Remember Steve Jobs

I feel very sad of his passing away. He is truly a legend.

About the Rise of the Knowledge Market

Due to the personal schedule I seldom blogged technologically in the recent months. Today, however, an article from Forbes caught my attention and pushed me to blog again. The title of the article is The Rise of the Knowledge Market. The topic represents a very important phenomenon in our modern society. In fact, I believe it is indeed the soul of the ongoing information revolution, which is the greatest event in human society since the industry revolution. The information revolution is fundamentally reconstructing our life in nearly all the levels and all of the aspects.

More than two years ago, for Internet Evolution I wrote an article titled User Generated Content, Revisited. In the article I pointed out a fundamental problem inside the model of Web 2.0---to the content creators UGC (User Generated Content) is about fame generation in contrast to the exchangeable value creation. The success of implementing the social network explained why Web 2.0 rises. The failure of bringing up a system of the individual valuation would be, however, the cause to the sunset of Web 2.0. The next day in Thinking Space, I thus coined the term UGA (User Generated Asset) and emphasized that the Web evolution urged us upgrading UGC production to be UGA production. With such a transition, the Web will evolve from a social playground to be a social marketplace in which people sell and purchase knowledge (more precisely, it shall be some type of the embodied knowledge) from each other. When we come to the Web, we no longer just browse or socialize through the Web. We use the Web building up our mind asset and trading it on the Web.

Apple's App Store is a great example of UGA production. When the developers create a third-party App and sell it through the App Store, Apple actually provides these developers a way of embodying their knowledge and selling the embodiment through the platform it designs. The success of Apple and its App Store has demonstrated us the power of the UGA business.

But the model of App Store is not even close to the ultimate vision of the UGA production. Right now one must first of all be a professional software developer so that he can take the advantage of this UGA business. Otherwise, the UGA business is simply an illusion no matter how creative a thinker he is or how compelling his mind truly may be. The model must be improved and simplified! By doing so successfully, a tremendous power of production will be released from people and a new golden time of the global business comes. Without a question the world will then be out of the recession.

Another related recent news is J.K. Rowling's decision that she will sell her electronic books directly to the readers but bypassing all the publishers. Although J.K. Rowling is likely too famous to be a typical example for the discussion of the UGA business, this decision is a sign showing the broken of the traditional knowledge trading business models, gradually but indefinitely. In tradition one have to be VERY much knowledgeable in order to earn the eligibility of entering the knowledge market. With the evolution of the Web, however, such a barrier is loosening and eventually it is going to be torn down.

As Jennifer said in her Forbes article, one may start to trade his limited knowledge as long as their is a buyer. The reason? The advancement of the Web has significantly lowered the cost of embodying human's knowledge and making it exchangeable.

This is the trend for the new-generation Web business! And this is where the Web is evolving toward at present.

Apple and a Mutant of Web it Creates

Holding an Apple product such as an iPhone or an iPad has been a fashion, let it alone the usefulness of the devices themselves. I am not a fashion speaker. However, what has driven me very excited about Apple is a mutant of the Web Apple creates. Intentionally or subconsciously Apple makes us a web backed by a different thinking. Due to the company's great success in business the thinking has already invaded into the mind of many of us though few might have noticed it. In this post I share my viewpoint about this Apple-created mutant and its relation to the eastern style of thinking we discussed in the last post.

The Web invented by Sir Tim Berners-Lee was conducted by a classic western style of thinking. The Web was composed of many nodes where each node represents a molecular object. Then there are hyperlinks connecting these nodes arbitrarily. In general every node of the Web has a name (typically a page title) while the hyperlinks are anonymous. This distinction is both essential and crucial. With name a thing declares its tangible intent and identity. Without a name, on the contrary, the intent of a thing is intangible. Therefore, by this design the Web is a world of objects/data and their categorization---the typical western style thinking. The initial Yahoo search was based exactly on this thinking in order to disclose the complete hierarchical structure of the Web, and in the first few years of the Web age the attempt succeeded more or less.

The fallen of Yahoo search and the rise of Google search was a remarkable event in the history of Web evolution. Besides all the other meanings, it tells that the Web had evolved by itself and broken the initial foundation upon the western style of thinking. Google's success showed that it was links instead of categories of the pages that mattered more when sorting the Web. The ones without name were more essential than the ones with name when we explored the topological structure of the Web. If only we think of this discovery once more, isn't the message itself shocking enough?

Then there was Apple.

Unlike Google who sorts and organizes the Web, Apple simply wants to use the Web. Unfortunately, like many other Web-based companies in the beginning Apple might have found that the Web was not very friendly for being consumed. Information on the Web is highly tangled and the traditional thinking of knowledge categorization is too slow to untangle the mess. Unlike an academic research institute, a company cannot wait since money never sleeps! So Steve thought of a solution.

