It is commonly accepted that the people of North Korea are cut off from all forms of technology—in stark contrast to their heavily wired counterparts to the south. Yet technology has slowly crept its way into certain, extremely limited, areas of North Korean life.
Yesterday we investigated what little is known about the country's totalitarian Red Star operating system. But what do North Korea's citizens see when they do gain access to a computer or mobile phone and get online?
"For the average North Korean, the Internet doesn't exist," Martyn Williams tells Co.Labs. He's spent decades studying the country, and is now a John S. Knight Journalism Fellow at Stanford University and the editor of the North Korea Tech blog.
Instead of access to the Internet, Williams tells me, the country has an intranet—an internal collection of networked servers and computers that is only accessible from inside North Korea's borders. The name of this intranet is Kwangmyong, which roughly translates into "Bright" in English.
As with most things about North Korea, what little is known about Kwangmyong has only been gleaned from North Korean defectors. Even foreign visitors to the country are not allowed to access it.
Kwangmyong is a free service to the country's inhabitants—even though less than 10% of the population is believed to have ever accessed it. Computer use outside of the capital of Pyongyang is virtually unheard of, and even most of those inside the city are unlikely to have a computer in their home.
Estimates for the number of websites on Kwangmyong range between 1,000 to 5,000 and their content is mainly dedicated to news propaganda, educational and reference materials, and scanned archives. Besides its limited state-hosted websites, Kwangmyong also has a search engine, news groups functionality, and even a messaging system similar to email.
One of the few North Korean websites available on the global Internet. It's believed this is taken directly from Kwangmyong.
"Their intranet connects things like universities and schools and libraries," says Williams, "but of course it is centrally run and you can't just put your own work server up and put your own website up there no matter what it does. It's all very strictly controlled."
The government dictates usage rules for even the tiniest minutiae of Kwangmyong, including the underlying HTML code used on every website. One such coding mandate dictates that every time Kim Jong Il's, Kim Il Sung's, or Kim Jong Un's names appear on a website their font will be 20% larger than the rest of the text on the page.
Note the larger font for the names of North Korea's leaders (Image from Martyn William's website).
What is more surprising considering the country's level of control over its intranet is that the North Korean government has, within the last six or seven years, been allowing a very select group of individuals to access the outside Internet that we all use.
Connection to the real Internet is limited to a few dozen "elites" as they're known. These are people in families in Pyongyang who have high-level connections in the government or military. The government has also allowed access to the broader Internet to select scientists and university students. In such cases Internet access is granted because it allows scientists and students to gather resources and learn from experts abroad, which helps advance the aims of the state in such areas as engineering, technological innovation, economics, and agriculture.
Why would the most controlling society on the planet chance give scientists and students—people who by their very nature desire to seek the truth—access to the outside world?
The government believes fear will keep them in line. "In almost all cases, all of the people that have Internet access are usually in a room and in a little room next door to the room where all the Internet computers are someone's sitting in there basically in real time, monitoring what everybody is looking at," Williams says. "They realize if they're on the Internet, that going and looking at Korean-language websites and free news is a very stupid thing to do because they could get caught very quickly."
Considering the measures the North Korean government goes through to limit the information that makes it into its citizens' hands, it's almost inconceivable to believe the country allows its citizens to have mobile phones. After all, mobile phones are an increasingly important tool used to promote democratic ideals—it was an instrumental tool in the Arab Spring.
Yet North Korea does have a rapidly growing 3G network called Koryolink. Introduced in 2008, the network was a joint venture between the state-owned Korea Post and Telecommunications Corporation (KPTC) and an Egyptian company called Global Telecom Holding. In the six years since its inception Koryolink's subscriber base has grown from 5,000 members to over 2 million (out of a total population of around 25 million). Its network now covers between six and 100 cities in the country.
But just as with its PCs, the mobile phones available to Koryolink subscribers are cut off from the real Internet. Users can make calls to other users inside the country, and they can access the intranet, but any access to numbers outside of North Korea or the global Internet is not possible. And as can be expected, members of the Koryolink network receive daily propaganda text messages espousing the virtues and greatness of their country's leaders.
Due to its lack of an advanced manufacturing industry, North Korea's phones are almost certainly not made in the country. Instead they're likely to be lower-end handsets imported from China. While no Koryolink-connected handset is known to have made it outside of the country, it's widely believed the phones are a mixed bag of flip phones and some smartphones. Higher-end handsets like iPhones and Samsung smartphones have been illegally imported, yet their use seems limited.
Most smartphones are assumed to be running a version of Android. This is supported by the fact that the country has also shown off an Android-based tablet computer called the Samjiyon, which it says is made by the domestic Chosun Computer company. Yet since North Korea lacks advanced manufacturing facilities many believe the tablet is actually a Chinese import as well.
Though the North Korean government can ensure that no one on the Koryolink 3G network can contact the outside world, one wonders whether it sees the threat in allowing citizens to communicate with each other in a semi-anonymous medium. After all, it's hard to believe even the Orwellian North Korean government would have the technology or manpower to monitor the daily communications of 2 million subscribers.
But as Dan Bowerman, an IT consultant and editor of the Opening Up North Korea blog, points out, though the country might actively monitor the cellular communications of those in the media or military—in other words, those whose dissent could cause immediate damage to the regime—the country doesn't need to actively monitor every single citizen because an existing culture of fear and paranoia keeps people in line.
"These things are pervasive throughout their culture," says Bowerman. "They have a very big snitch model type of system, where you never know who is looking at you. Your best friend might be tapped by the secret service one day to keep an eye on you or to report what you're doing. These kinds of things are reported by defectors to happen all the time."
Bowerman says that even if North Korea's citizens began trusting their safety with each other more and began to communicate more openly behind closed doors on their mobile phones, the government may have no problem simply taking all their phones away. After all, they've done it before.
"There were cell phones back in 2003 in North Korea, and they were getting quite popular," says Bowerman. "They were gaining traction. That was going well for a while; all the senior cadres in Pyongyang had cellphones. They were a hit, and then, all of a sudden, there was a big ban on them. The government completely locked down and took everybody's cell phones away."
The reason why the government confiscated the country's cell phones was because of a suspected assassination attempt on Kim Jong-Il's life in 2004.
"Nothing has ever been said by the State about this, but several records of this exist," says Bowerman. "They were going to use a cell phone to detonate a bomb to kill Kim Jong-Il. This was the suspicion at the time. So cell phones went away for a few years, simply because there was a suspicion that the bomb that went off that was supposed to knock over Kim Jong-Il's train—and it went off an hour after he'd already passed through—had used a cell phone as the trigger device. This is why there was the lockdown."
Taking away the mobile phones of 2 million people in 2014 may be harder than it was a decade ago. The government seems to realize North Koreans see how advanced the rest of the world is. Some of them will travel to China. Others will watch dramas and movies smuggled from South Korea, or read websites like Wikipedia that are saved to a USB stick and literally floated into the country by a helium balloon released over the border. In the north by the Chinese border some North Koreans will risk connecting to open Wi-Fi or 3G Chinese networks on smuggled smartphones to access the outside Internet. Now, more than ever, North Koreans are waking up to what life is really like outside their borders.
The official website of North Korea. One of the few sites hosted inside North Korea's borders that are available to the outside world.
But it's not just an awareness of the outside world's technological advancement that would make the North Korean regime pause for a moment before taking away the country's mobile phones now.
"Technological advancement in the country is needed more and more as North Korea gets increasingly desperate for foreigner money, which, frankly, they need to survive," says Bowerman."They have to welcome imports from China; they have to welcome imports from Russia; from the tourists that comes through. They have to make things more accessible for outsiders—and some of those things will trickle down, slowly, to the country's citizens."
If this technology and the information it brings continues to trickle down, could it possibly lead to a Pyongyang Spring along the lines of the Arab Spring we saw in the Middle East?
"Oh, I think there's definitely a potential in North Korea for things, very quickly actually, to reach a tipping point, and then suddenly there's a lot of people turning against the government," says Martyn Williams. But he notes that a potential problem arises in North Korea that those in the Middle East didn't have—at least not to the same degree.
"In other countries people have been able to self-organize, which in North Korea is difficult because even domestic communication is monitored. But also, in these other countries the eyes of the world have been on them. If you remember back to things like Tiananmen Square, while the students were in the square and while the Chinese were trying to figure out what to do, the world's TV cameras were broadcasting live from there. It was a difficult thing for the Chinese. But in Pyongyang, even if you manage to get 10,000 people in the middle of the city protesting against the government, I think the military could roll in and shoot all of them dead and we'd only find out about it through rumors like three weeks later or something. That all makes it a lot easier for the government there to keep things under control."
Still, with the increase in the people's awareness of technology, and the regime's acknowledgement that embracing more technology is necessary if it hopes to turn its fragile economy around, many believe the information that has been denied to the North Korean people for so long will only continue to increase. And with that information will come an ever-increasing desire to promote change in one of the most oppressive societies on the planet.
"I think it will happen," says Williams. "The question is will it happen this year or will it happen 20 years from now? What it requires, if you're in that type of society where fear rules...the only time you're going to be persuaded is if you're with such a mass of people that there's this unstoppable momentum that allows you to rise up in relative safety. That's going to take a while, I think. But whenever it does actually happen—as it did in Eastern Europe in 1989 when all of these countries very quickly fell—I think it could all end quite fast."
This was the second of a two-part series looking at the state of technology in North Korea and its implications for its citizens and the world. Read Part 1 here.
Every morning at 7 a.m., Matt Mullenweg wakes up in Houston, Texas, and reads a book. After a chapter or so, he scrambles some eggs, grabs a couple bottles of Hint water, and wanders over to his office—a desk a few feet away. This is the executive suite from which Mullenweg runs his three companies, a venture-backed startup, a nonprofit foundation, and one of the world's largest open source projects.
He logs into the internal project room where team members post discussions about what they're doing. It's buzzing with hundreds of updates from employees working from their homes in Europe, Asia, Australia, and the East Coast. Most of them only see each other once or twice a year.
Mullenweg turns on some jazz and starts reading. There will be no formal meetings today, or on any day this month. And only rarely does anyone communicate using email. He keeps his Skype connection open in case anyone wants to chat one-on-one while he trolls the discussions—which continue to update in almost real time.
In one of the posts, Mullenweg notices something out of sync and starts typing. Twenty seconds and 30 words later, he punches the "Post it" button. The pattern continues for the next several hours. A programmer is not thinking holistically about a particular feature. A team is getting off track from the broader product vision. On the side, he chats with a dozen people about how they're feeling, and touches base with a few key employees. Course corrected.
Then he closes his web browser and goes to dinner.
And that is how Mullenweg, creator of WordPress, founder of Automattic, and chairman of The WordPress Foundation, runs 22% of the Internet.
Every second, somewhere in the world four babies and two WordPress blogs are born. When those babies are old enough to blog, Facebook might not be the dominant social network anymore. But WordPress, the 11-year-old open source blog software, might just be their publishing platform.
One-fifth of all websites currently use WordPress. Facebook, by comparison, consumes the lives of about a third of Internet users. But while Facebook has 6,818 employees, WordPress is run by just 230 people. Facebook is valued at around $150 billion. Mullenweg this year closed a $160 million investment round for his WordPress hosting company, Automattic. He plans on using the money to increase the size of his staff, to 2,000 people.
Every day, Automattic's nine data centers push an astronomical 450 terabytes of data around the globe. (The much-anticipated WordPress Version 4.0 just launched on Friday, with millions of downloads already.) However, "I think we can do four times what we are now," Matt Mullenweg, recently told Fast Company. "Seventy or eighty percent of the web."
Yet even at that scale, Mullenweg is committed to continue running the WordPress ecosystem as a bizarre blend of non- and for-profit, meritocracy, and dictatorship. At the helm sits Mullenweg, playing "jazz director" and preaching open source, while carefully puppeteering every detail of his organization.
When management guru Scott Berkun "showed up to work" at Automattic in 2010, he worried that what made him good at other jobs wouldn't transfer to the chaotic, impersonal coworking dynamic for which Automattic was famous. "My best leadership tricks depended on being in the same room with people," he wrote. He wanted to know how such a successful enterprise had grown without emails or meetings or managers, and if it could continue to grow that way.
"At times I felt like a capitalist in a socialist country," said Berkun, who spent an ethnographic 18 months inside of WordPress and wrote a book about the company's unique culture, called The Year Without Pants, which was released last September.
By the time he arrived, WordPress had become the web's dominant blogging and content management platform. At around 60 employees, the company finally added some structure: The company split into a dozen small teams to work on individual projects together. Berkun joined the "social media" product team.
He quickly discovered that the famous Automattic chaos was actually quite organized. People had confused cultural freedom with disorganization, but to the contrary, Mullenweg had created a highly efficient process. Hours on the clock, employee location, managers—Mullenweg's philosophy was that these kinds of things were moot if the work itself got done, and that most companies engaged in a lot of unnecessary "metawork" because of these. He believed that if you removed those things, along with efficiency-destroying interruptions like email and phone calls and meetings, work could proceed more quickly and with less pain.
And though it sounds crazy, he replaced all of those things with one simple thing: blog posts.
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Automattic's secret sauce is a WordPress theme called P2 that every employee publishes posts on all day long. At the top of a P2 blog post is a blank box. When you enter something and hit submit, your update appears in a list below, essentially forming a big, group comment thread. Each P2 post gets its own URL, which can be referenced in other posts. Every project, question, idea, complaint, and conversation gets its own P2, and anyone who wants to can participate.
There are no private P2s. Everyone, from intern to CEO, can weigh in on anything. Most people aren't interested in most posts, of course, but if ever someone at Automattic needs to know about something—in any project and from any point in history—a P2 record is there.
Each Automattic employee checks the P2s all day long. Instead of email, which decays over time and empowers the sender, P2s are permanent and empower the group.
The radically transparent P2 method virtually eliminates politics. It keeps remote employees in the loop on everything in the company—it's their fault if you don't know about something, because that means you haven't read. The P2 system encourages healthy debate (which happens often), and reinforces the idea of meritocracy. Automattic also tracks employees' actual work (support tickets closed, code written and deleted) and puts it on a public scoreboard, so everyone knows how everyone else is doing. This creates internal pressure to achieve results and avoid that dreaded metawork.
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Though the system does have downsides (some conversations need to be real-time and involve fewer people, threads can be hijacked by tangents, and blog posts lack visual data like tone and body language), Berkun came to believe that the P2 method rendered Automattic's product development process and remote organization rather shatterproof. "It's very resilient, just not in the same predictable way that classical management or engineering would define resilience," Berkun explains. "It seems completely insane. But if you have smart people that you're working with it's actually liberating."
When forced to publicly document everything, the disparate team members became that jazz ensemble, each player improvising his or her own notes, but making music without skipping beats. (Automattic embraces the analogy by naming its product releases after jazz musicians.)
The great irony in this, of course, is Mullenweg himself. In the jazz ensemble, Mullenweg's notes overrode everything. "I'm married to WordPress," he told me. All the high-stakes decisions for all three organizations were made by him—and often low-stakes ones as well. Employees jokingly referred to the following common occurrence as "Matt bombing," writes Berkun:
"This was when a team was working on something in a P2, heading in one direction. Then late in the thread, often at a point where some people felt there was already rough consensus, Matt would drop in, leave a comment advocating a different direction, and then disappear."
On the P2 boards, the personally charismatic founder who friends variously describe to me as "calm," "wise," and a "gentleman," recalls Berkun, "earned a reputation for being terse, occasionally cryptic, and, to some, quite intimidating online."
Yet it worked. WordPress kept growing. And Automattic employees were happy.
As product visionary, Mullenweg was able to use P2s to scale himself beyond the effectiveness of a typical manager.
"If I were just dropping into a meeting like a regular manager, I would only have a few minutes of context," Mullenweg explains. "With the P2 structure, I can read [about] everything leading up to it and get a deep context." Instead of delegation, he simply had to be good at reading.
Mullenweg thinks his unconventional management system should be adopted by businesses everywhere. Still, with 190 employees by the time Berkun's book was published, it was a wonder Mullenweg had been able to keep micromanaging the Automattic team while running the open source project and the WordPress Foundation.
In truth he did have some help. Toni Schneider, an executive who early Automattic investors brought in as CEO eight years ago, managed business and revenue affairs while Mullenweg did his jazz-product thing.
That is, until January when Schneider stepped down.
Back in 2005, it became clear that WordPress couldn't be supported at scale through the generosity of starving programmers alone. Security and infrastructure would become increasingly disaster-prone as more people used it. Mullenweg believed fanatically that software should be free, and he created a for-profit side to WordPress to solve that problem. "Nonprofits can do amazing things but their reach is often limited; for-profits often do amazing things, but often their vision is limited," he says. "I thought if we could take the best of both, a complementary for-profit and nonprofit and create a wider ecosystem, we could create something bigger than them both."
So, he established Automattic, a corporation that provided web hosting and premium services to WordPress users who wanted the free software but were willing to pay someone else to run it for them. Mullenweg raised $1.1 million in venture capital and brought on Schneider, an experienced CEO who'd sold his webmail service, Oddpost, to Yahoo in 2004 (Oddpost became Yahoo Mail), to take care of business while Mullenweg focused on the product and community. Automattic would use some of its profits to ensure the continued development of the free WordPress code—especially unsexy components like security and infrastructure.
A fuzzy line separated the corporation (wordpress.com, which Automattic claimed) and the open source project (wordpress.org). "There were some people who were involved in the community who wanted to get jobs at Automattic but who were not offered jobs," said Siobhan McKeown, a WordPress historian who works for Mullenweg's personal investment company. Plus, she says, "Whenever there's a media story, they say 'Automattic, the makers of WordPress,' and people get frustrated with that."
Rich Bowen, an early WordPress.org contributor, and several others led a group in 2006 which split off from WordPress's codebase to form a rival blog tool, Habari—having grievances with Mullenweg's top-down decisions. "The perception was that people would work hard on patches, and he would accept or reject them in a somewhat capricious manner," Bowen says.
As if to make things more confusing, Mullenweg also created a 501(c)(3) called the WordPress Foundation, with the mission of democratizing publishing through open source software. Its charge was to protect the WordPress trademark and educate the public about the benefits of open source.
Mullenweg himself made it all work. "Subsequent history has shown that he must have been doing something right," Bowen admits. Through sheer charisma and micro-management, Mullenweg calmed the community and orchestrated the coders and volunteer educators within boundaries he set. He came to describe himself as a "benevolent dictator," helming the nonprofit, the open source project, and the commercial product offerings himself. Meanwhile, Habari and other splinter projects floundered, with little resources and direction.
As Automattic's revenue grew, he recruited work-from-home programmers from various corners of the world with the promise of freedom and flexibility, so long as they followed his process of no meetings and no email, and no hierarchy but "Matt."
The most important difference between Mullenweg and, say, Mark Zuckerberg is one of philosophy. Mullenweg keeps WordPress open source, because he believes it keeps him honest and shows that his intentions are pure—and that keeps the community building his software for free, despite what some outsiders see as a conflict of interest. "People could pick up [the code] and start their own WordPress," Mullenweg says. "That's sort of how it started in the first place." Despite the dictatorial nature of his management, it's Mullenweg's genuineness and vision that keeps WordPress's contributors contributing, Automattic's employees from churning.
On the other hand, Facebook's founder has put business before users enough times to make "we promise not to screw you for 2 years" the big reveal at his recent F8 summit. So if we had to entrust one of the two men with three-fourths of the web, I think a lot of people would pick Mullenweg.
Yet, if Zuckerberg dies, Facebook users won't notice. If Mullenweg moves on, WordPress won't immediately crumble, but its spiritual fire may die. No remote work, open-source-based organization in history has grown as big as Automattic intends. But as Berkun points out, "The oldest, largest companies today all began much like Automattic, with ambitious youth, big ideas, and high thresholds for change." And Mullenweg adds, "I get excited when people say things can't be done."
