Upon 2020

Much ink has been spilled on open-source vs. proprietary licensing, and in the end, it’s a clash of civilizations: one whose goal it is to better humanity by making valuable technology freely available, vs. one whose members must return more money to their investors than they had to pay to the developers creating the software. Nobody ever belongs to both of those civilizations, at least not for long, so they won’t ever agree about what’s good and what’s evil, and neither is going to win that argument.

But perhaps it is time to move on to a reframed argument that allows us to make more progress. Here’s is a new attempt. (I think it’s new, please link to previous work from the comments.) Instead of good vs. evil etc etc I’d like to frame it from the perspective of the two major constituents of software. These are:

• people who contribute to the creation of software, aka software committers. I’ll use this term regardless how their software is licensed or distributed, just to keep things simple.
• people who obtain and then run software for some purpose other than caring how the software has been created or could be improved by them. I’ll call those software consumers.

For example, the software developers at Microsoft creating Word are committers, and I’m a consumer if I run Word to write a letter. Similarly, if I download OpenOffice instead, I’m a consumer and the OpenOffice community are the committers. Software licenses enter the picture in two places:

• to enable and guide the flow of money. If there is no legal obligation to pay, for example, businesses can’t rely on getting paid. So we need a legal agreement that defines where and when and how the money flows, and that can be enforced through the legal system: aka a software licensing agreement.
• to guide and often restrict the flow of the software itself. Very few committers choose a “do whatever you want” license agreement; many (proprietary and open-source) licenses are very specific about how to software moves and does not move from one place to another. More importantly, the license agreement governs whether and how consumers can become committers themselves (or at least hire committers working on their behalf).

Here are the main categories as they exist for committers:

Here are the main categories as they exist for consumers:

You guessed it, it was going to become a table . I’ve put the major licensing models into the cells of the table.

[Disclaimer: I'm not a licensing expert at all; this is the best of my understanding. (Please correct if you know better) And in the middle columns and rows, there are of course a myriad of finer points that are different, say GPL vs. AGPL.] But:

How does this reframed matrix help us? It helped me to understand that all these license choices boil down to a choice of “what can the committers do” and “what can the consumers” do? Specifically, under which circumstances the committers can ask for money, and under which circumstances the consumers can become committers. This latter part, as one of the two major axes structuring the space, was a big surprise to me. (I started out with a different axis, but that turned out to be wrong.) If Doc Searls is right and consumers are becoming producers, this second axis is a really important question — perhaps a much more important question than “good vs. evil”. Do you want your consumers be able to be producers with (or of!) your software?

Well, I’ll be “committing” this matrix with a “do whatever you want”-like license (aka Creative Commons, like everything else on this blog) for the bettering of humanity. And to help create sustainable software businesses!

Of course this creates many questions. Off the top of my head:

1. How wrong am I? Followed by the second, advanced level:
2. Now enter the cloud. How does this change? Does it? And:
3. What’s the optimal business strategy here?

This time around, it’s serious. The recent publication of the massive Kabul war diary by WikiLeaks signals the end of business as usual for the establishment. This publication happens to target the military establishment, but its reverberations will be felt in all parts of society, and eventually, in all countries and regions.

Back in the sixties, all the singing and dancing and growing of long hair didn’t really impact the establishment very much. In the big picture, not much has happened since.

The released Afghan war diary database contains a description of essentially every single event that happened in Afghanistan for some years. The good, the bad and the ugly. But more importantly, it’s the raw data, and it’s all of it. Anybody motivated can sift through it and understand any aspect of what happened in more detail than all the top-generals combined. (Who, not surprisingly, don’t have the time to sift through the details.) Which means that all answers that the top brass can possibly give about what happened are necessarily worse than the answers we, individuals, can assemble ourselves.

Wikipedia defines “establishment” as follows:

The Establishment is a term used to refer to the dominant group or elite holding the effective power or authority in an organization, society, or field of endeavour, in particular when viewed as being opposed to change. In particular, it can refer to the traditional ruling class or power elite and the structures of society that they control.

