The moment was marked Wednesday when Apple, the maker of iPods, iPhones and iPads, shot past Microsoft, the computer software giant, to become the world’s most valuable technology company.
This changing of the guard caps one of the most stunning turnarounds in business history for Apple, which had been given up for dead only a decade earlier, and its co-founder and visionary chief executive, Steven P. Jobs. The rapidly rising value attached to Apple by investors also heralds an important cultural shift: Consumer tastes have overtaken the needs of business as the leading force shaping technology.
Microsoft, with its Windows and Office software franchises, has dominated the relationship most people had with their computers for almost two decades and that was reflected in its stock market capitalization. But the click-clack of the keyboard has ceded ground to the swoosh of a finger across a smartphone’s touch screen.
And Apple is in the right place at the right time. Although it still sells computers, a greater portion of its revenue is coming from handheld devices. Overall, the technology industry sold about 172 million smartphones last year, compared with 306 million PCs, but smartphone sales grew at a five times faster pace.
Microsoft depends more on maintaining the status quo, while Apple is in a constant battle to one up itself and create something new, said Peter A. Thiel, the co-founder of PayPal and an early investor in Facebook. “Apple is a bet on technology,” he said. “And Apple beating Microsoft is a very significant thing.”
As of Wednesday, Wall Street valued Apple at $222.12 billion and Microsoft at $219.18 billion. The only American company valued higher is Exxon Mobil, with a market capitalization of $278.64 billion.
The revenue of the two companies are comparable with Microsoft at $58.4 billion and Apple at $42.9 billion. But Microsoft is sitting on far more cash, $35.7 billion to Apple’s $23 billion, which makes the value assigned by the market to Apple — essentially a bet on its future prospects — all the more remarkable.
Microsoft and Apple declined to comment.
Apple’s climb to the top of the heap cements the reputation of Mr. Jobs, who once operated in the shadow of Microsoft’s co-founder William H. Gates.
“It is the single most important turnaround that I have seen in Silicon Valley,” said Jim Breyer, a venture capitalist who has invested in some of the most successful technology companies.
While Apple is at the top of its game, it faces a new and powerful rival in Google, which is battling Apple in mobile devices with its Android operating system, and mobile advertising. Google, with a market cap of about $151.43 billion, also appeared to leap ahead of Apple in a new, potentially important area, Internet-connected televisions. And Google is steering consumers toward yet a new model of computing in which Internet applications, rather than iPhone or desktop applications, rule.
“The battle has shifted from Microsoft against Apple to Apple against Google,” said Tim Bajarin, a technology analyst who has been following Apple since 1981. “Apple has a significant lead. But Google is going to be a powerful competitor.”
Apple and Microsoft initiated the personal computing revolution in the late 1970s, but Microsoft quickly outflanked Apple and grew to become one of the most profitable businesses ever created.
A little more than a decade ago, Apple, which had pushed out Mr. Jobs in 1985, was widely believed to be on the path to extinction.
Michael S. Dell, the founder and chief executive of Dell computer, went so far as to suggest that Apple should shut itself down and return any money to shareholders. (The computer maker is now worth about a 10th of Apple.) Around the same time, Microsoft’s chief technology officer called Apple “already dead.” But with the return of Mr. Jobs to Apple in 1996 — and an investment by Microsoft of $150 million — the company began a slow path to recovery. Apple’s rebirth began in earnest with the introduction of the iPod music players and Mr. Jobs began to gain a reputation for anticipating what consumers want. The company elbowed aside Sony and came to dominate the music distribution business with the iTunes online music store. It later upstaged Nokia, the dominant brand in mobile phones, by introducing the iPhone in 2007. And earlier this year, Mr. Jobs shook things up again, with the introduction of the iPad, a table computer that has the potential to create a new category of computers and once again reshape the way people interact with their devices.
Mr. Jobs helped create “the best desktop computer, the best portable music device, the best smartphone and also now the best tablet,” said Steve Perlman, a serial entrepreneur who was an executive at both Apple and Microsoft and is now the chief executive of OnLive, an online gaming company.
As Apple grew increasingly nimble and innovative, Microsoft has struggled to build desirable updates to its main products and to create large new businesses in areas like game machines, music players, phones and Internet search. Microsoft, which is a component stock of the Dow Jones Industrial Average, has lost half its value since 2000.
Still, Microsoft is a hugely powerful and profitable company in the tech world. Its Windows software runs 9 out of every 10 computers, while more than 500 million people use its Office software to perform their daily tasks like writing letters or sending e-mail messages. These two franchises account for the bulk of Microsoft’s $58.4 billion in annual revenue.
But it is Apple that has the momentum. “Steve saw way early on and way before Microsoft that hardware and software needed to be married into something that did not require effort from the user,” said Scott G. McNealy, the co-founder and longtime chief executive of Sun Microsystems, which almost merged with Apple. “Apple’s products are shrink-wrapped and ready to go.”
New King of Technology - Apple Overtakes Microsoft as World's Most Valueable Company
Innovation in Prevention and Monitoring, rather than just high cost treatment: Thats better care.
