Category Archives: Digital Life

Four Design Imperative for the Internet of Things

For my Innovations column in The Washington Post this week, I noted four critical issues holding back consumer adoption of the Internet of Things.

As Paul Nunes and I explain in Big Bang Disruption, transformative technologies must not only be better and cheaper than the products and services they replace, but also need to overcome consumer inertia.  That’s particularly so when the disruptor affects many industries, or when the worse and more expensive products are so familiar to consumers that they won’t replace them even for a better and cheaper alternative, at least not without strong incentives to do so.

Those incentives include life-changing new applications of the products.  In other words, the disruptor, to reach the rapid take off we refer to as the Big Bang, must do more than just replace existing and still-working products.  It must do so in a way that adds new functions and new applications that the existing technology can’t possibly duplicate.

Each of these characteristics is present in the emerging market for an Internet of Things, where everyday objects will be enhanced with some measure of computing power–processing, memory, and the ability to communicate over the Internet with other devices, sending and receiving data (often very small amounts of data) through the cloud.  When fully realized, the IoT has the potential to dramatically remake the supply chains for many consumer and industrial goods, revolutionizing every step from design to sourcing to manufacturing, distribution, retailing, and service.

And it will do so across industries, affecting financial services, manufacturing, energy, consumer goods, agriculture, and more.

But so far, the IoT has made only incremental progress.  What’s holding back the Big Bang?

In the Post article, I identify four obstacles–some technical, some legal–that are keeping consumers from jumping fully on-board with connected, smart homes, wearable health and fitness, and other high-potential IoT applications.   If developers and their investors want to see big returns and jump-start the connected device revolution, they’ll first have to design solutions for each:

  • Interoperability – As is typical with emerging technologies, every Internet of Things vendor hopes to establish itself as the industry standard for interactions with other networks and other products. Competing industry groups have also sprouted up, hoping to eliminate incompatibilities by offering an open, neutral set of communications and data exchange rules anyone can follow. Some Internet of Things vendors are trying to build products that follow everyone’s standards, while others are leaving the problem to third party developers. The standards war will undoubtedly be resolved, but in the interim consumers are understandably hesitant to make big investments in new systems.
  • Mobility – Internet of Things devices may not need to communicate large volumes of data, but the sheer number of connected items and their need for constant interaction can’t be supported even with today’s fastest 4G LTE mobile networks. That’s one reason mobile providers and their partners are investing billions in next-generation 5G networks, which will increase network speed and capacity by orders of magnitude, optimizing performance for both the close quarters of your home and the potential range of autonomous vehicles on the road and in the air.  In the United States, both Verizon and AT&T have already announced tests of 5G technology.  But the new networks require more and different ranges of radio frequencies, which only the FCC can allocate.
  • Invisibility – Sleep Number isn’t actually the first company to offer a smart bed; they’re just the first to build the sensors right into the mattress. Earlier efforts required users to remember to wear separate devices that were uncomfortable to sleep with or extra equipment that had to be installed under an existing “dumb” mattress.  To work for all consumers, technologies that transform markets have to become invisible — just part of the scenery. So Sleep Number’s mainstreaming of the disruptive technology is a necessary condition for mass adoption.  Ironically, the more disruptive the technology is, the sooner it tends to disappear.
  • Security — Already, a few early products with inadequate protection have led to some embarrassing security breaches, including a hacker who gained control over a “smart” baby monitor to talk to the baby. The Federal Trade Commission and other regulators are already circling the emerging industry, threatening pre-emptive action.  But as Kohlenberger points out, a widely-deployed Internet of Things will generate tremendous improvements in health outcomes, traffic fatalities and home security, among others. If lawmakers overreact to the Internet of Things’ growing pains, it may unintentionally delay both the development and adoption of technology that will actually improve the safety and security of activities that today rely on fallible human operators.

As these issues are resolved, the Internet of Things is likely to experience the same kind of dramatic takeoff that followed the introduction a few years ago of smartphones that users actually enjoyed owning.  Once the value proposition and technical obstacles are overcome, if history is any guide, consumer adoption for the Internet of Things will happen on an expedited schedule.

In other words, watch for the bang.

