Serving up Life in an Online World

Thomas John Watson Sr. was the president of IBM during its years of spectacular growth in the 1920s through the 1950s. It was during this time that he nurtured IBM's innovative management style, which, until recently, kept Big Blue at the top of the global IT league. Fast approaching 400,000 employees worldwide, IBM remains the world's largest IT employer; although, a couple of years ago, Hewlett-Packard overtook it based on total revenue (but not profit).

It was Watson's son, Thomas J. Watson Jr., who took IBM into the "modern-day" computer business after taking the reins in 1956. Previously, the company concentrated on building tabulating machines and cash registers, products that were to later be replaced by mainframes and personal computers. Thomas Watson Sr. was skeptical of the role of these "'new" machines -- still very much in their infancy -- and was reported to have famously said, "There is a world market for maybe five computers." There is considerable debate as to whether he actually say this, but looking at the landscape 65 years on, maybe he had a point.

Of course, history has shown us there was a much larger market for mainframe and personal computers, but had Mr. Watson said that the world could perhaps be run on five servers, then he might not have looked so out-of-touch.

Just look at Google, with its plans for online domination. First search, then online tools and applications that many believe will rival (and eventually replace) Microsoft Office as our main productivity tool. Even the mobile industry isn't safe, with Google's entrance via the Android platform late last year. The company has had an astronomical impact on IT, and, as with IBM in its day, it is blazing a trail with its innovative work and management practices. Suddenly, it seems, everything is moving online, and Google appears to be at the center, much to the concern of others.

Of course, an online world is something of a double-edged sword for users in the developing world. In much of sub-Saharan Africa, rates of personal computer ownership remain low, and many Internet cafes, particularly those in urban areas, thrive as a result. With mobile phones holding immense promise -- but so far failing to deliver an acceptable user experience -- personal computers remain the best option for many hoping to join the IT (and online) revolutions. It is something that hasn't gone unnoticed by organizations like One Laptop Per Child (OLPC), Intel and more recently Dell, which all have low-cost laptop initiatives aimed at these very markets. Intentional or not, many of these low-cost machines, with their relatively low storage and processing capacities, are ripe for this emerging online world, assuming, of course, that people can get online.

For now, computers in Internet cafe are more "public" than "personal," and having access to rich online tools -- such as e-mail, word processors and spreadsheets, and hefty amounts of online storage space -- is a huge plus. Personal computers no longer need to be personal. Multiple people can use them without worrying too much about privacy, where to save data or accessing the data if their first-choice Internet cafe is out of action. Hard as it may be for us to appreciate, these are real issues that many users face around the world on a daily basis.

With the growth of this online world, thin-clients -- "poor man's computers" to some -- are attracting renewed interest. In the days of mainframe computers, desktop machines acted as simple terminals, with little or no storage capacity and hardly any processing power or on-board memory. These 'dumb' terminals simply sucked down and displayed data on demand and sent it back if the user decided it needed changing. Terminals had smallish footprints, were simple, relatively cheap and could not do much if they were not connected to a mainframe. Today, the Internet is the mainframe, and many people find it hard, if not impossible, to work if they lose their connection. With our world increasingly served up online, the need for personal computers to be processor powerhouses with hundreds of gigabytes of storage seems less and less relevant. "Thinner client" machines being targeted at the developing world may well be just as relevant, if not more so. No doubt many of the innovative technologies developed by the likes of OLPC will one day make their way into our very own machines.

Imagining the landscape by the end of the next decade may not be that hard after all. Is it really so unbelievable to think that everything we do could be based on thin-client computing devices, maybe even mobile phones, the thinnest clients of them all? And that all of our digital assets could be held on five solar-powered mega-servers in Mountain View, California, home of Google?

Thomas Watson Sr. could have been a lot closer to the truth than he imagined.

Ken Banks devotes himself to the application of mobile technology for positive social and environmental change in the developing world, and has spent the last 15 years working on projects in Africa. Recently, his research resulted in the development of FrontlineSMS, a field communication system designed to empower grassroots non-profit organizations. Ken graduated from Sussex University with honors in Social Anthropology with Development Studies and currently divides his time between Cambridge (UK) and Stanford University in California on a MacArthur Foundation-funded Fellowship. Further details of Ken's wider work are available on his Web site at http://www.kiwanja.net.