The ongoing revolution of devices for personal monitoring (including app for the iPhone and Droid - see RunKeeper) has the potential to make Americans more informed and thus smarter about their personal choices. Everything from exercise to sleeping habits can be monitored in low cost forms at home. Having data at the fingertips then enables Americans to adjust behaviors.
Too much of our healthcare dollars are spent on treating an illness, rather than preventing illnesses from happening. Though not every illness and disease is preventable, a good number of them are, and thats where we need to start.
ER Doc's thoughts on keeping routine care out of the ER; but there are simpler ways
Solving the problem of access to care will require new thinking about how to meet all patients' needs, and the first step should be rethinking the role of emergency rooms.
It is not news that crowded conditions and long waits are staples of most emergency rooms in the United States. Many hospitals have been forced to send incoming ambulances elsewhere because of crowding. So it's clear that an influx of patients seeking help for non-emergencies -- a sprained ankle or seasonal allergies -- could further impair the ability to care for the critically ill or injured.
This appears to be what occurred after universal coverage was enacted in 2006 in Massachusetts, where ER visits increased by 7 percent, with costs rising 17 percent. It could be that the newly insured were accustomed to going to emergency rooms for treatment.
Adding patients to the ER in this way is simply not cost-effective. ER doctors rarely have relationships with the patients we see, and we don't have time for a lengthy dialogue about their ailments. So we often order expensive tests that add to a hospital's already-high fixed costs. As a result non-emergency care delivered in the ER costs almost five times more than in a doctor's office or clinic.
There are four ways we can steer minor emergencies away from the ER.
First, establish more offices and clinics that are not based in hospitals (and do not carry hospital overhead). The recent trend toward low-cost, retail- and pharmacy-based clinics has been a relative success for what these facilities offer: quick evaluation and treatment for simple problems. They have been found to cost less than one-fifth of what an ER costs for the same complaint.
Second, invest in allied professionals and paraprofessionals such as nurse practitioners, physician assistants and medical technicians to deliver much of this basic care. Training more primary-care physicians will not be enough.
Third, improve systems related to the delivery of health care. Every well-run company knows its supply and delivery chain in detail, so why don't health systems? Managed health-care systems such as Kaiser Permanente and the Mayo Clinic are ahead of the curve in this
respect.
Every municipality or county should have a detailed understanding of where needs are and a plan to address them. For example, by knowing the exact numbers of diabetics, smokers, and people with kidney disease and high blood pressure in our communities, we can predict how many CT scanners or, say, vascular surgeons are needed. Gaining this knowledge will require cooperation and information-sharing among all health-care entities: insurers, hospital systems (both public and private) and managed-care systems.
Finally, we need to employ the new ideas and technologies that have emerged from the Internet and social networking revolution to link patients with informed advice about their conditions. In a fully realized online system, simple medical questions can be answered by health advisers in real time. Patients can be directed to walk-in clinics, urgent-care centers or even emergency rooms when necessary.
This ER doc from San Francisco writes a good article on the need to keep routine care out of the ER's. This condition was made prevalent in the days when a lot of people (estimates of 30 million are on the low side) didnt have healthcare. Their only outlet for care was ER's as most states make it illegal to turn away patients in the ER. As we move into the new era of near universal healthcare, this behavior will persist unless we are proactive about it. In fact, as Massachusetts was the pioneer, they say their visits to the ER increased by 7 percent. I assume this is because now that everyone has healthcare, they are emboldened to use it. However, their behavior is still to go to the ER.
The physician in the article comes up with very good points on how to keep patients who require routine care out of the ER: more "Minute-Clinics" like clinics; more nurse practitioners and the like; improving the dynamics of larger health systems to be more integrated an efficient; and using the internet to have patients better understand their conditions. I applaud Dr. Brokaw for thinking about the issue and putting forth viable solutions. All of these should be sought.
However, humbly, I believe there are simpler methods to reduce patients going to the ER for routine care. These will not solve the problem 100%, but I believe they will help tremendously.
First, we must have an effective communication campaign to the public to go to see their primary care physician for routine care. The reason patients are going to go to the ER for routine care even with insurance is because it is a learned behavior from the previous days. In the US, these millions of new people are not used to seeing a PCP before going to the ER.
Second, as part of this communication plan, we must communicate when it is appropriate to go to the ER. From childhood, we are taught when it is appropriate to call 9-1-1 compared to calling the local police department. However, there is no similar communication campaign for when it is appropriate to go to the ER. My wife is a physician, and my family and friends (fortunately or unfortunately!) is full of physicians. I remember a specific instance when I went to the ER because I could barely talk or swallow out of my sore throat. In discussing with these physicians, they all looked at me cross eyed (you readers may also!) and couldnt believe I wasted previous ER time with this. An effective communication plan, much like the plan around effective use of 9-1-1, would alleviate much of the problem.
Lastly, we must create nudges to start to get all these new uninsured (and people like me who have had insurance) to begin to get into routine care with their PCP. I am now doing my annual physicals, but rarely did before the last 24 months. One big nudge would be for the PCP offices to take a dentist like culture when it comes to appointments - when I leave the dentist, they insist on setting up my next routine 6 month appointment. On the other hand, at my last annual physical, (a) I had to ask to set it up and (b) the scheduler said their schedule doesn't go out far enough yet!
