The End of Google

Google used to have a mantra, as much as massive global corporations can have mantras: "don't be evil." But the people in charge got rid of it after 18 years. It was now okay to be evil. 

More recently, they hired Timnit Gebru to focus on ethical AI issues, yet when she did, they fired her. Apparently, the people in charge of Google's AI want unethical AI.

And on a more personally noticeable level, they changed their mobile search app. No longer is it streamlined and simple, emphasizing speed and focus and, one hoped, accuracy and usefulness of the results. Now it's a news app with a general search function included. This in itself is not a huge problem, what they pass off as news is. About half of the stories are trashy clickbait, not designed to inform but instead designed to manipulate the inbuilt curiosity of the human mind and create "engagement" and advertising revenue. So it's no longer about providing reliable and useful information to the user, it's about providing the user to the advertisers. Much like was said of television advertising, "if the product is free, you're the product."

How this is not a major blow to their original branding, I don't know. Perhaps the DoubleClick people have taken over and they don't care. At this rate, I am seriously debating dropping Chrome completely, I had started using it years ago for its security features. 

I don't mean that Google will suddenly cease to exist. The Google we used to have, however, is gone. The thing with the search app is so upsetting, and the clickbait is so trashy and so transparent, that I am motivated to write a blog post about it. You know it's bad if I'm writing about it. 

What is the 20th‐century French Revolution?

 Apparently, it is the food processor! A friend of mine pointed me towards this and it's too good to not share. A lot of technologies get hyped pretty heavily, I think the Segway electric scooter thing was going to revolutionize everything (I forgot how to spell that, it isn't "segue"), but I didn't expect to see this level of excitement for a food processor--possibly because I grew up in an era with food processors.

It has been labeled, and not without justice, the 20th‐century French Revolution. It is the equivalent of an electric blender, electric mixer, meat grinder, food sieve, potato ricer and chef's knife rolled into one. Its invention, in the minds of serious cooks, ranks with that of the printing press, cotton gin, steamboat, paper clips, Kleenex, wastebaskets, contour sheets and disposable diapers. It has, in many minds, rendered the electric blender a hopeless antique, and we are willing at any time to relegate our old faithful to the Smithsonian.

The new mechanical Merlin is a French import known in this country is the Cuisinart Food Processor. It is a multifaceted marvel that has, as the saying goes, more uses than money. It blends, slices, grinds, grates and purées, or, as one kitchen enthusiast put it, “does everything except sweep floors, wash dishes and talk back.” 

(From the New York Times Archive, article titled "Kitchen Help", by Craig Claiborne with Pierre Franey, from March 16, 1975.)

As a communication scholar, seeing the food processor compared to the printing press is interesting. I'd say it is a rather hilarious comparison, except that the article goes on to say, quoting, I think, a French food writer...

“The French are just getting to the point,” one of them said, “where they are willing to invest in something more mechanical in the kitchen than an electric hand beater. I have lots of friends with servants who refuse to install an electric dishwasher. As everywhere else, the age of the servant is on its way out in France. Five years ago almost anybody with slightly above average means could afford the cheap kitchen labor offered them in the form of Spanish and Portuguese cooks, mostly female. But that's coming to an end. Until now the French have simply not thought in terms of kitchen aids but in terms of kitchen help.”

Servants! It looks like there is a really interesting issue there with gender, class, and nationality, as well as technology.

Edit: Could it have been the 20th century French Revolution because, like a guillotine of the previous French Revolution, it chops things with a blade? (I don't think that's what the writer was going for, though.)

Blogging, Ephemeral

So, I've been blogging for well over ten years now (but mostly the "readers" are myself and, I would guess given the consistent 30-40 views per post, webcrawlers), but I was blogging at UM before the earliest posts listed here (2007), which are re-posted UM posts IIRC.

Which made me think about how ephemeral this all is, although I might have a folder with the UMich blog material in it.

