Consilient Network· The graph of everyone who built this · Add your entry ↗
Concept path

Four companies, thirty-five years, one missing layer

The Business Process Abstraction Layer was named at Microsoft in 1991. Everything since is the same problem attacked with whatever the substrate of the moment allowed — and each attempt failed at a level below the one it was working on.

7 stopsFor: Anyone asking why this took thirty-five yearsAll paths
He chose it in 1993 as the hardest remaining problem, on the grounds that the others were well suited to existing capital markets and this one was not.
The path

Follow it in order

Each stop is a page in the graph. The order is an argument — but every one of them is also a door into the rest of it, so you can leave the path wherever it stops being useful.

01I named the missing layer at Microsoft in 1991. Thirty-five years later it is still missingNamed in Building 1: a coordination layer above applications and below business practice, letting processes span organizations without being re-implemented at every boundary.→02Blyth Software: Omnis, DEC, and the Immaculate RevolutionAttempt one, in product form. Omnis coordinating across two operating systems and five databases — and hitting the limit that the coordination lived inside the tool rather than the substrate.→03Software as a ServiceAttempt two, arrived at independently and built by others. Remove the requirement that a company own the machine. His grandfather had built the same thing in a basement in 1975.→04Erik Freed built the company that became Consilient while I was on sabbaticalAttempt three's origin: Sitelets, small portable agents running in a browser or inside HTML mail, derived from Evolve's asynchronous object model.→05BP: Lord John Browne proposed crowdsourcing on our platform in 2001How close it got. A major industrial company proposing to fund distributed, incentivized development on a shared coordination platform — in 2001, sponsored by a chief executive whose stated vision was the virtual corporation.→06Resilient Network Systems: Esther Dyson, the ODNI, and the IRS deploymentAttempt four, one substrate lower: verify identity, reputation and privileges across boundaries without anyone disclosing anything. The intelligence community had reached the same wall independently.→07Quantum Adaptive Systems Theory: six frameworks imported wholeAnd the layer beneath all of them, which is where the problem actually lived. Six formal frameworks imported whole, each with the condition that would defeat it.→
Where it lands

What the path is for

The point

Nobody arrives at a coordination architecture from theory. They arrive by hitting the same wall at every level — a database connector, a network bridge, an enterprise application, a trust network, a company — until the wall itself becomes the subject. Each attempt failed one layer below where it was working. Blyth's coordination lived in the tool. Evolve's lived in the application. Consilient's lived in a capital structure with a lever in it. Resilient's lived in an enforcement model that needed an authority. The architecture is the first attempt at the layer underneath all four.

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