You can’t have “effective power or authority” without some form of information superiority, at least in that you know some facts that the challengers have no way of knowing. That information superiority has just gone away for the military, and listening to their reaction, they feel like fish out of water.

Regardless what you think about whether WikiLeaks is the greatest or the worst idea ever, it’s clear that as the internet and mobile devices continue to proliferate, more and more of these data dumps are going to occur in many segments of society, WikiLeaks or not. Every single time, information superiority will have been taken away from some establishment, and people outside of the establishment will have many questions (first) that the establishment can’t dodge any more.

The genie is out of the bottle. The only thing the establishment can do is to start to self-police. Can you imagine that after this leak, commanders in Afghanistan are going to issue the exact same orders as before? (I can’t.) Can you imagine that next time there’s a country to occupy (regardless how noble the cause), the public discussion sounds in any way similar? (I can’t.) And all of a sudden, the establishment will start behaving very unlike the establishment, because effective checks and balances suddenly exist: exposure will be more likely than not, and nobody wants any dirty stuff be found. So let’s not do any dirty stuff any more.

And even where there is no leak, by 2020 the combination of billions of cell phone pictures and movies, GPS information, and massive data processing infrastructure a la Hadoop, will let lots of people derive much of the same information from publicly available sources. No more information superiority, no more establishment power.

Like much else I cover on this blog, I’m not sure whether on balance, I think this is a good or bad thing. Not that it matters; it will happen whether I like it or not.

Can you imagine a world without an establishment? Not sure I can …

I arrive at the airport. At curbside, I drop my (to be checked) bags onto the conveyor belt. Takes 10 seconds.

As I walk through the front door of the terminal, my smart phone rings and confirms the number and weight of my bags. It also gives me specific instructions how to get to my flight, such as:

• turn right, pass by the pretzel stand, go another 20 steps to the left to the elevator as the escalator is currently broken; go to floor 5. etc.

I don’t check in. Instead, I directly go to security.

Instead of getting at the end of the security line, I swipe my frequent flyer card at a reader there. It tells me which security line to go to (taking things into account such as how much time there is till final call, whether I’m first, business or economy etc.)

I go to the gate and swipe my frequent flyer card to get on the plane. No boarding passes needed.

Time saved: priceless.

How it works:

• I book my flight at the airline’s site. It asks me whether I own a smart phone and invites me to download the airline’s branded app, which becomes their primary customer satisfaction tool.
• My suitcase contains an RFID chip with my frequent flyer number. A simple database lookup tells the baggage handling system where it needs to go. (Why again do airlines put paper tags on all bags today?)
• I don’t need to check in because my smartphone app knows I’m in the airport.
• I don’t need a boarding pass because I show my frequent flyer card. It’s been “upgraded” to the security of a credit card. Sometimes I might have to show government identification, too, but I need to do that today, too.
• I don’t need to worry whether I’ll catch my flight while standing forever in a long security line. Just like sometimes airline employees cut their passengers into the front of the line for close flights, the system does this automatically.
• I don’t lose or break etc. my boarding pass, so I don’t need to check in and get paper or print out paper. That paper does not containing anything anyway that isn’t in the database record easily found from my frequent flyer number.

This past weekend, while ending up in the wrong (endless) line trying to return from vacation, and not getting where I needed to go (”first agricultural scanning, then check-in, then carry your back all across the airport, then security” in case you wanted to know), I realized that the airport check-in system likely hasn’t changed in 30 or more years. Why oh why? What I’m asking for is not exactly rocket science, is it?

Will we have it or better by 2020? Unfortunately, I have my doubts.

Apparently, 1 billion Facebook “Like” buttons went up all over the web within the week.

Technically, this means, 1 billion web pages now include a piece of JavaScript from Facebook. That piece of Javascript is aware of the user’s identity (and preferences, and social network, …).

