The voices from a certain segment of the developer classes cry out that the iPad has left out too much. That the simplicity of the device has cut them off from the toolsets with which they’ve become comfortable and productive. There’s no keyboard, no mouse, no windows, no multitasking, no hierarchical file system. Perhaps they state the obvious when they say it’s not the laptop they already have. The device, they say, is too simple to be useful. The computing environment is too vertical. Somehow this crowd imagines a linear incremental evolutionary development from personal computing as they’ve always known it to a simple tablet device. A simple device that includes all the complexity and clutter to which they’ve become accustomed. Of course we know the fate of the complex tablet device they’re describing— it never caught on. That wasn’t what they wanted either.
There’s another segment that says that this new iPad device won’t inspire the tinkerer, the maker. The person who, as a child growing up, reveled in taking apart things to see how they worked. There are no screws to let the user open up this device and have a peak inside. The device is both too simple and too complex. The integrated design and manufacture of the product is at such a high level that there’s not much for the tinkerer to play with. This crowd believes the iPad kills play. But tinkering and play is always a relative matter. With the iPad, tinkering is simply displaced— it moves up the stack to the level of web/cloud and native software. Tinkerers, if they are tinkerers, are not so easily dissuaded.
A third segment thinks that the iPad will re-incarcerate the audience. Social media and various crowd-sourced content sites have transformed the audience from passive observers to active participants. But, the iPad is deemed an evolutionary step backward, an evil plan by the incumbent media companies to preserve their dastardly business models. The device, they say, is purely for consumption of media— it’s a screen, much like a television. Because it lacks the traditional input tools, the keyboard and the mouse, it can’t and won’t enable the user to interact or create. Multi-touch is a gesture of consumption, not one of creation. Those making this argument defend the “new media of the internet” from the next generation of innovators and the kids who’ll learn to type on glass.
In each of these cases there’s a defense of an inconvenient complexity. The complexity must be preserved to extend the stability of the existing ecosystem. There’s even a moral edge to maintaining the status quo, as if embracing this new platform was a kind of degenerate act. And instead of the device that’s available today, a non-existent device of the future is peddled in its place. A device where choices don’t have to be made, where everything you want, everything you have, and everything you can imagine exist in a simple package. Of course, if you wait long enough, the thing you’re looking for might just come along. Either that or you’ll run out of heartbeats.
In the end, what the simplicity of the iPad allows is more participation by more people with real-time personal and social networked computing. By eliminating levels of complexity, the barriers to practical and emotional engagement with the device are reduced below a significant threshold. But we’re only in the year zero, as the platform expands and matures, as competitors flesh out variations of the theme, new levels of complexity will emerge.
The idea of a ‘MirrorWorld’ is very powerful metaphorically. It’s as though the vital and valuable parts of our world are taking root in the Network and creating— not a shadow existence, but a reflection of the shape of our lives. The personal computer has been the portal through which we viewed this reflection. It’s also been the tool we used to build this reflecting pond.
It occurred to me that the iPad is responding to the evolving shape of the Network. We think of augmented reality as something written on top of the base field of the reality around us. The Network, in the sense that it reflects our lived world, is already an augmentation of reality. The portal to that real-time reflection looks more and more like an iPad, and less and less like a personal computer. Perhaps we’re in an in-between state— we don’t yet know the shape we’re in.
The transposition of the metaphor of spatial relationships to the realm of computing gave us purchase, a foothold, on things and how they might be organized. Our personal computers were envisioned as very large file cabinets. The size of the cabinet was proportional to the size of the hard drive attached to the CPU. As the primary connection for storage systems moved to remote network-attached systems, the cabinet has grown to an enormous size, but the organizational metaphor remains unchanged.
While capacities seem almost limitless in the “consumer” computing space, in the enterprise there are limits everywhere. The corporate enterprise’s limitation on the size of these file drawers has resulted in the phenomena of email jail. A stream of email is constantly coming in to your mail reader, but the size of your mailbox is finite. Once the box is full, the stream is shut off until you create space in your mailbox by deleting a sufficient number of messages.
It may have been Gmail that introduced the idea that nothing needs to be deleted ever. The stream of mail comes in: we look at it, ignore it, act on it, search for it, view it in threads— but we don’t need to manage the number of messages in a mailbox of limited dimensions. A stream flows into a larger river and then into the ocean. The world of social media has given us a variety of new streams with which to work. Oddly, none of them have the basic toolset that the Gmail stream offered right out of the gate.
As we begin to think about how to work with streams, we flip from metaphors of spatial organization to temporal schemes. The stream doesn’t empty into an ocean, but rather always remains an event embedded in the stream of time. The control set we seek comes from the world of digital audio/video. Jump to a point in the time line, fast forward, rewind, zoom in, give me the alternate audio channel, jump to a live real-time view. Largely, the metaphors we use in these thought experiments have been checked out from the library of physics. We move from space to time, but perhaps we really move to the space-time continuum. It’s here that the term fabric is introduced to describe the medium within which we swim.
