gapingvoid: "cartoons drawn on the back of business cards"

post-geek-dinner update

[Loic and I giving our "Thank you for coming" schpiel to the crowd etc. Photo courtesy of Francine Hardaway.]

It was so lovely to see everyone last night. Thanks to all for coming. Hope everyone got home with their livers intact etc.

[Loic's Flickr photos of the evening are here.] [Dan Farber's photoset.]

Hugs. Kisses. Smiles. Rock on.

s.f. update

[Evelyn holding up a cartoon I drew for her. With Evelyn is her friend, Rich, who just moved here from New Orleans a week ago. Lovely guy.]

Having an extremely groovy Monday in San Francisco. Highlights would definitely have to include finally getting to meet the legendary Evelyn Rodriguez in person for the first time, hanging out over coffee, and talking about art, the universe and everything.

I'm jetlagged and tired. The geek dinner is in three hours. Off to take a wee nap. Later...

[REPEAT AFTER ME: "Hugh, the lucky, lucky bastard got to hang out with Evelyn Rodriguez and I didn't. I am insanely jealous etc etc etc."]

san francisco, monday morning

[View outside my hotel, circa 6.30am this morning.]

After many adventures, including a most welcome diversion in Chicago, I arrived safely at my hotel last night. Slept like a baby. All good.

Besides the geek dinner with Loic tonight [not to mention, 115-odd other people attending, Jesus], my main task for the next two days is preparing my presentation for the keynote I'm giving at the Real Estate Connect SF in two days.

This is my first big keynote gig ever. So yeah, I'm pretty prepared for it, but I'm currently nervous as hell. I guess jitters at this stage are normal.

At week's end I'm heading for Miami, where a geek dinner is happening on the 5th. Alex is organizing it. And I understand my favorite Florida sex bomb, Manola is coming. Hurrah!

I'm buried in work and Starbucks for the next 24 hours or so while I get my keynote properly organized. See you on the other side...

[As always, for anyone trying to reach me, my number while in the US is 646 704 4509.]

sf update

[Sunday Night:] My plane landed in San Francisco about an hour ago. At my hotel. About to go to bed. Will be online again in the morning...

downtown chicago

[The Sears Tower and the Chicago Tribune building in the distance.]

I'm hanging out in downtown Chicago for a couple of hours before heading back to O'Hare to catch my evening flight to San Francisco. Meeting Leah Jones for lunch. [UPDATE: Leah blogged about our lunch date here.]

As always, for anyone trying to reach me, my number while in the US is 646 704 4509.

greetings from suburban chicago

[The view outside my hotel window. Near O'Hare Airport, about 20 miles outside of Chicago. I missed my connecting flight to San Francisco last night. British Airways kindly paid for my room. Catching another flight in about 3 hours.]

greetings from heathrow airport

This picture was snapped about two minutes ago... Flying out of London in about an hour.

All going well, I'll arrive at my hotel in San Francisco around midnight tonight.

This is not set in stone yet, but it looks like I'll be moving out of London sometime in the next few months, and moving back to my cottage in the English boonies [Cumbria]. Don't have an exact date yet. Hell, it could be a couple of years. See where the chips fall.

Newcastle International Airport is less than an hour's drive away...

[UPDATE:] Missed my connecting flight. Drag. Staying overnight in Chicago. Hopefully be in SF by lunchtime tomorrow.

It's funny, people give blogs and bloggers a lot of stick, but all the blog thing has ever done for me is given me lots of money, freedom, job security, and personal sovereignty. I often wonder if the folks giving us bloggers stick have as much of the former as I do. Often it seems to me that they don't. Therein lies the rub.

See y'all when I get to America.

u.s. phone number: [646] 704 4509

Just to let you know: My plane does not arrive in SF till tomorrow, i.e. Saturday night.
I was hoping to get in town in time for tonight's Techcrunch party, but Alas!

I'm in town till the 4th of August. Then in Miami till the 8th.

If anyone's looking for me there's always e-mail or Facebook, but as always, my phone number in the US is: 646 704 4509.

Looking forward to seeing everybody again...

sf geek dinner: restaurant confirmed

This Monday's San Francisco geek dinner with Loic and myself now stands at 108 people confirmed showing up, with 66 "Maybe's". You can see everybody who's coming here on Facebook.

The restaurant can hold up to 120 people, and is charging us $40 per head for food, not including beer, drinks etc. To make paying the tab less of a hassle, we're asking everybody to pay in advance via Eventbrite/Paypal. You can do it here.

