Category Archives: Observer

Rash predictions and cloud computing

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This morning’s Observer column.

So what about [Tom] Watson’s prediction of the world market for [five] computers? Once again, there’s no convincing evidence he ever said it. According to Wikipedia, the earliest known citation is in the email signature of a Usenet member in 1986, which simply says “remark attributed to Thomas J Watson (chairman of the board of International Business Machines), 1943” – not exactly an impeccable source.

Nevertheless, Watson was on many people’s minds this week, after a talk given in San Francisco by Rick Rashid, the computer scientist who now heads Microsoft’s formidable research division. According to the Financial Times reporter who broke the story, Rashid said that “around 20 per cent of all the servers sold around the world each year are now being bought by a small handful of internet companies – he named Microsoft, Google, Yahoo and Amazon”.

If true, that’s an amazing statistic, and one that suggests we are well on the way to the kind of world supposedly envisaged by Watson.

The drunk, the lamp-post and Amazon’s Kindle

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This morning’s Observer column.

Know the old joke about the drunk and the lost keys? A policeman finds a guy scrabbling under a lamp-post and asks him what he's doing. “Looking for my keys,” he replies. “Is this where you dropped them?” asks the cop. “No,” replies the drunk, “but at least I can see what I’m doing here.”

When it comes to technology futures, we’re all drunks, always looking in the wrong place…

LATER: Interesting stuff about the upcoming eReader from the Cambridge firm Plastic Logic.

STILL LATER: See Jakob Neilsen’s review of the new Kindle.

Cloud computing’s silver lining

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This morning’s Observer column.

Here’s an ugly word that has infiltrated itself into everyday discourse: “outage”. Its etymology is a bit opaque, but it’s clearly modelled on ‘shortage’. Until last year it meant “a temporary suspension of operation, especially of electrical power supply”. Now it means a temporary suspension of ‘cloud computing’ services – ie services, such as email, web-hosting and file storage, provided remotely via the internet.

Until last week, most Europeans were probably blissfully unaware of the term. But then Gmail – Google’s webmail service – went down on Tuesday…

Openness is a feature, not a bug

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Today’s Observer column.

Openness is what makes the internet what it is. It enabled Tim Berners-Lee to dream up the web and release it on an unsuspecting world without seeking anyone’s permission. It’s also what enabled the guys who invented Skype to use the network as a carrier for voice communications, again without seeking administrative approval. But the same openness is what enabled Sean Fanning to launch peer-to-peer file sharing on the music industry. And of course it’s what enabled the sinister Eastern European crooks of Markoff’s nightmares to unleash the Conficker.B worm, with who knows what consequences.

So we’re stuck with the trade-off between the creativity, innovation – and, yes, insecurity – that comes with openness; and the security – and stagnation – that comes with a tightly-controlled network. Which do we prefer? You only have to look at the data traffic for web pages and file sharing to know the answer.

Need to read between the lines? Try Microsoft Word

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Today’s Observer column.

That left only Facebook as a focus for irrational exuberance. But how much was the preppy social-networking site ‘worth’? Arcane formulae were deployed by investment analysts to rationalise a range of fantastic valuations. Then Microsoft blew them out of the water by paying $240m for a 1.6% stake in the company. Here at last was a real number that people could latch on to. Even newspaper columnists could do the calculation: if 1.6% is worth $240m then 100% equals $15bn.

QED? Er, no. Even in those far-off days when a billion dollars was real money it was a preposterous valuation. But it entered the culture as a hard fact. After all (so the reasoning went) if those boys at Microsoft thought that 1.6% of Facebook was worth $240m, then it must be an exceedingly valuable company…

The sound of serious money

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This morning’s Observer column.

At this point, those of us who have been watching Mr Jobs strut his stuff for decades began to yawn. Then something happened that made your columnist sit up. On to the stage strode John Doerr, the driving force behind Kleiner Perkins Caufield and Byers of 2750 Sand Hill Road, Menlo Park, California – the world’s premier venture capital firm. Mr Doerr said that he was so taken by this apps store idea that he was setting up a $100m fund to invest in people who were interested in developing software for the iPhone.