I believe in simple solutions. People previously were going to the ER because they had no choice. With health insurance, people do have a choice, but will go to the ER because (a) that is what they are used to doing; and (b) they (including me!) dont know better. We need to change their pattern of behavior through communication and simple nudges. This is cheap and easy to implement.
The Vanishing Oath is a film ANYONE trying to improve healthcare must see; we can all make a difference
My wife is a physician... and I watch, and I learn. I see the good in US medicine, I see the bad in US medicine. The good is the people - everyone in medicine gets into it for the right reason. The bad, well, its the environment. The system is setup backwards in so many ways - its setup to treat people after they are sick, not to prevent them from getting sick. Its setup so that physicians, as you will see in the clip above, are spending more time on coding and other administrative tasks rather than treating. Its setup that we do the rare and complex optimally, but we do the everyday and basic poorly. Though the clip above is a bit of an extreme example, it does point to the difficult in treating patients well in US Medicine today.
My goal in healthcare is to make the everyday easy and help hospitals make better informed decisions. Right now the simple blocking and tackling in healthcare is very difficult, manual, and error prone. It creates billions of dollars in waste in hospitals annually and it kills 1,000's of lives. In fact, our whole mission is to make the everyday in healthcare simple, through good and appropriate use of technology (though that may sound like an oxymoron, or just moronic). That will drive more dependable data and smarter healthcare. That is my and my colleagues commitment to improving healthcare and has been since we started Mobile Aspects. And we are proud we are impacting hospitals positively everyday.
Cars & software bugs [via The Economist]: Medical device & healthcare IT industry can also learn a lot from a dummy
THE inability to explain the May 6th stock-market plunge shows just how difficult it is to predict—and then reconstruct afterwards—behaviour caused by bizarre combinations of unlikely events. In his 2007 best-seller “The Black Swan”, Nassim Nicholas Taleb argued that such excursions from the normal have three things in common: they are outliers, being wholly unexpected; their impact is extreme; and, in hindsight, we rationalise them by concocting explanations that make them seem (or so we like to think) predictable.
Lately, Toyota has suffered its share of black-swan events. The Japanese carmaker has categorically denied that the runaway throttle problems and mysterious braking issues that have plagued a number of its models over the past eight years have anything to do with the software embedded in its “drive-by-wire” components. And yet, the very nature of such glitches is that they are essentially irreproducible. It is therefore impossible to say whether faults in the software are to blame or not.
One thing computer programmers agree on is that there is no such thing as a bug-free piece of software. Yes, you can write a five-line “hello world” program and be reasonably confident it contains no errors. But any piece of software that does a meaningful job will contain hundreds, or even thousands, of undetected bugs.
Some of the cleanest software ever written—containing fewer than 0.1 errors per 1,000 lines of source code—has come out of NASA’s Software Assurance Technology Centre in Greenbelt, Maryland. But no commercial organisation could afford such an amount of scrutiny and testing. Microsoft, for instance, reckons to find 10-20 defects per 1,000 lines of code during its in-house testing, and to whittle that down to 0.5 per 1,000 lines by the time the software is released to the public. Even so, a program like Microsoft’s venerable Windows XP—which had 40m lines of code—would have contained at least 20,000 bugs when launched.
Commercially, that is about as good as it gets. In industry generally, programs written for internal use are reckoned to have error rates of anything from five to 50 bugs per 1,000 lines, depending on the programming language adopted; the use to which the software is to be put; and the amount of time the manufacturer can afford to invest, given the price the customer is willing to pay. A study prepared in 2002 for the National Institute of Standards and Technology, a government testing laboratory based in Gaithersburg, Maryland, concluded that software errors in industry were so prevalent, and their effects so detrimental, they were costing the American economy $59 billion a year—equivalent, at the time, to 0.6% of gross domestic product.
There is an old saying in computing that if Microsoft built cars, they would crash twice a day. Actually, that is neither fair to the software-maker, nor to the motor industry. Cars at the time were largely analogue, with barely a line of computer code between them. Their various components were manipulated by cables, springs, rods, levers, gears, hydraulic pistons and electric motors. Sure, they broke down—all too often. But their faults, unlike those in software, were fairly easy to diagnose and repair.
Today, electronic components account for up to 40% of a new car’s value. A typical vehicle has between 30 and 50 electronic control units (with twice as many in luxury models) performing many of the jobs done previously by mechanical or electrical linkages. Computer chips now manage everything from air-bags, door-locks and seat adjustments to ignition timing, throttle position, fuel injection, gear selection, cruise control, stability, and increasingly the brakes.
Frost and Sullivan, a consultancy, expects the average car’s software content to grow exponentially from 10m lines of computer code today to 300m within a decade. Even with the best programmers in the world, the average car of tomorrow will come with 150,000 software bugs embedded in its systems. Motor cars will then need to be patched with software updates even more frequently than computers.
In some cases, a bug might be so subtle as to barely affect the way a program—and the component it controls—works. In other cases, an error in the programming may cause the software to freeze or crash, and the component in question to go haywire. When that happens with a computer, the solution is to reboot it. That can be difficult to do with a car if it is racing out of control, or refusing to stop on a hill.
