Dr. Dobb's Journal November 2001
Microsoft releases Windows XP without support for Sun's JVM and blames it on Sun. Not so fast, says Sun's Scott McNealy, this is just another Microsoft plot. Internet Explorer drops support for Netscape-style plug-ins, and every site that depends on QuickTime suddenly fails. Apple, having already blamed Microsoft for plotting to kill off QuickTime only to discover that in that particular instance it really wasn't a Microsoft plot, quietly deploys a technological fix for the problem. It's easy to believe in conspiracy theories in the computer field when the leading software company really does indulge in devious plotting against its competitors. Sharing a market with a company that sends fake letters to the Utah Attorney General is enough to make anyone paranoid.
Which is sort of ironic, when you think about it, because being a software developer is a job that ought to fill one with a sense of power and optimism. Some time in every programmer's career, usually very early on, there comes a realization of the godlike power that programming puts in your hands. "Limited only by your imagination" is a phrase that was used repeatedly in the 1970s hobbyist-era computing advertising, and it still rings true.
But once you accept that you are limited only by your imagination, you start to think about lifting some of the limits on your imagining. You let your mind run to fantasy once in a while. Of course if you're a practical person, you ask yourself which of those fantasies might be realizable. Realizable in a market that you share with Microsoft. Programming is not immune to politics, and politics can lead to paranoia. Too rich a fantasy life can be bad, too, leading to I don't know what; maybe hebephrenia, at least to suicidal business models. Maybe the best strategy is to mix together fantasy and conspiracy theory, in the hope — the same hope on which the American legal system is based, after all — that out of contending falsehoods will come truth. The topics in this month's column are all conspiracy theories and realizable fantasies. I'll let you decide which each is.
In a recent Consumer Reports survey, MSN and AOL came in dead last in terms of customer satisfaction. Meanwhile, what are the leading ISPs in terms of the number of customers? MSN and AOL.
This is no shocker for DDJ readers, but we should not let our sophistication blind us to the fact that something is terribly wrong in the software market.
Why don't the better products win? The question is obvious, naive, and absolutely crucial. Because it isn't just a fluke. We know in advance that the best product isn't going to win in certain markets.
We know what kind of forces are at work here. But we also know the power of a good idea, and we know that programming is the most direct method of turning pure ideas into practical reality ever invented. Programmers should have immense power.
So can't we program our way out of this problem?
Okay, that's a fantasy. This is an economic problem or maybe a political problem, but it's surely not a technological problem.
Or is it?
Although I have not a glimmer of a clue how it would be done, I would love to see a SourceForge project on restoring healthy competition to the whole software market. We have Open Source software, Open Content, why not Open Markets?
The time could be right for this one. Even legislators are starting to admit that the patent system is not serving its original purpose. That purpose — to encourage innovation — was a good one, and some patents do serve that desirable end. But many software and business method patents are ludicrous and serve only to get in the way of innovation.
So does anyone have a workable proposal for fixing patent law? And if it is workable, can we all get behind it and make it happen? The initiative could be taken either in the U.S. or on the international stage, but given the current administration's attitude toward international treaties, it would probably be best to start in the U.S.
I admit, I was holding a grudge against Jeremy Rifkin. I bought, read, and wrote about a Rifkin book, The End of Work, and we can all see how that turned out. I don't know about you, but I'm working harder than ever.
My resentment over the end of work not happening in my neighborhood may explain why I put off reading his 2000 book until 2001. The book is The Age of Access: The New Culture of Hypercapitalism Where All of Life Is a Paid-For Experience (Tarcher/Putnam, 2000; ISBN 1-58542-018-2), and like most Rifkin books, its premise is that the sky is falling and we've run out of umbrellas.
Thanks to the Internet, Rifkin says, the center of commerce is shifting to cyberspace, the global economy is becoming network based, and the establishment is ceasing to be an old-boy club and is becoming a fluid keiretsu-like network. In this new economy, the primary goal is no longer transferring property, but rather providing access to life's experiences. In the new economy, we lease our lives.
The model of the new company for the new economy is Nike, a virtual company that scarcely owns or does anything itself, or the movie industry, where most of the work of producing films today is outsourced: Most companies in the film industry employ fewer than 10 people, with the big companies concentrating on shuffling money around and controlling (not necessarily owning) the distribution channel. And every business today seems to want to emulate show business.
