Embracing Chaos

It took a long time, but EmbracingChaos has finally escaped form Typepad.  About a year ago (just before the end of the previous billing cycle) I started trying to move this blog to blogger.  I like Google’s pace of development and wanted to hop on the blogger train and get automatic upgrades for everything they do.  But ultimately I didn’t because I couldn’t make blogger meet all of my requirements for migration:

• Keep all blog posts and comments
• Keep all posts at their original URLs
• Maintain all category pages at the same URLs

The first one’s easy.  Google released some migration tools which cover that quite well.  But, at least when importing from typepad / movable type, they don’t preserve permalink URL’s.  So anybody who followed a linked to a specific page on my site would get a 404 page.  Weak.

I spent a lot of time on this.  Basic problem is that Typepad doesn’t include URL information in their export file format. It would be very easy for them to do this, but then why would they want to make it easy for you to leave?  Actually the answer there is easy.  Because by trying to lock in users, they create angry vocal opponents of their service.  I’m not angry, but I would advise against anybody considering Typepad as a blog host, specifically because of their tendency to lock people in.

<rant> Don’t keep my data hostage.  It’s my content.  I created it.  You’re just delivering it.  Do not try to lock me into using you as a service provider.  You might get some more money out of me, but every dollar I give you after I want to leave will contribute to my dis-liking you.  As the internet matures and consumers become more sophisticated and better able to share their experiences with each other, they will increasingly choose the service providers who are open.  (Echoing Jonathan Rosenberg’s recent diatribe on openness.)  I really appreciate Google’s commitment to Data Liberation.  My current provider, Dreamhost, also does a splendid job of giving me control over my data.</rant>

It turns out that getting a full-fidelity export out of typepad is possible with some work.  I followed these instructions from FolioVision which provides a custom export template that does include URL’s.  If your blog has more than 100 posts, then you need to change the first line to

<MTEntries lastn="100">

<MTEntries lastn="100" offset="100">

<MTEntries lastn="100" offset="200">

etc. and merge all these files together into one big export file that has URL’s.  Then I tried to get blogger to honor the import file with permalinks but I couldn’t.  I do believe blogger is capable of doing this, but what ultimately turned me away from it was that it doesn’t seem to offer any way to honor links like www.embracingchaos.com/humor for category listings.  Which I like and get a lot of visitors on.  So I went with wordpress.

FolioVision helpfully posted a custom wordpress import plugin to match their typepad output template, which makes it all go.  Once that’s done, you have to move all the attachments hosted at typepad, and then there’s a bunch of wordpress configuration, and moving your analytics and favicons and finally switching DNS.

So here we are.  Please tell me if you notice anything amiss with the new site.

Coincident with the launch of the iPhone 3G hardware, Apple has started
a couple of new online services: MobileMe and the iPhone App Store.  In
some ways these are natural extensions of existing product lines.  But
I believe their launch actually represents a fairly substantial
strategic shift as Apple attempts to diversify from a hardware-only company to one that runs on a mix of hardware and services. In order to make this strategy work, Apple will need to sacrifice its much coveted high hardware margins.

Diversifying from hardware

Since Jobs pulled the company
out of the doldrums, Apple has been a
manufacturer of high-end hardware.  This is a very nice place to be.
Their margins are very high.  If you compare the hardware bits that go
into a Mac to those in any PC, Apple’s prices are much higher.  PC manufacturers
squabble over low single
digit margins because their product is almost completely commoditized.
HP, Dell and IBM struggle to differentiate themselves in the market.
Meanwhile Apple can charge a hefty premium for good industrial design
and software that is slicker than windows.  iPod followed in this
tradition of high margins by setting the bar for usability in portable
media devices and following up with fantastic marketing.



Being a niche retailer of high-end products is a comfortable and stable
place to be.  However, having a single line of revenue isn’t good for a
large company, so diversifying makes a lot of sense.  Thus Apple’s current push into services.

