Dion Almaer

Software, Development, Products

Archives for February 2017

The Unbundling of Mobile

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I happily pay Ben Thompson to read his daily thoughts on Stratechery. Not only do I enjoy seeing his thought process unfold, but I also have a really soft spot for someone who has been able to get direct to his customers, finding a niche that allows him to just do his thing, and be successful along the way. This is one of the great enablers of the Internet era. Because we have broken many of the borders, or distribution friction, we are able to see niche areas go deep and do well. This unbundling is fantastic for diversity. Without this we need to aggregate and then popularism naturally forces the hand on what content gets shared the most and touches people.

Ben talks a lot about this topic itself, and often points to Marc Andreessen’s old chestnut that there are “only two ways to make money in business: One is to bundle; the other is unbundle”. The pendulum swings, and those who get to the other side quickly can benefit from that momentum.

We are currently witnessing the unbundling of mobile, and it is fascinating to see people try to understand how deeply the pendulum will swing and where to get ready to add value to the ecosystem. I feel like a broken record when I remind myself and others how long mobile took to take off. It was The Big Thing tm at JavaOne for many years before it was.

You remember when…

  • the networks were slow and atrocious (and WAP? nuff said)
  • screens were tiny and low quality (and when we got to touch screens they were far from feeling like they do today)
  • input was often painful (as great as T9 was for those who assimilated it, and as great as hardware keyboards were).

We could keep going on, but man, it was bad. It just took time for all of the evolution to get good enough, and when it did, it clicked.

I really enjoyed seeing yet another view of just how big it was, and is. Just compare it to the other revolutions in computing:

Mobile is up up up up up and to the right

We bundled computing, communications (phone, texting => social), entertainment (media) and the hitch hikers guide to the galaxy (The Web) all together. You can carry it all around in your pocket with a usable screen and input that keeps getting better.

This is a popular bundle and it is still growing. We are also seeing attempts to unbundle again, in a phased way.

Remember when the desktop was the “digital hub” in the home? iTunes on a computer was the source of truth, and other devices could tether and untether. This has now been taken over by either mobile devices or the cloud itself. The most literal example here is with watches. The first version of watches required your mobile device, and over time this changed (NOTE: Wear 2.0 just launched!) This is critical. One of the great uses of wearables is fitness, and you don’t want to have to run with a watch AND your device.

So, what are we unbundling here?

  • Compute: it makes sense to have a system that can do “enough” itself, but can also use compute from other parts of the system (watch using mobile, mobile using desktop, everything using cloud 🙂 A really important part of this is bringing the power of ML to where you need it to be. As our best experiences all use ML somewhere, we need progressive ML enhancement, including being able to run some of this offline (e.g. TensorFlow crunching in the cloud => run detection locally on device)
  • Network: not having to go through your mobile device only, and also using the power of P2P (you see amazing examples of this in areas of the world with really weak and expensive networks)
  • Input and Output: This is huge. We are breaking out of touch screens of a certain size and virtual keyboards to include voice (including ambient), wearables, and optimized form factors.

After platforms have done the heavy lifting to break the bundle apart it unleashes even more opportunities. As you build product, your constraints are changed and the levels of context compound to let you do amazing things. Sometimes this comes via quick access for power:

  • “Hey Google, if you notice that I fall asleep can you pause my media?”
  • “… please reset my ad id once a month”
  • “… make sure my garage door is closed after 10pm”
  • “… how often did Wendy come over in February?”

At other times it is joining multiple modes together (I have talked about this in the past) and being able to naturally morph between voice and screen access. We do tend to use our senses together. One of my complaints about some voice UI is that it forces me to close my eyes and put my hands behind my back, and surely we will be able to do better.

The platforms need to be broken up to allow for this, and this brings us to hardware and software…

Hardware Unbundling

How do we enable breaking up the phone into various pieces, and also allow bundling up those packages? This is where IoT comes to play. With Android Things I get to see teams morph and bundle in front of my very eyes, and it is exciting to see when they stick. I know that it is early days, but this is an area that in aggregate will clearly scale massively on the Internet.

Software Unbundling

https://twitter.com/maxlynch/status/835541439513772032

We talk about unbundling and bundling in software all the time. With the desktop Web we bundled experience delivery where one web app could reach a massive audience. But then, when it came to unbundling with mobile, many companies didn’t have nice APIs with the web clients sitting in front. This allowed for translation engines such as usablenet and moovweb to come in to offer the quick fix to get you going with mobile. This allowed many of us to have a beer and laugh about the old times…. “do you remember when we went in and had to hack a layer of Struts Actions to output JSON instead of HTML? Man that was a brittle POS!” There was a lot of pain and a lot of money to be made as the industry tried to turn a tight corner as quickly as possible, and the long tail is probably only half way through that corner!

As we lean into the unbundling, do you have the right pieces in place to enable high quality experiences to be built for your users in short order? Do you know your business and use cases well enough to know which context are king for you, and how to best reach them all?

We may not know the exact details of the future graph. How large will the overall ecosystems become? It is hard to compare to mobile, but your niche may still be a massive opportunity. It is also humbling to realize that on one side the numbers that we considered to be massive hits were tiny back in the day (millions vs. billions) and on the other, global mobile growth is still far from done.

