Calder invites us to have a giggle, but really it’s not a bad list at all, and compared with the (cough) ‘futurists’ who have come and gone since, Calder and the participants did a good job. Alvin Toffler was repackaging these ideas, particularly mass amateurisation, many years later. As are thousands of Web 2.0 consultants today.

Read more at The Register

Google’s failure to dent the Microsoft monopoly will simply notch up another failure for Linux (whose fans are quite happy to work for The Man, as long as it’s not the Man from Redmond) – and it’ll do nothing for consumers. How so? Because the computing problems we’ll have tomorrow will still be the same ones we have today.

It must be frustrating to sketch out a long-term technology roadmap in great depth, and see it come to fruition… only to goof on your own execution. But to do so repeatedly – as Nokia has – points to something seriously wrong.

Nokia spent more than a decade preparing for Tuesday this week, when it finally launched its own worldwide, all-phones application store. It correctly anticipated a software market for smartphones back in the mid-1990s, when it was choosing the technology to fulfill this vision.

That was just one of the bets that came good. Leafing through old copies of WiReD magazine from the dot.com era, filled with gushing praise for Enron, Global Crossing, and er, Zippies, I was struck by the quality of the foresight in a cover feature about Nokia. (Have a look for yourself.) WAP didn’t work out, but I was struck by particularly Leningrad Cowboy Mato Valtonen’s assessment that “mobile is the Internet with billing built in”.

And so Nokia has been encouraging users to download applications for users. My ancient 6310i wants me to download applications. Every Nokia since has wanted me to, too. Seven years ago, the first Series 60 phone (the 7650) put the Apps client on the top level menu, next to Contacts and Messaging.

The problem is today, it’s Apple and BlackBerry who have the thriving third party smartphone software markets. For six months, punters have been bombarded with iPhone ads showing what you can do with third-party apps. And yes, it’s like Palm all over again, but they’re very effective. So if Apple’s store is the model, then what on earth is Ovi?

The launch was “an utter disaster” according to one blogger, or in a more measured assessment (from Ewan at All About Symbian), “rushed, early and not fit for public consumption”. Nokia accepts second-best from Ovi, which apart from Maps is second-best in every category, the company all but admitted recently. But the Ovi application store deserves a Z-grade.

Web services or bust

It’s now clear that it was simply too ambitious to roll out a store to so many territories and in particular, to so many device categories, in one Big Bang. The number of devices supported goes back six years – encompassing eight versions of Series 40 and three versions of S60.

We waited a couple of days until the server load eased up, and Bill Ray kicked the tyres. On older devices it was mostly a miss. The mobile clients I’ve tried are painfully slow, don’t have previews and can’t distinguish between trialware and zero-priced applications. They either bill you in a foreign currency or simply drop you down a dead end.

The web version is even worse: try navigating through pages in Firefox, or try changing your default device in the preferences. The result is that every attempt to actually get applications is thwarted. Still, the pages fade in and out, in a very Web 2.0-style fashion. And maybe that’s the clue.

Apple’s App Store requires iTunes or the native client. iTunes is a familiar place for anyone who’s shopped for songs, audiobooks or movies there. It’s fast and slick, there’s a preview for everything, and pricing is quite clear. You’re only asked for personal details when you reach the acquisition stage. You get the same experience on the iPhone/Touch native client.

There’s really no need for a web-based version of the Ovi store at all, and piping everything through the Nokia PC suite (or some Mac equivalent) would at least encourage people to try the exciting Nokia PC Suite add-ons, such as Nokia Map Manager and er… Nokia PC Suite Cleaner. Apparently that cleans up after earlier Nokia incompatibility cock-ups.

(This is an ominous sign of trouble ahead: like Palm designing its stylus dual-purpose, one of which is to make rebooting easier after a crash. It’s not something the user should ever see.)

But Nokia has arguably far more at stake here than Apple or RIM. Once you’ve spunked $8.1bn on a mapping software company – shouldn’t you want people to use the maps – and the potential upselling opportunity? Or are the maps just a hippy giveaway?

