Somewhere though the ether becomes hard physicality: one or more computers, usually in a data centre, a giant air-conditioned hotel packed with machines. Here your digital stuff – applications, music, photos, contacts – sits on a disk ready to be served up to you whenever you want them.

But do these computers really need to be so remote from us, and is this even desirable? Why can’t ‘The Cloud’ encompass the home?

The Cloud Begins at Home

There are certainly some good arguments for maintaining your own little piece of the cloud (dropping the inverted commas and capitalisation from here on). They were most recently put to me by QNAP, the Taiwanese storage appliance vendor whose equipment has become a fixture in my own home network. I met with the company’s Brian Pan and Alfred Liang recently when they were in the UK to introduce the latest firmware for its range of consumer devices.

The first argument for hosting your own piece of the cloud is cost. These days we all produce a vast amount of digital data. Storing and serving it remotely is expensive. Take my music collection. I have just over 40 gigabytes of music ripped from CDs and purchased from iTunes and elsewhere. The basic plan from Dropbox, one of the popular cloud hosting services would cost me about £6.56 a month ($9.99) or £65 a year if I paid up front. This gets me 100GB. Add in my photos (115GB), and videos (358GB), and I’d be outside the range of prices they publish online. But for comparison a terabyte (1000ish Gigabytes) of storage with JustCloud would be £79.70 a month.

Compare this to the cost of hardware. A basic QNAP Network Attached Storage (NAS) box will cost you under £200 when supplied with a 1TB hard disk. This device plugs into your broadband router at home and with the latest firmware will allow you access your files from anywhere. Performance will depend on your home broadband connection, but then you’re paying just two and a half months of the cost of renting that storage for something that will last years.

What won’t last is that terabyte. With multi-megapixel cameras, 3D camcorders and hi definition everything, one terabyte will soon seem like a small amount of storage. So you’ll want to upgrade: buy a two, four, or even six bay NAS and you can just slot in a new hard disk. Clearly this will cost a lot more – £250 for the entry-level 4 bay unit, without disks – but even at that price the economics rapidly make sense for large scale storage.

The Limitations of the Home Cloud

That’s not to say I want to store everything only on my home NAS. Does it really matter that I can’t access my music when I’m out and about? No – I can cope if my home broadband goes down and cuts me off. But my documents? I can’t afford for those to be unavailable. And good as my home broadband is these days, I wouldn’t trust it to be as available as Google’s services.

This leads to a bit of a policy split: some things I’m happy to leave stored at home. Some things I want synced up to a hosted storage service like Google Drive. Which is exactly what I do.

But that leads to another consideration: privacy. Appropriately secured I have absolute control of who accesses my home cloud. I may not always be confident that the same is true of data stored out in the ether where I have no physical oversight, on platforms designed for sharing. Whether they be sensitive business documents or just family photos, it may be that I my policy defines that other things stay local, as well as those that are just too large or insufficiently important to store remotely.

The Shared Cloud

One of the things I liked about talking to Brian and Alfred from QNAP was their pragmatism. They’re in a market that is growing around 14% year on year, and is forecast to be worth over $3bn by next year, so perhaps they can afford to be pragmatic. But the lack of spin is refreshing all the same.

Brian and Alfred acknowledge that home storage devices like their own haven’t always been the most easy to use devices. NAS boxes evolved out of the business market and it has taken a while for the rough edges – no problem for an experienced IT technician – to be smoothed off to consumer standards. That said, QNAP’s latest software looks like a step in the right direction, with its smooth Apple-influenced styling and apps for easy syncing to mobile devices. I’ve not tested them for myself yet so can’t give a true opinion, but will be doing so in the coming weeks.

They also know that they are not going to replace the bigger cloud with these home devices. The reality is that people are probably going to use both and most of the attention will be focused on the internet-based services. But today and for the medium term, they know they can offer a more cost effective, and arguably more feature-rich option to consumers looking to store and serve up lots of digital files.

