Screenshot from Apple’s “1984” ad directed by Sir Ridley Scott
Forty years ago today (24th January 1984) a young Steve Jobs took to the stage at the Flint Center in Cupertino, California to introduce the Apple Macintosh desktop computer and the world found out “why 1984 won’t be like ‘1984’.
The Apple Macintosh, or ‘Mac’, boasted cutting-edge specifications for its day. It had an impressive 9-inch monochrome display with a resolution of 512 x 342 pixels, a 3.5-inch floppy disk drive, and 128 KB of RAM. The 32-bit Motorola 68000 microprocessor powered this compact yet powerful machine, setting new standards for graphical user interfaces and ease of use.
The original Apple Macintosh
The Mac had been gestating in Steve Jobs restless and creative mind for at least five years but had not started its difficult birth process until 1981 when Jobs recruited a team of talented individuals, including visionaries like Jef Raskin, Andy Hertzfeld, and Bill Atkinson. The collaboration of these creative minds led to the birth of the Macintosh, a computer that not only revolutionized the industry but also left an indelible mark on the way people interact with technology.
The Mac was one of the first personal computers to feature a graphical user interface (Microsoft Windows 1.0 was not released until November 1985) as well as the use of icons, windows, and a mouse for navigation instead of a command-line interface. This approach significantly influenced the development of GUIs across various operating systems.
Possibly of more significance is that some of the lessons learned from the Mac have and continue to influence the development of subsequent Apple products. Steve Jobs’ (and later Jony Ive’s) commitment to simplicity and elegance in design became a guiding principle for products like the iPod, iPhone, iPad, and MacBook and are what really make the Apple ecosystem (as well as allowing it to charge the prices it does).
One of the pivotal moments in Mac’s development was the now famous “1984” ad , which had its one and only public airing two days before during a Super Bowl XVIII commercial break and built a huge anticipation for the groundbreaking product.
I was a relative late convert to the cult of Apple, not buying my first computer (a MacBook Pro) until 2006. I still have this computer and periodically start it up for old times sake. It still works perfectly albeit very slowly and with a now very old copy of macOS running.
A more significant event, for me at least, was that a year after the Mac launch I moved to Cupertino to take a job as a software engineer at a company called ROLM, a telecoms provider that had just been bought by IBM and was looking to move into Europe. ROLM was on a recruiting drive to hire engineers from Europe who knew how to develop product for that marketplace and I had been lucky enough to have the right skills (digital signalling systems) at the right time.
At the time of my move I had some awareness of Apple but got to know it more as I ended up living only a few blocks from Apple’s HQ on Mariani Avenue, Cupertino (I lived just off Stevens Creek Boulevard which used to be chock-full of car dealerships at that time).
The other slight irony of this is that IBM (ROLM’s owner) was of course “big brother” in Apple’s ad and the young girl with the sledgehammer was out to break their then virtual monopoly on personal computers. IBM no longer makes their machine whilst Apple has obviously gone from strength to strength.
After a much publicised “U-turn” the UK government has decided to change the architecture of its coronavirus contact tracing system and to embrace the one based on the interfaces being provided by Apple and Google. The inevitable cries of a government that does not know what it is doing, we told you it wouldn’t work and this means we have wasted valuable time in building a system that would help protect UK citizens have ensued. At times like these it’s often difficult to get to the facts and understand where the problems actually lie. Let’s try and unearth some facts and understand the options for the design of a contact tracing app.
Any good approach to designing a system such as contact tracing should, you would hope, start with the requirements. I have no government inside knowledge and it’s not immediately apparent from online searches what the UK governments exact and actual requirements were. However as this article highlights you would expect that a contact tracing system would need to “involve apps, reporting channels, proximity-based communication technology and monitoring through personal items such as ID badges, phones and computers.” You might also expect it to involve cooperation with local health service departments. Whether or not there is also a requirement to collate data in some centralised repository so that epidemiologists, without knowing the nature of the contact, can build a model of contacts to see if they are serious spreaders or those who have tested positive yet are asymptomatic, at least for the UK, is not clear. Whilst it would seem perfectly reasonable to want the system to do that, this is a different use case to the one of contact tracing. One might assume that because the UK government was proposing a centralised database for tracking data this latter use case was also to be handled by the system.
Whilst different countries are going to have different requirements for contact tracing one would hope that for any democratically run country a minimum set of requirements (i.e. privacy, anonymity, transparency and verifiability, no central repository and minimal data collection) would be implemented.
