Stop the Perpetual Beta Phenomenon...
Stop the World, I Want To Jump Off!
Really!
By Nicholas Ashton, CEO/CIO, CommSmart Global Group
The perpetual beta phenomenon is a natural effect of a lack of purposeful execution.
Jeneva Ray, who is part of a solutions think-tank with GLIA, shows examples can be drawn with stereotypical Silicon Valley teams.
“It's common among Silicon Valley incubators and Venture Capitalists (such as Y Combinator, seed for startups) to require that the founding team is balanced - that it have the business know-how as well as the technical know-how. These are contrasting, but complementary skills. Technical know-how easily leads to many changes - the "perpetual beta", for example, and without the business aspect easily falls apart. It's not hard to imagine a great website designer and a great database developer collaborating with great results but the little effect - it needs more than great ideas and a product to make a business.”
Now that we have an idea of what doesn't work, let's look at examples of success.
We shall use Google as an example.
Google knows that it's a business first. The company's biggest resource is its people, and its bread and butter are advertising. It encourages employees' involvement and innovation in new fields and makes plans to make the ideas a profitable reality. This is what created the vast proliferation of other Google properties. Some succeeded wildly (like Ad-words), and were refined from HTML-only templates to a pioneering interface. Other ideas failed before they became reality (like Buzz and its transformation into what became Google+). Still, other ideas have been extremely slow to pick up but have a great vision (like Google Checkout), and some ideas are still in the skunk-works (like Google Glasses was about two years ago). The difference is - too often - execution strategies, and the quality of the strategy significantly affected the future of the product line. Investment becomes so high and entraps the ability to go to the market and earn the revenue to continue.
Apple is also a great example. It created some unprofitable but inspiring products (like the Newton), and it created some wildly profitable products (like its iPod/iTunes and the now the Apple Watch, which has become a comprehensive platform), and it even created some average products (like the PowerPC Macintosh). The significant difference in its offerings is, again, execution.
Bringing home the Bacon, so to speak, with no excuse to my many Muslim and Jewish friends.
Execution strategies can come in many flavors. Some strategies work, and others don't, and others are assumed to not work. This is another topic entirely, but the worst thing you can do is to not have a direction at all.
Let us now turn the direction away for highbrow technology business to street-level problems and societal blight. Yes, there is such a stain on our landscape that others only wish could be swept under the carpet.
Many of you close your eyes and turn your back on the issues that will close your doors and possibly, end your life!
It is said, urban decay (also known as urban rot and urban blight) is the process whereby a previously functioning city, or part of a city, falls into disrepair and decrepitude. It may feature deindustrialization, depopulation or changing population, economic restructuring, abandoned buildings, high local unemployment, fragmented families, political disenfranchisement, increased crime, and a desolate, inhospitable city landscape. Social rat holes that house people who really do not deserve this cloak of despair.
Since the 1970s and 1980s, urban decay has been associated with Western cities, especially in North America and parts of Europe. Since then, major structural changes in global economies, transportation, and government policy created the economic and then the social conditions resulting in urban decay.
Many have politically attempted to make a change, sadly the ways and means are personal to the political group and the underlying motive means failure.
It is back to perpetual beta and the end is never in sight and taken to a real solution that can bring these neighborhoods to the level of competency. Livable, social acceptance, reduced or removed crime, removal of the drug supermarket and more over the intimidation.
That has a means to stop! Listen… The Pied Piper is here…
A little-collected history first, in the United States, the white middle class gradually left the cities for suburban areas because of higher crime rates and perceived danger caused by Colored-American migration north toward cities after World War I (the Great Migration)---the so-called "white flight" phenomenon.
Some historians differentiate between the first Great Migration (1910–1930), numbering about 1.6 million Black migrants who left mostly Southern rural areas to migrate to northern and Midwestern industrial cities, and, after a lull during the Great Depression, a Second Great Migration (1940 to 1970), in which 5 million or more Blacks moved, including many to California and various western cities.
Between 1910 and 1970, Blacks moved from 14 states of the South, especially Alabama, Louisiana, and Mississippi, to the other three cultural (and census-designated) regions of the United States. More townspeople with urban skills moved during the second migration. By the end of the Second Great Migration, Blacks had become an urbanized population. More than 80 percent lived in cities. A majority of 53 percent remained in the South, while 40 percent lived in the North and 7 percent in the West.
From the 1930s until 1977, Black Americans seeking borrowing capital for housing and businesses were discriminated against via the federal government legislated discriminatory lending practices for the Federal Housing Administration (FHA) via redlining. In 1977, the US Congress passed the Community Reinvestment Act, designed to encourage commercial banks and savings associations to help meet the needs of borrowers in all segments of their communities, including low- and moderate-income neighborhoods.