Features for the Home

As well as a more user-friendly interface, QNAP is incorporating other nice features for the consumer into its devices. There’s already an HDMI port on the back of many boxes, allowing you to plug straight into a TV and play back high definition video. The new software includes XBMC, a very slick media player interface designed for control from a remote rather than a keyboard. The software also incorporates transcoding – allowing you to reprocess videos for different devices, such as your smartphone or tablet, without needing a PC. Very neat.

Of course all of these things could be accomplished with a PC, or a laptop plugged into a TV as many people do. But these aren’t particularly neat solutions and a dedicated PC can be both noisier and more power hungry than a dedicated storage device, as well as being more complicated to configure to achieve the same functions.

All this leaves me pretty convinced that the forecasts for growth in this market are reasonable. In the long term we may well choose to store and stream all of our content from the ‘out there’ cloud rather than the one at home. But for now if you want a secure place to put all your digital stuff, extending the cloud into your home makes a great deal of sense.

eCommerce is clearly lethal to some businesses. But technology has presented the high street with another threat: the social seller. People who adopt retail as a way of life, selling things they know and love, and use the internet to amplify what used to be a purely offline, geographically-limited model.

Let me give you an example.

Karen Makin had a real grounding in high street retail. Like many successful people I’ve met, she started on the management training programme at M&S. She learned the ropes before moving into management at age 22. At a brand new Savastore she became duty manager then assistant store manager, controlling 800 staff.

In the 80s Karen took advantage of the boom with a jump into estate agency, before meeting her husband, moving to Bolton and settling down to raise two kids. She was out of retail for 14 years. Until recently.

With another recession slowing down her husband’s architecture business, Karen decided to get back into retail. She didn’t want to be back on the shop floor so she needed something a bit different.

A friend introduced her to a wholesale supplier of jewellery and accessories, and offered to front her the capital to buy some stock. Her friend was selling the stock through house parties, organising events at people’s homes. Initially sceptical, Karen was sold after the first event when it became clear that these weren’t awkward old Tupperware parties: people really appreciated having the goods (at a reasonable price) brought to them.

Karen started operating on the same model, under the name Antonia’s Recession Busting Glitz & Glamour. She used her contacts through school and gym to organise parties. And 20 years ago this is where the story would end: a small, simple lifestyle business that involved endless (face to face) networking, constantly looking for new relationships with potential party hosts.

But where Karen’s business really took off, and where technology adds the element of scale, was when she got a Facebook page.

Karen confesses that she was not technology literate. It was not so much that she was scared of technology, she just didn’t see the point of the computer. Over time though she was introduced by her husband and kids to email and Facebook and liked that she could keep in touch with people remotely. Then one day someone suggested a Facebook page for her business and her son helped her to set it up.

“That’s when it went crazy,” says Karen.

Karen’s still running the events but now people find her online. She ships around the UK. She uses the Mac in her kitchen and her mobile to respond to people. “Last night I sold three scarves, while sat in front of the TV,” says Karen.

Social Selling: Love the Product, Low Capital Investment, Round the Clock Engagement

Let’s recap here. Karen invested nothing in a website or eCommerce presence. She does not have a website other than her Facebook page. Her total capital investment, including stock and display hardware was less than £2k – much of it from her angel friend who got her into the business in the first place. That capital has been repaid in just 9 months. Karen is buying from a wholesaler rather than direct. Yet she can comfortably undercut the high street AND offer customers the benefit of bringing the stock to them at home or in the office. Whereas in the past her business would have been geographically limited, now she can sell across the UK and she’s looking to expand into Ireland.

This is still a microbusiness and probably always will be. But the threat to the high street is not Karen expanding to become the next Debenhams. It is the prospect of 10,000, 100,000 or even 1 million Karens.

