. If you’re a builder, you don’t have to also be a brick maker, but both skill sets are just as important as each other. We often lose sight of that fact. What Microsoft does at events like REMIX10 is to demonstrate what’s next, the latest tools, the latest skills and people sometimes think that this means we’ve forgotten about or no longer care about the more basic, yet fundamental coding platforms.
JB: So in many ways, every developer is standing on the shoulders of giants?
MK: Something like that, yes. And it’s made the industry larger and more diverse as a result. The ability to render applications across so many platforms has made the industry far more appealing to a broader range of developers. The analogy of standing on the shoulders of giants is accurate, but the reality is much wider than that.
JB: Facebook recently got into trouble around its privacy settings. In your opinion, does that represent a one-off incident with a company who went too far and got burned, or is it symptomatic of a deeper problem with online application privacy? Do developers have to take privacy considerations into account when creating their applications, anticipating how their product is likely to be used?
MK: Privacy concerns have been around for a long time; they’re much older than Facebook and even older than the internet. I prefer to abstract away from the idea of privacy and think more about businesses which are required to deal with both personal (ie: public) and private information, which is a far more sensitive business topic.
JB: It’s also an easier demarcation to deal with.
MK: What do you mean by that?
JB: From a business perspective, private or confidential information is protected in some way by legislation, and as such businesses have much clearer frameworks to work within, and the boundaries are less blurred. Also, the information in question is generally being used for well-defined business reasons and it’s therefore easier to determine when there has been a breach of privacy.
Personal information is harder to deal with, as it often involves individuals offering up information about themselves, whether that’s in exchange for some sort of service, something to make your life better or to connect with other people. When something goes wrong and there’s a breach of your personal privacy, it’s much harder to determine where the appropriate boundaries are.
MK: Yes, that’s right, especially with multinational companies like Facebook where the user base extends far beyond the company’s geographical region. For example, Australian privacy laws are different from US privacy laws.
From a developer perspective, privacy is an interesting topic which obviously goes far beyond development, but what is of particular interest is that as a developer you now have access to the online value which companies have created, such as Facebook’s base of users and communities, Microsoft Live ID or Google ID. Developers can extract that information and incorporate it into their sites or applications.
In my REMIX10 keynote I discussed how “it was all about the web”, and this is a great example of one of the fundamental things which the web allows – interoperability across all these platforms. For example, a developer brings a new site online and invites some users to sign up – now there’s a huge resource of accessibility, social information, authentication and identity management available for use, all thanks to the open standards which now exist around web-based identity.
We talk a lot about social networking – do you know which is one of the oldest and largest online social networks? It’s Messenger. From my perspective, Messenger is probably one of the most trusted social networks; far greater than Facebook. I love the idea that everyone on my Messenger list is either family or a friend – in some way known and trusted – which also means that a recommendation on Messenger carries far more weight.
JB: What you’ve also touched upon there is the concept of pure social networking as opposed to social media as a business model. Leveraging off the trust and value which companies like Microsoft have established is great if your plan is simply to pitch ideas out to a wider community, but it’s very different idea if the aim is to sell something or target people for marketing opportunities. Obviously it’s not that different from a coding perspective, but it’s quite a different mental approach.
MK: Putting ads up is almost a cop-out. To me, it’s just taking the easy approach.
JB: I must admit that I have stopped going to sites which have, over time, beefed up the amount of advertising they use. There’s a feeling that pre-advertising, the published content was genuinely for the benefit of the readership, but space on the site which was previously pitched to their readers’ interests now has nothing to do with them.
MK: I’ve heard it said that a useful trick to engage with social media is to follow the money. Always ask yourself where a particular site or Twitter account makes their money from. Is it from your attention, from the time your eyeballs spend on their site? Then you know you’re being advertised to. Do they want you make a purchase? If Amazon becomes your friend on Facebook or starts following you on Twitter, it’s quite obvious what they want, but it’s a very different business model from the pure advertising approach.
Crust Pizza have done an amazing job with social media – the amount of Twitter traffic they’ve created is phenomenal, and I think the reason they’ve succeeded is because their message is very simple – buy more pizza. When the message is honest and transparent, it works.
