How Android apps and the Play Store will come to Chromebooks

Google: Skype, Photoshop, Office and every Android app on Chrome OS.

In the second month after Infrics.com went live in 2011, I switched my primary computing platform to Google's Chrome OS.  As I've written, I believe it is the best expression of the major trend I've labeled "the stateless future."

Time has proven the accuracy of that prediction.  Chrome OS devices now outsell all others combined in the education market; in Q1 2016, IDC Research reported that Chrome OS has now overtaken Mac to become the second most popular PC operating system.  Enterprise penetration of Chrome OS is accelerating, and for good reason: incredibly simple deployment and management, excellent built-in security, plus dramatically lower cost of acquisition and TCO.

At the recently-concluded annual I/O developers conference, Google announced that, beginning with the next developer environment of Chrome OS and soon to be released in the stable channel, the Google App Store and its apps will run on Chrome OS.  Here is their announcement and a product demo:

The entire presentation is about 24 minutes, I've started the clip almost 5 minutes in.  Among the important takeaways:

• Every Android app will work offline, eliminating one of the last excuses not to deploy Chrome OS.
• This includes movies, music, photos, and the entire range of business applications in addition to games.
• The architecture runs a version of Android in a container within the existing Chrome OS shell, and it is fully integrated into Chrome OS standard features like notifications.
• This is "the other shoe dropping" after the organizational change at Google that brought the Android and Chrome OS teams together.  Chrome OS is not going anywhere: Android's next release will adopt the seamless behind-the-scenes update system that Chrome OS has always had, and Chrome OS will add almost all of the Android app and feature set to the laptop and desktop. 

Secure data, not perimeters, as we move to the cloud-based stateless future

Image from Cloudpro.co.uk

Cloudpro: Security at the Edge of the Cloud

This article makes a clear point about the need to evolve security models with the proliferation of multiple inroads to computing.  BYOD and cloud, author Davey Winder says, make the old style "secure the castle" security model unworkable--because there is no longer just one castle.  Instead, he argues, secure the data itself when you must deal with multiple perimeters.

This idea goes hand in hand with the decoupling inherent in the stateless idea:  data, apps, and device, once decoupled from each other, lend themselves especially well to the multi-perimeter security model.  Further, if a device like a Chromebook is run pure cloud, with virtually everything stored away from the device, the need to secure the machine itself is dramatically reduced.




Thanks to tech writer Ron Miller on Google+ for the heads up on this article.

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. 

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.

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. 

These 10 trends are hiding in plain sight: decoding technology triggers

--If we learn to ask the right questions, and apply the right tools, we can see important technology and business events before they happen: these "hide in plain sight" trends are technology triggers.    

First, here is the concept:

When Phillips introduced the compact cassette tape in 1962, they didn't foresee that Sony would use the idea in 1979 to bring us the Walkman.  The cassette made music portable and easy to copy at home.  The Walkman introduced us to the idea that we could hear what we wanted anywhere, and no longer be at the mercy of a radio station programmer when we weren't in front of our record player at home.  Cassettes were a technology trigger; why didn't we see it coming?

• it took time for the tech to get better, 
• and it took genius for someone to see it as a new business opportunity.  

Sony went on to rule the personal portable music business for many years, until other triggers made the cassette obsolete.  Except that Sony didn't see that coming, and lost its market dominance.

That's the nature of triggers, they're often cool in their own right, but rarely appreciated in real time for the true impact they will have. One trigger begets another; without the Walkman, would the market have been ready for the idea of the iPod?

Can we do better at that "real-time" part, and be the early Sony with the Walkman instead of the Sony that got blindsided by the iPod?  Can we think of triggers in ways to jumpstart innovation, or give our business a competitive advantage?

Maybe.  I've put this tool together and shown it before, based on the idea that you can take elements of a big idea--in this case, music--and look at the evolution of the ideas as horizontal timelines.  Back away, and the verticals reveal the big shifts brought on by trigger technologies or events.

Here is what it looks like:

We can track the cascades of trigger technologies through the entire reshaping of music sales and consumption.  Beyond cassettes and Walkmans, we had compact discs digitizing music, and home PCs powerful enough to rip, store and copy at very high quality: trigger.  Perhaps the ultimate trigger event was broadband to the home, enabling frictionless sharing, real-time streaming music, and online digital music stores.