Having been coached by Schneider, Mullenweg may no longer need adult supervision to run his three-headed organization. But despite his remarkable ability to influence and manage unwieldy programmers, Automattic is at a turning point. Mullenweg says he's ready to be CEO of a big company, and he doesn't want the distributed team or open source nature of the firm to change. But he admits that he's going to need good lieutenants and to shift his management style—P2s or no—if he's to get to 2,000 employees.
Last September, I asked him, "What if I offered you, personally, a billion dollars right now to sell me WordPress?" He laughed. "I would say I'm very flattered, but we have a lot of work left to do."
A random dark net shopping bot, a rabid meme music video collage, concept websites, and a browser-based film—these were some of the best artworks of the year, and they weren't hanging in a Chelsea gallery. Some were born digital. Some where built with shareware platforms or crowdsourced. Many referenced, intensified, and disrupted everyday Internet user experience, while spilling into the "physical."
Maybe the antiquated, catch-all term "net art" should be applied very loosely to this group, unless you'd like to get into a long, footnoted discussion about the latest art lexicon update in the age of (or rather, after) the Internet. This year in particular, the web-enabled stand-out artworks were accessible, obsessive, interdisciplinary and ballsy.
!Mediengruppe Bitnik
Every media outlet talked up "Deep Web" this year, but the technical aspects of anonymized browsers exploring its legally murky depths aren't exactly obvious to the general audience. For a group show at the Kunst Halle St. Gallen gallery in Switzerland, the !Mediengruppe Bitnik art collective capitalized on these inquiries by creating the mysterious "Random Darknet Shopper," a bot that would randomly buy something from the Agora digital marketplace and have it shipped to the gallery.
With its $100 in bitcoin weekly budget, the bot has purchased MDMA pills, black market Nikes, Ukrainian cigarettes and, since Fast Companyprofiled the project, a "Hungarian passport scan" and "a baseball cap with hidden camera." Ongoing documentation is freely viewable online.
The project raised important questions, such as, "How does the ethical reasoning of capitalism work in an unregulated digital market place, particularly when the consumer is a bot?" "Is that really MDMA?" and "Is this art?"
Just over a half hour, The Urgency is a sensory onslaught in form of a music video album "dedicated to all the people who have had their lives wrecked by computers, the Internet or social media." As Extreme Animals, artists Jacob Ciocci and David Wightman deliver a mix of hardcore, experimental electronic noise and metal, while the video splices found footage, YouTube's one-hit-wonders, and cartoonish, hallucinatory animation. Extreme Animals released their latest video on Undervolt & Co, a unique artist-founded experimental video art label, selling reasonably priced downloadable audiovisual artworks.
The Urgency takes place in a neon realm where Tea Party candidate Christine O'Donnell defends herself as "not a witch" during a 2010 campaign ad, set to a techno Harry Potter theme cover. (And that's quite another thing altogether when performed live with projections, guitar shredding, and shrieking vocals.) Perhaps the overwhelming theme of this particular piece is the sad idea that once you become a thing on the Internet, it will eat try to eat you alive, regurgitating parts of you in loops and bits, in a process that's never quite done, and that leaves neither you nor it fully satisfied.
This is much more than a take off of John Berger's seminal 1972 BBC documentary series Ways of Seeing. Ways Of Something is a timely and insane retelling of an outdated art history documentary by keeping the original soundtrack and replacing the visuals with videos made by digital-born and web-based artists from all over the world, one minute at a time. It's a quite serious but very entertaining artwork.
The first two episodes—a Euro-centric "fine art" history and a exploration of the female nude—involved 58 artists contributing webcam performances, edited gaming footage, animated 3-D renderings, and experimental flash films. It premiered at Transfer Gallery in Brooklyn and has since screened internationally. Curated by Lorna Mills for the One Minutes project at Sandberg Institute in Amsterdam, the resulting film updates art history, subverting and reworking its themes for the less exclusive realm of web-based, technologically enabled art-making. Photoshop jokes help narrate the history of perspective. Sexts and fleshlights mock the male gaze. WikiLeaks "Collateral Murder" footage makes the conversation of reproduction of imagery actually relevant.
For their latest project, stalwart art provocateurs Eva and Franco Mattes utilized a little-known Internet-based labor platform where anonymized users from around the world perform commissioned tasks on webcam—reminiscent of adult cam services, but much more innocent in nature.
"BEFNOED" specifically focuses on absurdist combinations of very mundane, harmless tasks. The performers were paid to spill candy on their chests while wearing balaclavas, twins stood in doorways, and men saluted from ponds and pools with buckets on their heads. The videos were then distributed through "peripheral" non-U.S. social networks and video hosting services. Eons away from Marina Abramović performing in a London gallery, this is a strange sort of web-enabled instructional performance art project. In assembling a work of art out of the work of thousands of low-paid volunteers, "BEFNOED" also raises questions about labor exploitation in a time of crowdsourcing, rampant freelancing, and precarious work.
Photo: TumblrPorpentine's"For Those We Love Alive" is a mostly text-based game, playable online for free, and built with the open-source Twine platform, a story-telling tool that is open to everyone. In a realm that is both dream-like and nightmarish, you are a transgender woman serving an insectoid alien Empress who emerges from an inky black lake with instructions for you to follow. On your read-and-click journey, you search for yourself, for autonomy, for love. You also physically draw on yourself with a marker, off screen. By the end of the game, you have covered your arm with runes and signs and symbols.
This is Porpentine's diary, rooted in trauma, flowering in fantasy. On top of an already large cult following, Porpentine's projects are finally getting long-overdue mainstream attention this year.
"Windows 93," maintained by Jankenpopp and Zombectro, is a collection of online artworks on a platform mimicking an ancient Windows operating system. There's "Star Wars" in ASCII, glitchy longform animation, an 8-bit Photoshop, and even a shout-out to Olia Lialina's "My Boyfriend Came Back From The War," one of the first (and still best) net art pieces. There are several interactive "applications," some of which involve light coding, "Defrag" which is actually a game of Snake, a Bytebeat album, and a funny "Manifesto" of alert windows like "corgi + open source = acid" and "glitch + php = meta-realism." Click everything, particularly the credits section, and soak it in.
Inspired by Jean-Luc Godard's "La Chinoise" and Marshall McLuhan, The Villains is a timely and twisted film. In 1968, Godard's passionate Parisian political dilettantes attempt to start a Maoist revolutionary cell in their parents' apartment. Rhett Jones' "villains"—prophetically flawed, pre-Occupy Wall Street young Brooklynites—are trying their damnedest to utilize the proliferation of the Internet, new media, and social networks to empower the people. But they weren't exactly sure what they were doing, until the film's jarring end. Here, Godard's jump cuts are replaced with datamosh and a fragmented Stockhausen score. The story is saturated with cutaways to found footage and YouTube videos, providing texture and counterpoint. It's a crazy project, made even more relevant when it was reborn as a "Search Engine Generated Artwork" in 2014.
The new version of the film is rigged with code—part algorithmic, part randomizing—connected to YouTube's APIs. At various points of the film, the code sets off a search for "baby plays with iPad" or "man destroys office" or other related interjections, and randomly selects the videos from the results. These play in variously sized pop-ups, adding even more texture and thematic over-stimulation to the already psychedelic experience, making the film different each time it's played. This version of the film has screened at Videology in three simultaneous projections and is now playable online.
Artist Bunny Rogers had been publishing her poetry online since 2012. Whatever form her art takes—physical installations, Second Life captures, performance, online projects—it has always presented incredibly specific signifiers, all tying together in pristine, interdisciplinary compositions. They are characters culled from the outer ridges of online culture (i.e., the Usul Neopet), or disconcerting tangential elements of tragedies or collective illnesses (young girls' obsessions with the Columbine shooters, children as objects for adults on the Internet).
In her recently released book Cunny Poem Vol. 1, Rogers' poems are published chronologically, delivering an honesty we are trained to suppress as we grow distant from unresolved and reoccurring traumas and pitfalls. Every misspelled feeling is that much more specific. Every symbol is devastating. Every short stanza is a concentrated deliberate burst, hanging in silence. (And all of her poetry is still online, just like, probably, a lot of our own, somewhere.)
In the tradition of The Yes Men's culture jamming, the Hello Velocity group has been responsible for some of this year's most viral "fake" projects. Still, it is possible we will one day eat sausage from cloned celebrity stem-cell meat ("BiteLabs") or encode our DNA into a bitcoin chain ("Genecoin"), or see a religious group try to crowdfund the installation of a fast food chain inside a church to lift attendance ("McMass"). It just didn't really happen. But the media ran with it and a conversation was started, which of course was the point all along.
The year's most existentially terrifying project comes from Amalia Ulman, who assumed several distinct fictional personalities on her Instagram account by following scripts she derived from observing Instagram culture and its "consumerist fantasy lifestyle." She switched between a swag-obsessed "sugar baby" to a rich girl next door type, going as far as to fake detailed preparation for and recovery from a totally fictional breast augmentation.
By following trending topics, presenting herself in easily digestible, fairly vapid, and polished stereotypes and other "shortcuts to popularity," Ulman amassed 65,000 followers on Instagram. Her posts and interactions with "fans" have been preserved by Rhizome's new archiving tool, for generations to come. Yikes.
One day I woke up and realized it had been years since I'd thought about my old Dell Axim X30 personal digital assistant (PDA), let alone touched one. The device quickly became extinct, replaced by other technology forging ahead. PDAs are the ancestors of our modern mobile phones, in the same way a lot of the items we're currently carrying around today will be looked back on in a few years the same way—in laughable disbelief that they lasted for so long.
It'd be hyperbole to say technology is on the brink of replacing some of the most important items ever, but as the new year rolls in, it brings with it a hit list full of items currently crucial in our everyday lives.
Some will protest that we're still years away from losing such reliable material things; others will bring on the change with a sense of good riddance. Either way, these things are all on the verge of going the way of a New York City payphone.
The Internet of Things (IoT) is in the beginning stages of taking hold of our homes, connecting the simplest, everyday, objects to each other—and among its first orders of business is upgrading our locks.
A number of different manufacturers and startups are looking to take the hassle out of carrying keys, as well as add some additional benefits. For instance, smart locks could allow temporary digital keys that can be sent to people needing access to your home—and just as easily revoked.
August is a new startup providing its own smart lock and has been one of the companies helping to jump-start the space. Its product has been one of most highly regarded in terms of design, ease of use, and functionality. It isn't the only one, however. Goji provides a similar offering and Sony has just recently overseen a crowdfunding project to do its own smart lock.
It isn't just new startups or technology companies trying to make physical keys extinct. Long-time lock manufacturer Kwikset has developed something called the Kevo Smart Lock, a hybrid deadbolt lock that adds connectivity to your traditional keyhole, and currently retails for under $200.
Speaking of money and security: Wallets are here for the long haul, but in a race for convenience and consumer protection, they'll continue to move from our pockets to our mobile phones. They've already become less personal with the loss of pictures, which have also largely been ported to our phones; it's only a matter of time before they completely become 1s and 0s.
There are a lot of factors at play and over the course of this next year, after a number of fits and starts and bits and bitcoins, the digital wallet might actually happen. Google has offered a wallet solution in some form for a while, but since the introduction of Apple Pay, both now have a much better shot at making a meaningful impact. Both use NFC, contactless payments to house credit and debit cards.
Meanwhile, credit card companies in the United States are transitioning to a chip-and-pin payment system, like the kind Europe has, before the end of next year. That means that merchants are updating or replacing their payment terminals, most of which should include the ability to accept NFC payments.
Not only are consumers starting to get onboard with these new payment methods, but banks are as well. The banks like that digital wallets are typically more secure than physical cards—which will save them money. Besides NFC, there's a retail consortium called CurrentC pushing another form of digital wallet. In this future consumers will use QR codes and barcode scanning to make purchases at stores and the retailers will gain spending information on consumers. This is unlikely to pan out for CurrentC, but stores want digital wallets as well, they just aren't sure how to quite go about it yet.
On a flip side, Coin and Plastc are pushing the ball in their own way, getting people comfortable with a digital wallet, even if there's still a physical component to it. Both startups will offer a physical card that has the ability to link up with a user's smartphone and side load cards on to it. It's all in the name of putting the pocket cowhide out to pasture.
Yo, wired headphones and earbuds: don't let the door hit you on the way out. It can't be too long before something catches the cord and my earbuds are violently ripped from my unsuspecting ears. Finally, the end is nigh.
Bluetooth headphones are steadily becoming more common, but the real advancement coming in 2015 is true, independently wireless earbuds that should get a lot of people to kick the wired habit.
Right now, we're stuck with a cable connecting the speaker in our right ear with the one in our left ear. With advancements in software, however, we'll soon have two separate and tiny earbuds that connect wirelessly to each ear and wirelessly to our mobile device. The Bluetooth spec allowing this advancement has been around for a while, but it's only been in 2014 that companies are exploiting it.
Earin will most likely be one of the first with wireless stereo earbuds, but others like Ownphones aren't far behind. It also wouldn't be surprising to see Motorola get in the space, its mono Bluetooth headset was one of the smallest around.
If it's not Uber, then it'll be Lyft or Sidecar or Hailo or one of the dozens of different options waiting to capitalize on how people commute and move around a city in an era when private car ownership is on the decline.
It's not that taxis or these new ride sharing services shouldn't have regular maintenance or driver background checks—or that the people driving them shouldn't have dependable and good salaries and protections and insurance. But the divide between the old style of regulating taxis and the new peer-to-peer visions of Silicon Valley are reaching a breaking point. What those new regulations will look like in hundreds of cities around the world remains to be seen, but in 2015, tech companies will continue to play an outsized role in nudging the old rules aside.
It's crazy to think that just a few years ago the word "download," in reference to music, meant that you were on the cutting edge. But digital music has moved on and now it's streaming music that garners all the interest.
This chart below, via the RIAA, shows where the music industry's revenues come from now—the red represents CDs, dark purple is a downloaded single, light purple is a downloaded album, and the rest represent ad-supported streaming, paid subscriptions and internet and satellite radio. (Earlier in the 2000s, that little bit of turquoise represents music videos).
Not only are physical music sales slipping, but iTunes downloads are as well—pretty quickly too. People are finding ways to listen to music that usually include the words Spotify or YouTube.
In a shot across the bow of Spotify, Apple, the current king of paid downloads, is rumored to be preparing to tip the scales and put an end to most people downloading their music in 2015 with a rebranding or integration with Beats' streaming music service the company bought in 2014. Whether subscriptions and advertisements can bolster the music industry in general against it's record-setting losses isn't yet clear.
For those that still want CD quality music, both Deezer and Tidal have made high fidelity streaming (with 1141 kbps Flac streams) a reality. And wireless carrier T-Mobile has a program in place that doesn't count streaming music against people's data plans. Downloads are quickly becoming toast.
2015 is do or die for Microsoft's mobile Windows platform. It hasn't pushed the needle in terms of users in a while and it continues to lose once major champions of the platform.
It's not for a lack of trying, the latest 8.1 phone software is practically on part with other mobile operating systems. But Microsoft's timing has never been ahead of the curve enough to snatch potential users and get high-profile developers excited.
While some people are clinging hard and fast to their analog watches, the vast majority have given up on a wrist-worn object in favor of their mobile phone. Much like the payment space, Apple, Google, and many others are all vying for that personal piece of real estate—which just happens to be on your arm instead of in your back pocket.
Apple announced its Apple Watch is coming in early 2015, starting at $349, while Google already has many manufactures pumping out cheaper Android Wear smart watches. Some of these new watches are made to embrace the classic analog aesthetic, though many take advantage of new shapes and technologies.
Not only are Apple and Google looking to the wrist, but fitness companies like Jawbone, Garmin, Fitbit, and more are all actively trying to convince people to track their activity with wristbands full of advanced sensors. Many of these wearable makers are including screens to display the time and taking the concept of a watch in a new, healthier, direction.
Yup, reality itself might be steamrolled next year by something bigger—virtual reality.
The company most likely to change the future of virtual reality, Oculus was bought up by Facebook this year. That may have come for a bit of a shock for the hardcore Oculus fans, but for the rest of us, that means that the company will get the funds it needs to continue its work—finally making virtual reality that doesn't suck.
Samsung is in on the virtual reality bandwagon as well, but instead of directly competing with Oculus, it has partnered with the company to power its Gear VR. Already available for purchase, owners of a Note 4 can slip it into the $199 headset to view games, videos, and movies in a whole new way.
Even if Apple isn't yet publicly touching virtual reality yet, other companies have already begun to tap into the iPhone market. Pinc is one of those that offer a cheap ($99) headset for iPhone 6 owners and promises an immersive experience of games, shopping, and videos.
Coming from the less expensive side, Google is fully embracing Cardboard, the project it debuted at its I/O developers conference this year. With over 500,000 Cardboard units shipped, it's now transitioning from being a "20-percent project" to a full time one which will be further developed in 2015. There are a few Cardboard kits that range from $15-20, but as long as you have the materials, free plans are available for anyone to construct a DIY headset that a phone can slide into.
And once Oculus finally publicly launches its offering you can bet Facebook will try to push virtual reality to a significant portion of the planet, in its continuing and much larger effort to kill "reality" as we have known it.
LinkedIn enjoys one big advantage against competitors Facebook and Twitter: It's the social network people can use at work. By positioning it as a service for professional development, LinkedIn has embedded itself into offices worldwide. And in the process, found a holy grail of corporate data: The social hierarchy of people inside an organization… even if the people themselves don't know it.
LinkedIn's affable head of search quality, Daniel Tunkelang, spoke with Co.Labs earlier this year. Tunkelang is the person responsible for making sure LinkedIn's searches connect people to the contacts they're actually looking for. This means learning a lot about how people know each other, and how people interact with each other, in the process.
One thing LinkedIn's users don't always realize is that the search process works differently depending on whether you're using a desktop or laptop computer, a smartphone, or a tablet. Tunkelang says typing is harder on mobile devices, which leads his team to see a higher incidence of shorter queries from users.
"In mobile, we really emphasize the autocompletion experience because the environment in which people use a laptop versus a phone is quite different." People also use the search function differently on mobile devices too. Tunkelang told me that his company sees a lot of what he calls "meeting intelligence" being conducted on smartphones—LinkedIn users inside meetings encountering someone at a real-life event, taking out a phone, and looking up the person's profile.
Because Tunkelang and LinkedIn's other data scientists are able to see how users search on the service and how they use it in different circumstances, this means they get deep insights into how recruiters search for candidates, how sales teams evaluate potential leads, and how different departments of organizations relate to each other.
One of the most fascinating parts of his job, he says, is finding unexpected results when finding data to prove or disprove different hypotheses. Tunkelang's team discovered the way people's social networks related to each other, and found that changed the search experience. Specifically, the way people search for names on LinkedIn and the way people search for titles on LinkedIn have little to do with each other at all.
When LinkedIn users search for someone by name, it's primarily for someone relatively closely connected to their social network (to be exact, one population away from them). But when searches are conducted for job titles, users are primarily contacting individuals two populations away from them in their social network—further away than searches by name. Although the discovery wasn't counterintuitive, it wasn't what they were looking for… and Tunkelang says the trend came "shining through the results" when they analyzed the data.
Other LinkedIn data projects require more user input to glean insights. Take for example that endorsement box that sometimes pops up asking you to vouch for someone's skills? There's actually a sophisticated project going on there.
These requests might seem like LinkedIn's way of increasing engagement on the site, but it's also part of a sophisticated mapping mechanism that lets data scientists figure out what job titles at organizations actually mean. Endorsements help LinkedIn figure out what skill sets and talent requirements align to which jobs.
