Category Archives: Observer

The Facebook question

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This morning’s Observer column:

Is Facebook now “too big to fail”? I don’t mean in the sense that the taxpayer would have to pick up the pieces if it went under, but in the sense that the social networking service has achieved a position of such dominance in the online ecosystem that its eclipse is unthinkable. Is Facebook, in other words, the next Microsoft or Google?

The question is prompted by a couple of milestones recently passed by Facebook. The first is that it now has more than 400 million members. The second is industry gossip predicting that its revenues for 2010 will exceed a billion dollars. Other straws in the wind are estimates of the size of the “Facebook economy” – ie the ecosystem of applications, services and products that has evolved around the service; and the moral panics it now triggers in the mainstream media – a sure sign that they fear a competitor…

Hard times for venture capitalists

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Last Sunday’s Observer column.

Spare a thought for the poor venture capitalists of the world. Well, perhaps the word “poor” is not entirely appropriate, but there’s no doubt that they seem to be having a torrid time at the moment. Over the past decade they have poured hundreds of billions of dollars into start-up technology companies – and have emerged with an average figure for five-year returns that has oscillated around, er, zero.

This will come as a surprise to those who subscribe to the cartoon image of the venture capitalist as a hatchet-faced investor who invests in someone's dream in order to wind up effectively owning it – and then flogging it to anonymous shareholders by floating the company on the stock market…

The Google Three

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This morning”s Observer column about the Italian convictions handed out to three Googlers.

In the case of the Google Three, however, it’s likely that they will be vindicated because even if the Italian appeal fails, there is always the possibility of recourse to the European Court in Strasbourg, which will take the view that European Union law, as currently drafted, appears to give hosting providers a safe harbour from liability so long as they remove illegal content once they are notified of its existence. The downside of this, of course, is that Google will have to be much more responsive to complaints, which will make it much easier to have videos taken down because the prudent course will always be to “take down first and ask questions later”.

The glory days of YouTube may be coming to an end. And Silvio Berlusconi remains at large.

David Bowie and the Grateful Dead: the web’s real visionaries

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This morning’s column in the new, rebooted Observer.

Psst: want to know the future of cyberspace? You could try asking a rock star. Why? Well, some of them have turned out to be perceptive futurologists. Eight years ago, for example, David Bowie said this to a New York Times reporter: “I don’t even know why I would want to be on a label in a few years because I don’t think it’s going to work by labels and by distribution systems in the same way. The absolute transformation of everything that we ever thought about music will take place within 10 years, and nothing is going to be able to stop it. I’m fully confident that copyright, for instance, will no longer exist in 10 years, and authorship and intellectual property is in for such a bashing.”

Bowie then went on to make one of the most perceptive observations anyone’s ever made about our networked world. Music, he said, “is going to become like running water or electricity”. To appreciate the significance of this, remember that he was speaking in 2002, a year after Apple unleashed the iPod on an unsuspecting world. At the time, millions of people were transfixed by the idea that they could carry their entire music collections around with them in a tiny device. But Bowie perceived that this blissful state might just be transitory– that iPod users were, in fact, the audio equivalent of travellers to primitive countries who carry bottled water because public supplies are unreliable or unsafe…

Aldous Huxley and the iPad

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This morning’s Observer column.

WATCHING STEVE JOBS unveil the Apple iPad, what came to mind was something that Neil Postman, the most influential media critic since Marshall McLuhan, once said. Our future possibilities, Postman thought, lay on a spectrum bounded by George Orwell at one end, and by Aldous Huxley at the other: Orwell because he believed that we would be destroyed by the things we fear; Huxley because he thought that we would be undone by the things we love.

As the internet went mainstream, the Orwellian nightmare has evolved into a realistic possibility, because of the facilities the network offers for the comprehensive surveillance so vividly evoked in 1984. Governments everywhere have helped themselves to powers to read every email or text you've ever sent. And that's just the democracies; authoritarian regimes are far more intrusive.

Until recently, the Huxleian nightmare seemed a more distant prospect…

The nice thing about the iPad is that it has ignited this closed v. open argument across the net. Here, for example, is an impassioned piece by Fraser Speirs:

The people whose backs have been broken under the weight of technological complexity and failure immediately understand what’s happening here. Those of us who patiently, day after day, explain to a child or colleague that the reason there’s no Print item in the File menu is because, although the Pages document is filling the screen, Finder is actually the frontmost application and it doesn’t have any windows open, understand what’s happening here.

