Ged Carroll

Search results for: “unix”

  • Mac software recommendations

    Why a list of Mac software recommendations and why me? I have been using Macs since my early cough, cough – ok let’s just say a long time. I bought my first Macs secondhand. The first one was a sit-up-and beg style Macintosh SE. This is in what nerds now call the Mac Classic style machine. This allowed me to proof club flyers on a computer rather than getting bromides made. The machine paid for itself in less than five months.

    Classic Mac Flickrdither

    I moved on to a PowerBook 165 running ClarisWorks and early Internet software.

    I managed to connect it to the net through my university and surf in 16 shades of grey. Some of the software I recommend has been maintained almost as long as I have been a Mac user which says something about the power of developer’s core ideas.

    At the time there wasn’t the Mac user community that there is now. But what users there were made up for their lack of numbers with fierce passion.

    When you bought a Mac you could tap into a real world community. My University user group met once a month and swapped software and tips.

    It was this rather than the iMac which made sure Apple had a user base by the time Steve Jobs returned. Mac related magazines filled in the knowledge gap and carefully curated demo software. It was through this experience that I learned about some of the apps here. I have stayed loyal to them over the decades and upgraded them as required.

    Nowadays there is a larger, but less passionate community. We tend to share web services rather than apps. We also tend to gather around the biggest rather than the best. I am a great believer in supporting independent development where the applications work better for me. This the lens that I view software through in making the recommendations below. Some of the recommendations come from people I trust like Mat Morrison. Where I have shared a piece of software I don’t use I’ve made this clear below.

    Despite the disappointing* product designs of the last two MacBook Pro revisions, I’ve been surprised as a few more friends move to the platform. They’ve sought advice myself and other friends. So I thought I’d consolidate the knowledge and put it out there.

    The process caused me to reflect on the software that I use and value. I like:

    • Products that work both online and offline, so Hemingway’s native app made it in rather than the Grammarly Chrome plug-in. Internet isn’t as ubiquitous as one would have you believe, God knows I love technology, but I am not blind to its faulty implementation
    • Products that seem to be mature and have gone through a couple of development cycles
    • Software has to fit me, rather than the other way around. I’ve built up behaviours over my time using computers and networks that seem to work for me. But we have different learning styles and habits, which was part of the reason why I’ve suggested choices that I don’t use but others like. Chances are one of them will work for you, but not all of them will
    • I prefer not to depend on web giants like Google, Facebook et al when it comes to software. Their ‘always in beta’ philosophy can make for inconsistent product experiences – look at how the Skype consumer platform UI and functionality has changed for the worse over time. ‘Always-in-beta’ also results in abrupt ‘sunsets’ – that’s tech speak for killed off. This happens for a few reasons. The bigger they get, the bigger a service has to be in order for it to be worthwhile supporting. Their product strategy is about you as a product rather than you as a user. This is true if its an application or an API. Their entry into a market can see them decimating small competition; once that has been completed if there isn’t megabucks they’ll leave just as fast. The RSS news service Google Reader is an exemplar for this process. I love new shiny things as much as the next nerd, but I also don’t want to invest too much into them if they can disappear just as quick

    Communications

    Communications used to be a simple process for me, as I used to run Adium.

    At one time Adium supported ICQ, AIM (AOL Instant Messenger), Google Talk, Yahoo! Messenger and MSN. Adium still exists but many of the main instant messenger platforms don’t. These days things are a little more complicated for me.

    I run Apple’s Messages.app which allows me to use my iPhone’s SMS service and contact other Apple product users. It’s encrypted which is nice. It’s so simple, even my parents have managed to master it.

    I use Slack to keep in touch with a number of professional groups.
    My friends in China and Hong Kong use a mix of WhatsApp desktop app and WeChat’s desktop app.

    I don’t use it so much any more but LINE and Kakao Talk make a couple of good desktop apps too. The Economist and Wall Street Journal do good content on their LINE channels. Bloomberg and the UK agency Battenhall publish some good content on WhatsApp that are worth subscribing to.

    I use the consumer version of Skype to dial into conference call bridge numbers. I have used Skype for Business whist working at Unilever and Publicis – it wasn’t a positive experience.

