hans.gerwitz

Your (Facebook) friends are watching

2012-04-26T07:00:00Z

Recently at frog’s Seattle studio we put to test the well-studied phenomenon of images with eyes encouraging prosocial behavior. Our office admins report a 90% reduction in dirty dishes left carelessly in or around the sink after placing a sign with faces exhorting us to behave like responsible adults. Previous text-only signs had led to no detectable improvement.

It was long ago showed that even subtle exposure to very stylized images of eyes strongly increases prosocial behavior. Melissa Bateson, a zoologist interested in how starlings react to images eyes, recently established the effect works with humans even without an accompanying message. Adding credence to the conclusion that a sense of being “watched” is behind all this, it’s been discovered that even atheists can be similarly primed by invoking god.

But who needs god, the POTUS, or even Bieber? Certainly our buying behavior is also an indicator for feeling “watched” when we avoid making certain purchases in public. University of Miami research has recently shown that our in-public behavior mode can be triggered not by anything as direct as pictures of our Facebook friends, but simply by the logos of social sites.

I’d love to know if the incidence rate of trolling is reduced in commenting systems that display a Facebook login, even if they don’t require its use.

Retromining

2012-03-31T07:00:00Z

I want to start a VC fund for bringing old video games to modern app markets.
— hans.gerwitz (@gerwitz) March 1, 2012

Plenty of the video games of my youth have lived on, with or without their brand franchise. Zelda and Metroid were the only two TV-based titles I enjoyed, and both have persisted and been well-copied. In high school we played a lot of Mac Risk¹, and that genre has certainly flourished.

Solar Realms Elite and Trade Wars, though, still exist but have faded into obscurity. It could be said that some MMORPGs (in particular EVE Online) have taken up that torch, but I’m not convinced. The evolution has been towards greater UI complexity, and the soul of these turn-based builders was in the simple, rhythmic nature of the maintenance loop. The zen of cow clicking with the brain crack of territory expansion. I’m sure this genre lives on somewhere, but I cannot find a well-designed iPhone derivative for spare time² empire building.

Dan Gorlin’s Choplifter has been successfully revived, but Airheart is the one that blew me away in 1986. Not just because of it’s amazing pseudo-3D graphics (560x192 pixels! 16 colors!) and smooth gameplay with an analog joystick. It was one of those games that sucked you in and made you lean in your chair while you worried about completing your mission. Especially with the tunnels and islands Gorlin originally intended, this would be a great accelerometer-controlled game.

And I have to mention Bill Budge’s Pinball Construction Set. A fine example of simulation-building accessible enough to bring basic procedural literacy to many. It wasn’t my gateway to programming, but I knew others who picked up Applesoft BASIC to satisfy creative urges initated with PCS.

Heavily modified with ResEdit, of course↩
The pocket form factor is perfect for casual gaming.↩

Back to basics

2012-02-20T08:00:00Z

A coworker recently turned me on to Nanoc, a static site compliation tool that lets me output plain old HTML. I was going to write about why I’ve come full circle for my 6th publishing tool and assembled my thoughts with a bunch of references, but Simon Sigurdhsson has already said it best:

use the right tool for the right job — there’s no need to bring out the sledgehammer when you’re trying to put up a painting. Use the hammer. Or your shoe.

Corporate rights

2012-01-13T08:00:00Z

From Tim Cook’s internal email addressing Apple’s 2012 Supplier Responsibility Progress Report:

Our team has built an ambitious training program to educate workers about Apple’s code of conduct, workers’ rights, and occupational health and safety. More than one million people know about these rights because they went to work for an Apple supplier.

In 1791, when the United States ratified the Bill of Rights, the population of “free white males of 16 years and upward” was 807,094. (The total population was more than 3 million more.)

I don’t mean to draw any conclusions about the ascendancy of corporation as a governance institution, but do find it noteworthy that the scale of a single company’s global manufacturing network is comparable to the birth of its nation.

Shared problems

2011-12-02T08:00:00Z

Schaeffer warned that America’s descent into tyranny would not look like Hitler’s or Stalin’s; it would probably be guided stealthily, by “a manipulative, authoritarian élite.”

These words were written by Ryan Lizza in his August New Yorker article about Michele Bachmann. He was making the case, accurately, that Francis Schaeffer was a paranoid conspiracist.
But a month later, Zuccotti Park was filled with Americans who seem very unlikely to subscribe to Schaeffer’s ideology, but are likely to agree with that warning. Occupier or Tea Partier, at least Americans seem to agree about our shared manipulative, authoritarian élite. Eventually we may figure out that the Koch brothers and Fanjul brothers both represent social problems.

City rights

2011-10-20T07:00:00Z

Today I’ve learned that NYC tried to implement congestion pricing but was foiled by their state government, and that Washington state is considering “allowing” cities to set speed limits on the roads that those cities build, maintain, and patrol.
America’s cities are responsible for over 80% of the population and 90% of the nation’s GDP. ¹ Yet this is the United States, not the United Cities, and our atomic units of governance are large land areas that generally have capitols in sparsely-populated areas. They tend to overrepresent rural interests and prioritize highways and social conservative issues with a dismissive attitude toward the collectivist preferences of dense population centers. Rhetoric from the right often extolls the virtues of local decision making, but generally mean to empower states.
Remaining competitive in an increasingly urban world is going to require more attention to the needs of cities. Our mayors need to fight for city rights.

Bruce Katz at Fast Company ↩

Just like the last time

2011-10-03T07:00:00Z

Five years ago, the Motorola Razr was the top-selling phone. Imagine trying to sell 6 million of them today.

