It’s hard to explain to someone who didn’t live through it how transformation technology has been. When I was a child a computer was something mysterious. My Dad has managed to work his way up from the shop floor of the shipyard where he worked and into the planning office.
One evening he broad home some computer paper. I was fascinated by the the way the paper hinged on perforations and had tear off side edges that allowed it to be pulled through the printer with plastic sprockets connecting through holes in the paper.
My Dad used to compile and print off work orders using an ICL mainframe computer that was timeshared by all the shipyards that were part of British Shipbuilders.
I used the paper for years for notes and my childhood drawings. It didn’t make me a computer whiz. I never had a computer when I was at school. My school didn’t have a computer lab. I got to use Windows machines a few times in a regional computer labs. I still use what I learned in Excel spreadsheets now.
My experience with computers started with work and eventually bought my own secondhand Mac. Cut and paste completely changed the way I wrote. I got to use internal email working for Corning and internet connectivity when I went to university. One of my friends had a CompuServe account and I was there when he first met his Mexican wife on an online chatroom, years before Tinder.
Leaving college I set up a Yahoo! email address. I only needed to check my email address once a week, which was fortunate as internet access was expensive. I used to go to Liverpool’s cyber cafe with a friend every Saturday and showed him how to use the internet. I would bring any messages that I needed to send pre-written on a floppy disk that also held my CV.
That is a world away from the technology we enjoy now, where we are enveloped by smartphones and constant connectivity. In some ways the rate of change feels as if it has slowed down compared to the last few decades.
Before we think about the IBM ThinkPad 701, I wanted to flag that I’ve been a Mac user for almost all of my computer-owning adult life. But there have only been a couple of devices that have ever given me PC-envy.
The first one was the IBM ThinkPad 701, my friend at college Jouni whom I lived in halls with at the time had a 701 and the product design blew me away.
The IBM ThinkPad 701 had a carefully designed set of accessories providing a full system of accessories that the road warrior would need including a desk dock, cable adaptors, spare batteries and a detachable disk drive. That was clever and as good as what Apple was doing with with its PowerBook Duo sub notebook. It’s hard to explain how connectivity pre USB was much trickier.
Surprisingly for a computer manufacturer, IBM turned out laptops that had interesting industrial design. They used magnesium alloy shells, titanium and carbon fibre in different model designs over the years and got less credit than they deserved for it.
Richard Sapper, a German product designer based in Italy came up with the design language for the ThinkPad which he modeled on the traditional black lacquer bento box. An ex-automotive engineer with Mercedes Benz Sapper was better known for his work with Alessi and the Tizio lamp for Artemide.
Sapper has kept a connection with the ThinkPad brand and is involved as a design consultant for the current ThinkPad range made by Lenovo.
What made the IBM ThinkPad 701 special was the butterfly keyboard designed by John Karidis solved the problem of making a portable computer with a full-size keyboard. It had a better action than modern laptops in terms typist feedback and was a compact full size keyboard. This was unheard of at the time. It was delicate the way it folded into place as one opened the lid on the laptop and robust enough to cope with travails of mobile working. More design related posts here.
Ferdinand A. Porsche, 76, Dies – Designed Celebrated 911 – NYTimes.com – Butzi Porsche dead. Butzi Porsche came from a family of engineers. His grandfather led the original team behind the Volkswagen Beetle. His father had been part of that engineering team and went on to found what we now know as Porsche. However, Butzi Porsche wasn’t engineer but a designer with technical chops. After an infamous meeting of the Porsche family, no members were allowed to work at Porsche. Butzi Porsche didn’t get to do more after he designed the 911. Instead Butzi Porsche started Porsche Design. Butzi Porsche did product design for other companies. Porsche Design also came out with its own products with Butzi Porsche designing watches, glasses and more. Butzi Porsche resigned from Porsche Design in 2005 due to ill health.
Why Are So Many Americans Single? : The New Yorker – single living was not a social aberration but an inevitable outgrowth of mainstream liberal values. Supported by modern communications platforms and urban living infrastructure: coffee shops, laundrettes
Kraft break-up yields marketing shift: Warc.com – the break-up is ironic when you look at the trouble they went to, in order to buy Cadburys and then break their business down broadly into Cadburys + Jacobs Suchard vs Kraft US.
HK’s rich hesitate to have babies | SCMP.com – interesting takeaways: didn’t want the emotional commitment, time poverty, financial stability / too small a living space and concerned about the local environment not being suitable for children. It was interesting that the education system was given such a hard time, given that it’s better than the UK system (paywall)
agnès b. | VICE – great interview with French fashion designer agnés b
Marketing
Fueling the hunger for The Hunger Games – The New York Times – really interesting comment: …during the 1980s you bought the poster and once a year went to a convention and met your people for something like Star Trek (and Star Wars). It misses out the fact that you are likely to have had real-world friends that you would have talked about it with as well – marketers now seem blindsided to the real-world
I had delayed writing about this as I had a busy run-up to Easter and just about everyone of note in the Bay Area seems to have weighed in on the Facebook Yahoo legal case over patents. Fred Wilson (aka A VC) channeled the concern that the start-up community in general over wide-ranging patents being a tax on innovation.
