Inflection Point

Bob Cringley has a must-read development on three recent developments: Microsoft's XBox 360, Google's Web Accelerator and Apple's High-Definition video plans.

It's an expression made popular in Silicon Valley years ago by Andy Grove of Intel: "inflection point." It's that abrupt elbow in a graph of growth or decline when the new technology or paradigm truly kicks in, and suddenly there is no going back. From that moment, the new stuff takes off and the old stuff goes into rapid decline, whether it is a new standard of modem, a new video game, a new microprocessor family, or just a new idea. I think we've just hit such an inflection point and -- though most of us still don't realize it -- the personal computer, video game, and electronic entertainment businesses will never be the same...So Apple takes over video and movies while Yahoo threatens with a low-priced music subscription service and Google threatens to take control of, well, everything. And Microsoft? Microsoft kicks the dog.

As Om Malik summarises it: "PC is dead, long live the network."

Display over IP

Jonathan Schwartz writes:

DOIP ("Do IP") is to the PC industry, what VOIP (voice over IP, simplistically, using the internet to make phone calls) is to the telecommunications industry. Phone calls are near to free at this point, and the business model is undergoing radical change. It's inevitable that pervasive and sufficient bandwidth will allow most of what happens on a client to migrate to the network. Why upgrade your PC if you can rely on plentiful bandwidth to have someone centrally deliver it as a service? You don't upgrade your TV set, BBC and News Corp do it for you every evening with fresh content. And you don't buy a new TV to watch it. The same should apply to your PC. DOIP is to a PC as XMRadio is to a CD player.

Sun's entry into the DOIP race is called a SunRay. Its primary value? It's a PC you never, ever upgrade. Whose intelligence is located in someone else's datacenter. With a beautiful monitor secured with a SIM card (just like the one in your cell phone). No, it's not perfect for all applications - SunRay's only work where Google works (ie, where there's a reasonable network connection). But I wouldn't bet against ubiquitous network coverage. Even on an airplane.

Now why use a SunRay (or other DOIP device)? A Sun Ray uses 15 Watts. Fifteen. Compared to 120+ Watts for your basic PC. Multiply saving a minimum 100 watts per office (plus the savings of not having to cool the offices from the heat dissipated by the PC), and at 15 cents per kilowatt hour, that's minimum $1.5 million dollars a year in savings for 10,000 employees. Free money, and you're saving the planet. And real estate. And noise (the SunRay's completely silent.) And a side benefit? You can't steal the data on them - they're completely stateless.

Idea Push Economy

Mark Pincus writes:

it's becoming apparent that we are entering a new era in information consumption. we have gone from extreme pull with huge friction both in money and hassle around info consumption (remember nexis lexis and sweet talking the company librarian?); to the huge open pipe, where useful information was a needle in a haystack of noise; to the emerging market today of idea push, where white collar professionals (mostly smart vc's at this point) see networking benefit in pushing out their best ideas to bring in even more good stuff back in the form of deal flow and props for 'getting it'.

seems like we've moved from open source software to open source ideas and i think it's awesome. sure the cost is that we all start to feel like people can scarf up our best ideas before we can even completely get them straight but we can also iterate together way faster.

EventWeb, Information and Experience

Ramesh Jain writes:

Gutenberg legacy has influenced WWW more than anything else. Current WWW is a web of documents. The Web was initially designed to allow researchers to share their research papers and then it took of to include all kind of applications. What is interesting is that we still think about everything on the web in terms of documents. We create documents and post them on the web. The basic unit of a document is considered a page. So we author these pages that may contain images and even video, but we think only in terms of pages.

Our search engines are designed based on Information Retrieval approaches. IR approaches were developed to create an exhaustive electronic index for large documents – the kind that you find at the end of a book – and were adopted for WWW by assuming the Web to be a collection of documents. When you type in keywords, all that the search engine is really providing you is a list of documents in which these keywords appear. Obviously, there is much work that goes on in identifying basic words that should be used and in what order the documents should be presented to you. But let¡¯s not get bogged down by the details – the fundamental fact remains that the Web is viewed by a search engine as a collection of documents. And we love search engines and depend on them so much because our (logical) view of the Web is the same – a collection of documents.

Humans are interested in what happens in real world. Of course abstractions of real world are essential for communication of information. But for experiencing, people want to get as realistic information as possible. That is the reason that though people may know about an event and its consequences by reading about it or hearing about it, they still want to see it (in video). You can read lyrics of a song or even read the musical notes, but that is not a substitute for enjoying a concert – in fact not even a dvd of a concert is usually a satisfactory substitute for the real experience.