At old days the ancient Chinese had faced the same problem but about the real world. Unlike the more idealistic ancient Greek who were enthusiastic in exploring the world knowledge bottom-up from the foundation, the ancient Chinese were more materialistic (or more practice-oriented; and until now they still are indeed). The ancient Chinese chose a middle-out way to explore the world. Neglecting object categorization and even logic, the ancient Chinese chose the methods of practice be the solution. Once one might have grasped a method of practice, he could apply the method universally to solve the other similar problems in the world. This is a core of the ancient Chinese philosophy. Note that when the "similar" in Chinese's mind is quite different from the "similar" in a westerner's mind. The westerners normally assume "similarity" within a common domain/category while the easterners (especially the ancient Chinese) generally do not have this hypothesis. Due to the difference it is not uncommon for a Chinese character being assigned multiple varied meanings in different (could even be mutually excluded) domains, and it is not unusual to find a Chinese character but with the absolute opposite meaning by simply being assigned a varied context. This type of word interpretation is rare in the western languages such as English, which generally pursue the preciseness and uniqueness on term definition. By focusing on grasping and utilizing the methods of resolutions in contrast to understanding the essence of the causes of problems, the ancient Chinese advanced the civilization faster than the western competitors in the early ages of human society. Apple adopted a similar solution as the ancient Chinese did.

Apple conducted a web of methods. Apple created a space so that people could implement their methods of consuming the Web and publish them. In contrast to selling information, Apple sells information-consuming methods. After buying an App, the users can decide how to use the method and which resources to be consumed. Through the AppStore, Apple creates a mutant of the Web in which the Apps (methods) are the main threads where objects are context.

Apple's methodology brings the company tremendous success in business. Have Apple added more regulation to the Web? Hardly any. Unlike the Semantic Web project, Apple's approach does little help for the Web to become a better organized place. But like what ancient Chinese did, through this methodology Apple gives the layman users the greatest freedom of utilizing their knowledge. In the ancient Greek society, knowledge was only on the hand of the intellects because it was studied in such an academic way. Comparatively people without much knowledge could learn a method and then applied it in their own life through their own human creativity by nature in the ancient Chinese society. It was an important reason that ancient China grew faster than the civilization in the western society. Now Apple cloned the similar methodology in its business.

Summary

Without the western style of thinking, we would not have invented World Wide Web. It was the objects and the links that constructed the skeleton and made the Web live. After the Web became alive, however, it is a much more complicated creature than a hierarchical category. Like the real world from which it is imaged, very quickly the virtual world is tangled. It is hopeless to untangle the mess from bottom-up or from top-down within short time of period. In order to facilitate the usage of the Web at this stage we need to borrow ideas from the eastern philosophies. At last, however, we still need the methodology in the western philosophy to finally solve the mess and invent the real science of the Web. It is like that eventually the long-lasting fundamental study in the western society made fruits from which we had the modern science and engineering. By contrast, the ancient Chinese civilization stopped growing eventually due to its lack of the fundamental study of the nature. It was the human history; and it will be the Web history.

My brief comment on iPad, Siri, GBuzz, and Aardvark Acquisition

Due to my schedule, I do not have time to make intensive posts that explore the news in depth as I used to do. To celebrate the Chinese New Year and Valentine's Day (this year they happen to be in the same day, Feb. 14) together with the Thinking Space readers, however, I would like to share my brief comment on some of them with my friends. Happy holidays!

iPad

iPad represents a remarkable breakthrough in concept. Its current product design is, however, immature. It is a terrible misleading to think of iPad an enlarged iPhone. To see the real intrinsic distinction, let's take a minute thinking of the following comparison.

The innovation of notebook computer brings the Web to people anywhere in the world; the innovation of iPhone brings people anywhere in the world to the Web; the innovation of iPad, on the other hand, makes an instant bridge between a person anywhere in the world and a specialized subset of the Web---his Web of interest. This is the real gap Steve Jobs claimed to fill in the product launching show.

Certainly, the current iPad design has not reached the goal yet. This is why I call it immature.

Siri

Siri on iPhone is a milestone though there is still a long long way ahead to reach a meaningful success.

Believe it or not, Siri and iPad actually belong to the same philosophy---developing a personal assistant. iPad plans to construct a hardware platform of personal assistants. Siri attempts to build a software platform of personal assistants. Compared to iPad, the road ahead for Siri is even tougher.

On the positive side, Siri provides a fascinating environment to experiment many key concepts of the Semantic Web and linked data in the real world. Idehen Kingsley must be interested in exploring his journey with this service. We as normal users, however, still need more time to watch the future progress of this service.

Google Buzz

Twitter but in Google? Maybe. But GBuzz means more.

Google Buzz reveals the GMail users the social communities they implicitly belong. These social communities existed disregarding GBuzz. GBuzz, however, makes them explicit. This is a critical step Google made towards exploring the treasure of the social web. Google has been hesitated on how to step into the social web for long time. Finally it seems the company finds their unique asymmetric strength to enter this market by cashing the popularity of its dominating GMail service. This is remarkable because in comparison Microsoft still does not get how they might exploit their asymmetric strength in this field.

Google's Aardvark Acquisition

The innovation of Aardvark is ended. This acquisition is probably a good news to the Aardvark investors and the Mechanical Zoo employees. It is, on the other hand, not so good a news to the evolution of the Web.

In short, Google's ultimate interest contradicts to the eventual potential of Aardvark. Google's ultimate interest is to make itself a super-smart brain while everybody using it may follow it stupidly. The social search services such as Aardvark aims to locate smart people and make people rather than machines be smarter through the social communication. This contradiction in the level of philosophy actually is the intrinsic reason that made the Aardvark designers leave Google several years ago. Although at present the power of money brings them back, it does not solve the fundamental conflict.

I had a phone conversation with Max Ventilla two years ago and we shared quite a few thoughts about what the social search was and how to approach it. I am glad of and sincerely congratulate his achievement in business by sealing this acquisition deal. I am afraid, however, that he will start another journey sooner or later when his original passion catches him again.