What does the 2016 election mean for Silicon Valley? Larry weighs in for Democracy Journal

The fall issue of Democracy Journal features an essay by Larry on the growing divide between disruptive innovation and technology policy, part of a series on the digital future.

In “Fewer, Faster, Smarter,” Larry argues that the continued explosion of digital innovation has created a public policy crisis for the 21st century.  New regulators are coming face-to-face for the first time with disruptions that challenge decades or more of compromises and cozy relations between government and industries now being reconstructed.

Innovators in the sharing economy, the Internet of things, artificial intelligence, the quantified self, self-driving cars, drone aircraft, digital currency and 3D printing are already feeling the pinch as regulators try to shove round disruptors into square laws, often with the encouragement of incumbents.

Some of these issues may well rise to the surface in the 2016 Presidential elections.  Already, Larry has been asked several times to comment on what the elections mean for Silicon Valley, which candidates best represent technology interests, and how technology will affect the election.  While it is far too soon to answer many of these questions, there’s little doubt that innovators and investors are watching closely–or ought to be!

See also “Silicon Valley is a Political Issue in the 2016 Election” (TechCrunch, August 20, 2015), Andrew Keen’s interview with Larry.  And see ‘Which Presidential Campaign is Winning Over Silicon Valley? ‘None of Them’” (L.A. Times, Sept. 11, 2015), which quotes Larry on the current prospects and their campaigns.

Happy Birthday to Moore's Law!

(Larry’s April 16th article for The Washington Post last week has been reprinted frequently…including here!)

Few revolutions can be said to have lasted for half a century, or to have wrought disruptive change at a predictable pace.

But that’s exactly the case with the digital revolution, which has seen computing get dramatically faster, cheaper and smaller every few years since the 1950’s.

The remarkable prophecy that anticipated that phenomenon is known as Moore’s Law, which turns 50 on April 19. In a four-page article for Electronics magazine, long-time Intel chief executive Gordon Moore (then head of R&D at Fairchild Semiconductor) made his famous prediction that, for the foreseeable future, the number of components on semiconductors or “chips” would continue to double every twelve to eighteen months even as the cost per chip would hold constant.

Moore originally thought his prediction would hold for a decade, but half a century later it’s still going strong. Computing power — and related components of the digital revolution including memory, displays, sensors, digital cameras, software and communications bandwidth — continue to get faster, cheaper, and smaller roughly at the pace Moore anticipated.

Moore’s Law is driven, as Moore explained, largely by economies of scale in producing chips, improvements in design, and the relentless miniaturization of component parts.  The smaller the chip, the cheaper the raw materials. Transistors, the building blocks for chips, have fallen in price from $30 each 50 years ago to a nanodollar today—roughly $0.000000000001.

That low price encourages more uses, which raises production and lowers costs in a virtuous cycle. Miniaturization also means a shorter distance that electricity has to travel to activate software instructions. Smaller, denser chips are consequently not only cheaper to make, they use less power and perform better. Much better. With each cycle of Moore’s Law, computing power doubles, even as price holds constant.

It is the prime example of what Paul Nunes of Accenture and I call an “exponential technology.” It’s hard to get your head around the impact of a core commodity whose price and performance have improved by a factor of two every two years for half a century.  (Compare that to commodities such as oil or meat, which get worse and more expensive.) One example I use is to help make Moore’s Law concrete is to compare the performance, cost and size of the Univac I, sold in the mid-1950’s, with devices available now.

Today’s home video game consoles, for example, have roughly the same processing power of one billion Univac I’s. Even without adjusting for inflation, the cost of a billion Univacs in 1950’s dollars would still exceed the entire money supply of the world today.  And had it been possible to buy that many computers in the 1950’s, you would have needed an area about the size of Iceland just to store them. But the consoles cost about $400, and fit comfortably on a shelf. And they are marketed not to the world’s largest enterprises but to children — who probably have a much better idea how to use a billion Univacs anyway.