Relatedly, I've been thinking about digital photos, and what is Facebook, Instagram, and Tumblr, for instance, it's all ephemeral. Someone a while ago pointed out how, in terms of records and photographs, we are in a terrible period, as none of it will be saved for posterity. I'm debating taking an afternoon and ordering up some print books of my photos, but am not even sure what I have anymore. I think I've lost my Belgrade trip photos, back in the days of my Canon Elf (~2003?), although I might have a CD with the photo from a friend who was on the trip as well (but neither my desktop nor laptop have a CD drive, however I have an old Macbook with a CD drive that I have saved just in case).

So, no more finding ancestors' diaries and photos.

My great-grandfather and great-grandmother made a scrapbook of their trip to England in the summer of 1914, just before WWI started. My great-grandmother's parents were German and had emigrated to the US. Oops. Being German-ish in England during WWI, not a great idea. They managed to get some money somehow and got on a boat home, but it wasn't easy. Sure, if this had been 100 years later, a blog, but would it even exist for a great-grandchild to read 100 years after the fact? Our digital world hasn't been around long enough to tell, but, given the rate of digital decay we've seen, the answer is no.

Why Isn't Underlining Dead?

I was editing a shared document, and we had a bunch of different header types, and some were in underline style.

I changed them to italics.

Now, the history lesson.

Back in the day of typewriters (IBM Selectric II with correctible ribbon ftw!), you had the keys (same pretty much as computer keyboards today) and each key related to a ... thing. Arm? The typing part that thwacked away onto the ribbon, leaving an imprint on the paper (and if you hit too many keys at the same time, the arms would try to occupy the same space at the same time and they'd get stuck). Oh, "type hammer" or "typebar", well those are ungainly.

Each bar / arm had two possible items it could print -- usually, a lower case and an upper case of the same letter. Hitting the SHIFT key would adjust the mechanism (I don't recall how anymore) so that instead of the lower-case part of the key hitting, the upper-case part would.

So you see what is missing: not just fonts, but italics or even bold.

Underlining was easy though: just back up and hit the underline key. _____ Like that but now on the computer _ is its own character in a way that can't be used to underline letters (other characters).

Underlining was the way you indicated to the typesetter (for printing for real, in a book or journal or magazine or newspaper, that is, on paper) that you wanted italics. Even early on with computers when you could have the computer do italics, often we were still told to use underline and then the typesetter would know what to do, since it was the same old thing. Computers were just fancy typewriters in this way -- but of course, they weren't.

Today we are stuck with so many web pages and word processor programs that insist on using black text and a white background to look like black ink on white paper. It's familiar, we know what it is. But that paradigm has been, not dead, but well yes dead in its solitary focus. We can do black ink on white paper, but we don't have to do black on white in the digital space. The paradigm should be "do what is nice and readable." The Financial Times, which prints on slightly pink paper, brands its website in this way (pinkish background), which is sensible. (Actually it's looking yellow, I thought it looked pink a few months ago.) Microsoft Word Mac used to have a "white text, blue background" option which I loved for many versions starting in at least 5.1, but they recently killed it and we're stuck with the black ink on white paper paradigm.

Maintaining the familiar within the new is a long-used approach and helps adoption of new technologies. "Horseless carriage" was what people called "cars", they knew what horses were and what a carriage was. "Wireless telegraphy" was early (pre-music/voice) radio, as people knew what telegraphy was and what wires were. "iPhone" well no it's not a phone, it's a hand held color wireless computer and communicator, but "iPhone" well people knew what cell phones and iPods were, so...

And thus black digital text on white digital background. And, keeping the computer and its keyboard and the overall gestalt familiar, underlining in the fonts. But we don't need it. It's redundant (it means italics!) and I don't think it looks very good. It is time for underlining to end.

Star Trek and the Future

Although this has been acknowledged before (Star Trek inventing the future and all that), during the recent 50th Anniversary of Star Trek where many or all of the original episodes (remastered so they look nicer on today's televisions) were shown, I was moved by the earpieces they use, since they are like clunky Bluetooth earpieces. Here's a quick (and thus blurry) photo I grabbed off my TV with Spock in the foreground with his easily observable earpiece and Uhura in the background adjusting hers. Granted for TV such technologies would need to be easily observable by the audience, especially in the mid-1960s, today not so much since we actually have these things.

Microsoft's Epic Twitterbot Fail

If you read this blog, you've read about the rather hilarious failure of Microsoft's experiment with a learning Twitter bot. Trolls gave it so much input it started turning out hateful, sexist, racist tweets.

