Apple's new core competencies, and where they lead

Back when Steve Jobs had just resumed control of Apple, as the iCeo (‘i’ for interim), the focus was on trimming back speculative projects and making the company concentrate on its core competencies, which, at that time, meant Macs – two desktop lines, one consumer and one professional, and two laptop lines, also one consumer and one professional.

A lot has changed in the meantime, Macs included, and Apple has a whole new set of core competencies. These include materials, fabrication methods, automation, radios and antennas, solid state storage, integrated circuit design, operating systems, APIs, development and application software, natural language comprehension, cloud storage, and powerful encryption. They also have an experienced and adaptable supply chain, a large and growing distribution network, and stellar customer satisfaction.

So, looking at this collection (and even this list is incomplete), what can we conclude about where Apple is headed?

First, Apple is too heavily invested in hardware to become a company that only concerns itself with software. If there was ever a time when such a move was under serious consideration, those bridges have long since been burned. If anything, Apple is now more of a hardware company than it was a decade ago.

On the other hand, Apple gains too much advantage from its software and services ecosystem to let that go. The pairing of apps and online businesses is a cash cow, from which Apple has gained a huge amount of experience, experience that is now being applied to building out their iCloud services. Remember iTools? Apple hasn't pushed their online services through four iterations – iTools, .Mac, MobileMe, and now iCloud – just because they were bored with the names. Sure, they were a little late getting into this game and haven't executed in the same deft manner as they do with hardware and operating systems, and really they have yet to broadly succeed in the social space. But they continue to try.

It's notable that we haven't yet seen a series of acquisitions. Apple could easily afford to pick up a few social internet operations, cobble them together, and integrate them with iCloud. That they haven't done so might be taken as an indication that it just isn't that important to them. Alternatively, you can interpret it as meaning that they won't be satisfied with anything not developed in-house, to Apple's exacting standards. Considering how visibly embarrassed Steve Jobs was by the awkward roll-out of MobileMe, I lean toward the second interpretation. If they were to acquire one-to-several such companies, that would be a clear indication of their intention to stake out a significant piece of the social pie. Meanwhile, iCloud has several hundred million active users and is growing rapidly, meaning that even services only available between iCloud users can no longer be taken lightly. Given sufficient intrinsic value, iCloud may begin to gain converts, corporations and associations as well as individuals.

Apple's design prowess and its family of closely-related, scalable operating systems make it rather simple for the company to prototype new devices, not only in categories we already associate with the company but of practically any sort whatsoever. Taking the device to market is another matter. Apple's brand more easily stretches to encompass some new additions to the product family than others.

Moreover, Apple doesn't have much experience with moving parts. There was the arm on which the display was mounted, for the second major iteration of the iMac, but aside from that the only examples of mechanical design from the company are hinges, clasps, switches, including keyboards, and the SIM drawer in iPhones and cellular iPads. Other examples, like the trays in early optical drives and the active insertion that came later, were designed and built by suppliers. Of course, as with IC design, Apple only stands a few acquisitions away from possessing leading-edge mechanical design skills, so we can't eliminate products with moving parts from consideration.

The biggest question is where the market opportunities in closest conjunction with Apple's existing competency set lie. There have already been open hints that they are getting into the wearable computing business, which is likely to mean more than just an iWatch, even though that by itself should prove very profitable. They may also have something comparable to Google Glass in development. Wearable augmented reality, a VR layer over physical reality, especially if it is unobtrusive enough to be worn routinely, should prove to be huge market. The potential applications are endless.

But even the wearable market will sooner or later begin to feel limited. To continue to grow, Apple must find markets beyond gadgets, and the sooner they lay the groundwork for this the better. One such possibility is 3D printing. Apple could buy their way in, acquiring a user base so long as they maintain those relationships without significant disruption, and begin to push the technology (for example printing circuitry as well as structure). Combined with support in Xcode for programming common microcontrollers, this would, in short order, endear them to the hobbyist community, with moderate investment and minimal risk. And as those hobbyists generated designs worth producing in larger numbers, that would drive demand for the 3D printing equipment. And, so long as that equipment was up to Apple's usual standard of quality, it would act to stretch the brand without distortion or dilution.

