Category: collaboration

Tailgating Apple

Published April 11, 2010 by cgerrish

The philosopher George Santayana’s aphorism: “Those who cannot remember the past are condemned to repeat it” seems to underlie many of the stories bubbling up around the leap from fixed computing to mobile computing. Especially with regard to Apple’s role in forming the ecosystem, the market and some of the decisions they’ve taken about what to leave behind. Santayana’s aphorism has been restated in a number of ways, another popular formulation is: “Those who cannot learn from history are doomed to repeat it.” At any rate, there’s an implication that history, the past, should never be repeated— doing so is the occupation of the doomed. There’s also a sense of coming upon a node, as we move through time, that contains the possibility of looping back to a previously experienced stretch of history. Although we don’t replay it note for note, the chord changes seem follow the same pattern.

There are two stories that run through the minds of observers:

1. The Apple and Microsoft story. An integrated computing system that pushed the boundaries of human-computer interaction into the realm of usefulness, and the lower-cost modular computing system (DOS paired with any manufacturer) that provided a ‘good enough’ experience and a solid return on investment. In the end, Microsoft’s Windows became the dominant personal and business computing platform.

2. The Monopoly and Anti-Trust story. From its position of market dominance, Microsoft used its position to maintain power. The law is fine with the use of soft power (you choose it because it’s best, whatever best means to you); but steps in when hard power is exercised (you choose it because it’s the only choice). A settlement was reached: Microsoft’s brand suffered damage, some APIs were opened up and market dominance was largely maintained. The second act of this story has developers starting to route around Microsoft by creating cloud-based applications of ever-increasing sophistication.

And so, as the mobile computing space comes into focus we see:

1. Apple and iPhone/iPad Touch/iPad as an integrated platform and device

2. Google and Android/Chrome across multiple manufacturers

3. Microsoft and Silverlight/Windows Phone across multiple manufacturers

Tech pundits expect an exact replay of The Apple and Microsoft story. Although, Google has been cast in the role of Microsoft this time. Steve Jobs, they say, has not learned from history. Apple will eventually be overtaken by a more “open” and commodified horizontal platform. On the other hand, both Google and Microsoft have learned from Apple and have bought in to integrated design practices while maintaining a multiple-manufacturer production model. And while Apple is thought to be repeating its mistakes on the one hand, on the other, they’ve been cast in the role of Microsoft based on their dominance and control of the new mobile market. On a recent Gillmor Gang, Blaine Cook suggested that Apple is courting an anti-trust action based on their recent behavior. The implication being that there is no choice but the iPhone/iPad, and that competition is hindered by Apple controlling their own device platform.

Google and Microsoft have understood that more control and tighter design integration will be required to compete with Apple. Google has started down that road with the Nexus One. Microsoft, with their Windows Phone 7 announcements, have shown that they’ll be moving in the same direction. They’re very fast followers, some might even say they’re tailgating Apple. As in any race, drafting into the slipstream of the leader provides many advantages.

The term “slipstreaming” describes an object traveling inside the slipstream of another object (most often objects moving through the air though not necessarily flying). If an object is inside the slipstream behind another object, moving at the same speed, the rear object will require less power to maintain its speed than if it were moving independently. In addition, the leading object will be able to move faster than it could independently because the rear object reduces the effect of the low-pressure region on the leading object.

A fast follower wants to put himself into the position to execute a slingshot pass. By drafting in behind the market leader, the follower can exert less energy while keeping pace. The slingshot allows the follower to generate passing speed by optimizing the aerodynamics of their relative positions. The leader wants to adjust position to block this kind of move. The analysis and play-by-play has been based entirely on the assumption the lessons of history have been locked in, and this new race will play out with exactly the same dynamics. The lesson Apple may have learned is that a post-PC approach and strong portfolio of patents could change the outcome of some key points of the narrative.

A subplot to the main story involves Adobe and its Flash runtime. Adobe’s Flash is playing the role of Netscape in the current transition. Although Hal Varian was referring to Netscape in his 1999 book Information Rules, the thought applies equally well to Adobe. They face a classic problem of interconnection. Their competitors control the operating environment in which they are but one component. Adobe owes its current level of success in the fixed computing environment to Microsoft’s dominance.

At a key point, Microsoft had no competitive product and agreed to distribute the Flash runtime along with its operating system and browser. This put Flash on a high percentage of the installed personal computing user base. This kind of market penetration probably could not have been achieved if users had been required to download and install the plugin on their own. Once the Flash player was in place, apps could be pushed over the wire, and there was a high likelihood that they would operate. The Flash runtime could even update itself once it was established on the local Windows machine. The Macintosh and Linux platforms were filled in by Adobe, but were given a much lower priority based on market share.