The iTunes music store was an important pre-cursor to the current push
into services.  Even though iTunes moves a massive volume of music, if
you work through the accounting confusion, they’re not actually making
much money there.  Because the established music industry giants are
completely fucked and have no
idea what to do, they drive the margins of all big online retailers
down to a pittance.  But iTunes did something very important for Apple: it established a billing relationship with customers. Cellular operators have this
kind of ongoing billing relationship with their customers which enables
them to push high margin, low utility products like ring-tones. Similarly, people
are used to spending small quantities of money in iTunes to get music.
So iTunes is the perfect precursor for an App Store.  In this way,
Apple doesn’t even need to rely on the carrier’s billing relationship
to build a services business.  This will be very important for Apple in
coming years as carriers increasingly become just another provider of
wireless bandwidth.  In the coming decades, the value will not come
from piping bits around.  It will come from the services built on those
pipes. 

MobileMe is a very Apple service

MobileMe is a cloud-hosted email, contact and calendaring solution.
There’s nothing revolutionary about this.  Google offers all of these
services for free.  By charging for these services, Apple is implicitly
promising to provide a better solution.  Considering their vertical
integration into popular hardware, it’s not hard to imagine that they
will succeed at this.  Google will probably remain committed to supporting
open standards for working with hardware.  By using proprietary
protocols, Apple can provide a higher-quality product and support it
better on the few platforms they care about.  It’s a classic story
we’ve seen in this industry before.

MobileMe’s launch was a
disaster.  This isn’t surprising as Apple is yet to demonstrated great skill in online services.  Personally I believe they’ll figure it out, because it’s
important to their long-term objectives, and they’re a smart company, and the skills to do this well are getting easier and easier to find.
But from a marketing perspective, MobileMe is nothing new for Apple.  Because
MobileMe is a premium service for which there is a very good free
alternative, MobileMe still targets Apple’s classic market segment.
They’re still targeting people who are willing to pay extra to have
something really polished.  They can stick to their classic bag of
tricks, like the ads that make fun of people who aren’t as cool as the
mac devotees.

App Store is new: a platform play

App Store on the other hand is going to be much harder for them to pull
off.  For App Store to succeed, their primary challenge is not to
attract paying customers, but developers.  Because independent software
developers (ISVs) are the ones who are actually creating value in the
App Store.  App is just a distributor taking a cut on that.  So what
attracts developers to the App Store?  Customers do.

It’s a real chicken and egg problem.  Nobody’s going to build software
unless there are customers to buy it, and it’s hard to get customers
without cool apps.  Well right now Apple has the whole farm, but it’s a
very small farm.  There are millions of iPhones out there, representing
potential customers.  Moreover, the iPhone SDK is very rich and capable
when compared to its competitors.  Qualcomm’s BREW, Windows Mobile,
Palm OS, Blackberry and Symbian have all faltered for one reason or
several.  Google’s Android holds much promise and hope, but at this
point it’s complete vapor-ware.  So for now, Apple has almost all the
mindshare of mobile application developers.

But how long will this dominance last?  Software platforms are natural
monopolies, meaning the
economics tend to be winner-take-all.  The chicken and egg “problem”
can easily turn into a virtuous cycle, pushing a winner to the top.
Application developers are fickle and will code to whatever platform
has the best distribution.  iPhones are very popular, but they are
still only used by a small fraction of all mobile subscribers.  Until the distribution of iPhones reaches a critical mass, their dominance as a mobile application platform is very shaky.

The mobile app challenger is HTML

But the laundry list of alternatives shows that the competition is
fragmented.  What could unseat Apple?  IMHO it’s not another
application platform, open or proprietary.  It’s the web.  Every
high-end phone can display web pages, and increasingly they’re using
high-quality javascript engines that can run real web applications.
Webkit, the super-fast open-source HTML/JS engine behind Safari is
showing up in Symbian devices, Blackberries
and Windows Mobile phones.

Apple’s challenge is to make the proprieray iPhone SDK compelling to
developers.  The alternative is to build a web application that works
well on webkit, and works on every high-end phone.  They can attract
developers in two basic ways — make the native features of their SDK
more compelling, and provide a large market for distribution of the
applications.

