Telepocalypse

A bargain at half the price

Was out taking the new little madam for a walk (well, a carry) this evening when I spotted this O2 mobile advert down our street:

So whilst embodying the obligatory we’re-so-clever advertising visual and wordplay puns, does it actually make people buy more O2 stuff? Did Telefonica get value-for-money when they bought O2 today? Are they buying into a compelling vision?

Well, let’s look at what O2 is selling, and then think what the alternatives might be.

So having this unheard-of “i-mode” thingy (and you can bet 98% of the UK population haven’t heard of it) lets me, um, access the internet and search for jobs. Err, but don’t you use a PC at work on the quiet to surf Monster.com, not your phone? Can’t recruiters just call me like they usually do? And can’t I access the Internet already from my phone? Won’t it be expensive? Hmm… where’s the benefit?

And the alternative? Well, perhaps a few of those billions spent on 3G upgrades might have improved the core product that generates 90%+ of the revenue — voice calls — just a bit? One picoiota? A nanocent? Err, nope. No improved voice call quality. Can’t tell if someone is around before calling them — or even if they’re in the country. Zero presence and availability features. Still can’t access your voicemail via a multimodal client, listen to voicemails out of sequence. And so on.

I love this industry. No other is as screwed up in such wonderful and creative ways.

PS — The only mention of i-mode on the O2 home page is buried away, the main promotion is for an unrelated prepaid discount campaign, and a search box to help you hunt it down? You’ve got to be kidding me. Nice to see such joined-up marketing.

PPS — The hyphenation of i-mode is guaranteed to make word-of-mouth spread slower. Why have some name that’s hard to spell in Google? Even O2 can’t make up their mind: the advert URL is “…/i-mode”, whereas on their home page it’s “…/imode”.

Special delivery

Martin and Auste are pleased to announce the birth of their second daughter at Edinburgh Royal Infirmary on Sunday 16 October 2005. All are back home and doing well. Baby name still to be decided. First child, Laima, excited beyond compare.

…oh, and the telecom angle (there always is one) — picture taken with Nokia N90 smartphone ;)

Strictly no blogging for a few weeks.

Re-inventing telephony (part 278)

A little something to make you think on a Sunday morning…

Check out this BoingBoing post on how there are potentially different styles of computer gaming that have yet to be explored:

Macroeconomic simulations
Social interactions
Making roleplaying meaningful in digital games
Games-as-theater
Geopolitics
The love story…

You could practically re-write this deck as a tale of personal communications, and how we’re still only part-way through exploring the different types of applications people can benefit from in maintaining their social relationships and masquerading physical distance. The slides about the Sims game could equally be about social networking, agents and telephony.

Just think of the information people store that is used in a phone call, the prompts that initiate the call, the actions that are possible during the call. Address books, alarms, calendars, voicemails, etc. What if the information found new outlets, new ways to combine, new expressions, and richer interactions?

Thought I’d point this one out as it shows a way of thinking — systematise the space, understand the axes on which value is being created, map out how much of that space is currently explored.

Teach ‘em to think, rather than tell ‘em the answers. :)

Don't get me wrong...

I don’t want anyone to think I’m about to become a crypto-socialist, so a quick clarification of my previous post. The correlation between “network freedom” and the right to bear arms is only a partial one.

Taking up arms is something that can be done unilaterally. A network is by its definition a collective effort, even if an emergent rather than centrally co-ordinated one. So it cannot be purely a personal “freedom”.

The right to bear arms is equally re-stated as a right not to have your arms taken away from you. It doesn’t mean anyone has to provide you with a gun. Network access is a positive outcome of economic activity over which there are rivalrous claims to finite resources, like network engineers. But you don’t (yet) own the network, so there’s no corresponding right not to be deprived of the use of your possessions. Bearing arms is really a negative freedom (something bad that won’t be done to you), whereas Net access is a positive freedom. Freedom doesn’t do free lunches.

As I have said before, price discrimination in competitive markets is your friend. Filtering can be used for price discrimination. Filtering is a symptom of how well the system is performing. In a mature telecommunications sector, such as wireline, it is a symptom of ill-health. In a nascent one, such as cellular access in the developing world, being only able to access closed phone and SMS service is a vital part of the pricing regime that makes the network possible. The existence of network filtering is an output, not an input; a symptom, not a cause.

You do not automatically make your society freer and healthier by outlawing all network filtering. Indeed, you might achieve the exact opposite result.

Guns don’t come with enforceable end user license agreements that say “For shooting small furry animals only”. But we do distinguish between bunny-hunting guns and machine guns. We discriminate based on lethality. We don’t expect unlimited freedom to bear arms. A farmer wanting to blow some cute crop-nibblers to kingdom come is given carte blanche to blast away. Walk into a bank carring the same hardware, and expect trouble. We might likewise expect some boundaries to our communications freedom.

So I would caution people from taking the analogy too literally. The right to bear arms is also a means to an end — a populace willing and able to resist attempts to capture the machinery of state to perpetuate undemocratic activity. Unfettered and affordable network access is correspondingly essential to the operation of a free and dynamic post-industrial society.

So I’ll say it again, differently. Rules against network filtering are one way of dealing with significant market power in a vertically integrated part of the market where someone has significant market power in the access layer. It isn’t necessarily the best way of doing it, but it’s one way. In all other cases, it’s likely to be harmful. You should use the existence of such activities as a yardstick for the development and maturity of the industry. Expect new technologies and markets to be full of filtering, which slowly recedes over time as competition heats up. Meanwhile, municipal networks and other co-operative of user-owned connectivity systems should aim for more opennness that simple economics suggests, because the benefits are hidden in the political layer.

I alluded to the special privileges and protections that exist in telecom. I guess I ought to enumerate a few to back up such a claim in what is becoming sometimes a suicidally competitive environment.

