Mark Zuckerberg’s letter to investors in Facebook’s IPO filing solidified how they think about the world:

People sharing more – even if just with their close friends or families – creates a more open culture and leads to a better understanding of the lives and perspectives of others. We believe that this creates a greater number of stronger relationships between people, and that it helps people get exposed to a greater number of diverse perspectives.

Facebook’s goal is to increase how much people “share” their information, to create a more “open” world where people are more connected. It’d be easy to quip that of course they want this, because it’s good business for them, but I don’t think that’s the way causation flows here. I’ve no doubt they believe that. And that’s the problem with it.

To do this, Facebook sees themselves as a sort of utility which connects the world and that everything is built on top of. Everything else—applications, games, services—should be built upon Facebook, because they are the one place you can go to get access not only to nearly every individual, but also to their personal information (metadata, if you’d like), and their relationship with every other individual. Facebook is a utility which allows you to tap into what they like to call the social graph, or the network map of societies.

My issue is with the idea of an “open” society, where people make most of their information public. Zuckerberg believes this society is superior, because the world will also be more honest and transparent, and we will be able to learn from differing perspectives. Perhaps. But as I argued in September 2010, an open society begins to breakdown the barrier between the private and public. In an open society, sharing becomes a part of the doing itself. If you’re seeing a movie, you post about it, along with who’s there with you; if you’re listening to a band, you let Spotify post it for you; if you’re eating dinner at a new, really cool restaurant, you haven’t really been there until you check-in.

Once the sharing is a part of the doing, you no longer consider whether to do something in the isolation of whether you want to do it. When sharing is a part of the package, you also consider how whatever it is you’re doing will reflect on you. You’ll consider what the general public’s, or your network’s, standards are for it. In that piece, I wrote:

To exist as individuals, we depend on private space to think and experiment without judgment by the public, and to judge the public by our standards. It is only within this space that we can define who we are as separate individuals from the greater society we exist in.

As that space decreases—as we begin sharing more and more of our interests, desires, hopes, fears, goals and what we are doing at any given moment—these factors, uniquely ours, will increasingly become the public’s. They will become the public’s to judge, compare, laude or criticize, and decreasingly our own characteristics, thoughts and beliefs. Rather than judge the outside world based on their own standards, individuals would judge themselves by the public’s standards. Individuals would be outsiders to themselves, looking in and measuring by everyone else’s standards.

That sounds hyperbolic, I admit. But I don’t think it is. As the amount we share increases, we begin to internalize the “public’s” standards next to our own, and at some point, it’s difficult to separate the two. Rather than creating a world filled with more diversity and variety and different perspectives, we create a networked groupthink, where heretics—diversity—is immediately found, criticized, and repressed.

You could argue that people should be stronger-willed and thicker-skinned. Maybe that’s so, and maybe that’s possible, when your identity is already formed. But imagine growing up in this open world, trying to figure out exactly who you are. Social pressure to conform on adolescents growing up in a pre-Internet world was already terribly high, so imagine trying to find new music, books, ideas and hobbies where you not only can share everything you do, but you’re expected to. Forming your identity requires experimentation with a variety of different things, seeing what you like and what you don’t, and that’s something which is inherently private, because you really aren’t sure yet what it is you like. But when that’s public, the overwhelming pressure will be to go along with whatever happens to be the social trend at that moment, to protect yourself from public ridicule. And not sharing isn’t much of an option, either, when the social norm is to share.

Tom Vanderbilt on the autonomous car:

Levandowski has a point. I was briefly nervous when Urmson first took his hands off the wheel and a synthy woman’s voice announced coolly, “Autodrive.” But after a few minutes, the idea of a computer-driven car seemed much less terrifying than the panorama of indecision, BlackBerry-fumbling, rule-flouting, and other vagaries of the humans around us—including the weaving driver who struggles to film us as he passes.

We are undoubtedly moving toward cars that drive themselves without any human input. Autonomous cars sort of symbolize new technology that, on the one hand, excites me because of the possibilities, the efficiency gains, the open parking spaces, the safety, the sheer excitement of creating a car which can drive itself—but it also worries me, because I wonder how that changes society and who we are.

A society where most everyone uses autonomous cars is also a society where being able to drive a car is a lot like being able to ride a horse—a quaint, cute skill to have. It’s a society where we may no longer enjoy driving down highway one through Big Sur, or along an empty desert highway at night, because most people may not even own a car, and if they do, they certainly aren’t driving it themselves. They’re passengers, distracted by other things like iPhones or iPads or Kindles or whatever else they’re playing with, because taking a car is now just free time.

I suppose it’s a bit odd to find pleasure in driving a few thousand pound piece of gasoline-burning metal, itself operated by computers, along a mountain or desert road and deriving some kind of relaxation or even meditation in it. Of course, the car itself was a huge technological change which completely upset the norms which came before it and, I’m sure, led to similar fears about what that change meant. And of course, as things change, we’ll adapt, and find new ways to enjoy ourselves.

Yet there’s also something utterly serene about driving down an empty desert road at night, perfectly awake and aware. It’s one of the few things left in our lives where we aren’t constantly bombarded by text messages, alerts, status updates, the urge to see what’s going on in the world, and where, because we aren’t bombarded by it and we must be focused on operating the car, we are actually left alone to think. That is freeing, and that is worth protecting. And so while change might be a natural part of life, it’s also true that we should try to protect that. Not protect driving in particular, but make time for those kinds of moments, and create ways for them to exist, even when we could be checking Twitter while our cars drive themselves.

