Voices from the dashboard

All my life I've taken road trips, partly by natural inclination, partly by necessity.  It's a largely timeless experience.  Sure, the roads have improved (see the Grapevine Grade section of this page for a good example), the speed limits are higher, cars are faster and safer and there's not a lot of "local flavor" in most stopping points unless you actively seek it out, but for the most part road trips have been road trips since well before Kerouac.

One thing that has changed is the soundtrack, and not just because tastes in music have changed.  When I was a kid, any audio not provided by the car and its occupants came from the radio, and if you were on a long haul, it was the AM radio.  Keeping FM tuned in was and remains too much of a hassle.  An AM station, especially one of the "clear channel" stations (not to be confused with the media conglomerate) licensed to broadcast at high power, could be good for hours -- enough for a whole sports fixture, several runs through the news or all the whacked-out talk radio conspiracy theories you could eat.

The key feature here, particularly on a solo trip through, say, the desert southwest US, was the lack of choice.  You'd be doing well to have your pick of baseball, UFO speculation and the company of your own thoughts, and a hundred miles or so out of Albuquerque on a dark night with the game a blowout the UFO speculation starts sounding interesting and plausible.

By the time I was doing my own solo long hauls, cassette tape was an option, but a library of a few dozen albums can be limiting after a while -- and suppose you want to know what's going on in the world, or just let someone else handle the programming for a while?  The in-dash CD (briefly supplemented by a multi-disc changer in the trunk) increased one's options, but the same basic constraints applied.  Only with the advent of satellite radio was there little reason to tune in to local stations at all.

And now there's the web.  As long as you've got a smartphone, bars, a bit of cable and an aux input, you can listen to pretty much anything.  Stream your favorite home station.  Stream your favorite internet station.  Play your podcasts.  Dial up Pandora.  AM won't be completely disappearing anytime soon -- technologies written off as obsolete seldom do -- but the proportion of people who know or care must be steadily dwindling.  Likewise I'd rather not try to predict whether or when web audio will supplant satellite radio, but if I had to place long-term bets, I'd bet on the web.

It's hard to argue that having a huge palette of choices isn't progress of some sort, but there's something to be said for being drawn out of one's comfort zone because there's only one game in town.

"Thank you for your business"

The book is The Thank You Economy, by Gary Vaynerchuk.  The thesis is that, thanks to social media, business is returning to its mom-and-pop roots, in that personal customer service is once again becoming important.  I ran across the book listening to an interview with Vaynerchuk on NPR.

I'm of two minds about this:

Mind 1: Hmm ... it's all different now, is it?  Is business, in fact, paying more attention to individual customers?  Did it really stop?  How would you measure this?

Anecdotal evidence:  Today I took my car to the shop expecting a hefty amount of deferred maintenance because, well, it had been a while.  Instead, they explained what it really needed, did that, offered to fix a couple of minor problems that had been bugging me for years, which I had them go ahead and do, and sent me on my way for a modest sum.  These were the same folks who last year quickly and efficiently diagnosed and fixed a problem that the dealer I called had had no clue about, which is why I came back in the first place.

Are they on Facebook?  No.  Can I follow them on Twitter? No.  Do they provide no-nonsense service at a reasonable price?  Absolutely.  Do they have all the business they can handle?  Judging by the parking lot and the steady stream of customers, I'm guessing so.  Are they run essentially the same way they would have been 50 years ago?  Quite likely.

Mind 2:  Well, I've got to be a fan of someone who titles the first chapter of his book "How Everything Has Changed, Except Human Nature", and anyone pushing for good old-fashioned customer service is OK in my book.  Rather than focus on what historical trends might or might not have been, another take is that the modern web offers tools that let good businesspeople serve their customers better, even if those customers are across the country or the world.  In that case, he's got a point, and probably a lot of useful experience and tips to share.

Mind, Vaynerchuk's own site makes the less modest claim that the "Thank you economy" is "the most important shift in culture businesses have seen," but then, he's got a book to sell.

Via Appia or I-95?

In a previous post I had been about to assert that truly disruptive technologies only come along rarely, and then cite the automobile as a classic example. But my spidey sense started to tingle. Just what was the disruption?

Intuitively, it's difficult to look at, say, a satellite photo of the US eastern seaboard and claim that the automobile hasn't been disruptive. On the other hand, anyone who's ever tried to navigate, say, central London in a car knows that the even the automobile hasn't completely swept aside everything that came before.

But wait. Is it the automobile that's been disruptive, or the paved road? The pattern of commerce and (other) empire-building spurring roads spurring towns and cities spurring commerce and empire-building goes back at least to the Romans. Even paving with tar goes back a long way, to 8th century Baghdad, according to Wikipedia. In Voyage of the Beagle, Darwin reports macadamised roads in Australia in the 1830s, half a century before Benz's patent.

