科學人特別報導】
專訪環保署長張國龍：「台灣土地的病情應該講清楚」
環保署長張國龍，長期投入台灣環保運動。如今，從社運團體到中央部會，如何在環保署施展所長，在部會間如何折衝協調，是他最大的挑戰。
採訪＼李家維、王榮文 整理＼鄭靜琪【更多精采內容在本期科學人雜誌】
科學人封面故事
以下是《科學人》雜誌發行人王榮文與總編輯李家維的訪談紀要：
李家維：您是一位物理學者，同時又長期關心台灣環境保護，現在被任命為環保署長，領導一個重要的中央部會。您有什麼樣的特質，會讓政府對您信任、讓民眾對您有信心？
張國龍：做為一個科學人，在背景的訓練，以及對問題的解決，要比其他不同行業的訓練要好得多。不只台灣的環保署長找科學人來做，美國也一樣找科學人來做，全世界很多重要的OECD（經濟合作暨發展組織）國家，很多環保的中央業務，也都找科學人來負責。
台灣面臨的問題，比世界上其他地方更棘手，而且困難度更高，迫切性更嚴重，原因是西方國家追求經濟的成長，從工業革命到今天，有200多年的時間讓他們調適，發現什麼地方有不妥，可透過自我約束的調整機制，穩穩的往前跨步。
台灣沒有這個機會。外國200多年的經驗，我們用二、三十年的時間就濃縮了，沒有空間，也沒有調適的機制，所以我們累積很多的錯誤，特別是一些政策的錯誤所造成環境的衝擊，是無法逆轉、挽回的。
最明顯的例子就是台灣地下水的污染。過去石化工業為了成本的考量，以為髒的東西只要不見了，眼不見為淨，就把最高污染的廢液，用高壓灌到地下。該地區的地下水就變成永久性的污染，即使現在可以把髒水抽出來，但是，抽不乾淨。
毒物已經被土壤吸附了，不可能用乾淨的水再洗出來。我們不能說外國完全沒有這些問題，但是外國的步調慢了我們10倍，所以他們第一次發現，就可以馬上調整腳步，不再犯第二次錯誤，因為第二次可能是三、五年以後。台灣犯第二次錯誤，可能就是一個星期或一個月以後，來不及調適，造成台灣今日的環境衝擊，到了一個非常困難收拾的地步。
要處理這些問題，不是只從工程面考量，也要各方面的分析，因為工程面的考量可以解決特定的問題，卻可能製造出更多傷害環境的問題。所以我常說，用工程或技術來解決問題，叫做以毒攻毒，所以必須思考如何全盤性的考量，才可以達成社會極大利益的目標。
例如中石化安順廠的戴奧辛污染，目前發現有60公頃遭到重金屬汞與戴奧辛的污染，但我們的調查還沒有結束，預估污染區域可能會增加一倍，大約100多公頃。
這些高污染的地區，如果單純以技術層次來處理，唯一的辦法是挖掉，戴奧辛不溶於水，而半衰期到現在都還測不出來，因為這些東西只在一、二十年前才開始被關心，如果半衰期是200年，初步估計，住在污染地區的人，比一般人容易受到癌症侵襲，但是如果要把污染地區清理乾淨，勢必付出相當高的社會代價。
所以我們要從科學的觀點，以社會利益極大化為目標，來設計如何清理這些地方。
王榮文：如果換算成經濟成本，可以知道必須付出多少錢的代價嗎？有個數字就可以對比經濟發展的關係。張國龍：這個成本會大得驚人。我們要算出來，是將來做為處理的參考。這是錯誤的代價，說不定過去經濟成長得到的好處，拿來重新整理我們的家園，都還不夠。
調查報告不該是機密
李家維：美國能源部在前幾年發起一個影響重大的人類基因組計畫，可能很少人可以清楚說出，美國能源部為什麼要去檢驗人類的基因、序列是如何。但是從這個案例看來，一件重要的事情、對的事情，各個政府單位應該是協調，而且是爭著要去做，而不是爭著去擺脫關係。
環保署與其他中央單位的關係，是緊密連結的，但長期民間對於環保署的印象，不是那麼積極任事。一個多月前，鴨蛋的戴奧辛污染曝光時，我曾打電話給環保署的人員問，住在焚化爐旁邊的居民，身體檢查情形和血液裡戴奧辛含量等問題，得到的答案是：這該是衛生署的業務。
請您說明今後環保署除了要解決本身棘手的困難外，在政府各機構之間將扮演什麼角色？
張國龍：受戴奧辛污染的鴨蛋，消息發佈之後，所有需要承擔責任的部會都相當緊張。
李家維：經濟部做了很長期的隱瞞，環保署之前知不知道詳情？
張國龍：我們一直到今年2月才知道鴨蛋受到污染，這件事與經濟部、農委會和衛生署都有關係，環保署也的確沒有盡到應當盡的責任。例如在設廠時，環境影響評估對戴奧辛的項目，並未注意到這一環。
李家維：這就很不可思議，因為戴奧辛的兩個主要來源，鋼廠相關產業是其中之一，但是竟然沒有列為檢驗標準。
張國龍：環保署在第一個把關上就沒有注意到，可能有很多原因。他們太相信經濟部在主導這樣的設廠時會把關，因為可行性研究報告必須送經濟部，他們對重金屬的檢驗是做了，反而是戴奧辛根本沒有做，環保署對這件事情也沒有做追蹤。如果環保署在一開始就了解到戴奧辛應該是檢驗項目，一定會去追蹤。業者隱瞞之後，我們沒有主動發覺，是我們的責任。
我到環保署之後，希望改變一個文化，就是：從此以後，我們不要把所有的調查報告都看成是機密，所有的報告都應當公諸於世。一個好的負責態度，以及將資訊完全公開，的確可以讓全民參與並監視。
環保署其實應該像一位醫生，我們在檢查大地，就如同一位醫生檢查一個人的身體健康，檢查出有症狀，不是醫生的責任。如同我們檢查到台灣污染的嚴重性，不是環保署的罪過，這是全民為了生活的方便，為了經濟的成長，大家共同造的孽。環保署應該清楚說明：再這樣生活下去，台灣土地生的病會更嚴重。要讓人民了解台灣的污染情況，只有全民共同努力，才有機會改善台灣的環境。
李家維：隨著科技發展，為保護環境，隨時都有新增的檢驗項目和標準，環保署內部如果沒有很堅實的研究人力，就會有困境。目前可能就是如此，您將如何加強資訊的蒐集與人員的在職訓練？
張國龍：台灣的工業設施，其實都是世界其他地方有的工業，我們把它移植過來。很多環境應當關心的項目，如果能蒐集外國的資料，就盡量採用，若沒有外國的資料，就必須自己設計，例如制度上的設計與偵測程序。明顯的例子像台南的安順廠，生產五氯酚鈉，排出很多戴奧辛。當然，世界上也有很多地方生產五氯酚鈉，如義大利，過去二、三十年也發生過很多事故，事件發生後也需要遷村，把該地列為管制區。台灣現在第一步也是把該地列為管制區，接下來比較不同的是，外國案中，他們的廠區背景本來就是開闊的原野，一遷村以後，他們有足夠的時間和空間去想更好的辦法來做處置。
但是台灣的情況完全不一樣，我們發現管制區裡面以及還待偵測的區域，都是漁塭，過去在這裡生產出來的農產品，已經銷售的時間有多長？市場在哪裡？使用者是誰？完全無法追蹤，這就反映出為何台灣癌症死亡率連續多年都是第一位，環境污染絕對是原因之一。
台灣狀況特殊，從國外得不到經驗，就必須自己著手，做善後的規劃，這案例8月會有初步結果，我也物色到了適當的人選，國家衛生研究院吳成文院長也願意與我們合作，做一些與健康有關的風險評估。我們還要再找一群比較技術層面的顧問，看看對漁塭的底泥應該如何處置，因為台灣的特殊狀況，底泥的戴奧辛含量，全球沒有一個安全標準，我們要自己制定。而不同的地域有不同的使用功能，不同的使用功能有不同的含量標準，最簡單的例子，養魚底泥的污染物含量，與種荷花用底泥的污染物含量，可以定不同的標準，這樣才能達到社會利益極大化，接下來就是透過風險評估，做為制定標準的參考。
李家維：剛才談的環境保護都是跟人相關的事情，環保團體還關切很多跟人沒有那麼直接關係的對象，但是它們是這塊土地很重要的成員，例如，台灣原生有4100種植物，其中有1100種是台灣特有的。有不少特有物種，現在處於瀕臨滅絕的狀態，農委會是生態保育的主管機構，但是現在投入的編制與經費，離理想有很大一段距離，況且農委會業務重點是農業生產，這和物種保育有邏輯上的衝突。環保署有沒有計畫，把這樣的業務轉移到署裡，當成核心業務？
台灣像嬰兒，要呵護不要欺凌
張國龍：今天在中央部會裡，的確很多施政項目，追求的目標是互相衝突的，例如交通部的交通建設和農委會對綠地的利用，與環保署的終極目標不同，環保署該做全盤的管控，而時間不能等太久。最近剛好政府要改組，希望把業務導向互相衝突的幾個部會，乾脆納入一個部會，省得協調上大家針鋒相對，以後相關業務就整併成「環境資源部」。目前初步架構都已經設計好了，等立法院氣氛比較好時，就可以公開討論，台灣的永續經營才能落實。
台灣生態這麼豐富的一個島嶼，也是一個非常新生的島嶼，台灣浮出海面只有200多萬年的時間，與地球的46億年比起來，就像嬰兒一樣，這樣的嬰兒應當是所有人都要照護她、珍惜她，而不是趁她不能反抗時去欺凌跟糟蹋。
今天，推動者以開發為導向的，我常稱他們是擴張主義的信徒，而有更多人站在保護的立場，我把他們稱為簡約主義的信仰者。如果更多人能夠投入經驗與心血，很多環保團體，包括想保護瀕臨滅絕物種的團體，很多計畫，包括湖山水庫、蘇花公路，以及又要在北宜公路旁蓋一條北宜鐵路等，環保署會非常嚴肅來看待這些開發單位的要求，我們認為台灣沒有任何本錢再繼續做大規模生態與環境衝擊的開發案。
我來自於民間的環保界，我為什麼會來到這個工作，我的解釋是：政府有決心做環保。因為他們明明曉得我過去的生活態度與我的個性，一輩子到現在我沒有妥協過任何一件事情，他們也曉得一旦環境保護與經濟發展衝突時，我一定會站在環境這一邊。
王榮文：他們不怕你變成麻煩製造者？
張國龍：我相信他們了解我的個性，我也從來沒有隱瞞，他們願意讓我來主持環保署，就表示：萬一衝突時，相信我的判斷。我相信環保團體裡面的朋友，對我來這裡，會比較放心。
所以就任後，我第一次與環保團體見面時，來的團體相當多，我日後會主動到地方表達我的誠懇，因為每個地方都有當地的需求，我會傾聽他們的意見。
垃圾減量，已見成效
李家維：您一定也聽到了對垃圾焚化爐的不同意見，我舉一個切身的經驗，六、七年前我以清華大學代表的身份，和新竹市政府談，清華大學很願意跟市政府合作，解決垃圾問題，例如市政府可以要求科學園區、清大、交大、新竹師院以及各主要公家團體，一起做垃圾減量、資源回收，例如校園產生的樹枝、樹葉都不要離開校園，新竹市的垃圾量會減少1/3，但是新竹市政府很清楚的告訴我：你千萬不要這樣想，也千萬不要這樣做，我們也不可能朝這方向配合，因為焚化爐現在要燒的垃圾還不夠，需要燒更多才能養住這個焚化爐。
這是許多地方都會發生的事情，您怎麼解決這個問題？
張國龍：環保署對垃圾政策已經有一個非常明確的方向，而且這個方向在這幾年來證明是對的。五年前，我們每人每天製造的垃圾有1.24公斤，今天已經可以減少到0.7公斤，在全亞洲，我們跟新加坡一樣好。目前參與的有10個縣市，我們現在還沒有全台灣性的要求垃圾分類，明年1月1日才開始。環保署非常感激人民的誠意與合作的態度，每一次看到阿公阿婆拿著垃圾袋追垃圾車，我真的非常感動，他們是這麼善良，願意幫助。
