One Platform

A couple of things have struck me about the iPad and iBook Author.  If you want to read some background John Gruber has a good summary.  It may well come down to whether being focused on one thing is wrong.

Firstly, Steve Jobs is quoted in his biography saying he'd give away textbooks.  This is a pretty big bargaining chip when Apple was talking to the textbook publishers: go with us or we'll give your product away for free.  How does this differ from Bill Gates saying they'd cut off Netscape's oxygen supply?

The other thing it reminds me of is Bill Gates' developer virtuous cycle.  This is where developers write applications for a particular platform, users pick the platform with the most applications which then feeds back to developers supporting that platform.  In the past, developers have had to make a single choice as to which platform they wanted to support in order to succeed.  It continues to happen with Android and iPhone.  Jeff Raikes has given a good example in the early days of Microsoft in, "The Principle of Agility", he says:

I suspect many of you or in the audience might if I ask you the question of, "What was Microsoft's first spreadsheet?" You might think Excel was our spreadsheet. But in fact, we had a product called Multiplan...Our strategy was to be able to have our application products run on all of those computing platforms because at that time there were literally hundreds of different personal computers.

And on January 20th, 1983 I realized, I think Bill Gates also realized we had the wrong strategy. Any guesses to what happened on January 20th, 1983? Lotus, it was the shipment of Lotus 1-2-3. How many personal computers did Lotus run on in January of 1983? One, and exactly one. And it was a big winner. So what we learned was when it came to customer behavior. It wasn't whether you had a product that run on all of those computing platforms. What really mattered to the customer was, did you have the best application product on the computer that they own. And Lotus 1-2-3 was the best spreadsheet. In fact, it was the beginning of a "formula for success in applications". That I defined around that time called, "To win big, you have to make the right bet on the winning platform."

So what's the principle? The principle is agility. If you're going to be successful as an entrepreneur what you have to do is you have to learn. You have to respond. You have to learn some more. You have to respond some more. And that kind of agility is very important. If we had stayed on our old strategy, we would not be in the applications business today. In fact, one of the great ironies of that whole episode is that in the late '80s or early '90s our competitors, WordPerfect, Lotus. What they really should have been doing was betting on Windows. But instead they were betting on and WordPerfect was the best example. Betting on, putting WordPerfect on the mainframe, on minicomputers. In fact, they went to the lowest common denominator software strategy which we switched out of in the 1983 timeframe. So, for my key principle is, make sure that you learn and respond. Show that kind of agility. 

This is echoed in one of the recent exchanges (about an hour into MacBreak Weekly 283) where Alex Lindsay talks about how important it is to him to make education interesting and how he's not going to wait for standards, he just wants to produce the best.  Leo Laporte responds by saying how important it is for an open standard to prevail in order to prevent every child in America having to own an iPad in order to be educated or informed.

You have to wonder if developers have reached a level of sophistication that allows them to use a cross platform solution or whether that will ever happen.  I think that it's inevitable that a more open platform will succeed but I'm not sure whether multiple platforms can succeed - we shall see.

If you want to here more there are many interesting conversations around including: Hypercritical 51, MacBreak Weekly 283 and This Week in Tech 337.

Pretending We All Don't Know

Some amazing writing and performance by Mike Daisey (mp3):
He just walked up to the Foxconn plant and wanted to see if anyone wanted to talk to him:

I wouldn't talk to me...she runs right over to the very first worker...and in short order we cannot keep up...the line just gets longer and longer...everyone wants to talk...it's like they were coming to work everyday thinking, "You know it'd be great?  It'd be so great if somebody who uses all this crap we make, everyday all day long, it'd be so great, if one of those people came and asked us what was going on because we would have stories for them...

I haven't gotten all the way through but he has a bit about talking to a girl that cleaned the glass on the assembly line:

You'd think someone would notice this, you know?  I'm telling you that I don't know Mandarin, I don't speak Cantonese...I don't know fuck all about Chinese culture but I do know that in my first two hours on my first day at that gate I met workers who were 14 years old, 13 years old, 12.  Do you really think that Apple doesn't know?  In a company obsessed with the details.  With the aluminium being milled just so, with the glass being fitted perfectly into the case.  Do you really think it's credible that they don't know?  Or are they just doing what we're all just doing, do they just see what they want to see?

It seems absolutely credible that they do know.

Update 17th of March: Retracting Mr Daisey (mp3) it appears his story was more fiction than not.  I took it more as performance than journalistic reporting but many claims aren't just errors they were just made up.  He did out and out lie when asked about child labour, "Well I don't know if it's a big problem. I just know that I saw it."  Which is a shame because verified reports of these conditions contain similar claims.

Jesus Says Share Files

A famous story, Jesus takes some fish and loaves (accounts differ - although maybe he did it more than once, setting up the "Jesus's Food Multiplier" stall every second and fourth Saturday of the month) and feeds some people (again accounts differ and they don't count women and children as people - let's just skirt around that entire issue shall we).

Everyone was impressed - even the disciples that were fisherman who had deep ties with the community.  They didn't say, "Hey, Jesus you've just destroyed our business model, you can't go around feeding thousands of people per fish.  One person, one fish - that's the way it has always been and that's the way it should always be."

Partitioning Graphs in Hadoop

A recent article at Linked In called "Recap: Improving Hadoop Performance by (up to) 1000x" had a section called "Drill Bit #2: graph processing" mentioning the problem of partitioning the triples of RDF graphs amongst different nodes.

According to "Scalable SPARQL Querying of Large RDF Graphs" they use MapReduce jobs to create indexes where triples such as s,p,o and o,p',o' are on the same compute node.  The idea of using MapReduce to create better indexing is not a new one - but it's good to see the same approach being used to process RDF rather than actually using MapReduce jobs to do the querying.  It's similar to what I did with RDF molecules and creating a level of granularity between graphs and nodes as well as things like Nutch.