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Last week Google made a preemptive strike against Microsoft, revealing details of its Chrome OS months before that product reaches its near-infinite beta release.  The idea is simple: who needs a big OS if you are doing everything in a browser?  It’s a huge threat to Microsoft and Apple.  But then it struck me I’ve heard this all before, so I went back and found this video clip from my show Triumph of the Nerds, circa 1996, where Larry Ellison predicts the future, not knowing he was actually describing 2010.

The biggest news was simply that Google was finally taking Microsoft head-on. The rest of the news, at least to me, was that Microsoft should be worried, very worried.

While we’re talking about operating systems here, Google’s real target is Microsoft Office.  Redmond makes money from Windows but makes a lot more money from Office, its productivity app monopoly.  Google already has its Google Apps pitted against Office, but Brin and Page know they won’t crack Office’s hold on corporate America without addressing the Windows flaws that effectively underlie both Office and Google Apps in their current incarnations.  That’s where the Chrome OS comes in.

The Chrome OS strategy comes down to services, servers, security, and an iTunes-like app store (this latter part having been missed by nearly all the pundits).

An operating system with a user interface done through a browser is a completely practical idea and a vastly superior way to code User Interfaces than the Windows API.  It wasn’t always so, but now we have Java and Java extensions in the browser, so the UI capabilities are much better.

Remember Google makes its money differently than Microsoft, taking a few pennies here and there.  It is doubtful that either the Chrome browser or Chrome OS will ever cost users anything, but Google will make plenty from providing services and servers that run using these interfaces, with the real gold mine being that app store.

Under the Chrome OS, security is drum-tight so users can’t install unapproved software that might break the OS.  The client is small, light, secure, and easy to support. The back end can be in Google’s cloud or in one of those Google shipping container data centers dropped into the parking lot at a Fortune 500 company.  Either way Google makes money at the expense of Microsoft/IBM/Sun/Oracle.  Larry sure didn’t anticipate that part.

Google will make tons of money from its app store.  Remember that unapproved applications won’t be able to run on the Chrome OS and the best (maybe only) way to find approved apps will be through a Google store as pioneered by Apple with iTunes.  This wasn’t lost on Eric Schmidt during his days on the Apple board.  Through such an app store, Google will get a percentage of all third-party software sales — something Microsoft has never been able to do with third-party Windows apps.  The potential revenue from the app store alone is billions per year.

We know that under the Chrome OS Google Apps will be very secure.  Any tampering will trigger the download of a new and pure OS image.  But will the Chrome OS have enough performance to compete with Microsoft Office?  I think it eventually will, based, for example, on extensions like Google’s recently announced O3D API, which will allow Google Apps and approved third-party apps to grab spare GPU cycles to improve performance.

What’s left to be seen here is whether these improvements will be enough to beat Office or if Google will have to make a standalone (local PC-based) version of these apps.  Only time will tell.

The most interesting part for me will be Microsoft’s response.  This strikes at the very heart of Redmond’s business success and Microsoft will not take it lying down.  Expect thermonuclear warfare.

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We’re in the middle of a huge platform shift in computing and most of us don’t even know it.  The transition is from desktop to mobile and is as real as earlier transitions from mainframes to minicomputers to personal computers to networked computers with graphical interfaces.  And like those previous transitions, this one doesn’t mean the old platforms are going away, just being diminished somewhat in significance.  All of those previous platforms still exists.  And desktops, too, will remain in some form when the mobile conversion is complete, though we are probably no more than five years from seeing the peak global population of desktop computers.  We’d be there right now if we’d just figured out the I/O problem of how to stash a big display in a tiny device.  But we’re almost there.  That’s what this column is largely about.

I’ve been thinking about this topic ever since I wrote a column on an iPhone.  It wasn’t easy to do, but I researched and wrote the column, loaded it to WordPress and added graphics, all by jabbing fingers at that tiny screen.  It was for me an important test of what was possible and confirmed to me what I’d been guessing — that the iPhone is the first real device for the new mobile platform.  Not a great device, but as Adam Osborne used to preach, it is an adequate device, and in the early days adequate is quite enough.

