I’m going to give two examples of natural monopolies in high tech. They are not the perfect examples used in textbooks, but I think they are illustrative, and offer valuable lessons.

Natural Monopoly of Operating Systems

Operating systems are a good example of a natural monopoly. As much as we all value choice as a driver of innovation, the plain truth is that almost everybody is better off if there is a standard operating system upon which higher-level applications can be built. Application developers benefit because they have a single clear platform upon which to build. If there were two or three dominant operating systems, application vendors would need to build a separate version of their application for each one in order to reach consumers, which is considerably more effort. Similarly, the standard benefits consumers because they have a single choice which gives them the benefit of all the applications written on it.

Gates & Allen understood this long before most, which prompted them to drop out of school and pursue Microsoft with vigor. Windows succeeded in creating such a natural monopoly, enabling a rich ecosystem of third-party software vendors (ISVs in MS parlance) to create value for consumers without needing to worry about what chipset underlies the graphics card or network adapter their customers’ computers. In this way, Microsoft enabled the creation of value for PC customers and wealth for ISVs, and the monopoly persists in a form to this day.

But all is not rosy in this world. Other companies want to sell operating systems. People want choice. Once entrenched, the monopolist has a tendency to make choices which benefit the monopolist more than the consumer — Microsoft continues to exhibit this behavior even as their monopoly power fades. In classic natural monopolies like utilities, explicit regulation controls the monopolist’s abuse. With Windows, a combination of limited government intervention and competitive innovation ultimately limited their influence.

Social networks as natural monopolies

Online social networks also exhibit properties of a natural monopoly. A well built social networking service like Facebook creates tremendous economic opportunities. Particularly if the service exposes its valuable social graph data through an API that other services can use. Almost any online service can be made more compelling by incorporating social graph data. The existence of a publicly usable social graph dataset provides an economic boost to the entire tech sector.

This boost tends to create a winner-take-all situation.  When third-party services rely on a social API service, they reinforce consumer’s use of that service.  Third parties’ lives are easier when there is a single standard, because they only need to code to a single API in order to gain the benefits of the social graph.  Here the analogy to operating systems is clear.  The social network provides a platform upon which others can create value.  The value creation process is easier if there is a single standard social network upon which to build. These characteristics make the social networking monopoly natural.

A behavioral characteristic of social networking sites’ users also helps create a monopoly. People enjoy the benefits of having their social network defined online, but they do not enjoy the effort of defining it. Us geeks (everybody reading this and probably most of your friends) are willing to spend hours organizing our friends into circles or searching for people we know to connect with them. Some of us even enjoy it. But for most normal people this very quickly becomes a boring waste of time, especially if they’ve already done this once or twice on different websites.  Most people are not willing to maintain multiple social networks. Once they are invested in one, the barrier to switching is quite high.

Implications for Google+ in competing with Facebook

Facebook’s dominance is rapidly approaching monopoly levels.  They have crossed the tipping point where they are fast on their way to becoming the de-facto standard for social graph data, if they haven’t already.  The nature of social networks as supporting a natural monopoly means that Facebook’s rise will be supported more strongly than it would be otherwise.  When considering Facebook’s dominance, we readers must remember our place in the ecosystem as geeks.  We and our friends, are the innovators and early adopters who are far more willing to try the new thing, because we see intrinsic value in progress, and are far less perturbed by unrefined products.  The fact that recently Facebook’s fastest growing demographic was women over 55 shows that the service has crossed Moore’s chasm and now appeals to the majority of people.  As industry insiders, it’s easy for us to forget the bubble we live in — just because everybody we know uses something doesn’t mean it will ever actually take off an be popular with non-geeks.  But Facebook is clearly on a path to provide a dominant monopolistic standard for social networking data.