At this point I’d to change the focus slightly and look at the fabric of the transaction surface of the Network. While cash money is generally acceptable at every transaction point in our daily lives, the Network doesn’t have an analog. Credit/Debit cards and PayPal seem to be the primary transaction networks through which goods can be purchased or money can change hands. If you were to imagine the set of points in physical and Network space where electronic monetary transactions are possible, you’d have a map with a rather sparse distribution.
While money itself is an abstraction of commodity, in its physical form, as bills and coins, it has not been able to make the leap from our lived physical world to our lived Network world. Cash almost defines the quality of fungibility. And while digital bits can be re-arranged to represent seemingly any form within computational space, there is no digital representation of cash that maintains its fungibility.
The first chief function of money is to supply commodities with the material for the expression of their values, or to represent their values as magnitudes of the same denomination, qualitatively equal, and quantitatively comparable. It thus serves as a universal measure of value. And only by virtue of this function does gold, the equivalent commodity par excellence, become money.
It is not money that renders commodities commensurable. Just the contrary. It is because all commodities, as values, are realized human labour, and therefore commensurable, that their values can be measured by one and the same special commodity, and the latter be converted into the common measure of their values, i.e., into money. Money as a measure of value, is the phenomenal form that must of necessity be assumed by that measure of value which is immanent in commodities, labour-time.
-Karl Marx, Capital
Bank of America’s Keep The Change program introduced an interesting innovation into the transaction point. While it’s been lauded for its use of behavioral economics theory in spurring its customers to save more, the program’s technical implementation suggests some interesting possibilities. In general, this program has expanded the fabric of the transaction surface for routing funds to savings by giving every purchase point the ability to apply a portion of the transaction total to a designated savings account. The number of nodes on this private network through which savings can occur is radically expanded.
While currently Keep The Change limits the funds routed through this method to the difference between the purchase price and the next whole dollar, there’s no reason that any amount couldn’t be routed through this same channel. Just as we can now use ATM/Debit cards to withdraw cash along with a purchase, this program already has the primitives in place to allow deposits anywhere a card is accepted. The limitation on this model is that transactions can only occur at official nodes of the private network.
The App Store application on the iPhone has had a similar effect in expanding the fabric of the transaction surface. Historically software was purchased in shrink-wrapped boxes from a retail store or via catalog mail order. Software delivered over the wire to the desktop expanded the transaction surface tremendously. The iPhone App Store radically expands the surface, it delivers software and completes transactions wirelessly to any location with signal. Two friends meet over coffee at a local cafe. They discuss their favorite new apps. While they talk, each purchases and downloads the new apps that tickled their fancy. And an “App” might be a game, a word processor, a social media client, a news media client, a book, a song, a musical instrument, a video of a baseball game or an application that let’s them broadcast live video and audio commentary from their table in the cafe.
Jack Dorsey’s new venture Square has the potential to build on the iPhone’s platform. While the App Store has defined the model for delivering digital goods and services, and is now being widely copied, Square potentially turns every iPhone into a node on the private credit card payment network. As a purchaser, it provides enhanced identity artifacts, and as a seller it simplifies access to the private electronic payment routing system. And while the specified accounts may start with credit cards, there’s no reason that regular bank or brokerage accounts, telecom accounts, cable television, or bandwidth accounts couldn’t be endpoints in the future. There’s a real potential for another radical expansion of the transaction surface.
Each of these innovations reduces the amount of friction on the transaction surface. The obstacles between the desire and the object of desire are removed. By activating the iPhone/iPod Touch as both a product delivery/consumption channel and a node on the electronic payment routing system, the fabric of the transaction surface gains 78 million new nodes. The small screen that you carry with you replaces the fixed screen wired to a specific location. And as this surface unfolds into the world around us, more and more transactions will be routed via electronic message. This stream of data has been largely represented as a transaction log, an audit trail. Services like Square will allow the attachment of a micro-message and photo/audio/video file to each side of the transaction and ultimately the ability to route an item to the private side of your stream management client. Need the receipt, the warranty, the assembly instructions, the nearest service center? It’s all there, in your lifestream.
We see the shift beginning to play out as fragments of the picture leak out on to the Network. Presumably the strategy was set 4 or 5 years ago, but the artifacts of its implementation are now appearing in regular release cycles. As we fit more pieces into the puzzle, the picture is coming in to focus.
Most technology is only useful to the extent that people are around it. Some technical experiences are powerful enough to draw people to the technology. Recently we’ve seen a new landscape emerge where powerful technology is created that can follow people around wherever they might go. The big players are positioning themselves to flourish in this new world.
