Since the dawn of humanity the storyteller has been the center of popular culture. It began around the campfires of our ancestors where without scripts, screens or props they spun yarns that did more than entertain. Storytellers were the creators of tradition. The origin of belief.

Stories, the naked spoken word, were the way news was spread. The way knowledge was acquired. The way we learned how to act, to survive and to coexist as a community. It was through our stories that our cultures evolved and became what they are today. The differences in our stories are the reasons that the Dutch are the Dutch, the Irish the Irish and the Chinese, Chinese.

If there is a stronger force in all of human behavior, I can’t name it. Where else do habits, beliefs, attitudes and culture get formed except as a result of the stories we tell? And our storytellers, those great orators who make stories come alive, are a tidal force for societal change. Jesus of Nazareth’s stories created a belief system that stands to this day even under the relentless assault of science. Julius Caesar’s speeches rallied the Romans to spread across most of the known world. Adolf Hitler stoked a nation to a world war with his oration and Winston Churchill ensured the world survived it with his own. How else could one counter the power of a story except with another, equally powerful story?

Nations, religions and even corporations flourish under good story tellers and flounder under poor ones. Where would Apple be without the storytelling prowess of Steve Jobs? What heights could Google, Microsoft or Yahoo reach with a good storyteller of their own?  

So who is wielding the storytelling power now? Who will replace Steve Jobs in corporate America and Carl Sagan in science? Where is our next Martin Luther King, Jr. for equality and the next JFK among our leaders? Truth is, we’re in a storytelling dead zone where the loud and the well-financed are drowning out the wise and the profound. We’ve ceded the stage to the media where stories of Duck Dynasty and Kim Kardashian overpower the stories of Al Gore and Bill Gates whose stories, in turn, overwhelm the stories of everyday people with big ideas but small voices.

This is too much power in the hands of too few. Loud stories are overwhelming us. Media-driven stories of greed and goofiness prevail. Shall we put our culture in the hands of the rich and the noisy? For the first time in history the Internet puts every storyteller on near equal ground. It’s time we step up to this stage and counter the noise with stories of our own.

So come all ye storytellers for science and for women. Step up you supporters of minority and gay rights. Who wants to bear the standard of the poor, of alternative lifestyles, of fairness and justice? Who will tell the world about education? The environment? Peace? Humanity? Who will carry on that campfire tradition of teaching custom and molding culture?

Storytelling, good storytelling, is the one skill that can even the playing field. Nothing else can draw attention to the human condition or to a good cause. When storytelling is absent, the merits of a cause, no matter how important, go unnoticed and unappreciated. You see, it doesn’t matter what you know, what you have or what you need if you can’t convey it to anyone else.

The world needs better storytellers but the very idea that the media will suddenly shift its vast storytelling resources from reality TV shows to stories about science, women, minorities, the environment and education is laughable. There is only one solution. We must learn to tell our own stories. We cannot allow this skill to atrophy. It’s time we reclaim our stories. It’s time to remember how to tell them. It’s time to deliver them with such power that, perhaps, as a whole, we drown out the loud and well-funded media.

The democratization of storytelling. That is what I seek. For it is in the story that the future lies.

Imagine for a moment what Sheryl Sandberg could achieve for women if she had the storytelling ability of Martin Luther King, Jr. How many more people could she excite with her Lean In message? Could she do for a gender what MLK did for a race? And what if every woman who felt passionate about the feminine cause could tell their stories with that same power? The result would shift society.

What if messages of peace were delivered with the stage presence of Winston Churchill? Would our t-shirts and shopping bags now read KEEP CALM AND LOVE ON? What if John F. Kennedy had promoted clean energy instead of space exploration? He put a man on the moon with his words. What could he have done for the planet we live on?

What if every teacher in every classroom on this planet had the oratory power of our greatest storytellers? The school day would be anticipated instead of dreaded. Society would change. It would demonstrate once and for all that the power isn’t the message. It’s in the story that conveys the message.

What I am calling for is simple but profound: the democratization of storytelling. Our ideas, our projects and our causes are the proverbial trees falling in an unwatched forest. Wrap those same ideas in a compelling and powerful story and they will echo across the planet. As an audience, humans are wired to consume stories. We’ve quite literally evolved as a species because of our stories and only our stories can continue that evolution. In recapturing our stories, we reclaim our future.

Every person has a story. Every cause needs a storyteller. Learn to be a storyteller because unless you are a candidate for a reality show, no one else is going to tell your story for you.

So tell us a story. Tell us a good story. And let that good story be one part of a symphony of stories that makes this world a better place.