LinkedIn engineer Sam Shah and data scientist Pete Skomoroch explained how the endorsements feature worked at the 2013 edition of data science conference Strata. Endorsements are used to build a "Skills Dictionary" for the social networking site. Defined as a taxonomy of work skills, the skills dictionary is primarily based on mining data from the site's millions of profiles and then augmenting them through other sources like endorsements. A big part of Skomoroch and Shah's work is cleaning the data—over 250 different phrases map to "Microsoft Office" alone.
In one case study of mapping skills to the correct occupation, they showed which phrases map to "Angels" (as in alternative medicine) and "Angels" (as in venture capital). It's easy to figure out where psychic readings, clairvoyancy, and early-stage investing map. This information is then used to infer what skills someone with a specific title actually has.
LinkedIn then uses skills endorsements to see both which particular contacts users feel have these skills… and who they choose to endorse. The results in aggregate are used to both build social maps and to understand the difference in responsibilities between jobs with identical titles at different companies.
Facebook has its own social graph, of course. But those connections have been mapped to personal histories rather than job skills. And that results in an entirely different kind of network effect than the one LinkedIn is trying to capitalize on.
Apparently we should all learn to code. Men. Women. Children. CEOs. Everyone. Even President Obama is imploring his constituents to learn computer science already. But what if learning to code isn't the right mantra after all?
A 50-person Brooklyn-based dev shop called Happy Fun Corp thinks the pressure to program should be replaced by something else. Don't just learn to code, HFC says—learn to make products.
With their upcoming HFC Academy, the digital engineering firm is using its experience to lay out a course that teaches product management. It's no longer enough to learn some coding and call it a day. Thriving in tomorrow's tech world needs training in taking your digital product from vision to uploaded, accessible reality.
HFC should know: They've spent a lot of time training new recruits. In a way, their HFC Academy is self-serving, teaching students to code, design, develop, and iterate a product through a project timeline just like they've taught their recruits.
"Selfishly, our ability to grow is based on getting smart people," says HFC cofounder Ben Schippers.
University degrees have been the gold standard for decades, and their graduates often scoff at bootcamp graduates. Many academically trained programmers praise their computer-science education for expanding their problem-solving skillset. But Schippers sees a great disconnect between those programs and practical preparation for getting programming jobs.
"For people graduating now, what these expensive colleges are saying is, 'You are now prepared for graduate school,'" says Schippers. "They're not preparing you for the tech workplace. By the time they get to us, it takes just as long to teach four-year graduates as to teach a layman who's really hungry to learn."
Computer-science education teaches the abstracts of computer workings, but not the critical thinking to evaluate public-facing products, says Schippers. Liberal arts colleges teach more of the soft skills Schippers values, like communication and critical thinking. But as HFC Academy starts teaching interested students the practical project management and programming skills that Schippers says tech titans like Google and Facebook have been teaching for years, the hope isn't just to sneak ahead of the competition—it's to guide students into jobs they wouldn't have gotten with yesterday's code classes.
Schippers isn't going into the Tech Academy blind; he's already taught a version of the course to college students. Schippers' alma mater, Bates College in Maine, chose Schippers and HFC cofounder Will Schenk as part of its first wave of "Practitioner Taught" short courses. Bates is using the inter-term courses to bring business-savvy alumni back to explore the post-graduation world that's nebulous to academia.
While HFC's Technology Academy and The Flatiron School have similarly simple goals—educate professionals to find jobs in tech—Bates doesn't view the Practitioner Taught courses as purely pragmatic or vocational. They complement Bates' ambition for its students to find "purposeful work."
"Purposeful work is a notion of discovering through coursework what really matters to you," says Dean of Faculty Matthew Auer. "There's no sense in getting a job with no way to grow personally and professionally."
Like many Liberal Arts colleges, Bates stacks its faculty with long-term tenured professors instead of filling out the faculty with many higher-turnover associate professors and adjunct lecturers. While it's a win for faculty, it means the expertise pool is limited to whoever Bates hires long-term. Since Bates has no computer-science department, any programming education is part of patchwork courses taught by faculty who happen to have related theoretical experience for courses on number theory, artificial intelligence, or robotics design.
The Practitioner Taught courses address that experience gap, as much about exposing students to new concepts as keeping their critical faculties honed. Schippers' and Schenk's course doesn't just instruct how to build, but prompts students to ask if the world really needs this new product.
And as much as Bates shies away from the "pragmatic" label, Schippers' and Schenk's course had very work-practical elements—like mock interviews. According to the extensive student evaluations Bates collected, students raved about the workplace preparation that's largely absent from academic coursework.
"This is what students really want. Let's not pretend that they don't know what they want," says Schippers.
No matter how eager, Schippers felt the three days per week, five-week program was too short—hence why HFC Academy has been stretched to five days per week for seven weeks. On the whole, Schippers had to adjust his expectations of tech fluency. This is partially a generational issue: students grown on the app interface of iPads and iPhones were clueless about file system locations, for example. These are kids who may have never seen a DOS prompt. Schippers has separately taught Baby Boomers who missed the computer train and struggle to get on Facebook. These refinements don't just help certain demographics—they refine the educational process of programming education as a whole.
For Bates, the five-week length was a great testing ground for integrating programming in future courses. The faculty have talked about applying Big Data analysis to microeconomics and health courses, or even Dean Auer's own bioinformatics courses. And while those talks have a long way to go before implementation, Bates is seeing an uncommonly high number of faculty on the verge of retirement. Now is the time to plan for integrating programming in courses for the next 20 to 30 years, says Dean Auer.
Of course, there are brick-and-mortar Learn To Code schools that see just as much opportunity—and prove their worth by getting their graduates employed. For The Flatiron School's offshoot Brooklyn campus, that number stands at a staggering 98 percent of job-seeking graduates getting placed at programming jobs in New York City within three months.
Flatiron doesn't venture into the product management that HFC Academy is exploring, but its focus on employment-centric skills sets it apart from online and theoretical coding courses. While it doesn't pioneer project-management skills, the Brooklyn campus exists to innovate a different aspect of America's next generation of coding classes: educating the less-skilled and unemployed.
Through a deal with the city, Flatiron's Brooklyn campus holds tuition-free classes exclusively for students who are unemployed or make less than $50,000 per year. In addition, the school goes out of its way to enroll women, veterans, and minorities. The Brooklyn campus runs a 22-week course including a four-week job-placement externship that extends the course past Flatiron Manhattan's 16-week standard, but the instruction is otherwise identical. The Brooklyn students are held to the same standards, says the Brooklyn campus instruction lead Blake Johnson.
Flatiron Brooklyn has graduated one class and are in the middle of their second. Despite drawing an experience range from computer-science dabblers to students who didn't know what a URL was, the school found employment for all. It's a testament to the concept that literally anyone can walk into the right bootcamp's doors and walk out ready for programming work—even those with extensive obstacles. Poverty increases stress levels, Johnson says and decades of studies have supported, and there are very unfortunate moments where students can't afford a ride to class on public transportation.
And yet, Flatiron found them jobs—including getting one student a programming gig at Etsy.
Flatiron's job guarantee is a great carrot in a still-challenging economy, but the benefits of a brick-and-mortar classroom have always been teacher facetime and peer support. Students aren't just building a peer network in the classroom—they're training for tomorrow's group-oriented programming culture.
"That cliche of the cowboy coder in his parents basement—it doesn't happen anymore," says Johnson.
Those cowboy coders have always been the determined few who can learn on their own with minimal support. The classroom provides the space and authority for everyone else to learn. This includes the teacher facetime and the confidence of following structured learning.
"The most important thing you can give people is a map," says Johnson. "You say, 'Trust me. Do this now and do that tomorrow.'"
Obviously, having a structured timeline stretched over weeks is reassuring, but Johnson finds himself coaching his students through the difficult process of gearing up to learn again as much as he's actually teaching skills. Acting like a combination psychiatrist, priest, and parent on top of teaching means Johnson's troubleshooting his students as much as he's troubleshooting their code.
"One of the biggest obstacles is that programming makes you feel stupid. It's really crippling. The emotional aspect is the hardest thing," says Johnson.
It's especially hard to admit difficulty in tech—one doesn't want to look weak and unable to keep up with technology's progression. But that obstructs learning and builds poor communication habits. Part of Flatiron Brooklyn's program is Feelings Friday, a circle-up confessional period. Students vent—and nobody gets to respond. It's not just cathartic for the confessor. Chances are, others around the circle are relieved to discover that they aren't the only ones having trouble. That's the safe space and personal exchange that builds strong networks among the students themselves—something difficult to grow in online courses.
For their part, HFC Academy wants to keep their students in contact after graduation by launching a concurrent Academy Network. LinkedIn comparisons aside, HFC is setting up the Academy Network to be both an alumni hub and a job board stocked with listings by companies that trust the HFC name.
That's in addition to the business personnel HFC has lined up for facetime with students—connections HFC has made through years in the NYC tech scene. In a digital age, the future of programming education is in the human connections to learn, collaborate, and improve.
Every morning at 7 a.m., Matt Mullenweg wakes up in Houston, Texas, and reads a book. After a chapter or so, he scrambles some eggs, grabs a couple bottles of Hint water, and wanders over to his office—a desk a few feet away. This is the executive suite from which Mullenweg runs his three companies, a venture-backed startup, a nonprofit foundation, and one of the world's largest open source projects.
He logs into the internal project room where team members post discussions about what they're doing. It's buzzing with hundreds of updates from employees working from their homes in Europe, Asia, Australia, and the East Coast. Most of them only see each other once or twice a year.
Mullenweg turns on some jazz and starts reading. There will be no formal meetings today, or on any day this month. And only rarely does anyone communicate using email. He keeps his Skype connection open in case anyone wants to chat one-on-one while he trolls the discussions—which continue to update in almost real time.
In one of the posts, Mullenweg notices something out of sync and starts typing. Twenty seconds and 30 words later, he punches the "Post it" button. The pattern continues for the next several hours. A programmer is not thinking holistically about a particular feature. A team is getting off track from the broader product vision. On the side, he chats with a dozen people about how they're feeling, and touches base with a few key employees. Course corrected.
Then he closes his web browser and goes to dinner.
And that is how Mullenweg, creator of WordPress, founder of Automattic, and chairman of The WordPress Foundation, runs 22% of the Internet.
Every second, somewhere in the world four babies and two WordPress blogs are born. When those babies are old enough to blog, Facebook might not be the dominant social network anymore. But WordPress, the 11-year-old open source blog software, might just be their publishing platform.
One-fifth of all websites currently use WordPress. Facebook, by comparison, consumes the lives of about a third of Internet users. But while Facebook has 6,818 employees, WordPress is run by just 230 people. Facebook is valued at around $150 billion. Mullenweg this year closed a $160 million investment round for his WordPress hosting company, Automattic. He plans on using the money to increase the size of his staff, to 2,000 people.
Every day, Automattic's nine data centers push an astronomical 450 terabytes of data around the globe. (The much-anticipated WordPress Version 4.0 just launched on Friday, with millions of downloads already.) However, "I think we can do four times what we are now," Matt Mullenweg, recently told Fast Company. "Seventy or eighty percent of the web."
Yet even at that scale, Mullenweg is committed to continue running the WordPress ecosystem as a bizarre blend of non- and for-profit, meritocracy, and dictatorship. At the helm sits Mullenweg, playing "jazz director" and preaching open source, while carefully puppeteering every detail of his organization.
When management guru Scott Berkun "showed up to work" at Automattic in 2010, he worried that what made him good at other jobs wouldn't transfer to the chaotic, impersonal coworking dynamic for which Automattic was famous. "My best leadership tricks depended on being in the same room with people," he wrote. He wanted to know how such a successful enterprise had grown without emails or meetings or managers, and if it could continue to grow that way.
"At times I felt like a capitalist in a socialist country," said Berkun, who spent an ethnographic 18 months inside of WordPress and wrote a book about the company's unique culture, called The Year Without Pants, which was released last September.
By the time he arrived, WordPress had become the web's dominant blogging and content management platform. At around 60 employees, the company finally added some structure: The company split into a dozen small teams to work on individual projects together. Berkun joined the "social media" product team.
He quickly discovered that the famous Automattic chaos was actually quite organized. People had confused cultural freedom with disorganization, but to the contrary, Mullenweg had created a highly efficient process. Hours on the clock, employee location, managers—Mullenweg's philosophy was that these kinds of things were moot if the work itself got done, and that most companies engaged in a lot of unnecessary "metawork" because of these. He believed that if you removed those things, along with efficiency-destroying interruptions like email and phone calls and meetings, work could proceed more quickly and with less pain.
And though it sounds crazy, he replaced all of those things with one simple thing: blog posts.
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Automattic's secret sauce is a WordPress theme called P2 that every employee publishes posts on all day long. At the top of a P2 blog post is a blank box. When you enter something and hit submit, your update appears in a list below, essentially forming a big, group comment thread. Each P2 post gets its own URL, which can be referenced in other posts. Every project, question, idea, complaint, and conversation gets its own P2, and anyone who wants to can participate.
There are no private P2s. Everyone, from intern to CEO, can weigh in on anything. Most people aren't interested in most posts, of course, but if ever someone at Automattic needs to know about something—in any project and from any point in history—a P2 record is there.
Each Automattic employee checks the P2s all day long. Instead of email, which decays over time and empowers the sender, P2s are permanent and empower the group.
The radically transparent P2 method virtually eliminates politics. It keeps remote employees in the loop on everything in the company—it's their fault if you don't know about something, because that means you haven't read. The P2 system encourages healthy debate (which happens often), and reinforces the idea of meritocracy. Automattic also tracks employees' actual work (support tickets closed, code written and deleted) and puts it on a public scoreboard, so everyone knows how everyone else is doing. This creates internal pressure to achieve results and avoid that dreaded metawork.
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Though the system does have downsides (some conversations need to be real-time and involve fewer people, threads can be hijacked by tangents, and blog posts lack visual data like tone and body language), Berkun came to believe that the P2 method rendered Automattic's product development process and remote organization rather shatterproof. "It's very resilient, just not in the same predictable way that classical management or engineering would define resilience," Berkun explains. "It seems completely insane. But if you have smart people that you're working with it's actually liberating."
When forced to publicly document everything, the disparate team members became that jazz ensemble, each player improvising his or her own notes, but making music without skipping beats. (Automattic embraces the analogy by naming its product releases after jazz musicians.)
The great irony in this, of course, is Mullenweg himself. In the jazz ensemble, Mullenweg's notes overrode everything. "I'm married to WordPress," he told me. All the high-stakes decisions for all three organizations were made by him—and often low-stakes ones as well. Employees jokingly referred to the following common occurrence as "Matt bombing," writes Berkun:
"This was when a team was working on something in a P2, heading in one direction. Then late in the thread, often at a point where some people felt there was already rough consensus, Matt would drop in, leave a comment advocating a different direction, and then disappear."
On the P2 boards, the personally charismatic founder who friends variously describe to me as "calm," "wise," and a "gentleman," recalls Berkun, "earned a reputation for being terse, occasionally cryptic, and, to some, quite intimidating online."
Yet it worked. WordPress kept growing. And Automattic employees were happy.
As product visionary, Mullenweg was able to use P2s to scale himself beyond the effectiveness of a typical manager.
"If I were just dropping into a meeting like a regular manager, I would only have a few minutes of context," Mullenweg explains. "With the P2 structure, I can read [about] everything leading up to it and get a deep context." Instead of delegation, he simply had to be good at reading.
Mullenweg thinks his unconventional management system should be adopted by businesses everywhere. Still, with 190 employees by the time Berkun's book was published, it was a wonder Mullenweg had been able to keep micromanaging the Automattic team while running the open source project and the WordPress Foundation.
In truth he did have some help. Toni Schneider, an executive who early Automattic investors brought in as CEO eight years ago, managed business and revenue affairs while Mullenweg did his jazz-product thing.
That is, until January when Schneider stepped down.
Back in 2005, it became clear that WordPress couldn't be supported at scale through the generosity of starving programmers alone. Security and infrastructure would become increasingly disaster-prone as more people used it. Mullenweg believed fanatically that software should be free, and he created a for-profit side to WordPress to solve that problem. "Nonprofits can do amazing things but their reach is often limited; for-profits often do amazing things, but often their vision is limited," he says. "I thought if we could take the best of both, a complementary for-profit and nonprofit and create a wider ecosystem, we could create something bigger than them both."
So, he established Automattic, a corporation that provided web hosting and premium services to WordPress users who wanted the free software but were willing to pay someone else to run it for them. Mullenweg raised $1.1 million in venture capital and brought on Schneider, an experienced CEO who'd sold his webmail service, Oddpost, to Yahoo in 2004 (Oddpost became Yahoo Mail), to take care of business while Mullenweg focused on the product and community. Automattic would use some of its profits to ensure the continued development of the free WordPress code—especially unsexy components like security and infrastructure.
A fuzzy line separated the corporation (wordpress.com, which Automattic claimed) and the open source project (wordpress.org). "There were some people who were involved in the community who wanted to get jobs at Automattic but who were not offered jobs," said Siobhan McKeown, a WordPress historian who works for Mullenweg's personal investment company. Plus, she says, "Whenever there's a media story, they say 'Automattic, the makers of WordPress,' and people get frustrated with that."
Rich Bowen, an early WordPress.org contributor, and several others led a group in 2006 which split off from WordPress's codebase to form a rival blog tool, Habari—having grievances with Mullenweg's top-down decisions. "The perception was that people would work hard on patches, and he would accept or reject them in a somewhat capricious manner," Bowen says.
As if to make things more confusing, Mullenweg also created a 501(c)(3) called the WordPress Foundation, with the mission of democratizing publishing through open source software. Its charge was to protect the WordPress trademark and educate the public about the benefits of open source.
Mullenweg himself made it all work. "Subsequent history has shown that he must have been doing something right," Bowen admits. Through sheer charisma and micro-management, Mullenweg calmed the community and orchestrated the coders and volunteer educators within boundaries he set. He came to describe himself as a "benevolent dictator," helming the nonprofit, the open source project, and the commercial product offerings himself. Meanwhile, Habari and other splinter projects floundered, with little resources and direction.
As Automattic's revenue grew, he recruited work-from-home programmers from various corners of the world with the promise of freedom and flexibility, so long as they followed his process of no meetings and no email, and no hierarchy but "Matt."
The most important difference between Mullenweg and, say, Mark Zuckerberg is one of philosophy. Mullenweg keeps WordPress open source, because he believes it keeps him honest and shows that his intentions are pure—and that keeps the community building his software for free, despite what some outsiders see as a conflict of interest. "People could pick up [the code] and start their own WordPress," Mullenweg says. "That's sort of how it started in the first place." Despite the dictatorial nature of his management, it's Mullenweg's genuineness and vision that keeps WordPress's contributors contributing, Automattic's employees from churning.
On the other hand, Facebook's founder has put business before users enough times to make "we promise not to screw you for 2 years" the big reveal at his recent F8 summit. So if we had to entrust one of the two men with three-fourths of the web, I think a lot of people would pick Mullenweg.
Yet, if Zuckerberg dies, Facebook users won't notice. If Mullenweg moves on, WordPress won't immediately crumble, but its spiritual fire may die. No remote work, open-source-based organization in history has grown as big as Automattic intends. But as Berkun points out, "The oldest, largest companies today all began much like Automattic, with ambitious youth, big ideas, and high thresholds for change." And Mullenweg adds, "I get excited when people say things can't be done."
Having been coached by Schneider, Mullenweg may no longer need adult supervision to run his three-headed organization. But despite his remarkable ability to influence and manage unwieldy programmers, Automattic is at a turning point. Mullenweg says he's ready to be CEO of a big company, and he doesn't want the distributed team or open source nature of the firm to change. But he admits that he's going to need good lieutenants and to shift his management style—P2s or no—if he's to get to 2,000 employees.
Last September, I asked him, "What if I offered you, personally, a billion dollars right now to sell me WordPress?" He laughed. "I would say I'm very flattered, but we have a lot of work left to do."
