Telirati Newsletter #53

In this dispatch, I give a very postive review to .NET, which was, at the time, the best archiecture for multi-tier Web applications, and which, if Microsoft had executed on the potential to use .NET to tie desktops to Web services, could have enabled Microsft to dominate Web applications.

Four years later, Microsoft still can't seem to unholster the .NET gun, which could make Google's JavaScript hacks look pathetic compared to the level of desktop integration that mail, calendars, and search that employed .NET could provide.

Telirati Newsletter #53: What C#, .Net, SOAP, and NGWS Really Means

Microsoft holds some kind of world record for inept naming schemes for what is really pretty simple stuff. The whole COM/ActiveX nomenclature swamp, for example. It all refers to various levels of interface conventions in the COM distributed component system. (And you thought DCOM was the distributed version, eh?) That’s it. Now that you understand that, be assured the Microsoft nomenclatura have been working overtime to bring you the next deluge of impenetrable labels. Which is why you should turn to your trusted chronicler for the Magic Decoder Ring:

C#: A computer language. Who needs a new one? You do, trust me. And C# is a good one. As good as Visual J++, but without the lawsuits. Better than Visual C++, which is encrusted with macros and declaration obligatos that impede the coder and obscure the result from others understanding it. Better than Visual Basic, as much as Java is better, adding strong typing and removing the legacy compatibility that invites mistakes through lack of historical awareness.

.Net: It means many things (and that’s Microsoft for ‘ya). But the one we’ll focus on is that it means a common set of class libraries for all languages that enable creation of a desktop user interface, access to databases, access to other important Windows APIs, as well as a common set of class libraries and architecture for creating Web server applications. It may also mean support for Windows code associated with Web pages that enables code to “animate” Web pages behind the scenes. This aspect of .Net means Microsoft has finally unified the class libraries, and, implicitly (when you consider support for Java-style reflection and COM in the class libraries), the execution environment, for all languages for Windows programming. Halleluiah! But this is more than convenience for programmers: it represents the recognition that the class library, and not the API, is the platform. Pop-quiz for would be Microsoft-busters: Is .Net part of the OS, or a common library used by applications? Who maintains it? And who directs the architectural direction? Bzzzt, time’s up, thank you for playing, Judge Jackson.

NGWS: Next Generation Windows Services. This is stuff built using .Net that makes building Web sites easy. One of the most important aspects of it is that it enables easy outsourcing of Web site functions, like credit card processing, user identity management, chat support, call-center integration, etc. It represents the productization of distributed component interfaces.

SOAP: A common underlying protocol for distributed component (object) systems. Whew! And you thought this was going to be a simple newsletter. Again, trust me, you need it. The old way of making COM talk to CORBA or other distributed component systems involved gateways that were supposed to translate interactions. These presented scalability bottlenecks. They were always implemented by COM bigots, or CORBA bigots, or some other bigot who thought the other guys’ architectures were secondary. And, though I’m sure those who toiled in the gateway vineyards might differ, they never worked as well as one would want. SOAP puts interoperation where it belongs: in a common, standardized, Web-oriented protocol based on XML. It makes finding out about distributed component interfaces an XML application. And it makes software that does not employ distributed component systems, such as legacy database and transaction processing systems, able to play in a distributed object world through the use of XML.

What does it all add up to? It adds up to the fact that Microsoft gets it. It will be easier to make architecturally sophisticated and interdependent Web sites with Windows programming tools, Windows 2000 servers, and services from Windows-oriented B2B sites than with any other family of tools, OSs, and Web services.

Yikes! Does this mean Microsoft has a good shot at being the dominant force in Web-based systems? Does this mean that the loosely integrated Oracle/Solaris/Java way of making big Web systems might be overwhelmed? It sure does. Has Microsoft behaved virtuously? It has: SOAP is a benefit to all, though it does have the effect of bringing into relief the fact that COM is by far the most widely deployed distributed component system (marketing studies indicating CORBA and COM are in some kind of parity only take into account large IT projects, and ignore the fact that COM is vital to the operation of every Windows desktop).

Does it mean Windows CE will topple Palm with a startling burst of Web-oriented distributed applications that take advantage of the multi-platform execution environment in .Net? Ah… no. Not real soon anyway. That will have to wait for the deployment of real mobile wireless Web access at attractive prices and I don’t mean WAP.

One thing to understand is that while Microsoft has shipped some dodgy stuff, in the form of an over ambitious windowing environment built on top of a creaky DOS foundation, Microsoft has generally prevailed on the merits. Even Windows 95 was better than Apple’s development torpor at the time, not to mention Sun’s desktop user interface strategy. Oh, sorry, they didn’t have one. Allegations that Microsoft out-markets its competitors will have to come up with an explanation for the goofy naming conventions: perhaps a New World Order conspiracy to lull the masses into paying no attention to Microsoft’s plans for world domination. Well the Orbiting Mind Control Satellites are powering-up again, this time to turn all those Visual Basic zombies into tools of Web domination.

More seriously, those who fail to notice that Windows 2000 is very nice product indeed, and who fail to see the parallels between Microsoft having gobbled up the desktop, from school-child’s learning toy to engineer’s CAD station, based on products that are cheaper and easier to buy and use, will fail to see that complex multi-tier interconnected Web sites would benefit from the same formula. Sun won’t vanish tomorrow, but if Sun does not come up with a direct response to the PC server challenge, Sun will soon enough be marginalized, just as minicomputers and mainframes have been. And those who think this is a bad thing, and who would step up their efforts to crush Microsoft with the tools of state, will only deny the economy of the benefit of a significant productivity gain. If Microsoft’s potential to make Web development more productive is considered in the same light as a new vaccine or a more-efficient electric generator, keeping Microsoft down qualifies as equivalent to cutting off our nose to spite our face.

Copyright 2000 Zigurd Mednieks.

Telirati Newsletter #52

In this Telirati newsletter the question of when to follow and when to lead is addressed.

Telirati Newsletter #52: Imitation, Flattery, Competition

The Telirati do not do product reviews. In this case, examining some of Microsoft’s new products indicates company direction. Mostly, it is the right direction.

Microsoft is revamping MSN. You may not like the result, which is a customized browser with plenty of Internet dumbing-down, like big colorful buttons you can hit two drinks after your friends hide the car keys. But this is what was needed long ago as AOL was carpeting the U.S. with disks. The new MSN is exactly what one expects from Microsoft: aggressive pursuit of a market leader with a high-quality implementation of a flatteringly similar idea.

The main lesson here is that marketing strategy is mainly a question of when to follow and when to lead. If you follow, your results will be predictable. In a growing market, achieving results similar to those of a market leader is a good thing. So, while pabulum content and icons-for-morons might annoy you, you don’t have to read it and you can still use your unmodified browser at MSN sites. Embracing AOL-level customer intelligence and extending the idea to a very well-done Windows/IE-oriented implementation will, no doubt, be to Microsoft’s benefit.

Microsoft has another large initiative in the works: enabling digital publishing of music and books. This encompasses a range of products from the new Pocket PCs to the new Media Player software to a digital document reader called, obscurely enough, “Reader.” Here the mix of imitation an innovation is more problematic. Like many electronic book technology providers, Microsoft has included “digital rights management” (DRM) technology in its software. That’s fine. Publishers can choose to use it, or not. Microsoft’s Media Player incorporates similar capability for music.

The problems with DRM are twofold: For Microsoft, the problem is that the goal of popularizing Reader, their new Media Player, and Pocket PC is in conflict with the goal of getting content publishers comfortable with electronic publishing. Here, imitation flatters only past failures. Past electronic publishing initiatives foundered on over-protective content protection, and so, it seems will current efforts. Without an aggressive move to break out of the copy-paranoid mode of previous electronic media publishing attempts, aggressive following will only lead down the path of similarly tepid results.

Digital Rights Management and other content schemes are inconvenient, brittle, and contrary to the notion of being secure in one’s own computer. DRM enables bits, including executable bits, to be hidden from a computer’s owner. This should be alarming to anyone who takes the security of electronic documents seriously. On the one hand, Windows 2000 offers excellent security features like an encrypted file system that can probably put documents out of the reach of anyone except the most elite code-cracking resources, and the fact that the extent of national security code-cracking must be kept secret effectively prevents the abuse this capability in garden variety corruption. This is good. But then Digital Rights Management creates an infrastructure for snooping. This is very very bad. A trusted system cannot serve two masters. Your computer can be trusted by you, or it can be trusted by content publishers.

Content publishers are deathly afraid of rampant illegal copying. This has driven them not only to demand dumb and dangerous content protection technology but also to supporting dubious laws like the Digital Millennium Copyright Act (DMCA). Invoking the DMCA, which was supported by Microsoft, has put Microsoft in such worthy company as the Church of Scientology, and it has pitched Microsoft against worthy outfits like Slashdot in a public relations fiasco over what was supposed to be an act of magnanimity on Microsoft’s part in releasing a specification for Kerberos extensions. One could, one has, and one no doubt will go on at length about the evils of the DMCA, but the down-side for Microsoft is that sticking to the same old recipe will yield the same old results, and, on top of it, cause much embarrassment and loathing.