Charging for distribution of these applications is a gimick that won’t
last long.  Soon all the interesting applications will be free, but
tied to cloud services that have their own business models independent
of the mobile client.  Premium applications will start to seem a lot
like premium ringtones pretty fast.  Still, it will help bootstrap this
market for Apple so long as there are no serious competitors.

To stay on top, iPhones need distribution quickly

One thing that ties all these points together is that Apple’s continued
success with App Store hinges on having wide distribution of iPhones.
They are currently throttling the distribution of iPhones for some reason, possibly
because of software glitches.  But the aggressive $199 pricing is
clearly aimed at attracting a new larger customer base that will help
maintain their dominance in the mobile application space.

Long term they might be happy getting by offering premium versions of
applications that are freely available on the web.  But something tells
me they’re actually trying to break open the mass market on this one.
This is Jobs’ big play.  It’ll be really interesting to see how it
works out once Android hits the streets.

It was pretty late at night at my friend Miller’s birthday party last week.  She had asked everybody to do something good for the world in lieu of birthday presents.  The awake were discussing options as I was dozing off.  I overheard somebody say "If you’ve got an old linux box that you’re using as a firewall drawing 400 watts continuously, consider spending $30 on a dedicated router."  I thought about the headless Pentium 3 box in my office closet which is running the IP Cop Linux firewall distro.  I thought about the four matching ethernet cards I’d put in it and the rainbow of color-coded cat-5 coming off it: red for untrusted outside world, green for safe, orange for servers and blue for wifi.  I thought about all the time I’d spent configuring the thing perfectly and routing cables throughout the house and I thought, yeah it draws a lot of power, but I NEED all that.

When I sobered up the next afternoon it occured to me that I’d pulled my file server off the orange DMZ network for performance and simplicity, and that the other server box had long since been virtualized into the file server.  I moved my local public wifi off the blue network onto the red to make its security brain-dead simple.  So despite all the pretty color-coded cables and corresponding hubs, all I really had was a big loud NAT box with a few key port holes in it.  And since I’ve switched from outlook to Gmail, I never even RAS into my home XP boxes any more.  And since I do all my personal development on EC2 or some other host, I never use my home dev servers any more.  So in fact, I don’t need to tunnel home for anything.  Cloud computing.  For real.  All this stuff I used to need I don’t any more.  I could replace that old linux box with a cheap low-power firewall.

But that got me thinking.  There’s this li’l XP box sitting next to the printer that I have configured never to go to sleep because otherwise I can’t print from my laptops.  Print servers are similarly small and low-power and sometimes come in the same box as the firewall.  Then my eye turned to the terabyte file server in the corner and next thing you know I’ve got an Apple Time Capsule in the mail to replace all three permanently powered-on PCs in my house.

Happy BEarthday, Miller!

Many times I’ve been asked about the possibility of Apple offering a subscription music service for iPods and iTunes.  Here I’ll lay out why I think this will happen, what the timeline is for it, how that relates to the future of DRM, and what impact it would have on the competitive landscape.

First off, I am confident Apple will launch a subscription music service.   As every Rhapsody fan and many industry analysts agree, subscription services are the best way to consume music.  Just like Hotmail moved email into the sky, and Google Docs are doing the same for office productivity applications, music can and will go the same way.  Being tied to a specific piece of hardware to enjoy your information services is so 20th century.  The reason we’re not there yet is that it’s not easy to provide a great experience.  And considering people’s long-standing investments in legacy music media like CD’s, non-hosted music services actually provide a smoother transition.

When I worked for Real people generally spoke of Apple launching a subscription service with fear.  I argued that it would actually be one of the best things for the company.  The reason being that even modern electronic music consumers don’t understand what a music subscription service is.  If Apple started spending their quarter-billion dollar per year marketing budget to explain this to consumers, it would do wonders for Rhapsody.  Especially considering the low-quality, poorly-funded advertising campaigns Real has traditionally engaged in.  I wish I could find some of the infomercial-style TV ads they used to run.  Glaser built Real Player without advertising and still believes all internet services should be able to bootstrap themselves.  Maybe the alliance with MTV will help there. 