Something like that has happened on a number of occasions to Steve Wozniak, the co-founder of Apple. “This new model [Toyota Prius] has an accelerator that goes wild, but only under certain conditions of cruise control,” he recounted recently. “I can repeat it over and over again.” Mr Wozniak, a hardcore programmer to his fingertips, is adamant that the problem is the software, not a sticky accelerator pedal.
With cars becoming ever more computer-like, it is clearly time for the safety rules governing their behaviour to be brought up to-date. Congress has been goaded into action by the deadly incidents of runaway Toyota cars. Hearings in the House of Representatives got underway on May 6th, with similar sessions due to start in the Senate shortly. The proposed legislation is expected to be law before the year is out.
Beyond new punitive fines for hiding evidence and delaying recalls, the new legislation will require all new motor vehicles to be fitted with “black boxes” that record events from 60 seconds before a crash to 15 seconds afterwards. Carmakers will also be required to adopt brake overrides that cut the engine power to idle when the brake pedal is depressed—as is common practice elsewhere in the world.
But such changes to America’s vehicle safety rules seem more like political gestures aimed at appeasing a public shaken by revelations of Toyota cars accelerating out of control or refusing to brake properly. Overall, the Japanese carmaker has been forced to recall some 9.5m vehicles worldwide as a result of the recent outcry. Sooner rather than later, the company will fix its faulty software, and its current problems will be allowed to fade quietly away.
The broader issue, though, is that cars are no longer analogue machines: they are fast becoming predominantly digital devices—with all the strengths and weaknesses of modern computers. That means designing them with far greater resilience to digital disasters. If an electronic component suffers a black-swan event, it must not jeopardise the vehicle’s safety. Meanwhile, updating the car’s software will need to be done on a continuous basis using the internet, rather than be left until the next six-monthly trip to the dealer for a service.
What bothers your correspondent most, though, is the way each time a mechanical component in a motor vehicle is replaced by a digital one, it removes a measure of control from the operator. Anti-lock brakes and stability control systems were the first examples. Electronic throttles, stop-start mechanism and regenerative braking systems are among the latest. Soon we will have digital steering. Cars will then be virtually autonomous, able to drive themselves without the motorist’s intervention.
But a design philosophy that gives precedence to machine judgment over the human experience—and seeks to keep the operator out of the control loop as much as possible—has a fatal flaw. If the nuclear disaster at Three Mile Island in the 1979 taught us anything, it was that operators of any complicated machine should be fully integrated into the control process.
Of the many mistakes made at Three Mile Island, the most damning was that the reactor’s operators had become mere managers watching from above as the automated controls did their job. When things went horribly wrong, none of them had the skill nor the experience to wrestle the reactor back under control. Runaway cars with digital throttles are a timely reminder of the dangers lurking when the software in a machine is given too much control.
A great article from The Economist that actually doesn't go far enough... As autos move from analogue to digital devices, so does everything in industry, including medical devices. Everything from heart defibrillators, to ordering prescriptions from the pharmacy have gone from mechanical and handwritten processes to chips and software written by human beings, where new types of errors can be introduced. It is important to note, that overall, the number of problems are dropping dramatically with this move to digital. However, expectations by the general public is that the move will absolutely eliminate problems. Therefor, much like Toyota is seeing with its spiral of problems around cruise and brakes, there will be much more scrutiny on issues as they arrive. It is important for everyone in the healthcare IT and medical device space to take hard lessons from what Toyota is enduring.
The Vanishing Oath is a film ANYONE trying to improve healthcare must see; we can all make a difference
My wife is a physician... and I watch, and I learn. I see the good in US medicine, I see the bad in US medicine. The good is the people - everyone in medicine gets into it for the right reason. The bad, well, its the environment. The system is setup backwards in so many ways - its setup to treat people after they are sick, not to prevent them from getting sick. Its setup so that physicians, as you will see in the clip above, are spending more time on coding and other administrative tasks rather than treating. Its setup that we do the rare and complex optimally, but we do the everyday and basic poorly. Though the clip above is a bit of an extreme example, it does point to the difficult in treating patients well in US Medicine today.
My goal in healthcare is to make the everyday easy. Right now the simple blocking and tackling in healthcare is very difficult, manual, and error prone. It creates billions of dollars in waste in hospitals annually and it kills 1,000's of lives. That is my and my colleagues commitment to improving healthcare and has been since we started Mobile Aspects. And we are proud we are impacting hospitals positively everyday.
Cars & software bugs [via The Economist]: Medical device & healthcare IT industry can also learn a lot from a dummy
THE inability to explain the May 6th stock-market plunge shows just how difficult it is to predict—and then reconstruct afterwards—behaviour caused by bizarre combinations of unlikely events. In his 2007 best-seller “The Black Swan”, Nassim Nicholas Taleb argued that such excursions from the normal have three things in common: they are outliers, being wholly unexpected; their impact is extreme; and, in hindsight, we rationalise them by concocting explanations that make them seem (or so we like to think) predictable.
