The value of subjective data, and how Google used it to build successful teams: NYT story and comment

I've argued before that subjective information is among the most important measurements of the success of emerging technology research, and that you can add subjective data into a metrics stream by assigning number values to subjective ideas.  It's a great concept, one that is not often given much weight in enterprise metrics.

I recently hurt my back at the gym, and got a referral to see an orthopedist.  Among the very first things in our discussion was the question, "how much does it hurt on a scale from one to ten?"  "Well, it's an 8 when I have a back spasm, but just sitting here right now talking with you, I'd say it's a 2 or 3," was my answer. That discussion is a practical demonstration of applying hard numbers to subjective feelings as a way to benchmark them.  It's not touchy-feely at all, and it's surprisingly practical.

image from the NYT article

And in that conversation, we have an important lesson about the way we measure performance within our enterprises, and how Google applied numeric values to subjective data to find out why some teams succeed and others don't.

After exhaustive number crunching about teams that worked really well, one of the main findings was that all team members need to have a sense of what they call "psychological safety" within the team.  In successful, high-performing teams, all members feel safe to offer any contribution without fear of ridicule or reprisal.

Here is the article:

NYT: Google research on subjective metrics and successful teams

Here is a brief excerpt:  ‘‘ By adopting the data-driven approach of Silicon Valley, Project Aristotle has encouraged emotional conversations and discussions of norms among people who might otherwise be uncomfortable talking about how they feel.  "Googlers love data,’’  (Google manager, Matt) Sakaguchi told me. But it’s not only Google that loves numbers, or Silicon Valley that shies away from emotional conversations. Most work­places do. ‘‘By putting things like empathy and sensitivity into charts and data reports, it makes them easier to talk about,’’ Sakaguchi told me. ‘‘It’s easier to talk about our feelings when we can point to a number.’

"The data helped me feel safe enough to do what I thought was right,’’  is the concluding quote in the NYT story.

Let's take this away from the idea of just talking about feelings.  As Google's research bears out, feelings turn out to have measurable value for enterprise success.  But the goal to get value-add from subjective data goes much farther.  When it comes to perceiving nuance and big picture--as opposed to big data--there is still no more powerful computer on earth than the human brain, and you have them in your organization in abundance.  Unfortunately, because it's tougher to report nuance as a hard number, it's relegated to the "subjective, hence unimportant" bin.

We already have historical evidence of subjective input outperforming choices based upon pure datasets: crowdsourced stock predictions.

Here is a practical example of measuring subjective data in business.  At each stagegate of your projects, ask participants to report their sense of the project: "on a scale of one to ten, how do you feel about this project's likelihood of success?"  A caveat, though: unless you have made giving an opinion openly a safe thing to do*, the data you receive is likely to be highly biased.  Anonymity through a third-party survey site might be in order.  Average the results, chart it over time against your other KPIs for the project, and I don't think it will take very long to get a very useful Project Health Index that you can benchmark against variables within the project management, and against other projects.  That is an early warning system, a business metric you can take to the bank.

By the way, my back is doing better.  Occasional incidents of a 5 or so, but the trend is good.



*The whole topic of "safety in reporting" is profoundly important to business metrics. I'm at work on a subsequent article on the idea, and will report steps former Ford CEO Alan Mulally took to change the fear culture that used to permeate Ford.

Google Drive launches today: 5GB free cloud storage

When I published "5 steps to stateless" last week, the release of Drive was predicted to happen soon: here it is.

5 steps to stateless

Stateless data, applications, and devices are maturing so rapidly, and have such clear business benefits, I believe it’s time for businesses to take action.   You can begin to realize those benefits almost immediately, and you can make sure your organization is aligning itself in the present for a future that is certainly on the way.

In the stateless model, data and applications run in a private or public cloud.  The devices you use to consume them have only two main functions:

• connect you to the cloud.
• provide a user interface that lets you access and interact with your applications and data.

This article looks at 5 fundamentals of the stateless future.

For businesses, the benefits are profound.  Security goes up, because data is managed centrally, not scattered on thousands of hard drives and memory chips, where it is subject to malfunction, loss, or theft.  Application updates are done on one machine.  Devices become almost interchangeable, with simple configuration needs. Management costs go down, as do the costs of the devices themselves.  A four-year-old computer can be kept in service, since it must now do simpler work.   Answering the call of users to bring their own devices becomes easier, since for the most part you can deliver your entire work environment securely to any browser.  Stateless is "your business as a service."

