The inspiration for this post on Google Glass came from a conversation that I had with Ian Wood around this time last year and a twitter exchange that I had earlier this week with Excapite. We started off talking about what Tumblr meant to Yahoo! and what it meant in the broader scheme of things in the digital eco-system and the primacy of mobile device experience in the world now.
Nigel suggested that the future is likely to look like Google Glass, but that the current device is too early rather like the Apple Newton PDA. Part of the problem is a social one, the device usage is too conscious, so you have the ‘Glasshole’ phenomena as demonstrated by the white men wearing Google Glass tumblr account.
I suspect that the problem with Google Glass is partly one of execution rather like the HP-150 personal computer of the early 1980s. Why the comparison with a thirty-year old computer design?
Let me quote from chapter nine of Accidental Empires by Robert X. Cringely
The other problem with the HP-150 was what was supposed to have been its major selling point—the touchscreen, which was a clever idea nobody really wanted. Not only was it hard to get software companies to make their products work with HP’s touchscreen technology, users didn’t like it. Secretaries, who apparently measure their self-worth by typing speed, didn’t want to take their fingers off the keys. Even middle managers, who were the intended users of the system, didn’t like the touch screen. The technology was clever, but it should have been a tip-off that HP’s own engineers chose not to use the systems. You could walk through the cavernlike open offices at HP headquarters in those days without seeing a single user pointing at his or her touchscreen.
Funnily enough touch screens were tried again and again. They only seemed to sell in reasonable quantities when they were on devices that:
Didn’t have a keyboard (as standard) (PalmPilot, iPhone, iPad)
Didn’t try to do the kind of tasks that one would need a keyboard for. When one thinks about the the PalmPilot, the iPad and even the iPhone they are primarly information consumption devices
I think that the glance up display Google Glass has a level of social and user awkwardness similar to the touch display. Google are on to something, the use of sneaky applications that would provide the right information at the right time. But the very act of using the device is a big tell that is both distracting and takes away the social impact of the information provided.
If we think about the way similar displays are used in fiction:
The Terminator – it isn’t obvious that the data is being used as it is ‘in retina’ but cyborgs are really anti-social. In the first Terminator film, the posters showed the cyborg status information projected on to the inside of the Gargoyle ANSI Classics sported by Arnold Schwartzenegger
Jacking in to the ‘net in William Gibson’s sprawl series of novels have goggles and similar visual tools that augment the characters bodies; both of which detach the character socially as they go online or put them outside of the social norm with their artificial nature in the case of body augmentation
In real-life Zeiss and Sony’s personal cinema video goggle sets detach the user from their surroundings physically by concealing the eyes and psychologically by providing an immersive audio visual experience. So visual overlay may not be the best way of going about things.
When one thinks about the UN general assembly or news broadcasters, the participants get their cues via a discrete ear phone or assistant whispering within earshot. Sound may be a better way of providing sneak application information. However despite services like Siri the technology for audio input and output may not be there. At least in small discrete package with a reasonable battery life. More related content can be found 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 started thinking about what shaped me and came away with this list of ten books that influenced my view of the world. Even the nature of being able to read was a major mind opening experience. The world opened up from me from our neighbourhood and occasional visits to the family farm in Ireland. Starting off the ten books is a series, which is probably cheating but its my list.
Happy Venture reading system books with Dick and Dora. My first memory of reading was about a boy named Dick and a girl named Dora. They had a pet dog called Nip and a cat called Fluff. Part of the reason why these books appeared is that I related to Dick. Although I didn’t have a sister or a cat, I did share the house with a willful yellow Labrador that would get up to similar devilment to Nip. There was something of the haiku about the sentences in the book:
This is Dick.
Run, Dick, run.
Nip is a dog.
Nip, run to Dick.
What I didn’t know to much later is that the books were carefully crafted by a husband and wife team of Australian educationalists who had done a lot of research during the second world war on primary school learning. Fred and Eleanor Schonell’s books were the standard reading system for English pretty much everywhere outside the US. There are some who think that the US Dick and Jane books by Gray and Sharp plagarised the Happy Venture books. The Schonells also created the next stage you went on to reading the Wide Range Readers. If you want to blame anybody for this blog, Fred and Eleanor Schonell would be as good a people as any.