So we really have to wonder...

1. Why are Microsoft engineers so ignorant of Internet culture?
2. Why Microsoft engineers who program text-based bots have no idea about the range of text available?

Because these are epic failures. Epic. No wonder there are jokes about engineers being completely socially inept.

Code for All Summit

Had a great time at the Code for All summit, held here at Civic Hall. Global meets local with a variety of civic tech people and a few government and NGO people thrown in. Code for All is the global offshoot of Code for America.

One nice thing to see was that yes, sometimes the best solution is SMS and not a fancy app.

That's me in the front row second from the left.

Apple's Audio Outputs and #Fail

If you want to stream sound on your Mac to your stereo jack speakers by the computer and to your Apple Airport Express with its audio, you can't if your sound stream isn't through iTunes and is, say, via the web (like with Pandora in my case). Not at the same time, regardless of what the web says. The stereo jack output doesn't work that way, apparently. (This does work quite well if your sound source is iTunes, note.)

A lot of sites say you can do this generally, and have detailed explanations about how you make a new device through the Audio Midi Setup app. An article at MacWorld hints at the problem but isn't at all clear: "Let’s say you have an Airplay device plus a USB, ethernet, or Firewire audio interface attached to your Mac..." Right. Note the article doesn't mention the stereo out port (the one that matches your little headphones on your iPhone, Android, or oldschool Walkman), because it won't work.

The best I got was stereo on my Mac and one horribly noisy speaker on the Airport Express (through a receiver). The easy solution, although I haven't actually tried it, is to use one of the other sound outs on the Mac (probably the monitor over Firewire) instead of the speakers, but I like my speakers here. The other, better and more expensive solution, is to go with Sonos -- a friend of mine has some Sonos devices and it is an awesome setup, very easy to use and understand, streams from lots of sources, and the app on the iPhone seems great to me.

Update: You can make an "aggregate" device or a "multi-output" device, and neither works for me at all. When I tried using the Airport and the Firewire monitor speakers, which seemed like it should work via all the online help, it didn't -- the best I got was one of the two speakers on the receiver via the Airport (both of which work fine through iTunes or System Preferences when the Airport is the only sound out device) and the monitor speakers had a large amount of noise (a hiss, to be specific). This is unbelievable. Apple is usually really good about making simple things easy, but not here. Weird given how great NeXT hardware and software were at sound.

Update 2: I FOUND A SOLUTION! Via TidBITS, the little app Airfoil from Rogue Amoeba! It works! And it's only $29.00 as I am typing. Really OSX should just do this, but it doesn't, and $29 for a solution that does a lot more than what I am trying to do currently (that is, it gives me future flexibility) is great.

Picturephone Redux

I wrote a little about the Picturephone a few years ago, so it is cool to see it mentioned in the NYTimes today with a photo I hadn't seen before (this one I'm including).

NYTimes caption: "In New York on Dec. 21, 1965, Keum Ja Kim, 15, a soloist with the World Vision Orphan Choir, used the Picturephone to audition for Robert Merrill, a star with the Metropolitan Opera, who was in Washington to sing at the White House. Credit Bettmann/Corbis"

PS2/PS3 Controllers and Time

I loved my PS2. Some great games. So great that I bought a used PS3 to get the kind that does the PS2 emulation in hardware and not just software (although no, I have not actually played any of my PS2 library, but that's a different story -- I could if I wanted to). But I had it for a long time. And, I've had the PS3 for a long time? How long? Well, that's the problem.

I've had them so long that the rubber on the thumbsticks degrades and becomes sticky. Not just a little grippy, or tacky, but sticky, in a gross, "this rubber is chemically falling apart" way. That's a problem. (Well ok I got rid of my PS2, but that was after the sticky thumbsticks.)

This has not happened (yet?) with the controller for my XBox 360.

