85 Million Faces

It should be pretty obvious why Microsoft wants 85 million faces. According to its privacy policy

Microsoft uses the data we collect to provide you the products we offer, which includes using data to improve and personalize your experiences. We also may use the data to communicate with you, for example, informing you about your account, security updates and product information. And we use data to help show more relevant ads, whether in our own products like MSN and Bing, or in products offered by third parties. (retrieved 25 October 2016)

Facial recognition software is big business, and high quality image data is clearly a valuable asset.

But why would 85 million people go along with this? I guess they thought they were just playing a game, and didn't think of it in terms of donating their personal data to Microsoft. The bait was to persuade people to find out how old the software thought they were.

The Daily Mail persuaded a number of female celebrities to test the software, and printed the results in today's paper.

Computer"tell yr age" programme on my face puts me 69 https://t.co/EhEog5LQcN Haha!But why are those judged younger than they are so pleased

— mary beard (@wmarybeard) October 25, 2016

Talking of beards ...

. @futureidentity If we ever reach peak data, advertisers will check photos before advertising beard accessories #personalization #TotalData

— Richard Veryard (@richardveryard) April 1, 2016

. @futureidentity So, did you ever buy that right-handed beard brush? #PeakHipster #Sinister https://t.co/kESqmUooNk #CISNOLA cc @mfratto

— Richard Veryard (@richardveryard) June 8, 2016

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Kyle Chayka, Face-recognition software: Is this the end of anonymity for all of us? (Independent, 23 April 2014)

Chris Frey, Revealed: how facial recognition has invaded shops – and your privacy (Guardian, 3 March 2016)

Rebecca Ley, Would YOU  dare ask a computer how old you look? Eight brave women try out the terrifyingly simple new internet craze (Daily Mail, 25 October 2016)


Related Post: Another 20 million faces (January 2018)


TotalData™ is a trademark of Reply Ltd. All rights reserved

Functional Organization at Microsoft

@iamjaygreene and @jimkerstetter of @CNETNews are not surprised by the departure of unpopular Windows boss Steven Sinofsky from Microsoft.

• Jay Greene, Steven Sinofsky: Microsoft's controversial Mr. Windows 8 (CNET 21 October 2012)
• Jim Kerstetter, A tale of two execs: Microsoft's Sinofsky and Apple's Forstall (CNET 3 November 2012)
• Jay Greene, Shocked by exit of Microsoft's Sinofsky? You shouldn't be (CNET 12 November 2012)

Some pundits (e.g. ZDnet's Larry Dignan) had predicted that Sinofsfy would survive if Windows 8 was a commercial success. By letting him go immediately after Windows 8 went live rather than waiting, Ballmer has clearly signalled that it is not about Windows 8 success but about something else.

In pieces written in the weeks before Sinofsky's departure, Greene and Kerstetter mention the following issues.

• Sinofsky successfully battled with Ray Ozzie for control of Windows Live Mesh. Ray Ozzie left Microsoft immediately after Ballmer folded Windows Live Mesh into Sinofsky's organization.

• According to unnamed critics within Microsoft, Sinofsky created a rigid product development process that puts more control in his hands and diminishes Microsoft's ability to innovate.

• In a similar fashion to Scott Forstall at Apple (who also lost his job recently), Sinofsky zealously promoted his group's work at the expense of the rest of the company.

• Manu Cornet's cartoon of Microsoft's organization chart is thought to be a reference to Sinofsky.

 

But this story isn't just about personality clashes and organizational politics. Sinofsky has championed an approach to organization structure, which he calls Functional Organization, and this is described in a book called "One Strategy: Organization, Planning, and Decision Making," (2009) co-written with Harvard Business School professor Marco Iansiti.

The Functional Organization builds management reporting lines around job functions -- such as product management, development, software testing. This may be contrasted with a Product Organization where multi-disciplinary teams work on specific feature sets together.

Sinofsky and Iansiti argue that functional organizations create clearer road maps for workers to march toward a final goal. However, critics within Microsoft disagree. Apparently referring to Sinofsky's Functional Organization, Charlie Kindel, another ex-Microsoft executive is quoted as saying that "it represents a siloed perspective, it represents an us versus them perspective".  Another former senior executive (unnamed) has referred to the approach as "Soviet central-planning", where tight control from the top squeezes out innovative thinking from below.

