10 ms·

Thank you for that article! I have been feeling like that for many months, and whenever I point it out to co-workers or friends, they mention the Apple-universe

Thank you for that article! I have been feeling like that for many months, and whenever I point it out to co-workers or friends, they mention the Apple-universe as the ultimate achievement of interconnectivity. And in a one-vendor universe, the world may be okay right now. Apple did a fine job there. However, interconnectivity between devices (and software) of different vendors seems to get worse and worse; standards seem to have become irrelevant. Time to market is the only thing that matters and long-term customer satisfaction and durability seem to be of no importance any more. They just don't care about integration with other vendors any more. When I saw Minority Report (2002) a few years ago, I thought dragging windows and applications across devices with a gesture would be a possibility in the not-too-distant future. Now, in 2016, this not-too-hard-to-develop feature seems almost impossible to imagine. Sharing content between devices is utterly painful or even impossible: copying large files between computers in the same Wifi without going through the Internet; playing a video from your Android phone on a Samsung TV; moving application state from your laptop to your desktop PC when you leave work; playing music from your Android phone in a brand new Audi via Bluetooth ... All of these things are absolutely achievable if vendors worked together or standards were to be developed/followed. Right now, though, it just looks like technology fragmentation is getting worse every day.

FussyZeus 10y ago
I was going to bring this up too, and you got close, but you're just saying it's a lack of standards and I'd say it's something far more nefarious and intentional: brand lock-in. Brands are what's missing from all the sci fi films where this stuff works, in Minority Report's D.C. Crimelab the displays aren't Samsung monitors hooked up to iPads, and THAT is what makes them work so seamlessly. No vendor wants to allow you to buy from other vendors so naturally the only time you get a seamless experience is when you sell your soul to the devil of your choice (in my case, Apple) and then your iPhone, your Macbook, your iPad and your Apple TV all work miracles right before your eyes. If I ever get an Android phone, it will never sync up properly like the iPhone. And I just have the garden variety stuff, if you buy any of this IoT crap you damn well better hope that your given manufacturer will be around for long enough to make all the things you want and that they offer good support. I have a lot of plans to make our home smart once we buy one, but when I do it will be built on open source modules that I can modify and control, and more importantly SERVICE myself when they inevitably break down after a time.
- barnacs 10y ago
  This is capitalism at its finest. Everyone just redoes the same things, occasionally with a slight spin on it followed by heavy marketing. Noone cares about interoperability, noone cares whether all the data and content we're generating today will be accessible in a few decades or centuries. Standards bodies are being taken over by company interests and we're still piling stuff on top of a technology stack designed with a ~50 year old technology landscape in mind. Noone wants to think further than next quarter's profits. Our industry has gone to shit.
  - dozzie 10y ago
    > This is capitalism at its finest. [...] > Noone cares about interoperability, noone cares whether all the data and content we're generating today will be accessible in a few decades or centuries. It's not a consequence of capitalism alone. Capitalism wouldn't result in that if its actors were rewarded for interoperability and future-proof access to data. Sadly, customers don't care about these two aspects (or long-term durability of a product, or servicability), so almost no company makes any effort to provide them. > Our industry has gone to shit. It's hardly specific to IT/consumer electronics. You have the same with cars, tools, clothing, everything really.
    - pjc50 10y ago
      > "customers don't care about these two aspects (or long-term durability of a product, or servicability)" Customers have no realistic way of assessing those things, especially in a market where all the products are obsoleted every year or so. It's Akerloff's "Market for Lemons" all over again.
      - FussyZeus 10y ago
        A vast amount of the consumers in this case are still woefully ignorant of technology at all, but that is changing, the younger customers are more demanding of tech companies and have d loyalty than any group before, meaning these companies will have to start changing or be replaced by ones using more open frameworks.
PhasmaFelis 10y ago
I agree with most of your post, but: > I thought dragging windows and applications across devices with a gesture would be a possibility in the not-too-distant future. Now, in 2016, this not-too-hard-to-develop feature seems almost impossible to imagine. Moving a running process from one machine to another, seamlessly and instantly, is not at all easy on current architectures. Not that it's impossible (well, it might be impossible to do it instantly in all cases), but it would be a hell of a lot of work, even across a single platform, and have a lot of unpleasant snags to deal with. (What happens when important app/system settings are different on your desktop and laptop?)
