Sunday 10 August 2014

THOSE PESKY ATOMS

Dick Pountain/PC Pro/Idealog 236  06/03/2014

Foot-to-ground contact is pretty important to us motorcyclists so we get picky about our boots. I favour an Australian stockman's style that can pass for a fashionable Chelsea Boot in polite society. Having worn out my second pair of R.M.Williams after 15 years yesterday I went shopping for new. I checked Russell & Bromley and John Lewis on the web, then set off to town to try some on. Why didn't I buy online? Because I need to try boots on, and you can neither upload your feet nor download boots over the web, which still only handles bits, not pesky atoms. I'd never consider buying boots from Amazon, though I did go there after my purchase to snivel quietly about the £8 I could have saved...

Russell B's lovely boots were too narrow for my broad feet and John Lewis didn't have the ones advertised on their website, so I ended up buying Blundstones (which are fab and half the price of R.M.Williams) from the Natural Shoe Store. Later that day I realised there's a moral to this gripping tale, as I was reading John Lewis's announcement of its massive new IT project: an Oracle-based ERP (Enterprise Resource Planning) system that will completely integrate the firms' online and physical stores, including all the Waitrose grocers. No cost was quoted for this four-year project - scheduled to run in 2017 - but it will certainly be both expensive and risky.

Manufacturers have only a slightly better record than public-sector institutions when it comes to screwing up big IT: in recent years major corporations from Avon to Hershey and Levi's Jeans have lost fortunes botching or cancelling ERP projects. If anyone can pull it off it might be John Lewis, whose overall competence is renowned. It first pioneered Click & Collect, where you choose a product on the website and then collect it from your nearest store, though all its competitors now do the same. But C&C is only one permutation people use to bridge the bits/atoms gap. Some folk research products in the bricks-and-mortar store, then go home and order from the website. Some fear online shopping and prefer to order by phone from a human. As for browsing the site, they might use a mobile, tablet or a PC. Hence the new buzzword is "omni-channel", and it matters enormously because all of these modes of e-commerce will fail - like my boot purchase - if stock in stores isn't accurately reflected on the website. That demands a whole new level of integration of stock-control and delivery systems, which for a grocery operation like Waitrose that delivers perishable foodstuffs will be ferociously hard. The new project is ambitious indeed.

This is clearly the new frontline of online retailing. There are more and more items like TV sets, clothes, shoes, high-end acoustic musical instruments, possibly furniture and fabrics, that people won't be satisfied to buy from a purely online outlet like Amazon but need to see and touch before choosing. Admittedly a lot of people go to bricks-and-mortar stores to browse, then go home an buy from Amazon, but the stores are getting wise to this. I imagine that John Lewis's new system, assuming it works, is intended to make it so easy to buy-as-you-handle that you won't want Amazon. Meanwhile Amazon and Google are both leaking weirdly futuristic plans for delivering atoms rather than bits independently of the Post Office or courier service. Amazon's vision involves flocks of quadcopter drones, delivering your purchases down the chimney like the storks of legend. Google, with its feet more firmly on the ground, buys up robotics firms: I particularly like their galloping headless-heifer robot, which would make quite a stir as it rumbled round the corner into our street towing a sofa (especially if chased by a squawking flock of quadcopters... )

Omens are gathering that the power of silicon valley giants has peaked, just as the oil, coal and railway barons' power did in the 1900s: even the US Right is getting chippy about the amount of tax they avoid (which means taking more tax from civilians); among Democrats there are populist stirrings about their almost-jobless business model and exploitation of interns; and the San Francisco bus protests are seriously tarnishing their public image. And all that Kurtzweilian Transhumanist/Matrix/Singularity nonsense looks more and more like a religious cult, a post-modern reinvention of a Protestant Millennium. We might spend a lot of time watching movies and listening to music in bit-land but we're never going to live there full-time because we're made of atoms, we eat atoms, breath atoms and wear atoms. And bricks-and-mortar shops have a head start when it comes to distributing atoms in bulk: just watch them start the fight back.

WHAT'S A MOOC?