Along the same lines, it was a long time before automobiles surpassed trains. In the US, one could argue that it took the interstate system -- more and much better paved roads -- to really get American car culture going, and to this day it is possible to live comfortably in major metropolises (albeit mostly outside the US) without access to a car.

Again, there's no way to claim the automobile hasn't had a major disruptive effect, but the simple narrative of "the automobile changed everything" just doesn't hold up.

Likewise, was it the internet that changed everything, or the web, or fiber optics, or Moore's law, or developments in software engineering, or ...? The answer is probably "all of the above, and more."

The commonplace mashup

I've learned to take it on faith that the latest revolutionarily new forms and genres don't arise fully formed out of nothing, but have direct roots in older forms. Often these roots can be traced back quite a ways. Case in point: The net and the web are supposed to have created entirely new modes of expression based on taking bits and pieces from here and there and putting them together into a never-before-seen whole. For example, as I quoted Bruce Tognazzini in a previous post:

[W]e are also seeing the emergence of a new and powerful form of expression, as works grow, change, and divide, with each new artist adding to these living collages of color, form, and action.

This was written in 1994. At that point, sampling in music was well established. It's not clear whether Tog would have had sampling in mind as an example of such new forms, but if not it would certainly be a predecessor to whatever starting points Tog did have in mind. For example, the web mashup, which is clearly the sort of thing Tog had in mind, is so named by direct analogy with the musical mashup, which in turn is essentially sampling on steroids.

Sampling, in the sense of directly lifting parts of one recording into another, goes back to the 1960s, at least, with the Beatles and Frank Zappa among others. Lifting the music from one piece into another is much, much older. Working backward, start with jazz and folk music and along the way note that several classical composers were happy to incorporate folk tunes into their works, whether the critics approved or not.

Robert Darnton's The Case for Books gives another example: the commonplace book. People have been keeping journals and log books forever and these, along with the newspaper column, are clearly antecedents of modern web logs such as this one. I was surprised, though, to learn what a webby flavor the particular genre of the commonplace had. As Darnton explains it:

Time was when readers kept commonplace books. Whenever they came across a pithy passage, they copied it into a notebook under an appropriate heading, adding observations made in the course of daily life. Erasmus [1466 or 1469 - 1536] instructed them how to do it; and if they did not have access to his popular De Copia, they consulted printed models or the local schoolmaster. The practice spread everywhere in early modern England, among ordinary readers as well as famous writers like Francis Bacon, Ben Jonson, John Milton and John Locke.

Darnton goes on to assert that people read in a much webbier way then (which leads me to think, rather, that both modes he describes have been around forever):

It involved a special way of taking in the printed word. Unlike modern readers, who follow the flow of a narrative from beginning to end [...], early modern Englishmen read in fits and starts and jumped from book too book. They broke texts into fragments and assembled them into new patterns by transcribing them in different sections of their notebooks. Then they reread the copies and rearranged the patterns while adding more excerpts.

This is not necessarily a private exercise. Some commonplace books even saw publication and were doubtless then further dissected by new readers.

There is a commonly accepted narrative that before the web, information was produced and consumed in a strictly linear fashion and distributed strictly top-down from authoritative publishers to captive readers. The web, so the narrative goes, broke that all wide open.

The actual history of books paints a significantly different picture. Active reading and reconstruction has a long history. Commonplace books probably date to the 1100s and remained in vogue into the Victorian 1800s. The Talmud, with its commentaries and its commentaries on commentaries, is another notable example. Nor has publishing itself ever been exclusively confined to official sources. Unofficial publication has been illegal at various times, but the very act of suppression implies a market. This market has seldom gone unserved.

This is not to say that the web has had no effect. It has clearly tilted the tables towards self-publication and sampling, mashups or what have you. However, the web-oriented mindset behind these activities is not new. Neither are complaints about it. From Darnton again, himself quoting Bernard Rosenthal's translation of a letter by Niccoló Perotti written in 1471:

My dear Francesco, I have lately kept praising the age in which we live, because of the great, indeed divine gift of the new kind of writing which was recently brought to us from Germany. [...] I was led to hope that within a short time we should have such a large quantity of books that there wouldn't be a single work which could not be procured because of lack of means or scarcity . . . Yet — oh false and all too human thoughts — I see that things turned out quite differently from what I had hoped. Because now that anyone is free to print whatever they wish, they often disregard that which is best and instead write, merely for the sake of entertainment, what would best be forgotten, or better still erased from all books. And even when they write something worthwhile they twist it and corrupt it to the point where it would be much better to do without such books, rather than having a thousand copies spreading falsehoods over the whole world.