In a recent piece I did for the Institute of Chartered Accountants on the future of work, I came to the conclusion that many more of us will be self-employed in the future. Most self-employed people that I know do more than one thing. I’d expect that a fair few of us will be retailers – as many are today via eBay, Etsy and more. We all have our specialisms that we could turn into shops – many of us selling things that we really enjoy working with, as Karen does with accessories.

Working like this has its challenges, as Karen acknowledges: it’s hard to switch off sometimes when your work is connected to your social profile and always accessible online. But it also has great upsides in its flexibility.

People have always run microbusinesses like this from home, be they self-started or franchise. But the ubiquity of the Internet and social networking particularly has created the opportunity for these microbusinesses to operate more efficiently and scale to a much greater audience very rapidly.

Look out high street: it may not be eCommerce that kills you, it could be your customers.

They weren’t the first rock and roll band*. But they popularised rock and roll and changed culture in the process. They were huge in their day. But they were never going to dominate the charts forever.

Facebook will not be on top forever. Possibly not even as long as the decade the Beatles managed.

Facebook’s business is inherently trend-based. It very quickly loses its appeal once the people in your circle begin to abandon it. And in some markets people are clearly leaving Facebook. Three different analyses in recent weeks show the active user base falling by millions in the UK and US.

Facebook is still gaining users overall but only because new users in developing markets are offsetting the losses elsewhere. This may go some way to explain the declining revenue per user – down 12% quarter on quarter even though the proportion of mobile users has climbed. Developing market users may be numerous but they are worth less individually in advertising revenue.

The question about Facebook was never if it was going to be superseded but when. Two years ago I said we had seen the beginning of the beginning of the end. Now I’d say we have seen the beginning of the end.

It will be slow at first but I believe the decline and fall of Facebook has begun.

*If you heard 5live this morning, yes I do count the beatles as rock and roll, no matter what Nicky Campbell might say.

Gordon Moore, co-founder of Intel, never intended to create a ‘law’ in his own name, he merely observed that the number of transistors on a silicon chip was doubling approximately every two years. This was way back in 1965, and the trend he had observed stretched back to 1958. Amazingly this statement became a ‘law’ because it remained true and continues to be so right up to the present day.

Now we are constructing chips with such tiny components – working on a process at 22 nanometres, the width of just 220 helium atoms – that we are coming up against the limits of the laws of physics. AMD is struggling to shrink its transistors to this scale and beyond, though its main competitor Intel seems confident it will get down to 14nm and even 10nm in the next few years. The slower transition to 22nm is effectively breaking Moore’s law, at least for AMD.

Eventually Moore’s Law was always going to expire. There are only so many transistors you can cram on to a chip however incredible your technology. But to understand the spirit of the law you have to go back to what Moore originally said: he wasn’t talking about what was technically feasible, but what was economically feasible. Now if you accept that transistor count used to be a reasonable analogue for computing power, what Moore’s Law really represents is that computing power per pound increases exponentially.

Of course the measure of computing cost is not only the unit’s acquisition: you need to consider its power consumption. This too though has been falling exponentially. We can now deliver more computing power per pound and per watt than ever before. Continuing the trend is a challenge but you only need to look at initiatives like HP’s Moonshot to see the gusto with which it is being attacked (think of Moonshot like Southampton’s Raspberry Pi ‘supercomputer’ on a grand scale). After all, no-one would bet against there being a big market in the future for the infrastructure behind all internet services.

Ultimately we will reach the outer limits of what can be achieved with silicon. Physicist Michio Kaku predicted some time ago that we will reach that limit by the middle of the next decade. Though this may slow our ability to increase absolute computing power for a short time, it is unlikely to diminish our ability to refine the production processes and hence further diminish the financial and energy cost of each unit. And beyond this there are a number of candidates on the horizon to replace today’s silicon chips.

