One Thousand Doors

First of all, I’m a big fan of the _idea_ of open source hardware (OSH).  (For reference, an excellent compendium of the idea has been growing here at the P2P Foundation wiki.) The notion of a global OS design database, a distributed network of fablabs, and a market driven not by the price signal but by collaborative communication, is very alluring — especially to nerds.

But I have lingering doubts…Certainly the movement is increasingly technologically feasible, and likely to create some sort of fringe guild ecology over the next 10 years.  But from an economic and social viewpoint, much remains to be sorted out in any rigorous way.   I should clarify here that my goal is to critique the OSH movement’s ability to have a meaningful impact for the welfare of the world’s poorest, or to meaningfully change the ecological footprint of the global economy.  Key to this dual goal are speed and scale: the OSH economy must grow at least as fast as the ‘traditional’ economy, and preferably should outpace it by an order of magnitude.   In other words, how can the OSH community lay plans to grow revenues by 25% per year for the next 10 years?

And in sorting out whether OSH has legs, we need to think about whether it will be able to harness the three forces that drive successful product/service growth: a business model that keeps investment dollars coming in, keeps producers gainfully employed, and keeps consumers happy.  I’ll look into possible business models for OSH in a later post.

Dick Armey weighed in on behalf of the Hayekians against the stimulus bill with a WSJ editorial last week.   Beside his proud reference to the Laffer Curve thesis (meh), he also rests most of his thesis on this idea:

“The problem with government attempts to manipulate the economy through fiscal policy — spending that takes resources away from those who are productive and redistributes it to politically favored interests — is that it is audacious. It assumes that government knows better how to spend and invest than individuals acting in their families’ best interest.”

Now I get the argument…and I am generally in agreement: more money in the consumer’s pocket is just and smart policy.  But Dr. Armey certainly wouldn’t argue that “individuals acting in their families’ best interest” would ever create public works, public education, NASA, Yellowstone Park, the Armed Forces, or the Pell Grant program?  Or would he?  Does he have a political theory of how self-interest can create public goods?  I’d love to hear it.

Furthermore, Hayek and Armey assume ‘normal times’ in the economy.  Do Hayekian tax cuts solve the problems facing a massively indebted, credit-frozen, psychologically-unstable economy?  Are they cure-alls for recessions generally?  If there are empirical examples of this, I’d love to see them.

Ideology over pragmatism is a dangerous choice for all points on the spectrum.   It is unfortuntate that Dr. Armey has chosen this path at a terrible time in our economy.

Cisco "EnergyWise" Smart Grid Software

This move by Cisco has already been blogged a lot, but I thought I’d comment from the perspective of someone who’s worked with a small smart grid startup: Cisco is going to eat small smart grid startups for lunch.

Their new flash demo certainly features lots of Oz, but it doesn’t take long to realize that they’ve been putting some thought (and cash) into this.  Their software appears to have a simple, user-friendly aesthetic, and offers the broad functionality that small startups struggle to engineer: device scheduling, predictive budgeting, user-, office-, and campus-level analysis, and capacity to track hundreds, if not thousands of networked devices.

Of course, the hardware at the other end of this dreamscape is vaporware, too, but for those small startups seeking to corner the software platform of the smart grid space, this certainly can’t be a good omen.