So that's the background.  There are triggers in play at this moment, here are 10 I think are worth watching:

1. Maturity of machine voice recognition and interaction-by-voice Voice interaction is still crude, hindering its adoption for hands-free machine operation, customer service, text entry.  Maturity here triggers a world of possibilities. Impact: Automobile interaction, digital personal assistants, customer service, almost all mobile services and social interactions.
2. Computer image recognition and taxonomy Computers still do a poor job of recognizing things, and an even worse job of detailed identification.  The ability to say “what building is this?  What kind of plant is this? Who is that?” will extend the power of search to the entire visual world. All the workarounds we use to take the place of simple recognition, like barcodes, RFID, QR codes, can simply disappear. Impact: shopping, education, travel, social interaction, manufacturing, digital personal assistants. #3-5 deal with the major trigger effect of artificial intelligence as it matures and comes into daily life
3. AI: context The ability to infer meaning by context is a crucial enabler for digital personal assistants and other more sophisticated computer tasks.  A spouse learns quickly not to talk about Aunt Marge’s boyfriend when he’s around her ex, a contextual simplicity that still baffles computers.  Success here is easier to identify by example than by descriptor.  
   Contextual AI would know that a traveler in NYC who says, “directions to airport” would want JFK instead of LaGuardia because of his existing flight itinerary for that day. We are seeing glimmers of this trigger in Apple's Siri and in Google Now.
4. AI: nuance Beyond context, the use of artificial intelligence to derive the more fine-grained nuance of a situation is a necessary enabler to unlock high value computer services like excellent machine-based customer service, and the use of computers to automate currently-tedious but vital tasks like data cleansing. There is a huge range of tasks currently using disengaged, low-paid and low-job-interest humans simply because the nuance trigger has not matured in the AI space. Impact: customer service, digital personal assistants, security.
5. AI: enterprise data and application integration Businesses already know how much master data management means. They are aware how important it is, how impactful if they could seamlessly work with data across many situations, applications, and languages. But even if all new products were designed to work together out of the box, this fact remains. When it comes to the "as-is" state of data and apps, corporations must deal with high expense, little agility, and the "IT says no" mentality. It's due to the burden of the programs and services that are already installed and handling day-to-day business, and the business model pressures of vendors who would be endangered if you could plug and play applications from anyone. Once this AI trigger matures, we can apply computer speed to data concepts like this: "customer," "client," and "name" can mean the same person. This ability takes both contextual awareness and a fine sense of nuance--including the appreciation of the proper time to call for human help. But once it emerges, there is hope to manage that data nightmare with speed, accuracy, and transparency--to make it appear that those systems are cooperating because AI is applying real-time integration that makes it happen.
6. Stateless apps, data, and devices Anyone who has read my posts on Infrics.com will see this as a soapbox topic for me. Data, applications, and machines have historically been linked, tied to one another like members of a chain gang. Once you decouple them from each other, you can use each to its best advantage, at the time you want and on the device that makes the most sense. Data is available everywhere, applications work seamlessly on any device, and the machines themselves can be dramatically less expensive. The "lightness" that the stateless decoupling enables is revolutionary; it is the source for the slogan on the masthead of this site: "everything you need is everywhere you are." As the stateless idea matures and gains market penetration, the trigger cascades into modular, just-in-time application development and delivery, to revolutionary models of rights purchase and ownership, and to radical agility in the development and deployment of devices.
7. Digital rights management and rights ecosystems Hopelessly fragmented, driven by efforts to preserve legacy business models, contentious, and volatile, our current system of digital rights is a mess.  Ownership and licensing rights involve three layers: creators, sellers, and buyers. Of these, buyers of music, video, books, and applications are the least well served in the current model.
   
   The trigger-to-come: the separation of rights control from its current tight links to those who sell and deliver content. An independent third party rights unifier serving the buyer will explode the existing business models, and bring new opportunities for sales, storage, and delivery of digital content.
8. 3-D printing Kudos have to go to Jackie Fenn at Gartner, who has told us for at least 10 years that 3-D printing is an important idea.  
   