Adobe has two problems in this transitional environment. The first is that their competitors control both their operating environment— and the distribution channel. Secondly, where they once had a willing partner, Microsoft now has Silverlight which competes directly. Because Adobe has had a high penetration percentage, they claim as much a 99%, they feel entitled to ship with any new operating environment. It used to be that way, but things have changed. The problem that Adobe’s Flash solved now has other solutions in each of the mobile stacks.

In the post-PC mobile computing world all of the original assumptions and agreements are being reassessed. This new environment isn’t an extension or an evolution of the fixed desktop environment– the blackboard has been erased and the project has been built up from scratch. That means you don’t assume Adobe’s Flash runtime, you don’t even assume copy and paste, multi-tasking or a file system. The first couple of things you might put on the blackboard are 10 hour battery life and always-on wireless network connectivity— that’s what makes the device usable in a mobile context. From there we can add location and streaming services, real-time responsiveness and the rest. But it’s battery life that’s the limiting factor. It’s the invisible tether that eventually draws us back to the power source to recharge. Where silicon once ruled, we now look to lithium.

The assumption that history will repeat itself relieves us of the burden of figuring out what’s going on, of understanding out the differences that make a difference. No doubt some threads of history will repeat themselves, but they may not be the ones we expect. When we come upon a node, as we move through time, a moment that contains the possibility of looping back to a previously experienced stretch of history. We also have the opportunity to take a familiar melody and go off and explore unexpected directions.

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The Base and the Overlay: Maps, MirrorWorlds, Action Cards

Published March 28, 2010 by cgerrish

There are natural and abstract surfaces onto which we overlay our stories. The sphere that we paint water and land masses on represents the natural shape of our small planet. For other endeavors we designate abstract work surfaces. One early example of this idea is the organizational scheme of Diderot’s encyclopedia. While subjects were laid out in alphabetical order, the book also contained conceptual maps and cross-linking to super-impose the natural shape of the history of ideas on to the abstract system of organization. This blending of the abstract and natural (GUI and NUI) that informed Diderot’s project is a theme that has returned as we build out the mobile interaction points of the Network.

The alphabet is ingrained at such an early age through the use of song, that we often feel it’s an artifact of the natural world. The fact that so many of us can recite a randomly ordered set of 26 symbols is a triumph of education and culture. The neutrality and static nature of the alphabetic sequence allows us to organize and find things across a community with little or no coordination. Although, the static nature of the alphabetic sequence is rather unforgiving. For instance, my book and CD collections are both alphabetically ordered. Or at least they were at one point in time. And although I understand why things get into a muddle, it doesn’t help me find the book that’s just flashed through my mind as I look at the shelves in front of me.

These maps, both natural and abstract, that we use to navigate our way through the world are becoming more and more significant. Especially as our ability to represent the physical world through the Network becomes more high definition. Just as with the alphabet, we’ll tend to forget that the map is not the territory. Borges’s story about the futility of a map scaled to exactly fit the territory has an important message for our digital age:

In that Empire, the Art of Cartography attained such Perfection that the map of a single Province occupied the entirety of a City, and the map of the Empire, the entirety of a Province. In time, those Unconscionable Maps no longer satisfied, and the Cartographers Guilds struck a Map of the Empire whose size was that of the Empire, and which coincided point for point with it. The following Generations, who were not so fond of the Study of Cartography as their Forebears had been, saw that that vast Map was Useless, and not without some Pitilessness was it, that they delivered it up to the Inclemencies of Sun and Winters. In the Deserts of the West, still today, there are Tattered Ruins of that Map, inhabited by Animals and Beggars; in all the Land there is no other Relic of the Disciplines of Geography.

Google spiders the Network for its search index and then presents algorithmically-processed search engine results pages in response to user queries. The larger map is not in plain view, just the slice that we request. It seems as though for any question we can imagine, Google will have some kind of an answer. The map appears to cover the territory point for point. Even the ragged edge of the real-time stream is framed in to the prioritized list of responses. The myth of completeness covers over the gap between the map and the territory, and the even the other maps and communications modes we might use within the territory.

If a tree falls in a forest in China, and there’s not a Google search result page linking to the event, does it make a sound?

Reading and writing to the maps of the Network has long been facilitated by Graphical User Interfaces. While the abstract metaphors of the GUI will never go away entirely, we’re seeing a new set of Natural User Interfaces emerge. Designing a better, simpler and clearer abstraction is giving way to finding the gestures that map to the natural contours of our everyday lived experience.

