Category Archives: standards

Authenticating Utility Access

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Over at Architectures of Control I find this posting about a patent application from Apple that points out a means of securing hardware by limiting which battery chargers are allowed authorized to work with the device.  I have had quite a family of ideas along these lines over the years.  Most of these emerged from slew of wonderful standards stories.  You see you can always use non-standard as a means of service denial.  The example most of us have seen are the plugs in hotels to make it more inconvenient to steal the hair dryer; a historical example is adopting a non-standard railroad gage or bullet to make an invading army’s life more difficult.  My favorite story of this class: when they build the world trade center some vendor convinced the contractor to use light bulbs during the construction period that twisted into the sockets the wrong way, counter-clockwise.  Nominally that was to prevent the workers from stealing the bulbs but to my mind it was a great way to assure vendor lock-in.

The Apple scheme involves having the charger handshake with the charging subsystem in the device to see if it’s authorized.  It’s notable that the charging subsystem’s computer(s) can be kept closed and proprietary while leaving the rest of the system and open platform.  Obviously you could do something similar in the graphics chip or the network controller, i.e. any where you have a reasonable smart interface chip.  I mean, some of the printer manufactures even do it with their ink cartridges.
There are plenty of variations on this idea.  The coffee shop DHCP sign-in rituals are an example. Airports and other public spaces could have lots of non-standard plugs and then rent adapters which grant visitors access.  IT managers could have non-standard network connectors to help control access to their infrastructure by building visitors.  We can put a lot of wit into a very small package these days; and we know, form the counter-clockwise light bulbs, that people love to get increased control over the littlest things.

Lotus fought the Powerlaw and the Powerlaw Won

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There is an encomium to Lotus in the Boston paper today. I worked at Lotus back in the 1980s; during the era when Microsoft killed them or, if you prefer, they committed suicide. Lotus made bad choices about where to make their home. They died because they failed to pick the right answer to the multihoming problem. Of course there are plenty of other aspects to the story, but that’s its core and everything else is noise.

During that era I recall chatting with what we would now call the CTO of a company we went on to acquire. I asked him why he had decided to expend vast resources on keeping his product platform independent rather then on features for his users. This question was a lead up to a question about how he viewed what I’d now call the ‘plausible premise’ of each of the platforms he was supporting. His three
platforms were, if I correctly recall, in order of plausibility: Mac. Motif, and the Window 1.0. As a glimpse into my point about how Lotus was getting these questions wrong at the time it was a bone of contention that he didn’t have a OS/2 port.

He answer was “I have no idea which one will survive.” It’s a glimpse into how naive we were as an industry back then that this answer surprised and delighted me. It became a bit of a cliche for me. To say “Which of these platforms is going to survive.” in planning meetings was surprisingly provocative. The kind of thing that gets people to asking if you’re a team player.

Multihoming is costly. (Ben recalls at this point the misery of failing to learn a foreign language in high school.) These day, for example, it’s damn expensive to support both soap and rest APIs for your web services. You need to support both for the prosaic reason I thought the CTO would raise, i.e. to get access to the maximum number of users. But you also need to support both because you don’t know which will survive.

Most of my technically informed readers can not imagine that one or the other of those could possible die off. Holding that thought in mind you are recreating a bit of what the world looked like when somebody would float the idea that X11/Motif, or OS/2 might die off.

Friction

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Today I noticed this ad offering to reimburse you for getting a passport.  $157 per adult.  I felt some sympathy for the advertiser, an island in the Caribbean.  A place people go for the weekend; well they used to.  The island tourism folks woke up recently to discover that numbers where down and they have discovered that the newly increased tedium of getting a passport has caused huge numbers of idle travelers to decided to, well, just go someplace else.