Compare that to Facebook Beacon. It had massive privacy issues, but I certainly applaud their attempt at innovation and like the concept as a business model rather than simply bombarding users with ads. I think that we’re currently applying old-world marketing rules to social media, and the true monetisation and commercialisation of social media has yet to be realised. We’ve put a lot of emphasis and thought into the belief that social media is somehow a barometer for our customers’ mood. As an example, Twitter is one way to gauge opinion about products and services, but it’s a rather myopic and predictable method of measurement and it’s not necessarily accurate.
There was a study done in the 1950’s called the Asch Experiment, which looked at the ways in which people are willing to accept an argument which they know is incorrect, simply throught the strength of the desire to conform with a group of other people who have already accepted the incorrect argument (wittingly or unwittingly). The need to conform and to follow a leader is very strong within almost all of us, and when it comes to social media opinion is split between polar opposites: you either think it’s a success or not, but either way that opinion tends to have been derived from following public opinion.
When you’re trying to assess what customers think of your product or service, it’s a bad idea to use the conversations which are generated on Twitter as an accurate gauge. People tend to very quickly start saying the same thing as each other, with little originality or diversity. Also, arenas like Twitter tend to produce quite narrow samples – something which no statistician would accept when attempting to draw a definitive conclusion about anything. Social media is a very different world, and it raises some interesting challenges for making money. It’s fine for generating traffic to drive people towards a particular outcome; for example, entering a competition to win a new Xbox, but not for generating an accurate understanding about what people think about you.
Forums like Twitter are great for easily accessing customer feedback, and this is something we use quite a lot, especially at events like REMIX and TechEd, but interestingly the feedback forms which are handed back at the end of each session or presentation rarely reflect what’s being said on Twitter.
JB: Is that more to do with the difference between the type of person who twitters and the type of person who fills in a feedback form? By its nature, online feedback has a tendency to be instant, vocal and often anonymous. There have been a number of times when I’ve submitted articles online which, if I assess their success based purely on the online comments, have been complete disasters. It’s only after a few days that I’ll start receiving emails from people saying that they liked the piece or agreed with what I said, and I always wonder why those people didn’t at least post a comment to dilute some of the flaming.
That starts to suggest that the only way to get accurate feedback is via person-to-person conversations.
MK: Do you think that sort of feedback is ever really accurate? I often get people coming up to me saying how much they enjoyed a talk I gave, even though I know it was a bad talk. No-one, except perhaps a very close friend, is going to approach you and tell you in person how much they thought your talk sucked.
JB: True, but if they did think that, at least they wouldn’t tell you how good they thought it was. Silence doesn’t always indicate consent or agreement; it can simply mean that the person can’t think of anything nice to say without being disingenuous.
MK: Perhaps, but that doesn’t work when you have a bunch of needy evangelists who always want to know what people think of what they have to say!
JB: Evangelists and journalists have similar needs!
MK: Speaking of which, I’m interested get your feedback on a couple of ideas which I covered in the REMIX keynote. Firstly “It’s All Web”, where it doesn’t matter whether you’re writing applications of client computers, Surface hardware or mobile, and secondly “Journeys and Destinations”, where we are now in a new era of development where people are building applications which are really experiences which drive across a number of application platforms.
JB: Approaching those ideas from a non-developer perspective, my usual brief from clients is “Here it is, now make it work”. With that in mind, it’s very clear to me that a unified, hardware-agnostic platform built on the data intelligence which the web can provide, is clearly the way to go. It’s the only way to bring large groups of users together and break down the silos which applications tend to create. It’s the one arena where everyone is equal, in theory. Not necessarily as good or as capable as each other, but certainly having access to the same opportunities.
MK: The reason Microsoft invited Foxtel to present in the REMIX keynote was because they actually have achieved the cross-platform experience we envisaged in “Journeys and Destinations”. Until recently, to me Foxtel was a just a box connected to my TV, offering a one-way interactive experience. But they’ve also created an iPhone app which lets me schedule shows to record on IQ, which I can then watch when I get home. Although Foxtel didn’t articulate it in that way, that’s the idea behind “Journeys and Destinations”, which actually many companies do already achieve, through a desire to have a presence on many screens. The important thing is that the functionality available on those many screens should not be isolated from each other, but rather inter-connected and strongly connected to real life.
JB: I know it’s not consumer technology, but another great example is Microsoft Exchange, which offers the same functionality across a number of different platforms.
MK: There’s Xbox as well – there’s a lot of development in Windows Phone 7 which integrates into the world of Xbox. There’s nothing revolutionary about this approach, but those examples do serve to contextualise what we’re doing to try and make it more meaningful.