Co.Labs was founded as a sandbox for testing new ideas.
It was a place to experiment with new editorial approaches, while also writing about the technology—specifically software—that is changing our lives. We created article stubs that grew into deep-dive reports, pushed the limits of native content collaborations, and broke news.
The things we learned were ported to Fast Company and across the Co. network sites, an upstream R&D cycle. There were fails, too.
One of the biggest lessons is that a sandbox is hard to support within the dominant web advertising framework. Experiments are, by nature, often slow and usually interesting to only a handful of people. It's not very scalable, and that makes it difficult to support when you're only getting paid for every thousand eyeballs that see an ad.
That's why Co.Labs became mostly a technology site in the waning months of 2014. Although the site grew to over a million page views per month, most of the stories could just as easily have been published on Fast Company. And that's why the Co.Labs archive will be migrated to Fast Company's Tech channel, which is where you'll continue to find in-depth tech analysis and news (sign up for the weekly technology newsletter).
Now it's time for Co.Labs to begin a new phase of life, by going back to its origins. This site will be a platform for writing about some of the experiments going on across Fast Company as we continue inventing the future of business media. It will be updated only when we have something new to share, and it's no longer going to be dependent on advertising.
Fast Company's award-winning design news site is hiring a staff writer. The writer finds, pitches, and reports stories on everything from interaction design to branding to the occasional secret Chipotle burrito. You must have experience covering design, preferably for an online publication, and you should feel as comfortable breaking a 250-word news item as you are filing a 2,500-word feature. A background in technology or business journalism is a plus, but not required. This is a full-time job with benefits and competitive pay. To apply, send your resume and cover letter to Co.Design Editor Suzanne LaBarre: suzannelabarre@gmail.com.
"I guess it just kind of evolved," says Paige Cantlin, when talking about her unusual schedule-maximizing strategy, which is not to date.
Paige Cantlin
Cantlin is a 28-year-old investment adviser as well as the founder/CEO of the restaurant-bill-payment startup Full Society. About four years ago, she ended a serious relationship, and after that she did try to date for a bit. "I just didn't really enjoy it that much," she says. "I started spending time doing other things I enjoy." Like founding a company, for instance. And running—including, recently, a marathon in Antarctica.
Here, it helps to define what Cantlin means by "dating." Cantlin doesn't eschew all male romantic company. "I love men—they are fascinating and valuable creatures," she says. She's hardly a misandrist, nor is she celibate.
But the game she finds so many of her women friends playing—spending countless hours, using countless apps in the search for a Mr. Right to turn into a husband—doesn't appeal to her at all. When Cantlin does spend an evening or two with a man, "It's based on convenience and, I guess, coincidence, really." She says that she feels she meets higher-quality men simply by pursuing her interests anyway.
Cantlin has tons of friends getting married, and a few already getting divorced. "I think at this age, women feel like they should already be married or in a serious relationship," she says. "But all their stories were miserable sounding." The ones in long-term relationships seemed unhappy; the ones out of them seemed to be desperately chasing a ring. "If someone comes along who meets my lifestyle requirements, maybe I'd consider being with someone," she says. "But I don't see any reason to spend time looking for someone when I could be doing fun stuff in life I actually enjoy."
Once Cantlin articulates her non-dating philosophy, the questions inevitably come pouring in, be they from friends, or from a reporter. Doesn't she want a go-to person with whom intimacy builds over time? "I think that can be true," she counters, "but the question is: Are you really spending that time with the right person? I feel like most people are doing it with someone who's not the best person to be growing that intimacy with." For her part, she has a male roommate whom she calls her "best friend" and a "great partner in my life." Maybe she'll want a go-to mate later, but "a lot later," she says. "I don't know why people are in such a rush to find that kind of intimate connection when they're 25."
But are there, perhaps, biological reasons to consider choosing a mate in youth? Far from it, says Cantlin. If a healthy American might live to 100, "the idea of making a decision that affects the next 75 years seems ridiculous to me. That's like saying you're going to live in the same house in the same city for the rest of your life, and can never change your mind about it. It seems like that's what happens when people get married and have kids early."
And here it helps to know what Cantlin thinks about child rearing. First off, she sees no hurry. If modern technology can allow her to freeze her eggs and delay parenthood, why shouldn't she take advantage of that fact? She plans to save some money to do just that as soon as next year, since younger eggs are healthier.
But even having a biological child doesn't feel like her preference. (She says she is freezing the eggs only in case she later meets a partner for whom a biological child is essential.) For nine years, in Baltimore, she has volunteered, through a nonprofit, to oversee cases of children placed in the foster care system. "I've had the opportunity to see a lot of cases of misplaced children," she says. "It made me feel like I was kind of selfish to have my own kids, when there are so many out there that need good homes."
At about this point, anyone Cantlin has permitted to grill her about her life choices begins to sniff about for whether something is "wrong." Was her own family life traumatizing in some way? Far from it, she says. "I come from an incredibly normal family," she says: two married parents and a loving younger sister. "That's the only thing that would make me want to have kids, to have a family like my own." Maybe that breakup four years ago blindsided her? Not at all. It was mutual, she says. "He wanted to get married, and wanted me to work less, and to be around for more stuff than I was able to be around for," she says.
There's a feminist case for her stance, too. An unfair double standard in our society prizes age in men, but youth in women. "You're not getting any younger," Cantlin's father hinted recently. "I'm like, Dad, it's totally crazy. Sure I won't be as good looking in 10 years, but neither will anyone. When I think about having a long-term relationship with a guy, I sure as hell hope it doesn't have to do with what I look like. That should be fought against."
The hardest thing for Cantlin has been persuading men that she is serious when she says she wants to keep things casual. She says she hurt a lot of feelings in the beginning. Now, she almost exclusively hangs out with guys who have already seen firsthand how busy and independent she is.
Cantlin says many of her friends—particularly women—are curious about her choices. "The more people I talk to about it," says Cantlin, "first people are like, 'That's totally crazy.' But then when I explain the logic, they're like, 'That kinda makes sense. Maybe that is a good idea.'" She estimates that at least half of her friends would probably be happier if they followed Cantlin's model.
Ultimately, it all comes down to her time, and how she wants to spend it. Fittingly, she got the idea for Full Society while on a bad date she couldn't wait to escape. Her app lets users pay their restaurant bill faster, right on their phones, to allow for quicker exits.
Jeff Han's fingers are dancing across an expansive, wall-mounted touch screen. Planet Earth spins in front of him in computer-generated form; he grabs it with both hands and starts to zoom in. He keeps going—Western Hemisphere, North America, United States, Pacific Northwest—until we're finally staring at a prosaic industrial area alongside a highway.
"Here's our building, right here," he declares.
The conference room where this demo is going on is named after Bill Gates, so it shouldn't come as a complete shock that we're on Microsoft premises. But this isn't corporate headquarters in Redmond, Washington. Han and I are 200 miles away, across the Oregon border in the Portland suburb of Wilsonville, inside a 4-acre structure flanked by a manufacturer of industrial shredders and a storage facility for boats and RVs.
Microsoft hasn't played up the fact that it has a major operation in Wilsonville. Actually, it's been downright stealthy about it. (The roadside signage directing visitors to the main entrance doesn't even mention a company name.) But since March 2014, the building is where the company has been engineering the device Han has been showing me, the Surface Hub.
The company unveiled the device during its Windows 10 launch extravaganza in Redmond last January. It showed how the 84-inch all-in-one computer can be used for tasks such as brainstorming, videoconferencing, and PowerPoint presentations, all conducted via touch and pen input rather than mouse and keyboard.
Microsoft held back one of the most intriguing facts about this Windows 10 machine until now: It not only designed the Surface Hub but is about to begin manufacturing the thing itself, in 70,000 square feet of factory space in the Wilsonville building, steps away from where the hardware was engineered. "We don't actually manufacture the LCD panel," Han explains. "But that's pretty much the only thing we don't make here." Two models, a $19,999 unit with an 84-inch display and a $6999 version with a 55-inch display, will roll off the assembly line.
Microsoft has done such a crafty job of keeping its Wilsonville plans on the QT that a September 2014 Oregonian article on the facility simply assumed that it was all but a given that the company would go offshore when it came time to build anything. "[M]ass production would almost certainly take place in a country with lower labor costs," the story helpfully explained. "It's that way with nearly all high-volume electronics manufacturing."
For the 39-year-old Han, the impending release of the Surface Hub is the fullest expression yet of a mission he's been pursuing for more than a decade. The world first took note of it in 2006, when he was a computer-science researcher giving a TED talk in Monterey, California, about an intuitive new computing interface called multi-touch. He was an exuberant, charismatic presenter—and still is, as I learned when he showed off the Surface Hub to me in Wilsonville.
In the pre-iPhone era of 2006, what he showed was mind-bending; the video version of his presentation became one of the first TED talks to go viral, and Han's sheer enthusiasm made multi-touch feel like it might indeed be the next big thing. He then parlayed his fame into a startup, Perceptive Pixel (PPI), which sold pricey screens to everyone from the Department of Defense to Disney. Microsoft acquired the company in 2012.
Jeff Han in Microsoft's Wilsonville facilityPhoto: Brian Smale/Microsoft
Today, Han is general manager of Surface Hub. Without his research, vision, and persistence, the device might not exist. And yet at the same time, it's also a profoundly Microsoftian product. PPI's products were displays you plugged into a PC; the Surface Hub is a computer, running big-screen editions of Windows 10 and Office. It doubles as a videoconferencing system equipped with two high-resolution cameras and Microsoft's Skype for Business service. There are even signs of Xbox influence, such as the noise-canceling four-element microphone, which originated as part of the game console's Kinect sensor.
Unlike the other hardware device Microsoft unveiled at the January Windows 10 event—the mixed-reality HoloLens headset—the Surface Hub doesn't have a whiff of science fiction about it. It's about polish and technical sophistication more than raw futurism, and in a way, it feels like Microsoft tackling a bit of unfinished business.
"I've been working on product development around productivity forever," says Mike Angiulo, who, as Microsoft's corporate VP for hardware, is Han's boss. ("Forever," in this case, means since 1993.) "If I think about what's changed since I've been there in terms of individuals doing work, your ability to create and communicate has gone up exponentially, with PCs and mobility and phones. But the conference rooms are exactly the same as they were when I started. They're like time capsules. There's a projector, there's a whiteboard, there's a conference phone."
With the Surface Hub's collaborative tools, Microsoft is making a hyper-ambitious attempt to yank those time capsules into the present day. Which is not anything like a guarantee that it will be successful. In 2002, for instance, the company launched Tablet PCs and said it expected them to displace conventional laptops within a half decade; they didn't. And its first foray into multi-touch computing—2007's original Surface, which built a computer into a table for use in retail environments—didn't go anywhere.
Still, no matter how the market responds to the Surface Hub, the fact that Microsoft is behind it raises the stakes far beyond anything Han has attempted in the past. "This isn't a trivial little experiment," he says. "We're committed." He pauses. "We don't do things small at Microsoft. We do things big."
Surface Hubs being manufactured in Microsoft's Wilsonville factory
For as long as he can remember, Han, a research scientist working out of New York University's Courant Institute, has been fascinated by technology. He even doodles in right angles, rectangles, and squares—hieroglyphs that look almost like circuitry, a schematic of his unconscious. The son of middle-class Korean immigrants who emigrated to America in the 1970s to take over a Jewish deli in Queens, Han began taking apart the family TV, VCR, "anything that was blinking," at the age of 5 (he still has a nasty scar courtesy of a hot soldering iron his little sister knocked onto his foot).
—From "Can't Touch This," a profile of Jeff Han by Adam Penenberg in the February 2007 issue of Fast Company
Han first noodled around with multi-touch interfaces—a concept dating back to the 1970s—in 2002, as a researcher at New York University. Then he put the project aside in favor of other experiments. (Though his name is practically synonymous with multi-touch, he's also explored everything from autonomous navigation to eye tracking to motion capture.)
In 2005, he turned his attention back to multi-touch, and stuck with it. By February 2006, he was ready to show his work in progress at the TED conference, using a 36-inch screen set up like a drafting table, with cameras that tracked his finger movements. Viewed today, his demo remains engaging. But for a 2015 viewer, the most striking thing about it is the sound of attendees gasping and applauding at now-familiar gestures such as Han pinching a photo to resize it.
Han began his presentation by explaining that the interface he was about to show was ready to come out of the lab. He wasn't exaggerating. Perceptive Pixel, he told me, "was founded shortly after the response I got from TED." The startup's goal was to turn the technology into useful commercial products.
However, the next meaningful moment in the popularization of multi-touch happened on January 9, 2007, when Steve Jobs announced the first iPhone at Macworld Expo in San Francisco. "We have invented a new technology called multi-touch," he boasted, in one of the more reality-distorting things ever said during an Apple keynote. Han, by contrast, had been careful to share credit in his TED talk: "I'm not the only one doing it, there are a lot of people doing it."
Among the other organizations that had been working on multi-touch was Microsoft. Four months after the iPhone reveal, it announced Surface, a Windows Vista computer built into a table with a 30-inch screen. The interface bore decided similarities to Han's efforts. But instead of touting the table as a tool for workplace productivity, Microsoft said it was going to roll it out in public places such as hotels, casinos, and phone stores.
A press release quoted Microsoft CEO Steve Ballmer: "We see this as a multibillion dollar category, and we envision a time when surface computing technologies will be pervasive, from tabletops and counters to the hallway mirror. Surface is the first step in realizing that vision." But the billions never rolled in. Microsoft gave the table a vote of no confidence in 2012 by stripping it of its name, redubbing it PixelSense and turning the Surface moniker over to a line of Windows 8 tablets. Samsung continues to sell a PixelSense-based table computer, but if you've never seen one in the wild, you've got plenty of company.
While the Surface table was failing to catch on, the iPhone was putting multi-touch into the hands of people around the world, transforming the phone business forever. Today, Han says that neither product led him to question whether he was on the right track. "I wanted to focus on upright productivity," he explains. "Ever since TED, that's what it was about for me."
Perceptive Pixel's earliest screens found an unexpected killer app during the 2008 presidential campaign. News broadcasters—most famously John King of CNN—used them to swoop around maps and tally up votes via software handcrafted for the purpose by PPI.
The company sold these screens for six figures, but better still, they served as potent free advertising. "John King knows every single one of those counties," he says. "He's not reading off the screen. He's using this as a storytelling tool. At that time, whenever a customer saw that, they were like, 'This is exactly what I want to do.' This is what a teacher does. This is what a commander does in a mission briefing. This is what a surgeon does before they actually go into surgery."
Han's big-ticket high-end screens attracted attention, won awards, and generated revenue. But on some level, he remained unsatisfied. "It was good to put food on the table, but it was not going to be a huge, huge business," he says. "We got a lot of criticism as a startup: 'Great stuff, but when are you going to make it cheaper for the masses?' That's exactly why we started talking with Microsoft."
Those talks included both Steve Ballmer and Microsoft's cofounder and then-chairman, Bill Gates. "We started talking with them and realized they actually have the same vision," Han says. "When I met Bill Gates, he literally said to me, 'I want to see these things rain from the skies.'"
As for Ballmer, "he put one in his office right away. He was the first guy in the company to do it. He had a giant corner office. He took down the only whiteboard he had and put up the PPI, and said, 'This is how we're doing things.'"
When Perceptive Pixel became part of Microsoft in July 2012, it joined a company in more or less continuous flux. Ballmer was energetically trying to reposition the world's most famous software developer by delving into the hardware business. A few weeks before announcing the PPI deal, the company had unveiled its Surface tablets, the first PCs ever to be sold under the Microsoft name.
At first, PPI was part of Microsoft's Office division, placing it as close as possible to the nerve center of the company's productivity efforts. A year later, Ballmer instigated a sweeping reorganization that clustered Han's team, more conventionally, alongside other hardware products such as Xbox and Surface tablets (and, eventually, the former Nokia phone business, which Microsoft acquired in 2014).
Only six weeks after initiating the reorg, Ballmer announced he would step down as CEO once his successor had been found. The search dragged into February 2014, when longtime Microsoft executive Satya Nadella got the gig.
Nadella moved swiftly to rejigger how the company articulated its take on its own future, dropping Ballmer's "devices and services" mantra in favor of emphasizing mobility, the cloud, and productivity. Despite being the least portable hardware Microsoft has ever offered—the 84-inch model weighs 280 pounds—the Surface Hub project's focus on Net-connected collaboration had a place in the new CEO's vision, especially as he clarified that mobility was about more than phones and tablets. As he began putting it: "We want to build experiences that are about the mobility of the experience—not the mobility of the device."
Today, Han says, "the management support for this is even bigger than it was ever before. That's not a ding on Ballmer. Every time you have a regime change, you wonder. But this perfectly fits into Satya's vision of cloud-connected mobile workflows."
The personal touches that contributed to making Han's 2006 TED demo so engaging have helped him find his way inside the Microsoft labyrinth. "Jeff's a very talented, energetic guy," says hardware VP Angiulo. "And one of the few people who have made the transition from being a founder—where he was running the Jeff Show—to now being an important part of a cross-company initiative. Skype is the one writing the Skype client. OneNote is writing the whiteboard. Windows has an entire team of people creating team Windows now, that's designed for sharing."
Han, Angiulo says, "shows up with intelligence—deep intelligence, he really knows what he's talking about. And the passion for the product, and the vision. He gets people to want to work with him."
Microsoft won't disclose how many staffers it has working on the Surface Hub, but does allow that the number is in the hundreds. They include Perceptive Pixel crew members such as David Slobodin, who supervises hardware, and Microsoft veterans such as Hayete Gallot, who heads up business strategy and marketing. Stevie Bathiche, director of research for Microsoft's Applied Sciences Group, is also involved; even Alex Kipman, best known for spearheading the Kinect and HoloLens, is contributing to the Windows 10 side of things.
Not everyone is sold on Han's idea. Ben Shneiderman, a computer science professor at the University of Maryland and a founding director of the Human-Computer Interaction Lab, calls Han a "great showman" who has "opened the door to exciting possibilities." But he doesn't think Han's technology would be suitable for a large-scale consumer product, nor as useful as a mouse on a large display. If you are standing in front of the screen, Shneiderman wonders, how would people behind you be able to see what you're doing?
—From Fast Company's 2007 profile of Jeff Han
The device that Han, former Perceptive Pixel staffers, and new Microsoft colleagues ended up designing isn't exactly in a category of one. InFocus's Mondopad and Clary Icon's OneScreen, for instance, combine large touch screens, videoconferencing, and Windows into conference-room collaboration tools similar, in principle, to the Surface Hub.
"I know it sounds arrogant, but we don't have competitors," says Han when I ask about such machines. "Sure, we've seen large touch screens before, but they're in a different league, to be honest."
Arrogant, maybe, but also a defensible stance. There's a lot about the Surface Hub that's new, starting with its touch-screen technology. Like an iPad or Surface tablet, it uses an optically bonded capacitive touch screen that gives it the same sort of buttery responsiveness and ink-on-paper clarity that smaller-screen devices achieve. The screen's refresh rate of 120Hz—twice that of smaller devices—adds to the general smoothness of the visual experience.
The Surface Hub's capacitive screen also works with a pressure-sensitive pen for notetaking, sketching, and other purposes. Though it's not the only big screen to offer a pen, it uses Perceptive Pixel technology, which permits a single capacitive touch-sensor system to deal with both fingers and pens. Han says that PPI was one of only two companies to have worked this out; in May, Microsoft announced that it had acquired the other one, Israel-based N-Trig, whose technology is used in Surface tablets.
So much about the Surface Hub experience is familiar that it's tempting to think of it as an overgrown Surface tablet—a perception that the "Surface" in its name doesn't do anything to discourage. But the ways in which it differs from its dinkier counterparts are at least as important as the similarities. For one thing, it's designed to be used by multiple people at once—which, especially with the sprawling 84-inch model, makes sense.