Also, managing a multi-million song library is not easy.  Rhapsody does a pretty great job of it.  Although they’re going to get obsoleted unless they can figure out how to democratize the music editorial process.  But they’re still way better at it than Apple, who has frankly never been very skilled at online services.  So if Apple were to start spending their huge marketing budget tomorrow to explain why it’s not important to own your own music, it would be a huge boost to Rhapsody.

It won’t happen tomorrow though.  My guess is that within 5 years iTunes will offer all-you-can-eat music for a recurring monthly fee.  The timing depends on a couple of key factors:

• Uptake of network-enabled iPods
• Availability and quality of wireless net access

Before the iPhone, Apple could not launch a subscription music service for one simple reason.  If you stop paying your monthly fee, your subscription tracks need to be disabled from your portable device.  Otherwise somebody could pay the fee for a single month, go on a shopping spree and load up their device with all the music they’ve ever wanted, and never pay another dime.  So even though DRM is going away for track purchases, it has to stick around for subscription models, at least until many other things change.  How does this limit Apple’s ability to launch a subscription service?  As anybody who has used a portable music device with a subscription service can tell you, it is incredibly frustrating to pull your mp3 player off the shelf only to see a message that says it won’t play any of your music because your licenses expired and you need to plug it into a computer to verify that you have been paying your bills.  Even if you are paying, you need to constantly tend to your device or else it bricks itself after a few weeks, by design!  Steve Jobs would never allow his iPods to do this.  The solution is to enable the device to check your subscription entitlement itself — wirelessly, in the background, automatically. 

That’s exactly what the iPhone and iPod touch can do with their built-in networking stacks.  Even a slow network like AT&T’s EDGE network is good enough to verify that the monthly fee has been paid up.  Or for the wifi-only Touch, at least once per month you need to pass by an open hotspot or be in your house where it knows how to connect and it keeps working.  Not a serious burden.

So once there is a sufficiently large installed base of connected iPods, Apple will start selling a subscription service.  If I had more motivation to figure out the timing of when this would happen, I’d look at adoption/saturation curves for iPods and typical turn-over rates for such consumer electronic devices.  Other factors include the financial and market success of competing services.  I leave all this as an exercise to the reader for those of you working in this challenging industry.  My gut says it’ll be in 2010.

I’m glad the music industry is finally allowing legal sales of music online without DRM.  Before this, the situation was absolutely screwball.  Consumers had three choices for getting music onto the electronic devices:

1. Buy the CD and rip it
2. Illegally download it through a peer-to-peer network or sketchy Russian service
3. Buy the DRM’d track legally

The first option sucked because it either involved driving to a brick and mortar store or waiting for somebody else to drive the CD to your house.  There’s no instant gratification.  Then there’s the hassle of converting the CD to electronic format.

The biggest problems with the second option are things like not knowing how to do it.  There’s also some risk of viruses, etc by trawling shady parts of the net as you try to figure it out.  And there’s a minimal risk of the RIAA suing you.  But once you overcome these fears and startup costs, you end up with exactly the product you want.

The third option kinda sucked because modern DRM systems don’t work very well.  I think there’s nothing intrinsically wrong with DRM.  Enforcing copyrights through technical means is a good part of a multi-layer security and incentive system to promote the creation of valuable intellectual property.  But modern DRM systems are incompatible with each other across brands and devices and often they just plain break.  So as a music consumer, if you do the morally correct thing and pay for your music, you end up with an inferior product.

Now with DRM-free track sales, consumers can do the right thing and get the best possible product.  How this fact has been lost on the RIAA for so long amazes me.

This is just one example of why the digital music industry is a horrible one to be in right now.  I wrote a thorough analysis of the industry for my strategy class at school will likely post more of it as time goes on, but I wanted to start here.

I see a trend of how we’re approaching Tim O’Reilly’s Web 2.0 ideal in a way that he didn’t really identify.  But I think the trend is important, and growing, although still in its infancy.  The trend is towards richer web APIs
that enable people to build value on top of existing websites.  I’ll
give some history on how we got here, and talk about the current
trend-leaders that I see: Facebook and Google Maps.  I’ll also explain why I think Microsoft is in the best position to build the required enabling technology.

