KISS, or what computing is all about

Turn it on, get coffee, start Outlook, catch up on the gossip at the cooler, read first e-mail. This 15 minute sequence is what Monday morning, or any weekday, usually starts with for the vast majority of computer users. Many are still on Windows XP, running on machines with less RAM than the USB sticks the company uses as promotional gifts. If it takes too long or if they need anything beyond basic software such as the Office package they can call an IT person somewhere, who may or may not improve the situation.

The perception of computing in this case that of something you depend on but can't rely on. It's not there to assist you in being a lean, mean productivity machine. Rather, it is often perceived as the limiting factor in work performance, other than the quality of workplace coffee.

2010 is soooo over, and so is this type of computing experience. There are a number of highly interesting trends that will conspire to offer daily computer users ubiquitous computing: anytime, anywhere, but most importantly, very simple.

Apps have permanently transformed the mobile landscape, and mobile users expect fast & simple the same way they expect internet connectivity absolutely everywhere.

On the desktop, virtualization is making rapid inroads as the new must-have for enterprise environments, due to the lower cost of operating an supporting virtualized desktops. An interesting side effect for the end user is that software is on one side offered as a service in a browser window, and on the other side repackaged into conveniently distributable units that can be installed on these virtual desktops with a few mouse clicks. The effect for the end user is that desktop software becomes a lot like mobile apps: click, it's there, click, it's gone, and it has seamlessly saved your progress, menu layout and other settings for when you use it again.

The platform you use becomes a lot less important this way: virtual machines can be stacked a virtual mile high and still run some specialized software on top. Linux-based server clusters host VMware-based virtual servers which host Microsoft server software and virtual desktops which run application especially packaged for this purpose and which can be accessed from anywhere you can tie in to the company network.

With a bit of optimism one can imagine the desktop to become a larger, more capable iPad: simple to use, fast, stable, and you get what you need in a few clicks, whether that is new software, new e-mail, or news on the weather. The back end is managed by the large foreheads at IT, and the user has a package of rights enabling him to use his computer as he sees fit, within the boundaries of company policy, licence agreements and so forth. The company intranet provides tutorials on using the 'Apps' that people can install and use themselves with a few clicks. The main reason to call IT support is hardware failure, change requests etc. Now wouldn't that be the day?

My message is that before computing can really become an ubiquitous utility, it must be simple. Really simple, and really oriented to be used. I think OSX Lion will be a nice preview of things to come.

Read what Technorati are saying about virtualisation & consumer computing on http://www.anandtech.com/show/4042/virtualization-ask-the-experts-6.

The price of genius

Seen The Social Network? Zuck was not portrayed very kindly. Is being socially impaired the price of genius? I don't think so. Yet the typical portrayal of software wizards is generally concerned with making sure 'normal people' don't feel bad about their comparative lack of intelligence my gimping the coder with massive personality defects. We all love Sheldon Cooper, but we don't want his sex appeal. What's up with that?

Despite his reported lack of ethics in treating his business partners, Zuckerberg probably isn't quite as acrimonious a nerd as he is made out to be in the movie. He did something his business partners could not, at least not without him, whereas he might have made facebook without them, obtaining inspiration and support from other sources.

So why the sociopath portrayal? There's no need to make a fawning tribute movie to the world's youngest billionaire, but it is equally unnecessary to add insult to injury in what is, in effect, a blockbuster accusal of plagiarism, usurpation, backstabbing and a complete lack of ethics. Shark, fair enough, but why a mean shark?

It takes balls to create something like facebook, not to mention a whole lot of knowledge, skill and effort. All we can say after the fact is that he did it, mostly by himself, at a very young age.

Now I'm not a friend or admirer of Mark Zuckerberg. What I cannot stand is that his achievement, which I do admire, is now tainted by a morality tale in which he features a particularly lame villain. That should never be the price of genius. Do it better or shut up. Making this kind of Rita Skeeter movie is just low. The movie is well made but it's theme of vilification is it's moral undoing.

