From: rah@shipwright.com (Robert Hettinga)
Date: Mon, 22 Jan 96 09:01:07 PST
To: cypherpunks@toad.com
Subject: (fwd) e$: PBS NewsHour, Path Dependency, IPSEC, Cyberdog, and the Melting of Mr.Bill.
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From: rah@shipwright.com (Robert Hettinga)
Date: Mon, 22 Jan 1996 10:37:28 -0500
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To: Multiple recipients of <e$@thumper.vmeng.com>
Subject: e$: PBS NewsHour, Path Dependency, IPSEC, Cyberdog, and the
Melting of Mr. Bill.

I thought I'd crank this out in light of Friday's NewsHour segment about
Apple and the path-dependency of the microcomputer market.


Contrary to what PBS would have us believe, ;-), the concept of path
dependency in technology, and in economics, for that matter, is a proven
fallacy.

At the risk of sounding credentialist (*I'm* not an economist, either), the
NewsHour's Mr. Solman seems to be proof that journalism isn't economics, no
matter the journalist's academic credentials. Journalists have to get a
story out, and sometimes there's no story in the actual economics of a
situation. Certainly there's no story in the non-existance of path
dependency.


The most famous example of path dependency, the idea that our previous
economic choices doom us to repeat those choices forever, is the QWERTY
keyboard, which has been proven *not* to be significantly slower than the
Dvorak keyboard, its supposedly more efficient alternative. Dvorak, the
designer of the alternative keyboard, was also the same person who
conducted the "ergonomic" studies (spending our WWII tax dollars, I might
add) "proving" it's efficacy, and elevated his keyboard to the status of an
urban legend. Dvorak was at worst a fraud and at best deluded with his own
grandeur. Reviews of Dvorak's own data show some significant flaws in both
research methdology and data handling. In addition, several independent
studies since then have shown that randomly selected beginning typists,
starting out on one keyboard or the other, have *never* shown any
significant difference in typing speed.

The Betamax/VHS videocassete war, another example of path dependence, was
more one of Sony not having an open standard than anything else. Sony
played dog-in-the-manger with it's own technology, and consequently ended
up owning the most lucrative market on a profit-per-machine basis, the one
in television broadcasting. It also means they were leaving big money on
the table where the largest market was, in consumer electronics. Doesn't
this sound familiar to Mac fans?

Path dependence had nothing to do with it. Consumer Reports did comparisons
at the time showing only a marginal difference between Betamax and JVC, and
nowadays there is absolutely no percievable difference between the two.

I now challenge anyone (including, unfortunately, Apple's own
*psychologist*, quoted in the NewsHour piece) to *prove* path-dependence in
the current market "hegemony" of Microsoft on the desktop. It ain't so. The
reason that Microsoft has business computer market dominance today is *not*
because of it's original *perceived* incompatibility with legacy mainframe
equipment ("nobody ever got fired for buying IBM -- or Microsoft").
Technically, mainframe compatibility was a non-issue at the time. It
certainly wasn't for the first 5 years of the Mac's life, anyway. Apple
could have done something about the mainframe compatibility issue with
simple marketing communications if they had paid any attention to it at
all.

Apple's heart was never in the business market. First of all, for all their
lip service to business, they really weren't ever attracted to the idea of
building better word-processing and spreadsheet boxes, even if they did
have the best one, before Excel and Word moved to Windows, at the time of
the big ramp up of the business microcomputer market.  It showed in their
attitude to most business people. Outside consultants and mavericks were
always the heroes in Apple's commercials, and so outside consultants and
mavericks were attracted to the Mac as a computing platform, but large
businesses and conformists weren't.  When compatibility with mainframes
actually did become an issue, for the short time when people were
offloading their mainframe data onto LANs, Apple didn't want to be there
anyway. With the advent of LANs, Apple didn't build the technology to deal
with LANs head on on their own turf, large corporations. Apple built
peer-to-peer networks of collegial desktop machines. Unfortunately, they
never paid attention to the bandwidth or the multitasking premia necessary
for those networks to function properly from the high-volume user's point
of view, and, so, when someone downloaded a file from your machine, and you
printed something in the background at the same time, you suffered a
performance hit if you tried to do anything else. Your mouse jerked around
the screen, or your words wouldn't show up in a window as fast as you typed
them. With PC file and print servers, this was less of a problem, because
those two jobs were offloaded to a seperate machine, whose job it was to do
nothing but run a printer, or to serve files. Since everyone had to be
connected to these servers the local area network, or LAN, was born. On
Apple networks, every machine is potentially a server for everyone else,
and everyone is their own print server. Only after PC LANs became
ubiquitous did Apple ever build servers of their own. Again, their hearts
weren't in it, because they were more interested in the possiblities of
more distributed, collegial, peer-to-peer networks. Fortunately, the first
problem, network bandwidth, has been solved, because almost all Macs now
come with ethernet, while the second problem, preemptive multitasking on
faster processors, is being solved slowly. This is all very good for Apple,
because peer-to-peer architecture is where the world's going to go anyway.
The whole internet is a peer-to-peer, "geodesic" network, where each
machine is optimized for it's own particular function, be it serving, or
switching information. There is no central repository of anything. That has
been Apple's view of networks since day one.


