Rohan Jayasekera's thoughts on the evolving use of computers -- and the resulting effects

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Bundled writing

2010-01-25T00:24:00.001-05:00

Yesterday's Los Angeles Times has an op-ed piece by Daniel Akst, Apple's tablet and the future of literature, which I highly recommend. He asks a question which I think I can answer:

it's not clear how anyone will get paid for writing, or what will take the place of the existing commercial system, which produces ample dreck but a lot of great stuff as well, often written and edited by experienced professionals with families to support and bills to pay. It may get our egalitarian juices flowing to think that the digital revolution will open up this world, but a literary culture in which everyone is a writer and no one is an editor is likely to leave all of us poorer.

I agree about editors; almost every writer benefits from having an editor. In the past the printing presses were controlled by the publishers, whose editors hired the writers and fixed up their output. Now the writers have their own printing presses on the Internet, plus their work is unique in a way that editors' isn't. So now the tables should be turned: writers should hire editors.

Which they will do if they make their living from writing. Paying for editing services is then a justifiable expense to ensure that they have good products to sell.

Making a living from writing has never been easy, and nobody should expect that to change. But great writers have long managed to do it by various means. They generate unique content that people want access to, so they have something to sell. It might be ad space next to the writing; it might be sponsorships that even members of the public can engage in (I once sponsored the publication of a printed book and my name was printed in the Acknowledgements); it might simply be that you have to buy a copy. The public Internet hasn't been around very long and it can take a while for these things to be explored and winning formulas to be identified.

One thing is however clear to me: there isn't much of a future for newspapers as we know them. It's not just that they deliver stale "news"; most of their content is from wire services and is available on the Web at no charge (often from other newspapers). Magazines are very different: all their content is unique. I think they're the ones who should be putting up paywalls, more than newspapers, but while Google Search finds 5220 results for the phrase "newspaper paywall" it only finds 15 for the phrase "magazine paywall". I'd pay to read articles from such magazines as The Atlantic and The Economist; I don't only because I don't need to (The Atlantic's content is open) or they won't let me (The Economist has no single-purchase option, not for a single issue let alone a single article). But there's no way I'll subscribe to those magazines, i.e. pay for every article in every issue for a year or whatever, because I don't read that many of the articles. I will however occasionally buy a single newsstand copy because according to its cover that particular issue contains something of great interest. And then I don't even want most of the issue, just the one article.

That article I'm willing to pay for was written by a writer. I'd like to find out about the existence of that article (through such means as Twitter recommendations and, in the case of technology articles, a website like Techmeme), and then read it, paying with money or ad-watching as required. I don't want to have to get a bundle that was assembled by some newspaper or magazine editor. I might however be interested in a volume discount, e.g. if the Globe and Mail's columnists collectively resigned and started their own website where one must pay to read each article, I might be tempted to pay one price that's good for a bunch of articles from any of those columnists and with no expiration date. Unique content has realizable value.

We've been down this road already with music. Album sales are way down but single tracks sell nicely through the iTunes Music Store (which I don't use myself, but I bought a couple of tracks today on Beatport).

Curated collections won't be going away. But it's time for more of the individual creators to connect directly with their audiences.

Is Apple about to introduce a "no OS" computer?

2010-01-02T15:03:00.003-05:00

From 2001: A Space Odyssey

For some time now the tech bloggers have been going nuts over the prospect of a tablet computer from Apple. They've been focussing on hardware issues, in particular the "tablet" form factor. But one of the major themes of this blog, the disappearance of the personal computer as we know it, is highly applicable as well. Apple has a long and strong track record of streamlining user interfaces beyond their major competition (e.g. Apple ][, Macintosh, iPhone), and I expect them to do it again by introducing a "real computer" on which the visible operating system has been eliminated. There will still be an operating system, but largely hidden from the user, as on the iPhone (and similarly just a version of OS X).

As for the form factor, a tablet would be better for frequent use than a laptop (which has to be opened up), and more in keeping with a device that's more about "output" than "input". Most people don't type large amounts of text (tech bloggers are atypical but they usually forget that as they pontificate), and books and magazines and newspapers are gradually moving online (with the exception of those where high-quality printing is important). The screen could use protection, but it's really not that difficult with a good colourless-plastic screen protector (like those often used to protect smartphone screens) or a flip-up cover (like my old Palm IIIxe had), and particularly nervous people can use a full sleeve. As for typing, I imagine Apple would stick with an onscreen keyboard.

There's been some speculation that the device's software will be heavily oriented to reading material (e-ink based readers such as the Amazon Kindle won't appeal to all that many people; they can't even display colour, let alone video). I don't know of anyone who's designed a proper screen reading experience yet, e.g. Google Fast Flip doesn't even fit a page onto my 1280x800 screen. Apple would likely do it properly. For a fascinating look at what a good tablet reader might be like, see this and be sure to watch the video there (which is apparently 8 minutes long but for me the time flew by).

And Apple's tablet (assuming that it does come along) will be followed by devices based on Google's Chrome OS, which takes a different approach but has the same idea of eliminating the visible operating system. 2010 will be an important year in the disappearance of the personal computer as we now know it.

Hardware vendors get elbowed aside

2009-12-18T03:27:00.003-05:00

Hardware and software people have different areas of expertise. Obvious, right? Not at hardware companies, which as long as I can remember have tended to hire electrical engineers to write their software. Electrical engineers tend to hire other electrical engineers even when that's not the best fit, and the dismal results are everywhere.

Things are finally changing. But not because of any reform at the traditional hardware companies.

One of the reasons that Apple has been so successful is that it's good at both hardware and software, one of the relatively few such companies. By controlling both they can assure a good user experience. But they no longer build the devices themselves; that's long been done by contract manufacturers who have the facilities and expertise to crank out quality hardware at a low price, built to the specifications of their customers.

