There is something well beyond the geek factor, that would have worn off around 10k words. I find it to be a very personal space, and I realize how much I appreciate not having any interruptions forced on me. There is no visible key that I have a new email in, there is no text messages that show up unless I want them to, there’s nothing. Peace, quiet, I get in the ‘zone’ of high creativity and productivity and I stay there. It is immensely enjoyable.

It reminds me a lot of my Basic programming days, where I would literally get up in the morning, code code, eat lunch, code code WHAT it’s dark out? Huh. I would be in the zone, playing with ideas, moving code around in my teenage head, and utterly content. I wouldn’t think of words or code, it was blocks of concepts that I would fit together.

Currently I’m using Pages, on both my Mac and iPad, and I’m using iCloud. While I’m not truly happy with Pages as there are things that I am so used to Microsoft Word doing that it doesn’t seem to do that are frustrating (such as defining what the followup style should be after another style, like after H1 it should use something else I want) it does the job gracefully. Pages on the Mac needs to be automatically plugged into iCloud, but I’m sure that’s coming. The thing is, even with Pages on my Mac, it’s just not the same as on my iPad.

The solitude is key, and the natural interaction with the media is the secret. I don’t think about “now I have to move the mouse” on any level, I just touch, I touch everything. I scroll with a touch, I write with a touch, I move ideas (paragraphs) around with touches, it’s all as close to naturally as we have right now.

Now this is the point of Natural User Interfaces, to be as natural as possible, but I’ve been thinking about Kinetic as it readies to be released for Windows and we will start having Kinetic Windows all over the place. The thing is with that, that it is very likely going to continue to have me separate from what I’m working on, and I don’t see how it will improve anything like the writing experience.

I’ve come to realize that the influence of a technology has to really start with the simple, because at the end of the day it is the simple, basic things that we return to naturally. Not in a negative way, in an intuitive way. How many bookkeepers wipe out Excel so that they can do a bulk entry into the accounting software, instead of doing item by item in the accounting software? Lots that I know. Why? Time and intuitiveness.

For me I find that the other key part of the magic for writing on the iPad is being able to flip from a favorite book and descend into writing or the other way around. The idea of switching my mode without, again, unnatural interference.

This may sound obvious on a couple of levels, but I see this as being all the more important when helping customers. I stress user experience but most people draw the spectrum at the wrong place, the draw it between effectively let the developers decide to getting some creative people involved. Instead the spectrum is a lot wider, and I know at least one company that has engaged in a multi-million dollar project to revamp their interface because of the loss of productivity it caused.

The key for any application is the ability to envolve the user in a feeling of trust, comfort and intuitiveness. Allow the user to be able to experiment and try without devastating consequences. The idea of not spending money on corporate app UIs is over, some VPs just have realized that they could get fired over it yet.

There are a lot of lessons I’ve picked up writing the book so far, and with my goal of finishing it, I’m sure there are more to come.

by http://www.sxc.hu/profile/komekue

Most really good consultants spend a significant amount of time in that gray zone between the line on one side which is clearly customer-land, and the other side which is clearly consulting-firm land. However if you spend too much time in that gray zone, you will get hit by a truck-load of issues and complications which can leave you in a problematic state. That truck can come as easily from the customer side as from the consulting-firm side.

I’ve come to learn about myself that I really don’t enjoy the big consulting firm because of the restraints it of the consulting-firm side. On several occasions I’ve been able to work as more than just an independent for a client, but as a pretty-close to full-fledged member of customer-land. This allows me to say things that the customer needs to hear but because of politics others don’t necessarily feel they can say, or simply because you are challenging what has become an invisible assumption.

Whenever I’ve been engaged and earned this type of trusted-advisor role, and a large consulting firm is engaged, I find I end up being in a number of ways the anti-consultant. Not anti as in “in opposition to” but rather anti, meaning the other side of it. The Ying and Yang metaphor works best here.

Part of what anti-consultants do is help both sides drive towards clarity but with a very clear, customer-first perspective. This means thinking like the consulting firm and knowing where the natural desire or higher-up pressure is to inject ambiguity so as to allow negotiating room down the line, and thinking ahead of the customer so as to get certain things that need to be thought through now, done now, so that it isn’t twice as expensive to discuss later.