Dick Pountain/PC Pro/Idealog 235  05/02/2014

Fans of Scorsese's movie "Mean Streets" must certainly remember the pool-hall scene where Jimmy is called a "mook" and responds by asking what that means (we never quite find out). I was irresistibly reminded of this scene as I read an excellent recent column by John Lanchester in the London Review of Books (http://www.lrb.co.uk/v35/n22/john-lanchester/short-cuts) in which he discusses the  MOOC (Massive Online Open Course), a type of distance learning increasingly being offered by US universities. In Lanchester's case what attracted him to a MOOC was a Harvard course on Food Science given by Ferran AdriĆ , famous chef of the now defunct Spanish super-restaurant El Bulli. Not many years ago gaining admission to Harvard lectures would  have cost even more than dinner at El Bulli, but he was able to sign up for SPU27 and take the course on his iPad for free .

SPU27 forms part of a joint project for online learning between Stanford, Harvard and MIT called EdX. (Stanford pioneered the MOOC several years ago via iTunes, though of course our own Open University a far earlier pioneer using the ancient medium of analog terrestrial television). The idea of such courses is that they can "flip the classroom", so that instead of attending lectures students view them online and do their coursework work at home, visiting the campus only very occasionally to be tested and discuss difficulties. Advantages for the university are substantial: it can save on the cost of maintaining physical lecture halls and presumably stretch lecturers' salaries over far more students than can be fitted into a theatre. Lanchester forsees MOOCs becoming ever more important as university admission fees escalate while prospective students' earning-power falls, but he also forsees them putting some universities out of business altogether. For a MOOC, as for any other online content provider, attracting custom will depend upon effective viral marketing and hiring star performers like Ferran AdriĆ  or Bruce Sterling.

As for the quality of MOOC tuition, Lanchester found SPU27 harder and more rigorous than he'd expected, though he does acknowledge a loss of personal interaction among students and lecturers. But the fact that MOOCs are tolerable at all is testament, as if any more were needed, to a computer/telecoms revolution that's now entered the post-PC phase. Many MOOC students will  probably prefer to watch their lectures on a large-screen smart TV at home, on a tablet in the park or on the bus to their day-job. Last year in a column about Alan Kay and his Dynabook (Idealog 223) I felt obliged to point out that increasing monopolisation of copyrighted media content by big corporations was becoming an obstacle to its fullest implementation. Well, MOOCs offer one more source of free high-quality educational content, presumably subsidised by those high fees paid by physically-attending students. Free tuition could even revive that old idea of education for its own sake, rather than just for a job.

Market competition is working pretty well to reduce the cost and increase capabilities of the hardware you need. My first-generation LCD TV died the other day and I found the cheapest replacement was a 29" LED model from LG. Its picture quality is a revelation, in both sharpness and colour fidelity, but I was a bit sceptical about its smartness. I needn't have worried because it immediately found my home Wi-Fi and I was watching YouTube and reading Gmail within minutes. It finds my laptop too and plays content from its hard disk. Like Mr Honeyball I find the on-screen keyboard deeply depressing, but I've found some solace through an LG TV Remote Android app that lets me enter text into most forms and search-boxes via gesture typing, Bluetooth keyboard or even speech. It doesn't work with Google Docs though, as TV and tablet keyboards get hopelessly tangled. I've added my own 500 gig external hard drive to the LG's USB port for rewind and programme recording, and paired TV and Nexus to stream YouTube content directly without need for a Chromecast. And it came with built-in Netflix, Lovefilm and iPlayer, but irritatingly not 4oD.

Despite its weaknesses I can still easily imagine watching lectures on smart TV and answering multiple-choice test questions via the tablet. Data formats are no longer really a problem as I can shovel PDFs, JPEGs, MP3 and MP4s with ease between Windows, Android and TV. Google's new free Quickoffice handles the Microsoft Office formats pretty well (and I keep DocsToGo as backup for anything they can't). It feels as though a chilling wind of change is blowing right through the Stanford campus all the way to Redmond, and I seriously wonder whether I'll ever buy another Windows PC. I hope that doesn't make me a mook (whatever that means).

SOCIAL UNEASE

Dick Pountain /Idealog 350/ 07 Sep 2023 10:58 Ten years ago this column might have listed a handful of online apps that assist my everyday...