Apple announced three things today: textbooks for iPad, a new iTunes U app for teachers to manage classes and for taking them, and a free iBooks authoring application for the Mac.

I’m going to talk about the iTunes U app and textbooks, but I do want to say that this is incredibly exciting. Apple is trying to re-make education, and it’s very clear that this is something that means a lot to them. This isn’t just another business opportunity—it’s a chance to do something great and improve people’s lives. Apple is the only company with the platform, resources and passion to completely change how we learn in school, and they recognize it. What they announced today is the best example of why Apple is different than every other consumer electronics company. Their goal is not to make and sell devices. Their goal is to make the world better, and however cliché that sounds, that really is their goal.

iTunes U

Before, iTunes U was a section on the iTunes store with lectures from various schools and organizations across the world. Now, iTunes U is also an iOS application with direct access to those materials—and also a place for managing courses. Teachers can upload their class’s syllabus, books, handouts (documents, presentations, PDFs, web links), quizzes, assignments and media, and it’s all organized into a single place for students. Students can also take notes for each class within it, but the feature-set is so basic I don’t see this being very important.

But being able to manage classes within a single application is a big deal, both for K-12 and college students. When I was a kid, what I struggled with most was keeping track of all of the assignments and handouts from each class. Papers would get buried at the bottom of my backpack or I would lose them altogether. That’s not only bad for the student, but it’s also bad for the teacher, because they have to keep copies of every handout around for students who lose it and deal with students who aren’t prepared for class because they didn’t complete their assignment or didn’t bring it. If they’re using the iTunes U application, teachers and students won’t have to worry about it, because everything will always be on their iPad.

That’s less of an issue for college students, of course, but having each class’s presentations and materials with you at all times, able to look something up or study, is incredibly convenient.

The bigger picture for iTunes U is Apple’s created a very convincing way for people to take classes online. We can take classes online now, but it’s a terrible experience at many schools. Students still need to buy textbooks, and the class is managed through something like Blackboard or Moodle, which are rather bad. Because the experience is so bad, online classes tend to be something people suffer through for the credit, rather than something engaging that they learn from.

iTunes U could change that, because it’s actually nice to use. Everything is in one place and well-organized. It’s hard to overstate how important that is for a student: because everything is in one place and they know how to use it, there’s much less mental overhead for figuring out what they’re supposed to do. They just do it. That’s especially important when you’re taking a course online, because whether the student does their studying and assignments depends on their motivation to do so.

Textbooks

The new iBooks application includes digital textbooks, with books from McGraw-Hill, Pearson Education and Houghton Mifflin Harcourt. These aren’t static books, either—they’re what you’d get if you combined an Inkling textbook’s capabilities with Push Pop Press’s UI concepts. Textbooks can include video, Keynote presentations, 3D images, interactive images (for example, you can inspect different parts of a cell membrane) and chapter reviews.

Those interactive elements are important, because textbooks can more effectively convey certain types of information that’s difficult to do on a static page, but what’s most important is how good the reading experience is, and how easy it is to take notes. We’ve had digital textbooks for a while on the desktop, but they were never very good for those two reasons: they were difficult to read and take notes with. After using one of Apple’s new textbooks, though, they nailed it. Text is clear and, well, easy to read. Taking notes and highlighting text is easier in iBooks than it is in a real book; to highlight something, you just slide your finger from where you want the highlight to start to where you want it to end, and to making a note is just as easy.

iBooks also has a study cards feature, which takes the textbook’s glossary and highlighted items and turns them into flash cards, and it works really well. It’s a perfect example of what makes digital textbooks so convincing.

And textbooks are $14.99 each, or less. $14.99. Fourteen dollars and ninety-nine cents. Less than a night at the movie theatre. I’ve paid $250 for a single textbook before. $14.99 is what’s known as a big deal.

This isn’t exciting because Apple’s the first company to create worthwhile digital textbooks. That honor goes to Inkling. It’s exciting because Apple’s the only company that is in a position to completely change how we learn, and iBooks certainly has the power to do so. For the first time ever, elementary and high school students will be able to replace twenty pounds of books with a one-and-a-half pound device. They won’t need to decide between bringing a textbook home for homework and a backpack that strains their back. They won’t have to worry about forgetting a book. It’ll all be in a paper-sized computer that they can carry with them everywhere they go.

Thank you, he said. Maybe you don’t need me to say it, because I think you know, I think we’ve always understood each other, in that quiet and unacknowledged way, where you don’t say much but I know exactly what you’re saying, what you really mean—but I want to say thank you, he said, looking out into the distance for a second, beyond her, eyes unfocused, then back. Isn’t it funny that when you have something, you don’t realize what it is? That it’s something that won’t ever exist again, and you should thank God or nature or providence, or whatever it is—every second you have it, and every second afterward, too, because you had it, you were lucky enough to have that moment in time?

You infuriated me. You talked too much for too long. You made me listen, when I am the one who likes to talk. We infuriated each other. We argued about gun regulations, we argued about music, we argued about whether a restaurant was any good. You had to be right, and so did I, so everything was a potential debate just waiting for a spark. When you thought I was wrong, you said so. If you thought what I said was bullshit, he said, you said so. And when you thought what I was doing was right, you said so, too, because all you said is what you thought. Thank you.

