Play More: Embedded Futures

This is an experiment to enable more play in my life.  I've come to realize that - for me - to play is to create, to dream and to imagine. So I will begin with a possibility that arose when I first interacted with a Flip Video Camera.

A year ago I came across my first Flip Video Camera.  The amazement of flicking a switch and seeing a USB connector pop out amazed me so much that I went around the office demonstrating this feature over and over to the immense enjoyment of my co-workers.  Click.  Click.  Click. See!  Full frame video and audio for less than $100 and no cable!  Click.  Click.  Click. 

A neat solution to something few in the industry addressed as a problem - not having a cable on hand.  But this was not the real innovation as I saw it.  What floored me was that there was no software to install (aside from a driver issue).  Rather, the software to edit and upload your movies existed on the camera in PC and Mac formats.  Plugging in the camera caused it to appear as a drive and double clicking the software on the camera would cause it to run on your computer. 

This idea of software delivered "embedded" in a device is what got me excited.

I'm going to take a very broad and liberal view of "embedded software".  The industry views embedded software as something extremely specialized and included on a chip to better enable the hardware to interact with the real world.  But what if software came embedded on devices the way the Flip software for editing videos comes "embedded" on the Flip Video camera?

Questions for Playing

What are the human behaviors?  The unmet needs?

Devices that require software to be installed SEVERELY limit their ability to be used collaboratively with others who don't have the software installed.  As we move into a participatory culture and world, should devices that require software not come with the needed software on them?  I buy apps on my iPhone that require me to install software on my PC or Mac.  But updating my iPhone software doesn't update the computer software.  And further, to use these apps with another computer I have to find and download the software required.  Why?

What trends/changes show a shift away from software delivered via CD-ROM?

Networked computing/storage is exploding.  Google Docs, anyone?  How many people are shifting to buying and downloading software?  What if media was intelligent and DRM was less about who could use it and where it was being used from?  Networking standards have come a very long way.  I can connect my Mac and PCs to the same networks with less and less issues.

What if in the future we upgrade our "computers" by purchasing other physical devices that enable new features or capabilities in our devices?

Scenarios / Play Time!

The Car as Catalyst

Kat was late for work.  Again.  She grabbed her purse, coat and keys and shoved them under one arm, freeing up her hands to initiate a call to her assistant on her iphone.  Her car - sensing the approaching keys with an RFID signature - turned on the lights, started the engine and unlocked the doors.  Tossing everything haphazardly into the car and speaking into the bluetooth earpiece, "Jana, can you move my 8am?  I'm not gonna make it."

Her iphone beeped in her ear.  It had connected to the car and found local software standing by to run.  She began to dig through the debris on the seat beside her to find her phone while listening to Jana complain about how full her day already was.  "Aha!" she pronounced as she came up with the phone, much to Jana's surprise.  "It's cool, Jana, just reschedule Marketing to next week.  I'll call him later today."

She pressed "Proceed" on her phone, allowing it to launch the apps found in the car and quickly bypassed the signature check.  The dashboard application came to life - allowing her iPhone to take over the entertainment functions for the vehicle.  She smiled and turned to put her hands on the wheel, knowing that her favorite programming would begin as soon as this call ended. If it ended. Jana continued to ramble on about some trip the Chairman wanted her to take.  She put the car into reverse and backed out of the driveway, making a mental note to download some new audiobooks on time management to her phone.

The Printer as Enabler

Jeremy ran the office for a small not-for-profit that helped to develop sustainable building projects in the core of Toronto.  He felt good about his job but his role could be quite challenging. He was constantly tasked to accomplish the impossible on budgets that were always insufficient.  His latest task was to replace the aging office equipment as well as upgrade everyone's software in the office with a budget that was more appropriate to throwing a pizza party.

