This month I have such a grab bag of topics to discuss that it makes me feel like I'm writing a "Chaos Manor" column.
By "Chaos Manor," in the unlikely event that anyone reading this column needs an explanation, I refer to the long-time BYTE magazine column by science fiction writer, NASA consultant, and professional computer user Jerry Pournelle. BYTE has gone through some changes in recent years, being bought by CMP media, turned into an online-only publication, and most recently coming into the Dr. Dobb's family with the acquisition of CMP by the company that owns Dr. Dobb's (or is it the company that owns the company that owns Dr. Dobb's?). Through all the changes, Jerry has been a rock of stability. Make that a rock of chaos.
"Chaos Manor" hasn't always been the name of the column; it's also been called "The User's Column" and perhaps other things over the years. But the column canonically begins with Jerry reporting on events "here at Chaos Manor," describing what all members of the Pournelle household are up to on their respective computers, and slipping in a plug for his upcoming science-fiction collaboration with Larry Niven. "Chaos Manor" is apt: The column usually reads like a core dump from the Pournelle mind. A few hundred words into it he's reformatting the hard drive in one of his machines, which he introduces to us by name. This may or may not be the same machine on which he installed a system administrator's nightmare combination of Microsoft, Novell, and some-guy-who-walked-in-off-the-street's groupware products two months ago, which may or may not be the same machine he converted to DR-DOS last month. Not that he's unclear about it himself -- Jerry is never unclear -- but the overwhelmed reader soon gets an idea of why Jerry calls the Pournelle digs "Chaos Manor."
A lot of people send software and hardware to Jerry, hoping for a positive mention, and he definitely lets his readers know what he thinks of the more interesting products. What Jerry thinks may or may not be what the average user would think; while the problems he runs into with computers probably ring true for Joe Averageuser, the solution for Jerry sometimes involves having lunch with the guy who wrote the program or having an engineer friend drop by and solder a jumper on the motherboard. Jerry has spent so much time in his CONFIG.SYS file you'd think he'd be an expert, but like the Hardy Boys and Nancy Drew who remained perpetually the same age, Jerry remains perpetually a user, fascinated by the potential and frustrated by the shortcomings of computer technology.
In his December 1980 BYTE column, which I randomly pick off my shelf, Jerry's description of the state of "Chaos Manor" includes several "kids...playing games on the Radio Shack TRS-80" in the other room. Kids playing games in the other room: It occurs to me that the description is a nice metaphor for his readership back then, whatever their ages. A generation later, some of Jerry's kids have grown up -- literally and/or professionally -- to be working programmers, software company executives, and Internet entrepreneurs.
Joe Firmage would have been about 10 years old when that December 1980 BYTE issue came out. Did he read it? A few years later, when he founded a software company at age 17, he was certainly immersed in the technology and the industry. If, as seems likely, Firmage was one of Jerry's kids, he was one of the best and the brightest.
As recently as last November, the USWest web site proudly proclaimed, "As founder and chief strategist of USWeb, Joe Firmage is the driving force behind the company's ambitious plans to pioneer new methods of communication and commerce in the Information Age." In October, though, word had slipped out that Firmage was about to publish an online manifesto revealing his views on time travel (it'll happen, sooner or later), alien visitations (he's had one), and other fringe topics. One of his board members now calls him a crackpot and Firmage gave himself an ambiguous report card in March of this year when he said that he had "given nobody reason to question [his] sanity until six months ago." He says the decision to step down from the CEO job at USWeb was his, but that he might have been forced out if he hadn't moved first. Seems like USWeb, whatever management thought about Firmage's views, could have taken the high road blazed by Sirius Software, which introduces staff personal pages with this comment: "The following links are likely to be blank or to contain rabid political commentary, baby pictures, sailing schedules, dance annotation, maybe even technical articles. Whatever, Sirius Software is not responsible for what's here."
That's Sirius, no relation to Serius, the company that Firmage founded in 1987 to manage accounts payable for his mom's greeting-card business and sold four years later to Novell for $24 million. Serius pioneered visual programming with Serius Developer, which turned into Novell's Visual AppBuilder. (Notice how I managed to get around to the issue's theme. I'll return to it later in the column.) USWeb, which Firmage founded next, is valued in the billions of dollars today. And neither Serius nor Sirius is related to Ted Serios, the well-known thoughtographer. Thoughtography is the recording of images on Polaroid film through psychic projection, which Serios claimed to be able to do, until (and probably after) he was exposed by professional magician and psychic debunker James Randi. To the best of my knowledge, Joe Firmage does not claim to be able to record images on Polaroid film through psychic projection, though the topic is certainly fringe enough to interest him.