Many people believe that Moore’s Law or its successors simply cannot continue: exponential growth would ultimately end up consuming everything in the pursuit of computing resource were it to continue. But some don’t rule out even this extreme future. In Charles Stross’ visionary novel Accelerando, humans (or our information-based descendants) begin to demolish whole planets and asteroids to support the manufacture of ever greater volumes of ‘computronium’ – smart matter – the substrate on which their pure-intelligence life form exists.

That today though is the stuff of science fiction, outside of the 20 year window in which I choose to operate. Suffice to say, within that time frame I certainly don’t expect the rate of growth of computing power per watt and per pound to diminish. And that exponential rate of change will remain the biggest change driver in western life.

Why? There are many good reasons. First and foremost Skype has a better structured revenue model, generating income from a proportion of the 2bn+ minutes of voice calls it carries every day. Skype also has more active users and is growing, compared to the declining Windows product.

Finally there’s the issue of brand. Windows? Not sexy. Skype will become progressively more integrated into the Windows/Office environment over the coming months. But I find myself wondering: will anyone care?

Microsoft remains a major power – if not the major power – in PCs. For all the talk of the PC’s decline, they remain the best platform for much of our computing work. I’m writing this on a Windows 7 PC and very happy I am with it too. But I am no longer tied to Windows. And I’m no longer tied to Office. In the last two years I have jumped happily and easily between a Macbook, a Linux laptop, and a Windows desktop. Dropbox, Subversion, Google Drive, and InSync keep all my files available. Office, OpenOffice, AbiWord, and Google Docs allow me to edit them anywhere I need to with near-equal capability. Microsoft may still dominate the PC market but it no longer owns it. If I buy another PC (this one has lasted probably four or five years), I’m not convinced I’d pay for a Windows licence. I almost certainly won’t buy another copy of Office.

Where does this leave Microsoft? Clearly the loss of my custom won’t trouble the company too much. But it’s what it indicates that might: they no longer have a de facto role in the tech marketplace. And nothing they have tried to do in the recent past such as cloud services or tablets looks likely to earn them back that position.

You could argue that Microsoft has been playing catch-up for 20 years now. The company was late to the internet market, late to the mobile market, and late to the cloud. Its sheer scale makes agility tough and it hasn’t manoeuvred its juggernaut-like weight with sufficient foresight to be in the right places at the right times. What has sustained the company until now has been the incredible power of its market position, one gifted to it by a company in a similar position in the late 70s to the one Microsoft is in now: IBM.

Microsoft’s market position comes in part from Bill Gates’ early decision to licence MS-DOS to IBM for the first PC, rather than selling it outright. Instead of a few thousand dollars up front he chose a small licence payment with the same of each PC. IBM was happy with this because it didn’t have Gates’ confidence in the success the PC would prove to be.

IBM had handed development of the PC over to a little ‘skunkworks’ group within the company because developing something through the usual channels would have taken so long that new competitors like Apple would have established an even more significant lead in the burgeoning personal computer market. In other words, innovation had begun to stagnate inside the giant IBM.

This seems to be the situation facing Microsoft today. Even its biggest announcements around tablets and Windows Phone recently only seem to have brought it to a ‘me too’ position with its competitors. Because it is struggling to innovate it has to acquire companies like Skype. And whereas in the past it would have bought those companies for technology and people, now it buys them for brand and market position.

When tech companies hit this stage of maturity, the chequebook can only take them so far. Microsoft may still be strong today but it is waning. In order to check that decline the company needs to innovate again, not delivering products that match the competition but reinventing the market faster and better than Apple and Google.

To finish on a positive – and I would like to see Microsoft stay in the race – now is a really good time to make a new market. I’m strongly of the opinion that we have hit pretty much the zenith of smartphone and tablet capability, if not sales. I think there is a big form-factor shift coming, backed by an evolved set of cloud-based services. Microsoft is a company with a big cash pile and a load of clever people. It could yet find a product that keeps it at the top of tech for another 20 years.