Let’s face it, the 1990s were the golden age of software testing. As an industry we were still figuring things out. Global or local data? File and variable naming conventions. Time constraints versus memory utilization. Library, procedure or inline code? Use or reuse? And the granddaddy of them all: how do we fix bugs that occur in the field when the only way to get bug reports is by phone or email and the only way to update our software is by mailing a new set of floppies? We were at once not very experienced in writing code and after shipping that code, fixing it was a really, really painful proposition.

No wonder we put so much time and effort into testing. We had no choice but to double check developers’ work and try to ensure that as few bugs as possible made it into the released product. Like I said, it was a golden age for software testers. Small chance of getting it right, large chance of expensive rework. Testers were the insurance policy no company could afford to decline.

But then the world changed. First it was the web which made software updates a small matter of refreshing a web page. All those floppies were F5-ed into oblivion. And then along came mobile apps which could collect their own user telemetry, create their own failure reports and prompt a user to update them when necessary. At the same time the risk of shipped defects was decreasing dramatically. So-called waterfall software development models were replaced with agile methods that created better code out-of-the-box. A collective intelligence around how to code and the body of knowledge of coding practices matured. The art of coding has become downright pedestrian.

Quality is no less important, of course, but achieving it requires a different focus than in the past. Hiring a bunch of testers will ensure that you need those testers. Testers are a crutch. A self-fulfilling prophesy. The more you hire the more you will need. Testing is much less an actual role now as it is an activity that has blended into the other activities developers perform every day. You can continue to test like its 1999, but why would you?

You can’t test in quality, but you can code it in.

And at the tail end of the lifecycle, testing can now involve users at a level that it never could in the past. Who, after all, is the better judge of a bug: the user who is honestly trying to use the software to get work (or pleasure) done or a tester who has a preconceived (and unavoidably biased) notion of how the software is supposed to work? Why must a tester serve as the intermediary between the developer and the user when the user is only a click away? Can you imagine the impact on quality when developers and users have no middleman getting in their way?

Quality, and therefore testing, is not something separate from software development unless your software is going into a nuclear power plant, medical device or an airplane where it is difficult (for now) to recall post-deployment. For the vast majority of app development on this planet, software testing is an activity within the development process and keeps happening after the software is released. Modern testing is an activity and doesn’t require a separate role to perform it. It’s time to bring quality into the 21^st century where testing is such an integral part of software development that you’ll often forget you are doing because it has become so familiar. Hey wouldn’t that be awesome … that testing gets done without making such a big fuss about it?

This is not your father’s application development process. It’s yours. Own it.

In a nutshell, what Jack suggests is to work hard and over deliver, impress your boss (with “shock and awe” no less) and make yourself valuable to your company. It makes a good sound bite, but this advice is, at best, a placebo to make you feel like you are being proactive in managing your career, and, at worse, a slow poison that will prolong your servitude to the corporate machine.

Let’s begin with his advice to work hard and over deliver. The truth is, working hard only makes you stand out when you are the only one doing it. Everyone who gets ahead works hard. It is not a strategy; it’s table stakes. Unless you live at the office, you will likely never be the first to arrive, the last to leave or the one who produces the highest volume of work. Your determination to out deliver your hard working colleagues is more likely to land you on a therapist’s couch than in the executive suite.

When everyone is working their ass off, working yours off harder or faster won’t get you ahead. It will stretch you thin and stress you out and this stress will, in turn, hold you back. The business world is chock full of hard working people who regularly over deliver and yet are categorically not succeeding. The intersection of overworked and underachieved is a horrible place to be.

Jack’s next exercise in futility is to impress your boss. Such obeisance may have worked last century but in this one it will do little more than consign you to the career of a follower. Mindlessly working hard to impress someone else will ensure that your success is always dependent on that someone else.

You may not even get that far. In today’s working environment, even figuring out who to impress isn't easy. Modern matrix organizations like Facebook, Netflix, Twitter and many other progressive and ultra-successful companies, have blurred the lines between manager and managed. This structure is quickly becoming the rule rather than the exception. At Google employees are actively encouraged to change projects, and thus manager, at 18 month intervals. Even the biggest of companies have peer committees to decide promotion and advancement. Who you report to has never meant less than it does now.

Managers are no longer the all-powerful career makers they were last century. In fact, many modern workers will have a hard time staying with a boss long enough to do more than share space during group meetings. I had 4 managers in 4 years at Microsoft and 2 managers in less than 3 years at Google. (Had I stayed I would have moved to my 3rd.) Exactly which one was I to spend all that time impressing?

Bosses have less power than they have ever had. In many companies, managers are just peers who take on some additional leadership and administrative tasks. Trying to impress them is not time well spent.