- binwiederhier 10y ago
  You're right. Maybe it's not as easy as I made it seem there. It's definitely possible, if you think of VMware's vMotion (live migration). That implies a shared hypervisor _by VMware_, of course, ... but it shows that technology-wise it's doable. When I saw vMotion for the first time, it blew my mind. Now all I can think of is how cool it would be to have that among different devices (laptop->desktop->smartphone->..).
  - icebraining 10y ago
    vMotion is cool, but it works on isolated VMs, which is an easier job than migrating an application running on a desktop and integrated with the rest of the system (unless you completely isolate all applications like on the mobile OSs, but then you lose other things).
  - _nalply 10y ago
    That's an idea. Wrap applications in a virtual machine and all gadgets are hypervisors. Swiiiipe.
- dredmorbius 10y ago
  Xen demonstrated this (for hypervisor-managed running processes) prior to 2005. It was one of the selling points of their virtualisation process, though it turned out that live-system migration had a few additional hiccups in it. Mostly works now. If you're looking at back-end-mediated stuff, this is pretty much what happens when you synchronise browser sessions across devices, modulo the rate of transfer. The key is managing state intelligently. This is also done, mostly, on server-side infrastructure, where front-end systems have little to no state on them -- individual client requests come through, state is managed usually in the datastore itself.
collyw 10y ago
This is why I am skeptical about the job automation thing. We still can't get relatively easy stuff like this to work.
- icebraining 10y ago
  I don't get it; how can one be sceptical of something which has been happening for centuries? How many scribes copying books by hand do you know? The interoperability issues - which are mostly a matter of politics (in a broad sense), not technology - will certainly affect how fast certain jobs can be automated, but that automation does and will happen is undeniable.
  - majewsky 10y ago
    > will certainly affect how fast certain jobs can be automated, but that automation does and will happen is undeniable. But that's a relevant point. The main question in the automation debate is not whether it happens, the question is whether job destruction due to automation happens fast enough to outpace the usual job creation mechanisms (appearance of new market segments etc.).
- FussyZeus 10y ago
  You're forgetting the main point (at least how I read it) of the article: Automation for buildings already exists, our office has a ton of the stuff, the thing is the automation hardware we're using easily goes for about $30-40k per room depending what you're doing. Our media and presentation room are about in that number. They work fantastically and in six years have never needed a huge amount of service aside from an occasional tire kick, the problem is Joe Schmo wants that same experience for his house, and it's just not going to happen at the price point that a lot of IoT products are hitting. The sad thing is I would totally be up for IoT products that costed more, because then I would at least have an idea that whoever built it built it to last instead of with the accountant standing over their head.
  - collyw 10y ago
    I am well aware of how much automation exists. The amount of work we are doing is going up - 40 years ago it was mostly men in the workforce, now both men and women work.
smcl 10y ago
I dunno, even in the ideal Universe of Apple devices talking to each other I have headaches. AirDrop is my main bugbear - sending files (pictures) from my iPhone to my MacBook Air should be as easy as it gets but Airdrop has failed to discover the MBA for the last month or so, there's no direct Bluetooth file transfer as I can see, Mail kinda works as a bit of a kludge, but warns if the filesize is over a certain size. And iCloud is something I'd rather not touch (Apples cloud services can go take a hike, after Apple Music decided that a huge chunk of my music should be deleted forever). I had phone->computer file transfer working via Bluetooth back on a sketchy old pre-Android Motorola, if such a simple workflow fails then what hope is there for anything more complicated. </rant> edit: sorry this is slightly OT, it's irritated me for a while and this felt at the time like a good time to share/vent!
- unscaled 10y ago
  AirDrop was always a hit or miss for. I think it's even worse than file shares on Windows which worked me 80% on the time at best. It seems that the main issue here is peer discovery, but I'm still somewhat astounded nobody has managed to produce an easy-to-use service discovery that works.
  - smcl 10y ago
    That's the funny thing when specific issue started the discovery worked exactly _one_ way - the MBA would see the iPhone but not the iPhone would refuse to see the MBA. Puzzling at best!