Contract manufacturers have gradually become better and better at not just the manufacturing but the design, and many have become original design manufacturers (ODMs) who design and manufacture their own products and merely have them branded and sold by companies with a brand presence. For instance, the T-Mobile MDA Vario and O2 Xda Mini Pro phones, which were sold by carriers T-Mobile and O2 respectively, were both the same phone, one designed and built by Taiwan's HTC Corporation. While more recently HTC has also been selling products under its own name, the ODM phenomenon continues.

So now anyone with enough budget can become a hardware company. Just tell an ODM what the machine needs to do, and they'll design and build it for you to sell under your own brand.

Rumour has it that Google will be selling its own phones and netbooks, getting ODMs to design and build the devices to Google's requirements.

Why would Google feel the need to do this?

Because the existing phone and netbook vendors are not up to the task. They're hardware companies. Google is a software and services company.

Hardware companies, even when they have an operating system supplied to them by software people, rarely put out decent products from the user's standpoint. I won't use a laptop that isn't a ThinkPad or a MacBook (both created by companies that are longstanding hardware and software companies). And the iPod pushed aside the MP3 players that were already on the market from hardware companies.

Where laptops have less than adequate usability, they have more than adequate power. Laptops are still being sold on the basis of "more power" that hardly anyone needs. Netbooks are one response. The traditional PC vendors, and their high-cost suppliers Intel and Microsoft, have been mocking netbooks to try to stop people from buying them.

Google makes more money when more people are using the Internet, so anything that interferes with Internet use is something it wants to fix. If Google does sell a phone, it will be because it's not satisfied with the software side of all the Android-based phones currently hitting the market. And if Google does sell a netbook, it will be because the traditional hardware vendors are unwilling and/or unable to sell computers that are simple and cheap, with "simple" requiring that there be no user-visible operating system via something like Android or Google Chrome OS.

I expect to see more software and services vendors creating their own hardware products. I want even my television set to come from a software company.

140 characters to groupthink

2009-12-13T02:29:00.001-05:00

I’m on Twitter a fair bit these days, but lately I’ve been getting quite frustrated by the number of occasions on which I don’t connect properly with one or more other people: there are misunderstandings and miscommunications and crossed signals. It seems to me that the common element among these occasions is some level of disagreement. UPDATE: Or attempts at humour.

In the various “echo chambers”, where people retweet each other, send each other links supporting their common beliefs, and support each other against common enemies, 140 characters is enough. In contrast, delving into differences of fact or interpretation or opinion generally requires more space than that. So Twitter sucks for any kind of meaningful discussion.

Furthermore, Twitter makes it easy to stick with members of your own tribe and nobody else. Groupthink forms easily when nobody outside the group is present, and then any form of negativity or skepticism or disagreement is frowned on. Meanwhile, existing beliefs common to the group get plenty of reinforcement.

On Twitter, how often does anyone’s mind get changed about anything? I suspect that the answer is “not very often”.

My March 2007 blog post about Twitter, Reduced barriers to entry for ... narcissism!, was off the mark (I don’t mind admitting it since so many others were wrong too). Perhaps the real downside of Twitter is that it contributes not to narcissism but to rigidity. Mob psychology among people who aren’t even in the same place; just what the world needs.

Google, privacy, evil, and advertising

2009-12-11T16:18:00.009-05:00

I haven’t posted anything here for a long time. I did once write a post entitled Blogging infrequently is a feature, not a bug, but by “infrequently” I didn’t mean such a gap!

Eric Schmidt, CEO of Google, caused a flap this week by responding to a privacy concern with “If you have something that you don’t want anyone to know, maybe you shouldn’t be doing it in the first place.”

I have a few comments.

Essentially all of Google’s revenue comes from targeted advertising. If you use Google’s services, it collects as much as information as it can about you in order to better target the ads that it serves you. If targeted advertising isn’t evil, and if the information collected is used only for that purpose, it isn’t evil either, right? That’s how Google sees it.

Many people are in fact totally fine with having no privacy, especially those who indulge their exhibitionistic tendencies via Facebook and Twitter and location-sharing services such as Foursquare. That group consists mostly of younger people, and I would guess that some observers expect their attitude to dominate over time, i.e. it’s just a matter of waiting for the old fogies to become outnumbered and perhaps not realize what’s happening in the meantime (i.e. the frog in the slowly heating water).

I don’t believe that’s what lies ahead. According to Socionomics, which greatly influences how I view many things, we’ve been living through a very unusual period in history in which optimism and trust have been running at much higher levels than usual. If that period is in the process of ending, as I believe it is, we can expect a loss of confidence that it is safe to trust other people and companies with information about us that we wouldn’t necessarily want to be public knowledge. Not just the highly sensitive stuff that we generally manage to keep under wraps, but even some information that privacy-oblivious Googlers would think harmless.

Facebook has recently also been hit with privacy concerns, and although they haven’t done the best job of dealing with them to date, they’re continuing to respond and I believe can achieve an acceptable middle ground.

But Facebook and Google are in different revenue situations. Although Facebook too is largely dependent on ad revenue, it’s also going after other revenue that should in time reduce that dependence. Google also has non-ad revenue, in particular the growing Google Apps for Business, but relatively speaking the dependence is quite different. For Facebook, privacy is a pain in the ass but one that can be accommodated sufficiently to mollify users, while for Google, privacy is an enemy to be overcome.

Then there’s the dependence of advertising on the general economy. And then there’s what I believe is a long-term decline in advertising as the nature of customer engagement changes in a more connected world. What if advertising declines slowly over time, plus is hit across the board in a worsening economy, plus even its least-vulnerable spot of highly targeted advertising is hit by privacy concerns?

I understand why Eric Schmidt would like to think that privacy is in the past, because privacy is a major threat to Google. I think that belief is incorrect.

UPDATE added the following day: I forgot to mention one point I’d intended to make: advertising is widely seen as slightly on the evil side of the evil-good spectrum – and when the social mood (to use the socionomic term) is down, any perception of evilness gets magnified in the eyes of the public.