The US is the easiest example of how barriers to entry are built via co-option of the regulatory infrastructure, but examples about all over. Tariff sheets and their attendant cost of lawyers to issue, public utility comissions stuffed with friendly faces, exclusionary numbering schemes, sweetheart deals on rights of way, spectrum auctions that have singularly failed to recover the maximum public benefit, suspicious tax rebates, opaque pricing schemes that fail to come under scrutiny, faux taxes; the list goes on and on. Mostly it’s just a matter of not having to comply with normal competition and cross-subsidy rules and establishing your own parallel (and captive) regulatory environment, plus special deals on costs on inputs and prices of outputs. Check out the usual places for more data.

UPDATE: Susan Crawford has some thoughts along similar lines, with the money quote being:

I’m trying to create a normative map that will help reveal the assumptions at the heart of the network providers’ arguments. The key issue should be: is access to the internet a public goods problem, for which incentives are necessary to ensure buildout and maintenance? or — Is access to the internet a monopoly problem, for which you have to find ways to ensure frictionless competition?

Right now, we can’t tell what the right answer is.

My hunch is that we’ve not found ways for the invisible hand to operate that also allows collective action by users, groups of users, communities and regional government. It’s an “economics technology” problem, not a “technology technology” problem.

David Weinberger documents Tim Wu’s similar analysis of how the world is divinding into “openists” and “deregulationists”, where a confused cross-purposes of terminology, worldviews and methods collide.

OPINION://Shoot the messenger

There’s been a lot of press in the last year or so about port blocking, open access, Net Freedoms, and so on. I won’t provide the links, you go find ‘em. Every forum, mailing list, conference, and discussion panel seems to have a lot of heated opinion about it. Although I couldn’t attend the VON sessions, there was heated debate there between the “Freeloader!” and the “Freedom fighter!” factions.

But why should I, emotively, care at all?

Stop for a moment. Why do you, personally, care about this issue? Telecom isn’t the only industry with distribution bottlenecks, significant market power, and cross-subsidy between the stages of production. Just look at how baked beans are positioned in supermarket shelves. Manufacturers in the UK pay the supermarkets to buy prime positions. Yet telecom incites such great passion in intelligent people. Baked beans don’t. What’s going on?

I think I’ve finally worked out why. It’s David Isenberg’s elephant in the corner — what he ambiguously calls Freedom to Connect. Most of these arguments attempt to build a logical economic thesis about why we do or don’t have the correct balance between price discrimination, competition and common carriage. But it increasingly misses the point. We sense there’s a deeper, more troubling, aspect to getting cut off from part of the conversation.

Whilst nebulous and fluffy, it’s all about democracy. The rest is post hoc rationalization of our more fundamental beliefs about how a 21st century society needs to be wired up to work. And my thesis is that we are underestimating the importance of this political (as opposed to economic) side of the debate.

The sense of indignation you feel inside you when you hear about port blocking is because you sense the loss that those customer are enduring. You and I have come to realize that if you don’t have access, you aren’t able to fully participate in society any more in some non-trivial way. You can still do the old analogue things, have a protest at the street corner. But the crowds have moved online. Nobody can hear you.

Not only that, but when someone else gets the chop, you’ve lost a member of the demos from your democracy. Your conversation is impaired by others no longer being able to participate.

Why don’t we feel so upset about the closed, walled gardens of wireless networks? There are several reasons, I believe. Firstly, the very nature of the medium lends itself to competition (through multiple overlapping networks), which ensures some degree of openness. The low cost of wireless telephony is also in itself a great democratising force. Going from zero phones to one closed one is a great step forward. Participation is everything. We also have lower expectations based on the natural capacity limits the technology has had until recently. Our tolerance of “co-operative bottlenecks” has been greater in order to share the resource better.

On the other hand, when someone’s Net connections to their home come under pressure of restriction, we react differently. I think this is partly a psychological issue of how we view these spaces differently. We are defensive of our homes. Somewhat tenuously, the family still is the organising unit of society. We aspire for every household to have at least some form of unfettered access to all forms of information discourse. That’s why it hurts when we fall short.

Which brings me to my real point. This conversational chatty democracy stuff all sounds fine. But that’s hardly going to energize society into fits of fiber laying and open access regulation. Where’s the beef? Well, here’s my outrageous suggestion:

The ability to access Internet content and services is the new Right to Bear Arms.

Wow. I’ve said it. So what does it mean? The founders of the United States of America in their wisdom saw the seizure of excessive power by government as a central risk. To counteract this, they ensured the general populace would always be sufficiently armed. This gives any putative dictator or tyrant pause for thought before exercising the machinery of government violence for undemocratic ends. The price is a certain undercurrent of everyday violence, but the experiment has by and large succeeded. The USA is one of the longest-standing constitutional democracies, and has withstood extraordinary change in demographics and fortune during that period.

We’re moving from a society where physical force was the prime means of coercion to one where ideas have ascendancy. Physical force doesn’t scale well as a means of subjugation. It’s one thing to take a man’s posessions; quite another to persuade him to make your dinner every night for nothing. The hardest part of the civil rights movement wasn’t undoing the yoke of the white man, but persuading the everyday black man that it was his inalienable right to have that yoke removed. Once that was achieved, the outcome was largely a foregone conclusion.

Building tyranny is harder when the populace is armed with good information. It’s not impossible; indeed, a tyranny of the majority is still a major risk. But when I can have a cheap encrypted Skype conversation with Iranians, Syrians, and Mexicans, something qualitative has changed. For example, when I visited Syria a few years ago, we went to Hama. This town was largely razed in 1982 (with the loss of tens of thousands of lives) when its own army shelled the city to put down an Islamic uprising against the Baathist government. I pass no comment on the politics of it, but merely note that this is a little-known episode of history. You certainly don’t see it mentioned on the official tourist website. Can you imagine keeping such news under wraps in the era of video cameraphones, satellite Internet and Skype?

Consider a populace that wants to rise up against its political masters. We’re already at the point where the government response isn’t to take away the populace’s arms, but to take away its means of communication. Militias don’t congregate in the woods and more, they start their own Yahoo! group and MoveOn and Meetup from there.