所以垃圾減量是我們的終極目標，並且我們要減量到Zero Waste。Zero Waste被翻譯錯了，不是零廢棄，應該是零浪費。為了不要造成人民的困擾，依照零浪費的精神，我們強制全部的垃圾要分成三類，一類是資源、一類是廚餘、一類是一般垃圾，前兩類都是可回收利用的。現在的廚餘已經有部份讓養豬業拿去餵豬，有部份做堆肥，將來有些企業會拿去做土石改良的肥料等。希望所有的企業都可以發揮創造力與技術，共同利用這些資源。
資源回收的結果，現在20多座新蓋的焚化爐可能可以關掉幾座，而目前還沒有蓋好的幾座，我們已經發現沒有垃圾了，例如竹南、竹北與南投，我們準備把這三座關掉，目前我們也積極希望行政院達成我們的要求，政府當然在行政與程序上有些困擾，包括賠償、仲裁等，也需要時間。但是從全民與社會整體利益來看，我們不願意繼續浪費，因為蓋好的焚化爐要有一定的處理量才划得來。
李家維：焚化爐的建設是很高額的投資，您有決心做這樣的事情，代表有很大的毅力與風險在其中。還有沒有其他正在做大幅度改變的檢討案例，例如幾年前有電動機車的推廣計畫，後來腰斬了，現在街頭的污染還是很嚴重。對於新燃料的引進與廢氣管制，您有什麼想法？
張國龍：10 ~15年前，台北市的空氣污染大部份來自產業界，大台北地區工廠林立，特別是小型工廠與地下工廠，後來我在台北縣政府時，唯一的辦法就是讓工廠外移到工業區。外移需要誘因，當時的決定就是讓違建的工廠區域做地目變更，有利基了之後，他們才願意遷廠。因為到工業區買土地，設備都需要成本，這些成本過去都是用人民的健康來支付，人民是無辜的。
接下來就是管制工業區的排放，我們很多空氣排放標準都是用外國的，但是外國地廣人稀，我們必須採取更嚴格的標準，雖然大台北空氣改善，但是不盡人意，有很大的原因是交通車輛的廢氣。
要降低廢氣排放量，目前有兩個策略，第一是用油氣混合車，這種車子在高速公路行駛時，就一邊開始充電，一旦進入市區就改用電力，排放量就可以減少，不只讓空氣乾淨，也可以節省很多能源，例如Lexus休旅車一加侖可跑9英里，油氣混合車一加侖可跑29英里，做為城市間的交通工具是適合的。
第二個策略是希望城市內的運輸系統改用不同的燃料，例如PLG（液化瓦斯），廢氣排放量比傳統的柴油汽油低很多，但是過去社會硬體的設計，例如加油站只有柴油與汽油，所以加氣站不足，必須讓每個加油站也是加氣站。
下一目標是希望公部門的汽車、小貨車，都改用PLG，因為PLG的壓力只有兩個大氣壓力，我們拍個手掌的壓力都不只了，所以工業安全是沒有問題的。
【更多精采內容在本期科學人雜誌】
Tuesday, August 09, 2005
Monday, August 08, 2005
聯合新聞網 | 資訊科技 | 數位生活 | 消費冷感 數位化後遺症
消費冷感 數位化後遺症
【黃偉正】
「數位化」為民眾生活帶來了不同的新便利，尤其是有關視聽娛樂的個人或家用產品，近年間無不大肆流行「數位化」趨勢，因而造就了許多功能豐富，款式多樣的新電子產品。但市場上最近也出現許多「另類」的數位化後遺症，值得注意。
功能複雜化 花樣太多眼花撩亂
以家用視聽數位裝置為例，現在已變成單看外觀搞不清楚它擁有什麼功能的情景，即便是業界專家還是市場玩家，遇到一盒AV裝置，在沒有開殼、沒有閱讀規格或沒有人說明情況下，單看裝置外貌、或加看I/O接孔，都不易猜出盒中到底提供那些功能，更遑論一般消費者的理解。
其次，目前數位裝置很流行將外觀「化繁為簡」，主機上只留下最基本的少許按鍵，如電源開關、播放鍵等，期能免除消費者的應用焦慮，主機所有的功能全部佈建在一支遙控器身上，如果失去遙控器，也等於喪失產品大半功能。
此外，也出現遙控器按鍵不夠用的情況，需以單次按與長按來區分不同的命令；或者，藉由韌體設計，將各功能包裹在層層的目錄選單中，再利用遙控器上下左右鍵，配合螢幕資訊顯示來操作；另也觀察到有Set Top Box產品，提供二支不同顏色遙控器來控制內建2個選台器等設計，這些現象顯示，數位影音裝置的複雜使用與整合功能問題愈益嚴重。
過去類比家電產品，較常有各別廠商獨到的工藝表現，但在數位化後功能差異性縮小，廠商只能以不同功能整合、組合，或利用外觀、造型的變化，來進行產品區隔化。導致數位產品不只是功能複雜，是連機種也五花八門，令人眼花撩亂。
未來所謂的「新產品」，也預期將是多了功能、換了應用組合的產品，甚至改了造型、改了按鍵，只要能造就出另種時尚或風格的設計，也叫做是「新產品」。為了營造新產品的流行風潮或改朝換代，添加服務或強塞功能於新產品，成為許多產品線的開發目標，例如：消費者可能還來不及知道是否需要手機相機，也搞不清楚多少萬像素符合使用時，市場上已經「全線」佈滿相機手機了，這不知是對消費者體貼用心，還是營造市場大餅的吸金用心？
買前做功課 須先搞懂品牌功用
而且由於數位產品功能組合十分多樣化，消費者欲了解產品功能規格之間的差異，以及與本身的需求是否合宜，就要十分用功；加上許多個人裝置更帶有鮮明的個人時尚品味，消費者要面對多品牌、多造型機種，要收歛選出自己的產品，也具有相當難度；尤其目前的數位產品，價格其實不比傳統或前一代產品便宜（例如：MP3隨身聽＞CD隨身聽；照相手機＞一般手機），消費者必須要先做些功課，才能出門選購。
消費者收集產品資訊、比較功能規格、聽取別人的使用口碑的事前準備之消費趨勢，未來還會愈來愈明顯且普及，這可由網路漸多的產品交流討論區，以及二手交易網站中的討論聲浪中窺見端倪。因此在網路普及，資訊豐富又易查詢的今天，產品廠商絕對要正視這些坊間的意見流動情形，將會影響到產品的成敗與機會。
數位化消費性產品其實競爭非常激烈，廠商經常以多式樣且快速推陳出新的方式，吸引消費者的注目與購買。但也由於頻度過高，式樣多但功能好像又差不多或根本很難理解比較，消費者已漸出現消費冷感且慣用觀望與等待來對應市場。
例如：手機，多數人已備擁一支堪用手機，在沒有絕對的立即需求下，市場上新機頻出，式樣眾多，加上還沒上市的新產品消息總是捷足先「登」（且留下伏筆：預計xx月上市），如此，想要享受時尚換支手機的消費者，採買的過程將從數天延展至數個月都還可能在觀望等待將屢見不鮮。
回歸基本面 應遵循消費者需求
過去科技的確來自人性，但現在與未來的科技產品，似乎反過來在開發人性以引發消費，而且蔚為風潮。事實上，以行銷的角度來觀察，回歸基本面，以消費者實際需求為依歸才是維持消費忠誠的不二法門，iPOD的暢銷就是最好的見證。
（作者為資策會MIC資深產業分析師）
【2005/08/08 經濟日報】
【黃偉正】
「數位化」為民眾生活帶來了不同的新便利，尤其是有關視聽娛樂的個人或家用產品，近年間無不大肆流行「數位化」趨勢，因而造就了許多功能豐富，款式多樣的新電子產品。但市場上最近也出現許多「另類」的數位化後遺症，值得注意。
功能複雜化 花樣太多眼花撩亂
以家用視聽數位裝置為例，現在已變成單看外觀搞不清楚它擁有什麼功能的情景，即便是業界專家還是市場玩家，遇到一盒AV裝置，在沒有開殼、沒有閱讀規格或沒有人說明情況下，單看裝置外貌、或加看I/O接孔，都不易猜出盒中到底提供那些功能，更遑論一般消費者的理解。
其次，目前數位裝置很流行將外觀「化繁為簡」，主機上只留下最基本的少許按鍵，如電源開關、播放鍵等，期能免除消費者的應用焦慮，主機所有的功能全部佈建在一支遙控器身上，如果失去遙控器，也等於喪失產品大半功能。
此外，也出現遙控器按鍵不夠用的情況，需以單次按與長按來區分不同的命令；或者，藉由韌體設計，將各功能包裹在層層的目錄選單中，再利用遙控器上下左右鍵，配合螢幕資訊顯示來操作；另也觀察到有Set Top Box產品，提供二支不同顏色遙控器來控制內建2個選台器等設計，這些現象顯示，數位影音裝置的複雜使用與整合功能問題愈益嚴重。
過去類比家電產品，較常有各別廠商獨到的工藝表現，但在數位化後功能差異性縮小，廠商只能以不同功能整合、組合，或利用外觀、造型的變化，來進行產品區隔化。導致數位產品不只是功能複雜，是連機種也五花八門，令人眼花撩亂。
未來所謂的「新產品」，也預期將是多了功能、換了應用組合的產品，甚至改了造型、改了按鍵，只要能造就出另種時尚或風格的設計，也叫做是「新產品」。為了營造新產品的流行風潮或改朝換代，添加服務或強塞功能於新產品，成為許多產品線的開發目標，例如：消費者可能還來不及知道是否需要手機相機，也搞不清楚多少萬像素符合使用時，市場上已經「全線」佈滿相機手機了，這不知是對消費者體貼用心，還是營造市場大餅的吸金用心？
買前做功課 須先搞懂品牌功用
而且由於數位產品功能組合十分多樣化，消費者欲了解產品功能規格之間的差異，以及與本身的需求是否合宜，就要十分用功；加上許多個人裝置更帶有鮮明的個人時尚品味，消費者要面對多品牌、多造型機種，要收歛選出自己的產品，也具有相當難度；尤其目前的數位產品，價格其實不比傳統或前一代產品便宜（例如：MP3隨身聽＞CD隨身聽；照相手機＞一般手機），消費者必須要先做些功課，才能出門選購。
消費者收集產品資訊、比較功能規格、聽取別人的使用口碑的事前準備之消費趨勢，未來還會愈來愈明顯且普及，這可由網路漸多的產品交流討論區，以及二手交易網站中的討論聲浪中窺見端倪。因此在網路普及，資訊豐富又易查詢的今天，產品廠商絕對要正視這些坊間的意見流動情形，將會影響到產品的成敗與機會。
數位化消費性產品其實競爭非常激烈，廠商經常以多式樣且快速推陳出新的方式，吸引消費者的注目與購買。但也由於頻度過高，式樣多但功能好像又差不多或根本很難理解比較，消費者已漸出現消費冷感且慣用觀望與等待來對應市場。
例如：手機，多數人已備擁一支堪用手機，在沒有絕對的立即需求下，市場上新機頻出，式樣眾多，加上還沒上市的新產品消息總是捷足先「登」（且留下伏筆：預計xx月上市），如此，想要享受時尚換支手機的消費者，採買的過程將從數天延展至數個月都還可能在觀望等待將屢見不鮮。
回歸基本面 應遵循消費者需求
過去科技的確來自人性，但現在與未來的科技產品，似乎反過來在開發人性以引發消費，而且蔚為風潮。事實上，以行銷的角度來觀察，回歸基本面，以消費者實際需求為依歸才是維持消費忠誠的不二法門，iPOD的暢銷就是最好的見證。
（作者為資策會MIC資深產業分析師）
【2005/08/08 經濟日報】
Tuesday, August 02, 2005
The Value of Inventive Services
這篇文章很有趣, 某程度上他解釋了Hannspree在business model的缺陷, 同時也解釋了製造業跟服務業的分野, 越來越模糊的關係, even 可以回過頭想想我們自己的研究案....
