April 29, 2014
Troll Indulgences: Virtual Goods Patent Gutted [7,076,445]
Another terrible virtual currency/goods patent has been rightfully destroyed – this time in an unusual (but worthy) way: From Law360: EA, Zynga Beat Gametek Video Game Purchases Patent Suit, By Michael Lipkin
Law360, Los Angeles (April 25, 2014, 7:20 PM ET) — A California federal judge on Friday sided with Electronic Arts Inc., Zynga Inc. and two other video game companies, agreeing to toss a series of Gametek LLC suits accusing them of infringing its patent on in-game purchases because the patent covers an abstract idea. … “Despite the presumption that every issued patent is valid, this appears to be the rare case in which the defendants have met their burden at the pleadings stage to show by clear and convincing evidence that the ’445 patent claims an unpatentable abstract idea,” the opinion said.
The very first thing I thought when I saw this patent was: “Indulgences! They’re suing for Indulgences? The prior art goes back centuries!” It wasn’t much of a stretch, given the text of the patent contains this little fragment (which refers to the image at the head of this post):
Alternatively, in an illustrative non-computing application of the present invention, organizations or institutions may elect to offer and monetize non-computing environment features and/or elements (e.g. pay for the right to drive above the speed limit) by charging participating users fees for these environment features and/or elements.
WTF? Looks like reasoning something along those lines was used to nuke this stinker out of existence. It is quite unusual for a patent to be tossed out in court. Usually the invalidation process has to take a separate track, as it has with other cases I’ve helped with, such as The Word Balloon Patent. I’m very glad to see this happen – not just for the defendant, but for the industry as a whole. Just adding “on a computer [network]” to existing abstract processes doesn’t make them intellectual property! Hopefully this precedent will help kill other bad cases in the pipeline already…
August 23, 2013
Patents and Software and Trials, Oh My! An Inventor’s View
What does almost 20 years of software patents yield? You’d be surprised!
I gave an Ignite talk (5 minutes: 20 slides advancing every 15 seconds) entitled
“Patents and Software and Trials, Oh My! An Inventor’s View”
Here’s some improved links…
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I’ve created ip-reform.org to support the “I Won’t Sign Bogus Patents” pledge.
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Encourage your company to adopt Twitter’s Inventor’s Patent Agreement
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Support the The EFF on Patent Reform – DefendInnovation.org has a proposal
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Sequestration has delayed a bay area PTO office, support this bill
I gave the talk twice, and the second version is also available (shows me giving the talk and static versions of my slides…) – watch that here:
July 8, 2009
Online Gambling Patent: Another One Bites the Dust
For regular readers of Habitat Chronicles, it comes as no surprise that Lucasfilm’s Habitat, the first graphical virtual world with the first avatars, was the source of much innovation in the field. And this was back in the mid- to late-1980’s before people tried to patent software. As a result, those who created products like these are in some demand when later related patents were filed in the 1990s and now lawsuits a cropping up in an attempt to enforce them.
Another product during that period was called Rabbit Jack’s Casino, which allowed Quantum-Link users to play online gambling games such as Bingo, Poker, Slots, and Blackjack against each other for Q-Pons, chips that were not backed by real dollars, other than the $3.60 to $4.80 an hour people were paying for premium service access.
Rabbit Jack’s played an important role in getting an EU patent on online gambling [EP 0625760B1] declared invalid yesterday. Though I provided three sworn statements about Habitat, in the end the Honourable Lord Lewison did not need to site them in the decision. No matter – I was glad to be of help and to see the process in action.
Another one bites the dust!
December 29, 2008
The Demise of the Word Balloon Patent
or How IMVU, Bruce Damer and I Saved Blizzard a Million Dollars and They Don’t Even Know It
Patent Trolls Piss Me Off
The latest news about Worlds.com, Inc. joining a long line of virtual world patent trolls has pissed me off.
You can always tell a patent troll because they are not actively developing or marketing the supposed “protected” technology and the patents are a decade old and they had previously turned a blind-eye to possible infringing use, then sold them to lawyers (or just retained a trolling firm) to generate cash to keep a portion of their anemic business on life-support by shaking down the gaming and virtual world industry. In the U.S. the big money target is Blizzard’s and their global monster hit: World of Warcraft. These lawyers don’t go after Blizzard straight away. That’d be stupid, since that company has the deep enough pockets to tell them to pound sand, and on the chance they might even become inspired take active countermeasures [as happened with the case I am going to share with you today]. Instead, they’ll first go after a few little guys who can’t really defend themselves; get them to roll over and pay just to establish a precedent. Then, armed with the claim that the industry has obviously accepted the validity of their patent – start the proceedings against the larger worlds, and eventually hit up the big guys – Linden Lab/Second Life and Blizzard/World of Warcraft.