Original Web 1.0

Universal access to massive volumes of data.  Being able to search
through masses of data and find what you want.  Connecting people to
huge databases really well.  Key examples:

• Online telephone books
• Web search
• Huge e-commerce sites

But in all of these applications, the data set is static.  User activity will not change the data for anybody else.

Web 2.0.1: Democratizing use of the data

The users of these data make the data better.  They can collectively
organize the data.  (i.e. tags)  They can help filter good data from
junk.  (i.e. voting)  Or they can help you find the data that are most
interesting to you.  (i.e. collaborative filtering).  In other words,
you can interact with the data.

Any "Web 2.0 company" worth their salt has an API that federates out their raw data.  This enables other sites to use the data in new and novel ways.  But the primary problem with this paradigm is that anything built using these API’s is done from the ground up.  Using the gmail POP interface, it’s possible to build a better UI for gmail.  But to do so you need to first build an entire AJAX mail client — no small feat.  Better would be the ability to add features into the gmail UI itself.  But this is really the standard in web 2.0 API’s today.

Web 2.0.2: Democratizing the feature set

The next big trend will be enabling users to make more compelling ways to interact with
the data.  Users can change not just the data, but how other users see
and use the data.  Sometimes this means API’s with UI hooks.  Or other ways to enable new functionality into an existing site.  This kind of platform enables Independent Software Vendors to improve upon the UI’s that the original sites created.

Facebook is doing this by allowing ISV’s to add new communications features to their site.  Google Maps is doing this through maplets that allow developers to create new ways to interact with mapping data from within the fabulous Maps UI.  Right now these are the only two examples of web 2.0.2 platforms that I’m aware of.

Building this kind of API is very challenging.  There are several very different ways to go about doing it.  Here are a couple of ideas:

• Provide a server-server API that includes content generated from the ISV’s servers into the main experience.  Facebook style.
• Allow developers to author XML files that define new algorithms that are interpreted on the primary host’s servers.  Yahoo pipes is a service in this style, but they’re not doing anything to enhance an existing service so it doesn’t really meet my 2.0.2 criteria.
• Allow developers to author javascript plugins to run on the client machine.  Greasemonkey is essentially doing this.  This strategy has the best shot for a lot of applications in the long term, IMHO.  But it comes with some serious problems right now.

Doing this correctly would allow ISV’s to add new features to Gmail.  Think about it — if I wanted to change the way gmail messages were displayed, or how addressing happened, or whatever it was, this kind of platform could provide hooks for making gmail better in a way that a POP interface never would.  And even though a POP-style interface theoretically could do this, there would never be momentum because having a high-level base to build upon means that there are network effects from the extensions.  (Rails achieves a similar advantage over other web frameworks — just having a standard, any standard, means people will build upon that standard rather than argue over which library to use and extend none of them.)

3rd-party javascript

The big problem with this approach is security.  There is none.  You need to completely trust the ISV before you should allow their code to run in the context of your site.  The kind of editorial review required to do this today would completely kill the democratic goal of such a platform.

The world needs a security sandbox to run third-party javascript code inside.  This way primary site hosts could allow ISV’s to run their code on client machines safely.  Here are a few examples of places this kind of tool could be used.

ISV’s could…

• Add UI features to Gmail
• Create alternate ways to share and discuss images on Flickr
• Define new mathematical formulas to run client-side on a web spreadsheet
• Create new playlist selection / shuffling algorithms for Rhapsody

… and much more.  Even better, individual users (not developers) could pick which UI extensions they wanted to use.  Any site which provides such an API has democratized the feature development process in a very important way.  Not only does it provide a distributed mechanism to figure out which features are best, but it allows users to self-segment as to which features work for them.  Without such a mechanism the entire service must have the same features for everybody, which means product designers must play a political game where they’ll never make everybody happy.  Right now I think really only Facebook has solved this problem.

