{"product_id":"the-pebble-and-the-avalanche-isbn-9781576752944","title":"The Pebble and the Avalanche","description":"The Pebble and the Avalanche shows how the Internet, the auto industry, music downloading, and other rapidly evolving industries are all connected by the same dynamic -- disaggregation. Moshe Yudkowsky shows why this dynamic is crucial to survival in the 21st century marketplace, and how you can use it to bring about change in your industry.\u003cbr\u003e\u003cbr\u003e Disaggregation means taking things apart -- for example, the break-up of AT\u0026amp;T, which greatly improved phone service. But there are more subtle examples. Separating information from the storage medium -- digital music doesn't rely on records, tapes, or CDs; digital photographs don't require paper; and digital movies don't need film -- has enabled millions of people to create and share their work (and others') far more easily than ever before, with enormous implications.\u003cbr\u003e\u003cbr\u003e Think of this process as an avalanche: at the top of a mountain, rocks are jammed together in a solid mass. Pry some of these rocks loose and you will unleash a tremendous outpouring of energy that sweeps everything from its path. The same thing happens in technology: with the right innovation, you can pry the pieces of technology apart and unleash an outpouring of powerful ideas that shake apart whole industries.\u003cbr\u003e\u003cbr\u003e Yudkowsky details exactly how disaggregation works, describing five different ways of taking things apart, and the many ways it can be used to generate new innovations. The Pebble and the Avalanche provides strategies for successfully adapting to a disaggregation revolution, and points towards the future, identifying several industries that are about to be completely transformed by disaggregation.Preface \u003cbr\u003e Acknowledgments\u003cbr\u003e\u003cbr\u003e Part I.   Disaggregation: Why the Sum of the Parts Is Greater Than the Whole\u003cbr\u003e Chapter One  Disaggregation: The Driving Force of Revolution\u003cbr\u003e Chapter Two  Starting Revolutions: What to Take Apart\u003cbr\u003e Chapter Three  Benefits of Disaggregation: The Revolutionary’s Bill of Rights\u003cbr\u003e Chapter Four  Four Stages to Revolution: Devise, Interface, Accept, Evaluate \u003cbr\u003e\u003cbr\u003e Part II.   Case Studies: Two Hundred Years of Revolutions\u003cbr\u003e Chapter Five  From Horses and Buggies to Jet Planes: The Revolution in Manufacturing\u003cbr\u003e Chapter Six  The Automobile Takes On the Railroads\u003cbr\u003e Chapter Seven  The Internet’s Permanent Revolution\u003cbr\u003e\u003cbr\u003e Part III.   Business Strategies: How to Cope, How to Fail, and How to Predict the Future\u003cbr\u003e Chapter Eight  Interfaces and Standards: The Nuts and Bolts of Modern Civilization\u003cbr\u003e Chapter Nine  Coping with Surprises\u003cbr\u003e Chapter Ten  Marx, Lenin, and Gates: Failed Counterrevolutions\u003cbr\u003e Chapter Eleven  The Role of Government\u003cbr\u003e Chapter Twelve  Predictions: Three Revolutions in Progress\u003cbr\u003e Chapter Thirteen  Getting Started, Finishing Touches\u003cbr\u003e Notes \u003cbr\u003e Index \u003cbr\u003e About Disaggregate\u003cbr\u003e About the AuthorMoshe Yudkowsky received his Ph.D. in condensed matter physics from Northwestern University. After two years as assistant director of the Nuclear Magnetic Resonance Laboratory at the Department of Physics at Northwestern University, Moshe joined Bell Laboratories as a member of the technical staff. Moshe worked on a variety of projects at Bell Labs, including the first national deployment of AT\u0026amp;T’s “robotic operator.” After leaving AT\u0026amp;T, Moshe joined Dialogic Corporation as a senior system architect. Moshe worked with speech technology companies to find ways to simplify their transition to Dialogic hardware.\u003cbr\u003e Moshe left Dialogic to found Disaggregate, a technology consulting firm that helps clients understand, create, and apply revolutionary technology.\u003cbr\u003e In parallel with his work at AT\u0026amp;T and at Dialogic, Moshe chaired the Automatic Speech Recognition Task Force of the Enterprise Computer Telephony Forum, an industry trade group. In his final year with the forum, he served as technical chair of the organization.\u003cbr\u003e Moshe is a founder of the Midwest Speech Technology Association, a professional organization centered in the Midwestern United States, and serves as chair of the organization. He is a member of the board of Applied Voice Input\/Output Society, an international professional organization.Chapter One\u003cbr\u003e Disaggregation: The Driving Force of Revolution\u003cbr\u003e\u003cbr\u003e 3\u003cbr\u003e One of the first safety rules I learned while hiking in the mountains was to never toss pebbles or stones down the side of a mountain. There’s the danger of hitting someone—a pebble that falls a thousand feet can do an impressive amount of damage. The other danger is starting an avalanche. It’s a tiny little pebble, true; a pebble that size can dislodge only another few pebbles, true; but if enough pebbles start to tumble, soon the large rocks start to move, and your one little pebble triggers a landslide.