You and I, he continued, were friends for eight years, through high school and college, and—the edges of his lips arced up slightly—wasn’t there a sort of strange symmetry there? You had such a difficult time in high school, you know, that stuff a lot of people go through then, not sure where your place was, who you were sort of, and we talked and talked, and I tried to listen and understand, but I probably wasn’t very good. And in the last year, I went through something where what I thought was my purpose dissolved and I wasn’t sure anymore—and you told me I needed to get stronger, what I was doing was right, and everything that happened would be for the better, that I’m capable of great things and I should achieve them—and I deserve someone great, too. You made me believe it. And you made me laugh—really laugh—when I hadn’t for weeks. Thank you, he said.

Between the tournaments, the classes and the lunch breaks, the movies, the breakfasts, the bon fires, the long conversations, the drives, the concerts, God—we had more good moments than any two friends could ask for. We did. A lot happened in that time, didn’t it? You and I graduated from high school, stopped speaking for a few years because of a disagreement (and doesn’t it seem so silly now?), you graduated from UCLA in three years, I started graduate school, we both had long relationships, we started speaking again the year before—calmer people, more willing to listen, less arguments, but that same understanding, that never goes away, I think—and you talked me through those few months where I didn’t know what was up and what was down, like we had never stopped talking.

Thank you, he said. A calmness rolled over him, like a slow tide inching along, because he had finally told her what he never had—the calmness that comes when a task of great importance is finished. But under this was a splinter, a small bit of pain almost unnoticed but unmistakably there, because he knew he would wake up soon. Thank you, he said one last time. Thank you for that time you were here, for that time we were friends, and I hope you knew what it meant to me.

Tim Ricchuiti takes exception with my characterization of Greece, Italy and Spain’s problem as being too much debt:

Not quite. It’s not the heavy weight of debt (as Krugman has posted about at length the past week, most notably in this column) that’s causing European nations to struggle. What’s causing those nations to struggle is their inability (until recently) to finance that debt at any sort of tenable rate (7% or under). The reason those governments couldn’t finance their debt is that investors don’t want to purchase debt that might not be paid back. The reason the debt might not be paid back is that, unlike the case of the United States, Great Britain, Finland, and various developing nations, European countries like Spain, Italy, and yes, Greece, can’t print their own money (their own money being Euros). Therefore, they’re at risk of not being able to pay back their Euro-denominated debt. The United States, on the other hand, will never be unable to print dollars, and will always be able to pay back its dollar-denominated debt.

Greece and Italy used substantial amounts of debt to sustain their welfare states, and while their economies are doing reasonably well, there’s no problem—they can roll over their debt before it comes due at similar interest rates and everything works out fine. The problem they now face is their economies are not doing well at all, tax revenue has decreased, and thus their deficits have shot up as they continue to fund their expensive government programs.

As their deficits have continued to grow, and their debt has continued to grow as a percentage of GDP, investors became afraid that they would not be able to pay their debt. Which is why, as Tim says, investors would not purchase their new debt at a sustainable rate: because their debt burden is too high.

Tim argues that this is only a problem because Greece and Italy are on the euro—rather than their own currency—they cannot “print” more money, that is, devalue their currency so the past debts are worth less now than they were then and are thus more affordable to pay.¹ Tim further argues that the U.S. will never have this problem, because since we do control our own currency, and our debt is denominated in our currency, we can inflate our currency to reduce the magnitude of our debts.

That’s perfectly accurate, but that does not happen in a vacuum. Everything else is not held equal. Investors will factor the risk of intentional inflation into their investments, and expect higher interest rates for future debts, too. Perhaps Greece and Italy (and the U.S., if we don’t right our ship in the interim) will leave the euro, re-denominate their debt, and pay their existing debt of a smaller magnitude. But what happens when Greece and Italy go back to those same investors, who just received substantially less than they were supposed to from their debt, and ask them to purchase their new debt? It’s going to be expensive, and unless Greece’s and Italy’s economies begin growing strongly, they’ll have the same problem all over again.

I never intended “…the heavy weight of their debt” to be a conclusive summation of Italy and Greece’s problems. Their problem is a confluence of a very poor economy, low tax revenues as a result, and debt used to finance an expensive welfare state. It’s but a piece. A very large, very heavy, piece.

1. Let’s set aside normative criticisms of this, which are substantial—”inflating” your currency for the purpose of making past debts more affordable is essentially stealing from creditors, because in real terms, they receive less than they were supposed to. [↩]

Clayton Morris hears that Apple’s January event will be about iTunes U and the textbook project Steve Jobs was working on, as mentioned in his biography.

Walter Isaacson wrote:

In fact Jobs had his sights set on textbooks as the next business he wanted to transform. He believes it as an $8 billion a year industry ripe for digital destruction. He was also struck by the fact that many schools, for security reasons, don’t have lockers, so kids have to lug a heavy backpack around. “The iPad would solve that,” he said. His idea was to hire great textbook writers to create digital versions, and make them a feature of the iPad. In addition, he held meetings with the major publishers, such as Pearson Education, about partnering with Apple. “The process by which states certify textbooks is corrupt,” he said. “But if we can make the textbooks free, and they come with the iPad, then they don’t have to be certified. The crappy economy at the state level will last for a decade, and we can give them an opportunity to circumvent that whole process and save money. (pp. 509-10).