The approach to contact tracing developed by Google and Apple (the two largest providers of mobile phone operating systems) was published in April of this year with the detail of the design being made available in four technical papers. Included as part of this document set were some frequently asked questions where the details of how the system would work were explained using the eponymous Alice and Bob notation. Here is a summary.
Alice and Bob don’t know each other but happen to have a lengthy conversation sitting a few feet apart on a park bench. They both have a contact tracing app installed on their phones which exchange random Bluetooth identifiers with each other. These identifiers change frequently.
Alice continues her day unaware that Bob had recently contracted Covid-19.
Bob feels ill and gets tested for Covid-19. His test results are positive and he enters his result into his phone. With Bob’s consent his phone uploads the last 14 days of keys stored on his phone to a server.
Alice’s phone periodically downloads the Bluetooth beacon keys of everyone who has tested positive for Covid-19 in her immediate vicinity. A match is found with Bob’s randomly generated Bluetooth identifier.
Alice sees a notification on her phone warning her she has recently come into contact with someone who has tested positive with Covid-19. What Alice needs to do next is decided by her public health authority and will be provided in their version of the contact tracing app.
There are a couple of things worth noting about this use case:
Alice and Bob both have to make an explicit choice to turn on the contact tracing app.
Neither Alice or Bob’s names are ever revealed, either between themselves or to the app provider or health authority.
No location data is collected. The system only knows that two identifiers have previously been within range of each other.
Google and Apple say that the Bluetooth identifiers change every 10-20 minutes, to help prevent tracking and that they will disable the exposure notification system on a regional basis when it is no longer needed.
Health authorities of any other third parties do not receive any data from the app.
Another point to note is that initially this solution has been released via application programming interfaces (APIs) that allow customised contact tracing apps from public health authorities to work across Android and iOS devices. Maintaining user privacy seems to have been a key non-functional requirement of the design. The apps are made available from the public health authorities via the respective Apple and Google app stores. A second phase has also been announced whereby the capability will be embedded at the operating system level meaning no app has to be installed but users still have to opt into using the capability. If a user is notified she has been in contact with someone with Covid-19 and has not already downloaded an official public health authority app they will be prompted to do so and advised on next steps. Only public health authorities will have access to this technology and their apps must meet specific criteria around privacy, security, and data control as mandated by Apple and Google.
So why would Google and Apple choose to implement its contact tracing app in this way which would seem to be putting privacy ahead of efficacy? More importantly why should Google and Apple get to dictate how countries should do contact tracing?
Clearly one major driver from both companies is that of security and privacy. Post-Snowden we know just how easy it has been for government security agencies (i.e. the US National Security Agency and UK’s Government Communications Headquarters) to get access to supposedly private data. Trust in central government is at an all time low and it is hardly surprising that the corporate world is stepping in to announce that they were the good guys all along and you can trust us with your data.
Another legitimate reason is also that during the coronavirus pandemic we have all had our ability to travel even locally, never mind nationally or globally, severely restricted. Implementing an approach that is supported at the operating system level means that it should be easier to make the app compatible with other countries’ counterparts, which are based on the same system therefore making it safer for people to begin travelling internationally again.
The real problem, at least as far as the UK has been concerned, is that the government has been woefully slow in implementing a rigorous and scaleable contact tracing system. It seems as though they may have been looking at an app-based approach to be the silver bullet that would solve all of their problems – no matter how poorly identified these are. Realistically that was never going to happen, even if the system had worked perfectly. The UK is not China and could never impose an app based contact tracing system on its populace, could it? Lessons from Singapore, where contact tracing has been in place for some time, are that the apps do not perform as required and other more intrusive measures are needed to make them effective.
There will now be the usual blame game between government, the press, and industry, no doubt resulting in the inevitable government enquiry into what went wrong. This will report back after several months, if not years, of deliberation. Blame will be officially apportioned, maybe a few junior minister heads will roll, if they have not already moved on, but meanwhile the trust that people have in their leaders will be chipped away a little more.
The Watching “Eye” of the HAL 9000 Computer from 2001 – A Space Odyssey
I like to think (it has to be!) of a cybernetic ecology where we are free of our labors and joined back to nature, returned to our mammal brothers and sisters, and all watched over by machines of loving grace.
The last verse of Richard Brautigan’s 1967 poem, All Watched Over by Machines of Loving Grace, has a particular resonance during these dark and uncertain times caused by the COVID-19 pandemic[1].
The poem, which was also the name of a BBC documentary series by Adam Curtis[2], speaks of a time when we can return to nature and that mammals and computers will live together in “mutually programming harmony” with machines taking care of all our needs.