Building a security sandbox is an area that Microsoft could probably do best and fastest.  They are good at code API’s and layered security models,a nd they have a perfect place to do it with Silverlight and the CLR.  They’re trying to position Silverlight as a faster way to run DHTML, which is something else the world desperately needs right now.  But I just can’t imagine them doing anything this innovative or generally valuable.  Doesn’t sell more Office.  Doesn’t sell more Windows.  They don’t even really have many services that could use third party extensions, and they’ve lost touch with the ISV’s who might build such extensions too.  Google Gears could conceivably add such an extension.  There’s precedent there considering the javascript threading extensions they provide.

This will be a difficult problem to solve, I have no doubt.  But I hope somebody with the resources to leverage a solution takes it on, because I think it would really make the world a better place.

An obvious trend in this industry is towards more pervasive internet access with bandwidth steadily increasing.  The build-outs of WiMax networks, 3G cellular networks and metropolitan WiFi efforts promise to offer broadband-class connectivity to all major cities in the US within the next couple of years.  Suburbs and extended metorpolitan areas will quickly follow.  Even airplanes should have reasonable net access before too long — Virgin America will have it next year.

In this environment it’s tempting to design products that assume customers will always be well connected.  It is certainly easier to build compelling services to users that have a good pipe to the net on them at all times.  So this begs the question: If customers will soon always have good broadband net access, why do we need a client-side data store like Google Gears?  For example, somebody working on a subscription music service might conclude that it’s a waste of time building portable mp3-players with local storage since soon enough everyone will have broadband access everywhere, so why not just stream the music off the net?

There are several good reasons why client-side storage is still important and will continue to be important into the future:

• Wireless net access sucks down battery.  Always will.  It’s physics.  Local access to data will always cost less battery.  This won’t change no matter how pervasive broadband is.
• Pervasive net access is expensive. Arguably we’re already in a world where some people have pervasive net access.  Verizon EVDO cards do pretty darned well in this country, for $60/month.  But it will be a long time before most people have it.  Higher speeds will always demand a premium.
• Net access is unreliable.  Especially wireless access, but wired too.  Packets collide.  Transmission patterns have nodes.  Routers flap.  Cables get unplugged.  Laptops wake up and can’t figure out where they are for a while.  Something gets misconfigured.  If your software is designed to gracefully degrade when the network is unreliable, your customers will be happier, because it’s going to happen.  Remember what Outlook/Exchange was like when the entire Outlook UI would freeze while waiting for the Exchange server to respond to any request?  Please don’t do that to your users.

Once web applications are fully embracing it, Google Gears will close most of the functionality gap between native-client applications and web applications.  I believe it’s really important, and I’m really glad that there’s industry consensus around Google Gears and that other offline browser storage projects have deferred to it.  I’d hate to see web app developers trying to choose between several different client-store plugins.

I went to watch the latest Harry Potter movie last night with some friends.  One of the previews was for a new Bourne movie, The Bourne Ultimatum.  Typical lots of cars getting smashed and then at the end, on the text page, a URL:

From across the theater I heard a "Woah!" I think from Brady.  Why?  Because even without touching a web browser, this constitutes an apparent change in policy for Google.  Advertisers with enough money can now buy marketing URLs on the highly trusted and respected google.com domain.  In other words, they’ve sold out.  People intrinsically trust Google and will do lots of things that Google sponsors that they wouldn’t do for say AOL, Microsoft or (ahem) Real Networks.  Ironically, the reason people trust Google is because Google has never done these kinds of co-marketing deals.  They have previously only done things with clear customer benefit. 

Google is stepping down a dangerous path.  It’s not exactly evil.  But it’s putting more attention on getting revenue than on delighting the customer.  If Google keeps doing this, customers won’t trust the Google brand because they won’t know when Google is doing something to help organize the world’s information and make it universally accessible, and when Google is doing something to make money off you the trusting customer.  Thinking these two activities are both "good" (as opposed to evil) is a dangerous cultural shift.  Brand equity is like an old-growth forest.  You can cut it down and make lots of money.  But it will not regrow quickly nor easily. Real Networks did this after the bubble burst.  They were able to survive some pretty tough times using shady business practices like superpass which turned consumer trust into cold hard pennies.  But they will probably never be a respected brand again, largely because they cannot shake the addiction to business practices with the value proposition of pick-pocketing.  Has missing their numbers sent Google down a similar path?    (A couple weeks ago there was an interesting, somewhat related discussion on Radar.)

