All Google Glass apps to be web based: tidbit hiding in NY Times Bits Blog

Google Glass image from NT Times Bits blog

Google Emulates Apple in Restricting Apps for Glass - NYTimes.com:

This story from the Times' tech blog, is about restrictions on developers, but the real news for me was this:

"The apps, which will be called Glassware, will be cloud-based, like Web apps, as opposed to living on the device like cellphone apps. "

So, it appears that Google is going with the stateless future for Glass, a good sign, and an indication of their commitment to an ecosystem of web-delivered applications.


'via Blog this'

New York Times reports: the biggest cable network isn't cable, it's streaming video

More Cracks In TV’s Business Model - NYTimes.com:

This is an excellent article examining "unbundling," when consumer choice overrides the current business models of TV networks and other media outlets.  If you're read Infrics.com for a while, you'll see two big themes here:

--Greater consumer power and choice about media: The Era of You
As author David Carr points out, "Historically, once the consumer decides, it doesn’t matter what stakeholders want. They can’t stop what’s coming." 

--Decoupling of content from distribution and consumption: statelessness
Like many forms of media, legacy behavior is to preserve high profits by linking the art you buy (TV show, movie, book, application for your computer, music) to some form of distribution method (cable, iTunes, Google Play, physical DVD or CD) and to a fixed location or device for consumption (home TV set, movie theater, downloaded copy on your specific computer, tablet, or phone.)  

Unrealized across the board in the emerging scenario is the massive business and profit opportunity in digital content licensing that works with the stateless model, and allows the license purchaser to consume the art via the distribution model and on the device of their choosing.  

Let's keep watching this story: there's much more to come.

Mary Meeker calls us the "Asset-Light Generation." Consumers do their best to live stateless, even though the future is still arriving

Will we be burdened by technology, or will it free us?
Slide from KPCB

Kleiner Perkins analyst Mary Meeker has used a new term to describe our emerging tech world: "asset-light."  The slide shows us this idea in a snapshot. You can know a lot and do a lot with few encumbrances, and consumers are adopting asset-light behaviors rapidly.

With that idea, she has given a name to one of the central concepts of statelessness.  In the stateless future, data, applications, and device have been decoupled from each other. Because everything's always available, on every device, asset-light behavior is a natural outcome.

My take on that idea is this: consumer behavior is already anticipating that future, but our applications, operating systems, and devices have yet to catch up.

It's a simple concept; asset-light behavior is setting our expectations, creating the next wave in our bigger "life with technology" picture.  To fully realize those expectations,  it takes stateless apps, data, and devices.  The stage is set for an explosion of "everything, everywhere, all the time."

The next wave?  In 1980, Alvin Toffler's "Third Wave" postulated that humanity has gone through major eras, which he called "waves." Toffler said we have been through waves one and two: agricultural and industrial. We were all embarking on the third, the information age, which is still emerging.  Computing, central to the information age, has had waves as well.

1. Mainframe: You go to your stuff, which is immovable and unshareable.
2. Client-Server: I carry all my stuff with me, often spread across many devices.
3. Stateless future: I don't carry any of my stuff, but I can get all of it whenever I want.

This "whenever I want" idea drives the benefits of statelessness.  It's the thing that makes it possible for us to be "asset-light." In the stateless future, everything you own is available on every device in every location: phone, tablet, laptop, TV, store, car, airplane.  Because everything you need is everywhere you are, you and I will no longer be bound by the need to lug it around.

Once the apps and data are independent of the device, no one need ever again carry a complete data center with them. When you think about it, that's really the the central idea of fat OS laptops, tablets, and phones; they're all little self-contained packages of computing power, operating system, apps, and data: legacies all the way back to the first PCs and sneakernet file transfers.   There are two early exceptions, stateless devices from Google (Chrome OS) and Mozilla (Firefox OS.)  The stateless future promises we'll have all our stuff with us without the burden of the packed briefcase carried by the businessperson on the left in the photo above.

Asset-light behavior--acting stateless but with "all my stuff with me" technology--comes at a huge cost.   The legacy of the client-server model shackles each of us to security risks, incredibly frustrating app and OS updates, needless cost and complexity of devices.  Even with media and data files in the cloud, synchronizing multiple local copies to support the old model is practically stone age.

