This is going to be a followup to
yesterday's post about Firefox. But first I want to tell a little story to set up an analogy.
My first child was born in 1970. My wife Karen and I named her Shanti, so that gives you some idea of the then-current zeitgeist and where we saw ourselves in all that. I raised goats and organic vegetables. Yes, me. Shocking, I know, but true. And in keeping with that "alternative lifestyle" (though we didn't know that phrase yet; we just called ourselves freaks; with some pride, I should add), we of course did the Lamaze training in preparation for Shanti's arrival. Pant-blow, pant-blow. Yeah, it was a little weird, but back then, what wasn't?
So some months later, when the contractions were five minutes apart -- to quote from the literature -- we set out for the hospital. Karen was ushered into the process with all due regard for "her condition," but when I asked where I could change into scrubs and where the labor room was, the nurses looked at me funny. Real funny.
"The waiting room is down that hall," they said. Not adding, but I could tell they were thinking: you freak!
"You don't understand," I said in my best understatement. "We're doing Lamaze."
Now the whole nursing station was tuned into this man from Mars who'd just told them that he and his wife were "doing Lamaze." Was it a new kind of illegal drug? Had he just said the equivalent of "we're doing acid"?
After much confusion and rolling of eyes -- theirs and mine both -- our doctor was consulted. To the nurses astonishment, he told them yes, I was to be admitted not only to the labor room, but to the delivery room as well.
"Well!" The nurses dispersed with a tacit yet nonetheless clearly communicated "Harumph," their authority not only challenged, but recklessly overridden. They'd lost.
So I got to be there to see Shanti take her first breath. Hold her in my arms. Welcome her into the world. The barriers that had excluded men from this experience were clearly all wrong. And they fell.
Three years later, we had a second child. Jesse. Much more conventional, you're thinking. Yeah, except that his middle name is Mountain. I was still doing acid and Lamaze. And here comes the point of this little tale. When we arrived at the hospital this time, all the nurses had been trained in natural childbirth techniques. My participation raised not a single eyebrow. Lamaze births had, in those three intervening years, become standard procedure. No one had lost. Everybody had gained.
OK, ready for the analogy? This may be a little painful at first, so follow my lead here. Pant blow. Pant blow...
Three years ago, it was next to inconceivable that a mere Microsoft employee -- and by "mere" I mean one not drilled in the Key Point dunning techniques of Corporate "Communications" -- would someday speak publicly and positively about a competing company or product. But that day has come, and that "mere employee," now magically transmogrified into an actual human being is Robert Scoble.
As he took a little friendly fire in my previous post, I want to reproduce here -- in full, links and all -- what he posted about an hour later...
Hi Blake Ross (and Asa and others on the Firefox team): Congrats on hitting 25,000,000 downloads of Firefox. You did what few people have done: you changed the world and got people to download and install your application.
At Demo yesterday I saw Firefox all over the place. I saw far far far more Firefox icons than I saw Linux or Macintosh icons.
In just a few months your app has become one of the most used Windows applications in the world. My hat's off to you!
And a few minutes earlier than that one,
he wrote:
Hey, did anyone notice the 400 comments left over on the IE Blog yesterday?
Nah, don't start a conversation. Why would someone want to do that? Heh!
The big story here is not another browser war (not that I have anything against one; as I said yesterday, what fun!), but rather the conversation that has finally started between people inside companies and people outside those companies. The net made this inevitable, as
the cluetrain manifesto predicted in 1999. Did
Doc Searls,
David Weinberger and myself
really believe it would ever happen? I can't speak for Doc or David, but I know I was skeptical.
Something has begun here that is hugely significant. It doesn't mean there won't be any pain, but -- pant-blow, pant-blow -- maybe we can get through it, one contraction at a time. In some cases, of course, there will be complications and the (spin) doctors may have to resort to massive administrations of morphine. (Oh do please hit that link!)
The point is not the process, though. It's the product. And the product in this case is neither Firefox nor Internet Explorer. The "product" is the conversation itself. People talking to people. Just us chickens here, boss!
How could we ever have let it become otherwise? Now that we've got a toehold on this baby, let's not let it happen again.
Because if the Lamaze learning-curve example was an analogy for this recent exchange, so is this recent exchange an analogy for something larger, something not yet quite in sight. But it needs to come into focus, and fast. There are far more pressing issues in the world today than which operating system and which browser we'll use. Is it too much to hope that the conversations we're learning how to have today constitute a training ground for how we'll keep this planet hung together for another 1000 years? We'd better hope it's not too much to hope.
Pant blow. Pant blow...
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