Category Archives: Observer

Acorns, oaks and Silicon Fen

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This morning’s Observercolumn.

For those of us who were around Cambridge in the 1970s and 1980s, Micro Men, BBC4’s dramatisation of the days when Britain (briefly) led the home computing business, raised some awkward questions. Were our jackets really so awful? (Yes.) Did geeks use oscilloscope probes to eat takeaway noodles? (Probably.) Were the technology programmes on TV really as embarrassing as all that? (Yes.) Was Clive Sinclair's hair really as improbable as the hairpiece welded to the pate of Alexander Armstrong, the actor playing him in the film? (No.) Was Sinclair as insufferably pompous as he was portrayed? (Mostly.)

And did he assail his rival, Chris Curry (co-founder of Acorn Computers), in the Baron of Beef pub with a rolled-up newspaper shouting, “You fucking buggering shit-bucket!”? (Yes, according to the Guardian.)

Heady days, eh? But at the core of this story of rivalry between former collaborators was a problem that still plagues the start-ups in the Cambridge ‘technology cluster’, namely how to make the transition from being a small team of bright people to being a global company…

There’s life in them thar fogeys

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This morning’s Observer column.

WE ARE all slaves of some defunct economist, said Keynes, who until the recent disturbances in the banking system was widely regarded as defunct himself. But it wasn't just bankers and politicians who denied their indebtedness to ancient economic principles. Newspaper and print publishers generally also ignored the axiom that, in a competitive market, prices tend to converge on the marginal cost – the cost of producing one more unit of the good(s) in question.

The internet provides a pretty good approximation of such a market…

The Holy Grail

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This morning’s Observer column.

The quest for the Holy Grail is generally regarded as a preoccupation of those of a religious or mystical bent. But in fact the community which suffers most from Holy Grail Syndrome is made up of geeks and early adopters who would never be seen within a mile of an altar.

For Christians, the Grail is the cup, plate or dish supposedly used by Jesus at the last Supper. For the computing community it is the Tablet, a slim, lightweight device which combines significant computing power with the convenience of a paper notebook. And sightings – or rumours – of the mythical device provoke the kind of delicious excitement so masterfully exploited by the novelist Dan Brown.

We had such a sighting last week…

Google displays its hand

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This morning’s Observer column.

The scariest question a venture capitalist can ask a company seeking funding is: what if Google enters your market? For years, this question has haunted folk in mainstream advertising. They had already seen Google collar an overwhelming share of the targeted-advertising market via its AdSense and AdWords technology, the system through which small, hopefully relevant, text ads appear alongside the results of internet searches.

On the back of this, Google become a money-printing machine and now has nearly 70% of the paid-search market. This is nice for it in the short term, of course, but raises a strategic issue. What would the company do when the paid-search market was saturated? Where would the next growth area be?

Happy Birthday, Blogger!

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This morning’s Observer column.

“When a true genius appears in the world,” wrote Jonathan Swift, “you may know him by this sign, that the dunces are all in confederacy against him.” So it was with blogging. It was ridiculed as self-indulgent, lazy vanity publishing; lampooned as the product of obsessives tapping feverishly in their pyjamas; blasted as a parasitic activity, feeding on the blood of hard-working professional journalists; and derided as a doomed fad because there was no ‘business model’ to support it. After all, virtually no one makes money from his or her blog, so the thing clearly didn’t have a future.

And guess what? Blogging is thriving. In virtually every area of human interest, the diversity and quantity of fact and opinion available online dwarfs what was available in the print era. In the old days the News of the World had a ludicrous slogan: “All Human Life Is Here”, a promise on which no publication could ever hope to deliver. The ‘blogosphere’ is the first medium we’ve ever had which could conceivably live up to the slogan…

Erratum: A computer scientist has emailed, objecting to my reference to Tim Berners-Lee as “a physicist working at CERN” when he was, in fact, “a computer scientist employed by CERN in that capacity, who just happened to have a first degree in physics”. He’s right of course. Mea culpa. My only defence is that, as an engineer, I regard physicists much as some people regard Catholics (as in the saying “once a Catholic, always a Catholic…”).