   I have to say I agree, but as cool as 3-D printing sounds as a concept, I believe the true impact lies beyond the "wow" factor. Where we'll see revolutionary change lies in the businesses and related technologies it will trigger.  The state of the art is still crude, slow, and expensive, but so were laser printers in the 80s.
   
   The closest analogy I can think of for the most profound trigger effect is that this digitizes things in the way that CDs brought us digitized music.  Who will profit and who will lose when you can “rip” an object, make a perfect copy, store and transmit it online, and share it at will? Some clear impacts: manufacturing, including supply chain; extreme personalization of "made" goods; and the new importance of rights management for objects that can be printed at will.
9. Social authentication Tech security to date relies on two things: something you have (key) and something you know (password.)  We are very close to the ability to allow a return to the most fundamental, earliest form of authentication: who you know.   Social authentication will enable a huge shift to make security technologies transparent and invisible.  Just as you once ran a tab at the corner restaurant because they knew you personally, that small-village ability could soon spread to our entire online and in-person lives.
10. Ubiquitous broadband It’s not “you can never be too rich or too thin,” it’s “you can never be too fast or have too much bandwidth.”
    
    Broadband connections, primarily mobile ones, are immature but growing fast.  This one trigger sets of a cascade of abilities from stateless computing to emerging economy enablement to social revolution. We saw one such revolution in the trigger breakdown illustration for music shown above. This is a case that is less about the technology itself maturing than about its deployment worldwide at higher and higher speeds and at lower and lower cost.

As I've said, trigger events and technologies can be stealthy. I think these cover most of the ones on my radar right now, but I'd like to hear from you. What else is hiding in plain sight? What will we look back on in 5 years and wonder, "why didn't I see that coming?"

Infrics.com coverage of tech triggers will continue, and I'll be working to expand several of the ones listed here into separate, more detailed articles. Broadband is first of the list, look for that report very soon.

Firefox OS is to mobile what Chrome OS is to laptops: update from ZDNet

Mozilla's Firefox OS eyes mobile domination - with tablets to follow | ZDNet

As shown in this slide from Kleiner Perkins' Mary Meeker, there are about 5 billion mobile phones in the world, but only 1 billion of them are smartphones.  The entire presentation is available online.

This is a perfect opportunity for the stateless model, in which a simpler, lower-cost device handles your connection and user interface, but all data and application activity is in the cloud.  Mozilla's Firefox OS is nearing readiness to seize that opportunity space; this ZDNet article provides an update, and useful insight into the way Mozilla sees the stateless model as applied to ownership and rights licenses.

Mozilla VP of mobile engineering Andreas Gal is quoted by ZDNet on this idea: "You sign in with your identity and when you purchase an application you really purchase the application for that identity and not the device. For example, if I sign into my identity and purchase the New York Times app and then go to my desktop browser and assign the same identity, I essentially take that content with me," Gal said.

"Content is no longer bound to one specific device, it is now bound to my identity that I can take with me to all these different devices."

This is precisely the decoupling of device, data, and application I've evangelized for almost two years.  The battles of the future are not between legacy operating systems like Mac and Windows, iOS and Android. They are between different stateless delivery models and the ecosystems that support them, now reflected by Chrome OS and Mozilla OS.  These are going to be interesting times. 

The "Anti" technology trigger: DRM and 3D printing

Here's a scenario from, perhaps, 2015.

I just bought a $25 case for my phone with a clever new mounting bracket to use in the car. Cool, this is really useful.  To surprise a friend who has the same phone, I take pictures of the case from three different angles and upload them to replicators-r-us.com, who convert the photos to a digital file for a 3D printer, send it to the printing station at my local Kinko's, and store a copy in my Google Drive inbox.  An hour later, I pick up an excellent copy of the case for $5 and present it to my buddy.  By 2018 or so, costs will have come down so far, I'll do the printing at home instead.

The CNET video shows a similar scenario already in production, just not commercialized yet.

When you or I can do that, what has happened to the business model of the original manufacturer, and the designer of the case?  Disintermediated.  Those in the CD industry knew your pain years ago.  Just as we created the ability to digitize music, we will soon have the ability to digitize things.  That means we can store and move them online, we can share them, and replicate them at will.