Lately, Toyota has suffered its share of black-swan events. The Japanese carmaker has categorically denied that the runaway throttle problems and mysterious braking issues that have plagued a number of its models over the past eight years have anything to do with the software embedded in its “drive-by-wire” components. And yet, the very nature of such glitches is that they are essentially irreproducible. It is therefore impossible to say whether faults in the software are to blame or not.
One thing computer programmers agree on is that there is no such thing as a bug-free piece of software. Yes, you can write a five-line “hello world” program and be reasonably confident it contains no errors. But any piece of software that does a meaningful job will contain hundreds, or even thousands, of undetected bugs.
Some of the cleanest software ever written—containing fewer than 0.1 errors per 1,000 lines of source code—has come out of NASA’s Software Assurance Technology Centre in Greenbelt, Maryland. But no commercial organisation could afford such an amount of scrutiny and testing. Microsoft, for instance, reckons to find 10-20 defects per 1,000 lines of code during its in-house testing, and to whittle that down to 0.5 per 1,000 lines by the time the software is released to the public. Even so, a program like Microsoft’s venerable Windows XP—which had 40m lines of code—would have contained at least 20,000 bugs when launched.
Commercially, that is about as good as it gets. In industry generally, programs written for internal use are reckoned to have error rates of anything from five to 50 bugs per 1,000 lines, depending on the programming language adopted; the use to which the software is to be put; and the amount of time the manufacturer can afford to invest, given the price the customer is willing to pay. A study prepared in 2002 for the National Institute of Standards and Technology, a government testing laboratory based in Gaithersburg, Maryland, concluded that software errors in industry were so prevalent, and their effects so detrimental, they were costing the American economy $59 billion a year—equivalent, at the time, to 0.6% of gross domestic product.
There is an old saying in computing that if Microsoft built cars, they would crash twice a day. Actually, that is neither fair to the software-maker, nor to the motor industry. Cars at the time were largely analogue, with barely a line of computer code between them. Their various components were manipulated by cables, springs, rods, levers, gears, hydraulic pistons and electric motors. Sure, they broke down—all too often. But their faults, unlike those in software, were fairly easy to diagnose and repair.
Today, electronic components account for up to 40% of a new car’s value. A typical vehicle has between 30 and 50 electronic control units (with twice as many in luxury models) performing many of the jobs done previously by mechanical or electrical linkages. Computer chips now manage everything from air-bags, door-locks and seat adjustments to ignition timing, throttle position, fuel injection, gear selection, cruise control, stability, and increasingly the brakes.
Frost and Sullivan, a consultancy, expects the average car’s software content to grow exponentially from 10m lines of computer code today to 300m within a decade. Even with the best programmers in the world, the average car of tomorrow will come with 150,000 software bugs embedded in its systems. Motor cars will then need to be patched with software updates even more frequently than computers.
In some cases, a bug might be so subtle as to barely affect the way a program—and the component it controls—works. In other cases, an error in the programming may cause the software to freeze or crash, and the component in question to go haywire. When that happens with a computer, the solution is to reboot it. That can be difficult to do with a car if it is racing out of control, or refusing to stop on a hill.
Something like that has happened on a number of occasions to Steve Wozniak, the co-founder of Apple. “This new model [Toyota Prius] has an accelerator that goes wild, but only under certain conditions of cruise control,” he recounted recently. “I can repeat it over and over again.” Mr Wozniak, a hardcore programmer to his fingertips, is adamant that the problem is the software, not a sticky accelerator pedal.
With cars becoming ever more computer-like, it is clearly time for the safety rules governing their behaviour to be brought up to-date. Congress has been goaded into action by the deadly incidents of runaway Toyota cars. Hearings in the House of Representatives got underway on May 6th, with similar sessions due to start in the Senate shortly. The proposed legislation is expected to be law before the year is out.
Beyond new punitive fines for hiding evidence and delaying recalls, the new legislation will require all new motor vehicles to be fitted with “black boxes” that record events from 60 seconds before a crash to 15 seconds afterwards. Carmakers will also be required to adopt brake overrides that cut the engine power to idle when the brake pedal is depressed—as is common practice elsewhere in the world.
But such changes to America’s vehicle safety rules seem more like political gestures aimed at appeasing a public shaken by revelations of Toyota cars accelerating out of control or refusing to brake properly. Overall, the Japanese carmaker has been forced to recall some 9.5m vehicles worldwide as a result of the recent outcry. Sooner rather than later, the company will fix its faulty software, and its current problems will be allowed to fade quietly away.
The broader issue, though, is that cars are no longer analogue machines: they are fast becoming predominantly digital devices—with all the strengths and weaknesses of modern computers. That means designing them with far greater resilience to digital disasters. If an electronic component suffers a black-swan event, it must not jeopardise the vehicle’s safety. Meanwhile, updating the car’s software will need to be done on a continuous basis using the internet, rather than be left until the next six-monthly trip to the dealer for a service.
What bothers your correspondent most, though, is the way each time a mechanical component in a motor vehicle is replaced by a digital one, it removes a measure of control from the operator. Anti-lock brakes and stability control systems were the first examples. Electronic throttles, stop-start mechanism and regenerative braking systems are among the latest. Soon we will have digital steering. Cars will then be virtually autonomous, able to drive themselves without the motorist’s intervention.