The most valuable role a modern manager plays is that of mentor. But time has changed this role too. In Jack’s day, you were stuck with your manager and everyone who could positively affect your career was within line of sight of your desk. The world is so much more accessible now and the most important person to your career may be on the other side of the planet connected to you only through email, video conference and social networking. Or, they may be someone with whom you have never had first-person contact. The world is smaller now and we have less need of our boss to tell us how to navigate it.

Of all the people who have helped my career and taken my shock and awe to heart, none of them have ever been my manager. Many are at or only slightly above or below my level. Most are peers and the majority aren't even inside my company at all. Had I ignored any of these mentors in favor of the person writing my annual review, I would not be where I am today.

Bosses come and go. Time spent impressing them is time you could be spending more intentionally to better your situation and yourself. You are who you learn from and now choosing who is entirely in your own hands.

Finally, we get to Jack’s last piece of advice: make yourself valuable to your company, and once again I advise you to ignore it. Like the person you report to, the company you work for has never mattered less.

Consider just how much Jack and his peers were tied to their employer in the 60s, 70s and 80s. Where else would they have gone? In the days before online job postings and career websites like Monster.com and Linked-In how would other employers have found out about them? Choice was limited and required substantial effort to exercise. Opportunities within one’s company were much more accessible than without.

Indeed, the world at large was harder to discover. Daily newspapers and weekly business magazines reported official press releases days to weeks old. How do you decide where the grass might be greener given only this limited information? Staying put, working hard and beating out your coworkers for promotion was the path of least resistance. Today it is, at best, the slow road and more likely to end directly at that dreaded intersection of overworked and underachieved.

The industry at large is now, quite literally, at your fingertips. Journalists compete to report up-to-the-second information about products companies haven’t even released yet. Corporate road maps are analyzed and reanalyzed and measured based on Twitter “follows” or Linked-In “connects.” It’s never been easier to scope-out and judge potential employers and if one of them aligns with your particular passions their recruiters are only an email, tweet or connect away. In fact, if you know how to work the industry, those recruiters probably have you on their radar already.

Company Kool-Aid is a dangerous drink. Gulp it down and you’ll have little value to the broader industry. Don’t let Jack buy you that drink. The rewards for gulping it down are more immediate but much smaller in the long run than sipping it carefully and keeping your options open. The pulse of the industry is far more important than the pulse of a company that may become less relevant in these fast moving times. Make yourself valuable to the broader industry and insulate yourself from your company’s mistakes and hard times. You must always remain valuable no matter what happens to your company. Just ask all those GE employees “Neutron Jack” downsized about where company loyalty lies. You can serve your company all you want. It may or may not serve you back. Your loyalty must lie with your own career in the industry where you've chosen to work.

Let’s put Jack Welch’s advice into perspective. He started work in 1960—the same year the Dallas Cowboys became an NFL expansion team, New Zealand got its first television station, John Lennon and Paul McCartney named their band, and Muhammad Ali won his first professional fight. Jack retired as CEO of the same company 40 years later, a time when the PC was still the most relevant computing device, Google was a start-up and Apple was taking loans from Microsoft.

Time changes a lot of things and career advice from Neutron Jack is like dating advice from your parents. Sorry dad, you lost me at “courting.” We live in a time where college dropouts have founded well-respected companies. Serial entrepreneurs from unranked schools are out innovating well-funded, hard-working corporate machines — and out earning corporate vice presidents. It’s time to update the career manual.

Outdated business rules will not only accomplish little in this modern world, they will interfere with your career progress. If you take this impressing your boss and over-delivery advice to heart you’ll very likely to be too busy (because you are working so hard) or too complacent (because your boss is telling you how great you are) to see an opportunity when it presents itself. You’ll be blinded by the feeling that you are already doing the right thing when, in fact, you should be consciously seeking out the actual right thing.

The industry has changed. Corporate culture has changed. Careers are no longer something we have; careers are something we must own. Anyone can have a job, but a career is something more. Careers are at once more meaningful and more enjoyable. They are something that can make a huge difference to our self worth, our net worth and our work-life balance. They don’t rely on bosses and employers. They rely on you.

Success isn't easy. If it was everyone would have a constantly ascending career path. Don’t make success harder by following advice for a bygone era. Today, success requires a modern perspective on the industry and actively managing your skills and relationships.

Leave all that other advice in the museum where it belongs.

So it's review time
And what have you done?
One set of commitments over
A new one just begun

But does any of it matter?
This time we all make
To fuss over ratings
And claiming our take

Did reviews create the PC?
Did they contribute to the Web?
Will they improve the human condition?
Will they make a topic for TED?

So have a happy review time!
And write what you want
Make it sound like you exceeded
And yes this is a taunt!

Here's a better idea: Do what needs to be done. And when something needs to be done, do it.

"Do the pre-reading." Yeah, like that's going to happen.

