The Future of Information Work: Technology

Research with Magazines Online

Tue, 03 Jun 2008 02:54:20 GMT

I admit it. I still read magazines. On paper. But increasingly, I am trying to go from clipping to pasting, and using Microsoft OneNote to keep all of my stuff in order. I have to say, some magazines, like New Scientist are great. Read the magazine, click the archive, and you can get to everything in the same order. No need to hunt. If you have a paper subscription, you have an electronic subscription. Scientific American - you need a separate electronic subscription. I don't like that.

What I dislike even more are magazines that ignore their print versions on the web. No way to find a table of contents from an issue. Article titles change and have different posting dates than the print versions. I love the expansiveness of the online world. I love the commentary and the augmentation, but I also want to find stuff. I should not have to turn to a generalized internet search engine to find an article on a site (some of these unnamed magazine search engines turned up nothing, while the Internet engines quickly took me to an article). I find this abysmal treatment for readers and researchers.

So here is my advice to every publication that also has an online version:

Create an archive that mimics the print version so people can easily go to a page they saw in print.
If your search engine can’t find articles, get a new search engine.
Let subscribers subscribe to an RSS feed or e-mail that has the table of contents of the current print issue with links
If it is in print, but it on the web. A lot of factoids don’t get published. Publish them. People see things and want to go back to them Smart IT shops will also remember proximity ads and reinforce them when people go to the web with a print memory
Remember the read. If you print a magazine, remember those readers and make sure you cater to them on the web. That doesn’t mean constricting, just creating views that connect with them. It also doesn’t mean charging for PDF versions of articles or electronic subscriptions. If I pay for a paper subscription, I want the electronic version.

As we watch CBS consume CNET, I remember how the web was supposed to change media. It has, and the plethora is still not navigable enough to stop me from buying print. When I want news and reviews, I want them in a consumable form, and we have not yet created all of the ways information can easily be consumed. More research on that now…

The Work of Reading: E-Book Business Models

Thu, 22 May 2008 16:10:16 GMT

I'm sure that Sony and Amazon both thought about what they were doing when they came out with an e-book. Both looked at a several hundred dollar spend for a device, and then the subsequent revenue, at nearly no cost once the infrastructure was in place, for delivering high margin digital books to the devices. They thought iPod, not e-book, and went forward.

There are differences between Apple's model and the Sony and Amazon model that are fundamental. First, most iPods run as much, or more music from illegal downloads and shared collections as they do from the iTunes store. The licensed music is personal and can't be shared (well, there is even a work around there are people burn CDs for others to rip). Books are meant to be shared and traded, sold and resold - and that is legal, as it is for CDs and DVDs. Books that cost $20 or $30 that can be resold, running on a machine that costs $299-$399? I'm not intrigued yet.

Well, I'm even less intrigued because I don't understand the cost model on the machines themselves. They should be loss leaders into the library of digital reading bliss. I can buy a lot of physical books for $399, especially when I factor in used book stores.

Other issues:

Book costs: $9.99 doesn't do it for me. Not after a three of four hundred dollar investment. If I paid $50 for the reader, I might be willing to pay $9.99, but the economics aren't yet razorblade light.

Performance: Reports and personal experience tell me that the e-books aren't as fast as books at turning pages. Not since the early days of MP3 have I heard about processes that couldn't keep up with the decoding. Early days for e-books, yes, but if they want to grow old with MP3 players they need to perform at the right price.

Take-off and landing: Both e-book models run on batteries. They become one less thing to use on a plane. American is woefully underread, and the one place I see reading is on planes, because you can't do much else from the door close to 10,000 feet. e-Books don't held here.

Memory: I have a nineteen foot wall covered with books. Some of them are not about words, but about pictures. Even if I take those out, I will still have a pretty big library once I repurchase all of my books in electronic format. Oh, the model doesn't allow for as many books as I have. Sure, memory is cheap and I will get more - how do I backup my devices? How do I ensure that my books are safe? SD support is good. 4GB is a lot of books and more will come, but is this really the relationship we want with words?

Downloads: I like that Amazon pays for the Kindle airtime, but what if I want high speed and have a huge collection I want to manage. Is the device enough? Shouldn't they be PC companions of a sort, at least for power users?

