PICKING LOCKS by Michael S. Malone
One of the most frustrating features of the current era in high tech – that is, the years since the bursting of the dot.com bubble and 9/11 – has been the comparative lack of competition.
Part of the fun of being an observer of the tech revolution all of these years, particularly here at Ground Zero in Silicon Valley, is the epic human frisson that comes from really brutal market competition: the companies stealing each others’ employees (and sometimes their technologies), the rich and famous who lose their cool in public, the unforgiveable slights and cuts that take place everywhere from cocktail parties to industry conferences, the companies that sweep the table and the companies that bet it all . . .and go down in flames.
This is the Silicon Valley I love, and it was at its best in the late ‘60s (when Fairchild blew up and the scores of new chip companies fought to the death), in the early ‘80s (when the personal computer boom surfaced maniacs like Steve Jobs and Bill Gates), and, as noted, in the late ‘90s, when everybody became a paper millionaire overnight and went insane in the process.
Unfortunately, the last few years – the Web 2.0 years — have been comparatively dull. Sure, there have been a lot of great companies created, fortunes made, and some of the greatest consumer products in tech history introduced. But somehow the big companies, old and new, seemed to slipped right past each other. They’ve carved out spaces of their own and rarely tread upon each other’s turf.
Even the few outright collisions have been oddly anticlimactic. Hewlett-Packard and Dell were supposed to duel to the death over the PC market – until Dell shot itself first. Facebook and MySpace seemed destined to collide over the social network world – until MySpace unexpectedly became the land of the pervs and the uncool. Then there was Google v. Microsoft v. Yahoo – but Google won almost on the first day, Microsoft acted its usual boring self, and the only entertainment was how badly Yahoo would be managed until it finally cratered. Meanwhile, Apple’s offerings, from iTunes to the iPod to the iPhone, were so revolutionary that they created their own competition-free spaces.
All that was good news for a lot of people, including us consumers. But it sure wasn’t very exciting watching all of those corporate gentlemen bowing and nodding and politely insisting that the other company go first. And, who knows? All of that solicitous behavior may has cost us all some of those great products and inventions that only appear when angry competitors throw all caution to the wind and head for each other at ramming speed.
In all, the last seven years of high tech can be characterized as a dozen or so major companies, each with a lock on their marketplace, and each doing their damndest not to interfere with each other’s success.
But not, refreshingly, those locks look like they are about to be picked.
Everywhere you look right now, companies are moving fast to step on each other’s turf. And when I say fast, please note that almost none of this had surfaced even three months ago – and now almost everything seems to be in play.
For example, take Google. Almost everybody in tech (and a lot of other industries) has burned with envy about that company for most of this decade now. The media world feels as if it was played for a sucker early on by giving Google the keys to its advertising business . . .and never getting them back. Other companies in the search business are cross-eyed with resentment that Google quickly raced to a lock on that business and has never let it go. And everybody else in tech hates Google because it is just so damn successful . . . and so cocky about it.
“Steve Jobs’ departure”?
Puh-lease.
It isn’t Qualcomm that is the key to the new netbooks but ARM. Qualcomm is just one of the licensees. TI, Samsung and many others can also produce ARM cored, android running chips for netbooks.
The key that _all_ these devices have compared to ATOM is the power management capabilities. Because ARM has been the core used in cellphones, ARMed systems tend to be extremely low power so a battery that lasts a couple of hours with an Atom can last maybe 10 if powering an ARMed system.
Splashman: I was speaking of Jobs’ ‘departure’ from day-to-day operations over the last six months. It also remains to be seen just how much he will now devote to Apple upon his pending ‘return.’
Francis T: I used Qualcomm as a shorthand for ARM, as it was the first big licensee and is thus pretty synonymous with the devices. But, on your advice, I’ve fixed it.
Mike Malone, editor-in-chief
Entertaining article.
But could we get some proofreading? There’s a half-dozen glaring mistakes that take the sheen off an otherwise nice piece.
-tff
In the field I care about, there is a lot of interesting movement in data management, and we may actually see the end of the Oracle hegemony at some point. The relational database using a traditional transaction-logged storage system is one of the oldest software technologies on the planet (it can trace its lineage back to Codd’s paper in 1970, and UCB-Ingres/IBM System R research projects in the mid to late 1970s), but it’s showing its age, and a host of startups are appearing that challenge it. Some use new storage managers underneath open-source relational platforms like MySQL, while others are using completely new approaches to search, while yet others are hybrid approaches.
One other cool thing, because it introduces “hard problems” that drive innovation, is the fact that people who don’t have tons of money do have tons of data that needs to be organized, so the traditional “throw a few million bux at Oracle and a server farm” approach isn’t available.
Mr. Malone:
I notice you’ve edited the story re: Jobs — now you have “departure” in quotes, which is appropriate, IMHO, as nobody really knows how involved he’s been in the last six months. My guess, based on the fact he’s a control freak and passionate about what he does, is that he’s been working 60 hours a week for Apple the whole time, remotely. I seriously doubt his involvement in product development, roadmap, big picture, etc., has slowed down even a smidgen. In fact, with PR duties being curtailed and some day-to-day operations stuff off his plate, he might even have had more time to devote to product development.