"No OS" computer on its way

2009-04-06T10:13:00.003-04:00

Further to my post More on the evolution of netbooks, ZDNet’s Andrew Nusca points to a story printed today in the New York Times. The NYT has obtained confidential documents saying that cellular carrier T-Mobile will next year launch in the USA a tablet computer that uses the Android operating system. This would be an example of the device I expect to largely replace today’s personal computers: one without a conventional operating system, and pretty much just a smartphone that has a much larger screen and a full-sized keyboard (which in the case of tablets may be an on-screen keyboard).

Replace, that is, for those of us who feel the need for more than a phone in our pocket. I expect us to be in the minority, with most people satisfied with a smartphone. Today smartphones such as the BlackBerry and iPhone and Treo/Centro are priced much higher than regular cellphones, but as the category becomes more popular, and as all the cellphone manufacturers get into the market, the prices are coming down. Already, new lower-end phones and plans increasingly include browsers and some Internet access, leaving out only smartphones’ larger screen and full keyboard (physical or on-screen). I recently heard a Torontonian who is originally from India tell a story of a recent trip back to India: when he pulled out his laptop, his nieces laughed at him and said “Oh, uncle, you’re so old-fashioned – you and your laptop!” They just use their phones now, and they think that’s better!

The "Sixth Sense" wearable device

2009-03-12T17:06:00.003-04:00

Back in the mid-1970s I decided that the type of computer I really wanted was one implanted in my body and attached to my central nervous system, so that I could interact with it via nerve impulses back and forth. I wouldn’t be able to really use it immediately as I would have to learn to emit signals along certain nerves, those that instead of being connected to various physical muscles were connected to my computer, replacing input devices like a keyboard or pointing device. In the other direction, I would learn to process the signals emitted by that computer, as I process the vision and sound emitted by my eyes and ears. In time it would happen without thinking, just as I don’t have to think about what nerves to activate in order to turn my head to the left, or how to interpret the signals from my eyes in order to form an image.

I suppose the computer-to-brain direction could be called a sixth sense. (But it wouldn’t allow me to see dead people.)

The “Sixth Sense” wearable computer recently developed at MIT introduces a new method of practical interaction that doesn’t use a conventional physical screen. It’s not an implant, but it’s a big step along the way. Watch the video of the TED 2009 presentation here. 8 minutes 42 seconds of mindblowingness.

More on the evolution of netbooks

2009-03-09T20:59:00.005-04:00

Finally there’s an article I can really recommend on the evolution of netbooks. It’s at the Wired.com blog: Netbooks Offer a Chance to Challenge Windows' Long Reign.

I can’t, however, recommend the reader comments at the end of the article, as they’re mostly negative ones from Windows and Linux loyalists who cannot imagine that, in an online world, most people would be better served by something other than Windows or Linux or Mac OS.

There is a more reasonable comment that the article should also have listed Google’s Android OS. While no official Android netbook implementation has been announced, it was recently reported that Asus is working on an Android-powered Eee PC, possibly with assistance from Google Taiwan.

Meanwhile, here’s an update on my December post in which I wrote that I and others think Apple should introduce a netbook that’s not a small Mac but rather a large iPod Touch. (Admittedly, such a device would differ sufficiently from current netbooks as to warrant having a different name — and I have a suspicion that Apple would loudly say “it’s not a netbook”.) Earlier today Silicon Alley Insider wrote about the mounting evidence that Apple intends to introduce such a device later this year. (The reader comments there are much better!)

More on deflation and unemployment

2009-02-02T12:06:00.006-05:00

Back in April 2006 I wrote about how Web 2.0 would contribute to deflation and unemployment. Those things are happening now (not just because of Web 2.0, of course!). Here are a couple of things that I find interesting:

Fred Wilson’s post When Talking About Business Models, Remember That Profits Equal Revenues Minus Costs examines some companies that can generate huge revenues with few employees, thanks to modern technology. Craigslist does that, while Facebook and Digg probably could – but don’t. Why not? Because they’ve been growing their businesses to make them more attractive to buyers. Now that buyers have largely dried up, the old “bigger is better” is increasingly being challenged by “small is beautiful”. Maybe Digg and Facebook will make the switch to smaller, and operate with relatively few staff, i.e. lay off lots of people. “Lean and mean” is already so much easier to do than in the past, but a sinking economy will dramatically accelerate the shift to it. I find the transition to 21st-century organizations exciting – and frightening. I don’t think that many people are psychologically prepared for how efficient companies can now become if they make that their priority. In the late 1970s, I.P. Sharp Associates, a pioneering online-services company I worked for, ran on tools such as email, instant messaging, and a flat organizational hierarchy – and was reputed to have the highest revenue per employee of any computer services company in Canada. Since then, easy credit and a zooming stock market has put the emphasis on growth rather than profitability – but that era is now over. Many traditional companies won’t move effectively because they’re not willing to accept the gravity of the situation, e.g. instead of targeted layoffs, many offer voluntary buyout packages which are most likely to be taken by those who can easily get new jobs elsewhere, i.e. the employees they should hang on to, not lose. And CEOs hired for growth are usually not the best at lean-and-mean.

The other interesting piece is that The Times (London) reports that India set to follow cheap car with £7 laptop. Even if the price ends up not being quite that low, it will be low. Part of what makes it possible is the use of domestic Indian technology: no reliance on the likes of Intel and their high cost structures. I presume there will eventually be export versions to the West, though by then I suppose the Western nations will have protectionist trade barriers in place.

We are shifting from a long period of growth to a period of retrenchment. And the Internet is there to assist in that retrenchment. I wonder whether it will eventually suffer backlash from the public at large, as things like free trade and unregulated markets do now.