Ireland: a history by Robert Kee. Growing up at the end of the 1970s was a complicated time. The world was a more chaotic place than it is now (though I realise that maybe hard to believe). My Dad believed that I needed to have a good grasp of my own history and that would allow me to drive my own path. So he got me to read this dense academic history book that was originally written to accompany Ireland: a TV history – a co-production between RTÉ & the BBC. Kee was a British journalist who’d worked on Panorama with the series producer Jeremy Isaacs. Isaacs had produced The World At War in the early 1970s and my Dad had been a fan of the series because of its thoroughness and multifaceted viewpoint. To be honest with you I dreaded reading this book at the time because it was so big and there was so many words, but my Dad’s rationale stuck with me.
How It Works – Marshall Cavendish part works. My Dad used to read a lot whilst working shifts in the shipyard. He used to buy pulp paperbacks by the likes of Hammond Innes and Alistair McLean from a second-hand bookseller in Birkenhead market. One day he came home after being to the bookseller that lunch time. Instead of the usual couple of paperbacks was an open cardboard box under his arm and inside was a 50-volume part-work magazine published by Marshall Cavendish called How It Works. I used to dip in and out of it coming out of it with the answers to questions that I never knew I wanted to ask. The articles were generally better written and illustrated than the comparable Wikipedia article and there was a serendipity in randomly picking an issue and reading. Marshall Cavendish have re-released this at different times in different editions and with different numbers of volumes. I got rid of our box of How It Works magazines and instead managed to buy them as an encyclopedia set with much more robust bindings a few years later.
The Hobbit by J. R. R. Tolkien. I remember being at primary school and hating having to pretend being Bilbo creeping around the dragon’s lair as some sort of half-assed drama class. I can still remember vividly the polished wooden floor feeling slippery beneath my socked feet. It was accompanied by the BBC dramatisation of the book which the school had a recording of. The recording inspired me to read Tolkien’s book despite the acting lesson trauma. The Hobbit acted as an on-ramp to the Lord Of The Rings series, I was fascinated by the intricate structure of it all: the multi-layered story that Tolkien created.
Modern Petroleum Technology – Institute of Petroleum. I had wanted to work in the oil industry for two main reasons: at the time I was living at the top of the Mersey basin which was dominated by oil refineries and chemical plants. Whilst environmentalists may see them as monstrosities in my child eyes they were a silver and fiery cathedral. The second influence was John Wayne’s portrayal of Red Adair in Hellfighters.
My Dad managed to borrow an old edition of Modern Petroleum Technology and I read through both volumes to help me prepare for a career in the oil industry. I eventually left the oil industry to study in marketing at university, but the experience that I gained put me in good stead for my subsequent roles.
The Art Of War – Sun Tzu. Despite having 13 chapters, The Art of War is a slim volume and an easy read. I dip into this book every so often and have done for the past 20 years. Everything else written on strategy is layered in unnecessary window dressing. I first picked up a copy of The Art of War while I was at university. There was a bookshop in the town which sold discounted textbooks way below price. I went in there looking for marketing books to broaden my source of references and came away with my first copy of this book and Accidental Empires.
Principles of Marketing – Philip Kotler. Doing my degree meant spending a lot of time with this book in a blue and grey Prentice Hall cover. Kotler’s work is thought to be the bible for marketers. To be honest with you, by the time I had finished my course I hated Kotler, his book sat on my shelf taunting me. It is the only book that I have burned. Reading Byron Sharp’s How Brands Grow made me realise how much of marketing at the time was based on the opinions of old white academics rather than rigorous research.
Accidental Empires by Robert X. Cringely – I came across Accidental Empires in the library at university and it was a revelation. Mark Stephens aka Robert X. Cringely had lived and breathed Silicon Valley, working at employee number 12 at a very young Apple Computer; so he made the ideal guide to the technology industry. Unlike most books that provide a background in technology, Cringely wrote in an informal style and gave the warts and oil side to the story. The book gave me a really good primer on the technology sector which came in handy when I went to work in my first agency role for The Weber Group in their London office. Despite the fact that the book was last updated in 1997, it is still worthwhile getting a copy from your local book shop.
Zen And The Art Of Motorcycle Maintenance – Robert M. Pirsig. I’d done and seen a lot by the time I got to college. One of the things I used to do was read a lot, especially whilst working a boring shift. I had an older friend called Mark who I had met through a summer job. He was well educated, but bummed out and used to smoke a lot of cannibis. The 9- 5 of repairing electric tools and concrete mixers gave him what we’d now call work life balance. He switched me on to ZATAOMM. On getting to college, during my final year there I spent a good deal of time sharing a house with a fellow ZATAOMM devotee. I still go back to this work and the follow-up Lila to reset my inner compass when life throws me a curve ball.
