Category Archives: Observer

The aphrodisiac effect of power

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This morning’s Observer column…

Once upon a time, the ultimate put-down to a bright spark was to say, ‘well, if you’re so smart, how come you’re not so rich?’. Wall Street Crash 2.0 has rather undermined this ploy, by making it clear that an awful lot of very rich folks were anything but smart. It turns out that we were unduly dazzled by the Masters of the Universe, but we had to wait until they had vaporised the US economy before getting wise to the fact.

Actually, this was just a special case of a more general human weakness – our tendency to lose all capacity for critical thought when confronted by great wealth or power. This ‘aphrodisiac effect’ seems to be ubiquitous. One saw it, for example, in the way leggy females used to throw themselves at Henry Kissinger, a stumpy troglodyte who just happened to be US Secretary of State. And we see it in the way even hardened hacks go weak when offered an audience with Bill Gates, Warren Buffett or even, God help us, Steve Ballmer, chief of Microsoft…

Androids and walled gardens

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This morning’s Observer column…

‘We are all,’ said Keynes, ‘the slaves of some defunct philosopher.’ The question that will increasingly preoccupy mobile-phone executives from now on is which deceased sage is more appropriate for their product. Up to now, the relevant thinker has been Lenin – who, you may remember, was a control freak. Given that most mobile operators had their origins in traditional telephone companies – which liked to think they ‘owned’ their customers – this is hardly surprising. These outfits have control freakery in their corporate DNA.

Last week, the first mobile phone based on Google’s Android operating system was released by T-Mobile in the US. (The network is bringing it to the UK in November.) The philosophy underpinning the device is radically different from anything we have seen thus far in the mobile-phone market. The world is about to become a more interesting place. And what happens next could have far-reaching implications…

CORRECTION: An observant reader, Duncan Thomas, has just spotted an error in the piece as published. The piece says that “the most important difference [between the Google phone and the iPhone] is that the Android software ecosystem will not be an uncontrolled, open space”. That ‘not’ ought to have been deleted. Drat and double drat.

LATER: Webmonkey’s five reasons why Android might do the business

1. It promises to run on most modern smart phones – More cell networks will support Android than iPhone does — the iPhone is bound to just AT&T. Mobile providers NTT DoCoMo, Sprint Nextel, T-Mobile and more have committed to the project. Also, more handsets will operate on it. You might even get more life out of your old phone if it supports it. Handset manufactures HTC, LG, Motorola and Samsung have already signed on.
2. It’s open-source software – Any programmer can whip up some code to match popular features from any other phone. Under the Apache license, any programmer can take the code and port their own version of the OS.
3. It has support for Google products out of the box – The latest Android demonstration displayed the phone’s compass prominently in Google Maps. You can bet Google will have the latest and greatest features of their software running on Android before it hits other operators.
4. Third-party developers have more access – iPhone prohibits people from using its internet capabilities for things like VoIP or an alternative browser. Android’s API allows you to create an application for anything, even the dialing software. The evidence is in the 50 applications already developed for the Android Developer Challenge last May.
5. Android allows for ‘unlocked’ phones – Most handsets in America, including the iPhone, are locked by software to a cell phone provider’s network. While there are various ways to jailbreak, it’s not easy and might break your terms of service. The availability of downloading and installing your own unlocked OS might just change the game in respect to shopping for mobile phone providers and signing contracts. If this method gets more popular, it is conceivable phone networks may drop the contracts in lieu of (better) European pre-pay pricing.

Toxic assets and silver linings

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This morning’s Observer column…

Every cloud has a silver lining. Ask the cybersquatters. Even as the short-selling vultures began circling Lehman Brothers, HBOS, Merrill Lynch and co, a legion of entrepreneurs began betting on domain names for hastily merged financial institutions. For example, when Barclays and Bank of America began to emerge as buyers for Lehman, names such as barclayslehman.com and bofalehman.com were promptly registered by enterprising hopefuls.

Some of these domains were being offered for sale on eBay last week. For example, www.bankofamericamerrilllynch.com was available at a starting bid of $1,500…

Genius? What genius?

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This morning’s Observer column…

In triumph of the Nerds, Robert Cringely’s 1996 TV documentary series about the rise of the personal computer industry, Steve Jobs was asked what made Apple such an unusual company. ‘It comes down,’ he said, ‘to trying to expose yourself to the best things that humans have done and then try to bring those things into what you’re doing. Picasso had a saying, “good artists copy, great artists steal”, and we have always been shameless about stealing great ideas.’