What Palm's announcement did not contain

2009-01-11T23:59:00.002-05:00

Palm’s January 8th announcement of the Palm Pre and its webOS operating system was extremely exciting for me. Palm’s products have been at my side continuously since 1997, beginning with a PalmPilot Professional and continuing through my current Treo 650. I haven’t been totally thrilled by any of the competing smartphones, not even the iPhone nor the various BlackBerrys, all of which are missing what I consider essential features that are present even in my four-year-old Treo. For instance, I want a touchscreen and a physical keyboard, and I’m astonished that not every smartphone has a switch to silence the speaker. And as for the iPhone’s lack of copy-and-paste, um, well. The new Pre looks great to me and I look forward to its availability in Canada at some point.

The Pre does however lack something that all my Palm devices have had: a desktop application (Windows or Mac OS), together with hardware and software to synchronize with the device. The Pre will not have that. Why not?

Because Palm is moving online. If I’m looking for someone’s phone number on my smartphone and I hadn’t entered it there, I’m not likely to have entered it on my laptop either, so synchronization won’t help. That phone number may however be on Facebook — and the Pre will get it from there. It might cache a copy so that it doesn’t need to fetch it again (well, not until enough time has passed that the number should be re-fetched in case it’s been changed). For a more detailed exploration of this, see this article published today by Ars Technica.

The Palm Pre seems to be a true online device, going even further than the iPhone does when it’s used with MobileMe. Bravo, Palm!

Computers continue to become more like phones

2009-01-10T14:09:00.005-05:00

As readers of this blog know, I have long contended that personal computers as we know them today are an instance of temporary insanity. For the vast majority of people, the future is the same as the past, when people used “terminals” to access, via some kind of network, computing resources located elsewhere.

Phones have always been like this, both landline and mobile: a phone has never been of any use as a standalone device. I’ve recently written about how personal computers should behave more like phones, and now they’re being sold more like them too. Mobile carriers frequently offer subsidized phones (“sign a 2-year contract and get this expensive phone for only $X!”), and lately carriers in some countries have had similar offers with netbooks (“sign a data-plan contract and get this expensive netbook for only $X!”). This is now happening in the USA.

Windows 7

2008-12-22T11:50:00.003-05:00

Given the widespread disappointment with Windows Vista, Microsoft is now pinning its hopes on Windows 7. But why should it get a better reception? True, Vista upon introduction had problems with device support that Windows 7 will not repeat. But that’s not the main problem, which in my opinion is this: people who have Windows XP (like me) generally don’t want a newer version. Even if they get one “for free” upon buying a new computer, they don’t want a “better” version of Windows, they want the one they have (hence the popularity of XP downgrades). They’re familiar with it, it works acceptably well by Windows standards (sad but true), and they don’t want to risk new problems, especially after hearing so many complaints about Vista. The shift to Vista caused many Windows users to decide that “well, if I have to switch operating systems, I might as well switch to a Mac”.

Why the lack of interest in improvements to Windows? To hack an old phrase, “it’s the online, stupid”. My earlier post The decline of the personal-computer operating system talked about this.

Windows 7 will be better than Vista, both by lacking Vista’s initial technical problems and by having some nice features, and power users will like it. Nevertheless I predict that Windows 7 will be a commercial flop in much the same way that Vista was. Microsoft is flogging a dead horse.

The decline, Part 2, of the personal-computer operating system

2008-12-20T06:03:00.005-05:00

At the end of my previous post I mentioned “nothing” as one of the possible operating systems on most people’s next computer. With quotes, because an operating system is unavoidable – but it can be more or less invisible. What operating system does a BlackBerry have? I’m not sure – the manufacturer refers to BlackBerry Device Software while others refer to the BlackBerry Operating System. Contrast this with a PC running Windows: if you have Windows, Microsoft will make very sure that you know it. Even though so many users curse it! Wouldn’t it be nice for ordinary users not to have to deal with an “operating system”?

I happen to know that my Treo smartphone runs PalmOS, but just like on the BlackBerry, the operating system isn’t really visible. There is a “Prefs” application (which I access just like any other application) where I can change the phone ringtones, set how quickly the screen shuts off to save power, and some other things. There are no “files”.

Personal computers for most people should be like that. And they will be. Computers with a visible operating system (whether Windows or Mac OS X or Linux) will be used only by “power users”. (Under the hood, I expect Linux to dominate this market, and the iPhone has OS X which is very closely related to Mac OS X.)

As I said in my previous post, given the increasing price gap between a netbook and a MacBook, and an economic recession/depression, Apple can’t expect to keep selling expensive MacBooks at the same pace it has been. But it’s clearly reluctant to drop the price as long as a substantial number of people are still willing to pay the premium. One way for Apple to respond to the advent of netbooks would be to introduce one that isn’t a Mac but is more or less an iPhone or iPod Touch with a much larger screen. A good writeup on this can be found here, with subsequent speculation that it could happen as early as January 2009. Such a device would be a netbook, but the first netbook with the potential to be reasonably consumer-friendly because there would be no visible operating system. (Well, except for the OLPC XO-1, but that’s intended only for children; adults often have trouble using it.)

One thing that happened with the arrival of the IBM PC and its Microsoft-sourced operating system was that control of the user experience largely shifted from the computer manufacturer to the operating-system vendor. Windows computers are all used pretty much the same way. As the operating system “disappears” on most future netbooks (and never really appeared on smartphones, with the possible exception of Windows Mobile), the manufacturer will once again largely determine the user experience. This would obviously be the case on an iPhone-like netbook from Apple, but would also be true on a netbook that ran Linux but with a manufacturer-created user interface to hide the operating system.

An Apple netbook might also have a larger screen than netbooks to date, allowing Apple to justify a higher price. I personally would cheer, as my one complaint about existing netbooks is their small screens. Since I’m not already in the Apple ecosystem I don’t think I’d be a customer, but such a move by Apple might prompt other manufacturers to build a consumer-friendly (i.e. hidden operating system) netbook with a decently sized screen. Perhaps I’ll start saving the pennies now.