There’s no point in demanding universal access if you don’t have the economic means to deliver. Much of the debate is about means, not ends. But those ends deserve greater exposure and reflection. If we are serious about transformation of society through information technology it means sweeping away many of the special protections the telecom industry has managed to accrue, enforcement of competition law, and greater collective effort to deploy connectivity and open up wireless and fixed rights of way.

There’s more at stake here than cheap phone calls and unlimited TV channels. Cheap airlines have done more for European cohesion and understanding than decades of political exhortation. Cheap, ubiquitous and unfiltered communications are becoming a prerequisite of a pluralist participative democracy. Societies that fail to encourage the free flow of information will suffer because ingrained interest groups will ensure the rules are set up to perpetuate their privileges. When you can’t make a Skype call, you’re losing something more than money.

You might believe that your political system is a stable one delivering endless contended freedom and openness. But your average American feels a lot more secure in that knowledge with a rifle in the basement. I’d want the same feeling of security, just with symmetric gigabit fibre so I can host my own subversive content if necessary.

Next time someone is vigorously defending the existence of filters on the Net, dig deeper. Don’t ask them for the logic of their argument. Rather, try to find out why it excites them so much. Perhaps they aren’t aware of what animates their own passions.

Conference announcement

Telepocalypse is delighted to announce its own industry thought-leading conference to which everyone is cordially invited.

Gopher 2.0 will bring together the latest developments in information technology, finance, and the art of blowing large soapy bubbles.

Scheduled speakers include:

• Mary Dairy of Microsoft on how rebooting your PC will be even quicker with the next generation of Windows, bringing untold joy to millions of consumers.
• Jack! Stack! of Yahoo! will demonstrate how to build a home page with an infinite number of embedded links using their new “Aleph One” technology.
• A keynote by Tim Berners-Lee on why the teaching of semantic markup is an education priority for all elementary school children (“Reading, Riting, Rdfing”).
• Hu R Yu of Google Research will demonstrate their Loginulator, an automated keyboard add-on that will self-press your name, address, user name and password at the press of a single hot button!
• A panel on “How Gopher 2.0 makes the Internet safe and convenient for everyone.” (Sponsor: Terminix — Your Pests Are Our Problem^SM).
• A round-table discussion on whether anyone’s mother will ever bother with using any of this stuff. (Attention: For security reasons, no mothers will be admitted to this session.)

Evening entertainment will be provided by the modern disco troupe AJAX, who will perform there recent hit “My back is broken!” from their breakthough album “Where art thou, O spellcheck?”.

The attendance fee is US$4999 per head (reduced to $4998 for pre-IPO companies).

We look forward to seeing you at the Ryugyong Hotel, Pyongyang, North Korea on 29-30 February, 2006 to celebrate our 2005 record conference sales human global interconnectedness.

UPDATE: We apologise that we were unable to have any speakers from the mobile operator community attend, as they were all too busy serving their two billion actual paying customers.

UPDATE: Further speakers wishing to raise their profile with prospective future employers should please write to the conference organisers as soon as possible, including their resumé and enclosing a small amount of equity in a start-up of our selection.

Intelligence is harmful

From Bruce Schneier’s security blog:

Turns out that you can jam cellphones with SMS messages. Text messages are transmitted on the same channel that is used to set up voice calls, so if you flood the network with one then the other can’t happen. The researchers believe that sending 165 text messages a second is enough to disrupt all the cellphones in Manhattan.

Naturally, a stupid network would not suffer from such a performance bottleneck that can be exploited maliciously.

And IMS will keep you totally safe, 100% available, honest ;) No intelligent bottlenecks in this network! Move along please…

An attractive delusion

I’ve been challenged by a source working for a mobile operator whether my view of IMS is too pessimistic. He writes:

The big reason for carriers to implement IMS is not merely a matter of re-structuring our services in a TCP/IP-oriented fashion, or being able to do seamless provisioning. […]

It is the “enabling” portion of it that matters. Moving to IMS will let mobile operators (for instance) deploy integrated services that can tie together core enablers such as a profile database, a presence server, billing hooks, etc. to build a whole new service with theoretically less time and effort. Essentially, it’s about moving from monolithic, one-piece, vertical services into a component-oriented approach.

Of course, current demo services aren’t that enticing — mostly because this entails a new way of thinking about service design that hasn’t really sunk in yet, and there is the usual amount of experimentation going on. I personally think this will throw up a few good ideas in a year’s time (or even less) as telcos open up to outside partners doing the actual development.

So, the yellow brick road that takes us back to happy, profitable telecomland seems to have a fork. Turn left, kill wicked witch, deploy new services, become rich. Turn right, open up our platform, let the scarecrow and tin man work out what the best services are, click heels, get rich.

Unfortunately, this wizard can’t offer a happy ending for either direction.

Can the carriers deliver on the promise of great new application services?

One way is that they themselves research and discover them. But the precedents are mixed at best. Take MMS (again). What could be simpler than getting users to exchange pictures? But it was a commercial flop. It misunderstood what the value proposition was in the eyes of the user. As I said before, people wanted to share experiences — as sense of “being there”, not just pictures. This means sharing a whole sequence of pictures during a day, and unintrusively allowing a whole string of receipients not at the party/zoo/bar mitzvah to keep up with the event. MMS didn’t define a photo repository API, make sharing across mobile and PC devices simple, etc. Recipients had no easy way of saving and organising the pictures. They couldn’t track things at their leisure.

And at the prices charged, sharing a whole day’s “roll of film” was just prohibitively expensive. You didn’t even get a little stack of pictures to hide in a shoebox under the stairs! MMS’s immediacy wasn’t enough to overcome its deficiencies in competing with the Kodak experience. Flickr got it, telcos didn’t.

So even the simplest of services turned out to be a screw-up. On the other hand, Sha-mail was a success. Sprint’s picture service, which did incorporate Flickr-like features (outsourced to Lightsurf) was a success. Funnily enough, these are the products that didn’t fall out of a standards committee.

