Tech Insight: Eye of the Needle

The San Jose Mercury News recently announced a contest to name Apple’s proposed futuristic new headquarters.  I’m sure there will be a lot of good submissions – got me thinking of lots of names.

Apple's proposed futuristic new digs

Here are my top five suggestions:

AppiPlex: My personal favorite. App is short for Apple and not short at all for App. iPlex puts an Apple spin on Google’s “Plex”.

Steve’s Place: Keeps it informal and also gives props to both Apple cofounders.

Apple One: Because when you say it out loud it’s more a statement about Apple’s success.

Think Different Central: The quirky Think Different ad campaign has long run its course, but there’s no better legacy statement to describe how Steve Jobs & Company brought Apple back from the dead.

Infinite Possibility Headquarters: Plays off the current address of Apple’s headquarters (One Infinite Loop) and IP HQ would be a cool Silicon Valley abbreviation.

I attended a fascinating panel discussion earlier this week at the famed SRI research facility in Menlo Park, CA. Sponsored by Xconomy, the panel featured several tech experts speculating on how mobility will change and evolve over the next decade.

One of the notable changes is that we may not think much in terms of mobile devices. “The mobile form factor will melt away,” said Larry Smarr, founding Director of the California Institute for Telecommunications and Information Technology (Calit2). Among other access points, Smarr expects Internet connectivity will become part of the clothes we wear.

“We’re going to transition to an enchanted world where inanimate objects appear animate … and can always talk to each other,” said Smarr. This enormous data flow will radically change how we communicate and take us, Smarr thinks, “on a one-way trip to a different planet.”

Larry Smarr explains why technology is driving us to "a one-way trip to a different planet."

Wow. Sounds like Second Life on steroids. “The world’s going to be a very, very strange place,” said Smarr, leaving many of the audience slack-jawed, wondering just what he had in mind.

Bill Mark, who heads SRI’s Information and Computing Science Division, didn’t seem quite ready to go as far as Smarr, but he agreed with the notion that how we think of mobility will change. In fact, Mark thinks mobility today is misunderstood.

Even though we talk a lot about mobility, most of the time we’re not really mobile when we use these devices, rather we’re at home or at work, Mark noted. He sees our environment, the places we live, getting “smarter,” enriched by communications and computer technology.

“For example, your kitchen knows a lot about you. It can help let you know when you’re low on ingredients or recommend a meal based on the ingredients you have,” he said.

I can see it now:

ME: “Hmmm… I sure could go for some Pumpkin Squash Curry Infused with Citrus.”

KITCHEN VOICE: “I’m sorry Dave, you can’t do that.”

Another area ripe for a tech overhaul is education.

“Every year schoolrooms learn and see patterns and could give advice. Maybe the desk becomes a computational device,’ he said.

An explosion of mobile form factors

But Dan Reed, who heads the Extreme Computing Group (XCG) at Microsoft, isn’t ready to throw mobile devices under the bus. Reed anticipates “an explosion of device form factors” because there will always be a need for a rapid response you can get right in your hand.

Reed said most of these future devices will communicate between themselves “to address needs we haven’t even expressed yet.”

Steven Levy, author of the new book, In the Plex, about Google, shared a series of fascinating insights Tuesday at a Churchill Club event in Mountain View not far from the famed Googleplex.  All Things D’s Kara Swisher interviewed Levy before an attentive early morning audience.

I haven’t got a copy of In the Plex yet, but it’s clear from Levy’s remarks that it’s a very different book than earlier ones on Google. The main reason is the unprecedented access Levy, a respected author of earlier books such as Hackers and a writer for Wired, had to Google execs and staff.

Does Google make mistakes? Sure says Levy, noting several flubs in the area of social networking including the privacy flap that accompanied the launch of Buzz. But he says he thinks Google for the most part tries to live by its famous “Don’t be evil” motto.

“They don’t say ‘don’t be evil’ anymore, but it’s in people’s head there, they embrace it,” he said.