    I know some friends that find Franz handy, it seems to support an eclectic collection of services; but not all the ones I need covered.

    Evernote alternatives

    Evernote wasn’t the innovator that many people think it is. DevonThink and Yojimbo have been longer in usage amongst a small but dedicated Mac user base.

    DevonThink – positions itself as document management. It also syncs across devices. It is an expansive and thorough piece of software, I’ve tried it. It’s great, but just wasn’t for me. Devon Technologies also have some interesting products that do web and system search. They have been handy for friends in recruitment headhunting research.

    Yojimbo – In my personal experience I found Yojimbo easier to use than DevonThink. Both are great tools, but its a question of what makes the most sense for you. I think you should try both and see which one works best for you.

    Graphics

    OmniGraffle – great for diagrams and flow charts. OMNI are long time Mac developers and always seem to get the most out of the machine.

    News

    I have been vocal in my love of Newsblur RSS reader on other occasions, so won’t go into how fantastic it is here. I use a native Mac app called ReadKit to interface with Newsblur, Pinboard and Buffer on my Mac. This was really handy when I was in China, as the internet operates differently there.

    ReadKit also has good integration with Buffer and Pinboard.in; services I use for social posting and bookmarking respectively. ReadKit isn’t perfect; in particular its persistent windows for posting to Buffer and Pinboard.in can annoy; but it works for me.

    Office software

    I use the default macOS applications Mail.app, Calendar.app and Contacts. app. They work flawlessly with iCloud to sync across iPhone, iPad and Macs. I have Google hosted, Microsoft Exchange and IMAP based accounts running on Mail.app side by side with no problems (so far).

    I use the home edition of Microsoft Office (for Word, Excel and PowerPoint). Going for the home edition is a fixed cost rather than an Office 365 subscription. I use Hemingway to handle the creative process of writing and provide some editorial input. If I am writing a presentation for myself then I will use Keynote instead of PowerPoint.

    I use OmniPlan as an equivalent to Microsoft Project.

    Music

    I still listen to ripped music on iTunes. Streaming services like Spotify often have a limited library of back catalogue music. Carefully curated playlists can see tracks disappear in an arbitrary manner when rights owners pull them from the streaming service. I listen to old DJ mixes, digitally bought music from BeatPort, iTunes and Bleep. I also rip CDs as often these are cheaper than their MP3 counterparts or haven’t made it into online music stores. iTunes also handles my podcasts and audio books. I have an iPod Classic that’s tricked-out with a 256GB SSD. I don’t run my phone’s battery down listening to music. I have been keeping track of my listening using last.fm’s app.

    Productivity

    BBEdit is a 25-year old piece of software for the Mac. It is a text editor but always comes in more handy than that descriptor implies. It’s one of them applications that I discovered on a Mac Format or MacWorld demo disk and then kept on using.

    I haven’t used it, but Duet looks like a handy way of bringing a secondary screen around with you, if you are working out of client offices.

    OmniFocus – list writing made better, but also handy for getting thoughts down on a presentation etc

    Parcel – comes in handy for keeping an eye on your package deliveries.

    PopChar X – I have been using PopChar since I was in college. I got it on a demo disc from MacFormat and immediately saw its benefit. Twenty years later I am still using the application.

    Screen grabs

    Papparazi is my go to screen grab tool, Skitch comes highly recommended from people I trust.

    Utilities

    Apple has got an annoying habit of taking ideas from great utilities and including them in future versions of macOS. This is great for users, but bad for Apple’s long-suffering developer community. It was independent developers who kept the faith during the dark times of the mid-1990s.

    coconutBattery – recommended by a friend who uses it for ensuring that apps aren’t drawing excessive power when you’re on a battery. Here’s looking at you Google Chrome!

    GraphicConvertor – yet another app that is over 20 years old and still supported. It manages to handle the most arcane graphics formats and allows you editing functions.

    Fetch and CyberDuck – Fetch and Transmit have been the go to Mac apps for FTP clients for a long time. Familiarity for me means that Fetch edges out Transmit. Both are great pieces of software that I am happy to recommend. It is also worthwhile considering CyberDuck which is open source. CyberDuck has also done work on supporting Amazon and Google storage which some of my friends find invaluable.

