Speeds and Feeds

Google is developing an operating system of its own, based on the company's Chrome browser and intended primarily for use in low-cost Netbooks. Now I'll tell you why I think Google is doing it.

Like any other commercial enterprise, Google is trying to make money. No secret there. But Google doesn't make money the way other computer software companies do.

Microsoft, for example, makes money mostly by selling software (and a few hardware products) to computer users. There are two sides to this plan. Microsoft wants to make computers more valuable, so buyers will spend more of their income on computers; and it wants to increase the share it receives of that budget.

What makes Google unusual is that it wants a share of a different budget: the time people spend in front of their computers. Google makes money by displaying ads on a small part of the display while people view Internet content on the rest. Not all the time, of course, but the opportunity is there, and Google's multibillion-dollar revenue shows how well this strategy can work.

Turning the Chrome browser into the Chrome OS is technically straightforward, though of course it'll take a lot of work. A browser already has most of the key elements of any OS: application programming interfaces (APIs) to allow application software to display content and accept user input, store and retrieve data from mass storage, communicate over the Internet, and so on. Google will have to add a driver model and some other things that don't exist in a browser, but it can learn from how these things are done in existing operating systems, and possibly even borrow much of the code directly from Linux; there's no need to reinvent the wheel.

Existing operating systems such as Windows support a far wider variety of programming languages and provide far more services than Chrome OS will, but Chrome will probably be plenty good enough for Netbooks. (Personally, I don't think Netbooks are good for much, and many Netbook buyers seem to agree as shown by the huge volume of refurbished systems now available from remarketers like Woot.com.)

So, Google is after your time, not your money. It can try to get more of your time in the same ways Microsoft tries to get more of your money. Will the Chrome OS increase the time people spend in front of the computer? No, quite the opposite. There will inevitably be less to do on a Chrome OS computer than on a Mac or Windows machine. Buying a Chrome-based Netbook means giving up the chance to run most Windows games, Apple's iLife suite, and other popular software.

But for Google, the key is this: once you've got a Chrome system, Google's in charge of ALL the time you spend with it.

I don't think that's good enough, and it looks like Google feels the same way; the company intends to implement the whole Chrome OS environment within the Chrome browser so Linux, Mac and Windows users can also run Chrome applications. This plan is necessary, since Google can't very well hope to muscle aside the incumbents, but it means that Netbook buyers will have no reason to prefer a Chrome-based machine.

Or will they? Linux may be free, but Google can undercut that price if it's willing to cut OEMs in on its ad revenue. In this way, Google could bring to market a subsidized pricing model we usually associate only with 3G-equipped notebooks. Google won't have nearly as much money to throw around as the cell phone operators do--maybe just a few unpredictable dollars per month averaged across all Chrome OS users vs. the reliable $60/month subscription fees associated with 3G cards--but that could still add up. Even a $20 subsidy could amount to 10 percent of the sale price of a cheap Netbook, which could tip the balance in favor of Chrome.

Like I said, it seems to me that Netbooks aren't the ideal platform for this strategy. The Google model can't work as well on a small screen, since users will be reluctant to share what little space they have with Google's ads. But they'll work well enough, and Google has no realistic chance to place Chrome on mainstream notebook and desktop systems except in the same narrow markets where Linux sells today. (And not all of those; for example, Chrome has no shot at the engineering workstation market, where Linux is popular.)

So I'm sure we'll see some number of Chrome OS-based machines on the market in 2010, and then we'll see what happens. My guess is that Chrome will do about as well as Linux has done in the Netbook business: not well. A lot of people will try it, possibly enticed by those lightly subsidized prices and the usual interest in novel computing platforms (the information-technology equivalent of the Coolidge effect, which perhaps could be known as the Glaskowsky effect.)

And then most of those people will return those machines, or give them to their ungrateful children, or just toss them onto a shelf to gather dust, and they won't buy more of the same--at least not until Google spends a few more years building Chrome OS into a fully competitive product, which I'm sure it will do. Google's big enough, and it knows there's a business here. It just won't be ready to take full advantage of the opportunity just yet.

The "Singularity" is that postulated point in time when technological progress, led by machine intelligences designing their own replacements at an ever-increasing rate, becomes so rapid that we mere humans can no longer comprehend or control it.

It's a popular concept in science fiction. Some people believe that this point will eventually be reached in the real world. I think that those people are drastically underestimating the other limits to progress, such as bandwidth limits for data gathering, the difficulty of comprehension, and the inverse relationship of speed to reliability in data analysis.

They're also confusing exponential growth curves (which lead to arbitrarily high growth rates) with S curves, which apply to real-world situations in which growth rates increase for a while as key limits are overcome, then slows again.

But while we're waiting for God to emerge from machines, some of the people promoting the concept of the Singularity are looking for practical ways to turn technological progress into social progress.

