Category Archives: Observer

The uses and abuses of Skeuomorphism

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This morning’s Observer column.

Or consider this, from Wired magazine, claiming that Apple’s iPhone app, Find My Friends, “includes astonishingly ugly, faux stitched leather that wastes screen space. On the new iCal for the Macintosh, things are odder yet: When you page forward, the sheet for the previous month rips off and floats away, an animation so artless you’d swear it was designed personally by Bill Gates.”

Ouch! What Apple’s designers are being accused of, it turns out, is the grave sin of skeuomorphism. Now there’s a conversation-stopper if ever I saw one. A skeuomorph is, according to the OED, a ‚”derivative object that retains ornamental design cues to a structure that was necessary in the original”.

Google’s self-guided car isn’t just about automobiles

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This morning’s Observer column.

At the ceremony in Mountain View, Google’s co-founder, Sergey Brin, announced the company’s intention to bring autonomous vehicles to the market in five years. In a pre-emptive attack on critics, he pointed out that autonomous vehicles would be significantly safer than human-controlled ones. That seems plausible to me: 40,000 people are killed every year in road accidents in the US and many, if not most, of those are caused by human error. “This has the power to change lives,” Brin said. “Too many people are underserved by the current transport system. They are blind, or too young to drive, or too old, or intoxicated.” He also argued that manual operation of cars was inefficient: autonomous vehicles could make better use of the road and reduce the size of car parks by fitting into smaller areas than humans could get them into.

Ignore the evangelism for a moment and think about what Google has achieved. Its engineers have demonstrated that with smart software and an array of sensors, a machine can perform a task of sophistication and complexity most of us assumed would always require the capabilities of humans. And that means our assumptions about what machines can and cannot do are urgently in need of updating.

This isn’t just about cars, by the way…

Quis custodiet ipsos custodes?

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This morning’s Observer column.

The first thought to strike anyone stumbling upon the now-infamous Innocence of Muslims video on YouTube without knowing anything about it would probably be that it makes Monty Python’s The Life of Brian look like the work of Merchant Ivory. It’s daft, amateurish beyond belief and, well, totally weird. So the notion that such a fatuous production might provoke carnage in distant parts of the world seems preposterous.

And yet it did. In the process, the video created numerous headaches for a US administration struggling to deal with the most turbulent part of the world. But it also raised some tricky questions about the role that commercial companies play in regulating free speech in a networked world – questions that will remain long after Innocence of Muslims has been forgotten…

Why the disenchantment with Twitter?

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This morning’s Observer column

For most of its short life, Twitter has had a good press, partly because of the way it has stood up to attempted bullying by lawyers and security authorities seeking the personal details of users. During the attacks on WikiLeaks after the release of US diplomatic cables, Twitter functioned as a way of bypassing the withdrawal of Domain Name Services (DNS) for the site, providing a workaround that allowed access to WikiLeaks. It also played a significant role in the Arab spring, especially in Egypt – all of which persuaded the world that Google might not be the only internet corporation that had “Don’t be evil” engraved on its corporate DNA.

Recently, however, Twitter has come in for some heavy criticism on two fronts. During the Olympics it suspended the account of Guy Adams – the Independent’s man in Los Angeles – who had been posting hyper-critical tweets about the awfulness of NBC’s coverage of the Games. Twitter claimed that the suspension was because Adams had broken its rules about not revealing people’s email addresses. Critics alleged that it was because of the fact that Twitter had a commercial arrangement with NBC, and that this had led it to curtail Mr Adams’s freedom of speech. “Twitter is becoming old media,” fumed one venerable netizen, Dave Winer, echoing the sentiments of some other netheads.

Dear Delegate…

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An excerpt from my Open Letter about the Communications data Bill to LibDem delegates at their Annual Conference.

The draft bill is riddled with flaws. Look at the commentaries by experts such as Professor Robin Mansell of LSE, or the evidence given to the joint committee by Professors Ross Anderson and Peter Sommer.

Your political masters will tell you that it’s all very complicated, which it is. They will also assure that “the devil is in the detail” and if we can get the details right, then all will be well.

Well, actually, in this case the devil isn’t in the detail – it’s in the principles underpinning the bill. And they aren’t complicated at all. If you wanted to put it in everyday terms, the CDB is the equivalent of a proposal that all household waste should be accumulated and kept for at least a year because somewhere in that Himalaya of trash there’s bound to be evidence of wrongdoing.