Breaking this monopoly would be difficult for Google even without the advantages of a natural monopoly.  People’s natural laziness makes a third social network (after Facebook and Twitter) unlikely to succeed as well.  So on the face of it, Google’s got a very tough road ahead.  It’s tempting to declare G+ dead on arrival because of these intrinsic forces, but there are other reasons why I think they actually have a decent shot.  But I’ll save that analysis for another story.

Preparing for this talk has been a lot of fun.  I’m guessing it will be fun to deliver as well.  (I’m writing this to be posted immediately after my talk, so I can’t know for sure yet!)  The whole process reminds me how much I love my career — the huge impact I can have on making people’s lives better.  This particular talk was a very good reminder to me how much I rely on my training as a scientist to perform this job.

• 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.

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.

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!

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.

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.

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.

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.

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 financial transactions, which economically speaking pretty much always makes things more efficient and prosperous.  I’m hearing an increasing cry for showing more graphs in term sheets to explain what’s going on.  I think this is a fabulous idea.

As promised, here is my slide deck from last night about VC Term Sheets.  But I’m afraid after looking through my spreadsheets I’ve decided they’re not really ready to share yet.  I put together some nice tools for visualizing waterfall charts, but they need a little work to make them user friendly.  So stay tuned — I will post them.  In 1996 parlance "check back often" or in 2006 parlance "subscribe to the feed for immediate updates."  I’ll try to get them up in the next few days but realistically it’ll likely take me a week.

[Thanks to Randy Stewart for the photo of me looking extra scruffy.]

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

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.

Safari does have some innovative UI features which will win them some
fans.  Without IP protection I’m guessing it won’t take long for the
Mozilla kids to replicate them.  (If there’s one thing open source is
good at it’s building a project to match somebody else’s spec.)  I
really doubt Apple will be able to keep innovating useful features fast
enough to keep a meaningful lead for long.

The real reason they’re doing this is of course to make it a more attractive platform for people to write applications for the iPhone.  It’s a close analogy to how Microsoft supported IE for Mac — the only reason is to have a reasonable cross platform story.  This is another sign that Apple’s betting big on the iPhone.  The fact that it won’t be easy to text while driving will limit its usefulness for some people.  It’s a symptom of the phenomenon that even with a great touch-screen like the iPhone has, generic UI’s aren’t as good as single-purpose UI’s.

Attracting web developers is really what Apple needs to do.  Listening to my coworkers, they’ve got an uphill battle ahead of them.  Safari claims to be based on standards, but I hear it’s a hassle to get things to work properly in it.  Right now, the subtle HTML/CSS rendering differences aren’t nearly as important as differences in javascript behavior.  For a long time Safari has been missing some a few key XML parsing APIs for AJAX.  In the near future, the key differentiator for browsers is going to be the availability of good libraries for off-line web applications, like Google Gears.  Unless they talk Google into release Gears for Safari, I predict this isn’t going to go very well for them.  I hope we don’t see too much industry fragmentation here.

Now my machine isn’t the switftest deer in the forest.  But it’s got a 2GHz processor and 2 GB of ram so it’s not exactly archaic.  What takes so long I have no idea.  After a bit of wrestling I managed to disable the on-anything virus scanner, so I know it’s not that.  Indexing the messages for searching is my best guess.  If I could figure out how to uninstall the MS/Live Desktop Search App I would, but it conveniently forgot to add itself to the add/remove programs list.

I’m sorely tempted to switch to gmail for my corporate e-mail interface.  I admit I haven’t yet made it past the first step of the 3 standard Microsoft troubleshooting techniques.  But I know others who are having similar problems so I suspect it wouldn’t help.  Overall Office 2007 is a pretty nice product once you get used to the menu shuffling.  But it runs painfully slowly.  I guess this is the trend for MS software which supports their symbiosis with Intel — code for the next generation of hardware to encourage upgrades.  The idea being that more CPU power supports a more compelling user experience.  Personally, I haven’t been convinced that the upgrade is worth it yet.  I’m more often impressed with a good web UI than a new flashy aero-glass UI.