I am incredibly excited, if not surprised, that Apple is working on a project so integral to education. Our education system, from elementary school to university, is very much broken, both in its overall intent and how it uses technology. Education today is too expensive and too irrelevant.

Fortunately, though, that also means there’s huge improvements we can make. Apple has quietly built an incredible educational resource, iTunes U. Anyone, for free, can download lectures from some of the world’s best universities and watch them on their own time. They can be taught how to develop iOS applications by Apple engineers at Stanford, cosmology from UC Irvine, economics from UC Berkeley, China’s history after the collapse of the empire from Harvard University, or even how to bake and make pastries from the International Culinary Schools at the Art Institutes.

It’s an incredible resource, one that we should probably all take advantage of more often. But what it also shows is that education does not necessarily mean attending a single university, choosing a narrow major to focus on, purchasing a $200 textbook, sitting through several lectures each week and taking a midterm and a final. It could still be all of these things, but it doesn’t have to be.

We need to begin finding new models for education, because our current one is failing us terribly, and certainly not sustainable, either. I don’t know what Apple’s planning nor the extent of it, but I’m glad to see that they are trying to improve education.

Google said that they are generating $2.5 billion of revenue from mobile devices, and some mistook that to mean Android is responsible for $2.5 billion of revenue. It isn’t—that includes search ad revenue, AdSense and AdMob, all of which also generate revenue from iOS devices, and purchases from Android’s app market revenue.

The Macalope points out just how small that means revenue generated from Android is:

“Mobile” does not equal “Android.” Some Android fan sites also got this wrong, but “mobile” means ad revenue from all mobile operating systems. Further, because we know that about two thirds of Google’s mobile ad revenue comes from the iPhone we can figure that Android is generating at most $833 million in ad revenue a year for Mountain View. That is, of course, chump change compared to what Apple makes on the iPhone. Still, Android’s winning. Somehow.

“…two-thirds of Google’s mobile ad revenue comes from the iPhone” is somewhat misleading, because Google actually said that two-thirds of mobile searches comes from iOS, but it should be accurate enough. As the Macalope points out, this means of Google’s $2.5 billion of mobile revenue, only $833 million of it derives from Android devices.

That’s just three percent of Google’s $29.3 billion of revenue in 2010, and the 2011 figure will be much higher—so the actual percentage of total revenue will be closer to two percent.

Without data on how much Google spends on developing Android, there’s no way to judge how profitable it is for Google, but however much it is, it contributes almost nothing to their profitability as a whole.

The typical argument made for why Google develops Android is it expands the mobile market, so there are many more people using Google search and other services from their devices, and thus generating ad revenue for Google—which is their entire business. Yet the above shows that even with 190 million Android device activations, Google is hardly benefiting from Android.

iOS has completely overwhelmed Apple’s prior businesses, while Android contributes next to nothing to Google’s revenue.

You decide who’s winning.

I posted this last year, but I want to discuss it again. From a cut section of Ayn Rand’s The Fountainhead:

After the explosion, his voice, his hands moving slowly as he spoke, like planes smoothing unseen walls, raised broad, clean streets and houses in the likeness of what those within should be and would be made to become by these houses: straight and simple and honest, wise and clear in their purpose, copying nothing, following nothing but the needs of those living within–and let the needs of no one living be those of his neighbor! To give them, Cameron was saying, what they want, but first to teach them to want–to want with their own eyes, their own brains, their own hearts. To teach them to dream–then give the dream to them in steel and mortar, and let them follow it with dreams in muscle and blood.

That’s what design is: a grand symphony in physical form, the physical embodiment of a brilliantly clear thesis, and one that inspires anyone who sees it through its integrity.

We are used to the idea that design is utilitarian: well-designed things are unswervingly designed to fulfill their purpose. This all feels very cold and calculated; some need is recognized, and an object is designed to satisfy it.

Well-designed things do indeed fulfill their purpose, but this formulation of what it means for something to be well-designed ignores that design inherently reflects the designer’s principles. Something that is truly brilliant transcends its purpose and becomes something more. Dvorak’s The New World Symphony is not sublime because it is well-composed, but because it is so viscerally beautiful, that it cannot be fully expressed in words. It can only be heard, and felt.

And that is what design ought to be. The principles which led to it should be so evident that the person viewing, hearing or using it feel them, feels the creator’s heart in it, and is inspired to put that same level of dedication into everything they do, too.

When I listen to that symphony, I know that great things are possible. I know that we are all capable of dreaming wondrous things, and of making them reality. I know it, because that symphony exists.

Chris O’Brien fears Apple’s success was dependent much more on Jobs than we have recognized, and thus he thinks their “golden age is over”:

That is the question the book left me asking: Who is the person at Apple who will wake up at 3 a.m. and realize that the latest product is all wrong? Will that person have the courage and standing to walk into Apple, announce he “doesn’t love the latest product” and persuade the company to scrap it and start from scratch after months of work? Jobs did that over and over in his career, Isaacson notes, and his charisma and self-confidence made even folks like Ive willing to follow these gut-wrenching U-turns.

I don’t think this issue is settled.