I know about this particular pattern first hand, as Bruce Damer and I helped IMVU ‘s founder Will Harvey (et al.) defend against one of these terrible patent suits, and all the parties involved ended up limping away with limited victories.
Software Patents are Newer than Virtual Worlds
For the last several years, I’ve been doing a lot of patent consulting since I was one of the principle developers of Lucasfilm’s Habitat /QLink’s Club Caribe (the first graphical virtual world), which existed in the mid-1980s, before people even thought they could make money patenting software. This means that the stuff invented for Habitat is NOT PATENTED and is PRIOR ART to be used to defend against many early and bogus virtual world-related patents. Seriously folks, there are patents out there with claims like generating a random number on a server that is authoritative for chance events when received by clients. Really? “You can’t trust the client” was novel as late as 1996? I don’t think so! And I have the software, documentation, and widely cited white papers to prove it.
The Word Balloon Lawsuit
Three years ago, on November 3rd, 2005 Forterra Systems, the company formerly known as There.com, filed suit against Avatar Factory and William “Will” D. Harvey in US District court for Patent Infringement. The suit was all about US patent number 6,784,901 Method, system and computer program product for the delivery of a chat message in a 3D multi-user environment
Abstract
A chat system, method and computer program product for delivering a message between a sender and a recipient in a three-dimensional (3D) multi-user environment, wherein the 3D multi-user environment maintains respective digital representations of the sender and the recipient, uses a recipient interface to receive a message, map the message to a texture to generate a textured message, and render the textured message in the 3D multi-user environment so as to permit the recipient to visually ascertain the location of the digital representation of the sender in the 3D world. Received messages are mantained as two-dimensional elements on a recipient viewport.
- Inventors: Harvey; William D. (Palo Alto, CA), McHugh; Jason G. (East Palo Alto, CA); Paiz; Fernando J. (Millbrae, CA), Ventrella; Jeffrey J. (San Francisco, CA)
- Assignee: There (Menlo Park, CA)
- Filed: August 31, 2000
- Granted: August 31, 2004
You can find all the details about this case online by entering the case number 95000155 here – there are thousands of pages of documents. I am not a lawyer, I’m a storyteller, and was just one of many people who played a non-trivial role in determining the primary outcome.
I like to call this action the Word Balloon Lawsuit since the claims in question are primarily about displaying chat messages in word balloons that float over an avatar’s head in a virtual world. Forterra was claiming they had a patent on them and IMVU was infringing and should stop or pay up.
You probably noticed in the patent office excerpt above that the primary inventor on the Patent is the same name as the primary individual defendant – Will Harvey. Will filed the patent while he was still a founder and member of the virtual world and company There (which was later renamed Forterra Systems). After leaving There, Will founded IMVU – another 3D avatar chat system – dropping the virtual world from the original idea altogether and just keeping the best lessons about avatars and user-created clothing, objects, and environments.
The Word Balloon Suit against IMVU seemed shrewd on Forterra’s part for several reasons:
- IMVU, on the surface, had features that looked in many ways similar to those in There.
- IMVU was small and not cash-rich and unlikely to put up a protracted fight, or any fight at all.
- By being an Inventor on the patent in question, Will’s options to defend himself would be limited because of the legal principle of Estoppel. For example, he couldn’t claim that the patent was invalid, since he signed the application saying that it was valid when it was filed.
Archivists To the Rescue!
January 9th, 2006 I received an email from Will that started:
“Thought you might be able to help me on something and simultaneously help stop some bad people from blatantly abusing the patent system by egregiously
asserting intellectual property rights that they don’t own.”
He was looking for support in the form of screen shots, articles, and even physical media that proved prior art to break the patent. He continued:
“… of course I know that we at There.com did not invent the idea of chat balloons, but There.com is trying to give the patent a broader interpretation than was intended and claim that they own idea of chat balloons […] something they didn’t even invent!”