"Be on time." Sure, it's not like we're busy or anything. Deadlines, schmedlines!

"Know everyone's name." Five minutes of intro time saved! Go buy some blue tights and paint an 'S' on your chest.

"Be a proactive listener." Darn, that whole not listening thing seemed like such a great career move. Is 'reactive listening' even possible? What did you say? Sorry I must've missed that.

"Have a good reason to meet." Ok, this one just pisses me off. If you are meeting for no good reason, no advice about the semantics of a meeting can help you. Whoever wrote this, please never work in the software industry.

Oh there are plenty more, like taking good notes, creating action items, using good humor (hey I called this meeting to fire you, but have I got a great joke about being unemployed! You see this jobless guy walks into a bar ...) and stating the purpose of the meeting in advance. Boy, wouldn't have thought of those in a million years.

Yawn. 

This advice is as unproductive as the unproductive meetings it is trying to alleviate. I've been to meetings with all these ingredients and guess what? Those meetings still sucked. Why? Because good meetings are not about the way the meeting is held but about the culture of the organization that is holding those meetings. Thus, my thesis: If you want productive meetings, create an anti meeting culture. Here's my shot at defining this culture:

First, get the right attendees and be aggressive about it. Invite people who can contribute and when people sustainably fail to contribute, un-invite them. The same thing goes for people who drag out the meeting with tangential issues and pointless debate. Meeting invitations are not some corporate-given right. Meetings are not a door prize everyone collects. If you want in, be in. Take the meeting seriously or don't be part of it. Create this culture and you will find that people come to meetings ready to get work done and that the attendees will self-select to be the right people to be there in the first place.

Second, make coming and going kosher. Halfway through a meeting and you realize you can't contribute or don't need to be there? Leave. Such an egress shouldn't even raise an eyebrow with the right grown-up meeting culture. A great way to start such a culture is to hold meetings in open areas where coming and going is more natural and fuss-free. Or remove the chairs from the conference room and stand up. You've just made the door easier to get to.

Third, vote with your feet by walking away from the more useless meetings. Just don't go to those meetings where the organizer holds court. Anyone who likes the sound of their own voice that much doesn't deserve your attendance. When he asks why, tell him! If such bluntness isn't your style then turn it around and put a positive spin on meetings. Create a rank ordered list of good meetings and "like" them, "tweet" about them or, in Microsoft's case, use Yammer as a hammer. Meetings are important so make good ones a cause for kudos and a metric you track.

Fourth, heed the warning signs. The first such sign is the meeting agenda. Big agendas mean lots of time switching topics. Too many decision points means too much debate. A long list of topics ensures that some people won't have a stake in some topics and that's a poor use of those people's time. Single purpose meetings are the best: this is what we are here to do, now lets use the meeting time to do it. The second sign is multiple presenters. The more, the less merry. Each one has to do their little warm up and wind down and each must pay the technology tax of switching laptops and dorking around with display settings. Ah that damn tech tax! Someone bring me a bucket.

Fifth, follow up a scheduled meeting with scheduled work time. If a meeting has a purpose and requires action to be taken (like any good meeting should), schedule time immediately following the meeting to take that action. When the meeting ends, the action items are fresh in everyone's minds and everyone is on the same page. There is no better time to act. Make sure you actually schedule the work time too so everyone's calendar is blocked preventing other people from putting meetings there. Post meeting hallway conversations are often the best part of meetings, make time for them!

Finally, all this points to building an anti meeting culture within your organization (or at least work group). Build disdain for meetings into your DNA so that every meeting is useless until proven otherwise. Anything less means superfluous meetings are the accepted norm. But a meeting series that starts out with a "useless" label only to become a part of the rhythm of business is a meeting to respect. Meeting organizers need to be put on notice: make this meeting meaningful, its your damn job.

Once this culture is built, prepare for extra-meeting communication to spontaneously form a life of its own. Status is reported over email (where it belongs), accomplishments spread through lunchroom chatter, hallway conversations sort out blocking issues, office drive-bys turn into brainstorms. In such a culture meetings are part of the flow of business instead being the pause button for the business. When meetings are sparse, that means communication is flowing freely and no one feels like they need to be at a meeting to be informed of some key decision (which is lame) or just to be seen (which is lame squared).

An anti meeting culture is about getting stuff done. It's the opposite of talking about getting stuff done. Fewer meetings isn't necessarily the goal; better and more productive ones is the goal. Fewer generally follows better and an anti meeting culture is the way to get there. What it takes is for some meeting organizer to step up and do it right and provide the high water mark for all other meeting organizers to reach. Be that person for your org and sit back and wait for someone complain about having too much time to get their work done because there aren't enough meetings.