[Insider knowledge: picture messaging was a low priority in the Sprint PCS Vision launch, and it only made the cut because the handset folks were only being offered camera phones by the main Korean and Japanese suppliers. There weren’t any non-camera models around to stock, so there was no choice in having a picture messaging product! The big news was supposed to be Java downloads and ringtones, but these turned out to be much less compelling to the users. And instant messaging never made the launch, despite being the most in-demand feature requested by the target youth/early adopter demographic! I look forward to contradictory reminiscences from former Sprint colleagues…]

So there’s good reason to believe that joint efforts of telcos to develop new services will face an uphill struggle. And stand-alone efforts, as noted previously, are limited by your connectivity user base and are in competition against those of Internet giants.

Rather than ‘build’, how about ‘buy’? Can’t you just wait to see what takes off and then buy your way in? Well, that sounded like a nice theory, at least until last week. Then we got to see the price of that strategy. Ouch!

So being the owner of the end application didn’t work. What else is there? Well, you can shred your business model into itsy bitsy chunks, turn yourself into a platform, open up, charge some access fees, and let someone else take the credit.

This is an attractive proposition, and one I’ve promoted extensively. It’s just a shame IMS doesn’t deliver on it. All the key bits — federated identitity, profile, billing — aren’t covered by IMS, which is stuck in a old-skool mindset of the services living inside a telco-owned application server working to telco-owned customer data. You don’t need much sophistication in privacy and permissions control when you federate with yourself. There’s no unified developer program. The architecture is horifically complex. It cuts out the cheap P2P delivery options. It mandates specific technologies (e.g. SIP) when others (e.g. IAX) may be more appropriate for some tasks. No doubt it’ll be a lowest common denominator in presence — your “Away on vacation” status may not be supported, never mind “Needs cheering up”. So I’m not exactly optimistic that this route will play out well for the telcos either.

Mobile operators have a better excuse for IMS than fixed ones. There’s still a scarcity of capacity that requires some form of QoS rationing — at least some of the time. As networks get faster, that need decreases. (All those Skype calls on EV-DO seem to work fine without IMS!) But application-specific ways of tying connectivity and service together to do QoS aren’t the way to do it.

UPDATE: A reader challenges me to say what I would do and say something constructive for once. It’s hard to give a snappy response since my approach would probably try to blow apart many of the assumptions of how we build and finance networks. It’s more than just the technology. For example, the way we license spectrum divides the resource up and limits the statistcal gain we would have from sticking more traffic into one bigger pipe. But forgetting all that, what should a carrier today do? Well, it’s a bit like my 3G advice: no bid on an overpriced license, improve the stuff you’ve got, buy up an over-leveraged competitor later in the business cycle if necessary. Increasing capacity and lowering latency is obviously one first step. (Just increasing capacity alone doesn’t help your QoS problem — check your queueing theory text book.) Embrace user-owned networks, get as much traffic off the WWAN onto WLANs as possible. Avoid the IMS tax by deploying simpler QoS technologies already developed, even if it means doing layer 1/2 optimisations. Encourage innovation by opening up some of your platform using cheap web services APIs. (Application logic does not run in the telco.) Focus on other ‘convergence’ issues like getting MP3 players embedded in your handsets. And so on.

OPINION://Take your product higher

This is a somewhat dangerous essay to write, as you could readily draw all sorts of wrong conclusions. But I suspect there is a kernel of truth that is worth the long process of extraction.

Exhibit A: Umair anticipates “hypercivilization” — “a space where everything is hyperreal; hyperlinked, simulated, plastic, liquid, etc.”. A virtual world of virtual relationships and virtual pleasure.

Exhibit B: An extraordinarily long, detailed and challenging inquiry into the nature of human happiness, its chemical and biological origins inside us, and our liberation from “Darwinian” suffering of the mind. The debate is half pharmacological (could we replicate the positive aspects of the MDMA experience across large populations indefinitely?), half philosophical on the benefits (or otherwise) of such advances.

At the heart of their thesis is this:

Fortunately there is no reason, in principle, why an analogue of Moore’s law can’t be implemented in successive generations of the reward circuitry of organic life-forms. The affective, aesthetic, intellectual, interpersonal (and spiritual?) well-being of neurochemical robots like us can be genetically pre-coded. If rationally redesigned, our enlightened successors may view today’s “natural” rewards as poor surrogates for genetically underwritten happiness. When the mechanisms underlying bliss and its gradients are understood, the molecular machinery of the sublime can be modulated - and amplified indefinitely.

The interesting bit to me was learning about all the different forms of reward circuitry in the brain and the interlocking regulatory mechanisms. Naturally, the elimination of mental anguish whilst maintaining touch with reality (whatever that is) is a multi-generational project of immense difficulty, as the authors stress.

The connection beween the two exhibits isn’t so obscure; we’re entering a world where our social relationships are frequently mediated by machines. The next “logical” step is where the link between our external senses and our internal id is mediated by technology — in this case utopian pharmacology, gene therapy and eugenics.

The ultimate irony of “intelligence at the edge” is that it turns out to be us, and we don’t always like what we see:

Jealousy, envy, resentment, ridicule, hate, anger, disgust, spite, contempt, schadenfreude and a whole gamut of nameless but mean-spirited states we undergo each day are a toxic legacy of our Darwinian past.

The ambitious program of work they lay out is intended to address this toxic legacy. Misguided? Maybe, but equally inevitible in its arrival.

But what on earth has this to do with telecom?

Technologies like SMS could be seen as a form of self-medication for temporary social isolation. Need a dopamine squirt? Text a few friends, and get your reward when they return the compliment. Remember the cocaine-fuelled lab rats self-administering hits until they drop? I bet they have some great jokes they share between cages at night about humans and SMS. Cue suitable Larson cartoon.

Well, today’s there’s no such discipline as biotelecology. We don’t have teens strapped into fMRI scanners seeing how their mesolimbic pathway lights up for each ring tone.

But maybe we should? Forget all those boring customer surveys and focus groups. Just experiment with thousands of simulated product concepts and watch the customer neurons at work!

