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?

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 …

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.

In a report on the Stereo 3D PC market, Jon Peddie Research argues that 1 million 3D PCs will ship in 2010 and surge to 75 million units by 2014. Simply put, 3D will become a standard feature in your PC in four years.

Recently Netflix announced that it would move its own not insignificant web operation entirely onto the Amazon infrastructure. This may well be a watershed moment in the adoption of virtualized servers-to-rent.

By 2020, it seems safe to say that most servers will be operated virtually in massively scaled data centers like Amazon’s. More and more people are already pronouncing that they will not ever buy a server again. The reason is simple: why should I have to worry about adding or replacing disk drives? Fixing broken power supplies and all the other things that go wrong with servers? Massive server farm operates can do that at a fraction of my cost. And they enable me to operate servers on three continents, if I want to, without ever leaving my office; something impossible before.

The most obvious impact: sales channels for servers. So far, most servers have been sold in small batches: “I have a new site / I have a new app in my enterprise, let’s buy some servers for it.” In 2020, the number of server-buying customers will be much smaller: just the set of cloud operators. Like Google, they might even build their own servers. Margins will come down in any case. Not a market I’d want to be in.

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?

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.

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.

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).

Fry’s is selling Terabyte hard drives for $69.99 this week. A Terabyte is, give or take, a billion pages of text, or a million books. An entire library. Or a month’s worth of video. At the current rate, give or take, we’ll get a factor of at least 100 ($0.69 per Terabyte) by 2020; chances are it will be all solid state memory instead of spinning disks, but I don’t care too much about this distinction in this blog. I do care that we will also get substantially higher communication bandwidth and better broadband coverage by 2020, which can be used to instantly access more storage in the cloud. Note that much of the need for storage on client-side devices is driven by a lack of good high-speed connectivity: if I can easily get at my iTunes collection over a network, there is not need to carry a copy of it in my pocket, a major driver for client-side storage needs today.

Together, this means that by 2020 we’ll essentially have unlimited storage capacity for free on our personal devices for any foreseeable application. I’ve been attempting to come up with applications that require multi-terabyte storage on a client-side device, and have come up with basically nothing. Visual input is the highest-bandwidth input channel to humans, and there is no way even a single terabyte is insufficient as a cache to a high-speed communications link for video. Sensors on devices are unlikely to produce higher-bandwidth data either.

If we go into the realm of the very speculative, we could think of some wearable health monitoring systems (like “portable MRIs”) that could possibly produce higher data rates, but for a variety of reasons I think those are unlikely by 2020.

So the price points for client-side storage will gradually approach zero because there’s no need for higher-priced storage on the client. One lesson to draw: you won’t get rich as a vendor of client-side storage in 2020.

P.S. as usual, please tell me that I’m wrong if I am!

So if I were Apple, and there aren’t any screen size holes to fill any more, what new device would I come up with?

I can think of only one, and that may turn out to be the most important of all: smart glasses. Heads-up goggles that is, using the same form factor that has worked well for glasses for centuries.

My understanding is that in 2010, nobody has technology that could do that. But I wouldn’t be surprised if the following chain of events occurred through 2020:

1. 3-D movies like Avatar are a huge hit, so mass production of 3-D screens commences (already happening).
2. Computer desktop monitors go 3-D and the main Mac Finder / Windows Explorer user experience becomes 3-dimensional. (In the past month, the first 3-D monitors have gone on sale at Fry’s, at a rather reasonable price. I think this one is unstoppable.)
3. People get used to wearing glasses to look at monitors (they are needed for the 3-D effect), and the monitor manufacturers are bundling them with their monitors.
4. Then they might as well incorporate Bluetooth audio in the 3-D glasses. They sit on one’s ears already anyway, and it helps with watching TV in a room with other people.
5. Now the stage is set to make the glasses smarter: first, only a few pixels might be projected into the glasses. Perhaps the volume control indicator for the audio, or an alert.
6. They will also start to connect to one’s cell phone, so one can use the Bluetooth audio already on one’s head to take an incoming call. And before we know it, we’ll keep wearing the glasses even when not looking at a 3-D screen.

Of course, this is total speculation. But I’m quite certain we’ll have intelligent glasses, even if it takes a long time there, and this adoption avenue sounds plausible to me. They will then be the last screen we’ll buy.

By 2017 there could be 7 trillion wirelessly connected devices and objects — about 1000 per person.

Personally, I think their timing is off: I can believe that the hardware can be built by 2017, but not that we figured out how to manage or use them. But regardless of the exact date, it’s going to happen sooner or later.

Look around where you are sitting right now. With this vision, in a few years, at least a hundred should be in sight right now.

They looked like they had been married for a long time, like they were retired, and they were on a very normal afternoon stroll through the neighborhood. They didn’t look like the people who were on an urgent conference call while taking the kid to the park. Or like they were expecting a must-take call any minute. (both of them?)

