When Microsoft put together a design team over a year ago to come up with “Metro” – the design language for their new Windows Phone platform – they were faced with a difficult challenge.  After years of ignoring Apple’s iPhone and trying to heap features onto the Windows Mobile platform in an effort to compensate for a lack of  design savvy – to the extent that even owning a Windows Phone was considered a career limiting move for Microsoft employees – a sudden change of direction occurred within Microsoft.  All at once, design values seemed to matter.

But what should the new phone look like?  Led by people like Albert Shum from Nike, the new design team could not afford to ignore the iPhone.  Ignoring the iPhone was in part the source of Microsoft’s decline in the phone market up to that point.  They also could not simply copy the iPhone’s look.  An iPhone knock-off would quickly kill the venture.   Finally, they faced the danger of trying too hard to design an anti-iPhone.  This would be just as deadly as creating something that looked too much like the iPhone.

The literary critic Harold Bloom coined the term “anxiety of influence” to describe a similar problem that faced the great Romantic poets.  Byron and Keats learned to be poets by reading and emulating John Milton.  At some point, however, they had to find their own voices in order to become great poets in their own right.  What greater horror can there be for a poet that leaving of the footsteps of a greater poet and making a new path.  The tracks of the master are sure while the new steps are difficult to evaluate – are they brilliant but different or merely random steps that eventually end in the gutter?  What must Shakespeare have felt as he stepped from behind the shadow of Christopher Marlowe and first tried to pen something original and truly Shakespearean?

As the release date for Windows Phone approaches – as developers wait for the WP7 Marketplace to start accepting applications – phone developers must decide what sort of apps they will build for the device.  Will they copy the great apps of the iPhone – the fart app, the beer app, the squealing cats app – or will they come up with something original?

Writing a phone application is not quite the same thing as writing poetry.  The goal of the one is to create art that edifies and glorifies while the goal of the other is to make money.  So everyone should definitely take some time to write a copy of an Android app that is a copy of an iPhone app that was a bad idea in the first place.

But what do we do after that?

Phone apps are a genre unto themselves.  They have to work within a small display.  Ideally they should be simple.  They must be easy to use since users of phone apps have short attention spans.  Yet people continue to copy ideas that are native to to PCs and game consoles.  It is worth emphasizing that a phone is not a light-weight PC and it certainly is not a light-weight console (that’s what the Nintendo DS is for).

Is it talking in circles to say that the apps we write for the phone should be guided by a notion of what works well on the phone and nowhere else?  To paraphrase Bill Buxton, any idea is good for something and terrible for something else.  For this reason, with the phone we should be wary of ideas that work well on other platforms.  If they work best on other platforms then there’s no need for them on the phone.  The real breakthroughs will be with game concepts that are horrible for the PC or the game console – or even for the iPhone – but which might just work great on Windows Phone 7.

And then there are the ideas no one has thought of yet.

To that end, here are links to some rather crazy, idiosyncratic games.  They may simply be frustrating or, potentially, they could be inspiring.  Here is an article from the New York Times to accompany them.

Erik Svedang’s Blueberry Garden

Cloud by Jenova Chen and Kellee Santiago

Jason Rohrer’s Passage

The WP7 design team in the end were able to overcome the anxiety of influence by setting up a manifesto, of sorts, outlining their design philosophy and building up from there.  Where the iPhone design philosophy is dominated by icons and gel buttons, the WP7 core philosophy, called Metro, is built around text and flat, “chrome-less” design.  The overwhelming spirit is one of minimalism.  The Metro design even has precedents in the Bauhaus movement and the works of Frank Lloyd Wright – a return to simplicity in design and an eschewing of ornamentation without purpose.  At times, the Black Book even reads like Adolf Loos’s famous 1908 essay Ornament and Crime.