Ogilvy on Advertising – David Ogilvy. Everything that we do whether we realise it at the time or not builds on or is a derivative of the work of people who have gone before us. Reading Ogilvy on Advertising early in my agency career brought that home as I continually saw ideas redressed and polished for new audiences. For instance, some of the posts that I have written here to do with the ethics of social media mirror the same level of respect that Ogilvy had for the audience of his advertisement campaigns.
Those were my ten books, I hope to add to this list rather than remaining static. What ten books have influenced you? More book related content here.
Also check out my bookshelf of non-fiction recommendations here.
On June 6, Apple announced a number of products at a keynote speech to kick off its worldwide developer conference. Mac OS X Lion and iOS 5 were widely anticipated; but the one that got the most attention was a service called iCloud.
This service has received a fair bit of coverage and its worthwhile reflecting upon, some of this reflection has to do with all the things that we don’t currently know. I am not going to focus on the iTunes Connect product that gives you a selection of your music across devices as other people have done that much better than I could.
First of all a bit of a history lesson
Apple has actually selling online services since about 1985, so Apple’s history with online services is almost as old as The WELL. AppleLink was an online service set up originally to connect Apple employees and dealers, it had a client software application for both Mac and the later models of the Apple II. It provided assess to remote server folders (kind of like FTP, iDisk, Box.net or Dropbox), bulletin boards for discussion and system-wide email (though interoperability with other email systems came in later).
This system was a way that Apple distributed systems updates and drivers to dealers (you have to remember that at that time operating systems and the associated software that went along with them took up much less memory than they do today). This was all hosted on time-shared mainframes and connected by a global data network by GE Information Services. GE charged too much for the service and didn’t reflect the technological changes coming down the pipe that made these services cheaper to operate. So Apple eventually worked with Quantum Computer Services (now known as Aol) to develop a version of AppleLink suitable for consumers.
The first email from space was sent on an Apple Portable via an AppleLink account from the Atlantis space shuttle to the Johnson Space Center in 1991. Back in 1988, AppleLink was also the host for a multi-channel story that played out with weekly episodes and included user identities woven into its plot. The storytelling used chat rooms and email was well as a more traditional narrative format echoing Matt Beaumont’s novel e by about 12 years.
After a while, Apple, had a falling out with GE Information Services and consolidated their own service renamed eWorld and had it run by AOL. Eventually eWorld was closed down as Apple realised that it couldn’t compete with AOL and they had bigger things to worry about as Apple was on the downward trajectory that would result in the return of Steve Jobs. By 1997 both AppleLink and eWorld had been closed down. The content eventually ended up on the Apple website under sub-domains like developer.apple.com and support.apple.com.
In 2000, Apple came back with iTools which included the .mac email accounts, simple web publishing and iDisk. The email account allowed you to have IMAP4 which was rare at the time and iDisk was based on WebDAV standard to syncing. There were other services including web publishing and iCards: an electronic greeting cards service (prior to Facebook were a low impact way to exchange greetings, with a HTML card sent via email. One of the most prominent providers bluemountain.com was bought in a deal apparently worth 780 million dollars by then internet giant Excite@Home). By 2002, Apple started charging for these services and briefly threw in a subscription to Virex.
The service got a rebrand as MobileMe to take account of Apple’s expanded computing portfolio to take in the iOS-powered series of devices. Newcomers got a .me.com email address rather than the .mac.com email address. I myself have been signed up to these services through their evolutions for the past ten years or so, so still have a .mac.com ID.
iCloud is a development repackaging of these offerings; an evolution rather than an innovation, it also means that Apple’s claim in the sub header of its press release that the service: Free Cloud Services Beyond Anything Offered to Date – are economical with the truth. There is also a question in my mind, for reasons I’ll outline below, about whether this next evolution is positive for end users.
Device philosophy
One of the things that stuck out to me when I was listening to Steve Jobs introduce iCloud, he described the Mac as ‘just another device’. On one level it makes sense; as the Mac is one of three sets of computing devices that Apple now sells: the Mac, the iPad and the iPod Touch / iPhone.
The second thing that marks it out, is a trust that as Sun Microsystems used to say ‘the network is the computer’.