In telephony, (once again, that pesky topic sneaks in) the question is in how to crack the stagnant CPE market. Small and medium business CPE is a large but torpid trade where market-share shifts with the speed of molasses in January. Here, using the same recipe, which is to say traditional channels and promotional tools, not only limits your market to current established boundaries, it limits your ability to make headway in that market to what appears to be a speed limit of about 0.5% per year. At that rate, most startups will starve before they reach a viable sustainable market share. Aggressively following established leaders into the conventional telephony channel has proved to be a quagmire for telephony servers, convergence products, and other novel CPE.

The answers have to be comprehensive and bold. In order to get Pocket PCs and digital media distribution off the ground, two approaches can break the logjam: One is to make large amounts of public domain and freely distributed content available, and the other is to lead the publishers by distributing paid content with less-intrusive security measures like watermarks that would still enable detection of industrial-scale piracy without inconveniencing, or reducing the privacy of, the consumer. This may not seem particularly bold, but it does mean scaring rather than seducing content publishers. Unless publishers fear commercial irrelevance more than they fear digital distribution, digital distribution will remain stifled by heavy-handed content protection. But this is the only way forward. Unless Pocket PCs break away from the past, they will follow a predictable path into obscurity.

In telephony, breaking out means developing products that are consumer friendly, have features that truly deliver value – screening nuisance calls, for example, because telephone companies will never respond with an equivalent subscription service (Caller-ID helps, but it is not a cure), and, especially, it means finding and exploiting channels that are different from established telephony channels. Where are the established player not? They are not selling direct. They are not advertising on the Internet. They are not selling superior customer relationship management capabilities to e-commerce startups. They are not linking their products to B2B portals. They are not creating features that antagonize the telephone companies by serving the individual rather than the telemarketer. These are the places telephony ventures must go in order to crack open a valuable but heavily encrusted prize. In telephony, especially in CPE for small and medium business, aggressive following, much less tepid and timid following, will not get you far.

Copyright 2000 Zigurd Mednieks.

Telirati Newsletter #50

In this number, I kick sand in the face of Y2K alarmists, having successfully predicted nothing would happen. The meanstream media was wrong about Y2K, and blogs like Slashdot got it right, presaging the current "discovery" of the blogoshpere by the mainstream media by nealry 5 years.

Telirati Newsletter #50: Why Too 'K?

No accidental nuclear war. No food riots prompting the imposition of global government implemented by U.N. zombie soldiers in black helicopters. Did you even get a fax dated 1900? Y2K went more than just OK, it went swimmingly OK. But then, this was predictable (and predicted in the newsletter entitled "Why Tu Que?") Before returning to rubbing it in, let's look at why this was so predictable.

First, and most important to those of you in the computing and telecom industry: the number of mission critical systems is vastly overestimated. Most systems hardened against failure and operated by a team of operators that wear their pagers proudly to display their importance are not actually mission critical outside of the mission of enhancing the significance of the people operating them. By contrast, the small number of actually critical systems were long since well taken care of, if there had been any Y2K concern over them in the first place.

Corollary to this rule are the fact that Russia, Nigeria, Mexico, and other chaotic places are chaotic for reasons like cleptocratic government, organized crime, and other forces far more life-threatening than any computer bug. It is unlikely that the balance of chaos in these societies would be upset by anything less substantial than a few planeloads of AK-47s and a coven of spies. Computers, as powerful as they are, are not up to fomenting revolution, and their relative lack of importance is viscerally known to every banana republic strongman with the wits to live through next week.

Second, expectations of Y2K were driven by a singularly unreliable transmitter: the "mainstream media." If there is one lesson to learn from Y2K it is that independent, non-traditional, and largely Internet-based information sources are at least as good as the so-called "mainstream press." Yes, kooks use the Internet as their trumpet, but they are easy to spot. Instead, the calm that pervaded independent Internet news sources like NewsMax, StratFor, the undeservedly maligned Drudge Report, and the non-traditional computer-oriented sites like Slashdot indicated that there would be no significant trouble. This illustrates that the "mainstream" press has been disintermediated as an effective way to get the most important news fastest. It now picks up and retransmits things we already know to the unplugged and generally apathetic, while retaining its other function as spin amplifier for views sympathetic to the journalistic subculture of people who have never made an actual functional work product and sold it. Hence we see the spectacle of formerly respectable institutions such as the New York Times and BBC proclaiming the non-millennium as if it were the millennium if only to avoid contradicting the political objects of their toadyism who have stood for dumbing down the calendar.

It is far too much to expect the traditional press to comprehend and accurately portray facts such as that computer systems of any non-trivial complexity have dozens to hundreds of bugs that can cause them to stop functioning. Increased taxes would not fix this. Regulations would not fix this. More social workers would not fix this. A lawsuit would not fix this. One could blame it on white men, but those were antediluvian times when white men with short hair wrote code. Nobody would get the connection, since everyone who relies on the mainstream media knows that most programmers look and act like Jaron Lanier (who invented virtual reality in the lab just down the hall from where Al Gore, who must have at the time sported a similarly Rastafarian haircut, was inventing the Internet). It is therefore impossible for most young reporters who have been to journalism school in the last 20 years to write a concluding sentence to a news item accurately describing the danger, or lack of it, from the Y2K bug.

Then there is the minor point that it wasn't actually the millennium. The new millennium, the next thousand years after the first and second thousand in the Western calendar's numbering scheme, begins at the end of this year. The first year of the new millennium is 2001. If one is really serious about immanentizing the eschaton, which is not a task to be taken lightly, one would make sure not to martyr oneself and appear before the higher authority a year early. Oh faux pas! Which only goes to show that the average fanatical zealot can get the calendar right when a certain prodigal Rhodes scholar cannot, or chooses a path of ignorance on purpose. Should one be more worried about the end of this year? Probably. But even if you think the world is done on the granularity of millennia, it is a bit arrogant to suggest that you will be walking the earth when the End of Days does arrive. Even the fieriest millennialist may have to concede that Bill Clinton makes a pretty lame antichrist. He's smart enough, but the ease with which he is distracted from his job does not exactly fit the profile of "working like the devil."

There are however, some serious pitfalls to avoid. While there is no orderly or competent New World Order, there are thousands of little Pol Pots in bureaucracies all over the world that would take advantage of any opportunity to regulate your life in accordance with their pet theory of society. Some boondoggle monger got the U.S. President to stand up and spend a considerable amount of credibility on asking for government money for an anti-cyber-terror squad just as the FBI was admitting there was literally not a single incident of Y2K cyber-terror that stood out from the normal level of cracker jiggery-pokery of port scans and spammers shanghaiing mail servers. Resisting such cyber-pork swindles will be a tiresome but constant and important chore for cyber citizens that want to keep the golden goose out of the kettle of the government chef.

Watch your wallet around government men. Don't trust the big media companies. Do listen to your own judgment based on data you collect yourself. Go forth and prosper in the New Year.

Copyright 2000 Zigurd Mednieks. May be reproduced and redistributed with attribution and this notice intact.

Telirati Newsletter #49

Four years ago, the specter of content protection stalked the PC. Four year on, it's still out there, threatening to turn the magic of a general machine into something more like television.

Telirati Newsletter #49: Content protection: diabolical, or just evil?

First, we start with the good things about content protection: (let me know if you come up with any).

OK, now let’s get into what is wrong with it:

Content protection is the end of personal computing. This may sound a bit apocalyptic, but it really only means that the reasons the personal computer is popular could all be extinguished through content protection. The personal computer became popular because it was completely under the control of the individual who owns it. Subsequently, in the name of orderly corporate computing environments and other supposedly worthy causes that control is eroded. But, still, you can purchase a computer, a completely general machine, capable of any function, programmable to any purpose, and control it completely and utterly.

The attractions of this total control range from those based in the philosophical freedom it gives to create forms of information processing that authorities cannot control and that can embody seditious intent, to the rather more mundane blessing of getting one’s work done no matter how inefficient one’s IT department is. Everything from the free choice of digital music formats to the world-shaking possibilities of anonymous digital cash depend on the individual being able to completely control and trust a computing machine.

What happens when you destroy this trust? The PC industry, as it is currently constituted, dies. Forget, if it makes it easier, the moral dimensions of content protection. Content protection is directly inimical to the foundation of the industry and the attraction the customer has to its product.

Content protection is also equivalent to key escrow. Remember key escrow? That cold, clammy feeling of the spook’s hand on your shoulder all the time? Content protection, which must enable your computer to keep secrets from you and rat you out is literally identical to key escrow in its ability to enable Big Brother to take up residence in your computer. Perhaps even worse. The presence of hidden software, undetectable execution and storage, and use of network connections without computer users’ knowledge of such communications can turn the PC into an instrument of surveillance. Content protection is, in fact evil.

But is it diabolical? Yes, if the criterion of diabolism is that it can make intelligent people act against their self-interest. Microsoft, for example. Microsoft is in the process of flushing tens to hundreds of millions of dollars down the toilet in the name of content protection. How? By failing to see that Windows handhelds need a killer app. Well maybe they see it, but they don’t have the will to pursue it.