Or as Tog said it, over 500 years later:

Writers will no longer need to curry the favor of a publisher to be heard, and readers will be faced with a bewildering array of unrefereed, often inaccurate (to put it mildly), works.

Disruptive technology, indeed.

How disrupted is technology?

The idea of disruptive technology is that changes in technology can bring about significant changes in society as a whole. But how much does technology itself change?

Let's start with what's on my screen right now:

• A browser
• An email client
• A few explorer/navigators or whatever you call things that let you browse through a file system.
• A couple of flavors of text editor
• A command-line terminal (which I often don't have open) into which I mostly type commands I learned over twenty years ago.
• If I'm working with code, I'll also have an IDE running

Everything on that list could have been there ten or fifteen years ago [The browser has since eaten the email client and a couple of flavors of text editor.  In general the trend seems to have been spending more and more time in the browser, to the point that, at least on my laptop at home, I spend virtually all the time in the browser.  I don't know what the split is between apps and browser pages on my phone, but certainly almost all screen time on a modern phone is web-driven one way or another --D.H. Dec 2015].

Now that first item, "browser", is a bit misleading because what you can access with the browser has changed significantly over the last decade or so, but even then the last major changes in browser technology, namely the key pieces of AJAX, happened over a decade ago. Again, I'm talking about disrupted technology here, not disruptive technology. Whatever changes the web and the computer desktop have wrought over the last decade, the underlying technology hasn't changed fundamentally.

What about the broadband connection behind the browser? There's broadband and then there's broadband, but if you mean "much faster than dial-up, fast enough to stream some sort of audio and video", that's been widely available for years as well. What about the server farms full of virtual machines at the other end of that connection? The whole point of such server farms is that they're using off-the-shelf parts, not the bleeding edge. Virtualization has become a buzzword lately, but the basic concept has been in practice for decades.

In short, I don't see any fundamental shifts in the underlying technology of the web. In fact, it seems just as likely that it's the stability of web technology that's enabled applications like e-commerce and social networking to build out over the last decade. Whether those are disruptive is a separate question, one which I've been chewing on for a while, mostly under the rubric of not-so-disruptive technology (in case you wonder where I stand on the matter).

Now, it's a legitimate question whether a decade or so is a long time or a short time. If you're a historian, it's a short time, but wasn't even one year supposed to be a long time in "internet time"?

Wikipedia, voices and objectivity

In some sort of ideal world, we get our information purely from objective sources, apply cool judgment and act accordingly. In this world the ideal news article or reference text doesn't appear to have been written by anyone. It merely transmits facts, and only facts, to the reader directly and transparently.

This is a caricature, of course, but it's fairly close to what my high school journalism teacher taught, and it's woven deeply into Wikipedia's fabric under the label of Neutral Point of View (NPOV). On the other hand, Wikipedia is almost by definition a work in progress, constantly updated by a near-anarchy of mostly psudonymous if not anonymous editors. No one can stop you from saying that hard-boiled eggs must only be cracked on the big end, and no one can stop me from correcting your heinous misconception. I mean, from expressing my personal opinion on the matter.

But it all works remarkably well, for several reasons:

• Wikipedia is inclusive by nature. An encyclopedia aims to be all-inclusive to begin with. An online encyclopedia, without the limitations of physical ink and paper, doesn't have to worry about running out of space. More important, though, is the huge number of contributors. All the paper in the world is useless without someone to write on it. And revise. And re-revise. And so on. This is not to say that Wikipedia includes everything willy-nilly. There are definite policies for what can and cannot be included, but they're aimed towards notability and not someone's idea of correctness.
• The guidelines like NPOV really do matter because they're supported by a strong culture. The community has long since reached a critical mass of active members that take Wikipedia policy seriously and act to reinforce it and to repair breaches, even if that means tediously reverting an endless stream of "MY MATH TEECHUR SUX DOOD" and worse vandalism.
• It's generally easy to tell when someone is injecting opinion. It's even easier to tell when two (or more) people are trying to inject conflicting opinions. The occasional of jumble of "Some authorities ^[who?] insist that ... however so-and-so^[17] has stated that ... " doesn't necessarily make for smooth or pleasant reading, but it does tend to make clear who's grinding which ax.
• Similarly, it's easy to spot a backwater article that hasn't seen a lot of editing. This is not necessarily a bad thing. Obscure math articles, for example, tend to read like someone's first draft of a textbook, full of "Let x ..." and "it then clearly follows that ..." The prose may be a bit chewy, but whoever wrote it almost certainly cared enough to get the details right. Articles on obscure bands generally read like liner notes and tend to slightly hype that band's achievements and their home-town music scene. That's fine. Take it with a grain of salt and enjoy the tidbits you wouldn't have heard otherwise.
• Likewise, it's easy to tell when an article has had a good going-over. Articles on "controversial" topics may or may not have had their "on the other hand ... on the other other hand ..." back-and-forth smoothed out, but they do tend to accumulate copious footnotes. Just as one could argue that forums exist to generate FAQ lists, one could argue that such articles exist to gather references to primary sources.