    Little Snitch – in the world of Mac users Little Snitch used to be famous for stopping Adobe software from phoning home. This was back before Creative Cloud when buying software was a major investment for agencies. So there was an interest in cracked user codes and careful monitoring of your network connection. Little Snitch is very useful these days as a really good firewall application.

    Stuffit Deluxe – yes you can do a lot in terminal but you’d be hard pushed to find a compression app that handles as many formats as Stuffit. I even opened up some 20 year old .sea archives from my time in college.

    TechTool – machine health monitoring that has been around since the dark days of the Mac. A great application to keep your Mac running the way you want it to.

    Terminal.app (default app) – macOS is built on a proper operating system NetBSD and the Mach micro-kernel. Terminal allows you to access the power of the operating system. But with great power comes great responsibility, I strongly recommend some additions for your bookshelf. O’Reilly Publishing has some great books that provide advice on how to use the terminal notably Learning Unix for OSX. David Pogue’s Missing Manual series for macOS are worthwhile as references as well.

  • Luxxury I wanna be everything & other things

    Luxxury has released a new track I wanna be everything. Luxxury has the expansive feel of post-disco, pre-house uptempo dance music a la Shep Pettibone, the Latin Rascals and Arthur Baker. More related content here. Luxxury I wanna be everything is digital only.

    A YouTube video on the history of Unix. Now before you roll your eyes and move on to another site. Think about the ubiquity of unix. Key parts of the internet run on Unix. It’s also the reason why URLs and email addresses aren’t case sensitive. Most telecoms equipment runs on Unix or an analogue of the operating system.  I am writing this on a Mac, the core of the operating system is based on BSD – a variant of Unix. If you’re using Windows 10; it owes a lot to VMS – an operating system developed as a Unix analogue in the early and mid 1970s by Digital Equipment Corporation.

    As for Linux; it was originally developed because Linus Torvalds didn’t realise he could download a free version of BSD…. Linux now powers Android smartphones, smart televisions and all of the internet of things stuff that poses a huge security risk in your home. In terms of a written thing; Unix must be right up there with the works of Shakespeare or JRR Tolkien in terms of its importance in the modern world.

    The presentation also puts a bit of personality into what could have been quite a dry subject.

    I found this on Core 77; Nestle posted some epic videos from its Japanese Kit Kat factory. I love the enthusiasm of the presenters in their workwear as they take you through the manufacturing line: K. Kohno and H. Matsumoto are stars. Japanese Kit Kat is not the same as the sad loser biscuits that you pick up in your weekly shop. Instead they are beautifully packaged and come in a constantly changing variety of flavours like cherry blossom or green matcha tea. The process itself is beautiful to watch. In particular look at the packaging automation.

    The New York Times made a lot of allegations about Facebook and its reaction to Russian election tampering. Scott Galloway was on had to do TV interviews that poured petrol on the fire.

    Great video on Johnny Cash’s live concert At Folsom Prison. It is up there with Live at San Quentin also by Johnny Cash.

  • Looking back at Enron and the net in 2000

    Enron: even now is a byword for dodgy dealing and corruption. Back in the summer of 2000, Enron was a large respectable corporation.  Three people came over from Portland, Oregon to London. They looked to pioneer a new way of thinking about broadband capacity and they came to Europe to do peering agreements and business deals. They were ‘Enron Broadband Services’.

    The whole thing was moving at ‘internet speed’, which is a euphemism for crazy fast and with money flittered everywhere.  So I ended up working agency side arranging everything from pre-paid mobile phones to a dinner for 150 internet geeks at The Hempel – a luxury hotel with a minimalist restaurant that used to be in Bayswater.

    Enron acquired Portland General Electric (PGE) back in the mid-1990s. This was part of Enron’s play in deregulated electricity markets. With PGE also came an optical fibre network. The company had been dropping fibre into the ground every time it did reinstatements. Enron then built and leased optical fibre from the likes of Level3.

     

    While I was trying to get these guys in front of the European telecoms press I was hearing from my media contacts that Level3 were actively briefing against them, saying that their business model was full of shit. They were right it was. Enron Broadband Services depended on their ‘Enron Intelligent Network’ a set of proprietary technologies that was supposed to prioritise traffic for quality of service and commercial traffic reasons.

