W. Brian Arthur wrote a very interesting article for McKinsey Quarterly called The second economy (h/t to @justinspratt for the link). Registration is required to view the article but it’s worth it.

Much has been written about digitization and technology’s impact on society, but Arthur takes a fresh approach by looking at the digital economy as an unseen layer underneath the physical economy. He starts by defining communication for this (second) economy:

[Processes] are “speaking to” other processes in the digital economy, in a constant conversation among multiple servers and multiple semi-intelligent nodes that are updating things, querying things, checking things off, readjusting things, and eventually connecting back with processes and humans in the physical economy.

You know, like Siri does. In fact, notice how perfectly Siri fits into Arthur’s central thesis about the second economy:

If I were to look for adjectives to describe this second economy, I’d say it is vast, silent, connected, unseen, and autonomous (meaning that human beings may design it but are not directly involved in running it). It is remotely executing and global, always on, and endlessly configurable. It is concurrent””a great computer expression””which means that everything happens in parallel. It is self-configuring, meaning it constantly reconfigures itself on the fly, and increasingly it is also self-organizing, self-architecting, and self-healing.

These last descriptors sound biological””and they are. In fact, I’m beginning to think of this second economy, which is under the surface of the physical economy, as a huge interconnected root system, very much like the root system for aspen trees. For every acre of aspen trees above the ground, ther’s about ten miles of roots underneath, all interconnected with one another, “communicating” with each other.

Arthur makes it clear that he’s not interested in the realm of Sci-Fi and AI. He’s not sharing a completely improbable vision of the future (well, with the exception of driverless cars, depending on how much of a Google believer you are). And even though nothing he describes is brand new, this idea of a silent, interconnected layer underneath the physical one gives us a new lens through which to view the digitization of our lives.

I don’t want to get all “The End Is Near!” on you, but I’m currently reading Sherry Turkle’s Alone Together - Why We Expect More from Technology and Less from Each Other, and Arthur’s article reminded me of her words of caution:

Now demarcations blur as technology accompanies us everywhere, all the time. We are too quick to celebrate the continual presence of a technology that knows no respect for traditional and helpful lines in the sand.

[A] stream of messages makes it impossible to find moments of solitude, time when other people are showing us neither dependency nor affection. In solitude we don’t reject the world but have the space to think our own thoughts. But if your phone is always with you, seeking solitude can look suspiciously like hiding.

Hopefully there will still be places to hide once the second economy has fully established itself.

Hey Microsoft, I’m sensing that you’re trying to tell me something about updates?

In a recent episode of The Talk Show, John Gruber and Dan Benjamin pointed out something interesting about the Windows 8 redesign of Microsoft’s well-known “blue screen of death”. First, here’s an example of what this screen currently looks like:

Notice how Windows essentially accepts the blame in this situation. The title of the page says “Windows”, and they give you the cold, hard facts: An exception occurred. The application will be terminated, and you have to restart. Sucks to be you.

Compare that to the redesigned screen for Windows 8:

Notice all the subtle differences here. The emoticon to put you at ease. The nice font. The assurance that they will restart the computer - you don’t have to do it yourself like in the previous version. But most of all, notice the copy changes.

“Your PC ran into a problem that it couldn’t handle and now it needs to restart.” In this version Windows isn’t the culprit any more - your PC is. Your computer did something it shouldn’t be doing so it broke. “But hey,” they say, “don’t worry, Windows has your back and is swooping in to save the day!”

It’s a subtle change in design and copy, but credit where it’s due: this is pretty clever.

The most interesting part of today’s Amazon announcement is not whether or not they have an “iPad killer” (ugh), but the news of the new Silk browser that will run on the Fire. The details are getting lost among all the “Is Apple dead?” talk, so I wanted to point you to a couple of important articles about the implications of Silk. Here’s a recap of what it does, from their blog:

Instead of a device-siloed software application, Amazon Silk deploys a split-architecture.  All of the browser subsystems are present on your Kindle Fire as well as on the AWS cloud computing platform.  Each time you load a web page, Silk makes a dynamic decision about which of these subsystems will run locally and which will execute remotely.

Silk will use Amazon’s EC2 service to pre-cache web browsing, and in the process return heavily compressed images to the browser. There are two things that might not be immediately clear from their announcement and accompanying video.

First, this is not a new idea (and it can have pretty negative effects on user experience). Here is Mark Wyner in Amazon Silk. Just Like AOL Used to Make:

This is quite exciting news for the laymen. But does anyone remember AOL and their promise of accelerated browsing? They, too, elected to compress images and run a proxy server to deliver websites faster.

The result was horrible. Professional web designers take great care to build websites which are optimized for speed while retaining as much quality and visual integrity as possible. When ther’s a middle man degrading our work, it causes problems.