The visigoths are at the gate of the city. They’re demanding access to software. they’re demanding to be in control of their own experience of information. They may not like our high art and culture, they may be really into OpenGL boob-jiggling apps and they may not always share our sense of aesthetics, but they are the people we have claimed to serve for 30 years whilst screwing them over in innumerable ways. There are also many, many more of them than us.

People talk about Steve Jobs’ reality distortion field, and I don’t disagree that the man has a quasi-hypnotic ability to convince. There’s another reality distortion field at work, though, and everyone that makes a living from the tech industry is within its tractor-beam. That RDF tells us that computers are awesome, they work great and only those too stupid to live can’t work them.

The tech industry will be in paroxysms of future shock for some time to come. Many will cling to their January-26th notions of what it takes to get “real work” done; cling to the idea that the computer-based part of it is the “real work.”

It’s not. The Real Work is not formatting the margins, installing the printer driver, uploading the document, finishing the PowerPoint slides, running the software update or reinstalling the OS.

The Real Work is teaching the child, healing the patient, selling the house, logging the road defects, fixing the car at the roadside, capturing the table’s order, designing the house and organizing the party.

Think of the millions of hours of human effort spent on preventing and recovering from the problems caused by completely open computer systems. Think of the lengths that people have gone to in order to acquire skills that are orthogonal to their core interests and their job, just so they can get their job done.

If the iPad and its successor devices free these people to focus on what they do best, it will dramatically change people’s perceptions of computing from something to fear to something to engage enthusiastically with. I find it hard to believe that the loss of background processing isn’t a price worth paying to have a computer that isn’t frightening anymore.

And here’s John Murrell of Good Morning Silicon Valley

So I was chatting with my buddy and loyal Apple customer JP yesterday, and he asked me if I would be buying an iPad, and I said … wait, let me check the log … I said, “Oh, heavens no. Maybe some sort of slate, someday, but on an open system.” And it struck me that we’d had essentially the same exchange a few years back about the iPhone. Lovely as it may be, I just don’t want to confine myself to Apple’s walled garden. This is partly a philosophical thing, partly a preference for having the maximum number of options, and partly because I’m a tweaker by nature, and Apple products have never lent themselves to tweaking. No knock on Apple and no arguing with the success of its integrated approach. But for my purposes, Apple’s big contribution is to keep driving new ideas into the marketplace so they can find their way into gadgets for the rest of us.

In the case of the phone, I had a long wait before the arrival of the right handset with the right operating system on the right network (and by right, I of course mean right for me). Then the Droid showed up, and I became the very happy owner of a powerful, versatile pocket computer with an open operating system, a beautiful display and apps for everything I need. In the case of the tablet … well, it’s not a pressing issue for me due to certain constraints regarding disposable income, but the wait for worthy non-Apple contenders won’t be nearly as long. In its form factor and niche targeting, the iPad may be a bold business move for Apple, but it’s not the leap in technology and interface that the iPod and iPhone were. This time around, Apple doesn’t have any secret sauce. Competitive processors, touchscreens, operating systems and content services are already out there, and manufacturers have the pieces to start pushing iPad alternatives out the pipeline almost immediately — devices that will come equipped with the features missing from the Apple tablet and will let you roam outside the garden. But, I can hear the Apple fans saying, you’ll never have the cool design and elegant integration that comes out of a tightly controlled environment. Yep, that’s true … and that’s just fine with me. I have no trouble accepting that life outside the wall can be grittier than life inside. The freedom to choose is worth it.

Thanks to Andrew Laird for the link to Speirs.

Google and China: from drama to crisis in one easy step

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This morning’s Observer column.

ONE USEFUL spin-off from the developing story of Google’s difficulties with the Chinese communist regime is that it may finally spur the west to discard the rose-tinted spectacles through which it has chosen to view China in the past decade – and not before time.

The west’s response to China’s rapid industrialisation was determined by a recipe blending three parts greed with one part naivety. The greed was understandable: the stupendous rate of Chinese economic growth triggered a desperate desire for a slice of the action. Everywhere, whether in companies or universities, one found a palpable determination to “get into China”. In the political world, we saw western governments scramble to out-do one another in fawning upon visiting Chinese potentates.