Developer Event Goes Mainstream

An annual trade show has only a certain number of decent years in it when it can remain an intimate, low-key affair where the members of an industry can congregate, set the stage for future business and innovation, get a few drinks on the company expense account, and then go home. Because if it truly is an important conference, then inevitably the jackasses who wear their Bluetooth headsets everywhere they go will sniff it out and ruin it.

(If you wear a Bluetooth headset everywhere you go and you are not a jackass, I really should apologize. Don't worry; I'll get to all 82 of you eventually... just be patient. Though I should warn you that when I call you, if you answer simply by saying "Go" I'll be forced to use my influence to have you removed from the International Database Of People Who Wear Bluetooth Headsets Everywhere But Who Are Not Jackasses.)

I suppose the San Diego Comic-Con is the classic example of this sort of thing. It's the biggest annual comics and science-fiction convention in America. I attended it in 1999, when it was pretty huge but was still a place where professionals and wannabe-professionals could network, and fans could buy dead treeware and artwork and meet their favorite creators.

Now it's a place where fans can wait in line for three hours for the pleasure of being told that the auditorium has already reached capacity and they won't be able to hear the producer of Iron Man III explain why he replaced Robert Downey, Jr. with someone younger and cheaper.

I come not to bemoan this phenomenon, but to praise it. At the 2009 Comic-Con, you'll be in the same facility as Kate Bosworth, Natalie Portman, and Samuel L. Jackson. In 1999, I was in a facility with a heartbreaking number of fat 40-year-old men wearing a set of Batman tights with no underpants.

So I'm monitoring the ongoing Bluetoothification of Apple's Worldwide Developers Conference with great interest. The lion-haired men and women of the developer community have the cunning, reflexes and savagery of a mongoose in a basket of cobras but they breed at such a slow rate compared to the Bluetooth bunch that they'll inevitably be outnumbered soon.

WWDC has been an annual event since 1983, when it was a deeply insider event. Most of what was discussed was for developers' ears only and even the contents of the keynote was delivered under a non-disclosure agreement that kept the press and the general public away. Which isn't to say that the things announced at WWDC were of any possible interest to anybody who wasn't writing device drivers for an AppleTalk-to-Centronics hardware print spooler.

But the transmogrification of the first WWDC session from a simple "state of the nerdly union" address to a full-blown Stevenote in 1998 made the change in the conference's character inevitable and irrevocable. The family of viruses responsible for Ebola and Marburg hemorrhagic fever fear nothing and yet they all steer clear of any room that Steve is keynoting in. When His Royal Steveness gets up there and starts spinning plates, everything else in the room starves and dies for lack of attention. Documentation of the methodology for binding Python scripts to Cocoa in XCode never had a chance.

This year just made it all official: WWDC is just another keynote on the tour schedule. Months before June 9, anticipation about the new iPhone had crowded out any other possible expectation and ensured that the only questions the audiences were interested in would be "How much?" and "I know that this is technically supposed to be Q&A, but I just wanted to take this opportunity to personally thank you, Steve, and the entire iPhone team for..."

Honest to God. It's as though Apple had been cheating on its developers with consumers and the mainstream press, and WWDC 2008 was the year when they got so shameless about it that they told their collective mistress "You know what? It'd be a lot simpler if you just started calling me at the house instead of at the office."

So: goodbye to the clubby and technical industry event. Hello to a new opportunity to spot someone in the crowd who you think might have been that guy in that movie with Nicolas Cage a couple of years ago. Here's what we can look forward to in future WWDC keynotes:

2009: Steve is introduced by a former Beatle (living).

2010: A personal guest of Jonathan Ive is pulled from the auditorium so that Simon Cowell can be seated at the last minute.

2011: First appearance of some sort of teary plea for an end to global warming or, quote "that thing with all those poor kids over there, you know, recently"

2012: Has-been and wannabe movie starlets stroll up and down Howard Street in front of the convention center on Keynote Morning, trolling for paparazzi. They have paid the designer of their gown the customary extra $280 for the special mechanism that causes the strap holding the top up to "accidentally" disengage when triggered by multiple flashes.

2013: Keynote is concluded with a musical performance by two former Beatles (Paul plus a tastefully-reanimated John or George; let's just say that Apple's new product that year will turn a damned many heads).

I can only see one single downside to this overall shift. In the past, I've been unable to attend WWDC beyond the keynote because of my status as a journalist. Apple has told me that I wield too much power in this industry (in so many words), and that sends me away from those closed doors with a certain spring in my step.