And, really, that's the trick for all of us, to find ways of growing with integrity, without sacrificing who we are.

Robert Parry traces the right-wing takeover of big media

In an article titled It's the Media, Stupid!, Robert Parry tells the story of how “those who held entrenched power” pushed back against the honest journalism which became common during the latter part of the Vietnam War era, characterizing it as “liberal” and “anti-American”, and how they came to dominate the news a mere few years later.

In agriculture robots replace job vacancies

Here's the bottom line…

So as new types of machines find their way into the fields, rest assured that they are not, for the most part, displacing workers who would otherwise be in those fields, but rather, in some cases, moving them into more technical work as robot tenders, and in other cases taking over work that fewer and fewer people are willing to do for the money it pays, and that, for those few who are displaced, there will be other farmers nearby anxious to hire them. Meanwhile, a new industry will be germinating.

See the full article on Robohub.org

The Natalia Project

Drones not required

The use of pilotless drones might reduce the cost of operation and/or increase loiter time, but the surveillance technology which many are so concerned about is here now.

Fukushima, two years later | SBS Dateline, via Journeyman Pictures

Tour the exclusion zone and listen to a few of those who lived (or still live) within it.

more of a multiplicity than a singularity

What does the word singularity suggest to you? If you understand it to mean a turn of events so full of portent that it effectively divides past from future, you'd be on the right track. If you are aware that the word is also applied to black holes, those infinitely dense bundles of mass at the centers of many/most galaxies, then for you the notion may be laced with overtones of the one-way nature of crossing an event horizon, as in there's no turning back.

It has been suggested that it's only a matter of time (months, years, or decades) before an artificial intelligence becomes self aware and therefore an artificial life form, replete with self determination, and that this event will initiate a transition to something radically different, perhaps even a post-human world, but certainly to one in which humankind is eclipsed by this machine.

While I see nothing preventing the emergence of a self-aware AI, I expect the first such will, like a black hole too small to be self-sustaining, evaporate as quickly as they emerge, until such time as self-awareness occurs in the context of strong connection to the physical world, as in robotics, and that long before then another turn of events, also involving robots, will have utterly transformed how we humans conduct our lives.

The central development around which this sequence of events turns is that of self-reproducing factories.

You've probably heard of self-replicating machines, and that might work if the machines in question are nano-scale and composed of DNA, or grow from a single cell as we do, but, for machines that exist at the same scale as ourselves and are composited from parts, self-replication is impractical. They would need access to other machines for the manipulation of materials to create the parts from which to construct replicas of themselves, and it's doubtful that something like a robotic vacuum cleaner would be able to contribute anything useful to the process, so its involvement would essentially be limited to issuing a "clone me" command to something external to and far more complex than itself.

A factory, on the other hand, besides being able to fulfill the order to clone the vacuum, might also be able to fabricate all of the parts needed to build another factory, and also to produce the machines to assemble those parts, perhaps even scavenging materials by sorting and recycling garbage.

Say the first such factory devotes only 10% of its capacity to the project of replicating itself, and that replication takes five years. After five years there would be two such factories, and, if both continued to devote 10% of their capacity to the project, after another five years there would be four, and so forth.

On the other hand, if the first factory devoted 50% of its capacity to replication, the second factory could be online in one year, four after two years, eight after three years, and so forth. By the end of the tenth year, there would be 1024 factories, and the 50% of capacity they devoted to other purposes than replication would dwarf the 90% of capacity from a meager four factories in the first scenario.

This logic is compelling. Given a factory capable of self-replication, it makes sense for it to put a significant portion of its resources into that replication, until the need for additional production capacity is erased, and that point won't have been reached until anything such a factory might produce has become affordable for the purpose for which it is designed, and appropriate designs exist for all worthy purposes.

What this means in the spaces between factories is a profusion of new products, many of them robotic - some designed to handle specific tasks, and some more general in their design - all steadily dropping in price as overall production capacity grew.