The killer app, of course, is digital media delivery. Windows handhelds, with the high resolution text and powerful media player, are potentially a very attractive platform for delivery of digital audio and books. So far so good: an application has been connected to product features. Somebody read up on how the Mac’s bacon was saved with desktop publishing. But Microsoft has left out a key ingredient: creative destruction.

If you are old enough, you might remember that desktop publishing destroyed several industries and professions: Page composition workstations, layout service bureaus, and several other crafts and their tools went extinct, or were decimated, by desktop publishing. Almost all publishing today is desktop publishing. Apple was big enough, and the conventional page composition industry and service infrastructure was small enough and invisible to the wider public, enough so that it could be wiped out without much outcry. Microsoft has a bigger challenge.

If Microsoft really wants Windows handhelds to take off it will do this: Instead of playing footsy with the content publishers, seed the content directly. For music, this means allying with a Napster-like service or adding unattended file transfer capability to Windows Messenger, NetMeeting, or some other utility and feeding it with an alliance with MP3.com or the like. For books, it means directly funding one of the sleepy and underfed public-domain electronic library projects and making sure they can deliver in a Windows handheld-friendly format that takes advantage of the new high-resolution text display technology. Or an e-learning initiative like the one in Cambridge Massachusetts that aims to teach an MIT-level computer science education in one year – free or low-cost college courses in the palm of your hand. In all these cases, however, someone’s ox ends up as the main course of the luau.

The music industry has demonstrated that they are bastards of the first water. Book publishers, while more gentlemanly, nonetheless will not be cheered by a flood of public domain reading material packaged in the hottest new format and delivered by a super-slick Web site. And universities in the U.S. have spent the last two decades raising tuition far faster than costs in general. But the fact is, if nobody gets pissed off at you, it is a sign you are not delivering value. What do you expect? To be able to create sufficient value out of thin air to motivate people to spend $500 on a new and untried tool that already has a history of dubious utility? No, unless take the value out of some other industry, you don’t have a killer app. If you don’t have the will to destroy, you will never create anything big.

The question is: What is it worth? Does Microsoft really want to succeed with handhelds, or are they a hobby? Does Microsoft remember what made PCs an unstoppable force in the first place? Or do they really think they cannot be replaced by a system that respects the customer more than it respects slimy payola-dealing record companies? Is content protection a concept so diabolical it can cause the downfall of an enterprise more illustrious than any that came before, and do it far more surely than a bunch of DoJ pinkos?

The other side of the same coin is that actors, musicians, and authors and others sometimes act as irrationally as makers of digital media hardware: Before there were record labels, almost all musicians had day jobs as music teachers. A small number of elite musicians were subsidized by sponsors. Now, a small fraction of a percent of musicians make a living by selling records, supplemented by commercial sponsorship of concerts, and the concept of “elite” extents to The Backstreet Boys. Even if the “worst” were to happen and record companies went out of business, the effect on musicians would, in the context of their total population, be almost undetectable. As horrible as it is to contemplate that the world might never have heard of Brittany Spears, it is not outlandish to suggest that the diffusion of commercial activity now concentrated on both the deserving elite and the manufactured pop icons out onto the whole real world of music-making might be a net benefit.

Then there is the danger is that the idea of intellectual property could be fundamentally damaged. Laws granting limited protection to intellectual property have fostered an era of wealth creation that was impossible in a time when land and minerals were the only defensible form of wealth and value. Some people believe that intellectual property is so artificial as to be immoral. Some even believe all property ownership is immoral. The record, however, shows that people take care of what they own far better than any form of collective stewardship has ever done. So when abominations like the Digital Millennium Copyright Act do the equivalent of loosing vicious dogs in the neighborhood in order to protect a single lot from trespass, the reaction is to shoot the dogs and hang the landlord. Some time ago we reached a sensible and fair balance between absolute and eternal control over a work of art or literature and the public good of eventual free dissemination. Modern efforts to enlist government in oppressive and unfair schemes that directly contravene established doctrines of fair use only strengthen the hand of radicals who would overthrow property in general. These bad laws also create needless conflict between the nature of the Internet and the personal computer on the one hand, and intrusive laws that create thought-crimes and sneaky and brittle protection technologies on the other hand. This conflict is bad for commerce as a whole.

Far better to let change happen. Far better not to subject the legal traditions of patent and copyright to artificially created stresses since they face sufficient natural challenges. And far better for the shareholder, the musician, and the author for Microsoft, or Palm if they are unwilling, to take up the challenge of digital media distribution in a post-Time-Warner era. Such are the risks and rewards that will create the next great wave of wealth.

Copyright 2000 Zigurd Mednieks.

Telirati Newsletter #48

This newsletter, written 4 years ago, describes a lesson still valid today: New technologies have to be an improvement over what they replace - a lesson VoIP has only now applied with the superior sound quality available with Skype.

Telirati Newsletter #48: What Roger Ebert Can Teach Us About Telephony

What can a movie critic, a fat man in a tweed jacket, teach us about telephony? A lot, as you will see. Telephony, because it is so widely used, is about what people want, much the same as making and showing movies. In a recent column, Roger Ebert, a noted movie critic, takes his gaze away from the screen and looks into the projection booth. There he finds digital cinema technology trying to make an unwise leap and landing under the wheels of the juggernaut of refined existing systems:

I have seen the future of the cinema, and it is not digital. No matter what you've read, the movie theater of the future will not use digital video projectors, and it will not beam the signal down from satellites. It will use film, and the film will be right there in the theater with you.

Then there is the hype:

But how good is digital projection? I saw it demonstrated in May at the Cannes Film Festival, and have read reports of those who've attended the custom "Phantom Menace" installations. A system offered by Hughes is not very persuasive, the witnesses say, but the Texas Instruments system is better; reviews range from "85 percent as good as a real movie" to "about as good." The special effects in "Phantom Menace" looked especially sharp, viewers said, and a reason: They were computer-generated in the first place, so they arrived at the screen without stepping down a generation to film. And because they depicted imaginary places, it was impossible to judge them on the basis of how we know the real world looks.

For all the hype, "about as good" is about as good as reviews get. Remind you of anything? Like how H.323 and most other forms of IP telephony is "about as good" as normal switched-circuit telephony? "About as good" should ring alarm bells to management and investors. Nobody wants to get a new technology that is about as good as the old one. In one case, we have a digital cinema technology that delivers less resolution than film, in the case of telephony, a technology that could deliver better phone calls, but generally doesn't, because of poor choices in product formulation. In the case of cinema, what is going to keep digital projection at bay?

"Dijection" offers a wonderful new prospect, if it's for real. But it's not the only possible future. Far from the boardrooms of Texas Instruments, which has unlimited financial resources and wants to grab the world movie distribution market, there is an alternative film-based projection system that is much cheaper than digital, uses existing technology and (hold onto your hats) is not "about as good" as existing film, but, its inventors claim, 500 percent better. That is not a misprint. This system is called MaxiVision48. I have seen it demonstrated. It produces a picture so breathtakingly clear it is like 3-D in reverse: like looking through an open window into the real world. Motion is shown without the jumpiness and blurring of existing film projection, details are sharper, and our eyes are bathed in visual persuasion.

Is Ebert describing something like IMAX? No. IMAX has its own problems. The system he describes is a relatively simple and quite inexpensive optimization of 35mm film projection:

Without getting into labyrinthine technical explanations, here is how MaxiVision48 works: It can project film at 48 frames per second, twice the existing 24-fps rate. That provides a picture of startling clarity. At 48 frames, it uses 50 percent more film than at present. But MV48 also has an "economy mode"... MV48 uses a new system to pull the film past the projector bulb without any jitter or bounce... MV48 completely eliminates the jiggle that all current films experience as they dance past the projector bulb. Watching it, I was startled to see how rock solid the picture was, and how that added to clarity... The result: "We figure it's 500 percent better than existing film or the Texas Instruments video projection system, take your choice," Goodhill (the inventor) told me.

Unfortunately for the digital cinema equipment providers, this refinement is startlingly inexpensive:

It is also a lot cheaper, because it retrofits existing projectors, uses the original lamp housings and doesn't involve installing high-tech computer equipment. MaxiVision's business plan calls for leasing the projectors at $280 a month, but if you wanted to buy one, it would cost you about $10,000. Estimates for the Texas Instruments digital projector range from $110,000 to $150,000 per screen.

In this, we see reflected other aspects of how the new telephony is actually unfolding, in contrast with some predictions. Instead of the telephone infrastructure (and incumbent operators) being replaced, they are being refined. Fully IP-based infrastructures may be on the way, but solutions that focus on true network operator needs are likely to do quite well until IP calls are not just "nearly as good" or even "just as good," but will likely be dominant until anyone offering an alternative technology delivers along with it phone calls that are really better.