It's the biggest part of the economy these days, but many companies' innovation remain focused on products. Here's why that needs to change
Ask most executives how innovation can spur their growth, and they'll immediately think about changes in their product lineup. Wrong. They should be thinking "services."
As a percentage of GDP today, services comprise 82% of our economic output. The number has been increasing for years. The crossover point from products to services actually happened in 1987. Yet when we think of innovation, most of us are still thinking products -- iPods, Mini Coopers, Treo's, and the like still dominate our mindshare about what's cool.
And yes, they are cool, but cool isn't what's making the most money or growing at the fastest rate these days. Look at General Motors (GM). In 2004, the carmaker lost $95 million on revenues of $193.5 billion. However, this loss was significantly underwritten by GM's financial-services arm, which made $2.9 billion, according to its annual report.
Yes, without financial services, GM's loss would have totaled $3 billion. The company's stock and bonds took a big hit in the aftermath of its earnings report, but I wonder what further damage would have been wrought had financial services not been there to buoy the company.
BIGGEST PROMISE. In terms of growth, GM's On-Star service has grown to 3.3 million subscribers that pay an average of $300 per year for it. Although On-Star had a slow start, it's now in ramp-up mode due to the decision to make it standard equipment on all GM vehicles -- that would be over 8 million per year. If just half of these drivers decide to keep the service, On-Star's revenue moves into the range of $2 billion, with profit margins that most certainly beat the industry average for automobiles.
And so it goes. For almost every leading big corporation -- and, paradoxically, especially those that make products -- growth in services holds the most promise for successful differentiation and sustained profitability for the future.
With this palpable shift to services in our economy, one would think that service providers would be looking to every tool available to drive better, faster, and cheaper innovation. Yet after studying over 150 services businesses over the last 18 months, my colleagues and I at Peer Insight have determined that service innovation as a discipline is still in its infancy. Here's why:
Dearth of Information
First of all, there just isn't a lot of information or rigor around the topic. While reams of books and articles abound on the topic of product innovation and product development, very few focus specifically on services and the distinctions therein.
And you would be hard pressed to find a course on service development or innovation on any B-school campus, reflecting the dearth of academic concentration in the area. Today, few universities even teach service management, and if they do, the emphasis falls to quality management and the operational excellence associated with existing service environments, never the invention and nurture of new service concepts. Further, there are few public forums where professionals involved in service innovation can learn from exemplars.
Second, although we have found that the best service innovators draw on the conventional wisdom associated with product development, most aren't using the latest tools, such as ethnographic research and rapid development techniques, to drive innovation. Just as important, they don't understand the basic distinctions between product- and service-innovation environments. Before rushing off to innovate in services, managers would do well to understand their uniqueness.
Climate Change
By far the biggest distinction between products and services is that services are intangible, and therefore much more complex when it comes to buying decisions.
Because you can't touch them and feel them ahead of consuming them, conveying the brand promise is paramount for service providers. This requires more brand savvy and investment than that for products. This is how you know the difference between a Ritz-Carlton, a Sheraton, and a Holiday Inn Express by just hearing their names. Largely business-to-consumer companies are further along the learning curve on this than business-to-business companies, who often think of brand management as just having a recognizable logo.
Things that make the offering tangible help facilitate the diffusion of intangible services. My business partner's favorite example of a service made tangible is the toothbrush he receives from his dentist after each visit that has the month he needs to return imprinted on it. The implicit message? "We care about you and your teeth -- let us serve you."
DISCREET EVENTS. Another difference from products is that with services, ownership isn't conveyed. Customers merely "rent" capacity for periods of time. Since people are so vastly different, service innovation requires extraordinary skill in anticipating customer needs, especially because of the wide range of situations confronted in the field. There are empathic design research methods that help discover which latent needs could be put to good use here. But they have yet to be deployed widely in the service sector.
A third difference is that with products, consumption is a discreet event that happens after the purchase is made. With services, supply and consumption happen simultaneously. This has enormous organizational consequences. It requires massive, 24/7 command, control, and logistical capabilities. Think of Hertz, Marriott International, or Citigroup. These are far different systems to build out than your average production line and require an even higher degree of cross-functional integration than found in manufacturing.
In service environments, the proverbial "customer journey" happens over multiple touch points. It's very complex. It often involves a large number of interactions between people and machines and among people. Therefore, services are much more dependent on big investments in information-technology development, as well as good old fashion employee training.
THINKING BIG. Finally, research and development groups don't tend to exist in most service companies. This makes it more difficult for innovation expertise to find a home. By comparison, product-based companies regularly invest billions to understand where their future revenue streams will come from.
Conversations I have had with managers of service innovation at many big companies suggest that the tendency is to support Six Sigma-type quality improvements. This approach can spawn incremental ideas, but never bold, game-changing concepts, or paradigm-breaking moves.
Just look how long it took for banks to get their ATMs to "speak" Spanish. It shows how difficult it is to implement rather easy improvements if there's little appetite and budget for innovation.
A View to the Future
So what should companies do to innovate, given the clear differences between products and services? There are a number of innovation tools, both old and new, that can be applied to service environments. My advice to anyone trying to innovate in a service environment would be to:
• Get your senior leadership team's attention around the issue. Bold moves are impossible without their support.
• Constrain the problem around where to play. Focus in terms of solving customer needs. What are the issues and opportunities? How do these relate to your current set of offerings? What's the competitive environment like?
• Lay out the end-to-end customer journey you envision for the new service. Where will you be able to provide a compelling value proposition that can provide a more convenient solution or save customers time or money? How does this influence your potential business model? Zip Car reinvented the urban auto rental business with this type of approach.
• Once you have a solid concept around the value you would like to provide, seek feedback from important stakeholders. Start with the end customer, of course, but also include other important players in the service environment's ecosystem. If FedEx hadn't acknowledged the critical role administrative assistants play in getting packages out, they never would have invented one of its critical management tools, FedEx Ship Manager.
There are a growing number of tools and metrics for service innovation. At Peer Insight, we're gathering evidence from dozens of companies that reveal many of the key principles of successful service innovation. We have organized them into 17 disciplines that allow companies to benchmark themselves. My next column will deal with how service managers can use this framework.
It's the biggest part of the economy these days, but many companies' innovation remain focused on products. Here's why that needs to change
Ask most executives how innovation can spur their growth, and they'll immediately think about changes in their product lineup. Wrong. They should be thinking "services."
As a percentage of GDP today, services comprise 82% of our economic output. The number has been increasing for years. The crossover point from products to services actually happened in 1987. Yet when we think of innovation, most of us are still thinking products -- iPods, Mini Coopers, Treo's, and the like still dominate our mindshare about what's cool.
And yes, they are cool, but cool isn't what's making the most money or growing at the fastest rate these days. Look at General Motors (GM). In 2004, the carmaker lost $95 million on revenues of $193.5 billion. However, this loss was significantly underwritten by GM's financial-services arm, which made $2.9 billion, according to its annual report.
Yes, without financial services, GM's loss would have totaled $3 billion. The company's stock and bonds took a big hit in the aftermath of its earnings report, but I wonder what further damage would have been wrought had financial services not been there to buoy the company.
BIGGEST PROMISE. In terms of growth, GM's On-Star service has grown to 3.3 million subscribers that pay an average of $300 per year for it. Although On-Star had a slow start, it's now in ramp-up mode due to the decision to make it standard equipment on all GM vehicles -- that would be over 8 million per year. If just half of these drivers decide to keep the service, On-Star's revenue moves into the range of $2 billion, with profit margins that most certainly beat the industry average for automobiles.
And so it goes. For almost every leading big corporation -- and, paradoxically, especially those that make products -- growth in services holds the most promise for successful differentiation and sustained profitability for the future.
With this palpable shift to services in our economy, one would think that service providers would be looking to every tool available to drive better, faster, and cheaper innovation. Yet after studying over 150 services businesses over the last 18 months, my colleagues and I at Peer Insight have determined that service innovation as a discipline is still in its infancy. Here's why:
Dearth of Information
First of all, there just isn't a lot of information or rigor around the topic. While reams of books and articles abound on the topic of product innovation and product development, very few focus specifically on services and the distinctions therein.
And you would be hard pressed to find a course on service development or innovation on any B-school campus, reflecting the dearth of academic concentration in the area. Today, few universities even teach service management, and if they do, the emphasis falls to quality management and the operational excellence associated with existing service environments, never the invention and nurture of new service concepts. Further, there are few public forums where professionals involved in service innovation can learn from exemplars.
Second, although we have found that the best service innovators draw on the conventional wisdom associated with product development, most aren't using the latest tools, such as ethnographic research and rapid development techniques, to drive innovation. Just as important, they don't understand the basic distinctions between product- and service-innovation environments. Before rushing off to innovate in services, managers would do well to understand their uniqueness.
Climate Change
By far the biggest distinction between products and services is that services are intangible, and therefore much more complex when it comes to buying decisions.
Because you can't touch them and feel them ahead of consuming them, conveying the brand promise is paramount for service providers. This requires more brand savvy and investment than that for products. This is how you know the difference between a Ritz-Carlton, a Sheraton, and a Holiday Inn Express by just hearing their names. Largely business-to-consumer companies are further along the learning curve on this than business-to-business companies, who often think of brand management as just having a recognizable logo.
Things that make the offering tangible help facilitate the diffusion of intangible services. My business partner's favorite example of a service made tangible is the toothbrush he receives from his dentist after each visit that has the month he needs to return imprinted on it. The implicit message? "We care about you and your teeth -- let us serve you."
DISCREET EVENTS. Another difference from products is that with services, ownership isn't conveyed. Customers merely "rent" capacity for periods of time. Since people are so vastly different, service innovation requires extraordinary skill in anticipating customer needs, especially because of the wide range of situations confronted in the field. There are empathic design research methods that help discover which latent needs could be put to good use here. But they have yet to be deployed widely in the service sector.
