ExtraEagle

Johan Norberg my favorite Swede has a great article Entrepreneurs are the Heroes of this World in the latest Cato Institute news letter.

Go read the whole thing but in particular check out the story in it about Malcom McLean. Malcom was a definite Extra Eagle. Wikipedia says:

In 1937, McLean was delivering lumber from North Carolina to New Jersey. While sitting on a dock waiting for his truck to be unloaded onto a ship, he was watching other trucks being unloaded. Every crate on every truck had to be unloaded, put in a sling and hoisted up and then down into the hold of the ship. There, more stevedores took it off the sling and made sure it was properly stowed. This method is called”break-bulk shipping”. It was slow and labour intensive, and there was lots of pilferage and accidents. McLean first conceived the idea of using the entire truck trailer itself to load onto and off of a ship. McLean could not develop the idea further because the Interstate Commerce Commission did not, at the time, allow truckers to own shipping companies.

So let’s see. Malcom saw a really stupid way of doing something that was protected by special interests. He immediately saw what for him was an obvious solution, but had to fight to get it through.

This reminds me an awful lot of enterprise software development vs small agile teams using for example Ruby on Rails. As a matter of fact there is a direct parallel between Malcom’s story and many other heroic entrepreneurs.

An example that most of os web entrepreneurs know well is the David and Rails story. He saw the stupidity of the world of enterprise development and new there was a better way. I could find a lot more parallels between Malcom and David’s story, but I’ll leave that as a creative exercise for the readers.

Just look around your house or office. Very little of what you see would have been there if it wasn’t for Malcom deciding it was idiotic to wait for people unloading trucks and loading individual items one by one onto a ship.

In the same way many of the newer services you use today and in the future would probably not have existed if it wasn’t for David’s annoyance of repetitive J2EE (Java Enterprise Environment) configuration and coding.

Moral of the story, get annoyed and change the world.

Everyone hates them and no one reads them. Now a campaign ReasonableAgreement.org has started to fight this bullshit. Place this on your emails, t-shirts etc.:

READ CAREFULLY. By [accepting this material|accepting this payment|accepting this business-card|viewing this t-shirt|reading this sticker] you agree, on behalf of your employer, to release me from all obligations and waivers arising from any and all NON-NEGOTIATED agreements, licenses, terms-of-service, shrinkwrap, clickwrap, browsewrap, confidentiality, non-disclosure, non-compete and acceptable use policies (”BOGUS AGREEMENTS”) that I have entered into with your employer, its partners, licensors, agents and assigns, in perpetuity, without prejudice to my ongoing rights and privileges. You further represent that you have the authority to release me from any BOGUS AGREEMENTS on behalf of your employer.

Fantastic. As they say it is probably as legally unenforceable as normal click through license are and for the same reason. But that is the whole point. For a contract to be legal it has to be negotiated, all parties have to understand it and specifically give acceptance to it.