TechnologyPosted by kevin Tue, May 18, 2010 22:48:42 Rather disappointingly, I seem to have inherited very few of my father's redeeming features. Not for me the fine aquiline nose, the easy athleticism, the ability to be at ease in any social situation or the capability to enjoy a good political argument without resorting to mild violence. Disappointingly, my make-up features clear opposites of all of the above, plus a rather jaundiced view on genetic inheritance.
Where we stand, however, father and son together, is in our clear enthusiasm for taking a stand against some of societies irritants, to the point of boycott and damnation. If you want to see my father worked up into a furious, blue-nosed frenzy, just mention that you're a glowing admirer of Dame Shirley Porter, the London Evening Standard, or Rupert Murdoch. If you want to see me seething in a similar fashion, you can achieve a similar effect by expounding the virtues of Bill Gates, Michael Winner, or, funnily enough, Rupert Murdoch.
In my father's case, his sense of moral frustration has some dire consequences. He lives a long way away from the distribution of the Evening Standard, and only recently have I realised that he's managed to put a good 10 miles between him and the nearest branch of Tesco's, which was probably a key factor in choosing his location for retirement. He still believes that every penny spent there personally bankrolls Dame Shirley, and for all I know, he may well be right. His love of cricket is tempered on a regular basis, depending on which network has got what contract - he'd rather make a 250 mile round trip to see a county game than even consider watching a test match on Sky.
Anyway, the fantasy disembowelment of Rupert Murdoch is a passion shared, and I guess we're both equally pleased to see the real-life Monty Burns start to get irritated about copyright law. As far as I understand the argument, the sense of outrage that News International currently has, is against the notion that its journalistic data be shared on the internet for free. As such, it is planning to introduce a new model for Times subscribers, whereby they pay for online content. And presumably NI plans to sue the backside off anyone who has the audacity to use the copy & paste facility. (Which, I might add, was not invented by Bill Gates.)
Since the first salvoes were launched on charging for online content last year, it's all gone a bit quiet, but I can't imagine the ambition has gone away, so the likes of me are still looking into the middle distance, jaws dropped on the floor. If it had been suggested 10 years ago, we would have pointed and laughed. To suggest this as a valid business model now is kind of missing the point of the internet, of social communication, and of how the whole realm of journalism is heading. It's not as if there isn't a model to base the future challenges on - I'm not sure what parts of the music industry NI owns, but there's a pretty strong precedent there in the way that old business models just don't work any more. In the same way that musicians are going to have to find different ways of getting people to listen to their music, journalists and writers are going to have to find different ways of communicating. And that's no bad thing. When I buy a newspaper I'd really quite like to have a different type of paper every day. Generally I would rather buy than have something sold to me, and I'm sure I'm not alone there. The bigger point is that the days of the fourth estate and journalistic privilege are truly numbered as long as there is a persistence that the public needs to pay in old fashioned ways for new delivery. Which means that News International, Fox, The Sun, Sky and all the rest might all yet be under threat. And I'm sorry if this sounds childish, but good. And ner ner ner ner ner ner*.
For now of course, I'm pretty happy the way it is. When Principle Skinner got together with Marge's sister in The Simpsons, they realised that their common bond was that they hated the same things. It might not be the strongest basis for a relationship, but I do quite like having something in common with my Dad.
I've been lucky
enough to be working with technology in one form or another for all of my
working life. I 'got into it', as we used to say when we were young, purely by
accident, and have grown ever fonder of the twists and turns it has taken ever
since, providing us with new smarter ways of communicating, keeping
transparent, staying alive, and much much more. So I am what you might call a
fan of technological advance.
And central to the
theme of technological advance is Research & Development. Or at least it used to be. In what my
children are increasingly calling the olden days, there would be a separate
R&D function in almost every business that was delivering new stuff. This
stuff could be anything from service products to cars to software. It was
expected that any company worth its salt would be finding out what the market
wanted or even how to manufacture that market. (History is, of course, littered
with attempts to manufacture the market that went horribly wrong. The one that
always sends a shudder down my spine is the campaign based on Wireless
Application Protocol (WAP) at the end of the 90's. If you've erased this from
your memory (and I so wish I could), this consisted of O2 promising that the
internet was going to be arriving on WAP-enabled handsets, so everyone
could happily browse away in the
(relatively infant) web. The problem was, they couldn't. Not only was the
network not up to the job, but neither was the internet. Or the handsets,
really. Which just left a half baked idea and a lot of front. And what might
work for Simon Cowell didn't work for O2.)
Anyway, R&D was
pretty core to the smart companies that dominated the post war years. Any book
on company management will tell you that R&D is the key to the constant
re-development of companies like Sony, Apple, Toshiba etc. And the companies that
didn't have effective R&D are the ones that started feeling a bit
cumbersome. I think that's what happened to IBM, and I also think (and part of
me secretly hopes) that it's what may well happen to Microsoft. If your
business is constantly trying to push the same market, there's a chance you're
going to run out of customers.
