Technology Archives » Page 4 of 6 » David Louis Edelman

Hugo/Campbell Nomination Deadlines

January 30, 2007

Just a friendly public service announcement that just so coincidentally happens to pertain to, well, um, me. The deadline to submit nominations for the Hugo Awards and for the John W. Campbell Best New Science Fiction Writer Award is not until March 3, 2007. Plenty of time. However… in order to nominate someone, you must have either been an attending or supporting member of last year’s WorldCon in Anaheim, CA or this year’s WorldCon in … Read more

Ten Tech Companies That Blew It in the Past Two Decades

January 26, 2007

I had a high-tech CEO ask me the loaded question to end all loaded questions the other day. What makes a technology company succeed?

It’s almost impossible to come up with a single answer, or even a single set of answers. What do Google, Microsoft, YouTube, MySpace, Digg, Mozilla, Adobe, Dell, and Apple have in common? I came up with a number of factors off the top of my head — empowering users, keeping a steady pace of innovation, good PR, making easy-to-use products — but none of them seemed to be the end-all, be-all of high-tech success.

So I decided to look at the question from the opposite angle. What makes a technology company fail? Here are a handful of companies from the past twenty years that strike me as prime examples of organizations who lost a commanding lead and/or market dominance in a particular field due to their own idiocy or incompetence.

1. Atari. The mass market videogame console was more or less invented by Atari in the late ’70s. Their only real competitor for years was Mattel’s Intellivision, which may have had vast technical superiority but had inept marketing. (George Plimpton? You’ve got to be kidding me.) But instead of innovating, Atari took the road of suing anyone and everyone who touched its much-beloved system. (Activision, Coleco, Starpath, Odyssey, Nintendo, Phillips, and Epyx all suffered Atari’s litigious wrath.) There was also a precipitous drop-off in videogame quality, as anyone who remembers notoriously bad media tie-ins like E.T. The original company was sold off many times and finally diluted to nothingness in the ’90s. The name still had such cachet, however, that Infogrames later licensed it for themselves.

2. Netscape. Netscape partisans and Microsoft haters have long promoted the urban legend that Microsoft drove this company into obscurity. And while Bill Gates & Co.’s anti-competitive practices certainly helped, ultimately the blame lies with the company itself. Netscape was running neck-and-neck with Microsoft in the browser wars for several years until its hideous Navigator 4 browser (which earned the company the Nutscrape label, among many other less complimentary names). Undeterred by their slipping fortunes, the company followed Navigator 4 with… nothing. For years. They pursued a ruinous portal strategy instead and sold out to AOL, who let the company completely die on the vine. Now Netscape is stuck with a dying portal website and an also-ran browser that piggybacks on both Internet Explorer and Firefox.

3. Palm. The early PalmPilots finally found the magic formula that had eluded so many other companies for so long. They were easy to use, integrated tolerably well with your PC, and were extremely reliable machines. No wonder the company built up such a network of software developers. And then a long series of ownership switches threw the platform’s future in the toilet. The result? Microsoft’s Pocket PC platform (now Windows Mobile) overtook the Palm on basic, must-have features (like oh, say, enabling a contact to have both a home and business address, which the Palm still can’t do). I read recently that the Palm OS actually still funnels everything through emulation software for its ancient Dragonball processor, which is a good indicator of how far behind the innovation curve these folks have gotten.

The End of MySpace

January 24, 2007

Ziff-Davis’ Baseline recently published an insider’s look at how MySpace functions on a technical level, and it’s quite revealing.

The common assumption among programming types about MySpace is that the system started off as somebody’s pet project and quickly mushroomed beyond the programmers’ control. Rather than cooling off growth to create a better infrastructure, the MySpace folks opted for growth at any costs. As a result, we end up with the buggy, unreliable usability nightmare that is MySpace today. Now, it’s assumed, the programmers and sysadmins are scrambling to play catchup.

This article pretty much confirms these assumptions. According to the article, MySpace started out as a ColdFusion-based project — and while ColdFusion is ridiculously easy to program, any developer can tell you it’s got a reputation (deserved or not) for being a little slow and resource-heavy on the performance scale. So as they’ve grown, MySpace has been moving to Microsoft’s ASP.Net and relying on emulators to port some of the older code over.