Natural interaction with high-definition representations via the Network has opened the door to what David Gelernter calls Mirror Worlds. Just as the fixed nature of the alphabet provided us with a set of coordinates on which to hang our collections of things, geo-coordinates will provide a similar framework for mirror worlds. Both Google and Microsoft have pasted together a complete base map of our entire planet from satellite photography and vector graphic drawings.

As with the search index, the base map provides us with a snapshot in time; we see the most recent pictures. The base is a series of photographs, not a real-time video stream. Even at this early phase of the mirror world we can see an overlay of real-time data and messages projected on to the base map. While we might expect the base map to move along a curve toward higher and higher fidelity and definition, it seems more likely that the valuable detail will find its home in the overlays.

The base map will be a canvas, or a skeleton, on which we will overlay meanings, views, opinions, transaction opportunities and conversations. While there will be a temptation to somehow ‘get it right.’ To present a compete and accurate representation of the territory— mapping each point, and each data point, with absolute fidelity and accuracy, it’s here where we wander off into Borges’s land of scientific exactitude and the library of babel. The base map only needs to be good enough to give us a reference point to hang our collections of things on. And, of course, realism is only one mode of expression.

The creation of overlays is the province of the mashup, the mixing of two distinct data sources in real time. Maps and twitter, apartment locations and craigslist, potholes and San Francisco streets, a place/time and photographs of a special event— all these implementations have demonstrated that geo-mashups are possible and happening continuously. But as this sea of real-time data washes across the surface of the map, we’d like a seat at the mixing board. A URL that pre-mixes two or more data sets has it’s use, but it’s a static implementation.

The framework of selectors and action cards may have the most promise here. Action cards are already engineered to work as overlays to base maps of any kind. When mixing and matching geo-location coordinates on the base map with streams of data, including identity-specific private data, is just a matter of throwing action cards from your selector on to a base map, you’ll have a natural user interface to a mirror world. And while the gap between the map and the territory will remain, as Baudrillard might say, the map begins to become a kind of territory of its own.

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A Little Bit Louder Now…

Published March 7, 2010 by cgerrish

We move from one metaphor to its opposite, swinging like the bob on a pendulum. As our daily activities start throwing off streams of data, and we aggregate the data of others into composite parallel streams for our consumption— we look across the great divide and gaze at the old metaphor of files, folders, explorer/finder and the desktop. We hop back and forth between the metaphors, juggling streams and file folders. Wondering at what point will we leap across the chasm— and be mostly here in the stream, instead of mostly there on the desktop.

Personal computing is largely a matter of time and where the user spends it. Using applications to manipulate files located in folders has dominated our computing experience for a long while. Perhaps it was the steady stream of emails filling up our inboxes that provided the bridge to the stream of tweets flowing through our selective view of the consolidated lifestream. The metaphor of a desktop, folders and files gave us a handle for managing digital things inside the world of personal computing. A user might have a messy desktop or clean one. One could use up energy keeping things organized, putting them away in the proper folder— or allow them to become messy and spend energy finding things amidst the chaos.

The Desktop, folder, file model corresponds to the outline. Other words we might use to describe this kind of formation include hierarchy, name space or tree structure. The problem with things is that they don’t seem to know where they belong. They don’t take the initiative, always have to be told what to do. But, as long as the numbers stay small— not too many files or folders; not too many streams, or too much velocity, we can manage on either side of chasm. However, to stay small in this context means to exclude possibility. And once the numbers get large, the amount of energy required to keep things organized in outlines exceeds the value derived from the organization.

As David Weinberger points out in his book Everything is Miscellaneous, search transformed the value of the outline as a system of organization. Once everything has been indexed, sorted and ranked by algorithm, the findability of a thing doesn’t depend on its place in a hierarchy of categorization. This was a transition from organization based on the metaphor of extension in physical space to the random access metaphor of computational space.

Moving from Space to Time is another kind of transition. David Gelernter is one of the few who has spent time thinking about organization based on time and stream. Why should we have to give names to digital files or assign them to folders? Can’t things just take the initiative?

