Ólafur Andri Ragnarsson

Laws and treaties are killing the Internet

When the Internet first came into the mainstream the most amazing thing about it was how global it was. I could, using my desktop computer in Reykjavik, Iceland, view web pages coming from a server in Brisbane, Australia. I could get the home page of a restaurant in San Francisco to see the menu. I could read the local news paper in Eugene, Oregon. With Amazon, I could order books and with Classic FM, I could listen to classical music. The Internet was global and made the world a single united place. Now we are seeing more and more indications that the Internet is getting local. Laws are slowly destroying the global Internet.

As I mentioned in a previous post (see The State of the Internet) the law is changing the Internet for the worse. Let’s take few examples. I subscribe to Audible, a site with audio-books. Usually when I find an interesting book to buy, it ends in a disappointment. As soon as I sign in, the book is nowhere to be found. The reason is that Audible cannot sell the book in my region so it does not come up in a search. This restriction makes Audible much less interesting and practically useless to me and my credits just pile up.

UK based Classic FM stopped working one day and displayed this message:

“Unfortunately, due to music-licensing laws, we aren’t permitted to allow non-UK users to listen to our stations online.”

Hulu has a similar message:

“Hulu is committed to making its content available worldwide. To do so, we must work through a number of legal and business issues, including obtaining international streaming rights.”

Music site Pandora has this:

“We are deeply, deeply sorry to say that due to licensing constraints, we can no longer allow access to Pandora for listeners located outside of the U.S.”

There are many more examples.

What makes the Internet so special and a wonder-the-of-world is slowly being killed by old and outdated laws that don’t keep up with the way people use technology. International agreements take even more time to adjust. It is not that people outside US or UK or wherever the content is located, don’t want to pay their share to the authors of the content. If I buy a book on Audible, it is not like my money would be any different than a person in the US. The problem is that someone owns the rights to distribute the content in Europe or even in Iceland. The site mentioned above do not want to violate that right and be subject to litigation.

This shows how the laws are outdated. Now that we have technology which allows a music site like Classic FM and TV station like Hulu to have international customers and expand their revenue base, limitations due to physical distribution prohibits this. With the Internet the distribution is not a issue as distribution itself has no value, yet the laws protect those that have rights to distribute. The real problem however is that there might not even be any will to change this. The law is destroying the Internet – it should be the other way around.

The Internet is far from dead but some people are doing their best

Singer Prince made the news headlines earlier this month due to his comments that the Internet is over. A tsunami of reactions followed where people rejected this ridiculous claim coming from a singer who distributed his new album on a plastic disk with a printed newspaper. While people made fun of the singer, at least he got some exposure. But there is actually some truth in what Prince is saying. The Internet might be too important to die and disappear, but there are strong forces that are slowing killing the way we use the Internet.

Predictions that the Internet is over are not new. In the 1994 Nov/Dec issue of Internet World magazine (see Internet in a Box) Joel Snyder talks about how the Internet is choking. In his article titled Internet: Going South,  he claims that too many people are using it. Discussions are difficult to follow since too many people are posting useless comments, directory listings are getting too large and that it is difficult to find anything anymore. Mr. Snyder was right. The Internet of that time was going away. By going mainstream in 1994-5, the crowd was killing the way we used the Internet prior to 1994. Later we would get sites like Yahoo! and Google help us use the web and the Internet just continued to grow.

The Internet is always changing. Today it is not the result of too many people crowding up the network. Today there are two professions that are mainly killing the Internet as we know it: politicians and lawyers. The problem has to do with law and the lawmakers cannot keep up with the rate of change introduced by the Internet. This is causing all sorts of disruptions. Even worse, it is not clear if the politicians really understand the Internet and the way people are using it. The net-generation has adopted a totally new way to use content, yet this generation has no representatives making laws.

Unfortunately the results are that laws are passed that try to control the network instead of allowing people to use it. Content owners like big music labels have for years used the law to control their music with only limited success. Governments in countries like Germany and the US have banned all Internet betting and yet, people still bet on illegal sites that happily take all the profit and pay no taxes to the country of the punter. Many countries have or are considering adopting a three strikes rules where content owners can complain to an IPS about illegal downloads – and the offender’s Internet access is revoked.

