The two Microsofts

By Darren Abrecht, McClatchy Interactive

In the recent series of “Get a Mac” ads from Apple, John Hodgman personifies the PC as a boring, gray-suited middle-management type, and few of us care strongly enough to protest. Many of us appreciate Microsoft products for their familiarity or utility, but no one ever really gets excited about them. At least, that was the case until a little over a year ago, when Microsoft began unveiling a series of flashy new products. Suddenly they were eliciting the kind of gasps that techies usually reserve for companies like Apple or Google.

On the hardware side, consider Surface, Microsoft’s tabletop computing project. Imagine a multitouch display—like Apple’s iPhone, but much bigger—set into the form factor of a coffee table. The result is a truly novel computing platform, as different from desktop machines and mobile devices as they are from each other. Multiple users can simultaneously manipulate photos, maps and music using just their fingertips. The device can also interact with objects placed on its surface, including bluetooth-enabled phones.

On the software side, Microsoft has been generating a lot of buzz with a pair of projects from its Live Labs division. Photosynth can stitch together snapshots to build a three-dimensional model of a place. Photos of popular tourist destinations—already available on the web in large numbers—could be scooped up and used to create photo collages that could be “walked” through as if they were virtual worlds.

Meanwhile, Seadragon aims to create an infinitely zoomable graphical user interface. Imagine your collection of photo files arranged as a set of thumbnails on your desktop. Instead of opening a photo by clicking, you could just zoom in to view the photo in full resolution. When you’re done, zoom out, and keep zooming, until your entire collection of files becomes visible as if viewed from miles high.

These forward-looking initiatives will take real risks in being brought to the marketplace, which makes it all the more amazing that they’re being produced by Microsoft. The company has a well-earned reputation for waiting on the sidelines of an emerging market, letting smaller, nimbler companies absorb the risks of development, before hopping in and throwing its weight around to become a dominant player in the space.

Critics of the company refer to its “embrace-extend-extinguish” strategy: Microsoft adopts an established technology, produces a proprietary version that’s only partially compatible with existing standards, and then leverages its near-monopoly on the desktop to establish its own version as the new, de facto standard. The result is that companies which previously dominated the market find themselves marginalized.

Examples?

Novell, which produced the WordPerfect word processor in the mid-90s, claims that Microsoft’s Office suite made use of undocumented features of Windows which allowed it to out-perform competing office products. WordPerfect, the industry-standard word processor of the DOS era, faded into obscurity as Microsoft Word ascended.

Netscape claimed in Microsoft’s U.S. antitrust trial that the bundling of Internet Explorer with Windows amounted to unfair competition. Netscape’s browser, released earlier and at one time the most popular, has gone the way of WordPerfect.

The products underlying Microsoft’s other core businesses—Windows, Windows Mobile, MSN, the XBox—were late entries to the worlds of graphical operating systems, mobile operating systems, web portals and gaming consoles.

So how does one explain the two faces of Microsoft? With nearly 79,000 employees and a diverse product line, Microsoft is a galaxy of a corporation that can, at times, seem to lack a unified corporate voice. One thing is for certain: unless a project wins the support of the larger corporate culture, it will wither on the vine, regardless of the plaudits it receives from outsiders.

Consider the fate of Internet Explorer for Macintosh. When version 5 was released in 2000, it was widely praised as one of the best web browsers on any platform—the rare example of a Microsoft product for Macs that exceeded the Windows version. Then as now, the kind of people who usually take digs at Microsoft were giving the company a second look. But after the initial release, developers were diverted from the project, and the browser quickly began to lag behind the competition. Only minor updates and bug fixes followed until 2003, when Microsoft axed it.

The forces driving the new, radical innovation within Microsoft are swimming upstream against a culture deeply invested in the embrace-extend-extinguish strategy. It’s too soon to tell whether we’re seeing a new Microsoft or just a flash in the pan.

© 2007 McClatchy. Reprinted with permission.

A conservative prediction

I’m just going to come out and say what we all know to be true. Let’s call it the Manifest Destiny of the Internet.

The Manifest Destiny of the Internet is this: Every bit of media in existence¹ will be digitized and made available to the world in a form that is instantly accessible from anywhere and free to use.²

The “pirates” will win, and win so completely that we will forget what the fuss was ever about. Grabbing media without impediment of any kind will come to seem as natural as breathing.

As Cory Doctorow likes to say, there is no future in which bits will get harder to copy. There was a brief period of time, starting with Gutenberg in the case of printed matter and Edison in the case of audio recordings, when mechanical reproduction was possible but difficult—hence, scarce and centrally controllable. That period of time is ending.

I chose the term “Manifest Destiny,” with all of its connotations both dark and bright, for a reason. The transition to this world will be ugly. It will take a long time, and won’t happen without a fight. A lot of good people will lose their livelihoods. The quality of media may suffer, at least in the short term, while new methods of quality control are worked out.

The old business models will survive for a generation on the back of consumer habit; they may survive for a generation more under the umbrella of government protection. In the end, though, as the efficiencies of the black and gray markets triumph, Big Media will run out of lobbying dollars. Intellectual property as we know it will be no more.

Massive efforts are already underway to digitize the world’s media and make it accessible online. Google, Microsoft, and Yahoo are working with the world’s libraries to digitize books. Virtually every audio recording ever released can be found online—a project realized without any centrally organized effort.

