Google vs. Apple

Remember the not-too-distant past when Google did Search and Apple made iPods and iPhones. They both had a minimalist aesthetic to their products, and both seemed to be obsessed with making computing simple and pleasant for their customers. Way back then, I thought a merger of Google and Apple could be the only company to take on Microsoft. Imagine their combined ingenuity and software running on Apple hardware accessing Google’s cloud services.

Then Google announced their own browser, and then a mobile OS, and then a desktop OS, and then a phone. Apple bought up a mobile advertising company. Suddenly, Google and Apple were waging a cold war. Google folks had to resign from Apple’s board. Verizon/Motorola were fighting AT&T in ads, which were really a proxy for an Android vs. iPhone showdown. Apple is suing HTC for patent infringement over their multitouch Android phones. Hell, Apple is even threatening to make Microsoft’s Bing its default search engine. That’s how stupid that is getting.

Adobe vs. Apple

Now let’s look at Adobe and Apple. They’ve had a rocky relationship from the start, but for creative types, Adobe and Apple went together like peanut butter and jelly. You wanted to do graphics work, you used Photoshop and Illustrator on a Mac. Right around the time when Apple switched to Intel processors, things got hairy. Adobe put creating Universal Binaries to support the new Apple platform on hold, and focused their attention more on their Windows products. Apple refused (and still refuses) to allow Flash on the iPhone OS, effectively creating a large chunk of web users (iPhone, iPod Touch and now iPad owners) that Adobe could not reach. The CEOs of the two companies are trading barbs via leaking company communications and tech blogs. That’s how stupid that is getting.

Misery acquaints a man with strange bedfellows

Not wanting to get blocked out of the burgeoning mobile market, Adobe countered in two ways. First, it partnered with Google to bring Flash to the Android platform. Second, it built a cross-compiler into its soon-to-be-released revision of Flash to allow you to create an application in Flash, and port it effortlessly to native iPhone APIs. Yesterday, Apple’s new iPhone Developer Agreement, effectively negated the latter by declaring all cross-compilers out of the terms of service. This is potentially a huge blow to Adobe. What is left for them to do? How about that partnership with Google?

On the surface, Google and Adobe have few interests in common. They play nice and partner in limited ways. But Google is all about the web as a platform, and Adobe owns many of the tools with which the content for the web is made. Right now, Google and Apple are aligned in that their strategies are built on the forthcoming ubiquity of HTML5 and the rich content features that are built into the standard. It promises to do away with the Flashes and ActiveXs of the world.

But imagine an HTML5 world where Google owned Acrobat (and the PDF format), Flash, Photoshop, Dreamweaver, Air, Illustrator, AfterEffects and ColdFusion. Could anyone stop a combined Google + Adobe on the web? Would Apple be forced to capitulate? Would Android tablets with a Flash/Air-based development environment quickly eclipse iPad?

Even though a Google acquisition of Adobe seems unlikely, it does have intriguing implications. Regardless of how this shakes out, Apple now finds itself fighting a two-front war against very formidable opponents.

In a commentary on CNN.com, John Feehery rants a bit about the implications of Al Franken being seated as Minnesota Senator, giving Senate democrats a filibuster-proof majority. I won’t get into the politics of the discussion since this is a tech blog, but I had to laugh at Feehery’s dire warns that the Democrats would soon crumble under the weight of their own power. Yes, according to Feehery, Senate Dems will overreach their bounds, trying to impose evil things on an unwary public. Dreaded things. Horrible things. Things like … the metric system.

What is it about human nature that makes us pick what is easy over what is smart?

There are a few things Americans are uniquely attached to in this regard. We just got over our desperate clinging to standard-definition television (HDTV has been about 20 years in the planning, and they still were trying to delay the digital broadcast mandate at the last minute). We keep indulging our “love affair with the automobile” (i.e., choosing cars with big, powerful engines instead of economical, fuel-efficient ones) even though it endangers our economy, our national security and our environment. But nothing is so uniquely American as is our ridiculously outmoded system of measurement “US Customary Units”.

Seriously, at this point it’s an international embarrassment that we’re only one of three countries on the entire planet that hasn’t adopted the metric system (more precisely the International System of Units or SI) as the standard system of measurement. Yup, it’s just us, Liberia and Myanmar. That’s just awesome!

Our best scientific minds aren’t even exposed to SI in any great depth generally until high school. Why are we content to lag behind the rest of the world with our stupid 12-inches-to-a-foot mentality? We have a trillion dollars to bail out banks, but we have no money for NASA to convert to metric? Though there is a cost associated with switching to metric, isn’t the potential gain greater still?