So, I was at a
meeting with a pretty big IT company recently, and asked them how much they
were spending a year on R&D. The rep quoted an absolutely massive number,
which I couldn't quite believe. Pushing a bit harder, we agreed that this
number must include acquisition costs. At which point it struck me that that's
where we've got to in the development of R&D. We see this all the time in
IT, with the big companies buying up the small ones to create a portfolio of
product, sometimes at odds with their initial direction as a business. And I
think that's a real shame as it becomes all about wedging something small into
a bigger whole, and that's not really about R or D. And of course, in extremis,
the big company buys up the smaller one before they can become a competitor,
sometimes killing the developed technology in the process.
So I think that's a
shame. When I looked at this fantastic idea from the RCA grad show:
Don't know if you've noticed, but this internet thing seems to be catching on. I really really ought to do more on this, and I will when time permits; in the meantime, here is every single statistic that you'll ever need to prove why everything that we've learnt to date is wrong.
This is a story about how attitudes to technology and sharing across the internet have changed, seen through a very personal lens (mine). All I really want to do in this blog is to use a couple of experiences to gauge how far away we’ve got from the original objectives of the internet.
And, in order to do so, it would be good to examine these objectives…which of course, don’t really exist. However, let’s look to the inventor of the web, Tim Berners-Lee, for inspiration, and look at the names rejected before settling on world wide web. These included The Information Mesh and The Information Mine. Incidentally, both were turned down as they abbreviated to TIM, and TB-L is a modest sort of a fellow. Anyway, these say an awful lot more than WWW. The object of putting the web on top of the internet in the first place was to allow users to mine for information in a way that, until that point had only been possible in slow time with huge physical libraries of information at your disposal.
Which brings me to coming across the web for the first time. In its early days, the internet made its mark through Joe Public (who needed a networked connection into some other host capability) accessing what we now refer to as bulletin boards or user groups. If you knew an address, then you could type this in to some sort of emulator, and see what the dudes on alt.gaffatape.hamster were talking about. It wasn’t really until the web and web browsers were laid on top of this that any ‘browsing’ could take place, and even that was a bit rudimentary. But what the browsers did do, was open up a whole lot of relatively rich content.
So, my first story involves setting up these browsers at work on an internet connected network for the first time. I had a rudimentary networking knowledge, and we chose a browser called Netscape a) because it got the best reviews and b) because it wasn’t a Microsoft product. We’d read up a good deal on the potential for sharing information, how we were going to see encyclopaedic knowledge shared throughout the world, although of course the number of sites providing this data was a fraction of a fraction compared to the web today. So, we dutifully installed the browser on the MD’s computer, and configured it to connect to the net while isolated from our internal network. We solemnly placed the cursor on the address line and awaited instructions from the MD, who had just come into the office with the marketing director.
“Right”, the authoritative voice called out, “Where’s the porn?”
When I was at primary school, there was a book that predicted what life would be like in the year 2000. To a 10-year old, the prospect of actually getting to this milestone felt light years away – after all, I’d be 30-something, and that was almost as old as my teacher.
Anyway, the key points I remember in that book were that, by the year 2000,
- we would be travelling in remote controlled cars, into which we simply programmed our destination, and relaxed, thereby avoiding traffic jams and crashes,
- we would take all our meals in pill form,
- we would start inhabiting other planets, starting with pods on Mars, and…
- a loaf of bread would cost more than £1.00
Rather sadly, we appear to have over-predicted on three of these and under-predicted on the negative one. And, this being partly the point of this blog, the person who predicted all this has probably long packed up the Smith Corona and shuffled off to a blissful retirement in the country.
Which brings me to the wonderful world of predicting the future in 2008. And at this point, I’ll point you at almost any one of the excellent ‘Shift Happens’ videos. You might have come across these yourselves, or you might have been told about them by your kids, if you have any – possible proof that most 12 year olds are better informed about the future than their parents. Anyway, this is my favourite:
And all of this is very different from the sort of predictions that we saw in our youth. For a start, this stuff is happening now. These are events that will happen in our lifetime. Secondly, there is a lot less of the fanciful optimism of (say) a remote controlled car, as we’ve got so used to assessment of events as cause and effect. So we see the population of India changing and immediately think about the impact on the rest of the world.
I think the stark difference is that the predictions of yesteryear were cosseted in a world we understood. So the remote controlled car still had wheels, ran on roads, and was probably fuelled by fossil fuels. Our pill meals were probably going to be dispensed three times a day! And because the future these days looks much less constrained by fixed parameters, the prospect of change seems even more of a nightmare.
I wanted to close this with a snappy line about embracing change being the only way forward. I googled ‘embrace change’ to get a bit of inspiration, and found this at the top of the list: http://www.marvel.com/embracechange/ Seems as good a way forward as any…
So, this is a sort of test, as I drag myself into the 00's and finally get round to writing a blog. And timing is impeccable, as I just read in www.wired.com that the blog is dead, and we should all be expressing ourselves on Facebook, Twitter or Flickr.
So, let's buck that trend and go down the old school route. Just need to think about something to write about then...