Of all the trends that will impact business, and of all the things that will benefit business, stateless is among the easiest choices.  It offers clear rewards and very quick payback, and can be implemented with iteration rather than a single giant project.  

This illustration plots elements of the stateless future into four tracks, from legacy to pure stateless.  The latter isn’t quite possible yet, and few people reading this will find themselves purely in the former; it's the middle--the “act now zone”--where action is possible, and needed.




1. Data: cloud before data center before local device
The local machine is about the worst possible place for data to live; we still follow the practice largely out of habit, because it was necessary in the days when connectivity and bandwidth were primitive.  Neither is true today.  User data storage offerings are maturing in both the consumer and the enterprise spaces; where data storage from legacy client/server applications is dependent on local installation, move toward desktop virtualization (see below.) Of all the things that offer quick benefits and move you toward stateless, getting data off local machines offers the easiest path and the quickest deployment.

2. Applications: web before app before fat client
Fat client applications represent almost everything that’s wrong with legacy IT.  Let’s count the sins: Resource Hog.  Security risk. Nightmare to install and maintain. Constrains choice of deployed hardware, especially when companies are faced with user demands to “bring their own.” Fat clients on local machines were a miracle 20 years ago, a burden today.

Faced with that reality, it’s easy to be seduced by all the current hype around the “app internet.”  Programs available in an “app store” seem so much lighter-weight, almost elegant in their point-click-run simplicity and the storefront environment in which consumers devour them.  

But as they stand now, they only solve a few problems.  Some are only available for one ecosystem, like Apple’s iOS.  Or if they are widely available, say for Android as well, they’re sold by different vendors, each within its own walled garden.   In some cases, they use cloud storage of data as the default, which is on the right track.  But they still must be locally installed, still must sync data from the cloud to the local device, and still need endless device-by-device updates.  

Contrast that with the stateless, web-delivered alternative:  available on any device you sign in to, maintained and updated centrally, does not need to sync data, and needs only a browser on the other end in order to work.  With the advent of HTML5, web based apps are growing in power very rapidly, and are already being deployed preferentially in some cases.  Do not make the strategic mistake of investing in new applications that can’t be delivered to a browser, or else risk getting trapped in the same client/server problems of the past.

One interesting interim step is used by SaaS provider Podio.com; one Podio app is installed locally on iOS or Android, and provides a gateway into a big range of cloud-sourced apps in the Podio portfolio.  Install one app locally, run hundreds from the cloud.  Look for more of these “adaptive” app gateways in the near future as a bridge technology until pure web apps mature.

This is an important point: cloud-delivered, browser-accessed data and applications are not purely stateless, but they abstract most of the old problems away from the local machine, making it possible for you to deliver many stateless benefits now.

3. Desktops: browser before virtualized before local
We graduated from command-line computer interfaces  in the 1980s.  Even my Commodore 128 had a primitive mouse-controlled “click on icons” interface called GEOS.  For most practical purposes, everything else we’re used since the C:/ prompt is a desktop.  The multiple screens on smartphones are desktops, so is the work area on a tablet.  

It’s a visual interface between the user and whatever the user is doing; now that we’ve had desktops for 30+ years, it’s a comfortable place.    However, it’s no secret that the trend in technology has been away from the desktop as we know it for many years  So much so, that for many current knowledge workers, a browser sitting on a desktop is where we spend most of our time at work.  You may work all day in IE, Firefox, or Chrome, and never need to look at the underlying desktop once. The metaphor of the desktop and that of the tabbed browser window are merging.

Many of your needs can already be met in a browser, without a desktop at all: e-mail, several business applications,  and most office productivity applications like word processing and presentations.  In that case, the browser essentially is the desktop.  That’s a sort of “stateless light” and represents progress.  

But let’s be realistic. Many important parts of your business are client/server, and will be part of your portfolio for years to come.  You can still begin the stateless journey today by shifting to virtualized desktops, in which a licensed copy of a traditional fat OS runs on a server, complete with your legacy client/server applications, delivered in stateless form to a browser.  