Sounds silly? Well, OK, let’s just do it as a thought experiment instead. Imagine in my IM/VoIP client I can right-click on any contact, and select “Wave to Bob”. Bob then sees his Martin icon waving back when he comes online. Maybe I can even tag the wave “Happy Birthday”. No, it isn’t an IM because it doesn’t demand a response — there’s no text entry pop-up where Bob feels obliged to acknowledge your wave. (You don’t send thank-you cards in return for birthday cards you receive, so why should you online?)

So in some way I’m triggering Bob’s reward and wellbeing circuitry. It’s just we have no real idea which ones. Yet shouldn’t every communications product ask “how does this light up the pleasure and reward circuitry in users”?

We could be building better communications products by also asking the question: how does my product appeal to Darwinian and post-Darwinian values?

Let’s take a Darwinian example first. We out-maneuvred the sabre-toothed tigers by enlarging our brains and living in close-knit cooperative communities. We are hyper-social, but also adapted to form a social hierarchy. The quoted article even argues that conditions like depression are adaptations to help low-status individuals channel (or extinguish) their survival and reproductive energies.

So how do our communications tools come to reflect social hierarchy? Here’s an example. If you’re both running the latest release of Skype, you can view in turn how many buddies each of your buddies has:

I now am socially humiliated - a total outcast. I mean, only 68 people on Martin’s buddy list! What a loser…

(Not sure what’s making Stuart look so happy, but I know I want some. Well, actually theobromine does me fine — all donations welcome, minimum 60% cocoa, dark preferred — and caffeine is waaay too stong for me most of the time!)

Without knowing it, Skype has just taken a small step in the Darwinian direction. What if every “Voice 2.0” telephony system published the number of calls each user made and received, the number of minutes they spent using it, and the status level of those callers? Score bonus marks if you have an assistant to answer the damned machine for you! Seriously, we have no idea how people’s behaviour might change. We could guess, but a century of rigid assumptions about what telephony is and does has left us bereft of imagination of how it could be different.

I guess we can push our drugs analogy a bit further. After all, what’s the point of a colourful metaphor if not to be pushed to breaking point? The Darwinian drugs are the “isolators” such as cocaine. They re-inforce destructive egotistical pleasure-seeking. The post-Darwinian ones are the ones that enhance self- and social awareness (entactogens). This is a much smaller group. (Maybe tobacco smoking is so addictive because of the social bonding it provides among smokers, as a pseudo-entactogen?) Shouldn’t you be asking which drugs your product resembles, how to get the users hooked, how to enhance the high, and how to ensure coninued addiction?

Just think of the “I am socially important and necessary to the operation of this enterprise” that the Blackberry brings. First it divides the “ordinary” staff from the executives who are traditionally issued with them. Then the egos of the holders have to be stroked continually to maintain their self-esteem. Pure Darwinan approach. If you want to beat the Crackberry, build a product that puts empathy and co-operation at its heart. What does an “E-berry” look like? I don’t know, but I expect it’ll come in pink and the secretaries will buy them first.

Likewise, the status symbol of having a “car phone” propelled the status-worth image of cellular telephony.

Take MMS as another example. This is a post-Darwinian product; one that should bring us closer to one-another. But it was a market flop on release. One reason MMS missed the mark was because, well, it didn’t deliver enough brain happy-juice for the price. A single lousy picture of the grandkids at the zoo? What you want is to share the experience with those not present, not just a moment. And that’s more than one lousy picture. You want to share a whole stream of images throughout your visit. There should be anticipation of more coming. The sense of being there for grandma is accentuated as she receives in (near real-time) updates of your progress. Ooh — they’re at the monkey house now! (And you can now see how mobile video would possibly be less attractive than a stream of camera messages with the occasional tagged on audio commentary, since the temptation would be to create an anthology video later on in the event rather than the feeling of real-time sharing.)

The product and pricing didn’t lend themselves to this, hence the failure to meet market expectations. Too hard to organize an album being shared as it is created, too costly to send one. A better product would probably have been priced on a “per day” basis: become an MMS user for the day, send as many as you want. Only $2! And it would always offer to send the next picture to the same recipient as the last one — one click.

How would you re-work directory enquiries in this biochemical reward model? Can’t say. There’s probably a way to portray users as more socially successful. Have a TV advert that contrasts the inept non-user funbling to find a number by calling friends with someone who just stumps up the cash and calls for help. The main aim of this product is avoiding pain, not engaging pleasure. You sell more of it by exaggerating the pain of not having it.

Put on your shades and look at your computer screen. Imagine they are magic polarizers: look one way, and you see pleasure; look the other way round, pain. What about your communications tools is visibly glowing with pleasure? A new email? From whom? Which parts of my product transcend the merely functional? How can I better explot those parts? What would a super-rewarding email client do with new email? How could I share my “Wow! A message from Bob!” feeling? What if the response was automatically prefixed with “Martin immediately responds:” by the system, so Bob sees how much priority I give him? I think you get the idea, even if the example is lousy.

It isn’t a surprise we don’t have a root “reward” model for communications product design that reflects our biological makeup. It’s a massive challenge. It’s a shame we don’t often relate to a Maslow-type model of reward and motivation that at least abstracts away the biochemical complexity. It’s a problem when you’re a telco, and you don’t have a model of what makes people do more of what makes them feel good. It’s a tragedy when 80%+ of your revenue comes from one or two communications products, and you have no model of what the users do with them and how you might get them to do more of it. It’s a serious farce when you don’t have “get users to make more phone calls and SMS messages” as key objectives!

Sadly, from what I’ve seen, much of the industry is at the “farce” level still. Basic questions of how to get people to consume more telephony, and get a bigger kick out of it, go unanswered. At Sprint I couldn’t find anything about what people do with their mobile phones and how we might get them to do more of it! Making more phone calls wasn’t a product selection criterion. Yet whether your means are Darwinian or post-Darwinian, the objective remains the same.