    Like many things at the time the technology was less developed than one would believe. Much of the functionality replicated existing technology such as MPLS. IBM developed their e-commerce offering on the back of ‘suckered’ customers like Boxman.com. Technology was a sketchy business at the time; but it seemed to matter less as the world was being changed. This was pre-9/11 and Gap was convincing many people that khakis were cool.

    https://youtu.be/OLSjcGjLQ7s

    In the case of IBM, they seem to be still doing similar practices two decades later; this time with their Watson machine learning offering.

    The problem was that the ‘Enron Intelligent Network‘ was a relatively minor sin compared to everything else that was going on in the corporation.

    What happened to the companies mentioned in the Enron slides?

    • ARC
    • Atom Films – Founded in 1998, Atom was bought in 2006 by MTV Networks, Google had considered buying it when it eventually purchased YouTube. Eventually it was absorbed into Comedy Central
    • Avici Systems – was hit hard by the dot com bust. It eventually pulled out of the core network router business and changed its name to Soapstone Networks
    • Ciena – Ciena still exists as a networking equipment and software company. It managed to ride out the dot com bust by diversifying its portfolio of networking equipment
    • Cisco Systems – continues to be one of the world’s largest companies in networking equipment
    • Compaq – never managed to fully integrate its acquisition of the Digital Equipment Corporation (DEC) and ended up being acquired by Hewlett-Packard. In 2015; Hewlett Packard split into two businesses. HP held the PC, printers and related businesses. Hewlett Packard Enterprise contained business software (subsequently merged with Micro Focus), services business (merged with Computer Sciences Corporation) and a hardware business.
    • CountryCool.com – started as a country music site and seems to have morphed into an analogue of Comedy Central
    • The Drew Carey Show – ABC situation comedy that finished its run in 2004
    • EasyStreet – ISP that is still going, mostly reselling other vendors products
    • Epoch Internet – was the first tier one ISP on the west coast when it was founded in 1994 and played a crucial role in some of the first commercial peering points. It was eventually acquired by MegaPath in 2004. MegaPath in turn is owned by Fusion Connect, who were recently acquired by Birch Communications Inc. as part of a further consolidation of business ISPs in the US
    • Firstworld
    • FlashNet – FlashNet now only exist as a legacy domain that AT&T supports for customers. FlashNet Communications was founded in 1995 as a Fort Worth, Texas-based internet service provider. It had an IPO on the NASDAQ in March 1999 and was acquired by Prodigy Communications in November that year. Prodigy was acquired by AT&T in September 2001
    • FYINet.com – FYINet was a Houston, Texas based company that provided training materials on CD ROM about networking technology. They then moved their content to the web and promoted their 3D animation and interactive design capabilities. They seem to have disappeared sometime around 2002.
    • GST Telecommunications
    • GTE Internetworking – GTE Internetworking became Genuity when its parent company merged with Bell Atlantic to found Verizon. It was eventually acquired by Level3, which was in turn acquired by CenturyLink 2017
    • Inktomi- Inktomi was one of the leading providers of web caching for both content and streaming. It became a key provider for early content delivery networks. It was eventually acquired by Yahoo! in 2003. Yahoo! was acquired by Verizon and merged into Aol as part of Oath
    • iStream TV encoding – iStream continues to provide solutions for both video on demand and live streaming. Turner acquired a majority share in the business during 2015
    • latinsoccer.net – Mexican based site that covered Latin American football news. It featured both video and audio which wasn’t the norm for the time. According to Archive.org’s Wayback Machine, the site didn’t survive the dot com bust
    • Lucent Technologies – acquired in term by Alcatel and Nokia
    • MShow.com – Chicago-based Mshow provided interactive broadcast services. It was founded in 1986, had one round of funding in 2000 and is no longer in business
    • NetRail – provided backbone networks and hosting to ISPs. It was acquired by Cogent Communications Group in 2001
    • NextVenue – specialised in video and audio streaming, it was acquired by iBEAM Broadcasting – a satellite networking company. iBEAM went under in 2002, its assets were acquired by Williams Communications LLC. Williams is now owned by Level3
    • Oracle – Oracle remains a leading provider of enterprise software
    • OrcoNet.com – was a US ISP, eventually filed for chapter 7 bankruptcy in California
    • pdq.net – was an ISP. It was acquired by Internet America. Internet America was acquired by JAB Broadband and folded into Rise Broadband
    • Q4i.com – defunct online brokerage with video component for independent brokers
    • RCN – Boston-based ISP that has gone on to become the sixth largest cable and broadband provider in the US
    • rmi.net – Rocky Mountain Internet was an early provider of dial-up connectivity. It moved into e-business for SMEs and eventually became part of EarthLink, which went on to consolidate with Windstream
    • showdigital – provided broadband to the hospitality industry. Its assets were acquired in 2001 by STSN
    • Sun Microsystems – Sun Microsystems never managed to recover from the dot com bust and was eventually acquired by Oracle. Oracle now sells its own brand of hardware that can run Solaris UNIX – Solaris is now owned by Oracle who continues to maintain it alongside a distribution of Linux
    • Sycamore Networks – Sycamore Networks was wound up by its shareholders in early 2013. During the internet boom it had a market capitalisation of $44.8 billon. It was worth just $64 million when wound up.
    • TeleCommute Solutions – Atlanta based ISP that specialised in providing workforce connectivity to companies. Crunchbase lists it as closed
    • Telescan – founded in 1982 as a provider of stock charting tools, it eventually became part of TD Ameritrade’s Thinkorswim
    • TotalCricket
    • USWest – one of the original ‘baby Bells’. It merged with Qwest in 2000. Qwest was acquired by CenturyLink in 2011
    • Verio – founded as an ISP in Denver. Acquired by NTT of Japan in 2000
    • VillageNet – small Canadian ISP which is still running