At that point, when your users get their entire experience online, you’re free of concern about local updates beyond the operating system and the browser itself.  While desktop virtualization is often promoted as a cost-saving measure, I would argue that the truly compelling case is because you can then keep your whole environment secure, do updates and backups all at once, and make it available anywhere on a “need to use” basis--in a browser.  Again, a solid step in which many benefits of the stateless future can be delivered today.

In an interesting turn of events, technology is now coming full circle, not just to a “post-PC” era, but a “post-browser” one as well.  The new Aura window manager in Google’s Chrome OS remains completely stateless, but has a familiar desktop interface.  “Browser” was an application that ran on a traditional fat operating system, but in the stateless world, in which you’re just delivering a user interface to cloud based data and apps,  you can make the UI look like whatever you wish.  In Aura, a “browser” delivers a “desktop,” upon which sit “browser” windows.  It looks like the past, but it offers the benefits of the future.  

4. Roles: deploy to the need
Not all parts of the stateless future are here yet. Neither are all parts evenly distributed, and there are a few needs that argue for the old style “data/application/machine in one.”  

What roles are “stateless ready” right now?  Any knowledge worker or administrative/clerical role that primarily works in one place, or has good WiFi/3g/4g access in the locations they work, is an excellent candidate for a browser-delivered stateless experience using a hybrid of web apps and desktop virtualization.  Many of these could go pure stateless now, using Chromebooks.

Media production, involving a lot of processing of image or sound files, will likely not be suited for a pure stateless environment.    There are also knowledge workers who need office productivity applications during many long flights, and must still rely on old “local client, sync to server when connected” applications.  But have you noticed how many flights now have WiFi? The "I can't use stateless because I need to be connected all the time" argument is fading away.

The point is, you may be using the tech equivalent of a tour bus for many, many people in your organization who could get where they need to go in a minivan or compact car. Don’t wait until stateless can serve every role in your company before you begin offering its benefits to roles that are ready today.  


5. Machines: extend the life of legacy, deploy stateless where possible
We’ve already considered the ways desktop virtualization and browser enablement can allow for longer lifecycles with your existing laptops and desktop computers.  As long as a machine has the power to deliver good connectivity and run a browser, you can deliver a near-stateless experience to those machines using browsers and virtualized desktops.

Stateless content and applications are an excellent match out of the box for the new ultrabook laptop computers, or for any bring-your-own-device program.  

As this is written in spring 2012, the Google Chromebook is the only stateless device you can buy, and only from two vendors: Samsung and Acer.   New, more powerful models of Chromebooks are on the way, but I will tell you from experience that the first generation has served me well as my primary computer for almost 11 months.  Mozilla is working on the stateless phone, with their Boot2Gecko project.

Conclusion: takeaways
Although the full realization of the stateless future will use a stateless device to interact with data and applications delivered from the web, there are straightforward steps you can take today to make the stateless delivery of data and apps available right away, even if you are using Windows or Mac OSes.  

Try all these pilot programs:

• Users’ data in the cloud, not the local machine
• Virtualized desktops to a variety of laptops and desktops.  
• Get some Chromebooks into service in different roles, find out to what extent a fully-stateless environment works for you or does not.

In my opinion, the future will be stateless.  Because it touches so many things, and offers benefits across so many boundaries, this article is the start of the implementation discussion, not the complete dialog.  I’d like to have that longer discussion with you if you’re thinking about stateless, both to share my ideas, and to learn from yours.  Do let me know by e-mail or in the comments what you’re interested in.  I’d be happy to plan a seminar with your team, either online or at your site, to look at the entire stateless picture and your plans to get there.  

This article is part of ongoing coverage of the stateless future, one of the big ideas.  

Could social networks revolutionize security? Seven degrees of "I trust you."

In the very first thought piece I wrote for Infrics.com, I discussed the idea that all the talk, all the hype about social networks online really came down to community--how the internet has made possible communities of shared interest.  Later, I compared the idea of online communities to the small village, and how pretty much everything we do in business, commerce, and personal lives includes some attempt to overcome the fact that our worlds are no longer defined by our respective villages.

We’ve also looked a lot at “the era of you,” about the  explosion of connectivity, social interaction, consumer-added value, and the ever-growing network of things.  You can now know more, in more places, and greatly personalize your interactions with each other, with your employer and colleagues, and with businesses.