The Internet is a living thing, constantly changing. As with many new technologies it proposes new business models and new opportunities. The problem is when the incumbent businesses and governments do not want to understand the technology and try to take laws that worked prior to the technology and try to apply them in totally different environment. Just like Mr Snyder’s Internet from 1994 is gone, chances are that today’s Internet will also die to be replaced by new uses and new rules.

Tablets are causing disruption to laptop sales. History is repeating.

Most people love cool new electronic gadgets. The iPad tablet is an example. Beautifully designed, pretty powerful and fun to use. Importantly, it is also easy to use. People are finding out that they can fulfill most of their computing or surfing needs with tablets like the iPad. Indeed we are seeing that the tablet is beginning to disrupt laptop sales.

There are indications that tablets will be popular this year and in the coming years. Tablet sales are expected to reach  15 million units in 2010, and 28 million in 2011 (see Report: iPad, tablets to cannibalize ‘Wintel’ laptops). While this will introduce new users to computers, this will also take a some cut out of the market share of laptops and netbooks. This is a very good example of disrupting technology.

This trend is not surprising since computers are moving from being technology products to becoming consumer devices (see the iPad Effect). This is a normal evolution of technology. As products become less technical and more functional, the market usually increases and the majority of people can start to use the product.

Another interesting thing is that we are seeing new types of operation systems grow in market share. iOS from Apple is on millions of devices and Android is a popular tablet OS available to anyone and growing fast according to some reports. These operating systems are based on real systems like the MacOS and Linux, but they are simpler with simpler interfaces (see Human Computer Interaction. This could have impact on operating system vendors, in particular Microsoft, makers of Windows.

The tablet is causing a new shift in computing and disrupting the current form of computers. If you compare tablets to personal computers, they may be lower performance and cheaper, but many disruptive technologies have this attribute. The personal computer itself a good example. History is again repeating itself.

My article titled Your online future needn’t be a lottery was just published in G3 Magazine. In this article I’m looking at the future of lotteries and I believe this future is going to based on the Internet and interactive games.

Many lotteries have not taken the opportunity to expand their market, increase their portfolio and offer online games. Many lotteries in Europe and in particular in Scandinavia have experienced online success, without seeing major decline in terminal revenues.

The online world cannot be ignored. Today’s consumer isn’t just online; (s)he is online on the move and if we’re being serious about extending business strategies to cater for our consumers and in turn, maintain a sustainable, scalable business, then this fact cannot be ignored.

See the full text of the article here in PDF: Your online future needn’t be a lottery

Tech news over the Easter weekend were dominated by one device: the over-hyped iPad. Every major and not so major tech source has done a review of this thing. Opinions were out weeks before the device was even available. Comparing it to it’s smaller cousin, the iPhone you may wonder if this device will have similar impact. The iPhone simply turned the telecom industry upside down and reshaped how we think of mobile phones. This is sometimes called the iPhone effect. So, what will the iPad effect be? Here I’ll present some ideas.

The iPad is a Consumer Device, not a computer. There is a big difference between technology products like computers and consumer devices. With the former, the focus is on the technology while the latter focuses on the non-technical consumer and functionality. Of course under the shiny appearance, the famous tablet is a computer with an industrial strength OS, but the important thing is, as with the cousin, that this is hidden.

We don’t have to look far for a computer dressed up as a consumer device. Consider the PlayStation 3. This powerful machine is a consumer device. It has two buttons, one to turn the machine on and one to eject disks. The operating system is focused on playing games and consuming content like music and video. Anybody can operate this machine right out of the box. And in many cases it is the most powerful machine in the house. Personal Computers and the major desktop metaphor operating systems are still very much technical although they have improved dramatically over the last few years.

