The Future of Technology and Proprietary Software
by Tim O'Reilly
December 2003
In celebration of its 25th anniversary, InfoWorld did a feature on where technology has been and where it's headed: 25 Years of Technology. I answered some questions for that piece about the future of technology and proprietary software. Many of my comments were included at the end of the article, but I'd like to include them here in their entirety, as well.
Question: If you were to take a stab at labeling the technology eras of the future, out to the year 2028, what would you call them? If, for example, we consider the 1980s the PC era, and the mid-90s marked the start of the Internet era, how would you define the eras to come in 5 years, 10 years, 15 years, 25 years?
Answer: My favorite phrase for the next five years is Dave Stutz's "software above the level of a single device." Consider Apple's iTunes for a moment as a paradigmatic example:
- Runs on a Mac or PC desktop/laptop
- Syncs with a handheld device (iPod)
- Does ad-hoc local area network sharing via Rendezvous
- Has a web database/e-commerce backend in the music store
Over the next five years, all apps will follow this pattern. I tend to call this the "true Internet era." We could also call it Internet 3.0 (with the old telnet/ftp era being Internet 1.0, and the web being 2.0).
On a related note, in my talk The Internet Paradigm Shift (PowerPoint), I ask my audiences how many of them use Linux. Depending on the audience, 20-80 percent raise their hands (usually towards the lower end of that range). Then I ask how many use Google. Close to 100 percent raise their hands. The point: We've been conditioned by the desktop era to think of the software we "use" as that which is running on the machine in front of us, when all of the "killer apps" of the Internet era (from Google to Amazon to eBay to MapQuest) run on at least two--our access device, and a backend server farm. And if you look at how the most advanced users are working, you might see a situation in which someone accesses Google from a laptop connected to a cell phone via Bluetooth, through the cell network to a remote data server, and from there out across the Internet. We're building a huge, decentralized computing fabric.
When a computing paradigm changes, it takes at least a decade for the world to catch up. Consider how years after the advent of the PC in the early 80s, Ken Olsen of DEC could still deride it as a toy. It wasn't till the 90s that it really became clear that the PC was the center of gravity of the computing universe. In short, I think we've got a long way to go before we realize the full potential of the Internet era. We're going to see network effects--and network-effect businesses--having impact on fields from politics to human interaction.
That being said, I also very much like IBM's phrase, "pervasive computing," which emphasizes not just the Internet but the omnipresence of computing. Because, of course, "software above the level of a single device" means much more than what we used to call a computer. We are starting to see the real blurring of handhelds, cell phones, cameras, and other consumer devices. Everything is becoming connected, and computing truly is becoming pervasive.
Wireless is a big part of this. (That is, you could also call it the mobile era, or the unwired era.) As people get seamlessly connected, wherever they are, devices become less important, even throwaway, and the continuity of the user's data becomes most important. An interesting corollary is that a huge part of the value premium of Internet-era powerhouses like Amazon and eBay is not in their software, but in the critical mass of participating users that they have.
It's hard to see even ten years out--the pace of change is increasing. However, it's clear that life sciences are going to have a huge impact in years ahead. While the human genome project hasn't lived up to the short-term hype, it's clear that we're getting very close to many breakthroughs. And any one of many could so redefine society that we'd immediately consider it a "new era."
I expect to see a lot more happening with robotics, as well as with human augmentation. The Segway is the thin end of a wedge. We'll start with disabled people wearing powered exoskeletons and other devices, and then they'll be adopted by otherwise healthy people. I do also expect to see a progress through wearable computers to "embedded" computers--chips and devices embedded in the human body for everything from health maintenance to communications, and in a dystopian vein, even location tracking.
Speaking of location, location-based services are going to be huge in the next decade, to the extent that any device that doesn't know where you are, and filter your data accordingly, will be considered broken.
Distributed, low-power sensor networks are going to revolutionize many devices. In some ways, you can think of the next ten years being about the interpenetration of the real and the virtual worlds. People and things are going to get wired (or rather unwired), not just "computers" in the traditional sense.
We'll also see computerized assistants that, while not AI in the traditional sense, will seem magical to today's users. (Heck, Google would be magical to someone from ten years ago. You can quickly find an answer to almost any question from a huge distributed knowledge repository, using search techniques that come up with close to the right answer from very small clues and a minimal interface.)
We're starting to see an interesting resurgence of interest in space, both from India and China, and also from U.S.-based entrepreneurs.
In a darker vein, it's also the era that will see the end of privacy, or rather, the illusion of privacy.
Question: What is the future for proprietary software?
Answer: About the same as the future for proprietary hardware. That is, as any industry matures, many elements that were previously high-value become standardized, and then commoditized. But that doesn't mean that there is no longer any possibility of proprietary value. A commodity PC has a proprietary "Intel Inside" processor; an open Internet has "Cisco inside." But it's increasingly difficult to charge a premium even for innovations in hardware these days--Nokia says that its new phone designs are knocked off in Asia within a few weeks of introduction. So there's really a pressure to find value in other ways.