The decline of the personal-computer operating system

2008-12-05T10:20:00.001-05:00

The personal-computer operating system as we know it, typically Windows or Mac OS, was needed back when people installed lots of applications onto their computers. To get the apps you wanted, it was necessary to use a popular OS. Things have changed. Most people use only a few apps, all of which were pre-installed on the computer when they bought it: a browser, an email program, an instant-messaging program, a media player, and perhaps an office suite, and the browser is the main one. Obtaining new functionality is certainly common, but it’s now mostly received from web-based applications that are accessed from the already-installed browser. For most users, installing apps is a rare thing, and furthermore it’s a dangerous thing because it can cause all kinds of trouble; they’re best off sticking with the key apps, and letting those apps update themselves. People are learning this.

In the past, most people insisted on getting Windows because most installable apps only worked on Windows. Now the need for apps beyond a core set is largely gone. The result has been an increasing market share for Mac OS. Not so long ago I would have hesitated to use a Mac because of the app problem, but earlier this year when given the choice of Windows or Mac OS at work it was a no-brainer for me to choose the largely superior Mac OS. (Well, except for one thing. Choosing Windows would have gotten me a ThinkPad, complete with the pointing stick in the middle of the keyboard. We touch-typists can, once used to a pointing stick, use it way faster than we can a trackpad, and a ThinkPad is what I use at home. A true no-brainer would have been a Mac with a pointing stick.)

In the longer term, however, Mac OS will suffer. If you do almost everything via your browser, it doesn’t much matter what OS you use. Macs have become relatively very expensive: a Mac laptop still costs $1000 or more while some Windows laptops cost only $500 (and smaller-screen Windows netbooks even less). In a post-credit-bubble economy, most people will be far less willing to pay the premium for a Mac.

Windows will lose out too. As laptop prices drop, the cost of Windows is getting to be a larger percentage of the overall cost of the machine, and it’s an obvious thing for the manufacturer to cut. Some netbooks don’t have Windows; others have it only as an extra-cost option.

So what’s ahead? There are three choices for most people’s next computer: Linux (free), Windows (more expensive, but with a reluctant price cut by Microsoft to stay in the game), and “nothing”. Fear not, Apple fans, Apple can still be a big player, via the “nothing” category. More in my next post!

Still at it

2008-11-14T14:44:00.003-05:00

I no longer work for Tucows, not since Tuesday's 15% staff cut. But I'm still very much in the space of online services / cloud computing / software-as-a-service / whatever-you-want-to-call-it. I hope to write here more often than I have lately.

How Microsoft is quietly leaving its past behind

2008-06-29T16:53:00.006-04:00

Since starting my new job over three months ago, I’ve been too busy to write anything here. I’m not complaining; I’m really happy to have this job and the opportunity it gives me to make “computing” better for people at large. Thanks to Canada Day’s being on a Tuesday this year, I and many of my colleagues are taking Monday as a vacation day to create a four-day weekend, so here I am, writing again.

I put “computing” in quotes because these days it’s harder than ever to know what to call it. I like that people often use phrases like “being on the Internet” and “going online”. Sure, you can use a computer without being connected to anything or anyone else, but the range of what you can do is so much more limited.

I sometimes talk about “personal computing” as a period of temporary insanity. (Apparently I haven’t written that in a blog post before now, although I did write it a couple of years ago in reply to a comment here.) We’re recovering from it now, and I find Microsoft’s way of dealing with the shift to be quite fascinating. Microsoft stands to lose more than anyone else, but isn’t silly enough to pretend that that things aren’t changing. Its response, Live Mesh, takes Microsoft into the new era, but in an old-fashioned way. Let me explain what I mean...

There doesn’t seem to be a generally accepted term for the emerging new way of using computers. Out there in “the cloud” of the Internet there are servers that have all kinds of applications, data, storage space, you name it. Meanwhile people use various devices, such as PCs and cellphones, that can connect to the Internet and therefore to all those services as well as to each other. What is now available to us is the powerful combination of all of these elements working together.

The advent of PCs is why Microsoft was founded, and selling software to run on those PCs is still how it largely makes its money. As things evolve, however, the need for that software is disappearing: using a PC operating system other than Windows no longer causes much difficulty to the user (I now use Mac OS at work, and not long ago I wouldn’t have been willing to), and even though I have Microsoft Office at both home and work I rarely use it any more since I’d rather use server-based systems such as wikis. To me, a device is just a way of getting at my “stuff” – which I really don’t want to be stored on a device that might get lost or stolen, or whose hard drive might (will, someday) fail, or might get screwed up by the actions of its owner (me) or by all those software updates that I don’t understand and just hope will work as they’re supposed to.

UPDATE: Somehow I forgot to mention this when I wrote this post yesterday: the other problem with being device-centric is that a lot of things aren’t generated by you on your devices. Like all the emails that people send you! And the instant messages, and all the news you read on the Web, etc., etc.

Well, the way that Microsoft describes Live Mesh is very device-centric, and the word “mesh” seems that way to me as well, even though as far as I can tell it is a comprehensive system that could be a solid platform for the future. “Devices are how we interact in this new ‘web connected’ world”, says the Introducing Live Mesh blog post; “however, ... it becomes increasingly difficult to keep the people, information and applications we depend on in sync”. The result is a focus on synchronizing devices with each other. But how is this actually done? By synchronizing them with “folders” – that happen to be stored on a server, not on any of your devices. In fact, “Live Desktop enables you to easily access your mesh anytime, anywhere, using only a Web browser.” You don’t actually need to use any of your own devices; any Web browser anywhere will do.

Even at Microsoft, the device is becoming just an access point to where things really live, out there in the cloud. It’s just that Microsoft doesn’t want to admit it.

Putting my income where my mouth is

2008-03-10T21:38:00.008-04:00

As I blogged a few months ago, I recommend that you store your email not on your own desktop/laptop computer, but rather on a server that you can access over the Internet, and that if you prefer to do your email using an email program (like Outlook Express or Apple Mail or Thunderbird) rather than through a Web browser, you should use IMAP on an email service that supports it.