So when Jeremy decided he needed a new printer for the office, he became very interested in the new lines of multi-use printer/copier/fax/scanner/counterfeiting units.  There were so many to choose from. It was a bit daunting and he had already wasted an afternoon at one of the stores with some kid who was just reading to him from the boxes.  One model did stand out in his mind, however, and it was the new Xerox model.

He didn't really care the technology the printers used to print but he did like their story about less waste.  What really amazed him about this particular unit was that it came with a full copy of Photoshop SmallOffice - they called it "Smart Software".  He wasn't quite sure what "Smart Software" was but figured it was worth a risk.  He had 24 hours to return it with no questions asked. 

When he unpacked the printer, he was a bit surprised that there were no CD-ROMs or software to install.  The quick-start guide walked him through how to plug the printer in and how to get it on the network. Jeremy walked through the setup instructions while eating a bagel and as he pressed the last button, he had to jump back.  Like magic, a network drive began to appear on every computer in the office - Macs and PCs.

He sat down at his computer, thinking this was beyond cool.  There was a folder for drivers and another folder for software.  He clicked on the software folder and there was a Mac and a PC executable for Photoshop as well as ScanSoft.  He double clicked Photoshop and sure enough, a full copy of Photoshop SmallOffice launched.  A screen came up and said he was the only user and 2 more copies could be run at any time by any other computer on his network.  It also warned him not to copy the software to his computer as it would only run when launched from the printer.

Was this cool?  Sure, but Jeremy wasn't sure how this would be adopted.  Over the next few weeks he became a believer.  His office saw a constant flux of people as they used a lot of part-time and even seasonal staff.  Suddenly it was ridiculously easy to get people connected to the printer.  And if they needed to scan something, the software was right there for them.  No more installing of CD's and the like.  Furthermore, his graphic artist on staff was beyond happy as they had been using a copy of Photoshop that was 5 years old.  If anything, Jeremy was interested in buying more concurrent licenses for the applications...

Electronics as Enhancement

"Is that the new Samsung 3000+ Entertainment console?", Josh asked in a reverent and disbelieving tone.  Greg grinned and nodded.  Josh gulped visibly and a look of envy flashed across his face before he regained his composure.  "That's the one that turns on 5D sound in World of Warcraft 7?"  His question died at the end as he noticed the shit-eating grin on Greg's face.

Greg had to laugh as he pulled his laptop from under the coffee table and presented it to Josh.  "Here.  Try it."  Josh had been reading the reviews and his hand trembled as he went to launch World of Warcraft from the Start menu only to have Greg bat his mouse hand away.  "Dude.  Please.  You have to run the special version off the console."

Josh looked like a geek who had been shown up by a small child.  Greg grinned and double clicked the network drive for his sound console and launched the icon located there under games.  It quickly searched his hard drive for the other needed game components and then launched the advanced version that took advantage of the unique capabilities of the house-shaking sound system that the packaging promised "came close to bending time and space."

Play with Me, It's Fun!

This is about playing, not predicting.  It's about unlearning and exploring without the normal boundaries in place.  What emerges and what other ideas come up are totally a bonus.  So wade on in.

P.S.  Come on Alan, you can't let that last title "get off" so easily.  ;)

Comments

[Stan Lee]

That post went to places I never imagined it would go when I started reading it. Nice one!

[The Kaiser]

yes, yes, yes.

And don't forget you need to get naked on Thursday.

[Paul]

Your ideas are certainly off-the-wall and stimulate creative thinking about possibilities, but the trend you suggest of embedding more and more smarts into devices to make things simple only works when either a) the device isn't simple enough to install and use, or b) the software is commoditized and there is literally almost no functional difference between applications. Basically, the design constraint that makes the device more compelling to serve an unmet or underserved need has to be at the software or software/machine integration point.

Certainly in the Flip Video camcorder, you can make that argument. It wouldn't be simple enough or inexpensive enough without the bundling, and the whole package becomes more convenient, easy-to-use and "good enough" to create a new category of point-and-shoot-and-share video devices. So the constraint is on the overall design. I think you also have an interesting example for printers for many of the same reasons (HP beware -- you should do this first, or risk being disrupted by an upstart, perhaps who attacks by being a pack-in-your-briefcase, or a battery-operated "field use" printer initially).