How we will manipulate ourselves internally in future to achieve perpetual hedonic bliss, I don’t know. It certainly adds a whole new dimesion to achieving The American Dream for those on that side of the pond. But the ideas of pleasure, reward, pain and social anguish are ones that are powerful indicators of success and failure in technologies that operate outside the mind and body. You would do well to understand and harness them.

Digital rights, social wrongs, economic corrections

I’ll splurge this down, rather than worry about actually having a coherent and fluid argument.

1. DRM makes devices less flexible, and less able to adapt to future uses.
2. This shortens the lifespan of consumer electronics goods.
3. Consumer electronics poses significant environmental externalities in its production and disposal not borne by the producer or consumer. (Although there are efforts to remedy this.)
4. DRM is environmentally unfriendly.
5. DRM prevents the use of material in ways tha has wider social benefits (e.g. remixing by school children as part of a project).
6. Devices containing DRM should be taxed to reflect their social and environmental externalities.

Note the twist at the end. We don’t outlaw DRM, or repeal laws that make its use enforceable.

If you wanted to get the political establishment on your side, just find some vocal interest group to hypothecate your iPod tax towards (e.g. starving millionaire rock stars), et voila the lawmaking machinery jumps into action. Don’t campaign against DRM. Use the price mechanism, Luke - it pervades all things and binds all things together. Find your own body of vested interest, and harness it.

Perhaps we should simply generalise this? Laws like DMCA and EUCD are little more than state-sponsored protection rackets for established business models, so why not claw back some of the benefit? Sure, you can have DMCA protection! Just as long as you register your product with the Bit Reproducion and Transmission Device Commission and pay the usual 5% of sales to the government ;)

Quite how the anti-tax free-marketer inside me manages to struggle out of this intellectual straight-jacket, I’m not so sure…

I’ve been slowly making my way into Oz Shy’s Economics of Network Industries (about 18 months after Bruce Williamson first recommended it to me at WTF, so it’s taking a while). I’ll comment about the book in more detail another day, but if there’s one take-away it is this: there are many different kinds of network industry resulting from different forms of “interface” between the network components. It is by no means obvious which (if any) flavours of network industry a DMCA-like law is economically efficient for, or whether indeed any such in-depth analysis was ever done prior to copyright maximalism taking hold. It might behoove some of the campaigners for DRM reform to look beyond their own intellectual circle and engage the economists who have already trodden this turf. Make the lawmakers see you’ve done your homework.

Hmm, how about this for a really wild thought, well outside telecom. Capitalism is the economic technology that replaced feudalism. It found a superior way of harnessing self-interest to promote the wider good. This was achieved through increased decentralisation of economic power — you didn’t need to ask permission to start a business. We’re still hunting for the social technology to replace v1.0 mass democracy, whatever it may be. Once we crack the problem issues like DMCA will probably go away, since capture of the lawmaking process will become too expensive. To subvert Hayek’s economic message, the pricing information of new laws will more readily become apparent to those affected. This undermines the “information advantage” that the lobbyists have: a few people know they stand to gain much, whilst the masses don’t realise they’ve each lost a little bit of their cultural and economic opportunity.

(Then again, if Americans haven’t yet discovered the superiority of Bramley apples for making apple pie, I don’t hold out too much hope for a world without distance eliminating all social and economic barriers to opportunity…)

Until you either reach your techno-regulated anarchist nirvana (or opt out of trying), there’s only way of dealing with polluting digital technologies: old-fashioned political slog.

Patently ridiculous

I don’t understand why Sprint is suing a bunch of folks over VoIP patents. Sprint’s aim in assembling a patent portfolio was primarily to create a bargaining chip that could be used in negotiations with big suppliers. You cross-license your intellectual property in return for ours. This greatly lubricates relationships between the carriers and major suppliers and partners (e.g. IBM).

Licensing revenue has not, generally, been a significant factor. Ability to bleed upstart competitors disintermediating your cash-cow voice business? Hmm, maybe.

There are some cool Sprint patents on how to deploy and operate fibre and wireless networks. There are more cutting-edge technically savvy inside operators than their reputation would suggest. Sprint does some quality stuff over at Sprint Labs. So I would counsel people not to dismiss out of hand that Sprint folks were thinking throuh the challenges of deploying VoIP apps and filing patents well ahead of the curve.

That said, somebody in the legal department must have had one double espresso too many and got over-excited. I can’t see how this lawsuit is worth the PR mess.

How do I know? Seventeen of Sprint’s patent applications have my name on them as sole or joint inventor. None in the space of the current lawsuit, though — mine were mostly around the wireless web and handset features.

Upgrade

I’ve upgraded to the latest version of Movable Type in a probably hopeless effort of stemming the tide of spam comments and trackbacks. As usual, it was painful. (Someone needs to teach them about configuration management, and how to separate the application, plugins, config generated blogs in a clean manner.) I think things are working OK. Let me know if you find anything broken.

Who am I?

You could do far less productive and entertaining things than spend the next 15 minutes viewing this presentation by Dick Hardt, CEO of Sxip. It’s both a presentation tour de force as well as a brilliant overview of the digital identity space.

In Dick’s parlance, our abortive efforts at Sprint were aiming to build “Identity 1.9”. We wanted to create a more user-centric identity model, but with the carrier acting as a proxy for you. Not a pure and perfect end-to-end solution, but one which was technically feasible at the time and sellable internally.

UPDATE: I used to present this stuff to Sun and IBM and get black stares, because they were stuck in the enterprise-centric world of federated identity. We were talking about public identity, a different beast. My metaphor was “identity projection”, rather than federation. Nice to see the wheels of history catching up with us.

A bit of Sprint runs away

A “sleeper story” in telecom at the moment is what’s about to happen to the local telephone division of Sprint, which is being spun-out after the Sprint-Nextel merger.

This could have a much bigger effect on the US telecoms landscape than is currently anticipated.