Most independents aren’t anti-consultants, they are just contractors. They show up for the job, they do what they are asked, maybe they offer some suggestions, and then they go home. They aren’t involved so to speak, they just do what they are asked to do.

Anti-consultants play an important role of helping tear down some of the walls that can start to be built on both sides of the line, and really good anti-consultants are able to make it clear that they are on the side of delivering quality for the customer, a position that sometimes the customer can accidentally abandone.

Some consultants and independents behave as if there is no line, and those in particular tend to go quickly from being trusted to having an air of suspicion. For example I remember years ago when someone was not empowering the full timers, but rather was keeping as much knowledge and power for himself as possible. He tried to leverage that into a position of contractor-like salary with the company, and it backfired. The company couldn’t let him go, but they quickly started reducing their dependency on him. Some would say that he just pushed it a bit too far, but I see it as having had a complete lack of respect for the line.

The line is where you remember that you are there to serve the customer, at the discretion of the customer. The anti-consultant knows that, and takes ownership for what is being brought about as the result of the project. They keep their eye on the prize and try to make sure that everyone, customer and consulting-firm alike, are bringing their best to what needs to be discussed rather than hiding in vagueness and swallowing the best ideas out of concern for repercussions from their own side. The anti-consultant often can be the respected vessel for taking those ideas and getting all parties to listen and potentially accept them.

The line is there, and depending on the level of trust you can live +/- meters from it, but if you lose sight of it, then you lose your frame of reference for understanding what is in the customer’s best interest.

I worked at Microsoft for nearly four and a half years. I have met Steve Ballmer twice, once when he was completely drunk (in my first couple of months at MS) and I was a table away from Bill Gates when he got an award related to a project I helped deliver. In Bill’s case, he didn’t even come over to the team and congratulate us on what we were delivering, or even just to glad hand, nothing. We could see him for a table or so away, that was it. In Steve’s case, the second time I met him, it was to receive an award with about a dozen other people. I seem to recall him quality posing for a photo with all of us and then being out of there. I know when these guys pass on, I’m not going to feel anything more than I would for any other passing I hear about where I don’t know the person, but Jobs, there’s something there.

Steve’s story is fascinating to me after he was removed as Apple’s CEO. He didn’t allow his view of where things could go to be damaged by that, and those who ever used a Next computer would know just how ahead of its time it was. His work with Pixar changed how we think of the monsters in our closets, what our toys do when we leave the room and so on.

The thing that really gets me is that he seemed to really just not care what other people thought. He wasn’t concerned about shareholder value today, now, stop thinking and give out the money. He just tuned all of that out and did what he felt he could bring about.

When I finally got my first Macbook Pro, after leaving Microsoft, I started from the perspective of someone trying to understand a different language and paradigm. Not programmatically, but conceptually. When I got my iPhone I had already been following Natural User Interface approaches and technologies but as I played with it in the first weeks I remember the point where I realized two key things:

1. It took immense vision to see this far down the road

2. It took tremendous skill, vision and discipline to be able to break that down into steps to be realized. Commercially successful steps especially.

I have pointed out many times to people that Apple is not a software company and is not a hardware company, it is a user company. Microsoft makes all kinds of software, and HP makes all kinds of hardware (for now at least), but Apple? They only the software needed for what they want the user to accomplish and the devices are sculpted to that need.

Steve’s tenacity with the cellphone carriers is legend. His view on design and quality being vital equally so. His intolerance of boot time length is yet another.

He will continue to be inspirational, and hopefully he created through leadership leaders who will continue this irreverent personality, the incredible set of skills, and the wisdom to wield them well.

You inspired, you provoked, and you will be missed.