Another source of value is in design. In his essay "The Birth of the Big, Beautiful Art Market" (collected in the book Air Guitar: Essays on Art and Democracy), Dave Hickey describes how, after WW II, Harley Earl of GM turned the marketing of automobiles "from being about what they do to what they mean." His point was, as industries become commoditized, intangibles play a greater role in product differentiation. This is now happening in the computer market. Apple has been a pioneer in marketing computers for what they mean rather than what they do. Everything from the 1984 ad to "Think Different" speaks to the self-image of the user who chooses an Apple product. But the rest of the market is catching up to them.
In short, the kind of premium that proprietary software has enjoyed in the Microsoft era is likely to be significantly reduced, till it is equivalent to the proprietary value that, say, Mercedes has relative to Toyota or BMW or GM. Anything good will be copied quickly. There will be some engineering advantages, but new market momentum often comes from design innovations rather than technical superiority.
Return to: tim.oreilly.com
Showing messages 1 through 6 of 6.
-
Agree, Mostly
2003-12-25 11:31:34 kwporterfield [Reply | View]
-
Agree, Mostly
2003-12-25 15:00:31 Tim O'Reilly [Reply | View]
Obviously, search engines could get even better...but I still do find google near-miraculous. It's very easy to take for granted what happens on the net, but it's worth putting yourself back into the world of ten years ago, and reminding yourself just how far we've come.
As to using PowerPoint for a presentation on Open Source being "ironic", no, I don't think so at all. If you've followed my thoughts on open source over the years (or even just the "paradigm shift" presentation), you will see that I consider the licensing angle (free vs. proprietary) relatively uninteresting, especially when used as a litmus test. I have always advocated using the handiest tool for the job. And for presentations, Powerpoint and other proprietary tools work just fine. Useful software gets created under both free/open source and proprietary models. Just because I'm fond of pointing out to proprietary software vendors the many benefits of open source software development models, doesn't mean that I believe it's the only way to produce software.
Would you consider it ironic that I used a piece of desktop software to make the case that the really interesting things in software are network-related? Sure, I think that amazon and google and itunes are more interesting than powerpoint, but that doesn't mean that I won't use a good piece of desktop software when I need it.
We need to get past either-or. To me, the whole open source movement was about recognizing some things that were under-valued, not about saying that anyone who doesn't already know these things is bad. Frankly, I see proprietary software vendors learning a lot from open source, and open source vendors and projects learning from proprietary software. The best of breed systems these days (whether Amazon, Google, or Mac OS X) actually tend to be a melange of proprietary and open source software.
-
Agree, Mostly
2003-12-25 20:13:29 kwporterfield [Reply | View]
I'm not advocating an either/or approach, and certainly agree that the open source and proprietary worlds each have much to learn from the other. One's personal choice of software is exactly that, and (cost aside) should probably not be made primarily from a licensing perspective. Personally, I find the OpenOffice tools superior to their Microsoft counterparts, and my desktop is Linux, so that's what I use.
I applaud RedHat's decision to cut loose their basic workstation distribution as a sponsored open source project (Fedora). Despite the outcry from some quarters of the Linux community, I think it showed an understanding of the symbiosis between the two development models. Like Sun/OpenOffice and Netscape/Mozilla before them, they seem to be on the leading edge of a new synergistic software development model for the future.
I do think you undervalue licensing as an issue, especially in light of its economic impact as an installed base scales in a business environment. The city of Austin, TX or the Israeli Department of Commerce aren't deploying OpenOffice because it's open source -- they're doing it because it meets their needs at a lower total cost of ownership. I predict we're really going to see some movement when the Windows and Office 2000 products hit end of life next year.
But at its core, the paradigm shift you're talking about depends more on open standards than on a software development model. The ISA bus drove the PC revolution, TCP/IP engendered the Internet, and SGML-derived markup took it to the masses. But less than 2% of the desktops on the Internet have a browser than can reasonably render CSS2, a standard that is more than five years old now. Don't get me started on PNG and SVG. Browser hacks still waste far too much of every good web designer's time. This time and money could be better spent.
Finally, you mention OS X as a best of breed. I'll certainly agree with you there. Lots of cool stuff going on at Apple since Steve came back.
-
Agree, Mostly
2003-12-25 22:36:07 Tim O'Reilly [Reply | View]
Re. PowerPoint -- if I were running Linux, I'd definitely be using OpenOffice as well. But I've got a MacOSX Powerbook with Office X installed, and that was "good enough" that I didn't need to download OpenOffice. If I didn't have Microsoft Office X already, I might well have done so, but I don't have the "must use open source" gene that many OSS advocates do, and am happy enough to mix and match.
