Things #2.1: Apple's Developing Strategy.

Ok, so in my last post I tried to sketch out the position that Apple has secured over the years since the launch of OS X, but it's worth noting too that it's been handed some significant things largely because of others' greed, laziness or downright incompetence. Here I might mention that it seems Microsoft has largely given up on usability or innovation in the GUI space, and a is mostly reduced to introducing interface features, which isn't the same thing at all. A half-dozen different, all non-optimal ways to achieve the same task isn't the way forward anymore, though it worked for Windows 95 and eventually for the NT team. Neither does a $10k back-projection table count, though I might concede that the photosynth purchase was a real coup. If those guys can deliver within Live Labs then MS might just get its UI mojo back. But I digress.

Stability and security is another area where Apple has been handed the prize without really trying. Building on NextStep with its UNIX roots was natural for Steve's incoming team, and the sluggishness of Redmond's response to the whole 'broken Windows' security nightmare has left Apple able to claim leadership in that area too, whilst doing relatively little. It's been said often that the almost non-existence of Mac OS X malware and viruses is because there's no point in writing such things for a tiny installed base, and that the advantages of OS X's supposedly superior architecture will crumble if and when Apple's market share grows significantly. Actually the opposite is true: Truly dangerous viruses are significantly harder to architect and construct on the Mac, and when one finally emerges the relatively low concentration of Macs in an explosively expanding universe of connected devices will make propogation much harder.

When it comes to Apple's newer role as a producer of consumer electronics goods and associated services, the apparent lack of amy real competition is even more startling. Do we even need to recount how the major music recording labels handed Apple the keys to the digital music kingdom when they assumed that technologists couldn't possibly know more about their audiences than they did? Suffice to say that Apple were allowed to take the lead in the digital music revolution by providing simple hardware solutions tied into services while the competition were either offering clunky hardware players or betting on a software solution that would work anywhere. That last strategy belonged to Microsoft of course, until they rolled over their Plays for Sure partners to emulate Apple's model, just as Apple was building its own 'iPod as software' strategy with re iPhone and iPod touch. Now MS is back singing the 'software running anywhere' refrain, but it might just be too late to catch up again.

When it comes time to write the history of the post-macintosh Apple, then I'm willing to bet that the extraordinary hubris of the entrenched phone manufacturers and carriers will feature heavily. This might just dwarf the foolishness of the record industry, and contribute even more to Apple's success over the next decade. Remember, we're talking here not of an industry which produces things that people like in a generally unpleasant fashion, but of one that has systematically placed its own ability to extort money from what it laughingly calls its customers at the very top of its agenda.

People love recording artists, if not the companies that record them; I've never met anyone who loves their phone company, and until recently no-one went misty-eyed talking about their handset. The phone companies, and most handsets, are tolerated because they provide something we generally can't do without, and many of us dream of replacing the carriers with an IP-solution.

It's in this context that the attitude of the entrenched players to Apple's 2007 launch of the iPhone seems hubristic, even downright foolish, and I'll talk a little more about that as I try to unpick Apple's forward momentum in my next post.

[ Sent from my iPhone]

Things #2: The future of Apple.

Ok, let's get the elephant in the room out of the way: Steve Jobs is taking time out for medical treatment, and plans to return to Apple in the summer. Too many words have been written on this, and I don't need to add to them.

Instead, this is the post that I've been gestating since before MacWorld, but wanted to delay lest I look like another wishful thinker pushing his own fantasy technology list. That's not my intention, so forgive me if I lapse into indulgent fandom now and then. What I hope to do is to rehearse a few possibilities in the hope that we can be better prepared should the future actually work out even vaguely similarly.

Steve Jobs aside, it's clear that Apple has since the turn of the century been putting in place the technological pieces necessary to dominate the next fifteen to twenty years of consumer computing, just as Microsoft dominated the last, and IBM the twenty before that.

This architecture wasn't all planned at the beginning, but then these things never are: They grow organically and benefit from the mistakes (and greed) of others, as much as the genius and opportunism of the prime movers. Thus Microsoft was able to blindside hardware-focused IBM, turn its command line advantage into a GUI one, and then hold onto it through successive generations of upgrade. Pretty much all of these software upgrades required hardware upgrades too, but they were relatively painless and distributed over the 3-5 year buying cycles of most corporations. For consumers the deal was harder but pretty inevitable: you buy what industry uses.

This remained true until the skyrocketing demands and specialised requirements of consumer apps (home media, digital appliances, gaming) began to direct the market. In each of these areas specialised technology starts to look like the way forward and then there's little to be gained from buying the same tech as the Fortune 500. The Internet was a great leveller too: it's remarkable now to recall the difficulty and cost of cross-platform work back in the late 80s and early 90s. Now it's truly trivial, and matters much less that you're running distinct platforms.