 There are only a couple of real types of corporate cultures when it comes to careers. Whether they say it or not, my experience has shown me that you have those who believe in:

• Stinky Fish - We promote 1 or 2 levels only, then we hire from the outside. The philosophy, subconsciously, is that they need to bring in fresh blood regularly and that they really don’t trust they talent once they’ve been around for a while.
• Cult-y Goodness, or earn your stripes here. This is the philosophy that after you have joined the company that you’re prior experience, no matter what you have done, is no longer relevant and everything needs to be proven here, again.
• Prisoner of the Past. This is where your previous experience is constantly revisited and valued, but wait, there is a draw back if you want to get skeptical about it. The idea here is that you are always tied in some way to your past. If you are a technical person but used to be in sales, well, that sales experience (even though it was 7 years ago) is still of disproportionate weight compared to the 7 years since.
• Momentum. Momentum is where you are either a rising star or a sinking ship. You’re put on a crazy project, you succeed AND people like you, you’re a rising star! You’re put on a crazy project, you succeed but key big wigs don’t like you, you’re so-so or worse. Internal politics are thick in this one because it really comes down to marketing, marketing, marketing. It isn’t really merit baed at all.

Now all of these do have a positive side, for example:

• Stinky Fish – If you are trying to seriously transform the company that you need to think about when you hire in, rather than promote up, in order to continue the shift.
• Culty Goodnees – Some people actually don’t lie on their resume, but it can be hard to tell who those people are. If they show you they can do it once, you know ‘for real this time’, they then most probably can do it.
• Prisoner of the Past – The truth is that your past is of value, and whether or not you want to do it again, it’s part of the wisdom and experience you bring with you. This is of value to the company, and should be of value to you as well.
• Momentum - When you are starting your career or when you are really to slam a career into overdrive, this works to your advantage because it means they more you can do the more the company is going to offer you to do and you are going to get rewarded for it. Those who aren’t doing well can’t usually hide in these cultures.

My friend who asked for advice is in a Momentum culture, but the problem is that he was hired into what I see as a ‘automatic lose’ situation. After 6 months of being hired the management team weren’t leveraging his core skill which was extremely valuable in the marketplace. Promises of leadership, management, driving a key segment of the business were left to grow mold, and when first review time came he got a “Well, you’re still here, aren’t you?” type of pat on the back with those type of alligator smiles you can’t quite figure out.

Now  I think he’s about 2 years in, and while some of what he was promised a couple of years ago is starting to happen, his career just isn’t getting the kick he expects. He isn’t getting the support during review times, there’s the constant mixed messages going on, etc.

So he asked me, for my honest opinion. As I said, that means “Brutal, savage if you must, raw thoughts” opinion. Here’s what I outlined for him.

1. If you are in a momentum culture, you are dead if you don’t have traction after a couple of months. Now the lower on the hierarchy you are, the more time you have. If you were hired right out of university, you can have 2 years. If you were hired at a senior level, then you have about 4 months.

2. If you are moving and shaking and nothing is happening after several months, leave. Momentum cultures that give you no momentum are going to take all that indecision around you and turn it into concrete which will drag you down going forward.

3. You cannot play it safe at a momentum culture company, at best after doing a couple of small miracle jobs or one big one, you can ‘park yourself’ for 6 months as you ride some of the momentum you earned. Play it safe without momentum, and you are telling your career that you don’t need it anymore.

A career that is unmanaged is a terrifying assortment of random acts. You need to understand the culture of the company you are in, what the dynamics are around you, and understand not what is expected of you but understand what is the implied expectation of the top performers and figure out if that fits with whom you want to be. If not, then leave.

And if you’re wondering what this has to do with software architecture and consulting, tons. If you understand your client and their context, then you can better understand how they need to manage information, marketing of internal info, and politics. It’s not just about the technology after all.

As a handset maker, the last thing you want is to keep getting shaken down every couple of months by someone else claiming to have proof that you are violating their patent with Android, especially given that you can’t protect yourself as you don’t really control that intellectual property. But if HP was offering you its operating system, say for $10 per handset with IP protection, hmm… right off the top there’s a financial incentive and then secondly, you’re getting protection. This sounds like a much better deal.

Google’s Android and HP’s WebOS aren’t in the same class and category as Apple who makes you think it’s about the device, but it’s really about the fully connected experience (note that I am indeed giving Microsoft the ‘Ron Paul – major US news network treatment’, i.e. ignoring it).

HP seemed to be Yet Another company to think that it just needed to make a slick device, and that’s the way things used to be, before Apple got its second coming of the Jobs and did to the retail software space what I feel IBM did to the enterprise services space two decades ago.