All seriousness aside, Joe Firmage is a bright and thoughtful guy with some views very deserving of consideration, in my humble opinion -- just not the ones involving spectral forms from other planets hovering over his bed and inspiring him to write manifestos about the destiny of mankind.
The changes in society being wrought by the Internet challenge one's ability to speculate.
The investment community recognizes that something transformational is happening and responds by betting on the people who seem to have some clue where we may be headed. They put megabucks into businesses, or into business plans. A year ago, the only Internet billionaire was Netscape's Jim Clark; today, there are over a dozen. But tracking the VC money is a very crude way to follow the changes underway.
I firmly believe we are experiencing an economic paradigm shift. The magazine Business 2.0 has a whole checklist of the indicators of the shift: frictionless economy, disappearance of distance, of time lags, of inventory, of boundaries between nodes in supply chains. Most interestingly, there is a shift occurring in who controls markets, with consumers getting more control over pricing, product information, and transactions.
With the latest Palm device we see the consumer being empowered with the ability to price compare, over the Web, on a cellphone, while standing in the store considering whether to buy an item. "It's $29.95, you say? But I can get it for, let's see, $19.95 down the street. What are you going to do about that?"
The new visibility of the consumer allows one-to-one selling. Remarkable, but is it a good thing to have marketers understand your desires better than you do?
Auction sites let consumers set the price, which you'd think would mean lower, fairer prices. But in the case of collectibles, the consumer's price turns out to be more, not less, than anyone would have the nerve to charge. This new economic paradigm isn't so simple. The need for vision here is so great that maybe it makes sense to listen to someone who talks with aliens.
Firmage wants to see companies dedicating a portion of their equity to nonprofit institutions that tackle environmental and other long-range problems. He thinks it could make economic sense for the companies that did it.
"As a consumer, if you were presented with the opportunity to purchase from an organization whose profit motive is geared toward worthy nonprofit causes...would that not be a factor in your decision-making when you choose to buy goods and services?" he asks the interviewer in a recent issue of Business 2.0.
It's not far fetched: You can already choose a long-distance provider that invests in rain forest protection, and it's exactly that aura of goodness that Apple tries to get for free by associating the company with pictures of Gandhi.
What's interesting about Firmage's idea is that he thinks this should be the standard model for business. He wants to see a whole generation of companies adopt this business model (of adopting worthy causes). He plans to push that idea as hard as he can through something called "EarthCity," whose web site will be up later this year. It will be, he says, the ultimate e-commerce portal, but one dedicated to good causes. Maybe it's too visionary to work, but I wouldn't bet against it. It's Joe Firmage's third startup, and the first two were spectacular successes.
Apple had a number of announcements to make at its Worldwide Developers Conference in May. I didn't make it to the WWDC this year, so I'm drawing on reports from others who did. The release of a completely functional Darwin binary was welcome news. Darwin, of course, is Apple's open source project, a complete operating system based on technologies in MacOS X Server. Darwin is a BSD UNIX system with support for both Macintosh and UNIX filesystems.
The upcoming OS X will use a new imaging model called "Quartz," but it's based on Adobe standards like PDF. OS X's transparent blue box, the place where old-style Mac apps can run, is now officially called "Classic" as in "Coke Classic." An obscure swipe at John Sculley, former Pepsico exec no longer on Steve Jobs' party list? Who knows, who cares. Yellow box, the unclassic side of OS X, is now called "Cocoa." Whatever. OS X itself, the client version, was actually released in an early form at the conference -- "Developer Preview i," it was called. It includes Quartz and upgrades the kernel from Mach 2.5 to 3.0. At WWDC, the big winner in the Apple Design Awards competition was Real Software, whose Realbasic took the best new product award and was runner-up for best user experience and most innovative. Real Software is promoting the product as Visual Basic-like ("If you like Microsoft's Visual Basic and wish there were a Macintosh version, you need to check out Realbasic.") I've checked out Realbasic, will probably write more about it next month, and have to report that, whatever it is, and no matter how innovative it is, and what a great user experience it provides -- it's not Visual Basic.
