While I was PhatNoise I witnessed firsthand the introduction of Apple’s iPod.  This was really the first product that directly competed with ours, yet for years investors had always warned us of companies like Sony or Philips just running us over.  We always contended that while Sony had 100000x the money and resources of our little company, it didn’t really matter — they weren’t wired to make a compelling portable music player.  As my business partner likes to say, they wouldn’t even know the right questions to ask.

Of course, the MP3 was a completely disruptive technology, and the company best positioned to introduce it to the masses was Apple.  So when I came across the Foundry Group’s post about Digital Life it got me thinking about this problem in the realm of the living room.  They correctly note the challenges in building a product that makes enjoying digital media in the living room an intuitive process for everyone: hardware is not for the faint of heart, and must be dead simple to use right out of the box.  And as mentioned, giants such as Apple, Sony, and Microsoft have all doused the problem with hundreds of millions of dollars with no real great strides in product innovation.  So, what’s the problem?

Just today there have been a bunch of posts about boxee raising $4M.  From the videos, Boxee looks quite slick, and I know it is built on XBMC which has been in the works for a while.  I haven’t played with it, but I have played with (in order from newest to oldest):

- AppleTV
- Meedio
- Windows Media Center
- MythTV
- some other crappy ones I can’t remember

Hell, even PhatNoise made one* for browsing audio content on a TV.  Most of these are varying attempts at getting files (either local or remote) to stream on your TV.  A lot of attention has been placed on things like browsing big lists of files, fetching metadata, and making sure the software can put on the screen whatever could be put there (photos? sure!  the weather? why not!).  But let’s say you made the perfect software/device thing, and it synced and played beautifully.  The AppleTV has lots of flaws, to be sure, but it is pretty good at just this task.  So why is it kinda ho hum?  Steve Jobs’ hobby, dare we say?

One of the things I realized when I first held a Compaq reference design of a harddrive music player back in 1998 was that it would change everything.  It was totally a new mode of operation, to have that much music wherever you were.  There was no other practical way of achieving the same result. It was just a matter of the right company to educate the consumer and it would take off.  But I can’t really find a parallel with so many of these “digital living” products.  While it is kinda cool to have a large movie collection sitting there on the screen, the same thing is achieved with a DVD player and a bunch of discs.  We’re not talking about portable here, so the fact that DVDs are clumsier doesn’t make much of a difference.  How about streaming a movie from the web?  Well, most folks have some sort of Pay-per-view or On-demand through their broadcast provider.  And while not cool, their QOS usually bests what you could get online.

Lastly, what about stuff that is web only, like YouTube?  Here we are getting closer, since there is no “sneaker-net” way of getting that stuff on your TV.  But what does it mean to watch it on your TV (beyond the obvious, smarty pants)?  What is the user’s behavior, their preferred use case?

Well, this post from Brightcove CEO Jeremy Allaire (and the associated TechCrunch coverage) I think  describes precisely the problems to date, and outlines what a use case would look like.  However, I strongly disagree with the approach: getting standards bodies to define such a set of requirements.  This will go nowhere really quickly, guaranteed.  Why?  The people at the table, CE companies, Web companies, PC suppliers, infrastructure companies, etc. do not have the DNA to devise such a product.  It just isn’t in them.  It would be about as disruptive as Sony’s MP3 players or Microsoft’s Media Center.

We are looking at a gap here.  The really awesome, game changing thing lies in between what all these companies do well.  No standards body is going to magically solve that.  So what will it be?  Maybe Boxee is on to somthing, or maybe Apple will make an SDK available for AppleTV like they did for the iPhone?  What I do know is that standards bodies may be largely ineffectual in the future — too slow and too many competing agendas.  This is a winner take all game, folks.

(* I can’t believe that manual is still there.  I had a hand in this one, probably the only product manual written entriely in LaTex!)

Gladwell and his contemporaries argue that while Duncan’s results are interesting, they stand by their “real-world” results.  Duncan, in-turn, states that their results don’t necessarily point to a root cause, with conclusions largely theoretical.  Tempers flare.

As I am embarking on a real world modeling effort myself, it struck me as odd that such contentions might really exist: both parties are right, and what the article really is pointing out is a very common dilemma in any engineering endeavor.  Models are, by definition, inaccurate.

Models are used as a utility, and well-designed ones make approximations and assumptions that are understood and accepted.  I’ll use an example from my old acoustics days.  If you wanted to build a sealed wooden box with a speaker stuck in it, you can use the following formula:

This is not as bad as it looks, as is the volume of the box, and the other values come with the handy spec sheet of the woofer you buy.  A few simple punches in the calculator and some wood glue, and you have a decent sounding speaker!

This is a great model, because it boils down very complicated acoustics into high school algebra.  If you studied acoustics you will find more elaborate models at work, but even those are inaccurate.  You can involve thermodynamics and even human hearing physiology, but there are diminishing returns for all this work.  The equation above gets you 90% of the way…reams of additional study will get you maybe a few points more.  That equation bakes in literally decades of work, with its principle authors essentially saying “trust us, it will sound fine.”

So, in the case of studying the viral trends, Duncan’s models probably serve his needs of predicting the outcome of Yahoo’s advertising programs, within a certain ballpark at least; but they are not perfect.  Gladwell and others, however, are also correct in basing hypotheses on the observed outcome of various real world studies; but they cannot prove it.  There usually exists a gap between observed outcome and predicted outcome in natural systems.  I say “usually” as there are exceptions, and these exceptions have largely changed our world — something I’ll have to write more about later!

(Photo from the source article.  The pretty printed math courtesy of the great wpmathpub plugin!)

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