Yes, 3D printing is not very sophisticated yet, but who can doubt that it is a temporary thing?  Like music, video, books, and applications, some objects are about to become stateless--not permanently bound to one means of storage, delivery, or consumption.  Patent trolls have already figured this out.  Click through to this article from extremetech.com last fall:

How DRM will infest the 3D printing revolution

That is why the title of this post refers to the idea of an "anti technology trigger."  Some developments trigger new uses of existing abilities; some--like imperfectly resolved rights management--hold those new uses back.

This behavior is typical, and expected, whenever a new technology threatens existing business models and profit streams.  Just be warned.  3D printing has profound implications for manufacturers, both as an enabler for your supply chain (parts created just in time, or the ability to recreate archive parts at will) and as a threat to now-secure ownership of creative and manufacturing processes.  We saw firsthand what it did to the music industry, an upheaval that is by no means settled even yet.

Remember, in times of change and controversy lie business opportunity.  One such opportunity, a multi-billion dollar business that doesn't exist yet, is Digital Content Identity and Access Management.

What are you thinking about 3D printing?  Still more hype than delivery? Or are we going to see it in widespread use so quickly we'll have to catch our breath and put it to work?

Forrester: 15 emerging technologies to watch

There are many ways to group related ideas in the near-term tech future; this is a pretty good version from Brian Hopkins at Forrester Research, and a report from the enterprise architecture community on their emerging tech predictions.

He completely misses the upcoming revolution in artificial intelligence (AI)-driven digital personal assistants.  One aspect of the AI tsunami I'm just starting to be aware of is its potential to make sense of big data in a human-like manner (understanding context, relationships, data cleansing,) but at computer speeds.  We'll see these ideas show up in new releases of Apple's Siri, and in Google Now.

Also not even mentioned: 3D printing.  I'm not certain if we will see it impacting business in a big way by 2018, but the implications of "print to order" parts and products could well be important.  I'll write more soon about another 3D printing effect I haven't seen mentioned anywhere:  what happens when you can store things digitally, share them freely online, and create-to-order?  Will it bring about an intellectual property revolution like the one we saw with digital music, books, and video? What will happen when we can treat physical objects as part of the stateless future, in which content, storage, and delivery are decoupled from each other?

Let me know in the comments if you think there are other big topics in the 5-year horizon.

Forrester's Top 15 Emerging Technologies To Watch: Now To 2018 | Forrester Blogs:

'via Blog this'

With pure HTML5 app, Amazon deftly sidesteps Apple content and app control for iOS

In jab at iTunes, Amazon releases iOS-optimized MP3 store - CSMonitor.com:

Image: Christian Science Monitor

It's not an Apple app store app, it's an HTML5 optimized web app, anyone on an iOS device can use it whether Apple likes it or not.

More evidence that stateless delivery of applications and content changes the rules--and the business cases--for a lot of companies.

And it reminds me of Princess Leia in the original "Star Wars" to the emperor: "The more you tighten your grip, the more star systems will slip through your fingers!"

I think it's Very Interesting that the last two pieces of important news about digital content (this, and the debut of the Auto-Rip service to make physical CDs purchased now or in the past digitally available) have come from Amazon.com.

Amazon Auto-Rip, a positive step toward unified online digital rights management

from Mashable
Amazon's AutoRip Gives You Free MP3s for CDs You've Purchased:

My Amazon Cloud Player. There are double arrows beneath
the albums added automatically today by Auto-Rip

I got this news on Mashable today.  Amazon has gone live with a service that closely mirrors the digital ecosystem ideas I recommended a few months ago.  Auto-Rip mines your account for the record of all the physical CDs you've purchased from them since 1998.  It automatically adds digital access for that CD content to your online library via the Amazon Cloud Player. You don't have to manually rip or upload anything yourself,

The breakthrough idea is this: Amazon has decoupled the rights to the content from the delivery mechanism.  They effectively acknowledge that the money I spend for content--the music--means I have rights to it on a CD, online, or as a local download to my personal devices.   This is a cool service, but it's part of a Big Idea, stateless data, applications, and devices.

Take note: especially if Amazon extends this idea to video, books, and applications, they will have changed the game and the business model for content sales.  Why would I buy from anyone else unless they recognize that I'm buying rights to content, not the physical thing that holds it?