"Multi-touch was about breaking the tyranny of the one, to me, the single cursor. But to bring multi-touch to its fullest potential, we're going multi-user," Han says. "A lot of plumbing needs to change in order to really accommodate what it means for multiple people to be working together. And there are some hard problems in there." For instance, the Surface Hub must be able to to register not up to 10 fingers at a time, but 20 or more—and to figure out if two people are working in different apps at the same time.
The Surface Hub sports a tailored-for-big-screens Windows 10 interface
The Surface Hub's approach to videoconferencing is also new. Instead of plunking a single camera above the screen like a tablet would do, it's got two side-mounted 1080p ones which are angled to capture the entire room and are "located at eye level, not God level," Han says. The device's special version of Skype for Business intelligently cuts between the two cameras to provide what Microsoft hopes is an optimal view of what's going on at any given moment.
Speaking of software, it isn't a coincidence that the Surface Hub will reach its first paying customers a few weeks after Windows 10 is available in final form. The device and its operating system were built with each other in mind, and though the hardware can run the same Windows apps that will work on a PC, tablet, or phone, it adjusts the interface to make sense on a huge display. The Start menu, for example, sits in the middle of the screen, rather than popping up in the lower left-hand corner, and some controls get duplicated alongside the left- and right-hand edges.
The Mondopad and OneScreen, by contrast, both ship with Windows 7—an operating system that, though still beloved by risk-averse large enterprises, was never designed with gigantic screens or serious touch input in mind.
So much of the Surface Hub's hardware and software is designed around the fact that's meant to be used by multiple people in a collaborative environment that Han bristles at the notion that it's merely a really nice PC, or even a PC at all. "People have tried PCs in conference rooms before," he says. "They suck."
The Surface Hub aims to eliminate typical conference-room PC hassles. Using Microsoft Exchange calendaring features, it automatically credentials meeting attendees so they don't have to log in to get access to their files and the network. A motion sensor allows it to sit unobtrusively until someone approaches, whereupon the screen lights up. Remove the pen from its holder, and the device automatically goes into whiteboard mode. And when your meeting ends, it wipes away all evidence of the activities you conducted, so it's ready for the next user.
Microsoft has also put a lot of thought into how the device works with the PCs, tablets, and phones that people bring into meetings. Using the Wi-Fi Alliance's Miracast wireless technology, attendees can fling their gadgets' displays onto the big screen. Unlike garden-variety Miracast, the Surface Hub's version is bidirectional: If you use its pen to scribble notes on a PowerPoint slide, your annotations travel back to the version on a Windows 10 laptop.
The Surface Hub will do a lot out of the box, and will run standard Windows 10 apps. But it's pretty clear that it will become much more useful if third-party developers start to build software with it in mind. And some of that software will need to cater to specific industries.
"We digitally model everything, but our interface is a mouse and keyboard, and that's not necessarily the most intuitive way," says John Cerone, director of digital design and construction at New York-based SHoP Architects, whose projects include Uber's new headquarters. SHoP has used Perceptive Pixel displays and has just gotten in a preproduction Surface Hub. With the right applications, it sees the potential for Microsoft's new device to be transformative. "Anytime we have the opportunity to touch or draw or pull or push a 3-D surface, we want to do that," Cerone says.
Jeff Han is helping me buckle my boots. They happen to be part of the head-to-toe clean-room "bunny" suit I'm donning so we can visit the factory floor where Microsoft assembles the Surface Hub's touch screen. Properly suited up, we must pass through a tiny room where jets of air blast away any remaining detritus from the outside world.
Jeff Han suited up in clean-room duds at the Surface Hub factoryPhoto: Brian Smale/Microsoft
Cleanliness counts in manufacturing of all sorts, but the size of the Surface Hub's display ups the ante. "It's exponentially harder the bigger it goes," Han explains to me. "It's like defects in semiconductors. It's literally by surface area. If I have one flaw—one little speck of dust or one little bubble—I throw away the entire thing."
Almost everything that's tricky about making a Surface Hub involves the process of fusing touch sensors and glass into enormous touch screens. Though the capacitive technology is similar to that used in smaller devices, the enormity of the 55-inch and 84-inch displays necessitated a new approach to manufacturing, and reduced the appeal of outsourcing the job to a third party on another continent.
"We looked at the economics of East Asia and electronics manufacturing," says Angiulo. "When you go through the math, it doesn't pencil out. It favors things that are small and easy to ship, where the development processes and tools are a commodity. The machines that it takes to do that lamination? Those only exist in Wilsonville. There's one set of them, and we designed them."
Surface Hubs are anything but small and easy to ship, a point that is obvious in the first place, but even more so once you've seen them being built. The sensors—the layers that detect finger presses and pen input—are stored as enormous Saran Wrap-like rolls. They get adhered in two parts to the glass that protects the LCD. The process of sandwiching the enormous layers together involves massive robotic arms capable of hoisting screens though the air, conveyors of various designs, ovenlike chambers, and other custom machinery, all of which must do its job gingerly to avoid damaging the component it's creating.
A robotic arm lifts a Surface Hub screen
A factory employee works on a nearly complete Surface Hub
Touch sensors, in sheet form, that will be fused to the Surface Hub's glass screen
Surface Hub screens travel along a conveyor
A machine-vision robot applies adhesive to a Surface Hub screen
Surface Hub screens on their way to be optically bonded
Another robotic arm used in the manufacturing process
Surface Hubs undergoing burn-in tests
"You get the sense of scale of these things?" Han asks me as we peer at an 84-inch piece of glass having its touch sensor applied. "I look at this almost as a patient on a table." At various other times on the tour, he compares the touch screens under assembly to automobiles, flypaper, pizza, and buttered pieces of toast. Like a proud father, he beams continuously, pausing to fawn over items as mundane as the packing materials that will protect Surface Hubs when they're shipped out of the factory.
Han admires a Surface Hub in the process of being assembled
Observing Surface Hubs being put together is an unexpectedly multi-sensory experience. It's not just the thrum of the robotic equipment. Even before you spot the bank of gleaming metal vessels full of bonding materials, you notice the air is pungent with an epoxy-esque odor. In another area, signs warn you not to look directly into the ultraviolet light that cures the screens until the sticky adhesive is no longer sticky.
Exotic though this world seems, it's in the same building as the cubicles and conference rooms where the Surface Hub's hardware team toils. (Software development happens in Redmond, in closer proximity to the folks responsible for Windows and other Microsoft software.) Perceptive Pixel has had a presence in the Portland area since 2009, drawing on the region's rich supply of display engineering talent, a legacy dating back to the founding of lab equipment maker Tektronix in the 1940s.
"I don't have to send my folks over to China, so they're happier," Han says. "It's faster. There's no language, time, or culture barrier to deal with. To have my engineers go down the hallway to talk to the guys in the manufacturing line and tune the recipe? That's just incredible."
At the time I visited Microsoft's Wilsonville factory, it was still building Surface Hubs in small quantities and gearing up for the mass-production effort necessary to get units to customers by September. When I ask Han what the future holds for the product line, once it becomes a shipping product, he refers obliquely to next-generation models the company is currently working on, but provides no details.
In Microsoft's San Francisco office, his boss, Mike Angiulo, is more explicit about where the line could go over time. He gestures at the 84-inch screen, and then at a wall that's mostly whiteboard (with a sign tacked up reminding people to erase it when they're done). "By the time that's mundane, this entire wall is going to be a screen," he says. "And everything you touch on the whiteboard is going to be responsive and digitally synced to the phone. We have a vision for group productivity that extends beyond what you can do with this kind of a screen today."
"I didn't actually just announce those products," he adds, just in case it wasn't abundantly clear. "But you can imagine that if bigger is better, the future is about having all the spaces you work with when you're around other people to be useful to you."
Jeff Han checks out some of the Surface Hub's prototype pen designs (note the old-fashioned whiteboard in the background)
Will Microsoft keep plugging away at making that dream into reality, especially if the Surface Hub isn't an immediate breakout hit? "If anything, they've already exhibited a fair bit of patience," says Forrester analyst J.P. Gownder, referencing the 2012 Perceptive Pixel acquisition and effort the company has put into making Windows 10 work well on a large display. "This is a good core-competency kind of place for them. I suspect this is going to be for the long haul, especially as they get customers."
Much more patience will be required. The Wilsonville quarters is festooned with Surface Hubs in use—even hung in a break area near a pool table. But when I stroll around with Han and notice that the engineering team still writes on whiteboards and pins things up on bulletin boards, the day when such old-school tools are as archaic as a typewriter does not feel imminent. Even though someone has playfully scrawled, "This is obsolete technology" on one of the whiteboards.
In Adam Penenberg's 2007 Fast Company profile, Han spoke of wanting to flit from technological challenge to technological challenge, like an entrepreneurial honeybee. Now he seems game to continue on with this quest. "This is one of the final frontiers of computing," he tells me. "We've got the personal thing nailed pretty well, you know? The next undiscovered country is how we do things with multiple users, together." Just as when he gave his TED talk in 2006, his enthusiasm for his work is powerful, infectious stuff. And with Microsoft's help, we're about to learn how much further he can take it.
For Eric Maland, the whole thing goes back to that San Francisco wedding. Mikey wasn't there—well, wait, actually, Mikey was there. But Eric didn't meet him at that point. Eric met some other folks at the wedding who told him they were doing some fix-it stuff in Washington, and it sounded kind of interesting.
And now we're chatting about it in front of the White House security gate, where we're waiting to talk with the leaders inside about why guys like Eric are now wandering around this neighborhood with MacBooks in their shoulder bags and code in their heads. These are the "new techies," as longtime Washingtonians tend to say, but that's somewhat imprecise. These are people whose pedigree in Silicon Valley gives them the whispered reputations of gods and goddesses. I look at Eric. He's wearing a faded T-shirt; his sparse hair is seriously matted down. Did he sleep lately? Exercise? Shave? All debatable. "Ever wonder what you're doing here?" I ask him. He was the 13th engineer hired at Amazon, the first operations director at Twitter. Like everyone else on the stealth team that President Barack Obama is amassing and deploying inside the government, he never imagined he would live and work in D.C. "I guess I just like to fix things that are broken," he says, shrugging.
Then there's Lisa Gelobter. "Oh, you've gotta hear my story," she says. It's later that day, and we're walking near the Washington Monument under a searing midday sun. There was this call she got out of the blue last summer in New York, inviting her to some kind of roundtable discussion in Washington for tech leaders. Lisa had just spent time on the upper management teams at Hulu and BET. She decides, reluctantly, that she'll go take the meeting, which includes this guy named Mikey as well as this other guy named Todd, and turns out to be in the Roosevelt Room in the West Wing. Then President Obama opens the door and surprises everyone, and over the course of 45 minutes gives the sales pitch to beat all sales pitches. They need to come work for him. They will need to take a pay cut, the president announces. But he doesn't care what it takes—he will personally call their bosses, their spouses, their kids to convince them. The crowd laughs. But he gravely responds: I am completely serious. He needs them to overhaul the government's digital infrastructure now. "What are you going to say to that?" asks Lisa.
Lisa Gelobter,Chief digital service officer, U.S. Dept. of Education;Previously: Hulu, BET
Oh, and the stories about Weaver. "First name is Matthew," Weaver says, sitting on a cheap couch in a makeshift office near the White House. But no one calls him Matthew, he explains, since there are too many Matthews in any given room at any given moment. Even among D.C.'s new technorati, people view Weaver as someone separate from the fray. Maybe it's because he once lived in a camper in the Google parking lot without going home for an entire year. Maybe it's because he was the one guy who, if he didn't answer an emergency call, the whole search engine might go down. Or maybe it's because in a group of brilliant engineers, Weaver, as one of his new colleagues puts it, stands out as "someone who is, like, superhero-fucking-brilliant." Recruited from California last year by these guys Mikey and Todd to work on the broken Healthcare.gov website, Weaver decided this year to stay in D.C. and leave behind the comfort of Google and a big pile of stock options. He recalls it in terms that suggest the transfixing power of a holy pilgrimage. "That"—he says, meaning the Healthcare.gov fix-it work—"changed my life in a profound way. It made it feel like all my accomplishments in my professional life meant very little compared to getting millions of people through the hospital doors for the first time. And that made me see that I could never do any other work without a public impact." Weaver now spends his days in the guts of the Veterans Administration, helping the agency's digital team upgrade their systems and website—and trying to reboot the way government works. As an early test to see if he could challenge the VA's protocol, he insisted, successfully, that his official government title be Rogue Leader. And so he is: Rogue Leader Weaver.
Todd and Mikey—the ones who helped bring people like Eric Maland, Lisa Gelobter, and Weaver down here—are, respectively, Todd Park, the former chief technology officer of the United States, and Mikey Dickerson, who led a team of 60 engineers at Google and supervised the crew that fixed the Healthcare.gov website last year. Since that time, Park and Dickerson have been steadily recruiting an elite digital corps—a startup team, essentially, built mainly from the ranks of top private-sector companies—and embedding them within the U.S. government. Their purpose is to remake the digital systems by which government operates, to implement the kind of efficiency and agility and effectiveness that define Silicon Valley's biggest successes, across everything from the IRS to Immigration Services. "We've got about 140 people in the network right now," Park says of the digital team. "The goal is to get it to about 500 by the end of 2016." Whether Park and Dickerson can find enough superstar techies to take a flyer on this risky project is just one of many concerns. There are bigger questions, too, such as whether a small number of technologists can actually bring about vast changes within the most massive, powerful, bureaucratic regime on earth.
Todd Park has just 18 months—until the Obama administration ends—to recruit a tech corps of 500.
It helps that the two men have substantial "air cover," as President Obama describes it in an exclusive, in-person interview with Fast Company. For the past year, the president explains, he has personally helped Park and his team hire talent and implement their ideas across a host of government agencies. While the reasons behind this initiative and its scope have not been made clear before, in the president's view, the idea of building a "pipeline" of tech talent in Washington starts with practical appeal: Better digital tools could upgrade the websites of, say, the Veterans Administration, so users get crucial services that save time, money, and (for veterans in need of medical help) lives. "But what we realized was, this could be a recipe for something larger," the president explains. "You will have a more user-friendly government, a more responsive government. A government that can work with individuals on individual problems in a more tailored way, because the technology facilitates that the same way it increasingly does for private-sector companies." In other words, if Obama's tech team can successfully rebuild the digital infrastructure of Washington—an outcome that is by no means certain yet—you might not only change its functionality. You might transform Americans' attitudes about government too. And you might even boost their waning feelings of empowerment in an ideologically riven country of 320 million people.
In the meantime, do you also end up with a dedicated group of Rogue Leader Weavers where none existed before? Tech geniuses who embrace public service as an essential element of their careers? The president is betting on that outcome as well. Get the country's technologists to change Washington, the theory goes, and maybe—just maybe—you end up changing the country's culture of technology, too.
The new hub of Washington's tech insurgency is something known as the U.S. Digital Service, which is headquartered in a stately brick townhouse half a block from the White House. USDS employees tend to congregate with their laptops at a long table at the back half of the parlor floor. If there's no room, they retreat downstairs to a low-ceilinged basement, sprawling on cushioned chairs. Apart from an air-hockey table, there aren't many physical reminders of West Coast startup culture—a lot of the new techies are issued BlackBerrys, which seems to cause them near-physical pain. Nevertheless, the corps at USDS tends to rely on the same jargon you hear around Silicon Valley these days. They'll say they're here to "iterate," or to "deliver product," or to "JFDI" (that is, just fucking do it). When I wander downstairs one morning in late April, Ben Maurer, a young engineer on sabbatical from Facebook, is huddling with a few colleagues on a project for the Department of Defense. "I'm not just fixing bugs here," he informs me, looking up from his laptop for about a nanosecond before going back to his coding. He seems tired but pleased to work on something big—in this case, to map out a broad digital structure for an upcoming project at the mammoth agency.
To a certain extent, the Obama administration has always been a comfortable place for techies like Maurer; the president—whose 2008 campaign was arguably the most convincing demonstration at the time of social media potential—was the first chief executive to appoint a chief technology officer and, more recently, a chief data officer. "Government has done technology and IT terribly over the last 30 years and fallen very much behind the private sector," Obama says. "And when I came into government, what surprised me most was that gap." But creating high-level positions like the CTO was a route to better government technology policy, not necessarily better operations. Besides, the immediate priority was addressing the economic crisis and resolving military entanglements.
Tech moved up on the punch list in 2013 due to a new crisis: the Healthcare.gov fiasco. When the president's key legislative achievement was mortally threatened by a nonfunctioning website, Todd Park, as CTO, was among those asked to help rescue the endeavor. Before his stint in government, Park had started two medical IT companies now valued at over a billion dollars each, and it was that experience, not policy or politics, that he called upon. Park recruited Dickerson from Google, as well as a half-dozen other engineers. This small team, working around the clock in Maryland, fixed the site in seven hectic weeks. Not only did the effort "save the president's baby," as one former White House staffer puts it, it crystallized within the administration the impact that just a handful of deeply talented techies could have on our government's functionality. And it prompted Obama, Park, and their colleagues to wonder: Could an infusion of West Coast tech talent become permanent? What might that achieve?
As it turned out, there was a model to follow. The British government had demonstrated that the best digital practices from the private sector could be applied to the public realm with transformative results, through an initiative known as the Government Digital Service. (A columnist at the Guardian newspaper lamented that he couldn't invest in the GDS, even though it seemed like the best tech startup in Europe.) Park, meanwhile, had already put some pieces in place: a program known as the Presidential Innovation Fellows, begun in 2012, which brought bright young technologists into government for 12-month stints; and a group called 18F, within the government's General Services Administration, that deployed graduates of the fellows program to other government agencies on a project basis.
With the backing of the president, Park scaled up his recruiting efforts. His outward-facing policy job became focused on building an internal tech team. Dickerson had returned to the West Coast after Healthcare.gov—his goal was to sleep as much as possible for several weeks straight. But in May 2014, he came back to Washington for a meeting with Park, who harangued him late into the evening at the Shake Shack in DuPont Circle, the favored hangout of the West Coast techies. Park wanted Dickerson to pick up where he left off at Healthcare.gov and lead a new and more ambitious project. The two were gently kicked out of the restaurant by a manager locking up for the night. But by that point, Dickerson had decided to commit to running a new central technology bureau. The USDS opened for business a few months later.
One morning in late April I sat down at USDS headquarters for several hours with Park, Dickerson, and Haley Van Dyck, who, with Dickerson, helps run the USDS. If the president is effectively the CEO of the White House's tech startup, Park would be its chief strategist. He is excitable and charming, with a cyclonic energy that helps explain why he's been so successful as a talent recruiter. When he talks about two ideas, or two people, that he very much likes, he blurts out, "This is a total double-helix of awesomeness!" In describing the level of difficulty the new tech team in D.C. faces, he exhorts, "This is DARPA meets the Peace Corps meets SEAL Team Six!" ("Todd is the most enthusiastic person I know," says Obama.) Dickerson, by contrast, does not emote. In fact, Dickerson comes off at first glance as grumpy and rumpled—someone who, in a not-too-distant era, might have made an excellent clerk in a video-rental store. Then you talk with him and wish to take your first impression back. Dickerson is an uncommonly skilled engineer with a deadpan wit and an unflappable nature. When I ask how he feels about the tech surge scaling up, he says, "Yeah, I'm losing all that free time I had." His business card carries no title but reads, Don't panic. Park calls him Buddha.