UPDATE: Zuckerberg is Time's person of the year 2010! The article is much more positive about Mark than about the movie, too.

Human brain more complex than internet

Scientists examined the glowing brain of a supermouse in order to find out just how capable the brain and its synapses are. The mind boggles, and boggles some more, thanks to its incredible capacity and complexity. Scaling up their findings, they found that all the babble about supercomputer brains is even more true than even than Tony Buzan would have us believe. Watch and boggle. And be very proud of your superbrain. Original story here.

Which makes me wonder: what the hell do stupid people waste all that synaptic goodness on? We all got the basic hardware... It kind of humbles me as an IT guy that all our collective effort in the tech industry is still bested by the product of a little unskilled labor. Mostly I'm proud we can use our brain to figure itself out. Cogito ergo sum, that whole bit.

Managing really clever people

The IT industry is famous for its composition of generally very intelligent people. Even technological scut work is commonly done by people with relatively high intellectual capacity. Now as someone who the words nerd, geek and similar epithets generally apply to, I can tell you that the industry is rife with situations in which a focussed intellect is managed by a more general intellect.

Note that I am not speaking of relative intelligence, merely to the organisation and application of brainpower in the individual. The specialist and the manager are different in this area, because of the nature of their jobs, one who has a highly defined problem domain, and the other who has a less delineated set of problems to solve.

This often leads to situations in which, for lack of a shared problem space, specialists and managers have very different views of the same issues, and a very skewed picture of each other.

Dan Pink (author of Drive and other works) has written extensively about motivation in knowledge work, the solving of nontrivial problems creative work. He hinges motivation on three basic aspects: a purpose, self-direction and the will to make a contribution, and backs it up with a bevy of research data.

The big takeaway here is that you can better manage really clever people by getting out of their way and letting them do really clever things. The organisation is better off contributing purpose and a suitable environment, instead of monitoring and incentivizing the living daylights out of its techies, or trying to maintain a hands-on management style with them.

My own challenge as I become increasingly responsible for fellow problem assassins is to strike the balance between letting them do their tech wizard thing, which they do very well, and making sure that the business environment they operate in keeps running smoothly too. I must be the pilot in uncertain waters and navigate the currents of business interests, budgets, goals and realities. The IT department of many organisations is essentially a black box where the inputs of budget and human resources (hopefully but seldom) result in the output of smoothly running IT assets to support the business. Giving my manager full understanding of what his people are doing is often impossible, as is explaining why the best solution to a given IT problem cannot be implemented because of broader concerns which have no bearing on the problem itself.

The key to this problem is building mutual trust. Every time either the IT department or management has to deny the other what they want it is for a damn good reason. To this end a skilled intermediary who has both deep technical knowledge and insight into managerial concerns is invaluable. This maintains as much freedom on both sides as possible, freedom to act as they see fit and solve problems in the best possible way.

Being in the loop is absolutely essential for such an intermediary. In order to properly represent my people I have to know what they do and how they do it. In order to properly manage my manager I also have to know at least something of his concerns and the broader interplay of forces within and around the business. Only then can I be a functional filter for information in either direction and prevent many issues before they arise. Again the key is trust. Trust in the understanding and discretion of the intermediary which can only develop over time.

The position between technology and business is a tenuous one, and it is quite hard to be Mr. current affairs on both fronts. As I spend more time managing and less time wired this will become harder, as the tech industry moves fast. Until I become such an old fart that I wouldn't recognize a brilliant hack if it bit me, I'll consider it my solemn duty to make life easier for my people and my manager. Wombats, hands-on managers and crawling horrors be warned.

Track & Trace

The Find my iPhone app was a godsend yesterday. I was dumb enough to misplace my iPad at a busy trainstation. A quick remote message containing my mobile number and a very welcome phone call later I was reunited with my mobile mind-extender. This totally proves that MobileMe is worth it: find your $600 device anytime anywhere for $99 a year including email, dropbox & website. Thank you Apple. Now I'm hoping the rumored free MobileMe¹ is on it's way, but I'll never be a grouch about the yearly fee again.