The subject of the desktop is also an important issue. The iPad could challenge the conventional desktop metaphor user interface. The metaphor of a desk with folders and files, documents and directories is decades old. That’s like working in an office which needs to process paperwork all the time. That’s the legacy of PCs, but who want’s to organize their personal stuff and experience in file cabinets? The interesting point is this: will iPad start the escape from the old office-like desktop metaphor of organizing content?

An interesting side-note is that tablets are not new. When Microsoft introduced its tablets in 2002, they may have looked like crippled computers that were missing the keyboard and mouse. The reason was that these tablets were computers with the same desktop operating system as desktop computers. This is what I call the Prevailing Technology Trap. Users saw tablet PCs as inferior computers, not as a new type of device. If the iPad can avoid this trap, it is precisely the point that might make the iPad an important device. Perhaps the most important issue that separates the iPad from the old tablet PCs is both the elegant hardware and the excellent and intuitive multi-touch interface. This is the most noticeable feature of these new hand-held devices.

It still remains to be seen if the iPad is a new type of device. Initial sales numbers indicate an high consumer interest. As many technology writers have pointed out, the reviews of iPad are very polarized, either people like it or they see no use for it. This is very interesting if you look at history. Many disruptive technologies had similar reactions. The early PC was dismissed by many mainframe and minicomputer users as inferior and low performance. However, non-computer users embraced it. If this is any indication, we are entering the decade of the tablet.

Digital book readers have the possibles to improve books in innovative ways.

(Apple iPad picture found on cnet.com)

Apple last week released its version of a tablet, the iPad. While it looks like an elegant device, it is similar to other hand-held screen computers. Like with the iPod, the real innovations will likely be the associated software services like the bookstore introduced. This confirms my belief that printed books are about the get disrupted by digital books. Apple’s e-reader software takes experience of reading paper books to the digital format. While it is clever to take a familiar model people know and replicate it on-line, it can restrict innovative use of new technology.

Technology cramming is when products that were invented with one technology get crammed into new technology. There are many examples of technology cramming. The first cars looked like stagecoaches, the first online newspapers looked like printed newspapers. And now digital books in ereaders look like printed books.

The reason for this is what I call The Prevailing Technology Trap. Current and dominant technology will highly influence new innovation, and can even restrict them. Innovators are so influenced by the current technologies that they will try to work according to them, including their limitations.

Even Alexander Bell was not trying to invent the telephone. He was trying to improve the telegraph, the prevailing communication technology at the time.

The digital e-readers with the on-line Internet services have many possibilities to improve books. Books are traditionally linear stream of text. Some books have media items like still pictures. With digital books these restrictions don’t apply. Textbooks for example can have hyperlinks to further explanations, embedded videos, and cross-references. Many Internet news stories have links directly to their sources.

With digital books, text can even be in different sizes and depth, for differentiated learning. Consider a textbook that is in a compact mode. It will have a short and concise text with all major points. In expanded mode it will contain more explanations and examples, and in elaborate mode it might have several case studies to explain concepts in more depth. Students can choose which version to read. A quick review for an exam might for example favor the compact mode. Stories can also be more flexible in storytelling. What if you could read a book in different paths? Or digress into another story or a subplot before continuing with the main story.

With digital books, new possibilities emerge. As the new digital format of books matures we will see books escape the limitations of the printed format and truly become a new experience.

Recently I did a presentation on software development in distributed environment. Since Betware has six offices around the world with twelve teams we need to manage distributed teams. Our PMO has good experience in dealing with teams where the members are located in different offices and timezones. We have found out what works and what doesn’t. But, at the end of the day, the best rule is this: don’t distribute your teams.

In the era of constant connectivity you might think that its ridiculous to worry about management of distributed teams. In fact, we exchange information in real-time. We can have text, audio and video in real-time. And that is exactly what we do. We deploy an IP phone station that links every employee’s computer (with speaker headset) within the company. Meeting rooms have speakerphones and cameras. With Microsoft Communicator or TeamView we can share desktops.

But in the end nothing works better than just sitting down with your coworkers and going over the details. Face to face communications. If you think about agile software methodologies the key is high communication bandwidth. Indeed, the important thing about development is the communications. This is the same with software architectures: don’t distribute you objects. Network latency will kill performance. For teams the same applies for communication.

