bibliostructures

A couple of weeks ago the venture capitalist Fred Wilson wrote about being open to investing in social networking enterprise applications but he hasn’t identified any. He was noticing that people wanted to use the services that they use in their private lives in a business setting. This came to mind as I’ve been researching the equipment I need to buy to make my bibliostructures business operational again. When I bought the Sony VAIO that was my computer in America the decision was driven mostly by the need to run the book-keeping software, Quickbooks. At the time Quickbooks existed either as a stripped down application for Apple, or didn’t run at all on an Apple operating system. It was at the time that DVD’s were new, and the VAIO became an ancillary home entertainment system as well as the accounting office. Those concerns are different now.

 

My aim is for cloud computing and my computing devices will be divining rods pulling my data out of the ether. The bibliostructures I’m building are meant to have a symbiotic relationship with a Walkman-like device, and so far the ipod touch / iphone is the most evolved creature in this genus. So everything pointed to an investment in an Apple computer. The specific business software I need isn’t dependent on running through the Apple operating system, and I can run the open source browser Firefox, and Google’s Chrome browser along with Apple’s Safari.

 

I had modest ambitions for my iphone.

-           To read the New York Times online (with pictures) in a more elegant form than my Nokia iphone presented it to me. And to be able to read the blogs that open up whole worlds to me: Fred Wilson’s venture capital blog, Bldgblog, William Gibson’s blog, and Steven Johnson’s blog.

-           To be able to access my own blogs, which I use as business journals and records of my research, and to be able to post directly to them from my phone.

-           To listen to the radio on my phone.

-           To be able to use I-Tunes, and the music streaming functions of Last.fm and myspace to demonstrate what my books might be able to do with music embedded in them.

-           To be able to search for information about materials and suppliers while I’m in meetings, and to save my searches.

-           A more complex calculator to do engineering calculations when I’m making structural and materials decisions about my bibliostructures. (The Iphone’s calculator is a scientific calculator when it’s held in landscape mode).

-           To send e-mail from my phone.

-           To be able to open the PDF files in email.

-           To keep a running tally of my expenses in Google documents.

-           To find addresses and draw maps.

 

Two days after I got my iphone I’m doing all of those things. If I’m able to find these devices and services I may never need to buy a large computer again.

-           An infrared keyboard that projects the outline of a keyboard onto any surface and turns it into a keyboard.

-           A voice record function that I can use for interviews, that ports to a programme that transcribes the conversations into text.

-           A piece of hardware that looks like a painting that converts into a screen, that the iphone plugs into when I want to watch videos on a larger screen.

-           An audio dock with an amplifier that turns my iphone into an audio system, with wireless speakers.

-           An internet radio.

 

Which brings me back to Microsoft’s current marketing campaigns. I haven’t seen any of the ads, I’ve read about them. In one Microsoft addresses the nerdy “pc guy” that Apple spoofs then explodes the stereotype. Microsoft customers are incredibly diverse they assert. I believe this, but I wonder if that diversity comes from two factors that are no longer as important as they once were. That people had to buy PC’s to run business applications. And that the original Microsoft customer came to computers through being introduced to them in the office rather than at home. With a new generation that came to the computer through instant messaging and games as children, they are socially comfortable with the computer in a way that they want to bring into their businesses. As Fred Wilson is finding they may not look at business technology solutions from business back into life but vice versa.

 

I think it was in the documentary No Maps For These Territories that William Gibson made the observation that when he didn’t have his watch with him, or his watch had stopped, and he looked at his mobile phone to find the time, he realized that watches were now obsolete, something sentimental, just jewellery. I scanned a turgid academic essay on steampunk whose thesis was that as computers became obsolete and shrank into phones and other ephemeral devices that people become nostalgic for the machinery, and something to material to hold onto and nostalgic for moving parts and machinery that they can see working.

 

I thought about this today when I picked up a brochure for Sony’s Executive Mobile VAIO Z. “High craftsmanship: Clearly evident in the keyboard panel shaped from a single sheet of aluminium. … this exquisite aluminium design was created in Subame City, Niigata, a well-known industrial city in Japan widely recognized for its excellent craftsmanship.” There’s a portrait of the fan, which looks to be cast from some heavy industrial steel, with a copper detail, and the shot of the mother board could be an aerial view of a city seen from way up in space. The covers and accessories look like something from a Montblanc catalogue: a sleeve that resembles a leather writing case,

 

Branding is as mysterious to me these days as a foreign movie without subtitles. My interest in Sony ended with Nobuyuki Idei stepping down as CEO, and I don’t have an emotional feeling about Apple or Microsoft. Apple equipment does everything I need it to, simply, and I can hold onto my Compaq and strip it and re-build it with an open source system a little further down the track. I don’t have a loathing of Microsoft, I’m just weary. Since I uninstalled everything except for itunes and the word processing software my Compaq starts up instantly, and writing on computer is a pleasurable activity again. The ‘hawt post’ when I logged into wordpress yesterday was from a woman who wrote about moving to Apple equipment for the same reasons I am, to have the machine start instantly, and to get around problems with the internet connection. She’d upgraded from Windows XP to Vista which exacerbated her problems twofold. She likened being a Windows user to being someone who is terminally ill, there’s no longer a frame of reference for robust health, so you become grateful for small things, being able to connect to the internet for ten minutes without it crashing.

 

I read today about the woman who’s been running the Bill and Melinda Gates Foundation moving to a post at the Smithsonian Museum. She doesn’t feel that she’s leaving the foundation in the lurch because Bill is making it his primary focus now that he’s retired from running Microsoft. He’s turning his vast fortune towards saving the world, curing AIDS in Africa, funding biofuels research. On the other hand, for all of Apple’s soaring rhetoric: the logo alluding to the bite Eve took from the apple in the Garden of Eden, the identification with Martin Luther King Jr. and Ghandi, and the Natural Geographic imagery bundled with the iphone / ipod touch, Apple doesn’t have a great environmental record and Steve Jobs is not known for philanthropy. Perhaps we’ve reached a place where identification with a brand or a corporation is irrelevant, and the smartest businessperson might be Marc Jacobs, whose sense of reverence for art and irreverence for the pious exclusivity of high fashion have made his designs for Louis Vuitton and his own label so functionally beautiful and fascinating.