Announcing Sinofsky's departure, and the appointment of Julie Larson-Green as his successor, Steve Ballmer wrote "The products and services we have delivered to the market in the past few months mark the launch of a new era at Microsoft. To continue this success it is imperative that we continue to drive alignment across all Microsoft teams, and have more integrated and rapid development cycles for our offerings. ...  Her unique product and innovation perspective and proven ability to effectively collaborate and drive a cross company agenda will serve us well as she takes on this new leadership role".

(BBC News 13 November 2012)


So is this the end of the Functional Organization in Microsoft? Martin Fowler talks about the oscillation between FunctionalStaffOrganization and TechnicalStaffOrganization, essentially the same dynamics (he reckons) as drive the boom-bust cycle of EnterpriseArchitecture. (PreferFunctionalStaffOrganization). So perhaps now the cross-company silo-busting agenda will have the ascendency for a little while.

Except that the new organization also seems to attract the label "functional".

In a 2,700-word internal memo rich in management-speak drivel , Ballmer announced a "far-reaching realignment of the company that will enable us to innovate with greater speed, efficiency and capability in a fast-changing world". The various internal warring silos known as "product groups" will be disbanded and the entire company (97,000 employees) is to be rejigged on "functional" lines (engineering, marketing, advanced strategy and research), with the aim of "focusing the whole company on a single strategy".

John Naughton, How Microsoft spent a decade asleep on the job (Guardian July 2013) 

What Makes a Platform Open or Closed?

#bizarch @nickvitalari sees signs of resurgence at #Microsoft. Everyone Beware: Microsoft is Alive Again and May Become an Elastic Enterprise (April 2012)

Vitalari sees Microsoft's deal with Barnes and Noble as a promising signal, although he admits that it is open to conflicting interpretations. On the one hand, the idea that you can compete with Amazon by getting into bed with Barnes and Noble looks suspiciously like the idea that you can compete with Google by getting into bed with Yahoo. On the other hand, the deal might have the potential of getting Microsoft membership of the elite club that Vitalari and Shaunessy call "The Elastic Enterprise". (See my post on Business as a Platform at Amazon, discussing Shaunessy's recent blogpost.)

Among other things, I was intrigued by Vitalari's comparison between Apple and Microsoft.

"Microsoft was the undisputed leader in the formation of 20^th Century ecosystems, along with Cisco and WalMart. Everyone envied Microsoft’s partnership with Intel and the extensive VAR (value-added reseller) system they created.  But the ecosystem was closed.  Anyone who participated in the old Microsoft ecosystem had to be approved and most importantly it did not have a powerful business platform as seen today with Apple, Amazon or Google.  But that is changing."

Most software historians perceive the difference between Apple and Microsoft the other way around.

"The more restrictive a platform, the less attractive it becomes. Had Microsoft imposed T and Cs as restrictive as Apple’s on Windows software developers, Windows would not have achieved the dominance it did during the 1990s." (Jack Gavigan, Apple's Platform Strategy, June 2011)

"What Apple is trying to do is prevent companies from building phones with multi-touch user interfaces. They want to freeze innovation in the space so that they are the only ones to have the features people want." (John Carroll, Why I (now) hate Apple, ZDNet, 4 March 2010)

"From the beginning, Jobs resolutely resisted efforts to unbundle the Macintosh operating system from the hardware. This contributed significantly to the long-term erosion of both Apple’s hardware and software market share in the computer business relative to more focused players like Microsoft and Dell.  From his perspective, perfection requires tight integration. In working with Disney, Jobs is likely to push for larger, more tightly integrated content – exactly the opposite direction from the one required to maximize returns on content development in a world of attention scarcity." (John Hagel, Disney, Pixar and Jobs, February 2006)   

From this point of view, Microsoft beat Apple because its platform was more open. Some people may have thought that Microsoft didn't care enough about controlling the quality of third party developers, and Apple cared too much - but for many years it was the Microsoft platform strategy that was more commercially successful. Apple's commercial breakthrough didn't come as a result of changing its platform strategy, but extending it - in other words, radical adjacency. Above all, iTunes as the killer app.

But then this is evidence that a proprietary platform, like iTunes or Twitter, will sometimes produce the strongest network effects. Here's Jack Gavigan again.