Things haven’t quite turned out like that have they?
In some kind of warped way maybe our machines are taking care of our needs but are they things we really need taken care of? If by “meeting our needs” we mean machines whose algorithms predict and dictate our shopping choices (Amazon), influence our voting behaviour (Facebook), satisfy our sexual preferences (Tinder, Grindr) or find us cheap rides and accommodation (Uber and Airbnb) then yes, maybe we have reached a mutually programmed harmony. I’m not sure that is exactly what Brautigan had in mind though.
If we think the “machines of loving grace” part of the poem have not quite happened in the way Brautigan predicted it could be that the “all watched over” part is about to become only too true however.
China, where the current coronavirus variant, SARS-CoV-2 originated, was already building the worlds largest social credit system whereby all citizens are given points from which the authorities make deductions for bad behaviour like traffic violations, and add points for good behaviour such as donating to charity. The full system is being rolled out during this decade at which point all citizens will be forced into using the system and everything from credit worthiness to political allegiance will be ‘measured’, not just by the system but by your peers as well. If trust is broken in one place restrictions will be imposed elsewhere meaning the untrustworthy will have reduced access to everything from jobs, to foreign travel, to bank loans and the internet.
Now, as a way of tracking peoples freedom of movement as its citizens come out of the coronavirus lockdown, the government has, through the ubiquitous Alipay and WeChat platforms, developed a “health code” service. This assigns users a colour-coded status based on their health and travel history plus a QR code that can be scanned by authorities. If you have a green code you are allowed to travel relatively freely. A yellow code indicates that the holder should be in home isolation, and a red code says the user is a confirmed COVID-19 patient and should be in quarantine. In China, which is not exactly known for its liberal attitude toward privacy, this may be acceptable as the price to pay for relative freedom of movement however as talk of such apps being rolled out in western liberal democracies start to become news, its citizens may not be quite as accepting of such uses of private data.
A similar system in South Korea that sends emergency virus text alerts has already revealed some embarrassing revelations about infected people’s private lives. These include a text saying “A woman in her 60s has just tested positive. Click on the link for the places she visited before she was hospitalised.” For many people the texts, whilst intended to be helpful, are creating a climate of concern by revealing a little too much personal information including revelations about extra-marital affairs.
At a country level there are already plentiful supplies of open data that allow apps such as this one to track COVID-19 statistics by country. The fact that we have systems and organisations that publish such data is to be applauded and should be seen as a good thing in providing us all (if we can be bothered to look) with plentiful amounts of data to help us come to our own conclusions and combat the unfortunately equally plentiful supply of fake news that abounds on social media about COVID-19. However once such data starts to get more personal that becomes a different matter.
Dominic Cummings, the Prime Ministers chief advisor, hosted a meeting at Downing Street on 11 March with technology company leaders to see how they could help develop an app to tackle COVID-19 and on Easter Sunday the UK government confirmed plans for an app that will warn users if they have recently been in close proximity to someone suspected to be infected with the coronavirus. Meanwhile Apple and Google have announced a system for tracking the spread of the new coronavirus, allowing users to share data through Bluetooth technology.
Four questions immediately arise from this situation?
Should we trust corporations (especially Apple and Google) to be handling location data identifying where we have travelled and who we might have been close to?
Can we trust the government to handle this data sensitively and with due regard to our privacy?
What happens if not enough people use these apps?
Once the pandemic is over can we trust the government and corporations to disable these functions from our phones and our lives?
Let’s take these one at a time.
First, are Google and Apple to be trusted with our private data? Historically neither exactly have a clean slate when it comes to protecting private data. In 2014 third-party software was used to steal intimate photos of celebrities from Apple’s cloud service iCloud, forcing the company to expand it’s two-step authentication service. More recently Hacker News revealed that Apple suffered a possible privacy breach in 2018 due to a bug in its platform that might have exposed iCloud data to other users.
Google’s failed social networking site Google+, which had already suffered a massive data breach in 2018 that exposed the private data of more than 500,000 Google+ users to third-party developers, was shut down earlier than planned in April 2019 following the discovery by Google engineers of another critical security vulnerability.
Despite the breaches of security suffered by these companies it is probably true to say that they have a deeper understanding of their platforms than most companies and government agencies. Putting something temporary in place during this potentially existential threat to society is probably not a bad thing however what happens once the pandemic is over then becomes critical.
