Category: digital

Microsoft and Google: Wielding Hard and Soft Power

Published July 8, 2008 by cgerrish

Vendor Lock In

Steve Lohr of the NY Times posted an interesting article on the economics of Google and Microsoft. As usual the Network Effect was front and center in the analysis. Bill Gates gets his props as the foremost applied economist of the 20th Century. For those keeping score at home, that would be the last century. According to Lohr, Google lays claim to the 21st century. But it’s Lohr’s extension of the metaphors of hard and soft power that open some new areas for conversation.

Microsoft is associated with hard power combined with the network effect. The idea is that through proprietary formats and an operating system, Microsoft created a lock in that couldn’t be broken. You can check out any time, but you can never leave. Interestingly, Microsoft’s network effect was created without the Network. Dominance was enforced at the Enterprise and OEM level, most users never actually had to buy a Microsoft product.

Google is associated with soft power. Users are free to leave at any time, no proprietary formats are used, but ongoing usage creates a form of addiction. The network effect enables the large scale harvesting user gestures to create a learning machine that constantly adapts their algorithms. The result is the ongoing incremental improvement of the value of their software products delivered through the Network. Switching costs are low, but finding better value is difficult.

The internet has detached the user experience from Microsoft’s hard power, and Google has created a cash machine located firmly within the Network. Microsoft won the 20th century battle for hard power, but the 21st century’s battle is over soft power. The major players have to dominate without lock in, and Microsoft is starting to pivot from hard power to soft power. The Yahoo play was part of that strategy, Live Mesh and Silverlight also move Microsoft up the stack to the level of the Network. To win in the soft power arena, you’ve got to play in the open and you’ve got to deliver more value. The other thing Microsoft needs is a source and engine for harvesting user gestures as an input to improving the value of the product.

The hard power metaphor is useful at looking at the lock in players that still have some dominance. The obvious move would be to look at the entertainment industry, but that game is largely over. It’s the Telcos that really still play hard ball with hard power. The iPhone is starting to break that lock as it floats above the telephony system and lets the Network dominate. Think about the raw usage percentages of the iPhone, how much telephony, how much Network? The big lie that the Telcos need you to believe is that voice data is special. They need to distract you from the fact that the Network is getting more and more real time and delivers multiple media types for a lower cost.

But the Telcos are safe until the internet identity problem is solved. Today you’re identified by a phone number. Tomorrow it may be OpenID or CardSpace, but you won’t need that phone number anymore. When the hard power war is over in that space, a huge wave of innovation will be unleashed. And you might be surprised about who’s leading that charge…

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Writing to the Stream: As Time Goes By

Published July 7, 2008 by cgerrish

Jon Udell talks about teaching civilians about syndication. This, of course, makes me think of Heraclitus. Udell would like his local school to stop posting calendars in PDF format and start using something like iCal, a format with a more formal structure. The idea is to write events that stream across a calendar– something that can be subscribed to, parsed, mixed and mashed up. The reason that it’s hard to change the way people think about data is that the stream is not part of the metaphor we put in front of our operating systems.

There is nothing permanent except change.
– Heraclitus

“The file system is dead,” The guy who said that agrees with Jon Udell. His name is David Gelernter, and he’s one of the first people to talk about organizing data in terms of time rather than space. Lifestreams was something Gelernter talked about before there was Flickr, FaceBook, Twitter or FriendFeed. It’s simply a matter of changing the metaphor of the file system from a desk, file cabinets and a trashcan to something that more adequately fits the contours of our lives. In case you hadn’t noticed, we live our lives in both space and time.

What if instead of saving to a file or printing something out, we saved to a stream. What if that was acting within the normal metaphor for Human-Computer Interaction? We’ve come a long way with the graphic user interface metaphors developed by Doug Engelbart and the folks at Xerox Parc, but we’re in a period of transition. We’re moving from the solipsistic unNetworked desktop computer to the always already connected Network dashboard. We have an opportunity to expand the user interface metaphor we place between ourselves and the new internet operating system to include the concepts of time and the stream.

The other starting point for thinking about time-bound, documented objects in a stream is with Bruce Sterling’s idea of Spimes. He discusses the kind of design thinking that might go in to creating Spimes in his book Shaping Things. Boing Boing offers this summary:

A Spime is a location-aware, environment-aware, self-logging, self-documenting, uniquely identified object that flings off data about itself and its environment in great quantities. A universe of Spimes is an informational universe…

Sterling is speaking to the culture of industrial designers and the ecosystem of the manufactured object. But, of course, this doesn’t help with the problem of Jon Udell’s local school calendar.

Just as we’re always already part of the Network, all the marks we make are part of a stream. We keep the stream private and the make sections of it public when we choose to. It’s with Ward Cunningham’s idea of the Wiki that the document as a current public version begins to get purchase. Google Docs extends the metaphor to the typical office application suite. As Microsoft moves into the Network with Live Mesh, it has some opportunities to create foundational pieces of the new metaphor.

You could not step twice into the same rivers; for other waters are ever flowing on to you.
– Heraclitus

To understand the state of writing to the stream, all we need to do is look at what FriendFeed aggregates. To understand what the most common writing implements are, we can examine what makes up the flow that passes through FriendFeed. No doubt we’d find the usual suspects, Blogs via RSS, Twitter, Flickr, Delicious, YouTube, etc. Upcoming is the tool that writes events to the stream. Where, you may ask, is Microsoft’s Office in all this? While Outlook can export an iCal file, it is unable to publish it to a stream. It’s as though the program is unaware that it’s part of a Network and meant to serve humans who live their lives in a stream of space and time. The writing implements and storage metaphors of the new internet operating system must take the stream of time into the foundation of their UI metaphor. Once our tools understand and inhabit their proper ecosystem, Jon Udell’s local school will stop posting calendars as PDFs.