Tangible goods still exist in the new economy, but they are no longer sold, just leased. Owning a car once served as a symbol of wealth, but now one vehicle in three on the road is leased. Much has been made of the growth of small business in the U.S. in the last half of the 20th century, but most of these small businesses are really franchises — in other words, the outsourcing arms of big businesses. Even the ownership of business real estate is outsourcable: Many businesses are now selling off their stores and leasing them back, unloading the headaches of ownership onto someone else.
Money is no longer tangible. Most transactions involve the shifting of bits, not the transfer of currency or coins. The total amount of U.S. coins and currency in circulation is less than half the gross sales of those small businesses, and much of that is in other countries.
The new economy brings new biases. A farmer can be sued for saving seeds from his own crops and replanting them. The physical seeds and crops are irrelevant in the new perspective; the farmer has leased a specific, limited level of access to Monsanto's intellectual property, and that's the economic value the courts recognize.
Rifkin delves into the changing perception of property, pointing out that in feudal times, property was viewed very differently from the way it was viewed in the 20th century. The king granted certain rights in land to nobles, while retaining other rights, and the nobles parceled out more limited property rights on down to the peasants who tilled the land. Nobody could be said to own the land, or any property, but only to have certain access rights defined by their place in society. The new networked economy is in some ways a new feudalism, with no absolute rights of property and access rights defined in a network of relationships.
It's been nearly four decades since the service economy eclipsed the material goods economy. Now, as products become more information rich, they become more like services, until pretty much everything is a service. Goods are becoming mere packaging for knowledge value, and what is sold — or leased — is the right of access to that value: a service. The experiments with free computers were a little ahead of the curve, but they fit the increasingly relevant model of giving away the goods and charging for the services.
Or the relationships. One French economist coined the term "R-technology," for relationship technology, which is all about processing relationships. The proponents of customer relationship management argue that selling all you can to a few people is a better business model than selling one thing to as many people as possible. Relationships are critical to the new economy, where the metaphor of the village market is replaced by the metaphor of the gated community.
If the primary commodity of the new economy is access, the rulers of the new economy are the gatekeepers, those who control access. In cyberspace, we are already seeing a worrisome consolidation of gatekeeping power in the hands of a few media giants. It is going to be critical to establish how much power we are willing for these few giants to have, and to establish what rights to access we want to guarantee to all people. Since the nation-state as a power is in decline and the global corporation is ascending, that won't be as easy as it was in 1776, but it's just as necessary.
Anyway, that's Jeremy Rifkin's theory. I find that it fits my particular paranoia quite well, but you may see things differently.
I can't match Rifkin, but I do have a modest Microsoft conspiracy theory. Two facts:
"[B]y and large, Microsoft's efforts to shift from being a software company into being a creative and innovative content producer fell flat," says Dwight Davis, an analyst. Sidewalk.com and Slate are other Microsoft content ventures that haven't panned out well.
So is Microsoft giving up on content? Here's a theory: Microsoft sees a new paradigm. Not apps running on an OS, but content running on a channel. Or maybe it's through pipes. Anyway, it's the .NET model.
In such a paradigm, there is even more legal justification than in the app/OS paradigm for denying one company the right to have a foot in both fields. At least if the channel owner is a monopoly. Microsoft, according to this theory, intends to hold a channel monopoly. (Maybe the strict monopoly part isn't necessary to the argument, but control of the channel is.) But Microsoft doesn't think that the content companies will let it have its channel control if it competes with them in content. The peasants have already revolted in the OS/apps paradigm, where Microsoft used to get away with pretty much anything it wanted. This is also essentially the kind of business model that the federal courts have ruled illegal in the OS/apps paradigm. If they do it again in the channel/content paradigm, the feds'll come down on them.
And even if they can fight off the software/services/publishing/entertainment/etc. industries that will collectively make up the content industry, even if they think they can stand up to the feds although they lost that fight in the OS/apps paradigm, is constant warfare a good business plan?