The Sprint local telephony division is a cash-cow, but only has a footprint of about 5% of the US market. It is concentrated heavily in the Florida and Las Vegas markets (i.e. growth regions). Whilst heavily unionised, it is run with a pretty high degree of efficiency. There are none of the wild antics of the cellular division, or stranded assets of the long distance group. Networks upgrades to packetized voice are mostly done and dusted.

Richard notes how the Baby Bells are being sued for allegedly colluding not to compete out-of-territory.

I think the Sprint deal could change that. If it doesn’t get snapped up by a big daddy, the (by then renamed) Sprint local outfit will be a real nuisance. It’ll have a much stonger balance sheet than most LECs. It’ll have a culture of being part of a nationwide telco. If anyone goes for out-of-territory VoIP deployment and busts the cartel, they’re the ones to do it. Sadly the nationwide MMDS spectrum ended up with the main wireless group. If it’d been handed to the fixed subscriber access group at Local, it’d have made more sense to me — since it’s destiny is probably in providing fixed wireless broadband.

This is all rather ironic to this former Sprint employee. For years the mantra was “One Sprint”, and how Sprint would only prosper if the local, long distance and PCS bits pulled together. But a few nice meals and corporate jet trips over to Virginia and suddenly you’ve discovered a long-lost brother and disowned your first-born. Such is business! Oh, and there’s the small matter of what to do with the empty half of your newly-built $700m campus once the Local folks evacuate…

(Some Sprint insider stuff: The plush campus has been called “Johnson County Correctional Center” by one wag. The prisonesque architecture, looming sniper-toting watchtower and highly conservative institutional attitudes do somehow match the moniker. Somehow the architects also decided that compulsory exercise in sweltering 40C summers and exposure to bone-chilling midwestern blizzards was to be a major attraction when traversing the vast site. Luckily you can always retire for a congenial team meeting over in Conference Room J across the road if it all gets to be too much.)

A thousand words

In a spare moment I whipped together this little diagram that tries to explain in pictures what I’ve probably failed to convey in many thousands of words.

It’s certainly more illuminating that the arm-waving “Power of 3” stuff in eBay’s investor relations blurb. There’s magic happening somehow in the arrows in their diagrams.

So, what’s the message? Really, it’s quite simple. Marketplace enablers can be defined by the breadth of goods on offer, and the depth of support for the transaction they offer. The picture shows how eBay, Amazon and Google are currently positioned, and how Skype might be positioned in future. The edges are “clipped” because not all transactions go to the maximum depth; e.g. not all eBay auctions are settled via Paypal, and Amazon sometimes hands off fulfillment to 3rd parties. (The eBay region is made translucent — I hope it’s still obvious which bits are eBay despite the colour transition.)

At one extreme, Google has a very broad business base (any commercial transaction that can have an unambiguous keyword associated with it). But it doesn’t do much beyond that.

At the other extreme is Amazon, which will encase your goods in gift wrap and even deliver them to you personally when it comes to certain digital goods.

eBay falls in the middle. Its business model is narrower and shallower than these extremes, but perhaps encompasses a greater “commercial land area” as a result.

The purpose of the Skype-eBay deal is to push eBay into a broader realm of things for sale. For instance, if you want legal advice today, Google is the only place to go search for it. Want a reputable lawyer nearby? Sorry, the eBay reputation system doesn’t help you — yet.

The many articles on “pay per call” models for Skype tend to miss the bigger picture. Skype isn’t constrained by PSTN circuit technology, so previously unimagined transaction-supporting functionality can be integrated. Only by looking at the increased breadth and depth of a Skype-eBay transaction environment can you see where the value lies.

I expect Google to continue its strategy of expansion along a different axis — the set of “search moments”. I have previously argued that Google missed an opportunity to deepen its business model by acquiring Skype.

Currently Skype’s business is a thin, empty line along the bottom of the diagram. Infinite width, zero depth. US$4.1 billion is a lot of money for what amounts to a risky experiment. But the prospect of re-defining the experience of how consumers and businesses talk to one another is an exciting one. For someone it may even turn out to be a lucrative one, and not just Skype’s management and investors.

A dongle a day

A valued reader directs me to take a peek at this coolio product (pic reproduced with permission):

It’s called the nabjac, which stands for “Not a box – just a connector”. What is does is upend the concept of the TV set-top-box (STB) by building the whole thing into a connector.

So, what does it do? Our correspondent says:

…it is built on top of a TV SCART connector, using an old low-cost, high-volume MPEG2 decoder. In addition to SCART it has an Ethernet port, and a connector for an infrared detector. It has very limited inteligence, it decodes MPEG2 streams by itself, but for menus, EPG and browsing it does a VNC session to a “smart” Linux server.

So it is a “dumb” edge device, connecting as a VNC terminal to a “smart” server also on the edge of the network.

(VNC is a way of displaying text and graphics from another computer remotely.)

I just love this kind of innovation, gently shredding vertically integrated business models into prosciutto-thin horizontal slices. Stick this device on your TV, get your program information from anyone you like. No need to be locked into the provider of the actual media signal to get your metadata. Want to receive your IMs on your TV too? Just click here to enable…

Every function is now up for grabs by third parties.

Shame it’s precluded from the outset in all those DRM-infected HDTV appliances that outlaw reintermediating any information flow, ever.

Secret sauce

I firmly believe one of the things about Skype that is frequently misunderstood is what makes it special. Many media articles tend to focus on the people (“lanky forrin folk”) and the product. But what makes Skype unique is really how it is adopted.

A department store sells a unique aggregation of goods. The trousers are the same as in the fashion store next door. The scented candles no better or worse than those from the boutique candle shop. So the products are pretty standard. Likewise, the standard goods were manufactured in standard ways. They are sold in a standard way — just pick one off the shelf, walk up to the counter and lay down your credit card. (This isn’t always so — for example, Argos in the UK has its catalogue retail stores where the goods are picked for you from its warehouse while you wait.) The department store is financed in standard ways, marketed using standard techniques.

So it is the distribution of the goods that is what makes a department store special. And the same applies to Skype.