Haley Van Dyck:Deputy Administrator, U.S. Digital Service;Previously: Obama 2008 campaign, FCC, USAID
Outsiders often make the mistake of perceiving Washington's technical problems as the result of a dearth of engineering talent. This makes it tempting to frame the current wave of hires from Google and elsewhere as a wartime tactical team moving in to save us from the city's existing coding barbarians. But this is not quite correct. For one thing, the people Park and Dickerson are luring here aren't just software engineers; they're data scientists, user-experience gurus, product managers, and design savants. For another, these people are being matched with government insiders who can advise them on how to deploy private-sector tools like Amazon Web Services, for instance, that have long been considered forbidden within the Beltway, or how the procurement of contractors can be improved. Usually this involves cutting a jungle path through thousands of pages of overgrown government regulations. As Park says, "We need both kinds: people who can hack the technology, as well as people who can hack the bureaucracy."
The complexity is formidable. If you put your engineer's hat on, Dickerson says, you can look at government's approach to tech and decide that it's pretty much insane. But if you consider it as an anthropologist might ("If you're studying this alien culture," he says, "and you ask, Why do they behave so strangely?"), you see that D.C. has developed its dysfunctions for deep, structural reasons. For instance, Washington has plenty of smart people, Dickerson says. But they have been removed from the extraordinary growth—only occurring during the past decade, really—of the handful of West Coast companies that can now manage "planet-scale websites," as Dickerson puts it.
Above all, there is the inertia of the past. One of the first lessons Dickerson learned about D.C. when he arrived was that the city traditionally conflates the importance of a task with its cost. Healthcare.gov ultimately became an $800 million project, with 55 contracting companies involved. "And of course it didn't work," he says. "They set aside hundreds of millions of dollars to build a website because it was a big, important website. But compare that to Twitter, which took three rounds of funding before it got to about the same number of users as Healthcare.gov—8 million to 10 million users. In those three rounds of funding, the whole thing added up to about $60 million." Dickerson believes that the Healthcare.gov project could have been done with a similar size budget. But there wasn't anyone to insist that the now-well-established Silicon Valley practice of building "agile" software—rolling out a digital product in stages; testing it; improving it; and repeating the process for continuous improvement—would be vastly superior to (and much, much cheaper than) a patchwork of contractors building out a complete and monolithic website. In his Fast Company interview, President Obama remarks that he made a significant mistake in thinking that government could use traditional methods to build something—Healthcare.gov—that had never been built before. "When you're dealing with IT and software and program design," the president explains, "it's a creative process that can't be treated the same way as a bulk purchase of pencils."
Which is not to say that replacing Washington's culture with that of Silicon Valley should be the goal. Some hybrid of tech people who can innovate with patience rather than aggression may be more effective. Dickerson notes that government tech contractors, even the most skillful ones, face the arduous challenge of trying to repair an aging digital system without compromising any essential services. The method for issuing Social Security checks, for instance, relies upon old mainframe servers running on the dying COBOL computer language. "That's fine, and it's lasted them a long time," Dickerson says. But the people who can maintain and operate that generation of technology are not going to live forever; indeed, many of them are past retirement age already. In this case, the West Coast mentality could be counterproductive. "There's an attitude in the entrepreneurial private sector where we don't care what came before us: We're going to disrupt it," Dickerson explains. "But we are not going to disrupt Social Security. That's a big reason why it's so hard to make these changes, because you can't interrupt the flow of operations."
Dickerson adds, "It will not work, and you will not go far, if you come here with a big attitude, saying, 'You people are stupid, get out of the way and we'll show you how it's done.' "
Are there really people like that in the Valley? I ask.
Dickerson laughs. The people he's directing, he says, tend to be the more humble types. And the folks interested in curated meals and big equity packages and uncompromising disruption didn't come east to help him. This is not the place for them anyway, he says. They just wouldn't get it.
We're not choosing these types of people when we recruit, Van Dyck, the USDS deputy, adds. "And they're not choosing us, either."
The White House chief of staff, Denis McDonough, enjoys walking meetings, so one morning he guides me through the corridors of the West Wing and out onto the South Lawn, where we spend 25 minutes doing brisk laps around a circular driveway flanked by green grass and blooming gardens. McDonough points out the Rose Garden and relates a few historical tidbits about the White House grounds. But mostly we talk about the larger goals of the tech insurgency. As he sees it, the web and technology tools "flatten everything" by allowing Americans to engage with government more directly. So the notion that better tech will yield better democratic engagement is to both him and the president an aspirational—and logical—pursuit. But McDonough also believes there will be other immediate benefits. The transparency that technology enables (consider, for instance, how health insurance plans can now be easily compared online) will not only yield tremendous efficiencies. It can allow Americans to have better control over their own decisions—to interact with government in the same glitch-free way we do with iTunes or Amazon. "Why should we be immune?" he says. "Everything else is getting done faster. Why should this institution be different?" McDonough tells me that he admires how the tech insurgents have brought to D.C. their skills and collaborative habits, as well as what he calls a "hunger" for increasing performance. He stops walking and turns to me to say, "They are in an industry that has constantly reinvented itself and become more efficient. And that's because at the heart of that industry is the belief that you're going to get twice as good every two years, and that's held for 50 years."
There is no Moore's Law for government—at least not yet. And another thing that McDonough, Park, and Dickerson must confront is that this government startup will never have the same lean, concentrated focus of a private-sector company. Indeed, the tech insurgency is not even being built all in one place. Dickerson's USDS currently employs 37 people, but it is only one aspect of an endeavor that has grown organically and sprawls all over Washington. It doesn't even have a proper name. Park tends to describe the new tech corps as a "three-layer cake." USDS is the first layer—a group of technologists who strategize about what projects should become government priorities and which people should work on them. The second layer is 18F—a group of 90 technologists and designers who work within the General Services Administration a few blocks away. 18F takes its name from its address (the GSA building is at 18th and F Streets) and has informal ties to USDS, but it is essentially a service agency. The group can take on jobs from anywhere within government that's in need of digital help. Unlike USDS, it doesn't necessarily follow the president's political priorities.
And the third layer? That would be the tech teams, ranging in size from five people to 50, that will be installed within 25 government agencies over the course of the next 18 months. These teams will consult regularly with USDS for guidance and may utilize 18F for its services. The first wave is being led by people like Lisa Gelobter, who was given the hard sell by the president in the Roosevelt Room and who now works in the Department of Education. Matthew Weaver, formerly of Google, leads another group at the Veterans Administration.
Matthew Weaver:Rogue Leader, Digital Services, U.S. Dept. of Veterans Affairs;Previously: Google
The "tech cake" is only a metaphor, of course. And while visiting the different layers of the cake over the course of a week, I began to wonder if it's the wrong one. What the designers of this effort actually want to create is something more dynamic—in effect, a technology ecosystem that long outlasts their stints in government. In that regard, you might consider Washington's tech landscape, as it currently exists, as a kind of brown and barren field. And on that field, consider each agency as having a fenced-in plot of land. The USDS works now as landscape architects—the ones who design what kind of trees and plantings will go in each plot, and who will do the work. The people at 18F function like a nursery and contractors—they'll provide the healthiest trees and do the plantings, either on their own or via someone they trust. They'll even teach you how to be a good gardener. Meanwhile, the tech teams at agencies like Education and Veterans will take what USDS and 18F advise to make their plot flourish.
The overarching goal here is to get everything to grow together—very tall, very fast, inevitably joining up into a forest canopy so as to create a functional and interconnected system.
"If we're trying to build new services that serve the public good, then the mechanism by which we do that is by combined services talking to each and getting you what you want," says DJ Patil, another Silicon Valley recruit of Park's, who works closely with USDS and serves as U.S. chief data officer. Plus, he adds, "If we combine systems, what kind of cool, amazing things will we find? What happens when we bring together climate data with health information—can we understand how the changing environment is impacting our health?"
If it's still too early to say whether this technology ecosystem will flourish, it is nonetheless true that the tech surge has moved beyond its conceptual stages. Various teams are now engaged in rolling out projects. One day in Washington I spend the afternoon at 18F, a large, bright, open space, where teams of two or three work at white tables. The group has 15 contracted projects under way. "Our two primary areas are delivery and consulting," says Hillary Hartley, who leads 18F. Delivery, she explains, "is where we would build the thing for an agency—the website, the service, the online transaction, whatever." That's what most of the teams in front of us are up to. "Consulting is where we're helping the client do some of the design thinking, or problem scoping," so they can figure out what to buy from a vendor.
We sit down with a team trying to revamp the Peace Corps website, then we walk over to chat with another team that recently created a user-friendly analytics web page, analytics.usa.gov, that tracks which government websites are trending (a National Weather Service page usually tops the list). The goal here is to reveal how U.S. citizens use government websites, and to spark healthy competition among agencies to create more popular services. In keeping with the tech corps' guiding principles, everything is open source, so outsiders are free to adapt the program. And they do: A few weeks after the analytics website went live, Philadelphia used the program for its own analytics website, which the 18F team considered a measure of success. Thanks to their open-source code, they had improved government without doing any extra work.
We visit another team at a nearby table. At this point, probably the most important work at 18F, done in conjunction with USDS, involves overhauling the Immigration Services website. 18F is helping to redesign the site to drastically improve the user experience—for instance, by simplifying searches to aid those whose facility with English may be limited. Meanwhile, USDS is laboring deep beneath the surface. One of the initial goals is to rebuild the technology for a form known as the I-90. It's how legal immigrants whose green cards are lost or stolen apply for a replacement, and the current process—paper-based and slow—can take as long as eight months. In creating a digital tracking form and a better online application, the designers think they can reduce the time to a fraction of that.
And that's only one bureaucratic improvement at one agency. There are dozens of other forms on the Immigration Services website alone, which hints at the scale for improvement. "This is a $75 billion technology market," Andrew McMahon, a cofounder of 18F along with Hartley, says of the annual government IT budget. "So if you wonder, How far can we reach? Well, I think it's kind of limitless." Hartley, for her part, notes that 18F couldn't actually capture all of that IT work. "Our underlying goal is to make better clients, and to make the agencies understand a new way of doing things," she says. "We're never going to be big enough to take on the $75 billion market. But we will be big enough to help people out there make better decisions on how to build, or buy, their digital services."
The paradox here is that when the tech teams succeed with a project like the I-90 form, or with any retooled government website, users likely won't think much about it. It will be fast and intuitive. It will not crash when you use it. And you will then get on with your life. When I ask Dickerson what USDS's biggest win has been since its start, he points to the open-enrollment season for Healthcare.gov, which went smoothly this year as compared to last year's debacle. "That's a big accomplishment," he says, "but we don't have any coverage of it because there's nothing to say. The train wreck didn't happen. We're proud of that."
The biggest problem with assessing tech startups is that most of them sound pretty good at the start. And even if you know the odds going in—that by some estimates, nine out of 10 will fail within a few years—it doesn't necessarily dim the shine of a new idea. Without question, a tech startup of 100-plus people, backed by the president and working deep within government, differs from a startup involving three guys in a Palo Alto crash pad cluttered with fast-food wrappers. As Park perceives the government mission: "This may be more like what some large corporations have done to basically disrupt themselves." Still, if you were a VC trying to game out the odds of success here, you might go through the risk factors facing the U.S. Digital Service, 18F, and the tech teams now growing within various agencies. As a risky and ambitious startup, how do they measure up?
First, there's what we might think of as "talent risk"—as they scale, are these the right people for the right job? Tech managers like Dickerson and Weaver already proved their mettle during the Healthcare.gov rescue, and the folks now being lured to D.C. by Park's team are arguably among the industry's best. They are screened not only for IQ, but for EQ (that is, emotional intelligence). So they seem to pass that test. And that means we might next consider the risks of the tech corps' resources: Do they have the wherewithal and organizational structure to make this take root within government?
There are a number of reasons, some highly technical, to think the corps have a reasonable chance. One should never underestimate the difficulty of getting Washington to move forward quickly—or logically. What's more, budgets can always be vulnerable to political fights in congress. But the architects of the USDS—especially Park, Dickerson, and Van Dyck—made sure that their bureau was ensconced within the Office of Management and Budget, which gives the techies muscle within various agencies and an ability to influence various IT budgets and lines of command. What's more, with the solid backing of the president and his chief of staff, the USDS has enough of what Dickerson calls "hard power" to fix important problems around town. Quite simply, the president can (and does) ask his cabinet secretaries to take seriously any USDS overtures to work on projects within their agencies.
What about the market risk? Will there be enough business in D.C. for the tech teams? If you've ever been on, say, the U.S. Department of Education's site, it's a question that answers itself. Van Dyck tells me "there are now lines around the block" to tap the USDS's services. McDonough, the chief of staff, says, "Those guys"—the USDS—"went over to brief the secretary of defense and he said, 'I'm sold. Give me 10 teams.' " The techies' market demand is further buttressed by a lack of competition. The USDS is helping agencies find the best contractors, not competing with contractors or agencies. So, arguably, they pass this test too.
Mikey Dickerson:Administrator, U.S. Digital Service;Previously: Google
An unresolvable risk nevertheless hangs over the whole endeavor: the risk of running out of time. Many of those working with USDS talk about getting to "escape velocity," which means getting the speed and momentum necessary, much like a rocket at liftoff, before Obama's second term ends. "We have 630 more days," Dickerson tells me in late April. "We have booster rockets for those 630 days to get us into orbit. If [USDS] achieves a stable orbit in that time, then it will be here for a generation, or maybe longer." And what if the next U.S. president has a different agenda? In a number of conversations, I came away with the impression that improving government technology is less politically fraught, and less partisan, than other Obama initiatives—yet it still might be the case that a future administration dismantles what Dickerson and Park are building, or even eliminates the office of chief technology officer. "I don't personally worry about it a ton," Dickerson says with a shrug. "Because the things we set out for ourselves just for the next two years—I mean, if we accomplish just those things, it will be worth all the effort, even if it all goes up in smoke just after."
The people at USDS and 18F don't seem to doubt that they'll have an impact. Indeed, they believe it is obvious already. By constantly testing their software with users, they can gauge improvements in real time. Some of those upgrades may seem minor now, but they should, in time and in sum, add up to something significant—and perhaps something very big. Even if you never go onto the improved Veterans or Immigration websites, you may soon find that, say, the Federal Student Loan pages (a forthcoming project of Dickerson's) are improved so that better information and clearer navigation increases participation and reduces defaults. And it doesn't seem to matter, in this case or others, that USDS teams as small as five or 10 people will be working inside agencies that are much larger than Google, Apple, or even General Motors. As the Healthcare.gov rescue effort demonstrated—or, indeed, any successful startup in Silicon Valley can prove—a very small number of tech people can have a disproportionate effect.
There is another side to the impact question as well: What about the effects on the recruits themselves? In terms of looking for meaningful work, the tech industry may not be what it was; one running joke on HBO's Silicon Valley is that everyone has been led to believe that they're changing the world with their app or algorithm, even when they obviously aren't. Meanwhile, at the actual Silicon Valley companies that have genuinely changed global culture and business—Google, Apple, Facebook, Twitter—there may be a different dynamic. As those companies grow ever larger, the contributions of individual engineers may seem proportionately ever smaller. At least so far, these factors have created a pool of top-tier candidates open to taking on other kinds of work with depth and import. And the point for Obama is not to sell these candidates on a career in government, but rather to enlist them in a stint of a year or two at USDS, or even a few months. For decades, accomplished lawyers and economists have worked in the capital between private-sector jobs, so why not technologists? "What I think this does," says Megan Smith, the current U.S. chief technology officer, who spent much of her career at Google, "is really provide a third option. In addition to joining a friend's startup or a big company, there's now Washington."
Megan Smith: U.S. Chief Technology Officer;Previously: Google
This idea appeals greatly to the president—in fact, it was built into the USDS design from the start. "I'm having personal conversations with folks, meeting with them, or groups of them, and pitching them," Obama says. "And my pitch is that the tech community is more creative, more innovative, more collaborative and open to new ideas than any sector on earth. But sometimes what's missing is purpose. To what end are we doing this?" As the president explains, he asks potential recruits, "Is there a way for us to harness this incredible set of tools you're developing for more than just cooler games or a quicker way for my teenage daughters to send pictures to each other?" For the time being, at least, there seems to be. HBO might want to consider an on-location shoot.
[Photos: Daniel Shea for Fast Company, President Obama photographed in Washington, D.C., on April 30, 2015.]
We've been on a hiring streak, and it's time to welcome our four newest staffers—three on the edit team and one engineer.
Serving as the first head writer for the influential live TV series Attack Of The Show is just one of the reasons Eric Alt (@Eric_Alt) will be a fantastic senior news editor for Fast Company. His career so far includes a stint at Maxim's website, babysitting toddlers with Angelina Jolie, serving as a senior entertainment news editor at NBC, and throwing expensive game consoles down flights of stairs while wearing a panda suit. He's also a huge hockey fan, like Canadian-level obsession—though Eric assures me he is a New Jersey native. He's also contributed to Cosmopolitan, Inked, Nylon, Spin, Mental Floss, Viggle.com, and consulted for Vayner Media as well as helped establish the editorial direction for Howard Stern's recently launched media hub. We're excited to have Eric in the news room, you can reach him at ealt (at) fastcompany.com.
Eric Alt and Michael Benin
Michael Benin, our new senior developer (@michaelbenin), started building websites for money as a teenager, and the biggest change since then is that he's become really good at it. An experienced Node.js developer, Michael specializes in creating single page web apps (he's currently building an open source isomorphic JavaScript web framwork for node). He's previously worked for Conde Nast, UrbanDaddy, AdKeeper, and Penton Media. And he likes fishing on his 12-foot Carolina Skiff, which needs a new engine. We look forward to joining him on a cruise sometime soon. How many people can your skiff hold, Michael?
Diana Budds and Meg Miller
After studying environmental policy and art history, Diana Budds (@DianaBudds) decided to write about design—which makes perfect sense if you think about design the way we do at Co.Design. She worked in the curatorial department of the San Francisco Museum Of Modern Art Architecture + Design before moving east (but she still loves the Oakland A's for some reason). She joins us from Dwell, where she was a senior editor, and will be covering architecture, urban design, product design, and much more. Email her at dbudds (at) fastcompany.com.
Meg Miller is Co.Design's new assistant editor. She joins us from Simon & Schuster, and she'll be covering graphic design, product design, art, and more.
Huddled around a laptop at the bottom of a stairwell in Havana, a group of three teenage boys banter as they skip between video clips and music. A fourth arrives with some ice cream, which completes a scene reminiscent of teenagers killing time on YouTube. They play an amateur music video in which the singer, looking for a laugh, periodically bangs his head against the wall. Then Beyoncé. Chris Brown.
But this being Cuba—where the Internet is, for the most part, only available at some professional jobs, in foreigners' homes, and in expensive hotels—this isn't YouTube. What looks like a few teenagers surfing the web is actually a small part of an only-in-Cuba business that gives locals access to content from the Internet, offline, thanks to an army of human middlemen and thousands of flash drives.
I pass my own small drive to the boy who owns the computer, and he asks me what I want. He scrolls through the little blue files on his desktop, which have labels like "movies," "music," "videos from Cuba," "applications," and "video games." After I ask for videos from Cuban artists, he plugs my drive into his computer and asks me to come back in 10 minutes.
There are similar booths that sell El Paquete Semanal ("the packet of the week") across Havana. Some are run casually, like this one. Others are part of more formal businesses, with signage and separate store space, that also offer services like printing or software updates. But everyone, from the young waiters at restaurants to the lawyer who rents me his home, seems to have a source for El Paquete, their link to a connected world that would be taken for granted in most modern countries. A retired woman who plugs her flash drive into her television recommends that I watch Mr. and Mrs. Smith. My taxi driver plays local music videos from a portable player mounted on his dashboard. And when I meet with the founder of a company that functions like a Yelp for Cuba, he peppers his stories with Game of Thrones references. All of them are getting access to this media either by purchasing content from an El Paquete vendor, or by copying from the computer of a friend who has purchased it.