Now that co-founder Larry Page has taken over the role of CEO, Levy said he expects Google to push harder into new product areas and ramp up its efforts to compete with Facebook and Twitter in social networking. Already under Page, Google reportedly has tied employee bonuses to how well they execute on social networking strategies.

“Larry Page is disappointed more people don’t believe in trying the impossible,” said Levy. “He can’t understand why people don’t push harder.”

Near term Page & Company face the challenge of staying nimble and encouraging innovation despite its growing size and a bureaucracy Page is trying to streamline, if not eliminate.

“Google has a willful non-acceptance of its size,” said Levy adding the company continues to hire people intolerant of bureaucracy. “Google wants risk takers,” he said.

A Facebook Panic?

As for social networking, Levy said it’s become a high priority at Google because it impacts the search giant’s business model. “They’re in somewhat of a Facebook panic now, people share a lot of information on Facebook that Google doesn’t have access to,” he said.

But he also rejects the analysis you hear sometimes that Google doesn’t “get” social networking because of its cold-hearted, algorithm-loving culture.

“I reject the notion that Google is all about computer science and they don’t understand social networking. Facebook has a lot of engineers too that aren’t the warmest people in the world,” he said, winning a few snickers from the crowd.

So what’s the company likely to do next?

“They might buy Twitter,” said Levy. “Twitter is a natural fit for Google.”

Stay tuned.

Microsoft cofounder Paul Allen scored a coup for his new book Idea Man by landing an interview on 60 Minutes with Leslie Stahl Sunday night.

But the smiling Stahl seemed a lot more excited by the topic than the generally stony-faced Allen, who rarely gives interviews and it showed. One controversial issue she raised was when she asked Allen about charges that Idea Man, due out Tuesday, is a “revenge book, a bitter book” that seeks to bring down the other billionaire Microsoft cofounder, Bill Gates, at a time when his childhood friend is widely revered for his charitable work.

But Allen said he wrote the book because he was part of “an important piece of technology history and I should tell it like it happened.”

Idea Man should make for an interesting read. Certainly very little has been written about Allen’s role in the early days of Microsoft. And the release of Idea Man comes at a time when another computer pioneer, Apple co-founder Steve Jobs, also plans to set the record straight, at least by his reckoning, by cooperating on a biography being written by Walter Isaacson, who’s penned several popular biographies on such figures as Albert Einstein and Ben Franklin. 

I expect the Steve Jobs book to be even more controversial than Allen’s and it will be interesting to see how Jobs’ assesses the role of his co-founder, Steve Wozniak, in Apple’s success.

Having covered the personal computer industry, and Gates in particular, long enough, I didn’t learn much from the 60 Minutes piece. That Gates is combative and doesn’t suffer fools gladly was hardly a newsflash, though a short video clip of Gates made the point nicely.  But it also irked me to hear an important part of PC history misrepresented.

“Allen says he was the one who pushed through the company’s first big break, development of an operating system for IBM’s personal computer in 1980,” said Stahl.

While Stahl’s summation may be technically accurate, it implies an oft-held belief that Microsoft created the first operating system for the IBM PC. Not true.

IBM did license the original IBM PC’s operating system from Microsoft. Big Blue also licensed the CP/M 86 OS for the PC from Digital Research, a company that missed a chance to cut Microsoft off at the pass – but that’s a whole other long, tragic story.

The key point here is that it’s well-documented Microsoft didn’t develop the first PC DOS, rather it licensed (and later purchased) what was then known as QDOS (Quick and Dirty Operating System) from a local developer, Seattle Computer Products, and in turn licensed it to IBM which renamed it PC-DOS.

Apparently it was Allen who was able to secure QDOS for Microsoft. If that’s the case, long overdue kudos to Allen; even if Microsoft didn’t actually create the software, making sure the company had something to get IBM’s business is what put Microsoft on the map.

