- Finally, a conspiracy theory I can believe in. Lee Gomes speculates in Forbes that the whole Vista fiasco was a marketing ploy by Microsoft to drive sales of well-received Windows 7. After all, says Gomes, the biggest selling point of many Microsoft releases is that they fix the flaws of the previous release. (Ba-da-Bing!)
- Meanwhile, Microsoft is establishing a cloud presence. It has spent $500 million for a data center near Chicago, where 400,000 servers will run on Microsoft’s Azure operating system. But to compete in the cloud, Microsoft will have to build a new business model as well, in place of those software upgrades that have served it so well.
- And nuclear power struggles to make a comeback. In a section devoted to energy, Technology Review looks at nuclear’s prospects 30 years after Three Mile Island. (No full free access.) The industry’s challenges now are mainly financial. Only large plants are economical, but their high front end price is a barrier, given the uncertain future cost of other power sources.
Thanksgiving Leftovers
November 29th, 2009If Content is King, Where’s My Crown?
November 15th, 2009Following the tech press is always instructive, frequently entertaining, and sometimes alarming. An October article by Daniel Roth in Wired, ‘The Answer Factory,’ falls into that third group.
No writer likes to hear that the divine spark of creativity can be automated, particularly if this innovation is associated with low paying work, but that is exactly what Demand Media has accomplished.
The technology itself is pretty clever. Demand Media hunts through ‘long tail’ search terms, the sort that Google sells cheap. Then it feeds them through a ‘Knowledge Engine’ that determines what other search terms they are connected with, creating a sort of tag cloud.
At this point humans are brought in to arrange the jumble into prospective titles for articles or videos that, according to the algorithm, have a potential audience out there. (Mostly how-to’s of one sort or another.) Finally Demand Media hires writers or videographers to produce an article or video that fits the title.
The work is low paid, but there is a lot of it (and Demand Media pays, quickly and reliably). One videographer has ground out a staggering 40,000 videos – in all, the company has some 170,000 videos on YouTube. In one typical day he shot ten kayaking instructional videos in a couple of hours, earning $20 for each.
Should I be offended or worried by this intellectual assembly line? I’m not. The technology is pretty cool, and it is giving a lot of writers and videographers some steady income. There’s nothing wrong with that.
The articles and videos are not the greatest, but that merely points out an ancient adage that the Internet has not completely changed: By and large, you get what you pay for. And King Content isn’t the first king to have to skimp on the crown.
The March of Time: Hello, Windows 7; Goodbye, GeoCities
October 28th, 2009Windows 7 is out, and getting good reviews. Even the reviews that go looking for faults don’t seem to be finding that many.
A cynic would say to just give it time; Vista also got some good early reviews. But perhaps Microsoft learned from Vista. When all else fails, falling flat on your face can be instructive; it works for the rest of us.
Anyway, it is not as easy to hate Microsoft as it used to be. Apple has gone from cult to hot, Windows Mobile lags, and Google is everyone’s next world conqueror.
But Windows is not going away. Probably it will run on my next desktop, and there’s a good chance it will be running on yours. Perhaps everything will eventually get beamed up into the cloud, but a lot of people will still want or need a powerful local machine and an operating system to run it.
For most of us, for the next few years, that will mean Windows 7. I don’t need to think about it till I upgrade my machine, but if you deal with desktop computing at the enterprise level you need to start thinking about it now.
Meanwhile, GeoCities closed its doors, providing an occasion for sentimental commentary about this ancestor of Web 2.0. The Web, as it turns out, is not forever after all. Many people might be just as happy that their old GeoCities homepage, abandoned ‘under construction’ years ago, has finally disappeared. If they even remember they ever had it.
Just remember that one day your Facebook page may also be half forgotten, then disappear.
TecTrends Reporter on Healthcare: Watching the Vital Signs
October 22nd, 2009Healthcare is at the center of the Washington universe this month. It is also a key component of the tech industry and the fastest-growing sector of the global economy.
Each month TecTrends Reporters survey developments across the tech industry, and this month I thumb through the TecTrend Reporter on healthcare.
The articles summarized in this issue range from current clinical developments to legal and regulatory issues and the growing crossover of the healthcare and computer sectors.
- Scientific American looks at the H1N1 flu, commonly called ’swine flu,’ and the gap it has revealed in our ability to track disease patterns among livestock.
- Genetic Engineering and Biotechnology reports that the pharma industry is now betting heavily on RNA interference (RNAi) technology to offer subtler, more precisely targeted drugs. A snag: Delivering these drugs to their targets has proven challenging.
Washington’s political fights do not figure heavily in these articles – anyone who wants a dose of healthcare politics will have to go elsewhere. (Don’t worry, politics is easy to find on the Web.)
But some articles here do touch on the real world issues and concerns that have thrust healthcare into the political arena.
- In Technology Review, Andy Kessler has tough words for the healthcare industry on the subject of digitizing health records. The industry has been in no rush to digitize, he argues, because the current chaotic system helps to ‘keep medicine’s lucrative business model hidden.’