Well, on Monday I started working at Tucows as Director, Tucows Email Service.

Some of you may remember Tucows as the original software download site on the Internet; I used it as far back as 1994. Today, Tucows the company still runs that site but also does a number of other things. Its largest business is now to provide services for resale by over 7,000 ISPs and web hosting companies. The largest reseller service is domain registration; Tucows is actually one of the world’s largest domain registrars! Also in the area of domains is SSL certificates: your website will need one of those if it’s going to provide https:// access, e.g. if people can buy things by giving a credit-card number.

Then there’s the Tucows Email Service, which is my main focus. ISPs and web hosting companies need to provide email to their customers, but doing it themselves means having to keep an email system working reliably around the clock, with spam filtering and antivirus protection. The most recent Email Metrics Report from the Messaging Anti-Abuse Working Group, of which Tucows is a supporting member, showed 86.7% of all email as “abusive”, meaning spam. You may think that the spam that’s directed at you largely gets diverted to your spam folder, but you’re not even seeing the additional email that is so obviously junk that it doesn’t even get put in your spam folder! The spammers are always coming up with new tricks, and the total challenge of running an email service well means that it’s an activity best left to those who specialize in it. Even Bell Sympatico, Canada’s largest ISP (I co-founded Sympatico back in 1995), which had a perfectly decent email system, upon forming a partnership agreement with Microsoft chose to migrate to a Microsoft-hosted email system for the future. So the Tucows Email Service is an excellent way for ISPs and web hosting companies to provide quality email to their customers, complete with 99.99% uptime guarantee. So far it has resellers on three continents; I’d aim for all seven except that I don’t think Antarctica has an Internet industry.

My other focus is the fairly new Personal Names Service, a unique offering that’s built on top of the Tucows Email Service and also makes use of Tucows’ specialty in domains. Suppose your name is Yvonne Desjardins and you have a typical email address like (slightly misspelled to foil spammers) yvonne.desiardins@sympatico.ca or yvonned@hotnail.com. What if your ISP contacts you and tells you that you can have yvonne@desjardins.net for a small fee per year? You might well be interested. That’s what the Personal Names Service does, via its collection of about 40,000 domains such as desjardins.net. (It doesn’t own anything for the surname Jayasekera – I guess my surname isn’t all that popular in certain countries!)

One of the interesting opportunities here is to make Web-based email access even better than using an email program installed on your computer. Webmail always used to be the ghetto version of email; you’d use it only because your email service was free and accessible only though webmail (and not very nice webmail either), or because you didn’t have your computer with you. Gmail was the first large-scale email system that aimed to provide a high-quality web interface, but as much as I admire what they’ve done, the fact is that I’ve never used my Gmail account very much. As I wrote in that earlier post, I’ve always preferred to use an email program, so if even I can be converted to preferring webmail that will be a good sign.

I’m very excited about this new job. When I first used email about 35 years ago, it was much better than it is now: if I sent an email, I could be sure that it would reach its recipients (unless they were avoiding their email of course!), and there was nothing annoying about email either. Plus I could retract emails that I had already sent. Now, email is more important than ever, but it’s deteriorated. I will do what I can to help make email great again.

Mozilla Prism

2007-10-30T21:10:00.000-04:00

In my last post I talked about how you can now properly access Gmail not only through its Web interface but also through a PC-based email program like Outlook Express or Thunderbird.

That’s an example of where a server-based application is accessed other than through a Web page. In this vein I’d like to mention Prism, which was announced a few days ago by Mozilla Labs and works with the Firefox browser. Prism (formerly WebRunner) makes Web-based applications behave more like PC applications and less like Web pages. Here’s an example:

I use a Web-based to-do list system called Vitalist, and I use it frequently throughout the day. But with lots of browser windows/tabs open at the same time, I may have to hunt a bit to find the one that has Vitalist. Not any more. A few days ago I installed Prism and told it to create an application with name “Vitalist” and URL “http://my.vitalist.com/”. Now I have what seems to be a regular Windows application: there’s an icon on my desktop labelled Vitalist (I could also put it into the Windows Start menu if I wanted to, or the Quick Launch bar), and when I run it the taskbar shows “Vitalist” in the same way that it would show a traditional application like Outlook Express, completely separately from any regular browser windows I may have. I can navigate to it in the same way I would any other Windows application. Furthermore, the window doesn’t waste space with browser buttons like Back and Forward, nor with a location bar, because with Prism those are optional: it gave me checkboxes for them and I didn’t check those off. Although the window is actually a browser window, you’d never know it.

I’ve used Prism for a few days and although it’s an “early prototype” it works fine for me, and I love it. If you use any web-based applications a lot, like Gmail or Facebook, you may like it too.

So far it’s available only for Windows, but Mac OS and GNU/Linux versions should be available soon. More information, and a link to download it are at mozilla.com, specifically here.

One fewer reason to store data on your computer

2007-10-25T01:07:00.000-04:00

In my post Online storage I wrote about why you shouldn’t store your data on your desktop/laptop computer, but instead store it on servers that you can access over the Internet.

That includes your email. Web-based email is popular, but what if (like me) you prefer to do your email through an email program (like Outlook Express or Thunderbird) than through a Web browser? Up to now you’ve usually had to download your email to your local computer, while (optionally) leaving your original copies on the server. While that works, unfortunately the communication goes only one way: when you read an email message through your email program it gets marked as “read” locally, but not on the server. Same for deleting messages and other things. And properly organizing the messages you send is usually a hassle.

There is a solution: it’s called IMAP (Internet Message Access Protocol) and is one way that an email program and a mail server can communicate. With IMAP everything is synchronized: whatever happens at one end gets reflected on the other. And the mail server is the “primary residence” of your email; you may have copies of various messages locally, for speed and for availability when you have no Internet connection, but IMAP meets my objective of storing your data on servers intended for that purpose.