The next logical extension will apply to third-party streaming of content I've paid for.  Pandora, for instance, can mine my digital rights and steam me my own content without paying a broadcast license fee to do so: it's microcasting, not broadcasting.

'via Blog this'

5 Trends In HTML5 In 2012

This is from ReadWrite Mobile:  5 Trends In HTML5 In 2012:

As you know, I think the move to stateless data, apps, and devices is one of the biggest trends shaping our technology future.  HTML5 is one of the keys, a language that enables apps to be written as pure web applications, needing no local installation or updates--the app, its security, and its updates all run in the cloud.  Your phone, tablet, laptop: they all deliver you that app via some sort of browser.

Two important points to remember in this article:

• Performance matters, as demonstrated by the challenges Facebook has faced in preferentially offering web apps.  When devices are not optimized for web delivery, web apps face an uneven playing field.  There is still a lot of evolution to come in this aspect of stateless app delivery.
• Never forget that the best tech idea can be deliberately hindered when it challenges another business model.  Apple's deliberate crippling of web technologies in order to protect its own app store is a classic case, and ironic when viewed next to Apple's own efforts to discourage the use of Flash in favor of HTML5-like web content delivery.

The future still favors web delivery of applications and content; this article is a reminder that the future does not come in a steady stream, but in fits and "quantum change" bursts. 

'via Blog this'

When you no longer have to know or care where your servers are, you're stateless

ReadWriteWeb DeathWatch: In-House Datacenters:

This is part of the reason I see the stateless revolution as one of the biggest technology trends.  The ReadWriteWeb article mentions the Netflix migration to Amazon Web Services: from 2500 in-house servers to 50.



'via Blog this'

I moved all my data to the cloud: living stateless all the time with Google Drive and Chrome OS

Sometimes the new is easier when it looks like the familiar.

Here is a screen capture of my Google Drive interface, using a friendly 

tree-hierarchy folder layout. For this folder of classic car photos,

I'm using a large-icon preview.

Everything is in the cloud, but you'd never know.

Would you store all of your data in the cloud?

Everything? Documents, photos, music, video? Not a single item in local storage other than what's cached in the browser?

I did just that.  This is the story of why I did and how that happened. When your data lives in the cloud, you have decoupled it from local storage. You can access your stuff on every machine, because it's no longer tied to the particular machine you have in your hand.   Data becomes stateless.

I believe it's a big trend, an important enabling technology.

In the stateless future, every device is a blank slate, ready to become what you ask of it.  Lose it, have it stolen, run over it with a truck--you don't have to care, because everything that makes the machine yours is in the cloud, free from any specific machine and ready to use the moment you sign in somewhere else, on some other device.  There is a lot to say about this idea; Infrics' coverage and advocacy of the stateless future is here.

So far, Google is the only major company bringing this idea to market*.  Improvements in the ChromeOS stateless operating system and in the Google Drive cloud data service made something possible and easy last month, my move to all-cloud-data, all-the-time.

In other words, last month, I turned my Chromebook into a dumb box.  Using drag and drop between windows in ChromeOS, I moved every file I had stored locally on the machine's flashdrive up to the cloud, and onto Google Drive.  It is now my default storage mechanism and the solid state storage on the Chromebook is empty.  There is an exception: my music and videos are in Google Play Music and Amazon Cloud Player--still cloud-based, but not part of Drive. Even though cloud-data-only is practical, we are not quite there in terms of a truly unified cloud data system.  The digital ecosystem needs work.

It doesn't feel like a sacrifice at all.  I set Drive as my default storage within ChromeOS settings, so I can save to Drive directly.  I can print any document or photo or web page to a .pdf stored in Drive. I can attach files to mail from Drive, or upload directly from Drive without any local presence of the file (as I did to import the screen capture above into this post.)

You can throw everything into Drive as one big bucket, and retrieve it on the fly using search; if you prefer more structure, use Drive's tree structure of nested folders to organize files.  It feels just like the comfortable C: drive I've used for 20 years on legacy systems, but it's as stateless as tomorrow.  Unlike the old C: drive, I can get to every file I own on any device I use without ever synching anything.