Well, more expensive and not better seldom beats cheaper and better, but this is not the most interesting part of the comparison. The really interesting part is the fact that the refinement trumps the new technology by offering a higher quality expeience to the viewer. The system's inventors seem to grasp the needs of the people making the pictures, which is how they arrived at a system that delivers something superior to every point in the value chain: a superior tool to the cinematographer, an economical system to the cimema operator, and a visibly better result to the customer buying the ticket:

One advantage of a film print is that the director and cinematographer can "time" the print to be sure the colors and visual elements are right. In a digital theater, the projectionist would be free to adjust the color, tint and contrast according to his whims. Since many projectionists do not even know how to properly frame a picture or set the correct lamp brightness, this is a frightening prospect... We saw a scene that had been shot for Goodhill by another cameraman who likes the system, Steven Poster, vice president of the American Society of Cinematographers. Poster deliberately assembled a scene filled with technical pitfalls for traditional film and video systems:

We see actor Peter Billingsley walking toward the camera, wearing a patterned shirt. He is passed by another guy, wearing a T-shirt with something written on it. The camera tilts down as Billingsley picks up a hose to water a lawn. The camera continues to move past a white picket fence. In the background, a truck drives out of a parking lot. Not great art, but great headaches for cinematographers, who know that picket fences will seem to "flutter" if panned too quickly, that water droplets will blur, and that the sign on the side of a moving truck cannot be read. All true in the old systems. With MV48, we could read the writing on the shirt, see every picket in the fence, see the drops of water as if in real life and read the side of the truck. Case closed.

This is a devastating case. Simpler, better, cheaper, more compatible. By now you may be thinking "In film, I can see the advantages, literally. But what do you do once you have delivered a full-rate voice telephone call?" And this question is at the crux of why alternative telephone technologies have had such little impact on sales of telephone equipment. Has nobody asked if you (or, more importantly, the customer) would want a better phone call? The very term "full rate" inspires a lack of inspiration. Why go to all the trouble of digital phones, network interfaces, complicated protocol stacks, powerful servers, abundant bandwidth, and the imposition of QoS on a network that mostly spells c-h-a-o-s when all that is delivered at the end is a full-rate phone call, perhaps not even, and almost always with marginal to poor latency?

Can we do better? Why yes. And this answer is not even an outre suggestion, it is right under our noses, at least if we are familiar with ISDN or ATM. "High quality voice" is an ISDN service. It bears reminding that ISDN means Integrated Services Digital Network, integrating the definition of services into the definition of the network. We only need support a long-defined service in order to provide to users voice quality that is more like broadcast-quality audio than a phone call. ATM is even more flexible, allowing us to trade off network bandwidth for signal processing horsepower in situations where that is appropriate. H.323 and IP telephony on 100Mb networks would easily afford the bandwidth. Yet we are stuck with systems that deliver a product that is "almost as good" as the decades-old systems they want to replace. Unlikely.

But can such attention to a quality experience by the user find powerful allies? In film, it can:

The big film companies such as Kodak and Fuji should like the system, since it will help them sell more film. The directors who love celluloid, like Steven Spielberg and Martin Scorsese, should know about MV48. And there are other applications. Retail outlets use "video walls" to create atmosphere. Rainforest Cafes could put you in the jungle. NikeTown could put you on the court with Michael Jordan. No more million-dollar walls of video screens, but a $10,000 projector and a wall-sized picture.

What about telephony? Both IP telephony and voice-over-ATM systems have the prospect of delivering a truly better product, in audio quality, in call information, in lightning-quick connection, in integration with PC and Palm-based information, in the richness and friendliness of voice interface. Why use bells and tones and buzzes when you can explain things to the user and offer alternatives? Still, makers of new-style systems seem to think their work is done when it is "almost as good as" phone calls delivered over the very first, and now decades-old electronic exchanges.

Are the developers of new telephony systems stupid? No, they are merely tired. By the time they have gotten their products to work, with their investors breathing down their necks, they are happy to have something that will satisfy a specification and a business plan, rather than make a customer say "Wow!" But if you really want success, you won't stop until you have something that is really remarkable, not just respectable.

Moreover, the best way to come to an understanding of how to assemble the right set of capabilities into a system that delights not only the end-customer, but every hand along the value chain to that end-customer is to develop as integrated a view of your pursuit as Roger Ebert and the inventors of the MV48 projector have of cinema. Without the ability to translate artistic need, viewing delight, and cameraman's craft, all the way down into the engineering detail of how film is pulled through a projector, they would have produced something only prosaic, incremental, and only a half-step improvement in one place in the value chain. Similarly, without the ability to integrate knowledge of users, network operators, and all levels of system design and implementation, just having the ambition to produce a great telephony product won't get you to actually have one in the end.

Copyright 2000 Zigurd Mednieks. May be reproduced and redistributed with attribution and this notice intact.

Telirati Newsletter #47

In this newsletter, written in 2004, I made a number of predictions. My scorceard looks like this:

Apple did make a UNIX my mother could use. But now they face the task of taking advantage of, rather than being run over by, the coming desktop Linux wave.

Microsoft, after the huge technology achievement of Windows 2000, did face the challenge of remaining relevant, and largely failed. Microsoft isn't moving fast enough, hasn't had a break-out into new product categories - with the possible exception of XBox, and hasn't created any new product categories to dominate.

Until recently I was right about VoIP being irrelevant because incumbent networks could comfortably drop prices. Cisco is finally getting some traction (by default) in VoIP CPE, and Skype has discovered pricing and a business model that (probably) works.

I was thuddingly wrong about VoATM. Never heard of VoATM? Yeah. Anyway, DSL and VoATM are wrong and deserve to lose. VoIP will set you free to buy service from any telco. VoIP wins.

In 2000, I predicted content protection is futile, and it remains so. Public domain literature still isn't in mass-market circulation. Nobody has, for example, brought Soviet-era prices to iTMS for back catalogs of Soviet-era classical recordings. eBooks are still a total commercial failure. Bah! How many years of clue-stick bashing will it take?

9/11 has forestalled both shrinking government and making it more transparent. The population is the target of tag-and-bag technologies, not the government itself. It will be a long road to turn this one around, and this is Not a Good Thing.

Oh, and other failed prediction: Windows CE, Web terminals, and other non-PC products went nowhere for Microsoft, and continue to go nowhere. Maybe CE will make a comeback in Xbox II. Maybe.

Telirati Newsletter #47: At the Crossroads

A number of technologies, economies, companies, and policies are at a crossroads now. They are worth marking.

Apple is flush and healthy. They have had time to really finish OS X. When Steve Jobs started Next, I could have told him it was a dim idea to use a Unix variant as the basis for his operating system. Some ten years later, he might be done taming Unix, and in time to catch the Internet wave. Apple will thrive or die based on whether OS X really is a Unix my mother could use.

In newsletter #46 we looked at Microsoft?s operating systems design leadership with and found it a mixed bag when it comes to being equipped for the next fight. Speed has become the issue. Microsoft has many of the right answers, but can it put them into products, have the products accepted, and have applications that take advantage of the capabilities quickly enough that those right answers turn into value, instead of just white-paper fodder? Focus, simplicity, and clear-headed assessments of whether leapfrog moves have to be made when incrementalism gets bogged down will be the key. The positive signs for Microsoft come from the fact that Windows 2000 is an excellent product. It really does deliver the ease of use that only Windows95/98 had before, and then some. Go ahead! Windows 2000 is an NT that doesn?t hurt to install anymore. Your mother could set up Internet connection sharing. A wonderful product. But is a wonderful desktop OS enough? Will COM+ win the middleware war? Will Microsoft break out into post-PC devices? They are fighting a war on many fronts, and victory is not at hand.

The technical battle of packet-switched voice vs. circuit-switched voice spirals into irrelevance. Much as Intel showed the world that manufacturing prowess can overcome the purported advantages of RISC, circuit switched communications carriers are showing that bits are bits and that the incremental advantage of packet switched voice communication can be countered by incumbency, scale, and experience in network operations. In the middle term, ATM will emerge as the currency for apportioning DSL bandwidth between voice and data. ATM is a connection-oriented virtual-circuit technology that will prove to be just flexible enough to enable DSL to use its bandwidth very efficiently. DSL is not as pure as IP over a cable modem, especially for supporting household servers visible to the Internet, but clever cooperation between CPE devices and carrier equipment will make even this distinction irrelevant.

In telephony, CPE vs. network is a battle that morphs into an Internet incarnation as Cisco acquires a lot of carrier-oriented technologies like big-iron unified messaging technology. They are forgetting that the network is dumb and the edges are smart. While the network is very good at being dumb, reliable, and transparent, it is as hard as ever for attempts to add value to the network to keep up with the cleverness that springs up at the edges. They will find customers who are happy to buy more efficient ways to deliver capacity, but dubious about providing more than an e-mail address over and above the raw bits.

Intelligence at the edge, plus voice-over-ATM, will produce a new class of mass-market telephony applications for making individuals? telephony experience smarter and better. These applications will live in integrated access devices and will arbitrage the boundary between ATM WAN connections on one side and IP SOHO LANs and wireline/wireless telephone handsets on the other side. The most imaginative applications that break down the boundaries between business and residential needs, and that take best advantage of the WAN architecture will form the basis of a new and vibrant class of intelligence at the edge. Voice mail will morph into a more user-friendly blurring of the real-time/store-and-forward boundary, much as instant messaging is blurring this boundary in the text medium.

