I started using the Internet before there were browsers. When Netscape was delivered I immediately started using it. Thus began a long love hate relationship with browsers. I will admit that in my misspent youth (before 50) I changed from Netscape to Windows Explorer. This usage lasted until I found Firefox. I used Firefox for years and years until Chrome appeared, which is my current browser. Along the way I tried about six other browsers, including Safari, for a week or so and then rejected them.
One of the great stories from the MIT Media Lab is that when Netscape announced their IPO in 1995, a student wrote a new browser. He did it overnight and it was 7 lines of code. 7 lines of code! Browsers are actually quite simple. They are not rocket science. The thousands of add-ons and extensions for every browser I think prove the point. However, add-ons and extensions are where my problem begins. Over the years I have become quite particular about the functionality in the browser and have always customized the browser with add-ons and extensions. To a significant degree I pick new browsers based on their add-ons/extensions and they have to be the ones I have become dependent on, such as Evernote, Dropbox, Wolfram Alpha, etc.
This required package of add-ons/extensions brings me to my single biggest complaint with the iPad. The browsers are inadequate. Safari is hopeless. No real functionality beyond sharing to Twitter and Facebook. My current iPad browser, Terra, is slightly better but I still do not have the ability to add something to Evernote or Dropbox.
This week I ordered the new Lenovo tablet to evaluate. I picked it because it has the option for an integrated keyboard. If this tablet has a decent touch screen, accelerometer and a Chrome browser that I can sync to my laptop version of Chrome, the iPad may be toast. If the browser just permits add-ons/extensions for my requirements, even that would be sufficient to abandon the iPad.
For me the iPad is attractive because of its form factor and weight. Such features do not develop much loyalty in a user. I am not interested to use iCloud. I have better free or low cost alternatives. For the iPad to maintain its marketshare over time, I think they need to upgrade the browser for add-ons and extensions. Given that most people use their tablet for email and internet access, my points seems even more compelling.
This post was inspired in part by a post on ReadWriteWeb.
Much press is recently devoted to fixing the education system in the U.S. Fixing the problem is quite simple, as demonstrated by Stephen Fleming's recent post at Academic VC. All we really need is the will to change from the current industrial model where principals are the factory owners, teachers are the foremen and students are the output.
Cathy Davidsonwriting at the Chronicle of Higher Education sums up the problem well:
"Unfortunately, current practices of our educational institutions—and workplaces—are a mismatch between the age we live in and the institutions we have built over the last 100-plus years. The 20th century taught us that completing one task before starting another one was the route to success. Everything about 20th-century education, like the 20th-century workplace, has been designed to reinforce our attention to regular, systematic tasks that we take to completion. Attention to task is at the heart of industrial labor management, from the assembly line to the modern office, and of educational philosophy, from grade school to graduate school."
The dilemma of abandoning the industrial production model of public education is further complicated by the widespread proliferation of computing devices, whether it be desktops, laptops or the current panacea--tablets. Everyone sees technology as a part of the education solution and the most extreme commentators see technology as replacing the teacher. Clayton Christensen, anHBS professor, points out in his book Disrupting Class that if we use technology to reinforce the existing methods we should not expect any appreciable improvement in student performance.
What actually concerns me the most is that everyone is formulating solutions based on the past. Everyone seems to be contemplating a solution based on the current usage of computers. What no one appears to be taking into consideration is what students, or least students from middle income or better families, will be like in 5-10 years. I jokingly tell people that we use an 18 month old child to evaluate new tablets at OLPC. The fact is that if the interface and touch screen do not work well, this young child loses interest in the device. (For the record the 18 month old tester likes the iPad, iPhone and XO so far.) I have seen 3 year olds control televisions by moving their hands to activate a Wii controller and five year olds recording videos and posting on YouTube. Nearly all the children I know who have used an iPhone believe that every picture on every device can be enlarged by moving your fingers. 12 year olds are writing Python programs...I have seen it.
Very young children are becoming very advanced computer users, perhaps in part because the computing devices and content available are so entertaining. Regardless of why it is happening, children entering kindergarten in 2020 will have very high expectations for the computing environment they need. They will also expect teachers knowledgeable about the latest technology and its use in primary school education. What will the teacher do if every first grader shows up with a tablet or laptop because they want to check at lunch time the daily views of their videos on YouTube.