A third difference is that with products, consumption is a discreet event that happens after the purchase is made. With services, supply and consumption happen simultaneously. This has enormous organizational consequences. It requires massive, 24/7 command, control, and logistical capabilities. Think of Hertz, Marriott International, or Citigroup. These are far different systems to build out than your average production line and require an even higher degree of cross-functional integration than found in manufacturing.
In service environments, the proverbial "customer journey" happens over multiple touch points. It's very complex. It often involves a large number of interactions between people and machines and among people. Therefore, services are much more dependent on big investments in information-technology development, as well as good old fashion employee training.
THINKING BIG. Finally, research and development groups don't tend to exist in most service companies. This makes it more difficult for innovation expertise to find a home. By comparison, product-based companies regularly invest billions to understand where their future revenue streams will come from.
Conversations I have had with managers of service innovation at many big companies suggest that the tendency is to support Six Sigma-type quality improvements. This approach can spawn incremental ideas, but never bold, game-changing concepts, or paradigm-breaking moves.
Just look how long it took for banks to get their ATMs to "speak" Spanish. It shows how difficult it is to implement rather easy improvements if there's little appetite and budget for innovation.
A View to the Future
So what should companies do to innovate, given the clear differences between products and services? There are a number of innovation tools, both old and new, that can be applied to service environments. My advice to anyone trying to innovate in a service environment would be to:
• Get your senior leadership team's attention around the issue. Bold moves are impossible without their support.
• Constrain the problem around where to play. Focus in terms of solving customer needs. What are the issues and opportunities? How do these relate to your current set of offerings? What's the competitive environment like?
• Lay out the end-to-end customer journey you envision for the new service. Where will you be able to provide a compelling value proposition that can provide a more convenient solution or save customers time or money? How does this influence your potential business model? Zip Car reinvented the urban auto rental business with this type of approach.
• Once you have a solid concept around the value you would like to provide, seek feedback from important stakeholders. Start with the end customer, of course, but also include other important players in the service environment's ecosystem. If FedEx hadn't acknowledged the critical role administrative assistants play in getting packages out, they never would have invented one of its critical management tools, FedEx Ship Manager.
There are a growing number of tools and metrics for service innovation. At Peer Insight, we're gathering evidence from dozens of companies that reveal many of the key principles of successful service innovation. We have organized them into 17 disciplines that allow companies to benchmark themselves. My next column will deal with how service managers can use this framework.
Tuesday, July 19, 2005
Apple Looks to Sell Videos -- and Maybe iPods to Play Them
從這篇報導來看, iPods似乎走向垂直整合的產品. 也許是受到Sony最近宣示要搶回mp3 player的市場, Apple才release這份消息....By NICK WINGFIELD and ETHAN SMITH
Staff Reporters of THE WALL STREET JOURNAL
July 18, 2005; Page B1
Apple helped ignite the digital music craze. The next possibility: video.
The Cupertino, Calif., computer and electronics company has recently held discussions with major recording companies, seeking to license music videos to sell through Apple Computer Inc.'s iTunes Music Store, according to several people in the media industry briefed on the discussions. The negotiations are a possible prelude to a version of Apple's hit iPod that would play video, a widely expected gadget that Apple has told some entertainment-industry executives that it could announce by September.
An Apple spokeswoman, Natalie Kerris, declined to comment on "rumors and speculation" about the company's plans.
Any foray into video would represent a major gamble by Apple that it could translate its smash success in digital music into a broader entertainment franchise. If successful, such efforts could help create a significant new source of income for media companies that are stepping up efforts to distribute video content on the Internet, in part to counteract the growing volumes of pirated movies, television shows and other programs being traded online.
So far, commercial movie-download services haven't widely caught on, nor have devices from Creative Technology Ltd., Samsung Electronics Co. and others that have hard disk drives onto which users can transfer video files from their PCs. Apple Chief Executive Steve Jobs, in fact, has derided the consumer appeal of watching feature-length movies on portable devices with small screens.
Yet Mr. Jobs has made a practice of criticizing product categories that Apple later adopts; he dismissed music players that use a form of storage hardware called flash memory rather than hard drives, for example, until Apple began offering the iPod Shuffle based on the technology. What's more, some analysts consider it telling that Mr. Jobs hasn't spoken out against all forms of video on portable devices, such as television programs, clips from personal camcorders and other short-form content.
Music videos, too, make sense because of the iPod's ready-made audience of music lovers. Apple in recent months has started bundling a limited number of music videos when iTunes customers purchase an entire album on the site. Users who pay $9.99 for the latest album by the White Stripes, for example, get a video for a song by the rock duo called Blue Orchid that can be downloaded to a computer.
Building on that effort, Apple has approached the four major music companies, Warner Music Group Corp., EMI Group PLC, Vivendi Universal SA's Universal Music Group and Sony BMG, a joint venture between Sony Corp. and Bertelsmann AG, to license music videos for sale through iTunes, according to people in the media industry. The videos, which could go on sale as early as September, would likely be sold for $1.99 each, with the possibility of a discount if consumers buy a music video and a song at the same time, these people say.
For music companies, a deal with Apple would represent another attempt to generate income for the music videos they sometimes spend hundreds of thousands of dollars creating. Music companies are still smarting from their two-decade-old strategic blunder of letting cable network MTV air video content for next to nothing, a decision that gave them little participation in the creation of what has become a hugely successful business for Viacom Inc.
Global music companies recently reached arrangements to charge online services like Yahoo Inc. and Time Warner Inc.'s AOL to broadcast music videos over the Internet.
Apple has also approached some media companies with television-production arms about licensing shows, one media executive said, though securing rights to sell television shows over the Internet is highly complex and is likely to take longer than other forms of video.
If Apple succeeds in creating a video-distribution service, analysts expect the company to follow up with a portable hardware device capable of playing the content, just as it has used iTunes Music Store -- which makes little money as a separate business -- to help promote sales of the highly profitable iPods. The three-year-old iPod line has led a renaissance at Apple, accounting for about a third, or $1.1 billion, of the company's $3.52 billion in total revenue last quarter.
Speculation about Apple's product moves is rampant, and frequently wide of the mark. Yet many analysts consider a video iPod a virtual certainty, in part because of Apple's strength in video software, including the Quicktime movie format and Macintosh video-editing software such as Final Cut Pro and iMovie.
In one potential clue about the company's plans, Apple recently licensed a chip from a subsidiary of Broadcom Corp. that could be used to display video on portable devices, though it can also be used to power more sophisticated graphics, a person familiar with the matter said.
"I believe it's inevitable," Richard Doherty, an analyst with Envisioneering Group, a research and consulting firm in Seaford, N.Y., says of a video iPod.