User Evolved Practice

I don't actually know what the official phrase is (the term of art), but I bet there is one -- a practice in a system that the users create on their own, independently from the creators or maintainers of that system. Several weeks ago, someone had mentioned to me that users of the bike share program (which is found internationally and across the US, here's the NYC site) would, upon returning a bike that had a problem, reverse the seat. This acted as a sign to other users. This was not official, and somehow had to spread in terms of knowing what it meant (perhaps via forums). So I don't know all the details, but I finally saw one at the rack outside my office! (And no, this is not a staged photo -- I could have done that but where's the fun in that?)

Face to Face as Technology

Great article over at the New Yorker about the diffusion, not of technology, but of technique, which itself (I would argue) is a type of technology. (The author is Atul Gawande.) One quote which is particularly nice is...

People talking to people is still how the world's standards change.

And, an Ev Rogers quote, connected to the same idea, which is reinforced by the article:

Diffusion is essentially a social process through which people talking to people spread an innovation. [italics added]

The two quotes, which are not adjacent to each other, suggest the idea (backed up by research) that technology is not spread by technology but by sociology (to keep the -ology endings). More than technology, though, is technique, which some authors have written about (I am thinking about the STS researchers, like Hughes and others).

I almost forgot: Teaching is essentially a type of diffusion of technique. This is one of my hesitations about MOOCs.

Nokia Lumia 920 "Not"

This is amusing. So Nokia recorded a video that starts with a guy on a bike pointing his little Nokia Lumia at perhaps his GF on a bike next to him. Then, the view changes to what is obviously supposed to be the guy on the bike, with his Nokia. But, as people pointed out, it's not.

It's a dude in a van. At the 28 second mark, you can see it. I captured it here for your viewing pleasure.

"OIS ON" means that the Optical Image Stabilization is on. You can see the camera van in the reflection there on the right, clearly. One supposed the OIS is from the OIS in the Lumia they were just telling you about and just showed you pointing at this same woman on her bicycle, but no.

Actually the people who originally caught this have a bigger picture.

Word (Mac) and Removing Field Codes

So, if you're using Mendeley and you have all of your citations (references) in a Word document on your Mac, and you are ready to submit your Word document, you need to change all the field codes from field codes into regular old text showing the result of the field codes.

Word help does not help (bastards). The Internets assumes you are not using an awesome Unix-based OS, and tells you to select all the text and then use control-shift-F9. This does not work on a Mac, even though there is a control key. It's close, though:

Command-A (select all the text in the doc).
Command-Shift-F9 (changes all the field codes to text of just the results).

Better on a Mac:

Command-A (select all the text in the doc).
Command-6 (changes all the field codes to text of just the results).

C/o Adept Scientific from three years ago, and it still works today with Word Mac 2011.

Disappointing Analysis from Pogue

Usually, I like David Pogue's posts on technology, as he has a bit of humor and humanity that some other reviewers lack. But today Pogue lacks decent analysis in a review of the Lumia 900 phone. His presentation of pricing and screen resolution do not meet the basic standards of reporting. Recall I used to work at Ziff-Davis many years ago, where we did computer reviews.

Pogue:

It’s the Lumia 900. It’s beautiful, fast and powerful, and it’s only $100 (with a two-year AT&T contract). That’s half the price of an iPhone or a comparable Android phone — but you’re still getting a top-of-the-line machine.

The problem is that it is not at all half the price, thus his mention of the two-year contract, but that's a weak analysis and not at all true. Granted, different calling plans cost different amounts, but let's look at some hypothesized numbers. Let's call the cost of the phone the "up front" cost, since that's more accurate.

Phone	"Monthly"	Up-Front	Annual	Total
Lumia 900	$50	$100	$600	$700
iPhone 4S	$50	$200	$600	$800
Compared		50%		87.5%

87.5%, for this theorized monthly, is not half.
But many calling plans cost more. What if the theorized monthly were $100?

Phone	"Monthly"	Up-Front	Annual	Total
Lumia 900	$100	$100	$1,200	$1,300
iPhone 4S	$100	$200	$1,200	$1,400
Compared		50%		92.8%

92.8% is not half.
(And, you can get the iPhone 4 currently for $100, and the 3GS is free -- of course, like Pogue mentions but doesn't deal with, that's with a contract. Given that you can't divide by zero, the 3GS is unspeakably amazing.)

But that's not the only problem with Pogue's analysis.