Can we trust governments to behave properly with how they handle this data? Again governments do not have a good track records here. Edward Snowden, in his memoir Permanent Record, reveals the extent of the mass surveillance that was taking place on US citizens by the National Security Agency from 2010 and beyond. If even democratically elected governments do this what chance for the dictatorial regimes of Russia and China? Even during these unprecedented times we should not be too hasty to give away the freedoms that we enjoy today without knowing the extent to which our data could be compromised. As John Naughton explains here there are ways of doing non-intrusive tracking of COVID-19 but to do so our smartphones have to be a bit, well, smarter. This is also a good reason why here in the UK, parliament should be recalled, even in virtual form, to ensure decisions being made in this area are challenged and subject to proper scrutiny.
Next, what happens if not enough people use the apps, either because they don’t trust the government or because not everyone has smartphones or they simply can’t be bothered to install the app and make sure it is active? It is estimated that in order for this to work there must be at least a 60% take up of the app. Can governments somehow enforce its usage and penalise users in someway if they don’t? Maybe they rule that only those who have smartphones with this app installed and active are the ones who will be allowed freedom of movement both to work, socialise and meet with other family members. Whilst this may encourage some to install the app it would alsonput a huge burden on police, the authorities and maybe even your employer as well as shops, bars and restaurants to ensure people moving around or entering their buildings have apps installed. Also, what about people who don’t have smartphones? Smartphone ownership here in the UK varies massively by age. In 2019, 96% of 25-34 year olds owned smartphones whereas as only 55% of 55-64 year olds owned these devices and only 16% (figures only available for 2015) of people over 65 owned them. How would they be catered for?
Finally, what happens when the pandemic is over and we return to relative normality? Will these emergency measures be rolled back or will the surveillance state have irrevocably crept one step closer? Recent history (think 9/11) does not provide much comfort here. As Edward Snowden says about the US:
“The two decades since 9/11 have been a litany of American destruction by way of American self-destruction, with the promulgation of secret policies, secret laws, secret courts, and secret wars, whose traumatising impact – whose very existence – the US government has repeatedly classified, denied, disclaimed, and distorted.”
Will our governments not claim there will always be a zoonotic-virus threat and that the war against such viruses, just like the “war on terror” will therefore be never ending and that we must never drop our guard (for which read, we must keep everyone under constant surveillance)?
An open letter published by a group of “responsible technologists” calls upon the NHSX leadership and the Secretary of State for Health and Social Care to ensure new technologies used in the suppression of Coronavirus follow ethical best practice and that if corners are cut, the public’s trust in the NHS will be undermined. The writer Yuval Noah Harari, who is quoted in the open letter by the data campaigners, warns that such measures have a nasty habit of becoming permanent. But he also says this: “When people are given a choice between privacy and health, they will usually choose health.”
Once the surveillance genie has been let out of its bottle it will be very difficult to squish it back in again allowing us to return to times of relative freedom. If we are not careful those machines which are watching over us may not be ones of loving grace but rather ones of mass surveillance and constant monitoring of our movements that make us all a little less free and a little less human.
COVID-19 is the disease caused by the 2019 novel coronavirus or to give it its World Health Organisation designated namesevere acute respiratory syndrome coronavirus 2 or SARS-CoV-2.
No longer available on the BBC iPlayer but can be found here.
Ten years ago this week (on 9th January 2007) the late Steve Jobs, then at the hight of his powers at Apple, introduced the iPhone to an unsuspecting world. The history of that little device (which has got both smaller and bigger in the interceding ten years) is writ large over the entire Internet so I’m not going to repeat it here. However it’s worth looking at the above video on YouTube not just to remind yourself what a monumental and historical moment in tech history this was, even though few of us realised it at the time, but also to see a masterpiece in how to launch a new product.
Within two minutes of Jobs walking on stage he has the audience shouting and cheering as if he’s a rock star rather than a CEO. At around 16:25 when he’s unveiled his new baby and shows for the first time how to scroll through a list in a screen (hard to believe that ten years ago know one knew this was possible) they are practically eating out of his hand and he still has over an hour to go!
This iPhone keynote, probably one of the most important in the whole of tech history, is a case study on how to deliver a great presentation. Indeed, Nancy Duart in her book Resonate, has this as one of her case studies for how to “present visual stories that transform audiences”. In the book she analyses the whole event to show how Jobs’ uses all of the classic techniques of storytelling, establish what is and what could be, build suspense, keep your audience engaged, make them marvel and finally show them a new bliss.