This seminal role for the iPhone is mainly by chance, I think.  Its success is deserved no more than it is undeserved.  The role could have fallen to Android or WebOS if they had been earlier or even to Windows Mobile if it had been a bit better.  Steve Jobs proved his luck again by dragging his feet just long enough to fall into the sweet spot for a whole new industry.  That’s not to say he can’t still blow it, but he has the advantage for now.

It’s important to understand just how quickly things are changing.  Part of this comes down to the hardware replacement cycle for these devices.  A PC generation is traditionally 18 months long and most of us are unwilling to be more than two generations behind, so we get a new desktop or notebook every 36 months.  Mobile devices don’t last that long, nor are they expected to.  The replacement cycle is 18 months, reinforced by customer contract terms that give us a new device every couple of years in return for staying a loyal customer.  Mobile hardware generations last nine months, and 18 tends to be the maximum time any of us use a single device.

Think about it.  This means that mobile devices are evolving twice as fast as desktops ever did.  This just about equals the rate at which wireless network bandwidth is declining in price and matches, too, the faster-than-Moore’s Law growth of back-end services.  Think about those first iPhones compared to the ones shipping today.  In less than two years the network has increased in speed by an easy 2X and the iPhone processor speed has doubled, leading to a device that is at least four times more powerful than it was originally.  It’s a much more capable device than it was, yet the price has only gone down and down.

This is not a celebration of the iPhone: the same performance effects apply equally to all mobile platforms.

Now just imagine what it says for the smart phones to come.  In another two years they’ll be eight times as powerful as they are today, making them the functional equivalents of today’s desktops and notebooks.  If only we could do something about those tiny screens and keyboards.

The keyboard is a tough one.  In one sense it isn’t hard to imagine it being handled through voice input.  That’s how they did it on Star Trek, right?  But there was a problem with Star Trek computing: the interface is what I think of as interrogational.  Kirk or Scotty asked the ship’s computer (a mainframe, obviously) a question that always had an answer that could be relayed in a handful of words.  The answer was “yes,” “no,” “Romulan Bird of Prey,” or “kiss your ass goodbye, Sulu.” There’s never any nuance with an interrogational interface and not much of a range of outputs.  It’s okay for running a starship or a nuclear power plant, but by being only able to speak it is limited to what words alone can do.

I attribute this, by the way, to Gene Roddenberry’s work as a writer.  I doubt that he saw word output as a limitation, since his product was, after all, words.  TV is radio with pictures, and the words really count a lot.  But try to use them to simulate a nuclear meltdown with any degree of precision or prediction and they’ll fail you.

Our future mobile devices will use words for input, sure, but words alone won’t be enough.  Still, between voice recognition, virtual keyboards, and cutting and pasting on those little screens, there’s a lot that can be done.  It’s the output that worries me more.

I first wrote about this a decade ago when I heard about how Sony was supporting research at the University of Washington on retinal scan displays — work that eventually resolved into products from a Washington State company called Microvision.  They’ll shine a laser into your eye today, painting a fabulous scene on the back of your eyeball in what appears to be perfect safety, but I have a hard time imagining the broad acceptance of such displays by billions (yes, BILLIONS) of users any more than I expect that Bluetooth earphones will survive a decade from now.  Too clunky.

I think we’re headed in another direction and that direction is — as always — an outgrowth of Moore’s Law.  Processors get smaller every year and as they get smaller they need less energy to run.  Modern processors are also adapting more asynchronous logic — another topic I started writing about 10 years ago that offers dramatic energy savings.

We’re at the point right now where primitive single-pixel displays can be built into contact lenses.  They act as user interfaces for experimental devices like automatic insulin pumps.  This already exists.  A patch of carbon nanotubes on your arm continuously monitor blood glucose levels, driving a pump that keeps your insulin supply right where it should be.  Any problem with the pump or the levels is shown by a red dot that appears in your field of view courtesy of that contact lens.  The data connection between pump and eyeball is wireless. The power to run that display is wireless too, since the contact lens display scavenges RF energy out of the air to run, courtesy of that mobile phone on your belt and that WiFi access point on the ceiling.

As long as we’re personally connected to the network we’ll have enough power to run such displays.  No more airplane mode.

