Thursday 4 July 2013

IDEALOG NOW AVAILABLE IN KINDLE FORMAT!

            


For truly dedicated fans of this column who find this scrolling blog format inconvenient, I've now made the  first 200 columns available on Amazon as Kindle books. Two volumes of 100 columns each are available here for a very reasonable £5/$7 each:

UK:
http://www.amazon.co.uk/The-Compleat-Idealog-ebook/dp/B00DNI90KC/
http://www.amazon.co.uk/The-Compleat-Idealog-ebook/dp/B00DP1P75Y/


USA:
http://www.amazon.com/The-Compleat-Idealog-ebook/dp/B00DNI90KC/
http://www.amazon.com/The-Compleat-Idealog-ebook/dp/B00DP1P75Y/


(I decided on two volumes because a single one made an unwieldy 1000+ pages, and set a price to match)



RIP PC?



Dick Pountain - Idealog 222: Jan 11th 2013

I'm currently conducting an experiment whose outcome will profoundly affect the way I work in future: I'm writing this column for the very first time on my Nexus 7  tablet rather than on my laptop, and I've actually typed these first few sentences on its tiny on-screen keyboard using Jelly Bean 4.2's 'gesture typing' feature, with which I've become rather proficient over the last few weeks. (I'll tell you further down whether I stuck with this resolution or chickened-out and fetched my Bluetooth keyboard). The location of my experiment is our beloved chairman's glorious house on Mustique: sure it's a tough assignment but someone has to do it, and I'm here toiling away in the Caribbean sun so that you don't have to. I deliberately left London without my laptop to see whether I could cope, and so far haven't missed it at all. The Nexus has provided all my Spotify tunes, my YouTube movies, email correspondence, and now text creation (in Word format) in faultless fashion.

Prophesying 'The Death of the PC' is liable to embroil me in a raging troll-fest nowadays, but I can't help it if the phrase just won't leave my head. Over the last couple of weeks I've been reading several insightful analyses of the future prospects for both Intel and Microsoft that leave me in no doubt that both firms are going to have to get used to reduced rations rather soon.

Intel has unquestionably missed the boat in the low-power processor sector: its strategic error in believing the x86 architecture to be invulnerable looks increasingly like a catastrophe that has granted ARM the same sort of six-year lead in the mobile arena that Intel itself enjoyed all those years ago when IBM adopted the 8086 for its first PC. Intel is finally taking low-power seriously with new Atom chipsets, but the sheer volume of Google's ARM-based Android may have shut that door. Ironically enough, Intel actually owned a viable ARM-architecture range in the shape of the xScale devices it inherited by the purchase of DEC, but it never took them seriously - thanks to big-corporation inertia and hubris - and its recently-departed CEO Paul Otellini sold them off to Marvell back in 2005 as one of his first acts.

Microsoft too has floundered in trying to come to terms with mobileworld. It's not that it hasn't tried hard enough: on top of various versions of Windows Mobile/Phone over the years it's tried Ultra-Mobile PCs and even half-decent touch-screen Windows 'slates' like those by Samsung, but none of them ever really took off (and the omens are not good for the Surface to do any better). The reason is fundamentally the same as for Intel: massive success imposes an absolute demand for compatibility which stifles certain vital synergies.

Apple on the other hand has always been ruthlessly pragmatic about  changing CPU vendors, first deserting Motorola for PowerPC, then moving on to Intel and lately ARM whenever the time was right. And it had the courage to innovate boldly in its user-interface design with iOS. Google meanwhile has combined an open-source software model with agnosticism about hardware, and none of the whingeing about Android fragmentation can diminish its big numbers.

The mobile market has become a dinosaur trap financially too because profit margins on both hardware and software sales are far, far shorter than the Wintel twins are used to, and need. The cost of building fabs for ever smaller feature sizes becomes prohibitive just as margins are shrinking, and Moore's Law is being revealed as an increasingly tired marketing strategy rather than a science, now most users demand more battery life rather than speed.

The ultimate demise of the PC won't be in favour of Apple or any other hardware standard but rather in favour of cloud vendors like Amazon, Google, eBay and the like, whose products and services can be reached from *anyone's* mobile device. It would be wise for me to cover my arse by pointing out there will always be a few PC niches left, but I'm not sure I actually believe it. The vast grazing herds will be of thin mobile clients, and generations will arise that never knew a mouse or keyboard - even for business, even for accounts receivable.