"In principle, there’s no barrier to building an open version of Twitter. ... But Twitter don’t want that because, in that scenario, the network effects that currently drive everyone to Twitter would be neutralised." (Jack Gavigan, Open vs Proprietary platforms, March 2011)

People talk about different platform strategies, using terms like "open" and "closed", but these terms seem to have worryingly unstable meanings. Platform strategy is clearly a critical question for business architecture, but business architects don't always seem to have consistent ways of describing platform strategy, let alone predicting its consequences.

Zapthink Bashing Microsoft

"Microsoft thinks that SOA is all about XXX, but any fule kno that SOA is all about YYY" (Zapthink via ZDNet).

Microsoft architect John Evdemon protests: he thinks this is Moving the SOA Goalposts, and lists several conflicting statements about what SOA is all about.

If we are to believe the pundits, SOA has always been "all about" all sorts of things. Three years ago, Martin Fowler called this Service Oriented Ambiguity. See also post by David Ing Dude Where's My SOA?

In my post here on Ambiguity, I said we have to distinguish between diversity of explanation (sometimes it makes reasonable sense to emphasize different aspects of SOA for different audiences) and outright contradiction. For my part, I try to avoid saying that SOA is "all about" anything, because it sounds much too dogmatic and prone to contradiction.

Utility Computing and Profitability

In this month's interview [GigaOM Interview, March 10, 2008], Om Malik pushed Ray Ozzie to say something about the profitability of serving the cloud.

"It’s unlikely that we would get into it if we didn’t think it was going to be a profitable business. So we’ll just manage it to be profitable. It’s going to have different margins than classic software, or the ad (-supported) business. But, we have every reason to believe that it will be a profitable business. It’s an inevitable business. The higher levels in the app stack require that this infrastructure exists, and the margins are probably going to be higher in the stack than they are down at the bottom." (2008)

Let me repeat what Ray says here: "We'll just manage it to be profitable." It is certainly conceivable in some markets that a single dominant player can determine how the added value is shared between the layers in the stack. In our work on service-oriented business strategy, we look at some of the ways of influencing the value ladders in a complex stratified business ecosystem. So has Microsoft really got the power to exert that kind of hegemony over the Internet Cloud? Maybe not, but it certainly looks like it's going to try.

Ray Ozzie

Ray Ozzie doesn't do many interviews, so lots of people are finding interesting snippets from his interview with Om Malik last week [GigaOM Interview, March 10, 2008]. Jesper Joergensen (BEA) notes that Ray Ozzie plugs Amazon Web Services. Phil Wainewright interprets the entire interview as a signal of Microsoft's surrender to the cloud. Recently Ray has been a strong advocate of Microsoft's Software+Services strategy, which Phil has criticized as bunkum. But Ray has been a strong advocate of collaborative computing, dating back long before he joined Microsoft. In April 2003, when Ray was the Chief Executive of Groove Networks, he wrote this article: Perspective: A mosaic of new opportunities, which I have quoted before on this blog. (In my post Internet Service Disruption (November 2005), I called out a key difference between Ray's thinking and Bill's - a very early signal that Ray might lead Microsoft into new areas.) So I thought it would be interesting to see whether Ray's thinking has changed in five years.

Loose Coupling

"The next 10 years will find us moving decidedly from an era of personal productivity to one of joint productivity and social software. That will involve a move from tightly coupled systems to more loosely coupled interconnections." (2003) "If you look at the innards of a Yahoo or a Microsoft, an MSN, or a Google, you will see the people who have designed the systems and have taken a number of the things we’ve learned in the enterprise space. We have to throw them them away, because the way that we did it in the enterprise space was more tightly coupled. We need to be more loosely coupled." (2008)

A consistent appeal to loose coupling, but a somewhat different emphasis. The 2008 quote was prompted by a question about reliability, and he is invoking loose coupling from the supply side perspective - presumably motivated by his current supply-side responsibilities. In 2003, he was talking about loose coupling in relation to the end-user experience - in other words, the demand side.

Synchronization

"These changes will transform the personal computer into an interpersonal computer. This will be a rich, self-synchronized and readily interchangeable device focused specifically on people and what they do with one another online." (2003) "The Internet is this resource in the back end that you can design things to take advantage of. You can use it to synchronize stuff, and communicate stuff amongst these devices at the edge." (2008)

In his post Ray Ozzie bringing ’syncromesh’ to the Web, Larry Dignam points out that this has always been a consistent theme of Ozzie's work going back to Lotus Notes.