- Villains are harder to find in Clinical Laboratory News, which looks at the debate in laboratories over testing for deficiency in prohormone Vitamin D. But there is also a back story here involving research findings, the mass media, and the public.
Meanwhile the tech industry is looking for a piece of the healthcare sector.
- Also from Genetic Engineering and Biotechnology, Microsoft’s health solutions group has grown from four to 400 members. This year Microsoft released its Amalga Life Sciences 2009 solution package for life sciences research information.
- From Health Management Technology, software as a service (SaaS) is finding a home in the healthcare sector, with NYU’s Langone Medical Center choosing an SaaS system called ePREMIS to straighten out a muddle of legacy administrative and accounting systems.
These are only a handful of the 33 articles conveniently summarized in this month’s TecTrends Reporter on Healthcare. Read the whole Reporter to give you a big picture view of the whirlwhind of activity taking place across the healthcare technology spectrum.
Talking in the Library
October 14th, 2009Public libraries were the original cloud resource, where generations of kids went for books they could not afford to store locally (i.e. buy), and even more than that, for books they would never have known existed if it weren’t for the library shelves. In spite of dire warnings that public libraries would go the way of the giant auroch, if my local branch is anything to go by they are very much alive.
The public library world, says Zeth Lietzau, was an early adopter of the Web 2.0 idea, starting back in 2004. In U.S. Public Libraries and Web 2.0 – What’s Really Happening? (alas, not available free online), he looks at how well they are doing.
The picture is mixed. This should be no surprise. Big public libraries have done a pretty good job of putting their catalogs online (Open Public Access Catalogs, OPACSs, in the jargon of the trade), and some are experimenting with nifty Amazon style user recommendations and reviews. The thousands of small public libraries are lagging. The one Web 2.0 area where they are more competitive is blogs – though too many public library blogs, says the author, have a single entry dated 2006.
In the same issue of Computers in Libraries, Paula Webb and Muriel Nero examine OPACS in the Clouds. Their focus is academic libraries, but the catalog access services they cover, such as LibraryThing, will find a place in public libraries as well. Complete with those nifty bells and whistles, which can do more than just entertain. Especially intriguing is the role of tags in forming ‘folksonomies,’ linkages among topics that grow up from users, connecting ideas in different ways from standard cataloging taxonomies.
As someone who grew up around libraries, and pays a weekly visit to my local branch, it’s good to see public libraries staying on top of the information world.
The SEO Game
October 4th, 2009As a writer I have mixed feelings about search engine optimization (SEO). On the one hand, no one writing to engage a human audience wants to do things like beating popular search terms to death with repetition, in hope that a simpleminded search bot will notice them more that way.
On the other hand, I learned the power of search terms a few years ago when my old website turned up as the first Google result for interstellar trade. My top ranking did not bring worlds knocking on my door to broker deals, but it was cool being Google’s go-to guy on the subject. (Alas, economist Paul Krugman once wrote a paper on interstellar trade, and when it got online it knocked me out of the top spot. But I am still on the first page.)
More recently I was delighted – and, the first time, a bit startled – when Amazon.com went live on my work, adding links to relevant books and films. There was the occasional miss (a writer about frontier-era Canada who had the same name as one of Henry VIII’s wives), but all in all it was an impressive display of Amazon’s ad algorithm at work. It did exactly what it was supposed to do, using text I wrote for people, not bots.
All of this – on both hands, so to speak – has confirmed my skepticism about some popular SEO hype.
There is no magic bullet formula for pushing your page up in the the search engine rankings. The story of search for the last 10 years has been people trying to game search engines, starting with simple tricks like white-on-white text, invisible on the page but read by search engines spiders.
Google muscled past the early search leaders like Alta Vista by making search smarter, which in part means not letting themselves be gamed. Their bread and butter is delivering useful search results, and they put a lot of effort into it, because if any other search engine – like, say, Bing – became markedly better at it, Google would be in a world of hurt.
But there is a third hand. I do a lot of search, and on the whole Google works pretty well. Practically none of my search use, however, has anything to do with e-commerce. And on those occasions when my search terms do relate to e-commerce the results get very cluttered very fast. Getting on the first page of results for interstellar trade is one thing. Getting a high page rank for auto parts is another matter. It is hard to blame merchants for struggling to get every bit of advantage they can.
A great deal of SEO, in fact, has nothing to do with fiddling text to game search engines, but is a matter of best practices in website design, such as using meaningful terms for links instead of ‘click here.’ Another part of SEO, perhaps the largest part, amounts to recognizing that search is about words and language, and the ways people use them to look for information online.
So I remain skeptical of anyone who claims, for example, that larding text with some artificial percentage of search terms will improve your rankings. Google has shrewd linguists who have analyzed billions of lines of text; chances are their algorithms can distinguish natural emphasis from artificial larding. But most websites can stand to be cleaned up, and so long as you don’t expect magic bullets, an SEO perspective can help you help the people who might want to find your site.
Flying Into the Cloud
September 3rd, 2009Nothing on the current Internet scene is bigger than the Cloud. Gmail is there, and Google is staking its future on the Cloud. But then, Google has always been in the Cloud. Social networking, the hottest thing, is all in the Cloud. And Software as a service (SaaS), provided from the Cloud, is a looming overcast over the enterprise marketplace.