Second, the data mining and aggregation implications are quite staggering. Here is Chris Espinosa in Fire:

But what this means is that Amazon will capture and control every Web transaction performed by Fire users. Every page they see, every link they follow, every click they make, every ad they see is going to be intermediated by one of the largest server farms on the planet. People who cringe at the data-mining implications of the Facebook Timeline ought to be just floored by the magnitude of Amazon’s opportunity here. Amazon now has what every storefront lusts for: the knowledge of what other stores your customers are shopping in and what prices they’re being offered there.

I’m sure we’ll hear more about these issues (and of course the privacy implications) in the days to come, but for now these are two very interesting posts on the implications of Silk - definitely read through them both.

Here’s Mashable in an article with a title that sounds like it was created in a random buzzword generator: Facebook Open Graph Seeks to Deliver Real-Time Serendipity:

Facebook felt constrained by the Like button because it was an implicit endorsement of content. Facebook wants users to share everything they are doing, whether it’s watching a show or hiking a trail, so it decided to create a way to “express lightweight activity.”

So in essence they’re saying that clicking the Like button is too much of a commitment; the action is too heavy. We need something a little more indifferent and “lightweight”.

With the Like button you already didn’t have to use words. With Facebook Open Graph you grant permission to an app once, and then it silently and passively starts broadcasting what you’re doing. No thinking required.

By continuing to reduce the effort needed to share and communicate with others we seem to inch ever closer to a post-literate society.  In his essay Like, the Post-Literate Society, James Shelly discusses this phenomenon and quotes Bruce W. Power:

What happens to thinking, resistance, and dissent when the ground becomes wordless?

He goes on to say this:

Thus I ponder: do we become a post-literate society at the moment we manifest an incapacity to discuss our own potential status as such? If so, are we already there?

These are good questions on a day like today.

I love Tom Armitage’s post Asleep and Awake, about the differences between the Kindle and the iPad. Here’s how he describes what happens when you wake each device up:

The Kindle blinks ”“ as if it’s remembering where it was ”“ and then displays a screen that’s usually composed of text. The content of the screen changes, but the quality of it doesn’t. Ther’s no sudden change in brightness or contrast, no backlight. If you hadn’t witnessed the change, you might not think there was anything to pay attention to there.

When the iPad wakes up, everything else in the room disappears; your attention’s been stolen by that burst of light.

He goes on to describe the Kindle as having a “quiet confidence” while the iPad constantly seeks your attention. The conclusion serves as a healthy reminder of the scope of true user experience:

The Kindle, much like a paperback book, is just as happy “asleep” as it is in use. It’s a reminder that the design of genuinely ubiquitous devices and products is not just about what they are like in use; it is also about what they are like when they are just present.

We need to remember that even on the web, we’re not just designing online experiences. All the touch points with users have to be designed. Yet we often don’t apply user-centred design principles to areas like customer support and logistics. Let the Kindle’s “asleep” state remind us to do so.

Marco Arment recently wrote an excellent post about the differences between Apple and Microsoft customers. It got me thinking about Windows 8, Metro UI, and a slightly different theory on what Microsoft is trying to accomplish with the next version of their operating system. Here’s Marco:

People who aren’t willing or able to compromise on their needs regularly are much more likely to be Windows customers. The Windows message is much more palatable to corporate buyers, committees, middlemen, and people who don’t like to be told what’s best for them: “You can do whatever you want, and w’ll attempt to glue it together. It won’t always work very well, and you might not like the results, but we will do exactly what you asked for.”

He leaves out one important group of people who are also more likely to be Windows customers: regular users who don’t care about computers at all, and just want something to perform their daily email / browsing tasks on. Matt Gemmel sums up this crucial market really well:

The biggest (and most lucrative) set of customers is ordinary people, without a computing degree or specialist knowledge. These are people with no interest in specific technologies, but only in how easily they can finish today’s tasks without reading the manual. Apple caters to that market; companies who loudly proclaim their device supports CSS3 and MPEG4 and SDHC don’t even understand that it exists.

I agree with Marco’s (and Matt’s) main point: one of the main reasons for Apple’s success is their ability to compromise in the way that designers use the word: saying no to the right things. And that the Microsoft team will need to learn to compromise like that if they want to compete seriously on the tablet front.

Still, most people buy Windows PC’s not because they care about extensibility or because they have moral objections to Apple’s supposed walled garden. Most people buy Windows PC’s because they are just plain indifferent. It’s what they know, it’s what they’ve always used, and they don’t care enough about computing to consider other alternatives. This isn’t a good or a bad thing in itself, it’s simply the way it is.