Still, greed is part of human nature; we have to make a living, and often behave reprehensibly while doing so. What was less forgivable about the west’s approach was the implicit naivety. It was a product of wishful thinking brought about by market triumphalism, the belief that, in the end, it is impossible to have a capitalist economy without also having liberal political institutions…

FOOTNOTES:

  • Full text of Hilary Clinton’s speech on Internet Freedom is here. And Clay Shirky has done a useful abridged version.
  • Microsoft, of course, has no problems with Chinese censorship. Indeed Steve Ballmer thinks the Google view is nuts, at least according to this report:

    At a conference in Houston on Thursday, Microsoft CEO Steve Ballmer spoke critically of Google’s recent decision to stop censoring its search results in China. Paraphrasing some of Ballmer’s statements, Forbes says Ballmer called it an “irrational business decision” on Google’s part.

    Ballmer suggested that Google’s decision to no longer filter out internet searches objectionable to the Chinese government was an irrational business decision. After all, Ballmer said, the U.S. imports oil from Saudi Arabia despite the censorship that goes on in that country.

    “The U.S. is the most extreme when it comes to free speech,” said Ballmer, noting however that even the U.S. bans child pornography, while France bans internet access to Nazi imagery.

    Forbes says Ballmer made the statements during the Q&A session after a speech to oil company executives. Ballmer also said that Bing will comply with requests to censor its search results “if the Chinese government gives us proper legal notice.”

  • Perry Anderson has a terrific piece about Sinomania in the current issue of the London Review of Books.

    • Mandelson and the laser

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    This morning’s Observer column.

    Lasers are … a critical part of our technological infrastructure, yet no one involved in the research that led to them had any inkling of what their investigations would produce. The original idea goes back to a paper Albert Einstein published in 1917 on “The Quantum Theory of Radiation” about the absorption, spontaneous emission and stimulated emission of electromagnetic radiation. For 40 years, stimulated emission was of absorbing interest to quantum physicists, but of little interest to anyone else – certainly to nobody in government.

    Which brings us to Lord Mandelson, now in charge of all government funding of universities and academic research. He has no personal experience of research in science or technology, but, like many people whose minds are unclouded by knowledge, has strong views on these matters.

    LATER: BoingBoing picked up the column (thanks, Cory) and among the comments there was a link to an interesting article which reminds us that when the first working laser was reported in 1960, it was described as “a solution looking for a problem.”

    Nexus vs iPhone is a skirmish, not the real war

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    This morning’s Observer column.

    Despite their tender years, the boys who run Google have consistently shown a good grasp of military strategy, the first law of which is always to decline combat on territory dominated by your enemy and fight only on ground where you have the advantage. That’s why for years Google avoided getting into the PC operating system market – Microsoft’s fiefdom – and concentrated instead on search and networked services, where it was overwhelmingly dominant.

    This also explains its mobile phone strategy. They recognise that the functional elegance of the iPhone comes from having total control of both the hardware and its software. This kind of integrated mastery, which is Apple’s stock-in-trade, would be difficult to acquire quickly, even for a company as smart as Google…

    LATER: I was pondering writing a post expanding the claim in my column about why the iPhone is currently the superior, but I find that Dave Winer has done a much better job than I could. As usual.

    An antidote to Kindlemania

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    This morning’s Observer column.

    A strange thing happened at Christmas. Well, two really. Amazon.com reported that its Kindle eReader had become the “most gifted” product in its vast inventory; and on Christmas Day sales of eBooks on its site exceeded those of physical books. The phenomena are, of course correlated: all those recipients of Kindles needed to buy something they could actually read on the devices. But the combination of the two ‘facts’ has further ratcheted up speculation that 2010 will be the Year of the Kindle and the end is nigh for the printed codex.

    If you detect a whiff of what philosophers call ‘technological determinism’ in this, you’re in good company. I have on my shelves a (printed) copy of The Myth of the Paperless Office by Abigail Sellen and Richard Harper, a wonderful antidote to the irrational exuberance of Kindlemania. The authors conducted an ethnographic study of how people actually use paper in order to reach an understanding of which of those uses might conceivably be eliminated by electronics, and which might not. It should be required reading for anyone showing the early symptoms of Kindlemania…

    The Noughties

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    Conclusion of this morning’s Observer column.

    What all this suggests is that the noughties were the years when the internet went from being exotic to mainstream – indeed, to being a utility. No child under the age of 11 knows there was once a world without Google. Most teenagers cannot imagine a world without Facebook or YouTube. And even the proportion of adults who can remember travel agents is declining fast. Almost without noticing, we have become dependent on the network. Our task in the next decade will be to make sure it remains free and open, rather than the captive of the corporations and governments who would love to control it. Happy New Year!