By adding video to iPods, Apple could help maintain the popularity of the devices, which have nabbed more than 90% of the market for hard-disk based music players. One threat may come from cellular phones as handset makers add increasingly sophisticated entertainment functions to the devices, including the ability to download music and video. Verizon Communications Inc., for instance, recently added a limited number of music clips to its mobile video service, which users access for a fee; other carriers are expected to follow soon.
Mr. Jobs has also fielded questions about the prospect of video iPods as head of Pixar Animation Studios, the Emeryville, Calif., movie studio responsible for "Finding Nemo" and "The Incredibles." In a conference call in May with Pixar investors and analysts, Mr. Jobs declined to say whether Pixar plans to make its library of movies available for portable video players, though he said Pixar had discussed the subject with Walt Disney Co., its movie-distribution partner.
"So far there really hasn't been a successful portable video device other than those that play industry standard DVDs, and that we participate in just because we sell DVDs," Mr. Jobs said in the call. "So who knows what's down the road?"
Monday, July 18, 2005
台幹大鬧上海灘
台幹大鬧上海灘2005/07/18
中國，創新的搖籃或墳墓？
在回答這個沒有絕對答案的問題前，先告訴你這幾個月我所經驗的一件小事。
有天當我在辦公室裡得意揚揚地告訴上海同事們，我在路邊買的盗版DVD，每片價格已從剛來時的8元人民幣，降到5元一張只有上海人才買得到的道地價格，忙著在鍵盤上運指如飛的的上海姑娘曉雯，突然不解的抬起頭望著我道：「現在誰還在買碟啊？」
是啊，現在誰還買碟啊？在同事的大笑聲中，我極不服氣地聽從指示，用百度(中國最有名的搜尋引擎。相信我，這比google好用很多。)在茫茫網海撈針。出乎意料地，我找到一堆網站。上去試了一下，簡潔的網頁要我用手機發送一個附有特定代碼的簡訊到某個電話，一分鐘後，我馬上拿到我的通關密碼。「不滿意隨時可以短消息回覆退訂。」服務真好，起碼網頁上是這樣說的。
五分鐘後，我已在線上開始看起台灣還沒有上演的世界大戰了。畫面的流暢、一月只要三十元人民幣的價格，可下載，可線上收看，內容涵蓋各式片種，還附有劇情說明和網友點評，就連台灣的各式節目一應俱全。「是啊，有了這個，現在誰還要買碟啊？」我只能洩氣的喃喃自語。
我知道這些網站幹得都是不要錢的勾當，我也知道這些網站完全視著作權於無物。但我不得不佩服，他們成功地玩出一個連比爾蓋茨（微軟最近苦心研發，希望進軍 IP電視）都看傻眼的商業模式。十分鐘裡，他已從我口袋中掏走錢。我相信即使日後網站因為版權等等因素要漲月費，我也會心干情願地買單。可以隨時看、可以在任何地方看（當然，你必須要用寬頻網路和電腦），還有豐富的互動內容，這種線上電影院去那找？
在中國，最讓我看了頭皮發麻的就是科技的應用。這裡，根本沒有章法可言，沒有所謂循序漸進這檔事。有時候憑著全民大煉鋼時代留下，全憑雙手超英趕美的土法精神就提槍上陣，但也因為如此，創新由此產生。
當台灣最近二天正為了3G開台熱烈慶祝，大陸的3G還在只聞樓梯響，不見人下來的情況。但這表示大陸的行動科技和所帶動形成的行動經濟圈比較落後嗎，答案是否定的。
例如對簡訊的應用，大陸的玩法就讓我這個跑了很多年的前電信記者瞠目結舌。前面談到的線上小額付費機制就別提了，只要你高興，幾乎每個電視節目你都可以發短信去互動留言表達意見，更別說還可以用短信當電子機票或訂計程車。
之前還親自訪問過一個一夜暴富的年輕小伙子，他只不過就是憑著一個以互動簡訊為平台，讓手機使用者可以尋找同年同月同日生的陌生人並且交談，一年之間擁有上百萬個註冊會員，快速積累千萬身價。他靠的是什麼？就是用年輕人愛交朋友愛瞎聊的個性，去充份開發簡訊運用的可能性。這例子真該讓台灣那些每次只會拿一堆炫麗科技名詞嚇唬消費者，只會感嘆消費者不長進無福消受新奇服務的電信業者好好拿去研究反省才對。
市場規模大小是創新是否得以延續或被驗証可行的原因之一，但創意卻是推動創新最不可缺的力量。兩者如果能夠結合，那力量之大猶如愛因斯坦的相對論一般，套句這裡愛用的口頭禪：「是炸開的。」中國，現在看來很有這個條件。
上海因為高樓處處，每棟樓動輒數十層，電梯就算再多也不夠用，所以一樓往往都是大排長龍等電梯的景象。這等電梯的幾分鐘空檔，究竟該做什麼？這個長以以來未曾有人解答的問題，有個才三十多歲名叫江南春的年輕人決定用他的方法試試看。
從三年前開始，江南春在每個電梯口前裝設液晶螢幕，利用ADSL線路日夜推播，針對辦公樓進出族群量身訂做的廣告，這個看來並不高明的主意，讓他在今年七月十四日登上納斯達克主席台敲響開市鐘，並為它贏得６億人民幣的身價。這個被大陸廣告界喻為第五大媒體的公司，叫做分眾傳媒。如今它已在全中國數十個城市佈下最少十萬台以上的液晶電視，讓上千萬個搭電梯的人每天最少都得看上六分鐘以上的廣告。
神奇吧！這種利用現實缺陷再利用的創新（跟IPOD SHUFFLE因為省成本拿掉液晶顯示選曲功能，讓消費者只能瞎聽歌曲，卻能另創「生活就是隨機」的行銷口號獨樹一幟的作法同出一轍）真讓人佩服的五體投地。
中國式的創新讓人驚喜，這其中包含了因地制宜、因為科技進步，不用再多花基礎建設成本一步到位（如偏遠地區乾脆不建固網，直接架設無線基地台）、刻意漠視法律，不受西方世界的條框約束等因素的混合，才造就這般新天新地景象。
中國的廣大市場，是提供創新實驗的泛土，但很不幸的，中國卻也是創新的墳墓。
中國對知識產權的維護尚未到位，固然造就許多創新商業模式的可趁之機，但接踵而來的，其他人的快速模仿，馬上讓這些創新淪為削價競爭下的犧牲品。例如之前談到的電梯廣告，如今市場上最少有十多家與其競爭，連名稱都取得相近，例如聚眾、大眾傳媒等等，魚目混珠、龍蛇雜處的情形相當嚴重。但分眾卻也無法仿效亞馬遜書店，把「點擊紀錄購買行為」這種讓人難以服氣的創新，堂而皇之地在美國註冊並受到保護，只能任由眾業者如同土狼般嘶咬這塊市場肥肉。
中國之所以是創新者墳墓的另一個原因，是因為創新的本質往往沒有更深一層的不可取代性，很多都是取巧變通下的產物，初遇時偶有驚喜，但細究之後也就沒什麼。中國游資太多，人工便宜，地方廣大，資訊流通沒有想像中快速，一旦有好點子出現在市場，三兩下馬上被「克隆」（CLONE），有時還能青出於藍更勝於藍。君不見蘋果I –TUNE和I-POD成功後多少人眼紅，但能跟上者幾希？有誰又能真正參透其創新本質？無怪乎執行長賈布斯老神在在。
中國究竟是創新的搖藍還是墳墓？這答案目前看來一半一半。
中國，創新的搖籃或墳墓？
在回答這個沒有絕對答案的問題前，先告訴你這幾個月我所經驗的一件小事。
有天當我在辦公室裡得意揚揚地告訴上海同事們，我在路邊買的盗版DVD，每片價格已從剛來時的8元人民幣，降到5元一張只有上海人才買得到的道地價格，忙著在鍵盤上運指如飛的的上海姑娘曉雯，突然不解的抬起頭望著我道：「現在誰還在買碟啊？」
是啊，現在誰還買碟啊？在同事的大笑聲中，我極不服氣地聽從指示，用百度(中國最有名的搜尋引擎。相信我，這比google好用很多。)在茫茫網海撈針。出乎意料地，我找到一堆網站。上去試了一下，簡潔的網頁要我用手機發送一個附有特定代碼的簡訊到某個電話，一分鐘後，我馬上拿到我的通關密碼。「不滿意隨時可以短消息回覆退訂。」服務真好，起碼網頁上是這樣說的。
五分鐘後，我已在線上開始看起台灣還沒有上演的世界大戰了。畫面的流暢、一月只要三十元人民幣的價格，可下載，可線上收看，內容涵蓋各式片種，還附有劇情說明和網友點評，就連台灣的各式節目一應俱全。「是啊，有了這個，現在誰還要買碟啊？」我只能洩氣的喃喃自語。
我知道這些網站幹得都是不要錢的勾當，我也知道這些網站完全視著作權於無物。但我不得不佩服，他們成功地玩出一個連比爾蓋茨（微軟最近苦心研發，希望進軍 IP電視）都看傻眼的商業模式。十分鐘裡，他已從我口袋中掏走錢。我相信即使日後網站因為版權等等因素要漲月費，我也會心干情願地買單。可以隨時看、可以在任何地方看（當然，你必須要用寬頻網路和電腦），還有豐富的互動內容，這種線上電影院去那找？
在中國，最讓我看了頭皮發麻的就是科技的應用。這裡，根本沒有章法可言，沒有所謂循序漸進這檔事。有時候憑著全民大煉鋼時代留下，全憑雙手超英趕美的土法精神就提槍上陣，但也因為如此，創新由此產生。
當台灣最近二天正為了3G開台熱烈慶祝，大陸的3G還在只聞樓梯響，不見人下來的情況。但這表示大陸的行動科技和所帶動形成的行動經濟圈比較落後嗎，答案是否定的。
例如對簡訊的應用，大陸的玩法就讓我這個跑了很多年的前電信記者瞠目結舌。前面談到的線上小額付費機制就別提了，只要你高興，幾乎每個電視節目你都可以發短信去互動留言表達意見，更別說還可以用短信當電子機票或訂計程車。
之前還親自訪問過一個一夜暴富的年輕小伙子，他只不過就是憑著一個以互動簡訊為平台，讓手機使用者可以尋找同年同月同日生的陌生人並且交談，一年之間擁有上百萬個註冊會員，快速積累千萬身價。他靠的是什麼？就是用年輕人愛交朋友愛瞎聊的個性，去充份開發簡訊運用的可能性。這例子真該讓台灣那些每次只會拿一堆炫麗科技名詞嚇唬消費者，只會感嘆消費者不長進無福消受新奇服務的電信業者好好拿去研究反省才對。
市場規模大小是創新是否得以延續或被驗証可行的原因之一，但創意卻是推動創新最不可缺的力量。兩者如果能夠結合，那力量之大猶如愛因斯坦的相對論一般，套句這裡愛用的口頭禪：「是炸開的。」中國，現在看來很有這個條件。
上海因為高樓處處，每棟樓動輒數十層，電梯就算再多也不夠用，所以一樓往往都是大排長龍等電梯的景象。這等電梯的幾分鐘空檔，究竟該做什麼？這個長以以來未曾有人解答的問題，有個才三十多歲名叫江南春的年輕人決定用他的方法試試看。
從三年前開始，江南春在每個電梯口前裝設液晶螢幕，利用ADSL線路日夜推播，針對辦公樓進出族群量身訂做的廣告，這個看來並不高明的主意，讓他在今年七月十四日登上納斯達克主席台敲響開市鐘，並為它贏得６億人民幣的身價。這個被大陸廣告界喻為第五大媒體的公司，叫做分眾傳媒。如今它已在全中國數十個城市佈下最少十萬台以上的液晶電視，讓上千萬個搭電梯的人每天最少都得看上六分鐘以上的廣告。
神奇吧！這種利用現實缺陷再利用的創新（跟IPOD SHUFFLE因為省成本拿掉液晶顯示選曲功能，讓消費者只能瞎聽歌曲，卻能另創「生活就是隨機」的行銷口號獨樹一幟的作法同出一轍）真讓人佩服的五體投地。
中國式的創新讓人驚喜，這其中包含了因地制宜、因為科技進步，不用再多花基礎建設成本一步到位（如偏遠地區乾脆不建固網，直接架設無線基地台）、刻意漠視法律，不受西方世界的條框約束等因素的混合，才造就這般新天新地景象。
中國的廣大市場，是提供創新實驗的泛土，但很不幸的，中國卻也是創新的墳墓。
中國對知識產權的維護尚未到位，固然造就許多創新商業模式的可趁之機，但接踵而來的，其他人的快速模仿，馬上讓這些創新淪為削價競爭下的犧牲品。例如之前談到的電梯廣告，如今市場上最少有十多家與其競爭，連名稱都取得相近，例如聚眾、大眾傳媒等等，魚目混珠、龍蛇雜處的情形相當嚴重。但分眾卻也無法仿效亞馬遜書店，把「點擊紀錄購買行為」這種讓人難以服氣的創新，堂而皇之地在美國註冊並受到保護，只能任由眾業者如同土狼般嘶咬這塊市場肥肉。
中國之所以是創新者墳墓的另一個原因，是因為創新的本質往往沒有更深一層的不可取代性，很多都是取巧變通下的產物，初遇時偶有驚喜，但細究之後也就沒什麼。中國游資太多，人工便宜，地方廣大，資訊流通沒有想像中快速，一旦有好點子出現在市場，三兩下馬上被「克隆」（CLONE），有時還能青出於藍更勝於藍。君不見蘋果I –TUNE和I-POD成功後多少人眼紅，但能跟上者幾希？有誰又能真正參透其創新本質？無怪乎執行長賈布斯老神在在。
中國究竟是創新的搖藍還是墳墓？這答案目前看來一半一半。
Social Machines
Social Machines Social Machines
By Wade Roush August 2005
(Editor's note: While writing this feature for the magazine, senior editor Wade Roush added notes to the story. He also solicited reader feedback, which was incorporated here. Throughout the article, readers can mouse over the bold text to see what early readers contributed. If you are unable to click on the link in the contribution, simply click on the bolded word in the article, which will take you to the appropriate page.)
My boss, Jason Pontin, caused a minor ruckus in May while attending D3, the Wall Street Journal's third annual "All Things Digital" conference outside San Diego. The editor in chief of Technology Review, like many executives, entrepreneurs, engineers, and students these days, doesn't go anywhere without his wireless gear--meaning, at a minimum, a Wi-Fi-enabled laptop and a cell phone. At D3, Jason was using his laptop to file blog (or Web log) posts "live" from the conference floor, summarizing talks by Bill Gates, Steve Jobs, Sun Microsystems CEO Scott McNealy, and other computer-industry celebrities. But on the third day, he couldn't find a signal. The Wi-Fi network he'd been accessing was on by mistake, a conference staffer told him. She explained that the hosts of the conference--Walt Mossberg and Kara Swisher, two of the Journal's technology writers--had decided that no one should have Internet access from the main ballroom.
Jason, naturally, wrote a new blog post
Blog post: See pontin.trblogs.com/archives/ 2005/05/d3_suppressing.html.
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about the incident (from the hallway this time). Forbidding live blogging at a technology conference, he remarked, "seems a very retrograde move." Mossberg responded hours later. "It is untrue that Kara and I banned live blogging at D3, from the ballroom or anywhere else," he explained. "We merely declined to provide Wi-Fi, to avoid the common phenomenon that has ruined too many tech conferences--near universal checking of e-mail and surfing of the Web during the program."
Other bloggers
Other bloggers: Including me. See www.continuousblog.net/2005/05/ disconnected_at.html.
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soon pounced on the minicontroversy. Some commended Mossberg's decision and warned against the perils of "continuous partial attention,"
Continuous partial attention: A phrase coined by Linda Stone, a former Microsoft vice president and a widely respected authority on human-computer interfaces.
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the state of mental blurriness thought to be induced when information is constantly pouring in from multiple sources. Others extolled the social benefits of "always on" connectivity. "During conferences the back channel can and does enhance the fore channel, especially if I'm able to look up information that would be too tedious, basic, or digressive to ask about during a Q&A," wrote Gardner Campbell, an assistant vice president for teaching and learning technologies at the University of Mary Washington in Fredericksburg, VA. "I can also share the experience, and be newly energized, by being in touch with staff and friends and family who are not able to attend with me."