He also contacted virtual worlds pioneer, author and archivist Bruce Damer. I was probably the most vocal co-creator of the first two or three generations of graphical virtual worlds and Bruce had a broad, almost ecumenical view of the entire field. Bruce’s book Avatars, is a catalog of the state of virtual worlds as of 1997 and would also play a key role in the final decision.
After reviewing the patent, it was obvious to me that Will’s interpretation was right – the patent was not meant to cover all 3D word balloons, it was something he called “Chat Wads” – to me a ho-hum idea of little indicators that the user is typing flying through the virtual world to the balloon. That interpretation might be innovative, but certainly no one had copied it. Stretching it to cover all word balloons? No way!
IMVU was based in Palo Alto, where I live, so Will and I had a face to face chat at a coffee shop downtown. He seemed understandably preoccupied with the personal ramifications. I said something like “Dude! I’m not just doing this for you – they aren’t just after you! If you cave or lose, they’re going after bigger fish. You aren’t the real target. They’re after Blizzard! They figure you’re easy pick’ns given that you have to defend yourself with one-hand tied behind your back and a limited legal budget.”
Bruce and I independently agreed to help with Will’s defense of this case not only for him or IMVU, but for virtual righteousness.
Bruce and I produced piles of prior art – for products such as Lucasfilm’s Habitat (1986), Club Caribe (1988), Fujitsu Habitat (1990), Sony’s Community Place (1995), WorldsAway (1996), The Palace (1996), ECHabitats/Microcosm (1997), and more. We provided screen shots, videos, white papers, published articles, and other patents. I even remember demonstrating ECHabitat’s 3D word balloon system to Will Harvey at Bruce Damer’s Avatars97 conference. I was even able to point to online conference photos that included myself and clearly EC Habitat with visible balloons.
The best defense is…
On July 17th, 2006 – IMVU requested a Patent Reexamination for the patent claims in question. If the request was granted this would allow the USPTO to review the patent more closely and potentially throw out invalid claims. This was a risky move, because if the PTO refused to reexamine, or even worse, reviewed and upheld the patent, it would be a disaster for IMVU. But, at this point the examiner’s research would now include all of the court record to date, including the comprehensive submissions of prior art that Bruce and I provided.
The Decision
On October 17th, 2007, after almost two years and 137 separate legal filings the lawsuit was Dismissed With Prejudice.
Bruce Damer wrote me:
I was told that the presiding federal judge [The Honorable Patricia V. Trumbull] upon denying all the claims of Forterra held up a copy of my 1997 book “Avatars” and said something like “not only are all of your claims predated by the prior art but that prior art is all contained in this one book which was published two years before the patent was filed…”. I like to think that she then slammed the book down on the bench, gavel-like, but wasn’t there to witness this.
The lawsuit was dead, but the patent reexamination was still underway.
The Danger of Suing with Bad Patents: Reexamination
Losing the suit wasn’t the end of the bad results for Forterra.
Almost one year later, on October 7th, 2008 the US Patent Office issued a Reexamination Certificate, numbered 95/000,155 that invalidates all of the claims in question – gutting the patent for use in future lawsuits against 3D chat systems.
Virtual worlds with chat balloons past, present, and future could rest a little easier, even if they didn’t know it. Blizzard dodged a bullet. You’re welcome guys. :-)
Epilog: Goliath’s Rage
Forterra was beaten, twice.
In a Hollywood-inspired universe, this would be the end of the story: Rationality and the little guy triumph, the free (virtual) world is saved, and the big bully goes home with his proverbial tail between his legs, right?
But this is the real world of angry losers.
Will Harvey had really pissed off someone with a lot of money. Forterra filed a new and unrelated lawsuit that seems to me to be attempting to make IMVU pay for the lost potential revenue as a result of defeating the chat-balloon patent suit. Unlike with British tort law, where losers pay much of the winner’s legal costs, in the US civil courts it often ends up that the one with the most cash can continue to sue the little guy over and over, making him spend dollar-for-dollar the same amount of money with no real recourse. Deepest pockets can force a financial draw.
This later suit was eventually settled for undisclosed terms to presumably just get the whole matter behind them. As a side effect of the settlement, if it weren’t for this post, you probably would have never heard about any of this. But, you see, I never signed anything. :-) And the patent (re)examiner pulled the entire court proceedings into the web-accessible public record!