Meanwhile my traveling companion was flabbergasted at the quick and easy localisation, remote locking and messaging functionality of my iPhone and iPad combo. When I explained it works from any internet connected device with half a browser his esteem of Apple Inc. increased dramatically (it had taken a severe hit previously when his expectation of remote desktop trough Apple TV wasn't quite met by his new and expensive hardware). However we did note that it was a little scary.

In my work experience I've come across car tracking systems that were expensive and inelegant combinations of bricks installed in a car and a server-side application that ate more resources than the Sarbanes-Oxley Act. And here I was saved by a nice little consumer doodad doing the same thing fast & cheap, thanks to Apple's nephology.

The knowledge that some computer somewhere knows where I am at all times because I carry a cellphone is a fact of life. The scary part is encountering spooky reality of watching your gadget move trough a train station, live, on a Google map. While I might benefit from this functionality, I have no control over it's use. Sure, I have control over when I use the MobileMe service, but that's merely something built on top of a gadget that is location-aware and has an internet connection. What else is done with those features is beyond my ken. Maybe Apple is profiling me. Maybe T-Mobile is. Either way, there's not much I can do about it.

The social networks are eager to tap in to your mobile device to record the when & where in meatspace associated with your online activities. Twitter, Foursquare, Loopt and of course facebook Places all use your mobile device's location to provide the world a blow-by-blow account of your wheelings and dealings. Transparency 101: Do not skip your work/school/date and use any of these services! Full disclosure is already taken care of courtesy of your free user accounts at social networks. To qoute Google's Eric Schmidt "But with the mobile phone you could just ask. You could measure everything. And you might be surprised at to what people actually do versus what they say they do—one of the first rules of the Internet."²

Again I can only conclude that the possibilities offered by today's technology come with a price: secrecy. It's great that the advantages of the digital world include a bias in favor of honest people, as long as the people in charge of Minitrue are keeping it equally real. As soon as governments and/or corporations are turning 3v1l on us we are, to put it plainly, pretty screwed.

UPDATE: Apple made the Find my iPhone service free for iPad, iPhone 4 owners³

The next step

IT started with electricity. Then we started switching electricity to signal across large distances, and the telegraph was born. As our technological savvy increased we could modulate signals to transport voice and connected people in a much more immediate way than before.
Nowadays we manipulate electrons, light and airwaves to transport huge amounts of data for an array of purposes, many of which have brought people closer still in spite of time or distance. I can access the minds of legends past by looking up their works online. I can see and hear my parents across the Atlantic using voice over IP technology. There are virtual places where I can communicate with friends and acquaintances, and share news, thoughts, pictures and music with them.
I wonder what the next step is. What is more meta than a social networking tool built on top of the internet built on top of a lot of computer hardware, software and interconnections built on top of an unbelievable amount of basic infrastructure? What's the next layer on the technological cake here?
Because this cake is going to keep stacking up, and one day the internet will be as present-but-obsolete as is the telegraph system today, whose dits and dahs persevere in the form of ones and zeroes zipping around our networks, the basic switching principle remains intact. What technology will be fresh and 1.0 then? How close will it bring us?

Apped

With OS X Lion Apple Inc. is making Macs a lot more like its mobiles. Fortune Magazine's CEO of the decade has chiseled out a whole new web experience for the users of Apple products, one based around a highly controlled 'Apple' experience trough apps rather than trough traditional internet use. The upside of this is that Apple's quality control provides a seamless, pleasant, and relatively safe internet experience. The HUGE downside is that it leaves out anything that doesn't fit in Apple's vision of your online future.

Much of the debate about the pros and cons of a 'limited' internet experience is waged by my fellow loudmouths in the IT industry. "Users", meanwhile, vote with their wallets and make Apple stock a stratospheric phenomenon. Clearly, it works well for most people, in spite of its drawbacks.

I, for one, like what Apple is offering on weekdays and tinker around with Tux over the weekend, allowing me do have a much richer, albeit more difficult computing experience mostly for the sake of learning cool geeky things about computing. 