In other articles, I’ve shared the concept of technology triggers, the idea that developments in two or more unrelated tech areas can trigger the emergence of a new technology or new business model.  For instance, digitization of music plus broadband networks = billion-dollar+ markets for Amazon and iTunes.  

Today, I’d like to extend all  of these concepts, and make a prediction:

Online security could be revolutionized by applying social tools to authentication. In addition to “what you have” and “what you know,” technology will let us reintroduce the most basic small village security concepts of all: “I know you,” and “I know who you know, and because I trust them, I trust you.”

The “seven degrees of separation” meme is well known, and all of us have experienced that small-world moment when we’ve discovered a friend or colleague in common with someone totally unexpected.  “Who do we both know” is something Facebook has used to great advantage; when you receive a friend request or look up someone’s profile, it tells you what friends you have in common.  For me, that’s the first thing I check: “are there a lot of them?  Who do I know in person I could ask about this stranger who wants to know me?”  

Authentication is everything. 

Take that question just a bit farther, and it’s easy to see that there is a taxonomy of relationships.  It started in the village model, “I do business with you and we have a history together.”  What are the determiners of confidence in “I know you?”

• Proximity--Is the association real (have met in person) or virtual (from online?) In-person does not automatically guarantee trustworthiness, there are people I have met casually once or twice, and I do not trust them nearly as much as some online friends I share many trusted friends with.  
• Role--what is the nature of the connection?  Friendship? Work? Client or Customer? Vendor? Famiy?
• Length of association--How long has this association existed?
• Shared communities--community affinity can predict areas that might match the authentication need.  For instance, if you’re considering going on a date with a new connection, shared friends would be important. If you’re considering voting for them, shared political involvement would be a key.
• Shared associations--If you and I work for the same employer, but are not connected otherwise, your connection to a mutual colleague could be more significant than your connection to a contractor for my home.
• Degree of personal contact--how many degrees of separation are there?  Are you a friend of a friend?  Note how LinkedIn uses social proximity in their 1st/2nd/3rd degree connection model.
• Frequency of association--for instance, if you see me on Facebook through a mutual friend, and send me a note with the friend request, “I’m the guy who rides in the same Metra car with you every day on the commute into Chicago,” that adds social depth to the likelihood of trustworthiness.  If I’ve used this credit card at your business 50 times in the last year with no problem, chances are high that this transaction will have no problem either.

How would it work?

Let’s take the simplest example, one that Facebook should offer today, but doesn’t.  Let’s say I have 100 friends.  John, with 500 friends, sends me a friend request, and we have 20 friends in common.  So, "friends in common" is 20% of my friends list, and 4% of John's friend list.  Shared numbers as an absolute are helpful, but the chance that his 4% will be as important as my 20% is lower.  Derive an index number by dividing 20 by 4 = 5.  If John also had 100 friends--20% shared--the index would be 1.  Now we have useful information; a higher percentage of shared friends tells me the chances are greater I’d want to be friends with the stranger who is saying hello.  

That’s social authentication, and as this example shows, it can be turned into metrics, which in turn can be used to predict the likelihood of trust.

In the Facebook example, it wouldn’t take much history of managing a friends list to get a sense for what index number is the threshold for those you want to add, at least in the absence of other information, such as an introductory letter.  

The result: the social trust index

As we develop indexes for each of the taxonomy areas, we can move to situational comparisons of trust threshold, and we can compare them across many instances of different people and situations to give a very useful complement to online and in-person authentication.  To sign in to online banking, you might need a social trust index no higher than 2.5.  To buy a latte at Starbucks, maybe a 6.  Starbucks would quickly amass average social trust metrics for their huge client base, and dynamically know on the spot whether a transaction were legitimate.

These numbers are purely arbitrary, the point is to demonstrate the value of social authentication.  Remember, the social trust index is not a fixed number like your FICO score, it changes based on your current location, role, purpose, and intent, and as your social connections evolve over time.

So, why could this be revolutionary?

