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You all are not seeing the forest for the trees. Using a sci-fi film as the yardstick for what interoperability should look like is silly. (This is in response

You all are not seeing the forest for the trees. Using a sci-fi film as the yardstick for what interoperability should look like is silly. (This is in response to the general angst over interoperability, not the IOT space, which I agree is underwhelming at the moment. However, in what I assume to be opposition to most people in this thread, I am hugely optimistic (if not yet invested).) Sure, every once in a while something that would appear to be easy turns out not to be, and that's really annoying. But most things works well most of the time. Transferring state between devices? That's the cloud. My email is in sync 100% of the time between 4-5 different computers and devices of different brands and OSs. Dropbox takes care of my personal files, box.com of those for work. I frequently collaborate on documents in both Google Docs and Quip. Not too long ago, transferring files between Mac and Windows was hard (I think macs had a proprietary compression program that wasn't available on windows?) - luckily that's entirely in the past. USB is ubiquitous, FireWire, PS/2, ADB, serial, all gone. A Mac keyboard works on a Windows box, and vice-versa. Bluetooth definitely has kinks, but it also has a lot of "just works" along very long stretches. With a few annoying exceptions, people using Linux, Macs and Windows can work together seamlessly. Websites (with a few annoying exceptions) generally works well in all major browsers on all major platforms, on desktop, tablets or mobile (both IOS, Android and Microsoft). I got a new wifi-printer a few days ago - after joining to the network, it was automatically available on our computers. Took maybe five minutes, no messing about with IP addresses and drivers. I can cast to a ChromeCast on my TV from my Mac, my Android and random guests iPhones (I can also "cast" Youtube directly to the TVs Youtube app, but it's pretty flaky -- and this is some fancy standard, as opposed to the ChromeCast, it's just that Sony is shit at implementing the standard). I can play music from Spotify from my laptop or smartphone on a Denon speaker in the kitchen, a "GramoFon" wifi-sound-device attached to my "dumb" stereo and my dad's "smart" Marantz stereo. Interoperability is doing fine, but yes, it's messier than it might have been if some magic omniscient body had come up with clean standards for all this. That doesn't mean that it's not there.