It may have been Ray Ozzie who most succinctly drew the boundaries of this new landscape by coining the phrase: “three screens and a cloud.”
“So, moving forward, again I believe that the world some number of years from now in terms of how we consume IT is really shifting from a machine-centric viewpoint to what we refer to as three screens and a cloud:  the phone, the PC, and the TV ultimately, and how we deliver value to them.�
Ozzie’s phrase assumes the transition from locally-installed software to mostly cloud computing. It equalizes, and puts into the same field, three devices with historically separate development and usage paths. It also reduces all of the physical characteristics of the devices to the virtual, by way of a screen. In addition, the specific historical uses of these devices is replaced with delivering value from the Network. This implies that the functionality of these separate channels has been absorbed, blended, and can be delivered over the Network.
Some assume all of these devices are being absorbed into the personal computer, but if you track the evolution of the PC’s form factor you can see that it’s been reduced to an input (keyboard, mouse, camera, microphone) and an output (screen). The CPU has largely disappeared from the experience, it’s been reduced to the primary user interaction points. This is just a preparation for its ultimate absorption into the new three screen ecosystem.
There’s a fixed screen that creates a large high-definition experience and draws the user to it. This screen is appropriate for individuals or social groups. There’s a small mobile screen that the user takes with her everywhere she goes. This is a private screen, mostly for individual use. And there’s a medium-sized screen that you bring along when there’s a specific work/play purpose requiring a larger interaction surface, or when you need a device that bridges the private and the public.
If you think about the mobile phone market prior to the release of the iPhone; the transition to a platform in which a “small screen delivers value from the Network” seemed an impossibility. The players were entrenched and the carriers controlled the device market. The deal that was cut with AT&T, along with the revaluation of all values in the mobile device market, created a new starting point. There was no evolutionary path from the old mobile telephone to the iPhone. Although technically, it’s a small computer, Jobs was specifically aiming at creating the small personal screen.
“I don’t want people to think of this as a computer,� he said. “I think of it as reinventing the phone.�
Apple dropped “Computer” from it’s name and placed a large bet on the post-PC future with the iPhone. They have publicly reset their strategic direction and now describe themselves as a ‘mobile devices company.” The iPad doubles down on mobility and bets that the netbook was a rough sketch of what would be useful as a second screen in a mobile computing context. Both the iPhone and iPad— through multi-touch— have continued to reduce the frame of interaction. The screen is transformed and becomes both the input and the output for the user’s experience.
A key development in the ‘three screens and a cloud’ vision is the elimination of input devices. The screen, and the gesture space around it, serves the user for both input and output.
Google has begun to design their products with a mobile-first sensibility, and has even made public statements indicating that within three years the mobile screen will be the user’s primary interaction point with the Network. Both Chrome and Android point to mobile technology. (It should be pointed out that Android isn’t an operating system, it’s a java-based runtime that sits on top of a Linux OS. In this sense, it’s more similar to Silverlight)
Microsoft made a hard pivot with the Windows Phone 7 product. The “Life in Motion” theme and the кухниtiles and hub user interface moves away from file systems and toward lifestream themes. Add to this the porting of Silverlight to the Symbian, Android and Windows Phone platforms, throw in a connection to Azure, and you have a massive developer pipeline to the small screen.
We all like to paraphrase William Gibson on the future, it’s here, it’s just not evenly distributed yet. Although this isn’t different from most things: the past, the present and any object you’d care to choose from the physical universe. None are distributed evenly. Time, as the old joke goes, is nature’s way of keeping everything from happening at once. And therefore it follows that Space, is nature’s way of keeping everything from being just one big smoothie.
Progress toward the vision of “three screens and a cloud” will be measured in the distribution power of the major technology/media players. Apple has developed a significant channel through its innovative devices, iTunes and its physical stores. Microsoft has a strong base in operating system and office applications, but has expanded their distribution portfolio with Silverlight and Azure. Google’s distribution power is contained in their search index, which is exposed through their search query page. Facebook and Twitter’s distribution power is located in their social graph and the fire hose of their real-time index. All of these players have created vibrant developer ecosystems. This future won’t be distributed evenly, but to break through to mass markets, it will require both distribution power and a high-touch service channel.
The convergence implied in the phrase “three screens and a cloud” will consume the personal computer as well. It will be transformed, blended, and its functionality and services made accessible through any of the three screens. Preparations have long been underway for the a Post-PC future. The productivity once available only through the old devices and channels has been migrating quickly to the new Network-connected screens. Google has now joined Microsoft and Apple in attending to the possibilities of the large screen. These changes aren’t taking place as a gradual evolution, there’s a dangerous leap required to reach this new platform. Not every company will have the strength, capital and will to make that leap. And as the old devices and channels are hollowed out, at some point there will be a major collapse of the old platforms.
In the war rooms around the technology world, there’s a conversation going on about what it will take to get to the other side.