But as big as the IBM deal turned out to be, Gates scored an even bigger coup in his dealings with IBM, getting the computer giant to agree to a non-exclusive deal. Specifically, Microsoft was able to license essentially the same OS it was providing IBM with to other companies (i.e. the PC cloners). Like most companies at the time, IBM thought hardware was more important than software. But IBM’s capitulation gave Microsoft a multi-million dollar stream of licensing fees that helped catapult the firm to king of the software heap.

I’ll certainly buy that Allen hasn’t gotten the credit he deserves for Microsoft’s early success – for starters, he was the one who convinced Gates to drop out of Harvard and begin their software adventure – but he didn’t develop IBM PC DOS. And neither did Microsoft, it was just smart enough to sell it to IBM. Just because this is all ancient computer history, doesn’t mean we shouldn’t get it right.

The Pirates of Silicon Valley

BTW, if you’re interested in the history of personal computing I highly recommend the entertaining 1999 movie, Pirates of Silicon Valley as well as the book it’s partly based on, Fire in the Valley, ably written by two of my former tech reporting colleagues and friends Paul Frieberger and Michael Swaine.

I still get a kick out of watching the Pirates of Silicon Valley trailer.

By David Needle

There are no shortage of tried and true ways to succeed in business, but if your goal is to be the next Apple be prepared to toss the rule book out the window.

That’s the inescapable conclusion I came to after hearing a number of tech and business execs discuss how they promote innovation and inspire leadership at their companies.

“We’ve moved from over 25 to very small teams of four or five people and we iterate with our customers to get closer to the customer’s pain. We have failures, but we have more at-bats,” said Kaaren Hanson, vice president of Design Innovation at Intuit. Hanson spoke recently as part of a recent Churchill Club-sponsored panel on innovation at Microsoft Research in Silicon Valley.

Another panelist, Inder Sidhu, senior vice president for strategy and planning at Cisco, said it can be tough for a big company to innovate if its perceived as a challenge to the mainstream business. “It’s like an infection, new antibodies will come and try and crush it,” he said.

Sidhu drew a distinction between sustainable and disruptive innovation.

He related the story of how Cisco developed its Telepresence video conferencing system by incubating it’s development under a separate team that had its own executive and resources. “We gave them a sheltered environment and violated all the rules” for how products are normally developed at Cisco, he explained, including a $50k incentive bonus paid to each team member for finishing the project six months early.

“The parking lot was full every Saturday night,” he recalled. “If you get the incentives right, you can get to disruptive innovation.”

Based on Cisco’s recent woes, it sounds like the company’s bread-and-butter “sustainable innovation” isn’t holding up well. But Cisco CEO John Chambers told the Mercury News this week that the networking giant plans to “double down” on its long-stated commitment to further development of video technology.

That fits with the strategy Mark Johnson, co-founder and Chairman of innovation consulting and investment firm Innosight, said is required to keep companies focused on long term challenges.

“A leader needs to say a set of things won’t happen for three, four, five or seven years out, but that ‘its’ our future’,” said Johnson, who also spoke on the panel.
And then there’s Apple

I’ve covered a number of panels where tech execs offer advise on how to be successful with product launches and strategic initiatives. It always sounds reasonable (e.g. “Listen to your customer,” etc.) until you step back and realize that’s not how the hottest tech company going, Apple, got where it is today.

Apple does far less market research than other companies when it comes to developing new products. And whatever the labs come up with, the ultimate test is whether CEO Steve Jobs likes it.

Microsoft’s Dan’l Lewin argued the software giant has a more balanced sustainable and disruptive innovation cycle than Apple. “Apple’s good at making you buy a new machine every three years because the old stuff won’t run anymore,” cracked Lewin, vice president of strategic and emerging business development at Microsoft Research.

But Innosight’s Johnson said Jobs has proven to be uniquely capable at guiding Apple’s innovation.

“Steve Jobs is relentless on user experience and integrating that philosophy into the whole organization to make sure it happens,” said Johnson. “So it’s not just about understanding the customer, but seizing opportunities.”