‘Strategy’ is stretching it a bit

We all know in hindsight Nokia that should have focussed on making the mobile and PC clients perfect, and limiting the number of devices at launch to a subset of those supported. Anything before S60 3rd edition didn’t really need to be there, and there’s a case for limiting to devices launched in the past 18 months, even though there are a lot of N73s and E61s out there.

Separating the excellent applications from chaff such as movie trailers and wallpaper might have helped. There are still a handful of good applications out there, despite diminishing interest in Symbian, the pick of which is the best mobile email client in the world, Profimail. (Measured in ease of use, features, and the fewest seconds it takes to achieve a given task – a formidable combo.)

But again that goes against the Web 2.0 ethos of “stick any old crap up there – and let the Hive Mind sort it out”. No thanks, I don’t want MOSH 2.0.

And as for games – it would be flattering Nokia to call the six year N-Gage adventure a “strategy”. Again, it saw the market early, but didn’t follow through. Every now and again the multi-billion dollar investment veers back into view, only to disappear again. Is it N-Gage or Ovi Gaming? The few titles that are out there aren’t too bad, but again Nokia’s delivery strategy makes them hard to obtain. Meanwhile you can’t escape people playing games on their iPhones, or iPod Touches.
Operation Rescue Nokia

The market could benefit from a healthy Nokia software market, so here are some suggestions. There’s a valuable lesson to be learned. In business as in war, you make the most of your assets while trying to minimise your weaknesses. Nokia’s Ovi Store does the opposite: it emphasises the complexity and lack of focus at the company, and its disorganisation. If your first and only experience of Nokia was Ovi, you would never believe the company could ship 50 products into 120 markets with military efficiency.

Firstly, Nokia should focus on people’s needs – and applications that make the phone useful and fun – and not building up a “a portfolio of web services”. It’s already invested heavily in Maps and games – just make them easy to try and buy.

Ovi means “door” in Finnish

Secondly, the Ovi brand has made no impact on phone users at all. There’s no shame in abandoning confusing or invisible brands. Confine Ovi to mean boring, management services like backups, or data transfer, or services discovery. These shouldn’t be underestimated; they should give users security and peace of mind.

Thirdly, the vast majority of users want to do a few tasks simply – take note of the Magners TV ad which now singles out flash smartphones that are impossible to use. Nokia has inched towards better usability with the E71 and the 5800, but this needs to be a company-wide goal. Showing photos on the family TV, sharing photos with a small group – all much more useful than the 2.0 guff.

And finally, the managers responsible for putting together the Ovi Store should be put on Nokia’s naughty step – and left there for the Finnish winter.

And it’s not just software. From TP monitors, to minicomputers, to Novell Netware, recent history is full of examples of perfectly splendid systems being thrown out and replaced with something that doesn’t live up to the billing – and perhaps never will. Which sounds wacky, but that choice is being made on the rational calculation that the software or hardware of choice today won’t be made or supported, or the standards that bind the parts of the system together will become obsolete. (Which leads to the same thing.)

Sometimes a brave company bucks the trend. Most famously Microsoft refused to “eat its own dog food”, and stood firm against the move to client/server computing running PC or Unix-based databases like Microsoft SQL Server, instead insisting that its mission-critical accounts department ran on, er, an IBM AS/400 mini.

But by and large, the strategy works very well for companies that trumpet a “paradigm shift”, or “new era in computing”, and convince people that they own a secret part of the future – one that no one else can yet see. It worked for Microsoft, and Google hopes it will work for it, too. The Chrome browser today is little more than a piece of demoware, but it’s not just about “today”, is it?

Before we see what Google is hoping to achieve with Chrome, let’s take a look at a precedent from history that I find quite spooky.

Old-timers may excuse this brief wallow in nostalgia.

In the 1980s, PC business software was dominated by three names. Ashton Tate, Lotus and the WordPerfect Corp. The former two produced dBase III and Lotus 1-2-3, which were practically mandatory. Each product had what your modern, New Age marketing-droid would call an “ecosystem” around it – the value of the choice was as much in third-party add-ons and libraries of macros and scripts, as in what came out of the box. Developers skilled in these black arts were plentiful too.

