Paul Graham knows startups. In addition to founding one himself, he is investor and coach for dozens more through his VC company Y-combinator.

In this essay, he writes about a pattern he's seen with some of the more successful startups. The ones that make it tend to start off benevolent. They make something people want, often in opposition to older, bigger, less ethical businesses. When we think of such idealism and struggle, Google comes to mind, but Graham reminds us that Microsoft was once this way.

Surely Microsoft isn't benevolent? But when I think back to the beginning, they were. Compared to IBM they were like Robin Hood. When IBM introduced the PC, they thought they were going to make money selling hardware at high prices. But by gaining control of the PC standard, Microsoft opened up the market to any manufacturer. Hardware prices plummeted, and lots of people got to have computers who couldn't otherwise have afforded them. It's the sort of thing you'd expect Google to do.

Microsoft isn't so benevolent now. Now when one thinks of what Microsoft does to users, all the verbs that come to mind begin with F. And yet it doesn't seem to pay. Their stock price has been flat for years. Back when they were Robin Hood, their stock price rose like Google's.

When you're small, you can't bully customers, so you have to charm them. Whereas when you're big you can maltreat them at will, and you tend to, because it's easier than satisfying them. You grow big by being nice, but you can stay big by being mean.

Detail of Winter by Hendrick Avercamp, Rijksmuseum, Amsterdam

You get away with it till the underlying conditions change, and then all your victims escape. So "Don't be evil" may be the most valuable thing Paul Buchheit made for Google, because it may turn out to be an elixir of corporate youth. I'm sure they find it constraining, but think how valuable it will be if it saves them from lapsing into the fatal laziness that afflicted Microsoft and IBM.

The curious thing is, this elixir is freely available to any other company. Anyone can adopt "Don't be evil." The catch is that people will hold you to it. So I don't think you're going to see record labels or tobacco companies using this discovery.

Being good is good strategy

Graham's hypothesis, then, is that by being good and staying good, old companies can flourish like young ones.

According to his essay, being good helps startups in three ways:

1. It improves their morale- If you feel you're really helping people, you'll keep working even when it seems like your startup is doomed. Oftentimes, this is what it takes to succeed. Almost every startup reaches a point where it is near death. Having a real purpose --something more than a paycheck-- can help them survive when they might otherwise fail.
2. It makes other people want to help them- We like to root for the little guy, especially when the little guy is doing something good. That's why we support the local free trade coffee house instead of the Starbucks that just moved in down the block. When people hear that someone bad is trying to stop the little guy from being good, it makes them really want to help them. This applies even when you're not so little anymore. Apple and Linux spring to mind.
3. It helps them be decisive- The business of making things is complicated; too complicated to for one to reasonably sustain a web of ulterior motives and falsehoods. So don't. When faced with a choice, there is only one choice: do the right thing. We've said something similar before, but I like the way Graham puts it. Being good is the only algorithm that scales.

Don't just not be evil

Most explicitly benevolent projects don't hold themselves sufficiently accountable. They act as if having good intentions were enough to guarantee good effects.

So I'm not suggesting you be good in the usual sanctimonious way. I'm suggesting it because it works. It will work not just as a statement of "values," but as a guide to strategy, and even a design spec for software. Don't just not be evil. Be good.

Graham is a polarizing figure, but I think we can get behind what he's saying here. In fact, we've said it before: in the long run, ethical behavior tends to win out.

On Saturday, I proposed something to ponder over the weekend. Namely, I suggested that we all think, over the weekend about the possibilities of a brand and design strategy that takes into account multiple degrees of control, in the various registers of user experience.

This is a deep and complicated question, and whatever strategies will be used to resolve it will likely involve brand strategies that are downright alien to the ones we know today. Why this might necessarily be the case, I thought, may give us some deeper insight into moving forward on this difficult problem. After all, diagnosis is one thing, treatment is another.

Read More...

Vista has problems. Paul doesn’t like it; Apple grabs market share while making fun of it. So what does Microsoft do? Fight back with science!

Microsoft recently conducted its own study where they showed users a new Windows operating system called “Mojave”. Subjects reported that they liked the new OS better than their current one (presumably XP). The catch is that it wasn’t a new operating system, it was Vista.

It reminds me of when the tobacco industry published its own research back in the 50’s. Suspicious? You bet.

Read More...

Microsoft Research just published a paper revealing a new type of web search ranking — BrowseRank [pdf] — as revealed at last week's SIGIR (Special Interest Group on Information Retrieval) conference. (Thanks for the heads-up James).

The gist of the proposal is that search results are ranked by how long users tend to stay on a single page vs. the amount of incoming links a page has (i.e. PageRank).

Read More...

Ever since I first read Vista's UAC security prompt was designed to annoy you at Ars Technica, I've had a chip on my shoulder about it.

User Account Control is easily one of the most hated features of Windows Vista, according to readers. The seemingly endless stream of UAC pop-ups, asking you to confirm this action or that action, just get in the way (and aren't particularly zippy, given the screen redraw)...

At the RSA 2008 confab in San Francisco, Microsoft admitted that UAC was designed, in fact, to annoy. Microsoft's David Cross came out and said so: "The reason we put UAC into the platform was to annoy users. I'm serious," said Cross.

Microsoft's idea here is that they can transfer the burden of not annoying users to developers. This seems almost reasonable when you say it like that, but the reality is this: In order for users to not be constantly frustrated by these pop-ups, developers are forced to jump through hoops to design their software in such a way that privilege elevations aren't needed in the first place. (UAC is basically a lumbering, graphical sudo.)

This means that Microsoft's best attempt to solve the problem of viruses and malware infection for Vista ensures that a) no extant software is cleanly compatible with installation, b) every software company designing for Windows now has to refactor their installers, and c) also, everyone else has to be creative enough to figure out how to do everything they need to do without requiring elevated permissions (good luck, Norton!).

Read More...