The iPhone product launch, though hugely important, is not what this post is about though. Rather, it’s about how ten years later the iPhone has kept pace with innovations in technology to not only remain relevant (and much copied) but also to continue to influence (for better and worse) the way people interact, communicate and indeed live. There are a number of enabling ideas and technologies, both introduced at launch as well as since, that have enabled this to happen. What are they and how can we learn from the example set by Apple and how can we improve on them?
Open systems generally beat closed systems
At its launch Apple had created a small set of native apps the making of which was not available to third-party developers. According to Jobs, it was an issue of security. “You don’t want your phone to be an open platform,” he said. “You don’t want it to not work because one of the apps you loaded that morning screwed it up. Cingular doesn’t want to see their West Coast network go down because of some app. This thing is more like an iPod than it is a computer in that sense.”
Jobs soon went back on that decision which is one of the factors that has led to the overwhelming success of the device. There are now 2.2 million apps available for download in the App Store with over 140 billion downloads made since 2007.
Claiming your system is open does not mean developers will flock to it to extend your system unless it is both easy and potentially profitable to do so. Further, the second of these is unlikely to happen unless the first enabler is put in place.
Today with new systems being built around Cognitive computing, the Internet of Things (IoT) and Blockchain companies both large and small are vying with each other to provide easy to use but secure ecosystems that allow these new technologies to flourish and grow, hopefully to the benefits to business and society as a whole. There will be casualties on the way but this competition, and the recognition that systems need to be built right rather than us just building the right system at the time is what matters.
Open systems must not mean insecure systems
One of the reasons Jobs gave for not initially making the iPhone an open platform was his concerns over security and for hackers to break into those systems wreaking havoc. These concerns have not gone away but have become even more prominent. IoT and artificial intelligence, when embedded in everyday objects like cars and kitchen appliances as well as our logistics and defence systems have the potential to cause there own unique and potentially disastrous type of destruction.
The cost of data breaches alone is estimated at $3.8 to $4 million and that’s without even considering the wider reputational loss companies face. Organisations need to monitor how security threats are evolving year to year and get well-informed insights about the impact they can have on their business and reputation.
Ethics matter too
With all the recent press coverage of how fake news may have affected the US election and may impact the upcoming German and French elections as well as the implications of driverless cars making life and death decisions for us, the ethics of cognitive computing is becoming a more and more serious topic for public discussion as well as potential government intervention.
In October last year the Whitehouse released a report called Preparing for the Future of Artificial Intelligence. The report looked at the current state of AI, its existing and potential applications, and the questions that progress in AI raise for society and public policy and made a number of recommendations on further actions. These included:
Prioritising open training data and open data standards in AI.
Industry should work with government to keep government updated on the general progress of AI in industry, including the likelihood of milestones being reached
The Federal government should prioritize basic and long-term AI research
As part of the answer to addressing the Whitehouse report this week a group of private investors, including LinkedIn co-founder Reid Hoffman and eBay founder Pierre Omidyar, launched a $27 million research fund, called the Ethics and Governance of Artificial Intelligence Fund. The group’s purpose is to foster the development of artificial intelligence for social good by approaching technological developments with input from a diverse set of viewpoints, such as policymakers, faith leaders, and economists.
I have discussed before about transformative technologies like the world wide web have impacted all of our lives, and not always for the good. I hope that initiatives like that of the US government (which will hopefully continue under the new leadership) will enable a good and rationale public discourse on how we allow these new systems to shape our lives for the next ten years and beyond.
One of the things Apple are definitely good at is giving us products we didn’t know we needed (e.g. the iPad). Steve Jobs, who died a year ago this week, famously said “You’ve got to start with the customer experience and work back to the technology — not the other way around” (see this video at around 1:55 as well as this interview with Steve Jobs in Wired).
The subtle difference from the “normal” requirements gathering process here is that, rather than asking what the customer wants, you are looking at the customer experience you want to create and then trying to figure out how available technology can realise that experience. In retrospect, we can all see why a device like the iPad is so useful (movies and books on the go, a cloud enabled device that lets you move data between it and other devices, mobile web on a screen you can actually read etc, etc). Chances are however that it would have been very difficult to elicit a set of requirements from someone that would have ended up with such a device.
Jobs goes on to say “you can’t start with the technology and try to figure out where you’re going to try and sell it”. In many ways this is a restatement of the well known “golden hammer” anti-pattern (to a man with a hammer, everything appears as a nail) from software development, the misapplication of a favored technology, tool or concept in solving a problem.