One can’t really blame MySpace for such logic. It’s the kind of hot-air logic that propelled companies like Pets.com to the stratosphere back in the ’90s and made a ton of people oodles and oodles of cash. It’s Web 1.0 thinking. Using such Web 1.0 thinking, MySpace has quickly vaulted to become the most visited site on the Internet and gotten snatched up by Rupert Murdoch’s News Corp. in the process.

But as a result, they’ve built on an unsustainable foundation. They’ve made the classic gamble that short-term gain will trump long-term stability. And like so many Web 1.0 companies that came before them, MySpace is headed for a big, clumsy fall. Here’s why.

Easy come, easy go. The base audience for MySpace consists of teenagers and folks in their twenties. That’s not to say this is the only demographic using MySpace, but that’s the core audience. These people flocked to the service for the same reasons young people flock to anything: it was new, it was cool, it was free, and everyone they knew was doing it. Give them an alternative that’s newer, cooler, better functioning, and more reliable — not to mention backed by big corporate dollars — and they’ll flock there just as quickly.
Insecurity. Recently someone came up with the grand idea of distributing malicious code through a security vulnerability in embedded QuickTime videos. Folks have been taking advantage of CSS and HTML quirks to hack MySpace almost since the place began. More and more people are complaining about hacked profiles and hijacked identities. MySpace has demonstrated time and again that they’re behind the curve when it comes to security. So I think it’s highly likely that at some point in the near future, we’ll see a series of successful crippling attacks on MySpace that will send people running in a panicky exodus.
Slowing pace of innovation. Adapt or die, that’s the unofficial motto of the Internet. And unlike, say, Google, which continues to pump out features and applications by the gallon, MySpace has remained largely sedentary for the past year. They released a lamentable, old-school IM client and better video integration, but otherwise the system is pretty much the same as it was 18 months ago. As MySpace’s technical problems grow and their folks spend more and more time just keeping up with demand, they’re going to fall even further behind.
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The Jukebox in the Sky

January 17, 2007

Fortune Magazine’s David Kirkpatrick recently took a gander at the iPhone hype and concluded that the Apple model of music distribution is a thing of the past. “I doubt most people will want to buy or ‘own’ music at all,” writes Kirkpatrick in his article Looking Beyond the iPhone. “It will be far more useful to pick from a giant online library and listen to whatever we want wherever we are.”

The author then goes on to hold up as a model for the future RealNetworks’ Rhapsody service, which RealNetworks CEO Rob Glaser calls “the jukebox in the sky.” It sounds like a great deal: $10 a month for all the streaming music you can listen to. The catch is that you don’t get to own any of it; everything resides on the Rhapsody servers, you’re just checking it out for a few minutes.

Jukebox with wings Let’s put aside the fact that RealNetworks’ products turned into clunky, adware-laden pieces of crap several years ago with the release of their RealOne player. Let’s also put aside the fact that the company has lost so much ground in recent years to Apple’s iTunes and Microsoft’s Windows Media that they hardly have the clout to revolutionize the music business anymore.

The real (Real) question is this: Do people want a jukebox in the sky?

Kirkpatrick points to the coming ubiquity of wireless broadband networking. Within the next ten years or so, we’ll all be using 3G or WiMax or some as-yet-unchristened technology to access information anytime, anywhere. You won’t need to bring your music with you on little metallic discs — or little plastic iPods — because it will all be available for the taking on the big jukebox in the sky. Why pay to “own” music at all when downloading it is effortless? Just download what you want, when you want.

But here’s the problem with that scenario. Broadband access isn’t the only technology that’s growing by leaps and bounds. Disk storage is exploding too, and getting cheaper by the day.

As I write this, I’m looking at a last-generation iPod sitting on my desk with 30 GB of storage. Not quite enough to store my whole music collection yet — I rip my MP3’s at a full 320 Kbps, as God intended them to be ripped — but the newer 80 GB iPods might do the trick. Within a few years, we’ll be carrying 500 GB iPods. Seagate and Hitachi have 1 terabyte hard drives coming out this year. Flash memory is getting so cheap that you can find piles of thumb drives sitting next to the check-out counter at computer stores.

Guess how much data the entire printed Library of Congress contains? 10 terabytes. Yes, that’s it, 10 terabytes. Assuming we continue along this exponential trend of increased storage, you’ll be blowing your nose with 10-terabyte Kleenex soon enough. What does that mean? That means you’ll be able to carry your entire music, video, and book collection around in your pocket in 20 years. Let’s take it even further: in 40 or 50 years, you’ll be able to carry around every book ever written and every piece of music ever recorded around with you. Give it another 10 years for video.