The latest such effort involves futurist Ray Kurzweil, Peter Diamandis of the X Prize Foundation, and Google co-founder Larry Page. The new Singularity University is a school aimed at both students and executives in various technology disciplines.

From a Los Angeles Times blog post:

"Dubbed Singularity University, its founders hope it will help close the gap in understanding and applying fast-developing technologies to solve what they called humanity's grandest challenges...such as poverty, hunger, and pandemics."

The Singularity University Web site identifies these areas of technology for its curriculum:

• Future Studies & Forecasting
• Networks & Computing Systems
• Biotechnology & Bioinformatics
• Nanotechnology
• Medicine, Neuroscience & Human Enhancement
• AI, Robotics, & Cognitive Computing
• Energy & Ecological Systems
• Space & Physical Sciences
• Policy, Law & Ethics
• Finance & Entrepreneurship

This all sounds wonderful: that is, I wonder if Kurzweil, Diamandis, and Page actually believe that the solutions to poverty, hunger, and pandemics will be found in technology.

It seems to me that it would be more useful to take these students and executives through some classes on philosophy, theology, politics, sociology, and history--fields they're probably not sufficiently aware of and that are much more directly related to the causes of, and possible cures for, social problems.

I've been to two of Kurzweil's Singularity Summits, including the most recent, in October. I didn't write about it here because I simply didn't see anything worth writing about. Most of the conference wasn't even about the Singularity in any meaningful sense.

It will be nice if the Singularity University can achieve useful results for society, but I suspect that it will just be a longer, more labored version of the Summit, a painful muddle of science and science fiction identifying no clear path to a future we might not even want.

It looks like Google is marking all of its search results with this warning: "This site may harm your computer."

If you click on a Google result link in spite of the warning, you get an interstitial page with an additional warning: "Warning - visiting this web site may harm your computer!"

Clicking the warning itself will take you to this page, which explains: "This warning message appears with search results we've identified as sites that may install malicious software on your computer."

The server(s) that hosts that page seems to be getting hammered right now. No surprise. So is StopBadware.org, a site Google refers its users to for more information.

And so is the Google server that provides more detailed diagnostics for sites allegedly failing Google's safety tests, such as this report for the presumably clean Wikipedia site.

Coincidentally, I was reviewing the diagnostics page just yesterday for a site that had been infected by malware. The diagnostics page identified the origin of the malware that Google spotted on the server it was warning about. I wonder what, if anything, Google is saying about all these allegedly infected sites this morning... especially since Google is warning about its own site as well, if your search encompasses one of Google's own pages.

Something, I think, is amiss in Mountain View...

UPDATE: Todd Gardner suggests this problem was caused by an outage at StopBadware.org. If so, Google needs to rethink its fail-safe strategy for this data source.

UPDATE 2: Google seems to be working normally again.

UPDATE 3: According to a comment on this post by CNET user stopbadware, manager of StopBadware.org, and a blog post on that site titled Google glitch causes confusion, the problem was not with StopBadware.org.

UPDATE 4: According to this post on the official Google blog site by Marissa Mayer, Google vice president of search products & user experience, the problem was caused by a bad update to Google's list of malware-infected Web sites. As the post says, "the URL of '/' was mistakenly checked in as a value to the file and '/' expands to all URLs."

Mayer reports that the problem has been fully solved and promises that Google "will carefully investigate this incident and put more robust file checks in place to prevent it from happening again."

Just hours after I posted my WTF report (for "where's the feature," of course) on the iPhone 3G with version 2.1 software, Apple released the 2.2 update. I figured I ought to go through my post and see if any of the things I mentioned were addressed in the update.

But the short summary is: not much has changed. The new 2.2 software, as described on Apple's main page for iPhone updates, is mostly about internal quality.

Apple describes only four areas of new features for US users: an improved Google Maps application, direct downloading of podcasts from the iTunes Store, the ability to turn off auto-correction when typing, and using the Home button to return to the first Home screen from other Home screens.

Only that last change addresses one of my issues. It's a bolder change than what I suggested (allowing the screens to slide around from last to first in a circular fashion), and a bigger improvement, I think. It makes the first Home screen distinctly more convenient than the others, and I suspect this new feature will influence how I distribute applications across the available screens.

That said, it would still be useful to add the wraparound scrolling feature I described. It would save time-- and more importantly, reduce the chance of accidentally opening an unwanted application-- when accessing the later screens.

I tested the other issues I reported last week, and I didn't see any changes. I haven't had time to decide if the new software is more reliable, but I've had few problems with reliability anyway. I've seen my share of browser crashes, but Safari restarts more conveniently on the iPhone than it does on my Macs, so that hasn't been a big thing for me.