Whilst all this is true and would seem to make sense, at least as far as Apple is concerned, there is still another subtlety at play when building truly successful products that people didn’t know they wanted. As an illustration of this consider another, slightly more infamous Apple product, the Newton Message Pad.
In many ways the Newton was an early version of the iPad or iPhone (see above for the two side by side), some 25 years ahead of its time. One of its goals was to “reinvent personal computing”. There were many reasons why the Newton did not succeed (including it’s large, clunky size and poor handwriting recognition system) however one of them must surely have been that the device was just too far ahead of the technology available at the time in terms of processing power, memory, battery life and display technology. Sometimes ideas can be really great but the technology is just not there to support them.So, whilst Jobs is right in saying you cannot start with the technology then decide how to sell it equally you cannot start with an idea if the technology is not there to support it, as was the case with the Newton. So what does this mean for architects?
A good understanding of technology, how it works and how it can be used to solve business problems is, of course, a key skill of any architect however, equally important is an understanding of what is not possible with current technology. It is sometimes too easy to be seduced by technology and to overstate what it is capable of. Looking out for this, especially when there may be pressure on to close a sale, is something we must all do and be forceful in calling it out when we think something is not possible.
The need for more STEM (that’s Science, Technology, Engineering and Maths) skills seems to be on the agenda more and more these days. There is a strong feeling that the so called developed nations have depended too much on financial and other services to grow their economies and as a result “lost” their ability to design, develop and manufacture goods, largely because we are not producing enough STEM graduates to do this.Whilst I would see software as falling fairly and squarely into the STEM skillset (even if it is also used to underpin nearly all of the modern financial services industry) as this blog post by Jessica Benjamin from IBM points out STEM skills alone won’t solve the really hard problems that are out there. With respect to the particular problems around big data Jessica succinctly says:
All the skills it takes to tell a good story, to compose a complete orchestra, are the skills it takes to put the pieces of this big data world together. If data is just data until its information, what’s a lot of information without the thought and skill of pulling all the chords together?
The need for right as well as left brained thinkers for solving the worlds really, really hard business problems is something that has been recognised for some time now by several prominent business leaders. Indeed the intersection of technology (left-brained) and design (right-brained) has certainly played a part in a lot of what technology companies like IBM and Apple have been a part of and made them successful.
So we need not just STEM skills but STEM++ skills where the addition of “righty” skills like arts, humanities and design help us build not just a smarter world but one that is better to live in. For more on this check out my other (joint) blog The Versatilist Way.
Tradition has it that users come up with a set of requirements which architects and designers take and turn into “a solution”. That is, a combination of bespoke and off-the-shelf, hardware and software components, that are assembled in such a way they address all the requirements (non-functional as well as functional). Another point of view is that users don’t actually know what they want and therefore need to be guided toward solutions they never knew they needed or indeed knew were possible. Two famous proponents of this approach were Henry Ford who supposedly said:
If I had asked people what they wanted, they would have said faster horses.
which is debunked here and of course Steve Jobs and Apple whose “Eureka” moments continue to give us gadgets we never knew we needed. As Adrian Slywotzky points out here however, the magic that Jobs and Apple seem to regularly perform is actually based on highly focused and detailed business design, continuous refinement through prototyping and a manic attention to the customer experience.In other words it really is 90% perspiration and 10% inspiration.
One thing that both Henry Ford and Steve Jobs/Apple did have in common was also a deep understanding of the technology in their chosen fields of expertise and, more importantly, where that technology was heading.
If, as an architect, you are to have a sensible conversation with users (AKA customers, clients, stakeholders et al) about how to create an architecture that addresses their needs you not only need a good understanding of their business you also need a deep understanding of what technology is available and where that technology is heading. This is a tall order for one persons brain which is why the job of an architect is uniquely fascinating (but also hard work). It’s also why, if you’re good at it, you’ll be in demand for a while yet.
Remember that, even though they may not know it, users are looking at you to guide them not only on what the knowns are but also on what the unknowns are. In other words, it’s your job to understand the art of the possible, not just the art of the common-or-garden.
I’ve just finished reading Steve Jobs by Walter Isaacson. In case there is anyone out there who doesn’t know it yet, this is the authorised biography that Jobs asked Isaacson to write which was completed a few weeks before Jobs untimely death aged 56 last month. Jobs insisted that Isaacson would have complete control over the contents of the book saying he would not even read it before it was published adding “I don’t have any skeletons in my closet that can’t be allowed out”.Jobs is clearly a very complex personality, on the one hand a creative genius whose zen like focus on simplicity and efficiency helped create some of the most beautiful and useful gadgets of our time (some of which we never even knew we needed) whilst on the other he was a bully and a tyrant who knew exactly how to “size people up, understand their inner thoughts, and know how to relate to them, cajole them, or hurt them at will”. One of jobs girl friends, who later went on to found a mental health resource network in California, even went so far to say that she thought Jobs suffered from Narcissistic Personality Disorder (NPD) in which the individual is described as being excessively preoccupied with issues of personal adequacy, power, prestige and vanity.