Standards: Sure RTF and PDF, but what about transferring among e-book models? Books are portable. What if a friend has a Sony and I have a Kindle? What are my options? And with Kindle, the non-native PDF thing is just a bit under considered. Just a bit. Not only doesn't it read the most popular native document format for static text, converting them seems to break the wireless model. Kindle needs a consistent user experience - stand along or PC companion?? How about switching between WiFis and it understand Windows and Mac so when not on its own wireless, it seamlessly gets on a home network and can share with PCs or file servers.

Audio vs. text: Good that audio works too. Is this meant to replace my MP3 player or augment it? Is listening to a book the same as reading one? It is not, and I have yet to discover a good experience that bridges the audio and text worlds well.

Knowledge transfer: with magazine I can rip out pages. With online magazines I can book mark pages or send them to OneNote. With e-books I can read, maybe bookmark, but I can't integrate them into my information environment. I don't think research is their future.

Screen and power: e-paper. Finally. Screens look pretty good, but only B&W. So much for art books (well, seriously, are we really ever going to enjoy coffee table books on a device like this - me thinks not). But the e-paper has driven down power use greatly, leading to very long times between charges. Good economics around power and use models (I never need to recharge a book, however) but this innovation isn't enough yet to drive total unit cost into the reasonable range.

Bottom line: e-books need to be less expensive, better integrated with other technology and offer a clear value over paper. The cost and the take-off and landing thing is enough to keep me away for now.

Early adopters already have one of these devices and they are sharing likes and dislikes on the web. I encourage you to read those before considering a device (here is a sample from CNET). I had earlier versions for review purposes, and never used them much. I might even use one of these, but I also know I will regret being an early adopter here because of my love for books. Neither of these units is made for bibliophiles. Perhaps they never will be, but that begs the biggest questions about the market: if the staunchest, most active readers don't want them, then who are they designed for?

DVD Wars

Thu, 26 Jul 2007 06:31:22 GMT

Engadget reports about the decision by Target to only stock Blu-ray DVDs, combined with Blockbuster's decision to only stock Blu-ray disks means the begriming of the end for the DVD battle, one that will be fought and won in retail and not by consumers.

As a consumer, you know, I don't really care. As a futurist, I only care for a few more minutes, because once content is all digital it will be all downloaded. And you know, DVDs look pretty good on my 57 inch HD TV. I'm sure Blu-ray or HD would look a little bit better, and have a few more bits (well, a lot more digital bits and a bit more content).

But again, let's get the TV to talk to the Net and declare removable media dead. If you have ever downloaded a movie you know it will fit on a new 4GB SD card. The answer is distributed computing, not distribution channels for disks. Um, that would upset the market wouldn't it. It will happen anyway. I have four computers running right now, if they were working together they could download a movie while I'm typing this, from the net or satellite.

(BTW, for backup, just go get a $100 external HD. For less then $500 get a terabyte disk. Plenty of room for downloaded movies and all their licenses)

But I guess we need something to talk about when Lindsy or Brit or Paris aren't being arrested.

I can see the difference, can you?

Open Source Counterpoint: Proprietary Doesn't Mean Non-Collaborative

Thu, 24 May 2007 06:10:10 GMT

In the January/February Technology Review from MIT, Larry Constantine from the R&D Lab at the University of Madeira, Portugal, wrote a letter extolling the virtues of open-source software. "As you read this," he begins, "countless programmers worldwide are collaborating to write, refine and debug open-source software." I rarely say much about my employer, but you know, as you read this, thousands of Microsoft employees around the world, and countless partners, are doing the same thing. They are just as dedicated, just as tireless and just as innovative.

Microsoft software, as feature-rich as it is, doesn't do everything (despite the accusations to the contrary). That means partners have to add code, and partners work tirelessly on behalf of their customers to craft solutions on top of Microsoft code. Constantine also says that "Open-source is both a movement and a method." Also true of the stalwart coders at Microsoft, in home offices, in partner R&D centers and in university labs. Software doesn't become as widely distributed as Microsoft's without it being a movement, and robust applications don't get written without sound methodologies.

Constantine admits that the collective code called open source isn't as usable as it could be, despite it being robust. Well, that means the methodology is weak, because a good methodology would produce usable code too. You can argue with some Microsoft choices, but 450 million users of Office must have pretty much figured out how to use it, and many use it very well. The usability problem for open source comes from its lack of a center. You can't have a distributed philosophy that results in adherence to a centralized doctrine. Methodologies are doctrine. User interfaces reflect belief systems. Open source has a belief system, unfortunately it is a social one, not a software one.

