Skip to content →

Category: value

Only Connect: The iPhone Crosses the Bridge

Published July 12, 2008 by cgerrish

Alexander Graham Bell speaking into a telephone

The dashboard formerly known as “computing” is always already mobile. It’s when we try to think about mobile computing as a separate category, potentially having something to do with “telephones,” that we make a fundamental error. All computers have always been mobile; granted, the speed and practicality of moving them has improved enormously. And, shrinking the form factor to size of a pocket has also helped– there’s little real difference between a computer and a teleputer.

And, what do we mean when we say “computer?” In its most common usage, it refers to an appliance in the home or office that is used for certain kinds of activities. And this matches up nicely with Doug Engelbart’s idea of computing as an augmentation of human capability. Computers are valuable to the extent people can use them in the course of their lives. They have no value in and of themselves. Even when they’re crunching numbers and calculating astounding Bayesian probabilities, they’re doing so with human purposes as their program. If we focus on Engelbart’s idea of augmentation we can see that the form of a “computer” is unimportant.

After spending a very short time with Apple’s new iPhone software (version 2.0), it’s clear that the iPhone is not a telephone. The name of the device is a bridging mechanism; it creates a familiarity that enables dispersion into the Network. The actual use of the device has now crossed over that bridge. Telephones transmit voice over far distances; they are single purpose and that’s the derivation of their name. Any analysis of usage patterns of the iPhone will show that voice transmission will be a shrinking percentage of overall engagement with the device. The iPhone is not limited to the augmentation of our capability to transmit voice over distance. The first release of the App Store has given us a preview of the many kinds of augmentation to which we can look forward.

EM Forster in his rooms

As friction in the user interface is reduced, and mobility and connectivity is improved; the augmentation layer becomes more transparent. When our vision isn’t clouded by the cumbersome interface of primitive machines, we can look up and see what the Network connects us to.

Only connect! That was the whole of her sermon. 
Only connect the prose and the passion, and both will be exalted, 
And human love will be seen at its height. 
Live in fragments no longer. 
Only connect…

—E.M. Forster, Howards End

 

Comments closed

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…

3 Comments

Writing to the Stream: As Time Goes By

Published July 7, 2008 by cgerrish

Heraclitus

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.

Comments closed