  - tinus_hn 10y ago
    Unfortunately AirDrop is two things: a file sharing service over Bluetooth and a file sharing service over wifi. It only recently got somewhat unified which allowed you to use it to transfer files between a Mac and an iPhone but it doesn't seem to be quite ready yet. Bluetooth is not fast and reliable enough for sharing modern file sizes but there is also no guarantee two phones that are near each other will share a wifi network. And then there are the security requirements.
    - 10y ago
Capt-RogerOver 10y ago
I'm a relatively avid software user and I'm having a hard time agreeing that lacking such features is a big problem. I have almost never thought that I would need such a feature, and haven't heard anyone else lack it. My point is that it's very understandable that such possibility would be useful for some people, and that they would very much like that workflow. It's just that if they are a minority - the industry will not prioritize such development, and it's a good thing. This means that they will develop more needed features. In a way, everything you describe already exists in the form of Web Apps. Log into Gmail on your PC, do some things there, then switch to an iPad and open the same address there. - voilà you have same app on multiple devices. It will even sync flawlessly... Regarding file sharing - I can only speak for the technologies that I've been using personally, but both Samba, Dropbox, FTP, SFTP bluetooth filesharing and bluetooth sound have all been working amazingly great for me... It seems like a perfect example of a developed and implemented standard which most devices agree on. What am I doing wrong?
- TeMPOraL 10y ago
  > My point is that it's very understandable that such possibility would be useful for some people, and that they would very much like that workflow. It's just that if they are a minority - the industry will not prioritize such development, and it's a good thing. This means that they will develop more needed features. I disagree this is a good thing. IT is an extreme example of the fact that people don't know what they want until you show it to them. For all you can tell, seamless transfer of files between multiple devices could be a feature people wouldn't imagine living without if they had it. But you can't explain mass complains about lack of such features because people have stuff to do, and they adapt their workflows to the capabilities of the tools they know - not the other way around.
  - Capt-RogerOver 10y ago
    Doesn't Dropbox achieve exactly that, and in almost the perfect way possible? But yes I get your point, there are surely some areas for which no good solutions exist yet and users don't know that it would be very useful.
sly010 10y ago
There is no economy without consumption and there is no consumption without waste. Incompatibility makes for a great waste. Edit: The technology industry needs things not to work for it to be profitable. Imagine if things just worked. Dropbox, Box, Google Drive, and hundred other solutions would never be paid for and would not be needed. Waste creates jobs. Android had beam that just worked so well to transfer practically anything. Recently it fails to transfer photos about 50% of the time on the latest and greatest Android devices. Btw apple is probably just as bad as everyone else, the only reason things seem to work in the apple universe is because the life expectancy of an apple device is 2 years max, so they can just focus forward. The best way to transfer files to an other computer if we are on the same wifi is still `python -m SimpleHTTPServer`. Old things always seems to work better than new ones. If we deprecate the 3.5m jack, we are doomed.
- sly010 10y ago
  Edit: For the downvoters - I am not saying I am happy about this, but denying it doesn't help anyone.
api 10y ago
What's the incentive? Everyone wants a walled garden to maximize lock-in.
kartickv 10y ago
General thoughts, not in the context of IoT: Interconnectivity is a double-edged sword: it sometimes precludes innovation. To interconnect, you need an agreed-upon spec, which constrains what you can do. If you can think of a better way to do something, you may not be able to implement it. As an example, IMAP lets you use any client app with any server. But IMAP lets a message belong to a single folder. Gmail, on the other hand, lets you apply multiple labels to an email. Doesn't map well to IMAP. Gmail also lets you star a particular mail in a thread, while applying a label to the entire thread — these don't map well to IMAP. Neither does priority inbox, for example. And so on. Which is why you get a second-rate Gmail experience if you use IMAP. Standards and protocols sometimes preclude innovation. I don't want to live in a world where everything is interoperable, because that's a world where everyone is forced to conform to a straitjacket. That doesn't mean, of course, that interoperability is completely useless. It's a matter of balance. I don't want too much interoperability or too little. The point I'm making is that interoperability has a cost. It's not all good.