Local data is the answer to a need from the earliest days of hardwired networks, low bandwidth, and legacy thinking.  We are past those days. I gave up local data, because I believe it's time to move on.  Now, no laptop hard drive crash can hurt me, no thief can cost me months of work by taking my computer.  I never back up anything, because there is nothing that needs to be backed up.  I'll never fail to give a presentation because I left my computer in the taxi, or because I brought the wrong SD card. Everything I need is everywhere I am.



*Mozilla's stateless FirefoxOS for mobile devices is very promising, and near-market.  Because they are tied to local applications and fat operating systems like Mac OS, iOS, and Windows, I do not consider the cloud data offerings from Apple and Microsoft to be serious stateless contenders--yet.  Cloud data services like Dropbox are close to being stateless, but lack ease of integration to be useful alternatives to the Google Drive/ChromeOS pairing of stateless OS and stateless data.  There is much room for discussion on this point in the comments.  I hope you will share your ideas and questions.

Amazon Web Services: $1B in stateless computing revenue, "less than 10% of its eventual size" -- NYT

Active in Cloud, Amazon Reshapes Computing - NYTimes.com:

When an AWS customer speculated on the price of a server--which he never has to buy thanks to Amazon's servers in the cloud--he said, "for me, that would be like knowing what the price of a sword is."

This is an excellent article from the New York Times.  The success of Amazon's effort highlights three important Big Ideas:

• Abstract complexity
  If you can't eliminate the complex, manage it so the part that is consumed appears simple.  AWS abstracts the entire data center so well, end users neither know nor care how it happened.  Don't Know, Don't Care (DKDC) is one of the biggest enablers of:
  
• the Service Oriented Enterprise
  Up to now, buying, configuring and managing servers and the place they live was like a piece of a very elaborate jigsaw puzzle.  It had many edges and only fit together in one way with other similarly elaborate pieces.  AWS is like Lego blocks: standard and predictable. It can be assembled in millions of ways. When the elements of business processes are decomposed into reusable component parts, it's the difference between a Lego store and the impossibly jumbled Room of Requirement in the Harry Potter stories.
  
• Decouple data, applications, and machines
  Remember, cloud computing, for all its (mostly justified) hype, is only one part of the stateless future.  AWS represents the impact of stateless processing power at the top level; imagine the same impact propagated across personal and mobile computing, user data, and the applications in your enterprise, and you begin to see the true promise of the stateless future. 

"A Chromebook needs no care and feeding:" Michael Horowitz

Wake up and smell the Chrome | Computerworld Blogs:

Since I advocate stateless computing--the decoupling of data, applications, and devices--it stands to reason I think that Google's ChromeOS is a breakthrough.  I've used a Chromebook for 14 months, only booting up my Windows laptop once a week or so; I Skype on it, and yesterday I needed to rip a CD so that I could upload it to cloud storage.

This is an excellent post from Computerworld's Michael Horowitz, comparing the experience of keeping a ChromeOS machine up to date (no action ever needed) with another expert's routine to achieve the same thing with a fat operating system.  Here is the money quote:

Yes, a Chromebook is less functional than a laptop running Windows, OS X or Linux. But, it requires no maintenance. Let me say that again: no maintenance. Try and let that sink in, if not for yourself (this is Computerworld after all), then for the non-techies you know. A Chromebook needs no care and feeding. 

I believe that ChromeOS will continue to improve functionality much more quickly than any legacy OS will get rid of updates, scans for malware and viruses, and the need to back up data.

'via Blog this'

iTunes, Google Play, Amazon: digital ecosystems fail the stateless future, digital content IAM offers opportunity, hope

As John Battelle pointed out in his own blog post a few days ago about the Google Nexus 7 tablet, the company you choose for your digital ecosystem matters.  How we pay for, manage, and consume content is becoming more and more important.  That's because content--words, audio, video, and applications--represents the sentinel trend of the entire stateless revolution.  Content is digital, stored in the cloud, and separated (or decoupled) from the delivery mechanism and the way you consume it. 

In a pure version of this, you would pay for a license for the creative part, and then own it.  You would decide where it would be stored, how and when it would be delivered to you, and on what device you consumed it.