Once we shift the axis of organization from Space to Time, we begin to think about how we could relate to dynamic flows of information. We glance again at outlines, files and folder systems. The numbers are too big, if we look a the problem through that lens we’re inevitably lead to the view that there’s information overload. Clay Shirky rebuts that claim, and calls it filter failure. But a filter is only one of the tools we’re missing. The spatial metaphor can’t even give us the basic steps to dance to the music of time. We need a different starting point. Gelernter, in his essay “Time to Start Taking the Internet Seriously” improvises on a theme:

17. There is no clear way to blend two standard websites together, but it’s obvious how to blend two streams. You simply shuffle them together like two decks of cards, maintaining time-order — putting the earlier document first. Blending is important because we must be able to add and subtract in the Cybersphere. We add streams together by blending them. Because it’s easy to blend any group of streams, it’s easy to integrate stream-structured sites so we can treat the group as a unit, not as many separate points of activity; and integration is important to solving the information overload problem. We subtract streams by searching or focusing. Searching a stream for “snow” means that I subtract every stream-element that doesn’t deal with snow. Subtracting the “not snow” stream from the mainstream yields a “snow” stream. Blending streams and searching them are the addition and subtraction of the new Cybersphere.

18. Nearly all flowing, changing information on the Internet will move through streams. You will be able to gather and blend together all the streams that interest you. Streams of world news or news about your friends, streams that describe prices or auctions or new findings in any field, or traffic, weather, markets — they will all be gathered and blended into one stream. Then your own personal lifestream will be added. The result is your mainstream: different from all others; a fast-moving river of all the digital information you care about.

19. You can turn a knob and slow down your mainstream: less-important stream-elements will flow past invisibly and won’t distract you, but will remain in the stream and appear when you search for them. You can rewind your lifestream and review the past. If an important-looking document or message sails past and you have no time to deal with it now, you can copy the document or message into the future (copy it to “this evening at 10,” say); when the future arrives, the document appears again. You can turn a different knob to make your fast-flowing stream spread out into several slower streams, if you have space enough on your screen to watch them all. And you can gather those separate streams back together whenever you like.

So, what does the toolset look like? Filters are a part of it. We’ll want to filter the stream based on keywords, selected social circles, location, time period, velocity of flow, media type of hyperlinked citation, authority of a person in particular slice and more. The results of a filtered stream will look like the surfacing of particular elements of the stream and the backgrounding of others. Stream splicing is a pre-requisite of filtering, blending together a bunch of streams doesn’t result in information overload if you have the right tools at your command. You’ll be able to filter and pause; go to super slo-motion; fast foward and even loop a section, manage public and private streams in the same workspace, mix recorded on-demand tracks with live real-time feeds and add in your own commentary in a live chat running alongside.

Music may provide the most developed set of metaphors to think this new landscape through. Here’s Thelonius Monk stream splicing:

Here’s Michael Tilson Thomas blending streams, pulling themes to the surface, modulating the information as it flows past:

The blends and modulations can be sophisticated and complex or rough and full of energy. Some lads from Liverpool get a little bit louder now:

When Gelernter describes the process of searching for ‘snow’ in the composite stream, he gets to the difference between search and track. Search was built on the ability to spider the corpus of web pages and links, build an index, and provide ranked results in response to queries. Track is a tool to help us manage and explore the real-time stream. The days of the world wide web conceived as a static set of hyperlinked pages are coming to an end. The file is a finished product, the stream is always unfinished. Gelernter describes the emergent new cyberstructure:

13. The traditional web site is static, but the Internet specializes in flowing, changing information. The “velocity of information” is important — not just the facts but their rate and direction of flow. Today’s typical website is like a stained glass window, many small panels leaded together. There is no good way to change stained glass, and no one expects it to change. So it’s not surprising that the Internet is now being overtaken by a different kind of cyberstructure.

14. The structure called a cyberstream or lifestream is better suited to the Internet than a conventional website because it shows information-in-motion, a rushing flow of fresh information instead of a stagnant pool.

Your connection to the item in a stream is open ended— the flow is open, or it is closed. If it is open, there’ll be a next item, and one after that. All these items are unfinished, they need response, routing, to be ignored, or decorated with gestures. We find ourselves in the in-between moment between the photograph and the motion picture. Our tools are at the level of the zoetrope, the praxinoscope, or the magic lantern. But once we start thinking in terms of Time instead of Space, the world looks very different.

At this moment of transition, we now have the tools to analyze our direction. Are we building tools for the static hierarchical namespace of the world wide web, or building tools for the real-time stream of the Network? If we look at Salesforce’s introduction of Chatter, Google’s introduction of Buzz, the expansions of Facebook and Twitter, FourSquare and GoWalla, the augmentation capabilities of Kynetx— we can see a shift in orientation from Space to Time. And while we might expect the leap across the chasm to require the bravery of the early adopter, I think we’ll be surprised at how natural most people find living in the stream of time to be.