\u003cbr\u003e\u003cbr\u003e An avalanche releases energy—a really impressive amount of energy. Shift a few pebbles, take apart the structure that’s holding the rock formations together, and suddenly you release an incredible, unstoppable force that transforms the landscape. Avalanches snap trees in half, shove boulders out of the way, and cut a huge swath out of forests. However, despite their massive power, when avalanches stop, you’ve still got the most of the pieces you started out with. All the pebbles that started off at the top of the mountain fall to the bottom—the pebbles aren’t gone, they’re just arranged differently—and now you have a nice collection of interesting pebbles, conveniently located here at the bottom of the mountain. They can be cut, polished, and made into jewelry; they can be used to build walls and pave garden paths. They’re still useful in many ways, and so is all the other debris that’s been brought down by the avalanche.4\u003cbr\u003e\u003cbr\u003e This book is about how this same idea applies to everyday life—technology and the business of technology in particular. Technology and the business of technology have structure; if you take apart that structure you can unleash an avalanche that has tremendous energy, one that can change the entire landscape. Avalanches smash old businesses into smithereens; sometimes the businesses vanish entirely, and sometimes a few pieces survive. Old, comfortable business and technical relationships snap under the stress of the avalanche. New opportunities appear in the empty spaces left behind.\u003cbr\u003e\u003cbr\u003e Not only that, but when the avalanche is over, you’ve still got, for the most part, the pieces of technology you started with in the first place. And just like the pebbles in an avalanche, these pieces of technology can be improved, used over again, and made infinitely better than before. These pebbles are no longer jammed together in some lump that’s impossible to use, and they’re not hidden under larger rocks where it’s impossible to get at them. They’re accessible, lying around waiting to be picked up. A small pebble is much easier to handle than a large rock. Pebbles are easier to polish, cut, decorate, and fit into a beautiful mosaic.\u003cbr\u003e\u003cbr\u003e What are the pebbles that make up the structure of technology? They include the usual things we think of: nuts and bolts, electronics, manufacturing plants, and chemicals to name a few. Software, processes, and work flows are just as important to technology, even though they’re not tangible. Other equally important pebbles—ones that can also be taken apart to start an avalanche—are the social pieces of the technological landscape. These pieces include government regulations, business ideas, intellectual property law, patent rules, and dozens of other social structures that govern the business of technology, how the pebbles can be used, and what structures can be built in the first place.5\u003cbr\u003e\u003cbr\u003e \u003cbr\u003e Taking Things Apart: Recent Revolutions\u003cbr\u003e\u003cbr\u003e \u003cbr\u003e Here’s a list of some revolutionary changes that happened over the past thirty years. Each one unleashed an avalanche and completely changed both technology and the business of technology.\u003cbr\u003e\u003cbr\u003e The Internet, which provided obscure services that later became quite popular, such as e-mail and Web browsing.\u003cbr\u003e AT\u0026amp;T’s divesture into separate long-distance and local phone companies, which ultimately drove the price of long-distance service to near zero.\u003cbr\u003e Personal computers brought the benefits of computing to everyone, not just the lucky few.\u003cbr\u003e The World Wide Web transformed how we share information.\u003cbr\u003e Open source software provides excellent—and often free—software and challenges the entire software industry to compete and improve.\u003cbr\u003e Telephone calls over the Internet are about to make classical telephone systems utterly obsolete.\u003cbr\u003e The items on this list don’t seem to have much in common, do they? In fact, every single one of these important revolutions started by taking something apart:\u003cbr\u003e\u003cbr\u003e \u003cbr\u003e The Internet? Before the widespread use of the Internet, each manufacturer had its own idea of how to transfer data between computers. This made it difficult, or sometimes practically impossible, to create networks or send interesting information—e-mail, music files—between computers from different manufacturers. The Internet describes a common set of methods to transfer data between computers, which broke an entire piece of technology out from under the manufacturers’ control and made it possible to send data between any two computers on the Internet.\u003cbr\u003e AT\u0026amp;T? Well, that’s easy: the company broke apart into separate entities, a change in the business of technology that had profound implications for the technology itself. Competition has since driven the price of long-distance calls to be next to nothing, and new services are everywhere.6\u003cbr\u003e Personal computers? The parts that go into computers stopped being custom-made for each different model; instead, the relationship between computer model and, say, the disk drive was broken and all disk drives became commodity parts. Computers now run standard operating systems—the operating system is no longer part and parcel of the hardware, as it was in the old days.\u003cbr\u003e World Wide Web? Prior to the development of the Web, you couldn’t just send someone an electronic document and expect them to be able to read it. When a supplier sent me a catalog on a disk, I had to install a special “viewer” program to read the catalog—and each and every supplier had its own program! There was a strong connection between the document and the viewer program. With the Web, electronic documents can be viewed using any Web browser because the Web breaks the connection between a document and some particular brand of viewer software.