My own Nexus 7 arrived a couple of days ago.  As reported all over the web, it's optimized as a consumption device for the offerings of Google Play, their digital ecosystem of books, magazines, music, movies, and TV.  This is hardly a radical idea.  The iOS/iTunes pairing and the Amazon Kindle Fire are also designed toward the same goal; each claims to offer a complete one-stop answer for all your media purchase, storage, and consumption needs.

Content bound to media: how quaint
image from freedigitalphotos.net

What doesn't get mentioned often is just how carefully each is designed to make sure you don't get or consume content from the competitors.  That's the business model: create a single point of contact for digital media, keep it inside your own four walls, and sell it as a package.  Alas for big companies, that's the big-box retail model brought to the web, isn't it? As a consumer, you trade convenience for lock-in and more limited choice.

In that way, the business models from each company work directly against your own increasing ability to own and control your own content.  At the same time, across almost everything we see in technology, the real trend is toward personalization, more specialized choice, and the movement of tech power further away from big companies and ever closer to the end user.  

When you think about digital ecosystems as part of a business plan, rather than a reflection of where society and technology are taking us, there is a disconnect.  Where there is a disconnect, there is a need and a possibility.  Where there is a need, there is a business opportunity, and the likelihood of disruption.

 Later in this article, I'll introduce the idea of externalizing that control with Digital Content Identity and Access Management, and offer ideas about the way that one change may profoundly alter the way we think of digital ecosystems.

Historically, the physical manifestation of art--words, sounds, images--was bound to the thing that brought that content to you.  It could have been words on the page of a magazine or a book, or the tracks on an LP or CD.  When you paid for the physical thing, you bought a license for the artistic part at the same time.

The core of the stateless idea is that each of those elements is decoupled from the others; data and applications are cloud-delivered, and consumed on a machine designed to deliver a user interface and a connection to the cloud content.  The inevitable trend is toward separation of content from delivery mechanism from consumption mechanism.   So what happens to the license, your payment for the true worth of a book, a song, or a movie?  For the most part, when you become part of a digital ecosystem, it is still bound to the delivery mechanism, and your newfound digital freedom has been limited.

There is no iTunes app for Android, for instance.  You can "own" streaming movies through Amazon, but you can only access them through the video player on Amazon's website, which is Flash-only, therefore off-limits for iOS and my new Nexus tablet, which is Android Jellybean and also not Flash-enabled.  Digital books from Amazon are linked to their own Kindle device--and even though you've paid for a Kindle book, you can't loan it to anyone the way you could with a physical book (correction: shortly after I published the story, a reader let me know that you can, in fact, loan a Kindle book on a one-time basis to another reader. I think that is good news.)

Google Play is somewhat less controlled, but it's still a "four-walls" kind of thing.  Buy a song from Google, where do you have to manage it?  Yup. If any of these sites goes down, do you have rights to access a licensed copy of your content somewhere else?  No.  If your account is hacked, who do you have to go through to regain access to your content?  The ecosystem.  I think you see the point.  As things stand now, you only own content you buy if you play by the rules of the company that sold it to you. 

It's as if, 25 years ago, you bought a Fleetwood Mac CD from a Virgin Megastore, could only store it in their proprietary CD case, and only play it on a Virgin player.  I exaggerate, of course, but the point is, we have all gained one freedom--online access to our stuff--by trading control of it to the company we choose for that digital ecosystem.

The promise of stateless digital content is unfulfilled.  If ever there was an area facing a perfect storm of technology change, new user expectations, and old business ideas fighting to stay alive, this is the place.

What is the opportunity?  Digital content identity and access management (DCIAM) 

As part of your online identity, this company will--once it exists--maintain a database of all the digital rights you own, authenticate you as the rightful owner, and verify you as licensed owner of cloud-sourced digital content.  Accessible as a universal web service, and independent of any ecosystem, this is a not only a logical outcome of the move to stateless, it is a huge enabling technology for:

• Further disintermediation of traditional media companies, as independent artists' reward system would move outside the media companies' control.  If you are a media company, it is now in your interest to make sure your product can be sold in the widest-possible range of locations, because what you are selling is just the license, now handled by a trusted third party.  If your business model is based on artificially high prices based on forced linkage between content, delivery, and consumption, that model will be in significant danger.  
• New sales models, in essence re-enabling in digital format the old megastore idea, in which you could pay for a license for any content from any publisher or creator.  As the consumer, you would no longer be hindered by the fact that your ecosystem vendor does not have sales agreements with every source.
    