And while that display is a single pixel today, we can pretty easily predict at what point it could be the equivalent of HDTV.  Except I don’t expect we’ll ever get there.  That’s because, thanks to Ray Kurzweil’s singularity — that point at which everyday machines have more computing cycles than I do — we’ll soon have so much excess processing power that mere physical interfaces will be boring and not necessary.

Here’s my problem with the singularity: I don’t want to work for my computer, much less for my microwave oven, both of which are supposed to be way smarter than me by 2029, according to Ray.  My way around this problem, in the Capt. Kirk tradition, is to find difficult jobs for all that computing power to keep it from interfering with my lifestyle.

So there’s a platform transition happening. We’re in the middle of it.  The new platform is a mobile interface to a cloud network.  And the way we’ll shortly communicate with our devices, I predict, will be through our thoughts.  By 2029 (and probably a lot sooner) we’ll think our input and see pictures in our heads.

Think it can’t happen?  Twenty years ago was Windows 3.0 and Mac OS 6. Twenty years from now computing won’t even be a device, just a service.

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Just in case you are an astronaut and need something to worry about, according to NASA there are 18,000 pieces of space junk the size of a basketball or larger right now orbiting the earth. That’s 18,000 chances to slam into the International Space Station (ISS), bump into a U.S. Space Shuttle, or plow into any of a number of satellites in low Earth orbit. Twice the ISS has had to be moved to avoid potential collisions and one other time when it couldn’t be moved the crew huddled in their Soyuz taxicab for danger to pass, with one such near-miss taking place just last week, which is what inspired this column.

I say it is time to clean up all that junk.

Space junk means everything from rocket upper stages weighing several tons down to the odd wrench lost in space by space-walking astro- or cosmonauts.  This stuff that got to space more or less by accident is now torquing above the ionosphere at around 17,000 miles-per-hour, which would be worse if nearly all the junk wasn’t going in the the same direction.  Friction and gravity will eventually bring all the space junk back to earth, but that could take centuries.  So I say simply to avoid any more space junk stories in USA Today, we ought to find a way to get rid of the stuff.

It won’t be easy.  We can’t shoot it down, because even if we are accurate enough to hit the junk all we are likely to accomplish is blasting it into lots more smaller pieces that will need tracking.  We could shoot it with high-powered lasers, but unless we were able to vaporize the debris completely, all we’d be doing is boring very nice holes in it.

Nope, we have to gather the stuff and bring it back to Earth.  But how?

I propose a space garbage scow.

My garbage scow would use a very fine net to capture the debris and hold it.  The net could be built from kevlar, but this week I’m making everything from carbon nanotubes, thanks, so that’s what we’ll use.  Nanotubes have the highest strength-to-weight ratio of any material and would allow us to make a very large, very light weight net.  Our point here is to make the net light rather than strong, since our capture speeds will be low and the lack of gravity ought to make it easy to keep the junk tethered together.  The point of making it strong, then, is so it can be light enough to be big enough to maybe gather all the junk — all 18,000 pieces — into a single scow.

I imagine a seine purse-style net, if you know your commercial fishing.  Launch the net into an inclined polar orbit generally higher than the space junk to be harvested.  The polar orbit will ensure that eventually the scow will go over every spot on the Earth as the planet rotates below, but it also means the scow will eventually cross the path of every piece of space junk.

Here’s where we need an algorithm and a honking big computer, because this is a 3-D geometry problem with more than 18,000 variables.  Our algorithm determines the most efficient path to use for gathering all 18,000 pieces of space junk.

I haven’t yet derived this algorithm, but I have some idea what it would look like.  We’d start in a high orbit, above the space junk, because we could trade that altitude for speed as needed, simply by flying lower, trading potential energy for kinetic.

Dragging the net behind a little unmanned spacecraft my idea would be to go past each piece of junk in such a way that it not only lodges permanently in the net, but that doing so adds kinetic energy (hitting at shallow angles to essentially tack like a sailboat off the debris).  But wait, there’s more!  You not only have to try to get energy from each encounter, it helps if — like in a game of billiards or pool — each encounter results in an effective ricochet sending the net in the proper trajectory for its next encounter.  Rinse and repeat 18,000 times.