If you think carefully, there are so many events happening in the world that you would love to attend. These events range from personal events in family to international events, sporting events, official activities, and so on. Now we have tools, different types of sensors including those for audio, video, temperature, pressure, and other sensory mechanisms commonly used by humans that can capture the environment of an event and can reproduce it at remote places. Technology is advancing rapidly in making tele-presence possible. We are now at a point that we can start thinking of building an EventWeb – a web that uses events as the basic node rather than a document.

EventWeb will require different thinking than the document centric thinking that we currently use.

He adds in a subsequent post: "DocumentWeb, or the WWW for documents, became successful because it allowed democratization of document creation and democratization of document access. When it became easy to create documents that could be easily put on the web and tools became available to access these documents using any computer, the exponential growth of WWW started. Can that be repeated for events to fuel the growth of EventWeb? I believe the answer is yes. There are enough tools to start capturing and posting events on the web and accessing those such that the process can start. And once the process starts, the virtuous cycle will start resulting in better tools for posting events and for experiencing those. I believe that the bottleneck is not the technology; it is our legacy thinking."

Here are excerpts from other posts [1 2 3] elaborating on some of the ideas:

Information and experiences are important part of human life. Experience is the basis of our understanding of objects, thoughts, and emotions through the senses. We experience the world using our five senses: vision, sound, smell, taste, and touch. All our concepts are essentially formed using these senses, through our experiences. Abstraction allows us to communicate and share our experiences. Abstractions are the mechanisms that we learn to assign symbols or names to our experiences. The mechanism of abstraction is essential for learning and the mechanism of assigning specific symbols to our experiences is facilitated by human languages. In fact, languages evolved to standardize symbols and this standardization resulted in enhancing communication among people. Next development was the idea of building hierarchical and complex structures of abstractions to build complex concepts related to the experiences that we gain through our senses. This resulted not only in communicating our immediate experiences bet also relating our experiences to other past experiences and experiences of others. This resulted in starting of building the knowledge base in the society. The great advantages offered by these abstractions, symbolization, and building of symbolic structures resulted in the virtuous cycle that continues until today and will continue as long as society of intelligent beings exist. These knowledge structures later became the basis of storage and distribution of knowledge and are still the prominent mechanisms used for communication, storage, and distribution of knowledge using language.

Information and experience are closely related to each other. As humans, we experience the world. Events and objects in the world are first experienced using our senses and then are abstracted for communication, storage, and for relating those to other experiences using knowledge structures build in our head as well as build by the society based on societal experience. Obviously, the societal experience starts with individual experiences, but is the assimilation of all such individual experiences and further abstractions of those.

In information centric environment the emphasis is on capturing essential aspects of situation and use them to communicate. In several cases, like in information theory, the major emphasis is on minimizing the amount of resources to represent the situation. On the other end, in an experiential environment, the emphasis is to use appropriate amount of resources to provide a compelling "better than being there" experience to a user. The emphasis is on providing a high quality experience using appropriate sensory data and presentation mechanisms. One sees efforts in this direction in some of the three-dimensional and realistic movies like the one presented in Epcot center and such places. Here they use multiple senses to create a realistic experience.

The Mood of the Newsroom

Tim Porter writes:

The amount of anger and hostility, of distrust and suspicion, of inertia and ennui that pollutes the journalistic environment in these newsrooms at first surprised me....

It is a venom whose toxicity, fed by the same sort of outwardly-directed anger and suspicion that floods the waning days of all diminishing industries, weakens all hope these reporters and editors and photographers have of imagining a future in which journalism survives but its form is vastly different....

The obdurance and avoidance endemic in newsrooms rests on a bedrock belief that the "problems" at their newspapers are best solved with more bodies or a return to a more "traditional" form of journalism....

In these same newsrooms where the nattering nabobs of nostalgia pine for days of yore, there are also forward-thinking reporters and editors and photographers who envision and are working to create a journalistic future built on new story forms, deeper community connections and more truth-telling and watch-dogging....

We are in a time of great transition in journalism. The tectonics of technology, demographics, economics and lifestyle are disrupting the ground on which newspaper journalism stood for half a century. Survival requires nimbleness, openness and a sense of the possible. The intransigent and the angry and the incurably nostalgic will fall into the cracks....

Jeff Jarvis has some suggestions:

1. Set a strategic imperative for change. From both the top down and the bottom up, there has to be an agreement -- an urgent passion -- for change: for updating, improving, finding new ways.

2. Listen to the public. Don't just go to another focus group about the paper. Go listen to the people who don't read the paper but want news. Learn how they're getting it now: They no longer have the patience to wait for the news; the news waits for them to search for it, click on it, have it recommended. Ask them about trust and brace yourself. Read Merrill Brown's Carnegie report.