This enables Facebook to push out 1 billion advertisements to all over the web at the push of a button. These ads will be 100% targeted to the user, because they can be driven by all the personal information Facebook has about their users. They will almost certainly be better than Google’s because they are more aware of the user, and most crucially, can be social: e.g. “Your friend Joe is looking at SUVs today, would you like to assist him?” and stuff like that, just as with the “Like” button.

There is nothing anybody has to do, just Facebook needs to turn the knob on their end. Of course, they may decide not to overload the “Like” button, in which case it would be less automatic, but the exact same architecture can be used for ads, and now tens of thousands of sites know how to include them because they learned how from including the Like button.

Regardless which, if I were Google whose revenue is 90%+ advertising, I’d be really uncomfortable. How would you compete if you were them?

Interesting take and very consistent with my series of posts on how computing is moving all around us:

I truly believe that the models of human-computer interaction (”HCI”) that all of us grew up with are going to change dramatically in the next 3, 5, 7, 10 years. … the iPad is such an important device [because] it is a decisive break from the keyboard/mouse paradigm that we’ve been living in for 45 years (yes, the mouse is over 45 years old).

Add the “watch” paradigm of the TV, but which is not natural either.

The iPad makes electronic things touchable — if you think of it, a much more natural way of interacting than a keyboard or a remote control or a mouse. And because it is portable and can be put anywhere, and can act as a remote control, it becomes part of the set of everyday things around it, instead of being “a computer”.

Of course it’s a V1 device, so we have to overlook a few things as Eric says. But five years from now … transformational.

A techie debate is raging on the relative merits of relational vs. so-called NoSQL databases. I have a techie opinion and a stake in the debate, but in this post I’d like to make a business prediction that has nothing to do with the technical merits of one vs. the other at all. It’s only about Japanese cars and Detroit. And Oracle, which has been making more money off SQL than anybody else. Aka the Innovator’s Dilemma.

First the facts:

1. Big Oracle databases can do amazing things with amazing amounts of data, at even more amazing prices (counting software, hardware, people — total cost of ownership).
2. NoSQL databases can do somewhat different but also amazing things with perhaps even more amazing amounts of data, at a price close to zero.
3. The cool engineers and most innovative projects are at big internet companies and startups. Which rarely spend their money to buy Oracle databases any more, so they use NoSQL for their massive amounts of data.
4. The big sales for Big SQL are in enterprises, which by and large have less cool engineers building less cool things.
5. Wait a few years, and two things will have happened:
   • enterprises are going to play catch-up on the coolness, as they always have. So they will copy NoSQL successes inside the enterprise.
   • NoSQL databases will have a lot more features and support. So they will be mature enough for the enterprise.

You see where this is going, and it’s not pretty for Oracle’s market cap:

NoSQL databases are a perfect disruptive technology in Clayton Christensen’s Innovator’s Dilemma model. NoSQL are the cheesy, cheap, toy Japanese cars in the 1970’s. Oracle is Detroit. To rehash the history, some customers decided that a cheesy toy car was just good enough for them. The Japanese took the profits to make their toy car just a little less cheesy and a little less toy. So more customers bought them, which generated more profit that could be invested for a more serious car etc. etc. Detroit almost died (and still might) because it was unable to respond to a low-cost alternative moving upmarket, which is the heart of the innovator’s dilemma.

To the right is the graph from Wikipedia illustrating the innovator’s dilemma. Applying it to SQL/NoSQL, the “most demanding” arrow is the Oracle database. One of the lower arrows is MySQL (now also owned by Oracle). The arrow going across is NoSQL that upsets this very nice equilibrium.

I’m predicting that the relational database is going to die. (Not die as in “vanish”, but die in the same sense that the mainframe died: it became irrelevant for the majority of the industry.)

It’s not going to die because the technology is bad and something better (NoSQL) came along. That point can be made, and has been made many times in the NoSQL debate. But every time it is being made it seems to ignore the possibility that Oracle extend its database to include NoSQL features. That is an almost-certainty a little further down the road: think of it, if you were their product manager, wouldn’t you? My point about the death of the relational database here is a stronger one because it is about money.