I find open source an interesting phenomenon, but having run IT departments before, it is not something I would risk my organization on. I know I have colleagues that would disagree with that, but I want vendors I can have relationships with. And when open source is delivered by a vendor, rather than by a community, it looses much of its rebellious overtones, and just becomes another form of commercial software. If that is true, and I believe it is, then I will go with software from a company that I can visit, that I can dialog with, and that I can influence by teaching them about my organization. Most organizations don't want to code any more, not at the basic level of open source or Microsoft's core apps. These organizations want software that delivers business value, and that means a reliable base to build upon, one that is usable and robust. I'm sorry Larry, but that isn't open source - and for all the reasons that you state open source is superior, I would argue those same conditions exist for any piece of commercial software with a robust ecosystem of partners and a large group of customers with unique problems to solve.

And that is where this is interesting for me. We don't need another word processor. That is a waste of the open source community's time - and I would argue, anyone's time. What we need are great services and add-ons that make Word, for instance, better - better for me, better for sales people, better for lawyers, better for doctors. That leaves plenty of work for communities of creative people without anyone ever writing a line of code for selecting words or checking spelling. Let's solve the hard problems for the customers, and that won't happen from code wars at the basic level of operating systems and productivity apps. Turn your attention instead to visualization of unstructured content or pattern recognition, and then figure out how to deliver that through Microsoft Office. You can make your code as open as you want it to be. Chances are, if its good, you'll probably want to make some money before you give it away - but that is a philosophy discussion for another day.

Why the Web will Never be as Smart as You Want it to Be

Sun, 20 May 2007 17:18:45 GMT

Web 2.0 was misnomer, and now we have talk about Web 3.0. Be cautious. I love artificial intelligence. I spent years programming expert systems and conducting knowledge acquisition sessions. I know one thing the hype makers keep missing. It's not about algorithms, its about understanding. And right now, the Web doesn't understand anything.

Well, let me be a bit more precise: the web doesn't understand anything in the way we understand it. Certainly smoke and mirrors abound, from the Amazon tracking system to targeted ads, but that just means the web understood your last click, not you or what you want. Yes, over time, if you keep doing the same things, it will get more focused on that thing, but shift gears and the algorithms go into a tail spin and must reset their expectations. Heaven forbid the renaissance person with many many interests, or the person who changes hobbies after a long while. Don't even mention new project assignments.

Our technology continues to have a fundamental flaw when it comes to understanding us, to anticipating our needs. It doesn't understand us. It does understand weblinks statistics, inbound and outbound pointers, traffic patterns and buying patterns. It doesn't, however, understand a document. I can ask MySpace to find poets, but I can't ask MySpace to find poets like me by having it read my blog postings. No, I have to wait for the community to read my poems and decide it they want to interact, and then there is a difference between what readers like and what poets write - so my readers may not be poets that write in the same style as I do, or about the same topics. The chances are very small that computers will understand poetry any time soon, or for that matter science or literature.

The computer industry is spending time in an escalation of advertising cold wars when it should be working on trying to get computers to work more for us, in the mundane, everyday, not in virtual sales held in virtual strip malls.

The algorithms of Web 3.0 are myth. They may appear to find what you are looking for, but they have no idea what you are looking for means. Which is why community is going so quickly on the web. We find people of like minds and ask them the questions. And for the most part, as we do at bars or work or social gathering, we meet the people we meet on the web accidentally, and not always for the long term. But we meet people, in all their guises, and those people, all have their own perspectives and their own understandings, and a common base for dialog. They understand meaning.

If you need proof, just look at the lack of sophistication in feedback systems. Simple votes, sometimes little more than binary (did this help you or not). I can tell a person why. I can explain what I was looking for. I can share my biases, my personal quirks of interpretation, my version of a color. Computers don't get that yet, and may never get it. So take Web 3.0 prognostications with caution.

My personal opinion, the web will be much more about communication and sharing than about intelligence. It will bind people together more closely. Our mashups will be driven by human insight. (and yes, database stuff when it makes sense, but joined queries are nothing new, we just happen to have more and cooler data than before. Again, no intelligence in cross-linking a restaurant database to a visual map with underlying addresses and coordinates).

Let's stop numbering the Web. It is not a release but a technology evolution platform. Technology remains the one place neo-social-Darwinism continues. Evolution is not about progress. It is not about complexity. Evolution is about adapting to niches, and if something adapts well, it may move beyond its niche to procreate. Microsoft, Amazon and Google are examples of that phenomenon - not a march toward complexity and perfection.