Forty years ago the mobile phone was just that: a portable handset connected to the telephone network via the airwaves. It was for voice calls and nothing more. Fast forward to today and people rarely seem to list ‘making calls’ in the top things they do with their smartphone. It is a camera, media player, gaming device, web browser, email and social media tool.

Each of these functions, alongside the ability to make calls, places both functional and ergonomic demands on the design of the device. Demands that have first shrunk it down and then stretched it out to accommodate more hardware and larger screens.

The result is a compromise. However slick and pretty we make these little slabs of glass and plastic, they are not ideally shaped for any of their functions. What keeps the functions all packaged together into one place has been – in part – technological restrictions. If you were to separate all of the features out into individual units you would need to supply each with power and connectivity so that they could keep running and share their functions with each other. This adds cost and complexity; small batteries powering wirelessly-connected devices would not last very long.

But the price of technology falls fast, in direct opposition to its capability. Before long the cost and capability barriers to breaking all of the converged functions out of the mobile phone will be outweighed by the benefits.

Does this mean we will be left with an old-school phone just for voice calls? No. For exactly the same reasons. Is holding your hand up to your head really the best way to put a microphone and speaker in the appropriate places? Strip away the technological restrictions and the phone was never a great design for its original purpose. Our first attempts at replicating these features wirelessly – the Bluetooth headset – may make you look like a bit of a twonk, but they are improving. We seem to have much less of an issue with less sci-fi, more stylish headsets that allow us to use both our hands while making a call.

What will be stripped from the phone will be all the user inputs and outputs: screen, camera, microphone, speaker, movement sensors. These will be distributed around the body through connected clothing and accessories. What is left will be storage and connectivity – a little personal server/router that links together your devices and connects you back to the net. Will this still be a ‘mobile phone’? Arguably not: descended from it but so removed in usage terms that it doesn’t really count.

How fast will this happen? Well it has begun: look at the increasing prevalence of wearable health sensors like the Nike+, Fitbug, and Jawbone Up. Rumours are rife about Apple launching a smart watch to bring you updates from your phone; Pebble raised over $10m from Kickstarter in order to bring similar technology to market. Battery technology and wireless connections have improved dramatically. Printable, flexible screens are just around the corner.

I think there’s a good chance that in ten years time we might be looking back at the passing mobile phone era, rather than celebrating another anniversary.

It may surprise you tech-savvy reader but most people still don’t use Twitter. Though we’re one of the most populous Twitter nations (4th in the Twitter league as of 2012), only one in five of the UK population uses Twitter from the stats I can find: i.e. users are in the minority. And of those, around 40% are passive – readers – rather than active – writers.

All this explains why yesterday around the network’s seventh anniversary I found myself on BBC Radio Scotland explaining the basics of Twitter. And why it seems like a good time to analyse the success of Twitter.

That success might in large part be attributed to the old adage that the simplest ideas are the best. Twitter took one of the key ingredients of the early social networks – the status update – and turned it into a hyper-concise broadcast medium. In tune with our time-pressured lifestyles it took what was most valuable to us about social networks – what other people were  thinking, doing, eating, seeing – and condensed the ability to share and read this information down to a compact form.

Though there have been numerous evolutionary changes in the way Twitter operates this simple core has remained, and grown in popularity. Today around 200 million people use Twitter regularly. And from these 200 million users, Twitter expects to generate a billion dollars in advertising revenue this year.

The way people use Twitter has evolved too. One thing I have noticed recently is a willingness to conduct business via open @ messages that would previously have been restricted to private direct messages or SMS. For example, organising where and when to meet.

This says a lot about  our attitudes to privacy in this social century, but it also comes in part I think from a willingness to jump fairly indiscriminately between multiple short messaging services. Conversations flip between Facebook, text, Whatsapp, Skype, Twitter, and more, albeit not seamlessly.