So just at the moment that a generic single OS running on existing hardware starts to look less important, and just as a simplified, largely consistent and usable interface gets more critical, Apple positions itself with a solid OS that's up to the tasks that consumers want to throw at it, and none of the architectural baggage of backward compatibility with four or five generations of PC software. This is good, and while it may not have been entirely part of Apple's gameplan, neither was it entirely the result of Microsoft's mistakes.

Track forward by 3 years or so and Apple is also in the consumer electronics game, with what's beginning to look like a fairly major hit on its hands. The upshot of this is that Apple is shipping vastly more devices with an embedded OS than it is traditional computers by about 2003. That's quite a game changer for the whole company, and for the corporate culture, and by my reading nowhere more so than in the mind of Steve Jobs, who has been pretty focused on the desktop up until this point. Remember, he's the guy who killed the Newton. Three years later they're building Apple TV and the iPhone platform, leveraging the work done on Mac OS X for sure, but fundamentally thinking about platforms in a way that's new both for Apple and for the mobile industry.

It's this platform focus that's central to Apple's future, and hence to all of us who live and work with digital technology. While it's fun to speculate about specific devices or software functions that Apple might choose to introduce, it's a largely futile exercise and matters much less than the overall emerging strategy. A few aspects of this seem fairly clear now and I'll talk about those in a later post.

[ Sent from my iPhone]

Things #1: Seeing the future.

Just before Christmas, as if to pre-empt the usual spate of 2009 predictions from anyone who fancies themselves a technology pundit, music industry consultant Andrew Dubber wrote a passionate rant (his term, so no criticism implied) against prediction.

I've never been afraid to critique punditry, especially where it's based upon little else than speculation, but Dubber's post got me thinking about the whole area of prediction in technology and everything that's mediated by technology (which might just mean everything that involves people and their myriad interactions over distances). Is it really a fool's game? Is prediction and speculation so meaningless as to be consigned forever to the realm of charlatans and snake-oil? When I (only half jokingly) described myself as a "network futurist" did I condemn myself to ridicule and mistrust?

The weeks pre-CES and MacWorld are notable each year for a dramatic increase in idle speculation and opinion, and this year was no exception, with dozens of analysts and bloggers producing thousands of words telling us just what we should expect from the technology companies.

Apple in particular is subject to this kind of empty analysis, partly because of the secrecy surrounding their future moves, but also because Apple and its various products touch us culturally and creatively in ways that few other technology companies do. The various developments around iTunes and the iPod ecosystem, for example, have ramifications for the whole music industry and for the digital distribution of all kinds of intellectual property (some of which I'll expand upon over the next few days).

It's this degree of influence that brings analysts, speculators, pundits and, yes, self-proclaimed network futurists out in a cold sweat, and leaves us feverish over the possibilities. In our predictions we embody our wishes for the future of technology, media and ways of living, as if the words on the screen (and the attention they garner) will magically bring our desires into being.

Now for the most part this is a futile exercise, and little better than sitting in a bar waxing lyrical over the future of digital media, politics, or sport. If the past is a foreign country then the future is another universe entirely, and we have no right to expect it to behave as we wish. Most of us are condemned to live in the future as tolerated outsiders, watching the next generation unpick the mess we left behind and bring something decidely alien and unexpected into being.

Sometimes though, this act of prediction is less selfish, motivated not by a desire for recognition (or worse, profiteering) but by an acceptance of constant change and the need for social advancement. The genuine spirit of futurism lies not in pretending to see the future, but in recognising that we all have to live there, and that although the best way to predict the future is to invent it, first we have to imagine the possibilities and work out which of them we want. Or, just as importantly, which of them we wish to avoid.

So while Andrew Dubber is right, I intend nevertheless to spend the next few days recklessly gazing over the horizon. Here in Bangkok, seven hours in the future from the UK and on the continent which will likely dominate the next fifty years, I'm looking forward. Not from a position of special insight, but from one of optimism and excitement, tempered by the knowledge that there are crucial things we need to imagine now if we, and the alien race we call the next generation, are to actually make it happen.

[ Sent from my iPhone]

A Few Things

As I write I'm several thousand metres in the air, en route to Bangkok once again for another five days teaching and the required weekends which bookend the work and allow a little recovery from the jet lag. The altitude must be doing something to my head, as I've finally determined to revive this long-dormant blog in order to get a few things done.

Over the ten days or so of my time in BKK I'll be posting every day. At least, that's my intention, but we'll see how I get on. The aim is to rehearse a few ideas which might turn into some other things. Or not. When I hit the ground I'll be checking in, sleeping, and then beginning the weekend afresh with some posts that I've been meaning to make for a while. Wish me luck.

[ Sent from my iPhone]