The New Copernican Revolution
April 19, 2010
News flash: my book isn’t selling very well. I put two years of my life into researching and writing it, and so far only the few semantic web people are buying it. The problem isn’t that it’s no good. In fact, the reviews are all much better than I expected. Those who have read it say it’s remarkable and just what’s needed. One person said we’ve all gotten used to going to the outhouse, and my book describes the future of indoor plumbing, where the water (information) is delivered to us so we don’t have to fetch it or go to it.
No, the problem isn’t that the book is not the right thing at the right time. The problem is that no one knows about it. This site has very few links to it, very few people find their way here, and, when they do come, people spend an average of less than 2 minutes. Even though I’ve put hundreds and hundreds of hours into this site, and thousands into the book, the venture capitalists, investors, entrepreneurs, corporate planners, and mainstream business press have no idea my book or my work exists.
The other day, my wife said it’s no wonder that books about the past sell better than my book about the future. She said pull is a Copernican revolution – it’s about changing people’s fundamental viewpoints. And Copernican revolutions, she said, can be uncomfortable. They usually take place long after the original prophet’s death. Whether the prophet is me or Tim Berners Lee or any of the remarkable people working in the semantic movement today isn’t important. The question is – when will our vision be seen as mainstream and mission critical?
There haven’t been that many Copernican revolutions. Nicolaus Copernicus (1473 – 1543) was the first to hypothesize that the earth was not at the center of the universe, but rather the sun was at the center of our solar system. It took several other astronomers and another 100 years for Galileo Galilei to challenge the Catholic church doggedly enough that people started to see the wisdom in changing their point of view. Importantly, in light of new information, it became harder and harder for the church to defend the old earth-centric worldview. By applying Occam’s razor, which says a simple solution is often more correct than a more complicated one, people could see that putting the sun at the center of our solar system immediately solved a lot of problems and made things much simpler.
Similarly, I would say that Einstein’s theory of special relativity was also a Copernican revolution, because he quickly destroyed two hundred years of Newtonian physics with a single simple formula (e=mc2). At the time, Newtonian physics was breaking under the attempts of many researchers to understand the nature of light. They knew something was going to have to give. They didn’t realize it would have to be their point of view, but they managed to accept Einstein’s statement that “there is no preferred frame of reference.” As soon as they did, a new world of opportunity opened, and physicists were off on a race across new territory to explain all the forces in nature (a race they are still on and which has had a few Copernican revolutions of its own, just in the past few decades).
And now we’re at 2010 in the business world, and people have gotten used to the tools and processes that got us here. If you look back ten years, I would say we’re not doing things too differently from the world of 2000. We use essentially the same computers and software and processes we did back then, though things have sped up a bit. It’s hard for us to see how broken things are. As the Economist points out in its issue on The Data Deluge, we are far past our necks in data, and the sheer amount of it makes our business challenges fundamentally different from those of even a few years ago. (I’ve made a video on this very topic and will launch it in a few weeks – watch this space for details.) And the fact that companies like Oracle, Sun, Apple, and Microsoft seem to be doing well at the moment keeps us thinking that we don’t need to change our point of view.
But we do. That’s why Tim Berners Lee is running around talking about open data, that’s why the open data movement is gathering momentum, and that’s why I wrote my book. It gives technical people a chance to talk with business people about the real challenges ahead. My message is that we can’t get complacent, because what we’re doing in business isn’t scaling well at all. While each day may look a lot like the last, we must look forward far enough to see that the road we’re on leads to more crises in health care, finance, education, environment, energy, etc. We need to veer slightly today, so we can get where we want to go tomorrow. My book is that turning point. When you read it, you’ll start to take your company very slightly in a new direction. And that’s exactly what it’s meant to do.
So I’m asking for your help. If you know a business person who really should read my book, and I’m sure you do, please buy it for that person or send a link or keep bugging him/her to get to it. I’m not going to make that much money from this book, but if the word gets out and companies start to make changes now, we will all be better off. If you know a venture capitalist, please buy my book and send it to that person. I need the venture community to get the message now, so they can start building the new companies that will help us change “business as usual.” The argument for doing so is clear. The fundamental principles are right. We really do need a new point of view. Data should be online, in semantic formats, interoperable, and protected by new identity and security schemes to scale to meet our growing needs. It’s time to start taking small steps in a new direction. I hope you’ll help double the number of people aware of my book and my blog so we can go from there and build the new world we will need for 2020 and beyond.
It’s clear to people working in the semantic web that it’s a revolution, but why is it a Copernican revolution? What, exactly, is the change of viewpoint?
For the technologist, it’s a change from looking at solutions to looking at problems. The problem isn’t that we’re not using semantic technology. The problem is that what we’re doing in business isn’t scaling well at all. Many of our business processes are driven by the way we push information. It takes three days to complete a loan application because each bank has its own set of rules on how to process loan applications internally, and each client has to fill out that information anew when starting the process of applying for a loan, and then someone in the bank (or a broker) has to enter it into the system in the way the system needs it to even start processing a loan. We’ve gotten used to working on our own islands, so our systems mimic the processes, which mimic our systems, etc. Each time we get a new version of our software, we’re just bolting more and more parts onto a fundamentally broken platform. Look at Adobe. How many products does Adobe make these days? I looked at their product list, and it’s full of connective tissue – products designed to manage work flow from one environment to another, because everyone is still working alone one some stand-alone workstation using desktop software and passing files back and forth. They have as many tools that simply translate media from one format to another as they do applications to create the media in the first place.
But if you have read my post on shipping, you have learned that a new data standard would change the carriers’ worldview. Can you imagine dropping a package into a box that is shared by UPS, FedEX, and the Postal Service? They can’t. But we can, because we’re customers, and that would work better for us. Can you imagine sending me a package just by writing my email address on it and dropping it into the mail stream, and letting me and my software manage how the package gets to me? You might be able to, but the carriers can’t. That’s because their religion is vendor lock-in, and their church is the brand – the end-to-end solution that seems so good for us but really isn’t. Like bottled water, they have us drinking the Kool-aid they began marketing many years ago.
For the business person, it’s about changing the viewpoint from vendor-centric to customer-centric. I wrote an entire book about this in 1999, and I’ve written the next version of that book recently. It’s about switching from push to pull. It’s easy to see when we look at media. In media, the old push paradigm is fading quickly. Where we used to push content to consumers on our schedule …
We now have to provide the content consumers want where they want it, when they want it, the way they want it, on the device they want it …
And that includes the branding, messaging, and advertising that have been so sacred to push-marketers for so many years. Pull really is a radical new viewpoint. It’s the customer’s viewpoint. A customer wants to push ONE button and apply for a loan. If you are running a bank, you should have a big banner printed that says “ONE CLICK LOAN APPS BY 2015″ and hang it on the wall somewhere visible. It starts with changes like this, and it ends with the personal data locker, which I’m sure is the future of how we’ll use information. When we have personal data lockers, we’ll say we’re looking for a loan with one click and all banks will have a chance to respond semantically. You can get there in steps, starting with account portability. I’ll show you how if you’ll just give me one weekend. That’s how long it should take you to read my book. My father says it’s taking him a bit longer, but I’ve also heard from other people who say they stayed up until 3am, so your mileage may vary.
If you haven’t seen it yet, please see the brilliant STI video on the coming semantic web. And if you know any group or government that wants a new point of view, please contact me before I’m dead – I’ll be easier to work with that way.
Have a good weekend.
