Do You See What I See?

Do you want to heap praise upon somebody in the technology industry?  Use a single word to describe them as tops in their field, somebody to be looked up to, respected, and admired?

Call them a "visionary".

Everybody wants to be a visionary.  To be a visionary means to be able to see what other people can't.  It means being able to predict the future.  It means being able to find winning solutions, and understanding what your customers want before they know it themselves.  What could possibly be more valuable than to have a clear view of the future before anybody else?

Lots of things, actually.  Just ask Cassandra.

According to Greek myth, Cassandra was blessed by the god Apollo with the ability to see the future.  However, nobody would believe her, so she was unable to act on her visions, and the blessing became a curse.

Steve Jobs was often acclaimed as a visionary.  Perhaps that was true in spots, but it’s also true that much of his success was attributable to being a guy with absolutely zero vision, but who could identify quality whenever he saw it.  This was well demonstrated in a famous exchange between him and James Vincent, who was developing the commercials for the forthcoming iPad.  Jobs was adamant that the first round of proposals "sucked", but was unable to provide any guidance for how to improve them. When pressed on this point, Jobs responded "You’ve got to show me some stuff, and I’ll know it when I see it.”

On the flip side, let's talk about somebody who is not often called a visionary: Bill Gates.  We need to be a bit cautious about denigrating Gate's achievements, because whatever you may think of Microsoft's products, it’s indisputable that he achieved a level of professional success that most people will never approach.  But it's also true that despite hundreds of different products, the vast bulk of Microsoft's wealth and success came from just two product lines: Windows and Office.  In neither of these categories was Microsoft first to market.  (Anybody remember when the leading Office applications were WordPerfect and Lotus123?)  Instead, Microsoft came late to the game with inferior, "me too" products, and achieved market dominance through aggressive marketing, incremental improvement and sheer stubbornness.

Despite this, Bill Gates has demonstrated a brilliant understanding of the future on numerous occasions.  Consider this excerpt from his book "The Road Ahead", where he described a future product, which he called the “wallet PC”:  "You'll be able to carry the wallet PC in your pocket or purse. It will display messages and schedules and also let you read or send electronic mail and faxes, monitor weather and stock reports, play both simple and sophisticated games, browse information if you're bored, or choose from among thousands of easy-to-call up photos of your kids."

Sound familiar?  Swap the words "Wallet PC" with “iPhone” or the Android of your choice, and the description is spot on.  Bear in mind that this book was published back in 1994, when the state of the art in portable computing was a device that weighed only 5 lbs and had no built in internet connectivity.

With a lead like this, how could Microsoft possibly fail to dominate the mobile technology platform as thoroughly as it dominated the personal computer?

How indeed.

This isn't the only lead that Microsoft has squandered.  Back in 2008, 2 years before Apple released the iPad, Microsoft was working on a revolutionary new tablet device code-named “Courier”.  It had a built in camera, and accepted input from both multi-touch and stylus.  Gizmodo, in a review of a late stage prototype, called it "astonishing".  It might have proved a fearsome competitor to the iPad, but we'll never know, because Microsoft killed the product before it was ever released.  This decision was made in part on the advice of then-retired Chairman Bill Gates, who didn't think that Courier followed the core Microsoft Windows strategy closely enough.

In hindsight, this was probably a bad choice.  Might it have been anticipated?  Many years before Courier was killed, a technology visionary made an astute observation about how an ailing IBM was stifling its own innovation.  This came during the period of collaboration between IBM and Microsoft, who were jointly developing the new OS/2 operating system.  At the time, IBM was extremely concerned about interoperability between all of its product lines, and suggested in all seriousness that fonts be dropped from OS/2, because they would not be supported by IBMs existing line of mainframe printers.  This visionary correctly noted that you can't survive in the technology industry for long unless you are willing to cannibalize and render obsolete your own product lines.

That person's name?  Bill Gates.

Cassandra must have been laughing her head off.

For all of Microsoft’s considerable success, it seems like it might have been greater still had it only managed to take better advantage of the visionary skills of its founder.  It might not be struggling to stay relevant in a world where PCs are rapidly giving way to mobile phones and tablets.  It might still succeed.  But if so, it will be celebrated as a surprising turnaround story, not of a Goliath maintaining its dominance.

So if ever Apollo offers you the chance to be a visionary, think about Bill Gates.  Remember Cassandra.  And most importantly, remember Noah, who understood the key principle of being a visionary: Predicting rain doesn’t count, unless you're also building arks.

The End of PCs?

You are most likely reading this blog article on a machine that would have been considered inconceivably powerful for most of the scope of human history.  You can easily communicate with people around the world in the blink of an eye.  You can effortlessly solve mathematical problems that would have confounded Euclid and Archimedes.  You can access an information repository greater than the Library of Alexandria.  If you transported this machine back a thousand years or so (and let’s pretend it would have had access to the necessary battery life and internet knowledge bases), wars would have been fought to possess it.