Both sides had a point. But the most telling thing about the debate was that it happened at all. Without much hoopla, many conference centers and university and corporate campuses--even entire metropolises, in the case of Philadelphia and a few other cities--are being turned into giant Wi-Fi hot spots. Trains, planes, airports, and libraries are also installing wireless networks to serve customers carrying wireless gadgets. As a result, many businesspeople, students, and Starbucks addicts now expect cheap, easy access to the Internet as a matter of course. Losing it can feel like being stranded.
Constant connectivity has changed what it means to participate in a conference or any other gathering. Using chat rooms, blogs, wikis,
Wikis: Web pages that allow users to add content or edit existing content.
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photo-sharing sites, and other technologies, people at real-world meetings can now tap into an electronic swirl of commentary and interpretation by other participants--the "back channel" mentioned by Campbell. There are trade-offs: this new information stream can indeed draw attention away from the here and now. But many people seem willing to make them, pleased by the productivity they gain in circumstances where they'd otherwise be cut off from their offices or homes. There is meaning in all of this. After a decade of hype about "mobility," personal computing has finally and irreversibly cut its bonds to the desktop and has moved into devices we can carry everywhere. We're using this newly portable computing power to connect with others in ways no one predicted--and we won't be easily parted from our new tools.
Continuous Computing
To grasp how rapidly things are changing, consider all the things you can do today that would have been difficult or impossible just a few years ago: you can query Google via text message from your phone, keep an online diary of the Web pages you visit, download podcasts
Podcasts: Amateur radio shows without the radio. Podcasters produce MP3 recordings on whatever subjects interest them and publish the files on the Internet, where listeners can subscribe to shows, download files to their computers, and then transfer them to their portable music players, such as the Apple iPod.
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to your iPod, label your photos or bookmarks with appropriate tags at Flickr
Flickr: The photo-sharing site of choice for many digital photographers. One of its trademark features is the ability to add descriptive words, or "tags," to photographs, so that the photographer or others can find them more easily later. See www.flickr.com.
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or Delicious,
Delicious: A "social bookmarking" site created by freelance software developer Joshua Schachter. Users can store URLs, personal comments, and descriptive tags that will help them identify Web pages they want to find later. See del.icio.us.
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store gigabytes of personal e-mail online, listen to the music on your home PC from any other computer connected to the Net, or find your house on an aerial photograph at Google Maps. Most of these applications are free--and the ones coming close behind them will be even more powerful. With more and more phones carrying Global Positioning System (GPS) chips, for example, it's likely that companies will offer a cornucopia of new location-based information services; you'll soon be able to find an online review instantly as you drive past a restaurant, or visit a landmark and download photos and comments left by others.
This explosion of new capabilities shouldn't be mistaken for "feature creep," the accretion of special functions that has made common programs such as Microsoft Word so mystifyingly complex. There is something different about the latest tools. They are both digital, rooted in the world of electrons and bits, and fundamentally social, built to enable new kinds of interactions among people. Blogging, text messaging, photo sharing, and Web surfing from a smart phone are just the earliest examples. Almost below our mental radar, these technologies are ushering us into a world of what could be called continuous computing--continuous in the usual sense of "uninterrupted," but also in the sense that it's continuous with our lives, in all their messy, social, biographical richness.
The arrival of continuous computing
Computing: Blog reader Hannu Leinonen comments: "I feel uneasy about the word 'computing.' It sounds like counting. In Spanish the word for computer is 'ordinador' and in Finnish it's 'tietokone.' Tietokone translates to 'knowledge machine.' We are not there yet, but have we passed computing?"
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means that people who live in populated areas of developed countries (and increasingly, developing ones such as China and India) can spend entire days inside a kind of invisible, portable "information field." This field is created by constant, largely automated cooperation between
1. the digital devices people carry, such as laptops, media players,
and camera phones,
2. the wireline and wireless networks that serve people's locations as
they travel about, and
3. the Internet and its growing collection of Web-based tools
for finding information and communicating and collaborating
with other people.
People: Blog reader Gene Becker comments: "In your definition of continuous computing, you might consider adding '4) and the devices they encounter along the way, such as situated displays, networked entertainment systems, printers, and connected vehicles.' We are just around the corner from these situated networked devices' becoming active participants in our digital experience. I wonder if you also want to pull in physical-tagging notions (RFID, bar codes, semacodes, visual tags, etc.) as the 'physical hyperlinks' that bring everyday objects into the digital mix. In the same spirit, GPS and other location technologies are starting to make physical place a first-class element of the digital experience. Oh, and can we all please work on a better term, one that doesn't use 'computing'? It's so not about that."
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This information field enables people to both pull information about virtually anything from anywhere, at any time, and push their own ideas and personalities back onto the Internet--without ever having to sit down at a desktop computer. Armed with nothing more than a smart phone, a modern urbanite can get the answer to almost any question; locate nearby colleagues, friends, and services; join virtual communities that form and disband rapidly around shared work and shared interests; and self-publish blog entries, photographs, audio recordings, and videos for an unlimited audience.
The ingredients of continuous computing have emerged piecemeal. Japanese companies, for example, have long been testing new social and personal uses for cell phones. Model smart homes
Smart homes: A leading example in the United States is the Georgia Tech Broadband Institute Residential Laboratory, a three-story home outfitted with people-tracking sensors, gesture-sensitive remote controls, and other widgets. Part of the Aware Home Research Initiative funded by Hewlett-Packard, Intel, Motorola, and the National Science Foundation, the Residential Laboratory is a classic instance of computing research that starts with a perceived need--assisting the elderly with complex, information-intensive tasks, for example--and invents gadgets and software that supposedly address the need. But as we'll see, continuous computing is an emergent phenomenon--a complex pattern of social behaviors that arises from the use of a variety of simpler digital tools. It advances in unexpected directions as people find innovative ways to put these commercial and open-source technologies to use in their social lives.
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that demonstrate how intelligent appliances will converse with each other are a perennial favorite in both Japan and the United States. But the final pieces fell into place only recently. These include the spread of Wi-Fi and other types of wireless access to millions of offices, homes, airports, and cafés; the enormous popularity of camera phones and mobile audio players; free or inexpensive voice-over-Internet phone calling; the rise of blogs as a means of both personal and political communication; personal and professional social-networking sites; tagging and social bookmarking; collaboration tools such as wikis and Microsoft's Groove Virtual Office; new tools for gathering chunks of media "microcontent" into something resembling a personalized electronic newspaper; location-based services and other applications tied to specific geographic coordinates; and new computer languages and standards that make it easy to offer powerful, personalized software services over the Web. What makes all these tools different from the computing styles of the past is that they fit more naturally into our real lives--meaning, for example, that they adapt more readily to our locations, our preferences, and our schedules.
One analyst who writes about these issues is Alex Pang, a historian of science and former managing editor of the Encylopædia Britannica who now works as a research director at the Institute for the Future, a Palo Alto, CA, think tank. Software engineers, he says, have discovered that computer science's decades-long effort to make computers smart enough to understand humans is simply irrelevant; they can make computing truly personal and social using simple Web-based programming tools. After all, we don't really want to talk with computers--we want to talk through them. "The brilliance of social-software applications like Flickr, Delicious, and Technorati
Technorati: A search engine built by software developer David Sifry that scans millions of blogs and displays the most recent posts relating to any given keyword or tag.
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," Pang says, "is that they recognize that computers are really good at doing certain things, like working with gigantic quantities of data, and really bad at, for example, understanding the different meanings of certain words, like 'depression.' They devote computing resources in ways that basically enhance communication, collaboration, and thinking rather than trying to substitute for them."
The Computer That Wouldn't Disappear
While continuous computing is now a practical reality, it has been a long time coming. The first serious work on it began 17 years ago at Xerox's famed Palo Alto Research Center (PARC). That's where computer scientist Mark Weiser set out to study the notion of ubiquitous computing,
Ubiquitous computing: Weiser’s original Web pages on the subject are preserved at www.ubiq.com/hypertext/weiser/UbiHome.html.
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which he defined as "activating the world"--creating networks of small, wireless computing devices that permeated the physical structures around us, where they would supposedly anticipate our needs and act without requiring our attention. Weiser's earliest experiments, funded by the U.S. Department of Defense, involved a network of infrared sensors scattered around PARC. The sensors communicated with prototype "tabs"--small, wireless displays that functioned as labels or sticky notes--and with tablet-sized handheld computers and large display boards. Weiser envisioned hundreds of these devices installed in rooms, homes, and office complexes, where they would eventually become "invisible to common awareness," as he predicted in a 1991 article for Scientific American. "People will simply use them unconsciously to accomplish everyday tasks," he wrote.
Tragically, Weiser died of cancer in 1999, at age 46. But by then, others had taken up his call, including the famed product-design consultant Donald Norman, who squeezed an entire thesis into the title of his 1998 book, The Invisible Computer: Why Good Products Can Fail, the Personal Computer Is So Complex, and Information Appliances Are the Solution. People might be more efficient if their spaces, work flows, and communications were fully digitized, but this wouldn't happen until improved technology relieved them of the sense that they were interacting with "computers" at all, Norman argued. He called for a new generation of "information appliances" that would facilitate specific activities--such as teleconferencing, shopping, photography, or exercise--without calling attention to themselves. Echoing Weiser, Norman wrote that these appliances would "become such an intrinsic part of the task that it will not be obvious that they are there. They will be invisible
Invisible: Blog reader Gardner Campbell comments: "These are compelling essays and concepts, but a small worry persists: will the grail of invisible, continuous, ubiquitous computing turn out to be a cognitive deadener, too? Some things work best when they’re visible and a little recalcitrant: writing, for example, or thinking, for another example. If we use symbols effortlessly, there’s a risk we’ll settle for the path of least resistance automatically rather than go for the more ambitious and difficult goals, the computer equivalent of a set of grunts and gestures instead of a language, which involves a fair amount of work to acquire and use well but has rich payoffs in terms of semantic density."
Author’s response: I agree. That’s why I point out in this section and elsewhere that continuous computing is not about making computers invisible.
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like the embedded processors in the automobile or microwave oven."
Researchers got busy building these appliances at places like MIT's Laboratory for Computer Science and Artificial Intelligence Laboratory (since folded into one large lab). In 2000, the lab launched a five-year, industry-funded initiative called Project Oxygen,
Project Oxygen: See oxygen.lcs.mit.edu/Overview.html.
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so named because the founding scientists believed that computation would eventually be "freely available everywhere, like batteries and power sockets, or oxygen in the air we breathe." Like Weiser, the Oxygen researchers have focused on a combination of handheld devices and networks of sensing and communications equipment embedded in the environment--cameras, microphones, displays, wireless transmitters and receivers, and the like. Their most famous prototype is the Intelligent Room, a conference room rigged with sensors and displays that responds to voice commands, saves audio records of users' discussions, and calls up presentations or recordings of prior meetings. The idea, according to the MIT researchers, is to automate as many aspects of human collaboration as possible.
Ubiquitous-computing research continues at PARC, where researchers are working on technologies such as embedded sensors trained to zero in on specific conversations in busy rooms so that people watching by videoconference can join in. And in Europe, a three-year, $28 million "Disappearing Computer" initiative from 2001 to 2003 resulted in several ongoing projects on "ambient computing," the idea of augmenting everyday objects with small, wirelessly networked sensors.