Then again, the Lumia actually shows you a larger area, but in less detail. Its resolution is 800 by 480. The iPhone’s 3.5-incher has 960 by 640 pixels, so Apple’s screen is far sharper.

The Lumia 900 has a 4.3 inch (diagonal) screen. The problem is that Pogue gives us two sets of metrics: resolution and size; but these are not directly comparable. Resolutions are comparable, but only at the same size. We don't have the same size, so Pogue should tell us the dpi -- dots per inch (in this case, pixels). You can't exactly calculate the dpi from these numbers, because the diagonal measure does not give you the area in terms of square inches, so you can't calculate the pixels per (square) inch.

So, yes, the iPhone 4S has more pixels, but not 960x640 versus 800x480 more, because the screen sizes (not just resolutions) are different. Pogue addresses this, but not at all adequately.

Leisure Suit Larry's Last Laugh

Recently, with the game series Dragon Age (Origins and II), Mass Effect (1 and 2), and even Grand Theft Auto IV, there has been a focus on relationship management in-game. GTA IV was a bit heavy in this respect, whereas you can ignore it somewhat in the others if you want. But, the thing is, if you choose the right dialog options with the right characters, you can have sex with them. Ok it isn't usually shown very explicitly, isn't realistic (nor is the dialog or the whole scenario in the first place), and it seems like an odd addition to the game that isn't related to what the point of the game is.

An LSL screenshot - love me some pixels.

But there was a game series where sex was the entire point of the game, the Leisure Suit Larry series (which, according to Wikipedia, survivied longer than I thought). I remember them from when I was a teenager, although I never played one. They were generally thought of as rather weird, they weren't quite games, they weren't quite legit uses of your computer, and they weren't real porn either (now we have the internet for all that).

But with the intentional, direct inclusion of dialog to get to sex in hugely popular, successful, and mainstream games, Larry is vindicated to some extent. (I still don't find these weird sex scenes in games anything worthwhile or even hot, they're just creepy.)

Scenes are easy enough to find in YouTube. Here's a search for Mass Effect 2 scenes, and a video making fun of one (a combination of the gameplay footage and real people -- that makes it sound creepy -- real people as if they were other characters on the ship who do not get it on with the digital in-game characters). I've tried to watch a few to see what they are like but they are all so creepy right away I give up. (And I gave up on Mass Effect 2 since I found it rather tedious and repetitive.)

Edit: I totally forgot The Witcher, which I really see no reason to play.

The Future of Facebook

First, I'll recommend this Mimi Ito interview from PBS. It's just a few minutes long. In it she points out how kids don't generally like online social spaces where their parents are.

Watch the full episode. See more Digital Media - New Learners Of The 21st Century.

One element that stems from this observation is about the future of the Facebook userbase and Facebook itself. As its users get older and more of them become parents, will their children want to use that place where their parents hang out online? Probably not.

I could be dramatic and make statements about Facebook's not-so imminent demise, but that assumes all kids act the same, or that kids won't carve their own spaces out of the larger Facebook "Zuckerberg says we should share everything" space. It also assumes stagnation on the design side of Facebook, and they've been a moving target for several years, although usually in the pro-commercial side (share!) and not the pro-user side (privacy if you want).

I'm also not going to predict that in about 10 years we'll see all the current pre-schoolers decide on some online space that isn't Facebook. Given technological change, and the ease of making a social networking website (relatively speaking), it is difficult to predict how we will conceive of, talk about (academic: framing, discourse...), and label future online spaces. MUDs were in some ways early social software, but we didn't call them that (although people did point out the social side at the time).

But, to use market-oriented terms, there is clearly an opening for such a space. Could we see a resurgent MySpace? What happens to kids as they grow out of those "kid spaces" that seem odd to me since I'm an adult (and I don't follow them), what are they, Penguins?, Disney?, Habbo Hotel? Hobo Hotel? I don't know, they aren't marketed to me (as neither a child nor as a parent).

But, if kids want their own spaces, will Facebook be able to provide a space where kids feel it's their own? Given the number of adults on Facebook currently, and that teens on Facebook currently will grow older and many will have their own children, where will those children go when they are online? Will we even call it online at that point? (Probably, given that word has been around for a while and transitioned to today from modems, walled-garden online service providers like AOL used to be, and other dial-up services like BBSes and mainframes back in the day.)

