One hundred eighty degrees of freedom: signs of how open platforms are spreading

I was talking recently with Bob Frankston, who has a distinguished history in computing that goes back to work on Multics, VisiCalc, and Lotus Notes. We were discussing some of the dreams of the Internet visionaries, such as total decentralization (no mobile-system walls, no DNS) and bandwidth too cheap to meter. While these seem impossibly far off, I realized that computing and networking have come a long way already, making things normal that not too far in the past would have seemed utopian.

Flat-rate long distance calls

I remember waiting past my bedtime to make long-distance calls, and getting down to business real quick to avoid high charges. Conventional carriers were forced to flat-rate pricing by competition from VoIP (which I'll return to later in the blog). International calls are still overpriced, but with penny-per-minute cards available in any convenience store, I don't imagine any consumers are paying those high prices.

Mobile phone app stores

Not that long ago, the few phones that offered Internet access did so as a novelty. Hardly anybody seriously considered downloading an application to their phones--what are you asking for, spam and fraudulent charges? So the iPhone and Android stores teaming with third-party apps are a 180-degree turn for the mobile field. I attribute the iPhone app store once again to competition: the uncovering of the iPhone SDK by a free software community.

Downloadable TV segments

While the studios strike deals with Internet providers, send out take-down notices by the ream, and calculate how to derive revenue from television-on-demand, people are already getting the most popular segments from Oprah Winfrey or Saturday Night Live whenever they want, wherever they want.

Good-enough generic devices

People no longer look down on cheap, generic tools and devices. Both in software and in hardware, people are realizing that in the long run they can do more with simple, flexible, interchangeable parts than with complex and closed offerings. There will probably always be a market for exquisitely designed premium products--the success of Apple proves that--but the leading edge goes to products that are just "good enough," and the DIY movement especially ensures a growing market for building blocks of that quality.

I won't even start to summarize Frankston's own writings, which start with premises so far from what the Internet is like today that you won't be able to make complete sense of any one article on its own. I'd recommend the mind-blowing Sidewalks: Paying by the Stroll if you want to venture into his world.

But I'll mention one sign of Frankston's optimism: he reminded me that in the early 1990s, technologists were agonizing over arcane quality-of-service systems in the hope of permitting VoIP over ordinary phone connections. Now we take VoIP for granted and are heading toward ubiquitous video. Why? Two things happened in parallel: the technologists figured out much more efficient encodings, and normal demand led to faster transmission technologies even over copper. We didn't need QoS and all the noxious control and overhead it entails. More generally, it's impossible to determine where progress will come from or how fast it can happen.