For their part, Ashton Tate and Lotus had grown fat and lazy from astronomical growth, and had been slow in updating the software. They had seen off competition from integrated suites, and looked formidable enough to keep superior rivals from gaining much market share. And they were very expensive – dBase IV retailed for $795 in 1990.

But buyers, who were in no rush to migrate, knew there were two events in the coming years that might force them to re-evaluate at some point. 32bit computing would eventually supplant the limited address space of DOS running on 286 or 8086 machines, and eventually – at some far off date in the future – graphical user interfaces would come to the PC.

Microsoft knew this too, but it had a few problems. Its own clunky GUI, Windows, offered no advantages to the business user. The giants of the DOS world wouldn’t run very well inside Windows – if they ran at all. There was no unique killer application for Windows, either.

Worst of all, few people really believed that Microsoft owned that vital secret of the future, or knew something no else knew. Apart from DOS, Microsoft simply sold a few compilers, while its own applications rarely got to a medal position in the shoot-out comparison tables in the computer press. And that was about it.

As Software Magazine, reviewing Windows 2 in 1988, wrote -

“There are challengers, including Desqview, and entries from Hewlett-Packard, Xerox and IBM’s own Presentation Manager.”

In other words, if the PC went GUI, it would probably be thanks to one of the grown-ups. Apple had priced itself out of the business market and refused to license the software. However, what credibility Microsoft had rested entirely on hanging onto IBM’s coat tails with its work on OS/2. And few people had any great enthusiasm for a future that returned control of the industry back to IBM.

So Microsoft bundled a Windows “runtime” with one of the few prestige applications that had been ported to Windows. Typically this might be Aldus Pagemaker, or Microsoft’s own Excel spreadsheet, because there weren’t really any other heavyweight Windows applications. The runtime was a limited version of Windows that started when PageMaker ran, and ended when you closed it.

Unravelling history

Like Microsoft 20 years ago, Google wants to shift users to a new platform – its own – for which there is much hype but no great enthusiasm. Like similar migrations the new platform offers very few advantages – and plenty of disadvantages. Not only are great chunks of functionality missing, but even when you’re supposed to be “online and always connected”, you might not be.

There have been plenty of hiccups in the “cloud”, recently. As Ted Dziuba wrote here recently, it’s captivated the investors for several dubious reasons – one of which is that a “cloud” is ever so easy to draw on a White Board.

That’s where the “runtime” comes in. Today, Chrome is simply a technology demonstration – and I can’t see Firefox users with their carefully-cultivated selection of add-ons, or Opera users, making the jump any time soon. But Chrome is a Trojan Horse for bundling Google’s Gears onto your PC – and in the hope that manufacturers look to Google services for new Eee-type lightweight PCs, perhaps running something like gOS, the Ubuntu-derivative.

Gears is simply designed to make Google’s online services more attractive, and makes it looks like Google’s is setting the standard: leading where everyone else follows. (That isn’t entirely unfair.) And as a technology demonstration, Chrome succeeds.

Google has two powerful arguments for software as a (Google) service: it may be cheaper than licensing Office, and less complex than running client/server in your office. Uncannily, that’s the two things that helped swing the market Microsoft’s way, too. Migrating to a GUI required more powerful and expensive PCs, but it would save large amounts in training costs.

Microsoft then played its ace: it began bundling a not-very-integrated “suite” of applications for around $500 – less than the price of dBase or 1-2-3, and that’s before you’d bought the essentially companion software such as Clipper. In a recession, that started to look quite attractive.

Windows also offered a “cockroach” alternative to some of the grander vapourware designs on offer. Rather than wait for the Next Big Paradigm Shift (there were many of these vision-things being touted back in 1990, invariably including the words “Object” and “Architecture”), users smuggled in a copy of Windows for Workgroups and tried to get it running on the company network. Google services have the same appeal: people simply start using them.

So will Google succeed? Well, you tell me (below). But your 80s throwback will offer a couple of perspectives, that I’ve looked for this week, but failed to find.