Date
Monday, July 30, 2007

Time
6:00 pm PT - 11:30 pm PT

Location:

Foreign Cinema
2534 Mission Street
San Francisco, CA 94110

[Google Map]

"hugh's law"

Hugh's Law: "All online social networks eventually turn into a swampy mush of spam."

Which explains why early adopters are always fleeing online social networks [e.g. LinkedIn], only to join a new one [e.g. Facebook]. They're fleeing the spam.

[For a far more learned and authoritative thought on the subject than my own, go read Clay Shirky.]

semi-official: steve ballmer loves the blue monster

[The Blue Monster makes it down to Australia. Backstory here.]

From Steve Clayton:

I also had a photo opportunity with Steve Ballmer, Kevin Turner and Jean Philippe Courtois and took the opportunity to hand Steve my Blue Monster business card. His words - "I love it - thanks". I didn't quite have the gumption to give it to Bill :)

fresh meat!

From the "When It's Time To Bitchslap The Newbie" Department. Just got the following e-mail:

My name is [*Name Witheld*], one of staff members at [*Name Witheld*], an independent production company in New York. Our digital media division has just launched a new blog, and would like to link our readers to yours. In exchange, we ask that to be added to your blog roll.

Here is our link. If you have any other questions, please let me know.

www.[*Witheld*].tv/

Thank you,

[*Name Witheld*]

Hugh - First of all, sorry for starting off on the wrong foot and creating a bad first impression with you and your readers. After more than 10 years in traditional media, we are learning this new way of talking and we're just taking our first steps. So thanks for not biting our heads off.

Secondly, a big thank you to the folks who commented - especially Rachel and Joaquin - for pointing out what we did wrong and how we can go about doing it right.

Like everyone else, we're learning as we do and your post is a lesson for us. And this time we've learned our lesson.

Cheers

Johnny Boston
CEO Raw Digital

Yeah, I know, this blogosphere culture has all these strange rules and rituals that are hard to navigate. Tell me about it.

But what's interesting to me is, by leaving the comment below, you actually made your company look good in the longer term. Turned a negative into a positive. This is what they mean when they say "Join the conversation". Cool. Thanks. Like I said, interesting...

techcrunch party poster

Spending the day signing the limited-edition lithographs [1,000] for Friday's Techcrunch party in Menlo Park, CA. They're being being shipped off this afternoon.

That's a picture of the SF peninsula, by the way... with the blue "X" roughly indicating where in Silicon Valley the party is taking place [Thank you, Googlemaps].

Thanks to Stormhoek for sponsoring it etc.

sf geek dinner, monday 30th july

Loic Le Meur and I are throwing a geek dinner on a week today on Monday, the 30th of July, at 6pm in San Francisco.

We're still deciding on a venue: Loic's looking into it as we speak.

Loic has just moved to SF, and I'm in town for a week. If you're around and fancy coming, please go sign up on the Facebook page.

Hope to see you there!

[Update:] Some really cool people are coming. Gabe Rivera, Mike Arrington, Robert Scoble, Deb Schultz, Oren Michels, Jeff Clavier etc. I'm so happy!

[Update:] So far 60 people have confirmed they're coming. Wow. Not as many as the 200 or so who turned up for Scoble's London geek dinner 2 years ago, but still pretty huge.

as her date...

when you're a jet...

From Mark Earls:

While you and I might find a gang of adolescents disturbing or frightening (and they might enjoy engendering that response in us), the truth is that they are merely doing what all humans do: gather together for safety, reassurance and cooperation.

Toddlers understand leadership, somebody they respect showing the way, teenagers expect leadership while adults work better under real leadership and no managing.

Every MBA course should have a section where the students are responsible for little people, in a kindergarten, for at least a month.

[Bonus Link:] Richard Edelman visits Auschwitz, and writes movingly about it.

dazzle

hallam foe bloggers' screning q&a

Back in June I organised a bloggers' screning of the film, Hallam Foe.

After the screening I moderated a Q&A panel with the director, David Mackenzie, the leading man, Jamie Bell and the leading woman, Sophia Myles. It was a good evening all round.

Here's it is, up on YouTube:

PART 1.