FAKE NEWS: The earth scale cache invalidation information war

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If you asked me to remember something from a Presidents Day in the past, I would struggle to come up with something. The question that always came to mind when it was brought up was: “do we have the day off of work?” and that is about it.

This year it’s different. I have a lot of emotions going through me today. I remember the great presidents of the past (one of which is pretty darn recent) and can’t help but feel a #NotMyPresident urge.

The topic that keeps coming to mind though is FAKE NEWS. I cringe when it is used to ironically argue about truth and then see actual lies being spouted during the same argument. I feel like I am watching a magician try to misdirect me but this time I CAN SEE IT RIGHT IN FRONT OF MY EYES.

I feel like I am in a large scale fight for basic truth, participating in a game of Go or Othello with information. Just when you feel like you have the majority agreeing to be on the same page, something pops up and everyone flips their bit to the other color.

After reading Algorithms to Live By: The Computer Science of Human Decisions I can’t help but relate the world of computers to the world of humanity. In this case I think of the population holding their views as a huge cache, and thus the battle is over invalidating and changing more of the nodes that the opposition.

The nodes are not all equal of course. It is important to know that flipping some nodes can have a huge domino effect (akin to a large line in Othello). Nodes also aggregate as a larger consciousness, which is fascinating. This even happens within us, let along in a group. The notion of self is an aggregation, as seen clearly with people who have issues with the corpus callosum. My favorite story is the following:

One child named Paul S. had a functional language center in each half of his brain due to trauma in his left hemisphere. When researchers posed the question “what do you want to be when you grow up?” to each side of his brain, each hemisphere had a different answer: the right brain wanted to be an automobile racer and the left wanted to be a draftsman.

So “I” am an aggregation of sub-systems. We then lump other abstractions on top. A company, a party, a state, all the sum of the parts and each have their own interface. Sometimes you have a leaky abstraction, and at others the details are well hidden.

When the world is calm, it feels like the cache is only subtly changing. Right now we are in a time of insanity, and thus it feels like a cancer has overtaken the board. “The Resistance” feels like white blood cells rushing in to combat the cancerous cells that are causing havoc. (I know that the other side would argue that the Tea Party was doing that when they thought the cancer was there in the past).

The oldest game in the book

This game isn’t new. Information has long been associated with power. The game has changed a lot over time though as the scale and speed of access has spread to become global. Back when we were in small tribes, the cache was much more local. Today it is as global as the Internet itself, with data flowing at the speed of light.

You could define successful organized religions as those who spread the Word in a way to get their believes into a large part of the cache. They also normally play the role of trying to slow down changes. You could argue that checks and balances are good, but I often feel like the major side effects are that they stop truth from spreading. The world is flat. Adam and Eve riding on dinosaurs. You name it. If your religion is at odds with science, it is often at odds with me. If a religion is orthogonal and allows for the real truth to be embraced? Much better, but rare.

How do we change the game?

As always, understanding the incentives in the system is key. If no one reads retractions in the paper, then why wouldn’t you bluster away? If your business model is based solely on clicks vs. subscriptions, you will change the content.

We need to combat the falsehood out there. In the debates there was a lot of talk about whether the networks should do live fact checking (uh, yes? 🙂 and the still holds. I would love for the networks to time delay content so they could fact check it to get more information to the populace. One concern though is the tragedy of the commons. If one network decides not to do this then do they get the rewards of being a lil earlier?

We have heard from a lot of the large tech titans about the responsibility they feel to combat the issue. We have PageRank, but how fantastic would a TruthRank be? Snopes, Factcheck.org, Politifact, and friends do yeoman’s work here and we need to do more. It is tricky though. Some topics are very binary, but most topics are subject to some form of interpretation, and we all need to be humble about the difference. I really feel like we need to all team up on this as much as possible as I witnessed a depressing backfire over the elections. I remember debating with people, showing them data from sources (such as Snopes), and then would end up with “those are all liberal machines!” Crap, the backfire effect in full force.

How do you know when to stop or to keep pushing? It appears that the more concrete the evidence the better, but it is so hard to comprehend when minds will change. Take one of the topics this weekend, where conservatives at large finally backlashed against Milo. As abhorrent as the latest tapes were, it is mind boggling that his other remarks about race and gender issues were not enough.

Aggregator Nodes

The aggregators and gateways have huge power here too. What surfaces on feed? What does your device say when you ask it “What’s new?” What pops up on your device when you turn it on? What is your “go to” source of information? These all have huge weight, and this is why so many said “finally!” when Fox News started to talk about Trump’s lies and totalitarian remarks about the media. Until recently if you only watched that network you would be looking at a parallel universe.

In fact, that is exactly what is happening isn’t it. As a node in the cache we aren’t yet members of a Borg collective. The cache isn’t evenly distributed, and our reach isn’t full. Certain abstractions may answer in a certain way, but our consciousness is far from shared.

This is the crisis that I think about on President’s Day in 2017. I hope that we make a lot of progress and I am nervously curious about where my mind will be this day in 2018. I won’t even let me brain think about what my heart wishes for here.

Here’s to Truth.

The right thing to do, is the right thing to do.