• New digital content storage, management, and delivery vendors, who maintain libraries of content in common, and follow the cloud shared tenancy model to supply you with your content via DCIAM authentication.  Any device, any time.  If one vendor is down, DCIAM eliminates barriers to your access through another source.
• New ultra-personalized "stations" combining delivery of your own licensed content with new content paid for via advertising or subscription.  I've already written about this idea as applied to Pandora.com, in which Pandora saves broadcast license fees by subtracting them from any content they play you that you already own.  If I paid for "Go Your Own Way" by Fleetwood Mac when I bought rights to the "Rumours" album, there is no longer any reason why Pandora should pay BMI or ASCAP if they stream it to me.  DCIAM makes granular song-by-song licensing not only possible, but powerful.
  
  Using DCIAM, the same model might further the distruption of the traditional video network concept and the cable/satellite industry.  We are already seeing a big consumer push toward a-la-carte TV; DCIAM can push that further toward the consumer.  If Pandora can deliver me a personalized audio experience of female jazz singers from the 50s, there is no logical reason why I can't get my own cooking channel on TV, assembling the best shows currently on the Food Network, Bravo, PBS, and the Travel Channel.  DCIAM would also manage one-time use licenses, such as for a TV show, either via purchase or paid by acceptance of advertising.  This is essentially a new network model, not of broadcasting, but of extreme narrowcasting.  DCIAM enables the business model.
   
• Handled properly, the marketing opportunities presented by one common database of a consumer's taste and purchasing history for content can use DCIAM to radically personalize ad delivery in cases where content consumption is still ad-supported.  Ad personalization is still wildly fragmented, and largely because information about purchases and interests is localized to the sites that control the ecosystem.  Once that is externalized, those barriers are gone.  This is "era of you" personalization brought home in the form of a huge business opportunity.  If digital ecosystems are the sentinel of the stateless future, digital ad personalization is that sentinel's entrepreneurial cousin.

Technology triggers are in action here.  Changes in what is possible--stateless licensing, content, delivery, and consumption--mean that opportunity is near for a company who moves beyond the current digital ecosystem model.  In so doing, they access business opportunities that make current ecosystem efforts look miserly by comparison.  

Combine DCIAM with the upcoming revolution in digital personal assistants, and you begin to see the true battle of the giants for your loyalty in the near future.  

There are big questions.  Who will bring this to you?  Who will still be a significant vendor in 5 years? Who will you trust?

Infrics.com articles referenced in this report:

The Nexus 7 and the Cloud Commit Conundrum, John Battelle

Who owns your music, movies, and books? The stateless revolution comes to the world of content and media

Don screams into his laptop at Pandora.com.  Computer says no.

Pano's PC Killer - NYTimes.com

Image from nytimes.com

 "Honey, does this Pano box make my Chrome OS look fat?"

Pano's PC Killer - NYTimes.com:

This is a fascinating development, the stateless idea extended to the point that more of the local OS has moved to the cloud. It appears to be solely a terminus for a cloud-based virtualized desktop.

A company in the traditional personal computer business “is like a saguaro cactus that has been shot,” (Pano CEO John)...Kish said. “It can stand for another 20 years without showing it, but it’s dead.”

Mozilla’s Boot To Gecko Becomes Firefox OS, Scores Support From Sprint, Deutsche Telekom, ZTE, And More | TechCrunch

Image from TechCrunch 

Mozilla’s Boot To Gecko Becomes Firefox OS, Scores Support From Sprint, Deutsche Telekom, ZTE, And More | TechCrunch:

The more-or-less official launch of what started at Boot 2 Gecko.  The big news here is the likelihood of an explosion in very low cost smartphones, and the first deployment of a stateless operating system for the mobile space (link is to all the Infrics.com stateless coverage, including a curated list of Boot 2 Gecko articles.) Firefox OS has the potential to be for smart phones what Chrome OS is for computers.