When my 1st son got his learner’s permit it took us three trips to the registry before we managed to accumulate enough documentation to convince them to let him have the learner’s permit.  My 2nd son submitted his first pay check’s stub rather than the check and the bank called to correct the error.  A bit got set on his account that didn’t get cleared.  So the ATM ate his bank card.  It took months to get a replacement card since his school was yet to issue the ID card they required.  All N of my financial institutions have recently insisted that I add four security questions, including one involving a photograph; which is a pain since I share access to these accounts with my spouse so all 30 odd questions and their answers all have to be in some shared location.  We recently got new passports, a project that was at least a dozen times more expensive and tedious than doing my taxes.

I once had a web product that failed big-time.  A major contributor to that failure was tedium of getting new users through the sign-up process.  At each screen they had to step  through we lost of 10 to 20% of our customers.  Reducing the friction of that process was key to our survival.  We failed. It is a thousand times easier to get a cell phone or a credit card than it is to get a passport or a learner’s permit.  That wasn’t the case two decades ago.

The Republicans have done a lot of work over the last decade to make it harder to vote; creating additional friction in the process of getting to the polling booth.  The increased barriers for getting a drivers license, passport, etc. are all part of that.  This make sense because now, unlike 30 years ago, there is now a significant difference in the wealth of Democratic v.s. Republican voters.

Public health experts have done a lot of work over the decades to create barrier between the public and dangerous items and to lower barriers to access to constructive ones.  So we make it harder to get liquor, and easier to get condoms.  Traffic calming techniques are another example of engineering that makes makes a system run more slowly.

I find these attempts to shift the temperature of entire systems fascinating.  This is at the heart of what your doing when you write standards, but it’s entirely scale free.  Ideas like this are behind the intuition of some managers who insist on getting everybody in the team working in the same room with no walls between them.

In the sphere of internet identity it is particularly puzzling how two counter vialing forces are at work.  One trying to raise the friction and one trying to lower it.  Privacy and security advocates are attempting to lower the temp. and increase the friction.  Thus you get the mess around the passport, real-id, and the banks.  Wearing that hat it seems perfectly reasonable that one should present photo id when you vote, or have your biometrics captured if you cross a boarder.  On the other hand there are those who seek in the solution to the internet identity problem a way to raise the temperature and lower the friction.  That more rather than less transactions would take place.  That more blog postings garner good coments, that more wiki pages will be touched up, that more account relationships will emerge rather than less.

Of course the experts in the internet identity space are trying to strike a balance.  It’s clearly one of those high-risk high-benefit cases that people have trouble holding in their head.

Shaping the Economy

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Concentrations of power can shape the world around around them. How is the question.

For example, market power, those with it can shape their markets.  While, small players skitter looking for niches and opportunities; big players can shape their niche.    In all cases firms question the vitality of their complements.  The innovator decides measures risk of each new technology. Large firms can control the health of their complements, for them it becomes actionable. In extreme cases they can make their own weather.

Two classic examples. Microsoft successfully killed Netscape by cutting off their air supply. Of course getting caught was a mistake but on the whole it may still have been worth the cost. Microsoft blew it when they made their hardware complement into a commodity. When your relationship with a supplier is perfectly commoditized then they have no loyalty to you. Commodity hardware enabled Linux.

Powerful market powers do shape the world, that’s the key point. Nobody is immune. Open source giants – e.g. Wikipedia, Mozilla, FSF, ASF, Sourceforge, etc. etc. – are not immune to this syndrome. Nor are large standards bodies like Oasis, the IETF, or the W3. What, presumably differentiates these classes of actors in how they answer the question: given the power now what?

Each class of actors legitimizes their actions in different ways. The discussion of legitimacy if both an internal one and one had with audiences outside the organization. While those dialogs are rarely in perfect alignment, over time they have to be kept consistent.

The process of solving the problem, the problem of how to deal with market power, includes at least three aspects: values, governance, and execution. These also must be consistent over time.

This question can not be avoided. Concentration, and hence power, happens.

Darwin and Platform Tyranny

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“Tyranny consists of the desire of universal power beyond its scope.”

One of the nice things about having a blog is that you can spit out those damn brainstorms before they do too much damage to your equilibrium or worse or are extinguished by your daily life.

I’d not noted before that the evolved animal is like a software platform.

