flashes & specs

Unsettling

The digital man making announcements at Sky Harbor airport has clearly been drinking.

Stackonomics

The dust has settled following Apple's iPad announcement and maybe it's best to let it stay that way until the thing actually goes on sale. But before I give it a rest, I want to follow up on one implication of the style of computing that the iPad implies: the increasing relevance of the stack over the device.

The "stack" is IT jargon for a set of interconnected technologies that are used to create a computing environment and, ultimately, a user experience. For years enterprise IT managers have debated whether it's better to stick with one vendor that can deliver a tall, integrated stack--Microsoft and Oracle exemplify this approach--or to favor a mixed environment. In integrated stacks the different pieces work together more smoothly (theoretically) but your options are limited and your vendor has you by the short hairs. In mixed environments you can select the best component for each function and remain more independent--but getting those components to talk to each other is expensive at best and sometimes can't be done at all. 

Personal computer users have been living out an attenuated version of this dilemma for years. Microsoft may be the schlump in the brown suit in the ads, but it's friendly Apple that refuses to let you choose the hardware to run your OS on. The iPhone--and now, evidently, the iPad--tie you down even more, all in the name of a smooth user experience. At the open end of the spectrum, Linux is gaining some traction in consumer markets, but continues to be the bumpiest option due to a multitude of distributions and uneven hardware support.

Theoretically, the cloud will liberate us from these tradeoffs by making computing easier to consume. Supposedly we'll call services instead of running applications, and we'll be indifferent to how these services are instantiated. Real professionals will do the tasks that have gradually turned personal computing into amateur system administration. The stack will be bigger than ever, but it will be less visible, and all we'll need to access it will be a neutral thin client device like the iPad.

Theoretically. But the technologies and standards that could deliver that environment are far from mature. In the meantime, user demand is shifting toward content and collaboration, each of which situates the user experience in a host of (currently) unstable business, property, and privacy models. These are not easily separated from the technical stack, and I suspect that the stack will be reshaped into a mix of technical tools, business relationships, and user-centered identities. While that situation cries out for openness, individual vendors will be able to create a seamless experience with proprietary tools and private deals faster than either open standards or legislative remedies can. Reliance on a particular stack will actually increase as the endpoint devices get dumber and more of the work gets done by the man behind the curtain.

My guess is that in the first generation of cloud computing consumers will go for the most integrated stack without much regard for openness, particularly as they adopt content-oriented devices like the iPad. They'll prefer a cloud to the cloud. No doubt they'll push back as they become more conscious of how competitive politics, DRM, and stealth lock-in have circumscribed their online lives, and with a little luck that will open the environment up. But consumers are also going to be very intolerant of bumpy, patchy stacks that force them to be systems integrators. For the first generation of cloud computing at least, I think the company that can vertically integrate a hardware/software/middleware/content/cloud stack will prosper better than one pursuing maximum openness.

Now, I know about those little blue cubes that exemplify Apple's failure to deliver the smooth experience it promises. Nevertheless, I can't think of anybody else that comes even close to having the kind of stack I've described. For better or worse, I think Apple is well positioned to capture the high ground of early consumer cloud computing.

New look

Hope you like the new look at flashes & specs. But don't get too used to it, as there's more (and let's hope better!) to come.

So much to learn

As I learn the art of blogging, I realize I can draw lessons from every medium. Like TV news:

(Via: Andrew Sullivan)

Apples in the clouds

It doesn't have a phone! And your problem with that would be...?

I'm still not sure how well the iPad has succeeded by my earlier criteria. Apple/AT&T didn't ream us for the data service--check. Is it open? ePub support is a good sign, so is the amazing fact that the AT&T data service is month-to-month. Support for GSM micro SIMs is great, and will be even better when some US carrier supports them. But no details yet about DRM on ebook purchases. Half-check. It does not multitask, except maybe when you're running certain Apple apps. That seriously fails the reading-and-surfing requirement. Uncheck.