A few Magenic colleagues  and I happened to be in the office at the same time today and were discussing what makes a good software consultant.  We arrived at the idea that there are certain archetypes that can be associated with our profession.  Consulting and independent contracting require a peculiar combination of skills which are not always compatible: leadership, salesmanship, problem solving, commitment, patience, quick thinking, geekiness, attention to detail, attention to vision, and so forth. 

As a consultant, one is often both the salesman and the product being sold, and it requires a bit of a split personality to pull both off well.  Most consultants are able to do well with certain aspects of consulting but not others.  It seemed to us, however, that if we could identify certain “types” of consultants rather than try to identify the particular skills that make up a consultant, we would arrive at something approaching a broad spectrum of what consulting is all about.

After a bit of work, Whitney Weaver, Colin Whitlatch, Tim Price-Williams (who needs a blog because he knows too much about the entity framework not to share)  and I came up with the following list of consulting archetypes and the qualities that exemplify each one. 

For our unit test, we then tried to match consultants we know first with who they think they are and then with who they actually resemble.  It worked out pretty well, and so we thought we’d turn the idea loose.  (I turned out to be a weird mix of MacGuyver and the Jump-To-Conclusions-Guy, though I also have a savior complex.)

See if any of the following archetypes matches people you know.  And if you think we’ve left an important archetype out of our catalog, please let me know in the comments.

 

Jack Bauer

Jack is the ultimate get-things-done guy.  This is in part because he takes the full weight of any project on his own shoulders.  He is admired by everyone he encounters for his dedication and competence. 

He also comes across as a bit harsh, however, so we can’t really say he has good soft skills.  Some consider consultants like him to be a bit too good to be true.

 

House

House is great at diagnosing any problem.  He is methodical and thorough while at the same time he is able to think well outside of the box. 

He is also a bit of a dick and will turn on you when you least expect it.  On the other hand, when he throws you under the bus, at least you’ll know it wasn’t personal.

 

Maverick

Maverick is charismatic as well as intensely competitive, though his arrogance tends to put people off.  If you think a task will take two weeks, he’ll claim it can be done in two days.  If you estimate that something will take two days, he’ll insist he can do it in two hours.

He always manages to be successful though no one is sure how. 

 

Sarah Connor

Sarah thinks quickly on her feet and is an extraordinary problem solver.  She has a great mix of soft and technical skills. 

Sadly, she tends to get the people around her killed.  Consultants with skills like hers seem to take on a lot more risk than the rest of us would, and we all reap the consequences.

 

Don Draper (Mad Men)

Don has infinite charm and is a perennial winner.  Women love him and men want to be his friend.

He is also clearly hiding something from everyone, and is haunted by the notion that he is ultimately a fraud.

 

 

Neo

Neo can re-program reality.

Some consider him to be wooden.  He also has a bit of a savior complex.

 

The Chick from Terminator 3

Pros: She’s smokin’ hot.

Cons: She will kill you at the drop of a hat.

 

MacGuyver

MacGuyver is a jack-of-all trades, the kind of consultant you want on any project.  He also has great hair.

He tends to be a bit of a one-man-show, however.

 

Kramer

Kramer has the “vision” thing.  He’s the one who will envision and lay out the entire architecture of the project in the first few days despite other people’s misgivings.

Unfortunately Kramer has poor follow-through.  You’ll be living with his architectural decisions long after he’s moved on to bigger and better things.

 

Benjamin Linus

Ben has excellent soft skills.  He is a master manipulator.  He can turn any situation to his own advantage.  In a tough negotiation, he’s the consultant you want at your side.

On the other hand, he is pure EVIL and cannot be trusted.

 

Alec Baldwin in Glengarry Glen Ross

“Second prize is a set of steak knives.”  Alec is a motivator.  Other people quiver in his presence.  We all know that sometimes you have to be an asshole to get things done.  Fortunately a consultant like Alec loves that part of the job.

We can assume that he will eventually flame out, as people of this type always do.  Sadly, no one will really feel sorry for him when this happens.

