Work(ing Title)

Once again the lightning rod around which my inspiration chooses to strike is the same. This time Marco Arment’s thoughts on digital media are dovetailing nicely with my own:

I hate watching video on my computer, and don’t have cable TV. Instead, I have an Apple TV and an Xbox 360 with Netflix’s on-demand streaming app.

I wanted to watch this. iTunes doesn’t have it for rental and it’s not available for Netflix streaming, so I put it in my Netflix DVD queue.

But since I hate DVD menus and the Xbox 360 isn’t a great DVD player (too much fan and disc noise, no deinterlacing even over HDMI outputs, and awful remote-control angle), I usually rip movies with Handbrake, deinterlacing if necessary, and play them with the Apple TV.

Except this time, the plastic disc holding the 8.5 GB of MPEG-2 was scratched too much and couldn’t be reliably read by either my DVD-ROM drive or the Xbox 360 for playback. This isn’t the first time this has happened, and it can’t really be avoided, although Netflix is very good at minimizing it. I went to their site and told them it was scratched, and now I need to wait two days for a different plastic disc with the same MPEG-2 data that hopefully isn’t scratched so my computer can read it and bypass the trivial encryption and remove the prohibited user operations and strip the menus and convert it to the format that works best on my TV because it’s not the same format as older TVs and I don’t want to buy another box with another remote and another video signal to collect even more dust in my “entertainment center” that needs to exist to hold all of these boxes that all do the same things but with different publisher deals and content availability and in slightly different and incompatible ways.

This all seems so archaic.

One reason HD-DVD died and Blu-Ray has had a slow pickup is that the geeks like me, who buy the cutting-edge technology before it’s mainstream, are completely disinterested in dealing with discs. Every time I put a disc into a drive, I feel like I’m waiting for a VHS tape to rewind before I eject it and drive it back to Blockbuster: that feeling that this seems completely unnecessary with modern technology and it’s probably not long for this world.

Our grandchildren (and, for the younger generation, even our children) will probably never hear a dial tone or busy signal, use a tape rewinder because we told them the expensive VCR would wear out its motors if it rewound too many tapes itself, bring the empty case up to the Blockbuster clerk to get the real movie, or be disappointed to open their new CD’s case and find that the spokes have cracked and are rattling around inside. Do you think they’ll be shuffling movies around on plastic discs transported by mail or automobile and exchanging them for different ones because they’re too scratched to play?

The frustration outlined here by Marco is something I’ve shared for a while, and it has continued to drive me to digitize and collect the media I want to enjoy. The desire for an appealing and modern user experience is so strong, I’ve begun to investigate the feasability of digitizing the books I own, so that I can study my photography books on a massive desktop display, and read my narratives on a Kindle or a phone.

One of the fundamental problems at this point in the digital revolution we are all living through is how to balance personal preference with legal standing: If I scan my copy of The Rum Diary, should I feel obligated to retain the tangible original? Present copyright law is clear on this, but the rational conclusion is that keeping boxes of unused physical material is simply unreasonable.

Further, I believe that securing and maintaining digital versions of the media I patronize is far more easily accomplished than with their physical counterparts. One of my closest friends Megan now has a distorted, water-damaged copy of Rubber Soul; the unfortunate result of a fire in her apartment last year. While the nostalgic part of me may believe that vinyl represents a subjectively ’superior’ sound, another good friend and unapologetic audiofile has concluded that the majority of his music collection will soon live on a Mac mini in a lossless digital format. Nirav’s digital library will be able to be seamlessly duplicated (for security purposes) and effortlessly enjoyed across locales and scenarios (courtesy of the digital device ecosystem).

