ThinkFlood Blog

Steve Jobs has gone on record at least a couple of times recently quoting from Alan Kay: “People who are really serious about software should make their own hardware.” I think this is especially true when it comes to usability.

The mainstream arrival of the Internet over the last dozen years or so has brought about some amazing changes. Not least among these is the ability for motivated entrepreneurs to build and bootstrap new companies at unprecedented rates. This is a great thing for innovation and our economy, and I hope that it continues.

But there is one thing about the proliferation of these companies that bothers me: it seems that many people have begun to expect that great things can come easy. Now, I am not trying to belittle the hard work that these entrepreneurs are putting into their businesses — certainly it is no small task to start and run a successful business in any space. And certainly there are some great ideas out there that seem to be just made for the Internet experience through a browser. But in many cases I feel that we are compromising — sacrificing the ultimate goal of the product or service in order to make it run in a browser and to keep down startup costs.

For example, I am struck by the sheer number of photo sharing websites — by my count, there are more than three dozen of these out there right now. I suppose this is not surprising, because writing a basic photo sharing application is not too hard. As a result, many of these services are free (i.e., ad-supported), require occasional purchase of photo prints, or charge a relatively nominal fee. But given the sheer number of competitors and sometimes questionable revenue streams, it is easy to see that a day of reckoning will come relatively soon — only a handful of these services will survive.

I suppose this “natural selection” among competing services is good for consumers and everything, but I wonder if we are not simply headed for a mediocre solution. In other words, is a browser application really the best way to share pictures? Sure, browsers are ubiquitous, so just about anyone can participate. And personal computers today have graphics capabilities that are more than adequate for transmitting, storing, and displaying pictures. But is the ideal photo viewing experience a laptop monitor? Is it really so convenient to upload pictures one by one, or even with a batch upload utility as are available on some sites? And why do I have to fire up a web browser and navigate to a particular URL rather than have my pictures come to me?

I’m sure there are people who will think that I am crazy for saying that it is annoying to have to deal with life through a browser window. You may ask, “What could be more simple?” But the fact is that many companies are beginning to acknowledge that it is hard to exist as destination web sites. Indeed, social networking sites are all the rage right now because they garner such a large percentage of people’s time spent online. Other companies (even Internet juggernaut eBay) are struggling to cope. And then there is a whole contingent of people — mostly above the age of 35 — who simply do not have time to spend futzing with MySpace or Facebook pages.

The way I see it, social networking is only one step along a path. In the earlier days of the World Wide Web, academia opened the doors with online catalogs of information. Then came Internet-based retailing. Around that time, most businesses began to put up websites to provide information on their particular products or services, and perhaps to attract investors. From there it was financial institutions and some digital media clearing houses. Now it is social networks.

I’m not sure what the next step along this path will be, but I do believe that someday soon we will start to see the Internet shed its browser skin. I’m not talking about viewing web pages in miniature on mobile phones, either. Instead, I believe that eventually we will see more products and services offered over the Internet in specialized packages (the buzzword for this ten years ago was “Internet appliances”). The reason for this change will be usability.

We already see moves in this direction today. For the past couple of years there has been a movement to help browser-based applications break out of the static linked-page metaphor. Flash and AJAX accomplish this to some degree, and we now see the likes of Google and Microsoft battling it out to figure out how traditionally “rich client” applications such as word processors can benefit from being connected over the Internet. But I think the transformation will be more fundamental than this. While I believe there will continue to be a place for our multi-purpose personal computers, I also think that we will see a proliferation of more specialized devices. In the same way that a chef does not prepare a meal using a Swiss Army knife, we will stop trying to shoehorn many tasks onto our laptops, desktops, and cell phones. Instead, we will choose the form factor (i.e., hardware) that makes the most sense for that particular application.

Unfortunately, it is hard to say when this change will take place. Personally, I believe that the building blocks are there. WiFi networking is everywhere, and it only costs a couple of dollars to build WiFi into a device, so it should be easy to get these devices online. And we have been putting small computers into increasingly more mundane devices for at least a couple of decades now. But I fear that one thing standing in the way of this change is the mindset among entrepreneurs. Many see that it is relatively easy to get funding if they can scape together a beta version of a browser-application on their own. By contrast, prototyping a hardware device and writing software for it (in addition to the server-side software for the service itself) can cost hundreds of thousands of dollars.

But I believe the fact remains as Mr Kay stated it, that those “who are really serious about software should make their own hardware.” But then I’m not going to wait around for others to figure this out, either. To take another famous line from the same speech, “The best way to predict the future is to invent it.”

I’ve gotta go — lots of work to do.