Why am I telling you this? Because unlike the delegates to other party conferences, you have the ability to make party policy. And when the issue of the CDB comes up, ask yourself a simple question: is this what you came into politics to do — to facilitate the mission creep of the National Security State?

Our new software monoculture

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This morning’s Observer column.

Apple has to date authorised 500,000 [Apps] for its iPhone. The corresponding number for the Android platform is 600,000. These numbers provide ample justification for the late Steve Jobs’s great insight: phones were really powerful hand-held computers that could run useful applications. And so it proved. Jobs unleashed an explosion in creativity as programmers raced to create apps that people would buy in huge volumes. The result is a world in which smartphones are basically app-running devices that can also make voice calls. Ditto for tablets, except that they don’t bother with the calls.

So that’s all right, then? Not quite. Look closer at this explosion of creativity and you find that much of what it has created is either trivial or downright crap. You can, for example, get an app to put an image of bubblewrap on your iPhone screen. Then there’s the Halloween Sound Machine (“Sneak up on your mates with the sounds of a rusty chainsaw, go on, you know you want to!”). Or how about iBeer (“turns the iPhone’s screen into a showy pint of the foamy stuff”)? And gentlemen trying to decide between a walrus moustache, Victorian sidewhiskers or a goatee beard will doubtless find Beard Booth invaluable.

I could go on, but you get the point. A large proportion of smartphone apps are the contemporary equivalent of those plastic gee-gaws my kids bought all those years ago: impulse purchases that provide a moment’s entertainment – or even delight – and are then forgotten…

Is Facebook ‘the real presidential swing state’?

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This morning’s Observer column.

So will the 2012 election provide the tipping point, the moment when the internet plays a decisive role in influencing how people vote? Given the penetration of the network into daily life, it’s obviously implausible to maintain that it isn’t having some impact on politics. The yawning gap that existed in the 1990s between cyberspace (where people do “social networking”) and “meatspace” (where they go to polling stations and vote) has clearly shrunk. But by how much?

Judging by current online activity, if the internet decided the outcome Obama would win by a mile…

But… [read on]

Whatever happened to Microsoft?

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This morning’s Observer Networker column.

Here’s a question you don’t often hear asked: whatever happened to Microsoft?

To many people, it will seem a silly question. Microsoft, they point out, is still around – with a vengeance. It’s a huge company worth $250bn (£160bn) that employs 94,000 people worldwide and earns vast profits. (OK, it made a loss last quarter for the first time in its history, but that’s because it had to write off $6bn it blew in 2007 on a company called aQuantive which turned out to be a turkey.) Microsoft dominates the market for PC operating systems and Office software, products that are still licences to print money: its Xbox game console sweeps all before it; its server software is a big seller in the corporate world. In 2012, the company’s net revenues totalled $74bn.

[…]

So why does it remind me of General Motors around the time that Toyota arrived in the US automobile market?

LATER: Nice meditation on the same theme by Karlin Lillington in her Irish Times column.

Celebrating Thomas Kuhn

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My (longish) Observer piece celebrating Thomas Kuhn and his remarkable book.

Fifty years ago this month, one of the most influential books of the 20th century was published by the University of Chicago Press. Many if not most lay people have probably never heard of its author, Thomas Kuhn, or of his book, The Structure of Scientific Revolutions, but their thinking has almost certainly been influenced by his ideas. The litmus test is whether you’ve ever heard or used the term “paradigm shift”, which is probably the most used – and abused – term in contemporary discussions of organisational change and intellectual progress. A Google search for it returns more than 10 million hits, for example. And it currently turns up inside no fewer than 18,300 of the books marketed by Amazon. It is also one of the most cited academic books of all time. So if ever a big idea went viral, this is it…

Put not your trust in the Cloud — any cloud

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This morning’s Observer column.

Most of the iCloud users of my acquaintance seem very happy with it. No more worrying about back-ups, or having out-of-date calendars on different devices. In return for an annual subscription, the great Church of Apple takes away the existential angst about data security that plagues less fortunate folks. And for as long as they stay within the enfolding arms of the Church, that blissful state will continue. That this is rather too good to be true should have been obvious to even the meanest intelligence, but it took a personal disaster last week finally to explode the illusion that single-church, cloud-based systems are the answers to everyone’s prayers.

The victim was a well-known technology journalist and iCloud subscriber named Mat Honan…

Lots of good stuff about this topic on the Web — for example this piece by Bob Cringely.