Power to the Edge

"What programming models can I give these folks that they can extend that functionality out to the edge? In the cases where they want mobility, where they want a rich dynamic experience as a piece of their solution." (2008)

Ray didn't actually talk about the Edge in his April 2003 article, but by September 2003 he was writing an enthusiastic review of a book called Power to the Edge. I'd really like to find out what he thinks about this now.

 

 

Links updated 14 April 2022

Software + Services

This week I visited Microsoft campus in Reading, to hear some presentations on their Software-and-Service (S+S) strategy, and have a chat with Gianpaolo Carraro.

Phil Wainewright recently described Microsoft's S+S strategy as bunkum, and accused Gianpaolo of drinking too much Kool-Aid. Phil's point was that people didn't want to worry about buying software AND buying services.

However, Gianpaolo isn't really focusing on the commercial side of the equation. He spends most of his time talking about deployment. From this viewpoint, it makes sense in many situations to have a combination of stuff running on your own machines (called software) and stuff running on other people's machines (called services). Actually that's what most users have anyway - both corporate users and domestic consumers.

But isn't it all software anyway? And who cares where the stuff is being run? Perhaps all of the people care some of the time, and some of the people care all of the time. I care when it affects my service level. For example, there are some places where broadband is unavailable, or at least very expensive. So if I want to work on an aeroplane, I may need to make sure the relevant documents are physically loaded onto my laptop beforehand.

The original vision of open distributed processing (ODP) included not only location transparency but other forms of transparency including migration and relocation. This means I don't notice when stuff moves around. Suppose I'm working on a bunch of documents that are currently on the server. Imagine my laptop knows my travel plans, knows that I'm going to be on an airplane this afternoon, works out which documents I'm going to need, and quietly and efficiently moves them while I'm in mid-edit, without dropping a comma.

I presume that Ray Ozzie, founder of Groove Networks and now Microsoft Chief Architect, understands these kind of requirements. He is pushing the S+S story hard.

But there is a conceptual problem with this semi-transparency - the fact that sometimes these aspects are visible and sometimes they aren't. ODP handles this by mandating several parallel viewpoints of a distributed system.

The CBDI method for service architecture and engineering (SAE) inherits this principle, although our viewpoints are not identical to the ODP ones. Meanwhile Microsoft has four perspectives, but these are defined in terms of process: Build, Run, Consume and Monetize.

When you want to think about deployment and location, you use one viewpoint; when you want to think about functionality and semantics, you use a different viewpoint; and when you want to think about commercial terms, costs and liabilities, you use a different one again.

I think this helps to explain the apparent disagreement between Gianpaolo and Phil. The S+S world looks very different from a commercial/organizational viewpoint and a deployment viewpoint. When I raised this with Gianpaolo, he made the valid point that these viewpoints cannot be totally isolated from one another. What happens from a deployment viewpoint inevitably has an impact upon the commercial viewpoint, and vice versa. Technological progress may help us reduce this impact, but it isn't going to disappear altogether any time soon.

But that doesn't mean the viewpoints simply merge into one unmanageable mess. The viewpoints are important precisely because they help us understand how things in one viewpoint relate to things in another viewpoint. And this in turn raises another important challenge. How are architects supposed to manage all this complexity? If you try to optimize the commercial/organizational arrangements alone, you may get unsatisfactory performance or service levels; if you try to optimize the physical deployment alone, you may not get the best commercial deal or organization structure; and if you try to optimize everything simultaneously, your head will explode. Gianpaolo's best advice at present is to do things at a very coarse level of granularity, which reduces the number of permutations to consider. But that's clearly not ideal.

The industry currently lacks decent tools to support this kind of architectural reasoning. We don't even have decent notations - you aren't going to get very far with colour-coded UML diagrams.

But what about enterprise SOA? Some people are working towards a world where all software is rendered as services - whether it is running on an enterprise server safely inside the firewall, or on a third-party server farm in Mumbai or Kiev. (By Day In Bollywood, By Night In The Ukraine.) Some of the same technical and conceptual issues here, but the terminology is different. S+S suggests that it only counts as a service if it is remote - this clashes with the enterprise SOA terminology.

