Embracing Chaos

Natural monopolies occur when it is economically favorable to have a single standard vendor for a product or service. In these situations, monopolies tend to appear and maintain themselves naturally. When I say “economically favorable” I mean in the aggregate — the entire economy operates more efficiently because of the standard. Which [...]

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As promised, I gave a talk at the Pacific Northwest Association of College Physicists conference today.  The topic was Physics at Google, or more specifically, “How a background in physics helps to solve Google’s engineering challenges.  Real-world examples of how making the world’s information accessible and useful leans on the principals of physics.”  My slides [...]

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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 [...]

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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…

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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…

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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…

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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: Buy the CD and rip it Illegally download it through a peer-to-peer network or sketchy Russian service 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…

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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…

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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…

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Here’s my deck from my recent Ignite/Gnomedex talk, hosted in web-viewable format by slideshare.net. Thanks for the tip, Dave! If you’d like to read what I said to go along with the slides, download the PPT and read along in the notes section. I’m really pleased that a bunch of people seem to have found this talk useful. I’m not trying to give away any secrets, and I’m definitely not saying either side is good or bad in these situations. But by explaining how things work, I’m trying to move a little bit in the direction of openness in these…

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