Meet smart and prosper.

Joining wires and the web on the list of endangered species:

Search: I’ve already voiced my discontent with the whole search space. Its general user unfriendliness (Google offers six 50 minute classes to help users master it) isn’t its worst problem. It’s an outdated technology based on a web that no longer exists. A web of interconnected machines serving content to users’ desktops is long gone. Web servers have fled the confines of homes and businesses and congregated into data centers where raw information can be collected and analyzed in bulk, i.e., turned into actual knowledge. It seems both Google (at almost two-thirds search market share) and Bing (at almost the rest) have made moves heralding the beginning of the end of this once useful technology.

For its part, Google has taken the drastic step of mixing its famously relevant web search results with infamously irrelevant information from its social network Google+. But watering down search results was only the first step toward relegating them entirely. Recently, Google further pushed web search results down the hierarchy by including better information from their “knowledge graph.” Such mucking around with their bread-and-butter can only mean that even Google sees the writing on the wall: this is the beginning of the end of search. Information from the open web is less valuable now than it has ever been.

Bing is also making search results share space on its results page by serving up three separate columns of information it labels: web knows (classic, unpolluted search results), Bing knows (structured entity information from its own knowledge store) and people know (results from actual social networks Facebook, Twitter, et al).

Search once occupied a mansion of its own. Now it has woken up to the joys of shared living space. How much longer until it is out on the street entirely?

Browsers: The browser wars are long past, the ground they fought over forgotten. The newer a device is to the connected world (phones, tablets, televisions, DVD players, etc.) the less valuable a web browser is to the user experience. Even Google, who depend on browsers almost exclusively for their income, is only now getting around to porting Chrome to Android. Their lack of urgency to create a mobile browser while simultaneous building an entire laptop around the Chrome desktop browser (Chromebook) is a clear signal that mobile browsers aren’t important. Web browsers are your grandfather’s way of getting online.

Keyboards and Mice: These input devices lost their wires first and now are being bypassed completely by voice technology for phones, Xbox consoles and video games and gestures on the Kinect and tablet computers. Beyond the obvious rejoicing of carpal tunnel and tendinitis sufferers, these natural user interfaces offer key advantages. Who wouldn’t prefer saying “How many goals did Pele score for Brazil” than typing it on the itty bitty mobile keyboard or suffering the click-through it would take to get an answer on FIFA.com?

But voice and gesture are only replacements for physical keyboards and mice. And, let’s be honest, voice technology is a finicky medium. Voice: the UI of the future … since 1994. Automatically deciphering user intent can make the need for any input mechanism moot. Temporal, location, calendar and history signals can prompt automatic action by a user’s device void of any repetitive stress injury or an automated assistant no smarter than a garden gnome. Interfaces are both going natural and becoming moot simultaneously.

Web companies and their sympathizers do have some compelling arguments that the web is still alive and kicking. For one, apps have a higher cost of entry. It’s cheaper and easier to deploy content to the web and slap a few ads on it than to surface it in an app where you have to worry about updates and an installed base. It’s no wonder the web is a sloppy, ugly and disorganized place. Why bother with beauty when ugly can be so easily monetized? For another, Facebook and other popular sites generate most of their traffic on the web. But lack of a compelling mobile story for popular websites is not much of an argument for the web. Finally, some claim that indexing-friendly HTML 5 will bring web apps up to par with native apps and thus narrow the gap. Maybe, but this seems more like an argument that the web is giving in to apps than vice-versa.

This queue building at the IT morgue changes things. For one, hardware and user-experience companies like Apple, who make their money selling products and apps, are more valuable than web companies like Google who make their money advertising web content. This value gap is only going to get wider. As the web recedes into the background, the opportunity shifts from making money on ads to providing actual value to users monetized through direct sales and subscriptions. Devices and data centers are the future and it is a very compelling future.

I will grant one thing, the web is not yet ready for the embalmer. Apps of this generation will still be built on top of information extracted from the web. Browsers will share this undead future as long as the web lasts. However, as Google and Microsoft continue to add structure to the information once scattered over the web, the world’s information is moving closer to how people think of the world rather than the way a computer represents it. It also means that apps can discover, ingest and display information in ways that are much more meaningful. The way, for example, Flipboard presents news or the Xbox presents entertainment, is a much better experience – particularly for a keyboard-less device – than a tendonitis inducing type/scroll/click/repeat browser. Having information come to you, instead of vice-versa, is the next web.

This puts data front and center in the next web. Owners of data, curators of data and acquirers of data … these are the people fueling the next web and the people who will profit from it. The ability to generate, curate, conflate, analyze and otherwise make valuable the data people need the most will make up next generation careers. Having the coding skills to make that data available in pleasingly packaged apps will be immensely profitable.