All this reminds me of the story behind the fabulous first album by The Postal Service, Give Up.  For those who don’t know the story, this fabulous album was created by two musicians living in different cities who sent tapes back and forth by mail to create the music. 

Now sites like JamGlue and SpliceMusic make this kind of collaboration possible for anybody musically inclined.  It’ll be fun to hear the first big successes from this new kind of band.  You might even call them a transhuman bands since they’ll using modern technology to overcome human geographic limitations to creating music.

This variation of the problem isn’t covered by Microsoft’s KB article on how to workaround the KB931768 problems.  I had good luck uninstalling the hotfix.  (Start -> Control Panel -> Add/Remove Programs -> Check "Show Updates" -> Windows Internet Explorer -> Security Update for Windows Internet Explorer 7 (KB931768) -> Remove )

[Update 6/12: I spoke too soon.  Last night, Windows installed the hotfix again and IE is back to broken.  My IT department advises shutting off auto-update.  Nice.]

One of my co-workers who was having the same problem went through the MS tech support stack and was told to re-install Windows.  I love it.  MS has 3 ways of dealing with any software problem, and having been spending the last couple of weeks wrestling with Earthlink’s attrocious customer support I’m imagining 3 tiers of support staff to deliver this message:

Tier 1 support: Reboot your computer.  Did that fix your problem?  Okay, let me transfer you.  Please hold.

Tier 2 support: Re-install the application in question.  Did that fix your problem?  No?  I’m very sorry.  Please hold while I transfer you.

Tier 3 support: Re-install your operating system.

The last one is pretty much guaranteed to work since by the time you re-install the OS and all your apps, the computer looks nothing like what you had before.  Because of this, very few people are willing to go through with it.

I’ve spent some time looking around this morning, and I can’t find any lyrics on Yahoo.  Anywhere.  Maybe they pushed it out and realized it couldn’t take the load and pulled the plug?  Or maybe it just didn’t get finished in time.  In any case, it appears to be a fascinating case of vaporware.  Either that or the implementation is absolutely atrocious, which I doubt.

If any can figure out repro steps to display lyrics on Yahoo, please leave a comment.

[Update 11:45 am: Techcrunch reports that the lyrics will be live "later today."]

I plop a few bucks into an adwords account and almost instantly the site shows up in the public search index, with a whopping pagerank of 2.  Not high enough that it was an obvious mistake to omit it from the index, but also not so low that it clearly doesn’t deserve to be in the index because there are other more important pages being indexed.  "Do no evil" they say.  This isn’t clearly a case of evil.  But it certainly seems like a bias.

But it is of course playing havoc with computer systems everywhere which have the DST rules built into hardware and software everywhere.  (As somebody[ref?] pointed out don’t trust your meeting reminders for those couple of weeks!)  A DBA I work with described the problem as "worse than Y2K" which I can totally believe since this change comes with just 7 months warning, whereas I started writing code to be Y2K aware in the mid-80’s and others started well before that.

I don’t write to this blog often enough for it to be worth anybody’s time for me to re-report news.  There’s plenty of bloggers who do that already — you don’t need me to filter what’s interesting for you.  So I always try to add some personal value in whatever I’m talking about.  The question I’ve been wrestling with here is: How can we avoid this kind of problem in the future?

"Always use network time" is one obvious answer, and for some things that’s all you need.  I don’t trust clocks that are set internally and can drift.  Cell phones, computer clocks (on well-run computers), the clock on my desk phone — all these are set from a reliable central source and I believe them.  But this answer isn’t good enough for any software that has to plan things in advance. Any kind of scheduling or calendaring software needs to know when time changes are going to occur in advance.  So just having the central network clock tell you that the time has changed unexpectedly doesn’t solve your problems.

As I said, many systems have the rules for time changes hard-coded.  To avoid this kind of problem in the future, these rules need to be configurable.  This is basic Software Engineering — don’t hard code things that change.    I don’t know how often this kind of change happens in the world, but I’m guessing it’s not infrequent especially if you take a global view of things.  I expect some countries change their timezone rules about as often as they change dictators.  (If I was a ruthless dictator I’d probably set my country 15 minutes off from my neighbors just to mess with everybody!)