It won’t always be possible, of course, to gain energy from each encounter, but that’s why we start in a higher orbit, so as energy is inevitably lost it can be replenished by moving to a lower orbit.

By the same token I think we would logically start with smaller bits of space junk so the net would gain mass steadily over time, then do the same again at each lower altitude.  Eventually the net would have corralled hundreds of tons of debris, carrying it down into the atmosphere where atmospheric friction would eventually burn it all up in a spectacular visual display that would create a thin ring of fire all around the Earth.

It’s a crazy idea, sure, but it could work.  For all the worrying we do about space junk hitting astronauts or rockets as they launch, we could pretty easily get rid of it all.  Small to big, high to low, all it would take is time.  How much time?  If the scow orbits every 90 minutes and it takes an average of a dozen orbits to set up the capture of each piece of space junk, that’s 18,000 * 90 * 12  = 19.4 million minutes or 36.9 years to get it all.

Funny, that’s about how long it took to put all that crap up there in the first place.

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Rupert Murdoch said recently that he’s planning to stop Google News from indexing his publications including the Times of London and the Wall Street Journal. Murdoch’s idea is that Google News and the like make it too easy for Internet users to sample news for free rather than paying for it as God and Rupert intended. Mark Cuban, who is very clever but with whom I rarely agree, thinks this is smart on Murdoch’s part, because Twitter is changing the way people find news, effectively disintermediating Google, but not the News Corp. publications, themselves.

It’s funny how Murdoch’s statement made Cuban think of Twitter while it made me think immediately of the A&P.

The Great Atlantic and Pacific Tea Company, or A&P, was America’s first national chain of food markets. Hell, it was America’s first self-serve market, first to have store brands, first to advertise nationally, first to have a customer loyalty program (in 1912!), first to publish its own magazine (Womens’ Day, which is still around, though no longer owned by the A&P), and for most of my childhood back in Ohio A&P was the big Kahuna of grocery chains. With $5.4 billion in sales in the mid-1960s, A&P was at least 20 percent bigger than any of its competitors.

But after 105 years of setting the pace for the grocery industry, A&P peaked in the mid-1960s and went into a decline that lasted for at least 15 years and, it can be argued, continues even to this day. A&P, which has had German owners (the Tengelman Group) since the 1970s, is more of a super-regional chain today and doesn’t particularly vie for industry leadership on any measure. What happened in the mid-1960s to hurt A&P was it opted out of being indexed by Google News.

Well not literally, but close enough. A&P management, which back in the mid-60′s was still chosen from the founding Hartford family, decided at that time to abandon shopping centers — retail aggregators as Google is a news aggregator. They reasoned that in most shopping centers the anchor store was an A&P. In their view their supermarket was the main draw for a shopping center and didn’t need any of those other shops or stores to provide traffic. The rest of the shopping center was seen by A&P management as being purely parasitic. The company could get cheaper real estate down the road with a standalone store, which is why today most A&Ps aren’t in shopping centers. It’s also why A&P is a shadow of its former self.

You see the Hartford family (and Rupert Murdoch) were wrong. The flawed assumption at A&P was that shopping centers would somehow do without an anchor supermarket, which they didn’t. By withdrawing from the common location A&P was not only walking away from significant customer traffic, it was in each case simply handing that traffic to a Safeway or a Kroger store. It was a supremely stupid move.

Which brings us back to Rupert Murdoch, who is brilliant in his own right but in this case can’t find his own URL with both hands.  If Murdoch abandons Google News, then those hundreds of millions of reader referrals per day will simply go to other publications or maybe even to guys like me.  It’s not like Google can’t fill the space.

Murdoch wants readers to pay for news. I’d like folks to be paying for my words, too. But pulling out of Google News isn’t the way for either of us to accomplish that. And Twitter isn’t a factor with enough of the audience (yet? ever?) to make a difference.

Giving Murdoch the benefit of the doubt, then, I’m guessing he simply doesn’t mean what he said.  Perhaps he just wanted to sow a little confusion, get some publicity and maybe a concession or two from Google.

It won’t work.