In the future, it'll be because a 6'5" former nationally-ranked Ultimate Fighter manning the door tells me I'm not on the list.

"But you didn't even ask my name," I'll protest. The man will continue staring off into the middle-distance, trying to work out whether it's rabbit or deer that he thinks he smells over there in the bushes.

It'll be just like I'm at a fancy Academy Awards afterparty. It'll be awesome.

[Andy Ihnatko is a technology columnist and author whose work appears regularly in Macworld and elsewhere. He is also technology columnist for the Chicago Sun-Times.]

Ending the Hardware/Software Rat Race

We're saved! Or rather, Windows XP is -- at least for the time being. Microsoft announced this week that it is extending the cut-off date for sales of the older edition of Windows until 2010, specifically to serve the needs of customers who are planning to buy one of the new wave of low-cost laptops due to arrive this summer.

It's not hard to see why. The mini-laptop that started it all, the Asus Eee PC, shipped with Linux pre-installed, and many of the new machines are likely to take the same road. In fact, some PC makers are reportedly so enamored with Linux that the news of an XP option might fall on deaf ears. This is a fascinating development, and with any luck it could be the start of a promising new trend.

In many ways, Windows Vista can be seen as the culmination of the old way of doing business in the computer industry: the hardware/software rat race. PC manufacturers release product lines with the latest, fastest, and most powerful hardware, and the software vendors pump out ever-more-bloated software to match. With Vista, it's gotten to where you actually need a multi-gigahertz processor and two gigabytes of RAM just to run the operating system! Does this honestly make sense to anyone?

Apparently, customers aren't the only ones who are getting frustrated. PC makers seem to be getting a clue, too; and for once they're taking the lead, rather than just taking marching orders from Redmond.

Nobody really expects these new, low-cost computers to replace the high-powered PCs we've come to love. But more choice is a great thing. For once, we could start to see a computer industry that behaves more like the automotive industry -- after all, you don't buy a Hummer when all you really need is a Vespa.

Which brings us back to the OS question. Microsoft obviously thinks this new market is important enough that it can't afford not to have a hand in it. In fact, I wouldn't count on this XP reprieve being anything more than a stop-gap measure. I'm betting Microsoft will come up with some form of Vista or Windows 7 that's specially-tailored for low-end machines in the near future. (By the way, if you simply must have XP, PC World's Preston Gralla has some great suggestions.)

Be that as it may, however, these new Linux-powered PCs are definitely ones to watch. For one thing, running Linux means the PC makers must come up with their own, custom UIs to make it easier for new users to access their software. Asus has already been fairly successful at this with the Eee PC. If the other manufacturers follow suit with new and creative ideas of their own, this could give desktop Linux a long-awaited shot in the arm.

More importantly, if the PC manufacturers are so successful with their Linux-powered devices that they can convince Microsoft to change the tune that it's been piping with Vista, we could be in for some very exciting computing times, indeed.

Speakeasy Brings 10 Mbps Internet, Symmetrically

Best Buy's Speakeasy broadband division is offering quite a deal for businesses that need more than DSL can offer in most markets, the service-level commitment of a T-1 (1.5 Mbps up/down) line, and high symmetrical bandwidth: what they're calling Business Ethernet, with 10 Mbps upstream and downstream starting at $1,295 per month.

While that's no co-location speed--where 100 Mbps to 1 Gbps Internet backhaul is common--it's still plenty good enough for moderately busy Web sites, and for companies that need to push out as much data as they pull in, such as graphic design studios and video-editing shops.

Speakeasy is making use of some newer technology to push this kind of high speed symmetrical offering up to about 10,000 wire feet from central offices in the central core of 22 U.S. cities. Many businesses are frustrated with the asymmetricality offered by DSL providers, even non-incumbent ones, and by the cost of using fractional T-3 lines.

The T-3 technology, which can run as fast as about 45 Mbps, is designed for carrier-grade and enterprise purposes, and doesn't scale down well in cost for hardware and monthly rates. In some markets, some providers can charge close to Speakeasy's rates; in others, far higher.

A Speakeasy spokesperson said rates are the same in each market, with $1,295 carrying a 3-year commitment; 2 years is $1,495 per month, and 1 year $1,695 per month. All plans in all markets include the local loop (the wire to the central office), all bandwdith, and the hardware and installation.