TeMPOraL 10y ago
A few counterpoints: > Transferring state between devices? That's my butt. No, it isn't. It is for transferring state between instances of the same application (or group of application by the same vendor) between devices. > Dropbox takes care of my personal files, box.com of those for work. I frequently collaborate on documents in both Google Docs and Quip. Did you try to make them work together? Oh, you can't really, because Google Docs decided to be cloud-first and you don't have files with actual data on your hard drive anymore. You can't open them in a third-party application anymore. Here's the thing - seamless operation is getting worse than it was few years ago. A lot of that came from the push to cloud and mobile - even with propertiary formats on the desktop you could work with the files using third-party apps, because the data was actually on your hard drive. Now the cloud services locked your data in, and they're giving you access only through a way of their choosing (which is usually a lowest-common-denominator webapp). What we see now is a lot of companies trying to commoditize each other. Third-party software developers try to commoditize the platform makers by routing the data through the Internet. So sure, Spotify works and syncs up nicely between your iPhone, Android tablet, Macbook and Windows PC. But why on Earth do I have to use the Spotify app to listen to music, instead of - I don't know - Foobar2000? That's right - because files are not there. > Using a sci-fi film as the yardstick for what interoperability should look like is silly. Actually, I think it's very good and sane. It's a perfect yardstick - because we get to ignore all the market forces and imagine how things could work if they were designed to be actually useful. And then we can ask ourselves, why things are not like this, and how to make them more like this.
- mseebach 10y ago
  You're speaking entirely in terms of actions that you can't perform, rather than outcomes. I use Google Docs and Quip because what I want to achieve is collaboration on a text document. None of that requires me to make two work together. That said, I just checked, Quip offers me to export to Word, PDF, Markdown, HTML and Latex - Google Docs to Word, ODF, RTF, PDF, TXT, HTML and ePub. I think I might just find a way. I used Spotify to illustrate interoperability between brands, but all of the mentioned devices support (many) other sources as well, including DLNA. > we get to ignore all the market forces and imagine how things could work if they were designed to be actually useful. Movies show things that are pretty, not useful. It's a flat out cliche that practically anything that happens in any movie (not just in tech, but pretty much any field) looks ridiculous to people who actually knows a little about what's going on.
- gjm11 10y ago
  Your comment quotes mseebach as saying "Transferring state between devices? That's my butt." I think you left Cloud-to-Butt turned on in your browser. That's not always a good move when reading HN.
  - TeMPOraL 10y ago
    > I think you left Butt-to-Butt turned on in your browser. That's not always a good move when reading HN. Indeed I did. Tech news are less bad for your sanity with it enabled.
    - coldpie 10y ago
      If you're twelve years old, I guess.
      - na85 10y ago
        I'm 31 and find it immensely satisfying to read about the latest news and advancements in the butt field.
- rzzzt 10y ago
kkarakk 10y ago
dude. in all of these examples, you're the interoperability stack. everything requires interventions from you. it's supposed to be the internet of things not the internet of my things that i make work somehow. goto someone else's house and make all this work without significant amounts of effort. that is what i want. i should just be able to walk into someone's house and say "hey check this out, ok google - play the last youtube video i saw on the biggest screen in the house" and it should work damnnit. that's the future i want
Silhouette 10y ago
But most things works well most of the time. Transferring state between devices? That's the cloud. And all we had to give up was security, privacy, reliability, longevity, speed and more money. :-( Unfortunately, as with so many adverse consequences when IT goes wrong, most non-technical people don't really understand the risks until something bad happens to them, and by then it's too late. In fact, these days with the trend for trying to outsource IT instead of maintaining in-house expertise, even a lot of technical staff don't seem to understand or properly control the risks. Just look at how many businesses grind to a halt every time one of the major cloud services has a significant outage. The move to Internet-hosted services and subscription-based products is entirely understandable from the industry's point of view: it gives them lots of new ways to exploit their customers and make more money. However, from the customer's point of view, I think we would be much better off if we invested more effort in decentralisation, standardisation and interoperability, and "private clouds" and VPNs. There are few advantages for customers to having important functionality reliant on a very small number of huge service providers, as opposed to having many smaller providers able to offer compatible variations and having options for self-hosting with decent remote access and backup provisions. Unfortunately, we seem to have reached a kind of equilibrium now where the huge players are so utterly dominant in their industries that disruption is all but impossible. Their worst case is that they buy out any potential serious threats before they're big enough to become actual threats, but much of the time, the lock-in effects create sufficient barriers to entry to protect the incumbent anyway. There is no longer effective competition or disruption in many IT-related markets, just a lot of walled gardens where you pick your poison and then drink as much of it as they tell you. I'm sorry to say I don't see any easy way to break the stranglehold the tech giants now have and get some competition and interoperability back into the industry. It's going to take someone (or possibly a lot of someones) offering products and services that are both competitive in their own right and built with a more open culture in mind to disrupt the status quo now, and it's hard to see either startup businesses or community-led efforts achieving escape velocity any time soon.
tw04 10y ago
"The cloud" only works when there is unlimited high speed broadband available everywhere. That's not even remotely close to being reality, and so long as the ISPs in the US are allowed to continue down their current path, it will never be reality.

TeMPOraL 10y ago

A few counterpoints: > Transferring state between devices? That's my butt. No, it isn't. It is for transferring state between instances of the same application (or group of application by the same vendor) between devices. > Dropbox takes care of my personal files, box.com of those for work. I frequently collaborate on documents in both Google Docs and Quip. Did you try to make them work together? Oh, you can't really, because Google Docs decided to be cloud-first and you don't have files with actual data on your hard drive anymore. You can't open them in a third-party application anymore. Here's the thing - seamless operation is getting worse than it was few years ago. A lot of that came from the push to cloud and mobile - even with propertiary formats on the desktop you could work with the files using third-party apps, because the data was actually on your hard drive. Now the cloud services locked your data in, and they're giving you access only through a way of their choosing (which is usually a lowest-common-denominator webapp). What we see now is a lot of companies trying to commoditize each other. Third-party software developers try to commoditize the platform makers by routing the data through the Internet. So sure, Spotify works and syncs up nicely between your iPhone, Android tablet, Macbook and Windows PC. But why on Earth do I have to use the Spotify app to listen to music, instead of - I don't know - Foobar2000? That's right - because files are not there. > Using a sci-fi film as the yardstick for what interoperability should look like is silly. Actually, I think it's very good and sane. It's a perfect yardstick - because we get to ignore all the market forces and imagine how things could work if they were designed to be actually useful. And then we can ask ourselves, why things are not like this, and how to make them more like this.