3. Perform a business reality check. Read Tim's post: The solution is still presumed to be adding more bodies. But when revenue is declining, that's obviously not realistic. Classified and retail are in decline; there are new inexpensive and free competitors; audience is declining. So new business models must be invented.

4. Catalogue the opportunities for delivering news. No longer constrained to a printing press and truck route, list all the wonderful new ways that you can deliver news. If you want the public to get its news from you then you'd better give it to them wherever and however they want.

5. Catalogue the opportunities for gathering news. Insert hyperlocal citizens' media spiel here. The public knows more than we ever can. How do we enable them to share that with others -- with content, promotion, training, trust, money?

6. Reinvent the product. After doing that homework, after dynamiting old assumptions, after starting a conversation with the public -- a converstion that should never end -- now, it's time to reinvent the product and the business and the industry of news.

7. Reinvent the relationship with the public. Now you can change the way the public views news. Hugh McLeod said, and I often quote it, that we need to stop thinking of newspapers (and their sites) as things but rather as places where help bring people together.

Google Video, and the Advent of the Google OS

Brightcove Blog writes:

Google's new video upload and search service is a tipping point in the evolution of Internet TV, and more importantly represents increased evidence of a dramatic and radical shift in the role that Google intends to play as a platform for the Internet, and is an inversion of their original value and place on the Internet.

As has been discussed elsewhere, Google has been quietly building the world's largest storage system ("infinite storage"), and has been acquiring "dark fiber" ("infinite bandwidth") globally, and are now starting to layer services and APIs on top of that platform. Video upload, search and delivery is a natural for that "infinite platform" -- a services layer that looks more like a Google OS than a simple tool. Google has become the Microsoft of "Web 2.0" Platforms.

The irony, of course, is that Google has built it's value for website operators and consumers by layering discovery on top of open, distributed services, content and systems. Yet, with these moves, Google appears to be (re)centralizing many functions that the web's architects would typically have running in distributed nodes. In the world of video and video search, this can be contrasted with Yahoo's approach with Video Search and Media RSS, which respects and assumes distributed usage. We like that.

TECH TALK: The Coming Age of ASPs: What’s Different

Application Service Providers (ASPs) are set to make a comeback. The term used to describe this shift in software pricing and delivery is “software as a service.” Bill Burnham considers the factors driving this trend:

First off, the main costs required to offer software as a service have declined dramatically. As Ryan McIntyre outlines in his excellent post on data center economics, datacenter/hosting costs have plummeted in the last 10 years with bandwidth costs declining 88%, storage costs declining an amazing 99.7% and CPU costs declining an even more amazing 99.9%! (When you think about this from a business economics standpoint it really is stunning.) With lower costs, the upfront investment required to offer software as a service is actually now quite reasonable.

Outside of lower costs, three other developments have helped make software a service much more attractive. First, developers have created new applications that have been engineered from the ground up to be offered as a hosted service and even many existing applications have been re-engineered to make them more “hosting-friendly”. Second, the advent of XML and web services has made it easier for companies to integrate hosted applications and data into their own legacy systems. From a technical perspective, this has removed one of the last major drawbacks of hosted software. And finally, 10 years of exposure to the web has made many corporate managers much more comfortable with the idea of hosted-applications. Even many IT managers, who at first resisted hosted applications as a potential threat to their jobs and influence have now warmed up to hosted-apps as a way to quickly meet business unit needs without adding significant costs to their own organization. For many developers, selling a hosted software solution is now an easier and faster process than selling installable code.

Business Week wrote recently: “Companies like Salesforce.com, NetSuite, and newly public RightNow Technologies are reinventing the way customers buy software. They're all making basic corporate software to manage finances or a sales team, run a business or run a call center -- not new stuff, and in many cases, with fewer features than existing products. But the innovation is in the business model. These companies deliver software over the Internet –- a Web service, if you will -- and companies pay as they go with monthly fees. That means less costly integration, no hiring an in-house administrator, and no big up-front contracts. It's a considerably cheaper and easier approach that gives these software-as-a-service companies an entrée into the last wide-open sector of software customers: Small and midsize companies.”

Tomorrow: What’s Different (continued)

Related Entries:  [All]
TECH TALK: The Coming Age of ASPs: Looking Ahead [June 3, 2005]
TECH TALK: The Coming Age of ASPs: The Problems [June 2, 2005]
TECH TALK: The Coming Age of ASPs: The Seller’s View [June 1, 2005]
TECH TALK: The Coming Age of ASPs: The Buyer’s View [May 31, 2005]
TECH TALK: The Coming Age of ASPs: Technology Building Blocks (Part 4) [May 30, 2005]