Then the right answer is to move time change and timezone configuration to a central place on the net.  Any place will do, so long as it’s reliable.  It should be highly available and distributed and secure and of course have some well-structured XML format.  None of this is hard — we know how to do all these things.  The consuming systems would only need to ping this service every week or month to see if any thing had changed.  The hardest part of doing this would be avoiding getting stuck in standards body bureaucracy and subsequent scope creep.  Actually doing it would not be that hard.

In the iPhone, Apple has built a completely generic UI.  All the controls are software reconfigurable "soft keys" — you touch a part of the screen that has a picture of a button on it.  This offers a fantastic level of flexibility, allowing them to build a lot of useful functions into a small package.  But soft keys like this are intrinsically limited by the fact that there’s no tactile feedback — you can’t feel the buttons.  Which means you really need to be looking at the device to be using it.  Which means you can’t send text messages from an iPhone while driving.  Some might argue that you shouldn’t even try to anyway, but I’m sure people will try, and I’m also sure they’ll crash trying.

Don’t get me wrong — I’m very excited about this device, and will probably use it as an excuse to ditch my crappy not-so-smart phone.  And I’m guessing that in about 5 years somebody, maybe Apple or MIT or UW, will figure out how to put texture onto a display and solve this problem.  But until then, I maintain that single purpose devices will be better at what they do than generic devices.

I’ve heard from security experts that FF has way more problems than IE does, but it just doesn’t get attacked as much.  I hate to say it, but we’re probably already living in a world where all software not only has bugs but has security bugs too.  We just gotta learn to live with it.

We might say “google should keep backups.” But then again, for a lot of
things, we probably don’t want google to keep backups. The gubment can
read backups, afterall. Data security vs. privacy is an intrinsic
trade-off that people don’t seem to think of much yet.

I think maybe they’ve got a bit too much peanut butter clogging up the works.  ;)  Maybe I should make a serious attempt to switch over to Realtime. 

Frankly, GOOG is eating MSFT’s lunch on the consumer software front.  But MSFT still dominates in the enterprise, and will for a long time.  GOOG’s model is hosted solutions, which enterprises are really hesitant to deploy.  And with good reason — if you were a CIO would you trust all of your company’s IP to somebody else?  Regardless of what promises they make, I wouldn’t.  So Microsoft continues to turn into IBM.

The two announcements I’m thinking about are Zune and Office Roundtable.  Strategically, Zune is an obvious one: they’re taking on Apple in the music space head on.  And they’re doing it MSFT-style: more features.  I think they’re really cool features and assuming they can make them work in a friendly manner (tbd), will make for a fantastic product.  But it’s worth noting that they’re building it entirely themselves, turning their back on PlaysForSure and their ecosystem of hardware -manufacturing minions.  (Perfect timing for RNWK to release an mp3-player firmware platform — oh wait, we did — but that’s another story.)  So MSFT wants to challenge Apple on their own turf.  Good luck I wish you well you’re not paying your industrial designers enough.

IMHO Microsoft Office Roundtable is exactly the kind of product MSFT should be building right now.  It’s an MS-branded hardware product built for the enterprise.  This is a fertile space that MSFT could completely dominate.  Phones, teleconferencing gear, photocopiers, faxes, whiteboards, etc.  By being the shepherd for all hardware device drivers over the decades, they’ve developed a unique skill-set of interfacing gadgets to PCs.  But more important, selling hardware is a great hedge against GOOG eating into their software business.  Building enterprise office hardware will further cement their hold on the enterprise software market, ensuring that businesses continue to need Windows on all their employees’ desktops.  Even if they’re primarily running Google software!