mseebach 10y ago
You're speaking entirely in terms of actions that you can't perform, rather than outcomes. I use Google Docs and Quip because what I want to achieve is collaboration on a text document. None of that requires me to make two work together. That said, I just checked, Quip offers me to export to Word, PDF, Markdown, HTML and Latex - Google Docs to Word, ODF, RTF, PDF, TXT, HTML and ePub. I think I might just find a way. I used Spotify to illustrate interoperability between brands, but all of the mentioned devices support (many) other sources as well, including DLNA. > we get to ignore all the market forces and imagine how things could work if they were designed to be actually useful. Movies show things that are pretty, not useful. It's a flat out cliche that practically anything that happens in any movie (not just in tech, but pretty much any field) looks ridiculous to people who actually knows a little about what's going on.
gjm11 10y ago
Your comment quotes mseebach as saying "Transferring state between devices? That's my butt." I think you left Cloud-to-Butt turned on in your browser. That's not always a good move when reading HN.
- TeMPOraL 10y ago
  > I think you left Butt-to-Butt turned on in your browser. That's not always a good move when reading HN. Indeed I did. Tech news are less bad for your sanity with it enabled.
  - coldpie 10y ago
    If you're twelve years old, I guess.
    - na85 10y ago
      I'm 31 and find it immensely satisfying to read about the latest news and advancements in the butt field.
rzzzt 10y ago

kkarakk 10y ago

dude. in all of these examples, you're the interoperability stack. everything requires interventions from you. it's supposed to be the internet of things not the internet of my things that i make work somehow. goto someone else's house and make all this work without significant amounts of effort. that is what i want. i should just be able to walk into someone's house and say "hey check this out, ok google - play the last youtube video i saw on the biggest screen in the house" and it should work damnnit. that's the future i want

Silhouette 10y ago

But most things works well most of the time. Transferring state between devices? That's the cloud. And all we had to give up was security, privacy, reliability, longevity, speed and more money. :-( Unfortunately, as with so many adverse consequences when IT goes wrong, most non-technical people don't really understand the risks until something bad happens to them, and by then it's too late. In fact, these days with the trend for trying to outsource IT instead of maintaining in-house expertise, even a lot of technical staff don't seem to understand or properly control the risks. Just look at how many businesses grind to a halt every time one of the major cloud services has a significant outage. The move to Internet-hosted services and subscription-based products is entirely understandable from the industry's point of view: it gives them lots of new ways to exploit their customers and make more money. However, from the customer's point of view, I think we would be much better off if we invested more effort in decentralisation, standardisation and interoperability, and "private clouds" and VPNs. There are few advantages for customers to having important functionality reliant on a very small number of huge service providers, as opposed to having many smaller providers able to offer compatible variations and having options for self-hosting with decent remote access and backup provisions. Unfortunately, we seem to have reached a kind of equilibrium now where the huge players are so utterly dominant in their industries that disruption is all but impossible. Their worst case is that they buy out any potential serious threats before they're big enough to become actual threats, but much of the time, the lock-in effects create sufficient barriers to entry to protect the incumbent anyway. There is no longer effective competition or disruption in many IT-related markets, just a lot of walled gardens where you pick your poison and then drink as much of it as they tell you. I'm sorry to say I don't see any easy way to break the stranglehold the tech giants now have and get some competition and interoperability back into the industry. It's going to take someone (or possibly a lot of someones) offering products and services that are both competitive in their own right and built with a more open culture in mind to disrupt the status quo now, and it's hard to see either startup businesses or community-led efforts achieving escape velocity any time soon.

tw04 10y ago

"The cloud" only works when there is unlimited high speed broadband available everywhere. That's not even remotely close to being reality, and so long as the ISPs in the US are allowed to continue down their current path, it will never be reality.