So that’s a free tip for you: Civil court documents become a part of the USPTO’s Patent Reexamination process. Amazing what you can find on the web these days.
But, Word Balloons are Free!
So, IMVU and Will Harvey took one on the chin for the rest of us. I say Huzzah! to them! They did us all a big favor.
Too many companies just cave when stuff like this comes along. It takes real courage to stand up and say “Hey! That’s not right!” Especially to Patent Trolls. So, if you see Will at a conference somewhere, say “Thanks Man!” He can’t talk about any of it, but hopefully with this blog post and the story spreading through the social network, maybe he doesn’t have to.
Patents weren’t created so that people can sue each other into the ground, they were created specifically to allow an individual (and eventually a company) to have a limited exclusive period to develop and market their invention. They are meant for defense. Something has gone horribly wrong that people who aren’t developing or marketing an invention at all are just applying scatter-shot legal action on the hopes of a big payoff. This sets the wrong kind of incentives for the creation of patents – see or think of a clever idea – patent it quick, without actually understanding if it is novel or common or has prior art. Or, if you patent something you think is novel, wait years as others use a similar idea to build successful products and then spring from the trees shouting “Ah ha! I got you! We’ll just sort it all out in court.” After all, if you can patent a method of swinging on a (tree) swing, you can patent anything!
Disclosure
I do not categorically object to patents. I have several granted patents and about the same number pending approval – filing defensive patents is unfortunately required by the current business environment . There are two Fujitsu patents that are in my name that Chip and I refused to sign because of prior art, and I have copies the legal paper trail to prove it – so if Fujitsu shows up at your door claiming to have the patent on the virtual world, you know where to find us.
February 21, 2014
White Paper: 5 Questions for Selecting an Online Community Platform
Today, we’re proud to announce a project that’s been in the works for a while: A collaboration with Community Pioneer F. Randall Farmer to produce this exclusive white paper – “Five Questions for Selecting an Online Community Platform.”Randy is co-host of the Social Media Clarity podcast, a prolific social media innovator, and literally co-wrote the book on Building Web Reputation Systems. We were very excited to bring him on board for this much needed project. While there are numerous books, blogs, and white papers out there to help Community Managers grow and manage their communities, there’s no true guide to how to pick the right kind of platform for your community.
In this white paper, Randy has developed five key questions that can help determine what platform suits your community best. This platform agnostic guide covers top level content permissions, contributor identity, community size, costs, and infrastructure. It truly is the first guide of its kind and we’re delighted to share it with you.
Go to the Cultivating Community post to get the paper.
November 16, 2010
Quora:What lessons of Social Web do you wish had been better integrated into Yahoo?
On Quora, an anonymous user asked me the following question:
In hindsight, what lessons have you learned from the Social Web that you wish you had been more successful at integrating into Yahoo before you were let go?
I considered this question at length when composing this reply – this is probably the most thought-provoking question I’ve been asked to publicly address in months.
If you read any of my blog posts (or my recent book), you already know that I’ve got a lot of opinions about how the Social Web works: I rant often about identity, reputation, karma, community management, social application design, and business models.
I did these same things during my time for and at Yahoo!
We invented/improved user-status sharing (what later became known as Facebook Newsfeeds) when we created Yahoo! 360° [Despite Facebook’s recently granted patent, we have prior art in the form of an earlier patent application and the evidence of an earlier public implementation.]
But 360 was prematurely abandoned in favor of a doomed-from-the-start experiment called Yahoo!Mash. It failed out of the gate because the idea was driven not by research, but personality. But we had hope in the form of the Yahoo! Open Strategy, which promised a new profile full of social media features, deeply integrated with other social sites from the very beginning. After a year of development – Surprise! – Yahoo! flubbed that implementation as well. In four attempts (Profiles, 360, Mash, YOS) they’d only had one marginal success (360), which they sabotaged several times by telling users over and over that the service was being shut down and replaced with inferior functionality. Game over for profiles.
We created a reputation platform and deployed successful reputation models in various places on Yahoo! to decrease operational costs and to identify the best content for search results and to be featured on property home pages [See: The Building Web Reputation Systems Wiki and search for Yahoo to read more.]