In thinking about the features of education in 2020, I see several requirements based on the students and their expected skills with computing technology:
Video as a teaching method will be a basic requirement and online course material will be ubiquitous
Education will need to be more entertaining to engage all the game addicts
Education will have to be more self-paced, where the student advances through subject matter as fast as they can
The use of grades (3rd, 4th, 5th) will go away and when you complete the primary school curriculum at your own pace you graduate to middle school
Budget constraints in the U.S. will reduce school activities to the bare bones curriculum and the private sector will provide services for after school activities such as drama, sports and yearbook
The number of teachers will be reduced given their new role as mentors rather than as instructors; school monitors may increase to maintain control
Schools will no longer be designed based on classrooms but rather based on the environments different children need for learning--online areas, quiet areas, video rooms, collaboration areas, laboratories, etc.
Much of the current dialogue on transforming education focuses on teacher quality and teachers' unions. Of course this dialog assumes that we should continue the current industrial production model of education. A better solution to the problem would be to focus on a new model for education, a model that recognizes the vastly different students that will need education and the increasing using of computer technology in education. Building a concencus around this new model might actually force us to build a model based on student needs and reduce the friction over teachers and unions.
A central concept in this new model should address the well known quote from Jean Piaget:
“The principle goal of education is to create men who are capable of doing new things, not simply of repeating what other generations have done - men who are creative, inventive and discoverers”
This quote strikes me as more timely today than when Piaget drafted it in the early 20th century. Access to information today is low cost and easy through the Internet, as compared to the time when the industrial production model was adopted for education. This "convenience of information" may afford us the opportunity to focus more on developing creativity and innovation skills in students given that the burden of simply transferring knowledge has been reduced by the Internet.
This post was inspired in part by some recent conversations with @OLPC_Mexico .
The views expressed here are my personal views and do not reflect the views of any client, organization or institution with whom I am affiliated.
Notes:
(1) Fleming's post was quite critical of the teachers' unions. I do not share this view. I do share his view that we should provide better pay to attract people to the teaching profession. However, without some sacrifice, budget constraints will make this challenging.
(2) The industrial model is held up as a culprit in education despite having educated all the critics of it so well, myself included.
(3) In a previous post on the future of education I proposed that schools would disappear in favor of online content. I now think this is unlikely to occur. I overlooked the role of schools as babysitters for dual income families.
In January 2008 I wrote a post on the decline of public intellectualism. The recent debt ceiling debate and the early start to 2012 U.S. presidential elections brings this theme to mind again. Many of the Republicans opt for reactionary commentary and President Obama is yet to frame a cogent argument on the economy. Many conservatives may dislike Paul Krugman, the economics Nobel Laureate, but his posts in the New York Times come as close as anybody to even handedly framing the issues. The absence of even handed, thoughtful commentary on economic, social and political issues is the reason that I find public intellectualism in decline and the U.S. outlook of such concern.
Jeffrey Kurtz, writing in the journal Logos about George Scialabba, helps us to better understand public intellectualism.
Scialabba writing about these great writers of the past provides further insight.
They “wrote in the vernacular, with vigor and clarity, for the general, educated reader. Their topics were large, their interests wide; however small their actual, engaged audience, their writings opened out, and so helped sustain at least the idea and the hope of a public culture.”
And finally, Kurtz explains what is so often missing in today's commentary.
"To perceive as readily and pursue as energetically the difficulties of one’s own position as those of one’s opponents; to take pains to discover, and present fully, the genuine problems that one’s opponent is, however futilely, addressing—this is disinterestedness.."
This may be a bit of an academic way to make a point, but the U.S. needs, in part, a return to well thought out, balanced discussion of the issues facing the country. If you call that liberal, so be it.
Anyone who follows this blog regularly knows that I like models, heuristics and algorithms as a means to analyze problems and develop better solutions. I am also very interested in economic development as these posts show. What could be better than a paper that applies game theory to economic development analysis. Dimiter Ialnazov and Nikolay Nenovsky have just released a paper, "A Game Theory Interpretation of the Post-Communist Evolution", which deals with the pace of economic development in Eastern European countries after the end of the Cold War.
The two main models of cooperation, namely the "prisoner’s dilemma" and the "stag hunter" (classic game theory models), are applied to basically conclude that the greater the homogeneity of beliefs and objectives the greater the economic development. The "stag hunter" model is the model for cooperation more evident in homogeneous groups.
Nice to see the mathematicians confirming long held beliefs in economic development. Would be interesting to see game theory applied to African economic development results.
I have often wondered why the development of science in the Moslem world so significantly slowed around the beginning of the eleventh century, given the rich contributions before that date. (These are the kind of questions that will bug me for years until I find a cogent answer.) In an article by Michael Lightfoot from the University of London, "Promoting the Knowledge Economy in the Arab World", an explanation is presented. I quote verbatim from the article below.