JB: This is where the cynic in me comes out – during the keynote demo where you were using a Windows Phone 7 device to grab information from a Microsoft Surface and walk off with it, a little voice in my head said “That’s a whole new way to pick up viruses”.
MK: Man, spot the IT pro in the room…
JB: I know, but on the one hand you have the developers and designers with these amazing ideas and their destinations and journeys, and then you have the IT professionals mopping up the mess which gets created when people don’t get their applications right or when code is exploited. That does happen and it’s the source of a lot of frustration. The journeys you’re describing are being peppered by sniper fire from the sand people up on the ridge! You always end up with these extra layers of protection, administration and management which really have little or nothing to do with the end goal.
MK: True, but I made a comment in the keynote to the effect that as a developer, I no longer need IT pros because I have Azure. I effectively have a thousand IT pros working for me.
JB: Except that you still need IT pros who know how to use Azure.
MK: It’s not about that. As a developer I now have an IT pro working for me which can be meaningful to me – Azure doesn’t replace IT pros, and building journeys requires even more IT pros than ever before to build and maintain the infrastructure which keeps the phones talking and networks running smoothly.
But we’ve come full circle in our conversation – we started off talking about how developers have been abstracted up a layer of technology. Hosted technology means that you IT professionals can care less about redundant drives and server memory and more about servicing the applications which you’re responsible for.
JB: Certainly when Windows Azure was announced at PDC 2008, a lot of the conversation in IT pro space revolved around concerns that it would make them redundant. It took at least twelve months for most people to realise that hosted solutions like Azure don’t replace IT professionals, but rather act as another string to your bow. As IT professionals we still have to have an active understanding of how all the infrastructure, regardless of where it’s hosted, interfaces with the business. If anything, bringing hosted solutions on board makes the environment more complex rather than less, and your skill set needs to evolve to accommodate that.
MK: Exactly, and it’s fun too. I built a system a few weeks ago for the first time in five or six years. I realised that I missed the experience of building machines, enjoyed putting everything together, but I don’t want to have to do that every day. I like the idea that if a family member asks me for a computer, I can jump online and buy them a perfectly functional computer, in spite of the premium I know I’m paying on the price. But I don’t mind the extra cost because then I don’t have to worry about whether I’ve put the system together properly, or waste time fixing it if I made a mistake. That extra premium buys a lot of peace of mind, and frees up time for me to do other things with that hardware instead.
The IT pro world is the same. You guys can spend more time in meaningful projects when you don’t have to worry about physical hardware. Of course there will be people who resist that change, but in some circumstances that’s fair enough. Azure isn’t a hammer for every nail; if you’re a small business with grand plans to scale up then Azure has value, but if that’s not the case you really don’t need a hosted solution, and those in-house skills remain valuable and relevant. People have the misconception that the cloud is the answer when it isn’t. However, it is an excellent answer to quite a lot of questions.
There will be IT pros who embrace cloud and those who won’t. I remember when we introduced SharePoint there was a lot of resistance from IT professionals who were horrified at the prospect of people being able to create their own sites, lists and data structures. Now, IT professionals who work with SharePoint are engaged in interesting, high-end projects and don’t want to be bothered with setting up new sites or creating lists to invite employees to the company picnic. SharePoint has liberated those guys from all that detail so that they can now go off an innovate or work with unified communications.
JB: So we’re back to what we talked about right at the start; how we have to worry less about certain aspects of technical detail and can work on new problems. It seems that this is a trend right across the IT industry, and isn’t restricted just to developers and designers.
MK: Of course. It’s important to remember that we’re young. Speak to anyone who’s been in the industry a long time and they’ll tell you that this sort of innovation has happened plenty of times before. Certainly the opportunities now we have are new and interesting but any industry, whether it’s the IT industry or something else, has certain rules which apply to it and that’s where innovation really happens, when you can build on top of what’s come before you and do something which nobody else has tried.
This why I love what I do. I love that I had an idea about putting together a demo bringing Surface, Windows Phone and a tablet together and the developer I worked with was able to open tools and be productive straight away. He didn’t have to worry about the details or intricacies of working with the Surface or Phone. He was already abstracted away from that and was able to be as creative as he liked. And the developers who come after us will be working on innovations which will blow our minds, simply because they’ll be abstracted further away again. It’s exciting times!