It’s the friction in swapping between these services that makes me wonder again if there isn’t an argument for a standardised, internet-based short messaging protocol. This would clearly damage Twitter and all the others unless they could find a way to differentiate. But in the long term it makes little sense that we preserve all of these little digital fiefdoms if they are fundamentally doing the same thing: carrying short text messages and linked media from one to one, or one to many. If this function is really a core part of the internet then surely its operation should be on distributed, internet principles?

It were to happen, one of the barriers to this shift would be identity: without a single authority who warrants identity (and polices abuse) on a communications network? The answer might come from the old telephone network: we pay for a company to connect our telephone number to the network, and sign up for their fair use policies in the process. Small breaches of good practice are handled by our provider, more serious ones by a central regulator or law enforcement.

In this model Twitter may retain a role as service provider, or this role may be taken up by those that provide our connectivity, much as they provide many people today with their email addresses.

Whatever happens I think Twitter’s lifespan in its current form is limited. Powerful, useful and entertaining as it has become, like any social network its hold on us is shallow. Its customer base is fickle and fast-moving. And its position in the market is under constant threat from some of the world’s most aggressive innovators.

I will continue to enjoy Twitter as a regular user. But I don’t expect to be celebrating its birthday in another seven years.

I missed the first speaker of the day, while giving a presentation myself elsewhere. But I caught him – Dan Hill, CEO of Fabrica – speaking the previous night at the launch event and read his theories online here.

Dan is a very engaging speaker and though my natural inclination towards concision found his essay a little extended for the argument he was making, it is nonetheless fascinating. I’ll try and précis in many fewer words here.

Dan argues that the debate around ‘smart cities’ today is dominated by large corporations promoting a vision of efficiency. When in fact efficiency is not necessarily a desirable objective for many of the key functions of a city. Rather the corporations are using this as a drive to increase network traffic and so increase demand for their own products. By contrast the real innovation is being driven by smart citizens using social media to self-organise and drive change. This progressive thinking and acting is in dramatic contrast to our rather 19^th century means of decision making. Dan believes we do need to update our infrastructure but doing so through the corporate/old government approach risks leaving us with dated infrastructure that doesn’t do what we need and locks us into long term issue much like the promotion of the car over public transport has over the last 50 years.

The afternoon debate featured Usman Haque, creator of Pachube (now Cosm), designer, artist and architect and Martijn de Waal, journalist and founder of the Dutch think tank, The Public Matters.

Usman explained how the very nature of the city makes it a ‘wicked’ problem – a definition created in the 1970s to categorise problems that for various reasons are difficult or even impossible to solve. He argued that the sheer ‘messy’ complexity of interactions that make up a city mean that a centrally-planned solution will never deliver efficiency or even any desirable outcomes. Especially if those outcomes rely on the collection of endless amounts of data for someone else to ‘do good’ with.

Martijn gave three examples of smart city development from around Seoul in South Korea including Hongdae and Songdo. Songdo is the archetype of the centrally planned, corporately-driven smart city. And as you might expect it looks pretty soulless so far. What it also is, more surprisingly, is largely devoid of smart city technology – sensors, communications etc. This is all yet to come, despite the marketing hype. Hongdae is a much more organic development from sleepy suburb into jumping urban development, with relaxed planning laws enabling rapid revitalisation and renewal. His third example was of a very engaged approach taken by Seoul city hall, where they are working with citizen groups to advance problems – for example using a social platform to work with local environmental groups to help uncover where a batch of radioactive tarmac had been accidentally laid, and track its removal and replacement.

In the keynote on day two, author Anthony Townsend asserted similar concerns to Dan Hill, while acknowledging the role that companies like IBM have played in the successful smart city experiments to date. And it was something that Townsend said that really crystallised my issue with the binary choice between soft and organic, and hard and corporate.