Really Smart Way: 1 millimeter x 1000 = 1 meter; 1 meter x 1000 = 1 kilometer
Really Dumb Way: 1 inch x 12 = 1 foot; 1 foot x 3 = 1 yard; 1 yard x 1760 = 1 mile

So, if the worst thing you can imagine that Al Franken and the Senate Democrats want to do is convert the US to the metric system, I say let’s do the smart thing. No matter how hard it may seem, we can do it. After all, we’re Americans.

When you want to get one computer to talk to another one, both computers must know the same rigid set of rules. These rules are agreed upon standards that are shepherded by an organization called The Internet Engineering Task Force, which publishes these standards through a very detailed and well-documented process.

The specifications for the standards are published through documents with a very friendly sounding name — “Requests for Comment” (more commonly known as RFCs). However, a quick perusal through even the first RFC (RFC 0001 from April 7, 1969) will show you that right from the start, these rules have always been quite complex, intricate, arcane and inflexible.

Note: if you work with computers and find RFCs to be insanely boring, don’t worry you’re not alone. However, if you don’t work with computers and you find them to be a fascinating read, you truly missed your calling.

All of this complicated, structured interaction between computers is designed with good reason. Computers, despite how quickly they can perform calculations, are pretty stupid. They need clearly defined rules of engagement. As as result, however, we get an either/or kind of performance. Either both systems know exactly how to talk to each other precisely along these rules, or they don’t. It will either work or it won’t. There isn’t a lot of in-between.

Take network protocols, for example. Protocols, in short, are agreed upon patterns of conversation between computers. For example, when e-mail is sent from one server to another, the servers communicate using the SMTP protocol. The protocol is very rigid in the structure. Both sender and receiver must communicate in a pre-orchestrated conversation that, in English would look something like:

Server 1: Hi, I’m an e-mail server.
Server 2: Hi, I’m the e-mail server for davekawalec.com.
Server 1: OK, what do you got for me?
Server 2: I have an e-mail from blog@davekawalec.com.
Server 1: OK.
Server 2: This e-mail should be delivered to whoever@phonydomain.com.
Server 1: OK.
Server 2: I’d like to start telling you the contents of this e-mail.
Server 1: I’m ready. Go ahead.

And it goes on and on like this. If either of the two servers doesn’t communicate the correct information in the correct sequence, the whole transaction is a failure. Even if Server 1 doesn’t say, “OK” in all the right spots, Server 2 will just stand there tapping its foot until the either it gets the “OK” it wants, or it just gives up and times out the session.

What if people operated this way? What if there was no variance allowed in the protocols we use to speak with one another? Imagine two co-workers at the office, we’ll call them Sally and Phil, walking toward each other down a hallway. Let’s say the RFC says the initiator of conversation should say, “Hello” but instead, Sally says, “Hey, Phil”. Without a flexible protocol (a combination of language and social norms), Phil would have no idea what Sally was getting at. The two would pass right by one another, maybe with each wondering why the other was being so rude.

Actually, given the strict rigidity of computer protocols, a successful standards-driven conversation between Phil and Sally might go something like this:

Sally: Hello, I am Sally what’s your name?
Phil: Hello Sally, my name is Phil.
Sally: Hello, Phil. I would like to begin having a conversation with you.
Phil: I agree to begin having a conversation with you.
Sally: Thank you for acknowledging me.
Phil: I acknowledge that you thanked me. I am waiting for you to ask a question.
Sally: How are you?
Phil: I am fine.
Sally: I have acknowledged that you are fine.
Phil: I am waiting for you to ask a question.
Sally: I don’t have another question. We can stop talking now.
Phil: Goodbye.

This kind of thinking pervades computer design from top to bottom. When I create a database, the first thing I have to do is to create a structure to put my data in. I have to not only know what kind of data I’m going to use, but I have to already know how that data is going to interrelate. You can’t start a database as a neutral “knowledge bucket” and let the database organize and relate the data on its own as those linkages become evident over time. You create a field, and you have to tell the database whether that’s going to hold a little text, a lot of text, smaller numbers, big numbers, dates/times, true/false … whatever. And that field is what it is always and forever. If you want to interact with the database, you must organize your data that way and package it in a way that the database can agree is correct.

This approach has been enormously successful up until now. However, is there a better way that computers can be designed to function to put some slack in the rigid rules? Can computers be designed to operate without such strictness, more along the lines of how people casually communicate?