There are few if any examples of basic commodities improving on so many dimensions at once, and certainly not at such a rapid and predictable pace.  As Moore reflected recently in an interview with IEEE Spectrum, “The semiconductor technology has some unique characteristics that I don’t see duplicated many other places. By making things smaller, everything gets better. The performance of devices improves; the amount of power dissipated decreases; the reliability increases as we put more stuff on a single chip. It’s a marvelous deal.” A marvelous deal, that is, for consumers. Every few years, the capabilities of our growing number of electronic devices — smartphones, TVs, game consoles and other consumer electronics — doubles, while the price for the previous generation collapses.

Thanks to Moore’s Law, tomorrow’s digital products are certain to be better and cheaper. Your newest phone does far more than your last one.  It has a better display, more memory, longer-lasting battery and more sensors for tracking you and your environment. The price for 12 megapixel digital cameras has fallen from $24,000 in 1995 to a few hundred dollars today. Mobile broadband networks, built of electronic components, have advanced steadily from 2G to 3G to 4G and beyond, even as unit costs for data transmission plummet.

Last year, a writer for The Huffington Post found a 1991 newspaper ad for Radio Shack and calculated the cost of 15 devices listed would have been, back then, over $3,000.  Today, all 15 — including a camcorder, a CD player and a cellular phone — have been replaced by superior equivalents on smartphones costing, unlocked, about $600.  And the smartphone does far more, in a single, smaller, integrated device.

Economists call this phenomenon “consumer surplus” — the excess value of a good beyond the actual price a consumer pays; what you would have been willing to pay, in other words, if you had to.  The difference between the price for the phone and $3,000 represents one estimate — and a conservative one — of the consumer surplus created by the deflationary effects of Moore’s Law.

Our expectation of increasing consumer surplus, however, generates a tremendous disruptive force for computer-related businesses.  We’ve now been trained to anticipate computing’s relentless drive into the realm of the better, cheaper and smaller.  That puts profound pressure on the makers of most consumer electronics to deliver new and innovative products every year or two — or else.

And while both manufacturers and the consumer benefit from the falling cost of digital components, in most cases consumers are keeping the lion’s share of the savings.

As a result, businesses in the most digital industries, including communications, electronics, software and digital entertainment, long ago stopped worrying about what their competitors are going to do next, but rather what the technology is going to make possible. Put another way, they all share the same competitor — Moore’s Law.

Over the last few decades, that phenomenon has expanded.  With the advent of cloud computing and the global Internet, most information-intensive industries have also been subjected to radical and continuous transformation, or what we have called “Big Bang Disruption.”

As the cost of collecting, storing, processing and displaying information falls, the supply chains associated with these businesses are being rebuilt on digital platforms. Think of financial services, newspapers and magazines, music and film, health care, education and even government services, where both the threats and opportunities seem to multiply overnight.

As Moore’s Law enters its second half-century, the echoes of that disruptive tsunami have now reached the shores of even the most non-digital businesses. In the next phase of the digital revolution, manufacturing is about to be upended by 3D printing and nanotechnology.  Agriculture is deconstructing in response to better and cheaper sensors, while transportation is girding itself for revolutionary change from autonomous vehicles, smart roads and drones.

And every dumb item in commerce, from individual light bulbs to your refrigerator, is now getting low-cost computing intelligence and network connectivity, a phenomenon known as the Internet of Things.

Just law month, Amazon introduced the Dash, a system of free WiFi-connected buttons that users can attach to everyday items such as razor blades and laundry detergent.  When it’s time to replace the item, you simply press the button to order it.

Over time, of course, the computing and communications intelligence will be built in, along with the ability for the item to monitor and report on its own condition.  You’ll be able to track electricity and water usage, be alerted when something needs maintenance, and authorize the things in your life to automatically reorder themselves when needed.

As trillions of items communicate their status up the supply chain, meanwhile, every step from design to production, distribution, marketing and sales will be reinvented to become vastly more efficient, generating still more consumer surplus.

In every one of these examples, Moore’s Law is the life-blood of the innovators.  It’s the uber-disruptor.

So even as the better and cheaper revolution is a boon to consumers, it’s causing increased anxiety for businesses, especially those just now starting to feel its full effect.  Every industry must learn to keep pace with exponential improvements in core commodities, and to respond to increasingly demanding and influential consumers.