But a design philosophy that gives precedence to machine judgment over the human experience—and seeks to keep the operator out of the control loop as much as possible—has a fatal flaw. If the nuclear disaster at Three Mile Island in the 1979 taught us anything, it was that operators of any complicated machine should be fully integrated into the control process.
Of the many mistakes made at Three Mile Island, the most damning was that the reactor’s operators had become mere managers watching from above as the automated controls did their job. When things went horribly wrong, none of them had the skill nor the experience to wrestle the reactor back under control. Runaway cars with digital throttles are a timely reminder of the dangers lurking when the software in a machine is given too much control.
A great article from The Economist that actually doesn't go far enough... As autos move from analogue to digital devices, so does everything in industry, including medical devices. Everything from heart defibrillators, to ordering prescriptions from the pharmacy have gone from mechanical and handwritten processes to chips and software written by human beings, where new types of errors can be introduced. It is important to note, that overall, the number of problems are dropping dramatically with this move to digital. However, expectations by the general public is that the move will absolutely eliminate problems. Therefor, much like Toyota is seeing with its spiral of problems around cruise and brakes, there will be much more scrutiny on issues as they arrive. It is important for everyone in the healthcare IT and medical device space to take hard lessons from what Toyota is enduring.
Great article on evolving business of news from The Atlantic. Many analogies to healthcare.
Photos by Robyn Twomey/Redux (Above: Hal Varian, Google's chief economist)
Also see:
Slideshow: "A Google-Eye View of the Newspaper Business"
A presentation by the company’s chief economist, Hal VarianEveryone knows that Google is killing the news business. Few people know how hard Google is trying to bring it back to life, or why the company now considers journalism’s survival crucial to its own prospects.
Of course this overstates Google’s power to destroy, or create. The company’s chief economist, Hal Varian, likes to point out that perhaps the most important measure of the newspaper industry’s viability—the number of subscriptions per household—has headed straight down, not just since Google’s founding in the late 1990s but ever since World War II. In 1947, each 100 U.S. households bought an average of about 140 newspapers daily. Now they buy fewer than 50, and the number has fallen nonstop through those years. If Google had never been invented, changes in commuting patterns, the coming of 24-hour TV news and online information sites that make a newspaper’s information stale before it appears, the general busyness of life, and many other factors would have created major problems for newspapers. Moreover, “Google” is shorthand for an array of other Internet-based pressures on the news business, notably the draining of classified ads to the likes of Craigslist and eBay. On the other side of the balance, Google’s efforts to shore up news organizations are extensive and have recently become intense but are not guaranteed to succeed.
That this campaign is under way is surprising in its own right, as is its strong emphasis inside the company as a significant strategic measure. Most Internet and tech businesses have been either uninterested in or actively condescending toward the struggles of what they view as the pathetic-loser dinosaurs of the traditional media. (What is the Craigslist vision for sustaining the news business? Facebook’s? Microsoft’s?) Google’s projects have hardly been secret, since most of them involve collaboration with major newspapers, magazines, and broadcast-news organizations. This April, the company’s CEO, Eric Schmidt, delivered a keynote address to the major news editors’ convention, telling them “we’re all in this together” and that he was “convinced that the survival of high-quality journalism” was “essential to the functioning of modern democracy.” Last December, he wrote an op-ed in The Wall Street Journal announcing that Google would be going out of its way to devise systems that would direct more money toward struggling news organizations—rather than, as many in the news industry assumed, simply directing more of everyone else’s money toward itself. Publishing this in The Journal was a piquant touch, since the paper’s owner, Rupert Murdoch, has frequently denounced Google’s effect on the news industry.
Still, compared with what it could have been saying about its strategy toward news companies, Google has undersold its efforts and rarely talked about them as an overall program with a central guiding idea. Partly this is because of the highly decentralized nature of most innovative effort at Google, which often takes place in “20 percent time”—a workday per week when developers can concentrate on projects they choose themselves. Partly it is because of the “permanent beta” culture at Google, in which projects are viewed as tentative and experimental long after they have reached what others would consider a mature stage. (The company’s wildly popular e-mail system, Gmail, officially graduated from beta-test status only last summer, after five years of operation by tens of millions of users worldwide.) And the news organizations that are trying out experimental approaches at Google’s suggestion and with its support have themselves chosen to be quiet.
But after talking during the past year with engineers and strategists at Google and recently interviewing some of their counterparts inside the news industry, I am convinced that there is a larger vision for news coming out of Google; that it is not simply a charity effort to buy off critics; and that it has been pushed hard enough by people at the top of the company, especially Schmidt, to become an internalized part of the culture in what is arguably the world’s most important media organization. Google’s initiatives do not constitute a complete or easy plan for the next phase of serious journalism. But they are more promising than what I’m used to seeing elsewhere, notably in the steady stream of “Crisis of the Press”–style reports. The company’s ultimate ambition is in line with what most of today’s reporters, editors, and publishers are hoping for—which is what, in my view, most citizens should also support.