So would you rather carry your digital media with you in your pocket, or would you rather carry your radio receiver with you and access your media on the great jukebox in the sky?

Why Is Gmail So Irritating?

December 20, 2006

I switched over to Google’s Gmail about a year and a half ago from Yahoo! Mail, mostly because I wanted a change. I’m on Gmail about half of the time now, while the other half of the time I use Microsoft Outlook 2003.

I like Google. I have great faith in their ability to bring new technology to the masses in an intuitive, highly functional package. Google Maps quickly supplanted MapQuest as my street directory of choice when it came out. And I’ve got high hopes for Writely, an online word processing application that Google bought earlier this year and promptly rechristened Google Docs & Spreadsheets.

So why is Gmail so irritating?

Gmail logo Gmail should be a slam-dunk for Google. After all, I can build a simple POP3 application on a ColdFusion web server in a couple of hours, and that includes time for me to consult the Macromedia documentation to fix my mangled CFML syntax. I’m not saying that that’s all there is to it, of course. (If you want to see a ColdFusion-based application gone horribly awry, look at all the flaws in MySpace.) But I don’t have some of the world’s best developers and billions of dollars in cash lying around either.

Here are my major problems with Gmail:

Gmail breaks the browser Back button. To me, this is an absolute cardinal sin. Yes, I understand how difficult it is to make a functioning web application that obeys the Back button in a stateless environment like the web. But certainly Google can do better. I back up into blank, non-functioning pages at least two or three times a day, usually when following links from the Gmail module on my Google home page. And when Google isn’t breaking the Back button, they’re opening up new and unwanted tabs in my browser.
Gmail breaks the Reload/Refresh button. Try opening an e-mail message, and then hitting your browser’s reload/refresh button. You get taken back to the list of e-mails. I get hung up on this several times a day too.
The interface is very, very slow. I lose patience very easily with the “Loading” messages that pop up at the top of the screen — there are actually two different messages, one that appears in the top right and one that appears in the top left — and they’re up there a lot.
No folders. Google assumes that we don’t care for the convention of filing our e-mail into different folders. Therefore Gmail does away with this metaphor altogether in favor of its own Label system, which I can’t seem to get used to. Couldn’t they at least give you the option of using folders, even if it’s not set by default?

Contemplating My Next Laptop

December 4, 2006

As a nice, juicy little carrot to inspire me to finish writing “MultiReal,” I’ve decided that I’m going to finally buy a new laptop once I’m done. So the question is: which one?

Reverse Engineering the Turing Test

October 25, 2006

As part of the research for my next book, MultiReal, I’ve been thinking a lot about mind uploading.

Brain in a jar Mind uploading is a transhumanist concept wherein you take a human brain and digitize it. We’re not just talking about scanning and mapping here; the goal is to have a fully functioning mind that can exist outside of all this defective muscle, bone, and tissue you cart around with you. Science fiction authors have been kicking the idea around forever. Wikipedia cites Philip K. Dick and Roger Zelazny as some of the earliest SFnal treatments of mind uploading, but you could make a good argument that Mary Shelley got there first with her Frankenstein, or the Modern Prometheus in 1818.

In theory, mind uploading is a pathway to immortality, and there are real organizations of thinkers, philosophers, and scientists working to make it happen. I’m betting that not only will it happen, but that it’s possible that the writers are going to get there first.

Let me back up.

Suppose you manage to “digitize” the human brain — whatever that means — and store the whole thing on a massive supercomputer. You run the program, virtual neurons start firing. How do you know it’s actually working? How can you tell that you’ve got an actual mind and not just a random collection of hopped-up virtual nerves?

Naturally you’d use the Turing Test. The Turing Test, created by visionary Alan Turing in 1950, says that if a machine can successfully fool other humans into believing it’s an intelligent entity, then for all practical purposes it is. So if we plug your spouse in to that supercomputer, have her talk to your uploaded mind, and she can’t tell whether she was talking to the flesh-and-bone you or the bits-and-bytes you, we’ve succeeded.

(Now there have been lots of objections raised to Alan Turing’s hypothesis. Some of them are of the predictable, nonsensical, religious variety, but some of them do seem legit. The Wikipedia article on the Turing Test spells them out quite nicely. My experience with cognitive science is limited to a semester in college, reading books by Ray Kurzweil and Rudy Rucker, six years of therapy, and futzing around in Wikipedia, so take my scientific opinions here with a gargantuan pillar of salt. But it seems to me that if you could put a digital brain and a meat brain in the same situation and they both make identical choices, you’ve succeeded in mind uploading.)