"By the 11th century, a tension had developed between the more rationalist philosophy of the Mu’tazilites (such as Abu Nasr al-Farabi [870-950] and al-Razi ibn Sina [980-1037], more widely known as Avicenna) and the more conservative Salafist believers. Al Farabi, for example, designed a school curriculum that stressed the importance of the natural sciences, the exploration of the nature and characteristics of elements in the material world, and the development of metaphysics to foster abstract thinking to help learners to understand the essence of being and begin to comprehend the nature of God (Gunther, 2010). By contrast, Abu Hamid al-Ghazali (1058-1111) reasserted the dominance of religion over reason. He was the headteacher of the influential Madarasah Nizamiyyah in Baghdad in 1067. Its founding marked the beginning of a sectarian system of education with a strong political bias. One of its main functions was to root in the public psyche the fundamentals of Sunni Islamic orthodoxy and to marginalize the more mystical Shia branch. However, the division between the traditionalist teaching rooted in the Qur’an and the transcendental spiritualism was not clear-cut. Al-Ghazali combined rationalism, mysticism, and orthodox belief in a way which is still evident today among many practitioners.
Al-Ghazali believed that reason and the senses allow humans to acquire knowledge of the visible material world, whereas revelation and inspiration permit them to discover the invisible spiritual world. Through perpetual learning and spiritual exercise, humans attain “true” knowledge and become capable of comprehending aspects of the realm of the Divine. Al-Ghazali dissuaded students and teachers from pursuing the natural sciences, especially those that, in his view, contradicted religion (Al-Ghazali, 1963). Al-Ghazali was highly influential in the development of the Sunni strand of the Islamic faith. He attacked the use of rational Hellenistic philosophy in the context of religious belief and rejected rationalism or rational scientific enquiry as a basis for promoting wisdom and knowledge. Some commentators (Alawi, 2009) claim that this rejection of philosophical rational enquiry by Al-Ghazzali is one of the most significant reasons why Islamic civilization failed to embrace modernity. By rejecting rationalism and undervaluing creativity and inspirational strands of thinking, the mainstream systems of knowledge fell back on the early texts as the only true knowledge—al-bayan—and the features of the more rationalist empirical forms were rejected, later to be subsumed into European thinking. Post Reformation and Enlightenment, European thinking succeeded in transcending the limitations imposed by religious dogma and enabled the development of science and technology–based rationalist discourse, which was a systematic break from the past. Meanwhile, the core beliefs and Islamic knowledge systems continue to revolve around the fixed body of text-based material that is fixed and immutable."
On a different note, the article does a nice job of defining the theoretical debate over what a student should be prepared for. Just in case you did not know, there is a debate going on. Also very interesting.
It’s always nice to have your predictions confirmed and the sooner the better. Yesterday’s post said that in five years the only surviving brands in consumer IT would be Apple and Amazon. Today’s announcement that HP is spinning off its computer division seems to support my prediction. Sale of the division would be the next logical step.
The new HP focus on business services also looks like a good decision. However, I would point out that this market is becoming more complicated by executive personal device selections, which now have a much greater effect on corporate decisions.
HP also announced that they are dropping further development of webOS. Based on this week's Google Motorola transaction, maybe someone in Asia like Samsung will buy it. In fact, maybe Samsung should buy HP's computer division. That would be an interesting development.
If you are interested in IT technology, one of the great places to visit is Taipei. I spent a few days there last week talking to OEMs and component manufacturers. The most interesting comments are listed below.
In five years the only two brands in consumer IT will be Apple and Amazon. Everybody else will be fighting over the crumbs or copying them.
Chinese manufacturers need another 18-24 months before they will reach the quality level of Taiwan in tablets and laptops. (I think this is very optimistic.)
The famous $35 Indian MOE laptop will cost $55, about the same as the cheap Chinese tablets. Of course, this cost is before distribution and handling charges and any markups. Also, the screen quality will be C screens, rejected screens from 1st tier brands.
Everyone is underestimating the complexity of repairs for tablets
A lot of companies are focusing on the server market because they can no longer compete in the consumer segment
As long as Taiwan remains the center of OEM manufacturing, it will always be a great source of information, analysis and future trends in consumer IT.
Yesterday every publication covered the announcement that Google was acquiring Motorola Mobility for $12.5 billion. The original announcement on Business wire is here. My thoughts on the acquisition follow.