One of the curious facts about software platforms is that they aren’t good for anything. You have to pile an application on to the platform before it solves real problem. That is a useful right first approximation. Of course platforms are good for something, they are good for solving some space of problems. They allow you to build things.

There is a gap between a platform and a problem solution. In platform system design, where we don’t solve problems we just design more platforms, we think of these as layers.

For example the end-to-end principle suggests that the layers should be thin, so that the lower layers are windowed down to a kernel of necessary function and no more. In business theory where platforms go by other names like toolkits, standards, rule sets, and are observed in numerous guises such as major commodities on supply chain, we know that a platform creates an options space of further commercial activity. There is always a lot of competitive to and fro about who gets to capture that value. Suppliers often covet value created down stream from them in the supply chain. That’s no different than how platform vendors often fold high value innovations back into their platform offering. A move that is contrary to the end-to-end principle but is quite rational in a commercial mindset. When we complain about a supplier, say Microsoft, overreaching, say by bundling the web browser with the operating system, we call that monopoly; but as the quote above suggests it’s a kind of tyranny.

Reading and thinking about “Breakdown of Will” has been triggering some very surprising connections to all that. Animals are wired to manage their attention in a way that is at odds what we believe to be the optimal way to manage the attention of a rational man. There is a gap between the platform, i.e. the animal, and the problem to be solved, i.e. to be a rational man. It is into this gap that we humans pour our clever rationalizing schemes. Applications on the platform.

So that was my brainstorm. What triggered it was some stuff at the beginning of a book from the anthropology library about trying to explain religion. The introduction was working it’s way through the necessary dross and was talking about Darwinian explanations for religion. My reaction was “The platform can only tell you so much about the applications that run on it.” Darwinian ideas are a major supplier in the explaination of animal systems, but there is a tendency for people to let these ideas overreach their natural scope. You see a similar overreaching by the ideas that come of economics. At this point in my thinking about the ideas in “Breakdown of Will” I’m more inclined to put religion in the application layer as part of our struggle to create useful solutions atop the worse is better legacy platform.

Bummer, my Car is just a Software Applications

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John Robb asks if Cars are becoming O/Ss. Absolutely not. Operating systems are intermediaries between hardware and software applications – two sided network effects. Cars with 700 page users manuals are becoming applications. Applications with very weak network effects. (As an aside their collision avoidance systems can have network effects since the more cars/planes/etc. that adopt them the more effective they become.)

Failing to find a auto-OS they can rendezvous around is not a particularly good architecture for the auto industry. Retaining control over that software frustrates innovation on both the hardware and user facing sides. I’m reminded of the old story of Adobe, who wiped out a lot of in-house printer software teams. Maybe somebody will do the same to the in-house auto application teams. A similar mess frustrates scale and innovation in the real time control industry.

Of course the most amusing element of all this would be terminology. Imagine a future where you can swap out your car’s engine for an alternate just as we swap graphic cards and disk drives on computers today. Of course at that point you couldn’t sit down and drive away until you loaded up some new drivers.

The Liablity of Sowing one’s Oats Widely

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This is great…

In a sense, Google, in its ADD-driven style, is building up a sizable engineering liability here, one that it will eventually have to ‘fess up to.” — at Infecious Greed

Is it true? For the life of me I don’t know.

Network effect businesses depend on running as fast as you can to capture a large a network as fast as possible. This is amazinlgy risky balance between capturing share and avoiding “engineering liability.” Nobody knows the right balance but we do know the trends. The share v.s. low-risk dial has moved consistently toward share wins. Microsoft’s ship crap fix it later strategy got them thru the transition to GUI, and quite a few other company killing upheavals. Open Source’s ship early and often strategy has enabled it to capture installed base and hence set standards faster than more conservative tactics.

I suspect that the author of the quote above is just peeved that he’s locked into more and more Google offerings while being frustrated that they aren’t becoming the robust software he desires. If these products were open source he could join in common cause with his fellow travelers and fix them. But since his vendor is a monopolist his only option is to plead, shame, and otherwise use voice rather than doing to resolve the problems.