My theory sort of crumbles a little right there, because I think that both Bill Gates and Steve Ballmer do think that constant warfare is a good business model, maybe the only business model. Let's play this out anyway. So they're going to cede the content market to others in exchange for pretty serious control over the channel. The serious control over the channel part is Passport/Hailstorm. Expedia and MSNBC suggest the unloading of content part.
Chances are they won't actually do it, but my theory really is that they are building a business model that makes it all right for them to dump content if they are forced to. Because Bill Gates is motivated by paranoia, and paranoids always have contingency plans.
Organic Gardening magazine, that bastion of homespun naturalness, has spun off a new publication. It's a slick, thick magazine named Organic Style. I kid you not. Style is the hottest commodity in an era in which every business wants to emulate show business. And nobody needs to tell Steve Jobs that. (This just in: Apple has won an Emmy for FireWire.) Jef Raskin, a former Apple executive and no relation to Jeremy Rifkin, says that Apple, particularly under Steve Jobs's leadership, runs the risk of concentrating on cosmetics rather than innovation. No duh. Tim Bajarin, an analyst and yet no dummy, agrees that Apple's "future products must go well beyond cosmetics and towards new and innovative digital devices if they plan to continue to be a player." But he thinks that Apple may be the only personal computer company positioned to be able to move beyond the moribund desktop PC market and into the "third wave" of the digital revolution.
As to the nature of that third wave, Bajarin seems to agree with Steve Jobs that PCs and similar devices will become "tools for managing, mixing, deploying, and displaying the disparate digital 'stuff' that will drive the digital lifestyle." That's Bajarin talking, but it could as easily be Jobs; Jobs has staked out the role of hub for the digital lifestyle as Apple's destiny.
But the current reality is that Apple is a personal computer company, dealing in expensive physical hardware. That doesn't sound like a new economy model, or a digital lifestyle model, so Apple will have to make a lot of changes to effect this transition. The opening of dozens of Apple stores, inspired perhaps by the Sony Style stores (that word "style" again) could be a big part of the transition. And it's so Martha.
(The last time I mentioned Martha Stewart in this column I had to explain the reference in a subsequent column. Surely I don't need to do that now?)
And now for something completely frivolous.
We know how Microsoft's customers can most easily make the transition from Windows 98 or 95 to Win XP: Buy a new computer. But how did Microsoft make the transition? Hard work, millions of programmer hours, sure, sure. But now that the work is done, is there not some algorithm defined on text that maps Win 9x to XP? And how do we know they didn't just implement that algorithm and run it? Save themselves a heap of effort, eh? It could be a simple program. Somewhere in a closet on the Microsoft campus is there a top-secret diff file?
Maybe the translation is simpler than we think. Maybe Microsoft is more devious than we think. And maybe you've heard this one before: What do you get when you play XP backwards?
Why, 9X, of course.
Moving right along, Jeffrey Harrow (no relation to Jef Raskin or Jeremy Rifkin) has shut down his long-running Rapidly Changing Face of Computing (RCFoC) web site. RCFoC was a Compaq project, and Jeff is no longer with the company (NLWTC). The good news for RCFoC fans is that Jeff is still providing that Harrowing experience at his own site, http://www.theharrowgroup.com/.
Jeff is a good person to check with regarding faster-than-Moore's Law phenomena (aka rapidly changing and so on). Broadband use is one such Moore's Lawbreaker, a Yahoo news story points out (http://dailynews.yahoo.com/htx/nf/20010810/tc/12705_1.html). And so it is, but unless some really weird stuff starts happening in medical science, no formula with people in the numerator and a constant in the denominator can grow faster than Moore's Law rate for very long. Not if it counts actual people. There are physical limits on how fast human population can grow, and without multiple births or some technological replacement for that 9-month process, the limit is Moore's Law. A couple can replicate themselves in 18 months. So as soon as everybody's online, Moore's Law is unbreakable.
Malthus trumps Moore.
Of course, this doesn't stop Apple from trying to capitalize on procreation for expanding its market. Years ago Jean-Louis Gassée did his Gallic gloss on the Apple logo, showing that it was actually all about sex. Now the company slogan is Pro Create; you can't get much more explicit than that. But Apple has a right. If you're going to be fruitful and multiply, what platform could more appropriate?
DDJ