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Brett Glass (on the left) runs Lariat, a small wired and wireless Internet Service Provider (ISP) on the prairie in Laramie, Wyoming.  Bob Frankston (right) programmed VisiCalc, the first personal computer spreadsheet and for several years worked on home networking issues for Microsoft, somehow without having to move from his beloved Newton, Massachusetts.  Two nerds, a decade apart in age yet both vastly experienced, they have completely different views on Net Neutrality. Bob loves it. Brett hates it. Yet coming to understand each man’s position helps us better understand the whole Net Neutrality issue and what really matters.

Net Neutrality discussions usually come down to pitting home users against Comcast, Verizon, or AT&T.  The ISP is presented as a bogeyman and a multi-billion-dollar bogeyman at that.  It’s easy to oppose big, rich companies that maybe aren’t as attentive to customer service as they ought to be. But what if the ISP is Lariat and the customer service comes straight from the owner? That’s when things start to get interesting.

Brett is trying to get the most bang for his Internet backbone buck, so things like traffic shaping, web proxying, and restricting certain protocols like BitTorrent appeal to Brett because without those policies he’d have higher costs and lousier service for most users.  So would Comcast and Verizon, by the way.  ISPs large and small generally want to limit their users to certain bandwidth and download caps and don’t like enabling software and media piracy.

Bob Frankston, as an outspoken proponent of Net Neutrality, is really more about outright defeating the telephone and cable companies.  He wants to put them out of business.  Or, more properly, he wants to put them out of their present business. Bob thinks ISPs should simply be schleppers of bits, not paying the slightest attention to ports, protocols, or applications.  In Bob’s ideal world we as individuals would control the copper wires and glass fibers that connect us to the Internet, with the ISP simply standing-by at the utility pole or neighborhood gateway to give or take bits that we’ll transmit at a rate of 100 million per second.

Bob’s concept of the Internet is actually fairly common in the darnedest places, like much of Eastern Europe.  In Moscow, readers tell me, there are neighborhoods where you can get a coax connection to the net running at a blazing 100 megabits-per-second.  But at the same time the meter is running and you may be paying individually for every one of those hundred million bits.

And this is where the two concepts — Brett’s and Bob’s – differ enough to matter.  By calling for the very broadest definition of Net Neutrality it seems to Brett that Bob is trying to put him out of business.  Brett identifies with his VoIP telco role.  But what Bob proposes would force a change of business model on Brett and all the other ISPs right up to Comcast and Verizon: no more e-mail, McAffee, Net Nanny stuff — just the bits, please.  Bob wants to take away everything that Brett sees as making his service charming.

The truth lies somewhere in-between.  Business models ARE changing and they always have, though not quickly, in the telecommunications space.  Back in 1983 when it divested its locl operating companies, AT&T (a different AT&T, remember, not the current company by that name) was choosing to deliberately abandon local phone service because long-distance made nearly all the profit.  So AT&T became a long-distance telephone company, squandered lots of money on cable TV and cellphones, then saw itself implode when long distance became a commodity that’s effectively free for most customers.  The AT&T business model changed (from full-service to strictly long-distance) then changed again (from long-distance to bankruptcy).

ISPs big and small are fighting to retain their present business models, which they view as essential to their survival and see threatened by Net Neutrality.  They are making good money with the current model and so are loathe to change it.  That’s it: they are resisting change, seeing it as bad. Until you get down to the level of Brett Glass trying to make some customer’s VoIP phone work well over a wireless link it’s fear of change that we’re seeing and not much else.  Yet change is inevitable as markets grow and mature.

Brett may not be able to survive as a pure schlepper of bits.  He sees his added value as bringing connectivity to places where it didn’t exist before.  Bob respects that but concentrates on a bigger picture where the virtualization of networks is carried all the way to our property lines.

In the long run Bob Frankston is more correct, though in his zeal he seems to need the current class of big ISPs to die and be replaced.  I’m not sure that is really needed, though it might be nice since that would at least end their reactionary lobbying.

Twenty years ago this month the Berlin Wall fell, changing European and Western culture as a result.  Within the next 20 years we’ll see a similar revolution in digital networks as distinctions between wired and wireless, Internet and television, voice and data blur to insignificance.  I just hope there’s still a role in there for Brett Glass, out on the prairie.  I strongly suspect there will be.