I’m not sure if this is a conscious choice for MSFT yet or not.  But If I were Ballmer right now I would be thinking hard about how to leverage my device driver and hardware experience into protecting some core aspects of the business.  Not that they should give up on fighting GOOG head on.  I honestly think Live search has a lot going for it beyond Google — for one thing it updates its index really fast, whereas changes on the web take weeks or months to show up in Google.  But that’s just one place where MSFT has caught up because they put a lot of effort and some fantastic people on it.  While GOOG continues to build better more integrated consumer software applications at an impressive rate.

There were lots of page-search engines along the lines of Alta Vista.  They crawled the web and indexed the contents of each web page.  They would try to figure out which web page best matched your search keywords based entirely on the contents of the pages themselves.  This didn’t work very well since spammers could fill their pages with keywords they liked that didn’t necessarily add any value to you.

Yahoo searched a database that was built manually instead of by crawling.  Yahoo’s staff would catalog thousands of web sites and categorize them according to keywords.  This provided a higher level of quality since a human reviewed every entry, but they were having trouble keeping up with the explosive growth of the net.

Then there was these two punk Stanford kids with their upstart Google.  Google was a lot more like Alta Vista than Yahoo in that they automatically crawled and indexed the entire web.  But they judged which pages were useful not based on what was on the page itself, but on other pages on the net that link to it.

We all know who won.  But I’d like to share a perspective on why that uses a political analogy. Google democratized search.  Yahoo was based on a communist model.  Alta Vista was complete anarchy.  Democracy won because it gives power to the people, and the aggregate opinion of millions of people is almost always better than even a carefully chosen set of experts.

Yahoo’s model was analogous to having a central politburo that makes all decisions.  Provided the politburo is skilled and benevolent, this can be a great solution.  But if the system they control gets too big, it just won’t work.  Alta Vista’s ranking system gave everybody speaking equal say in what happened, which amounted to total anarchy.  Google allowed every web page on the net to cast a vote on which pages were the most important ones.  (Beyond that, the pagerank system iterates so that some votes coming from more important pages count more than other votes — the details of implementation are always key.)  Information democracy is achieved by giving everybody a say in what’s important and aggregating the reults.

There are numerous examples of democratic services completely obsoleteing services based on communist editorial systems.  Wikipedia democratized the encyclopedia and has replaced Encarta.  Youtube democratized internet video clips and replaced iFilm.  In many more cases, the democratic service hasn’t replaced the centrally-controlled services, but provides a strong alternative.  E-Bay democratized shopping.  Blogs have democratized news.  Open-source software has democratized software development.

Clearly democratization isn’t a silver bullet for every problem.  Expertise is much more rare and valuable in some fields than others.  But if your business today is based on having a database that your staff maintains, take note!  Somebody’s probably out there right now figuring out how to build a competing business where anybody in the world can contribute to their database.  And pretty soon they’re gonna be taking pot-shots at your market.  Managing user-generated content is really hard.  Counting votes is really hard.  But if it’s done well, it will dominate any system based on central editorial control.  With the help of computers, groups of people can solve problems far more effectively than individuals can.  This truth will not change.

(I brought this idea up at the Decibel Festival talking about music editorial systems and received a lot of positive feedback about it, so I wanted to post it.  But I must give credit for the vocabulary to my good friend Ramez Naam — I first heard it when he was critiquing a startup’s business model as being communist.  At first I laughed, but later I appreciated his wisdom.)

Feeding into the main volume is the "mixer."  You can get to it by double-clicking the main volume control.  It lets you adjust the relative volume of various sound sources like CD audio and wave input and midi that were all very relevant in 1997.  Therein lies the problem.  The audio sources that people care about setting the relative volumes today all fall under one channel in the mixer: "Wave" — they’re different applications like WinAmp and WMP and Real Player and Rhapsody and various web pages.  But in today’s windows applications, every one of these applications has to implement its own proprietary volume control.  Having painfully built a bunch of volume controls out of javascript and .gif’s, I can say it would be much nicer if the OS managed this instead.