  • A few thoughts on innovation

    I started thinking about a post on innovation, after an agency meeting about a possible project. My friend Nigel Scott has been researching the venture capital industry. His ideas fired some of the thoughts in this post.

    It caused me to reflect again on innovation and the way we think about it.

    Innovation rewards hard work?

    We are often told that innovators work really hard and strive to achieve their goals. In Where Wizards Stay Up Late – there is a description of Silicon Valley culture. Late nights by engineers and takeout food was considered one of the factors that drove the early Internet. Engineers were building new technologies as they went at break-neck speeds.

    The problem is that for many jobs there is no 9-to-5 now. When I worked in agencies 12+ hour days were typical depending on the client load. Yet we weren’t pulling Cannes Lions award-winning work out of our butts.

    In China, many companies now work to ‘996‘. That is 9am to 9pm, 6 days a week as core hours. This is basic a minimum requirement for engineers. Somewhere like Huawei, try to build a ‘wolf’ mentality. They work their staff much harder and they’re expected to retire at 45 – presumably physically and mentally burned out.

    Working hard is a hygiene factor, technology has made it that way. Your typical Uber driver is gamed by the driver app to put in excess of 12-hours/day. Both knowledge and unskilled workers would have a similar level of time poverty.

    Innovation is like buses

    For long-suffering public transport users in the UK many services are compared to buses. Due to road traffic and scheduling, there would often be an overly long time for a bus to arrive. When it eventually did, there would be another two following very closely behind.

    You can see a similar thing with innovation.

    Whilst we’re used to thinking of John Logie Baird as the inventor of television – and Baird worked very hard on television. The reality is that television was based on a series of inventions from the middle of the 19th century onwards.

    There are at least 20 different inventors who had some claim to coming up with the light bulb. But Edison did manage to create the first commercially successful bulb. British school children are taught about Joseph Swan’s carbon filament bulb. This was let down by the vacuum process in manufacturing and poor quality electricity supplies so the bulbs didn’t last very long. Swan had solved his bulb’s problem and changed the filament.

    It was only at this point that Edison started his research into electric light bulbs.

    More recently, I was talking to an agency about a piece of work that didn’t come off in the end. The discussion turned to a drug that was very recently launched. The problem was that although they were first to market, they weren’t the only inventors. A large rival had launched drug approvals for their product in markets were original firm hadn’t focused on for its initial approvals. Another two companies were immediately behind them and likely to drop their prices (and profit margins) to make up for later market entry.

