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I read a blog post a while back called Reaction to the iPhone reveals how the electronics industry failed to beat the iPod. He talks about how the electronics industry is so obsessed with features that it forgets about user experience. Since then I've had a Design lecture from someone, who also looks a lot like an Apple fanboy, and talked about the same kind of things.

But the point they bring up about user experience is an important one. Much of the electronics industry can not understand why Apple products are so successful, they're overpriced and are easily matched by cheaper products with the same or even better raw functionality.

Engineers are unusual customers

I don't own an iPod, I do own an Apple laptop, but only because I know I can install other operating systems on it if I choose to. I'm extremely impressed with the iPhone, but I'm very unlikely to buy one. That's because I'm an engineer at heart and the opportunity for hacking on such closed systems is a lot less than for others. Apple is as proprietary as you can get. I'd rather own something I can hack on, even if that means sacrificing form for function. As an engineer I'm one of the worst placed people to judge the usability of a product.

This is a problem with the electronics industry, because the products are made by engineers like me. That's my first point, but there's a more important one.

Vertical Integration

The reason I believe Apple's products are so successful is because of the integrated user experience you get. The reason everything is so well integrated is because of the vertical market Apple have created. They provide the equipment, the peripherals, packaging and sales of their equipment, the operating system, the applications, the bundling and selection of content and there a links with the content creation itself.

When the button on your iPod is made by the same company you buy your music from, user experience is easy. I don't mean to trivialise the work that Apple put in to make this happen because they do an amazing job, I merely mean to point out that in a horizontal market it's going to be even harder.

Horizontalisation

A paper I read years ago by Milton L. Mueller talks about the economic consequences of digital convergence. He describes the transition from vertical market (like Apple) to a horizontal one where equipment, software, carriage, packaging and content will be distinct sectors of the market, run by different companies.

It's all the more interesting then that the company which just reached milestone in the convergence of computing, telecommunications and media did so with a vertical approach.

A horizontal market like the one described in that paper is my ideal for a converged market. It's good engineering and it's good for the consumer because it encourages a more competitive market. I think it's the market the Open Source community is heading for, which probably explains why they are notoriously bad at user experience.

The answer

So how do we achieve this level of user experience in a horizontal market where all of these functions are run by different companies? People who know me might guess that this is the part where I bring in my "open standards" mantra.

The only way we can hope to achieve this level of integration is by using open standards for the links between each level. Open hardware, open software, open networks and open formats for media.

If you want to converge different markets (which I believe is inevitable), those markets need to establish common languages to communicate with. If we achieve that ideal, everyone wins.

In a comment on my last blog post I mentioned that:

"I have a vision of something which basically *is* the web, but in 3D. In fact, I think the user should be able to choose how they wish to view a given web resource - in plain text, 2D shapes, 3D shapes, simulated speech etc. This can be done with content negotiation in HTTP. The same resource could be rendered by lots of different devices, from a light switch to a 3D headset."

I then found the Metaverse Roadmap, a "public ten-year forecast and visioning survey of 3D Web technologies". They have a wiki where you can input your thoughts. I was going to add my own vision statement about how the 3D web could just be one mode of interaction with a multimodal web (as mentioned above). I found this vision statement which is a similar idea:

"The world will be the metaverse. People often think of Stephenson’s metaverse as an “other” place, and the web as a window onto cyberspace, but as Paul Saffo and Mike Liebhold of Institute for the Future note, the best model for the metaverse of 2016 may be an information-drenched world, where the 3D web is just one particular instantiation. Mixed reality is likely to be the dominant user experience. You will use virtual worlds when they are an appropriate mode of interaction, but they are not your primary mode of communication – you have your chat, your email, your augmented reality, your 2D and 3D browser, etc. While people will continue to use online spaces and media centers for particularly high quality 3D content, the pervasiveness of information access and augmented reality will give world itself new layers of “metaverse-itivity.” The ubiquity of small, portable Sidekick-like and wearable devices will enable immediate access. Voice will be used for many basic queries, but text, even IM text, is private and unobtrusive, so it will not disappear."

Someone also mentions the need for a new type of browser which will allow us to access "all our 3D access through one piece of software" and mentioned that "Open standards will be particularly important for this". I've downloaded FreeWRL, the X3D renderer I want to use for Webscope

In other news...

It seems CES is all about convergence again this year with Apple's iPhone being announced alongside the Nokia N800, Apple TV and Windows Home Server. The iPhone was inevitable but it sure is pretty now it's here, very nice design touches like motion sensors and multi-touch screen that I didn't expect to see yet. Note the lack of 3G and the presence of WiFi. This is the kind of hardware we should be thinking about for future web software development.