The process of integrating with the reputation platform required product management support, but almost immediately after my departure the platform was shipped off to Bangalore to be sunsetted. Ironically, since then the folks at Yahoo! are thinking about building a new reputation platform – since reputation is obviously important, and everyone from the original team has either left, been laid off, or moved on to other teams. Again, this will be the fourth implementation of a reputation platform…
Are you sensing a pattern yet?
Then there’s identity. The tripartite identity model I’ve blogged about was developed while at Yahoo an attempt to explain why it is brain-dead to ask users to reveal their IM name, their email address, and half their login credentials to spammers in order to leave a review of a hotel.
Again we built a massively scalable identity service platform to allow users to be seen as their nickname, age, and location instead of their YID. And again, Yahoo! failed to deploy properly. Despite a cross-company VP-level mandate, each individual business unit silo dragged their heels in doing the (non-trivial, but important and relatively easy) work of integrating the platform. Those BUs knew the truth of Yahoo! – if you delay long enough, any platform change will lose its support when the driving folks leave or are reassigned. So – most properties on Yahoo! are still displaying YIDs and getting up to 90% fewer user contributions as a result.
That’s what I learned: Yahoo! can’t innovate in Social Media. It has a long history in this, from Yahoo! Groups, which during my tenure had three separate web 2.0 re-designs, with each tossed on the floor in favor of cheap and easy (and useless) integrations (like with Yahoo! Answers) to Flickr, Upcoming, and Delicious. I’m sad to say, Yahoo! seems incapable of reprogramming its DNA, despite regular infusions of new blood. Each attempt ends in either an immune-response (Flickr has its own offices, and a fairly well known disdain for Sunnyvale) or assimilation and decreasing relevance (HotJobs, Personals, Groups, etc.).
So, in the end, I find I can’t answer the question. I was one of many people who tried to drive home the lessons of the social web for the entire time I was there. YOS (of which I helped spec in fall 2007) was the last attempt to reshape the company to be social through and through. But, it was a lost cause – the very structure of the environment is personality driven. When those personalities leave, their projects immediately get transferred to Bangalore for end-of-life support, just as much of YOS has been…
I don’t know what Yahoo! is anymore, but I know it isn’t inventing the future of social anything.
[As I sat through this years F8 developers conference, and listen to Mark Z describe 95% of the YOS design, almost 3 years later, I knew I’d have to write this missive one day. So thanks for the prodding , Anonymous @ Quora]
Randy Farmer
Social Media Consultant, MSB Associates
Former Community Strategy Analyst for Yahoo!
[Please direct comments to Quora]
December 22, 2006
Smart people can rationalize anything
One of the things we were able to do at Electric Communities was to attract one of the highest density collections of scary-smart people I’ve ever seen gathered in one place before. There are a lot of nice things about working with smart people. For one thing, they’re not stupid. Working with stupid people just sucks. Smart people are good if you need to do a lot of really hard things, and we did a lot of really hard things. But it’s not all upside. For one thing, smart people tend to systematically overestimate the value of being smart. In fact, it is really valuable, but they still tend to weight it too heavily compared to other virtues you might also value, such as consistency, focus, attentiveness to the emotional needs of your customers, and so on. One of the problems with really smart people is that they can talk themselves into anything. And often they can talk you into it with them. And if you’re smart yourself, you can talk them into stuff. The tendency to drift and lack of focus can be really extreme unless you have a few slower people in the group to act as a kind of intellectual ballast.
Why do less when you can do more?
Smart people can invent solutions to problems you don’t actually have yet. The problem is, it’s easy to think of problems you don’t have yet. Stopping to solve them all now is a recipe for paralysis. Furthermore, while it’s easy to think of all kinds of potential future problems, it’s much harder to forsee which of those you will actually have, much less all the ones that you are going to have that you didn’t anticipate. People who are less smart manage to avoid pouring resources into unnecessarily solving future problems because they aren’t able to figure out how to solve those problems anyway. So they just ignore them and hope they don’t actually come up, which in a lot of cases turns out to be the way to have bet.
Programming sage Donald Knuth taught us that “premature optimization is the root of all evil.” It turns out that this doesn’t just apply to coding.
You can’t sell someone the solution before they’ve bought the problem
Smart people can invent solutions to problems folks actually do have but don’t know it yet. These solutions are usually doomed. This ties in with the whole You Can’t Tell People Anything principle. It is nearly impossible to solve a problem for someone if they don’t believe they have the problem, even if they really, really do.