Still, it looks like a better e-reader for me than Kindle, even if reading-and-surfing will be awkward until some later refinement. But the most important thing to my mind is that this device more fully realizes the logic of the cloud than any consumer hardware we've seen before, netbooks included.

The breakthrough thing about the iPhone was that it was a personal Internet device with a phone built in, not a cellphone with a crap browser. It took the logic of the Internet seriously, dismissing the fantasy that mobility would organize itself around the needs of telecommunications companies.

Now that logic is taken further, with a big media-ready screen and a pure data connection that just about begs you to sign up for the new browser-delivered Google Voice service. Telecommunications has been demoted to the status of an app. Everything, in fact, is just an app--but a network-enabled app.

What Apple has created here is a personal appliance with just enough power to give you entree to the cloud. The iPad may start out serving a few specialized functions, but ultimately people will want the data and applications now locked up on their PCs (or iPhones or whatever) at hand. Nobody will want to constantly move files or buy multiple copies of the same software for all their different devices. The virtues of a lightweight device that calls forth the powers of the Internet will become clear to users of the iPad in a way that no amount of cloud hype could ever accomplish.

iPad users will live by the Net. Want to watch a movie? No optical drive, sucker, so forget about DVDs; figure out Netflix streaming. Want to access your pictures? Yeah, there's a photo app, but your pics are already on your laptop, so either synchronize via Mobile Me or move it all to Picasa Web or Flickr. Like those $10 versions of the iWork apps? Nice, but eventually you'll want the more powerful versions available (some day) on iWork.com.

We once practiced personal computing, then we learned to love the connected machine. Soon I think we'll move toward person-centric computing, delinking connectivity and applications environments from discrete machines and organizing them around--us. Connectivity, data, and apps will travel with us, not our machines. In that world, devices like the iPad will make a lot of sense.

Score!

Looking good. Dockable and unlockable, reasonable price, $30/month unlimited data, with a cheaper metered option. Jobs speaks of establishing a "third category of products" --I think I've heard something like that before. Content portability still an open question, and I seem to have gotten carried away with that air-typing thing. But I think the iPad (terrible name) is a winner.

OK, that's cool

Apple has been granted a patent on a proximity detection technology that permits a touch-like interface without the touch. Presumably we'll see it demonstrated during the tablet announcement today. In the last decade we've learned at least three new ways to type that I can think of--the alpha-mapped-to-keypad cellphone mode, the thumb-typing Blackberry mode, and the hunt-and-peck-redux iPhone touchscreen mode. Now maybe airtyping--QWERTY without tactile feedback?

And can other applications be far behind?--maybe all that air guitar playing I did as a kid will finally pay off.

Kindle konvergence

Two days until the Apple tablet makes the critical transformation from unofficial to official vaporware. In the artfully managed run-up to the announcement--do you remember the iPod inspiring this much hype?--Apple has steamrollered over a flurry of e-reader product announcements at CES, benefited from a false rumor that Microsoft and HP had their own game-changing tablet in the pipeline, and kept the excitement high with a transition from leaks about form factor and price to leaks about new directions in e-publishing.

But the most interesting thing to me during this long tease was last week's announcement from Amazon that it was releasing an SDK and opening a Kindle apps store. Jon Stokes at Ars Technica argues that this will keep the Kindle "fresh and attractive" while a wave of competing devices hits the market, but he also notes, more convincingly, that Amazon can't really morph the Kindle into a multi-function tablet due to its e-Ink display and supermodel-skinny Whispernet pipe.

To me this looks less like a triumphant expansion of the Kindle to new markets, and more like Lee's note to Grant saying they really ought to sit down and talk. The Kindle was a bet on the notion that people don't want to read and surf at the same time; they just want to reproduce the experience of reading electronically, using connectivity only for book shopping and a few other kinds of content  download. Now Amazon is acknowledging that users want "word games, restaurant guides, and puzzles." Yes, they'll want those for about 15 minutes; then they'll want real apps. And real apps are only going to expose the weaknesses of the hardware and feed a spiraling demand to turn Kindle into something it wasn't designed to be: a converged, multi-purpose device. Apple will already be there, eating Kindle's content lunch.