Whenever I find myself too far out on my "web changes nothing" limb, it helps to consider Wikipedia and realize that there's really nothing quite like it. But it's also important, I think, to realize that Wikipedia works so well not because it works perfectly -- it clearly doesn't -- but because it's robust in the face of its imperfections. This is a property of good distributed systems in general, the distributed system in this case comprising not just the author/editors, but the reader taking Wikipedia's nature into account.


P.S.: While fetching up the link for NPOV above, I first tried "npov", figuring it would redirect to the right place, WP:NPOV, since I can never remember the right prefix for the special pages. Oddly enough, if you don't capitalize it the right way, npov redirects to Journalism. Not sure I buy that, but it's an interesting angle.

Tools of choice

In real life I'm a software developer. That doesn't figure in much here, probably because as far as the web is concerned I'm an ordinary user, not a developer. However, one place I use the web is at work. No, not to browse fascinating articles from the blogosphere, unless the article happens to answer a particular vexing question I'm dealing with. My web use at work basically boils down to

• gmail
• a web-based bug tracking system
• searches now and then for answers to vexing questions
• researching and downloading open source software

This last bullet item has significantly changed the way software developers work, at least in the Java corner of the world where I dwell. Your mileage may vary, but for a large and still-growing set of typical problems, downloading a package and using it is likely to be a better option than rolling your own. You can't beat the price, and the time between "that looks interesting" and actually using the package is generally measured in minutes. There's no obligation and if the package is not quite right, the source code is right there.

Some examples from the toolkit I use at work

• Java itself and its libraries are now essentially open source.
• The Eclipse IDE. Now, I realize that IDE wars are to our time what editor wars were to the previous generation (um, that would be my generation, I guess), but Eclipse is the one I happen to use for a variety of reasons. One caveat: Eclipse is not just an IDE. It's really a whole platform. It slices. It dices. It has distros like Linux has distros. If you're not careful you can end up with a bloated mess. If you pick and choose, though, you can end up with a very nice, usable, though still memory-hungry tool.
• Subversion for version control. Again, other worthy choices are available.
• JUnit. The value here is not so much the code as the mere fact of putting something out there as a framework for writing unit tests. That said, I've had no complaints about the code.
• Apache Ant for builds. I actually don't use Ant directly these days, but I rely on it behind the scenes. Having seen one too many Makefiles that ate Chicago, I have no plans to go back to make.
• Apache in general for a variety of useful libraries, including networking (Mina) and general utilities (Commons)
• A new favorite for taming Swing: MiG Layout. If you've ever considered fleeing to a tall mountain in Nepal rather than hassle another mysterious problem with GridBagLayout and its little friends, check MiG out. Your life will become better.

Naturally this is just a particular, idiosyncratic view of what's out there. If you run Linux (as I do at home), there's the whole GNU/Linux/git/gcc/autoconf/gmake/gcc/... toolchain. If you like Perl, or Ruby, or Python, each is its own little universe. Any way you slice it, the amount of stuff out there is impressive.

Back at the blog, is this a real live example of disruptive technology? If so, what is the disruptor? Is it the concept of open source? Is the enabling technology the internet, the web, or some combination of both? How much does it matter that much of the internet and web as we know it rests on open source/free software? Why am I carefully saying "open source" here and not "free"? How many threes are there in a dozen?

All interesting questions except perhaps the last, but not ones I'm going to tackle just now.

[I still use Java, Eclipse and JUnit.  I'd now recommend git over Subversion for version control.  For various reasons, I don't have much occasion to use the rest of the list these days. --D.H. Dec 2015]

The game is changing

When I'm beating my "not-so-disruptive technology" drum, I'm not trying to say that technological change has no effect. Rather, technological change is more gradual than we might sometimes think. Over time, it can have significant effects. The rule of thumb I've heard is that predictions overestimate the short term and underestimate the long term.

For example, over my lifetime Moore's law has tracked orders of magnitude worth of steady improvement in hardware. This progress has been accompanied by a steady stream of discoveries and algorithmic improvements on the software side (and a counterbalancing accumulation of layers between the code and the hardware, but that's a separate story).

In the early days of AI, there was much breathless talk (not necessarily by those actually doing the research) about the "electronic brain" being able to match and surpass the human brain. Only later did it become clear that this vastly underestimated the sheer computational power of a human brain -- or a gerbil brain, for that matter.