PART 2

PART 3

The movie opens in the UK on August 31st, so please feel free to spread the word. Dave Mackenzie is a very old friend of mine and I REALLY, REALLY REALLY want this film to be a hit. Thanks.

an increasingly exponential world

I recently managed to get my hands on some Hallam Foe schwag, two one-inch lapel badges. Very cool.

The phrases, "A Little Odd" and "Complete Arsehole" are taken from the original movie trailer. You can watch it here.

My spies tell me an interesting little factoid: It seems that the people wanting the "Complete Arsehole" badge outnumber the people wanting the "A Little Odd" badge by a HUGE margin. At least ten-to-one.

Yet one more reminder of what an increasingly exponential world we live in. Do I prefer the "Complete Arsehole" badge over the other one? Sure. Do I prefer it enough to where I think it's ten times "better" than the other one? No.

But what I think doesn't matter. To the victor go the spoils. Get it right, and your idea spreads like a killer virus. Get it wrong, and watch it whither and die, even if the idea wasn't all that bad to begin with. Life is asymmetrical. Life is unfair.

[Disclosure:The film's director, David Mackenzie is one of my oldest and dearest friends. A very talented filmmaker, he also directed the 2003 cult Scottish film, "Young Adam".]

sign up to facebook or consign your career to the dustbin of history etc etc.

Paul Walsh gives about as compelling a case for business folk to sign up to Facebook as I've ever seen.

I concur with Paul's case pretty much 100%, so if you're not on Facebook yet, I'd recommend signing up.

wake me up

the rules have changed

e.r.p. and social media are not the same thing, dammit

In response to my recent post about the lines that separate ERP and social media becoming blurrier over time, my old high school friend, Hamish, who works a lot with SAP, talks about ERP and Social Media, and the place where the twain shall never meet.

In SM, the message that is received, read or whatever, is not pre-determined for any purpose, it could be a blog entry about how cool sunsets are, or why LA sucks, the network does not care. All interpretation of the message is done by the human receiver. The language it is written in, the content, the references to external events and culture, are all parsed by the human. The software is just the conduit, or the environment in which the discussion takes place, if you will.

In ERP by contrast we have a whole load more stuff to do, as all interpretation is done by the software, or more accurately by rules written in software by a designer who is not in situ to intervene in any ambiguous situations. Is the message a request for spare parts for a car factory delivered by EDI, or is it holiday request from an employee? At the network and delivery level it is not possible to tell. The ERP software has to have a lot of additional information and processing to determine this, with a constrained and consistent data model, with specific processes that will create different outcomes under different initial conditions, etc.

[UPDATE:] Sigurd leaves a comment:

And as I said a bit earlier: "Actually it boils down to the definition of what 'social software' is..."

As Chad says - take the flexibility and transparency inherent in SM and add structure to the flows if required and design so that all data and events and whatever is properly captured. Add reporting capabilities and voila SM as ERP ;)

(Have more to discuss with Hamish there though as much of the rules-requirements in ERP or process systems is a leftover from the good (?) old days of pen and paper inherited "event documentation thinking" - but that would be a another story!)

power

religion is evil

my name is

the virus spreads...

MSFT's Steve Clayton on the Blue Monster: "This is about Microsoft on our terms - open to all and owned by the world. Rock on."

[Meanwhile:] The groovy cats over at MSFT's On10 have pinged the Blue Monster story.

Bearing the tagline, "Microsoft: Change the world or go home," the Blue Monster represents the vision and the passion of the company's employees: so passionate about what they do, if they can't make the world a better place, they should go home. Maybe the monster is just what Microsoft needs to draw more attention to the fact that, despite the lawyers and stockholders, they, too, have passionate employees who feel like they are changing the world in a positive way.

[UPDATE:] The Blue Monster finally makes it onto Techmeme. Thanks, Sarah! Very cool.

ideal working conditions

no longer angry

all moments

you only love me

mean, mediocre

just by the way

[Bous Link:] "Connected, Not Chanelled." JP Rangaswami: "But back to Microsoft. Maybe Hugh’s Blue Monster is having an impact after all. My faith in humanity is slowly being restored."

untitled 070707

pardon me

it's doc's world. we just happen to live in it.

As part of this SAP report he's writing, Shel Israel interviews Doc Searls with ten questions. Totally awesome stuff. Doc in fine form etc.

