"collision of hardware and software" entries
Welcome back, Weblandians
The collision of software and hardware has broken down the barriers between the digital and physical worlds.
Note: this post is a slightly hydrated version of my Solid keynote. To get it out in 10 minutes, I had to remove a few ideas and streamline it a bit for oral delivery; this is the full version.
In 1995, Nicolas Negroponte told us to forget about the atoms and focus on the bits. I think “being digital” was probably an intentional overstatement, a provocation to shove our thinking off of its metastable emphasis on the physical, to open us up to the power of the purely digital. And maybe it worked too well, because a lot of us spent two decades plumbing every possibility of digital-only technologies and digital-only businesses.
Solid attendees watch a Bot & Dolly demonstration of their Iris robot. Photo by O’Reilly.
By then, technology had bifurcated into two streams of hardware and software that rarely converged outside of the data center, and for most of us, unless we were with a firm the size of Sony, with a huge addressable market, hardware was simply outside the scope of our entrepreneurial ambitions. It was our platform, but rarely our product. The physical world was for other people to worry about. We had become by then the engineers of the ephemeral, the plastic, and the immaterial. And in the depth of our immersion into the virtual and digital, we became, it seems, citizens of Weblandia (and congregants of the Church of Disruption).
But pendulums always swing back. Read more…
Why PayPal jumped the software-hardware gap
A software company reaches into the physical world with hardware.
PayPal is a software company, but when I met with Josh Bleecher Snyder, director of software engineering at PayPal, it was to talk about hardware. He’s leading the development of Beacon, PayPal’s new hands-free payment platform. At its heart is a finger-size stick that uses Bluetooth Low Energy to connect with mobile phones and confirm identity.
Paypal’s move into hardware extends its software into the physical world — a key idea behind our Solid Conference. What was once a system confined to screens and keyboards is now part of a new set of interactions in brick-and-mortar stores.
Beacon is part of a vast PayPal stack, and Bleecher Snyder’s team solved problems with a blend of hardware and software thinking — writing code in Go that was efficient enough for Beacon’s processor to be underclocked and avoid overheating, and to anticipate attacks on PayPal’s service that might come from compromised hardware. His entire system hews to PayPal’s “don’t be creepy” mantra by quickly and permanently discarding data that isn’t used in transactions. Read more…
That thing looks like hardware, but it’s software now
Building great software on time is at the heart of more and more "hardware" projects.
The X-35A JSF performs flight tests at Edwards Air Force Base, California. Photo: Wikimedia Commons.
I think what’s most interesting about this story is that when we look at an airplane we tend to see a physical thing. We see airfoils, materials, and hard sciences animated and airborne, but a growing proportion of the “thingness” of these machines is happening in software — software that makes it fly and software that connects it with all the other things on the battlefield, to share information and fight as one organism.
This airplane will require approximately eight million lines of code on board to run mission systems and flight sciences. I’m guessing flight sciences code will be the same for the U.S. and its partner / buyers, but I’m not sure. Given that the aircraft is flying but not operational, one could hazard a guess that the flight sciences code is coming along faster than the mission stuff with all its complex real-time target fusion stuff going on. And the mission code is the really interesting part. It’s what makes a single aircraft part of a bigger whole. It’s analogous to what makes the Nest more than just your typical thermostat, but much, much more. Read more…
Exploring software, hardware, everywhere
A Twitter Q&A follow-up to my conversation with Tim O'Reilly.
Last week, Tim O’Reilly and I sat down in San Francisco and had a conversation about the collision of hardware and software. The fact that digital entrepreneurs see hardware as part of their available palette now is really interesting, as is the way many companies with traditional manufacturing roots are seeing digitization and software as key parts of their businesses in the near future. Software plus more malleable hardware is like a whole new medium for building products and services. We really are on the cusp of interesting times.
As our time wound down, questions were still coming in via Twitter. Since we couldn’t get to all of them during the time allotted, I thought I’d try to respond to a few more of them here. Read more…
Resilience over strength
Why the connected world should hang loose.
As we accelerate toward the great convergence of hardware and software — where almost everything we do may be monitored and transformed into commoditized data points — a 1989 observation from novelist and essayist Cynthia Ozick seems increasingly, and uncomfortably, germane:
“The passion for inheritance is dead. [Today,] knowledge — saturated in historical memory — is displaced by information, or memory without history: data.”
The triumph of data over knowledge would be deeply depressing not because it represents catastrophe; we would continue working out, going to restaurants and taking our kids to school. Civil society would not collapse. Indeed, our lives would be ever more enriched with layers of raw information that could be bent to our will and interests. But we will have lost context and meaning. Our options could be increased by outsourcing our memory and ratiocinative processes to the cloud and a worldwide web of sensors, but we would be less interesting people: flatter, duller, intellectually truncated.
Then again, Ozick is a writer and social critic, not a prophet. Joi Ito, director of MIT’s Media Lab, has another take. While the collision of hardware and software is irreversible, Ito emphasizes it is not a monolithic force that will turn us into digitally lobotomized drones. Knowledge is not lost, says Ito, nor is Ozick’s “passion for inheritance” dead. Both may be compartmentalized — but they are always accessible. Read more…
Why Solid, why now
We are on the cusp of something as dramatic as the Industrial Revolution.
A few years ago at OSCON, one of the tutorials demonstrated how to click a virtual light switch in Second Life and have a real desk lamp light up in the room. Looking back, it was rather trivial, but it was striking at the time to see software people taking an interest in the “real world.” And what better metaphor for the collision of virtual and real than a connection between Second Life and the Portland Convention Center?
In December 2012, our Radar team was meeting in Sebastopol and we were talking about trends in robotics, Maker DIY, Internet of Things, wearables, smart grid, industrial Internet, advanced manufacturing, frictionless supply chain, etc. We were trying to figure out where to put our focus among all of these trends when suddenly it was obvious (at least to Mike Loukides, who pointed it out): they are all more alike than different, and we could focus on all of them by looking at the relationships among them. The Solid program was conceived that day. Read more…