All Things Digital

A recent edition of Science featured a worrying paper by University of Chicago sociologist James A. Evans titled “Electronic Publication and the Narrowing of Science and Scholarship.” Seeking to learn more about how research is conducted online, Evans scoured a database of 34 million articles from science journals. He discovered a paradox: As journals begin publishing online, making it easier for researchers to find and search their contents, research tends to become more superficial.

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The rise of cloud computing raises a lot of legal issues, and one of the thorniest involves the variations in national laws governing the storage and use of personal and other information. Controls on data threaten, for instance, to prevent certain information from being stored in data centers outside a user’s home country, hence eroding some of the efficiencies promised by a global cloud.

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Over the past few years I’ve had an uncomfortable sense that someone, or something, has been tinkering with my brain, remapping the neural circuitry, reprogramming the memory. My mind isn’t going–so far as I can tell–but it’s changing. I can feel it most strongly when I’m reading. Immersing myself in a book or a lengthy article used to be easy. My mind would get caught up in the narrative or the turns of the argument, and I’d spend hours strolling through long stretches of prose. That’s rarely the case anymore. Now my concentration often starts to drift after two or three pages. I get fidgety, lose the thread, begin looking for something else to do. I feel as if I’m always dragging my wayward brain back to the text. The deep reading that used to come naturally has become a struggle.

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“I think [fixed prices] will disappear online, simply because it is possible–cheap and easy–to vary prices online.” That was MIT Media Lab’s Patti Maes in 1999, at a time when eBay’s business was booming and auctions were seen as the future of ecommerce. Flash forward 9 years, and BusinessWeek is today calling online auctions a dying breed, Nick Carr is wondering if auctions were a fad. Indeed, the fixed price (”Buy it Now” only) format is beginning to dominate eBay, and the company has taken recent steps push fixed price even harder. But the death knell of the online auction format is not eBay’s biggest problem–no, that would be the small exodus of sellers from the site.

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We already know that the famously cute story of eBay’s origin–founder Pierre Omidyar launched the site to help his fiancee trade the PEZ dispensers she collected–was a lie cooked up by a PR operative. We also know that the company’s vaunted “reputation system”–the foundation of what has long been perceived as a radically new kind of self-organizing and self-policing commercial community–has been crumbling.

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Oracle has enjoyed considerable success by rolling up the software side of the the now-mature client-server model of corporate computing. With its $13.9 billion acquisition of sluggish outsourcing giant EDS, Hewlett-Packard is playing the same game on the services side. It’s buying vast tracts of data-center space in which run the computers and other IT machinery that power the operations of lots of large companies and government agencies. The addition of EDS more than doubles the size of HP’s services business, giving it a scale closer to that of the leading IT outsourcing company, IBM.

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The inventor of LSD, Albert Hofmann, has joined the great Peter Max painting in the sky, but the dreams he spawned live on. Publisher and sometime savant Tim O’Reilly tells the BBC, on the occasion of the 15th anniversary of the open-sourcing of the World Wide Web, that a true “global consciousness” is at last emerging, thanks to the Net. “It really is going to happen,” he says, and “it’s going to happen mediated by computers.” It is, he continues, “the most profound change since the advent of literacy.” Might I just point out here that both LSD and the Web were invented in Switzerland?

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A new study, released Tuesday by McKinsey & Company, reveals in some of the clearest terms yet the sea change that is under way in business software. The consulting firm surveyed more than 850 corporate software buyers, from firms of all sizes, and found that software-as-a-service is rapidly “becoming mainstream,” with three-quarters of software buyers saying they are “favorably disposed to adopting SaaS platforms” for software development and deployment. The rapidly growing embrace of Web applications is leading, says McKinsey, to a fierce competitive battle, between “traditional mega-vendors and the larger SaaS incumbents,” for the future of the enterprise software business.

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As the Internet becomes our universal medium, it is reshaping what might be called the economics of culture. Because most common cultural goods consist of words, images, or sounds, which all can be expressed in digital form, they are becoming as cheap to reproduce and distribute as any other information product. Many of them are also becoming easier to create, thanks to the software and storage services provided through the Net and inexpensive production tools like camcorders, microphones, digital cameras and scanners. The flood of blogs, podcasts, video clips and MP3s, most available for free, testifies to the changed economics.

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There are an estimated half of a billion people in the world who surf the Net every day yet don’t own a computer. They depend on the public PCs available in cybercafes, which in many cities and countries remain the centers of personal computing. Cloud computing is ideally suited to these so-called cybernomads, as it can provide them with, in essence, a computer to call their own–a virtual desktop, or “Webtop,” that exists entirely in an online data center and hence can be accessed from any PC. Cybernomads can use their password-protected Webtops to run applications, store data, and share files with others. Webtops can provide an attractive alternative to the cheap laptops, like OLPC’s XO and Intel’s Classmate, in helping close the digital divide. Virtual PCs are more energy efficient than real PCs, they don’t wear out or require physical maintenance, and they can often be provided free, through ad-supported or other subsidized programs.

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You can get away with a three-letter initialism as a product name, but if you try to stretch it to five, you’re sunk. HD DVD? It never really had a chance, particularly when it was up against a snappy futuristic-sounding name like Blu-ray. If the Jetsons had decided to get a second dog to keep Astro company, they would have named it Blu-ray.

Can’t you picture Elroy throwing the happy pup some kind of electronic chew-toy gizmo?

Fetch, Blu-ray!

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When Google adopted “don’t be evil” as the cornerstone of its corporate code of conduct, what it really meant was “don’t be Microsoft.” The company’s loathing for its neighbor to the north was on display again today in a remarkably contemptuous broadside launched against Microsoft’s proposed acquisition of Yahoo by Google’s top lawyer, David Drummond. Drummond does not mince words. Microsoft’s “hostile bid,” he writes, is an attack on “the underlying principles of the Internet: openness and innovation.”

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We humans no longer have to struggle with just our own mind-body divide. Now, we also have to navigate the existential crises of the products we buy, which increasingly lead intellectual as well as physical lives. Descartes has arrived at the shopping mall.

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