    If one thinks about the modern computer with its graphical user interface. This was created by layers and layers of innovation. Doug Engelbart, whilst working at SRI International demonstrated the following to an audience of government officials in 1968

    • GUI interface
    • Mouse pointing device
    • Text manipulation
    • Collaborative editing
    • Video conferencing (a la Skype)

    The Xerox PARC (Palo Alto Research Center) refined Engelbart’s concepts further with a complete modern office by 1973. Steve Jobs and his team got into see it, which drove work on the Lisa and then the Macintosh. Microsoft got in and eventually came up with Windows. Microsoft also learned from building software applications for the Macintosh.

    Digital Research invented their own GUI layer called GEM. GEM was demoed at Comdex in 1984; right about the time Apple launched the Macintosh. Commodore launched the Amiga in 1985 and also added multi-tasking – the ability to run two or more apps at the same time.

    These are just a few examples for the sake of brevity. But the inventor slaving away in isolation to come up with something, uniquely innovative is not rooted in evidence. Yet intellectual property law gives lie to this myth. I don’t want to belittle the work done, but it is as if there is a certain amount of predestination to invention based on prior innovations.

    Innovation happens

    This predestination of technological progress is something that Kevin Kelly labeled the Technium. In his book What Technology Wants he posited that technological progress can be slowed, but nothing short of an apocalypse can stop it completely.  Here’s what Kevin Kelly said in an interview with Edge.org when supporting the launch of What Technology Wants:

    The technium is a superorganism of technology. It has its own force that it exerts. That force is part cultural (influenced by and influencing of humans), but it’s also partly non-human, partly indigenous to the physics of technology itself.

    We understand the innovation process?

    Nigel Scott has done some research on the historic records of venture capital companies. And a key finding was the Silicon Valley venture capital firms do a ‘random walk’ on Sandhill Road. It implies that much of the advice dispensed is survivor bias or post-rationalisation.

    You hear the phrase ‘pivot’ which means changing the model to profitablity. Old time VCs used to talk about investing people or teams, which explains why research by Boston Consulting Group found that women get less funding than male entrepreneurs.

    Venture capitalists have the monetary incentive and the budgets to develop a thorough understanding of innovation, yet they don’t seem to apply it successfully. Which begs the question – how much do we really understand about innovation?

    Innovation: did software really eat the world?

    Back in 2011, Marc Andreesen wrote an op-ed (opinion piece) in the Wall Street Journal ‘Why Software Is Eating The World‘.

    Six decades into the computer revolution, four decades since the invention of the microprocessor, and two decades into the rise of the modern Internet, all of the technology required to transform industries through software finally works and can be widely delivered at global scale.

    Over two billion people now use the broadband Internet, up from perhaps 50 million a decade ago, when I was at Netscape, the company I co-founded. In the next 10 years, I expect at least five billion people worldwide to own smartphones, giving every individual with such a phone instant access to the full power of the Internet, every moment of every day.

    On the back end, software programming tools and Internet-based services make it easy to launch new global software-powered start-ups in many industries — without the need to invest in new infrastructure and train new employees. In 2000, when my partner Ben Horowitz was CEO of the first cloud computing company, Loudcloud, the cost of a customer running a basic Internet application was approximately $150,000 a month. Running that same application today in Amazon’s cloud costs about $1,500 a month.

    As one can see Andreesen’s title is a bit of a misnomer. Software is only the front end of a technology stack that is transforming the world. That transformation started before the web, before broadband infrastructure; with the rise of integrated circuits. Machine learning is doing some impressive things, but they are part of a continuum. Machine learning in data mining is building on work done in academia in the 1980s. It is replicating work done in the 1990s on decision support systems and business intelligence software.

    Even, back in the early 1990s, commercial chemical labs were using software to guide product development. Rather than having to test every combination religiously; you started inputting formulations and results. The software would then extrapulate possible combinations and narrow down on an ideal formulation much quicker.

    Its_a_Sony

    As for machine learning in consumer products; it mirrors the late 1980s. Fuzzy logic came out of a 1965 research paper by Lofti A Zadeh at the University of California, Berkeley.