FussyZeus 10y ago

I was going to bring this up too, and you got close, but you're just saying it's a lack of standards and I'd say it's something far more nefarious and intentional: brand lock-in. Brands are what's missing from all the sci fi films where this stuff works, in Minority Report's D.C. Crimelab the displays aren't Samsung monitors hooked up to iPads, and THAT is what makes them work so seamlessly. No vendor wants to allow you to buy from other vendors so naturally the only time you get a seamless experience is when you sell your soul to the devil of your choice (in my case, Apple) and then your iPhone, your Macbook, your iPad and your Apple TV all work miracles right before your eyes. If I ever get an Android phone, it will never sync up properly like the iPhone. And I just have the garden variety stuff, if you buy any of this IoT crap you damn well better hope that your given manufacturer will be around for long enough to make all the things you want and that they offer good support. I have a lot of plans to make our home smart once we buy one, but when I do it will be built on open source modules that I can modify and control, and more importantly SERVICE myself when they inevitably break down after a time.

barnacs 10y ago
This is capitalism at its finest. Everyone just redoes the same things, occasionally with a slight spin on it followed by heavy marketing. Noone cares about interoperability, noone cares whether all the data and content we're generating today will be accessible in a few decades or centuries. Standards bodies are being taken over by company interests and we're still piling stuff on top of a technology stack designed with a ~50 year old technology landscape in mind. Noone wants to think further than next quarter's profits. Our industry has gone to shit.
- dozzie 10y ago
  > This is capitalism at its finest. [...] > Noone cares about interoperability, noone cares whether all the data and content we're generating today will be accessible in a few decades or centuries. It's not a consequence of capitalism alone. Capitalism wouldn't result in that if its actors were rewarded for interoperability and future-proof access to data. Sadly, customers don't care about these two aspects (or long-term durability of a product, or servicability), so almost no company makes any effort to provide them. > Our industry has gone to shit. It's hardly specific to IT/consumer electronics. You have the same with cars, tools, clothing, everything really.
  - pjc50 10y ago
    > "customers don't care about these two aspects (or long-term durability of a product, or servicability)" Customers have no realistic way of assessing those things, especially in a market where all the products are obsoleted every year or so. It's Akerloff's "Market for Lemons" all over again.
    - FussyZeus 10y ago
      A vast amount of the consumers in this case are still woefully ignorant of technology at all, but that is changing, the younger customers are more demanding of tech companies and have d loyalty than any group before, meaning these companies will have to start changing or be replaced by ones using more open frameworks.

PhasmaFelis 10y ago

I agree with most of your post, but: > I thought dragging windows and applications across devices with a gesture would be a possibility in the not-too-distant future. Now, in 2016, this not-too-hard-to-develop feature seems almost impossible to imagine. Moving a running process from one machine to another, seamlessly and instantly, is not at all easy on current architectures. Not that it's impossible (well, it might be impossible to do it instantly in all cases), but it would be a hell of a lot of work, even across a single platform, and have a lot of unpleasant snags to deal with. (What happens when important app/system settings are different on your desktop and laptop?)

