MALONE’S FOURTH LAW OF TECHNOLOGY by Michael S. Malone
At various times over the last three decades I’ve proposed – based upon having worked in, or reported upon, the high tech world for more than thirty years – one new law or another to describe the forces at work in the modern world.
It’s a natural human tendency to come up with some overarching rule that takes a bunch of largely inchoate experiences and gives them a simple coherence . . .whether it’s entirely true or not. We are wired to like the surprise of seeing disorder suddenly have meaning, especially when the spin it gives is slightly sardonic. It enables us to say, when something goes wrong, “Well, everybody knows that blah-blah-blah.”
The classic example of this is Murphy’s Law. It’s not really a law, of course, but more like a talisman to protect us against bad luck. “If anything can go wrong, it will” is just accurate enough as a description of daily life – making us chuckle ruefully even as we wince – that we keep it in our back pocket to pull out as needed to make the world a little less painful.
Murphy’s Law has, of course, provoked hundreds of imitators, from the Jelly-Side Down rule to arcane descriptions of recurring disasters in the far reaches of scientific research.
The technology world seems to provoke a lot of Murphy-like laws. One possible explanation is that the world of electronic engineers and code writers is so precise and so empirical, the belief so strong that you can precisely quantify ‘luck’ and failure rates, that when things do go haywire, when the program crashes or the device self-immolates, the only answer is to shrug and blame yet another pseudo-scientific law. It beats admitting that the world is irrational, chaotic and awash with plain old bad luck.
Of course, there are some real Laws in high tech, from the chilly perfection of Maxwell’s equations down to the odd world of quantum mechanics. And, of course, there are those two celebrated “Laws” to describe the behavior of high tech as it interacts with the world of human beings.
The first, and most famous of these, is Moore’s Law of Semiconductors. As I’ve written many times before, Moore’s Law is the single most important predictive tool in the modern world. The pace it sets – the doubling of performance at the chip level every 24 months – defines the world we live in better than any demographic or other sociological measure. Trillions of dollars have been made betting on Moore’s Law (including billions by Dr. Moore himself at Intel Corporation), while no one has ever won betting against it. Meanwhile, all of us are likely to live under the regime of Moore’s Law for the rest of our lives.
Interestingly, Moore’s Law, as Gordon Moore himself has often reminded us, is not really a Law at all, but an implied contract between the semiconductor (and now the entire electronics) industry to keep pushing technology forward at that breakneck pace forever – or until it crashes into the limitations of physics. And so far, so good.
The other, increasingly important law is Metcalfe’s Law of Networks, which states that the value of any network increases by some large factor with the addition of each new node. Interesting, it is a real law, and the explosive growth of the Internet is its proof – the problem is that nobody seems to agree on what that ‘factor’ is. Bob Metcalfe thought each new node doubled the value of the network. Others who have followed have argued that it might not be that much.
So, of the two defining technology laws of the modern world, one is very accurate but isn’t a real law, and the other is a real law but nobody is sure what it says. This could in fact be another example of Murphy’s Law.
My ‘Laws’ are neither very precise, nor very serious. Yet, if you do a Google search you might be surprised how many times they are cited. In listing them, I find myself looking back at the trajectory of my career and that of high tech itself over the last quarter-century. Here they are:
Malone’s Law No. 1 – Whenever a company builds a new corporate headquarters, short the stock.
This first one dates to the early Eighties when I was writing for newspapers. It was provoked by the construction of Hewlett-Packard’s headquarters in Palo Alto. What I noticed at the time, and which was confirmed over and over again in the years to come, was that whenever a company finally reaches the point that it needs a fancy new headquarters, it has usually lost track of the lean and mean style that made it a success in the first place. And if that doesn’t do it, then the months company executives spend pouring over the design of the new facility, jockeying for the best offices and lobbying for an executive dining room, inevitably distracts them from the real job of making money.
Malone’s Law No. 1 – Whenever a company builds a new corporate headquarters, short the stock.
Boy, that one nailed Sun.
So you start as an app, you struggle to become a community, you search for an underlying law so you can lead a revolution, and you crown it all by becoming so successful that you build a fancy new HQ and it all goes down the cr*pper, at which point you start over… all the while trying to avoid the conclusion that this cycle stuff is sounding more and more like the laws of thermodynamics…
And as a corollary to Malone’s Law No. 1, may I add;
“When business is conducted 24/7/365, bad decisions are more likely than good ones.”
This is because in an environment where speed of action is the primary desideratum (“We Have To Do This Right NOW!”) to beat the competition, etc., it is almost inevitable that decisions will be made on emotion, impulse, the decision maker’s personal likes/dislikes, etc., rather than on an objective assessment of the facts in the case. The result tends to be an inversion of the old axiom “look before you leap”, to “leap before you look”. If “fast” is considered to be the hallmark of a “leader”, you tend to get a lot of people making important decisions who are thinking with their adrenal glands instead of their frontal lobes.
The situation is exacerbated by the system of executive compensation, “golden parachutes” etc., which tends to insulate decision makers from any adverse consequences of their actions. It’s the equivalent of a ship’s captain telling the helmsman to steer for the iceberg at flank speed- and at the inquiry, being able to get away with saying it was the helmsman’s fault that the ship sank.(“If he’d followed my orders correctly, the iceberg would have been sunk, not us!”)
It is also facilitated by the present worldwide electronic data network, that allows instantaneous communication on a second-by-second basis. Which is, of course, the subject of Mr. Malone’s article. The system facilitates “day-trader”-like behavior, so it’s not too surprising that important decisions are increasingly being made in day-trader-like style; i.e., in a split-second, and more often wrong than right.
