Just for Fun : The Story of an Accidental Revolutionary (28 page)

Sun tried to get Java standardized through two different standardization bodies, and each time they basically pulled out because of the control issues. On the one hand, Sun wanted to standardize the language. But at the same time they didn’t want to lose control. So the standardization boards basically said, “Hey, this is not just about you.” And as a result, Sun just flaked out. It’s an example of a company trying to control technology in ways that make no sense for the people who actually use the technology. And it’s always going to fail for the company. It also makes the technology itself fail—or take longer to be accepted.

Contrast that with the If-you-love-something-set-it-free strategy taken by Palm Computing. The folks at Palm made their development environment open, and also opened up their platform, not only to vendors but to individuals who would want to write programs for the platform. They opened up their APIs and made it easy to get their development tools for free. What this did was create a cottage industry around the Palm Pilot. It made the Palm phenomenon more than just one company struggling in a new market. So now you have companies selling games that work on Palm Pilots, and more advanced calendar programs than what Palm itself offers. Now the consumer can choose what he or she wants and everybody benefits, particularly Palm, which enjoys a larger market as a result of opening itself up.

Handspring is doing the same thing with its device, the Visor. It’s a Palm competitor that uses the Palm operating system, and the company takes openness a step further by allowing hardware plug-ins like GPS receivers and mobile phone attachments. Like Palm, Handspring is creating a community of companies to support a new platform.

What Sun could have done is allow anybody to do their own Java—no strings attached—while wagering that they themselves could do a better job. That’s the sign of a company that isn’t blinded by greed or by fear of competition. It’s the sign of a company that believes in itself. And doesn’t have time to hate.

THE AMUSEMENT RIDE AHEAD

Is there anything more obnoxious than business prognosticators? Those self-important types who pretend to know where the insane technology amusement ride will take us? I guess they serve a good function. They populate the panel discussions and keynote speeches of the indistinguishable technology conferences that seem to crop up like unpleasant, inedible mushrooms in your flower bed. People hoping to cash in on technology trends spend thousands of dollars to hear them speak at technology conferences. It keeps an army of hotel workers and food handlers and bartenders honestly employed, so I suppose they serve a purpose.

And now David tells me that I should do one of those “Future of Business” chapters, too. I feel a bit sullied by the thought, but hey, he didn’t let me drown while we were boogey-boarding, and if he believes that readers will think the future of business is more interesting than the meaning of life, then I’ll just shut up and write.

I’ll go on record saying that I’ve not been a very good predictor of much of anything in my life, as far as I can remember. Did I predict that the little operating system I started writing for my own use would someday be all over the place? Nope. Took me by surprise, it did. My only defense is that nobody else seems to do be doing any better on this crystal ball thing either, and if I was taken by surprise by how big Linux became in the industry, then everybody else was absolutely flabbergasted. So I probably did better than most. And who knows? Maybe through this chapter I will be known as the Nostradamus of our time.

And maybe not. Here goes, anyway.

We can, of course, look to past experience. We can trace in sad detail how, say, an invincible-seeming company like AT&T went limp—and we can predict that if we stick around long enough, the weeds will overrun those tidy little green buildings in Redmond someday, too. Just as today’s hot young starlet will develop wrinkles and sagging breasts, today’s business hero will be supplanted by a new, more inspired model; and the hero’s company, even if it breaks a sweat reinventing itself—or whatever they’re calling it this month—will end up sagging and groaning, AT&T-style.

Call it evolution. It’s certainly not rocket science. No business will live forever, and that is just as well.

But what is it that actually drives this evolution? Is there some fundamental, inherent evolution of technology that will one day cause computers to take over, leaving the human race behind in the dust, like some people seem to think? Or is it just some random inevitability of progress, a “straight ahead and damn the torpedoes” kind of thing that causes technological advances?

I say no.

Technology is what we make of it, and neither business nor technology will change the basic nature of human needs and yearnings. As with everything else, the evolution slowly but inexorably will cause technology to move away from plain survival through a society based on communication and finally into the realm of entertainment
(déjà vu
alert: Yes, you’ve seen this theory before in these pages, and, assuming you stick around to the bitter end, you’ll see it once more).

Humans are destined to be party animals, and technology will follow.

So forget all the predictions about what technology can do in ten years. That’s not very relevant at all. We were able to put a man on the moon thirty years ago, and we’ve not been back since. I’m personally convinced that is simply because the moon turned out to be a drab place with basically no night-life at all—sort of like San Jose. As a result, people didn’t
want
to go back, and the amount of technology we’ve amassed in the meantime doesn’t mean a thing. The moon stays empty.

What really matters when you talk about the future of technology is what people
want.
Once you’ve figured that out, the only remaining question is how quickly you can mass-produce the thing and make it cheap enough that people can get it without sacrificing anything
else
they want. Nothing else really matters.

A small digression is in order here. What really sells, of course, is
perception,
not reality. Cruise liners sell the perception of freedom, of the salty seas, of good food and romance of
Love Boat
proportions. Who cares if the cabin is cramped if you
feel
like you’re free as a bird!

And what does this all means? It explains, for example, why people are going so ga-ga over the Sony PlayStation 2, the single biggest piece of technology to hit the store shelves this year. (I’m writing this just days after it was introduced in the United States in late October 2000). Talk about the embodiment of the entertainment society!

It also points out how personal computers have a perception problem. Clearly the PC industry is nervous about game consoles, mainly because they are seen as nonthreatening, fun and cheap, while PC’s are mostly seen as complicated and expensive. Sometimes even inimical.