Google’s bid for our literary heritage

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This morning’s Observer column.

If you have any free brain cells next Tuesday, spare a thought for Denny Chin. He is a judge on the US district court for the southern district of New York. And he has the job of deciding a case which has profound implications for our culture.

At its centre is a decision about how we will access printed books in the future. And, as you might guess, Google is at the heart of it…

The published version of the column omitted the reference to Professor James Grimmelmann’s terrific commentary on the case. If you’re interested, you can get the pdf from here.

Why elephants can’t dance (or do social networking)

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This morning’s Observer column.

Patience really is a virtue in this context, but it’s the one thing large corporations don’t seem to have. In part, this is a structural problem: public companies are driven by stockmarket expectations – which effectively means short-term exigencies. But corporate impatience to extract revenue juice from the online world in the short term is also a psychological problem. It’s the product of a mindset that has failed to take on board the scale of the changes now under way.

What’s happening is that one of Joseph Schumpeter’s waves of “creative destruction” is sweeping through our economies, laying waste to lots of established businesses and industries, and enabling the rise of hitherto unprecedented ones. And it’s doing so on a timescale of maybe 25 years, which means that the broad outlines of the new economic system won’t be clearly visible for at least a decade. But everywhere one looks, we find corporate moguls wanting answers Right Now. The most spectacular example is Rupert Murdoch, who is on his third demand for an immediate answer to the online question, but virtually every large organisation in the world is driven by the same panicky impatience…

Now you see it, now you don’t.

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This morning’s Observer column about the power that Google now wields.

Most of the time we don’t think about this because the company provides such a useful service to the average web user. But if you look at it from the point of view of someone who runs an online business then you get a very different perspective. In The Search, an excellent book about Google, John Battell tells a story that illustrates this perfectly.

It concerns a small entrepreneur called Neil Montcrief, who in 2000 founded a small e-commerce business (2bigfeet.com) selling outsize shoes on the net. For a time, the business was modestly prosperous because of the traffic Google drove to Montcrief’s site. By the middle of 2003 he was shifting $40,000 of big shoes a month.

“And then, one day in November of that year, everything changed. Traffic to his site shrivelled, cash flow plummeted and Montcrief fell late on his loan payments. He began avoiding the UPS man, because he couldn’t pay the bill. His family life deteriorated. And, as far as Montcrief could tell, it was all Google’s fault.”

In a sense, it was. But Google had not targeted him: the vaporisation of his little business turned out to be just collateral damage in the ceaseless war between Google and the armies of people who try to ‘game’ its search results…

Facebook, Friendfeed and, er, Google (of course)

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This morning’s Observer column.

Google’s page-rank search technology is good, but it’s still pretty primitive – try looking for a hotel in rural France or a plumber in any UK town. You could say that search is about 5% solved, with 3% of that down to Google. With 95% still to do, many people think the next advances will come from adding social or collaborative dimensions to pure computational algorithms.

Which is where social networking comes in…

The strange case of Apple, AT&T and Google Voice

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This morning’s Observer column.

The Google Voice team also developed a free App ie, application to run on the Apple iPhone. This would enable all US iPhone users to access the cool services above. The team submitted the App to Apple for approval in the usual way, only to have it rejected. Then Apple went even further: it deleted from the App Store two similar programs, GV Mobile and VoiceCentral, which had been there for months.

The VoiceCentral author got a call from an Apple functionary, who said, "I'm calling to let you know that VoiceCentral has been removed from the App Store because it duplicates features of the iPhone" – and absolutely refused to discuss the matter further.

At the moment, nobody really knows what lies behind Apple's intransigence. But conspiracy theories abound…

LATER: Jason Calcanis has published a terrific essay: “The Case Against Apple–in Five Parts”. Great stuff.