 

Cartman

Eric Cartman has strong survival skills and is highly self-confident, both of which enable him to accomplish his sometimes overly ambitious schemes. He also aways has a private agenda.

Because of this, he tends to make himself a bit of a target, while his single-minded pursuit of his own ends can cause serious problems for other consultants.

 

George Costanza

Everything always seems to blow up on George.  He is also high maintenance.

On the upside, he is generally considered non-threatening, which can sometimes be a very good thing in consulting.

 

The Jump-To-Conclusions-Guy

This guy is eternally optimistic.  He considers himself to have excellent people skills.

He does not have excellent people skills.

 

 

Vanilla Ice

Vanilla Ice is the archetypal one-hit wonder. 

He did something important back in 1990 and has been living off of that one success ever since.  Then again, not everyone gets even that one success, so don’t judge him too harshly.

 

Lumbergh

Lumbergh is the anti-Jack Bauer.  He is a human deflector shield, and while you’re not looking he’ll manage to blame you for his screw ups.   When he throws you under the bus, you’ll know that it really was in fact personal.

The best that can be said of Lumbergh is that you don’t run into too many Lumberghs in software consulting.

 

 

We are so happy with this catalog of consulting types that we are thinking of using it in our local vetting of new-hire candidates.  Given the broad range of technical skills people can have, it seems rather unfair to try to label new-hires as “senior” or “junior” or anything like that.  What we’re looking for, after all, is a good fit for our local office, and the best way to do this is to, say, determine that we need another Maverick or a Sarah Connor or a Neo, and to try to find the right person following the guidelines above.

Moreover, when we tell our clients that we are sending them our A-Team, we can mean it literally: they are getting one Alec Baldwin, one Don Draper,  a MacGuyver and a Jump-To-Conclusions-Guy.  On the other hand, if someone wants the cast from Seinfeld, we can fill that order, too.

 

 

In the same lecture excerpted previously, William James provides an earthy example of what he means by pragmatism.  It involves squirrel.

Some years ago, being with a camping party in the mountains, I returned from a solitary ramble to find everyone engaged in a ferocious metaphysical dispute. The corpus of the dispute was a squirrel--a live squirrel supposed to be clinging to one side of a tree-trunk; while over against the tree's opposite side a human being was imagined to stand. This human witness tries to get sight of the squirrel by moving rapidly round the tree, but no matter how fast he goes, the squirrel moves as fast in the opposite direction, and always keeps the tree between himself and the man, so that never a glimpse of him is caught. The resultant metaphysical problem now is this: DOES THE MAN GO ROUND THE SQUIRREL OR NOT? He goes round the tree, sure enough, and the squirrel is on the tree; but does he go round the squirrel? In the unlimited leisure of the wilderness, discussion had been worn threadbare. Everyone had taken sides, and was obstinate; and the numbers on both sides were even. Each side, when I appeared, therefore appealed to me to make it a majority. Mindful of the scholastic adage that whenever you meet a contradiction you must make a distinction, I immediately sought and found one, as follows: "Which party is right," I said, "depends on what you PRACTICALLY MEAN by 'going round' the squirrel. If you mean passing from the north of him to the east, then to the south, then to the west, and then to the north of him again, obviously the man does go round him, for he occupies these successive positions. But if on the contrary you mean being first in front of him, then on the right of him, then behind him, then on his left, and finally in front again, it is quite as obvious that the man fails to go round him, for by the compensating movements the squirrel makes, he keeps his belly turned towards the man all the time, and his back turned away. Make the distinction, and there is no occasion for any farther dispute. You are both right and both wrong according as you conceive the verb 'to go round' in one practical fashion or the other."

Altho one or two of the hotter disputants called my speech a shuffling evasion, saying they wanted no quibbling or scholastic hair-splitting, but meant just plain honest English 'round,' the majority seemed to think that the distinction had assuaged the dispute.