Jobs focused on making sure Apple is not dependent on one person. The first thing he did was make sure that Apple only hires really, really talented people that genuinely care about what the company is doing. Hiring smart people who believe in the company’s goal is the first thing that should be done, and they have no problem there. Second, Apple is organized to make creating great products as much of a reproducible process as possible. Each department isn’t a self-contained unit where they look out for their own interests above the company’s; rather, they’re integrated into a whole. The online store team, for example, doesn’t control the photos used on the store, and Jony Ive’s design team works on the entire company’s products, rather than just for a certain product division. Third, they’ve tried to capture management’s decision-making process into a set of case studies so the company’s next generation of leaders can be systematically exposed to how they think—and the cases are taught by Apple’s executives.

Fourth, and most important, Jobs’s obsession with making the product as perfect as possible and doing truly incredible things permeates the company. That standard of work is expected of everyone not just by each employee’s manager, but by the employee. They expect it of themselves. This, long-term, is what can make Apple successful—this feeling of what Apple stands for and exists to do. Everyone understands it, and everyone wants to honor it.

That’s the common purpose that’s directed Apple since Jobs returned and has made sure everyone is working toward the same goal. It’s a hell of a lot easier to keep egos and the tempting desire to put your own career goals above the company’s in check when everyone has a shared purpose. Jobs perfectly embodied this, because he started the company and embedded it with this obsession with making great things, and also because he unswervingly stuck to it. Jobs rarely wavered from it and thus, as the company’s leader, kept everyone in the company pointed in the same direction and working toward the same goal.

Unfortunately, though that is probably the most important part of what makes Apple such a fabulously great company, it is also the most ephemeral. Apple is at no risk of losing it in the next few years, but as time passes and that direct connection to Jobs passes, too, it will be all too easy for it to begin fading. What happens when Apple’s management is firmly divided over a decision, but there’s no one that holds everyone’s utmost respect to make the final decision while retaining their reverence, and thus their dedication? It’s very easy for someone’s ego to get bruised when they lose a battle they feel very strongly about and decide there’s better opportunities elsewhere. It’s easy to make it about your career, rather than the company’s best interest, when there’s no one that inspires that respect.

Worse, this could result in the organization ossifying into different departments, with their employees loyal to it rather than the company. If that common purpose begins to fade and become more abstract than it is now, that could happen. Why look out for the interests of the company as a whole when your job is tied to the project you work on? This process starts slowly, subtly, and innocuously—but once it’s done, there’s little to be done.

What can be done, though, is to make sure it never starts. This doesn’t mean glorifying Jobs as some sort of god amongst mortals, because that would be just as debilitating. Rather, they have to continue to do justice to the common purpose he built. Take big risks when it means you could do something incredible. Obsess over making products perfect. Only hire the best, and the people that have that same excitement about making great things. Don’t put up with people who are only there to advance their career. And don’t ever waver from this—it has to be instilled in the company, every day, because a company is an ever-changing combination of people, and they constantly need it reinforced.

I don’t know what will happen. I suspect that Apple will be successful for quite a while regardless, but building an organization that can perpetuate its values is very, very hard, and so it is possible Apple will degenerate into a more normal kind of company at some point. But they have the chance to be one of the few organizations that institutionalize excellence and can reproduce it over decades.

Rather than review iOS 5, I want to write a little about why I think Siri is important and what it means for the future of computing and the web. If you’d like to read a great iOS 5 review, Shawn Blanc will have you covered, I bet.

Every few months, I re-watch Apple’s 1987 Knowledge Navigator video, a concept for what computing should be like. I watch it because it reminds me what technology is about: making people’s lives dramatically better, and creating a sense of magic or wonder in doing so.

In the video, there is a tablet device that uses touch input, recognizes natural language and acts on behalf of the user (e.g., “Call Diana at home”), and has networked data stores that allow people to find data with no effort searching for it (e.g., “Get data on the deforestation of the Amazon rainforest from 1992-1995″).

That video was incredibly forward-looking and insightful, but with iOS 5 and the iPhone 4S, Apple is finally releasing the Knowledge Navigator. Its name is Siri. It isn’t as powerful, but we’re almost there. For me, this may be the most exciting thing Apple’s ever done, because it is moving toward realizing one of my favorite dreams.

Most articles about Siri have focused on Siri’s natural language recognition and how revolutionary it is. While it is integral, it is not the important part. It is the means, not the end. Focusing on Siri’s natural language recognition is like focusing on the original iPhone’s multitouch input; while it is what allows the iPhone’s magic, it is not the magic itself.

What is magical about Siri is that it allows people to talk to a device and it does what they tell it to. You can now ask your iPhone, “How many ounces are in three gallons?” and get an answer. You can tell our phone to schedule dinner at Chego in Los Angeles with your wife at 7pm on Friday and it will tell you that you already are going to see “50/50″ at that time. You can ask it if you’ll need an umbrella tomorrow, and it will tell you that, yes, you do.

What really excites me about this is not that I will be able to more easily create reminders, appointments and respond to text messages. (Although I am pretty excited about that.) What excites me is that this is the first version of what we saw in the Knowledge Navigator video: a device that I can ask for any kind of information, and because it (1) understands what I am asking for and (2) connects to different online services which provide data, it can give me that information. This is not just a vision for the future of computing devices, but the future of the web, too.