A classic AI program, say SHRDLU, ran on a PDP-6 and processed small chunks of text to maintain a set of assertions about a toy "block world". It was definitely a neat hack, and it looked pretty impressive since, as everyone knew, language processing is one of the highest levels of thought and therefore one of the most difficult [Re-reading, that's not quite right. Language processing really is hard in its full glory. However SHRDLU, like everything else at the time, did fairly rudimentary language processing. The "gee-whiz" part was that it could keep track of spatial relations between blocks in its block world. My point was that this is actually much, much simpler than, say, walking. So for "language processing" read "reasoning about spatial relations".].

In fact, "high-level" abstract thought is going to be about the easiest type of thought for a computer to mimic -- the computer itself is the product of exactly that sort of thought, so a certain structural suitability is to be expected. This is probably clearer in hindsight than at the time.

An oversimplified view of what happened next is that we began to understand and appreciate a few key facts:

• Biological minds are much more complex than a PDP-6. There are hundreds of billions of neurons in the brain, versus (somewhere around) hundreds of thousands of components in a PDP-6, most of which would have been core memory (by which I mean actual magnetic cores).
• Biological minds are distributed and work in parallel. For example, the eye is not a simple camera. The retina and optic nerve do significant processing before the image even reaches the brain.
• Biological computation is not based on abstract reasoning. Rather, the other way around. Biological computation has a much more statistical, approximate flavor than traditional symbol-bashing.

and so, again oversimplifying, the AI bubble burst. Everyone now knew that AI was a pipe dream. Best to go back to real work.

"Real work" meant a lot of things, but it included:

• Figuring out how to handle much larger amounts of data than, say, dozens or hundreds or even thousands of assertions about blocks in a toy world, and how to make use of hardware that (currently) throws around prefixes like giga- and tera-.
• Figuring out how to build distributed systems that work in parallel.
• Figuring out how to handle messy, approximate real-world problems.

Hmm ... three bullet points up there ... three bullet points down here ... almost like they were meant to be compared and contrasted ...


The jumping-off point for all this was observation in the previous post that our internal data network appears to have capacity comparable to fairly fast off-the-shelf digital networks. This rough parity is a fairly recent development.

Plus ça change ...

I'm thinking of a technology. A revolutionary, disruptive technology. This technology broke down the barrier of distance, putting people who would never have met in direct contact with each other.

Using this technology, someone in the far reaches of the country could do business with someone time zones away. The technology could be used to procure any kind of good for sale, from buttons to houses.

Not only is this technology responsible for the creation of industries and corporate empires, but for entire towns and cities. Access to this technology could make the difference between a settlement withering and dying or growing and thriving. It is fair to say that maps were literally redrawn around this technology. Ways of life were created and destroyed, species decimated.

The technology led to rampant speculation. Fortunes were made, lost, re-made and so forth on the strength of speculation in this technology.

Press agents and marketing wizards spoke breathlessly of the technology's transformative power. Lavish promises were made to the public. Some panned out. Many didn't.

I speak, of course, of the steam locomotive.

The jury is out (but online)

I heard a news story on the radio the other day about a high-profile case that was being reviewed, among other things, because jurors were thought to have been accessing the internet when they were supposed to have been sequestered.

This is sort of a dog-that-didn't bark situation. The net and web have been around for a long time now, with their potential for tainting jurors who are supposed to be isolated. You'd think there would have been more and bigger stories about it by now. Evidently, though, it's not a major problem. Take your pick of possible reasons:

• Most trials are over quickly. Relatively few require actually sequestering jurors.
• Web access is just the latest in a long line of potential leaks. Cell phones, (not to mention ordinary phones), have been a problem for years now.
• Jurors are generally good about following instructions.
• Jurors not communicating with the outside world is fundamentally a human problem, not a technological one.

What I found really interesting, though, was how the potential taint came to light: via email. And of course, the lawyers involved preface any discussion of this with "If these emails are genuine ..."

There's your barking dog -- email problems, particularly the ease of spoofing email, are a much bigger deal than the a web connection being available when it shouldn't.

Happy birthday, Kindle

CNN points out it's already been a year since Amazon introduced the Kindle. It's currently sold out, and Oprah likes it, as do Toni Morrison and James Patterson (but not J.K. Rowling). It's accounting for 10% of Amazon's book sales, even though only 200,000 of Amazon's zillions of titles are available on it (evidently it's the right 200,000). So it's a game-changing hit, right?

Well, it's definitely not a flop, and the article claims that sales are "on a par with other high-profile mobile devices in their first year." On the other hand, in keeping with my not-so-disruptive technology theme, I'd have to side with Paul Reynolds of Consumer Reports:

I think it's certainly a ways away from hitting the mainstream ... because of the price and the experience a reader gets from long-form reading. Whether these ... are successful, stand-alone devices remains to be seen. From what I've seen and heard, I think the technology is here to stay.