I have to say a few words about the experience of visiting that URL.  It immediately redirects you to another URL, www.searchforbourne.com, reinforcing the idea that all Google is doing is selling a trusted domain to hang a marketing URL on.  The launch page insists that you install Flash 9, and the upgrade experience from whatever version I had was not smooth.  (More echoes of Real Networks.)  Once inside, it asks you to sign in to your Google account to play some game it seems.  At this point I’m thinking that maybe there is some real integration here.  But no.  The next page explains it all:

"Google must provide Universal Pictures with the primary email address associated with your Google account for verification purposes."

Verification purposes?  I signed in with my Google account password — that’s verification.  This is something else, and that wording is deceptive IMHO.  Google just sold my gmail address to Universal Pictures!  Wow.  This is worse than I thought.  I wonder if Google will put an exception in its spam-filtering rules for Universal.

I’m gonna make a guess at to what Apple’s going to announce in August.  I’m thinking of the next gen iMacs with huge high-res touchscreens.  They’ll support apps like the iPhone has with draggable windows and the cool 2-finger resizing thing and all that.  It’ll merge Microsoft’s Surfaces technology with the iPhone’s UI and end up with something closer to the UI from Minority Report than anything we’ve yet seen.

Or maybe they’re not there yet, and it’ll take another year or two.  But this is what I think they should do.

A number of folks have been courting me for positions as a software development engineer recently.  Many of them sound really fun.  I love writing code, and even though it hasn’t been my professional focus for years, I think I’m still alright at it.  But I’ve had to come to a sober realization that I simply cannot take a job where writing code is my primary function.  I’m just not physically capable of it.  I just about cried during a job interview once when explaining this.

People come in my office and say "that’s a cool keyboard."  My response is generally something like "that’s what it takes."  I don’t use a $300 keyboard because it looks cool.  It’s more like a wheelchair.

I have repetitive strain injury.  It’s not carpal tunnel syndrome.  My wrists basically never bother me.  It’s more my pinkies, more the left than the right.  I can think of 3 causes.  In high-school I took a 3-day bike tour from San Diego to Santa Barbara wearing gloves that weren’t well padded.  For about a week afterwards I had no feeling in my left pinkie.  Then in 1996 a marathon perl coding session of several 100-hour weeks left my pinkies pretty sore because of all the mixed-case variables in our code. 

Also, I suspect cubital tunnel syndrome might have some part of it.  I’m not expert but my understanding is that it’s a result of spending too much time with bent elbows stretching some nerves causing problems with pinkies.  I understand the easiest thing to help is to sleep with straight arms.

The ironic thing is that with a good ergonomic keyboard I can write English text day
in and day out, but more than about 10-15 hours/week of coding and
things start to hurt.  Writing code on a laptop in bed, fun as it is, will get to me after about 10 minutes.  Code involves tons more time on the special keys
than English.  You don’t need a lot of
[]{}()<>*=+-~&^_!#@$%/|\ in e-mail or in specs.  And you don’t
need to bounce around the arrow keys for editing nearly so much
either.  The Kinesis advantage keyboard helps quite a lot, because it moves most of the keys that the pinkies do under the thumbs.  But it’s not quite enough for me, because the shift keys are still the responsibility of the pinkies.  I’ve tried using a foot-pedal for shift, but haven’t been able to
re-train myself.  And I’m not sure I really want to limit myself by
having a job I can only do in front of a super-tricked out
workstation.  Screwing up (gee it sure would be nice to get
something done on this here laptop) means having to use a microphone
and eat grams/day of ibuprofen for a few months which I’ve done and really really
sucks.

So physical disability has sent me down an interesting career path towards middle management.  I have tons of fun in this capacity, but sometimes I miss making things work with my own hands.

Also, if any of you have hints of repetitive strain injury, I strongly encourage you to shell out the cash for a good keyboard.  It’s way cheaper than the alternatives.