But here's the surprise: the tools that are actually bringing us continuous computing aren't invisible. In fact, they are the very technologies Weiser and his successors were trying to sideline: off-the-shelf computing devices such as laptops and cell phones,
Cell phones: They’re now constant companions for 1.7 billion people worldwide. According to market research firm IDC, more than 690 million phones were shipped in 2004 alone. In the first quarter of 2005, vendors shipped 8.4 million "converged mobile devices," meaning phones that also function as PDAs and can run many types of software applications—an increase of 134 percent over the first quarter of 2004. More than 182 million people in the United States subscribe to cellular services, and in 2004 they spent more than a trillion minutes using their phones.
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both of which allow users to tap into Web-based social-software systems built in a largely unplanned way by people using common programming languages and shared, open communications protocols and development tools. These systems don't have to be designed as unified, integrated systems, like Project Oxygen's Intelligent Room, in order to be useful tools for social computing; they can just as well emerge from the bottom up, the way peer-to-peer networks and the Web itself did. (Indeed, one reason that projects at PARC, Project Oxygen, and other labs have never really blossomed into commercial systems may be that they are too heavily engineered
Too heavily engineered: Blog reader Gene Becker comments: "I agree with your assessment and would add that in many cases, they are technology solutions in search of a problem. What is the question to which ‘ubicomp’ is the best answer?"
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for preconceived uses.) And we don't really need computers to disappear into the woodwork, or to have elaborate spoken-word interfaces. In fact, today's social-software boom rests on common devices such as mobile phones, computers, digital cameras, and portable music players.
"One of the things that really blew my mind was a trip last year at Christmastime to a mall in the DC suburbs," says Thomas Vander Wal,
Thomas Vander Wal: Best known for popularizing two concepts, the "infocloud" (the aggregate of one’s personal digital data, which increasingly resides on networks rather than on desktop PCs or permanent media) and "folksonomies" (the knowledge structures that emerge in place of hierarchical taxonomies when groups of people tag digital data using an -unconstrained vocabulary).
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an Internet-application designer whose writings are widely followed by developers of social-software applications. "Which is, as places go, a little bit more technically advanced than the more rural areas at the center of the U.S., but it's still not the Bay Area or New York. But I was seeing people 50 and older waiting in line to get their packages wrapped and staring at their mobile devices. I don't know if they were text-messaging their kids or browsing the Web or what, but their mobile devices were being used for more than just calling somebody. It was at that point that I thought, 'We're almost there'--wherever 'there' is."
The Enabling Technologies
Three broad technology trends are making computing continuous. The first, as noted earlier, is easy, inexpensive Internet access. The second is the spread of inexpensive, wireless computing devices. Above all, this means wireless laptops. Only a computer capable of running a full-blown Web browser allows access to the full range of Web-based software applications, which are, as we'll see in a moment, the third major source of technologies making computing more social. But laptops can't be carried everywhere, and smaller devices such as digital cameras, video recorders, voice recorders, portable CD and DVD players, MP3 players, PDAs, pagers, GPS receivers, and wearable gear like Microsoft's wireless SPOT (for "Smart Personal Object Technology") watches have the important function of maintaining the information field when there isn't a computer at hand. Then, of course, there's the smart phone--in essence, a miniature computer juggling tasks that formerly required half a dozen separate devices.
Separate devices: PalmOne’s Treo 650, for example, is styled like a phone but also acts as a still and video camera, an e-mail and instant-messaging platform, an MP3 player, a game player, a personal organizer, a Web-browsing device, an e-book reader, and a short-range communicator (using the Bluetooth wireless standard).
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The smart phone is "an ideal system for pervasive, supportive social computing," writes Russell Beale, director of the Advanced Interaction Group in the computer science department at the University of Birmingham, England. It's "a two-way device, creating and consuming information, is highly personal, and is almost always available... ."
The third trend nudging us into a new era of computing is probably the most important and the least expected. It is the emergence of the Web as a platform for personal publishing and social software. The examples are as diverse as informational sites such as blogs, craigslist, and Wikipedia
Wikipedia: An online encyclopedia built using wiki software, meaning that anyone may add entries or edit existing ones. With1.8 million articles written by 51,000 contributors in 109 languages, it is the world’s most comprehensive (though perhaps not its most reliable) reference work. It may, in fact, be the largest collaborative literary work in history. (See "Larry Sanger’s Knowledge Free- for-All," January 2005.)
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and services such as Gmail, LinkedIn, Flickr, and Delicious. All of these are examples of what software developers and Internet pundits have begun to call "Web 2.0": the transformation of the original Web of static documents
Static documents: Web 1.0 consisted largely of text files jazzed up with browser-readable HTML instructions on how to display the text and where to find related files. Web 2.0 is more like a collection of programs that talk to one another.
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into a collection of pages that still look like documents but are actually interfaces to full-fledged computing platforms. These Web-based services are proliferating so fast because they can be built using shared, standardized programming tools and languages developed, for the most part, by the open-source-software community.
The list of popular social-software applications is almost overwhelming. The oldest examples include text messaging on phones and pagers, instant messaging between computers, and good old e-mail. But while these technologies may be familiar, they are being radically upgraded to work with the Web. Classic circuit-switched landline and cellular telephony, for example, faces growing competition from packet-switched systems, including Voice-over-Internet-Protocol (VoIP) networks such as Vonage and Skype. Calls placed within Skype's peer-to-peer network are free, which has made the service a favorite among startup companies with employees in far-flung locations. Adam Curry, a former television-show host on MTV who coinvented the idea of podcasting, gushes frequently about Skype in his own podcasts, saying it's the main way he conducts business at Podshow.com, a podcasting network he is launching soon. "Skype is going to be the phone company," Curry intones.
Wi-Fi cell phones that let people use Skype even if they're away from their computers may soon hit the market, and new techniques for handing active calls from a cellular network to a Wi-Fi network will allow people with dual-band phones to switch to the lowest-cost service available at any given location. Meanwhile, the Short Messaging System (SMS) for text messaging is giving way to the Multimedia Messaging System (MMS), which can handle pictures, sound, and video in addition to text. Then there's Google's Gmail service, which offers a practically unlimited amount of storage online and an extremely efficient search mechanism for rummaging through it. Some users consider Gmail to be at least as powerful as client-side e-mail programs such as Outlook and Eudora (which store e-mail locally on a desktop machine), with the added advantage that it is accessible from any computer with a browser.
Tools that turn private individuals into Internet broadcasters are another booming application. When blogs were first emerging, publishing one was a tedious and forbidding process that involved rewriting HTML code and manually uploading files to a Web-hosting service. But with the advent of Blogger, LiveJournal, Movable Type, WordPress, and other services, the task of blog publishing has been reduced to writing something cogent and clicking on a couple of buttons. As a result, blogs have become the personal launching pads for millions of Web users' social activities online--the place where they gather their own thoughts and artistic creations, invite others to react, and share links to and commentary about content they find elsewhere on the Web. Lately, it's become cheap and easy to publish audio and video blog entries. And new tools for transferring audio blog posts to portable digital-music players like the Apple iPod have created a platform for podcasting,
Podcasting: Podcasters don’t agree on much about their craft—both Adam Curry and software guru Dave Winer claim to be the technology’s godfathers, for example—but they do seem to agree that the term "podcasting" was coined by Ben Hammersley, a writer for British newspaper the Guardian, in an article published February 12, 2004.
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an entirely new form of personal publishing. In 2004 there were only a handful of regular podcasts; now there are several thousand, ranging from the sexually graphic "Dawn and Drew Show" to "The Catholic Insider," in which Father
Roderick Vonhogen, a priest of the Archdiocese of Utrecht, the Netherlands, ruminates on the new pope, run-ins with airport security guards in Rome, and Revenge of the Sith.
But bloggers and podcasters wouldn't have much to publish without a constant stream of incoming information, and another set of Web technologies is helping Internet users to personalize that stream. Even before the Web, futurists predicted the advent of the personalized newspaper. Nicholas Negroponte, the founding director of the MIT Media Lab, called it "The Daily Me," a collection of items plucked from a variety of media outlets by your home's main computer, which would supposedly learn your preferences by watching what you read and what you ignore. But Negroponte's future has arrived: one of the most earthshaking developments in information management in the past half-decade is a straightforward Web-programming hack called RSS.
RSS: There is some contention over who invented RSS and what the name actually stands for. In 1999, as part of the World Wide Web Consortium’s effort to build a Resource Description Framework (RDF) to support Tim Berners-Lee’s concept of the Semantic Web, engineers at Netscape created a document-mining tool called "Rich Site Summary," but they abandoned it in 2001. Meanwhile, programmer Dave Winer wrote a script for publishing chunks of one site’s content on another, and called it "Really Simple Syndication." This is now the most commonly accepted meaning of RSS, but the Netscape definition still has its proponents, and still others say RSS stands for "RDF Site Summary."
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It's a way of packaging Web items such as blog entries in a stripped-down, XML-based format so that they can be imported into other Web pages. Most blog-hosting services automatically create RSS versions of blog posts. That means bloggers can "syndicate" their content across the entire Web, while readers can subscribe to RSS feeds
Feeds: An RSS feed can be created for just about anything. RSS is a key technology behind podcasting, which is essentially a method of delivering audio files via RSS subscriptions. And social-bookmarking services such as Delicious and Rojo let users subscribe via RSS to the links their friends save and annotate as they voyage around the Web.
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from all of their favorite blogs or news sites, and view them in a single place using an "aggregator" service such as NetNewsWire, NewsGator, or Bloglines. These services make it easier than ever for people to monitor developments in their areas of interest. (On the downside, perhaps, aggregators also allow people to filter out news and ideas that don't accord with their views.)
The most radical ideas in Web-based software, however, are flourishing in an area that might be called "social knowledge management," represented in part by sites like Friendster, LinkedIn, and Ryze. Such social-networking sites
Social-networking sites: See "Internetworking," April 2004.
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generated a wave of venture investment and new users in 2004. At their best, they are like human search engines: they exploit the "six degrees of separation" concept to help people make connections with friends of friends of friends who may share similar interests or business goals. Now a twist is on the way: a Boston startup called Proxpro is testing a cell-phone-based service whereby a traveling businessperson can register a change in location with an SMS message; if a potential contact who matches the traveler's prespecified areas of interest (say, Oracle databases) is nearby, both parties are notified, and they can use SMS to arrange a meeting.
The social-networking sites, in fact, were only a preview of what Web 2.0 technologies will make possible. Using a few basic building blocks such as XML, open-source database software, simplified programming languages and environments like Ruby on Rails, and protocols, like SOAP and REST, for exchanging data between Web applications, Web developers can build elaborate yet practical "social services" that collect and redistribute the knowledge of large communities of people. (See the box on page 52 for a tour of some of the most interesting new services.)
The more people who use the new services, the more powerful
More powerful: This is one manifestation of Metcalfe’s Law, the observation by Ethernet inventor (and Technology Review board member) Bob Metcalfe that the value of a network increases as the square of the number of nodes in the network.
