Shrunketized

Apple v Netflix II

Think Secret has reported that Apple will be offering movie rentals. I predicted this back in October, but i'm wondering how Apple will actually deliver these movies. I know I don't want to watch a movie on my computer, but how will they get onto my TV? Unless I hack into my cable box, I'm thinking the answer will lay in a new version of the Mac Mini that will hook up to your TV and wirelessly transfer movies from your desktop. That seems like the easiest path, but how much will it cost the consumer-- $600 on top of the movie cost and popcorn? Netflix has been hard at work with Tivo developing a box to deliver their movies digitally, and that's a big existing audience and a mechanism people are comfortable with. The Mini is going to have to get a lot slicker to win people over.

Who's in charge of software development?

I love Joel on Software, but this article about Development Abstraction is a little biased. It's great from the programmers' point of view-- put the programmer on a pedestal and give him everything he needs to get his job done. The reality is even in a software development company the programmer isn't the most important job in the hierarchy. Joel says it best himself that "The level a programmer works at (say, Emacs) is too abstract to support a business."

Why shouldn't it be the goal to remove impediments for every job role in the company? If that's not possible, there must be a balance so that the most needs of all employees are being satisfied. In my experience, most programmers are too myopic to direct the course of development. When it comes down to it, the best software solves the user's needs. Who knows best what those needs are? Not the programmer, who never deals with the user, and is likely on a much higher level of technical aptitude than the user.

Outside the company, it's the users themselves who should be on this pedestal. All functions within the company should cater to the users' needs. Within the company this falls on those that interact directly and translate those needs into functional goals. A more sensible heirarchy would be something like User Experience Analyst > Information Architect > User Interface Designer > Programmer. You could substitute any number of job titles, but that's the basic flow. Not that programmers are at the bottom of the heap-- I'd still put them above sales & marketing, management, human resources...but putting the programmer at the top is like suggesting that a mechanic can best design a car for human comfort.

a massive and staggeringly expensive email reading machine

From Fortune magazine: "To deliver a Web-based product line, Microsoft must build a global network of server farms that will cost 'staggering' amounts of money, says Ozzie." That's Ray Ozzie, the new hire Microsoft has pinned all its hopes on. "'The people who could build a viable services infrastructure of scale,' he says, 'are companies that have both the will and the capacity to invest staggering amounts of money - staggering amounts.'"

Web services have been talked about for years now, but they're finally starting to work on a larger scale. Implicit in web services is standards, interactivity, and a lightweight connection. Is a web service really a web service if it's just one Microsoft component talking to another Microsoft component? The popularity of a service is determined by how many ways it can connect to others and how simple and human-readable the connection is. Lock-ins don't happen because of proprietary software or legacy platforms but because the service has too many great features to do without. If a service stops performing a new one can be plugged in.

Perhaps Microsoft can build a giant server farm to house data, but their services won't succeed if they are equally massive. The key is to provide small functional components that can scale massively, not masses of functional elements that can't be reduced to their separate parts. Lighter, smaller and faster companies should win out in this space. 37Signals is constantly picked on for narrowly focusing all their development advice on the small team, but that's where the web is going. If a giant corporation like Microsoft can think and move like a small team, perhaps it can survive. Robert Scoble has some ideas on how Microsoft can do this.

The future is here!

Yes, the future is not 20 years away—maybe 20 months away. In January I was dreaming about Google voice search, and apparently it's just around the corner. The technology has been there for a while, but Google is finally trying to put it together in a way we can use. This will change the way we interact with the world around us. Mobile applications seem an obvious first step since the voice input is already in place.

Now here's what else I want. A little app I like to call "BAD DRIVER!" Someone cuts you off or does something crazy on the road-- you pull out your cameraphone, snap a picture of their license plate, then curse them out into the phone. The pic gets uploaded to a site that scans and ID's the plate, records it in the database, and attaches the audio of your berating. Totally hands off interface, but what fun to listen to later! And maybe someday your curses will even be heard by those they were intended for. If you really suck you might even get the baddest driver of the week award.

In the future

I was telling my wife that within 20 years Google will be much like the movies we see of the future. The computer will be a centralized appliance in the house that we can interact with from any room. We'll interact with it by talking to it. We'll ask Google "Who was that modern artist that painted swimming pools?" and it will return "David Hockney" in an expectedly pleasing female voice (or male, depending on your settings). "Would you like to read a biography of David Hockney?"