The thing is, almost the entire mobile and consumerization movement, which appears revolutionary, is still just a kludge to get us to asset-light stateless behaviors because the background architectures of applications, data rights, storage, and operating systems have not caught up with the way many of us already live.

This is a fascinating way to think of technology.  We have created the tech equivalent of cognitive dissonance; the way we live and the technologies that we use to make that life possible are not in line with each other.  In my opinion, the idea of an asset-light generation is a solid marker that the stateless future is destined to become real.

Meeker's presentation, from last December at Stanford, is here.  The description of the asset-light generation begins on slide 59.

2012 KPCB Internet Trends Year-End Update from Kleiner Perkins Caufield & Byers

 This link will run a search of all the Infrics.com coverage of the stateless future, sorted by date, most recent first. 

Google Think: Creation, Curation, Connection, Community define "Gen C"

Gen C illustration from Google Think

Introducing Gen C - The YouTube Generation – Think Insights – Google: "Gen C is a powerful new force in consumer culture. It’s a term we use to describe people who care deeply about creation, curation, connection, and community. It’s not an age group; it’s an attitude and mindset defined by key characteristics. 80% of Gen C is made up of millennials, YouTube’s core (though by no means only) audience."

Here is a link to the report as a .pdf

I'm not sure we're quite ready for yet another "Gen (insert letter of choice here,)" but the 4 Cs do capture a lot of what seems to be going on in our use of technology and our consumption of content.

Synchronous content consumption and communication: in decline or on the way out?

This made me think a little more deeply about a couple of related artifacts of daily life I've noticed lately, and they both deal with synchronicity:

• The days of consuming content in a synchronous fashion, like tuning in to a network broadcast of a sitcom every week at the same time, seem terribly old fashioned now.  It's much more "at the time, in the place, and on the device I choose."  Have you also noticed the growth of chunking out time and consuming TV series in multiple episodes all at once?
  
  This does not portend well for TV networks, cable companies, and satellite providers, but it fits in perfectly with the idea of the stateless future, in which we've blown apart the old links that tied content to specific storage, delivery, and consumption mechanisms.  There is probably collateral damage to in-theater movie viewing as well; when you can see a movie in HD at home on a big screen with excellent surround sound, streamed on the internet at the time of your choice, that has become a highly-viable option compared with the big screen (and social) experience at the theater.
  
  Asynchronous content consumption is yet one more sign that business models built on tight links between content, delivery, and consumption are in danger.  If they don't change to accommodate this emerging reality, their days are likely numbered.
  
• There is a new mode of personal communication I see more and more often Instead of purely synchronous, like a phone call or video conference that happens in real time, or asynchronous, like e-mail, but near-synchronous.  This is the text message effect: "I will answer you quickly, but don't interrupt me without notice for a phone call."  I find myself resenting phone calls that come in unannounced, and cautious about initiating one myself without texting first to check "is this a good time to talk."
  
  We are more connected than ever before, but also seem to demand a greater level of control in just how we divide our time among the screens, keyboards, and speakers of our daily lives.  The "I am multitasking and will get back to you soon" near synchronous effect could be our means of handling those demands.

5 things that won't exist in the (stateless) future

In my opinion, the trend markers for technology and business point to a future that is stateless: one in which data, applications, and the devices that interact with them are all decoupled from one another. Some of the current top-level predators of the tech world are endangered species.

Legacy business models and operating systems,

prepare to meet your fate.

Edvard Munch, "The Scream" from wikipedia.org

Cloud computing is fundamentally stateless.  So is all the banking you do on your bank's website. The Chromebook is the first stateless laptop, with a stateless phone OS on the way from Firefox.  My coverage of stateless includes business cases, impact on licensing, apps, and digital rights, and a 5-step "try it now" guide for businesses:

The Stateless Future


As that future emerges, these 5 things are endangered:

1. Fat operating systems: MacOS, Windows, iOS, and Android are all built on a central idea of the tech past, that operating systems, applications, data, and device are tied to each other.  The OS future belongs to lightweight systems that move beyond that concept: they provide connection to the net, user interface for web apps and data, and almost none of the other client-server complexity that fat OSes entail.
   