5. How has business fundamentally changed because of social media? How will it change in the coming years?

The walls of business will come down. That's the main effect of the Net itself. Companies are people and are learning to adapt to a world where everybody is connected, everybody contributes, and everybody is zero distance (or close enough) from everybody else. This is the "flat world" Tom Friedman wrote "The World is Flat" about, and he's right. Business on the whole has still not fully noticed this, however.

hallam foe screenings across the u.k.

There's a wee competition going to win free tickets to Hallam Foe screenings across the UK. Details here. I'm told the odds of actually winning a ticket are actually quite good, as they've got a lot of seats going.

[UPDATE: Check out the new trailer. Rocks.]

[Newbies: Hallam Foe is a film directed by my old high school friend, Dave MacKenzie. I highly recommend it. Official homepage here. Blog here. In cinemas August 31st.]

the time of the a-list is dead. thank christ. not a moment too soon.

From Robert Scoble:

One trend that bloggers don’t want to talk about? A number of my blogging friends have seen their traffic go down lately. They assume that their readers are off in social networks. I think they are absolutely right.

In the past, say, from the late 'nineties until the last six-twelve months or so, Bloggers' readership grew IN PROPORTION to the social networks that were built up around them. Hence the phenomenon of the "A-List".

But if we're honest, looking back, it was always these circumventing social networks that were the really interesting part of the equation. The actual blogger in question, less so. Even if in our celebrity-worshiping culture, we sometimes forgot that.

Then suddenly, along comes stuff like Twitter and Facebook... et Voila! Suddenly, social networks start being successfully created without the "A-Listers" having to act like "Hubs" [or "Human Social Objects", if you want to get REALLY technical]. Suddenly, the need for A-listers to arbitrate "Who the Cool Kids are" [and who they aren't] is rapidly and thankfully diminished.

I totally applaud this development. Whatever your blogging strategy may be, I personally believe that on average, you're far better off going off to somewhere like Facebook and building your own social network with like-minded folk, based on your own collective interests, your own collective passions and own collective sense of merit, than loitering around the Blogopshere, waiting for some rockstar like Scoble, Arrington, Cory etc to link to you... and hoping in vain that the latter will somehow transform your life. It won't. Just ask my blog buddies, Kent Newsome or Seth Finkelstein, who always have a sharp and and insightful word to say on the matter.

The time of the A-List is dead. Thank Christ. Not a moment too soon.

[UPDATE:] Lovely afterthought from Rex Hammock:

When you set up a Facebook account, you’re not weighted down with the responsibility of being a publisher or writer or pundit or whatever it is that keeps most people from setting up a blog. On Facebook, you’re not a Facebooker — you’re just you. You can connect with people based on something other than linking to what that person just observed...

blue monster coffee morning, august 3rd

The "Friends of Blue Monster" are having their first coffee morning in London, on August 3rd. See here for details. Hope to see you then!

[UPDATE:] 30 people confirmed so far, with another 34 "Maybes". Rock on.

the $900 pram. wow.

My Facebook buddy, Michelle Penny is trying to get the word out on her new website, Baby Gift UK.

Baby Gift UK is a site which helps to take the pain out of buying gifts for the new baby that has just arrived on the scene (and also gives some suggestions for the parents - with the sleepless nights they have ahead, they'll also need a bit of spoiling too.

blue monster update

The "Friends of Blue Monster" Facebook page now has 225 members, at time of writing.

Wow. That seems like a lot. Agree? Disagree?

e.r.p. being built around social media, not the other way around?

My friend, Shel Israel is doing some consulting work for the large German ERP software firm, SAP. To aid the cause I answered ten questions about social media that he e-mailed to me. Here they are below:

1. You've been around the social media scene for a long time. How has it emerged from your perspective?

It has emerged very unevenly, yet constantly. Six years of blogging later, and I still am utterly unable to predict what or who is going to be "the next big thing". Will Twitter win? Or Jaiku? Something else? Nobody knows. A year ago MySpace looked unstoppable. Now there's Facebook. Three years ago LinkedIn was all the rage. What will happen to Google in 10 years? Your guess is as good as mine. Sometimes it's just easier to wait for the future to arrive on your doorstep than to try to foresee events.

2. Where do you think social media will be going over the next 5-10 years?

I think it will continue to gravitate to where it has always gravitated towards i.e. Faster, Cheaper and Easier.

The most interesting thing to me recently has watching the peaking of blogs. For a couple of years there they were the biggest story in media. Now their cultural influence seems a lot smaller. People finally figured out that yes, doing a blog well is actually very time consuming. Not everybody wants to be Robert Scoble- Hell, I'm not sure if Scoble wants to be Scoble all the time, either [Joke!]. Which created a lot of opportunities for less time-consuming web products.

