Michael Loukides

Yesterday, Andrew Sheppard pointed me at a desktop 3D printer for under $5000. That brought back some memories...

In the early 80s, I worked for Imagen, the company that made the first laser printer that sold for under $20,000, the first laser printer that sold for under $10,000, and the first laser printer that sold for under $7,000. We didn't make the first laser printer that sold for under $5,000. That was Apple's first LaserWriter, and although the company survived for a few years more, it's really what did us in.

$5000 is still pricey for a desktop product, but it's plausible for a shared office printer. If Desktop Factory can get a few more thousand off the price, they'll have a viable personal product.

Why couldn't Imagen get to $5000, when Apple could? The printers were really very similar: they used the same Canon marking engine (and hence, identical print speed, resolution, image quality, and reliability). Apple's was PostScript-based, but at the time there weren't any other PostScript printers. We had a clever architecture that used a lot less memory--and this was back when RAM was hundreds of dollars per megabyte wholesale. Most of the cost of a printer, once you paid for the mechanical parts, was in the memory.

But even with our memory-stingy printers, Apple had enough buying power to drive their costs below ours. We were selling a couple of hundred units a month; I don't know how many units Apple sold, but I'm sure they were buying the same memory for their Apple IIs, Lisas (remember those?) and early Macs. So we lost the battle to economies of scale, and that's a battle that's hard to win when you're playing against a company a hundred times your size.

It will be interesting to see how this plays out in the 3D printer market. Desktop Factory looks a lot like Imagen: an aggressive, focused startup built around one product. Desktop printers probably aren't built around commodity parts, like processors and memory (and, for that matter, the Canon marking engine); the commodity parts are now much cheaper (RAM is pennies a meg). But what happens when HP or Apple gets into the game? Will Desktop Factory be the first to sell a 3D printer for hobbyists, or will we have to wait for Apple?

The LaserWriter drove standardization on PostScript, which in turn drove a new generation of text editors and typesetting products. That work is continuing with products like InDesign. 3D CAD software strikes me as being roughly where text editing and page layout was in the 80s. Is Desktop Factory the company that will drive a renaissance in 3D design tools? Will their printer interface become a de-facto standard that allows others to play? That's what it will take for them to survive. These days, Imagen doesn't even merit an entry in Wikipedia.

The New York Times quotes Laura Martin of Soleil Securities, as saying "This is management putting its employees and its job security ahead of current Yahoo shareholders' interest." The sense of horror here--that management could actually put the interests of employees ahead of the interests of investors--is interesting, to say the least. It raises an important question that's really almost theological in nature. It is most certainly theological in, as Lawrence Ferlinghetti wrote, "the promised land where every coin is marked In God We Trust, but the dollar bills do not have it being gods unto themselves. ("Autobiography," A Coney Island of the Mind, 1958, New Directions)

Where did the notion arise that management's sole responsibility is to its funding sources? It's not surprising that someone who represents investors thinks that investors are the only people who count. There's certainly some legal precedent for that view--employees work at the will of their employer, and if you take the abstraction far enough, the employer is basically a pile of money, and the employees are abstract labor power. But while Marx's formulation for the age of the Industrial Revolution may be applicable to workers in sweatshops, it's certainly not an appropriate formulation for the creators of value at Yahoo. Where, ultimately, is Yahoo's value? After all, Yahoo's contribution to the technology of the Web is second only to Google's (and that not by much). Yahoo engineers are not merely interchangeable cogs in an industrial machine.

Behind the idea of a "corporation" is, of course, the notion that a business entity is a kind of mystical body and can be treated as a person. So, what is that mystical body? Is it the investors, who certainly enable that body's existence, or the developers who create the value that the investors are after? Do we give priority to the food, or to the processes that digest the food? To give priority to the food lands us in a "cult of the investor," where Dollars provide the divine spark that animates the body corporate. In this view of the world, the investors are, in fact, little divinities. But Yahoo's value certainly doesn't derive from the investors, but from the company's technical creativity--something for which the investors are not responsible, and that they ultimately have nothing to do with. Would those creators be equally creative as Microsoft employees? Would the culture still be productive? Maybe yes, maybe no; it seems to me that the history of corporate acquisitions is littered with takeovers in which the shareholders may have profited, but the corporation's life and creativity withered.

It's certainly an oversimplification to imply that all (or even most) Yahoo employees opposed the Microsoft deal. But it's likewise an oversimplification to imply that all investors approved it--after all, one imagines that Yahoo's board and senior management are significant investors. But whether Jerry Yang was thinking in these terms or not, I can only applaud the idea that his company's value has something to do with the people who make it creative, not just with passive investors who wouldn't know a line of Javascript if it bit them on the wallet.

It's been good to watch the use of OpenID spread. It's great to see that ma.gnolia.com has dropped “traditional login” in favor of OpenID. And I was encouraged to read about Yahoo's support of OpenID. Granted, it took me a while to get around to trying it.

But when I got around to trying it, Yahoo!ID was a disappointment. The promise of OpenID is to return ownership of ID to the users, and to eliminate identity silos, in which the big sites compete to own your identity and your data. If that's the goal, Yahoo!ID may not be a step backwards, but it's certainly not much of a step forwards.

Although Yahoo is talking the talk, it's still playing the same game. Today, I went to Yahoo to try to use my OpenID URL (from myOpenID). And I couldn't. I kept being asked if I wanted to create a new Yahoo!ID account.

That's precisely what I did not want to do. If I have to create a Yahoo OpenID for Yahoo sites, but that ID is different from the OpenID I already use for Ma.gnolia and other OpenID sites, what's the advantage? I could give in, create a Yahoo! OpenID and use it everywhere–but isn't that just giving in to the problem that OpenID was trying to solve? I don't want Yahoo! to be the data silo that owns my identity, any more than I want ma.gnolia or del.icio.us or twitter or Get Satisfaction or… you get the idea. Google support for OpenID would be nice, but if they implemented GoogleID and didn't accept IDs from Yahoo or any other ID-issuing organizations, we'd be right back where we started.

Yahoo's OpenID press release is dated January 17th. Internet time flows quickly. I could perhaps pardon a “yahoo-only not-quite-open ID” in a beta release, though not an “eternal beta”. But I still wonder–what's the deal? Three months is plenty of time to accept a standard that you already support.

OpenID is important because it places control back in the users' hands. A net where we didn't have dozens of accounts and passwords to remember is something we all want to see. But we won't get there by building even bigger and better identity silos. “We support OpenID–you can use our OpenIDs anywhere. But don't try using anyone else's here” just isn't an acceptable position.