Music and books are at a crossroads. Publishers and creators can either face up to the fact that content protection is futile and change their business model to suit, or they will break their pick on the matter. Good guys in governments around the world can give this a heavy shove in the right direction by publishing all material under government ownership, the public domain, and material in their possession that is not protected by intellectual property law in open and unprotected formats. The result would be an efflorescence of cultural wealth, and a crushing blow to both piracy and harebrained schemes to infringe on the doctrine of fair use with fragile software locks. Government, museum, and foundation archives are brimming with recordings, images, texts, movies, and video. A large amount of it belongs to the people, or to institutions chartered to enhance the people?s lives through culture. It is time to use the Internet as a giant amplifier of the cultural legacy of mankind. The alternative is quite dark. The Digital Millennium Copyright Act tramples well-established doctrines of fair use, and creates novel thought crimes, like knowing how to break cheesy ?copy protection? schemes that at times take the form of a bit in a binary file, a setting in the Windows registry, or a line of text in a configuration file. It is not exaggeration that attempts to move past business models into an unaccommodating future will, in the short run, make the government into publicly funded goons for music and movie publishers.

The above comments might make your chronicler out as some kind of anti-capitalist flower child. Ha! The next victim standing at the crossroads not minding the traffic to be run over by the V-8 powered luxury sport utility vehicle of progress is government bloat and waste. Here the people are the ones faced with a decision: Do we let the fat times continue to blind us to the fact that government is at least twice as large as it needs to be? Or will the ethic of cheaper faster better begin to gain traction when people contrast the performance of government against the performance of technology. Will we accept more intrusive surveillance, or turn the camera the other way so we can see in real-time how many road crews are hanging out at Dunkin Donuts? We have ?sunshine? laws and the Freedom of Information Act. Government, in theory, operates under the scrutiny of the people. Why not make it a matter of course that all government meetings are recorded and the recordings posted on the Internet, along with all documents? In every department outside the FBI and DoD this should be the norm, and even in these departments, 80% of matters are mundane and would benefit from the sanitizing benefits of sunshine. The rest can be recorded and electronically numbered and signed in a way that would absolutely prevent destruction of evidence should they be unsealed in case they become the subject of an inquiry. Or, if these arguments do not sway you, think of it this way: Where do you think the productivity gains that will take your online stock portfolio to new heights will come from? Look at that nice fat government over there, like a great fatty slab of bacon. Wouldn?t privatizing another 20% of the GDP look nice on that mutual fund statement? Flower child indeed.

And finally, back around to Microsoft: What a simple idea, that Windows CE should be the foundation of simple, inexpensive machines that surf the Web. Not exactly a crossroads, it is more like ?Well, duh!? An idea whose time came about a year ago but nobody took the call. This product, together with Microsoft?s game console architecture again puts Microsoft at the crossroads of non-PC mass-market products. Microsoft tried, in the distant past, to promulgate a game console architecture. This time around, the x86 instruction set looks like part of the mix, which raises the likelihood of success considerably. But is it enough to withstand the rock of falling PC prices, while resting against the hard place of game console competition?

We will be keeping an eye on these crossroads.

Telirati Newsletter #46

Every now and then I would reach pretty far in my newletters, and this is a case in point: I analyize David Cutler's influence on Microsoft. Ambitious, but perhaps also useful in that the influence of people like Cutler is one reason why Windows seems to move so slowly to respond to the threat of Linux. He shaped Microsft, and his influence, and the momentum of what he set in motion, is still strong.

Telirati Newsletter #46: Cutler on the Couch

One thing that makes Microsoft great is that titanic personalities can still mold large parts of the company in their image. David Cutler, the father of NT, is one such titan, and his worldview is about to start shaping your desktop computing experience. What a strange world it will be. In a recent interview Cutler gave in a Microsoft newsletter distributed to the Windows 2000 beta test community, he made some telling remarks. The interview itself was a puff piece, and the writer was in awe of her subject. But Cutler reveals more than he or the writer might know.

One striking thing about the interview is the reverence over the original NT specification document. Your's truly enjoys regaling his co-workers with stories of how he had to walk five miles through the snows of Illinois to a log cabin where he toggled in the boot load code on the front panel of a PDP-8 until their appreciative snoring reaches its crescendo as much as the next old fart. But it does not exactly exude an aura of Internet speed to blow the dust off the original NT spec. It more reminds one that the ghost of VMS lives on in many of the clunky aspects of NT.

Everyone has to deal with the legacy of their previous efforts. This is nothing new. The more important thing here is the legacy of one's management philosophy and leadership. When Cutler was hired, the move was widely praised as signaling the maturation of Microsoft. Here was someone who could bring order to the chaos of microcomputer software, which had hitherto (and long after) been the province of cowboy engineers who had little patience for the style of software development practiced in corporate software engineering projects.

Microsoft no longer had to scrimp and improvise. It could for the first time afford to do things the right way, and Bill Gates thought there wasn't enough "right way" thinking inside Microsoft. It would be better to score a system architect from an established firm that did things the right way. At the time, the rightest company on the planet was Digital Equipment Corporation. Microsoft harbored dreams of PCs being able to reshape computing to the extent that the kind of rigorous design and development of an operating system that was a hallmark of DEC would become a requirement. So they went right to the source: David Cutler, father of VMS, would lead Microsoft to the future of microcomputer-based systems used alongside, and perhaps even replacing minicomputers.

Cutler is, as already stated, a titanic figure. He had the overwhelming force of personality to move a company like Microsoft, already filled with strong personalities, to a direction of his choosing. He would not shy away from spending whatever it takes to accomplish his goals, and, in general, has self doubt in amounts that, if it exists, must be hunted down as assiduously as a neutrino. In some ways, the perfect man for the job. In some ways, not.

One way to measure the level of self assurance is in the way the discussion of NT's goals are framed. Cutler refers to the original spec (which will be donated to the Smithsonian!) and an early book on NT:

We had five or six major goals: Portability, reliability, extensibility, compatibility, performance. I think that's right. Let me see.

He was then asked if the goals had been achieved. The response is intriguingly self-contained, internally consistent, but not even coming close to examining the ways in which reality has impinged on the relevance of the goals and the way in which they were met:

We tried to create a system that had a good, solid design, as opposed to one that would run optimally on hardware of the time. When we started, we were working on 386/20s. At the time that was a big, honking machine. Since our design had to be portable, we didn't allow people to optimize code in assembly language, which is hardware specific. This was hard for the Microsoft mentality at the time. Everyone wanted to optimize code in assembler. We didn't embed operating-system semantics into the kernel, so when we switched from OS/2 to Windows, we didn't take a major hit. If we had built OS/2 threading or signals into the kernel, we would have been in trouble. Instead we built the OS in layers.

Later he adds: "The basic, internal architecture has not changed, except for Plug and Play?"

Anyone who has ever complained to a Microsoft engineer that a product or programming tool might be more than necessarily complex or difficult to apply is familiar with the form of Cutler's response. Correct, but it leaves one with a sense of unreality. Two facts jar the mind here: Windows NT was forced to adopt an architecture where notoriously unreliable video drivers were allowed into the kernel for the sake of performance, and Linux achieves a high level of reliability with a low-tech monolithic kernel architecture. Multiple user interfaces, multi-protocol-networking, and other NT architectural keystones have become cybernetic teats on a boar. Shockingly, the museum-piece spec dates back only to 1989. NT feels much older.

Napoleonic siege development processes and forced-march debugging cycles do not feel right in Internet time. It is as if a bunch of splendidly dressed German officers on horseback showed up to fight the narco-terrorists in Colombia. What saves Microsoft is the fact that Windows 2000 development is not a single, monolithic army. It is a multi-service-branch task force with a variety of leadership styles and operating procedures. Good thing, for as Cutler says:

What I think is cool, is that the system doesn't crash, and it doesn't lose my work, and it has functionality. I could care less that the visuals are flashy if my 32-gig hard drive goes away.

Never mind the fact that Apple has resurrected itself on the restored ability to deliver the flashy visuals on a kernel that was iffy in 1984, and little better today.

Cutler's remark shows he is more brethren to the Linux people than one might think: architecting a system to make user interface systems changeable and disposable indicates a similar contempt for what we feed on through our eyes all day long. The kitchen may be a gleaming temple of stainless steel, impervious to infection, equipped with the fastest-cooking ovens, but if the food is unmemorable, never mind its objective quality, it will go uneaten in favor of the kebab of dubious street corner origin.

To this point Microsoft was up against companies that were either far more stultified and bureaucratic, or that had inadequate resources for a credible challenge. With Linux as the main competitor, the old measures of relative strength are mostly useless. Any inefficiency could be the cause of Microsoft's decline. They can no longer count on IBM to botch OS/2, or Apple to become a seething pit of office politics, or BeOS to be the consumptive Bohemian in the garret. Linux is immune to these diseases. Not to say Linux is destined to succeed. Only that the old paradigm that sucking less is enough may no longer hold. Can Microsoft make NT development really conform to what people want? Can they do this before Linux oozes into the gaps NT has left open, and metastasizes?

Telirati Newsletter #45

Overall, I find it eerie to reread what I woute five years ago. For an industry that supposedly moves at lightning speed, the predictions presented below are remarkable mainly for the fact that their outcomes are still unfolding.

Still, it is possible to tell that most of these predictions have come true. Moreover, it is also possible to say quite clearly that Microosft has failed to use the previous five years to take actions that would have been effective in minimizing the competitive threat from Linux and other open source software.