My wife asks, "Will it make your food for you?"

"No, it won't make your food. Not in 20 years."

"It'll also say 'Save 20% on a biography of David Hockney on Amazon.com. Would you like to receive a quote for painting services? Buy a swimming pool today, get it installed next week! Take art lessons from home.'"

Well, yeah. That's a good point. As Google transitions into new mediums, so will the ads. But i'm optimistic—I think the future holds less intrusiveness, or at least not any more than we have now. Ads will continue to become more targeted so what we hear will become more relevant and interesting to us. If they become too intrusive, we'll go elsewhere or alter the services we consume—in general we'll have more options and more power over the prominence of advertising in our lives.

When we experience intrusiveness in advertising currently, it's caused by a power imbalance between consumer and the advertiser, which is caused by lock-in and monopolies. Lock-in across many industries are beginning to unravel. Intangible goods delivered digitally, and services that are quickly and inexpensively duplicated, are becoming more difficult to keep locked in. Music, movies and books are easy to transfer to others (legally or otherwise). Independent labels are beginning to challenge the major labels. Blogs are beginning to challenge the mainstream media. VoIP is challenging the telecoms. All of these things are shifting the balance of power towards the consumer, and allowing us to dictate the terms of the agreement.

This doesn't mean that those in power aren't struggling to keep the balance the same. The RIAA and MPAA are struggling to lock down music and movies, to cripple all viewing and listening devices. The telecoms want to cripple the internet for those that can't pay. Patent laws are crippling innovation by competitors. Trademark laws are attempting to exert unreasonable control over basic language use. Those that would attempt to shift the power away from the individual belong in the Hall of Villainy.

Fortunately, the genie has left the bottle. I don't know how long it will take the villains to realize, but they are not getting it back.

Coming down the Pipe

Doc Searls has scared the crap out of me. This is a must read. It feels like we've toppled a giant only to discover he's falling on us. There's a call to action here, but i'm not sure what individual users can do about it. I'd like to think that Google and others can use their leverage to prevent things from getting out of hand. Unfortunately they're big enough that they can also afford to just play the game, at our ultimate expense. Perhaps i'm overly optimistic, but I'd like to think the very nature of the internet would make it quickly apparent how misguided these notions are. There are so many ways to route around "damage".

Pushing the Network

SBC CEO Edward Whitacre is tired of giving Google a free ride. Via IP Democracy, "Now what they would like to do is use my pipes free, but I ain't going to let them do that...The Internet can't be free in that sense, because we and the cable companies have made an investment and for a Google or Yahoo! (YHOO ) or Vonage or anybody to expect to use these pipes [for] free is nuts!" Wow, free internet? I'd like to get in on that action. Those phone companies are clever, charging customers on both ends to be connected, and then charging extra to use that connection. That's desperate logic. What caught my attention though was the word ain't, which leads me to believe Whitacre's Good Old Boy Network is doing better than his communications network. Vonage service is mediocre, but I'm happy to not be an SBC customer.

How hard should a search engine search?

Robert Scoble thinks that search sucks. He's got some interesting ideas about how it could be improved, but there's a larger question raised of just how fine grained general search engines like Google, Yahoo, MSN should be. I think his hotel example is playing to his point a little. If I want to find a hotel in New York my first thought would be to type in hotels in New York City, or more obviously go to Local Google or Local Yahoo and type in hotels in New York City, NY. Those deliver different results. By typing in new york hotel I think he was intentionally trying to pull up noisy data.

In my first search I was able to find the site Trip Advisor in the top 10 which gave pretty detailed information about hotels in specific areas with good customer reviews. That's where search succeeds now—it couldn't tell me the hotel I wanted, but it could find me another site that could. Google pointed me in the direction of a more expert site. To use a traditional metaphor, what is the goal of a search engine—to be the entire library? To be a librarian that has all the answers? Or to be a general librarian that knows which special collections librarian to point you to?

There are so many industries and areas of knowledge out there that adding the level of detail that Scoble is suggesting would weigh a search engine down considerably. Still, adding some interaction in the results on a basic level could improve existing search, but I don't think people are looking for complexity. When was the last time you used the advanced search?

Screw it

"Screw the nano," says Motorola CEO Ed Zander. "What the hell does the nano do? Who listens to 1,000 songs?" It's true, no one listens to 1000 songs. And no one reads 8 billion web pages. But we like to have them around, just in case.