That goal is a reinvented business model to sustain professional news-gathering. This is essential if the “crowd sourcing” and citizen journalism that have already transformed news coverage—for instance, the videos from inside the Iranian protests last summer—are not to be the world’s only source of information. Accounts like those are certainly valuable, but they will be all the more significant if they are buttressed by reports from people who are paid to keep track of government agencies, go into danger zones, investigate and analyze public and private abuse, and generally serve as systematic rather than ad hoc observers. (I am talking about what journalism should do, not what it often does.)
Google’s likely route toward this destination, however, differs in crucial and sometimes uncomfortable ways from the one the existing news business would probably choose on its own. The differences are natural, given the cultural chasm that separates a wildly successful, collectively cocky, engineer-dominated, very internationally staffed West Coast tech start-up from a national news establishment that is its opposite in all ways: East Coast–centric, liberal arts–heavy, less international in staff and leadership (more Brits and Australians than in the tech industry, fewer Indians, Chinese, and Russians), dominated by organizations founded in the distant past, and at the moment strikingly downcast and even panicked.
Journalism is undergoing a vast overhaul, as are many businesses in the internet dominated world. We must all respect the journalistic process and investigative journalism highly - it is the cornerstone to a well functioning democracy. Yet, the article points our several good tidbits. For example, there are too many reporters chasing the same stories. This makes many of the top news stories we see a commodity. There will be a shaking out of this part of news where fewer reporters (sometimes less can be more) will run after the same stories. Journalists dont like the change - who would? But its better to go along and embrace and even force change than to try to live in the past. Who knows what exactly the business model of news will look like in 10 years? Not even Google - but we know we must stay patient and continue to tinker with the model until we find it.
Cellphones Now Used More for Data Than for Calls - Obviously, as people are consuming content & media and texting
She taps out her grocery lists, records voice memos, listens to music at the gym, tracks her caloric intake and posts frequent updates to her Twitter and Facebook accounts.
The one thing she doesn’t use her cellphone for? Making calls.
“I probably only talk to someone verbally on it once a week,” said Mrs. Colburn, a 40-year-old marketing consultant in Canton, Mass., who has an iPhone.
For many Americans, cellphones have become irreplaceable tools to manage their lives and stay connected to the outside world, their families and networks of friends online. But increasingly, by several measures, that does not mean talking on them very much.
For example, although almost 90 percent of households in the United States now have a cellphone, the growth in voice minutes used by consumers has stagnated, according to government and industry data.
This is true even though more households each year are disconnecting their landlines in favor of cellphones.
Instead of talking on their cellphones, people are making use of all the extras that iPhones, BlackBerrys and other smartphones were also designed to do — browse the Web, listen to music, watch television, play games and send e-mail and text messages.
The number of text messages sent per user increased by nearly 50 percent nationwide last year, according to the CTIA, the wireless industry association. And for the first time in the United States, the amount of data in text, e-mail messages, streaming video, music and other services on mobile devices in 2009 surpassed the amount of voice data in cellphone calls, industry executives and analysts say.
“Originally, talking was the only cellphone application,” said Dan Hesse, chief executive of Sprint Nextel. “But now it’s less than half of the traffic on mobile networks.”
Of course, talking on the cellphone isn’t disappearing entirely. “Anytime something is sensitive or is something I don’t want to be forwarded, I pick up the phone rather than put it into a tweet or a text,” said Kristen Kulinowski, a 41-year-old chemistry teacher in Houston. And calling is cheaper than ever because of fierce competition among rival wireless networks.
But figures from the CTIA show that over the last two years, the average number of voice minutes per user in the United States has fallen.
Still, even the telephone design industry has taken note. Ross Rubin, a telecommunications analyst with the NPD Group, said cellphones outfitted with numerical keyboards — easiest for quickly dialing a phone number — were no longer in vogue. Touch screens, or quick messaging devices with full “qwerty” keyboards, on the other hand, are. On the newest phones, users must press several buttons or swipe through several screens to get to the application that allows them to make calls.
“Handset design has become far less cheek-friendly,” Mr. Rubin said. Mr. Hesse of Sprint said he expected that within the next couple of years, cellphone users would be charged by the data they used, not by their voice minutes, a prediction echoed by other industry executives.
When people do talk on their phones, their conversations are shorter; the average length of a local call was 1.81 minutes in 2009, compared with 2.27 minutes in 2008, according to CTIA. For some, the unused voice minutes mount up.
“I have thousands of rollover minutes,” said Zach Frechette, 28, editor of Good magazine in Los Angeles, who explained that he dialed only when he needed to get in touch with someone instantly, and limited those calls to 30 seconds. “I downgraded to the lowest available minute plan, which I’m not even getting close to using.”
Mr. Frechette said part of the reason he rarely talked on his phone was that he had an iPhone, with its notoriously spotty phone reception in certain locales. But also, he said, most of his day was spent swapping short messages through services like Gmail, Facebook and Twitter. That way, he said, “you can respond when it’s convenient, rather than impose your schedule on someone else.”
Others say talking on the phone is intrusive and time-consuming, while others seem to have no patience for talking to just one person at a time. They prefer to spend their phone time moving seamlessly between several conversations, catching up on the latest news and updates by text and on Facebook with multiple friends, instead of just one or two.