Before we get too sanctimonious about this, it’s worth remembering that Jobs’s adoption of Picasso’s mantra is what has made Apple such an innovative force in the computer business. Its unique selling proposition is that it takes good ideas and turns them into products that ordinary human beings can use…

Ten years on

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This morning’s Observer column…

In the old days, dates fell into one of two categories: BC and AD. Now the relevant categories are BG. and AG: Before and After Google. The critical date was 1998, when Larry Page and Sergey Brin launched their PageRank system for rating web pages. It was an epochal moment. No British child knows there was once a world without Google. In fact most would be astonished that people were able to get along without it.

Google is 10 years old today and it has celebrated by upsetting the world’s applecart – again…

Back from the dead

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This morning’s Observer column…

Premature obituaries have their uses. It is said that when Alfred Nobel, the Swedish arms dealer, read an obituary which described him as a ‘merchant of death’ he was moved to endow the Nobel Prizes as a way of laundering his image. They also provide opportunities for setting up jokes, as when Mark Twain observed that ‘the report of my death was an exaggeration’, or when the Daily Telegraph published an obit of folk singer Dave Swarbrick after he’d been admitted to a Midlands hospital with a chest infection. ‘It’s not the first time,’ Swarbrick observed, ‘that I’ve died in Coventry.’

What are we to make, then, of the obituary of Steve Jobs, Apple’s mercurial CEO, which was inadvertently released by Bloomberg News last week?

The lessons of history

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This morning’s Observer column…

Forty years ago this week, a British scientist named Donald Davies unveiled one of the great technological ideas of the 20th century. He called it ‘packet-switching’, which must have sounded odd at the time because it was a way of enabling computers to communicate with one another. But it turned out to be the basis for all modern digital communications and it’s the technological foundation on which the internet is built…

When ignorance is bliss

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This morning’s Observer column…

Sometimes, ignorance is bliss. We saw two examples of this last week. The first came when a new search engine – Cuil (www.cuil.com) – was unveiled. The launch was an old-style PR operation. Some influential bloggers and mainstream reporters had been briefed in advance, and whispers were circulating in cyberspace that this would be Something Big. Cuil would be the ‘Google Killer’ everyone had been waiting for.

Evidence for this hypothesis was freely cited. The venture was the brainchild of ‘former Google employees’: nudge, nudge. At least one of them had been at Stanford, the university that nurtured the founders of both Yahoo and Google: wink, wink. It had indexed no fewer than 121 billion web pages, compared with Google’s measly 40 billion: Wow! Cuil had already received $33m in venture funding! Cue trumpets.

So many people were taken in by this that when cuil.com finally opened for business the site was swamped…

Say ‘Cheese!’ for Google

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This morning’s Observer column — about Google Street View…

In a way the issue is not whether this Google innovation is permitted or not, but the general direction we’re headed and the role Google might play in our collective future. Last week I wrote about the legal ruling which compelled Google to hand over to Viacom its computer logs of every single viewing of a YouTube video, including those by UK residents. The privacy implications of that ruling have since been mitigated by agreement that the data can be ‘anonymised’ by Google before handover. But, again, the direction is towards a world in which everything we do is monitored and logged – mostly by one company.

Google’s mission, according to its corporate website, is ‘to organise the world’s information and make it universally accessible and useful’. What we perhaps haven’t fully realised is that these guys really mean it. Their ambition is at least as megalomaniacal as Bill Gates’s vision of a computer on every desk running Microsoft software. So it’s time we started thinking about what a world dominated by Google would be like. As it happens, some people have – and they’ve been publishing the results on YouTube. Have a look — and then pour yourself a stiff drink.

Who’s watching what?

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This morning’s Observer column

On 2 July, a US district judge, Louis L Stanton, lobbed a grenade into the cosy world of social networking, user-generated content and so-called ‘cloud’ computing. He ordered Google to turn over to Viacom all of its logs relating to viewing of YouTube video clips since the search engine giant acquired the video hosting site in November 2006.

That amounts to 12 terabytes (or more than 12 million megabytes) of data: each log entry records the user name and IP (machine) address of the user who viewed the video, plus a timestamp and a code identifying the clip. What the judgment means is that if you have watched a YouTube clip at any time since November 2006, a record of that will be passed to Viacom’s lawyers…

UPDATE: This from CNET:

Viacom wants to know which videos YouTube employees have watched and uploaded to the site, and Google is refusing to provide that information, CNET News has learned.

This dispute is the reason the two companies, and lawyers representing a group of other copyright holders suing Google, have failed to reach a final agreement on anonymizing personal information belonging to YouTube users, according to two sources close to the situation.