Today apps have beaten the web into submission, but apps beware…the world is quickly becoming hostile to your existence as well. Apps suffer from the desktop-esque problems of legacy. Apps must be installed and patches pushed to devices the same way service packs were pushed to desktop and server apps over the past couple of decades creating multi-versioning issues and other legacy problems.

The truth of the matter is that apps aren’t necessary either. Users want answers, not apps. They want tasks to be completed and actions to be performed that help them live their lives. Installing and using apps is a means to an end. Ultimately agents working on behalf of users will be able to use both native device capabilities and remote services to perform many functions now served by apps. Witness on{x}, a technology from Bing that allows devices to perform actions without an associated app. Between devices with built-in capabilities and data centers with directly-servable content, apps too face an uncertain future.

The great circle of IT life continues.

Anyone who has worked at both companies can't help but to compare their culture, review models, working habits and so forth. When Google was still small, it was an impossible comparison to make, but now that they've shed any claim to startup credentials the gap between the two is narrower than ever. Yet still some interesting distinctions can be drawn. Certainly Google has an advantage in birth order as it has had a chance to study its older tech sibling, mimicking the things it liked and jettisoning those it did not, but in a number of cases, Microsoft has turned the tables on Google and innovation is one area where Microsoft may very well have a more fertile environment and a more workable model.

Microsoft and Google have, in turn, been the most admired and seen as the most innovative tech company in the world. Both companies’ ability to continue to innovate has also come into question. Call it the innovator’s dilemma if you like, but innovating yourself to the top of an industry automatically makes continued innovation harder. Successful companies become beholden to the products that made them successful. There is feature iteration, maintenance, operations, support... Being successful signs you up to a profitable business rhythm where innovation plays, frankly, an optional role.

To their credit, neither company treats innovation as optional and both have systems in place for both top-down and grassroots efforts. Both have official research divisions full of accomplished scientists. Both have ties into academia. Both have dedicated teams who think about the future day and night. Both have successes they can point to. However, both companies are obviously aware that innovation isn't something that always happens so purposefully. Their grassroots efforts at innovation clearly show they believe (correctly) that creativity isn't governed by a person’s title or the org in which they sit. Creative people can literally be anyone and are often those without advanced degrees (Gates, Jobs, Zuckerberg …) and without an entrepreneurial track record (many top innovators have been one hit wonders). However, they take a very different approach to encouraging the masses to innovate. The bottom line: with 20% time Google lowered the bar for innovators and thereby watered down the value of the results; with its Garage, Microsoft raised the bar and created a more sustainable model.

Google popularized grassroots innovation with its famous idea of 20% time. Any engineer could take a day a week to work on an idea that has nothing to do with his or her day job. No structure to slow you down. No forms to file or permission to obtain … just go do it. Gmail, now a strategically important web property, had its genesis as a 20% project. It evolved into prominence despite the absence of executive-level strategic thinking over the importance of web mail. That’s the magic of grassroots innovation, it gives creative employees the potential to make a big impact on their company's success.

Calling it 20% time clearly exposed Google’s tolerances to how much of an engineer’s time innovation could consume. It set boundaries. Further, since 20% projects don't officially factor into an employee’s performance review (which determines bonus) the work you do there can have a negative impact on your pay. Still, for every employee who fretted about being compared to engineers focusing 100% on their day job, many more sought out 20% projects because 20% was so entrenched in Google's culture. The fanfare around 20% time meant that not participating implied a lack of creativity. There was stigma associated with it.

Internal websites advertising 20% projects popped up as enterprising Googlers recruited others to join their little "startups." Since anyone could do anything with their 20% time, Google was literally awash in pet projects and harebrained ideas proving that you cannot create innovators. Innovation is hard to plan. Surely there were killer projects among the crowd but who could tell? The signal was lost in the noise. A manager with a 50 person org was probably supporting 30 or more 20% projects he or she knew little about. What started out as a way to foster innovation at Google turned into chaos.

And, as with any well-meaning policy, there were those who took advantage of it. In my 3 years at Google I met any number of engineers whose 20% was basically staying at home a day a week and taking naps. Or, as one put it: “a method and apparatus for improving productivity for 80% time.”

In retrospect Google's 20% time suffered from two fatal flaws. There was simultaneously too much fanfare and not enough exposure. On the fanfare front, Google over promoted their culture of innovation to prospective employees. Recruiters prattled on about 20% time as an official company benefit along the lines of medical insurance. Engineers felt compelled to take part whether or not they had actual innovative ideas. On the exposure front, there was simply no down side to failing at your 20% project. There was no official mechanism for oversight. Whatever you did for your 20% was your business. Failure happened quietly and without much attention. Unfortunately, success also happened quietly and without much attention. Google often discovered cool 20% projects when the engineers doing them quit the company to pursue their idea as an actual start-up.