Visual Basic, which grew out of Alan Cooper's product Ruby, is one of the big success stories of development software. Curiously, Microsoft now seems worried about the future of Visual Basic in the age of the Web. At its recent TechEd conference, Microsoft went to some lengths to show that VB can be used to develop web server software. It's not just a GUI builder, was the message.
When that 1980 BYTE issue came out, Alan Cooper was one of Gary's kids: The bright young programmers Gary Kildall had recruited to work for him at Digital Research. Today, Alan is "a software god" [according to Stewart Alsop], "the father of Visual Basic" [Ruby was his baby], and an author. Alan's first book, About Face: The Essentials of User Interface Design, articulated his software design philosophy, critiqued a lot of commercial software design, and gave detailed advice on how to design good software. His latest book, The Inmates Are Running the Asylum: Why High-Tech Products Drive Us Crazy and How to Restore the Sanity (Sams, 1999), is a different kind of book altogether, and this has led at least one reviewer astray.
I won't actually review the book, partly because I read it in manuscript and gave Alan my feedback, so I'm not entirely unbiased; and partly because this book is not intended for Dr. Dobb's readers. It is, however, a book that I think Dr. Dobb's readers should read, because it argues for changes that would affect the working lives of all software developers.
In About Face, Alan talked about interface design. In The Inmates Are Running the Asylum, he has moved on to something subtly different, which he calls interaction design. In both books, he argues that the design of the user's interaction with the software, which is what he has been doing professionally for years, needs to be done by professionals. Professional interaction designers, not professional programmers. The problem is, there is no such profession, not really, not yet. Alan's own company, which has been doing this stuff for years and can be regarded as the vanguard of the movement to professionalize interaction design -- assuming there is a movement -- was only recently renamed Cooper Interaction Design to reflect its real mission.
The argument of the book is straightforward. High-tech products are forgetful, lazy, parsimonious with information, inflexible, and when they fail to do what they are asked they blame the user. The reason software interacts with users so obnoxiously is that the user interaction typically isn't anybody's unique responsibility in the design process. Either it is handled by programmers who treat the user experience as just one of many design constraints, or it breaks down to a directive to implement as many as possible of the top items on the users' wishlists. Either way, the user loses. The solution is to professionalize interaction design, train and hire interaction designers, and put interaction designers in charge of the development process.
That's Alan's case, and you may agree with it (I do) or not, but you should know that he is being taken very seriously by some large firms. Since it could affect you, you ought to be aware of and understand Alan's argument.
Jerry Pournelle reviewed The Inmates Are Running the Asylum in his column at http://www.byte.com/. He criticized Alan for not detailing what to do about poorly designed software. Here's Jerry: "What we should do, he says, is hire 'Interactive Systems Designers' to run software companies, and put 'Interactive System Design' in place before computers are coded. In other words, hire him."
But Jerry apparently didn't read Alan's preface, where he clearly explains that he set aside plans for a how-to book, on advice from friends, to first write this book presenting the business case for interaction design. "I beg forgiveness from any interaction designer reading this book," Alan says. "It has only the briefest treatment of the actual nuts and bolts of interaction design methodology..." Alan's friends convinced him that his ideas about interaction design represent such a substantial change in how the process of creating software gets done that he needed to write a book laying out the business case for interaction design. I think his friends got it right. And in this case, I think Jerry got it wrong.
Well, we all get it wrong once in a while. Several readers wrote to point out that I recently misused the expression "beg the question." Is there an emoticon for "thanks, and ouch!"? Even if I don't always agree with Jerry (and I don't!), there's no doubt that he has informed, inspired, and sometimes infuriated a generation of BYTE readers, and I'm glad of it.
The BYTE site recently ran a retrospective on the magazine. I'd considered doing something along the same lines here, but only about half of my BYTE's have been unpacked since I moved in February. One thing that the move hasn't changed: I will continue the double-headed homage that I've been paying for years to Jerry Pournelle and to Bob Kane, creator of Batman. The new Swaine digs will be referred to in this space as Stately Swaine Manor II.
DDJ