Well, that is enough for an early Sunday morning. Too bad Technorati will only be able to find keywords in this text, and have no idea I am challenging fundamental market assumptions, or taking computer industry investment direction to task. Technorati will just know that I said something about information work and Web 3.0 and not much else.

Richard Dawkins and the Work of Evolution

Wed, 11 Oct 2006 03:57:44 GMT

I suspect the Richard Dawkins is completely accurate and completely wrong. There may in fact be no God, but that does not mean there should be no religion. Humanity's evolution has primarily been cultural over the past hundred thousand years or so. If evolution is a fact, then our propensity for ruthlessness would need an evolutionary response to allow our selfish genes to proliferate. So some clever human invented religion as a way to moderate the human tendency toward self destruction. That makes Dawkins on one hand, a man who argues the improvable as much as a priest, as well as a man who fights with ghosts to defend his right to be reasonable, ghosts that may in fact, be the proof to his own point, but in a different line of argument.

Moving into Technorati

Sat, 03 Jun 2006 06:54:03 GMT

Technorati Profile

Is the Pen Mightier Than the Computer?

Mon, 10 Apr 2006 17:57:03 GMT

The Seattle Times: Business & Technology: Stroke of a pen captures data

The pen is fairly simple in its simplest form. Dip something into ink and start stroking. In its more modern form it is less messy and more convenient. I must confess that I travel around with a leather 3x5 card holder in the back pocket of my pants. Everywhere I go. And I always have two pressurized pens, one a Fisher Space Pen and the other a Sensa. Both have the stylus option so if I don’t need to quickly jot something, they can do the double duty of entering information on my always present PocketPC Phone. Most of the time though, they are brought into service to catch the stray poetic or business moment on a 3X5 card, which later becomes a fragment that starts a poem or morphs its way into one.

The cover story of the Seattle Times business section challenges the disconnection between pen and paper, and digital information. And I have long been an advocate of the need for these two worlds to merge. For several years I was a columnist with Pen Computing, a magazine devoted to the evolution of pen-based computing. In this article the Time reports on NIS, a Seattle startup recently awarded a DARPA contract that will fund research into how data jotted on paper maps can manifest itself in relationship to the digital forms of the maps.

I’ll let you read the article for more depth, but I want you think about how this convergence of pens and paper, and computer, will change the way you work. The Anoto pen, which became the Logitech io pen, required special, pre-registered paper. Good for niches, but not great for general use, despite partnerships with 3M on Post-It Note paper. The key to me is passivity. The technology must become passive. I don’t want to think about how the items move from analog to digital. I mostly want it to happen, much like synching my PDA. I want the data to know where to go. If that happens, let me ask again, what that does for work.

The article talks about forms mostly, registration of cargo, healthcare forms like evaluations and patient records, insurance forms and home inspections. Don’t forget utilities of all sorts—or handymen, interior designers and delivery folks. But what about the proposal writer in an aerospace company, working on massive contracts and requirements. Sure much of that is done by on-line editing, but think about the delays associated with making sure you have tracking on and a place to plug a PC, not to mention, the work not done on airlines because there just isn’t enough room to open the PC (another reason to think about a Tablet PC — a really small one like the Motion LS 800). Think about marking up the document with a pen. Sheaves of paper with red ink all over them—then the red marks transferred to the digital copy of the document when the pen comes into proximity with the PC it is registered to (or the document—we can talk implementation later).

I find it encouraging that we are continuing to pursue this line of research in the tech industry. Now, where did I put my pen?

Getting A Charge Out of New Battery Possibilities

Fri, 07 Apr 2006 19:02:24 GMT

When I was an industry analyst, I used to co-chair a conference with Rob Enderle called "The Emerging Technology Showcase." At the end of the conference we would hold a toy show, that was mostly about new gadgets. One of my favorite moments, was when I talked about mobility, and poured a very large box of power supplies, backup batteries and other charging paraphernalia onto the floor. The bottom line was this: being wireless didn’t mean being unplugged.

So I was very excited to read recently that researchers at MIT have invented a new technology that is not a chemical reaction, but a new kind of capacitor that stores a huge amount of electricity because it uses nontech to increase the surface of the capacitor’s charge plates.

Think about near instant recharges, and recharging that makes sense using static electricity and piezoelectric approaches.

Think about the changes that can take place in the structure of work when real mobility arrives, and that dream of working on a small Tablet PC near a beach, using just the sun to trickle-shock your capacitor makes where and when you work a real option.

Power, it seems, is knowledge.