This is us seeing Social Media evolving way from the time-guzzling "Celebrity Model", where people emulate "broadcasters" on a small scale, towards something that is far more useful to most people i.e. something that allows people to make friends and talk to their friends more easily.

This is why I find Facebook so interesting. The fact that it was invented by college students doesn't surprise me.

Think about it. Every college kid has a tight-knit group of friends [Think, for example, Animal House or St. Elmo's Fire}. Facebook was designed from the very beginning to allow groups of pre-existing friends like these to communicate with each other better. Quite different from the "broadcast model" of blogs. It's more collegiate.

3. How is social media emerging in the UK and EU v the US?

The UK blogging scene always struck me as relatively smaller and geekier than the US scene. Brits have always struck me as more cautious at embracing the internet compared to the Americans, and I imagine this will continue. That being said, the London Facebook network is the second largest in the world, bigger than New York's. I'm guessing this means they don't mind using social media for the FRIENDS THEY ALREADY HAVE, and are less willing to use Social Media to make new "online friends". Then again, the French really took to blogging, I suppose because it's an ideal medium for people with strong opinions- and the French do like a good, strong conversations. The Germans I understand never took to blogging on the same level as the French or the Brits, however I'm told they're really into Wikipedia- a more collaborative medium that respects and defers to authority.

I met a lot of really great bloggers in Denmark, the couple of times I've been there. Really smart and passionate. I suppose when you live in a very small country with few resources, the incentive to adopt an extremely cheap and easy global medium is huge. Similar to why it helps to learn English.

4. Let's narrow the conversation down to business. Are European businesses
embracing social media? What about just in the UK?

E-mail is a part of office life. Nobody questions its function [even when one has 800 unread e-mails waiting in one's inbox]. We're not quite at that stage yet with Social Media. The vibe I get from corporates who ask me questions at conferences is not one of certainly and enthusiasm, but more of a head-scratching, "Well, everybody else seems to be doing it, this is kinda the future, so I suppose I should be paying more attention, but..." I hear the word "But" a lot. It's still early days. In five years time I expect to be hearing "But" a lot less.

5. What tools are they embracing? Do various cultures impact the tools that
are gaining in popularity?

They are embracing all sorts of tools. There a lot of them out there, and nobody, repeat nobody can predict how much traction they'll eventually get inside a company culture. So what the savvy social software engineer will do is try lots of things and see which snowball rolls all the way down the hill, rather than put all of the eggs into a single, oversized basket.

6. Do you see a difference in the way global enterprises are embracing
social media v. small to medium sized businesses?

Big businesses will always have trouble with anything that subverts hierarchies, for hierarchy is the glue that holds large organizations together. Small businesses have an easier time with blogs and whatnot, for there are fewer layers to keep happy. Secondly, small companies are for the most part private companies. Large companies generally have public shareholders. Different rules apply.

7. What similarities/differences do you see between C-level acceptance of
social media and mid-management?

Mid-Management is in the unfortunate situation of wanting to "get it", knowing it's the future, whilst at the same time, they're paid to maintain the status quo. One thing management often underestimates is JUST HOW DISRUPTIVE social software is. I see lots of pain in that future. Hopefully it'll end up being worth it in the long run.

The main impact Social Media has brought to me was seeing my business model, over a period of about five years, evolving from a "Hierarchy" privilege model to what Jon Husband calls a "Wirearchy" model.

I started my career in the advertising business, working as a "creative". Back in the 1990s, there was very much a pyramid-shaped hierarchy in that industry, with "rock stars" on the top, and the "grunts" on the bottom. Every creative's business model seemed to be about getting the rock stars to notice you. In order to get paid noticeably more money you had to do all the normal stuff- win awards, land a job in a "sexy" agency, get your ad on to The Superbowl etc. Everyone knew who the rock stars were. Everyone knew what they were up to. And all you could do is hopefully one day get the opportunity to make your mark, the same way the rock stars had- INSIDE the existing pyramid.

Now, as a blogger, I feel completely oblivious to all that. Now I have a unique social network, kept coherent with Social Software, where the business model is not about rising up some imaginary status ladder, but "mashing up" people I know.

For example, I have people in my network who work in the wine business. I have people in my network who work for Microsoft. So maybe one day I'll end up doing something wine-related with Microsoft. Or not.