Between the many new robotic designs and the dropping prices, many things will change, not least the nature of work. We'll spend more of our time figuring out ways in which machines could perform useful tasks, and contributing to their design and programming, and less time doing work that could be done by some machine.

How this equates to a transformation as profound as I'm claiming it does is a matter of attention to detail replacing the fast and loose methods we've become so accustomed to that we're numb to how abusive they are. In some contexts this is the difference between sustainability and a path that leads to terrible, painful disruption, for example due to famine. By driving down the cost of robotics we acquire the means to save ourselves and the only planet within light years capable of supporting us in large numbers.

David Kelley of IDEO interviewed by Charlie Rose

Charlie Rose of CBS's 60 Minutes interviewing David Kelley, founder of IDEO and of d.school: Institute of Design at Stanford. The conversation encompasses his relationship with Steve Jobs, his family, the early days of IDEO, and the design philosophy practiced there and now taught at the d.school.

“Has progress plateaued?”

This question is posed in an editorial by D.J.Tice, commentary editor for the Minneapolis Star Tribune.

I like his choice of words; he's not suggesting that progress has come to an end, merely that the waves of change we boomers have all lived through have, for the most part, run their course, and nothing on the same scale has really taken hold yet.

You might object ‘But what about the increasing power and penetration of computers? What about the Internet?’ My response to this is that, so far, both phenomena have been noisier than their real contribution to people's lives have warranted.

The main impact of computers as they currently exist happened a couple of decades ago. Subsequent increases in the speed of the underlying electronics have enabled incremental improvement in usability, but it's only since 2007, and the burgeoning ubiquity of touchscreen devices which followed, that anything really new has happened in computing since the 1984 introduction of the Macintosh, and even that turn of events is beginning to feel a bit stale after five years. The popularity of the Wii, then of the Kinect, show that we haven't yet solved the human-computer interface problem.

The Internet has grown like a weed patch, displacing other media and offline activities, and making a wide range of information far easier to access than used to be the case, but the average quality of that information is fairly low as compared even with the golden age of television (when there were only 3 or 4 networks to divide the audience), and only those with better than average search skills could really be said to be better informed than before. Again, we are only beginning to figure out how to make all of this networked data relevant in people's lives.

Nowhere is this sort of thing more evident than in robotics. Except for the Roomba, and other similar appliances, a handful of military applications, and a few toys, there has been very little to show for all of the noise about robots since the rollout of industrial robots in the early 1960s, at least until quite recently.

But, while the world has waited for something to come of it, the necessary conditions for a robotics revolution have been falling into place, and it's from this direction that I expect the next big wave of change to come. In fact, that wave has already begun to arrive!

closing the election season chapter and looking forward

While I'm gratified by the result of the presidential election, I can't help being horrified that it was as close as it was. I mean, REALLY! Romney and Ryan in the White House? Even if you assume that most of their rhetoric was only that, designed to keep habitual GOP voters from bolting or sitting this one out, it was still a scary prospect. ‘Let's further entrench the idiotic policies that got us into this economic mess in the first place.’ This was the choice offered in place of Obama, the most upright, clear-thinking, and strong-willed President we've had since John Kennedy, perhaps longer, and yet the popular vote was as close as it was. I have to wonder what the outcome would have been if Jesus Christ had been running instead of Obama; would Romney have won? What a lot of work we have ahead of us, untangling the confusion of our brethren and their children.

Looking forward, I'm anticipating a lot of the same, which is to say moderate progress despite the noncooperation of the Republican dominated House of Representatives. With the government thus hamstrung, the main source of progress for the next two years, until the next congressional election, will be the backlog of unexploited applications enabled by recent advancements in technology, and the renewed entrepreneurial spirit that is everywhere in evidence, with its intense focus on providing practical solutions to real problems and making stuff that enhances people's lives – as opposed to get-rich-quick schemes built around financial instruments of dubious value, which were all the rage during the previous administration.

Obama can be counted upon to get the government behind this new economy as much as can be accomplished through the power of his office and through his personal influence, but for the most part it's up to us.