In retrospect, it may have been a pivotal moment in the history of the computing industry. Doerr, you see, has great judgment and a long history of spotting winners before anyone else. Companies he backed in their early days, for example, include Amazon, Compaq, Electronic Arts, Google, Lotus, Macromedia and Sun Microsystems. So if he thought there was something in the apps store idea then perhaps Jobs’s hyperbole might be justified.

And so it has proved…

Terminological capture

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This morning’s Observer column.

Rule number one in ideological warfare is to capture the terms in which the debate is conducted. If you can do that, you’re well on your way to winning the argument. Thus the religious right describes itself as “pro-life” and characterises abortion as “murder”, which means that anyone who does not share its views is, apparently, anti-life and in favour of murder. It’s preposterous, but it happens all the time.

This practice of terminological capture is the stock in trade of lobbyists, especially those employed by the music and movie industries. Thus any unauthorised use of copyrighted materials is always “theft”, anyone engaging in file-sharing is a “pirate”, and so on. And technical measures introduced by those industries to protect digital content are called “digital rights management” (DRM), a reassuring term implying that the user is managing something that is rightfully theirs. In fact, they are really digital restriction measures whose sole purpose is to constrain the consumer.

Governments and legislators everywhere are suckers for terminological capture…

Computing’s religious wars

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From this morning’s Observer column.

Umberto Eco once wrote an intriguing essay about the differences between the Apple Macintosh and the PC. ‘The fact is’, he wrote, ‘that the world is divided between users of the Macintosh computer and users of MS-DOS compatible computers. I am firmly of the opinion that the Macintosh is Catholic and that DOS is Protestant. The Macintosh is… cheerful, friendly, conciliatory; it tells the faithful how they must proceed step by step to reach – if not the kingdom of heaven – the moment in which their document is printed. It is catechistic: The essence of revelation is dealt with via simple formulae and sumptuous icons. Everyone has a right to salvation.’

The PC was very different: ‘Protestant, or even Calvinistic, it allows free interpretation of scripture, demands difficult personal decisions, imposes a subtle hermeneutics upon the user, and takes for granted the idea that not all can achieve salvation. To make the system work you need to interpret the program yourself: Far away from the baroque community of revellers, the user is closed within the loneliness of his own inner torment.’

The bean-counters’ sword

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This morning’s Observer column…

In the summer of 1978, a Harvard student named Dan Bricklin was cycling along a path in Martha’s Vineyard, when he had a big idea. As an MBA student, he was being taught to do financial planning using a large sheet of paper ruled into a grid pattern. One entered numbers corresponding to sales, costs, revenues and so on, into cells on the grid, did some calculations and entered the result in another cell. This was called ‘spreadsheet analysis’ and it was unutterably tedious because the moment any of the numbers in the sheet changed, everything else that depended on it had to be recalculated – manually.

Bricklin’s big idea was that all this could be done by a computer program…

Footnotes:

John Dvorak’s engaging rant is here.

Dan Bricklin maintains some enthralling pages about the background to VisiCalc.

Slimming down in 2009

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This morning’s Observer column.

On the web, we will see whether Twitter, geeks' beloved microblogging service, can find a viable business model. Given that Jonathan Ross and Jeremy Clarkson have just discovered, and signed up for, the service, it has clearly peaked. When boobies like that are using it, all persons of taste flee.

In the corporate world, 2009 is likely to be dominated by: speculation about Apple's ability to survive Steve Jobs's departure (yawn); Yahoo's death throes; Microsoft's struggle to erase the bad karma of Vista with shiny new Windows 7, plus its doomed attempts to seize the initiative in web services, search and online advertising; and Wall Street's disillusionment with Google, as the search giant struggles with the impact of recession on advertising. Hard times will mean fewer impulse buys of electronic toys, that upgrades will be postponed, and that companies will finally begin to examine the energy costs of their PC-based networks.

Other than that, I haven't a clue what will happen. Happy new year!