If HP is going to get anything out of its Palm purchase and WebOS investment, I think it’s really going to have to look at licensing FAST so that it doesn’t get labeled a has-been even before it’s had an opportunity to ‘be’. If it does this, then it has the opportunity to displace concerned/worried companies regarding the “maybe this was a bad idea, this Android thing.”

At the last game of the season, with only 15 minutes left, and her and her team were exhausted as it was a scorching day and they only had 2 substitute players. The other team had, literally, a tent to block the sun and about ten substitutes (4 kids + goalie at a time are on the field).

She was tired, moving slowly, like the rest of her team, but then something clicked. All of a sudden, she was everywhere. She took the ball off players, was shooting for the goal, she was intercepting passes, even parents from the other team (it was her old team from last year) were cheering her on. It was unbelievable, and unfortunately the rest of her team wasn’t there to support her, but she became a one girl army for those 15 final minutes. I would have thought someone was exaggerating if I hadn’t been there to witness it myself.

When I asked her what happened (after I’d let my super enthusiastic Daddy Pride calm down), she told me that all of a sudden, all the stuff we’d been talking about made a different kind of sense. And most importantly, she noticed that the girl coming towards her was just like she and I practiced. So she took the ball off her, just like we’d practiced, and then BOOM she was off.

This got me thinking about driving excellence in teams and in particular, about a friend of mine nicknamed Mo…

by http://www.sxc.hu/profile/svilen001

Years ago I was at a company Christmas party. I was new to the company and hired into a leadership position. I noticed that there was one guy, who seemed rather bright, who was drunk. People were ignoring him or making fun of him when he turned away, but when they looked at him they encouraged him in that way that I suppose if you’re drunk you think they are laughing with you but if you aren’t drunk you can see it is laughing at you. I had a couple of people come up to me and apologize to me for having arranged things such that I was sitting opposite him.

I’ll speed things up by saying that I decided to take a different approach than those around me, and his performance went from being “we need to fire this guy” to “this guy is on fire!” in the span of a couple of months. He had his click moment as well.

Mentoring people, hiring the ‘right’ people is all about different layers of strategy, some luck, and figuring out how you can help people motivate and change themselves. You can’t change someone, not really, you can help them change themselves because otherwise as soon as you step away, the wheels will come off. Maybe not at first, but when they do, the person themselves won’t know how to put themselves back together again unless they did it in the first place.

One of the things that I found crucial in opportunities like Mo’s, and that I witness in moments like that of my daughter, is that the top players aren’t there. There is no one’s shadow in which the person can hide, and it also means that there isn’t anyone who is trying, consciously or not, to stay the king of the hill. This allows other people to rise up and take themselves down a path they weren’t willing or able to go down before. It’s a very challenging thing to do, to invest in people to that point, to create a team environment that doesn’t necessarily have Super Heroes so that you’ve stacked the deck in your favour.

All too often I see project bids by consulting companies (I’ve participated in a lot of them) stack the deck to win the business and then not think about the people they are actually sticking on the team to deliver it. The classic “That’s a delivery problem, we’ve solved the sales problem, we got the business.” I shake my head even just writing this. The team’s that usually get put forward in those situations are put through such stress that you might think it was a growth opportunity, but it isn’t. Growth isn’t about putting a gun to someone’s head and telling them they have five seconds to do something that is nearly impossible and then patting them on the back when they do it. You know why? Because you haven’t taught them anything about helping others, never mind that 4 out of 5 will fail in that situation and you won’t realize that you are creating conditions for failure.

What my daughter’s soccer experience showed me is that there are plenty of moments in one’s professional and personal life, where you will see an unexpected return on a long term investment you are making. It takes a lot of skill and energy to invest in the growth of people, but you won’t know when they have built up enough energy in their rocket boosters to be able to pull on what looks like a miracle. The best part of it will be seeing their face as they realize that they are doing it.

When iTunes had started to redownload everything, I tried to pause things, so that I could spread it out over the month. Why? Because I figured that I was probably going to go way over my bandwidth limit if I didn’t manage it. The worst part? Some things ended up re-re-downloading without my control, putting me 180 Gigs over my 122 Gigs a month limit. The software just wasn’t made to allow me to manage this, because the assumption is of course, that you have all the bandwidth you need. That got me thinking this morning.