All that is solid melts into cyberspace

We all know that there are a lot of ideological battles out there on the Web. But does the Web itself express an ideology?

For the last few years I’ve had the gathering sense that networks have become the new master metaphor of the left, playing the role that factories did in the nineteenth century. I think that the Net provides a kind of locus for thought on the left that hasn’t existed since the collapse of Marxism twenty years ago. For most of that time, leftish thought has been incoherent and opportunistic, built on a mix of free-markets-but (the buts being aspects of market failure like public goods and monopoly power), free-markets-plus (social capital and civil society), and identity politics, often with a postmodern flavor.

Not that everybody on the left was a Marxist before that; far from it. But Marxism still played a special role in the left’s imagination and its demise created a vacuum.  Liberals  may have known that the theory of surplus value appropriation was bad economics, but they still liked to believe that some alternative political economy lurked out there somewhere. Nobody had much use for the USSR, but leftists did still permit themselves some fantasies about third-world revolutionary regimes, and many thought that the communist states might gradually democratize while remaining collectivist. And while fewer and fewer people were willing to pound through Capital, late Marxism’s cultural turn gave us some of the most stimulating thinkers of the post-war era. When I was in grad school in the ‘80s, Raymond Williams and E. P. Thompson, not Foucault and Derrida, were the authors most conspicuously influencing historical writing. My friends and I were roughly as prescient about Marxism’s collapse as the CIA was.

And then suddenly the wall came down and Marxism went meta and melted into air. Neoliberalism became ascendent; there hardly seemed to be a left ideology anymore. Liberals became enchanted with entrepreneurialism and divested themselves of embarrassing relics of the past like AFDC and Glass-Steagall. Those who didn’t want to play the new capitalist game abandoned materialism and empiricism altogether, advancing into the mists of critical theory and postmodernism.

But by the late ‘90s, core concepts of the left began to re-emerge in discussions of cyberculture, even as the Internet inspired a capitalist feeding frenzy. Some of the new ideas had a faintly Marxist odor, others powerfully resembled old utopian traditions, and others were entirely new. New modes of production, new expressions of community and collectivism, new ways to épater le bourgeois, new concepts of liberation and de-alienization and empowerment began to take shape.

I’m not convinced that the Internet will succeed in filling the vacuum left by Marxism’s demise (or that it should). But neither do I think the emergent writing on cyberculture is post-ideological;  it seems clear to me that most of those who have conceptualized the Net’s social and cultural effects have done so from a recognizably leftish position. I’ll grant that I have to stretch the category pretty wide to include, say, John Perry Barlow--though if you ever lived in Berkeley, you know that not all libertarians think their natural home is on the right. But look at Eric Raymond’s notions of open source, Yochai Benkler’s social production, the copyleft crowd’s ideas about property, Clay Shirky’s networked communitarianism or the online journal Vectors’s postmodernist readings of the Net, and you will find much that connects with the history and philosophy of the left.

On the other hand, though conservatives thrive on the Net, they don’t seem to have done much to create a theory of it. Yes, there’s a powerful strain of libertarian thought about cyberculture, but as I say it’s not particularly conservative. Yes, there are zillions of business guru-philosophers telling us to get on the cluetrain or to be "inherently purple," but to the extent that these guys are anything but self-promoting blowhards, they often convey the message that social realities trump the theoretical behavior of Homo economicus.

Stay tuned for more, but in the meantime: am I right? Is the Net the latest leftist utopia?

Koan-dary

About a month ago I wrote this on the whiteboard in my office: Dialectic is the Unseen Hand of the Left.

If you have any idea what I meant, let me know.