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Internet Economy, Technology

Bots are a transitional technology

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Yesterday Facebook announced, as predicted, the launch of a range of tools to facilitate the development of “bots” on its Messenger platform. The argument being made far and wide is that bots are a replacement for apps which have become so numerous that their usefulness to users is plunging and most developers are no longer making any money. 

It’s easy to see why Facebook is so interested. Unlike Apple or Google they don’t have a hardware and operating system platform with which to “own” the customer. Facebook needs to make its apps perform this function and bots give it the chance to make Facebook, and specifically Messenger, much more useful and immersive and in the process make hardware and operating systems much less significant. 

But bots are only a transitional technology. The holy grail (told to me over 20 years ago by the head of Microsoft Research and still true today) is the Star Trek Computer. The film Her is the best modern take on that vision. That’s why Google (with Now), Apple (with Siri) and Microsoft (with Cortana) and even Amazon (with Alexa) have been pouring so much time and money into developing competent AI-driven assistants.

But the technology still falls short of the vision, so in meantime we will have bots – highly specific and constrained AI-driven chat bots which aim to do one thing (booking a hotel room or flight for instance) very well and reliably. 

They will undoubtedly be a huge success – WeChat in China has already demonstrated that quite clearly. This post from Andreessen Horowitz has the best account I’ve found. How long the success will last rather depends on how quickly the more general AI being developed by Google, Apple et al gets good enough. Expect them to develop bot platforms of their own, but also to amp up their own investment in generalized AI. We all still really want the Star Wars computer, after all. 

Internet Economy

The power of the platform

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What is the key to allowing large companies to move fast? Build great platforms. I first heard this insight being persausively argued in Mark Zuckerberg’s interview with John Battelle and Tim O’Reilly at Web 2.0 in 2010 – an age ago in internet time. 

In this clip he tells how he urges his people to “be fast and be bold”. He then talks about what it means to be agile. While small start-ups can do it easily, the larger you get the harder it is to move fast. But, he says, people can move quickly on top of a robust platform built on “solid abstractions”. 

I also remember being impressed with the speed that Yahoo! teams were able to build strong features on the back of solid APIs to things like single sign-on, maps and Flickr photos. Because the APIs are easily internally available, teams are able to function on the innovation rather than the plumbing.

Amazon is perhaps the supreme example of a company build on the power of the platform. Jeff Bezos has built a platform which can quickly turn its hand to selling just about anything. There was an accidental post by a Google engineer Steve Yegge which famously demonstrated the pain it took getting there, but there is no doubt that the platform approach is one of the main underpinnings of Amazon’s huge success. That same post argued that Google was, incidentally, some way away from the ideal which illustrates eloquently just how hard it is to get it right. 


Internet Economy

Bringing internet access to the world

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There was rather a poor article in the Observer today by John Naughton about Google and Facebook’s recent buying sprees. It wasn’t that there was anything particularly wrong with the analysis – it is just that it was lame, uncontentious and old hat.

The main conclusion was that Google and Facebook’s recent purchases of drone companies was driven by a desire to bring the internet to the 5 billion people without proper access and in the process to advance their own businesses and increase their profits. Neither company has made a secret of their ambition to widen access to the internet and it would be extraordinary indeed if they didn’t want to make a profit from the activity.

There was a missed opportunity here as I think there is an interesting story to tell about these acquisitions.

I will concentrate in this post on the drone acquisitions – I will write a further post about the other acquisitions later.

Google’s move into the provision of internet services (as opposed to merely services which run upon it) may actually be quite a bit more calculated than it at first appears to John Naughton.

Aral Balkan, the designer, programmer and entrepreneur,  gave at talk at the RSA on April 10th called “Free is a Lie” where he argued that Google’s business model is “the business model of corporate surveillance”. (The talk will appear here in due course – there is usually a small delay before they are posted. The talk has now been posted here.)

He argued quite persuasively that “free is a concealed barter” and that the “monopoly of the free business model is leading to digital feudalism”. The argument is that Google needs to know everything about you in order to squeeze all the economic value out of your data. This is why they developed Android (which you log into with your Gmail address) and why they have developed services like Google Now, and why Chrome’s features are so much richer if you log in. The provision of internet services is even better as you log into the web with your Gmail address so that everything you do (on whatever browser) is now tracked and usable.

Facebook has the same business model. It tries everything it can to make us default to public so that, again, the economic value can be extracted. The problem is, says Aral “if we make the default public then anything private has the association of guilt about it”.

“The cost of free is our human rights – which is too much to pay.” Whether you agree with this interpretation or not, it is a much more interesting story.

Uncategorised

The rise of user power

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All Your Sites Belong to Us contends Steve Rubel in an interesting post describing the “me” revolution.

…something exceptional has happened. We now “own” the web even more than we did back then when all we simply did was create viable homegrown alternatives to big media sites.

It’s an era when Facebook’s redesign was road-tested by one million beta users before launch and yet still there are 1,564,576 members of the group “5,000,000 against the new version of Facebook”. A sobering thought for those of us striving to build communities.

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Facebook users rise up

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Facebook users in their thousands have signed a petition to protest against Facebook’s new ad network Beacon. The system automatically tracks what users are buying on affiliated sites and displays the information on Facebook home pages. However, users are worried that Beacon is an opt-out not opt-in service.

Forrester analyst Charlene Li has even deeper worries, as she points out in this post. The cookie-based approach means activity on one PC can be ascribed to an individual wrongly – and that could be quite damaging, she argues.

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