One OS to rule them all

Microsoft’s decision to combine the desktop and tablet UI (Metro) on PC’s and provide access to both from the same device is the most interesting part of the unfolding Windows 8 story - particularly because we don’t know how regular users will react. Gruber nails the main problem with this approach:

I’ve been thinking all along that I’d rather Microsoft have let Metro stand alone as a next-generation OS, separate from Windows. I’m hung up on the question of how any OS that lets you do everything Windows does could compete with the iPad, because the iPad’s appeal and success is largely forged by the advantages that come from not allowing you to do so many of the things Mac OS X can do.

Surely Microsoft knows that this might be problematic for developers and users alike. I have to believe that they’re not that short-sighted. So why would they go ahead with this awkward combination? We have to consider that combining the two UI’s is part of Microsoft’s response not just to the fact that herds of people are abandoning Windows PCs for Macs[1], but also to how these users are finding their way to a new Mac on their desks.

A story that got a lot of attention recently is how Mike Elgan, the editor of Windows Magazine, made the switch from Windows to Mac. He talks about the beginning of his… um”¦ “conversion” using the phrase “gateway drugs” to describe his experience with Apple’s non-Mac devices:

The perfect out-of-box experience with the iPhone, the elegance of the whole experience of using an iPhone, re-set my expectations for how consumer electronics and computers should function. I started looking at the out-of-box experience of buying a Windows PC with a new contempt. The crapware. The stickers. The anti-virus software problem where the cure is worse than the disease. The flimsy hardware. It’s not so much that I despised Windows PCs, but that it felt like Microsoft and the PC makers despised them, like they all have no respect for their own platform.

Be afraid, Microsoft

This, more than anything, should scare the crap out of Microsoft. Apple is using iPods, iPhones, and iPads - considered “non-threatening” devices by the masses - to get users to reconsider their computing worlds.

Suddenly regular users start doing something they’ve never done before: wonder if maybe, just maybe, the Mac experience can be as pleasant as that of an iDevice. So when their Dell crashes for the 10th time in a week and it’s time for a new computer, that iPod in their pocket serves as a not-so-silent reminder: why not just walk into an Apple store and see what all the fuss is about?

So maybe that’s what’s going on with Windows 8 and Metro. More than just their version of a tablet UI, Microsoft could be placing their bets that regular users will pick up a Metro style tablet, like it a lot, and remain comfortable on their Windows PC’s knowing that the Metro UI is available for them there as well.

Everyone is uncomfortable with change, so if Microsoft can promise a consistent experience across mobile and desktop devices, it could stop the hemorrhaging to Apple products that we’re currently seeing. I’m not saying that it will work, just that it’s an interesting strategy for which they should at least get some credit.

I’ll leave the final word to Marco, who wraps up his post articulating what a giant gamble it is to combine the very different metaphors of desktop and mobile UI’s:

But how will their customers react?

Will Metro be meaningfully adopted by PC users? Or will it be a layer that most users disable immediately or use briefly and then forget about, like Mac OS X’s Dashboard, in which case they’ll deride the Metro-only tablets as “useless” and keep using Windows like they always have?

Still, Metro is the first thing to come out of Microsoft that I’m interested in since the Xbox. It looks genuinely innovative in many areas, and I can’t wait to see how this all plays out.

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1. Be honest: when is the last time you heard a story about someone switching from a Mac to a Windows PC? ↩

James Gleick provides a very interesting excerpt from his book The Information in the article How Information Became a Thing, and All Things Became Information. In the excerpt he discusses the inventions that allow us to record and preserve information (like the transistor and the “bit” as unit of measure), and how this fundamentally changed society:

The information produced and consumed by humankind used to vanish””that was the norm, the default. The sights, the sounds, the songs, the spoken word just melted away. Marks on stone, parchment, and paper were the special case. It did not occur to Sophocles’[1] audiences that it would be sad for his plays to be lost; they enjoyed the show[2].

Now expectations have inverted. Everything may be recorded and preserved, at least potentially: every musical performance; every crime in a shop, elevator, or city street; every volcano or tsunami on the remotest shore; every card played or piece moved in an online game; every rugby scrum and cricket match.

It looks like a great book. James, if you’re out there, when will the Kindle edition be available?

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1. The Wikipedia entry on Sophocles is fascinating.↩
2. Speaking of enjoying the show. â†©

There was plenty of chatter about RSS over the weekend, mainly because of this “you’re doing it wrong” article on Ars Technica.

Most of the responses I’ve seen are strong defenses of RSS, and I’m happy about that. There has been so much talk about Twitter replacing RSS that I’ve been wondering if anyone else still uses it as much as I do. In fact, because of the iPad and apps like Reeder, my RSS usage is at an all-time high.

Marco Arment argues for a combined Twitter/RSS setup:

I can follow tons of low-traffic sites and keep my reading list more diverse than if I relied only on social links, but other people ensure that I never miss anything great on the high-volume sites.