IMAP isn’t new; in fact it’s older than the public Internet. But the popular free email services such as Hotmail and Yahoo! Mail and Gmail haven’t supported it, unfortunately.

This has now changed. Gmail has just added IMAP access as a new feature (though Google says it will take a few days to be rolled out to all Gmail users).

Since Gmail is so popular, its addition of IMAP means that a lot more people will no longer have any good reason to store their data on their local computer. The effect will be magnified if Gmail's competitors try to keep up by also adding IMAP.

Facebook as portal

2007-06-05T13:13:00.000-04:00

I haven't posted for a while; too busy with work and things like InteractionCampToronto and the great mesh conference here in Toronto last week.

About three months ago I wrote about my experience with Facebook. My admiration has only grown with the addition of the Facebook Platform, and enormously so. It's been less than two weeks since it launched, yet my Facebook friends are busy finding apps to add. And when Facebook lets me know that a friend has added an app I haven't yet heard about, I always check it out to see whether it's of interest to me too. This is only the beginning of this new platform, a platform that while "new" is built on top of existing social networks, giving apps a better shot at viral spread and often eliminating critical-mass challenges.

I highly recommend a really great guest post on Techcrunch: The New Portals: It's the Bread, Not the Peanut Butter by David Sacks. It's about portals, and in particular talks a lot about Facebook as a new kind of portal. Even though I myself co-founded Canada's most popular portal, I largely lost interest in it a long time ago when the portal sphere started to stagnate, and later the advent of Web 2.0 massively changed the environment within which the very concept of a portal is applied. A good Web 2.0 portal doesn't have that much in common with a good Web 1.0 portal, and perhaps it's time to introduce a new term. "Portal 2.0" has been used to refer to personalized home pages like Netvibes and iGoogle, but to me that is too limiting: a portal is something that people use as a main jumping-off point to the Web, and Facebook now falls in that category. I invite suggestions for a new term in the comments.

Again, I highly recommend the post I linked to in the preceding paragraph.

Welcome to Web 2.0; wanna be my friend?

2007-05-05T03:10:00.000-04:00

Unless you’re a complete hermit, you occasionally have to deal with strangers who want to befriend you for one reason only: so they can make money. Multi-level marketing is one source of that, but it’s been going on so long that you’ve likely developed an “is this multi-level marketing?” analyzer in your brain that starts up at the slightest hint and won’t stop until the question’s been answered to its satisfaction.

“Networking” is a more recent one, and unfortunately deciding between the good and the bad is often not so easy. In modern societies connections are much more fluid than in the past, and now that the era of the “permanent job” is ending, networking becomes an essential requirement for making a living. So networking isn’t so easily tuned out. (I’ve been a huge fan of Tom Peters for over 20 years, and it shook me to the core when I heard him say that everyone needed two skills and one of them was networking. I don’t even remember what the other one was, because it was something I decided I had and consequently didn’t need to worry about — but I knew that networking wasn’t my strong suit.)

Enter Web 2.0 and its “social networking”. In any social network, whether it’s a small interest group of people who like to knit scarves in the shape of a brontosaurus (“all brontosauruses are thin at one end, much much thicker in the middle, and then thin again at the far end”), or a huge ocean of pseudo-friendship like MySpace, the cost of reaching out to a fellow member is low. There have always been “joiners” who join every club they can find so they can meet more potential customers for insurance policies or whatever, but when meeting people requires actually going to a meeting it limits the amount of such activity. Online, reaching out promiscuously has little cost, and doing it in some quantity, perhaps even with a bit of personalization, is a trivial matter. Interest in email, a medium that’s largely meant to be person-to-person, is declining thanks partly to all the spam, and social networks similarly risk pollution levels that make the environment inhospitable. Women are at the forefront of this because of all the friend requests from men.

(I realize that there are many people who want as many online “friends” as they can get (“thanks for the add”). I’m not talking about them. I also think that their interest is a temporary phenomenon that will largely disappear once the novelty wears off and people realize that collecting 2000 “friends” is too easy to be worth any bragging rights.)

This post was prompted by a friend request I received from a fellow member of a social network who was looking to promote his new Web 2.0 venture. Not intrinsically a bad thing, but:
- he provided almost no information about what the product will do (“it has to be experienced”);
- all I can do now is to sign up to be included when the “alpha” starts up in future;
- he’s almost certainly never launched a product before (for instance, I’d be joining a beta, not an alpha); and
- it’s called Hypesphere. When hype is considered a good thing, count me out.

He’s not trying to get at my money, but he is trying to get at my time, and I only have so much. Request deleted.

Getting wikis filled in

2007-04-27T19:53:00.000-04:00

“The Wiki field of dreams bothers me just because you build it doesn’t mean that people will do your boring content entry”
-Bryce Johnson (on Twitter)

I think you can build a wiki and get it populated, as long as you satisfy the following conditions:

Your wiki fills a need, one that’s not already filled. According to people who are in the wiki’s intended audience — not according to you or “management”.

The people who would use it include a high percentage of what I call analytical-retentive people, like computer geeks, librarians (hi, Connie), or policy wonks (hi, Mark).

You seed the wiki the way I’m about to talk about.

If you’re like most people, if you’re given a blank slate and are asked to put something on it, you’ll have a much harder time than if someone gives you a starting point that you can modify. Even an example of the kind of thing that’s desired constitutes such a starting point, e.g. if you’re asking someone for a description of a table and you want to know its height, materials, etc. you can give as an example a description of a bookcase that includes similar attributes. (Highly creative people do thrive on blank slates, but most people aren’t that creative, and furthermore the people you want populating your wiki are the ones who are more interested in knowing boring old facts than in being creative.)

If you just create a blank wiki, or have just minimal content in it, chances are high that nobody else will contribute anything. So you need to get the wiki started by creating a bunch of pages and putting something on each page.

That’s advice you’ll get from other people too, but I would add this: make those pages annoying. Annoying to people who are interested in the subject and are bothered by seeing it treated poorly, enough so that they’ll fix the problem. Analytical-retentive people are more bothered by flaws than other people, and furthermore are usually good at fixing them.