One can also see that the importance assigned to these threats has held up: Price hasn't dislodged Windows from the desktop, where Windows pricing is low enough to fail to deter any customers. It is the other attactions of open source software that matter more.

Telirati Newsletter #45: Categorizing the Linux Threat (Opportunity)

How much of a threat is Linux to Microsoft? What are the main opportunities for Linux? In answering these questions, it is best to keep in mind that there are layers to the answer, and some layers matter more than others even though the theories behind each layer are supportable. Here, we attempt to order the layers according to importance:

Big threat: Linux is good enough. Linux is good enough for a lot of purposes. Serving simple Web content over moderate-speed links is simple, and Linux is more than good enough for this purpose. Inexpensive desktop PCs, or used PCs, are good enough for this purpose. If you need to put content on the Web, Linux is good enough. As broadband access explodes, a lot more people will find low-end PCs in combination with Linux ideal for this purpose. The vast majority of computers and the OSs they run are not applied to anything remotely approaching their highest and best use nor to the limits of their capacity. It should worry Microsoft that good enough might be good enough for most people.

Big threat: It's better than stealing. A lot of people got into computer software for the same reason people become drug pushers: they don't want to pay for their own habit. But not everyone can cadge free goodies. Linux, in addition to being good enough is free or near to it. As makers of commercial software squeeze out freeloaders and thieves, these people will have to make a decision on how to go legit. In this, Linux has the distinct advantage of not having a commercial entity associated with it that can be embarrassed by this market.

Big threat: It's better than cadavers. Students can cut Linux open and start hacking away without having to be part of the select few organizations with source access to Windows OSs. If students come to be familiar with the anatomy of Linux more than Windows, Windows will lose a key slice of mind share among the most fertile minds.

Moderate threat: IBM likes it. And so do all the other also-ran software makers. The problem is that there are a lot of these guys out there and they might get it together enough to add significant momentum to Linux as a platform that supports a full suite of software. And don't get all worked up about how IBM has higher software revenues than Microsoft if that is still true. Computer Associates is a very large software company, number two or three by most measures, and I defy anyone to tell me how that might be relevant to this discussion.

Moderate threat: Responsiveness. One of the most visible fruits of community development is multi-platform portability for Linux. It runs on the x86 platform, of course. And Alpha, so that it covers all the ground NT covers. Now add PowerPC, MIPS, and a number of miscellaneous platforms. The reason this isn't a large advantage is that the x86 architecture is so dominant. But it does draw in all the makers of platforms Microsoft doesn't have time for. To counter this threat, Microsoft has to reduce the cost of maintaining NT and it's successors on a variety of platforms, which is right now in the tens of millions of dollars per platform per version.

Moderate threat: The vast hordes of Linux coders. Only a small minority of these coders matter. If Microsoft can reform its culture, and there are some indications it will try, Microsoft can more than meet the challenge of open source development.

Moderate threat: Open source. Important, but vitally important to only a small minority of users. If you are running a defense organization outside the U.S., you would want an OS you can inspect for the presence of exploitable features. This is no joke. It has been reported that the Chinese government will not use Pentium IIIs because of the PSN and related features. Microsoft can blow it here by incorporating content protection features into Windows that will create the same kinds of security concerns that Intel inflicted on itself in the Pentium III. If this does happen, more people will justifiably ask: is my computer capable of betraying me?

Moderate threat: Stability. Only a small minority of people leave their computers on all the time. Microsoft has an opportunity, with Windows 2000, to meet the threat of Linux stability, which, in no small part comes from the fact that most applications of Linux are exceedingly simple. Still, it is not outrageous to suggest that a Unix-like OS would be more stable than Windows 98, and Microsoft will have to show it can make systems that inspire confidence before it becomes commonplace to leave one's computer in charge of one's house.

Not much of a threat: User interface. The Linux community is only now discussing user interface in something other than dismissive tones. Even now, various attempts at a user interface are regarded as interchangeable, and the discussions in most Linux fora still treat the topic as if it were a check-off item, like USB support. Wrong. The OS exists mostly to support the user interface, and the theory and architecture of the user interface are the most difficult aspects of OS design. Windows 98 is manifest proof of this. Apple understands this (and may produce the first Unix-derived OS that embodies such an understanding), and so does Be. Unless Microsoft goes on the long march to Bob II, Linux won't catch up. More likely, Microsoft will come up with at least a few interesting UI innovations while Linux is still learning the basics.

Not much of a threat: Price. Other than the aforementioned freeloaders and brigands, the price of a Windows OS has never been a barrier for any important customer that can move a significant number of machines. PC makers have common cause with Microsoft in maintaining price levels and margins, and, when they shift, to adapt to new levels by segmenting the market and pricing appropriately. Consumer preference is far more important than the difference between the cost of a Windows OS license and zero.

Copyright 1999 Zigurd Mednieks. May be reproduced and redistributed with attribution and this notice intact.

Telirati Newsletter #44

Five years ago I wrote this newsletter, and I came not to praise speech recognition, but to bury it. In the subsequent five years, speech recognition lives on as a novelty in mobile phone handsets and cards. One of my colleagues recently demonstrated his new Honda's abilities. "Take me to the nearest whorehouse!" he exclaimed. And, dutifully, the navigation system displayed nearby hospitals, in anticipation, no doubt of him catching some STD.

My prediction here is that speech technology providers would continue to bark up the wrong tree, and they have maintained that course with stubborn steadfastness. Interdisciplinary approaches are still left uninvestigated, and products are only slightly less of a laughingstock than they used to be.

Telirati Newsletter #44: The Shock of Recognition

Speech recognition is a curious beast: Sometimes it appears to have been tamed. It jumps through hoops on the trade show stage and once again we are drawn to believe. Perennially, Bill Gates makes the assertion that, really truly, we will have a "natural" interface to our computing environment. But sometimes the full horror is revealed. It twists our words into parody or simply refuses to behave. It cruelly mocks our ambition to move beyond the keyboard. For more than a dozen years, just on the PC platform, it has been "real soon now." This darker side comes into view only occasionally. One such occasion was a recent article by BT's chief technologist. Writing in his regular column the London Telegraph, he described his encounter with dictation software he bought because of a wrist injury. This is a singular event because this emperor of R&D has some 30 boffins working on nothing but speech recognition technology and applications. He had every reason to assert that he emerged from the dictation software fitting room fully clothed. Instead his candid account of the state of speech recognition serves notice to the believers that they are nakedly overoptimistic:

Like a dummy, I believed what was on the box and purchased a speech-to-text program. After five hours of continuous training (of the computer, not me), this expensive package was capable of creating complete gibberish. A quick search on the Net found many alternatives, one of which was a tenth of the price. Having purchased this cheaper package, I found it equally qualified in the gibberish department. Why is it taking speech-to-text such a long time to become a practical reality? And how come some people seem to be able to get them to work... or do they?

Well, what to make of this? Dragon Systems, IBM, and Lernout & Hauspie have been making and selling dictation and voice control software for almost the entire existence of personal computers, and this category of software has been available on mainstream retail store shelves since the days of Windows 3.1. People buy this stuff. They use it. They haven't all returned it (though, if you consider the amount of shelfware on your own shelf you might find the last part not too surprising). Is Mr. Cochrane too picky? Does he not get it? As it turns out, the problems with speech recognition software now are the same ones that existed a decade ago. Not only are the problems discouraging, the lack of progress in solving them is a strong indictment of a lack of creativity among the purveyors of speech technologies:

With military systems, banking and telephone operations, it is now possible to embark on an adventure of human-machine voice interaction. Even cars and television sets can be reliably controlled and commanded by speech. So why can't my laptop understand what I say? Well, there seem to be a number of key problems with all generalised speech-to-text technologies. First, the acoustic environment, noise and echoes in the room play a critical part in disrupting performance. It also seems to be vital to get the microphone precisely positioned and the computer set up just so. It is also imperative to be clear in your diction and dictation, leaving adequate spaces between words, which means adopting the monotonic regularity of a robot. It also pays not to have a cold or to be thirsty. Even worse, the problems associated with our wide vocabulary and use of several words for one meaning or different contexts seem to kill developers' efforts to create a generalised environment.

Cochrane knows it can be done, in some environments, and for some applications. It makes the lack of progress in addressing the environment of general purpose dictation that much more frustrating. BT, as a user of recognition technologies, has figured out where to apply them, what conditions are suitable for speech recognition, and what special measures have to be taken to make recognition work as well as possible. With dictation on personal computers, almost none of this kind of applications sense has been applied to the problem. The underlying recognition technology gets better each year and with each faster CPU, but that only affects the margins. Cochrane's overall experience is little different than when dictation software was a novelty.

Cochrane goes on to suggest a few things that could help: more computing power, and more attention to the context in which words are used. But this does not go nearly far enough, and, with a more open consideration of possible remedies it should be possible to make dictation work significantly better without a radical increase in computing power: Lip reading, using an inexpensive camera. Detection of the position of the user's head. Where is the user looking? With USB, a speech recognition product could be packaged with a microphone that gives uniform and predictable results, unlike the present situation with a motley assortment of cheap-as-possible mics and sound cards. What about a mic specialized to speech recognition, worn directly against the throat, to exclude environmental noise? And these brief musings are only the surface of what can be done to address an obvious and longstanding problem.