Regarding open standards and the paradigm shift, I couldn't agree more. But the sequence is as follows -- open standards lead to software commoditization, which drives value up the stack to new areas, which are not yet standardized. Rinse and repeat.
But note that software commoditization is separable from free/open source licensing. Web browsers are low/no cost commodity because of web standards, even though the dominant software (Internet Explorer) is proprietary.
F/OSS licenses are certainly a factor, but not the only one.
I see F/OSS licenses as a corrective response to proprietary vendors who have been abusive towards their users, just as the environmental movement is a corrective towards industries that have been abusive towards the environment. Once we get things in balance, activism fades into the background. You want to get to the point where "doing the right thing" just makes sense to everyone. (I like to quote Lao Tzu in this regard: "Losing the way of life, men rely on goodness. Losing goodness, they rely on laws." Reversing the pattern, you might say, "Finding goodness, men rely less on laws. Finding the way of life, they get beyond goodness, and judgments of right and wrong, and doing the right thing happens because it just seems to make sense."
The software industry is a long way from balance, but I'm convinced that many of the key players on both sides are moving to the middle. There's a huge amount of learning going on as a result of open source activism, in which companies are learning to be more engaged with their user community, more transparent about their code, and more collaborative in their development.
Meanwhile, they are also accepting that many hotly fought battles of the past are over, that the software that is the subject of those battles is no longer as valuable as it was, and that the locus of value (and unfortunately, the next round of battling for advantage) has moved on. As the poet Wallace Stevens says, "The tragedy begins again." But hopefully we've created a whole new realm of value in the meantime, value that can be taken for granted by a lot of people. -
tao tangent
2004-01-12 17:15:37 anonymous2 [Reply | View]
Tim have you looked at stephen mitchell's translation of the tao? -
Agree, Mostly
2003-12-26 11:41:40 kwporterfield [Reply | View]
Our exchange here had reminded me of the first O'Reilly Perl Conference. I wrote an article covering the conference and open source in general (back in 1997 we all called it freeware, even ESR) for netaction.org, and closed the piece with this:
"If O'Reilly is right (and I think he is), the future of software lies somewhere in a yet to be explored synergy between the clashing cultures of the freeware and commercial worlds. This pioneering experiment with Perl creates a whole new model, and will go far toward creating that future."
But, back to the future ...
You've nailed it on the role of commoditization. When a product reaches the critical mass where copying begins, there's an important fork in the road. Historically, the copies are usually one of two types: cheaper knock-offs or so called "value-adds", which add features but exact a high usability cost with their increased complexity. There's a third road, rarely taken: the "user-friendly" copy. Interesting that Sprint's latest round of TV ads touts a picture phone that's "easier to use" than its predecessors.
Sure, there are a few voices crying in the wilderness (Neilsen, Norman, Wurman, et al), but what's it going to take for the software industry to make a significant shift toward usable, consumer-driven products? It's also arguable that consumers have no idea what they want. I work with a lot of people who are relatively new to the Internet. Their first impression: "There's nothing out there that I want." So I show them how to use Google, and they get interested again. But the excitement fades quickly as information overload sets in. "It's too much, I can't deal with it." Even assuming that the user is willing spend some effort organizing the raw stuff they find by searching, there are no consumer-level desktop tools to help them do so. Builtin bookmark management functionality in browsers is still primitive at best, and available third party tools are not much better.
Jon Udell has been talking about another facet of the usability gem in his recent pieces, noting that it takes longer to make a presentation in PowerPoint than it used to writing the slides by hand (or, I might add, with vi and a troff macro package). One step forward and two steps back.
I think the most important factor in speeding up the commoditization cycle is getting the industry to start listening to its end-user customers. If you see evidence of major software companies engaging their consumer-level user communities in a non-trivial manner, please share. I could use some good news.
In your Google example, you refer to the data available on the Internet as a "huge distributed knowledge repository". Three out of four ain't bad, but you seem to be forgetting Sturgeon's Law. Over the last year or so, it's been my experience that finding information (in my view, it isn't knowledge until it's organized and vetted) on the
Internet is becoming increasingly difficult. In terms of the traditional information retrieval triumvirate, search engines like Google do very well in relevance and recall, but perform abysmally on precision (percentage of returned documents that are relevant). Even with well crafted search terms, users have to wade through pages and pages of irrelevant crap to find the nuggets they're looking for. The procedure that seems to work best for me is to use Google to find a site or two where "this guy knows what he's talking about", then follow the links I find there -- most of which will not appear in the first 20 pages of Google results. There's something fundamentally wrong with this picture.
Yes, we've come a long way. How cool was the debut of Alta Vista back in 1995? Since then the WWW has grown by a factor of 500, but the search engine model hasn't really changed. I won't go off on a full-blown metadata tirade here, but I do think it's interesting to note that a Google search on "topic maps" produces a "Work at Google" text ad.
The other thing that caught my eye was your use of proprietary software to produce the Paradigm Shift presentation. Rather ironic, don't you think?