Certainly, I’m talking about some level of artificial intelligence, because in order to accomplish something like this, computers would have to be capable of discerning meaning and intention outside of a set framework of expectation. There is great work currently being done in the field of artificial intelligence, neural networks, and such. For me, it’s exciting stuff to read about. However, I’ve noticed that the approach is typically to write the intelligence into a software abstraction. So, even if successful, we would be left not with intelligence, but with a simulation of intelligence.

What if instead of working on just 0s and 1s, computers could be made to understand, at a very low level, the infinitude of decimals in between?

This past weekend, I finished up reading Everything is Miscellaneous by David Weinberger. The main premise of the book is that there is no one best way that you can organize any group of information. He then goes on to explain how Web 2.0 technologies allow us to dynamically organize the massive collection of disorganized, miscellaneous information on the internet in ways that suit our needs at the moment.

I want to delve a bit more deeply into the concept of orders of organization that Weinberger talks about. The First Order is the physical. Knowledge is condensed into a readable form in books. Books are physical objects comprised of atoms and are thus bound to the laws of physics. They have to exist at some point in space and at some point in time. They can’t occupy the same space as any other object. A group of books can only be arranged on a shelf in one way at any one time. So, you may line the books on your shelf up by alphabetical order by author, or you may organize them by subject, title, height, thickness, whatever you want — you can pick any method of organization you want, but you can only pick one. This is the First Order of organization. The Dewey Decimal System (which Weinberger spends a great many pages discussing) describes one way to physically organize books in a library.

The Second Order introduces metadata (data about data) — we’re talking about the card catalog. Certainly, the card catalog doesn’t tell us as much as the books themselves do. However, multiple cards referencing the same book can be put in multiple places. As a result, the book can appear in the system in two (or more) places at once. We can organize the same information in multiple ways. But this Second Order still has its physical limits. For example, you can only have so many cards before the system becomes unusable.

In the Third Order, hyperlinks, tagging, playlists and folksonomies allow us to organize whatever information we want however we want. We can find connections we never knew existed, completely on the fly by bringing our information in the digital realm, making it miscellaneous, and then applying technologies that allow us to easily turn knowledge upside down and inside out.

When looked at in this way, the First Order becomes almost irrelevant. Weinberger asks us to consider Wikipedia, where pages don’t even “exist” until a collection of servers assemble them on the fly. Which sector of which hard drive are those bytes stored on? Does it matter? Contrast that with the Encyclopaedia Britannica. You’d better know where Volume 1 is or you’ll never be able to read about the fascinating lives of aardvarks.

As I read this, I thought of Second Life.

Is Second Life more like the Britannica than Wikipedia? Is Second Life less miscellaneous than the web? Sure, it often is seemingly random, but does it allow us to organize information in the Third Order?

One take on Second Life that I’ve read a few times is something along the lines of, “What if you were looking for a book, and you could browse through a virtual book store in Second Life, and with a single mouse click, buy the book and have it delivered to you in the real world?”

Would this make for a better store-browsing experience than shopping in real life, or a better online experience than Amazon.com? I don’t think I’d want to browse through infinitely long virtual rows of every book ever written. It would be like sifting through the entire Library of Congress every time I went to buy a book. Since Second Life simulates a kind of world with physical rules, we’re bound by its physical limits, and stuck with its First Order organization.

Sure you can fly and teleport in Second Life, but you’re still limited to a four-dimensional spacetime experience. You can only be in one place at a time. Events happen only once, at a certain time. You can craft an amazing island, with buildings featuring architecture unrivaled by any construction in real life. However, if you throw a party in Second Life, and someone shows up a half-hour after it’s over, rather than experiencing the communal bliss of interacting with people from the farthest reaches of the globe, they’ll instead be standing alone in a big empty building. In fact, the number one complaint I hear about Second Life is that when people log on, it always seems empty. It’s clear that you need to know not only WHERE to go, but WHEN to go. This is a limitation the web mitigated, that Second Life is reintroducing.

What might a Third-Order Second Life look like? Imagine being able to form space around you at any time. Why should Second Life necessarily mimic a physical reality everyone can agree on? What if “here” is not where I am on a grid, but rather some subjective “space” where I can pull together people and objects in order to create my unique experience? Maybe on my screen, we’re standing on a mountain, and on yours we’re on a beach. Or maybe we could both be in two places at once. What if any “thing” could be two things or three, or could be one thing for me and one thing for you, but it was exactly what we both wanted? What if we could trade, not just playlists, but whole realities?