At best, 20% time is a slippery slope. At worst it's a really bad way to organize innovators.

Enter Microsoft, or rather, its engineers.The Microsoft Garage is a bonafide grassroots effort. No executive sponsored it. Steve Ballmer didn't say "sure, take a day a week and innovate." In fact, no one even bothered asking him. Executives giving such permission is the opposite of grassroots. Instead, Microsoft modeled its Garage on the concept of "hacker space," (c-base in Berlin is a good example) a place for coders to gather, work and interact that has all the tools they would ever need.

The shared space part is important. It puts innovators in close proximity of each other. It takes them away from their desk and the distraction of teammates. it gives them the tools they need to tinker, machines, cloud accounts and storage, dev environments and so forth. Garage founders began by squatting in empty offices before finally earning space in one of Microsoft's original buildings with, you guessed it, actual garage doors. Just like a start-up, the Garage movement had to prove it could be successful before it got space of its own.

The Garage attracted people with colorful posters around campus urging them to "stay late and code!" The curious sought it out. The innovative stayed to code. Concepts were vetted, groups were formed, expertise was shared. Community was built by getting gurus to give Garage Talks. Experts on various tools shared their experience. Garage hackers got good at TFS, Azure, the Bing stack and so on. As I search around the company for talent for my team, I scan resumes looking for Garage experience. It means something to me, these folks not only know how to innovate, they have mastered an important set of skills.

The Garage dispensed with the fanfare that doomed 20%. Advertisements were ominous. "Stay late" specifically excluded the 9 to 5ers. "Code" made it plain what was important. If you want to sit around and postulate, go somewhere else. Code is spoken in the Garage.

For those who can't stay late, "Garage Weeks" are held occasionally for enterprising engineers who want to spend time in the Garage as their temporary day job.

The lack of exposure was the next problem the Garage tackled. Like trees falling in an unoccupied forest, innovation that stays in the data center or on your desktop doesn't get heard. Garage founders solved this by holding a science fair. That's right, a science fair, just like your kid's elementary school. But unlike your third grader, the judges here don't hand out ribbons for "participant." The Garage science fair has teeth.

The science fair time-bounds a Garage project. It creates real pressure, an urgency to get something done. It also provides a chance to get feedback from people who understand the industry and where it is headed. Feedback is not sugar coated. Think "sales pitch to a VC" and you are getting close. You need to be sure of your idea. You need to do your homework and perform due diligence. You need to be able to convincingly explain things like business value and customer need. During the Online Services Garage science fair, I saw presenters told bluntly that they had solved an already solved problem. Others were questioned hard about the underlying code and challenged to defend their design decisions. It’s not just about the flashy demo; it’s about really thinking your idea through the way an actual startup founder would.

Partner-level judges roam the fair judging the demos based on business worthiness, creativity, design and so forth … criteria set out in advance. The two primary award categories are for business value and thought leadership, this says a lot about the Garage. It's not about pet projects, it is about doing something that has value. The judges often arrange introductions for the innovators to internal teams that might provide good collaboration. If your Garage project is truly innovative, the science fair could be your ticket to sponsorship by a product team.

Winners of the judging round stay at their booths for a tour by the division president who selects the overall winners. Good Garage projects are guaranteed an audience of influential people with strategic insight into company direction. Nothing hits the spot like hearing a Microsoft president make a comment along the lines, of “what would it take to make this ship worthy?”

After all, what happens in the Garage should not stay in the garage.

- T. S. Eliot

Google's Marissa Mayer gave a Flintstonian glimpse at what search might look like in 20 years including "predicting what restaurant you might like in a new city" and "connecting you with strangers based on common interests." Things that take entire seconds today will take ... entire seconds in 2032. Thankfully, for Mayer at least, violating Moore's Law carries no actual criminal or civil penalties. 

In a nutshell, what Mayer (and I assume Google) is proposing is that in twenty years Google and the web will still be standing between knowledge and its consumption. Google has 40 billion reasons to be patient regarding the future. But their lack of urgency is irrelevant. A future where knowledge will stand on its own is well and fully underway. What is mere data and information today, stored over a hodge-podge web of machines requiring it to be crawled and recrawled constantly, will be ingested, conflated, curated and crowdsourced into a pool of universally accessible knowledge. Google won't lord over it; their specialized librarian skills will be distributed across a world of people who can curate data or expose knowledge in useful and interesting ways. It's a world where value is real and not generated by sponsorship, click farms and middle men. The Arab world is having their spring, so is knowledge. It is being liberated from the confines of a web that enriches the few and taxes the rest. This Information Spring will not require 20 years to play out.