And no, in the end I didn't need to deploy my Bluetooth keyboard at all for this column. As any writer will tell you, thinking up the next word takes far longer than to type it, so absolute typing speed is not the critical step. (I'll confess that decades of scribbling Graffiti have honed my sliding skills way beyond the average though).

           

THE GOLDEN GEESE OF ALPHAVILLE

Dick Pountain/PC Pro/Idealog 221  04/12/2012

Once upon a time I used to travel to Las Vegas, Taipei, Hannover or Tel Aviv in pursuit of new technology, but these days I don't go to many press events at all. As befits my status as a non-decorated veteran of the OS, Browser and CPU wars, I prefer now to recline in a bath of warm asses' milk, nibbling bon-bons and trying to maximise my views-per-photo on Flickr. Nevertheless the other day I was tempted out to an event in the real world, to whit the finals of "Discovering Start-Ups 2012", held in the City. This was a competition - a sort of MasterChef for new tech ventures - organised by Cambridge Wireless and Silicon South West, and attended by high-powered potential backers from Google, RIM, Vodafone, Orange, Broadcom, Qualcomm and numerous venture caps.

The last time I'd been to a start-up presentation was a one-to-one meeting with engineers on the science park in Cambridge, but this was a quite different sort of affair. For a start there was the venue. I hopped off a 46 bus at Shoe Lane, walked down a small inconspicuous alley and emerged into Alphaville. I don't visit the City much but I was vaguely aware there's been a lot of building - the Gherkin, the Shard and so on - but this still gave me quite a shock. What once was a small Dickensian square was now bounded on all four sides by glittering, high-rise, all-glass offices, adorned below with swanky wine-bars and purveyors of fancy coffees, chocolates and superior sandwiches, but the narrowness of the adjoining streets more or less hid it from Shoe Lane. I managed to locate the competition despite it being in the only block *without* a 10-foot-high sans serif street number.

I got to see around half the twenty finalists' presentations and there were some pretty impressive ideas on show: personal devices for monitoring everything from carbon footprints to skin cancers; low-power tracking devices, smart 4G antennas; ebook streaming and shared shopping services; even one that measures your emotional state in real time and tells your therapist via your smartphone. The winners included Anvil Semiconductors (www.anvil-semi.co.uk) who've made silicon carbide power semiconductors as cheap as silicon that can improve the fuel efficiency of hybrid cars by 10%, and D-RisQ (www.drisq.com) from Malvern who employ formal software validation techniques to reduce development costs of complex systems by up to 80%, as successfully used on the Eurofighter control computer. But what struck me most forcibly was how far the world has changed since my heyday.

I'm pretty used to talking to engineers with eccentric hair-styles, woolly upper garments and a slight hint of Asperger's Syndrome (as we're no longer allowed to call it), and I used to enjoy the experience as they plunged deep into technical explanations, eyes burning with enthusiasm. Not of any more. This was wall-to-wall white shirts and shiny suits, with few technical explanations pitched any more difficult than a BBC Four documentary. The really deep discussion was instead about patents, Intellectual Property and exit strategies. Today's start-ups are nobody's patsies and go in with eyes wide open, the enthusiasm visible in their eyes being for a buy-out by Google, Qualcomm or whoever within five years, for a eight or nine-figure sum. I'm not saying this is a bad thing, and my nostalgia for those dodgy haircuts is strictly limited. For years we've been moaning about the way British inventors failed to exploit their discoveries - little stuff like the jet engine and television - and left it to the Americans to cash in, but that isn't going to happen any more. I've written here before about how it was ARM Ltd that really broke that bad habit, and this competition was, if you like, part of a search for the next few ARMs.

What does worry me is that this emphasis on moving fast and getting out rich might eventually erode the innovative impulse itself, and if you think that's misplaced, just check out the ridiculous Patent Troll wars currently raging between the world's mobile corporations. The Register recently ran an article by Matt Asay called "Apple's patent insanity infects Silicon Valley", which reprinted a mind-boggling chart of who's suing who for patent violations (http://www.theregister.co.uk/2012/08/22/patent_trolls/). It looks a bit like a poster of the Krebs Cycle that used to hang on our lab wall, only more complicated. Microsoft, RIM, Google, Samsung, Kodak, Oracle, LG, Huawei, HTC, ZTE and several more are all suing each other, and they're all suing and being sued by Apple. Even Business Week now proclaims that the start-ups' creed must be "patent first, prototype later". The idea is that you should fully exploit all the golden eggs you have in the fridge, but there's a danger that you may in so doing forget to feed the goose...

SOCIAL UNEASE

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