For executives trained to manage to incremental improvement — the guiding principle of the industrial revolution — exponential innovation presents both a profound opportunity and an existential threat.  Gordon Moore used to say that if the auto industry had been built on exponential technologies, today’s cars would get a million miles per gallon of fuel and travel several hundred thousand mph.  The cost of a new Rolls-Royce would be cheaper than the cost of parking it overnight.  (It would also be only 2 inches long.)

That’s kind of change is not for the timid.  In a world dominated by Moore’s Law, many businesses don’t respond in time, instead going down with the ship.  Entrepreneurs thrive while managers retire.

Consider some of the many goods and services — some digital, some physical — already displaced by your smartphone, including address books, transistor radios, remote controls, taxicab dispatchers and maps.

Not only have these staple items gone completely obsolete, but so have the businesses that made, sold, advertised and serviced them.  Look down the main shopping street where you live, and you’ll see empty storefronts that used to house office supply stores, movie theaters, camera shops, bookstores, travel agents, currency exchanges and more.  Big box retailers and shopping malls have been marginalized; even electronics retailer Radio Shack finally succumbed to digital alternatives built from the components the stores sold.

And in the next generation of digital disruption, that list may be supplemented by post offices, ATMs, locksmiths, real estate agents and rent-a-car offices.

Some enterprises are flexible enough to make the transformation, and do so elegantly.  Philips Lighting, for example, anticipated the exponential power of LED lighting far enough in advance to get out of the incandescent business it both created and dominated for over a century, becoming a different company in the process.

Kodak, on the other hand, which held some of the best patents for digital photography, still couldn’t bring itself to commit to a future without film and chemicals, and wound up going from industry leader to bankruptcy in just a few years.

In that sense, Moore’s Law has acted as a kind of accelerant to economist Joseph Schumpeter’s often-quoted observation that capitalism proceeds in “perennial gales of creative destruction.” As every business becomes digital, the storms become that much more frequent and that much more intense.

This “new normal” for business won’t be ending any time soon.  Despite regular predictions of the end of Moore’s Law, the engineers just keep finding new ways to keep it going, using new materials, improved manufacturing techniques, and ever-greater economies of scale.

Gordon Moore, for one, is confident.  When asked about the rule he initially predicted would stay in force for a decade, Moore recently said. “I have never quite predicted the end of it. I’ve said I could never see more than the next couple of generations, and after that it looked like [we’d] hit some kind of wall. But those walls keep receding.”

As consumers, we’ll happily walk through each wall as it fades away, revealing the next great innovation.

But businesses will have to learn to jump.

 

Larry's Congressional testimony and hearing video on the future of the Internet

Larry testified on Feb. 25th before the House Energy and Commerce Committee on the future of the Internet and on proposed legislation that would limit the ability of ISPs to manage network traffic in ways that would harm consumers.

A video of the hearing is available, along with Larry’s written testimony.

 

Trust (but verify) the engineers

 

Last week, I participated in a program co-sponsored by the Progressive Policy Institute, the Lisbon Council, and the Georgetown Center for Business and Public Policy on “Growing the Transatlantic Digital Economy.” The complete program, including keynote remarks from EU VP Neelie Kroes and U.S. Under Secretary of State Catherine A. Novelli, is available below.

My remarks reviewed worrying signs of old-style interventionist trade practices creeping into the digital economy in new guises, and urged traditional governments to stay the course (or correct it) on leaving the Internet ecosystem largely to its own organic forms of regulation and market correctives:

Vice President Kroes’s comments underscore an important reality about innovation and regulation. Innovation, thanks to exponential technological trends including Moore’s Law and Metcalfe’s Law, gets faster and more disruptive all the time, a phenomenon my co-author and I have coined “Big Bang Disruption.”

Regulation, on the other hand, happens at the same pace (at best). Even the most well-intentioned regulators, and I certainly include Vice President Kroes in that list, find in retrospect that interventions aimed at heading off possible competitive problems and potential consumer harms rarely achieve their objectives, and, indeed, generate more harmful unintended consequences.

This is not a failure of government. The clock speeds of innovation and regulation are simply different, and diverging faster all the time. The Internet economy has been governed from its inception by the engineering-driven multistakeholder process embodied in the task forces and standards groups that operate under the umbrella of the Internet Society. Innovation, for better or for worse, is regulated more by Moore’s Law than traditional law.