Interconnected and Semantic Magic

Currently, while the web contains an overwhelmingly-large amount of data, it is basically disparate and in silos. To find Microsoft’s financial performance in 1995, for example, I have to use a search engine to find a website that has that data and, if I can’t find one, I have to compute it myself using their financial statements (which I have to find as well). Siri is a dramatic step away from this.

All that data is there, but we have to work to find it. What we are moving toward, though, is not having to find it at all. Instead, because that data is made available through APIs,¹ I can simply ask it for data, and it won’t just return a source, but it will return the data itself in a useful format.

Let’s use Microsoft as an example again. Right now, if I wanted to see their operating profit as a percentage of sales from 1995-2005, I would need to find their financial statements, locate the data contained in them, and make the calculations myself. If I wanted to do anything useful, I would have to import it into a spreadsheet application (most likely by hand). Rather than doing this myself, though, I could just ask a future version of Siri for Microsoft’s operating margin between 1995 and 2005, and it would return that data to me in a table and chart.

Then I can ask it to compare Microsoft’s operating margin over that period compared to Hewlett-Packard’s, Dell’s and Apple’s.

That’s a big deal. That’s what happens when natural language recognition is integrated with web services. And that’s why Siri is important: it is a large step toward the future Apple’s Knowledge Navigator video envisioned, where not only do we have access to the greatest source of information in the history of the world, but we can we can access that data simply by asking for what we want to see, and we can manipulate the data just as easily.

We have all of the world’s data available, and there is no good reason we shouldn’t be able to access it effortlessly. Making that reality will make our lives easier, but more importantly, it will allow us to be even more imaginative and insightful, because the cost of getting data to analyze and compare and find patterns will be much lower than it is now.

I love business and technology because they are where philosophy, literature, art and science intersect to push us forward. Philosophers tell us what the good is, writers and artists tell us what the beautiful and inspiring is, scientists make it technically possible, and business make it economically feasible. Without science and business, philosophy, literature and art are only ideas in our minds; without philosophy, literature and art, scientists and businesses are directionless as to what they should do. But together, they change the world.

Siri is a wonderful example of this, and it’s why I love what Apple’s doing. They are not just creating the future. They are creating a better future for us all based on a beautiful vision they believe in. What’s more exciting than that?

1. Or, more preferably, some kind of service that centralizes data from across the web and makes it all available through an API that returns it based on natural language. E.g., if I ask it for the United States’s tax revenue-to-GDP ratio from 1930-2005, it will connect to the different data stores it works with, find the appropriate source, and return the data in a useful format. This kind of service will require common data formats to be used and a way to semantically understand the data itself, which people are really good at, but computers just aren’t quite yet. [↩]

Starting October 31st, I am joining the Syndicate.

The Syndicate is a new RSS feed sponsorship network for technology, design, development and business writers. The network consists of nine sites, including Shawn Blanc, Marco Arment, Khoi Vinh, and Horace Dediu, and I am incredibly honored to be included.

My good friend Marcelo Somers created the Syndicate, and not only has he done a great job putting the network together, but he’s assembled a fantastic group of sponsors to start it off, and I’m really excited to be able to tell you about them. There’s only one week still available this year, so if you’d like to sponsor, I would jump on it quick. You can do so by visiting the website.

When I started writing TightWind in 2008, my hope was to, at some point, make enough income from it to continue spending the time on it that it deserves. I wanted to do so in a way, though, that is not just respectful of my readers, but gives them something useful. And that’s exactly what the Syndicate is going to be: I get to tell you about people that really excite me, and that I think will excite you, too.

I can’t wait for November.

I have written about many lessons we should learn from Steve Jobs and how he ran Apple, but the single most important lesson I learned from him is this: be genuine.

It is an incredibly simple phrase, but it is also incredibly meaningful. What I learned from Steve is I should follow my heart and do what’s meaningful to me, and when I choose to do something, I should put everything I have into it. There is no use doing something that doesn’t mean anything to me. This is the only life I have, and I want to make every second of it valuable.

I am so grateful for that lesson, and for living while he worked. He is the reason I studied business. He showed that business can be used to accomplish wonderful things for people, and can genuinely make people’s lives better. That’s what I want to do.

Beyond the products he helped build, I think Steve’s greatest legacy are the people who were influenced and inspired by him.

Let’s honor his work and his life by accomplishing our own triumphs. Let’s build incredible things, write fantastic stories, make beautiful music, dream a little bigger. Let’s create. Let’s put a dent in the universe.

Seth Godin argues we’re at a juncture in economic history, just like the rise of mass production in the twentieth century:

The industrial age, the one that started with the industrial revolution, is fading away. It is no longer the growth engine of the economy and it seems absurd to imagine that great pay for replaceable work is on the horizon.

This represents a significant discontinuity, a life-changing disappointment for hard-working people who are hoping for stability but are unlikely to get it. It’s a recession, the recession of a hundred years of the growth of the industrial complex.

Mass production of standardized goods—underpinned by workers doing very tightly defined jobs that can, with relatively minimal training, be done by anyone—provided incredible value. This was because up until then, goods were largely made individually with poorly defined standards and processes, so they were expensive and time consuming to make. Mass production made goods cheap and plentiful because the processes for making them were standardized so that anyone could do it. The twentieth century was almost entirely about turning people into cogs in a machine in order to squeeze as much efficiency out of each one as possible.