For my parents however, Apple's approach is a godsend. It allows them to have all the front end usefulness of computers and the internet, without having to worry about the complexities of the back end. That they lose a lot of the power that the technology is capable of is much less of an issue, as they don't miss what they've never had.

Although Apple is certainly pulling the App bandwagon, the popularity of this vehicle is increasing rapidly and there is no software or mobile devices company that refuses to hop on, and app stores are definitely the new business model in both industries. Nokia has the Ovi store, there is of course the Android Marketplace, and even old lets-screw-up-on-the-latest-trend Microsoft has the Windows Web App Gallery. I can only speculate what happens when this trend collides with the rapidly increasing use of virtualization in the enterprise sphere. More on that later.

Apps are here to stay, and computing will become more useful to more people yet again.

Costs to mindshares

The top 5 sites on the internet (Google, facebook, YouTube, Yahoo & Windows Live)¹ offer their functionality without direct monetary compensation by their users. The coin of the realm is information on online behavior, and we trade without a thought. Indeed, these five websites are such a large part of our average internet experience that the adsense way of thinking has become pervasive throughout the web. The has-beens of the internet snuggle up to these giants offering their supply of user data in exchange for a lease on life². Sites plug into Google analytics and facebook connect en masse. The information these sites gather on our surfing is primarily used to display targeted ads, and the economics of operating a major website are such that a single ad-click pays for hordes of freeloading visitors.
Taleb's Black Swan emerges again: No-one could have predicted to Tim Berners-Lee that the web anno 2010 would comprise of five gargantuan content providers (really four since Google owns YouTube) and 'the rest', nor that 'free' would be the norm and the subscription model obsolete
Of course there are exceptions: Apple's controlled internet experience is everything but free, and Rupert Murdoch is still a firm believer in making visitors pay for their time on his websites. Also, the impending demise of net neutrality can reverse this trend dramatically. For the time being, we'd rather be mined than milked. I wonder what the next wave will be.

UPDATE: Rupert Murdoch & Steve Jobs are reportedly teaming up to deliver News Corp. content trough an app.³

A most solemn duty

Social contract theory states that we humans sow discord and reap government. A government whose most solemn duty is to set the standards of accepted behavior and wield its monopoly on violence solely to maintain them. In our brave new and slightly shallow world of the internet governments are trying to establish the mores of digilife.

Now the newest and bravest among us would have the internet be a free-for-all where anything goes, and the only limits imposed on your online experience be bandwidth and latency. However, I think this belittles and underestimates the task of government to maintain a standard of propriety that allows full deployment of one's capabilities while safeguarding the rights of others. Property rights are a famous example of a terrain thoroughly plowed by one-click copying, and an area where governments are scrambling to determine new and proper delineations of mine and thine online. It is permissible and indeed proper for government to be much stricter than necessary in the realm of online property rights. Their duty is to uphold a universal standard both online and offline.

No individual is unformed by society. The most rebellious alternative is as defined by the mainstream as it's adherent. This implies that society is responsible for establishing many of our basic tenets, our internal sense of right and wrong. As society's appointed conscience a government is duty bound to set some standard throughout it's purview by which we can judge our deeds and those of others. A government allowing the online experience to be wildly different from life in meatspace is neglecting its duty as the steward of our moral integrity. As such, property rights, the protection of minors and certain, albeit minimal restrictions of the freedom of expression, are things that are and should be dealt with as stringently on the internet as they are in real life.

I know, I can get 'your' mp3 without you loosing it, something that is not possible with a physical object. However, that fact what is yours can so easily be mine does not mean it should be. A digital artifact originated somewhere, some amount of effort and value went into its creation. It certainly represents value to one who wants to have it. To refuse trading value for value and get what you want for free is an affront to common sense and economically destructive. It only works for you as long as you're the one who wants something, and ceases to be an attractive model of property rights as soon as you have something of value to trade yourself. Purposeful free content creation under the GPL or its kin is not a counterexample here, the activity is in many cases it's own reward. Neither is offering your own downloaded music for sharing. After all, something that didn't cost you anything to obtain won't cost you anything to share either.