In a country where the government, as per the constitution, owns all media, El Paquete allows Cuban people to access content that would never be found on official media outlets, even if it's nothing more subversive than the latest episode of House of Cards. It is not a static library of files, but a weekly updated resource that includes some of the same living resources that you might find on the Internet.
Revolico
One local app available on El Paquete, called Revolico, for instance, works like an offline Craigslist, with people posting ads for furniture, jobs, and homes. Another, AlaMesa, is a directory of about 600 restaurants, some of which pay to add extras like menus or special offers to their listings. Another, Conoce Cuba, is a guide app with GPS-enabled maps. Local magazines, like a richly designed music and culture publication called Vistar, also release new issues on the platform. "In Cuba, there are a lot of new artists with a lot of talent, and they never had something like this to show what they do," says its creative director, a 28-year-old graphic designer named Robin Pedraja. "Before us, this would happen and nobody knew." The publication has more than 20 people in its masthead and is working on its 16th issue.
"All media was the property of the state before," says Elaine Diaz, a journalism professor at the University of Havana who is launching a publication called Periodismo Del Barrio (Neighborhood Journalism) that she plans to distribute through El Paquete. "Now we have underground ways to publish and you don't need permission."
Vistar #15—June 2015
This underground publication system operates in a legal grey area, though the government has for the most part tolerated El Paquete. And though using El Paquete as a platform may not require permission, it does require some centralization.
Where El Paquete comes from and how it is distributed has been something of a mystery in Cuba. When I asked technology entrepreneurs and El Paquete vendors how it works, I got answers like, "It's an urban legend" and "Who knows?" El Paquete vendors have sources who have sources. David Mas, who worked on a publication about Cuban businesses called EnlaHabana that was distributed through El Paquete (it has since closed) described the way the business is structured as "like drugs," in which case the name that one of its top distributors goes by, El Transportador (The Conveyor), seems appropriate.
His real name, it turns out, is Elio Hector Lopez, and he's a 26-year-old with a passion for music who started working on what became El Paquete while employed by a bank. At first, he used the Internet access at his job to download music, and he gave what was essentially a mix tape of his best picks to local DJs in the area. As it became popular, he started to charge for the music, and, he tells me through a translator when I meet him one Sunday morning at a Havana café, "What began as a hobby became serious."
Elio Hector Lopez helps compile El Paquete.
Around 2008, Lopez started to get in touch with other people who had started similar businesses with different types of content—video games, movies, video clips, TV shows—and they decided to collaborate to make a bigger business. Their first collaborative packets were about 500 GB and included a tiny text file with an email address inside that people could use to make requests for the next week's El Paquete. Then Lopez and his partners would look for it. "It was like doing a Ph.D. in Internet to find this stuff," Lopez says.
He won't say exactly how the group currently acquires the 1 terabyte of new content that he says it sells to seven top-level vendors every week, except that part of it involves an illegal capture of a satellite channel and another several paid collaborators with Internet access (according to Internet freedom watchdog Freedom House, between 5% and 26% of Cubans have access to the open Internet, or access to Internet not controlled by the government). The hard drives travel via bus or plane to major Cuban cities, where their purchasers sell copies of the content to other vendors, who sell it to other vendors, and so on down the line until some slice of the original terabyte reaches the stairwell where I purchase about 16GB for the equivalent of U.S. $2.00. The system does bear a structural resemblance to an illicit drug business.
But even though Lopez and his partners have created what is arguably the most accessible open media consumption channel in Cuba, they aren't getting rich doing so. They sell each of the seven primary hard drives for $20 or less. It may seem crazy to sell such an influential product for so little—until you remember that many media companies, including this website, give their content away for free.
El Paquete operates on the same business model. It's not just a way to access content that Cuba's nationalized media outlets don't provide; it is also an advertising business that depends on wide distribution.
For a fee, Lopez and his partners will post an advertisement at the end of a popular movie or television show. They will also include your music or your magazine (Vistar doesn't pay because Lopez is its "coordinator & promoter"). Lopez says this advertising business makes about as much money as selling the content itself, and there are similar businesses further down the chain. If you want an advertisement for your restaurant or salon on your local version of El Paquete, some local distributors also sell advertising services.
Staff members of Vistar in their office
None of this—the publications, the advertising businesses, or El Paquete itself—is expressly legal. Cubans need licenses to do private business in the country, and Lopez's license is for selling hard drives. But the government probably won't shut it down. "It is stupid to prohibit it," says Carlos Alzugaray Treto, a professor and former Cuban diplomat. "You don't have a way of doing it. You will have to deploy so many resources to stop it from happening. That's impossible." Lopez offers another explanation. "If they shut down the package in the whole country, people will be mad and it won't be good for the government." In order to avoid antagonizing the government, El Paquete has a strict rule that bans politics and pornography.
What might ultimately be more threatening than the government to the web of small businesses on El Paquete is the Internet. Cuba's government announced recently that it would open 35 public Wi-Fi hotpots that Cubans can access for about $2 per hour. That's still well beyond the reach of most Cubans, who earn on average the equivalent of $20 per month, but it signifies a new willingness of the government to tolerate the Internet. If the Internet becomes more widely available in Cuba, what becomes of the business under the stairs? To the Craigslists and the Yelps of Cuba? To magazines like Vistar?
"The packet will disappear," says Lopez. But he believes the rest of his business, and businesses like it, can move online. Some, like Vistar, which publishes online, have already started. AlaMesa, Revolico, and Conoce Cuba have websites in addition to the apps they publish in El Paquete. And Lopez hopes that, with the Internet, El Paquete itself will remain an advertising channel, "like YouTube."
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Imagine if months after the iPad release, we learned it still hadn't outsold some model of Windows tablet. A couple of million units sold sounds okay, but hardly the sort of smash hit we've come to expect from Apple. A precipitous decline in sales after just a couple of months? Not a good sign.
Will the Apple Watch recover, and sell 100 million units in two years, like the iPad, or three years, like the iPhone? There's still time—but not at these rates. (Which, to be fair, are projections based on email receipts hoovered up by Slice, not from Apple itself.) Even with generous rounding errors, the Watch has failed to become the status quo object in wearables. And for Apple, that's a flop.
So how did this happen? The answer may sound like heresy to those who canonize—or even merely admire—Apple's designers. What if the Apple Watch, for all its its milled and woven metals, all its appearances on the catwalk, isn't actually all that well-designed? So far, the Apple Watch doesn't seem very useful, and it hasn't proven that fashionable.
It Just Doesn't Work That Well
Early reviews were filled with tentative criticism, and convoluted explanations about why you might want an Apple Watch in the first place. The New York Times needed "three long, often confusing and frustrating days" to learn how to use it. Others pointed to poor technical performance and a lack of meaningful apps. Many reviews contained the caveat, "it's not for everyone…" One influential review by TechCrunchpointed to what became a rallying cry for the Apple Watch's utility: the time saved by using a screen at a glance—as if teens and grandmas everywhere would relish the option to spend $500 to save the equivalent a few seconds each day. (Seconds that, more often than not, are consumed by a watch alert instructing its wearer to check their phone.)
Major developers complained to us before release that Apple had constrained Watch functions too tightly to create rich, meaningful experiences. Presumably to preserve the Watch's limited battery life, apps ran on the iPhone, the sensors and Taptic Engine were off-limits, and many graphical elements had to be streamed to the Watch instead of being generated natively. Apple has since released a new SDK to remedy some of these limitations, which will certainly improve the app experience, however un-killer they all, so far, have been.
From a user-experience standpoint, it's unclear that Apple ever figured out how people were really supposed to interact with the Watch. Consider that it contains four different types of notifications: a "glance," a short look notification, a long look notification, and another style of notification that pops up only inside a digital watchface. Sometimes they'll have the information you need. Sometimes they'll prompt you to open an app on your iPhone. Never do they indicate that Apple figured out one perfect way to use a tool of their own invention. And despite having three different types of touch interface—basic touch-screen interaction, Force Touch, and the Digital Crown—the watch still leans heavily on Siri, Apple's voice recognition agent, who remains fairly dense and hard of hearing.
Though at least Beyoncé, who made headlines for wearing her gold-band Apple Watch Edition (backwards, by the way; in what, let's all be honest, must be an under-the-table sponsorship we'll read about in a memoir 40 years from now), still Instagrams in it every once in a while.
You can view this in two ways, and neither bodes well for the Watch. Waning celebrity support could mark a cooling cool factor. Not because there's anything wrong with the Watch, but because Apple is not immune to fashion's whim—and fashion's whim is a lot faster than your two-year iPhone upgrade cycle. Maybe the Apple Watch had a moment of limelight, but now seems, if not tacky, at least pedestrian.
And let's ignore the challenge of auguring Yoncé's daily technology and fashion choices solely from images on a highly curated Instagram feed. So she doesn't wear the same watch every day; she's a fashionista who changes her look on a daily basis. When does she wear it?
A nice watch for a normal, non-celebrity fits somewhere between a wedding ring and your go-to black leather shoes. You'll wear it a lot, but not all the time.
But the Apple Watch isn't just another piece of jewelry. If you don't wear a Rolex every day, it's not a big deal. If you don't wear an Apple Watch every day, how is it ever going to become an integral part of how you pay for things, identify yourself, and check your emails? For the Apple Watch to replace the functionality of our phones, even in part, it has to be worn all the time. And it's looking like—at least according to my highly scientific celebrity Instagram analysis, cross-indexed with the upturned noses of many of my otherwise perfectly gadget-prone friends—Apple Watch just doesn't fit into every context. (And we're talking about gifted $17,000+ version here, which at least brings the cachet of excess. The entry-level models may be more innocuous, but they're still smartwatches, and smartwatches are still Segways for your wrist.)
Apple Is Still Thinking In ID, Not UX
All of this culminates to the Apple Watch's fundamental flaw: it's a myopic masterpiece of industrial design, with microchips under curved glass held firm by Velcro-elegant magnetic clasps, so focused on fit and finish that it forgot about the software experience. And it's the software experience that, ironically, could solve the disappointing UX, along with the stale problem of wearing the same old watch every day.
Look at the Apple Watch page and you'll see the pornographic macros of the digital crown and woven metal band; yet ultimately, the Apple Watch hardware you purchase has just one look. Software barely shapes its aesthetic. Apple hasn't even opened up digital watch faces to third party developers, and even if they do, they won't stop the watch hardware from looking like a dead screen that's too afraid to fire up its own battery, lest it die.
The Apple Watch is flopping because it's very well executed, but not very well designed. In terms of utility, it's hard to use, and not solving meaningful problems. In terms of fashion, it's a piece of technology that inherently falls short of timelessness, and yet doesn't keep up with fast fashion, either.
I'm not sure that the Apple Watch needs to rectify all of these problems to be a monster hit, but it certainly needs to solve one of them. Until then, the Apple Watch still "isn't for everyone." And apparently not as many someones as had been expected.
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A network of far-flung employees wasn't what Amir Salihefendic had in mind when he created Todoist more than eight years ago.
Salihefendic, who fled Bosnia when he was six years old, was just a college student in Denmark when he designed the to-do list manager, primarily for his own use. When he decided to work on it full-time a few years later, he realized he needed employees, and couldn't afford to be picky about their locale.
Todoist creator, Amir Salihefendic
Today, Doist—that's the official company name—employs more than 40 people in more than 20 countries: Belarus, Brazil, Canada, China, Germany, Italy, Japan, Portugal, Russia, South Korea, Spain, and elsewhere—including five who work in the U.S. at least part of the time. This team serves more than one million active Todoist users. Through optional subscriptions, it has remained profitable from the beginning without any venture capital, and is adding roughly 10,000 new registered users every day.
The experience has turned Salihefendic into something of a remote-work evangelist. He's hardly alone—companies like WordPress creator Automattic and Buffer have been preaching the benefits of distributed workforces for years—but what's interesting about Doist is the extent to which it's powered by its own self interests. It's a distributed workforce making tools for remote workers, drawing on everything it learns in the process.
Salihefendic is talking to me via Skype from an office space in Porto, Portugal, where he and his wife-to-be decided to move a couple years ago. Nine of Doist's employees list Portugal as home—Salihefendic fell in love with the country during a visit—so having an office makes sense. But no one is required to be on the premises.
Doist's distributed workforce arose largely out of necessity, Salihefendic says. He'd been working from Taiwan on the social network Plurk, when on a whim he applied for a grant from a startup accelerator in Chile. He packed up and moved upon acceptance, and Todoist, which had been on the backburner since 2008, became his focus once again. Salihefendic started hiring remotely while building the app's first mobile versions.
Doist's first employees were recommendations from Salihefendic's accelerator colleagues. To build the workforce further, Doist used "guerrilla tactics," he says, recruiting through forums like Hacker News, Github, and Reddit—at least until the company was large enough to attract applicants directly.
"It's not like I can go out and hire great Android developers in Santiago," Salihefendic says. "There were probably some, but I could not find them."
Doist's map of where its employees are located
Salihefendic quickly figured out that a remote workforce had other virtues. He estimates that his employee costs are a half to a third what they would be in a tech hub such as San Francisco—not counting savings on office space and other overheads—and he doesn't have to worry about tech giants like Facebook and Google stealing his best employees.
"It's not only about expenses, it's also about talent," Salihefendic says. "If you go to San Francisco, you're competing against companies that have a lot of millions in investment."
Perhaps the greatest benefit, however, is that Doist was able to grow on its own schedule, learning how to build a remote company as it went along. By comparison, Salihefendic seems wary of Silicon Valley funding, and the pressure it puts on companies to rapidly staff up.
"This kind of thing forces you to grow really fast without having time to really build a team, build a culture, build a process," he says.
Much of Doist's process doesn't sound drastically different from what's being preached by other remote-work evangelists. The company's screening for new hires, for instance, involves a test project to see how well the candidate works independently. Employee perks include an offer to pay for co-working space and the occasional team meet-up. Salihefendic also stresses the need for written communication and an emphasis on achieving specific goals over time. In other words, employers must go all-in with a remote-work mindset, otherwise they'll fail.
But in building a remote company over many years, Salihefendic has also started thinking that the tools are incomplete, and that Doist can build better ones as it grows. Todoist itself has already been part of that process, as the company adapts it to the needs of its own employees.
When it came to supporting different languages, for instance, Doist's job was made easier by having a financial manager in China, who helped deal with the complexities of date parsing. "For a normal company, I don't think you would focus on implementing Chinese date parsing, and spending a ton of time on improving and using and testing it, but for us it's just natural," Salihefendic says.
More broadly, Salihefendic believes a product stands a better chance of resonating with a global workforce when it's created by people around the world. He points out that Doist has a designer in Taiwan, who provides a different perspective on design than someone in Europe. "In the current world, the product that we need to build has to target the whole world, and not only white rich people," he says.
Beyond just its to-do list product, Doist is working on something completely new, borne from its own experience as a distributed workforce. Salihefendic describes it as somewhat similar to Slack—which the company already uses—but with an emphasis on threaded communications. It's in early alpha, but the plan is to eventually release it publicly. Not unlike Todoist in its dorm room days, it could be another self-serving tool that ends up being useful to millions.
"We are doing this communication app, and we are using it inside our team, and we can evolve it and fit it to our structure," Salihefendic says. "And the same thing with Todoist: We can develop stuff that solves our needs, and maybe in the end will solve the needs of other remote companies as well."
While remote work has plenty of success stories, most of them have head counts in the dozens, not hundreds or thousands. There's not a lot of proof that a massive organization can have a fully distributed workforce. Salihefendic wants to try.
"I can't really see why you should not be able to scale to thousands of people," Salihefendic says. "One of the things we want to do as a company is create tools that enable remote work. You will see a lot of innovation in the tools that we have access to that enable us to communicate, share thoughts, and organize thoughts inside huge remote organizations."
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In April 1977, Steve Jobs and Steve Wozniak rented a booth at the formative industry conference for the personal computer, the First West Coast Computer Faire in San Francisco. They were there to launch Apple's first breakthrough machine, the Apple II.
Vector Graphic founders Lore Harp, Bob Harp, and Carole Ely on a 1981 magazine cover
What few people know today is that only a few rows away at the same show, two women from Southern California were busy launching an innovative machine of their own. Lore Harp and Carole Ely of Westlake Village brought along the Vector 1, a PC designed by Lore's husband, Bob Harp. The computer derived its title from the name of their young company, Vector Graphic, Inc.
At a time when Vector and Apple were both tiny firms looking to gain a footing in an entirely new market, it was not instantly obvious which company would become more successful—for example, Byte magazine's report on the conference mentioned Vector but spilled no ink on Apple, which would eventually become the most valuable company on the planet.
For its part, Vector Graphic went on to become one of the best known PC makers of the late 1970s. Like Apple, it was one of the first computer companies to go public, and like Apple, it set its products apart from the crowd with its attention to industrial design.
But unlike Apple, Vector vanished from the face of the earth. It faded from our collective memory because it did not survive the massive industry upheaval brought about by the release of the IBM PC in late 1981. Very few PC makers did. But the story of how the Vector trio went from nothing to soaring success—and then collapse—is a tale worth retelling.
Traditionally, people move to the suburbs specifically to avoid novelty. And yet, in 1970s California, suburbia often served as a crucible for entrepreneurial risk-taking.
Many know the story of how Steve Jobs and Steve Wozniak launched Apple with a foothold in the Jobs family garage in suburban Los Altos, California. Around that same time, about 350 miles south, a spirit of entrepreneurship similarly captivated an entire Westlake Village household. In fact, it pulled in the neighbors, too.
Carole Ely and Lore Harp with the Vector 1, a stylish computer for its time
The Harps, who moved into the area in the early 1970s, were a typical suburban family: a father that worked in an office all day, a stay-at-home mom, and two elementary-school-aged girls. That father, Dr. Robert Harp, spent his days as a senior scientist for Hughes Research Labs in Malibu, and his wife, a recent German immigrant named Lore, kept house.
When Lore Lange-Hegermann first visited California in 1966, on a solo trip at the age of 20, she discovered an energizing atmosphere of freedom from parental meddling and a general sense that anything was possible. "I felt as though I was cutting the umbilical cord for the second time," she recalls.
Against the wishes of her parents, Lore decided to remain in the States. She picked up odd jobs until she met Bob Harp, who worked as a member of the faculty at Cal Tech. The two got married and had two daughters, and Lore earned a bachelor's degree in anthropology from Cal State, Los Angeles.
By 1975, Lore began to feel antsy. She found her talents wasting while her kids spent their days in class and her husband did the 9-to-5 at Hughes. Against this, as with her parents, she rebelled. ''I cannot stand being at home,'' said Lore in a 1983 New York Times article. ''It drives me insane. Everybody thought I was strange because I would not go to the bridge club or have my fingernails done.''
Carole Ely at work in 1978
Lore Harp met a kindred spirit in the form of a neighbor, Carole Ely, whose kids shared classes with the Harp children. Like Lore, she found the life of a homemaker wanting. "We were bored doing the housewife thing," recalls Ely today. "I was ready to be something." Just a few years prior, Ely had worked for large investment firms such as Merrill Lynch on the east coast, and she was itching to get back to business.
Together, the pair of bored housewives decided they needed something more productive to do. They began to explore ideas for starting a new business. Drawing from their shared love of travel, they first considered starting a travel agency, but the licenses required to operate one proved too burdensome and the possibility of profits too slim.
Then a uniquely 1970s opportunity popped up. During an era when the typical small computer came in a refrigerator-sized chassis and cost tens of thousands of dollars, an Albuquerque engineer named Ed Roberts took advantage of the incredibly-shrinking microprocessor to create a computer that hobbyists could build themselves from a kit.
That machine, the Altair 8800, debuted on the cover of the January 1975 issue of Popular Electronics, which reached a wide audience of technically-minded people. Roberts's company, MITS, became the pioneering firm of the personal computer revolution.