If my iPad and iPhone were also downloading the content from the internet as per the coming iCloud scenario, would that have been 3x? I think it would have. I think this is a real issue if this is the case, and that would logically have to move to a device to device synch that would use the cloud as the source of truth, but otherwise think about the bandwidth impact on the individual. If I decide to download a 2 gig movie, and I have a laptop, an iPad and an iPhone, that means I’m going to be downloading 6 gigs of material?

For the carriers and Internet providers this is a double edged sword, good in that it makes people consume more bandwidth and allows them to charge people for downloading more but then comes the other side which is that pricing pressure will limit how much they can recoup out of that, and their infrastructure costs are going to go up. Is Apple planning on buying Cisco, because if so this makes a lot of sense. Otherwise this really comes across as an absent minded miss, an assumption of a Microsoft order about the behaviour and expectations of consumers in terms of their bandwidth and the costs of that bandwidth.

I don’t know, am I missing something? For me the optimal strategy should be that my devices should synch with each other, that one gets the new content and that it then shares it with my other devices. Now if I grabbed my iPad and headed off with it, without having allowed the new movie I downloaded to my iPhone to synch to it, then I should be allowed to select that I want to download it from the Cloud, if I so choose. It shouldn’t be automatic.

I know this can sound very user interventionist, but I think that there’s some level of involvement that’s got to happen because otherwise it’s not just me that’s going to be surprised at a suddenly much higher bill at the end of the month.

by http://www.sxc.hu/profile/plex

I’m fortunate to work on easily the largest project I have ever worked on in my life, I’m one of about a dozen architects and my responsibility isn’t a classical one. My responsibility is really pulling together overarching views of the works of others as well as including all the natural missing common elements or things that don’t fit in other places. The nature of my document is just that, effectively an architectural summary of what is to come, with elements like integration and business understanding included. The thing that I kept having difficulty with was why were we kind of all over the map when it came to what we were expecting. This was our third meeting, and it rather than spending a couple of hours going through a couple more pages, we decided to try and figure this out from a couple of different perspectives.

During that fruitful discussion which allowed some people to have a chance to fully explain what they wanted and then to be able to have it debated and potentially identified as really belonging to another document or already existing in my document or potentially needing to be in my document, my pattern recognizer started to spin up and then DING! I pointed out that there were a couple of things that we had misaligned, between all of us, and everyone agreed.

1. Reader Expectations. We had different expectations of when you would read this particular architecture document. This doesn’t sound like much, and on a $50,000 project it doesn’t really matter. But what about a $1 Million project? What about a $10 Million project? $100 Million? What was ignorable on a small scale becomes a massive issue as you scale that up.

You need to be able to build the required knowledge set in the reader from their introduction to the project through to my document and beyond. I was originally told this would be (I’m simplifying here) the 3rd document you’d read, after which you’d read about the rest of the architectural pieces in detail. Someone else thought it would be the 10th document, after you’d read all of the pieces then you’d come here to see how they all played together. Others hadn’t thought about the reader at all.

It’s interesting to me to see what I take into account the further I go into my career. A software architecture document used to clearly mean one thing, and then it meant a superset of that, but now it doesn’t necessarily mean a superset of any of that, it really is about aligning the reader’s understanding with where we are going relative to what needs to be accomplished to solidify the understanding that came before it, present and solidify the message that’s critical at this juncture, and then to draw the map of where you are going from here. Everything else is just technical detail really.

2. The Assumed Reader. Another thing that I started thinking about was who was the assumed reader. Now this is an important distinction because if you asked everyone the question of “Who are the readers” they will correctly identify the different types of readers. But when you listened to their comments, you could start to hear a pattern and thereby identify who was the actual reader they were constantly thinking about when they were presenting their comments.

Calling this out, writing it on the board and making sure it doesn’t escape everyone’s attention can be a great way to manage this.

3. Length Matters. There is a famous quote that I don’t know who it belongs to, that the brain can only absorb as much as the backside can endure. Don’t put together a 500 page document and expect the reader to be able to read it, understand it and most importantly, remember all of it. You’re better off having a small series of documents.