Finally there is the question of primacy. Which device is the ultimate arbiter of the correct data?
The flawed ‘net
iCloud is based on the assumption that good quality data connectivity is ubiquitous, this is complete fiction for many people. I live in central London, apparently a world city, a hive of connectivity. Wi-fi that I can access safely is only available in certain coffee shops, and the mobile networks are full of holes like Swiss cheese. I am with Vodafone that seems to be better than most, but the only way to have a near-continuous reception is to roam on a foreign SIM; which is outrageously expensive. This situation isn’t . In the UK, the broadband infrastructure simply isn’t available to support existing streaming video services. I live in Central London within the proverbial stones throw from Silicon Roundabout and get barely 3MBs download and 400KBs upload from my ADSL connection. I live 500 metres from my local exchange.
Data integrity
One area I am not convinced that Apple will get right with the iCloud is keeping the integrity of address and calendar data intact. If one device doesn’t have primacy there is no control mechanism. It is easy to accidentally alter a record on an iPhone and that could then ripple through the iCloud to all associated devices based on it being the most recent edit. There is no information on how it will handle duplicate entries and failed syncs. Lots of unanswered yet critical questions.
Household enterprise systems
My set-up on MobileMe is relatively simple, I have one iTunes account, one address book, one calendar, one set of bookmarks and system preferences. These are synced across two devices (the MacBook Pro that I am writing this post on, and my iPhone). But increasingly, Apple’s eco-system is found at the centre of family’s IT systems. The analogy of the household CEO is often used to describe the housewife as homemaker.
The family’s IT system needs to look more like the kind of enterprise technology that a CEO would expect. With massive data storage and policy-based systems designed to keep the right data with the right owners. I haven’t seen any evidence that iCloud would do this which is likely to result in lots of poisoned address books and music collections.
It just works?
One of Apple’s key selling points since Steve Jobs returned to Apple was that the company’s products just work. This is why the synergy between hardware and software is so important. When you took one of the original iMacs out of the box, you plugged in the keyboard, the modem cable into the telephone socket, the power socket and turned it one; you were ready to start computing. It promised elegant simple technological choices to early adopters and the late majority alike and is why products like the iPod, the iPad and the iPhone have become commonplace in many developed marketplaces disrupting incumbent players like Creative and Nokia. The complexity and challenges that the iCloud system needs to overcome could undue this unique selling proposition and tear Apple’s market-making leadership position apart.
Open standards to Apple standards
One of the things that has helped Apple to do well has been its adherence to open standards: the iMac benefited from being a USB pioneer. Mac laptops became popular with photographers because of FireWire. The Safari web browser and WebKit build upon W3C standards compliance and it is hard to remember now, but the first iPhone used HTML5 web applications for external developers – something that many people lost sight of.
Apple’s online services were similar. The email service was based on IMAP4 allowing for easy synchronisation and iDisk works on WebDAV. However in the Apple press release announcing iCloud there is no information on what it supports any standards, but it does talk about iCloud storage APIs. And Apple did promise to make thse APIs available to developers. I am concerned that my social graph may be locked into a storage equivalent of the Hotel California; which is especially dangerous when you think at the amount of iterations and service closures that Apple has exhibited in the online space.
The Age of Spiritual Machines was written by Ray Kurzweil. Kurzweil is a technological rock star, responsible for great music synthesisers and much of the developments around optical character recognition and speech recognition. This is what makes him a good futurist. The fact that he has had his hands dirty.
The Age of Spiritual Machines: When Computers Exceed Human Intelligence is a book of two parts. In the first part, Kurzweil outlines how technology has progressed since the dawn of computing with Charles Babbage’ difference engine. Kurzweil uses this trip down computer memory lane to demonstrated that computing power has been increasing exponentially since the dawn of time rather than just the dawn of Intel with Moore’s Law on the doubling of transistors. Even though silicon transistors may top out computing power will keep on trucking (though Kurzweil doesn’t necessarily have the answer of what is the next technology).
The second part of the book is likely future scenarios; and this is where things get interesting. Kurzweil is setting himself up for a possible fail.
Bill Gates and Nathan Myhrvold missed the internet in the first edition of The Road Ahead when it was first published in 1995 and Kurzweil sets himself up for a potentially bigger fall in the scope of his book. Even if Kurzweil has his timing a bit wrong or doesn’t get everything right his book is still a great thought experiment in how intelligent computers would impact humanity. More book reviews here.