It also makes me personally convinced that if we’re still talking in a big way about operating systems fifteen years from now, something is seriously wrong somewhere. This may sound strange coming from somebody whose main claim to fame is writing his own operating system, but the fact is that, statistically speaking,
nobody
wants an operating system.

In fact, nobody even wants a computer. What everybody wants is this magical toy that can be used to browse the Web, write term papers, play games, balance the checkbook, and so on.

The fact that you need a computer and an operating system to do all this is something that most people would rather not ever think about.

This is why a lot of analysts like the notion of devices like the Sony PlayStation 2 that take over a number of the chores of a computer, without having that scary hand-sweat-producing property of being obviously complicated, scary machines. Which is technologically senseless, as we’re getting more and more computers into the house all the time like this, while being
unaware
of how complicated and scary they could be.

So my bet for the next Microsoft would be Sony, if they can just get all the pieces lined up properly. Now I’m not claiming that this is a prediction of Nostradamus-like mindbogglingness (yes, I know that’s probably not a real word, but it
should
be). There are others who would agree with this, but I’m trying to articulate
why
it is happening.

Not that I’m predicting the demise of the PC, like many have unsuccessfully done before. The fundamental strengths of PCs are still there; they are the Swiss army knife of computers. Overtly complicated enough to scare off people who don’t like technology—complicated exactly
because
they are not tailor-made for only one thing. That flexibility becomes the very thing that makes them attractive.

And then, the one ring to rule them all, and in the darkness bind them: communication. Everywhere. You can’t live without checking email at least twice an hour? No problem, my email-addicted friend. You can have the slightly guilty feeling of taking the day off at the beach, yet always be in touch with what’s going on at work. Remember: What sells is not the
reality
of being on vacation, but the
perception
of freedom. Size does matter after all, if only to make all of the technological wonders seem trivial and nonthreatening.

And where is Linux itself, and open source generally, in all this? You won’t even know. It will be inside those Sony machines. You’ll never see it, you’ll never know it, but it’s there, making it all run. It will be in that cell phone, which is at the same time acting as your very own personal communications hub for the rest of your electronic widgets when you’re away from your wireless local area network.

You’ll see. It’s only a matter of time. And money.

WHY OPEN SOURCE MAKES SENSE

IBM is a company with a history of screwing people over. It made its money by getting a captive audience and making sure nobody else got a foothold. That’s how most computer companies worked, in fact. It’s how some of them still do. Then, when IBM developed the personal computer, it unintentionally opened up its technology for anyone to replicate. That single act did more than anything to spur the PC Revolution, which has in turn spurred the Information Revolution, Internet Revolution, New Economy—whatever it is they’re now calling the massive changes taking place throughout the world.

It’s the best illustration of the limitless benefits to be derived from the open source philosophy. While the PC wasn’t developed using the open source model, it is an example of a technology that was opened for any person or company to clone and improve and sell. In its purest form, the open source model allows anyone to participate in a project’s development or commercial exploitation. Linux is obviously the most successful example. What started out in my messy Helsinki bedroom has grown to become the largest collaborative project in the history of the world. It began as an ideology shared by software developers who believed that computer source code should be shared freely, with the General Public License—the anticopyright—as the movement’s powerful tool. It evolved to became a method for the continuous development of the best technology. And it evolved further to gain widespread market acceptance, as seen in the snowballing adoption of Linux as an operating system for Web servers, and in its unexpectedly generous IPOs.

What was inspired by ideology has proved itself as technology and is working in the marketplace. Now open source is expanding beyond the technical and business domains. At Harvard University Law School, professors Larry Lessig (who is now at Stanford) and Charles Nesson have brought the open source model to law. They started the Open Law Project, which relies on volunteer lawyers and law students posting opinions and research to the project’s Web site to help develop arguments and briefs challenging the United States Copyright Extension Act. The theory is that the strongest arguments will be developed when the largest number of legal minds are working on a project, and as a mountain of information is generated through postings and repostings. The site nicely sums up the tradeoff from the traditional approach: “What we lose in secrecy, we expect to regain in depth of sources and breadth of argument.” (Put in another context: With a million eyes, all software bugs will vanish.)

It’s a wrinkle on how academic research has been conducted for years, but one that makes sense on a number of fronts. Think of how this approach could speed up the development of cures for disease, for example. Or how, with the best minds on the task, international diplomacy could be strengthened. As the world becomes smaller, as the pace of life and business intensifies, and as the technology and information become available, people realize the tight-fisted approach is becoming increasingly outmoded.

The theory behind open source is simple. In the case of an operating system, the source code—the programming instructions underlying the system—is free. Anyone can improve it, change it, exploit it. But those improvements, changes, and exploitations have to be made freely available. Think Zen. The project belongs to no one and to everyone. When a project is opened up, there is rapid and continual improvement. With teams of contributors working in parallel, the results can happen far more speedily and successfully than if the work were being conducted behind closed doors.

That’s what we experienced with Linux. Imagine: Instead of a tiny cloistered development team working in secret, you have a monster on your side. Potentially millions of the brightest minds are contributing to a project, and are supported by a peer-review process that has no, er, peer.

The first time people hear about the open source approach, it sounds ludicrous. That’s why it has taken years for the message of its virtues to sink in. Ideology isn’t what has sold the open source model. It started gaining attention when it was obvious that open source was the best method of developing and improving the highest quality technology. And now it is winning in the marketplace, an accomplishment has brought open source its greatest acceptance. Companies were able to be created around numerous value-added services, or to use open source as a way of making a technology popular. When the money rolls in, people get convinced.