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Antagonyms, Social Circles and Chattering about VRM

Published February 19, 2010 by cgerrish

Throwing all the pieces out on the table, we connect the dots to make pictures. It’s a child’s game, creating figures out what look like a random set of numbered points. We tend to visualize the network of our social graph as a series of connected points. The pictures that emerge from those connections tell a story about our lives and experiences.

One of the interesting things about random sets of dots is that we tend to group them based on proximity, similarity, closure and continuation. We project pictures on to the dots, and once we see a particular picture, sometimes it’s hard to realize that someone might put the same set of dots together into something entirely different. It could even be an image that has the exact opposite meaning as the picture we see.

There are a couple of words used to describe a word that can mean the opposite of itself. Here are some examples of Antagonyms (or Contranyms):

Overlook: to pay attention to, to inspect (“We had time to overlook the contract.”) vs. to ignore

Oversight: Watchful and responsible care vs. An omission or error due to carelessness

It’s the context that tilts the meaning of the word this way or that.

When you think about the set of people you may be connected to within a large company, you can overlay several kinds of connections. A person may be a colleague, they might be in the same division, have the same pay grade, be part of a project, be a friend, or even a relative. In fact, we make a virtue out of the idea that the people we work with could also be our friends. Many companies like to talk about their employees as being like a family.

Google tested their Buzz product inside the walls of their company. No doubt it was used for work, play and a whole range of unforeseen kinds of communication. After a while all those modes of communication began to blend together. The boundaries between them broke down. Just as email and IM are used for personal and business purposes, Buzz would naturally be used in the same way. From a business perspective, the dots were connected into a powerful image of collaboration and efficiency. Twitter/FriendFeed clearly worked great as an enterprise application.

The personal, public and business realms are overlapping images that can be mapped to the same set of dots. However, it’s the exclusive disjunction of these sets that defines the boundaries. In some cases, the boundaries need to be strong and impenetrable. These are the cases Google didn’t consider carefully enough in their launch scenario. Other times a co-worker becomes a friend, or someone you went to school with becomes a colleague. Or maybe you just decided to start following your company’s CEO on Twitter. The context of the interaction tilts the meaning of the connection. There’s not a bright line separating our private, public and business lives that can be applied as a definitive rule.

Google launched Buzz as a consumer product, but tested it as an enterprise product. Although they plan to quickly integrate it into their office application suite. But like all messaging tools it will have a public and a private mode. It will address and contain personal, public and business conversation threads. And by flowing data from a user’s social circle and the real-time flow of Buzz (effectively a ping server) into their search algorithm, results pages can be personalized by social graph in real time.

Meanwhile, SalesForce.com introduces Chatter to the enterprise and rolls it out at no extra charge to all employees on the internal network. And while it will start inside the enterprise, Chatter will quickly expand to the boundaries and begin to cross over. From a business perspective, it’ll be used to turbo-charge collaboration and create real-time communication for project teams and business units. But very quickly you’ll see friends sending messages to each other about meeting up for lunch, and a public-personal communications channel will be opened within the enterprise. And the circles will connect and widen from there.

Here are a couple more Contranyms:

clip (attach to) – clip (cut off from)

cleave (to cut apart) – cleave (to seal together)

Salesforce.com calls itself the leader in Customer Relationship Management and Cloud Computing. Chatter may just be the communication medium that ultimately contains both CRM and its opposite number, VRM. Vendor Relationship Management is a reaction to the data toolsets belonging to the enterprise and not to the individual customer.

In a narrow sense, VRM is the reciprocal — the customer side — of CRM (or Customer Relationship Management). VRM tools provide customers with the means to bear their side of the relationship burden. They relieve CRM of the perceived need to “capture,” “acquire,” “lock in,” “manage,” and otherwise employ the language and thinking of slave-owners when dealing with customers. With VRM operating on the customer’s side, CRM systems will no longer be alone in trying to improve the ways companies relate to customers. Customers will be also be involved, as fully empowered participants, rather than as captive followers.

If you were to think about what kind of infrastructure you’d want to run VRM on, Salesforce.com would be ideal. To run the mirror image of CRM, you need the same set of services and scale. The individual Chatter account could be the doorway to a set of VRM services. I can already see developers using the Force.com platform to populate a VRM app store.

Some corporations will attempt to maximize the business value of each individual worker, stripping out all the extraneous human factors. Chinese walls will be erected to keep the outside from the inside, the personal from the business, and the public from the private. But when you put messaging and communications tools into the hands of people they will find ways to talk to each other— about work, life, play, the project, and the joke they just heard at the water cooler.

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