A modern volume control mixer widget should have sliders for all running applications that are outputting sound.  Ideally adjusting them in the mixer would synchronize with their positions within the application.  This is a bit harder since it requires defining an API would allow applications to sync the display of their volume control to changes made in the system mixer.  Without this synchronization, this system could be retrofitted onto existing applications simply by hooking in at, say the DirectSound level in Windows.

When it comes to installing something free like Ubuntu, it seems that there’s a real "you-get-what-you-pay-for" situation here.  Premium services are highly accurate.  But free services like hostip.info are barely breaking 50% accuracy right now.  But even though it thought my IP address was in the middle of the San Francisco bay, that is at least in the correct timezone.

Hostip.info has the right goal of creating puclicly accessibly web services APIs.  In fact their API is beautiful.  So please, go contribute to their database and help improve the accuracy.  Then we’ll never need to tell the computers what timezone we’re in — they’ll just know.  And we all want the computers to get smarter, don’t we?

Hostip.info thinks you’re in this country:




Wrong?  Please correct it.

Power management.  It wakes up instantly when you pop the lid, and it doesn’t need to blunder around trying to reconnect to the wifi network — if it was connected when you closed the lid, it will be connected when you open it.  It dims & then blacks the screen pretty quickly.  But unlike a windows machine, I don’t feel a need to stop it, because I know it will wake up again.  It never gets stuck in this half-awake mode that windows laptops seem to love.  And I’m confident I will never open the lid to see it saying "Hibernating…" and then have it shut down.  A friend who works at MSFT once sang me a jingle that goes something like "Power management in windows isn’t very good.  They say it will be better in the next version.  They always do."

Filesystem.  When you erase a file, it goes away.  OS X never sits there pondering "Can I erase this file?  I wonder.  Hmmm.  Maybe.  If I erase it, what could happen?  Hmm.  I wonder.  Let me think about this for a minute."  While I generally don’t think much of unixy/open-source GUIs, having a rock-solid filesystem behind this machine is really nice.

Light-sensitive.  Here’s one of those really nice subtle touches that most people will never notice, but just makes the machine work better.  The MacBook has light-sensors under the grills on the sides of the keyboard.  If you’ve got one, try covering them up with your hands.  The screen dims.  It uses this to automatically adjust the screen brightness to the ambient light in the room.  Nice touch.

MagSafe power connector.  I never need to worry about tripping over my laptop’s charger and having my expensive laptop flung off the table.  That’s a nice patent.  I wonder how broad it is.  Really, alot of plugs could be magnetic.  But honestly I think that most new consumer electronics won’t need any cables in about 10 years.  In about 5 years, Bluetooth (or its ilk) will handle data interconnects, and in another 5 years, we’ll be charging our batteries without plugs either by using inductive battery chargers or smart wire arrays that automatically couple to any device placed on them.  I also have to say that while the magsafe plug is great, Apple has a few things to learn from Dell about how to build the charger unit.

A few annoying things:  The keyboard controls for editing text just aren’t as full-featured in macworld as they are in windows.  You are expected to use the mouse.  It’s hard to type as fast. 

But hands-down the best feature of the MacBook Pro: MacSabre.  Props to my old friend Jon Bell for a nice logo.

I also got Woz to sign it the other day.  Woz is rad!

For everybody else out there who didn’t grow up idolizing Larry Wall, there’s a better solution: Sonos.  They’ve built an amazing digital home stereo solution that blows away every other Digital Audio Receiver on the market.  And to make it even better, they just hard wired it into Rhapsody which means you have instant access to a huge catalog of almost 3 million songs anywhere and everywhere in your house.  If I hadn’t invested a ton of energy into my home-grown system, I would have a Sonos system, because it’s just that well done.  I’m actually tempted to throw away what I’ve built.