The invention of sound compression techniques has forced music into the vanguard position in this revolution, which has shown us the multitude of possibilities, including portable players and network streaming. The best example of this in my experience has been the Zune experiement coming out of Microsoft. It has certainly progressed along similar lines as most of the innovations coming out of Redmond, in that the appeal become clear in the first two versions. Zune started as a pedestrian piece of desktop software and a laughable portable gadget. This month though, The Zune HD begins to offer up the ability to tap into a essentially infinite library of audio content, all of which is available for unlimited consumption for a cost equivalent to five cappuchinos a month. And when the option to permenantly retain a CD’s worth of that music each month, the value proposition becomes truely astounding: Buy one album per month, and you’re entitled to listen to everything in the store as much as you like (to really put that in perspective, imagine if Netflix charged you a fixed rate for unlimited monthly video streaming, and they let you choose one movie to keep forever).

The elephant in the room here is DRM, which is already showing signs of fading, with iTunes Plus on the bright side and Amazon’s absurd 1984-on-Kindle debacle on the dark side. For me what this shows is the market motivations against being unreasonably restrained and for being given reasonable responsibility (iTunes continued to sell more music legally after removing DRM from their equation). I hope with time, other content providers will hear what the market is saying to them. Ryan Block’s A day in a DRM-free world is a wonderful vision for this version of the future.

In the end, those of us who are actors in this revolution of media consumption must behave accordingly, which is to say we must revolt in order to push things forward. For me this means violating laws in order to help illustrate future normative behavior and influence the revisions of those laws. So I will continue to form a digital basin of content, whether inside or outside the realm of copyright allowances and End User License Agreements. I will be able to patronize in ways that are most comfortable, as well as evangelize the potential of new technologies to those who remain on the fence about whether to join the revolution.

If the launch of Office 2007 was a new day at the office, is today only your second day on the job?

Here’s the official blurb…

“Wehave managed to complete the engineering work slightly earlier than we anticipated and are making the download available from OfficeOnline.

What can you expect in Service Pack 1?

SP1 focuses on the issues that matter most to our customers based on direct customer feedback and error reporting tools. You can expect:

• Stability.Using data from the Dr. Watson bug-reporting system, we’ve fixed the top software issues for each application in the 2007 Office system. The 2007 Office system SP1 also improves the stability of server components in the 2007 Office system and delivers compatibility with Windows Server® 2008, so you can confidently plan for future upgrades.
• Performance. The 2007 Office system SP1 improves performance in applications and servers. Performance improvements can be found in Microsoft Office Excel® 2007, Microsoft Office Outlook® 2007, Microsoft Office PowerPoint® 2007, and Microsoft Office SharePoint® Server 2007.
• Security. By incorporating incremental advances in security and results from application testing, the 2007 Office system SP1 offers home and office users better protection against malicious software and potential threats to privacy.

Fora full list of improvements in SP1, download the Service Pack 1 whitepaper.

What does SP1 mean for you?

Service Pack 1 eliminates distractions and performance issues that disrupt workflow, allowing employees to be more productive in the work that they do. SP1 is also an important milestone for deploying the 2007 Office system, making it easy to deploy the most secure and reliable version of Office to date.

How do you get it?

Initially, SP1 will be available as a free download from OfficeOnline. SP1 will be made available via Automatic Update in the next 3-6 months, and we’ll issue 30 day advance notice prior to delivering SP1 via automatic update.”

(Mark Bower)

The modern productivity worker isn’t quite as location-monogamous any longer. People are working from their desks, beds, and gazebos. Office Live Workspace is the beginning of Microsoft’s facilitation of this roaming work style. With the service, documents can be posted online directly from Word, Excel, and PowerPoint to be edited from just about any browser. The days of saving a file to your local machine and using a disjointed browser interface to move it online are coming to a close.

Eric Schonfeld’s initial review of Live Workspace for Techcrunch points out a few of the limitations at present. Most file types are only viewable online and cannot be modified. The only editable documents are those created in Microsoft Word, and those cannot be saved to the desktop from the Web Notes online word processor. Also, the ability to sync documents online is currently restricted to those running Windows with Office XP or later.

While the demand for Microsoft to release feature parity with the current crop of online productivity tools, there’s no great motivation to follow suit. As Joe Wilcox pointed out last month at eWeek, current sales are double the previous release, with Office 2007 volume responsible for 17.4 percent of all software that runs on Windows.

