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| Friday, June 15, 2007 |
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Fatlining 
| | Count me in. Coincidentally, I'm back on Atkins and have dropped from 191.5 to 182, so far. By the way, I'm not advocating Atkins. I just did it before, remember how it worked, and find it easy to follow. I don't intend to stay on it forever — just down to somewhere in the 155-165 range. Then I plan to stay there. That's what I didn't do last time. This time I'll be 60 and trying more seriously not to die soon. |
It's who ya gotta sleep with
| | Apple makes a lot of software that developers used to make. Over time they'll make more. And while that's going on they're becoming more of a consumer products company and less of a computer company. How does that translate for developers? The platform is less important and the package is more important. What the consumer gets out of the box matters. The ability to make a phone call, or listen to music or get directions to a restaurant. But run some random app that someone other than Apple made? There's not much demand for that with users. |
| | There's another reason: in the mobile phone market they're just like Nokia, Motorola, Sony-Ericsson, LG or Kyocera. They have to make what the carriers let them make. I suspect that when Steve Jobs said "Cingular doesn't want to see their West Coast network go down because some application messed up", he saying that the iPhone will be crippled for Cingular's purposes as well as Apple's. |
| | For example, I have a Nokia E62 here. It's a loaner from Nokia. Nice phone. But it's not as nice as the E61, which is identical except for one thing: the E62 doesn't do wi-fi. One can only assume that Cingular won't let them. A sales guy at a Cingular store told me the E62 is an E61 (available in Europe and used widely) crippled to run on Cingular's network, on Cingular's terms. One might also assume Cingular doesn't want to lose business to Skype or some other Internet-based phone system bypass method. Whatever the reason, it comes down to Cingular's choice, because it's unlikely that Nokia would have its own reasons for subtracting value from the E61. |
| | Cingular is now (or is becoming absorbed by) AT&T, which is also no stranger to value-subtraction. Think about that before you buy. (Though the others aren't much, if any, better.) |
| | Apple's market muscle so far is very limited in the phone business. It's kind of like Apple's muscle with the record industry just before the iPod came along. Or Apple's muscle with Hollywood right after Steve Jobs bought Pixar. It's mostly a matter of charisma. But there's no substitute for customers, and Apple doesn't have those. Yet. |
| | The whole game will change if the iPhone gets iPod-grade adoption, or even a large fraction of that. I'm willing to bet that Apple comes out with an SDK then. |
| | Meanwhile, to all the pholks lined up to buy iPhones, remember these things: 1) the original iPod; 2) the 128k Mac; 3) the first AirPort; 4) the Newton; and 5) Apple is already working on making the iPhone obsolete. |
YouEverything
| | "The user is in charge" became a cliche without ever becoming a fact. Vendors were talking about how "the customer is in charge" without that ever happening, either. Nor was the customer ever crowned, no matter how many times anybody said "the customer is king". |
| | While putting the customer in charge has been the purpose of VRM since long before it got that name (just late last year), we haven't been fully clear on how to make it happen. Joe Andrieu has just added needed clarity with VRM: The user as the point of integration, The set-up: |
| | When we put the user at the center, and make them the point of integration, the entire system becomes simpler, more robust, more scalable, and more useful. |
| | This is a profound shift that has some interesting parallels with a concept in AI called "stigmergy" and with a bit of classic Einstein becomes a totally new way to think about next generation systems design. In other words VRM changes the landscape in a way that not only makes life better for individuals, it profoundly improves the information architecture that modern society depends on. |
| | If you¹ll indulge me, I¹ll try to explain. |
| | He uses me as an example (from what I shared on a VRM conference call): |
| | Doc Searls shared a story about his experience getting medical care while at Harvard recently. As a fellow at the Berkman center, he just gave them his Harvard ID card and was immediately ushered into a doctor¹s officeminimal paperwork, maximal service. They even called him a cab to go to Mass General and gave him a voucher for the ride. At the hospital, they needed a bit more paperwork, but as everything was in order, they immediately fixed him up. It was excellent service. |
| | But what Doc noticed was that at every point where some sort of paperwork was done, there were errors. His name was spelled wrong. They got the wrong birthdate. Wrong employer. Something. As he shuffled from Berkman to the clinic to the cabbie to the hospital to the pharmacy, a paper (and digital trail) followed him through archaic legacy systems with errors accumulating as he went. What became immediately clear to Doc was that for the files at the clinic, the voucher, the systems at the hospital, for all of these systems, he was the natural point of data integrationŠ he was the only component gauranteed to contact each of these service providers. And yet, his physical person was essentially incidental to the entire data trail being created on his behalf... |
| | But what if those systems were replaced with a VRM approach? What if instead of individual, isolated IT departments and infrastructure, Doc, the user was the integrating agent in the system? That would not only assure that Doc had control over the propagation of his medical history, it would assure all of the service providers in the loop that, in fact, they had access to all of Doc¹s medical history. All of his medications. All of his allergies. All of his past surgeries or treatments. His (potentially apocryphal) visits to new age homeopathic healers. His chiropractic treatments. His crazy new diet. All of these things could affect the judgment of the medical professionals charged with his care. And yet, trying to integrate all of those systems from the top down is not only a nightmare, it is a nightmare that apparently continues to fail despite massive federal efforts to re-invent medical care. |