Creativity, cross-functional integration, and sophistication in integrating speech technology with the computing environment are the elements of success. But, instead of addressing these, speech recognition technology providers still put almost all their resources into the core recognizer technology. The folly of this should be easy to see: the level of sophistication of recognizers varies widely, but their performance in demos is uniformly wonderful. So instead of mocking the crudeness of a competitor's recognizer, some speech recognition company out there should take this as a hint that other avenues of competition are open, ready to be exploited, and may yield differences that customers will find very easy to see and appreciate.

Copyright 1999 Zigurd Mednieks. May be reproduced and redistributed with attribution and this notice intact.

Telirati Newsletter #43:

In this newsletter I take a shot at the server craze of the time. Over the years, server software has remained a very active area of the software industry, but Linux and other free and open source software has cooled the gold rush mentality.

Recently, tools like distcc have brought distributed omcpilation to Linux, confirming my prediction that software development would be one of the first targets for workgroup clustering.

But the real importance of this is in striking a blow against the TV-izing of the Internet. The less distinction between a user's node and a server, the better. An interesting example of the virtualization of server software in use today is Skype's distributed directory. A contining trend in this direction is all part of the return of the Internet to its network-of-servers roots, and it is a Very Good Thing.

Telirati Newsletter #43: Servers, Re-centralization, and the Promise of the Personal Computer

A wave of servers is sweeping over the face of computing. If you want an Internet presence, you need a server. For many prospective customers, this fact finally answers the question: "Why do I need a server?" For some people, mainly those who were never wholly comfortable with personal computers, servers feel like home, and the term "re-centralization" has come into currency, meaning the return to importance of a central computing resource.

I don't like it! No, I am not suggesting that the server market is over-hyped. It is as real as can be, and will make everyone serving this market a lot of money. However, it is easy to take enthusiasm for servers, server technology, and server-based software too far. One reason why it is so easy is that one can charge thousands of dollars for server software, and the vision of every-business-an-e-business with a server makes people who sell server software positively tumid with anticipation. On the other hand, the personal computer hardware business is now an exercise in extreme brutality of competition. Software, outside of Microsoft's dominant spheres of operating systems and desktop productivity applications, and a few high-end specialties, is also suffering from reduced price expectations, and Web-based replacement technology. Servers and server software offer a comfortable refuge. So it is no surprise that servers have sucked up all the available mind share.

The problem is that, while the server business is booming, servers have a long way to go to catch up with the computing power being deployed on desktops. Not the computing power of individual desktops, of course, but the aggregate computing power of the millions of desktop PCs built every single month of every year, with unit volume that continues explosive growth. This even as the revenue and, worse still, the profit picture for makers of PCs looks bleaker by the day. Nevertheless, desktop computing power dominates the computing landscape as never before. You can cluster servers, of course, and if you get several dozen of them together this way the results are very impressive, but it is still but a tiny fraction of what could be accomplished by turning large groups of personal computers into a kind of "hive mind."

Before this develops into a speculative discussion, here is an application of workstation-level clustering, as you might call such a technology: Software development. Compile-time is a critical element of coding productivity. Typically, coders are given fast machines for software development, so that they spend less time waiting for a compiler to complete its work. The process of "doing a build" - compiling all the code in a system and linking it, is also a key bottleneck in software development. On large projects, doing builds is a monumental effort. Still, I have not heard of one instance where the aggregate power of the idle or mostly-idle workstations in a software development organization are brought to bear on the task of compiling an individual programmer's modifications to a module or to the task of building a complete software system.

Compilation is an ideal task for exploring the possibilities of this type of distributed computing: It can be implemented at the level of the software development applications. It can be implemented with existing distributed component technologies. It can be administered using the same group administration user interface and database as used for source code version control. Compilation is almost entirely risk-free. It does not impinge on the state of the PC except to use a modest amount of temporary storage. The results would be valuable. Even a two-fold improvement in compile time would be a boon to everyone developing applications software. If it proves useful, such facilities can be migrated into the OS and made more user-friendly so that they can be applied to all applications.

There are some research implementations of this idea extant. Legion is one such system. The ideas in Legion are not too distant from what can be extrapolated from Microsoft?s directions in the development of COM, intentional programming, and next-generation component software systems. Jini incorporates some of these ideas, too. Market drivers for this technology could come from such end-user categories as game software.

But I want it now! This opportunity, and others, such as a successful implementation of personal communication in the form of IP telephony and conferencing, true integration with consumer electronics, the lack of any credible commercial attempts at an interface beyond the desktop metaphor, the lack of commercial attempts to replace the notion of data stored in files, the lack of breakthroughs in speech processing, etc. all indicated that anyone whining about a lack of opportunity to compete with Microsoft in operating systems is just not looking to see where the holes are.

Diversity in personal computer operating systems appears to have died with OS/2's larger ambitions. This need not be so. If there is a competitor out there that can put eight or nine zeroes in front of the decimal point of an operating system development budget, there are ample domains of product definition where superiority can be established. Compared with having to compete with Intel?s ability to spend a few billion on each new generation of a fab, going up against Microsoft is less daunting. Would it be a thankless task? Only if you think half a trillion dollars in market value is not worth the effort.

What of current challengers? Linux is a worthy opponent. Linux could acquire capabilities like ad-hoc workstation clustering sooner than Windows. But bringing a real challenge to Windows' superiority means surpassing Windows in several areas of product formulation. Linux, with all its advantages, doesn't have product formulation. It is a remarkable phenomenon, but it cannot go in an inspired, risky, and uncharted direction, which is exactly what is needed in order to compete with Windows. BeOS is still out there, waiting to get enough zeroes behind its budget, and BeOS does have developers of a particular vision. Lucent's Inferno and Plan 9 have, at least potentially, more zeroes than Croesus could bring to bear on a problem, plus the singularly fine mind of Dennis M. Ritchie. But Ritchie has recently given interviews that indicate he has given up on challenging Microsoft.

The likely outcome will be that this concept will be pioneered in Linux, achieving some popularity in, for example, cracking a crypto key or analyzing vast amount of planetary imaging data. The trouble is, to be well implemented, the concept has to incorporate the use of a distributed component technology, and CORBA is just not that intimately a part of Unix-like OSs, the way COM is part of Windows. So when Microsoft addresses this competitive threat, it will do so in a way that is more comprehensive and more interwoven with the way Windows software works. Unless someone else decides it's worth taking a run at Microsoft.

Copyright 1999 Zigurd Mednieks. May be reproduced and redistributed with attribution and this notice intact.

Telirati Newsletter #42

I predcited in 1999 that Microsoft would start to sort out the winners and losers from their Internet ventures. As with many other things that look like an action plan for a year, maybe two, at most, this process continues to drag on, and Microsoft is, still, part owner of an also-ran cable TV channel portal hybrid, among other oddments.

Telirati Newsletter #42: Species of Internet Ventures

There is no one kind of Internet startup, and it is a multidimensional space in which they exist. But at least one axis of this space can be mapped out, and it is to our benefit to do so since we can then place Internet ventures along this axis to see what type they are. And, more usefully, if they appear not to be in the right place, it can tell us which way they ought to be going.

At one end of this axis are companies that have business models enabled by the Internet. These include Ebay, PriceLine, and every company taking a new whack at direct sales based on the prospect of the Internet changing the rules of direct selling. Some of these companies will find that novel business models, like PriceLine's, will, in fact, change the world and build for themselves a defensible position over the long term. For these companies, the Internet truly is an enabling medium, before which their ideas were not possible or practical. Some, like many of the direct marketers, will find that the Internet did not change the rules so completely that products that had been far outside the scope of direct marketing before the Internet are now viable businesses on the Internet.

It is the companies with the novel business models that have attracted most of the attention. This is in part deserved, because some of these companies will be new giants. An idea, a new medium, and relatively little technology, are all it takes to change the world in a big way. Investing early in a winner of this type is what every investor dreams of. But happy endings to these dreams will be inevitably rare, and difficult to discern at a distance. More often the result will be that the Internet did not work magic, or that the idea itself was not a winner.

Below is a diagram of the spectrum under discussion:

--technologies enabled by the Internet-------------business plans enabled by the Internet--

At the other end of this spectrum: Businesses that hinge on technologies enabled by the Internet. Like most geek pursuits, these kinds of Internet ventures get short shrift in the coverage of the Internet economy. Indeed, the coverage this kind of venture gets has also been marred by the recent fashion of Microsoft bashing: trade publication coverage on the trend toward plug-ins that support enhanced interactivity have been slanted toward pointing out that Windows is a beneficiary of finally waking up to the fact that the Internet is a network of computers, not of browsers. But it is only a fact of life and of market share that when servers and clients on the Internet start to talk in any language more expressive than HTML it is likely to be a Windows-specific from of communication.

There are good reasons to pay attention to pay attention to those geekier companies at the more technology intensive end of the spectrum, and for companies at the other end of the spectrum to begin to move toward the middle.