So ... so far, so good, and it definitely bears watching, but more of a leadoff single than a grand slam home run.

Maybe all this googly stuff is worth something after all

Well, I never really doubted it, but it's good to have a working example from time to time.

A friend called, saying they were at a pizza shop on Smith Street (that's not exactly what happened, but let's say it is). The shop was next to a big red brick building. Could I come pick them up? Before they could relay any more detail, their cell phone went dead.

So I went to Google, searched for "pizza" "smith street" <my town>. Up came a little map with pizza shops marked. Two were even on Smith Street. I then clicked on the little push-pins for the two shops and checked the street view. Only one was next to a big red building. Voila!

I plugged the address into my GPS (I'm pretty sure in some setups that can happen automagically), set off, and sure enough, there was my friend waiting. Just like the breathless descriptions you'd see about how the web was going to Change Everything, with the added bonus that it actually happened.

That probably came off as overly cynical, so let me climb down a bit: A lot of the technology and trends that have been hyped over the years have actually happened. Phones, computers and TVs really are converging towards each other. You really can find all sorts of useful information and belong to far-flung virtual communities over the web. You can even shop and bank on the web.

I'm not down on the technology. I'm not even particularly down on the hype. Hype happens. If people didn't get excited about cool technology we wouldn't have any. Nonetheless, I can't help feeling that, with all these changes, my life is essentially the same -- even taking into account that it would have been a lot harder to track down my friend without the web.wizardry. Sure, technology can be disruptive, but most of it isn't, at least not as quickly or in the ways people often seem to imagine it to be.

How disruptive is online advertising?

A Forrester Research report quoted in a Wall Street Journal article, neither of which seems easy to access on line, says that Kids These Days spend more time online now than they do watching TV (apparently a good chunk of that time is spent gaming). Widespread adoption of broadband connections (or at least, considerably-faster-than-dialup connections) has been a big driver for this.

This is causing both major advertisers and major online advertising players to re-think how best to reach consumers in the new higher-bandwidth net.world. In the case in point, Proctor & Gamble and Google are going so far as to exchange employees, the better to understand each other's cultures and outlooks. An odder couple you couldn't ask for, and yet it appears to make business sense.

On the one hand, this is just another chapter of the "How do we make money off this 'web' thing?" saga that's been playing itself out slowly but surely for the last decade or so. But on the other hand, it gains a bit more urgency when rephrased as "We need to make money off this 'web' thing. The other stuff is drying up!"

My feeling continues to be that the web will have much more impact on how companies make money than on which companies are making it. That certainly seems to be the lesson from the dot.com boom and bust: WebVan folded but brick-and-mortar grocery stores still take orders online. EToys got bought out by KB Toys and Walmart and Target went online. Not to say that new companies haven't sprung up -- Google, Amazon and EBay come to mind -- just that old companies adapting has been more the norm.

In fact, the how is not necessarily changing that much. P&G still makes money selling soap, grocery stores still sell groceries and toy stores still sell toys. The big difference is in how they reach their customers. And even then, an ad still looks pretty much like an ad and an online catalog still looks a lot like a catalog.

Is the web saving trees?

The latest Economist has not one but two articles -- from its print edition, mind -- on the "Paperless Office". The first is more about the fact of the increasingly paperless office, the second delves into implications.

Back in the 1980s, when PCs started to take off and people used terms like "Desktop Publishing", it was obvious that before long there would be no need for paper in an office. Why xerox a memo when you can send an email? Why keep a paper ledger when an Accounts Receivable application will do all that for you? Why work up a spreadsheet when you could use, well, a spreadsheet?

By the year 2001, which saw the publication of a book called The Myth of the Paperless Office, it was clear that the hype was not going to pan out. People were using more paper than ever. A lot of places wanted a physical, paper backup of important files. Some people -- myself included -- just wanted to see certain things on paper, things like email (for executives) or code (for geeks like myself). In my case, I had a hard time navigating a 1000-line code listing on a 24-line screen. More on that in a bit.

Exept the year 2001 was also when paper consumption in the office peaked. It turns out that people really did start to use less paper. Email really has replaced memos, and so forth. When people do print things out, they seem more interested in nice, high-contrast color prints (e.g., of photographs or brochures) than just printing draft text. So what happened? The prevailing theory seems to be that kids these days are just more comfortable with a paperless environment. I'm sure they are, but I don't think that explains it all.

Like I said, I used to have a hard time navigating code without printing it out and scribbling on it. What changed? For one thing, I got more used to editing on a screen. For another thing, screens got bigger and sharper. There is a world of difference between paging through 24 monochrome 80-character lines at a time and looking at more than twice as many nice wide lines. For another, interfaces got nicer. It's much more convenient to search back and forth, to navigate from one place to another, to flip back and forth between several different documents, and so forth, than it was in the 80s.