    Japanese manufacturers built lifts that optimised for traffic flows of people. Microwaves that set its own timer for defrosting an item. Washing machines customised spin cycles based on the drum load. Televisions adjusted their brightness based on the ambient conditions of the room. (When similar technology was rolled out on early Intel MacBook Pro screens and keyboard lights it was billed as game changing). It removed a lot of blur from camcorder videos. All applications that are not a million miles away from smart homes and consumer technology today. They improved energy efficiency, with precise lighting, heating or cooling.

    A western analysis of Japanese technology companies; usually cites their ‘defeat’ by Silicon Valley as an apparent lack of software skills. I’d argue that this lacks an understanding of Japanese software capabilities. From gaming to rock solid RTOS (real time operating systems); Japanese products met Andreesen’s software definition. The Japanese didn’t manage to sell enterprise software in the same way as Silicon Valley. It is something to bear in mind given the current glut of machine learning-orientated businesses in Silicon Valley. Does it mean that we won’t have the type of general AI applications that we’ve been promised in the future? No far from it, though a technological idea often takes several tries before it breaks through.

    What becomes apparent is that software making an impact is merely the last stage of previous innovations. The problem with Andreesen’s model is that it portends what Judy Estrin described as innovation entropy.

    Andreesen’s model couldn’t exist without:

    • Packet-switched networks – 1960 (RAND)
    • Unix-type operating systems – mid 1960s (MIT, AT&T Bell Labs, General Electric)
    • C programming language – 1972 (Unix development team)
    • Optical fibre networks – 1965 (Telefunken)
    • Internet router – 1966 (UK National Physical Laboratory)
    • ADSL 1988 (Bellcore)
    • DOCSIS 1997 (CableLabs)

    So the core technologies that Andreesen’s software relied upon to eat the world was between 15 and 50 years old. It also relied on a massive overinvestment in optical fiber.  The dark fiber was done as part of a telecoms boom that occurred around the same time as the dot com boom. Software isn’t eating the world, its just the cherry on top of innovation that’s gone before. More importantly, software seems to be an end point and  doesn’t seem to extend the base of innovation further.

    A second problem is that semiconductors phenomenal progress in integrated circuits is slowing down. Part of the problem is that more money is being dumped into disrupting the supply and demand for service industries, rather than funding start-ups who will power the next wave of underlying innovation that future software will rely on.

  • China male beauty market + more

    The booming male beauty market in China – Daxue Consulting – Market Research China – finding the latest Asian male beauty market trend – Korean idol flower boy image difficult to square with mainstream male beauty products. I guess this male beauty market trend must be analogous to the new romantics of the early 1980s. In that case the new romantics had a high degree of cultural impact that dwarfed the actual size of the movement.

    Hayden Cox On Becoming An IWC Ambassador, And The Watches We Should Be Wearing – GQ – interesting choice of ambassador aiming at millennials. Hayden Cox shapes surfboards. He started Haydenshapes when he was in high school. In this respects his career mirrors the old school shapers like Shawn Stüssy in 1970s. Cox’s business is still laser focused on shaping boards as a business person.

    It is interesting that IWC focused on an entrepreneur, rather than an athlete, celebrity or adventurer. There is a certain commonality that can be drawn between the craft of shaping and the expertise of the veteran watch maker.

    Leading taxi-hailing app providers in Japan and South Korea to collaborate | The Japan Times – interesting move by Kakao. It shows the rise in Korea – Japan tourism. This goes against the wider policy dynamics prevalent in Korea – Japan government relations. Both vendors need to partner to deal with the South East Asian, Chinese competitors and Uber. In technology spheres, scale matters; innovation doesn’t.

    Doing One Thing, Well: The UNIX Philosophy | Hackaday – great essay on the design philosophy on Unix. The design philosophy was based around simplicity. Specific pieces of software were built to do one thing well. (That approach was mirrored decades later in web 2.0 design ethos as well). These applications were designed to work effortlessly together. This all made computing simpler and more accessible. It is the foundations that the web from network core, to smartphone clients run on. This post is written using Unix powered laptop and hosted on an instance of Linux (an operating system that apes Unix).

    Baidu in Hot Water After Hospital Mix-Up – Caixin Global – not the first time for Baidu

More posts