Broadcom Co-founder Drugged Drinks, Indictment Says

Broadcom co-founder Henry Nicholas on Thursday was indicted for possession and distribution of drugs and on charges of backdating stock options that caused the technology company to write-down $2.2 billion in profits.

For over nine years, Nicholas maintained a warehouse where he stored drugs including ecstasy, methamphetamine and cocaine, the indictment alleged. Nicholas put ecstasy in the drinks of industry executives and Broadcom clients, and supplied prostitutes and escorts he had hired with drugs, according to court documents.

The indictment alleges Nicholas and others smoked "extensive amounts of marijuana during a flight on a private plane between Orange County and Las Vegas, causing marijuana smoke to enter the cockpit and requiring the pilot to put on an oxygen mask."

Nicholas and former Broadcom Chief Financial Officer William Ruehle were also indicted for engaging in stock-option backdating between 1999 and 2005 and falsifying corporate books and records.

Nicholas and Ruehle were allegedly involved in schemes to give employees the option to buy stock set at a future price without recognizing its fair value, according to the indictment. The stock grant dates were selected to coincide with the low points of Broadcom's stock price.

The indictment also alleged that false statements were filed with the U.S. Securities and Exchange Commission through 2005 about Broadcom's stock option grants.

The fraud resulted in the largest financial restatement related to options backdating in U.S. history, with Broadcom adding more than $2.2 billion in additional compensation to its financial results in January 2007, according to the U.S. Department of Justice.

Nancy Tullos, Broadcom's former vice president of human resources, who is named in the securities fraud indictment, pleaded guilty in November to one count of obstruction of justice in connection with an earlier investigation into stock-options backdating at Broadcom by the DOJ.

Nicholas was the co-founder of Broadcom in 1998, and he served as CEO and co-chairman on the company's board of directors until May 2003.

Desktop Virtualization: Vista's Secret Weapon?

As Microsoft continues to recommend that business customers not pass over Vista in favor of the forthcoming Windows 7, the company has been working quietly to improve its software for desktop virtualization, which could in the future alleviate obstacles like application compatibility that have plagued Vista adoption.

Microsoft last month closed its acquisition of Kidaro Technologies, a desktop-virtualization software vendor, and plans to use technology from that company to create a new product called Microsoft Enterprise Desktop Virtualization, which the company will release in the first half of 2009, according to a post on Microsoft's Windows Vista Team Blog.

Desktop virtualization software allows a business to run an entire desktop, including the OS, as a virtualized container on a network. Specifically, Kidaro's software allows users to run applications from multiple versions of Windows at the same time on a desktop, with seamless windowing and menus so it is not confusing to users, according to the blog, which is attributed to Chris Flores, a communications director at Microsoft. This scenario alleviates the problem of having to bring older applications up to date with a new OS running locally on a client machine.

Microsoft will combine desktop-virtualization technology from Kidaro into the Microsoft Desktop Optimization Pack (MDOP) of software to create the forthcoming Enterprise Desktop Virtualization software next year. Microsoft has been offering MDOP for Vista since last July to make it easier for business customers to deploy the OS across multiple desktops. The package includes application virtualization and desktop- and asset-management software from several Microsoft purchases, including Softricity, AssetMetrix, Winternals Software and DesktopStandard, and is designed to help business customers deploy a new OS and then manage client desktops.

In recent months Microsoft executives both privately and publicly have been stumping for the company's application- and desktop-virtualization strategies. As business customers have been slow to adopt Vista, both scenarios can help solve at least one of customers' major gripes with the OS: getting older applications to run, and run well, without a lot of recoding or reconfiguring.

At a talk in New York last week, Chief Software Architect Ray Ozzie promoted Microsoft's desktop-virtualization strategy, stressing how it will alleviate compatibility problems.

"It's really the ultimate way of ensuring that if you have written an application in the desktop environment that you can run it in another version of the OS," he said at the Bernstein Strategic Decisions Conference. "As we make further and further improvements in the desktop, we'll make use of virtualization technology to ensure that compatibility."

Similarly, at a private meeting with journalists in April, Shanen Boettcher, general manager of Windows product management, also stumped for Microsoft's application and desktop virtualization plans.

Application compatibility has been one of the reasons businesses have been slow to adopt Vista, a fact that has not been lost on Microsoft. The company on Wednesday released a white paper encouraging businesses to adopt Vista amid increasing reports that businesses will skip it in favor of the next version of the client OS, code-named Windows 7, which is due out late next year or early 2010.