I'd like to thank CNET user IgnatiusTheKing for pointing out, in a comment to my previous post, that accented characters and some special symbols can be generated by holding down keys on the virtual keyboard. This works for accentable characters (such as "e" but not "x") and a few punctuation symbols (such as ! and ? to generate the inverted versions used in written Spanish, and $ to generate international currency symbols such as the pound, yen, and euro).

But as far as I can tell, there's still no way to get proper n-dashes and m-dashes, math symbols such as ×, ÷, and π, and other useful characters.

Also, I learned that Japanese iPhone users with the 2.2 software have access to a set of "emoji" symbols-- complex emoticons popular among Japanese users. (Back in October, MacRumors.com showed some of these symbols as found in the 2.2 beta, here.)

These emoji are also present in the US 2.2 update, but can't be generated from the US English keyboard, at least not without doing some hacking. One more reason for a little more typographical flexibility, I think.

So, anyway, I think there's still a lot of room for improvement in the iPhone software, good though it already is. I'll just keep hoping someone at Apple notices these posts and makes the changes I'd like to see.

Incidentally, before installing the 2.2 update, I checked around online to see if people were having any serious problems with it-- always a good idea, I think. I found scattered reports of various problems, but I went ahead with the update since it didn't look like there were any specific widespread issues.

After the update I tested for all of the reported problems, and was unable to replicate any of them on my iPhone. Everything seems to be fine. I can't promise it'll go as smoothly for everyone else, but this seems to be a pretty safe update.

On Thursday, I attended MobileBeat 2008, a new conference here in Silicon Valley focused primarily on cell phones broad enough to encompass closely related gizmos like Apple's iPod Touch and--at least in theory--mobile Internet devices.

The event was hosted by VentureBeat, where a great many blog posts can be found that go through all the sessions and significant announcements from the conference. (My thanks to VentureBeat writer Dean Takahashi, who invited me to the conference.)

... Read more

In a way, this story is left over from CES 2008, where I attended a blogger party hosted by the Parnassus Group and sponsored by, among other companies, Virgin America, the US domestic airline counterpart to Virgin Atlantic.

The party was a lot of fun, and all the sponsors did extensive giveaways. I got a flight suit from Intel and Zero G, a private company that offers "weightless" (parabolic trajectory) flights. Alas, I didn't win a Zero G flight, but I did win a free flight on Virgin America. In fact, I think pretty much everyone at the party won one of these prizes-- apparently they gave away 80 flights.

The free flight coupon, which was good for one round trip in the main cabin (that is, coach class) anywhere Virgin flies in the US, was valid through the end of May, so when Montalvo Systems shut down in early April I was able to spend some time planning a trip.

Although Virgin America flies to several West Coast destinations, I spend most of my time on this end of the country anyway. The two choices that seemed most attractive were New York and Washington, DC. Ultimately I decided I could have a better time in DC and not spend so much money, so that's where I went.

Buying the ticket on the Virgin America website was pretty easy once I figured out that the site requires customers to apply discount codes in advance rather than also accepting discount codes when paying for a flight.

I had to pay $21 in fees for the flight, and I chose to pay $25 extra for an exit-row seat, but the discount still amounted to $277.20. Normally I'd say such a meager amount wouldn't influence my posts here, but it's probably the case that I wouldn't be writing about Virgin America otherwise...

The airline charges $25 extra for "premium" seats at the bulkheads and exit rows in the main cabin. As a fairly tall guy, I like this idea-- it discourages people from taking these seats if they don't need them, and makes them more likely to be available for those of us who really need them.

I was able to get an exit-row seat on the return flight, but not on the flight out. The seat pitch in the main cabin is adequate for moderately tall people such as myself, but only barely. It's about like American Airlines, which is the airline I usually fly on.

Virgin America seems to have learned some valuable lessons from the success of JetBlue on these transcontinental flights. Virgin provides fairly comfortable leather seats in the main cabin and attractive leather massage chairs in first class. The airline's Airbus airplanes (my flights were on A320s) are attractively decorated inside with color-changing "mood lighting" (which remained set to blue and purple on my flights).

Virgin provides a high-quality multimedia entertainment system with a 9" touchscreen LCD at every seat. The system, called Red, carries 24 channels of live satellite TV (sourced from Dish Network), 20 channels of live satellite radio, a good variety of on-demand TV shows and music, movies, simple games, and even chat rooms. I checked frequently but never found anyone in the chat rooms on the way out; on the way back, this feature was disabled.

The system has menu options called "Read" and "Shop", but they were not active. It seems to me that unavailable options ought not to be displayed.