This is the technology triggers model in action: take two or more things that are and extrapolate something that might be.  Social authentication will be a vital part of the future in which the digital personal assistant (DPA) will play such an important role, and it adds to the business opportunity for the company that gets there first.  Take the “what might be” out to a logical--and possible--conclusion, and you have a computer intelligence with you at all times, helping you manage your interactions with the world, using those interactions to constantly prove you are who you say, you have community associations to back that up, and you are recognized wherever you go.  

If I can sit here at Infrics.com and envision this future, can there be any doubt that teams from companies like Apple, Google, and Microsoft have not done the same?

I think the biggest potential benefit to social-based authentication is just how hard it would be to falsify, to game the system.  Think of the current means of security:  something you have can be stolen, or falsified.  Something you know can be guessed, stolen, maybe just looked up by picking up the keyboard in your office and looking underneath it for the passwords on the sticky note.

But the permutations of who you know are so vast, and span so many aspects of your life, the trust index that could be generated from the taxonomy above would be nearly impossible to defeat.  Security is never a game of certainty, it’s a game of odds. You do what’s possible to know you’re giving trust to the right person, and you accept a certain level of risk.  Social authentication represents a very significant way to minimize that risk, and apply the metaphor of village life to security in a tech-enabled world.  Passwords?  Keys?  "Who goes there?" "It's ME!" "Well, come on in!"

"Everything, Everywhere, All the Time" from Tech Crunch, and why TMI from technology is the best argument for the digital personal assistant

This is a good story from Tech Crunch, one that touches on several Infrics.com themes.

Photo from the Tech Crunch article

Everything, Everywhere, All The Time | TechCrunch:

The explosion of smartphones, "connected all the time" expectations, and the associated "community all the time" effect have put us in a strange place. As I've pointed out in my "era of you" coverage, we know more, in more places, at more times, than ever before.

But we still must be our own librarians and curators of all that information; as Sarah Perez points out, there's precious little technology helping us take that last vital step. It's exhausting and frustrating.

Perez doesn't connect the dots to the logical needed technology, but she gets close.  What we need is a technology interface that learns our behaviors and our needs, compares them to the massive information streams, and delivers it to us in a useful form.  We need the equivalent of the executive's personal assistant.

Which is one of the main reasons I believe that the digital personal assistant, (DPA) although still in its infancy, is one of the most promising emerging technologies. As I wrote in this article introducing "Rosie," it will also be a forthcoming business battleground because the DPA is a gateway to recommendations, search, and tech-assisted business transactions. As Perez writes, "I’m ready for a computer you don’t have to input much into at all. A truly useful system will see what you’re doing, learn from your activities, then begin to automate tasks for you. Not just in email, but everywhere. In everything. And all the time."

See this article, published today, about the way Apple is already using their 1st generation DPA, Siri, to bring that power to bear in its battle against Google.

Yelp, Twitter, and Apple's Anti-Google Coalition

'via Blog this'

The digital personal assistant: Google's Majel project says "make it so"

Image from Android and Me website

Android and Me just published this article on Google's AI/personal assistant/Siri competitor, Majel.

More info on Google’s Majel, moving a little faster towards that Star Trek future | Android and Me:

I believe one of the biggest tech changes we'll see in our lives in the near future will be the digital personal assistant, powered by artificial intelligence, completely voice-enabled, and democratizing the experience of top executives, who have a trusted personal assistant.

It's the missing piece in a fully realized tech immersion life, in which we effortlessly know what we need at all times. See this article on "Rosie" for a sample of this life, and how it can happen. In that article I said that Google might be the best positioned company to deliver this future; this article hints at how close they are getting.

'via Blog this'

Nothing but net: stateless computing, technology triggers, and the business of technology

I believe that stateless devices are one of the most important technology trends. The concept is simple and elegant:  all applications and data run from the cloud, with lightweight, fast-booting operating systems delivering a connection to the cloud and a very rich, browser-based user experience.

Devices built as stateless will need much less in the way of complex operating systems, and can be less expensive to build, buy, and operate.

Stateless is important because it changes the discussion about devices in the way social networks change the discussion about communities; we get to manage our lives based on what we need right now, not on being in the presence of the device where the software and data we want is residing.
    

But why should you accept that stateless computing is A Big Thing? 

Predicting technology is a constantly-shifting balance of art and science. But I do believe we can think of the future in ways that are more roadmap, less crystal ball.  That is the idea behind technology triggers, timelines of changing capabilities in which we can observe A and B and think clearly about the still-unknown C.