   Today, the only two OSes that reflect that future are Google's Chrome OS and Mozilla's Firefox OS. The old-fashioned operating system vendors may one day play catch-up, but their legacy operating systems are already extinct.
2. Local applications, app downloads, app updates:  all of these disappear when web-sourced applications reach maturity.  App stores as we know them will likely continue, but the apps they sell will be web-sourced, not installed locally.
3. Branded, device-specific media sales and delivery: iTunes and Google Play have a terminal illness.  They are efforts to keep users locked in to ecosystems of music, applications, written word, and video that perpetuate a business model based on outdated technology concepts.  As such they're both easy targets for stateless rights management, and the disintermediation of Apple or Google; unless they change profoundly, and fairly soon, they will both be irrelevant.
   
   Who is most closely aligned with the future?  Amazon.com, with their HTML5 web app, their retroactive cloud-enablement of CD music bought in the past by their customers, and their willingness to meet customers on any device, any place, any time.  Amazon doesn't have to care about OS or device, as long as you buy from them.  
4. Cost as an indicator of the power of your device: Once, tech status came from the speed and power of your PC, laptop, mobile or tablet.  Processors, RAM, storage space, all those markers of your tech cred no longer matter when the power is in the web, and essentially unlimited.  See Google's Pixel Chromebook as the harbinger of this effect.  It's expensive, but where is the money? In the display and user interface, and in the construction, which looks good enough for an executive to show proudly in the boardroom.
   
   The $1400 Pixel has faced critical disdain because it scarcely does anything more than a $250 Samsung Chromebook.  But that is exactly the point.  The Pixel reflects the stateless future, and a wave of technology democratization.
   
   The need for social and business positioning has always been with us; for the last 20 years or so, the device you carried gained status from what it could do, and how much you spent for it.
   
   When tech ability ceases to differentiate, other status markers come into play.  Possible outcome: status-branding of devices, such as a Coach mobile phone, or a Mont Blanc laptop.
5.  Device encumbrance: a clumsy term, but an important idea.  Your entire world of contacts, data, apps, and all media need no longer be connected to any specific device in your possession.  Forget your laptop?  Lose your phone?  It no longer matters, beyond whatever status your specific machine brings you (see #3 above.)  Buy a $10 cheap temporary phone, log in, and everything you ever had is with you again.
   
   NONE OF YOUR STUFF resides on the device.  The security benefits of this effect alone make a hugely compelling business case for enterprises.  

This list is intended to be provocative, to challenge ingrained ideas about the nature of our devices and about ownership of the content they currently hold.  The old concept is that data, application, operating system, and machine are tightly linked; let go of that, and every one of these outcomes is not only possible, but likely. 

Salesforce.com "customer company" video, more era-of-you in action

Earlier this week, I posted a link to Appirio.com's blog post on the new "customer company" approach at Salesforce.com.   Here is their own video explaining and celebrating the idea.  Know more, in more places, and have ever-more-powerful choices.  That's what the era of you is all about.

Personalization matters: three articles speak to the heart of "the era of you"

When I first started talking in 2011 about "the era of you" as one of the big ideas driving our tech and business future,   I wrote:

The era of you: a great idea revolutionized by 21st century technology
Image from the Palm Springs Automobilist Facebook site

"It’s partly about the way the internet and social networks are changing our sense of what a community means. It’s about the increasing ability of end users in enterprises to choose and deploy their own technology solutions. It’s about the flattening of power structures in business and the increasing power of consumers to interact with businesses. But none of these by itself expresses the big idea; each of these trends is a part of the bigger concept:

Technology is enabling individuals to know more, in more places and situations, and have increasingly powerful choices about the way they live and work. We are entering the era of you."

The era of you stakes are getting higher, reshaping business models and business strategy.  Here are recent articles that drive the point home:

--from Fast Company
Why Companies Now Have to Romance the Same Customers They Once Bought


--from cloud integrator Appirio, on Salesforce.com
Salesforce’s shift in message is a recognition that consumers have more power than ever before in a connected world. No longer are they at the mercy of companies that treat them poorly; they have a loud, far-reaching voice with real power in the marketplace.

--from CIO.com
Gartner finds that CIOs now identify Customer Relationship Management (CRM) as their top IT spending priority

Finally, here is my report on what Disney's "Beauty and the Beast" can teach us about the power of technology. It can personalize business relationships and reintroduce the small village metaphor on the stage of the whole world:

We can now use technology to re-introduce highly personalized services that feel like village life in its most idealized form. Who will dream big enough to bring it to us? As Belle said, “there must be more than this provincial life.”