The new, new thing
There is a certain amount of prejudice inbuilt against incumbents going on; Silicon Valley doesn’t make big money from existing large businesses but the new, new thing – for example:
IBM vs. Apple, VisiCalc, Oracle and countless Boston corridor enterprise technology brands before them
Beckman Instruments vs.the traitorous eight who went on to found just about every other semiconductor company from the late 1950s through to the early 1970s: Fairchild Semiconductor, Intel, Intersil, AMD, National Semiconductor, LSI Logic and venture capital firm Kleiner Perkins
Microsoft vs. Apple, Oracle, Sun Microsystems, the open source community
Google vs. Facebook and just about anybody else looking to make money from online advertising
Monomyth archetypes
I don’t necessarily hold this against them, it is the classic tale of David and Goliath that resonates at a deep level in the human psyche. It probably helped us move beyond being slightly smarter than the average ape and turn our use of tools into a decisive advantage with humans becoming the apex predator throughout the world.
What a lot of these arguments are failing to do is look at the underlying form in the Facebook Yahoo patent case:
Yes, the patent system is broken
Yes, Yahoo! has multiple business issues which would merit a series of posts in it’s own right
Yes, Yahoo! is unlikely to survive at least in its present form. Though for reasons that I have gone into previously I don’t think that Microsoft is a suitable suitor (just look at what has happened to its continued inability to match Yahoo!’s previous returns on search with Microsoft AdCenter) and more controversially I didn’t think that it was serious about its takeover bid first time around
Yes, Yahoo! is likely to be outmaneuvered by Facebook and be on a hiding to nothing
But for me, the story isn’t about Yahoo! or the inequitable nature of patent laws, but about Facebook and its business practices in relation to data.
Facebook Yahoo case similar to 1990s Microsoft practices
In the 1990s file formats: .doc, .xls, .ppt and others were used by Microsoft to leverage a competitive advantage. Competitor applications couldn’t open them; so your information was locked into using Microsoft Office software. This was one of the reasons why the web was so transformational; HTML opened up publishing of documents that had been previously locked into Microsoft Office – electronic versions of scientific papers, price lists etc.
Data portability is the document format of web 2.0 (or social web). During my time at Yahoo! we introduced the requirement to sign into Flickr using a Yahoo! ID, Stewart Butterfield and the team at Flickr worked hard to ensure that existing Flickr customers who didn’t want to have a Yahoo! ID could move their pictures off the service.
The idea was that the customer’s data was their property and allowing them to freely move was as American as apple pie, capitalism and the free market. Allowing customer’s data to be portable fitted in with the web being free as in speech ethic that had predominated up until then. Portable customer data kept you honest and encouraged you to innovate as losing a customer was only one export click away.
In the case of Facebook; the data that really matters is your address book. Whilst Facebook eventually allowed consumers to download their profile information (after it had gained hegemony in the US social network sector), it holds on fast to your address book. Om Malk over at GigaOM wrote a really good post on how Facebook leeched off Yahoo! user’s address book to build its business, but didn’t allow Yahoo! users to transfer data back the other way.
This had a detrimental effect Yahoo!’s already weakened business. It wasn’t only Yahoo!, Facebook did the same on Plaxo and has been in conflict with Google over the same issue. In the Yahoo! patent case; Yahoo! is in the position of shooter and patsy – but like the dreams of conspiracy theorists looking for a dark hand moving the pieces around the board – Facebook is responsible.
So consumers and some companies got screwed on their address book; but what the great and good of the start-up community who criticised Yahoo! forget is where Yahoo!, Plaxo and Google have gone before their start-ups could be tomorrow. The problem is the over-reliance on Facebook Connect as a federated ID and as a marketing tool using consumer news feeds in their word-of-mouth marketing campaign strategies.
Federated identities
Federated IDs are not a new concept, Microsoft tried to have their Passport technology adopted in a similar way some ten years ago and it was stymied because of early adopter and technology sector mistrust.
Like Facebook, the businesses adopting Facebook Connect usually rely on some sort of advertising-related business model, either for their revenue, or for garnering customers; yet with Facebook Connect – Facebook holds all the cards on targeting information that means:
Your advertising platform will always be worse than Facebook’s because they have a better customer view – as we’ve seen in search this is likely to turn into a zero-sum game
For more e-commerce-based businesses, Facebook data could be used by rivals to directly target your customers – because Facebook already has your customer list. By using Facebook Connect you already gave it to them and they could even infer a good estimate of customer engagement were by how often and how long they logged in
It has the potential to be digital equivalent of the way Standard Oil used its dominant position as a buyer of railroad transportation to screw over rivals. By supporting Facebook in the Yahoo! patents case; I believe that leading players within the start-up community inadvertently darkened their own futures.
What Microsoft was like back in the day
It is hard to imagine now, but in the mid-1990s Silicon Valley was genuinely afraid of Microsoft:
Another big factor was the fear of Microsoft. If anyone at Yahoo considered the idea that they should be a technology company, the next thought would have been that Microsoft would crush them.
