“Working-class unions and middle-class environmentalists are very different organizations.

The middle class is prone to seeing the working class as rigid, self-interested, narrow, uninformed, parochial, and conflict oriented. The working class tends to perceive the middle class as moralistic, intellectual, more talk than action, lacking commonsense, and naïve about power.

Each side has a different standard for evaluating information. The working class trusts experience, and the middle class believes in research and systematic study. The result is a wide gulf in understandings of nature, sustainability, economics, and human conduct.

They seek change differently. The working class seeks to build power to confront external threats, while the middle class hopes to change people’s motivations, ideas, and morality.

The middle class tends to have greater faith in the ability of bureaucratic institutions to accomplish its goals. The working class, by contrast, is often the weakest party in conflicts and tends to pay the costs of many political and economic decisions. Its strategies reflect both this vulnerability and the interpretation of politics as a conflict about interests.

“Be open to feedback, but keep justification off the critical path.

“Why aren’t there more Googles? Because in the last five years, every company that had the potential to be economically revolutionary sold out long before it ever had the chance.

“Many of us conjoin the urgency of making another sale with the timing to earn the right to make it. You must build trust before you need it.

“Open source web application development doesn’t seem sustainable. Deployment concerns are a huge part of this. Being interested in a project requires that you be able to use the product (and to use it casually). Right now most people can’t use open source web applications.

There’s some applications, sure. WordPress, Trac, MediaWiki, MoinMoin. But most wiki software doesn’t have a vibrant community. Many a bug tracker has fallen by the wayside. Blog software projects have a horrible time building a viable community. Other website software hardly gets anywhere at all. A lot of the development that might appear to be application development really is more like a framework when you look closely (e.g., Plone, Drupal). Given its better deployment story, it’s no surprise PHP is the basis of most viable open source web applications.

“If you tell people that something is important, often they hear it as: everything else is unimportant. People just seem to be wired that way.

“Strategy isn’t written in stone. Rather strategy is built upon a given set of economics, a set of payoffs. Today’s economics are in shock – numerous shocks are rolling across the global economic landscape. As economics change, so must strategy. What was “strategic” yesterday is less and less so today.

“Why doesn’t anybody sell a chorded keyboard for cellphones?