The Cloud is as big as the Internet sky, and like an invisible tornado it wants to hoover up everything – your apps, your operating system, the backup drive tucked into a corner of your desk – and whisk your entire desktop to Oz. No more massive operating system taking up half your memory before you open any applications.
But there are a few bumps of turbulence in the cloudy sky. An intruder hacked into the Google Apps Twitter implementation, getting in through the password reset function. (How wonderfully, or dreadfully, ordinary.) This caused a stir for the City of Los Angeles, which is planning a shift to Google email and productivity suites, and triggered a whiff of anxiety among cloud computing advocates.
It also triggered articles in the business press that, like many such articles, play Captain Obvious, reminding you of things you already know but easily forget. Do ask your cloud vendor questions about security. (And really ask; don’t just ask boilerplate questions and accept a boilerplate answer.)
Some particular technology applications favor the Cloud. Server demand can fluctuate widely, for example, and a server farm can assign units as needed. An e-commerce firm with its own servers must either face slowdowns when traffic is heaviest (sale days, for example), or must keep servers that sit idle most of the time. Perhaps it doesn’t hurt that most people with websites, like me, have them hosted somewhere. So we are accustomed to having our websites hosted out in the Cloud.
Other Cloud successes seem due to particular firms and their services, such as SalesForce.com. I don’t have a staff of salespeople, so I haven’t a clue what this SaaS package does, but it must be doing it pretty well because it gets a lot of attention.
Whether the Cloud conquers business computing is going to end up depending mostly on fairly prosaic things like comparative cost of onsite hardware versus cloud services, perceived service quality, and how many people out there come up with killer-app Cloud solutions.
On the consumer side it is more complicated. Are people comfortable storing their personal files off in the Cloud somewhere? Don’t some people wish they could delete some of their Facebook pictures, and really delete them? And I like knowing where the manuscript of my novel is, a copy safely on my backup drive. How safe that really is, is another matter, but I like the feeling. Do I really want to entrust it to the Cloud?
But the mobile Internet will probably win it for the Cloud. My desktop is one thing, but no one expects to keep everything they own, so to speak, loaded into their smartphone. Which won’t keep you from demanding access to all your virtual stuff, whenever and wherever you want it. With a mobile device storing something in the Cloud feels natural. The coming mobile Internet age will probably leave earthbound desktop users like me as quaint fossils, with my external drive still next to my landline phone.
Clash of the Titans
August 24th, 2009Google CEO Eric Schmidt’s resignation from the Apple board early this month has tech industry observers picking their seats and calling for hot dogs wrapped in grape leaves. Another tech industry battle of giants may be shaping up, this time to rule the mobile Internet. And for once Microsoft will be watching from the stands instead of fighting it out as one of the gladiators.
Peter Burrows of Business Week gets props for putting the looming fight in historical context. Battles royal are nothing new to the tech industry. In the 1980s it was a double round as Microsoft both wrested the PC away from IBM and muscled past Apple to dominate the personal computing market. In the late 90s it was Microsoft again versus upstart Netscape in the browser wars – a desktop battle over access to the Internet.
What makes the looming Apple-Google battle an epic is that more than just market share is at stake. Like the battles of the 80s it pits open standards against a closed ecosystem. IBM took for granted that the hardware manufacturer would call the shots, the way it was in mainframe days. Apple thought the same thing. Microsoft upended them both, first turning desktop computers into a commodity, then opening its operating system to third-party applications. ‘Openness’ is not a word we associate with Microsoft, the company everyone loves to hate, but it conquered the world by letting in third party apps.
Apple survived, proving that even in the tech industry there are second acts. With the iPhone it has jumped to an early lead in the industry’s fastest-growing segment, the mobile Internet. But one thing hasn’t changed since Apple II days. The iPhone App Store may have thousands of apps, but if you want to play, Apple is referee and scorekeeper … as Google found out when it had an app rejected.
Google, in contrast, is the new champion of open standards, with its Android operating system slated for use in a slew of competing smartphone brands. And with its push for cloud computing it is proposing to move the apps onto the Internet, making the devices in our hands really just super browsers. So the stage is set for a new clash of philosophies: Apple, stylish and powerful but offering what Burrows calls a ‘walled garden,’ while Google offers the cloud.
Meanwhile, what of Microsoft? It hasn’t put down its sword completely, needless to say: Even as Google and Apple square off over the mobile Internet, it is taking aim at Google’s core business with Bing. But Microsoft has always been business-oriented (which is why MS Word has 10,000 features most of us never use and wish would go away). Bing, a ‘decision engine,’ is pretty unabashedly a shopping engine – and also a suitable platform for enterprise search.
Microsoft has never been a great consumer company. It conquered the computing market by offering business productivity suites, with the home computer a bit of an afterthought. It may be leaving old rival Apple and new rival Google to fight it out for the consumer-centric mobile Internet, and concentrating its own efforts on the business end. Meanwhile, take your seats as we await the march of the gladiators.