Cyberpunk is a type of science fiction that has been very influential in the creation of the web as we know it. As with most predictions about the future, the now has both over-and-under achieved. Since we are at an economic inflection point, I thought I’d revisit one of the seminal publications of the cyberpunk genre Mirrorshades.
Mirrorshades is a collection of stories that were created by authors considered to be representative of that genre by one of their own Bruce Sterling. Mirrorshades refers to the Oakley type-lenses in sunglasses that were considered to be a cultural artifact for this genre, in the same way that chromed rocket fins graced US-made cars of the 1950s and 60s.
In some ways the stories echoed the kind of ideas I would expect appearing in feature articles of Wired magazine: private artificial islands based on a libertarian ideal to fuel commerce, artificial-eye implants, radical Islam-inspired cyber-terrorism and gene therapy. All of this feels familiar in a post-truth era of late stage capitalism where authoritarianism vies with liberal democracy for legitimancy
Others were exceptionally dated: depending on the the Soviet Bloc to still be a bulwark against global capitalism. The rampant artificial drug use in the stories mirrored the US decent from hippy-inspired pot heads to mainstream cocaine use and new drugs that were then coming online including crack cocaine and MDMA. There was an assumption that the leisure pharmaceutical industry would carry on this spurt of commercial innovation through product development.
Mirrorshades is a good read, but the ideas have been so pillaged by later works that you have to keep yourself in check and remember that for much of the films and books in this area, Mirrorshades (often filtered through other authors later works) was the genesis; the source material from which they sprang. More book reviews here.
I have been playing with Bing for a little while now, so here’s my thoughts. The first thing that struck me about Bing is that most media commentators don’t get it. A classic example of what I mean is The search continues by Paul Taylor of the Financial Times (June 4, 2008). In his article Paul compares Bing to Google.
If you are going to gobble up one of the smaller fish you don’t have that many choices. Whilst Yahoo! got mauled by Microsoft, having to jettison Yang from the CEO chair along the way, it is still alive and kicking with a larger marketshare than MSN/Live/Bing search (though curiosity kicked Bing into second place for a few days during its launch).
Ask doesn’t have marketing muscle, it doesn’t have budgets for high-profile advertising campaigns. Microsoft has cash to burn on hiring agency marketing muscle in the form of Crispin Porter + Bogusky. Television is an ideal vehicle to reach married women who need help with their busy lives and advertising agencies likeCrispin Porter + Bogusky love TV adverts
Ask’s promise of being a natural language search engine where you could ask questions set the bar low enough that Microsoft could at least try and match it with Bing by utilising the expertise and technology Microsoft got when it acquired PowerSet
A lot of Ask’s traffic comes from toolbars that sit in the chrome of a browser (thats the grey bit above the web page where the address box and the buttons are). Given that in 2005, at one point Microsoft was even tagging Ask’s MyWebSearch toolbar as a “Toolbar Browser Hijacker”, it would be easy to sweep those busy married women along with a new complex web browser like IE8 that they don’t have the time to customise and a search web page that looks a lot like what they usually go to anyway
Plagiarism
In case you missed that last statement the likeness of the Ask.com home page and the Bing home page are strikingly similar in customisation and layout.
The positioning against Google is try and give Bing some credibility but the results and the search audience experience says that its all about Ask.com. Do you think Bing would have really got any air time from Paul Taylor if they had said we’ve brought out a new search engine that is just like Ask.com?
Industry innovator?
It would seriously damage Microsoft’s aspiration to be seen as an industry innovator rather than kludging together products that kind of look like the real thing. The copier is something that the company has been dubbed with countless times before for good reason:
DOS versus CP/M
Windows versus the Mac
Zune versus iPod/iTunes
SQL Server versus Oracle or IBM DB2
XBox versus PlayStation
Bing isn’t truly innovative (I am sure people worked hard to get it out the door in the same way they would at a Russian tractor factory, but its not innovative in a transformational way); its an imitation of a well-established fading product in Ask. It is the search engine equivalent of an over-the-hill punch drunk journeyman boxer who is easy prey for a frustrated large but untalented bully to reign down punches on. The whole thing feels a bit grubby to me: less successful crooning innovator Bing Crosby (he helped pioneer the use of tape recorders in studios, funding Ampex’s research into the area building on AEG’s Magnetophon), more like the mafioso catchphrase Bada Bing.
It is hard to explain how dominant Microsoft IE or Internet Explorer was for online access. For years Microsoft IE was the tip of a range of technologies that integrated with online experiences that sustained Windows dominance.
I was a late adapter to online banking since for years my bank required the use of Microsoft IE. Microsoft IE security technology was required for anything in Korea due to a government mandated ActiveX security digital certificate that relied on Microsoft IE.
EU Plans Fresh Strike on Microsoft – WSJ.com – there a flaw in it as Microsoft could still configure the browsers and tweak them to make them difficult to alter guaranteeing MSN / Live / Bing ‘unwilling’ traffic off 404 pages and the search box in the browser chrome
A.L.L. = Afghan Lessons Learned for Soldiers – interesting site by US servicemen looking to plug the knowledge gaps that US DoD training leaves. Using a blog platform for simplicity