It’s hard for anyone much younger than me to understand the fear Microsoft still inspired in 1995. Imagine a company with several times the power Google has now, but way meaner. It was perfectly reasonable to be afraid of them. Yahoo watched them crush the first hot Internet company, Netscape. It was reasonable to worry that if they tried to be the next Netscape, they’d suffer the same fate. How were they to know that Netscape would turn out to be Microsoft’s last victim?
That was Y Combinator’s Paul Graham on Microsoft back in the day and how fear of it partly sewed the seeds of failure at Yahoo! Great ideas couldn’t get funded if they where considered to fall anywhere near the purview of Microsoft – and Microsoft wanted everything, at that time the company mission statement was:
A computer on every desk and in every home running Microsoft software
Now the vision uses softer language that also takes into account technological change with Steve Ballmer describing it as:
…enabling people and businesses to realize their full potential
Microsoft still isn’t a cuddly business by any means. Let me show you: Some six years ago I spent a weekend in San Francisco on the dime of the agency I worked with at the time. The reason why I had a free weekend was that I was originally going out there to pitch an international brief for an enterprise technology company – and the weekend should have been very busy and productive in preparation fo the pitch early the following week.
The US folks had checked the substantial non-compete list that we had been provided with by Redmond and senior clients had been checked in with and they were ok with it.
Happy days, I was put on a Thursday flight from Heathrow to San Francisco with British Airways. I deplaned, got through immigration and got a taxi into town. I went to the hotel first; dropped by bags off and washed my face and then got a taxi to our San Francisco office down near the ball park.
As I walked in the door, I could see of the office general manager getting off the phone. Apparently my trip was a waste of time; someone at head office had a call with someone at Microsoft who asked us to withdraw at the last minute as the company operated in a space that Microsoft would like to enter in the next five years.
I ended up spending the Martin Luther King day weekend at the Hotel Monaco close to Union Square and spent much of the Saturday exploring the Asian Art Museum, the then Sony Metreon centre and shopping off Haight.
The point I am trying to make is that fear is relative, Microsoft is a changed but still fiercely ambitious and competitive business.
Facebook power
Facebook is much more than Microsoft. If we look at address books as an example; Facebook bought and closed down Malaysian start-up Octazen to close the door on others using their technology to import contact lists in February 2010.
Facebook is keenly competitive in the way that Microsoft has been, but it has learned from Microsoft’s mistakes; it has lawyered and lobbied-up much earlier in its development, so with Facebook there will be no humiliating Judge Jackson trial which gifted the start-up culture of Silicon Valley a second chance.
I believe that in the medium-to-long-term Facebook will have a neutron bomb effect on the Bay Area start-up finance community and at the moment they only have themselves to blame.
Although it may seem counter-intuitive to the start-up community at the moment, fueling Yahoo!’s patent duel with Facebook may make more sense in the long run.
Gore-Tex Under Siege from Waterproof Fabric Newcomers | OutsideOnline.com – interesting how Goretex waterproof fabric stranglehold mirrors Microsoft’s position in the technology sector. Goretex was historically under threat from a number of systems that had varying degrees of impact. Hipora is a silicon coating structure invented by Korean firm Kolon, Schoeller’s C change which has temperature dependent venting, SympaTex commonly used when you see ‘no brand’ 3-layer laminate, usually lower price products that would lose margin paying for Goretex licensing. Lowe Alpine’s ceramic coated triple point fabric, but managed Goretex to survive and Lowe Alpine didn’t. There are other competitor products including I suspect that the other fabrics will become niche pieces unless they sort their marketing out. Goretex is primarily a branding exercise, that sets minimum standards such as taped seals. Much of Goretex intellectual property has been voided or circumvented.
Marketing is where the Goretex difference lies now, but it is known for a confrontational relationship with partners.
Kwok brothers arrested by HK watchdog – FT.com – Sun Hung Kai is Hong Kong’s largest property company. Surprising that they are involved as the big firms there generally keep their noses clean (paywall)
Whilst the UK government flights with the major carriers including Vodafone over 4G whilst simultaneously wanting universal broadband for rural communities, Korea has a real-life working LTE eco-system.
So what’s it like?
The handsets come with a spare battery and desk charger as realistic battery life is somewhere south of an iPhone 4S.
The devices sport big screens and other features like a built-in mobile television receiver that allows you to watch the five main TV channels – so its hard to just blame the network.
Call quality was an issue, primarily because of the way the calls are handled, the Korean careers were using 3G networks to carry voice calls. This means that calls are affected by network handover issues and the complexity of the chip architectures needed to do this.
Network coverage is patchy, which is why the 4G networks have bolstered their offerings with wi-fi roaming. You can’t go into a coffee shop or a department store and not find a paid for wi-fi service.
The key thing for me was that there wasn’t a key application that demonstrated the real-world superiority of LTE over 3G services. And this means that its hard to drive sales beyond the early adopter community unless carriers use bundle-based price promotions and subsidised handsets. One thing that did strike me whilst on the road was that laptop users didn’t bother using 3-or-4G dongles at all – which is where I thought LTE would be able to demonstrate superiority. More wireless related content here.