Heinlein once observed that there is always time to think before you do something, and that when you don’t know what to do, any action you take without thought will very probably just make things worse. These are two observations that should be carved in the desktop of every decision maker in American business today.
clear ether
eon
#4 Eon – heh, I wish Barry our Fealess Reader would read up on Heinlein. Good stuff a bit of truth from common sense.
Heinlein on human nature in the
Engineering environment…
The updated summary: Dilbert is
a documentary.
Eon,
Exactly so. I would add that too many layers of management wreak havoc. When decisions are made 9 layers above the people who actually do the work, chaos ensues. I work for a major i/t company whose CEO is 9 levels of management above me. I had no idea what any of them do.
“Malone’s Law No. 4 – Until you’re a community, you are only an app.”
Just because you have a community doesn’t mean that you can make any money.
And application development is still alive and well and is, unlike, communities, easily monetized.
I look at Facebook today and remember Friendster of yesteryear.
And Facebook is still not profitable.
Meanwhile Microsoft is still selling Microsoft Office and iPhone app developers are still making tons of money.
Color me confoozled.
Regarding Moore’s law: IT ONLY APPLIES TO NANOTECHNOLOGIES (including semiconductors)!!! It doesn’t apply to energy, or any other macrotechnologies. There’s no magic silver bullet that’s going to make gas $1/gal again, or make cars get 300 mpg.
The most important thing about these “laws” is that people understand their scope of applicability.
Another law is that anyone who tries to argue that “if we can put a man on the moon, we can do _____” doesn’t know the difference between technology and magic.
Cathleen, you’re not supposed to know what they do. The real organizational dysfunction is that they don’t know what you do.
Speaking of layers, the longest-lived major organization in the world has four management layers. It has operations on all six populated continents, and over a billion members. It’s been around for almost 2000 years, and is growing in Africa and Asia, and holding its own in most other places.
And btw, regarding comment 9 (which Malone’s second law tangentially implies), software technology doesn’t even obey Moore’s law. It actually tends to work in a rather opposing fashion. The Law of Bloatware states that whatever advantage is created in the hardware by Moore’s law will be consumed in a zero-sum fashion by the software of the same generation.
This is why people have become so jaded by the “upgrade” cycle. When you go to the next hardware generation, everything gets faster. Then when you go to the next software generation, you’re back where you started.
RE: Malone’s Law No. 1: [...] whenever a company finally reaches the point that it needs a fancy new headquarters [...]inevitably distracts them from the real job of making money. [...]
Rephrasing: … from the real job of CREATING CRAP THAT POSSIBLY MAKES MONEY.
Michael, haven’t you noticed the idiocy written on the back of trucks: “Our Goal Is Safety!”?
No, your goal is to transport stuff from there to there – if you do it in a safe manner, that’s something else. But the main purpose of your enterprise isn’t safety – and all other businesses that define their purpose as MAKING MONEY are wrong, too. Their true efforts go into PRODUCING SOMETHING THAT MAY MAKE money.
I am surprised that this important nuance has escaped you -
12, actually, the theory behind TQC is that people and organizations can walk and chew gum at the same time. If you can only have a business goal, and not pay attention to anything else, you’re going to fail.
There’s no reason in the world why a trucking company can’t be focused on transportation with the constraint that they also pay attention to safety as a high-priority issue. When your truck crashes, the stuff doesn’t get there in time, and your bottom line suffers (and that’s before the lawyers get into the act).
According to your philosophy, the goal of living is death. That’s where we’re all headed, no?
Right on about corporate headquarters.
More examples…
Agilent, Silicon Graphics, Compaq, RCA Computers
Back in the days when Borland built their new HQ and promptly flamed out, we’d call your law #1, “The Edifice Complex”.
Michael, this is off topic, but… Somebody ought to look at the flim flamming that is going on at the recovery.gov website. It looks like their search method has been deliberately disabled. Drudge has posted up those links to the ham and cheese programs, but if you submit ‘cheese’ as your search term, it returns exactly NOTHING.
So the super-stimulating ham and cheese programs are effectively unreachable. Normally, I would just say that it is a case of mighty WEAK web programming.
But, the link Drudge posted this morning no longer returns the type of work performed. So you can’t even see what these outfits are being charged for. They have tinkered with the search method TODAY so that Drudge et al. cannot point to any more embarrassing food products.
This seems dishonest to me.
The only purpose of any business, should be to “Create and Maintain Customers”
18, fine, but I don’t want to hear you complaining when the lawyers are picking your bones clean. Business is war. Get used to it. You need offense and defense, and you also have to do the operations that make the money in your spare time.
Bankruptcy court is full of the poor fools who didn’t get that point.
Murphy’s law was not really formulated as some sort of psychic salve. It is really an engineering admonition. It means that you need to debug your designs assiduously with a degree of paranoia about the pervasive and devious malevolence of Nature. Or else.
The iPhone app market has a look of permanence to me. Apps tend to lock you into a platform no matter how uncomfortable the the fit might be. I’m thinking about all the Herculean efforts that went into preserving COBOL apps that had become indispensable. I still see lots of funky CICS screens running on PCs.
Malone’s Law #2 is confusing.
I agree that revolutions are rare. But I also think they are not so easy for the revolutionaries to recognize. Historically, most of the actors were trying to develop “better, faster, cheaper” solutions to existing problems. Some improvements are revolutionary, but most are just increments of “better, faster, cheaper”.
Only be looking back can we define something as a revolution.