Here is a timeline for the enabling technologies of the stateless world:





The vertical lines show the triggers. As an example, the emergence of widely-distributed 3g wireless networks was one of the key enablers for the explosive growth of smartphones and the currently-popular online application markets.  Had you examined mobile computing through this lens just before 3g, and extrapolated to possible outcomes once it became available, you might have gained competitive advantage in the mobile space, just as Apple did with the iPhone.  We are clearly past the trigger point for the so called “app internet”  But we are also close to triggers for stateless computing, with Google’s Chrome OS and Chromebook computers being first to market.


Look at the graph as the timeline progresses; the enabling trends are moving in the direction of stateless computing, which overcomes major limitations in even the most advanced “app internet” situation deployed at the time of this article in summer 2011.  

Further, we can see that a true movement to cloud computing is not complete as long as we must still synchronize cloud and local data and do installation and maintenance of locally-installed applications--a model that is as old as Lotus Notes.   Apple’s vaunted iCloud service, which stores data and music in the cloud, still relies on local copies, a move analysts were quick to remind us, “looks great as far as it goes, which is all the way to about 2006.” 


The “app internet” concept is the future, says Forrester Research CEO George Colony.  I respect Mr. Colony and Forrester, but I think the tech triggers say otherwise.  The use of small-locally installed applications on top of a complex and proprietary operating system, using cloud data sync, is the best we can do in a world where connections are not quite pervasive enough. But it is still kludgy beyond belief, and does very little about the device dependence that now seems very old fashioned. 


We have not quite reached the “trigger timeline” when stateless takes off, but I think we are close.  What enablers are not quite there yet?

Trigger	Opportunity	Disruption
better internet connections: faster everywhere, transparently available via multiple sources	IP network providers, especially mobile quality-of-service management for IP connections every “-as-a-service” vendor: Software-, Platform-, Infrastructure- cloud-based media vendors: Pandora, Netflix, Hulu, Amazon	proprietary content delivery architectures: non-IP voice, cable and satellite television services
penetration and evolution of browser-enabled applications	HTML 5   desktop virtualization vendors to stateless-enable legacy applications app developers cloud-centric platforms and development environments interface management systems that adapt stateless UI delivery to different browser forms on different devices.	applications and developers still relying on client-server models enterprises with large legacy app portfolios (although see “desktop virtualization” as opportunity to solve this) rich internet application tools that rely on local installation of software: Adobe Air, Microsoft Silverlight
stateless-enabling operating systems and devices for other form factors: phones, televisions, tablets, automobiles	developers of new web interfaces: voice, gesture, image recognition. the network effect of stateless benefits across many form factors presents a huge opportunity for manufacturers.  With very fast cycle times for mobile devices, a new market leader could emerge very quickly	fat operating system vendors could quickly be disintermediated: the stateless web experience is backward compatible with legacy operating systems, but not the other way around.

Although there is a high rate of change, there is also a big picture, a timeline from early mainframes, to networked PCs, to the internet-centric, multi-device era.


That multi-device era is where we are now: some cloudsourced data and some applications in the cloud, but still using a client-server model and complex operating systems.  While it's easy--facile, even--to say "the PC era is over," the truth is, we're much closer to a time in which the operating system and the purpose-built device of any sort will become almost invisible, and the idea of "browser" as a separate application becomes irrelevant.  

Stateless is the logical next step, based on evolving technologies, the social use of technology, and the historical evidence of the market in the face of the new capabilities brought on by those technologies.

Stateless is also the enabling technology that unlocks the greatest benefit of cloud computing, and helps us apply the lessons of online social interaction to the way we deploy and use the machines that make it possible. 

It is the tool through which data and applications in the cloud will create explosive growth in business value. Stateless computing is a big idea.

Google Takeout: new "export all my data" service, possible enterprise cloud model?

Mashable reports on this new service from Google, which allows you to export copies of everything you have stored in Google services.  

Pictured, their Data Liberation Front team.  Take a look at this story, because inside the news of a simple-sounding consumer add-on could be the seeds of an answer to one of the big challenges enterprises have seen in the cloud computing model: what do I do if I change my mind or change vendors, how do I get all my stuff?