| | He goes on at some length (and deeply) on the whole thing. Great stuff. Key points... |
| | Albert Einstein helped the world understand the truth that all velocity is relative. That me running at 15 mph towards a stationary car is the same as the car traveling 15 mph towards me. The important thing is the relationship between the parties, not which one is standing still. |
| | Now apply that sense of relativity to "stigmergy" and invert the ant and the environment. (And don¹t hurt your brain!) |
| | Instead of thinking of humans as the active element, think of humans as the environment and Vendors as the ants. Instead of humans visiting a bunch of isolated data silos, invert it so that vendors are visiting stationary usersor their stationary data stores. |
| | Now, instead of a bunch of individuals running around leaving a disparate data trail which is hard to keep track of, the individual represents the digital environment where data is stored by vendors. When the next vendor comes along, the data is there, available for use, without the need for complex integration, processing, or systems maintenance, just like the environment is there for the next ant to come along, allowing that ant to do what they do without a complicated brain or sophisticated map of the territory. |
| | It doesn¹t matter that Doc was physically moving around in his example. From Doc¹s perspective, he was always right there. "No matter where I goŠ there I am." This is more than just a solipsistic view of the universe, it is perhaps the most critical insight of the VRM user-centric gestalt. When you put the user at the center, it makes it trivially easy to manage and integrate the entire digital experience of the user. Because it is all right there, all the time. |
| | Sure, there is still a lot of work yet to be done. We have to figure out the protocols and technologies for what data vendors actually share in that data-store and how we assure reliable, always-on access in a secure and privacy-protected manner. Fortunately, as I mentioned earlier, the user-centric Identity meta-system is addressing a huge portion of that. In short, we are building on the shoulders of giants, which stand on the mountains of Moore and Gates and Postel and Berners-Lee and Andreeson. Sounds like fun to me. |
Improving on quotage
| | So Tony Goodson quoted me quoting somebody else who (may have) said, In the short term we overestimate, in the long term we underestimate. |
| | I always assumed that the other somebody was Paul Saffo, who famously works for the Institute for the Future, from which (I just learned here) he is on sabattical to teach at Stanford. But when I started looking up the rough quotage, I found myself corrected by David Isenberg, who wrote, |
| | Amara's Law says, roughly, "We tend to overestimate the short-term impact of technological change and underestimate its long-term impact." In the past, I attributed it to Paul Saffo, not surprising because Paul Saffo works at Institute for the Future, as did Roy Amara. People have attributed sayings embodying similar thoughts to Robert Heinlein or Arthur C Clarke or Winston Churchill or Mark Twain. (Further, when Elvis sang, "I'm all shook up," he was talking about here-and-now, with no regard for long-term impacts.) |
| | Whoever's Law seems true on its face. |
| | Yes, but ... isn't there a more quotable version of what's facially true here? |
| | So I looked up "Amara's Law" in Wikipedia. It says (currently, though the entry's history is just the current entry, so far), |
| | Amara's law is a maxim stating: |
| | We tend to overestimate the effect of a technology in the short run and underestimate the effect in the long run. |
| | A modern maxim says: People tend to overestimate what can be done in one year and to underestimate what can be done in five or ten years, |
| | Which occurs in a footnote on p. 17 of Joseph Licklider, Libraries of the Future, MIT Press, 1965. |
| | In looking forward to the effects of a technology, Amara had another maxim: |
| | Substance trumps methodology. |
| | So now I'm wondering if Amara's Law is less quote than maxim. If it's the maxim that matters, shouldn't the maxim people find most quotable then become the law? |
| | Anyway, just wondering. Whatever the answer, the credit goes to Amara. (Or should some also go to Licklider?) |
| | [Later...] Rex Hammock clears it all up, with a 2004 email from Paul Saffo in response to Rex's blogged 2002 request for clarity that somehow loops back to something I wrote earlier. Or something. Anyway, what Paul said: |
| | The idea that we overestimate short-term effects and under-estimate long-term implications of emergent technological change comes from an observation of the last 100-odd years of technology diffusion. As best as I know, Roy Amara, IFTF¹s first president, was the first person to explicitly note this phenomenon, and thus at IFTF, we often refer to it as Amara¹s law. I started talking about it publically in 1985, and Roy had been talking about it for at least 10 years before that. |
| | Adds Rex on Paul, He¹s perhaps the only person I¹ve ever heard called a "futurist" where, over the course of 15 years, I¹ve personally observed their predictions come true. |
| | I've never been called (nor have I called myself) a "futurist", but I am at least pleased that the optimisms I noted here (from 1995 and 1992) have kept true to their vectors, even if not all have quite "come true". |
| | During a phone call with Dave Rogers yesterday (and with his help) I realized that my view of things is often (perhaps too often) "The glass is 1/100th full". I think with VRM (covered in one or more items below), the ratio is more like 1/million. Yet I like the chances for the simple reason that I'm alive and committed to working on improving that ratio. And I'm not alone. |
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