Navigability is a big deal. In coding, it means I can easily get, say, from where I use something to where it's defined -- one of the big reasons I'd want to print out a bunch of code and lay it out on the floor. For non-geeks, it's the ability to click on a link on a web page and Just Go There. You can't do that on paper. Until the web came along, you (generally) couldn't do that on your screen either. Now it's routine.

In other words, it's not just (or perhaps not even primarily) a societal change. The technology, and particularly the software, made significant advances between the 1980s and the turn of the century. One change -- the widespread adoption of hyperlinks -- was seismic, but many changes -- higher screen resolutions, nicer UI widgets, nicer text formatting -- were incremental.

From that point of view, I'd agree with the second article that technological change and external shocks can bring technologies back into favor, but I'm not completely sold on the societal angle. In particular, I disagree that "The paperless office shows how a sociological shift can make the difference: although the technology did not change very much, its users did." The technology did change quite a bit, just not all at once or all that visibly. The gradual improvements were too gradual to draw notice, the web too pervasive. Who notices the air?

[Nowadays I often go for days, weeks even, without printing anything out, and whole days from time to time without writing anything down on a physical medium.  Along with better displays and better tools, I've gotten more comfortable working without the tactile cue of, say, circling something and drawing an arrow from it to something else.  In other words, it's partly technology, and partly gradual shifts in behavior from using the technology --D.H. May 2015]

Media convergence and divergence

Technically, it's game over.

There's no reason why a box like Roku's Netflix box [reviewed here] couldn't be used to deliver current TV shows, live events, premium cable content, whatever. And in fact, it looks like you can get just that kind of service from DSL providers (well, maybe you can -- it's not available where I am yet). Boxes like Apple TV are also in the mix; the streaming aspect is there, albeit downplayed.

There are some concerns about bandwidth on the backbone, but Cisco says it's manageable, and they're allowing for a sizable chunk of peer-to-peer traffic, which may (or may not) become less of an issue if people are happy with what they can get directly from the providers. If I can see a given movie anytime I want as part of a $10/month subscription, why would I hassle with copying it peer-to-peer? But maybe that's just me.

So somewhere around now, give or take a couple of years, is the point where in major markets it's technically reasonably easy to get all the media you want via the net, media meaning audio, video, phone (i.e., two-way point-to-point audio) and the web. At some point not too much later than that point -- again whether it's already happened or about to happen depends on your definitions -- it's all available in a mobile environment. Just take a more-or-less broadband mobile connection and use it instead of your wired connection. QED.

Technically, media convergence is here, and if technology were all that mattered we'd be about done. For better or worse, however, technology is only part of the show, and often not the part in charge. In this case, the real drivers are two divergent views of convergence: the consumer's view and the providers' view.

As a consumer, I want a complete mix-and-match free-for-all with the flexibility of the "pocket-thing" scenario. I can get my bits delivered any way I like and don't care which particular means is in effect at any given time. I can get whatever bits I like delivered without caring too much who's providing them, and in all cases I can easily pick how they're actually rendered useful to me.

If that's a bit too abstract (it seems a bit too abstract to me and I wrote it), here are some concrete examples of what that means:

• I could switch from, say, cable to DSL or WiMax or whatever tomorrow and, apart from performance, not notice the difference -- I could watch the same shows, keep the same phone number, listen to the same music, etc., etc.
• I get the same services when traveling as when at home, though again I may be dealing with a better or worse internet connection on the road. My services are tied to me, not to a particular location or device.
• If I want a particular bit of content -- a movie or a TV show, for example -- it doesn't matter whether I've got cable, DSL or something else, or where I am.
  

Providers, on the other hand, tend to take a different view. Convergence means you get all your media through them. They'd just as soon not have it be too easy to switch to a different provider tomorrow, and if you have to pay them again to access something on the road, so much the better. Hey, they're in business to make money and their interests are only partially aligned with yours.

My particular view is that the consumer will tend to win in the long run, but it will take a while and proceed in fits and starts. If what's provided gets too far out of line with what people want and what the technology can do, new players will step in and steal business from the existing ones. This tends to bring things back in line. The new players start to lose their competitive advantage, commoditization sets in, competition becomes harsher, weaker players are shaken out and competition wanes.

This lets the remaining players cash in and service once again get out of line with what people want and the technology will do. Which is where we came in ...

Interestingly, in the bullet points I gave above, video is the odd one out. Switching both land-line and mobile phone providers is fairly transparent. If you switch ISPs, your email accounts still work, and the web is the same, well, world-wide.