Allowing all sorts of hate and deviancy online is not a sustainable proposition either. Why would it be all right to go jewbashing online when it would get you instantly and justly reprimanded in real life? Why would it be all right to watch intercourse between humans and animals online when the difference in power and control make it an immoral act under any circumstances? There can be no double standard. Right and wrong must be made clear and the difference proactively maintained by a society that wants to maintain its integrity. We can't allow a completely free internet for the same reason we cannot allow different standards of behavior at night versus in broad daylight: it dilutes the concept of what is morally objectionable and therefore dilutes the premise that some things are morally objectionable at all. 

As a solid house is built of solid bricks a morally healthy society is composed of morally healthy individuals. We cannot afford total freedom, it will cost us too dearly in people loosing their way and becoming morally compromised by their experiences. To spare the rod is to spoil the child. Locke applies to the internet as much as to real life. We must give up some freedom in order to establish a framework in which to enjoy the rest of it responsibly.

As a laissez-faire capitalist in the economic pane admitting the necessity of government intervention anywhere is something I do with great reluctance. However, the redeeming function of government is precisely in setting and maintaining standards that allow and enable ethical behavior. As such I see it's intervention in online property rights and very limited censure as its proper function and most solemn duty.

A little defensive, guys. Scared?

Apparently European carriers are a wee bit miffed at the prospect of an Apple phone with a built-in programmable SIM chip.¹

Technological evolution! A huge opportunity to embrace the new, to out-adapt competitors! But no, they're threatening to sue.²

That's right guys, declaring war on Apple is the smart move here. It really shows that you're prepared to change with the times, that you're companies on a mission to make communication better, customers happier and the market operate more efficiently.

It also shows that you're technological powerhouses with a contribution to make, that you can come up with a good alternative, or even something better. It really shows that this new technology is not the next big thing in mobile.

Way to go, guys. Lawyer up, let's see who is still alive three years from now and what kind of mobile will be in my back pocket.

I'm betting it's the early adopter company and an Apple simless phone.

A is A

Renaissance and revolutions, omnipotent governments and George Orwell used to give us a healthy aversion to being brutally honest. Of course the law of identity holds, and whether or not people know you do something doesn't change the fact whether or not you did it.

People being people will either go the whole anarchistic hog and refuse any abridgement of their privacy, or merrily write down all the information needed to steal their identity on the profile page of each and every social network they come across. Now the vast power of the internet to connect, communicate, find and be found also means that it's exceedingly hard to do something online and maintain plausible deniability. Of course you can be a darknet rebel but in practice you only raise the barrier to being found out, you don't prevent it entirely. In fact, nothing short of a complete disconnect will really avoid the pitfalls of being cached, logged, and data-mined.

As I've said in the post "Don't be evil", the power of internet giants to aggregate data on human behavior equates to a vast store of invaluable knowledge for the fuzzy sciences. This is a very good thing as long as we are able to find out more about ourselves in order to better deal with the complexities of our existence. However, and it takes a nasty repressive regime to fully appreciate this, it places a lot of power in somebody else's hands. The power to describe human behavior in general comes from tools that allow tracking an individual's behavior during every second they are wired, and that includes carrying a cellphone. It's the price we pay for being online at all.

We all know the stories of people being fired over facebook pictures, twitter posts and foursquare location data. As big Z pointed out, people's perception of the value of privacy is changing, and changing rapidly. The Stasi held sway over millions a mere two decades ago, and yet we are happy to share information with the world that is fully as revealing as the files of the Schild und Schwert der Partei.

The danger in this time of nice governments is mainly identity theft and the odd affair or creative sick leave leading to undesirable consequences. However, there will be rain after sunshine and the ground is well prepared for totalitarian control the like of which we have not seen before. This is not only because we so blithely share anything and everything, but because our nice governments mandate service provides to store all that we do for automated perusal.