The paper, "The Business Value of Windows Vista: Five Reasons to Deploy Now," is outlined on another Windows Vista Team Blog entry. The five reasons to deploy Vista sooner rather than later, according to Microsoft, are that Vista improves the security of PCs and data; unlocks the potential of mobile PCs; makes employees more productive; speeds return on investment; and reduces support and management costs.

Wednesday's report follows one released to the Web several weeks ago that outlined some "misunderstood" new features of Vista, and how customers can handle them.

It remains to be seen whether Microsoft's continued Vista promotional efforts will work. Its virtualization efforts, however, could make a better case for deploying Vista than any marketing the company has done so far, if customers begin to leverage them before Windows 7 hits the market.

Keith Brown, a network administrator for Gwinnet Medical Center in the Atlanta metropolitan area, said that his company doesn't foresee adopting Vista until next year if at all, citing application-compatability issues as a key reason for holding off.

However, using desktop virtualization software is one way to avoid that problem, and will be a great aid to OS deployment in the future once the technology is more widely used, he said. "Virtualized software allows you to work around [compatibility issues]," Brown said. "This is a big-time thing."

More Laws, Collaboration Required for Online Safety

Washington state's attorney general is only half joking when he suggests that perhaps sites like Facebook and MySpace should require members to use a credit card to sign up for access as a way to prove their identity.

"We need good age and identity verification technology so that it's much harder for an individual to get online and pretend to be 15 when really it's a 45-year-old man," said Attorney General Rob McKenna at the Authentication and Online Trust Summit in Seattle on Thursday. "There is a way to accomplish this quickly. It's wildly unpopular," he said, before suggesting that social-networking sites require users to have credit cards.

In addition to online identity verification techniques, McKenna and other security experts discussed ways that businesses, law enforcement and policy makers must work together to solve cybercrime.

"We need to figure out what we can do not just with law enforcement but with each other," said Hemanshu Nigam, chief security officer at Fox Interactive Media and MySpace. "If there are bad guys in MySpace or eBay or Facebook, are they the same people?"

He pointed to MySpace's lawsuit against Scott Richter, a notorious spammer who was also sued by Microsoft, settling with the software giant for US$7 million. The industry might have better success shutting down such people if they work together to pursue single actions, he said.

In addition, the entire legitimate online community should be on the same page in terms of strict safety and security policies, said Mozelle Thompson, a former commissioner on the U.S. Federal Trade Commission and currently a consultant. Sites like MySpace and Facebook represent implementations of the best security policies, he said. "There are a lot of sites out there doing nothing," he said. "You're only as good as where the bottom is."

Some of the speakers pushed for new laws that might help companies shut down some cybercrime. MySpace would like to have laws that ensure education for law-enforcement agents, who need training, as well as consumers. States should require schools to teach online safety every year to students, Nigam said.

That kind of education could very easily prevent some of the most common online fraud, he said, including one technique described by Chris Siouris, a cyber investigator at the U.S. Postal Inspector. His office pursues schemes where people unwittingly sign up for a job advertised online that they think simply involves receiving items in the mail, repackaging them and sending them to a new address. However, they usually don't know that the items are purchased with stolen credit cards.

When Siouris and his colleagues discover someone has begun engaging in this type of job, they serve the person with a cease-and-desist letter and require them to sign an agreement not to do such work in the future or they'll be arrested. Rarely if ever has anyone engaged in the activity again, usually because they didn't realize that they were doing anything illegal, he said.

In addition to laws that would ensure education so that people realize that such jobs are illegal, every states should have antispyware laws, said McKenna. He also said that there should be federal data-loss notification requirements and legislation regarding spyware.

Washington state is seen as a leader in the country in its efforts to pursue cybercrime. In 2005, McKenna was instrumental in expanding the state's high-tech unit, which investigates cybercrime. His department now trains other states on how to bring spyware and other online crime cases to court.

Online privacy should also be addressed from a broader perspective, McKenna said. There is far more identity theft in the U.S. than in Europe or other regions that have stronger privacy protections, such as requirements for opt-in, rather than opt-out, for data collection, he said. "I think as a society we need to discuss more fully the affects on our privacy and the impacts on issues like ID theft from the extensive commercialization of private information that we've seen in this country," he said.