Suddenly I find myself without "50 people who want to take my job", simply because what I do is unique to myself, unique to my own social network. It's as unique as any human fingerprint. And the positive effect is has had on my own personal sense of sovereignty is staggering.

So let's say over the next, I dunno, ten, twenty, fifty years, this social network paradigm gets more prevalent. Will we still need large companies? Will we still be able to compete with all that unwieldy, energy-guzzling, calcifying corporate structure? Or will everything become "a loose confederation of skunk works"?

It's too early to tell, of course. Instead, focus on this: The main story about social software is not about how it allows you to carry out existing company functions, just more quickly and easily. It's bigger than that. In the future, companies will grow around social software, not the other way around. And your client, SAP, had better be ready for this. Because it's already starting to happen.

8. What are the biggest barriers to social media acceptance in EU business?

The barriers are the same as they've always been. Dinosaurs have a lot of money and power. And dinosaurs don't like dying.

9. How is social media changing culture?

Social media can only change the culture to the extent that it can change the nature of work. Which, as it's already starting to happen on a huge scale, is actually quite a lot.

10. Additional Comments?

One more thought, which pertains directly to your client. I firmly believe that the line that separates social media and ERP is going to start getting VERY blurry, and really soon. I can see a not-to-distant future where even the larger ERP solutions are built around social software, not the other way around. And I can see that day arriving in under five years. We live in interesting times.

[UPDATE:] Sigurd pipes in on Point Number 10:

As software "models real life as we see it" the ERP train picked up the well structured processes and left the loose ends to fight for themselves. But yesterday Hugh argued "that the line that separates social media and ERP is going to start getting VERY blurry, and really soon... I can see a not-to-distant future where even the larger ERP solutions are built around social software, not the other way around". And I agree simply for the reason that they should be one, there are no reasons why the world puts a line in the sand between structured and loose ends processes.

Actually it boils down to the definition of what "social software" is.

Social software "enables people to rendezvous, connect or collaborate".

But a short circuit happens in our brains when we "see" what social software is using those three terms: It invokes the image of an open marketplace or gathering where the efficiency requires freedom and little structure and thus quite the opposite of what ERP entails.

[UPDATE:] SAP's Thomas Otter pipes in about the false distinction between "business software" and "consumer software":

Creating barriers to entry through complexity is not a viable strategy. Creating competitive advantage through simplicity and fun is. Widgets, mashups, tagging, community and so on are not just cute. They are fundamental to the future of enterprise applications. It isn’t just the technology, it is the mindset.

scoble meets the blue monster

Heh. Robert Scoble has a Blue Monster sticker on his laptop. This pic was taken while he was waiting in line to get his new iPhone, so I'm told.

The sticker was given to him by Steve Clayton. Shel Israel got one, too. Steve tells me they were quite a hot commodity when he got them made, and his supply ran out very soon.

Robert's never mentioned The Blue Monster on his blog, as far as I'm aware. Not in any great detail, at least. Do I find that surprising? Not really. I can totally see how he'd much rather write more about his new job at PodTech, rather than about his old job at Microsoft. But I was delighted to see him joining the Facebook "Friends of Blue Monster" group.

I also notice the two Jaiku stickers. Very cool. "Social Object, Baby!"

the 1949 olivetti typewriter

[The 1949 Olivetti MP1 typewriter]

Of all the hundreds of lectures I attended in college many years ago, one stands out more than any other, one I remember more than any other.

It was a lecture on Industrial Design. More specifically, it was a lecture on the 1949 Olivetti MP1 typewriter.

Basically, what makes the Olivetti typewriter so iconic in the history of design are those smooth, sexy, curvy lines. What the lecturer referred to as "The Humanizing of the Machine".

What makes it interesting is that these sexy, curvy lines are, unlike say, Art Deco, completely functional, not decorative. Forms follows function, but in a feminine, non-masculine way.

Before Olivetti, nobody thought of industrial design in "feminine" terms. Now they do. Just look at Apple and the work of Jonathan Ive.

What got me thinking about this? Working with Microsoft got me thinking about this. I believe that if Microsoft wants to re-invent itself, if it wants to keep evolving, growing and prospering long-term, I keep thinking to myself, what Olivetti did to the typewriter, Microsoft has to do to itself.

Exactly. "The Humanizing of the Machine". Welcome to The Blue Monster.