Because there were so many gains to be made by using mass production for goods, it helped create an explosion of economic growth and development and, along with it, jobs. We needed cogs for those production processes. This was very beneficial for workers; because there was so much value created by mass production, companies could afford to pay very respectable wages and salaries and provide long-term benefits, all while the worker was responsible for very little more than following a series of steps.

But those gains have now been used up. There’s no more potential for growth in mass production, except in countries where labor costs are lower than others, and that will be used up in time, too. In manufacturing, it’s a race toward eliminating cost as much as possible, and that inevitably means eliminating people altogether.

What Godin argues is that the idea of long-term, stable jobs where individuals are responsible for very little besides doing their very specific job—an idea we grew up believing to be true because that’s what we saw in the twentieth century—is a myth created by the temporary explosion of economic productivity unleashed by mass production. It isn’t something we can always have or something we will soon get back to after this recession is over. It no longer exists.

This means suffering for many people, as we are seeing. Our society has been built on the assumption that, if only we do well in school, there’ll be a stable and respectable job waiting for us. That is no longer the case, and now people will have to adjust to it. A high school diploma and a college degree is no longer a ticket to a comfortable future. Rather than simply put in the time and work to be comfortable, we must now find insights into the world that will make us all better off. That’s the new frontier.

The Age of Insight

The nineteenth century was the age of the industrial revolution, the twentieth the age of mass production, and the twenty-first will be a new age, too, of the same scale.

Godin continues:

When everyone has a laptop and connection to the world, then everyone owns a factory. Instead of coming together physically, we have the ability to come together virtually, to earn attention, to connect labor and resources, to deliver value.

Stressful? Of course it is. No one is trained in how to do this, in how to initiate, to visualize, to solve interesting problems and then deliver. Some see the new work as a hodgepodge of little projects, a pale imitation of a ‘real’ job. Others realize that this is a platform for a kind of art, a far more level playing field in which owning a factory isn’t a birthright for a tiny minority but something that hundreds of millions of people have the chance to do.

Whereas the last century was about making goods—food, clothing, cars, toys—cheap and plentiful, the twenty-first century will be about making insights into what will truly make us better off.

It was easy to make huge gains in quality of life in the early twentieth century: providing any kind of affordable clothing, food and car was a giant leap forward. We can’t make those same gains now. That trick only works once.

Now, we have to be smarter. Now, we have to figure out what’s a better use of resources. We have to figure out what kind of car will both be more environmentally efficient and delight its owners. We have to think about completely disparate fields—say, manufacturing, software development, design, and psychology—and combine them to make products that conform themselves to humans, rather than making humans contort themselves to the product in order to use it. We must think about big ideas—ideas that will change society and how people interact—and the little ideas that merely improve people’s lives just a little.

We have to think. This is an age where all of our gains will come from insights into what make products, services, processes, and structures fundamentally better for us. Whereas the twentieth century was about standardization and following a series of steps in a well-defined process, in this new century, there are no defined processes. Everything is to be questioned, re-thought, re-made, or even thrown out altogether.

This century is about having a vision for the way things should be, and the audacity to make it so. Just a decade or two ago, it took immense amounts of capital to launch an idea that could change the world. Now, it takes a few people with an idea, a computer, and the willingness to learn how to build it.

The only thing holding us back now is ourselves.¹ We are all artists, designers, manufacturers, managers, musicians, writers, creators—if we choose to be. And that is the fundamental difficulty of this new age: we all are responsible for our own success.

The twentieth century had a well-trodden path for people to follow: you graduate from high school, go to college, you’ll get a respectable and stable job, and you’ll live in comfort. Our responsibility did not extend beyond following that path.

That will no longer work. We will all have to take responsibility for ourselves, our future, and our ideas. We have to learn to think this way—to think critically of the things we see, of how they could be better and how we could make it so, and thus to see opportunities for ourselves.

We have to change how we think to be successful in this century, and we have to re-design our schools to prepare people for it. I have some ideas for how to do that, but what’s obvious is we aren’t ready for it yet. Not even close. We’re still preparing kids for the last century.

This is a new age, and we better start thinking about it that way.

1. This is not, unfortunately, true for everyone. Poverty and lack of opportunity takes on a new meaning in this century. Rather than hold people back from an education and access to well-paying jobs, it now means holding people back from education that gives them the opportunity to discover a passion from something and discover a way to make something better and, therefore, make a living for themselves, because they are too busy simply trying to survive. This creates two very different classes in society, and is a fundamental threat to it. This, I think, will be one of the great challenges for our century: how do we not only revamp our educational system for a new economic age, but how do we truly make education available to everyone so everyone can participate? [↩]

Zach Epstein on what Windows 8 promises:

But the iPad was only the beginning.

Apple paved the way but Microsoft will get there first with Windows 8. A tablet that can be as fluid and user friendly as the iPad but as capable as a Windows laptop. A tablet that can boot in under 10 seconds and fire up a full-scale version of Adobe Dreamweaver a few moments later. A tablet that can be slipped into a dock to instantly become a fully capable touch-enabled laptop computer. This is Microsoft’s vision with Windows 8, and this is what it will deliver.

Epstein, with just a bit of snark, calls this the “post post-PC” era, because he doesn’t think the iPad is a “post-PC” at all. He argues that because the iPad isn’t as good at doing “work”—spreadsheets, word processing, et cetera—that it isn’t what’s going to replace the PC.