My guess is that this is at least partly because the technology for reasonable video over the net is only starting to become widely available, and that the Netflix/Roku box is an early participant in this particular cycle of innovation and shakeout. It's going to be an interesting time to be a studio or TV network, not to mention a cable or satellite TV company.

And yet, I remain strangely optimistic ...

So here's how I think we might eventually get to a world of personal datastores, in two easy steps:

1. (In progress) More and more people notice that, say, health provider A and health provider B have their own data fiefdoms. That presents an opportunity to actualize paradigm-busting disruptive technology by combining them into a single, personalized, customer-focused data vault. Maybe the patient even gets to see what's in it, if that doesn't violate any privacy rules ...
   
2. People start to notice that they now have a health-records data fiefdom, a travel-records fiefdom, an entertainment-preferences fiefdom, a "who's connected to whom" fiefdom, and so forth. These are provided by several different entities, each with its own local UI customs and its own data model for nuts and bolts like names, dates, addresses, ratings and so forth. That presents an opportunity to unleash previously roadblocked potentialities, synergizing to achieve optimality by combining them into a single, personalized, individual-focused datastore.

This is great news. The VCs get two swings at the piñata instead of just one (as would happen if we went directly to full personal datastores), so who knows what kind of candy will fall out? We code grinders get to grind out twice as much code, and the research community gets to write twice as many papers. Win-win-win.

Doubtless XML will be involved at several points.

And lawyers.

Text and technological change

In the previous post on literary texts and hypertexts, I had meant to make a fairly mundane point, but got sidetracked in the fascinating details of the particular texts I was using as examples. At least, I found it fascinating.

The mundane point was this: The web has given rise to new textual forms, things like wikis, blogs and for that matter ordinary HTML web sites. Some aspects of these are new, but the general notion of a text as a multi-layered, interlinked structure, possibly with multiple authors and a less-than-clear history, is not.

This is a general point, not limited to literary criticism. For example, the question of what constitutes a derived work, important in software copyrights, musical sampling and elsewhere, has a long history. This history happens to include Ulysses -- one of the charges leveled against the 1984 corrected text of Ulysses was that the publishers had pushed to include as many corrections as possible in hopes of obtaining a new copyright.

We sometimes like to think that a new technology changes everything, that the old rules cannot possibly apply because the game itself is so different. Technology does change things, but our social tools for coping with the change remain largely the same. The flip side of this is that the problems a new technology appears to raise are often older than one might think.

Buggy whips and blacksmiths

Pity the poor buggy whip, the icon of technology's scrap heap. Do you miss the sturdy heft of the old WE302 telephones? Alas, they've gone the way of the buggy whip. Can't stand the latest annoying gadget? Don't worry, the paradigm will soon shift and it, too, will go the way of the buggy whip.

Just what is a buggy whip? As the name implies, it's a small whip used to drive the horses pulling a buggy or carriage. Buggy whip manufacture used to be a prominent industry, but that changed when the automobile came along.

The implication is that when a new technology comes along, older ones are left in the dust. Consider blacksmithing. Look up at the older buildings in many cities and you're likely to see a lot of wrought iron (wrought iron is worked by hammers and such, while cast iron takes its shape from the mold it's poured into). That iron was likely worked by small armies of blacksmiths under the supervision of a master smith.

Blacksmithing was an important profession anywhere there was iron, which was a large portion of the world. In smaller towns, the smith would also act as a farrier, shoeing horses. But all that's gone the way of the buggy whip. With newer machining and manufacturing processes available, why would anyone take the time to work iron by hand, at least in the industrialized world?

Except ... blacksmiths are still very much around, and doing reasonably well for themselves. What do they do? Apart from producing pure sculpture, they build fences, handrails, window bars, fireplace tools, weather vanes and anything else that can usefully be made of wrought iron. Generally a hand-wrought item will cost more than something from the local big-box store, but it will also look better, custom-fit the site and provide a one-of-a-kind design. Enough people like that enough to keep modern blacksmiths in business.

The same has happened with many of the traditional crafts. Witness the resurgence of local breweries and bakeries, which are now called microbreweries and artisan bakeries, much as guitars are now called acoustic guitars. There are any number of other examples. Free associating from "acoustic guitars", drum machines were supposed to put drummers out of work, but they didn't.

That's not to say that new technology is necessarily good for old technology. There are, after all, many fewer blacksmiths, brewers and bakers than there used to be. But neither is it a death sentence. It's also worth noting that many modern blacksmiths use gas forges and power hammers, and state-of-the-art brewing and baking equipment is, well, state-of-the-art.

Not even the buggy whip has gone the way of the buggy whip, if that way is supposed to be extinction. They're still made, just not as many or by as many people.

What does this have to do with the web? I'm getting to that ...