Jonathan Chaplin, quoted in the WSJ
This feels like a fair comparison. At its height in 2006, the RAZR held a 22% market share. The iPhone has recently been estimated at 27% among smartphones.¹
Yet consider how the RAZR’s popularity fell off. It was dominating the high end of a category (now called “feature phones”) that had its top end chopped off by the iPhone and the other pocket-tablet phones it spawned. It was designed as a skunkworks project within Motorola, and after launch the only innovation the Motorola product machine brought to it was new colors and sacrificing profit to address the mass market. Apple, in contrast, no longer needs irreproducible skunkworks to develop disruptive products. While Motorola had to lower their margins to drive RAZR sales, Apple is profiting handsomely from the iPhone and will remain motivated to develop it.
What’s most troublesome about this sort of analogy, though, is the framing. Among mobile telecommunications industry analysts, Jonathan Chaplin is rather astute², but is still a member of an old guard that has learned to analyze an industry that has undergone dramatic change. They are working with an obsolete model where consumers visit carrier-sponsored storefronts, find a phone that matches their coat, and then settle on a service contract under the guidance of sales staff.
Today’s market is quite different. Many consumers are choosing a device based on its own features and perceive the carrier as a service provider. Each carrier is struggling to preserve its status as a direct marketer of handsets, and they have all failed to establish themselves as a credible provider of services beyond wireless data and, for now, voice communications.³
Device choice is leading consumer choice⁴ and arguably the most compelling feature is application platform. Which is why I don’t advise much attention to analysts that are veterans of the telecom industry, who have only managed to add “OS” to their box of phone features. Listen, rather, to those who see platforms and understand, for example, that the Amazon app store is a platform that has some cross-benefit with Google’s but should not be simply confounded as “Android”.
Except even these voices are lazy and want to believe this market will be a repeat of the Mac vs. Wintel history, or the iPod vs. everyone else history. Better to just remain suspicious of historical analogies.

http://blog.nielsen.com/nielsenwire/?p=28237↩
He’s one of very few who forecast Verizon’s iPhone sales growing from their own customer base, rather than AT&T; turnover.↩
Which is hard in a world where other business models support “free” services, and when your organization is built only for servicing a utility and reselling. But that’s another article.↩
Why else would Sprint attest that iPhone-seeking is their #1 attrition driver?↩

I should patent this idea.

2011-09-12T07:00:00Z

There has recently been much attention to the problem of software patents. I think Marco Arment probably best summed the prevailing wisdom: The USPTO has repeatedly shown that they do not possess the ability to issue software patents responsibly. This isn’t the agency’s fault — it’s impossible in practice.¹ and the current reform is likely to only exacerbate the issue by rewarding first-filing over invention.
I used to agree with a talk Paul Graham gave at Google in 2006; the system had created a tense stalemate that didn’t punish entrepreneurs too much, but patent trolls were upsetting the balance. Today, I fear, we’re seeing the result of that, with large and reputable players sniping at each other in Bush-style preëmptive strikes.
So the internet is abuzz with calls to end (or restrain) software patents. But what’s “software”? It seems algorithms are behind most things patented, even predating the concept of software. Is Intel’s new chip-level random number generator just software expressed in circuitry? The line between software and hardware is not one we can simply entrust the USPTO with, and letting the courts decide only re-frames the problem we already have.
It may be too late to return to the cold war of the past, but maybe we should try, and disable patent trolling as an industry. Award patents only to humans (not corporate “persons”) and do not allow transfer except via inheritance.

“Software patents”, Marco.org, 2010-03-06 ↩

Ignorance of the commons

2011-04-10T07:00:00Z

I just have to get this off my chest.

The “Tea Party” movement is directed by the ignorant, the power-hungry, and myopic oligarchs. They appear to be driven only by misled spite, fear, bigotry, and greed.

I do sympathize with their stated libertarian platform.¹ Open markets are a proven way to orient social forces towards optimizations. Unfortunately, our capitalist oligarchy only applies this magic of economics to currencies of wealth and power, optimizing for productivity of monetary value. This is not enough; we need collective governance to direct markets that optimize for sustainable consumption of shared resources and holistic well-being.

The traditions of zero-sum competition and the defensive anti-socialist postures they engender are antiquated and immature. I find it more inspiring to embrace the necessity of working together to achieve prosperity.

I was raised libertarian. My father was a conservative of the states-rights tradition. Granted, his love of Confederate history may have belied a streak of bigotry, but the lessons he imparted to me were of the value of local governance and laissez-faire capitalism. Thankfully, by the time I read any Ayn Rand, a descent to nearly the bottom of the US economic ladder had taught me how little “meritocracy” had to do with my climb up.↩

Why is Apple rising?

2011-03-16T07:00:00Z

In a characteristically insightful article, analyst Horace Dediu proposes the reversal of Apple and Microsoft’s fortunes is due to a shift in market priorities.

Apple has maintained its attention steadfastly on products while Microsoft has maintained unwavering focus on the distribution and control over value chains. During the 1990s one strategy worked and the other didn’t. During the following decade they changed places. The locus of the two strategies did not change. What seems to have changed is what the market values.

Horace Dediu, “Who’s knifing what?”, Asymco, 15 March 2011
I’m not sure I agree that Microsoft focuses on distribution control more than product development. Distribution is important, of course: Apple has always sold to people while Microsoft sold to businesses, and the locus of technology purchase decisions has changed. This could suggest that market values aren’t shifting as much as the consumer market has surpassed the business market, and changed the flow of influence. “I’ll use Windows at home because I have to at work” was replaced with “I want to use an iPad, please support me at work.”
I prefer a culturally optimistic explanation. Computing technology has advanced in capabilities while our approaches to using it have grown in sophistication. As a result, our baseline expectations have matured from “gets the job done” to “reduces my cognitive load while doing it”, and while Microsoft’s function-oriented approach once aligned nicely to our culture, now Apple’s humanist product design priorities are a better match.