Many of these projects are not sanctioned by rights holders, but increasingly, copyright holders themselves are making their catalogs available, reasoning that traffic can be monetized in any number of ways—see the New York Times archive and NBC/Fox’s Hulu, for instance. Scarcities will arise in the post-copyright world, along with ways to leverage those scarcities for gain. In a world where the viewer has unlimited choice, eyeballs and attention spans will become the new commodities to be brokered.

Edit: Anthony Grafton presents a contrary view in the New Yorker.

1. I’ll limit this to media which has been published and survived long enough to be digitized.

2. Also: high-quality, searchable, and fully hypertextualized.

Surf to it, click on it, wait for it to appear on your doorstep

You survived Black Friday—welcome to Cyber Monday!

Taking the left turn at Uncanny Valley

This weekend, I went with some friends to see Beowulf in IMAX 3-D. It was a very satisfying visual experience, but there was quite a bit of talk afterward about the failure of the computer-generated graphics to appear completely lifelike.

There was quite a bit of talk on this subject in the press, as well. The same conversation seems to happen every time someone makes a CGI movie that aspires to photorealism rather than falling back on the graphical tropes of the cartoon—the 2001 Final Fantasy movie got the same treatment.

It’s dangerous territory. Between depictions of life that we accept because we find them clearly artificial, and therefore harmless, and those that we accept because they fool us into thinking they are real, lie those depictions which we reject because they seem real, but somehow off. Robotics researchers use the term “uncanny valley” to describe this hypothetical space, whose occupants inspire in us a sense of mild to extreme revulsion.

We haven’t been able to cross the uncanny valley yet, with either our robots or our computer graphics. There will be a lot to think about when we succeed—science fictions authors have been preparing us since the mid-twentieth century. But I’m more interested, at least for the moment, about the prospects for computer-generated art once crossing the valley ceases to be an interesting challenge.

Consider, in broad strokes, the development of painting. The pursuit of realism occupied painters during the Renaissance. But once the techniques for realistic depiction had been developed and became widespread, realist painting ceased to be a fine art and became a craft—or the favored style of conservative and anti-intellectual regimes. The arrival of the camera freed painting from the requirements of a practical art, and modern painting became abstract or non-representational, a fitting vehicle for theory.

I think that the recent explosion of visually innovative video games is a good sign that a similar maturation of computer graphics is just around the corner.

Link roundup: surface computing

In the interest of posting more frequently, I've decided to start posting link roundups. On any given day I run through 50+ rss feeds and news sites, and compile lists of links that I think might be of use in writing future columns or blog posts.

Here’s the first batch: links dealing with the recent explosion in surface computing and multi-touch interfaces. I think there’s a widespread sense that this represents the first viable update to the basic computing interface since the popularization of the mouse.

Like that device, multi-touch interfaces allow us to interact with simulated space in the same way we interact with real space: by moving our bodies. Surface computing, however, represents a much more elegant way of doing so. By combining the point of physical contact and the point of visual representation, simulated objects become more phenomenologically material.

Jeff Han’s early (Feb. 2006) multi-touch table is now available in expanded form at Neiman Marcus for a cool $100,000 (found at Techdirt). Throughout his demo, Han emphasizes the intuitiveness of the interface, going so far as to claim that the interface has disappeared. Multi-touch computing is the rare example of a technology that seems to have arrived fully naturalized: it has appeared in our world as a new and fascinating species of cultural object, instantly graspable.

This effect may help explain why it’s already showing up in the toolkits of the barkeeper and the musician.

Invocations of the computing interface from “Minority Report” are becoming cliché, as in this examination of Microsoft's Surface table.

A couple more: Sharp combines multi-touch with optical scanning and, of course, Apple's iPhone—the most commercially successful implementation of multi-touch to date.

Edit: Somehow I missed this massive history of multi-touch computing from Microsoft researcher Bill Buxton.

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I’ve just got too much going on. Blogging will resume next week.

One to keep an eye on

Writer and comedian Stephen Fry has a new technology column at the Guardian. In his first outing, “Welcome to dork talk”, he objects to the distinctions so often made between between humanists and technologists...

Well, people can be dippy about all things digital and still read books, they can go to the opera and watch a cricket match and apply for Led Zeppelin tickets without splitting themselves asunder. Very little is as mutually exclusive as we seem to find it convenient to imagine. ... So, believe me, a love of gizmos doesn’t make me averse to paper, leather and wood, old-fashioned Christmases, Preston Sturges films and country walks.

... and between design and engineering.

What do I think is the point of a digital device? Is it all about function? Or am I a “style over substance” kind of a guy? Well, that last question will get my hackles up every time. As if style and substance are at war! As if a device can function if it has no style. As if a device can be called stylish that does not function superbly.

There is, I think, a growing consciousness of this last point. The “utility” and “efficiency” of a technological solution are often touted as if these were virtues unto themselves, and not a means to a greater end. The engineer who cannot appreciate aesthetics is like a miser who dies with millions but without having ever known a single earthly decadence.

There are some who would justify design by tying it to the bottom line. While it is true that beauty can grease the wheels of functionality, and that pretty things sell, I think this approach has it backward. Aesthetics is the end; functionality is the means. There is no objective reason why we should bother to go on living at all—we do so out of sheer preference, out of our aesthetic appreciation for living over dying.

Utility cannot be divorced from fancy. As we have struggled for decades now with poorly designed, nearly unusable, “utilitarian” computer technology, we have gradually come around to acknowledging the importance of taking pleasure in design.