2 weeks with the Chromebook: stateless in practice, how is it to live with?

After taking delivery of the Samsung Chromebook on June 15, the day it went on sale, I used it throughout my business trip and vacation in California.   I've written that I believe stateless computing, represented in the marketplace by the Chromebook, is one of the most important technology trends.  So how is it to live with every day?

The good news is, for the most part, the Chromebook doesn't feel all that much different from using any laptop.  For routine work, the kind of thing I'm doing all day, I want a genuine keyboard and a larger display; the CB suits me fine.  I continue to really enjoy the unusually bright display and the extraordinary battery life. If you've ever trotted down the hall at work from one meeting to another with your laptop open because it takes so long to resume, you'd enjoy the Chromebook's resume from closed, which is instantaneous for all practical purposes, although it actually may take 2 seconds or so.  The boot-up time for a conventional computer now seems glacial compared to the 10 seconds it takes to launch the Chromebook from fully powered off.

As I mentioned in the last post, I wanted to see how life would be when you're not in range of a conventional WiFi connection.  I activated the included Verizon 3g service, which gives 100mb/month at no charge for 2 years; Using my normal range of 6 tabs for e-mail (Gmail and Yahoo), Facebook, Tweetdeck, LinkedIn, and the Infrics site, I went through 10 of those megabytes in under two hours.  So although the 3g service works, and is reasonably fast, I will only access it as a last resort.

So that brings up tethering. Newer releases of Android phones have a built-in hotspot capability; using my 4g Android phone (T-Mobile), I can bypass the Verizon limitation with a connection that is faster and included in my data plan already.  Where there is a good 4g signal, it works amazingly well. The CB sees the hotspot as it would any WiFi location,  and speeds are comparable to a broadband connection. However, in travels up and down coastal California, I found 4g availability really spotty: strong and reliable across LA and San Francisco, strangely absent at my conference in the Santa Clara Convention Center, where I had to shell out $13/day for WiFi in the heart of silicon valley.  Non-existent across big swaths of the 101 between both cities, and in points north of the bay area.   As I mentioned in my first comment on the Chromebook, I would find this just as limiting with my Windows laptop, but it illustrates how our ability to put powerful connections to use has not been matched yet by networks to support it.

In that first post, I also wondered about Microsoft's Office 365 on the Chrome OS; if Microsoft's application is web-based, would Google try to preserve market for Google Docs by limiting a competitor's functionality?  It turns out the limitation is on the other side; Microsoft does not offer a version of Office 365 that is compatible with Chrome OS, and it also requires a locally-installed copy of traditional Office for full functionality.  So while MS is making cloud-based strides, I don't see evidence that they take stateless application delivery seriously at this time.   If you are considering Chrome OS for enterprise use and must stay with Office, this could be a concern.

Chrome OS has a file manager, which offers some ability to manage "non-cloud" files, and some ability to use locally stored files while not connected to the internet.  It gives "unrecognized file type" if you double click on .doc, .ppt, or .xls files stored on an SD card (the CB has one SD slot), but it will directly open .pdf files without an import into Docs. It also will play some music and video files directly from local storage, using a media player applet.  It is possible to export ("download") a file from the Google Docs cloud to the local solid state storage built in to the machine, although I was unable to get the Chromebook to write anything at all to the SD card.  Whether the fact that unrecognized file types all seem to be those associated with Microsoft is a deliberate act or a shortcoming is a question that will be resolved with iterations of the OS.

The bigger point, though, is that the Chromebook is the first commercial expression of the stateless device idea; to judge it by performance on old-style fat OS standards is to miss the point.  Chromebook is a pleasure to use in almost all the situations in which I'd use a laptop computer, and it offers compelling benefits in terms of speed and simplicity.   I'm not giving up my Windows notebook just yet, but now that it and the Chromebook are side by side as I work, the big operating system will now be my second choice.

Next, as we continue to examine stateless computing in action, we'll consider technology triggers--enabling technologies--that will shape the way stateless evolves.  First, the explosive increase in need for reliable wireless broadband.  Second, the ways in which legacy makers of software and hardware approach stateless and cloud computing: will they kill a great idea to preserve existing profit models, will they evolve in time, or will some of today's big names end up as "wikitrivia," known only to diehard old-timers?