For example, one of the deep flaws in many distributed object schemes, such as the CORBA standard, is that they make no effective provision for distributed garbage collection. This is a major pain, because if storage management is annoying to get right in a non-distributed system, it can be brutally so in a distributed system. Java’s Remote Method Invocation standard is somewhat better in that it does do DGC, but it still can’t cope with unreferenced distributed cycles. One of our wiz kids, Arturo Bejar, devised for us a truly elegant DGC algorithm, which is not only efficient but gracefully handles distributed cycles. (To my eternal shame we patented it.) Since to work well in Java it really wanted to be in bed with the Java Virtual Machine, we tried to sell it to JavaSoft, who were literally next door to us in Cupertino (actually, we tried to give it to JavaSoft), but they weren’t interested. They hadn’t bought the problem yet. So a small piece of great technology that could make the world a slightly better place sits on the shelf.
Generalitas gratia generalitatis
(For those of you who, unlike me, lack a co-worker who spent 7 years studying Latin, whom you can bug for stuff like this, that’s “Generality for Generality’s Sake”.)
Smart people love to think about the general case scenario.
For example, at Electric Communities we ended up making a big investment in developing an orthogonal persistence mechanism for our object infrastructure. For those of you who are unfamiliar with it, orthogonal persistence is one of the ultimate examples of highly generalized technical coolness. Basically, the idea is that you abstract away the file system (or any other persistent storage, like a database) by keeping everything in memory and then playing tricks with the virtual memory system to make processes immortal. The example we were inspired by was KeyKOS, a highly reliable OS for IBM mainframes that was developed by some friends of ours in the 1980s, in which you could literally pull the power plug from the wall, and, after plugging it back in, be rebooted and running again — including transparently resuming all the running processes that were killed when you cut the power — in about 8 seconds (this was actually one of their trade show demos). You gotta admit, that’s pretty cool. Some commercial installations of KeyKOS have had processes with running times measured in years, surviving not only power failures and hardware malfunctions, but in some cases actual replacement of the underlying hardware with newer generations of equipment.
Orthogonal persistence was attractive to us not just because of the reliability enhancements that it promised, but because it would free programmers from having to worry about how to make their objects persistent, since it abstracted away all the serialization and deserialization of object state and associated design questions. Anything that made programming objects simpler seemed like a big win. And so we built such a system for our object framework, and it worked. It wasn’t quite as awesome as KeyKOS, but it was still pretty awesome.
One of my favorite catch phrases is, “The difference between theory and practice is that, in theory, there is no difference, but, in practice, there is.” Orthogonal persistence was a great idea — in theory. Of course it cost months and months of development time, and it introduced a number of subtle new problems, any one of which would have a made a good PhD dissertation topic. If you are trying to produce a commercial product in a timely and cost efficient way, it is not good to have somebody’s PhD research on your critical path. For example, it turns out that for most kinds of objects, the amount of state you actually need to save persistently is a small fraction of the full run-time state of the object. But in an orthogonal scheme you save it all, indiscriminately. The problem is not so much that it’s bulky, though it is, but that the volume of semantic meaning that you are now committed to maintain in near-perpetuity is vastly increased. That turns out to be very expensive. The problem of schema migration as new versions of objects were developed (due to bug fixes or feature enhancements) proved effectively intractable. Ultimately we fell back on a scheme that compelled programmers to be much more deliberate about what state was checkpointed, and when. That proved more practical, but in the meanwhile we lost literally years of development resources to the blind alley. Less sophisticated developers would not have gone down this blind alley because they wouldn’t have a clue that such a thing was even possible, let alone be able to figure out how to do it. They would have been saved by their own simplicity.
Keep in mind that all of the foregoing is not an argument against being smart. Rather, it’s a recognition that human rationality is bounded, and even really, really smart people must necessarily fall far short of mastering the complexities of a lot of the things we do, as engineers, as business people, and as ordinary human beings. What works the kinks out of a thing is often just the passage of time, as the shortcomings and subtleties gradually emerge from practice. Because stupid people work more slowly, they get the benefit of time for free, whereas smart people have to work at it.