Whilst it is to be hoped that NPD is not a prerequisite for being a software architect Jobs did have vision and understanding of IT that we as architects can learn from. Six big ideas that stand out in this respect are:
Engineering matters. When jobs met with President Obama in 2011 he implored the President to reform the US education system and to create more engineering students. Jobs said “if you could educate these engineers we could move more manufacturing plants here”. Whilst there was always an uneasy tension between engineering and design at Apple Jobs recognised and valued the importance of there being an engineering led rather than sales led team at the top of the company berating companies like Microsoft (under Balmer), IBM (under Akers) and HP (under their last several CEOs) for putting sales people in charge rather than engineers. For software architects, engineering clearly translates to being intimately knowledgeable with the technology you are using, knowing how to put the working parts together. The best architects I know are passionate about technology.
Artistry and design matters just as much as engineering. This is a theme that Jobs emphasises over and over again. From when he dropped out of college and instead took a course on calligraphy to his sometimes maniacal focus on the smallest details of design to make the product as satisfying and aesthetically pleasing as possible. He even emphasized that circuit boards, which no one would ever see once the product was fully assembled, should be laid out in as clean and uncluttered was as possible. It is this aspect of design that most matters for architects. Provided that functionally a system does what it is meant to do within the required constraints and system qualities one could argue it does not matter how messily the software is assembled. Whose going to see it anyway? This misses the point though.Great design, as opposed to just good enough design, means the system will be easier to maintain, take less effort to learn and generally be more enjoyable for those that need to carry on working on it once the architects and developers have moved on.
Simple is better than complex. Apple had a design mantra: “Simplicity is the ultimate sophistication” or as Jobs said “very simple, and we’re really shooting for Museum of Modern Art quality”. Jobs felt that design simplicity should be linked to making products easy to use.So much of the software that we create today is far too complex and feature rich and as a result is very hard to use. People will often say that it has to be like that because just look at all the features you are getting. Unfortunately a lot of the time many of those features are not needed but add to the general bloat of the systems we build making them hard to use as well as difficult to maintain. Sadly building a complex system is often easier than building a simple one and it is not many architects that see value in stripping out functionality rather than adding it.
An unremitting focus on detail is key to creating a great product. Jobs was unique in that he was able to hold both the big picture view as well as zooming in to fine details. He would often sweat over the smallest detail until he was satisfied it was just right. This could be anything from the colour of a screw on the back plate of the iPod to the angle of the bevel on the iPad to make someone want to pick it up. This capacity for holding both the big picture view whilst also being able to zoom right down and question low level details is probably one of the hardest things architects have to do but being able to do so gives a definite advantage and enables greater integrity as well as better execution of vision.
Customers don’t always know what they want. In September 1982 when Jobs and his team were designing the original Macintosh he held a retreat for the Mac team near Monteray where he gave a presentation on his thoughts for the Mac. At the end someone asked whether or not they should do some market research to find out what customers wanted. “No”, replied Jobs, “because people don’t know what they want until we’ve shown them”. He then pulled out a device the size of a desk diary and flipped it open, it turned out to be a mock-up of a computer that could fit into your lap with a keyboard and screen hinged together like a notebook. “This is my dream of what we will be making in the mid- to late eighties”, Jobs said. Apple supposedly never did do any market research preferring to follow the Henry Ford approach who said he never asked what people wanted because they would have just asked for a better horseless carriage. Whilst it is probably the case that people can often see how to make incremental improvements to products they usually cannot see how to make disruptive changes that introduce a who new way of doing things, possibly making everything that went before it redundant. It is the job of the architect to show what is in the realms of the possible by creating new and innovative systems.
Putting things together in new and creative ways is sometimes more important than inventing things. Jobs was not the first to market with an MP3 player, a mobile phone or a tablet computer. Others had already innovated and built these things. What Jobs and Apple did were to tweak things that already existed. As Isaacson says “he had noticed something odd about the cell phones on the market: They all stank, just like portable music players used to”. Jobs applied his design skills to these and came up with a (far) better product and in fact a whole new platform as well (i.e. the computer as the digital hub. Architects to need to learn that its often putting together existing components in new and innovative ways that really counts and gives a competitive and business advantage.