If it's any consolation, we won't even need LANs to do business with,
anyway.  A couple months ago, I saw Netscape running in the bond trading
room of this country's largest institutional trustee bank, of all places.
In their case, Netscape beat Powerbuilder hands-down in a prototype
development shootout. The prototype *was* the production version.  Netscape
can do anything from secure outside-the-firewall SQL calls to actually
conducting cash commerce. Game over. By the way, Netscape is not special in
this regard at all. So can any other sufficiently secure browser server
combination. Either one, client or server, can be developed for a dime a
dozen even now. This is especially true when compound document
architectures come on-line, like Apple's Cyberdog, an internet
implementation of their OpenDoc software object technology.

The reason we won't need LANs is because the only real difference between a
LAN and the internet is a firewall for security, and the need for clients
to speak Novell's TCP/IP-incompatible proprietary network protocol.  With
internet-level encryption protocols like the IETF IPSEC standard, you won't
even need a firewall anymore.  The only people who can establish a server
session with *any* machine connected to the net will be those issuing the
digital signatures authorized to access that machine, no matter where those
people are physically. When that happens, networks will need to be as
public as possible, which means, of course, TCP/IP, and not Netware. It's
like Heinlein's old joke about space, "once you're in Earth orbit, you're
halfway to anywhere". So, once you've gotten *rid* of the firewall, you're
everywhere.  So much for the path dependence of the LAN market.

What happens to the information concentrated behind those firewalls  -- or
proprietary software markets, for that matter --  when, because of strong
cryptography, firewalls disappear? Remember what happened to those floating
globs of grease in the detergent commercial? Surfacted away into little
tiny bits. I can hear Bill Gates now: "I'm melting!, I'm melting!". Ding,
dong, Mr. Bill is dead... Game over. Now you see why he's fighting so hard
to be net-compatible all of the sudden.

In this "decade of the internet", the [user interface, platform, desktop,
LAN, whatever] is meat, and real life is on the net, to paraphrase William
Gibson.


For the time being, I have come to the conclusion that the Mac, at least as
long as Apple makes most of them, is the computer for the "best of us",
and, unfortunately, not "the rest of us". I've learned to live with that. I
no more worry about Apple's prospects than I do about Porsche's.  I expect
that Apple management, like Herr Doktor Porsche, is just waking up to the
fact that even though they designed the Volkswagen, they can't possibly
mass produce them efficiently at a decent enough profit to advance the
state of the art, which is really where their hearts have been all along.
Sooner or later, Apple will go back to cranking out 917s, to demonstrate
the power of the technology, 911s, for a more affordable version of that
power, and 928s, for those of us who only want to look the part. ;-).
Fortunately, there are lots of companies, like Power Computing, to produce
those Volkswagens for those of us who can't afford Porches, and "Macintosh"
won't mean just "Apple" anymore.


So, for developers, and for me, a fully-credentialled Mac Bigot and
camp-follower, the future for Apple means Cyberdog, because Cyberdog means
breaking down large "glops" of information and software "grease" and
surfacting them, fractally, into little bitty bits out into the net, where
*all machines*, not just dumb Java-terminals, can use them better. It also
means developing cryptographically strong internet-level security, so that
anyone can talk to any machine from anywhere if they have permission to do
so, and *nobody* with out permission can either get in or see what those
authorized people are doing, with a packet sniffer, or worse, with a
key-cracker. It means building into all network applications the ability to
do digital commerce. That is, the ability to handle digital bearer
certificates, like Digicash's ecash, and the ability to handle
micropayments, like the MicroMint protocol or it's successor technologies.
Imagine if your code could send you money in the mail, or if a router did
real-time load balancing by changing it's micropayment
price-per-thru-packet when traffic got too high or too low. The future of
the net's going to be a strange place, indeed.


Until that happens, I suppose Porsche parts is still a lucrative business,
as long as developers keep in mind what business they're really in.


Cheers,
Bob Hettinga

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Robert Hettinga (rah@shipwright.com)
e$, 44 Farquhar Street, Boston, MA 02131 USA
"Reality is not optional." --Thomas Sowell
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