He suggested that while one is like the mainframe, the other is like the internet: created in a distributed fashion from the ground up. Well the internet may have been built on open standards, and many of its outposts may have been constructed by hobbyists and communities. Indeed this is where the most interesting developments are happening today. But the superstructure of the internet was built by commercial entities, investing and often losing vast sums of money deploying global fibre, data centres and networks. Without that corporate investment, who would have created the incredibly expensive inter-city and inter-continental links that now bring us our videos, mails and social networks?

I believe that smart cities will be the same. There is a level of infrastructure required – power, waste, connectivity, sensing – that almost certainly will not be built organically by community groups. There will be outposts of DIY but mass coverage – the superstructure – will need to come from commercial entities, some of which will succeed, some of which will fail. We will have to trade something to these entities in order to make it worth their while to invest. And yes, we may not like those costs in the long run. But ultimately they will drive progress faster than if we leave everything to hackers and organic growth.

The analogy I offer is the difference between a house and a home. You can build your own house, and some people do. But for the vast majority, we buy a house. We don’t like the long term cost and the house we choose will usually be a compromise.  But we turn it into a home with the changes we make: the sounds, smells, and colours that we add.

Cities are the same: it’s going to be a long time until society evolves past the point where the market is the primary driver for investment. And until that point if we want our cities to be smarter, we need to swallow a degree of corporate investment and recognise that the humanity, the interest, the things that make great cities, are the things that we build on top of this superstructure, not in place of it.

The breach itself is bizarre. It involves the disappearance of a screen that suggested alternative browsers (other than Microsoft’s Internet Explorer) to people installing Windows or using it for the first time after puchasing a PC. Microsoft has explained that an engineer left out the line that told this screen to appear when publishing an update to the Windows 7 operating system. This is just about plausible, though it would require an awful lot of people to miss this pretty important exclusion.

What is less plausible is that the first time anyone at Microsoft noticed was 14 months later. Think of all the times Microsoft employees and its resellers must have installed or used a new copy of Windows in that time. Is it really possible that none of them noticed the missing screen – part of a legally-binding settlement negotiated with international governments? Or that they did notice but it took Microsoft, one of the world’s largest software companies, 14 months to implement a solution?

This is the way things happened says Microsoft. And hence the fine is the size it is: the EU could have increased it tenfold. Good thing for Steve Ballmer, Microsoft CEO, they didn’t: the apparent mistake has already cost him part of his bonus.

Even if it isn’t the size it could have been, this is still a sizeable fine. But will it change anything? Will Microsoft, or for that matter other global technology companies, think twice before pushing the boundaries of what is acceptable in corporate behaviour?

I think probably not.

Turn the situation around. Imagine that Microsoft, rather than its infamous ‘embrace, extend and extinguish’ strategy had decided to play nice with its upstart competitors. Not just the browser companies that were the subject of this case but the other innovators that Microsoft has crushed since the advent of the consumer Internet. Like RealNetworks for example, a somewhat unloved company due to the increasingly bloated and salesy nature of its product. But one that did much to popularise internet video and audio with consumers*.

Imagine Microsoft had stayed out of the Internet apps market and actively promoted these company’s to its users as examples of the great software available on the Windows platform. What would shareholders have made of that, especially once applications like Google Docs moved into the browser, competing directly with other Microsoft core products?

Answer? They wouldn’t accept it. Shareholders have a right to expect that the companies in which they invest strive to grow and do well. The very nature of a company of scale like Microsoft is that it has to press home the advantages it has. And its position is its biggest advantage, especially in the face of small, innovative competition. Because history has shown that beyond a certain size, companies struggle to innovate.
That after all is the story of Microsoft’s explosive growth. It was the computing behemoth IBM’s inability to innovate when faced with competition from early Apples and the new generation of cheap personal computers that gave Microsoft its first big leg up.