Ben Brooks has a different use case (more similar to mine) - he subscribes to lots of feeds, but he doesn’t allow the unread count to bother him. He makes a good point about not blaming RSS if you feel overwhelmed:

A tool is a tool. Should I get mad at my car because there are thousands of miles of road I haven’t driven yet to drive? No. If you don’t like RSS don’t use it. If you want to use it but don’t want to have thousands of items, then use it like Marco does. Or use it like I do and check the feeds more often.

But of course, no discussion on RSS is complete until its creator weighs in. Dave Winer blames feed readers (like Google Reader) and their insistence on showing you how many unread items you have, and asks us to separate that from the technology itself:

If you miss five days of reading the news because you were on vacation (good for you!) the newspaper you read the first day back isn’t five times as thick as the normal day’s paper. And it doesn’t have your name on the cover saying “Joe you haven’t read 1,942,279 articles since this paper started.” It doesn’t put you on the hook for reading everything anyone has ever written. The paper doesn’t care, so why does your RSS reader?

These guys all make a very good case for RSS so I’m not going to say too much more about it. I do want to add something I haven’t seen mentioned before though: using folders in your RSS reader to help manage the deluge of information. Here is a screenshot of my folder structure in Reeder:

I have a certain set of blogs that I tag as favorites, and those are the ones I read first. If ther’s time I move on to the others.

Note that I have a folder called “Large tech blogs”. The usual suspects are in there: TechCrunch, Mashable, Ars Technica, Wired… These blogs post a lot, so when the unread numbers get out of control I typically just scan some headlines and then mark all as read. With the big blogs I know that if something is really important, Twitter will tell me.

RSS will remain an important part of my workflow, and since I turn dock unread badges off, I don’t feel like my app of choice is silently judging me.

Setting up folders and actively managing your RSS feeds is hard work. But the payoff is huge for me - I can quickly get a broad overview of what’s going on in the industry without having to rely on the fleeting nature of a tweet coming across my timeline.

I’m a die-hard fan.

(By the way, if you’re interested in following my shared items, you can do so here)

In There Will Be No Files In The Cloud Fred Wilson argues that file-based cloud computing will become a thing of the past:

This is why I love Google Docs so much. I just create a document and email a link. Nobody downloads anything. There are no attachments in the email. Just a link. Just like the web, following links, getting [stuff] done. I love it.

That’s the future. I’m pretty sure of it.

He has a point, but I think it’s important to clarify what he means by “file”. Sorry to go all Wikipedia on you, but I promise ther’s a point on the other side. Wikipedia defines a computer file as follows:

A computer file is a block of arbitrary information, or resource for storing information, which is available to a computer program and is usually based on some kind of durable storage. A file is durable in the sense that it remains available for programs to use after the current program has finished.

The point being that a file is a block of data that is accessible to the programs that need it. Based on that definition files are certainly not going away, because software will always need access to the data that makes it more than a pretty shell.

What is going away though is the need for users to care about files: where they’re located, what file extensions work with what, etc. The best example currently in the wild is probably Notational Velocity, a text editor for the Mac where you don’t need to worry about where your files are located. From the web sit’s description:

The same area is used both for creating notes and searching. I.e., in the process of entering the title for a new note, related notes appear below, letting users file information there if they choose. Likewise, if a search reveals nothing, one need simply press return to create a note with the appropriate title.

Those files still exist, you just don’t have to go into Finder and start a search from there. Ther’s no File | Open command because it’s not needed. The data is in the app, and you interact directly with it. So if that’s what Fred Wilson means by saying “That’s the future. I’m pretty sure of it.” then we agree. But if he means that w’ll lose the “computer file” as an entity, I disagree. Fred ends his piece with this:

So if you are working in the cloud storage space, I think you’ve got a bit of a conundrum. The reality of the market today is that people use files. You need to support that use case, enhance it, and make peopl’s lives easier. But over time, that use case will go away. And what people will want is a service that doesn’t have files as the atomic unit.

I don’t think it’s that big of a conundrum. Notational Velocity doesn’t care where I store my .txt files, but I happen to store them in Dropbox. It doesn’t mean I now have to think about my files and wonder if they’re ok over there. It just means that the app pulls its data from a folder in Dropbox.

So taking that example all the way to the future of the computer file, this could be a great selling point for cloud storage companies: we host your files/data so that your apps will work anywhere and on any computer. (Ok, that sentence might need some Marketing magic, but you catch the drift).

Even if manipulating files becomes a thing of the past, data isn’t going anywhere. BBEdit 10 is already going down this road - they are encouraging users to sync application support files with Dropbox so you can easily maintain multiple installs. My guess is that many apps will take this approach where they add seamless data syncing to their offering without having to go into the cloud storage business themselves.

We don’t have to kill files. We just have to build apps that allow users to stop thinking about them.