During the coming days and weeks millions of words will be written about Steve Jobs, many of them on devices he created. Why does the world care so much about an American CEO and computer nerd? For those of us that work with technology, and hope to use it to make the world a better place, the reason Steve Jobs was such a role model is that he not only had great vision and a brilliant understanding of design but also knew how to deliver technology in a form that was usable by everyone, not just technophiles, nerds and developers. Steve Jobs and Apple have transformed the way we interact with data, and the way that we think about computing, moving it from the desktop to the palm of our hands. As IT becomes ever more pervasive we could all learn from that and maybe even hope to emulate Steve Jobs a little.
Software, although an “invisible thread” has certainly had a significant impact on our world and now pervades pretty much all of our lives. Some software, and in particular some software architectures, have had a significance beyond just the everyday and have truly changed the world.
But what constitutes a world changing architecture? For me it is one that meets all of the following:
It must have had an impact beyond the field of computer science or a single business area and must have woven its way into peoples lives.
It may not have introduced any new technology but may instead have used some existing components in new and innovative ways.
The architecture itself may be relatively simple, but the way it has been deployed may be what makes it “world changing”.
It has extended the lexicon of our language either literally (as in “I tried googling that word” or indirectly in what we do (e.g. the way we now use App stores to get our software).
The architecture has emergent properties and has been extended in ways the architect(s) did not originally envisage.
Based on these criteria here are five architectures that have really changed our lives and our world.
World Wide Web
When Tim Berners-Lee published his innocuous sounding paper Information Management: A Proposal in 1989 I doubt he could have had any idea what an impact his “proposal” was going to have. This was the paper that introduced us to what we now call the world wide web and has quite literally changed the world forever.
Apple’s iTunes
There has been much talk in cyberspace and in the media in general on the effect and impact Steve Jobs has had on the world. When Apple introduced the iPod in October 2001 although it had the usual Apple cool design makeover it was, when all was said and done, just another MP3 player. What really made the iPod take off and changed everything was iTunes. It not only turned the music industry upside down and inside out but gave us the game-changing concept of the ‘App Store’ as a way of consuming digital media. The impact of this is still ongoing and is driving the whole idea of cloud computing and the way we will consume software.
Google
When Google was founded in 1999 it was just another company building a search engine. As Douglas Edwards says in his book I’m Feeling Lucky “everybody and their brother had a search engine in those days”. When Sergey Brin was asked how he was going to make money (out of search) he said “Well…, we’ll figure something out”. Clearly 12 years later they have figured out that something and become one of the fastest growing companies ever. What Google did was not only create a better, faster, more complete search engine than anyone else but also figured out how to pay for it, and all the other Google applications, through advertising. They have created a new market and value network (in other words a disruptive technology) that has changed the way we seek out and use information.
Wikipedia
Before WIkipedia there was a job called an Encyclopedia Salesman who walked from door to door selling knowledge packed between bound leather covers. Now, such people have been banished to the great redundancy home in the sky along with typesetters and comptometer operators.
If you do a Wikipedia on Wikipedia you get the following definition:
Wikipedia is a multilingual, web-based, free-content encyclopedia project based on an openly editable model. The name “Wikipedia” is a portmanteau of the words wiki (a technology for creating collaborative websites, from the Hawaiian word wiki, meaning “quick”) and encyclopedia. Wikipedia’s articles provide links to guide the user to related pages with additional information.
From an architectural point of view Wikipedia is “just another wiki” however what it has bought to the world is community participation on a massive scale and an architecture to support that collaboration (400 million unique visitors monthly more than 82,000 active contributors working on more than 19 million articles in over 270 languages). Wikipedia clearly meets all of the above crtieria (and more).
Facebook
To many people Facebook is social networking. Not only has it seen off all competitors it makes it almost impossible for new ones to join. Whilst the jury is still out on Google+ it will be difficult to see how it can ever reach the 800 million people Facebook has. Facebook is also the largest photo-storing site on the web and has developed its own photo storage system to store and serve its photographs. See this article on Facebook architecture as well as this presentation (slightly old now but interesting nonetheless).
I’d like to thank both Grady Booch and Peter Eeles for providing input to this post. Grady has been doing great work on software archeology and knows a thing or two about software architecture. Peter is my colleague at IBM as well as co-author on The Process of Software Architecting.
Software Architecture Zen 