binwiederhier 10y ago
You're right. Maybe it's not as easy as I made it seem there. It's definitely possible, if you think of VMware's vMotion (live migration). That implies a shared hypervisor _by VMware_, of course, ... but it shows that technology-wise it's doable. When I saw vMotion for the first time, it blew my mind. Now all I can think of is how cool it would be to have that among different devices (laptop->desktop->smartphone->..).
- icebraining 10y ago
  vMotion is cool, but it works on isolated VMs, which is an easier job than migrating an application running on a desktop and integrated with the rest of the system (unless you completely isolate all applications like on the mobile OSs, but then you lose other things).
- _nalply 10y ago
  That's an idea. Wrap applications in a virtual machine and all gadgets are hypervisors. Swiiiipe.
dredmorbius 10y ago
Xen demonstrated this (for hypervisor-managed running processes) prior to 2005. It was one of the selling points of their virtualisation process, though it turned out that live-system migration had a few additional hiccups in it. Mostly works now. If you're looking at back-end-mediated stuff, this is pretty much what happens when you synchronise browser sessions across devices, modulo the rate of transfer. The key is managing state intelligently. This is also done, mostly, on server-side infrastructure, where front-end systems have little to no state on them -- individual client requests come through, state is managed usually in the datastore itself.

collyw 10y ago

This is why I am skeptical about the job automation thing. We still can't get relatively easy stuff like this to work.

icebraining 10y ago
I don't get it; how can one be sceptical of something which has been happening for centuries? How many scribes copying books by hand do you know? The interoperability issues - which are mostly a matter of politics (in a broad sense), not technology - will certainly affect how fast certain jobs can be automated, but that automation does and will happen is undeniable.
- majewsky 10y ago
  > will certainly affect how fast certain jobs can be automated, but that automation does and will happen is undeniable. But that's a relevant point. The main question in the automation debate is not whether it happens, the question is whether job destruction due to automation happens fast enough to outpace the usual job creation mechanisms (appearance of new market segments etc.).
FussyZeus 10y ago
You're forgetting the main point (at least how I read it) of the article: Automation for buildings already exists, our office has a ton of the stuff, the thing is the automation hardware we're using easily goes for about $30-40k per room depending what you're doing. Our media and presentation room are about in that number. They work fantastically and in six years have never needed a huge amount of service aside from an occasional tire kick, the problem is Joe Schmo wants that same experience for his house, and it's just not going to happen at the price point that a lot of IoT products are hitting. The sad thing is I would totally be up for IoT products that costed more, because then I would at least have an idea that whoever built it built it to last instead of with the accountant standing over their head.
- collyw 10y ago
  I am well aware of how much automation exists. The amount of work we are doing is going up - 40 years ago it was mostly men in the workforce, now both men and women work.

smcl 10y ago

I dunno, even in the ideal Universe of Apple devices talking to each other I have headaches. AirDrop is my main bugbear - sending files (pictures) from my iPhone to my MacBook Air should be as easy as it gets but Airdrop has failed to discover the MBA for the last month or so, there's no direct Bluetooth file transfer as I can see, Mail kinda works as a bit of a kludge, but warns if the filesize is over a certain size. And iCloud is something I'd rather not touch (Apples cloud services can go take a hike, after Apple Music decided that a huge chunk of my music should be deleted forever). I had phone->computer file transfer working via Bluetooth back on a sketchy old pre-Android Motorola, if such a simple workflow fails then what hope is there for anything more complicated. </rant> edit: sorry this is slightly OT, it's irritated me for a while and this felt at the time like a good time to share/vent!

unscaled 10y ago
AirDrop was always a hit or miss for. I think it's even worse than file shares on Windows which worked me 80% on the time at best. It seems that the main issue here is peer discovery, but I'm still somewhat astounded nobody has managed to produce an easy-to-use service discovery that works.
- smcl 10y ago
  That's the funny thing when specific issue started the discovery worked exactly _one_ way - the MBA would see the iPhone but not the iPhone would refuse to see the MBA. Puzzling at best!
- tinus_hn 10y ago
  Unfortunately AirDrop is two things: a file sharing service over Bluetooth and a file sharing service over wifi. It only recently got somewhat unified which allowed you to use it to transfer files between a Mac and an iPhone but it doesn't seem to be quite ready yet. Bluetooth is not fast and reliable enough for sharing modern file sizes but there is also no guarantee two phones that are near each other will share a wifi network. And then there are the security requirements.
  - 10y ago

