Archis's Blog

As devices penetrate our ever-increasingly connected lives, we struggle all the more to keep them in control. Devices whose purpose is ever-increasingly vague, if not converging. Phones have become portable VCR’s, and palm tops have phones in them, while PC’s are home theatre systems, and I don’t even know what to make of gaming consoles that replace supercomputers!

What makes up the mess?

Devices: As devices converge (or diverge), we acquire new skills to use them effectively. When phones handle your workflows, can transparently beam presentations to bluetooth-enabled projectors, and play your favourite movies on the television, it’s not just enough to simply be able to do these things. Where does your favourite movie come from on your phone? From your PC? If so, which one? Your personal desktop at home? Your kid’s desktop? Your wife’s desktop? Your laptop? One of your many computers at work? Imagine you’re about to leave on a weekend trip and want a fresh movie on your phone. You know you own a few movies, but where are they?

All that thousand-dollar piece of hardware being able to play movies, is worthless if you can’t get your favourite movies on the damn device to begin with. This is just one scenario on one device! Let me make it even more fun – say you were already on your way and had no physical access to the machine on which the said movie existed. Your phone with the fancy 3G/Wifi connections, TV-out and hardware 3d acceleration, just turned into a piece of junk! And we’re just talking about plain old big files!

Data: Extend this to thousands of office documents you need to process. Add the millions of songs. Add the pictures which come from various sources – all your own cameras, family, friends… you get the picture. All these “objects” have contextual data associated with them – data which each device wants to process uniquely. This may include comments, ratings, rankings, tags, etc on your photos or songs. Copying these files around, in the conventional sense of the phrase, is like passing around stone tablets with caveman-drawings on them. Soon, the sheer magnitude of managing this data is overwhelming enough for us to just “give up!” one day.

That was just files. We also deal with abstract “objects”. I mean stuff that can’t be just dismissed as blobs of files – such as email, appointments, notes, annotations, contacts, blogs, etc. My blog is more than just a big text file somewhere – it has pictures, it has links, it has tags. The “blog” so to speak, makes sense only when all these elements are put together. As plain binary data streams, it’s just random noise. Although objects are files at the backend, what really brings them to life are the applications used to view them. This blog entry, without blogger, is junk. A contact, without an application that can leverage it to make phone calls or send mail, is an irritation, if not a gross frustration!

Applications: Features are intrinsically reflected in data (regardless of what certain critics may have to say). Go pick up your phone from 3 years ago and tell me if it can aggregate RSS feeds from your friends – it’s contact storage, no matter how “standardized” it may be, will not include a link for RSS feeds. And I wonder if you had to put in a feature that was never imagined by the original application writers? How do we extend objects to cater to future features?

Connections: And finally, we have links – objects are meaningless without a context. The purpose of these devices, files, objects is to ensure they can be communicated. A phone number is linked to the person who owns it. If not updated regularly, it’s a random series of digits – hardly an appealing feature to have. So does music and movies. They all work a lot better in a social context – what your friends have to say about them, how they rank them, and so on…

Even within the context of applications without the data, maintaining settings and configuration coherence across all of them is certainly a challenging proposition. Imagine taking an hour setting up your video player “just right” for that saturday-evening movie and having them lost after reinstalling it! How many board room meetings have you felt embarrassed in because the settings weren’t consistent with the computer on which your presentation was designed? (this happened to me today afternoon at the most recent)

The popular solution? Web-apps: One solution, and one gaining recent popularity, is to dumb down all devices into a web browser. Turn them all into an HTML reader, move all logic to the cloud, and you’re done. Given the current intractability of the problems, this solution is an appealing compromise, if not the one most desirable. You buy a gaming console which can displace a supercomputer, and you run a web-browser on it! You buy a phone with 3d hardware acceleration, and again, the best you can do is run a browser on it! And have 5-6 computers that you deal with on a daily basis, and you do everything in your browser! Why? Because with one centralized place to store, manage, organize your data and applications, you get convenience.

Are webapps desirable? I doubt it. I admit they may be necessary, but they’re certainly not desirable. Surely with all those “innovation” keywords flying around out there, we could do better? If I buy a supercomputing-capable gaming console, I expect it to do something…super! If my friends come over, I want to show off some of that supercomputability! I sure as hell don’t want to be browsing bland HTML pages and have my friends go, “Eh…*yawn*”

Another popular solution? Closed Ecosystem. Every device you buy needs to be “certified” for every other device you presently own. Given this precondition, everything “just works”. In the worst case you have to physically plug them together with a wire, and in the best case, you don’t care how the hell they do it, but they just talk to each other!

Is a closed ecosystem desirable? Honestly? I don’t care. I’m certainly not philosophical about this kinda thing. If I could afford it, I’d go buy all pre-certified devices. It’s just about money for me – what is the perfect ecosystem worth to me? I bought my previous PC intending to heavily mod it throughout its lifetime. Five years later, I disposed it three weeks ago with the seal still intact. Couldn’t care less if it allowed me to tinker with it. However, there seems to be a lot of vocal resistance to closed ecosystems, although people still do go buy these devices – and I don’t blame them – I prefer a $200 worth of hardware which gives me $100 worth of value instead of a $50 device which didn’t do the task I bought it for!

So what comes next? I don’t know… yet. Everyone’s struggling to figure this one out, and it should be fun to see what people come up with. We certainly do live in a nightmare of devices, and every day, we get categorized into:

1. Those who take this mess in their stride. They can use all kinds of gadgets, perfectly configured to “just work” to make for a pleasurable lifestyle.

2. Those who still have some hope and are struggling.

3. Those who’ve given up and either gone entirely into the clouds, and compromise on the experience their powerful devices could provide, for the convenience of having it all “just work”. And of course, those who’ve bought into the closed ecosystem of devices which give a great experience and just work too!