At CES a couple years ago I shared a booth with some engineers from Sonos.  They’ve done some amazing things with Wifi.  Their amp units have audio inputs as well as outputs, so you can plug your DVD player into a sonos amp in one room, and have the same audio play simultaneously in another room.  Doesn’t sound like a big deal until you consider what’s actually going on under the hood.  They’re encoding the audio into some digital format (probably mp3 or aac or some such), and transmitting it over wifi to another amp unit.  Beyond that, they have to buffer the transmission to account for potentially dropped packets.  The truly amazing part is that they can do all this with such a short delay that you don’t even hear an echo in the audio between the two rooms.  Streaming audio over the internet typically requires 5-10 seconds of buffering.  Sonos does buffering and encoding all in I’m guessing <50ms.  Very well done.

This level of detail and engineering skill is maintained in every aspect of the system.  The UI of the remote control will long be held as the gold standard home audio remote control.  As I mentioned earlier, their business team knows how to rebuild the digital home audio market, basically from the ground up.  (Like iPod docks were ever anything more than a pothole in the landscape of consumer electronics evolution.)

It’s a pricey system, but if you can afford it, it’s well worth it.

I have to say that the magsafe power plugs are really cool.  But the way you have to wrap the power cords around the main transformer unit (undoubtedly actually a switching power supply with hardly an inductor to be found anywhere) is pretty weak.  Those fold out clippy things are flimsy and don’t really hold the cord very well either. 

Compare that to the power supplies that Dell supplies for its latitude laptops, where the main transformer unit is somewhat rounded like a spool specifically designed to have long thick power cords wrapped around it.  And the elastic belt is just genius.  That’s exactly how a laptop power supply should stow its cords. 

Eat your heart out, Apple.  Dell totally beat you at your own game on this one.

When thinking about gadget convergence, physics imposes some intrinsic limits.  For example, optics on a camera — right now you need a certain amount of glass to make a decent camera, and this probably won’t change for 5-10 years.  (MEMS mirror arrays will probably solve this problem at some point, but it’s gonna take a while before this is affordable.)  MP3 players are limited by storage or some tradeoff between storare, bandwidth and battery-life.  (Wireless data costs battery.)  But as Apple continues to demonstrate with their disappearing shuffle devices, there’s no intrinsic physical limitation to the size of an MP3 player except for the UI and the headphone jack, and Apple has shown pretty well you don’t need many controls for a simple music player.

But for a great music player it’s all about the controls.  Some say we’re converging on a world where all controls are done through touch-screens and soft-keys.  You certainly can build some fabulous UIs that way.  But until touch screens have tactile feedback, this is not the end of the story.  I operate many of my devices in very sophisticated ways without looking at them.  (Anybody here text while driving?  Be honest.)  Touchscreens can’t give you tactile feedback today.  Sometimes we get fabulous experiences with specialized controls like half-press buttons on cameras or jog wheels with quantized stops.  It’s hard to substitute for holding an ergonomically designed device and knowing how to operate it.  Different devices require different controls, and right now the technology doesn’t exist to genericize that.

Beyond that, when you pick up a generic gizmo, before you can do anything else you need to tell it what personality you want it to exhibit.  "Be a phone now."  When you pick up your dedicated camera, you never need to tell it to stop being an ipod before it will take pictures.  And while some cameras still take a while to boot up, most don’t these days, and they essentially never hang like my crappy "smart" phone does all the time.  These problems of multiple personalities and instability are also major barriers to gadget convergence.  The optimist in me says "these are just software / UI problems and are solvable."  But I don’t think we’ll solve the UI problem until our devices are much better in tune with our emotions, which is pretty far off.  Also, I don’t think we’ll solve the stability problem until we make a fundamental shift in how we write embedded code — something so fundamental I have trouble imagining it.

The single multi-purpose do-it-all gizmo will always have its place.  It’s convenient to be able to carry a single object around that serves many functions, even if it only does a half-assed job at each of these functions.  But until there are several major technological changes, I believe dedicated single-purpose devices will remain the best way for people to satisfy their high-tech gizmo needs.