The Dish Network channels are standard definition, not HD, but are stretched to fill the widescreen LCDs, which I find annoying. The broadcasts didn't come through reliably; on both flights, there were long periods when some of the channels were experiencing trouble, even in level flight at our cruising altitude under a clear sky. Sharp turns caused the satellite receiver to fail entirely, but I suspect there's no good way to solve that problem. On the return flight, four of the channels (ESPN, ESPN Classic, BET, and BBC America) were carrying Dish informational programming instead of the intended content.

I was pleased to see that the music videos and some of the pre-recorded TV shows and movies are offered free of charge. For example, I found several of the TED Talks and an episode of Patrick Norton's Tekzilla (an old one-- episode 17 from January 2008).

When watching the pre-recorded content, there are pause, rewind, and fast-forward controls. These functions aren't available for the live broadcasts-- no in-air DVR yet, sorry.

I also appreciated the live flight map based on data from Google Maps, although it doesn't offer a satellite view or a really close-up view of the road maps. It seems to me that these features would be useful, but I suppose that providing them would require much more on-board storage. The map can pop up over whatever TV show you're watching, which makes it convenient to check the progress of the flight during commercials. There was an odd problem with this feature-- the black pixels on the map overlay were actually transparent, so legends on the map (city names, etc.) were intermittently illegible depending on the TV image. This function worked well on the flight to DC, but was not reliable on the flight back. Even after we landed at SFO, the system showed the airplane was a few miles southwest of the airport.

The system can also be used to order food, which seems like a great idea, assuming it doesn't run the cabin crew ragged. Some of the things you can order are free, like sodas, but most items are sold to generate additional revenue. Accordingly, "Eat" buttons are easy to find on the wired remote control and the on-screen menus.

Entrees-- salad and sandwich type stuff, no hot food-- were around $9; snacks were $1 to $2. These prices were competitive with those of airport shops, and it's certainly more convenient to get the food onboard-- but most airports offer more variety. A turkey-bacon wrap sandwich I ordered came without the expected accessories (napkin, mustard, etc.).

One of the most valuable features on board-- to me, at least-- was the provision of two 110V outlets for each set of three seats in the main cabin. (Presumably the folks in first class get one each.) Finally, there's a legal way to power and recharge my laptop in flight. The DC outlets found on some airlines won't charge a MacBook Pro, although they do let the machine operate without running down the battery further. Virgin's AC outlets are oriented horizontally, rather than the usual vertical arrangement in most wall outlets, which made for a fragile connection to the MacBook Pro's power adapter, which frequently fell out.

Virgin America also offers Ethernet and USB jacks at each seat, but these are currently useless. When I hooked up to the Ethernet jack, my laptop detected the connection, but didn't receive an IP address, so there was no way to communicate over it. I can imagine this feature could be useful for business travelers who need to collaborate on some project during the flight, but until a DHCP server is provided, even peer-to-peer networking will likely not work.

The USB jack, allegedly provided to allow customers to recharge cellphones, iPods, and other USB devices (and, according to the on-board Welcome guide, to hook up a full-size keyboard for the in-flight entertainment system, an amusing notion), didn't even provide power.

Bottom line-- the electronics and the in-air food ordering are fun, but not enough to make a difference for me. I will certainly consider Virgin America for future travel, but I'll continue to choose airlines based on price, schedule, and compatibility with my existing frequent-flyer miles, as I've always done.

Coming up next, a few museum reviews! I spent most of my time in DC doing the usual touristy stuff, and I ran across a chunk of ENIAC, the world's first general-purpose digital computer, in an unexpected place...

After Jim Gray, a technical fellow for Microsoft Research in Silicon Valley, was lost at sea in January, Amazon.com set up its Mechanical Turk service to let the public help examine Digital Globe satellite photos of the ocean outside of San Francisco Bay for signs of Gray's sailboat. Unfortunately, Gray was never found.

I spent an evening going through these images on Mechanical Turk because I knew who Gray was (coincidentally, his home page at Microsoft Research was the first entry in my "People" bookmarks collection) and because ... Read more

It's been only a week since I blogged (here) about a proposal from author Peter Wayner that Google should reward original content creators by diminishing the search ranking of unauthorized copies.

According to news reports, Google News has already gone one step further, agreeing with four wire services (The Associated Press, Agence France-Presse, The Canadian Press, and The Press Association in the United Kingdom) to start hosting their stories directly on Google News-- thus diminishing a source of links to independent newspaper versions of their wire stories.

This wasn't what Wayner or I had in mind; I figured Google should just ... Read more

A friend sent me a link to the transcript of a talk that author Peter Wayner gave at Google last year.

It's basically about how Google could provide an incentive for newspapers and bloggers to do more original reporting rather than just rehashing previously published reports. (Yes, I know that's what I'm doing here-- but I've done a lot of genuine on-site reporting here lately, from Hot Chips, Zonbu headquarters, and Siggraph-- so I can see both sides of the issue.)

Wayner presents some interesting figures. He says ... Read more