They looked like they put on their headsets every morning as a matter of course, calls or no calls. I do that, too, some days, when I’m expecting to be on a bunch of calls and on the move (because I always misplace my headset on the move). But I don’t do it as a matter of course. And they were a generation older than me.

There is this transition between when something is a tool that I may or may not use, to something I attach to my body and in a way it becomes part of me. The transition to becoming a cyborg.

I figure our cyborgishness is growing exponentially:

First, our ancestors augmented their bodies with clothes to keep warmer, and put on shoes.

Glasses, for those who need them and could afford them.

The next one must have been the watch.

Now everybody has a cell phone. Not sure it qualifies as “part of us”.

But now we are apparently permanently adding headsets to our ears.

My guess is that augmented reality glasses will be next. Separate post on that.

One step at a time to being cyborgs. Perhaps more than one in the next decade. And all without a public outcry.

According to the [court] filings …, the laptops issued to high-school students in the well-heeled Philly suburb have webcams that can be covertly activated by the schools’ administrators, who have used this facility to spy on students and even their families. The issue came to light when …[a] child was disciplined for “improper behavior in his home” and the Vice Principal used a photo taken by the webcam as evidence.

This is what I meant. Times a hundred.

P.S. Gotta love that vice principal. You sort of wonder just what exactly students learn at his school.

It will be improved, of course, with more memory, more sensors, more connectivity options, more situational awareness, more data feeds, better screen resolution and so forth, but it will be very recognizable with what we know now.

It will still make and receive calls, and we’ll still use it to look up information such as a map of our surroundings.

It will also become the hub in a hub-and-spoke system of communications with smaller devices we’ll also carry. Today’s Bluetooth headphones are the first example of that. More in a separate post.

Many of those screens will have cameras that watch what we are doing, try to make sense of it, and react. Many of them will coordinate their actions as we move through the house. It will feel like we have “tunneling” windows to other parts of the world, some of them to people, some to places, some to data.

Much of the data will be transmitted to outside the house, raising a host of new security and privacy problems.

A few months ago, I banned all music CDs from our house, because all they did was collect dust. We had not touched a CD for years as iPods and iTunes took over. Looks like soon, we won’t touch many books either. Certainly the stack of magazines we read is much smaller than it was 10 years ago. It will be zero in 2020.

I’m sure I have a few books in our collection that won’t be available electronically in 2020, and we can’t rip them easily (unless Google really speeds up scanning …) So I’m not expecting an outright ban like for our CDs. But perhaps our house could do with 1000 or so less books than today. Imagine what we could do with all that space!

But more importantly:

• Barnes & Noble stores will go the way of the local Blockbuster.
• Public libraries … perhaps become glorified cyber cafes? Or iPad rental stations? Or go away? Shiny new public libraries worth millions may turn into obsolete dinosaurs much faster than city planners are suspecting.

Eventually, electronic books will also change the school system as we know it. Teachers, at least in the middle and higher grades, already have lost their traditional monopoly on knowledge. There are many students now who know much more about particular subjects than their teachers ever have.

But now image the future text book. iPad and the like will make it possible to go beyond copying the paper into PDF format, so to speak, which is what many electronic school books do today. It just the first step, like putting the equivalent of putting static brochures on the web, as many businesses did in the first years of the web.

Next-generation textbooks will make use of their always-on internet connectivity:

• to dynamically change the way they teach things based on what works better, based on real-time feedback from their customers
• to incorporate current events as they occur, e.g. for social study subjects
• be dynamic, e.g. let students interact with a (virtual) science experiment and see what happens.
• put more detailed reference information into hyperlinks everywhere over the book, for the more interested students
• add collaboration tools for more interesting (non-rote) homework…

The possibilities are endless. And at $499, and falling through 2020, very much viable given the cost of textbooks.

Strike off another “cultural institution” — books — for the dust bin. Unlike recoded music, books go back to the beginnings of civilization and in a way define what is history and what pre-history. If this is the end of books, perhaps we are now truly entering post-history.

I remember the first story I read about Amazon 10+ years ago. How Jeff Bezos moved to Seattle, set up shop across a bookstore, and sent people across the street to get the books that were ordered on www.amazon.com, so they could be mailed.

Today, Amazon is perhaps the greatest threat to Dell. Not because of the books. Not because they build better hardware (they don’t even build hardware, never mind better hardware). But because for me as a customer, the choices are: 1) buy a box, from Dell, or 2) rent something that walks, and talks, and feels like a box (although it isn’t a box) from Amazon. Whose hard drives don’t fail, whose ethernet cables don’t come lose and for which I don’t need to make sure I have an UPS.

I’m afraid to say that Amazon wins.

If I had to bet on who still exists in 2020 between the two of them, Amazon wins by 90 to 10.

Mystifying bit: why doesn’t Dell operate an EC2-like datacenter today? They got to realize that there are two kinds of computers customers are buying today, and they only sell the old one.