You hold in your hands the power of the Gods.

"With great power comes great responsibility." (Spider-man comics)

Spider-man learned this lesson to his cost when his inaction lead to the death of his beloved Uncle.  And Spider-man's powers were insignificant next to the powers of a modern personal computer.  This power is literally in your grasp.  Are you ready to accept the mantle of responsibility?

You probably think I'm stretching a point here.  If you're like most people, you just want to use your computer to read the news, gossip with friends on Facebook, and maybe watch some videos on Youtube.  You're just minding your own business.  You have no intention whatsoever of, say, joining a ring of criminals in Eastern Europe and participating in a scheme to extort money from e-commerce sites.  Except that, unless you’ve been extraordinarily careful with your super-powers, you probably already have.

"All that is necessary for the triumph of evil is that good men do nothing." (Edmund Burke)

The most common form of cyber-crime involves collecting a group of PCs to form a botnet.  This involves infecting each of these PCs with malware, which quietly turns that PC into a slave of the botnet owner, rather than the PC owner.  If the malware is at all clever at its task (which most of them are), it leaves the PC owner oblivious to the fact that anything has changed.  You still think that you're just minding your own business.  You don't realize that you've started engaging in criminal activity.

If it's any consolation, you're not the only inadvertent criminal out there.  You're in the company of millions of others.  Tens of millions.  Possibly hundreds of millions.  When you're talking about this magnitude of numbers, it’s hard to suggest a lack of personal ethics or failure of responsibility from any particular individual.  What we have is a systemic problem.  Systemic problems require systemic solutions.

"We have met the enemy and he is us." (Pogo cartoon strip)

It is possible to keep a PC free of malware.  You need to keep up to date with your patches.  Not just your operating system patches, however.  Also your browser patches.  And your Adobe patches.  And Java.  And any of the tens or hundreds of other programs you have installed on your computer.  And you need to make sure that you have a detailed understanding of any peer to peer software you run, in order to ensure that it's configured correctly.  And know how to configure your NAT router or firewall correctly.  And understand how to create good passwords.  And understand how to spot false links in emails.

The list goes on and on.  It can be done.  But it’s a full time job just to keep up with it.

There is an alternative.  It is to realize that not everybody has what it takes to be Spider-man, and not even to try.  This means something that makes most people cringe.  It means the end of PCs.

As revolutionary as this sounds, it's not actually a new idea.  We've already started using iPads, which are not PCs.  Not in the traditional sense.  They are extraordinarily limited.  There’s only one way to get additional software on them.  They don't have an exposed file system.  You can't connect them to all the cool USB devices that make your PC so flexible.  They are limited.  They are restricted.  They are, in a word, much safer than PCs.

"PCs are going to be like trucks.  They're still going to be around.  They're still going to have value.  But they're going to be used by one out of x people." (Steve Jobs)

Steve Jobs had an interesting vision: most people don't need PCs.  Most people don't need the level of power and flexibility that a full-blown computer provides.  You don't need a PC to browse the internet, check your email, and watch Youtube.  And Apple isn't simply filling this need with iPads.  They're moving in that direction with Macs as well.  In March of 2012, Apple will be implementing sandboxing for all applications sold through the Mac store.  This means that every application must request the specific permissions it will require before it is sold by Apple.  And Apple will have to approve it.  This will just be the online store.  At first.  But if Apple has its way, I suspect that it won't be long before the online store becomes the only way to purchase applications for a Mac.

This is going to slow down innovation.  People won't be able to write and release new and interesting applications nearly as fast as they could in the past.  If this had been the model back in the 80s, personal computers might never have gotten off the ground.  But we're no longer in the 80s.  Maybe it's ok for us to finally slow down a tad.

Of course, this doesn't impact Microsoft in the least.  Not yet.  But it seems that even Microsoft is realizing that unlimited power and flexibility in the operating system is not always such a good thing.  In 2001, feeling a surge of Unix envy, Microsoft released a feature called "raw sockets" into Windows XP.  Raw Sockets are cool.  They're powerful.  You can do all sorts of interesting things with them.  Maybe a little too interesting.  Some hackers leveraged them to perform some sophisticated attacks, some against Microsoft itself.  Raw sockets were quietly removed a few service packs later.

We may not yet be at the end of the PC era.  But maybe we should be.  Because most people simply don't need them.  Most people are unable or unwilling to spend the time and energy to use them safely.  And that's OK.  Not everybody needs to be Spider-man.