I've elaborated on this in the Flip(pant) conversation we're having about what makes this camera disruptive on my blog (see comment attached to your post). http://www.anti-marketer.com/2008/10/flipping-simpli.html?cid=134489669#comment-134489669

[Sean Howard]

Hey Paul,

Interesting points.

Aren't we lumping embedded software into only one category though?

The line between software and hardware is quickly disintegrating across every product category when it comes to all forms of product design. See Buxton, 2007, Sketching User Experiences, for a great summary on this.

Let's take a trend in the post-web-2.0 world. Standards are emerging. Web 3.0 (please, someone give me a better name!) is back to the land of APIs. It's no longer about embedding applications, it's about mashing up services using open and well define API or API-like calls.

If this trend continues (which I think it will) and we apply it to devices, then we see a new world where SOFTWARE doesn't have to be commoditized or the same, but rather the interfaces between devices and software becomes better standardized and defined.

So I would propose it's possible to have even more significant differences between bundled and "embedded" software moving forward, not less. And that multiple applications can interface with various other devices. And the quality of the device in our lives will be proportional to the embedded software's value.

[Paul]

re: one category. No. It either is or isn't embedded. What we're talking about is degree of utility. Every camcorder has embedded software, or it wouldn't function. The question is how much is there and what purpose does it serve. btw, same is true of your printer -- what do you think controls how and where and how much ink hits the paper, or allows you to do a preview or have bidirectional control? You just want to put a higher level of applications there that allows devices to shake hands with each other and do something that makes sense and is useful and makes life easier. But, if the consumer doesn't value it (remember, it is easy to exceed the needs of the average user, and when you do, they won't pay for the extra functionality) all you do is increase your cost of production without increasing your units sold).

re: Web 3.0. What a techie point of view. As a user, APIs are meaningless to me, unless they are so standardized its like the plug on an appliance that I stick in the wall to get electricity. If everything just plugs together, then the interface disappears, and frankly I don't and shouldn't care that it's there. Only engineers should need to worry about APIs. I care about specific value and benefits that something delivers to me, and doing less work to get it. That's why the Flip is so brilliant. It just works, and I need to know almost nothing.

re: commoditization. Commoditization goes in waves and it's driven by competition and what element of the user experience is least well served and where the limits of technology currently are. Think about enterprise software, for example. Thirty years ago, there was tons of innovation in applications from accounting to just-in-time manufacturing to order entry to CRM marketing systems to databases and so on. There was lots of differentiation between products as the market was developing. But, over a period of time, the market generally agreed on what features were required (the barrier to entry), pretty much every vendor started offering almost the same thing -- i.e. the market was fully commoditized, and profit margins evaporated for almost everyone. So, the only difference was who had greater market share, and therefore long term survivability, which tended to push more business and profits in their direction. The winners bought up the losers and that was the end game of commoditization. After user interfaces were all GUI-fied and all the applications were integrated, there was nothing left to do -- no new categories of enterprise software have entered the market in a long time, and they are all commodities. Until the web came along, which introduced the ability to collaborate and share massively, and de-commoditized the game for a while. Suddenly a Salesforce.com comes along leveraging the distributed, shareable, software as a service model and knocks Siebel, the previous CRM winner out of the game. But now, we're rapidly moving back to commoditization of software on the web as a new baseline is set. As you pointed out to me regarding the Flip and the printer example, what has changed is that technology has gotten small enough and cheap enough that you can have a multi-gigabyte flash memory or disk drive embedded in something like the video camera, and user expectations have standardized (we all want to share stuff on YouTube) that you can do some pretty useful things by collapsing the package, adding a bit of software, and making it simpler to use. Just 3 or 4 years ago, that much memory was bigger than the camera, and five times the price (of the camera), so you had no opportunity for a market disruption. Cost, convenience and ease of use all had to converge at a single pain point.