“Even though in theory, it might take longer to send a text than pick up the phone, it seems less disruptive than a call,” said Jefferson Adams, a 44-year-old freelance writer living in San Francisco. By texting, he said, “you can multitask between two or three conversations at once.”
Nicole Wahl, a 35-year-old communications manager at the University of Toronto, estimates she talks on her phone only about 10 minutes a month.
“The only reason I ever call someone anymore is if I don’t have their Twitter handle or e-mail address,” Ms. Wahl said. “Like my hairdresser to see if she has a last-minute appointment or my parents to say I’m dropping by.”
American teenagers have been ahead of the curve for a while, turning their cellphones into texting machines; more than half of them send about 1,500 text messages each month, according to a recent study by the Pew Research Center’s Internet and American Life Project.
Mrs. Colburn, from Massachusetts, said she caved to the pleading of her 12-year-old daughter Abigail for a cellphone to send text messages with her friends after she and her husband discovered it was hindering her from developing bonds with her classmates.
“We realized she was being excluded from party invitations and being in the know with her peers,” she said.
Mrs. Colburn said texting had also become a much easier way to stay in touch with her daughter and receive quick updates about after-school plans.
“The other night she texted me from upstairs to ask a vocabulary question,” she said with a laugh. “But I drew the line there. I went upstairs to answer it.”
I think we all knew this was coming, and coming pretty quickly. Who uses their cell phone to talk anymore? We dont have time to talk, unless it is a business call. We'd all rather text our family, our friends to see whats happening. And on the iPhone, Droid, and other smart phones, the ability to consume massive amounts of media lead to massive amounts of data downloads. Just go to any airport, supermarket checkout line, or the line at the DMV:when people (people in the US - Asia is a completely different story) wait, they dont call a friend, they text, read the paper, read a book, look up stuff, etc. I cant wait to see my iPad 3G monthly usage for the first month with the ability to stream Netflix content.
What does all this mean? Well (a) people will always be looking at screens; (b) the people who will succeed in the next wave will be the ones who can be hyperactive about consuming and internalizing content and media.
Social Media Parenting: Raising the Digital Generation
Last week, our family Pediatrician told me a teen he saw earlier that day did 11,000 texts last month. 11,000! in a MONTH! To me and you (assuming you are old enough to drink), this sounds ridiculous. To the average teenager, you'll get a "meh." The average teenager does 3,000 texts per month. (This is a combo of actual texts, receiving texts, instant messages, and many other things). To me, this is the official generation gap between me and my two year old. Her future will be much different than mine.
One of the things I think about most is how to raise my two daughters in this internet world. How much screen time is too much? How much is enough? I dont want them addicted to screens (like their daddy), yet I want them to have the requisite skills to live in the evolving digital world.
At the end of the day, I am realizing that the most important thing is just to be as involved with them, in anything, as much as possible. This is the same issue that every generation of parents face (I am sure mine were concerned by how much TV should I watch - well, it ended up being a lot, and I just love consuming any media now). The screen time issue, online concerns, etc will all resolve itself as long as I know what they are doing in general. But having some tips, like the included article still help.
ABC player for iPad just updated to stream over 3G! Downloading now to review and compare to Netflix.
iPad 3G - beginning to test out as my laptop replacement; typing is a breeze
Picked up my iPad 3G at the Pittsburgh - Shadyside Apple Store last Friday. Due to (a) a half-marathon run on Sunday; and (b) not wanting my two year old to see the iPad (lets see how long that lasts!), I only got to play with it a little bit so far. But today at work, I have started to see how this machine will work for me in real life. So far, I have setup my work email, calendar and contacts (works as beautifully and easily as my iPhone). My observation so far:
1. Reading and typing email is a pleasure. I actually like reading email on the iPad 3G better than my laptop. You are directly interacting with the email. Put the iPad into landscape mode and typing onto the iPad is practically as fast as typing on my latop. I am able to type quite fast, and I make very little mistakes (which the iPad corrects most of the time anyways). That is 60% of my work.
2. I can view any excel, word, powerpoint file without a problem. Viewing powerpoint is definitely a pleasure as I scroll with my finger.
3. We do a lot of zip file in our company (our server automatically zips files above a certain size). At first, this was a problem. But, cheap easy solution: Goodreader for $0.99. I can open zip files, read them, etc.
4. I was reading news articles and books over the weekend - this definitely was very nice. A lot of great apps and books. Combining iBooks with Kindle app, you get pretty much anybook you want, and all the classics (think James Joyce) are free.
5. I viewed videos from my library. Once again, terrific. I also viewed abcplayer over wifi (it doesnt work over 3g - boo) and it worked great also. Lastly, I tried netflix - over wifi, it was very clear; but over 3g the video got a little bit pixelated, but still very watchable. Hopefully that will improve.
So, as everyone thought, for consuming content, the iPad is amazing. My next step is to now create content. I'll be downloading the Pages, Numbers, Keynote package soon for creating content. One myth to disspell related to creating content though - many people said, and still say, typing would be hard for long periods of time. I must disagree. Typing on the iPad is simple and works well. I am sure, much like I connect my netbook to a proper keyboard when docked, it would be better to type on a keyboard; but when traveling or on your lap, typing on the virtual keyboard of the iPad works just fine.