Facebook's current userbase is a factor in its future userbase, and there are reasons to believe some of the current userbase will be a drawback for the future (youth) userbase. This problem is not, I don't think, easily overcome.

If You Follow, You Will Never Lead: Microsoft's Business Non-Strategy

The title of this post comes from my years growing up as a sailor in Nantucket, Massachusetts, on the wall of the old sail room in the Nantucket Yacht Club. The idea was that you'll get the same wind as the boat ahead of you, and, unless you are a greatly better sailor or have a vastly better boat, you will never overtake the leading boat. If you were that great, you probably wouldn't be behind in the first place.

This is not completely true in business, despite the myth of "first mover advantage", which is only true for successful products (so, not true in the long-term for Palm, nor for Apple's Newton, nor Atari in video games, to name a few). If you can copy products but improve on them without getting sued for patent violation, that may be viable, albeit difficult, and, honestly, foolish.

But it is Microsoft's strategy. I'll have to point out ahead of time that although they are ahead in market share in terms of operating systems if you group all the different versions of Windows, they are not ahead in some equally valid areas of measurement, such as smart phones (iPhone versus Windows Phone -- and they're not phones, of course, they're minis, as in, mini computers), digital music devices (iPod versus Zune), and, another measure, market capitalization -- Apple closed at an all-time high on Monday ($342.45), for a market cap of $314 billion, second only to Exxon Mobile in American companies. (The most recent number I can get for Microsoft's market cap is $240.5 billion. Not bad, but less than $314 billion, clearly.)

I would include digital music sales, but I don't actually think Microsoft really does that in any workable manner (iTunes Music Store versus what?). I'll have to check. I guess I could mention PlaysForSure. Oh I guess it's Zune Marketplace, which seems like a copy of... the iTunes Music Store. Well that continues to back my point. (I'll place it in the table below.)

The point is, Microsoft loves to copy, or on occasion purchase outright, what others are doing. And they usually do it badly, in terms of design and usability, despite market success over the long term, so far. Let's look at some examples.

Microsoft	Bought/Copied
Bing	Copied Google (see note)
DOS	Licensed another form of DOS (86-DOS)
Halo	Bought Bungie, for the Xbox
Hotmail	Bought, not as good as Gmail
Windows	Copied Apple's Mac OS
Windows Phone	Copied Apple's iOS and iPhone for the most part
Xbox	Copied Sony to challenge the PS platform
Zune	Copied Apple's iPod
Zune Marketplace	Copied Apple's iTunes Music Store

(I corrected/clarified the copying/licensing for DOS, I didn't like my initial explanation and it turned out not to be very accurate.)

The point is, Microsoft does not lead, it follows. I admit one interpretation is that I am saying that first-mover, which I just derided in a previous paragraph, is a strong effect, but that is not what I am saying. What I am saying is that Microsoft does not innovate, nor does it really micro-innovate, copying a product and then improving it as much as they can (incrementally). They buy products when they can't make a good competitor, and they copy products and they still can't make a good competitor (Apple's OSes have always been better, don't compare market share unproblematically since you have to deal with the hardware side of the equation, where Microsoft was not making the computers).

Apple tends to make products (and services) that make new markets (or, do so successfully). They are, to some extent, based on pre-existing forms, but not ones that are market successes.

Category	Apple's Move
Digital Music Downloads	iTunes Music Store (paid, not early free Napster)
Digital Music Player	iPod (a digital Sony Walkman)
GUI OS/Mouse	Original Mac OS (from work at Xerox PARC)
Smart Phone	iPhone (a mini computer, really)
Unix	OSX (based on NeXTSTEP, from Unix)

I'm avoiding the iPad as I think we need to wait another year to see how the "tablet" market pans out in the initial phase of the iPad era. Like NFL football before Thanksgiving, it's just too soon to tell. Apple's iPad has generated the most media coverage of recent tablets, which could be an honest indicator of quality, but I think there is some effect from journalists (not incorrectly) thinking they need to cover the iPad. There are probably some other items I could place in the list, but those are the most defensible and explainable that I can think of. (So, I'm avoiding USB and floppy disks.)