Software-and-Services? The name may well generate some misunderstanding, especially if it is taken too literally, but that's probably true of any jargon. Not the name I'd have chosen, but then I'm not in charge of Microsoft's marketing strategy. Gianpaolo and his team have been working hard, producing some interesting material and examples, and the tools and techniques and future challenges coming out of this kind of work will undoubtedly be relevant to Enterprise SOA as well.


References

Gianpaolo Carraro: S+S: Real or have I drunk too much Kool-Aid? :) (Feb 2008)
Phil Wainewright: Microsoft Kool-Aid and the cloud
Gianpaolo Carraro: I think Phil drank the Kool-Aid too but he has not realized it yet :) (Feb 2008)
Ray Ozzie: MIX07 keynote, interview
Broadway Musical: "By day in Hollywood, by night in the Ukraine"
Reference Model for Open Distributed Processing (RM-ODP): Wikipedia, specification

Lessons from Zune

"Microsoft launches the Zune" reports Engadget this week.

There has been some discussion on the Internet (Kirk Biglione, Cory Doctorow, Bob Wyman, plus discussion on Digg) about the main feature apparently intended to differentiate the Zune from the iPod - the wireless share-with-a-friend feature.

• Is this feature compatible with copyright law, or with a Creative Commons licence?
• Is this feature compatible with a reasonably broad range of use-contexts?

Zune Insider (and Microsoft employee) Cesar Menendez reveals the thinking behind the design of this feature.

' "I made a song. I own it. How come, when I wirelessly send it to a girl I want to impress, the song has 3 days/3 plays?" Good question. There currently isn't a way to sniff out what you are sending, so we wrap it all up in DRM. We can’t tell if you are sending a song from a known band or your own home recording so we default to the safety of encoding. And besides, she'll come see you three days later. . .'

Now I certainly don't want to join in the criticism of Microsoft based on one unguarded remark by a Microsoft employee, and I don't know whether the final Zune will work exactly as Cesar describes. What I do want to talk about here is the importance of differentiated behaviour.

What Microsoft's critics are demanding is that the copying/sharing function of the Zune ought to be differentiated according to several factors, including

• the original source (e.g. is this my own band recorded via old-fashioned microphones and mixed on my own computer, is it copied from a CD or downloaded from the internet)
• the presence of some copyright or creative commons licence
• the intentions of the copyright owner or licence-holder

What Cesar seems to be saying is that trusted information is not available to support this differentiation. Okay, something may be wrapped with a creative commons licence, but how do we know this can be trusted. Okay, you may have recorded this with your own microphone, but that doesn't prove you own the copyright. (Has your college lecturer given you permission to distribute his lectures?)

So why is this Microsoft's problem? If Microsoft has come up with a solution that suits most of the people most of the time, then everyone else can go hang. After all, it's not as if they got much better from Apple or Sony. (The Sony MiniDisc contained an early copy-prevention mechanism called SCMS, making the consumer-grade devices largely unsuitable for amateur music producers.)

Maybe it isn't Microsoft's problem. But there remains a significant value-deficit in some use-contexts. There might be a niche opportunity for some specialist provider, but this would presumably require some degree of interoperability. (Can the Zune receive material from third-party devices, or only from other Zunes?)

On this blog, and elsewhere, I have consistently supported differentiated (context-aware) services. I believe that differentiation is the right way (in an increasingly complex world) to deliver the greatest value to the greatest number of users, and I see loosely-coupled service architectures as the right way to configure differentiated services, to balance the (economic) needs of the provider with the (increasingly diverse) needs of the consumer.

In situations like these, differentiated service requires rich, reliable and ubiquitous data. In other words, network-centric.

Meanwhile, I take some comfort from Cesar's word "currently". There currently isn't a way - but let's hope they are working towards a sufficiently robust ontology, with decent (not just supplier-centric) trust, to support a fair degree of differentiation.

Some earlier posts about services and devices for recorded music:

• Shuffle (June 2005)
  
• Controlling Content (August 2005)
• Intrusion and Immersion (November 2005)

 

Internet Services Disruption

Integrated Innovation "There's a strong product pipeline coming through the integrated innovation, and we should be able to show people not only that we correct the things they think are tough about software today, but really bring in scenarios that they never would have expected, that we could solve and make it as efficient as we will." (Bill Gates, July 2003)

>>>

Loose Coupling "... a move from tightly coupled systems to more loosely coupled interconnections" (Ray Ozzie, April 2003)

leaked email courtesy InfoWorld
pictures courtesy PresentationZen

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