Architecture documents in particular are notorious for getting wildly out of control. I’ve seen consultants for huge consulting companies just keep growing the size of the document because they are billing a lot for it, rather than having the philosophy of delivering a kawasaki ninja motorbike. “That’s it?” might be the first reaction, but then when you show the content and how efficient it is you will probably get “Wow, okay, yeah, perfect, wow, yeah, wow.”

There’s a lot of psychology I find that goes into these documents, and it’s more than just understanding what your stakeholders are expecting. It’s about understanding how they absorb and interpret information. It’s about understanding who is going to read the document so that you make sure it is written for the proper set of knowledge and skill assumptions. It’s also about delivering a quality job without leaving the client feeling like they are too dumb to ask questions.

All too often I find that we the Smart Pants Architects can forget things like, you know, readers. Thankfully experience tends to cure that.

by http://www.sxc.hu/profile/danzo08

What Could Possibly Go Wrong?

One the Essential To Dos is to stop for a moment, step back, and look at your architecture from a supportability and troubleshooting perspective. When we build this system, how will we be able to know if it is not working as it is supposed to, and what are the essential human processes that go along with it. There is little point in sending out alerts if you don’t have the log files, and there’s little point in creating log files if they are not kept and no one looks at (or analyzes) them on a regular basis.

If you don’t take the time to stop and look at things from a “how am I going to get under the hood of this best” then you are going to really wish you had when things aren’t going right, and trust me, that point always happens. Sometimes it will only eat a weekend and lots of hours, other times it will become a permanent feature of the system.

It’s Secure Because I Said So

Another Essential To Do is looking at things from a security perspective, and that is a really loaded thing to say, I know. But understanding the different levels of sensitivity of the data your storing, and hunting for any time you hear “Yeah, but I’m sure company ABC stores this data, as a matter of fact I KNOW they do, and they don’t have a problem doing it.” Why hunt for those? Because it’s usually part of the argument of not spending any time, effort or money on putting any security on a solution.

As a concrete example a couple of years ago I was working with a client who was storing Visa numbers and I was asked to look at meeting Visa’s required standards for doing that. I analyzed it, determined a solution, and presented it back to my customer. The changes we would need to make were reasonable, and it was a business essential to have the Visa stamp of approval. When the client looked at what needed to be done, they really just went lazy on it, and said “Well, you know, I really can’t see us having an issue so you know what, we’re going to pass on doing this.” Wow, from business essential to “don’t bother” in about a week. Now, let’s step into it a bit further.

What actually happened is that the client, when they realized that there was stuff that they were going to need to do in order to meet the Visa standards, started to think that maybe, just maybe, they could be liable if they didn’t have security all over the place. That they could be shown to not be ignorant of such measures and instead be negligent, and that would be a bad thing in potential court, right? So, instead, let’s do nothing. Feign ignorance and march on according to industry standard practices (of which of course there aren’t any).

Shh, of course we like quality, but we like dates more!

When I worked at Microsoft we really engrained the idea of a Zero Defect Mentality in what we did. You can laugh or snicker all you want, but the idea is that there wasn’t an idea of a Good Bug or an Okay Amount Of Bugs, zero was the only happy number. I’m sure some would have argued -1 would be better, but that’s a different thread of discussion.

I keep running into situations where architects or the technical team have an opinion of what should be happening or where things should be going, but they really don’t say anything to stop the direction they helped initially set in motion. Very few, if any, want to wave their hands and say “Okay, over here! I learned new things, and I have a new opinion because of that.” Instead people prefer to act like the politicians they often despise, which is to stick to their guns no matter how little sense it makes as you go forward.

Many times I have planted my feet and pulled a “YOU SHALL NOT PASS” putting my job on the line so that a serious issue or set of issues gets properly discussed. Without exaggeration we shut down an entire project team of 60+ developers back in 98 for a week, which I have to say freaked our customer out but nowhere CLOSE to how much it freaked out our management. Trust me, pretty quickly everyone was happy that we did it because we delivered a face saving means for everyone to change their opinion.