Later urban centers were drained further through the advent of mass car ownership, the marketing of suburbia as a location to move to, and the building of the Interstate Highway System. In North America, this shift manifested itself in strip malls, suburban retail and employment centers, and very low-density housing estates. Large areas of many northern cities in the United States experienced population decreases and a degradation of urban areas.
Inner-city property values declined and economically disadvantaged populations moved in. In the U.S., the new inner-city poor were often African-Americans that migrated from the South in the 1920s and 1930s. As they moved into traditional white European-American neighborhoods, ethnic frictions served to accelerate flight to the suburbs.
Early government policies included "urban renewal" and building of large scale housing projects for the poor. Urban renewal demolished entire neighborhoods in many inner cities; in many ways, it was a cause of urban decay rather than a remedy. Housing projects became crime-infested mistakes. These government efforts are now thought by many to have been misguided.
For multiple reasons, some cities have rebounded from these policy mistakes. Meanwhile, some of the inner suburbs built in the 1950s and 60s are beginning the process of decay, as those who are living in the inner city are pushed out due to gentrification.
Without an identity, no one can gain a foothold, let alone a life that is worth living. It is not that folks are owed a living, it is the fact all human beings should and will have a chance to succeed. Today. It is on both sides of the tracks, White and Black, lack of money through economic downturn sees no color, nor there should be differences with a dividing line between people. It is affecting all colors, classes, and creeds and the sooner others understand this, it will and is changing.
The entitlement generation is over, the hands may still extended, by cities and government are broke! There is no more available and we have a different real solution which will be a cohesive team effort close the increased crime gap, unemployment woes and placing trust, respect, and pride on the front porch for all to see.
Our first change is in the controlling of crime. Right now, it is a “them and us” situation with bullying, intimidation, drug dealing, stealing to feed criminal habits and pure inhumane treatment of our follow man and woman. Children are not just affected by what goes on around them, behind the closed doors, where domestic violence is rife, sexual abuse is part of the norm and a chance to survive is slim to none.
Through those child’s eyes, the world is as it is, a total mess and they right now know no difference. That is about to change in the zip codes of shame and the surrounding areas are targeted for social change.
The Pied Piper Project is a proven community and neighborhood model that when implemented with existing city and municipality laws, social code and the community itself. They can see what can occur when a focused spotlight is highlighting the wants, needs, and demands of the residents. Normality, like it, used to be in the times when people cared about each other.
The anti-social behavior has to be curtailed, stopped and removed for the neighborhood to ever have a chance to move forward. It is the logical professionals in public safety that have to show the management of the city, from the Mayor down, why it has to change now, right now for any city USA, to have a chance to get out of the mire, before all are swallowed up and not spat out.
PUTTING VICTIMS FIRST –
MORE EFFECTIVE RESPONSES TO ANTI-SOCIAL BEHAVIOUR
The mistake of the past was to think that Government could fix the problem with a “one size fits all” model. It cannot. Anti-social behavior is a fundamentally local issue, one that looks and feels different in every single area, city, and state, in every neighborhood and to every solitary victim. The answers lie in local agencies and proven programs that respond to the needs of residents, victims, and communities. They must take the problem seriously, have the freedom to do what they know will make a difference, and have the right powers to act.
I know that public safety, police, local authorities and social landlords are doing a great deal to tackle anti-social behavior — but not this way - they need to adapt, maintain and accelerate their work, and focus more on the impact that anti-social behavior has on victims and the social structure of the community.
Local government's role should be to support these local agencies and private enterprise with solutions to provide them with the powers they need to do this.
We know that the current powers do not work as well as they should. More than half of all Anti-Social Behavior Orders (ASBOs) are now breached at least once and those that do get breached, are breached more than four times on average. Tightening of the community via community leaders and law enforcement is on the front burner.
We want to enable victims and communities. Too often people in a local area are desperate to have the behavior that's blighting their neighborhood dealt with, they just don't know how to get the local elected authorities to take action.
Neighborhood beat meetings will help, but we must support local communities by introducing new Community Triggers, such as the Pied Piper Project to compel agencies to respond to persistent antisocial behavior and community social change.
Using existing laws on the books already and introducing faster and more effective powers to stop the dangerous and yobbish behavior of those who make victims' lives a misery. The powers will include a new court order available on the conviction that will stop the behavior of the most destructive individuals and will address the underlying causes of that behavior.
The sentences and restrictions placed on the individuals are available and for discussion with the public safety directors and officials.
You want to make change contact and discuss, if not move on...
STOP THE PERPETUAL BETA PHENOMENON,
BEFORE THE WAR ON THE STREETS
TAKES OVER US ALL
copyright 2017
The waitress came over and asked how the meal was, I explained directly it was cold, to take it away and not bother replacing it. (I know what goes with replacement food and to someone who challenges so called professionals!)