The Big SQL business (in particular Oracle’s) is going to die because several major leading market segments (major internet companies, innovative startups, non-internet companies with massive amounts of data) are already massively investing in NoSQL, whose cost is much lower than the total cost of ownership for an Oracle database. So all the innovation is going into stuff that can be downloaded for free on the internet, that scales at infinitum, that can some things SQL can’t do, that does not require support contracts, and that is cool. That might even come included in other products and that does many things (think Map-Reduce) that a SQL database simply is not suited for. In a few years, it will be clear (what isn’t today) how to build the same kinds of enterprise apps against a low-fee NoSQL database and CIOs are going to question Oracle support contracts.

And then watch ORCL tank.

What is Oracle to do? Drop license fees? Open-source their “real” database (not MySQL, it doesn’t figure in this equation). Not going to happen. And if it were, it won’t help because the core problem is that they are too addicted to their fees at the level they are at. Wall Street would kill them. If they built an additional NoSQL product at a low price point it would have the same problem. Focus on their high-value customers is more like it, which Christensen calls “move to the high end” (aka expensive end). That strategy might patch the leaking dam for some time but only delay the inevitable.

I have no ill intent towards Oracle. I just can’t see any other future. Betting on NoSQL is the thing to do today, not because of all the stuff NoSQL does today but because it will move up-market, even if today it is still on the cheesy end. Soon it won’t be cheesy any more, and of course it won’t be called NoSQL by the time it starts winning seriously.

P.S. I realize very well that there are many rather different things on the NoSQL umbrella today. I do have an opinion which will be the ones winning and why, but for the purpose of this post, it doesn’t matter which one does, so I ignore the differences, because any of them will herald the end of Big SQL.

From Techcrunch. Quote:

The future of our industry now looks totally different than the past. It looks like a sheet of paper, and it’s called the iPad. It’s not about typing or clicking; it’s about touching. It’s not about text, or even animation, it’s about video. It’s not about a local disk, or even a desktop, it’s about the cloud. It’s not about pulling information; it’s about push. It’s not about repurposing old software, it’s about writing everything from scratch (because you want to take advantage of the awesome potential of the new computers and the new cloud—and because you have to reach this pinnacle).

From his responses to a survey at Harvard. Interesting read.

According to the 10-yr anniversary edition of the Cluetrain Manifesto:

There’s a lesson in there: it’s easier to predict stupidity than cleverness.

Sort of makes you think when trying to write this blog …

It is fashionable for corporations to declare their firm intentions to make the world a better place. If only one’s competitors wouldn’t embark on bad practices, then one would not have to copy them, or so the disclaimer usually goes.

Google’s threatened move out of China disrupts this excuse. You can bet that there are heated arguments right now in the strategy rooms of its Western competitors in China (Microsoft, Yahoo for search advertising according to this article) whether they should follow suit or shut up, kowtow and take the market share that’s up for grabs. Will men or mice emerge?

This could well turn out to be a watershed event for how the internet will look in 2020. If nobody follows Google’s bold move and nothing much happens, there is a good chance that more and more content filtering will be added to the internet, in China and otherwise. That’s the trajectory we are all on, unfortunately. (e.g. see this Wikipedia map on censorship) There will be workarounds, and hacks, to get at content anyway, just like in China today, and counter-hacks, and counter-counter-hacks, and so forth, but the net result is that content flows less freely.

On the other hand, if say, Yahoo declared their solidarity with Google today and threatened the same thing, it might well start an avalanche of Western firms saying, like Google, “enough is enough”. Imagine you have to defend, to your (mostly Western) users, that while the big guys are doing what your users think is the morally right stance, you are not. Not a great way of gaining users who love you. Yes, it would hurt to leave China; but it would also hurt to stay and lose Western customers instead.

In the best case, it would substantially slow and perhaps stop more censorship in the world outside of China for some time.

This is the kind of event that might have major ramifications for technology and society for years to come, which is why I’m putting it on this blog about technology in 2020.