Of course, there is a psychological hurdle when it comes to incorporating time into our new tool set. It reminds us that we are mortals, and our time is not unlimited.

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Lifestreaming, Performance and Respect for the Clown Nose

Published July 5, 2008 by cgerrish

Clown Nose

In remembrance of Larry Hamon’s passing, I thought I’d dig out my clown story. After all, we’re all bozos on this bus.

Back when I studied acting and directing at University, there was something we did called the clown nose exercise. Andrew Doe, the professor, introduced the exercise with great seriousness. Those of us in the Acting Studio didn’t know quite how to take this. Serious or kidding? The exercise is primarily used when rehearsing dramatic scenes. You play the scene straight, but you wear a clown nose.

Acting is, in some respects, a cry for attention. There’s the famous story about Olivier telling Dustin Hoffman the secret of great acting: “look at me, look at me, look at me, look at me, look at me…” That’s what the clown nose does, it focuses the “look at me.” It’s a direct raw exposure of the personal reason you’re standing on that stage. To play a scene straight, to really get the character, and let it shine through, your personal need for attention needs to be understood, controlled and you need to make peace with it. There’s no fooling yourself.

I decided to try an experiment, and I wore the clown nose for a full day, outside of the studio, in the real world. I tried to stay true to the spirit of the exercise and didn’t clown around. It was one of the most emotionally exhausting things I’ve ever done. It was like being on stage for hours and hours. The nose cried out for attention, even when I didn’t want it.

Stage and curtain

There are some who believe that we’ll be living our lives online– lifestreaming everything across multiple media types, including live video. I remember hearing Jason Calacanis talk about running a live web cam 24 hours a day in his office, and how eventually he had to turn it off. It made him feel anxious, self-conscious and short tempered. That’s the same effect evoked by the clown nose exercise, you’re always on stage.

The clown nose teaches you a respect for live performance as a deep and powerfully human art form. In this age of the Network, anyone can find or create a stage to stand on. As Clay Shirky notes, we publish everything and filter later. The cost of assembling a stage and an audience is as low as it’s ever been. The price of a true and good performance is exactly the same as it’s always been.

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Bootstrapping the Live Web: Declaring Independence from the Selfish Meme

Published July 4, 2008 by cgerrish

There are some distinctions that need to be made when thinking about the creation of new modes of interaction on the Network. A number of metaphors are currently employed when talking about services like Twitter (Identi.ca imitation is the sincerest form of flattery). The judgement we seem to be trying to make is whether this new thing will go viral, or will gain broad market acceptance. When we answer questions about the new thing in this way, we’re pretending to be venture capitalists. What we’re asking is: will my investment pay off? And since we have no real skin in the game, we’re really asking, will Fred Wilson’s investment pay off for his investors? There’s an assumption at the base of the question about what’s really important. In a sense, it’s a moral position about what’s most valuable and a definition of the fundamental drivers of innovation. Thus the endless questions about “business model.”

After the money question, we’ll ask what most people will do. Will this new thing be adopted and become common practice? There are a number of binary oppositions we use as sledgehammers to beat the daylights out of any emerging form of life. These tools are a substitute for thought and discovery, they stand between us and what is unfolding before our eyes.

Digital Natives vs. Digital Immigrants
Young People vs. Old People
Early Adopters vs. Most People
The Enterprise vs. The Consumer
Geeks vs. Jocks
You vs. Your Grandmother

Tools for thought need to be put into question even as we employ them. When we thoughtlessly pick them up and use them as a hammer, we’re just repeating memes. The meme is speaking us and just asserting its evolutionary destiny as a selfish gene. When a meme is repeated to a group in conversation and all heads nod knowingly, no thought has taken place. Rather, this is an example as language as a virus.

So when does thinking begin as we continue our conversation on these new modes of the Network? It starts with a question and the deepening of the question. The Answer puts an end to the dialogue. Think of an answer like a software release; there’s alpha, beta, release candidates, golden masters — but in the end everything launches with bugs and has a version number assigned to it. The only way to move the ball down the field is to return to the question.

We’re starting to see the emergence of the Live Web from the established Static Web. The mistakes we make at this point give us important information about the future landscape. Twitter built a static web application using a content management system metaphor. But by opening pipes to the live web through SMS, XMPP and Track, Twitter enabled a compelling live web experience. Twitter’s ensuing stability problems have taught us that static web architecture can’t support live web usage at scale. The team there now has to start over with a live messaging architecture that can support the experience that was discovered. In this effort, Twitter’s simplicity is its friend. Oddly, the imitators don’t seem to have comprehended this lesson.

The interesting conversation around Twitter isn’t about whether it will make someone money or whether your grandmother will use it. Rather it’s the question about whether it’s a real foundational piece in bootstrapping the coming Live Web. Twitter’s Follow and Track relationship models have uncovered a much larger social space for real time interaction. Where the real-time web as IM is largely point-to-point, allowing two previously connected individuals to trade messages, Twitter enables a space where meeting someone new is a possibility. Our bootstrapping activity is only partially about technology, fundamentally it has to be about how we use the service right now and our ongoing conversation about its possibilities.

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