The great firewall of China is reportedly circumvented with clever proxy tricks and the like. However, this doesn't change the fact that most people in China most of the time cannot be sure that what they do online doesn't lead to being branded as a criminal. Every state has the duty to draw lines in the sand about the admissibility of certain behavior. Under a nice and liberal state these are so drawn that we easily loose all sense of caution, whereas in a totalitarian state the lines are restrictive and very dangerous to cross. In either situation it is barely possible to cross them unnoticed. The promise of the internet as a brave new world has become the spectre of the telescreen.

In dealing with this phenomenon we cannot ignore that A is A, that doing something means accepting responsibility for doing it. This is the only mature way to live, online as well as offline. What we are obliged to ourselves and others is to make sure that the internet is used to enable rather than to stifle, to create rather than to control. Our governments and the giants of the internet must be led with scruple. Ensuring this is much more important and an activity on a much higher pane than arguing if the internet should veil the truth about how we use it. The real problem is not the records, but the consequences of their perusal, and that is what should give us pause when we do anything at all online, let alone publish the contents of our hearts and minds as I am doing here for the sake of the discourse. I will forever be the guy who blogged about the absence of privacy on the internet. So be it. A is A. And we've been warned.

UPDATE: The SSL encryption scheme is apparently compromised by a combination of man-in-the-middle attack hardware and (governmental) Certificate Authorities willing to fork over bogus certificates. Nice. http://arstechnica.com/security/news/2010/03/govts-certificate-authorities-conspire-to-spy-on-ssl-users.ars

Omnibook

 

Facebook is consolidating all forms of communication by offering multiple modalities trough the same platform: facebook chat, mail and messages, and of course its regular mechanism of wall posting are now an ubiquitous communication framework across all things wired, from cellphones to desktops.

 

This is very similar to Google's consolidation of search: webpages, pictures, video, location and more are simply Googled. It seems the major uses of the web are slowly but surely being centralized. Wikipedia for example has definitely become the one stop shop for getting the 101 on almost any subject. If you want to see or hear anything you can probably find it on youtube.

 

And so, as the web's giants become bigger, the web becomes a lot smaller. There's no user waxing nostalgic about using Veronica to find some information trough the quaint gopher protocol, but it's very useful to wonder what the next step is. When will a few websites be all the internet most people will ever use? When will facebook become omnibook and be a completely self-contained online experience?

 

I think this has already happened for many happy-go-lucky netizens. Technology has done something marvelous: We've reached the simplicity on the other side of complexity. We've made what was once the purview of intrepid explorers of cyberspace the commonplace activity of billions. Yet along the way we've lost much of the diversity and magic that made the net a world of possibilities. It's become a small world after all.

 

Don't be evil

The alchemy of Google's motto lies in the vast possibilities offered to knowledge prospectors by the company's assorted search tools. Granted, Google tends to obscure valuable knowledge by the large influence of vox populi on it's PageRank algorithm, but such is the price of the tool, much like Harlequin books are the price of literature. 

 

As it is the true power of the eponymous search tools are tapped by few. Ruben Puentedura made some excellent presentations using mashups of search data and visualization tools. Most users are content whatever pops up first as a search result on a given keyword, and with finding the occasional easter egg like Google maps reporting that there is no possible route from Iran to the United States (though there is one from Tokyo to New York involving a kayak).

 

There is a higher price to pay than having popular search results confused with best search results, however. Our surfing behavior is deftly stored, surveyed and mined by companies staking a claim on our hearts, minds and wallets in order to provide the billions it costs to build these tools. This of course is part of a larger trend of trading privacy for value, which is a business model shared by that other giant of the web, facebook. Dissecting this trend is outside the scope of this post but something I'd love to discuss in the future.

 

Google redeems itself by performing brilliant alchemy turning knowledge of the world's pedestrian surfing habits into peerless tools for intrepid explorers. The fuzzy sciences haven't had such a treasure trove of information on human behavior since we started writing about ourselves. Turning adsense into insight makes up for a lot.