As I pointed out, it could be argued that none of these were new products either, but the thing is that, unlike with the Microsoft examples, none of these Apple products went up against anything similar that was successful in the market. (RIM's Blackberry series of phones, although cool, were still in the interface and paradigm of cool handheld phone devices, like Palm to some extent, the iPhone is a different device, it is not really a phone in the full sense, it is a computer that also has phone capability -- did you ever call your desktop computer a phone when it had a modem?) OSX didn't face a mass market Unix, Unix is mainly in labs, corporate back offices, and the homes of Linux geeks. (I've had... two? At least two, Linux boxes, so far.) There was an MP3 player before the iPod (I can't recall the name offhand), but it was not widely successful. Apple made a better interface (the wheel, which has now been replaced with touch screens for the most part).

This is also not to say that everything Apple does is gold (the Newton didn't succeed in the market, Apple's computer offerings were overpriced, underpowered, and muddled in the early 1990s, and there have been occasional but odd AppleTV offerings--usually a Mac with a TV tuner card--which seem to have worked themselves out finally), nor that Microsoft isn't a market success (despite, or perhaps because of, monopolistic practices, and who can resist taking a shot at Microsoft's Bob?).

Leading, and innovating, versus following. As others have pointed out, innovation is risky, but not innovating is moreso.

Update: One area I avoided, unintentionally, was web browsers. Sure, both Apple and Microsoft have web browsers, neither are original, and both are bundled with their OSes. I am pretty sure MSIE came before OSX's Safari, so it doesn't fit my pattern, but Safari wasn't establishing a new market. Not every product for both companies work as examples, but more than enough do that we can look at the overall pattern.

Note: When I said Bing was "copying" Google, I didn't mean literally copying the search results, I just meant the idea. Apparently, according to this report, Bing is indeed directly copying Google search results. Amazing.

The Memex Contains and Is You

I am sure someone has pointed this out before, but I was looking at a blog post and there was the now-common "Like this on Facebook" link, and it struck me that we are the connected document.

It's like what they did in Caprica, which I thought was a good show. They portrayed the initial virtual world as full of porn and violence, and they built online independent avatars based off of the giant database of information about any particular person (and behavioral algorithms).

We can see the beginning of this distributed database, there is the more social side of it (Facebook, etc.), and the more commercial side of it (how that information is used to select advertisements to place on a page you visit). It is a web of connections and data, where you are at the center of it. Your online self is represented by this data, but in a stronger way that just it being a record of your actions online. With enough connections and enough data, it is you.

Design Options

I want to talk about two designed items, the choices behind them, and the resulting ease of use: an alarm clock and a recycling can.

I have a Brookstone alarm clock, with a long-life battery so it will always (or, for longer than the rest of it will last) remember the time, like magic (that's the idea). As a user feature, they built into it the time change for daylight savings. Which is nice, since I don't have to ever change the time, it does it automatically, like my phone and my computer. Except I do have to do it, four times a year, since the US Congress changed when we change the time.

The problem is it's hard coded, and not at all flexible, and the information that is hard coded into it (what date the time change happens) did indeed flex, but the device can't. So, zero was better than two (zero changes if the clock changes the time, twice if I change the time). But now it's four, and if zero is better than two then we know four is pretty terrible.

(To be clear, it's four because it changes earlier than it now should, so I have to change it back, then it doesn't change when it's supposed to, so I have to change it again, and do this the two times a year we change the clocks. And this only works if I live in part of the US where we change the time.)

Automatic time change? Good usability decision. Hard wired? Not good.

The other item, a recycling can, I saw the other day at one of the artsy theaters on Houston street here in NYC. One problem with a lot of public-area recycling cans is that people are busy and their attention is elsewhere and they throw out trash in recycling cans, which makes it look like a trash can and more people do it. But this design had a little lid with the recycling logo on it, and you had to lift the lid, which meant you had to look at it and think, "How do I open this, aha a handle, oh look a recycling logo." It forced you to slow down a second, and think, but only a very small, easy amount.

Granted these are two different areas of design, but they both remind us of the importance of design, and how little things can make a big difference. Also, flexible systems.