I actually suggested to a client that they consider offering an amnesty meeting, where people can either anonymously submit or maybe just stand up and say the crazy, corner-of-the-brain, thoughts that they have that could be in conflict with any of the accepted wisdom to date. Doing this on a regular basis should get people more in tune with their real opinions, and for those that keep flip-flopping with I Told You So… those you can fire because they are just CYA people and you’ll be able to see it more easily.

Whatever you put the focus on, consciously or not, is what your team will optimize for. If it’s dates, then don’t be surprised to find that the doors are glued on, the tires are bald and the engine? Well, you said you liked the twin-squirrel engine right? …

by http://www.sxc.hu/profile/Mattox

You may have read lately that HMV, who once really dominated the music store scene, has sold off most of their stores in Canada (article here). This is more than symbolic of the end of music stores, and we’re not that surprised really. What you may not be aware of, unless you’ve walked into one lately, is how big box book stores are basically getting out of the book business.

If you’ve walked into a Chapters/Indigo lately, and you think about it for a minute, you’ll notice it has started its transformation to a Lifestyle Store. This has been happening bit by bit, and it has always been epitomized for me by the little zen sandbox and rack, sold at what I think of as a book store.

While it feels premature for big box book stores to be reducing their dependence on selling glued together pieces of trees with dirty spots on them (that’s a book with pages with writing), you can understand their position. There isn’t a lot of margin to be made, and going to a bricks and mortar establishment versus ordering online doesn’t have an allure for everyone, particularly when you show up (because online it said there was a copy in the store) and there isn’t, or at least no one can find it. “Should have ordered it online.”

As Chapters/Indigo makes its way further down the path of a LifeStyle Store, you’ve got to ask yourself what that really means. As they expect to more and more books and music and videos to be sold online, you’ve got to wonder what this means. I mean, a coffee shop can only be so big. And who really wants a little book store meets Bed, Bath and Beyond meets Zen & The Art of KnickKnacks meets StarBucks? It doesn’t really justify the same square footage of floorspace in my mind.

The biggest thing that I think gets lost with this change is the art of browsing. The art of just walking through an area, while maybe you wait for a friend or loved one to find the book they are looking for, and you happen upon something that catches your eye. As a software architect, the “Browse” use case has gone from VITAL to “if we have to” in the eCommerce world. And it makes sense, because usually someone has already done the browsing (at a store) and therefore is looking to pinpoint what they want to buy. Remove the store (effectively) and you now have a use case that you have a tradition of disregarding that now needs to be considered (and I’m willing to bet no one is really going to believe until someone like Amazon does it, and then you’ll be all “I KNEW IT!”). Now to be clear, I don’t mean a top down, categorical search which is what browsing is today, I mean the real peruse, the wander, the random walk, the appreciating the layout of the place and knowing that you haven’t been “In that corner of the store since they changed where everything is placed.”

The last thought on this that pops into my mind is how these big box book stores consumed the economic landscape, cleaning out almost all, if not absolutely every single last, small bookstore. Now with these big box book stores changing direction, I’ve got to wonder if we’re going to start to see that Cyberpunk-esque return of the neighbourhood used book store, where you can actually find a book, on PAPER. Wow, so cool and novel, I’m sure that grandma would appreciate one of these.

There will always be the connaisseur who wants the paper book, and I have to say that I am bothered by the idea that I can’t browse my own book collection when it’s digital because it’s in several different applications, and I think a lot about format-longevity and the ability of the Amazons and what not being able to ‘de-sell’ me a book, removing it from existence, without me being able to say anything about it. This isn’t that important today, but in the near future, that also can be used for revisionist history in real-time. Remember 1984 and Brave New World? I thought they were stories about futures where everything was controlled, but I just re-read the latest updated copies, turns out they are graphic novels of cooking shows. Huh.

The real concern I have for these big box book stores is that I don’t really believe they are going to be able to make the transition, I don’t think that there is sufficient need for LifeStyle establishments, and I could easily be wrong, but I think we’re going to see the classic case of something that grew, like bacteria, to the point where it has consumed everything and sadly it can’t evolve past it for it was designed with one purpose in mind, and therefore it must pass on, as so many things before it.

Bye bye big box book stores, you’re future was written when the Kindle came out to wide spread adoption.