When assembling the hardware and software for the original PC, an IBM skunkworks team was assigned to work outside the rigid corporate structures that were slowing product development. Rather than face the bureaucracy and politicking required to get an operating system for the new machine developed internally, the PC team licensed MS-DOS. The rest, as they say, is history. Microsoft pulled in a tasty licence fee from each PC sold. And many more were sold than IBM expected – not just by IBM but by small hungry competitors who found they had access to the same components that the IBM skunkworks team had selected. By the time IBM launched its own OS, Microsoft was flying.

I’m not saying there isn’t a third way between embracing competitors and trying to smother them. But it is an incredibly hard course to plot. While a regulator may hit you with a fine every few years for bad behaviour, nothing will eat away at a company day in, day out, like competition you know you could – and for the sake of your shareholders maybe even should – squash.

For that reason I think we will continue to see companies pushing the boundaries of acceptable corporate behaviour. And every now and again, regulators vainly trying to reign them in.

*Just a note of interest, I worked on the UK PR account for RealNetworks from the end of 2000 through to about 2003/4 and spent some interesting times with the company’s executives including Joanna Shields, subsequently of Facebook and now CEO and chair of Tech City.

____

Open vs Closed: Standards for Success

In the futuristic Charles Stross novel Glasshouse, the protagonist acknowledges a turning point in human history when data was opened up not locked

I’m building a robot (see recent project posts for details). Having added some basic features – movement, position sensing, obstacle avoidance – I felt an overwhelming urge to make it more, well, robot-like. Or more accurately, more humanoid. And I’ve been trying to work out why.

A lifetime of science-fiction consumption has given me very strong opinions on what a robot should be: how it should look, how it should interact, and what its functions should be. Maybe I just wanted my robot to look a little more like those from films, comics and my imagination. But I’m not sure this covers it. The feeling of satisfaction from giving my robot a rudimentary head and body, even more rudimentary arms yesterday seems just a little too great for this to be the only driver.

I did some digging around the web for answers and found this fascinating paper from Brian Duffy at MediaLab Europe back in 2003. He does a very good précis of much of the research around anthropomorphism in robots, from which I can draw a few interesting things about my own desire to make Sammy (his name, given by my eldest daughter, being his first anthropomorphic characteristic) more human.

For a start humans have always liked to ascribe human-like traits to the things around us – animals, plants, computers, vehicles. And doing so in the case of robots can be particularly helpful in helping us to accept them in a social environment, and in helping us to interact with them. Adding human-like physical features has also been observed to increase the degree to which we treat the robot as if it is a being not a machine.

This makes sense: just adding a head and body to Sammy made me feel much more attached to him than when he was just a little wheeled platform. Even though this brought no additional function or intelligence.

But there are downsides to adding human-like features too. Humanoid features may not be ideally suited to the robot’s task. For example, the Roomba is a great design because it can vacuum (and live) under furniture. Giving it eyes and a mouth would just be pointless and may remove one of its primary advantages.

With humanoid features added we also begin to expect too much of what are often limited capabilities. This is an issue of which I am particularly aware. I plan for Sammy to be something of a household robot who evolves over time, in part as a means to teach my kids about electronics, mechanics and programming (though this is also a great excuse for me to indulge my geekery and create some good content for this blog). I don’t want the kids to be disappointed when Sammy can’t respond to all their spoken commands or play board games.

This leads to an interesting compromise in design: is there a sweet spot between a robot’s ‘humanness’ and ‘robotness’ that combines ease of interaction and socialisation with realistic expectations?

Pets provide an interesting analogue here. Dogs in particular. They are intelligent enough to provide useful functions (guarding the house) or fun interactions (fetching a ball), but we would never expect them to play Monopoly with us. Their physical features and voice (bark) make them easy for us to engage with and understand. But we would never mistake them for human.

So a somewhat humanoid but still clearly very ‘other’ design is probably the right approach for domestic robots of limited capability. Great for me since I doubt my restricted engineering and programming skills, and restricted budget, will allow for anything other than rough-and ready looks and limited capability.

Keep an eye on my project posts to see how Sammy develops.