Mashed Articles

For week 1 of my Book-a-week
resolution I read Free:
The Future of a Radical Price by Chris
Anderson.  Below is a review of that book.

Quick Review

If you have not read Chris Anderson’s The
Long Tail I would read that book instead of Free.  If you have read The Long
Tail, then Free is a decent investment of your time.  While Free is not technically
a sequel or a continuation of The Long Tail, it is a deeper dive into how shift from
physical media (such as CDs, DVDs, etc.) to digital media and distribution is effecting
our economy and society.

What I liked about the book

Before I started reading the book and even into the first 20 pages or so I was a little
concerned that Free was going to be focused on the mantra of “give everything away”
or “figure out the business model later”.  What I quickly found was that Chris
Anderson’s study of the “radical price” was clearly about using Free as part of an
overall strategy of having a solid business plan.  He actually starts with some
historical (going back more than 100 years) examples of how people have used Free
in order to gain traction in a market or used it to sell complimentary goods. 
He ends the book with many ideas and examples for using Free.

One of the other things that I really enjoyed was the sidebars
that Chris Anderson presents on real world examples of companies that use Free as
part of their business strategy.  They sidebars, despite being generally a page
or less in length, are rich in analysis and often have an interesting graph to illustrate
the example.  The Long Tail and the sidebars both made great use of the graphics
to add richness to the text.

What I did not like about the book

I alluded to the how much I liked the real world examples and graphics in the sidebars
in the last section.  I found that the main text of the book lacked some of the
hard data that I am used to in Chris Anderson’s writing style.  In Free he provides
lots of examples to support his ideas, but they often seem anecdotal examples. 
Contrast this with the rich data-backed examples that he presented in The Long Tail. 
I think this is more of a criticism of the research and writing style of the book,
rather than me thinking that the ideas he presents are flawed.  I think the ideas
that Chris presents are sound and everyone running a business should consider the
ideas presented if for no other reason than your competitors might be considering
Free at this moment.

An example of Free

This blog is a good example of Free (Chris Anderson identities it as such in the book). 
I post my thoughts here to share them with the world and in hopes to raise my reputation
as a Software Architect.  I take it a step further a put a Creative Commons License
on the work, so that other can take it and do interesting things with it and owe me
nothing other than an attribution.

Firmware bug
By Windell H. Oskay
Used Under Creative Commons

Yesterday morning I got several updates delivered to my laptop via Windows Update.  These were not security patches that are typically delivered by Microsoft on the second Tuesday of the month (commonly referred to as Patch Tuesday).  But these were non-security related updates to the system.  An example of one was an update to the daylight savings functionality, seems that governments around the world are still adjusting the start dates (see  http://support.microsoft.com/KB/979306 if you want the details).

Seeing the updates reminded me that it had been a while since I checked my various devices for updates to the firmware.  This was a good reminder, so I spent a few minutes checking the devices and bringing them up to the latest versions.

Keeping your firmware up to date is just as important as keeping your operating system and applications up to date.  Firmware updates will often correct application issues, close security holes, improve performance and even deliver new functionality.

The IEEE has a very dry, but functional definition of firmware:

The combination of a hardware device and computer instructions and data that reside as read-only software on that device

I tend to think of firmware as this magical layer of software abstraction that has a very intimate relationship with the hardware, but I am kind of a software romantic.

Firmware is becoming increasingly important in computing as we have more and more intelligent hardware devices.  I bet the average person carries at least 1 device that has updatable firmware on it and many of us who are “mobile” workers can carry 3 or more (I have 3 on me right now: Zune, Mobile Phone and laptop).  Even the speaker dock that I have for my Zune has firmware in it.

Firmware updates are different

One of the things that is so nice about Windows Update is that it can be set to automatically update the system by the user (in a home situation) or by the administrator (in a corporate situation).  For the most part your updates are on auto pilot at that point, with the exception of getting prompted for a reboot if an update requires one.

Note: I don’t mean to be a Microsoft “fan boy” in praising Windows Update here; the Apple software update process is similar and just as reliable.  There are philosophical differences between the two; Microsoft’s updates are more numerous, but much smaller in size and Apple generally prefers fewer, but much larger updates.  There are also update processes for software applications other than the operating system as well: Apple Update for Windows, Adobe, Firefox, etc.

Updates to firmware are generally not as seamless and carefree as the Operating System Updates.  Almost no hardware systems pull down the updates and apply them automatically.  The processes by which you apply the updates also vary greatly:

• The Zune and iPhone firmware updates are pulled down automatically and applied when you tether the devices, but they require software on the machine to accomplish it.
• The BIOS updates on a computer usually require you to download an specialized installer that updates the firmware the next time you reboot
• Home routers and access points generally have you download a binary file and upload it through the management interface

The slightly more complicated update process goes to the specialized nature of firmware, because it is at such a low level the update needs a little more care than updating a software application or even an operating system.