re: more or less difference thru software. So, what happens when everyone embeds a simple-to-use edit-and-upload software package on their camcorder? It used to be impressive just that I had the ability to get the video off my camera thru a standard interface and into my PC so I could edit it. But if everyone moves to this low cost point-and-shoot model (they'll have to to compete), then all of a sudden, we won't view it as embedded software anymore (anymore than we view the OS as embedded software today). It will become an expectation that my camcorder does this, or it isn't a camcorder, and the line between software and hardware blurs again. They'll start to add more features to the camcorder or to the software to avoid the commodity trap, killing the simplicity that makes this so cool, and we'll go on a path of sustaining innovation until no one can make money anymore because they all converge on the same commodity path. Then something else will come along to change the game from outside, and it won't have anything to do with embedded software.

Basically, I'm not saying that embedding smart software in a number of types of devices isn't a useful way to disrupt and create new value, it's just that it isn't a universal paradigm. It depends on where each product category is in its lifecycle, and where the constraint on technology and delivering better value is. There's already tons of embedded software in my cellphone, for example. So much, that I use a tiny fraction of it (just like I use a tiny fraction of the capability of Word), and it adds no value, but does add complexity and cost. This will be fixed thru a new business model, not thru more embedded smart software.

[Sean Howard]

I understand your points, but I'm not sure if you understood what I was trying to convey.

Right now we have one term for software on a device and it is generally "embedded software" (for us laypeople).

Reality is that devices are becoming mini-computers. And software that ships with the device is no longer actually embedded. It's not on the chip and it's features are often far beyond enabling hardware components to interface with people.

If we think of our handhelds (phones, PDAs, etc.) as becoming mini-computers, then we can begin to extend this thinking to household appliances soon. Refrigerators, TVs, Printers, etc...

When a device is in fact a mini-computer, then the idea of software on the device becomes very interesting when we add in an ongoing standardization of APIs and protocols for how different computers/devices can communicate.

This is not about SMART software embedded on a device.

This is about a device actually enabling other devices to perform better (through software) because I happen to own it.

So I'm not arguing that all users of this will be disruptive. Would be like saying all sellers of high end coffee were disrupters like Starbucks. What I am arguing is that the paradigm is potentially about to shift. Right now we design an object to act and work in isolation.

But when we start to think of devices as extensions of other devices (replace devices with computers and you can relate this back to your other story about IBM) then we see a new model of potential innovation and even disruption.

[Marko Bon]

I've always liked the Refrigerator analogy. I read some article years ago about folks trying to come up with new technologies for the Fridge, that would enhance existing uses for the Fridge: the posting of the soccer game schedule, a post-it note of the doctor's new phone number, a photo from a birthday, a magnetized pad with the grocery list. You can imagine all sorts of nifty techy solutions for the fridge-as-family-nexus problem, some of which may be less handy than a simple post-it note. But it's a great exercise nonetheless.

I now use the Fridge story to explain RFID to my mother -- explaining to her that your fridge can update your iPhone app, letting you know which items to buy, while you walk through the store. Similarly, Android's ShopSavvy or CompareEverywhere could be used to scan a product on a supermarket shelf, maybe I won't buy the $11.50 duck liver pate here, but order it online for %7.00. Of course when my fridge & cabinets speak directly to my Fresh Direct, all I'm gonna do is click "ACCEPT."

Anyway, many thanks for the post. Haven't been back her in a while, and it was great to find smart relevant fresh new content immediately!

[Sean Howard]

Thanks for the wonderful comment.

I'm dreaming of the day RFID takes off. There's a neat open source RFID project I recently saw somewhere... can't quite recall.

To RFID and beyond!

[Allan]

Creative play is so important. You should check out Lego's Creative Play program.