I happen to think the answer is “for better,” but I am not one of those who take that to the extreme in arguing that there is no place for traditional governments in the digital economy. Governments have and continue to play an essential part in laying the legal foundations for the remarkable growth of that economy and in providing incentives if not funding for basic research that might not otherwise find investors. And when genuine market failures appear, traditional regulators can and should step in to correct them as efficiently and narrowly as they can.

Sometimes this has happened. Sometimes it has not. Where in particular I think regulatory intervention is least effective and most dangerous is in regulating ahead of problems—in enacting what the FCC calls “prophylactic rules.” The effort to create legally sound Open Internet regulations in the U.S. has faltered repeatedly, yet in the interim investment in both infrastructure and applications continues at a rapid pace—far outstripping the rest of the world.

The results speak for themselves. U.S. companies dominate the digital economy, and, as Prof. Christopher Yoo has definitively demonstrated, U.S. consumers overall enjoy the best wired and mobile infrastructure in the world at competitive prices. At the same time, those who continue to pursue interventionist regulation in this area often have hidden agendas. Let me give three examples:

1. As we saw earlier this month at the Internet Governance Forum, which I attended along with Vice President Kroes and 2,500 other delegates, representatives of the developing world were told by so-called consumer advocates from the U.S. and the EU that they must reject so-called “zero rated” services, in which mobile network operators partner with service providers including Facebook, Twitter and Wikimedia to provide their popular services to new Internet users without use applying to data costs.

Zero rating is an extremely popular tool for helping the 2/3 of the world’s population not currently on the Internet get connected and, likely, from these services to many others. But such services violate the “principle” of neutrality that has mutated from an engineering concept to a nearly-religious conviction. And so zero rating must be sacrificed, along with users who are too poor to otherwise join the digital economy.

2. Closer to home, we see the wildly successful Netflix service making a play to hijack the Open Internet debate into one about back-end interconnection, peering, and transit—engineering features that work so well that 99% of the agreements involved between networks, according to the OECD, aren’t even written down.

3. And in Europe, there are other efforts to turn the neutrality principle on its head, using it as a hammer not to regulate ISPs but to slow the progress of leading content and service providers, including Apple, Amazon and Google, who have what the French Digital Council and others refer to as non-neutral “platform monopolies” which must be broken.

To me, these are in fact new faces on very old strategies—colonialism, rent-seeking, and protectionist trade warfare respectively. My hope is that Internet users—an increasingly powerful and independent source of regulatory discipline in the Internet economy—will see these efforts for what they truly are…and reject them resoundingly.

The more we trust (but also verify) the engineers, the faster the Internet economy will grow, both in the U.S. and Europe, and the greater our trade in digital goods and services will strengthen the ties between our traditional economies. It’s worked brilliantly for almost two decades.

The alternatives, not so much.

Announcing "VC/DC," a new webcast series for Forbes

 

This week, Forbes Senior Online Editor Kashmir Hill and I launched a new video series, “VC/DC,” where we review the latest developments at the accident-prone intersection of technology and policy. The first two episodes are embedded below.

We’ve envisioned the series as a regular look at the policy issues technology companies and investors should be paying attention to but probably aren’t.

Kashmir and I each bring a unique perspective to technology and policy. A former D.C. resident, Kashmir relocated to the Bay Area a few years ago to cover privacy, security, digital currency and other cutting edge topics.

As a Silicon Valley veteran who now spends nearly half my time in Washington at the Georgetown Center for Business and Public Policy, on the other hand, I am working to bridge the gap between disruptive innovations and the regulators who sometimes love them to death.

The program will cover a wide range of topics, and won’t be limited just to developments inside the beltway. As our inaugural episodes makes clear, we’re also looking closely at how technology businesses are affected by local and international laws, as well as developments in the courts and the legal system overall.

I hope you like the series and find it interesting enough to subscribe.  We’d be grateful for your feedback in any case, as well as suggestions for future episodes.

 

Episode 1:  “The Accident-Prone Intersection of Innovation and Policy”

 

Episode 2:  “Security Standards and the Patent Crisis”