Among the reasons to look at technologies enabled by the Internet is that Microsoft is waking up to these possibilities. Microsoft spent several years now trying to be a PC software maker and a constellation of Internet ventures. Some of these Internet ventures have been quite successful. Others, however, are also-rans. Is there a way for Microsoft to succeed more reliably in Internet opportunities. The answer is yes, if they pick opportunities that are linked to the needs of Windows users.

It seems simple, but the reason Microsoft is involved in, among the odder pursuits, a hybrid of a cable TV news channel and Internet portal, is that when the Internet hit big, it made people panic and worry that computers, operating systems, application software, and other mundanes of that nature would no longer excite. Now, with the confidence that Microsoft can make and sell world-beating Internet software and incorporate it into the development plan for Windows in a meaningful way, Microsoft has a collectively clearer vision of what the Internet is for: It is for making Microsoft customers happy.

Sit down you Linux users! Put away the pitchfork and torch. What's the matter? Birkenstocks too tight? Beard itchy today? The Internet is a computer network, not a hierarchy of browsers and HTTP servers. And this fact applies to all pursuits on the Internet, Windows-related or otherwise. Examples of Internet ventures based on a technology enabled by the Internet include streaming media technology providers, Internet-based off-site backup services, and some really innovative ventures like FusionOne, a service that enables synchronization of files, databases, and other aspects of one's computing environment.

It isn't just Microsoft that will benefit from the realization that the Internet does not begin and end with a small set of standard protocols and applications. Tight integration with the user's environment, the ability to reach into contact management databases, messaging interfaces, and user interface mechanisms in general will expand the horizons of the Internet. Which is all well and good, but how does this expansion of horizons affect which ventures will succeed or fail?

Here is why this matters: New business structures are exceedingly rare. Existing business structures translated onto the Internet may or may not benefit from the characteristics of the Internet. But if you have a useful software capability enabled by, or that has capabilities that are amplified by the Internet, you have something of value. These types of Internet ventures carry a far lower risk than attempts to create a novel entity in the economy as a whole. Moreover, there is a shortage of creative thinking in the area of how to amplify the power of individual computers by connecting them. The answer does not lie in the direction of technologies that reduce the user experience to the lowest common denominator. Rather, Windows PCs will find parts of the Internet serving the unique needs and capabilities of such systems, while other parts will be inaccessible to anyone not playing a game on a Playstation.

There are, of course, ways of going about the technology-intensive end of the Web business spectrum the wrong way. The Palm VII is likely to become an example of this. Instead of projecting the capabilities of the Palm OS out over the Internet, one is expected to find value in a constriction and limitation of Internet-based information for the sole purpose of making it possible to implement a wireless connectivity scheme with limited and immature technology with the wrong pricing model.

In general, however, one is more likely to succeed by treating the whole computer as the medium, not just the browser. This holds true even for business models enabled by the Internet. As competition moves in where it can (and often these business model-centric ventures have little or no barrier to entry) even the most innovative basic thinkers in business models will find they must enhance the sites that express their lovely ideas with more and more technology. Auction sites will become the sources of rich media content to make up for the lack of touch, taste, and smell. Internet direct marketers will apply community communications technology to make their constituency feel as if they have a common cause. Meanwhile, the entire idea of software will morph into something where the extent to which the Internet is brought to bear on users' needs will be the single most important distinguishing characteristic.

Copyright 1999 Zigurd Mednieks.

Telirati Newsletter #40

Here in the archives of the Telirati we have a classic tragedy of bad management. It is as current as ever in informing the process of management selection in small ventures.

Telirati Newsletter #40: Care and Feeding

In the ecosphere of the enterprise there are two species that require special care and feeding: engineers and salespeople. Salespeople are, to me, a delightful mystery. They live eat and breathe interaction with customers. Yet, the last time I had the pleasure of sharing a car ride with three of them, they were volubly discussing the role of Altoids in White House affairs while I was on the phone with an important investor and potential customer. Engineers, on the other hand, are more my cuppa.

Companies that keep their engineers happy reap worthwhile rewards. They skate over the perils of product transitions, they build high walls around their markets, erecting a thicket of features that are hard to duplicate. They acquire a halo of high touch that can sustain them when they stumble.

Much has been written about keeping engineers happy, and most of it is useless. "Don't step in the leadership" just about sums up that body of work. In keeping with the general approach of these newsletters we will pursue more modest goals here: First, do no harm.

This is evidently harder than it sounds. I recently had a chance to see, at close range, how hard it is. First, be assured that the example I am giving here is taken from real life. It is not a composite or a cautionary fiction. Second, if you think at times I have gone over the top in describing managerial incompetence, I assure you the same situation can be mined to much greater depths and would yield up even worse. For example, the manager I will describe in this document includes in his technique being overtly nasty to a woman seven and a half months pregnant, who put in 80 hour weeks, while pregnant, to get a product out the door. So it isn?t that the villains here deserve protection from universal opprobrium. They go unnamed just because it isn't strictly necessary.

This story begins before your humble chronicler arrived on the scene, in a startup where a charismatic founder and leader has assembled a team of engineers that would be the envy of anyone. The company, having spent many months banging around between unsatisfactory product formulations, sought the stability and direction that some management structure might confer on the product development process. This founder, so brilliant at attracting and retaining top-flight engineers, has only a spotty record of hiring good managers. As a further examination of this example will show, this was the downfall of the company as well as of the founder. Nevertheless, the founder hired an experienced and credentialed manager, ex-of IBM's Lotus division (some of you can at this point see where this is headed, but stay put, it will be worse than your expectations). I should add he was ex-of the non-Notes part of Lotus that had managed to fritter away a very strong franchise in desktop productivity software. But the resume looked good, and he seemed nice enough.

It didn't turn out that way. He was out of touch. He did not get involved in implementation decisions, not out of confidence in his crew, but because of a something like a character defect. He required detailed reports, but did not ever get deeper than this needless paper to find out what was going on. He was what Machiavelli would have called an indolent prince. He arrived early and left rather early. Decisions were made around him, among the engineers and the company founder, late at night when real work was happening. Eventually this manager was, in effect, fired by the people working for him.

The story should have ended here, but it didn't. Lesson #1: Anyone can make a hiring mistake. But to really screw up, you have to botch the firing. The more-serious error here was in not getting rid of this guy the first time (oh yeah, there is a second time).

Engineering resources are too valuable to waste. This is true, but the wrong conclusion was drawn here. It is the people writing the code that are the resource that matters, especially if they are proven to be highly productive. But here, the failed manager was installed in another role: running the company's IT and e-commerce infrastructure.

OK, so you can guess the result. But it bears examination just for the lessons to be learned. An insecure and incompetent manager, rejected by the team he was hired to lead, will make some predictable hiring decisions: Web site development at this company was staffed by third-tier plodders that posed no threat to their second-rate manager (this, after an outsourcing misadventure). The result, for a company with ambitions of becoming the Dell of small business phone systems, was disastrous. A hideously expensive effort yielded up an e-commerce Web site so undistinguished that you can buy aftermarket Beanie Babies from slicker sites that were homemade by housewives. The champagne-grade enterprise software systems do not mesh well. Telesales is sluggish because customers call, intrigued by the product and price, but puzzled over what it does exactly, the Web site being almost opaque on the topic.

Can it get worse? As promised, it does. Through a series of connivances and errors, the board of this company dismissed its founder. As you may have guessed, the ex-VP of engineering, a failed, embittered, and vindictive bureaucrat, was part of the plot to oust the founder from his company. As a reward for supporting this move, he got his old job back, heading R&D as well as the firm's gold-plated yet leaden IT infrastructure. Before going on to describe just how well this is working out, let us recall that the lesson here is "First, do no harm." You are reading the story of how a mistake by a well-intentioned and decent founder, for whom the company's engineering team would walk through fire, got amplified into a full on catastrophe. It happened under the direction of managers who, though they might not be the most benevolent people on Earth, do not have the excuse of lack of experience. It happened under the chairmanship of a long-time pillar of the Boston venture capital community. It happened in a small company where the issues are all easy to see and take little time to grasp. It happened where the stakes are petty. It happened. And if you don't pay close attention to your engineers, it can happen to you.

So there it stands: A manager who failed so thoroughly once, and twice, is back to wreak revenge on the competent and hard-working people who gave him the boot. The environment cannot be described in terms of worker morale, which has evaporated completely, leaving only distilled venom. The engineers are openly contemptuous of their boss, who, in return, is boorish as he can be. He dare not fire them because he hasn't got a clue about how the product works. Headhunters swoop and hover, some of whom placed engineers at this company and were stiffed on their fees. The table has been set for the engineers who will quit right away: Internet startups with great pay and entrepreneurial upside have made their offers. It is tragic for this group of engineers to have to abandon their baby. But their current management has reached a level of awfulness that is comic. Flipping the boss the bird and not getting fired for it is entertaining enough to make some of the group stay on just to see how things turn out. The possibility of a recovery, for the engineering team and for the company in general, still exists, but it would be a reclamation, not a save. You see the picture as if on the moment of impact, like an Edgerton strobe photo of a hammer striking a porcelain vessel.

Copyright 1999 Zigurd Mednieks. May be reproduced and redistributed with attribution and this notice intact.