When was the last time that you updated your firmware?

With the coming of the New Year we see a lot of Top 10 lists.  You know like the Top 10 planning, design and development websites of 2009 or the Top 10 Quotes of 2009.  We are doubly blessed that since this is the “end of the decade” that we also get the top 10 lists for that as well.  You know like EPSN Boston’s Top 10 of the Decade (all Boston Teams) or Yahoo Games’ Top 10 Video Games of the Decade (Super Mario Galaxy in the top 10?, really?).

Not to buck the trend, I decided to put together my own list of influential technologies for the years 2000-2009.  As you read this, please keep in mind the criteria that I used:

• The technologies listed are not in any order
• The technology did not have to be invented after 2000, but had to have reached wide spread adoption or a major turning point after 2000
• I tried to avoid specific products or websites by name, but rather focused on the technology or the trend, rather than a specific implementation
• I am strongly biased by my own personal experiences with the technologies, your experiences with them may be different than mine

Portable Music Players / Digital formats – It is not hard to see the impact of the portable music player on our society, just walk down the street and look at the number of people who have white ear buds in their ear. 

While the music player is obvious to see, what is not seen was the companion shift to digital distribution of content and the mind shift that we made with the change.  The digital music stores helped the music players to take off (although all indications are that most of the music does not come from online stores).

RSS – Really Simple Syndication is probably the geekiest of all the technologies that I will list it.  This is one of the technologies that predates that 2000s, but saw wide adoption in the last decade; if had a blog or a website that published RSS before 2000, you should have a special badge to indicate your early adoption.  RSS is probably the third most popular document type on the Internet (behind HTML and CSS).  It is the best example of the power of a common data format.

Social Networks – early forms of social networking existed before the year 2000 (Yahoo Groups was one that I used to hang out in back in the day) and the concepts behind social networking even pre-dated the world wide web with people interacting on bulletin boards.  But again, it was in the last 10 years (actually 4 or 5) that social networking went from being a niche activity to seeing wide adoption.

The real impact of social networking is just now being felt as the “social” aspect expands from a casual activity that takes place out of work, to applying these principals to activities at work.  The overall trend of taking social technologies and applying them to the work place is called the consumerization of IT, and we will see it with a number of the technologies in this list.

Smart Phones – One of the things that the MP3 players mentioned earlier did was get us used to making out computing experience portable and taking it with us.  Going back to the 1990s we had Personal Data Assistants and cell phones.  It was natural to combine the two into one device and throw in the MP3 players as well. 

Broadband – In August of this year Comscore released their latest estimates of broadband penetration in the United States.  The national average is now 89% of all Internet Users have some form of fast Internet access.  Personally I have had a cable modem for nearly 8 years, but I entered the year 2000 with dial up access. 

High speed access at the home was unusual in the 1990s; most people only had high speed access at their work place.  Now broadband access is becoming so ubiquitous that the people who develop websites and applications are starting to take it for granted.  By itself broadband access is a fantastic improvement, but like many infrastructure technologies, the real power of broadband is as an enabling technology that brings us other things (like streaming media).

Streaming Media – As I am writing this I have the television on in the background showing a movie.  The interesting thing is that it is streaming from Netflix in full High Definition quality to my Xbox using my internet connection.  There is no special magic about the Xbox; I could just as easily be streaming to my web browser or to any number of devices that support streaming.  Nothing special about Netflix either, I can stream from dozens of sites.  Contrast this with prior to 2000 when video on the web (when you could get it working) was of low quality.    

GPS – the Global Positioning System dates back into the 1970s from a military experimental standpoint and has been operational for civilian use since the 1990s, but this is one of the technologies that really took off in the 2000s.  The obvious adoption inside of the car was a first step, but now that many phones come equipped with GPS we are starting to see the real applications of location awareness.

Game Consoles – Game consoles are not new by any stretch of the imagination.  As early as 1978 I remember hanging out with my friend Charlie after school every day playing his Atari 2600 for 46 minutes (the time between us getting off the bus and having to turn off the console before his mother got home from work).  But the generation of the game consoles that launched with the original XBOX and the PS2 are really a different class of systems.  The modern game console is a hub of entertainment, with connections to social networks and streaming video.  Certainly games have comes a long way from Space Invaders.

Social Media (Blogs, Wikis, Podcasts) – The last item is less about the technology and more about what it has enabled.  A vast reduction in production cost and a huge reduction in the distribution cost have led to the emergence of user generated content.  There are some that are saying that user generated content is replacing content from traditional media companies, but I look at the trend as additive; I still watch the evening news, but I have added social media to the mix as well.

I rather enjoyed putting this list together, but I am sure that I have missed a technology or two that is influential and would love to hear about the ones that I missed.  I will say that I intentionally left off search as a technology.  Search was clearly influential in the 2000s; however I think that it was established by the beginning of 2000.