The magazine cover that spawned the PC business
One of the many electronics buffs who saw that article—and placed an order for an Altair kit—was Bob Harp. When it arrived, he found its memory board poorly designed. Instead of returning the kit, Bob reacted like most engineers of the time: he created his own memory board to replace it.
As a kid, Bob began experimenting with electronics when his family moved to a farm without electricity. He sought to build his own battery-powered crystal radios so he could pick up the radio shows he had grown fond of at his old house. It was frustrating, but the quest ignited a love of science which led him to acquire degrees in physics from Stanford and MIT.
Bob's first computer electronics project emerged from the Altair in the form of that 8K static memory board. It plugged into the Altair's 100-pin expansion bus, which the industry later dubbed S-100 in a nod to vendor neutrality. That bus became the basis of the first personal computer hardware standard—one that typically ran Digital Research's CP/M operating system. A rich industry sprouted around this fertile oasis, with multiple companies providing plug-in CPU, memory, video, and other peripheral cards for S-100-based systems. Meanwhile, other firms specialized in the software necessary to make those systems useful—including an outfit known at first as Micro-soft, founded by Bill Gates and Paul Allen.
Bob Harp in 1981
Bob Harp's memory board worked well, and he recognized that it could serve as a lucrative commercial product. Lacking the time and resources to commercialize it, he put it on the back burner for almost a year. But in 1976, when his wife and Ely were trying to hatch a business, he offered his Altair memory board as a potential product.
As exciting as the opportunity sounded to Lore, computers represented completely foreign territory for both her and Ely (and, for that matter, nearly everyone else on the planet in 1976). Lore recalls: "I called my friend and I said, 'Carole, what do you think about starting a computer company? I have this little 8K RAM board.' She said, 'What's a RAM board?'"
To familiarize Lore and Carole with the nascent field of personal computers, Bob Harp took the pair to a local computer show. There, the trio witnessed an eager, untapped market full of enthusiasts peeling off wads of cash to purchase unrefined, half-baked products. "It was an entirely new industry," recalls Bob. "In modern industries, the products are all good. They've been perfected over many years. But at that time, the competition was very poor."
An early Vector ad. Few other PC companies would reference mothers and babies in their marketing.
Lore and Carole found the idea of having their own physical product to sell appealing. With a good technical underpinning and a focus on style and aesthetics, they knew their boards could stand ahead of the pack. The pair even went so far as to seek out specifically-hued capacitors that would not clash with the other components on their circuit boards. "I don't know what people thought of us: two females looking for colored capacitors," Ely told InfoWorld in 1982. "But we were interested in what colors went into our boards."
As the duo geared up to start the machinery of a new corporation, which they registered in August 1976, Bob suggested the title of the new firm: Vector Graphic. He based the name on a certain type of video board he wanted to design. He never did design that board, but the name stuck.
Despite originating the name and the product, Bob decided to keep his steady job at Hughes while Lore and Carole ran the Vector business. (When they couldn't answer a customer question, they called him at work.) Lore Harp became president and CEO, and Ely specialized in marketing and communications. Bob Harp, who became chairman, didn't join the company on a full-time basis until July 1977.
Lore Harp and Carole Ely started Vector with $6,000 in capital. The pair soon hit upon a formula for selling Bob's board in kit form via mail order, advertising in nationwide magazines. By requiring cash-on-delivery and allowing no returns, the company found itself cash flow positive from the very beginning.
Lore and Carole set up two desks in a spare bedroom of the Harp residence, and for a short time, the whole family helped assemble the computer boards in their suburban electronics factory. According to a 1982 Time magazine article, they tested computers on the dining room table and kept packing materials in a shower.
When it came time to negotiate with component suppliers, Lore initially had trouble convincing them that the pair meant serious business. Lacking a formal office, she tried to take meetings outside of the house whenever possible. (Eventually, Vector grew big enough that it moved its operations into a former department store.) AMD wanted astronomical prices for memory chips, but finally, they struck a better deal with Fairchild, which supplied Vector's chips for some time.
Vector's memory board proved wildly successful—by the standards of the still-minuscule industry—and its sales fueled rapid growth. Soon, Bob designed other boards for S-100 bus machines, including a PROM board that eliminated the need for hobbyists to manually enter a boot-up program sequence via front panel switches (as was the norm with the Altair at the time). He followed that with a text-based video board, another memory board, a serial I/O board, a power supply, and a motherboard that allowed the boards to connect together. Hobbyists received each of these constituent pieces with enthusiasm, and they all sold fairly well. As business continued to grow, the next step for Vector became an obvious one. "We saw that there was a good market for the individual boards," recalls Bob, "so I said, 'Well, let's do the whole system.'"
This ad for the Vector 1, "the perfect microcomputer," emphasized the fact it had only two buttons on its front panel.
The result was the Vector 1, launched in 1977, which shipped in two case colors, green or orange (or "rust" as they called it at the time). Lore and Carole's emphasis on visual aesthetics led them to offer this choice of colors at a time when many companies gave little thought to what their computers looked like (and it was only starting to become a given that PCs shipped in a case at all). An attempt to order orange circuit boards to match the orange case went awry when the first batch of fifty came back pink.
Distinctively, the Vector 1 came equipped with only two front panel buttons—power and reset—which symbolized ease-of-use in an era marked by rows of intimidating toggle switches. (A later variant called the Vector 1+ built a floppy disk drive into the case; it was the first PC to offer this feature, which eventually became an industry standard.) The Intel 8080A-based Vector 1 retailed for $849 fully assembled (about $3,288 today when adjusted for inflation) or $619 as a kit.
At the time of the Vector 1's launch, personal computers retailed through mom-and-pop shops and tiny chains. To market their PC, Lore and Carole began contacting every dealer they could find, building valuable relationships that turned into an impressive international dealer network within a few years. The retailers would sell Vector's products to local customers, and soon, Vector began training the dealers with a certification process for customer support as well. The loyalty of this network would became the company's ace-in-the-hole during the intensely competitive years ahead.
In April 1977, when the Vector 1 and Apple II both launched at the West Coast Computer Faire, the two firms (who happened to be located hundreds of miles apart) never dealt with each other. Vector felt it was targeting the high-end of the relatively mature S-100 market, while Apple was marketing an entirely untested new architecture for the everyman. As a result, Vector did not find Apple's products threatening at first.
"We always looked at the Apple II as more of a toy," recalls Lore, "We went immediately after the business market, and not so much the personal computer market." Bob Harp agrees, although he greatly appreciated Wozniak's design of the Apple II. Carole Ely remarks that she envied the Apple II's stylish design and appealing nature to individuals.
An ad from a period when Vector used the lofty slogan "Computers for the advancement of society"
The PC market as a whole grew at a torrid pace, with revolutions in design and price rolling in every week. Within two years, the industry moved away from hobbyist build-it-yourself kits and into more whole-widget, plug-and-play systems. All the hallmarks of an S-100-based system—the large, individual boards with numerous components, the hulking metal chassis, big power supplies, and expensive connectors—meant that S-100 machines could not compete cost-wise with less complex home PC systems.
As those budget machines (such as the TRS-80 and Commodore PET) captured the lower end of the PC market, S-100 vendors like Vector, Cromemco, and IMSAI quickly shifted into the upper-end of the personal computer market where profits were comfortable, and where sophisticated business customers regarded the endless customization options afforded by S-100-based machines as a boon.
The difference in price between the old-school S-100 computers and the new consumer PCs could be dramatic: In 1979, a floppy disk-based Apple II+, the high-end of the home PC market and the low end of the small business market, retailed for around $2000 in a bare-bones configuration. A Cromemco or Vector S-100 bus system (depending on RAM and if it shipped with a hard disk) could cost between $4000 and $20,000—and that's not even counting for inflation, which reveals that the modern price equivalents of those higher-end computer systems soars into Mercedes-Benz territory.
But as those cheaper machines became more and more capable, Vector found Apple nipping at its heels. A key moment came in 1979, when the first spreadsheet, VisiCalc, prompted many businesses to consider buying a computer for the first time—and VisiCalc only ran on the Apple II. "It was just huge competition from both sides, from the top to the bottom of the market," recalls Ely. "The top end, the systems end, and the bottom end, the personal end, with Apple."
With the small-business strategy in mind, Vector's sales rocketed, and the firm introduced successor machines throughout the late 1970s that served their desired market with ample productivity software packages and complete turnkey systems.
Soon, the story of the California housewives who created a multi-million dollar company captivated the press, and Lore Harp found herself on the cover of multiple magazines.
Lore on the cover of Inc. magazine's March 1981 issue
Vector was quickly becoming a big deal—one of the earliest examples of a PC brand that broke free of the industry trade mags and into the mainstream. "While Godbout, Morrow, Cromemco, and a number of new S-100 machines and and cards can be seen in the latest issue of Byte," wrote pundit-to-be John C. Dvorak in InfoWorld, "you'll find Vector Graphic advertising in BusinessWeek and Lore Harp on the cover of the March 1981 issue of Inc., a small-business magazine."
In the industry, Lore and Carole became known as the "girls in green and white" for the company colors they often wore to trade conferences. Lore became a press darling. She enjoyed friendships with industry luminaries like Bill Gates and pundit-turned-PC-company-founder Adam Osborne. In the early 1980s, she would even end up partying in Paris, France, with California governor Jerry Brown and Steve Jobs as part of a delegation of California technologists.
Lore wasn't just regarded as a tech celebrity, but as a business maven in her field. In a 1983 article published after Vector began to run into trouble, the New York Times' Michael S. Malone said that "Lore Harp quickly showed she was more than just a business manager as she guided the company with a shrewd sense of the market's needs and possibilities."
As chief executive, Lore prided herself on frugality, positive cash flow, and avoiding debt. And on a personal level, she says that she found her role as a mother of two young girls to be a significant business asset, parlaying her maternal instinct into a respect for the well-being of her employees and their families. "Vector was a very close family, and a good bit of this was directly attributable to how Lore ran the company as our CEO," recalls Dennis Wingo, who worked as a technician for Vector during the early 1980s.
According to Wingo, Lore became known for her people-centric management style, running her company as a meritocracy with promotions accorded by accomplishments and actual skill rather than educational bona fides or gender. When asked in a 1981 interview why she did not specifically hire more women at Vector, Lore remarked that she hired whomever was best for the job, regardless of sex.
Lore Harp and PC pundit/entrepreneur Adam Osborne at a 1981 party held by InfoWorld magazine
Today, Lore says she never encountered significant opposition from men in the industry. When she heard rumors of the the term "ice maiden" used to describe her, she took the name-calling as a sign of her effectiveness and moved forward.
In her prior career on Wall Street, Carole Ely had witnessed fewer opportunities for the advancement of women in those firms. At Vector, she found no such troubles—perhaps due in large part to the fact that she and her boss, both women, had defined a company culture that strived to operate in an equitable manner.
Meanwhile, Bob Harp felt the media paid too much attention to the fact that Carole and Lore were women, when it was he, in fact, who made the company possible with his hardware designs. (Still, he admits today, he admired Lore's tenacity and ability to lead.)
As head of PR, Carole understood the appeal of a woman tech executive, and had no trouble stepping aside while Lore emerged as the face of the company. "It just happened naturally," says Ely. "People would meet Lore. She was out there all the time." But this unrelenting focus on the company's female president began to ruffle Bob's feathers. Carole recalls that when press attention turned to technical interview questions, she always included Bob Harp in discussions with journalists. (Looking back over press coverage of the time confirms this, although he was never featured as prominently as Lore.)
In retrospect, it's clear that the early success of Vector resulted from a team effort, and that the company thrived on the unique combination of talents of its founders. Between them, Lore, Carole, and Bob represented three of the primary divisions of any technology company—management, marketing, and engineering—and that is a powerful recipe for any founding team to have. "It was a good group, the three of us," says Ely. "A good trio."
With great successes come great pressures, however, and in 1980, the partnership began to crack at the seams. The stresses of the company took a heavy toll on Bob and Lore's marriage, prompting them to seek a divorce, which sent ripples of discontent throughout the company. (Time quoted Bob Ely: "It was an ego conflict. She wanted to do things one way; I wanted to do them another.") While Lore hoped that the break-up would have little impact on the future of the firm, the split between the company's president and its chief product designer set the stage for rough times. It was a bad time to be having problems, because Vector's toughest days lay just ahead.
Around 1980, IBM began knocking on doors in the microcomputer industry under the pretense of potentially licensing existing computer hardware to serve as its own IBM-branded personal computer. IBM used its clout as the leading mainframe computer maker to convince many small PC companies to "open the kimono" (in the parlance of the day) to reveal the nature of their technology and information on how lucrative the PC business really was. The company famously conferred with major software developers Digital Research (which didn't take the visit too seriously) and Microsoft (which did).
Vector received one of these visits from IBM in 1980. Don Estridge, head of the new PC project at IBM, arrived with seven associates at Vector's headquarters, which was then in Thousand Oaks, Calif. Lore recalls the scene: "I looked at him and said, 'You know, this is a joke. You have $25 billion in revenue. We're a $25 million company and you want to OEM from us?'"
No agreements were made, but the meeting ended on polite terms and IBM walked away with a Vector 3 system for evaluation. "I called a meeting immediately afterwards and said, 'We have one year before they come in, and the whole world is going to change,'" recalls Lore.
A 1981 ad for the original IBM PC
From her vantage point in marketing, Carole Ely was terrified of IBM entering the business. "It totally freaked me out," she says. "IBM bought one of our systems and took it down to Boca Raton where they had their new development labs. We thought, 'Well, there we go. Let's see what happens.'"
With clear signs of IBM entering the small systems business, Lore knew the clock was ticking. She set a goal to take Vector public while she still had the chance.
While IBM did not end up using Vector's hardware (or even copying it, as some at Vector had feared), IBM did something even more devastating: they studied the very effective relationships Vector had made with its business software suppliers, including Peachtree Software, maker of a popular accounting package. Before the launch, IBM had extended secret contracts to several of those software vendors, assuring that the IBM PC would also be able to run the applications right from the start. This undermined a great deal of Vector's software-derived competitive advantage in the small-business PC world.
It was not yet obvious to everyone in the industry that the battle over the future of personal computing would be fought through software on a commoditized platform, but Bob Harp had a strong hunch, and he saw the IBM PC as an existential threat to the entire company: "It was clear to me that IBM was going to drive the software in the architecture of the systems," recalls Bob. "And in order to survive, you had to be compatible."
Bob fought with Vector's board of directors, insisting the company should sell an IBM PC compatible machine, but Lore and the board resisted. From Vector's point of view, the choice to become IBM PC compatible was far from clear-cut. Had the company switched abruptly to a new, unproven platform, it would have alienated its customers by abandoning the CP/M-based systems that that been a proven success for over half a decade.
The fight over PC compatibility brought Bob's discontent to a head. He was already uncomfortable working for his soon-to-be ex-wife, and now he saw impending doom on the company's horizon. According to Bob, he began working on a side project on company time with the express intention of irritating Vector's board of directors.
"I felt that I had to leave the company and start another one based on PC compatibles," says Bob. Vector's board granted his wish, firing him in 1981. The following year, Bob founded Corona Data Systems, which created one of the first IBM PC clones. Losing the engineer who had designed almost all of its hardware products since 1976 was a huge blow for Vector.
The cover of Vector's 1982 annual report
But things weren't all doom and gloom in 1981. Earlier in the year, as Vector prepared to go public, Lore made sure that every Vector employee shared in the fruits of the sale, granting 100 shares of stock for every year they worked at the company.
"The underwriters were up in arms," she remembers, "They said, 'Our stock is for management.'" Lore explained that, in her mind, the lowest paid employee on the assembly line is as important as everybody else in the company. If he missed a screw or made a mistake, she explained, they would all take the blame.
Needless to say, this was a popular move within the company itself. As for the founders, they ended up with over $3 million apiece when Vector went public in October, offering one million shares at $13.
"It was exhilarating. It was fantastic," recalls Lore of the IPO, which would represent her crowning achievement at the company. With that launch, Lore became the first female founder to take her company public on the New York Stock Exchange.
But the celebration was short-lived. IBM PC's jump into the personal computer market in August of that year had a clarifying effect on the industry. Businesses which would have bought an S-100 system in the past instead began buying IBM PCs or machines compatible with IBM's hardware and Microsoft's MS-DOS operating system.
Vector responded to the IBM threat—two years later—with a dual-processor approach in the Vector 4, a machine which combined the company's longstanding CP/M support with limited MS-DOS compatibility as an intended bridge to an IBM PC-dominated future. But it was too little, too late. The company's fate had been pre-ordained as soon as it turned away from true IBM PC compatibility. Vector was already dead; it just didn't know it yet.
In 1982, Lore married tech media magnate Patrick McGovern, the founder of research firm IDC and publisher of Computerworld and InfoWorld (and, later, PC World, Macworld, and GamePro). She sought a new beginning with more time devoted to her marriage. In June of 1982, she passed the reigns of president and CEO to Honeywell veteran Fred Snow, while remaining chairman. Snow's tenure coincided with a downturn in sales, so in May of 1983, Vector's board convinced Lore to return as president and CEO. She began commuting over with an 800-mile round trip every day from her home in San Francisco.
Lore Harp on yet another magazine cover
By 1983, managing Vector was like trying to chart the destination of a sinking ship. Sales began to tank due to small businesses industry switching to IBM PCs in droves. Between the grueling daily commute and a lack of love from the board of directors, Lore had had enough. She stepped down once again, this time for good. It was 1984; she was 40 years old.
In her absence, Vector grew desperate. The firm's revenue slid from a peak of $36.2 million in 1981 to just $2.1 million in 1984. One of the company's final models, the Vector SX, served the company like a Band-Aid on a jugular wound. In a 1983 InfoWorld article during its launch that April, Vector marketing director Ron Tharpe cluelessly claimed that the SX's IBM-compatible floppy drives put Vector on "an evolutionary path toward greater IBM compatibility." At that sluggish rate, one can only surmise that the goal was being 100% IBM PC compatible by 1990.
Instead, time ran out, and quickly. The ugly end game for Vector graphic involved plunging revenue, desperate loans, defaulting on debt, and management losing control of the company to a loan guarantor. The company filed for bankruptcy in 1985, ceased operations in 1986, and a holding company liquidated all its assets, marking the final demise of Vector Graphic, Inc. in 1987—a decade after the launch of its first computer.
The truth is that, from 1982 on, no one could have saved Vector. The firm ultimately shared its fate with the every other PC maker that didn't jump on the IBM clone bandwagon. The only consumer PC company that survived into the 1990s with its own significant platform was Apple, and even then, just barely. In the end, Vector had one heck of a wild ride, made its mark on the PC industry, and helped create the template of business-oriented software and services that IBM could mimic with its PC for a dose of guaranteed success.
Since then, personal computer history has been written by the victors. The firms that survived were able to dictate the historical narrative of the industry—and that history usually places the two Steves at ground zero in Silicon Valley battling evil giants like IBM, leaving little room for outsiders from southern California, much less the rest of the world.
Reality is less tidy. By the time of Vector's disintegration, all three of the original founders had moved on to other businesses (Ely left Vector without drama in 1983). As usual, Lore Harp McGovern remained fearless: her very next venture pioneered a disposable device that allowed women to urinate standing up. "It was a little bit ahead of its time," she says, without any hint of understatement.
In 2015, the tech industry's gender gap remains a topic that generates headlines. It would be easy to conclude that this gap was an original sin of a male-dominated industry. But we've forgotten how two women from California ran a firm that pioneered influential practices such as attention to product aesthetics, vertical integration (Vector has its own in-house software developers), and establishing training networks, providing packaged PC solutions, and treating employees like an extended family. Some of what Vector pioneered is now intertwined into the tech industry's DNA.
Thanks to Vector, the origins of the personal computer cannot be separated from the story of women in technology. The personal computer has always belonged to all of us.
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