Instead, he believes that Windows 8 tablets will. The PC is still the future, he argues, because it will allow us to do work as comfortably as before, while enjoying the benefits of a touch-based tablet for browsing the web, reading, watching video and playing games. He lays out this vision above.

What I think his vision actually points out, though, is Windows 8′s central problem: it takes no position, it has no central theme or integrity. This isn’t a vision so much as a refusal to choose between fundamentally different user interfaces. Rather, Microsoft decided to combine the PC’s mouse and keyboard-based user interface with the iPad’s touch-based interface and have the best of both worlds.

What makes the iPad so compelling is that it is designed to work for touch and for a simpler kind of computing. We don’t need to worry about the file system, whether a runaway process is eating up our device’s resources, or if a certain file happens to be on our device at that time. Apple’s vision for computing is one where the user doesn’t even need to remember they’re using a computer, because the device gets out of their way and allows them to do whatever it is they want to do. This applies both to the hardware (no vents or fans to remind users what’s going on inside), the operating system, and applications themselves. “Designed for touch” doesn’t simply mean that it works with touch, but that the application is fundamentally re-designed to be simpler to understand and use, so it’s not just functional, but a joy to use. I summarized this vision in April like this:

The technology is a means to an end, and it is best hidden away, so the device’s purpose becomes one-and-the-same with the device itself. Apple’s vision for post-PC devices is not to make personal computers mobile. Apple’s vision is to make the technology so seamless, so effortless to use, that people forget they are even using a computer—so invisible that all people see is the web, or their book, or their movie.

Apple is seeking to make the technology irrelevant, so we can use these devices to do—to make, to create, to be inspired from. Don’t worry about what processor or display it has. Just read. Just write. Just draw. Just do.

Because Apple’s built a device that is so compelling and so successful, current application types that don’t map well to it—things like spreadsheets—will be re-conceptualized to work within their vision.

In Microsoft’s vision, none of this is true. Their vision is for a continuation of the PC as we know it, where we deal with task managers, filesystems and interfaces primarily designed for the keyboard and mouse. In their version of the future of computing, we have full compatibility with past applications. We can use our current copies of PowerPoint, Excel, Word, Photoshop and Dreamweaver on our new tablets, while still enjoying the benefits of touch.

Perhaps I’ll be wrong when Windows 8 is released, but I don’t think this will be true. Instead, what we will have are keyboard and pointer-less Windows computers that also happen to have a touch layer for inconsequential things like checking the weather, playing a game, or browsing the web. “Real” work will still be done with traditional PC applications, and they will remain fundamentally the same. Why would software makers completely re-think their applications for touch—for post-PC devices—when they will run just fine on them? Why wouldn’t they simply re-work them a bit by making their UIs “touch-friendly” and call it good?

The problem with Microsoft’s vision isn’t the Metro UI, which is original and beautiful. The problem with their vision is that they don’t have one. Microsoft realized the iPad threatens the PC and thus their business and so now they’re trying to figure out how they can preserve the PC as it is while incorporating touch. This doesn’t come from a grand desire to unify the PC and the post-PC, but rather a desire to preserve their current business. If they had made a bet on the post-PC and based it entirely on Metro, like they did with Windows Phone 7, there would be good reason to laude Microsoft for not only creating an altogether new user interface, but for having the courage to say, yes, this is the future of computing, and of our company.

Instead, Microsoft’s said the past is the future. And that’s disappointing.

In the fourth season of Mad Men, Don Draper’s advertising agency loses Lucky Strike Cigarettes, their most important account. Their firm relies almost entirely on this account, and in one dinner meeting, it was gone.

How would you handle losing your largest client? Sterling Cooper Draper Pryce handled it by (1) trying to secure their relationship with current clients and (2) gaining new ones.

That sounds like a logical strategy; you make sure your current business stays with you, and then you go after more business. It didn’t work, however. Their current clients became afraid that SCDP wasn’t long for this world, and some decided to move to a different advertising firm, while potential new clients wanted to wait six months to see if SCDP was still around before doing business with them.

Losing their biggest client made them look weak, and sucking up to their current clients and potential new clients made them appear desperate. Their strategy assumed that losing Lucky Strike was in fact a weakness, and thus only confirmed it for their clients.

The agency was spiraling out of control. Because they lost Lucky Strike’s revenue, they couldn’t meet payroll without a loan from the bank, and they began laying off employees. Competing agencies were circling overhead, waiting to pick off clients. They were near death.

Draper, though, had an idea: turn a weakness into a strength. He took out a full-page ad in the New York Times and published an open letter titled “Why I’m Quitting Tobacco.”

He wrote that their agency helped sell cigarettes for 25 years, a product that kills people, but now that Lucky Strike’s taken their business to a different firm, he has a chance to help sell products that don’t kill people, and that SCDP will no longer take tobacco accounts. He went further than that; he then listed several competing agencies who will take tobacco accounts if people are interested.

They might still fail, but Draper gave them a chance to survive. That letter changed the rules of the game. When they were attempting to reassure current clients and gain new ones, they were playing by the rules that said losing your biggest client is a terrible event that means the death of your agency. No matter what they did under those rules, they would lose.

But after the letter, that was no longer true. Instead, losing Lucky Strike became a strength, an opportunity—a chance for them to make an idealistic stand against tobacco.

If you change perspective, sometimes what looks like the end of the world can actually be an opportunity for an even better tomorrow.