Asian cell phone manufacturers will not like the transaction. Therefore, I expect HTC, Samsung and LG (to name a few) all to react negatively to the acquisition and begin efforts to explore alternatives to the Android operating system. Given that Asia is the largest market for cell phones, moves away from Android by these leading Asian cell phone companies cannot be good for Google. It may take some time, but expect phones from these leading manufacturers with alternative OS.
Buy versus build is questionable. Whenever one does an acquisition one should consider whether there is a cheaper alternative. In looking at Motorola, what does one get? A weak brand, uninspiring design expertise, a history of technological innovation that stopped in about 2000 and a worldwide distribution network. Seems like a lot of money for a distribution channel.
It looks like WINTEL all over again. Having single handedly destroyed this monopoly with Android, it looks like they are making the same mistake. Yes--Android will remain open source, but see my first bullet point.
Are they trying to be Apple? While Apple has enjoyed great success on many platforms with a combination of proprietary hardware and software, Google's strength has always been with the ultimate low cost strategy--free. I do not see how this acquisition plays to a repeat of a low cost strategy with free products.
Is this another error in China? Google has struggled in China and I do not see how this strategy helps them gain market share there for any of their products. It may very well trigger a move away from Google by all the second and third tier phone and tablet marketers there in favor of home grown alternatives.
Bottom line I do not see the logic for the acquisition of Motorola. I think the acquisition will encourage much more competition in the operating system space, as I described here. Also, I think that it could weaken their position in search even further in China and perhaps in other markets.
Maybe we should all hope for Microsoft to make a better offer to acquire Motorola, but I do not think that is likely. Microsoft was shopping for a phone company earlier this year and probably looked at Motorola and passed. If even Microsoft passed on the acquisition, what was Google thinking.
After the original post, someone contacted me and said the acquisition was a patent portfolio acquisition, in response perhaps to Google's losing bid for Nortel. Seems like a lot of capital for patents but the comparative cost is similar to the pricing on the Nortel portfolio when one adjusts for the larger number of Motorola patents.
Every course and every workshop on entrepreneurship I teach I explain four techniques to understand the customer as a means to develop a business concept:
Much modern thinking on strategy is based on Michael Porter's ground breaking work. Porter's work is fundamentally an economic analysis of value creation, with perhaps the critical insight being in how Porter defines competition.
In a new HBR article "The New Psychology of Strategic Leadership" HBS Professor Giovanni Gavetti argues that the role of the of the strategist is to see the opportunities that rivals overlook. To see such opportunities requires the Nintendo perspective--"we compete for people's spare time"-- a more insightful understanding of the customer, which was discussed in this post from SF November 2008. I think Gavetti could have focused more on understanding the customer as a means to finding the overlooked opportunities. The link to Gavetti's HBR summary is here.
Of course Marcell Prevost probably summarized the whole article best when he said "you have to see the invisible to do the impossible".
The ever inventive Fred Wilson of AVC blog yesterday posted on how to capture Kindle highlights from their web storage...and then share them. Use this link in any Kindle device and login https://kindle.amazon.com/your_highlights. All your highlights and notes appear.
I mentioned in yesterday's post how much I am enjoying Robert Kaplan's Monsoon and hopefully my Kindle highlights below do justice to the rich content of this book.
Your Highlights (Most recently updated first)
Monsoon: The Indian Ocean and the Future of American Power by Robert D. Kaplan
You have 9 highlighted passages
You have 1 note
Last annotated on August 6, 2011
The Indian Ocean is small in a cultural sense, but too vast even in the jet age for one power to gain real sway over it. The Portuguese conquest, like the conquests of the Dutch and the British that followed, reflects both the dynamism and imprudence to which all empires are susceptible. It is a lesson the United States would do well to learn.
For Sindhi nationalists, the Arabian Sea might yet return to its pre-Portuguese medieval past, as a place of regions and principalities, in which Kabul and Karachi were as united with Lahore and Delhi as Delhi was with Bangalore and the rest of south India.
This search for a reinvented national greatness among middle-class Hindus of India also applies to the new Muslim middle classes of Pakistan and Iran, which is why all three are intoxicated about the idea of nuclear weapons. Whether it is the Mauryan Empire in India, or the Achaemenid Empire in Persia, for millions lifted out of poverty and recently educated, the bomb now summons forth these great kingdoms of antiquity.
He seems to have imagined, most erroneously in our opinion, that he could effect nothing against such [Indian] adversaries, if he was content to be bound by ties from which they were free, if he went on telling truth, and hearing none, if he fulfilled, to his own hurt, all his engagements with confederates who never kept an engagement that was not to their advantage. Accordingly this man, in the other parts of his life an honorable English gentleman and a soldier, was no sooner matched against an Indian intriguer, than he became himself an Indian intriguer.…
poet, short story writer, novelist, and artist Rabindranath Tagore, who in 1913 was awarded the Nobel Prize in Literature.