July 4, 2004
Beware the Platform II
A long time ago we said “The implementation platform is relatively unimportant.” This was a statement made at a time when a lot of people were insisting that to do “real” cyberspace (whatever that is), you needed an $80,000 Silicon Graphics system (at least), whereas we came along and somewhat arrogantly claimed that all the stuff that really interested us could be done with a $150 Commodore 64. And we still believe that, notwithstanding the fact that today’s analog of the C64, a $150 PlayStation II or Xbox, has performance specs that exceed 1989’s $80,000 SGI machine. (Hey, we never said that we didn’t want cool 3D graphics, just that they weren’t the main event.)
So it should come as no great surprise, at least to those of you who have come to recognize us for the crusty contrarians that we are, when I tell you that one of the lessons that we’ve had our noses rubbed in over the past decade or so is that the platform is actually pretty darned important.
Our point about the platform being unimportant was really about performance specs: pixels and polygons, MIPS and megabytes. It was about what our long-time collaborator Doug Crockford calls the “threshold of goodenoughness”. We were in an era when the most salient characteristic of a computational platform was its performance envelope, which seemed to define the fundamental limits on what you could do. Our thesis was simply that much of we wanted to do was already inside that envelope. Of course we always hunger for more performance, but the point remains. What we didn’t pay enough attention to in our original story, however, was that a platform is characterized by more than just its horsepower.
No matter how much our technical capabilities advance, there will always be something which acts as a limiting constraint. But though there are always limits, our experience had always been that these limits kept moving outward with the march of progress. While we were always champing at the bit for the next innovation, we were also fundamentally optimistic that the inexorable workings of Moore’s Law would eventually knock down whatever barrier was currently vexing us.
In the past 5-10 years, however, we have begun to encounter very different kinds of limits in the platforms that are available in the marketplace. These limits have little to do with the sorts of quantitative issues we worry about in the performance domain, and none of them are addressed (at least not directly) by Moore’s Law. They include such things as:
- Operating system misfeatures
- Dysfunctional standards
- The ascendency of the web application model
- The progressive gumming up of workings of the Internet by the IT managers and ISPs of the world
- Distribution channel bottlenecks, notably customer reluctance or inability to download and/or install software
- A grotesquely out of balance intellectual property system
- The ascendency of game consoles and attendant closed-system issues
- Clueless regulators, corrupt legislators, and evil governments
As with the performance limitations that the march of progress has overcome for us, none of these are fundamental showstoppers, but they are all “friction factors” impeding development of the kinds of systems that we are interested in. In particular, several of these problems interact with each other in a kind of negative synergy, where one problem impedes solutions to another.
For example, the technical deficiencies of popular operating systems (Microsoft Windows being the most egregious offender in this regard, though certainly not the only one) have encouraged the proliferation of firewalls, proxies, and other function impeding features by ISPs and corporate network administrators. These in turn have shrunk many users’ connectivity options, reducing them from the universe of IP to HTTP plus whatever idiosyncratic collection of protocols their local administrators have deigned to allow. (Folks should remind me, once I get the current batch of posts I’m working on through the pipeline, to write something about the grotty reality of HTTP tunneling.) Furthermore, the security holes in Windows have made people rationally hesitant to install new software off the net (setting aside for a moment the additional inhibiting issues of download bandwidth and the quantum leap in user confusion caused by any kind of “OK to install?” dialog). Yet such downloaded software is the major pathway by which one could hope to distribute workarounds to these various connectivity barriers. And working around these barriers in turn often comes down to overcoming impediments deliberately placed by self-interested vendors who attempt to use various kinds of closed systems to achieve by technical means what they could not achieve by honest competition. And these workarounds must be developed and deployed in the face of government actions, such as the DMCA, which attempt to impose legal obstacles to their creation and distribution. Although we enjoyed a brief flowering of the open systems philosophy during the 1990s, I think this era is passing.
Note that, barring the imposition of a DRM regime that is both comprehensive and effective (which strikes me as unlikely in the extreme), the inexorable logic of technological evolution suggests that these barriers will be both permeable and temporary. That is a hopeful notion if you are, for example, a human rights activist working to tunnel through “The Great Firewall of China”. On the other hand, these things are, as I said, friction factors. In business terms that means they increase the cost of doing business: longer development times due to more complex systems that need to be coded and debugged, the time and expense of patent and intellectual property licensing requirements, more complicated distribution and marketing relationships that need to be negotiated, greater legal expenses and liability exposure, and the general hassle of other people getting into your business. This in turn means a bumpier road ahead for people like Randy and me if we try to raise investment capital for The Next Big Thing.