Everybody wants to be Apple

Like many others, I was deeply saddened to read of the death of Steve Jobs this last week, even though I don't consider myself a hard-core Apple fan.  I love my iPad and my iPod, but I get frustrated by the simple things they are unable to do.  For example, I can't get my iPod to list all the titles of my Audiobooks, or my iPad to put all my martial arts documents (books and videos) in a single folder.  And I haven't used an Apple computer since I finally, and reluctantly, gave up on my Apple IIe sometime around 1990.  But I have enormous respect for what Apple, and Steve Jobs, has done and become in the last 14 years or so.  And it's interesting to see how Apple’s business model is being emulated by some very different players in the technology Industry.  Two that I'd like to call specific attention to are Oracle and Amazon.

It’s worth asking what makes Apple so special.  There's no single factor - they do an awful lot of things very well, and a misstep in any of them would dilute many of the others.  Most people say that Apple's secret is to make insanely great products.  This is true, but hardly sufficient.  The Flip was an insanely great product, for many of the same reasons that Apple products are great.  It ignored conventional wisdom about how to make a video camera (pack in loads of features).  Instead it focused on delivering the core features that people wanted, and packaging it in a small, elegant, easy to use package.  It was tremendously successful, but not successful enough - for reasons known only to themselves, Cisco pulled the plug, and stopped making them.  I'm not sure what I'm going to do when I need to replace mine.

Apple's real secret sauce is that it doesn't limit itself to making a single product in isolation.  It asks what experience it is trying to deliver.  Then it builds a product to create that experience.  But products don't deliver experiences by themselves - what else do you need?  Apple figures that out, and makes sure that those pieces are in place as well, either by building them, or controlling the delivery.  Ipods aren't nearly as useful without iTunes software to manage the library, or the iTunes store to sell media.  The Mac and iPad both work well because Apple doesn't look at hardware or software in isolation, but makes sure it owns both sides and integrates them seamlessly.

This isn't happening in a vacuum.  In one of the biggest non-Apple product releases in recent years, Amazon.com recently announced what may be the first serious competitor to the iPad, the Kindle Fire.  The naysayers point out that this new Kindle is doomed because it is both physically smaller and less capable than the iPad.  This is true, but it misses the point that these are the exact same reasons people used to claim the iPad would fail when it first launched.  Netbooks were available that were also small, and had much greater power and flexibility.  These critics failed to realize that many purchasers and would-be purchasers of netbooks had little interest in running all the Windows software a Netbook will run.  They wanted something light, easy to turn on, that would allow them to browse the web, read email, and perhaps use some applications.  IPad met the bill, and sales have been explosive.  Time will tell whether there is a similar niche at the lower end of the tablet market that Amazon will be able to dominate with an inexpensive competitor.

The Kindle Fire makes great use of the Amazon store, allowing it to be a seamless portable platform for consuming books, music and movies.  But Amazon's great conceptual leap lies in the leveraging of their cloud technology to seamlessly accelerate the performance of their new web browser, Silk.  Amazon has been one of the top players in the new Cloud marketplace, selling unused computing power from their massive server farms for low, hourly rates.  Now, harnessing that same horsepower will allow Kindle users to view the complicated web sites that proliferate these days much faster than would otherwise be possible with the hardware available at the Kindle’s price point.  Amazon cleverly made this an optional optimization, so people don't have to feel tied to Amazon's infrastructure if they want to browse the web directly, albeit at a slower speed.  I personally have no interest in the Kindle (the screen is too small for my needs), but I applaud Amazon for realizing that the web surfing experience doesn't need to be constrained to a single device, and figuring out creative new ways to solve the problem.  And although privacy advocates will howl, it certainly doesn't hurt Amazon's marketing analysts to gain a portal into the full web browsing experience of Kindle Fire users.  My guess is that most people will gladly trade privacy for convenience, as we've already seen in many areas of online life.

The other interesting innovator we've seen recently is Oracle.  When the number one database company purchased Sun Microsystems in 2009, the common speculation was that Oracle was after Java, MySQL, and Sun’s patent library, and would basically milk the hardware business dry.  But lately, Larry Ellison has been talking all about the hardware, crowing about how a tight integration between hardware and software will provide unprecedented levels of performance.  Sound familiar?

The funny thing is, what we now call the Apple strategy wasn't invented by Apple.  Not even close.  That award probably goes to IBM.  They wrote their own operating systems and software to run on their mainframes because they were the only game in town.  Only gradually did it occur to people that you might get greater flexibility by adopting a “best-of-breed” model.  At the time, this multi-vendor approach was considered a huge leap forward, mostly because IBM and the IT departments that bought from them had grown sluggish and inward focused.  Now we seem to be coming full circle.  IBM has moved on to selling software and services (and doing basic research, as they are happy to periodically demonstrate against the Chess and Jeopardy champions of the world) while Apple leads the charge back to the world of fully integrated solutions that just work.

Farewell, Mr. Jobs.  May your greatest legacy be not the products you invented, but the path you blazed which will lead Apple and many other companies into the future.