Fungibility – the dark side

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If you give your child lunch money only later to discover they are buying candy with it you may discover your yearning for a special less fungible lunch currency. Not surprisingly there are micro-currency solutions for this problem in micro-managing your subordinates. If you give money to the local youth center earmarking your donation for youth basket ball and later find out it was spent to repair the roof the situation is less clear. When the green grapes appear at your grocer in January you can thank free trade and Chile; when there happens to be a black widow spider in the grapes you might question the wisdom of the making produce so fungible.

I used the word fungiblity a lot when I was working on Internet Identity. One of the many players in that standards making process are the firms that have huge amounts of account data about their trading partners. A strong identy system would allow them to make that data more fungible. If they could puzzle out a way to get permission to exchange that data with other parties they could convert static data in their vaults into dynamic data – a source of profit.

So I’m gobsmacked that I didn’t see this coming. The tax prep industry is seeking a rule change from the IRS that would allow them to resell the tax return data of their clients. Man is that evil! I paarticularly admire how this is framed as a clarification of tax payer privacy rights – indeed it is. Notice also how the industry is using it to protect themselves from foriegn competition. I guess this kind of thing happens almost automatically when the middlemen – in this case the tax prep industry – becomes sufficently concentrated.

Meanwhile, back on the lunch money problem. You could send you child to school with lunch already made. This would teach them valuable negotiation skills as they barter their lunch for better options. A wise parent might just send them to school with some highly fungible trade goods – cookies for example.

State Power and Industrial Standards

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My friend Ben Laurie bought a tiny bit of plastic and he’s pissed. It seems that he bought a CD and it doesn’t work. He thinks, quite reasonably, that this he was shipped faulty goods. Digging a bit deeper he’s becomed convinced that the manufacture intentionally shipped out faulty goods. It seems likely that everybody in the distribution channel knew these were faulty goods.

That seems all bit criminal, so Ben’s gone off to appropriate authorities to bring this criminal activity to their attention. So far, the authorities are confused, but Ben’s helping them to see the light.

One critical function of standards, like the audio cd standards, is to reduce market friction. What you lose is product diversity and in exchange get to eliminate whole bucket of costly activities: negotation, contracting, haggling, quality assesment, etc. This lowers risks for both buyers and sellers. One of my cliches: Standards are a substitute for lawyers.’

It also enables the market to grow and the producers to consolidate. The reduction of risk allows producers to justify making large capital investments – i.e. building a factory that builds machines to build audio CDs. While the loss of product diversity reduces the mutations that might allow the market to evolve the emergence of large producers provides a substitute means for changing the standards; i.e. industrial standards making. For example forking the audio CD standard to create a standard for digital CDs.

Standards set the rules of a game. Sellers have a huge incentive to cheat. If they can label the product as conformant with the standard but get away with cutting corners it’s pure profit. Other industry participants hate that. If you commit to a 100 million dollar factory and somebody else cheats the scale of your response is typically greater than Ben’s. The airline industry had to write specifications for things like lunch because some of their breathren were handing out crackers instead of sandwitchs. Buyers hate it too. You let your guard down. You casually buy a product. You get home and the damn thing doesn’t work. Unlike the guy with the million dollar product your rath is limited – but unlike the producers there are billions of consumers and some of them can get pretty testy.

Big rich guys allied with terrifyingly angry customers makes for a powerful lobby. So it’s easy to get the state’s police power brought to bear to enforce market standards. Who’s going to argue against it? Cheaters will. Market participants who are close to monopolizing the market will; since they are then free to set their own standards. When markets become dominated by an oligarcy; those producers will often argue for it.

The key point: consumer protection regulations benefit more than just the consumer. They function to to make the market less risky for all participants. They are public goods and once there is an installed base of consumers with the guard down and producers with huge sunk costs you mess with them at your peril.

Which brings us to the fundamental question. Are Ben’s bogus CD’s conformant with the relavent standard?