With that sort of growth in Microsoft’s traditional software business, there is a reasonable counterpoint to the Web 2.0 communities death knell for software sold in boxes.

photo credit: Ken McGrail

Getting under the skin of this week’s Zune launch, Saul Hansell has posted a three-part interview with Microsoft’s J Allard at the NY Times Bits blog. There’s a great amount of candid conversation around all aspects of Microsoft’s growing entertainment movement.

On the perpetual rumor of a Zune phone:

The phone will be one part entertainment…. What you will see from us is more of these signature experiences. When you see the Zune, you’ll say say, I want my music experience on the phone to be like that. Hey, I want my telecommunication experience on the phone to be more like that.

On the evolution of Zune devices:

I’m a big believer in failing fast… If we skipped last year, we would have never come out with the product we did this year… We learned that because of the shortfalls in the PC client [software], the device was less useful… People hated that there was no podcasts, that they couldn’t fill their cultural cache [the Zune] with the stuff that was meaningful to them.

On the evolution of a new Microsoft entertainment platform:

Today we have Xbox live for $50 a year. We have Zune Pass at $15 a month. We don’t have a rationalized premium version yet. Fast forward a little bit, and you can image a menu like DirecTV. There is basic, there is enhanced, there is movie pack and NFL Sunday ticket.

It’s exciting to see another solid base hit for Mr. Allard. His laser focus on consumer experiences and the interaction between Microsoft and individual human beings is right up my street. There’s a gravity around personalities like J and Ray Ozzie that fill me with a lot of hope. They both seem to understand the importance of user experience, and seem to place more importance on them than traditional Microsoft thinking.

This morning’s Defrag keynote opened with a panel discussion on where the business of search and discovery has come from, and where it needs to go.

Marti Hearst (UC Berkeley) made a strong opening analogy by explaining that search is currently an, “experience in orienteering;” the journey to your information begins with a few words, followed by a long period of sniffing out clues. This process repeats until hopefully you find what you were looking for.

Obviously this creates a demand for a major upgrade to the human experience of search. One of the natural solutions is natural language processing, where Microsoft is doing a lot of great work (TellMe, Windows Speech Recognition, and Ford Sync).

Another of the interesting factors in the evolution of search is a pitch for building more topic-specific indexes. Steve Larsen (Krugle) argued a compelling case for vertical search indexes, “In a code-writing search index, Python is never a reptile and always a language.”

This feels like a workaround for the lack of NLP implementation/effectiveness, but as opposed to most instances, that sort of design sounds extremely valuable. I think I might rather have a half-dozen different search engines that I use across a day, assuming they are each much more targeted toward the information I’m looking for. I think this type of strategy could allow for a lot of smaller-scale growth in the search market.

Bradley Horowitz (Yahoo) gave an explanation of Flickr’s Interestingness system which brought up the powerful difference between explicit and implicit discovery systems. Explicit systems (voting, rating) are ripe for gaming and rigging, which obviously prevents an honest view of the landscape from emerging. The Interestingness recipe watches views, comments, and favourites across all the system’s photos. In addition though, it weights the value of those actions based on the relationship the author has with the viewer (your brother marking your photo as a favourite is different than a stranger doing the same). Intricacies like that help develop a more honest result set.

The beauty I see in these implicit designs is their invisibility to a user’s actions. Rather than putting the request on the user to think consciously about the value they place on something, the software simply listens and reacts. As Bradley put it so eloquently, “The system changes in the user’s wake.”

When the discussion got to addressing the uncrawlable information trapped behind paywalls and corporate firewalls. Jeremie Miller (Search Wikia) made the comment that as people define knowledge by what is discovered through search, knowledge that doesn’t make it into the index may cease to exist (so far as many people are concerned).

Honestly I’m terrified by the social implications of such a reality; the rift between those with access to the indexes and those without can have dire effects, not to mention the concerns around who controls those indexes.