You can’t just create garbage as your starting point: you need to create something that’s going in the right direction, but is flawed. The better you know key people in your audience, the better a job you can do on this: ask yourself what kind of flaws would get those key people riled up and anxious to fix them. For example, if a wiki page is about how to use a Macintosh computer, you could seed it with some “information” that is obviously about Windows and is completely wrong for a Mac. This is where creativity can really come in handy: for seeding the wiki, not for populating it.

Misinformation is not the only way to seed with flawed content, but it can be an effective one. If you use misinformation, I recommend that your wiki be in a clearly stated beta mode until all the misinformation has been removed by users. (There is always the possibility that someone just removes misinformation without replacing it with something accurate, but it’s less likely to happen if you do your job well. There is an art to this.)

I’ve never seeded a new wiki by putting in provocative content, but I’ve successfully used the technique to seed individual pages in an existing wiki, and I find it powerful.

Net Neutrality

2007-04-21T12:03:00.000-04:00

Most of the people advocating “Net Neutrality” seem to view high-speed Internet access as some kind of fundamental human right. I think such an ideological view is blinding them to the fact that Net Neutrality is not that simple an issue. I note also that most of them are pretty clueless about how the Internet actually operates, but like most politicians they feel perfectly capable of setting policy about something they know nothing about. There are different kinds of Net Neutrality, and my own position is that one kind is good while another is bad. I don’t propose to do a complete analysis here, but only to show a particular distinction that I think is very important.

The side of Net Neutrality I like is the one about not discriminating among destinations. If I place a VoIP call, my ISP should not be able to prevent my using Vonage (or to permit it only if I pay more) just because it has its own VoIP product. Such discrimination allows a carrier to take advantage of its near-monopoly situation in order to boost its other non-monopoly business, and should be prohibited. A non-Internet example: I subscribe to cable TV, and when the cable company, which also has media interests, bought a sports channel from another media company it decided to make it a “basic cable” offering that every cable customer would have to pay for, including people like me who never watch it. The cable company had never forced on its subscribers a longer established and much more popular sports channel that it did not own; this action was taken only when it benefitted the cable company’s media division. This is the kind of discrimination I would like to see prevented. If a carrier offers value-added services like VoIP, that’s fine with me, but it should not be permitted to discriminate between its own services and those of others.

The side of Net Neutrality that I’m not so keen on is the one relating to “traffic shaping”. Here the ISP gives lower priority to certain types of packets in order to keep the rest of the packets moving smartly. In particular, it gives lower priority to BitTorrent packets. BitTorrent is a peer-to-peer system for distributing large files, and is very good at that: GNU/Linux distributions have been spread this way, for instance. Unfortunately, the vast majority of BitTorrent traffic consists of audio and video distributed illegally, such as movies recorded by a video camera smuggled into a movie theatre. Movie files are huge, and BitTorrent traffic now constitutes a large percentage of all Internet traffic. Net Neutrality advocates say that this traffic should get equal priority. I don’t agree. If my ISP uses traffic shaping to slow down BitTorrent, that’s just fine with me. Yes, that unfortunately slows down “legitimate” torrents as well, but I’d rather pay that price than have the entire Internet slow to a crawl.

Consider this: if we applied full Net Neutrality to email, everyone relaying email would be required to give spam as good treatment as other email. Now there’s a cause worth supporting!

Those of you who have been around for a while may remember Usenet newsgroups. They were very useful, until the flood of “newbies” in the late 90s swamped almost every newsgroup with entries from people who had little or no idea what they were doing. The result was that newsgroups were abandoned; I haven’t looked at them in years and my ISP doesn’t even carry them any more (though it’s arranged for free access via a third party for those few customers who still have any interest). A situation like this is called “the tragedy of the commons”, and if the Net Neutrality advocates get everything they’re asking for, that’s what we risk happening to the entire Internet. Any “commons” needs to be policed to prevent abuse, and right now only the ISPs can do that. If we were to take away that ability, the Net Neutrality advocates might achieve a Pyrrhic victory.

How dependent are you on Internet access?

2007-04-18T01:27:00.000-04:00

A recent post by David Heinemeier Hansson in the 37signals blog complained that “the idea of offline web applications is getting an undue amount of attention”. (You can see the post here, but be warned that the title uses language that is “not used in polite society”.) That there are 203 comments, most disagreeing with DHH, shows that being able to use computers without having good Internet access is something many people consider important. 37signals makes products for people who have reliable and fast Internet connections and don’t necessarily need access when travelling, and many of the commenters accused the company of being out of touch with those who aren’t that lucky.

I think the situation is that the lucky ones constitute enough of a market that 37signals can be a viable company without having to worry about building applications that will run offline, something that would dramatically increase application complexity and cost. 37signals also knows that the connectivity situation will continue to improve. If it were a public company the shareholders might well have demanded that it make more money by building products for the markets it’s not currently addressing, but it’s not a public company. It can stick to what it does well, knowing that the future is on its side. For other software companies, building offline Web applications may well make sense.

If you’re one of those lucky ones, and if you’re reading this blog you probably are, I recommend that you stay that way: before you become dependent on any online-only applications, have some form of backup Internet access in place. In my case, for instance, if my DSL connection at home ever failed for any length of time I could use dialup instead (my Sympatico High Speed subscription includes dialup, with the first 10 hours/month free and additional hours cheap), and if the entire phone line ever failed I could go to a local Internet café. For businesses whose staff need to stay in one place, one option now available in many Canadian cities is wireless Internet service that uses pre-WiMax technology. For only $25/month, plus $100 to buy the modem, you can have a backup 128 kb/s Internet connection (or faster if you pay more monthly, up to 3 Mb/s for $60/month) that will still work even if neither phone line nor cable works. For most businesses that’s affordable insurance. Preferably, get your backup connection from a different carrier than your usual connection.