Idées Fortes
The Shame of Java
The technology press seems to know only three stories: Apple is dead, Microsoft is evil, and Java is the future. And reporters ask only two follow-up questions: Is Apple still dead? Is Microsoft still evil? Let's ask the third.
Microsoft is a brick wall. Like so many others in the past, Sun Microsystems has decided to throw itself against the wall as hard as it can, hoping to break through with Java. Here's what the wall looks like. Microsoft has deals with virtually every PC hardware manufacturer. Microsoft makes money on each computer they sell. This is a multibillion dollar business for Microsoft. It would be very natural for PC makers to license their Java Virtual Machine from Microsoft instead of Sun. Microsoft knows how to play this game. Microsoft owns this game.
If you're a Java developer or licensee, in other words, you're the stuff between two slices of bread. The slices are Sun's and Microsoft's virtual machines.But Sun's not telling all about Java. There are secrets. What are the terms of the license agreements Sun has struck with Netscape, Apple, Oracle, IBM, et cetera? They're confidential.
Let's say you want to license Java. Get out the checkbook and start writing. Add another zero. Add another. Next year, more millions. Add it up. JavaSoft has 400 employees. That's a big burn rate. So what do you get for those millions? There's a feedback system, the company says. Sun listens first to licensees, then to the general world. Pay us money, and we'll implement your ideas. I suspect that the more money you pay, the more they listen.
The shame of Java is that it's being used to serve Sun's corporate purposes, to keep the stock price up. Java is owned, not free. And while it made sense for Sun to own Java for a time, that time is gone.
Sun CEO Scott McNealy seems to agree: "You don't have to own English to be a writer." Eventually Sun will set Java free. But will this be before or after it destroys the entrepreneurial energy of the Internet?
Java was a vote for the geeks. A necessary balance to the world of easy-to-use software. Java was also love at first sight. Like the happy start-up icon that greets Mac users, Java loves the world, and the world loves Java.
But does Java really have an answer to the security problem? No. There's no smartness to the Java sandbox, no way to move stuff over the firewall. Java is a world unto itself, which means users will store stuff there they don't want to lose, and that stuff can fall victim to viruses, just like ActiveX or FTP downloads.
And is there any value in Java's cross-platform promise? Mac users don't want software that doesn't look and behave like Mac software. Same goes for users of Windows, and, I suspect, Solaris. Java has to find a niche where people don't already use software. In the mainstream market there's no time to catch up.
All of which raises the real questions the tech press ignores: When will Silicon Valley get the message that great software is created by people, not companies? When will Silicon Valley's financiers set up corporate systems that serve the products, instead of vice versa? And when will creative engineers stop selling their babies to the miserable, petty agendas of small-thinking corporate credit-takers?
The future is not Java - it's still the Web. It's the platform without the platform vendor. It's yours and mine as much as Sun's.'
Yes, you can build new things with Java, but you can do that with other languages and in more complete environments. In other words, if you have an idea, there's no need to wait for Java to catch up with you.
Memes: Technostalgia
Shoot a street scene with a Cinématographe and it will take your city back 100 years. Shoot it in super-8 and you will be magically transported to the 1960s. Indeed, just as the constraints of moving picture technology define the look of an era, the design of any graphical interface shapes our view of history. Which makes Mosaic the Net's Lumière camera, our first window to the Web. And no matter what is shown, anything seen with the venerable Mosaic 1.0.3 will forever be stamped 1994. As time goes by, expect to see old browsers become collector's items, a stylish means of looking backward as you ride the infobahn for nostalgia's sake.
Cross-Platform Technology
The two major political parties - with their reliance on top-down, legacy media branding and communications structures - are failing to produce useful solutions to tomorrow's problems. Is it any wonder that citizen participation is so sadly reduced? The Internet, on the other hand, has created great excitement about one-to-one and relationship marketing and mass customization. Yet using the Net to create a plebiscite form of government is a bad idea. Just ask businesses whether they would like to be run by instant polling of their customer base and see how fast they say no.
A better approach is fusion, or cross-nomination, which allows two or more parties to nominate the same candidate on separate ballots. The Populists and other parties used fusion to great effect in the 19th century. The major parties responded by outlawing the practice almost everywhere.
While the Supreme Court recently upheld the right of states to ban cross-nomination outright, the Internet process is far more compatible with approaches like fusion than with the current system. Fusion can break the stranglehold of strict party lines.
The Power to Consume
A massive paradox plagues contemporary economics. On the one hand, we insist that macroeconomic growth demands increases in productivity. On the other hand, at the microeconomic level firms try to raise productivity by reengineering to reduce employment, which then affects the macroeconomy by reducing unemployed workers' ability to consume what has been produced.