20 years! Turn the clock back to 1992, 20 years ago, and very few people had email addresses, video game consoles, mobile phones, home computers ... This was the era of phonebooks, file cabinets, folding maps, Rolodexes, landlines and paying for long distance phones calls. 20 years! 20 years ago people learned about computers in specialized courses and on university campuses. Today, toddlers perfect gaming strategy on mobile phones more powerful than any of those machines. 20 years! Computing went from the bleeding edge to dominating the business and social fabric of society. Think back for a moment over the past 20 years and realize just how far we've come. Now look forward 20 years and imagine ... restaurant recommendations? Hook ups with strangers? Really? Ok, well yabba dabba do! to you too.

20 years is a long time. Too long perhaps for predictions of any accuracy. Fortunately, what is happening right now with the web is pointing us squarely toward what the web will be like, not in 20 years but more like 2 or 3. Search is labor intensive and requires far too much human involvement. I spent the better part of the 90s acting as the help desk for my non tech social circle. Now I serve as their personal search engine optimizer. Here's an experiment: give ten people a browser each and ask them to use search to complete some task. This experiment can easily have ten different experiences and search results. That's why booking travel is such a pain. That's why searching for sports scores is such a pain. Your success at search depends on how good you are at it and how much time you devote to it. Users have noticed and abandoned search in droves, particularly mobile search. They voted with their fingers and installed apps to do the search work for them. Apps are capable of sorting through just the portions of the web you might be interested in. Don't search the web for soccer scores, use an app. Don't search the web for hotel deals, use an app. Apps are better because they cut search out of the equation. Apps succeed in large part because search is so broken.

You want a prediction of the future? The trend of disappearing search will continue. The web will melt into the background and humans will progressively be removed from their labor intensive and frustrating present by automation. In five years the web is likely to be completely invisible. You will simply express your intent and the knowledge you seek will be yours. Users will be seamlessly routed to apps capable of fulfilling their intent. Apps won't need to be installed by a user; they will be able to find opportunities to be useful all by themselves, matching their capabilities with a user's intent. You need driving directions? Travel reservations? Takeout? Tickets to a show? Groceries? Tell your phone, it will spare you the ugly links. It will spare you the landing page. It will spare you the ads. It will simply give you what you asked for. This is already happening today, expect it to accelerate.

The future of the web? Now you see it, soon enough you will not. The idea that any of this will take 20 years is the pipe dream of someone who specializes in monetizing the present.

And, Mr. Eliot, to answer your question, we are looking for it, sir. Beyond restaurant recommendations and the kind embrace of total strangers, it is out there. Ms. Mayer's company isn't the only one with an index of the world's information.

Now, let's consider those car keys for a moment. You lose them once and you search for them. Lose them again and you repeat the search. Lose them enough times and you'll get better at finding them because you'll know where you tend to leave them. That's the thing about search, you can redo it from scratch or you can pay attention and not have to search so much. And your lost pet? Lose a beloved pet once and you are unlikely to lose her again. Not because you've gotten better at search, but because you now take pains not to lose her a second time. You can be stupid about search if you like, or you can be thoughtful and more organized so you decrease your reliance on it. You don't have to search for things that are not lost.

We could do the same thing online, be thoughtful and organized, but we don't. We start from scratch each time. We search for things we've already found.

The problem with Internet search is that being stupid about it is profitable. The more ugly blue links you serve up, the more time users have to click on ads. Serve up bad results and the user must search again and this doubles the number of sponsored links you get paid for. Why be part of the solution when being part of the problem pays so damn well? It's 2012 and we are still typing search queries into a text box. Now you know why, a 'find engine' swims in the shallow end of the profit pool. Is it any surprise that technology such as Siri came from a company that doesn't specialize in search? (Where do you place an ad in a Siri use case?)

There's no more reason to expect search breakthroughs from Google than there is to expect electric car batteries to be made by Exxon.

We can do better. We've been searching for over a decade. We know every place possible where the online equivalent of car keys are found. We know where our online pet is, always. We know so many things about the world that no longer need to be served up as search "results." (Results indeed! If users ever wake up and divorce their search engine, the "results" page is likely to be exhibit A in the separation hearing.)

Search, my friends, is broken. Finding things has become secondary to monetizing the search process. Fixing this situation is not in the best interest of the incumbents. Which, actually, is all well and good because the fix will need a more web-wide effort anyway. The companies that own the data sources, the companies that ingest, store and conflate that data, the myriad small development shops that do interesting things with the data, the cleverness of the people who curate the data and the power of crowdsourced know-how need to come together and make search ... better? No, not better, irrelevant.

Search is dead. The web doesn't need it and neither do we.