So the bar to clear in order to declare ourselves successfully uploaded isn’t as high as you might initially think. We need a program that can successfully imitate everything you do and convince anyone on the planet it’s the real thing. Once we had that program, we could then theoretically rebuild your mind, back it up, even transfer it into the body of a super-soldier a la John Scalzi’s Old Man’s War. (Although only Scalzi can make them wisecrack so).

We probably don’t need to map out every single one of the umpty-ump trillion molecules in the human brain to do it. We can take mathematical shortcuts. We can eliminate a lot of the redundancy and vestigial functionality in the human brain that we don’t use or don’t need. (Would you really be less of an intelligent entity if we could smooth out the neurological wrinkles that cause deja vu, for instance?)

In short, we treat the human brain like the ultimate black box. We know what the desired outcome is — a program that acts just like you do — and we don’t really care how we get there.

So how would you create such a program?

Again, I’m no cognitive scientist (see caveat above). But presumably you could create such a program through pattern recognition. Feed some analytical computer gajillions and bazillions of samples of your thought processes, and let the computer sniff out the patterns and logistical rules. Eventually, if you provide this computer with enough data points — thoughts — it should be able to create a simulation that performs identically to your real brain. The more you input, the greater the precision.

Name me a class of people who routinely record their thought processes for a living.

Correct! Writers.

Random Things Not Worth a Full Blog Post

October 17, 2006

Where have I been the past few weeks and why haven’t I been blogging? Take your pick: Freeboating at a fancy-schmancy LexisNexis conference in Boston with my wife Diligently avoiding sharp objects in an attempt to avoid despair at the still-unfinished state of MultiReal, the sequel to Infoquake Falling increasingly behind on a number of web projects Starting half a dozen rants about this or that topic and coming to the realization that none of … Read more

Will Open Source Software Rule the World?

September 26, 2006

A few people have pointed me to this discussion about Infoquake on the Asimov’s forums. Some of the forum participants appear to be skeptical about Infoquake because it doesn’t embrace open source software as the end-all, be-all of human existence.

Linux penguin on a throne I could point out that one shouldn’t necessarily take anything one reads in a science fiction novel as an outright prediction. I’ve blogged elsewhere about the impossibility of predicting the future in any meaningful kind of way. As many other people have said, science fiction is largely about the present, and Infoquake isn’t really a serious attempt at predicting what life will be like in the year x. It’s more like looking at the year 2006 through a funhouse mirror in order to see things in a different light.

But enough about the book. The real question is whether open source software will become the dominant (or even only) form of programming in the future. My answer to this question is no, because I don’t think the open source software model has proven itself yet.

A very quick summary of the debate before we get much further:

Proprietary software is like a car that’s sold to you with the hood closed and sealed. You want to tinker around under the hood to make your car run faster or smoother? Tough, you can’t. Only authorized mechanics and dealers can get under that hood. No, more than that, only authorized mechanics and dealers are legally allowed under that hood.
Open source software, by contrast, is like a car that’s sold with the hood wide open. Complete documentation for every last screw, bolt, and chip is sitting in the glove compartment, and everyone in the world can poke their nose in your engine and see how long it’s been since your last oil change.

The idea with open source software is that, when everyone has access to the complete source code, everyone can pitch in to fix security exploits and coding inefficiencies. You don’t get the kind of security snafus you get with Windows where some independent researcher finds an exploit and everyone has to wait around for Microsoft to fix it. When will the patch be ready? “We’re working on a fix,” say the ‘Softies. “Just keep quiet for a few more months. It’s not that bad. Trust us.”

Open source sounds like a great idea, in theory. But so does socialism. And while I’m not ready to throw in the towel on socialism either, let’s just say that thus far it hasn’t performed as well in the real world as it does in a laboratory setting.

But the open source movement has produced some very good pieces of software, like Mozilla Firefox, the OpenOffice suite, the GAIM instant messaging client, the MySQL database, and the Apache web server. There’s also Linux, of course, an operating system which has become ubiquitous in technical circles and on web servers, even if it hasn’t made much traction on the typical business user’s desktop. This blog itself runs on WordPress, an open source project.

So why am I down on open source’s prospects for the long term? A few reasons: