Fumbling the Future

An extraordinary event happened last week. AT&T, the shrunken telcoms behemoth, was bought for a mere $16 billion by one of the ‘Baby Bells’ spun out of it when the company was broken up in 1984. (‘Ma Bell’ was the universal nickname for the company, a legacy of its founder, Alexander Graham Bell.) It’s an amazing moment in corporate history — and a salutary warning for monopolists in high-tech industries. The AT&T name may live on if the new owners think it’s worth it, but effectively the company that once bestrode its industry has ceased to be.

This week’s Economist has a thoughtful piece about the story. “For much of the past century AT&T was the envy of the corporate world — the largest firm on the planet both by revenue and market capitalisation. No share was more widely held — the firm was so solid it was considered ideal for ‘widows and orphans’. Its legendary research arm, Bell Laboratories, was responsible for some of the 20th century’s greatest inventions, from the transistor to the laser, and fielded seven Nobel Prize winners. At the time of the break-up in 1984 AT&T boasted around 1m employees. So what went wrong?”

The answer, in a phrase, is that the world changed but AT&T didn’t. I came to a vivid appreciation of the extent of its corporate myopia when I was researching my history of the Net. And the funny thing is that they blew it not once, but twice.

Paul Baran, the guy who first conceived the idea of a packet-switched, digital network in the early 1960s, tried to persuade AT&T to adopt it — and was rejected. “First”, said Jack Osterman of AT&T, “it can’t possibly work, and if it did, damned if we are going to allow the creation of a competitor to ourselves”.

Note the monopolistic mindset implicit in the word ‘allow’. Although the Pentagon accepted Baran’s proposal for a new network, he withdrew it because he knew that the Department would contract AT&T to implement the design and he figured they would screw it up and that the idea of a digital network would thereby be discredited for a generation.

But the idea of a digital network was resurrected by ARPA in the mid-1960s. The ARPAnet was built (by Bolt Beranek and Newman and a team of academic researchers) and was fully operational by 1972 — at which point the DoD asked AT&T if they wanted to take it over and run it. Once again the company refused!

The story of AT&T’s fate is one of hubris and nemesis, larded with ironies and accidents. Bell Labs — the company’s R&D arm — was a wonderful ideas factory, but AT&T often failed to profit from the magic the Labs produced. They invented the transistor, for example, but it was Fairchild and later Intel who capitalised on the concept. And Bell Labs was where Unix was written. Same story: by the time the company was free to exploit the operating system the window had passed. The open source genie was out of the bottle. Sic transit gloria mundi.

The economics of sharing

Although the corporate world is still baffled by the open source movement (why do these smart people invent wonderful things and then give them away?), the rest of us know that it makes sense.

That’s partly because information goods (such as software) are — like the light from Thomas Jefferson’s candle — non-rivalrous: if I give you some of my software, I don’t have less as a result. But up to now we’ve tended to assume that sharing only made sense for non-rivalrous resources. Now comes an interesting paper by Yochai Benkler arguing that sharing is emerging as a viable strategy for some rivalrous goods and services — e.g. computing power and bandwidth. The SETI@home project is one example, but there are lots of others. This also reinforces the point that P2P technology is important because it’s a tool for sharing (rivalrous) resources over the Net.

Benkler is one of those wonderful people who pours out original ideas and insights. His layer model of the Net has been very helpful in explaining IP issues to students.

BS — not!

Quentin and Martin took a break from inventing and went for a nice rural ramble at the weekend, only to find a formidable bull taking a close interest in their activities. Photos here. Wonder if they had a red rag.

What not to do in bed

It gets worse.

After the dentist’s chair, comes this:

Martin Heiddeger once said that technology was “the art of arranging the world so that one doesn’t have to experience it”. Precisely. Thanks to Dave, from whom nothing is hidden, for the link.

Tools for thought

For as long as I can remember, the Holy Grail of computing (at least for me) has been to find tools that actually help in making one a better, more efficient or more creative writer. And I’m not talking about word-processing but something that can do for authors what, say, the spreadsheet did for accountants and planners. The word processor is, well, just that — a tool that processes words. But where do the words come from? And can computing help in stimulating or generating the ideas that are expressed in words? So far, the answer seems to be “not much”.

It’s not that there aren’t lots of programs out there which help one store, index, organise and retrieve information, create ‘mindmaps’, even do brainstorming, etc. But none of these tools maps naturally onto the way one thinks — or at least the way I think. So there’s a tradeoff: given that I have to change the way I work in order to accommodate the software, do the benefits of doing so outweigh the costs? So far, the answer has usually been ‘”no”.

Enter Steven Johnson, a writer I admire. He’s produced several really interesting, stimulating, thoughtful books — notably Interface Culture. So when he published an essay in Sunday’s New York Times about a software tool he swears by, I sat up and took notice. The software in question is called DEVONthink. Johnson has given a much fuller explanation on his Blog of how he uses it. I was sufficiently intrigued to download the software and get it to index all the documents, web pages, images, etc. on my hard drive. It’s a very interesting tool with a fairly steep learning curve. And to get the most out of it one would (as usual) have to adjust one’s working methods to fit in with its underlying metaphors. Nevertheless, Johnson has persuaded me that it’s worth exploring it in more depth.

Oh — bad news for Windows users: DEVONthink is for Mac OS X only.

Skype now available for Linux

Yep!. Yippee! The only downside is that the kids will demand another headset. Sigh.

Dog bites man. And Google doing well. That’s news for you

Today’s NYT reports:

“Google … surprised Wall Street yesterday by announcing that its sales and profit margins grew much faster than expected in the fourth quarter.

The results were a sharp contrast to the company’s warnings in November that its revenue for the quarter would probably decline because of increased competition and an inevitable slowing as a result of its growth.

Google’s shares surged in after-hours trading, rising nearly 10 percent to more than $210, a record for the company, which sold shares in its initial offering in August for $85 each.

‘More humans around the world are using Google and they are spending more time with Google per human,’ the chief executive, Eric E. Schmidt, said last night in an interview.”

Hah! Note the use of the word “human”. Those rumours that Google is developing a search engine aimed at dogs are true!

Our borrowing culture

One of the things that most exasperates me about the copyright industry’s crazed drive towards the propertization of everything is how self-defeating it would be if it is allowed to go unchecked. Every cultural artefact that our civilisation has valued is the result of an artist’s conscious and unconscious borrowing from the works of others. Lock down the borrowing and you lock down our culture. Why can’t people see this? It’s not as though it’s a difficult idea. (I tried to express it in my rant to the Westminster Media Forum.)

I found a lovely phrase in Virginia Woolf’s A Room of One’s Own (one of my favourite books), which expresses the same idea beautifully. “Masterpieces”, she writes, “are not single and solitary births; they are the outcome of many years of thinking in common, of thinking by the body of the people, so that the experience of the mass is behind the single voice.”

So where’s the spittoon?

Macintosh for dental hygeniests.

Click here if you’re daft enough to want one. You’ll be taken to a clueless website which omits to mention the only interesting thing about this upholstered absurdity — the price.

Regrets

From the Blog of someone whose server was comprehensively hacked…

“Okay, so how did the guy get in? No idea. The logs were gone. My best guess is a PHP CLI script I had running which allowed a Flash IRC app to re-route through my server to the freenode IRC servers. It was probably running as root and hackable as hell. I’ve also been playing with Apache and PHP 5 lately, so that was running on port 8080, and I really hadn’t made any effort to secure it. Or it could have been any number of exploits out there that I never bothered to patch, or it could’ve been a bad password. We’ll never know. Whatever it was, it was my fault for not maintaining my site better.”