Tag Archives: technology

By James Kwak

The recent New York Times story on Facebook Credits was just one of a slew of articles that have been coming out recently on this topic. (Hint: When that happens, it’s usually because the company in question is putting on a PR campaign, which means they are pushing stories to the media in an attempt to build buzz.) According to the generally positive reporting, Credits are “a virtual currency system that some day could turn into a multibillion-dollar business.”

As far as I can make out,* Credits are points that you can buy with real money and that are stored with your Facebook account data on the mother ship in Palo Alto (just like your bank keeps track of the Dollars you have on account there). You can use Credits to pay for a variety of stuff in Facebook apps, and Facebook takes a cut (currently thirty percent) of the value of any transaction using Credits. The story is that in the long run, you may be able to use Credits to buy anything, not just stuff on Facebook, positioning Facebook as a potential leader in electronic payments.

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By James Kwak

(This is Part 2 of 2; Part 1 covers the shift in personal computing from the age of the standalone PC to the age of cloud computing.)

We left off with the idea that personal computing was inexorably, though slowly shifting toward a Web-based model in which our computers’ main purpose is to run browsers and we spend most of our time on the Internet. A decade ago when this idea became popular it was not particularly practical, because you simply couldn’t do very interesting things in a browser; it was originally designed, after all, for reading static web pages. But in the past decade, web sites have become much richer and interactive — think about something like Gmail, with its automatic refreshing and keyboard shortcuts, or Google Documents, which allows multiple people to edit a document at the same time — to the point where most of what people do most of the time can be done in a browser.

But then there was Apple.

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By James Kwak

This week, Apple passed Microsoft to become the most valuable technology company in the world (measured by the market value of its stock).* I’ve been wondering about Apple and, in particular, why “apps” — which at first glance struck me as a giant step backward in computing technology — have gotten so much buzz in the media. Then I bought an iPad, and while I understand apps a little better, I’m still perplexed. But since this isn’t a particularly technology-savvy audience, this is going to take some setting up. The background is here in Part 1; Part 2 will be coming shortly.

(Note that here I’m talking about personal computing, which is what people like you and I do on our own; enterprise computing is something very different that I’ve written about before, and still largely takes place on mainframe computers.)

A Little Background

Rather than recap the entire history of computing (hilarious synopsis here, hat tip Brad DeLong), I’ll start in the early 1990s. At this point, many people had personal computers, but for the most part they weren’t connected to anything except maybe a printer. (Actually, in the early 1980s my father brought home one of those primitive modems where you actually placed your phone receiver into a socket to communicate, so we could log into the mainframe at his university, but that was the exception.)

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By James Kwak

So, after questioning the iPad, I bought one.* My primary motivation was that I wanted to be able to watch old TV episodes on the commute to and from my internship this summer, and I think an iPod Touch is just too small. I also bought an Android phone, because my three-year-old Motorola RAZR2 v9m (who comes up with these product names, anyway?) developed a crack in the hinge, and because I wanted the best camera I could get on a phone. (My #2 use for a phone is not email — it’s taking pictures and videos of my daughter.)

Anyway, catching up on the last three years of mobile technology has provided ample food for thought. I have a long post on the Apple-Google(-Microsoft) war rolling around in my head somewhere, which I will hopefully write down later this week. In the meantime, here’s John Gruber‘s verdict on Microsoft:

“Three years ago, just before the original iPhone shipped, here’s what Steve Ballmer said in an interview with USA Today’s David Lieberman:

‘There’s no chance that the iPhone is going to get any significant market share. No chance. It’s a $500 subsidized item. They may make a lot of money. But if you actually take a look at the 1.3 billion phones that get sold, I’d prefer to have our software in 60 percent or 70 percent or 80 percent of them, than I would to have 2 percent or 3 percent, which is what Apple might get.’

“Not only was he wrong about the iPhone, but he was even more wrong about Windows Mobile. Three years ago Ballmer was talking about 60, 70, 80 percent market share. This week, Gartner reported that Windows Mobile has dropped to 6.8 percent market share in worldwide smartphone sales, down dramatically from 10.2 percent a year ago.”

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By James Kwak

“I’ve given lectures on incivility around the globe. When I ask audiences whether anyone considers sending e-mail or texts during meetings uncivil, almost everyone raises their hand.

“Then, when I ask whether anyone in the audience sends texts or e-mail during meetings, about two-thirds acknowledge the habit. (Presumably, there are still more who don’t want to admit it.)”

That’s Christine Pearson, from her article in The New York Times.

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By James Kwak

No, it’s not a line from a pop song. It’s part of my hopeless, Luddite anti-smart phone campaign. This is from an interview with Tachi Yamada, president of the Bill & Melinda Gates Foundation’s Global Health Program.

“When you actually are with somebody, you’ve got to make that person feel like nobody else in the world matters. I think that’s critical.”So, for example, I don’t have a mobile phone turned on because I’m talking to you. I don’t want the outside world to impinge on the conversation we’re having. I don’t carry a BlackBerry. I do my e-mails regularly, but I do it when I have the time on a computer. I don’t want to be sitting here thinking that I’ve got an e-mail message coming here and I’d better look at that while I’m talking to you. Every moment counts, and that moment is lost if you’re not in that moment 100 percent.”

Yamada is just one person; because he feels this way doesn’t prove that you should, too. But I bet some of you will agree with him, and will start switching your BlackBerrys off when you are talking to other people. But over time, you will find yourself leaving it on, and then you will find yourself surreptitiously checking it under the table. It’s like chocolate ice cream; it’s too hard to say no to.

By James Kwak

Not the day they launched Google Buzz, but the day that Google Buzz product manager Todd Jackson responded to legitimate privacy concerns by writing this piece of meaningless corporate PR spin worthy of, well, any other company out there: “Google remains completely committed to freedom of expression and to privacy, and we have a strong track record of protecting both.”

By James Kwak

Some law school friends and I had trouble figuring this out two nights ago when Buzz was apparently rolled out, so I thought this might be helpful. I think I got it right, but no guarantees. Note that this post is about including your profile in public search results; there is another more important privacy issue discussed here.

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I know that no one out there really wants to hear my thoughts on new personal technology, but no one’s forcing you to read this. So here are my first thoughts on the iPad, Apple’s new 10″ tablet.

The resurgence of Apple in the last decade has been based on its ability to simply design and build better products than anyone else, in part because it does a better job of understanding what consumers actually want than anyone else. They are also extremely good and marketing and selling; who would have imagined that Apple would also turn out to be better at retail than any other electronic company? But I wonder if, with the iPad, the Steve Jobs magic is running low.

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Tyler Cowen asks why pay across software programmers is not more unequal. He cites John Cook, who argues that differences in programmer productivity are difficult to identify and measure. Since I do know something about this (though not a comprehensive answer), I thought I would comment.

Cook contrasts programmers to salespeople: “In some professions such a difference would be obvious. A salesman who sells 10x as much as his peers will be noticed, and compensated accordingly. Sales are easy to measure, and some salesmen make orders of magnitude more money than others.” Although this is the most-cited example around (except perhaps for traders), I don’t actually think it’s true.

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