So here’s a question for you, not snarky, just curious: Do you honestly think Jobs is capable of walking away from Apple for six months, in the sense that he relinquishes influence on product development and Apple’s roadmap? If so, why? If not, why should anyone, including investors, care about his “departure” or “return”?
Splashman: I have known Steve Jobs since the fifth grade. I think he is quite capable of anything.
tff: New to the blogosphere? Or just a member of the Grammar Police? Given your concerns, may I suggest that you read the professionally edited version of this same column, which has appeared every Friday on ABCNews.com for the last decade. Scott Mayerowitz at ABC is far better than me as a line editor of my copy.
Time to buy a couple of ARMH shares?
“The two greatest locks in the high tech world are the Microsoft Windows operating system and the Microsoft Internet Explore Web browser … Microsoft has essentially owned these giant businesses for decades now.”
Windows 3.0, the first version widely sold, came out in 1990. Internet Explorer 3.0, the first version with significant market share, came out with Windows 95 OSR 2, in late 1996. Neither of these is “decades ago.” The Web itself isn’t even “decades old.”
Just sayin’.
Dennis
The main story you do not mention is VMware. That and its consequences such as cloud computing and SaaS (two hottest acronyms since WWW and PC) have a chance to push Windows away for good.
dennis: Sorry, but engineers are not allowed to comment on literary hyperbole, because they are too literal to appreciate it. (And yes, I do know that the Internet was invented in 1969 — I first used it at Xerox PARC in 1970; that the Web was invented at Cern in 1979 — I first used it in 1981; that Windows was introduced in 1985 — I covered it for the International Herald Tribune and used both MS-DOS and DR-DOS before that; and that Internet Explorer was introduced in 1995 — I was at Netscape that day).
Just sayin’
msmalone: Impressive experience. No, really.
Have you ever seen a scenario in which the
market for consumer goods was as low as we
can expect during the next few years ?
I’m pretty sure the World Wide Web was invented at CERN in 1989, not 1979, msmalone. The NeXT computer, one of which I bought with my meager Navy pay in 1990 (because I was an idiot then), was the catalyst for promulgation of the Web — the very first Web server was a NeXT.
Even tools such as Archie and Gopher don’t predate 1990.
Is Wave that project the inventor of Quicksilver was working on? If so depend on it to be orthagonal to 30 years of desktop/window/folder interface conventions. In a good way.
Ironically this latest wave of Silicon Valley competition comes just when the Obama admin is considering antitrust regulation of the industry. More evidence of lumbering bureaucratic stupidity
Brendan: You’re right. I mis-typed and didn’t edit my copy (see tff’s comment above). The WWW was indeed ’89 and I first used it in ’91 (the decades do slide together at my advanced age). That said, I’m not sure I’d give that much credit to the Next Computer . . .
M. Report: Yeah, 1972-74. That was when HP went to the ‘nine-day fortnight’ to keep from laying off anybody, and Intel had to stop building its Oregon fab — leaving doberman guard dogs to run around inside the empty factory. That crash came right on the heels of the big aerospace recession that seemed to cause at least one dad on every block in Silicon Valley to lose his job at Lockheed. So tech was pretty well flat on its ass. Of course, within two years Nolan Bushnell had started Atari and Woz had built the Apple 1 and things took off again.
That said, if we double dip this current recession, with the giant debt being created by the current Administration setting off a half-decade of stagflation, it will make the Seventies look like a party in tech.
MM: Oops – me, a grammar cop? That hurts. I should’ve focused solely on the fact that I liked the article — it just seemed to have some pieces that got cut up and pasted back with something missing. Happens to me all the time. (E.g., I think the “But not, refreshingly, ” should read “But now, refreshingly” and for some reason didn’t get it when I first read through and couldn’t make sense of the sentence.) Maybe I’m hung up on the topic, but I always thought a blog could have a private email link just for users to point out errata privately — an army of editors named David? I would appreciate it, if I were a writer.
Anyway, I’ve been dinking around with computers online since my Kapro II could access Prodigy for a marvel called “e-mail”, and wasting way too many hours on the blogosphere before it was even named thus.
In any case, thanks for the insight on the tech shake-up. I hope, for example, that the Pre puts some heat on Apple to keep improving the iPhone/iPod Touch. If they could take this long to put in copy and paste, one could imagine they could drag their feet in improving the device if no competitors loom.
“Out of this nettle, danger, we pluck this flower, safety.” H4A2S3 W.S.
Plenty of opportunites to “Do well while
doing good”, but not by selling toys to be
purchased with consumer’s discretionary
income; They will not have any.
Telepresence may be the first Killer App,
for military, medical, and security uses.
From a technical standpoint, it wouldn’t be hard to take on ebay and give it a run for its money. Its aging, slow and unresponsive to customer feedback. Its a behemoth Goliath waiting for its David.
Michael,
Tim Berner-Lee created WWW on a NeXT computer in 1989.