Of course for practical reasons, it is not always possible to stick with a team in one location. There might be expertise required that is not possessed within the team in one location. The team in one place might not be enough and more team members from other locations need to help. Whatever the reasons, we always have some distribution and remote communication. Just like with distributed architecture, you need to choose your boundaries carefully. What we try to do at Betware is to define “project silos” that are subprojects with in projects. By defining the subproject carefully you can control the communication boundaries.

Communication technologies will improve, and more importantly people’s comfort level of remote communication will rise. Eventually remote or virtual communication will become better then the real world. Until then, don’t distribute your team.

This month we have seen number of new Android phones enter the market. Android is Google’s new operating system for mobile phones. Android is entering the open-application phone market which is dominated by Apple’s iPhone. Comparing Android phones with the sophisticated and well-designed iPhone with it’s successful App Store, has caused people to dismiss Android as a serious threat to the iPhone. However, Android has one advantage that can makes it powerful: it is open platform. And open platforms tend to win.

Some may argue that Apple is open platform. Sure, anyone can put their applications in the Apple App Store, and thus the Apple model is more open then the walled garden models of the past. Still, the iPhone OS is tied to one handset manufacturer that uses one carrier. Android is available to any handset manufacturer and carrier. In this sense it is similar to the early PC model where any PC manufactures could build IBM PC compatibles and any program written for the IBM PC would work. The open model won over the closed model pushed by Apple.

For independent developers, the Apple platform is not entirely open. Apple has to approve your app. Granted, the process is painless and relatively quick and Apple tends to approve anything that is not offensive or that might upset Apple or it’s partner AT&T. Then even if you’re app gets approved it will get lost in the sea of 85.000 apps. And if you want to sell your app from your own App Store, that’s not possible.

iPhone developers, when asked about their interest in Andriod, will laugh and ask back if I have seen the Android phones. I admit I have never seen one, but there is a funny thing working here: it’s called sustainable innovation. With sustainable innovation products get improved gradually and only by comparing with old models you see the difference. Android phones will be just as cool as the iPhone.

With its introduction of iPhone, Apple disrupted the Telecoms industry in a major way. However, Apple adopted the closed proprietary model. This model is successful for the Mac brand and for iPhone, but if history of the PC can tell us anything, Android might become more important in the long run.

It’s another example of how existing technology gets disrupted by new technology and fades away. CompuServe on-line dial-up service was the king of the consumer computer networks in the 80s and into the 90s but got replaced by the Internet. For many the service was the first experience into the online world. According to news reports this week, CompuServe Classic was officially suspended July 1, 2009.

CompuServe was one of the earliest consumer networks. With dial-up modem access it offered person-to-person messages, discussion forums, news and more. Since this was an example of utility computing, the business model was based on subscription fee added to the cost of a phone call for dialing in.

CompuServe got disrupted pretty fast by the Internet when the World Wide Web started to spread with the Mosaic browser. Although the dial-up network provided many services we now take for granted on the Internet, for example news, shopping, travel and so on, the proprietary model did not stand a chance. The Internet was, if you take away the dial-up cost, free. More importantly, the Internet was truly global. In fact, the generative nature of the Internet is so powerful. Anybody can add a service to the Internet. Just install a server somewhere and plug it to the Internet. While CompuServe was great, it was only extended by the private company running it. This is another example of how the generative platform tend to win, if freely allowed to.

One of the core topics in my Design and Implementation of Software course at Reykjavik University is design patterns.

Design patterns are among the most powerful methods for building large software system. Patterns provide well-know solutions to reoccurring problems that developers are facing. There are several benefits of using patterns if applied correctly. Although design patterns are only over decade old, the science of patterns is becoming established, allowing for consistent communication. By using well-known patterns reusable components can be built in frameworks. Providing frameworks for reusability and separation of concerns is key to software development today.

This article appeared in Icelandic magazine Tölvumál.

Importance of Design Patterns and Frameworks for Software Development