In essence the Skype product feature set has never differed much from instant messaging and open source competitors. At least when viewed as a simple feature ‘tick list’. What Skype has done uniquely well, though, is to tailor every part of the product experience for ease of adoption: from investigation to use to recommendation onwards.

This could glibly be dismissed as ‘viral marketing’, but that doesn’t do justice to the depth of their achievement. For the term ‘viral marketing’ doesn’t explain how everything in the web site and product is oriented towards getting people on board with the minimum of obstruction. The term ‘viral marketing’ merely focuses on the moment of contagation.

To find out how well Skype’s doing, you just need to take a look at some of the competition. Let’s examine the download experience of AOL Instant Messenger, MSN Messenger and Yahoo! Messenger, and contrast them to that of Skype.

(Apologies in advance for the layout mess of this article; I just don’t have the energy to do some fancy CSS to put borders around the images and scale them better.)

AOL Instant Messenger (AIM)

First up to the plate is AOL. “Mum, just go to the AOL home page and grab their messenger client, then we can chat for free.” Oh, yeah.

AOL, MSN and Yahoo all have a problem from the word ‘go’. An a non-US resident, which web site do I go to? The “.com” or the “.co.uk” one? (Skype is notoriously global in outlook.) Let’s assume we go the .com route every time. After all, my IP address is trackable to be in the UK, my browser is telling them my preferred language is “en-GB”. They’ve got enough clues.

So let’s hunt for the entrance to the rabbit hole:

OK, it’s there. It has a nice biggish icon. It just requires you to be telepathic and know that “AIM” is their codeword for their instant messenger. And that “Join AOL” isn’t the same thing as, um, joining AOL’s IM network. Let’s click forth…

Good - a call to action, bang in the middle. But there are some niggling ‘buts’. What if I get distracted by their kind offer of a trial of their new client? I’m outside the US (see bottom of screenshot) — do I need to download something different? I don’t have a screen name — am I supposed to get one before I download?

So AOL have given you plenty of excuses to abandon you shopping cart.

Next!

Mon dieu! You mean it didn’t just start the download? Am I an upgrade or a new user? OK, let’s go to ‘new user’.

Note the sidebar — AOL are positively inviting you to abandon the download and go sniff around some of their other stuff.

Phew! They want my mother’s dog’s date of birth before I can download it and try it? Luckily I’m a 102 year-old Swiss woman today.

Um, except Switzerland apparently comes between “Congo” and “Cote D’Ivorie”. I guess AOL forgot to pay the license fee for the advanced sort option when they bought in SQL Server. Naturally, “Germany” comes right before “Djibouti”, too. I’ll bear that in mind. (I couldn’t find the UK, anyway.)

Nooooh! It can’t be true! But I love you — I want to give you my life story, hold and caress your IM product in my hand! Don’t leave me now…

MSN Messenger

So, AOL was an embarassing user experience catastrophe. Can MSN do better? At least the rabbit hole has a sign, even if painted somewhat obscurely:

Click on…

OK, so what do I do now? The top of the screen is animated, and marquees through their key products (Hotmail, Messenger, Spaces) each with their own “learn more” button. So one usability problem is that if it switches just before you click, you get the wrong product.

Anyhow, we wait for “Messenger” to be shown, and click…

Oops! Just takes me right back to the same page, minus the fancy graphics. Maybe they never tested their web site with Firefox?

Let’s go back and click on that “MSN Messenger” text link…

Err, where do I go now? What am I supposed to download? Abandon ship, I think.

Yahoo! Messenger

I think our friends from Sunnyvale can do better, don’t you?

The good news: a prominent icon, clearly labelled. And you can even tell that it lets you talk!

OK, since the icon didn’t set up the expectation of a download starting, they’ve got to stick an intermediate screen in. Note the lack of clutter and diversions. Download, learn more, nothing else.

Uh oh! Which one should I choose? Is there anything good — or missing — in the UK version? I think I’d get a call from my mum at this point. Remember, a lot of newbies are really afraid of making mistakes.

Cool. Simple download instructions. Although I’m not sure that the idea of saving to your desktop is going to be universally understood.

All in all, high marks to Yahoo!. A force to be reckoned with?

Skype

So, on to the masters of the slick download.

Subtle? No way! But effective, absolutely.

It’s good. It tells you what to do without any jargon. I think they can do better, though. I should get instructions perfectly tailored to my browser, not just generic Internet Explorer instructions.

Scores on the doors

You would have thought that by now the traditional IM networks would have got this process down to a fine art. But clearly not. Marketing clutter, technical faults, invitations to abandon ship. These are cumulative. Someone isn’t doing their job. (That said, it could be worse. Ask your mother to provision herself with an open SIP softphone and establish a public identity. Ouch!)

There are lots more bits to the Skype adoption puzzle that make it sweetly special. The greater degree of internationalisation. The lack of use of the registry, so it’ll install on locked-down corporate laptops. The fact that incoming calls ring, triggering a Pavlovian “answer the call”, rather than popping up an obscure dialogue box. And so on.

The only mystery is why Yahoo! is the only one rising to the challenge of out-distributing Skype. AOL were once the kings of distribution, via CD carpet-bomb. Microsoft outran them by bundling with Windows, a superior distribution strategy. Yet neither can get the basics right of a simple download of their most personal, sticky and vital communications tool.

Until the competition starts putting the user front and centre in the experience, and not bizdev marketing deals or internal product marketing struggles, Skype will continue to sweep up new users faster than the opposition.

Dumb Pipes R Us

So, BT launches its dumb pipe product. Shame they’ve got a super-confusing way of pricing it:

…for that you will get 4,000 minutes BT Openzone Wi-Fi access and 75MB of data transfer via 3G or GPRS.

Do the users care what radio technology is used to make the connection? Why mix your metrics across connection types? Why bother limiting the Wi-Fi connection time at all? Afraid someone will decide to take up permanent residence in the airline lounge?

PS - 75Mb is only about 4 hours of Skyping. At the price, you’re still better off getting traditional cellular minutes if you’re willing to forego all the goodies of the stupid network.