Capt-RogerOver 10y ago

I'm a relatively avid software user and I'm having a hard time agreeing that lacking such features is a big problem. I have almost never thought that I would need such a feature, and haven't heard anyone else lack it. My point is that it's very understandable that such possibility would be useful for some people, and that they would very much like that workflow. It's just that if they are a minority - the industry will not prioritize such development, and it's a good thing. This means that they will develop more needed features. In a way, everything you describe already exists in the form of Web Apps. Log into Gmail on your PC, do some things there, then switch to an iPad and open the same address there. - voilà you have same app on multiple devices. It will even sync flawlessly... Regarding file sharing - I can only speak for the technologies that I've been using personally, but both Samba, Dropbox, FTP, SFTP bluetooth filesharing and bluetooth sound have all been working amazingly great for me... It seems like a perfect example of a developed and implemented standard which most devices agree on. What am I doing wrong?

TeMPOraL 10y ago
> My point is that it's very understandable that such possibility would be useful for some people, and that they would very much like that workflow. It's just that if they are a minority - the industry will not prioritize such development, and it's a good thing. This means that they will develop more needed features. I disagree this is a good thing. IT is an extreme example of the fact that people don't know what they want until you show it to them. For all you can tell, seamless transfer of files between multiple devices could be a feature people wouldn't imagine living without if they had it. But you can't explain mass complains about lack of such features because people have stuff to do, and they adapt their workflows to the capabilities of the tools they know - not the other way around.
- Capt-RogerOver 10y ago
  Doesn't Dropbox achieve exactly that, and in almost the perfect way possible? But yes I get your point, there are surely some areas for which no good solutions exist yet and users don't know that it would be very useful.

sly010 10y ago

There is no economy without consumption and there is no consumption without waste. Incompatibility makes for a great waste. Edit: The technology industry needs things not to work for it to be profitable. Imagine if things just worked. Dropbox, Box, Google Drive, and hundred other solutions would never be paid for and would not be needed. Waste creates jobs. Android had beam that just worked so well to transfer practically anything. Recently it fails to transfer photos about 50% of the time on the latest and greatest Android devices. Btw apple is probably just as bad as everyone else, the only reason things seem to work in the apple universe is because the life expectancy of an apple device is 2 years max, so they can just focus forward. The best way to transfer files to an other computer if we are on the same wifi is still `python -m SimpleHTTPServer`. Old things always seems to work better than new ones. If we deprecate the 3.5m jack, we are doomed.

sly010 10y ago
Edit: For the downvoters - I am not saying I am happy about this, but denying it doesn't help anyone.

api 10y ago

What's the incentive? Everyone wants a walled garden to maximize lock-in.

kartickv 10y ago

General thoughts, not in the context of IoT: Interconnectivity is a double-edged sword: it sometimes precludes innovation. To interconnect, you need an agreed-upon spec, which constrains what you can do. If you can think of a better way to do something, you may not be able to implement it. As an example, IMAP lets you use any client app with any server. But IMAP lets a message belong to a single folder. Gmail, on the other hand, lets you apply multiple labels to an email. Doesn't map well to IMAP. Gmail also lets you star a particular mail in a thread, while applying a label to the entire thread — these don't map well to IMAP. Neither does priority inbox, for example. And so on. Which is why you get a second-rate Gmail experience if you use IMAP. Standards and protocols sometimes preclude innovation. I don't want to live in a world where everything is interoperable, because that's a world where everyone is forced to conform to a straitjacket. That doesn't mean, of course, that interoperability is completely useless. It's a matter of balance. I don't want too much interoperability or too little. The point I'm making is that interoperability has a cost. It's not all good.