\u003cbr\u003e Open source software? The functions of writing, documenting, selling, maintaining, and improving software can be performed by separate groups instead of by the more traditional single company.\u003cbr\u003e Telephone calls over the Internet? Instead of paying the phone company to route your call and provide you with the bandwidth to carry your voice, Internet telephony lets you separate the two—you can use any Internet connection to carry the call.\u003cbr\u003e\u003cbr\u003e There are more examples, from the past thirty years, the past two hundred years, and the past two thousand years; we’ll cover some of them later in this book. The basic idea remains: many important revolutions in technology started by taking things apart. These revolutions act as avalanches, as tremendous forces that sweep aside the old, clear the way for the new, and leave interesting and important pieces behind.\u003cbr\u003e\u003cbr\u003e \u003cbr\u003e Disaggregation: The Science of Taking Things Apart\u003cbr\u003e\u003cbr\u003e \u003cbr\u003e “Taking things apart” is a nice expression, but it doesn’t really give the exact flavor of the process, so I use the term disaggregation to explain the idea. Here’s the explanation.\u003cbr\u003e\u003cbr\u003e Often a particular technology, or a business of technology, seems to be made up of one solid piece; but if we inspect it carefully we can see that it’s really made out of individual pieces—pieces we can take apart if we’re careful. The business of telephone service is an excellent example. In the United States until 1984, and aside from a few small competitors, AT\u0026amp;T did everything: it provided long-distance service and local service, installed and owned the wires on the city streets, installed the wires in homes and businesses, and even installed and owned the telephones in people’s homes. There was no technical reason why it had to be that way—the electric company didn’t insist on owning and installing everyone’s electrical appliances!—but through social and legal conventions, all these functions were aggregated, that is, stuck together, into one entity.7\u003cbr\u003e\u003cbr\u003e How do I describe taking AT\u0026amp;T apart? I don’t want to use words like destroyed or smashed because it was a very careful processes. Nothing was destroyed; all the equipment remained in place—in some buildings, the workers painted white lines on the floor to show that AT\u0026amp;T’s equipment was “here” while the local telephone company’s equipment was “there.” Telephone service wasn’t disrupted—calls continued without any interruption. The best way to describe taking apart AT\u0026amp;T is to look at the results. The various pieces of phone service are no longer aggregated into one solid mass—they are disaggregated into separate entities. The pieces are no longer bound together with the social glue. Disaggregate is the word I’ll use throughout this book to describe this process of taking things apart, of breaking connections, and of dismantling the infrastructure of technology and its businesses.\u003cbr\u003e\u003cbr\u003e Did disaggregating AT\u0026amp;T make phone service better? Absolutely: top to bottom, left, right, and sideways. The first advances came in long-distance service: the quality of connections improved at the same time prices dropped. Then came new services that AT\u0026amp;T would never have offered, like prepaid phone cards. And look at the different styles of telephones! In the old days at AT\u0026amp;T, all telephones were black; today they come in every conceivable shape and color, and a few that are outright ridiculous. These benefits are typical of disaggregation, and I’ll outline the general case in the next chapter.\u003cbr\u003e\u003cbr\u003e AT\u0026amp;T exemplifies another important lesson about disaggregation and revolutions. As AT\u0026amp;T disaggregated into smaller companies and the technology fell into separate hands, the bonds—interfaces—between the various pieces were carefully preserved. Local telephone companies still routed calls through the long-distance network; telephones that people purchased and installed in their own homes still were able to get dial tone from the local telephone companies. This didn’t happen by accident—it was carefully planned. Successful disaggregations in technology, and the business of technology, repeat this pattern over and again: you must provide at least the basic pre-disaggregation functions of the technology (e.g., the ability to make phone calls), and to do this requires that you pay careful attention to interfaces between the pieces left behind after disaggregation (e.g., telephones still plug into the phone network).8\u003cbr\u003e\u003cbr\u003e The goal of this book is to help you understand, create, and apply revolutionary technology. In the remainder of Part I, I’ll discuss the details of disaggregation: how to understand what disaggregation does; what benefits to expect from disaggregation; and, given a problem, how to generate solutions based on disaggregation.","brand":"Berrett-Koehler Publishers","offers":[{"title":"Default Title","offer_id":46300014182629,"sku":"NP9781576752944","price":27.95,"currency_code":"USD","in_stock":false}],"thumbnail_url":"\/\/cdn.shopify.com\/s\/files\/1\/1842\/7735\/files\/9781576752944.jpg?v=1767740897","url":"https:\/\/k12savings.com\/products\/the-pebble-and-the-avalanche-isbn-9781576752944","provider":"K12savings","version":"1.0","type":"link"}