Clever is not clairvoyant

One of these is that “the company that knows secrets about the future™” is a myth created by the press – particularly the glossy end of the US business press. It’s a powerful narrative, and suits their lazy writers, but the reality turns out to be very different.

Years later, we discover the company was simply blundering on in a state of chaos, slapping tactics together until they passed for a strategy, and winging it. And so a consequence of this myth-making is that it makes the poster child – the Google or the Microsoft – look much cleverer and more coherent than it really is. It’s an elaborate game of bluff.

At the time Windows offered business a cheap and cheerful “standard”, but Microsoft’s success was not based on technical excellence – on any unique knowledge of 32-bit computing or excellence in UI design – but rather more to its iron grip on the PC distribution channel. PC manufacturers paid Microsoft whether they shipped MS-DOS and Windows with the PC or not. So why ship anything else? Antipathy to IBM helped Microsoft enormously, too, of course.

But I simply don’t see where Google has the same grip over routes to market that Microsoft could exploit. And while costs can certainly be lowered by throwing away all your useful software, I don’t see that Microsoft generates the same animosity that IBM once did. I’m confident that we’ll be using web services more, as they get richer and more functional.

I’ll predict that Linux will thrive as a kind of bootloader on low-end PCs designed to use these services. And that Microsoft, as a result, will face continual margin pressure on Office and Windows in the years ahead. But I can’t see either Microsoft, or the idea of local applications, fading very far from view.

While much of the press has creamed itself over Chrome this week, it’s almost rude to point this next one out. When there’s one computer serving the planet – even if it’s Google’s – that’s a single point of failure.

And in that sense, Google’s vision of computing looks less like a piece of risk insurance, than a very big risk indeed.

Back in 2002 I was living in San Francisco, a city that was in the depths of recession, when I first noticed the stirrings of the next wave of hype. Hope springs eternal, they say, and the Bay Area’s unemployed web monkeys, technology prophets, and a gaggle of marketing and marketing consultants – who had all been having a jolly good time until quite recently – began to figure out how to construct the next bandwagon.

The result is another web mania gripping the media. This one isn’t quite like it’s predecessor, however.

For a start, it’s much more limited in scope. It’s rhetorical, rather than economic. While the original dot.com bubble will always be remembered one of the biggest losses of wealth in human history, prompting ordinary investors to plunge their life savings into worthless stocks, the new web hype has been a much more modest affair. This time the asset bubble is property, not technology, and most internet users have simply carried on as before, happy to swap dial-up for broadband in the quest for idle chatter, free music and porn.

The “Web 2.0″ affliction of has so far only infected the media and political classes, with isolated outbreaks in marketing and the social sciences. (Naturally, you’d expect something created by ad consultants to hit ad consultants hard, but I didn’t expect the London media to fall for it the hardest.) But where it strikes, it seems to take over the unfortunate victim’s entire brain; and that’s still a lot of people with public policy influence. The zombie symptoms of the virus we all know today: gibbering about “new democracy”, “wise crowds”, and the rational faculties of a three year-old.

For three years I found myself the only journalist chronicling such phenomena as the new democracy that wasn’t, or the paradigm-shifting business revolution that couldn’t make money, or the global intelligence that was easily outwitted by trinket salesmen, or the encyclopedia that destroyed Universities. This was the Dawn of a New Punditocracy.

I fortunately had lots of help from readers, who’ve coined many of the pithiest descriptions of the web bubble. Lots and lots of help. The Reg readership includes a lot of people who implement technology, and then have to keep the systems running – and the distaste is quite visceral. (Most of you have rumbled quite early on that this web hype was presentation layer people trying solve system level problems, all the while hiding behind a lot of New Age marketing guff).

Pointing this out made me hugely unpopular with a small number of people (who’d figured out that these tools and processes could so easily game the media, promote their agenda) who naturally resented the lid being lifted. But this all-sweeping utopianism needed many more hands to pry apart. For the past two years, Nick Carr’s RoughType blog has done that job with style to spare.

[read the full review at The Register here...]