Where knowledge is free; Where the world has not been broken up into fragments by narrow Domestic walls
Man is often compelled by circumstances to undertake cruel deeds but true humanity is to forget them. What remains eternal with man for which he builds temples and monasteries it is surely not violence. Herein is the essential Tagore.
Sitting in a hotel room in Jakarta, up early with jet lag. Particularly fun to be in Asia when I am reading Robert D. Kaplan's Monsoon. Monsoon is a history of the Indian Ocean beginning with the early Omani traders who discovered India and moving forward in time to the current geo-political strategic issues faced by both India and the U.S.
Reading one of my favorite newspapers, the Jakarta Post. Forgot how much I enjoyed this newspaper. Excellent Asian news coverage drawn from articles in other Asian newspapers. Very balanced coverage of only important issues. Today's Jakarta Post had a good article from the Tokyo Yomiuri Shimbum on the U.S. debt crisis and a very thoughtful article on Pakistan as a "rogue state" from Bangkok's The Nation. Reading these articles makes one realize that the problem with U.S. newspapers is as much about the coverage as the new technology.
Reading excerpts of poetry by Rabindranath Tagore, early 20th century Indian Nobel Laureate in literature. Realize I am not getting wiser. I just re-state ideas from a better quality of thinker. Plan to devote more future SF posts to India.
Have decided I am a syncretist. Look it up in the dictionary. Typepad on the iPad does not allow linking, which is why this week's posts will have no links.
It is now confirmed that this fall I will be teaching a Monday night masters level course at the FIU Engineering School. Theme will be entrepreneurship and course will be on developing a business concept and writing a business plan. Special thanks to Professor C.C.Chen for making this possible and to the unnamed advisor who put him in touch with me. Looking forward to working with the engineering students, who always had great presentations in the FIU business plan competition.
Recently I began reading an excellent blog, UX Magazine, that talks about design, web design and user interface. The posts are comparable in quality to Frog Design, the best blog on design that I have found so far. My fascination with design as a means to better understand entrepreneurship and innovation is briefly explained here and a quick search of SF shows 40 posts on design.
A recent UX Magazine post discusses Frank Gehry, arguably the greatest architect of modern times. In the article they describe Gehry as follows:
"Over and over again you see this persistent iterative discipline within his works. In his exhaustive explorations of new materials and his highly collaborative critiques, each step in the process reveals new strengths and weaknesses that can be added to, taken away, or left alone—a continuous cycle of exploration, critique, and iteration that constantly challenges the interpretation of the product."
"Ultimately, iteration is one’s ability to know what to throw away and what to keep in order to move closer to one’s goal."
This last quote particularly caught my attention. This is a re-statement of one of my favorite approaches to innovation--relax the assumption. In the "relax the assumption" approach to problem solving one identifies a key assumption and then relaxes that assumption. For example, software applications resident on PCs. Relax the assumption about the app resident on the computer and you might get cloud computing, software-as-a-service, video distribution, browser-based applications, etc. More on this method is here.
Now that I can cite Frank Gehry for "relax the assumption" I feel even better about this concept.
The UX article goes into Gehry's design methodology in much greater detail and discusses three principles in all his work. Well worth reading if you design anything or are interested in how world class thinkers approach problems. Remember, as Marvin Minsky says, when you see a great idea understand the process that produced the idea.
Recently I wrote a very popular post on Brazil--ABDI Presentation on the Future of Brazil--that discussed a government presentation on the competitiveness of Brazil. A friend sent me some similar statistics on Mexico.
Based on statistics from the International Monetary Fund:
Mexico is the 14th largest economy in the world and the 2nd largest in Latin America
Mexico is the 11th most populous country with 107.6 million inhabitants
Mexico had per capita income of US$ 8,096 in 2009
The Secretaria de Desarollo Social, a minister level position responsible for social development in Mexico, provides the following statistics:
54% of Mexicans live in poverty
24% earn less than US$ 2 per day
The poor are highly concentrated in the indigenous populations and the states where they live
The middle class in Brazil is roughly the same percentage as the poor in Mexico. Herein lies the problem for Mexico, for its people and its economic competitiveness. A large middle class is required to truly build a modern country.
Some additional statistics on poverty and social issues in Mexico are here. (Spanish)
Image via Wikipedia