In the past, increases in productivity did not lead to overcapacity because foreign markets could be found for excess goods. National economies were open systems that could export. But the global economy is a closed system for which increases in production must ultimately be balanced by increases in consumption. In other words, increases in productivity (production per worker per hour) must be matched by increases in consumptivity (consumption per consumer per hour).
Consider three components of consumptivity: first, the ability to consume; second, the will to consume; third, the knowledge of how to consume cleanly, wisely, and without waste.
The ability to consume is a function of the ability to acquire - that is, purchasing power - and the ability to use. What is the difference between raw consumption and consumptivity? We all know how to add; we don't all know how to use a computer. We all know how to use a phone; we don't all know how to use the advanced functionality available over a T1 line. So the ability to consume demands not only the cash one gets from a good job, but also the knowledge to take advantage of what one buys.
Consider, for example, the difference between the wino and the wine connoisseur. The wino may drink more wine, but the connoisseur does more for the economy through the ripple effect, employing more people, including vintners, wine stewards, and food journalists. While the wino's absolute consumption may be higher, the connoisseur's consumptivity is higher.
If we want the economy (rather than the state) to do the job of raising purchasing power, then we need to find a way to accelerate the velocity of exchange by raising consumptivity. Yet raising consumptivity requires not only purchasing power, but also the will to consume - namely, desire.
In addressing this second component of consumptivity, we have to acknowledge that plenty of people simply don't want much. Even if they have the purchasing power, you can't get them to buy more consumer goods, or experiences, or services. Yet this nonconsumption reduces the velocity of money and restrains the wealth-enhancing capacity of the economy. Forget about the argument that such behavior helps the economy by increasing savings rates and investment in productive capacity. What good does it do to produce more goods that don't get consumed? Such productivity merely builds inventory and induces overcapacity, leading to subsequent plant shutdowns, fallow fields, unemployment, wage reduction, and a decline in the power to consume.
Beyond the ability and the will to consume, there is the knowledge of how to do so cleanly and wisely. The classic environmentalist protest to consumer-driven economic growth takes the form of this question: What if every family in China buys a car? The earth lacks the carrying capacity to allow overpopulated, underdeveloped countries to grow along the path laid down by consumers in developed economies. Such growth is ecologically unsustainable.
A new understanding of consumption, however, needs to be situated in the context of the transition from industrial economy to information economy. This third condition, the requirement for benign consumption, helps save consumptivity from attacks against base consumerism. It is a call for the sublimation of desire from materialism to etherealism - fewer durables, more intangibles: experiences, entertainment, knowledge, wisdom. Fortunately, this higher order of consumption does not obey the law of constant conservation of mass and energy. The sublime is not a zero-sum game. Consequently, increasing consumptivity can accelerate the velocity of money, create jobs, and enhance purchasing power.
Enhancing consumptivity in the economics of the sublime means educating our passions, refining our tastes, raising our appreciation for the finer things in life. Think of laughter as the consumption of a joke, and a better sense of humor as a higher level of consumptivity. Likewise, think of better health as higher consumptivity in the health care industry. Now translate that model to the rest of your desires.
Conspicuous Conservation
Perhaps only the rich can afford to be truly frugal. The wealthy have always needed something to separate themselves from the masses. When resources were scarce, the well-to-do would deliberately waste them, just to show they could. But in this age of plenty, most of us in the industrialized world live as no medieval kings could ever have dreamed.
Hyperefficiency, however, is still a scarcity. And, ironically, even those who live simply by necessity have lost their edge when it comes to economizing. Well-designed and expensive state-of-the-art machinery, from thermodynamically efficient washer/dryers and fuel-saving hybrid electric cars to resource-conscious smart homes, can easily outscrimp less advanced tools. Thus the concept of conspicuous conservation - being frugal in high style.
You Own Your Own (S)Words
Despite the success of multiplayer mayhemfests like Duke Nukem, game developers need to ask themselves how long they can milk motivation from the same old mutant-zombies-attack formula. Well before "fast, free, guiltless killing" was a warm twitch in some SegaSoft marketing exec's loins, the wrath, vengeance, fury, rage, and madness promised by the HEAT gaming network already had bubbled over in other digital realms. The Well, for example. So why not combine the two in a bulletin board (sorry, conferencing) system where you can rationally discuss both esoterica and important issues of the day - and, when you just can't take it any more, blow opponents like the Always Right Leftist and the Flippant Fop into tiny shreds of deintellectualized meat. This would certainly make a more innovative - and compelling - kind of language game.
