CTO for the USA

Mitch Kapor talks with Technology Review about the need for a CTO for the entire country.

"TR: Why does the country need a CTO?

Kapor: The underlying premise is that tech is inextricably intertwined with virtually everything. You can't talk about homeland security or education or energy without it being in large part a conversation about technology. The president will be well served if policy making is done in a more technologically sophisticated way."

Link: http://www.technologyreview.com/Infotech/21247/page1/

Is Google making us stupid?

Nicholas Carr created a firestorm around the value of IT in 2003 when he wrote the article “IT Doesn’t Matter” for the Harvard Business Review. He has a new article in The Atlantic entitled “Is Google Making us Stupid?” Google and similar tools allow us access to a lot more information than any other generation has ever had. However, the style of the information and the mental behaviors that we use to access and absorb it are very different from the way previous generations absorbed books and detailed articles. Carr suggests that are becoming accustomed to all information being delivered as small bites that can be consumed in a few minutes. As a result we are losing the mental habit and facility to sit with a long treatise on a subject and work through it over many hours or many days. He reaches back to historical examples that have had similar effects on people’s behaviors. In summary he proposes that the tools that we use to create and deliver information shape the way our brains work and that the Web fails to create the mental muscles required to deeply investigate a subject.

• TheAtlantic.com article
• IT Doesn’t Matter

Lead User Innovation

In most industries, R&D is done by a specific in-house department. However, for many products there is a leading edge group of users who buy the product and immediately make modifications to meet their very unique needs. Eric von Hippel (2005) of the MIT Sloan School of Management has studied the impact of "lead users" on the development of new features for products. He describes this effect in windsurfing, mountain biking, and open source software. These customers are effectively an external R&D lab for the company’s products. von Hippel argues that they need to be enrolled by the company as partners in identifying and developing features for the next generation of products. Three criteria must exist for this to be effective: (1) the users must have an incentive to innovate, (2) they must have an incentive to reveal their innovations and share them, and (3) their work must be at a competitive level with innovations created internally and by competing companies.

von Hippel’s book Democratizing Innovation is available as a free download on his web site: http://web.mit.edu/evhippel/www/books.htm

MMOG on Cellphone - Resurecting Motorola RAZOR

There are 10 million players of World of Warcraft and a few million more MMOG players spread among the other major titles. These people form a distinct customer group. Some portion of these are very dedicated and would take advantage of the opportunity to access and play their character when they are away from their desktop computer. Imagine that a cellphone company signed an exclusive deal with WOW to provide a miniature version of the game client for the cellphone. It could potentially capture several hundred thousand players and become the center for an entire sub-culture in society that is growing. The cell client may not allow the player to do all of the functions of the full 3D desktop version. But by giving them the ability to manage their assets, plans raids, stay connected to other players, and exchange dialog these players would spend even more hours with the game. This service might have the power to rescue a struggling cellphone provider like Motorola from oblivion. WOW exclusively on the RAZOR could reignite interest in that platform and drive sales for generations of new and better devices. At least one company may be saved from competing in commodity hell by offering such a unique product – that also makes phone calls on the side.

Annual Computer Server Sales

At a recent presentation, Scott McNealy, the Chairman of the Board at Sun Microsystems, stated that estimates for 2007 were that worldwide sales of server computers were 8 million units. They believe that 1.5 million of these servers were purchased by Google. If you estimate the numbers purchased by Yahoo, MSN, Amazon.com, and Salesforce.com, it paints a picture in which server side computing is being dominated by a few big service providers. This seems to align with a statement that Sun’s CTO made in 2006 that “the world only needs 5 computers”. Most of these companies are creating a server-side infrastructure that can handle a huge load of the world’s computing needs as a subscription service, with few applications residing on the client-side (a.k.a. desktop or thin-client machines).

- Scott McNealy's Talk on the subject (somewhere on this page - they keep changing the URL)

- Greg Papadopolous' Five Computers:

Social Browser

When the Internet looks like an endlessly linked set of HTML web pages, you need a browser to navigate the links - like the app you are using right now. But when the Internet is a set of social networks that link to you to friends and content that you have associated together, what should the browser look like then? Perhaps it should look like the Flock browser (www.flock.com).

I think millions of us hove been wondering what the next step in our web tools was going to be. We have been offered Firefox and IE 7.0, both nice tools, but both pretty much the same thing we have been using for a decade or so. The creators of Flock begin to see the web differently. They begin to appeal to the next generation of web users who are social, those people who "Surf Facebook" rather than "Surf the Web".

FREE ... what does that mean?

Chris Anderson is the Editor of Wired magazine and the author of The Long Tail. His newest idea and next book is centered on the idea that computer and communications costs are dropping to zero. What does it mean when these resources are so cheap that they are essentially free?

A video of a presentation that he did on the subject for Nokia is posted on the web HERE