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those services become. That's because they're all about cooperation: people are usually happy to share their knowledge, experiences, creations, schedules, and locations if it means that they can learn what the people who are important to them are thinking and doing. The most successful services are always about shared interests; Jyri Engestrom, a PhD student in the Department of Organisation, Work, and Technology at the Lancaster University Management School in Britain, calls this the rule of "object-centered sociality." "The fallacy is to think that social networks are just made up of people," Engestrom wrote in a much-cited entry on his blog, Zengestrom.com, in April. "They're not; social networks consist of people who are connected by a shared object," such as the photographs they upload to Flickr, the URLs they bookmark at Rojo or Delicious, or the articles they write for Wikipedia. Of course, social software can also be put to less community-minded uses: the same Internet-based services that keep businesses and families connected can be used to arrange casual sexual encounters, distribute pornography, or run terrorist networks.
Terrorist networks: See "Terror’s Server," February 2005.
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But in a way, the fact that the technology can support the full spectrum of human enterprises--whether socially productive or not--only underscores its power.
Computing Is Real Life
It's clear that new technologies are making computing continuous--meaning both "always on" and "smoothly shading into our real lives." But what's actually new about the experience of continuous computing? How is life changing for those with the money
Money: It must be said that in many parts of the globe, low incomes and political restrictions mean that citizens are very far from achieving a state of continuous computing. At the same time, however, cellular networks cover an increasing portion of the planet, efforts such as Nicholas Negroponte’s Hundred-Dollar Laptop project may bring cheap computing to many markets currently underserved by major manufacturers, and countries without an entrenched infrastructure of landline telephones are often leapfrogging to broadband wireless networks.
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to buy a few mobile devices and the time to sign up for Web-based social services?
At bottom, the shift is bringing computing far closer to our everyday experience. We've just seen how social software can give us new ways to tap into the collective wisdom of the people in our social groups. But that's only one consequence of continuous computing. On a more personal level, for example, the portable devices that sustain the information field are more respectful of our bodies and our perambulatory nature. No longer do we have to slouch over desktop computers all day to stay connected to the Net: computing devices have become so small, light, and ergonomic that we can take them almost everywhere.
Almost everywhere: There is, however, one limitation still tethering us to the grid: battery power. Even today’s best nickel-metal-hydride, lithium-ion, and lithium-ion-polymer batteries will keep a laptop running for only eight to 10 hours, and a cell phone for about five hours (assuming continuous talk). Compact fuel cells could quintuple these times, but they aren’t expected to be widely available until 2010.
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Visit any airport, beach, or city park and you'll see people carrying laptops, cell phones, and dedicated devices such as cameras and music players as naturally as if they were part of their clothing. For people who must take their cell phones absolutely everywhere, there are even "ruggedized" devices like Motorola's new i355 handset, which meets U.S. military specifications for resistance to dust and blowing rain.
Mobility, in turn, has created a demand for software that's sensitive to our ever changing locations. Already, many cell phones sold in the United States contain systems such as GPS receivers that report users' whereabouts during 911 calls. So far, few carriers have created ways for third-party software developers to put this location information to other uses, but in time, navigation tools and automatic-access location-specific shopping or dining information will become standard fare for cellular subscribers. In this area, Japanese and South Korean companies are, as usual, showing the way. Tokyo-based cellular provider KDDI, for example, sells phones that use GPS and onscreen maps to guide urban pedestrians to their destinations.
The new technologies also allow people to create more-detailed, true-to-life online identities. A decade ago, it was common for consumers opening online accounts to disguise themselves behind fanciful usernames like "Sk8rdude." But today it makes little sense
Little sense: Blog reader Erik Karl Sorgatz comments: "I disagree to the extent that there is an old maxim about the system: ‘If you build it...they will hack it!’ Disguise, deception, and outright identity theft are also amplified by the very same tools that can bring us together in our creative phases. In some ways, this dependence upon a technology-based infrastructure makes us both stronger and weaker. It might be better to blend this all with a little self-reliance, some non-computer-based learning, a little apprenticeship involving real mechanical skills—they don’t even teach the kids shop classes anymore."
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for a blogger or a member of a photo-sharing or social-networking community to stay anonymous; after all, taking personal credit for the viewpoints we express or the creations we share is often a way of gaining clout and attracting new acquaintances.
The best continuous-computing applications also mesh with our lives by understanding our preferences. Think of Amazon.com's recommendation engine, which suggests products based on the purchase histories of other customers with similar tastes. Newer Web tools apply the same idea to other types of content; for example, Bloglines, owned by search company Ask Jeeves, analyzes a user's RSS subscriptions to come up with a daily list of new feeds that might be of interest. The creators of Backpack, meanwhile, built in many ways for users to adjust the site's behavior to their needs. For example, users can publish files and to-do lists from their cell phones if they aren't at a computer, make their pages public or restrict them to specified associates, and program the system to send SMS reminders to their phones at general times like "next Tuesday" or at specific moments like "30 minutes from now."
Which leads to a final feature of continuous-computing technologies: they adapt to the chronology of our lives. Shared calendars like EVDB and Upcoming make it easy to synchronize our activities with those of our friends and colleagues. Soon, our mobile devices may even track our activities, extract patterns,
Patterns: Blog reader Ian Wells asks, "How do we teach ourselves and our children to develop a rhythm of communication that is helpful to our relationships and our human pace of life? What patterns of communication will drive us crazy? What helps our families? What helps our relationships? Why do so many people spend so much time watching TV instead of doing something active with real people? We had part of the same issue with cheap phone calls, with continuous TV, with broadband Internet. Now we go up a level of choice. Because we can communicate continuously, should we? What do conscientious parents teach their children about healthy continuous computing? Are there healthy limits?"
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and predict what information or services we need at specific times of day. That's an area being explored by Nathan Eagle, a postdoctoral student at the MIT Media Lab. "There are patterns in when you go to Starbucks, when you go out to the bar, and when you call your mom, to the point that you can start predicting what the person is going to do next," Eagle says. A phone sensitive to your schedule and your location might realize, for example, that the office is always your next stop after the coffee shop and would start gathering your e-mail and voice-mail messages from the Internet as you take your first sip of latte.
Of course, you don't need futuristic gadgets
Futuristic gadgets: Blog reader Jim Haye comments: "Very interesting, but I’m surprised at the lack of coverage of the devices we interact with each day that have the most computing power of all—automobiles. The typical car today has numerous microprocessors operating over several networks and runs incredibly complex software in a highly risky environment. Sure, you don’t carry them in your pocket, and they’re transparent to most users, but automotive information systems are a big computing application."
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like this to create a personal information field. Just look at Ross Mayfield, CEO of Socialtext, a company that sells Web-based collaboration software based on wikis. The 34-year-old serial entrepreneur lives in Palo Alto with his wife and two children. Until Socialtext obtained venture-capital funding this spring, Mayfield's office was entirely virtual. But even though the company now has a real headquarters, Mayfield still carries a small armory of digital devices around with him, including a Treo 600 smart phone, a 17-inch Macintosh PowerBook G4 laptop ("It sounds like it wouldn't be portable, but it is," he says), an Olympus 5060 digital camera, an Apple iPod with an iTalk attachment for recording voice memos, a Jabra wireless headset, a Wi-Fi network detector, an Apple Airport Extreme Wi-Fi base station, a USB memory key, and, of course, the obligatory tangle of power cords and chargers.
Together, these devices ensure that Mayfield is never out of touch with his colleagues or his family. For one-to-one communications, Mayfield says, he uses the Treo, Skype's free VoIP service, and the e-mail system built into Socialtext's own software. To conduct company meetings and client calls, he uses the conference-calling services at FreeConference.com. When he's at a convention, a hotel, or a rented meeting room, he connects the Airport to the local network, which creates his own Wi-Fi zone and gives him access to the Web, Skype, instant-messenger software, and his company's always-on
Always-on: Blog reader Daniel Barkowitz writes, "This ‘hands-on’ participatory back channel even now pertains to the world of college admissions. At MIT, we are conducting our own social experiment with blogging about the college admissions and financial-aid process with our incoming MIT freshman class. The experiment has been a tremendous success, providing students a much more interactive way to get their questions answered and their issues addressed. As the director of financial aid at MIT, I walk around with my AIM channel always open on my cell phone and constantly am monitoring the blog for feedback. Not only does the technology exist to allow this, but the next generation of customers is expecting it."
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IRC channel. He also advertises his whereabouts by registering his temporary Wi-Fi zone with a service called plazes
Plazes: A Web service based in Cologne, Germany, that allows users to set up new "plazes"—representations of local networks complete with pictures, maps, comments, and lists of the people online —wherever they go.
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and by describing on EVDB the events he's attending. He uses Movable Type and TypePad to maintain multiple blogs, including one for his employees, one for the public, and several restricted to his customers. He bookmarks interesting Web pages on Delicious and sends them out on his personal link feed, titled "Linkorama." He reads the news and follows his favorite blogs using the NetNewsWire and NewsGator RSS aggregators, which also supply him with regular podcasts. Almost daily, he uploads photos from the Treo and the camera to Flickr, where anyone can view his photo stream. He even has a dedicated wiki for his family.
Though Mayfield is a self-confessed early adopter, he isn't using all these socialcomputing technologies just for the sake of being wired.
Being wired: Blog reader Pete Sulick comments: "Are we taking the first steps toward digitizing our lives, or is this just an inevitably more efficient way to share information, like e-mail, TV, the telephone, radio, the pony express?"
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They're "rewarding in all kinds of ways," he says. He uses Skype to save money on long-distance calls; he announces his location to increase the chances of meeting useful business contacts; he posts photos on Flickr because he wants his family and his friends to know what he's been up to; and he blogs because it's an efficient way to keep his employees up to date, care for his customers, and get his message out to the larger world.
And this, in the end, is what's truly new about continuous computing. As advanced as our PCs and our other information gadgets have grown, we never really learned to love them. We've used them all these years only because they have made us more productive. But now that's changing. When computing devices are always with us, helping us to be the social beings we are, time spent "on the computer" no longer feels like time taken away from real life. And it isn't: cell phones, laptops, and the Web are rapidly becoming the best tools we have for staying connected to the people and ideas and activities that are important to us. The underlying hardware and software will never become invisible, but they will become less obtrusive, allowing us to focus our attention on the actual information being conveyed. Eventually, living in a world of continuous computing will be like wearing eyeglasses: the rims are always visible, but the wearer forgets she has them on--even though they're the only things making the world clear.
Wade Roush is a Technology Review senior editor based in San Francisco.
By Wade Roush August 2005
(Editor's note: While writing this feature for the magazine, senior editor Wade Roush added notes to the story. He also solicited reader feedback, which was incorporated here. Throughout the article, readers can mouse over the bold text to see what early readers contributed. If you are unable to click on the link in the contribution, simply click on the bolded word in the article, which will take you to the appropriate page.)
My boss, Jason Pontin, caused a minor ruckus in May while attending D3, the Wall Street Journal's third annual "All Things Digital" conference outside San Diego. The editor in chief of Technology Review, like many executives, entrepreneurs, engineers, and students these days, doesn't go anywhere without his wireless gear--meaning, at a minimum, a Wi-Fi-enabled laptop and a cell phone. At D3, Jason was using his laptop to file blog (or Web log) posts "live" from the conference floor, summarizing talks by Bill Gates, Steve Jobs, Sun Microsystems CEO Scott McNealy, and other computer-industry celebrities. But on the third day, he couldn't find a signal. The Wi-Fi network he'd been accessing was on by mistake, a conference staffer told him. She explained that the hosts of the conference--Walt Mossberg and Kara Swisher, two of the Journal's technology writers--had decided that no one should have Internet access from the main ballroom.
Jason, naturally, wrote a new blog post
Blog post: See pontin.trblogs.com/archives/ 2005/05/d3_suppressing.html.
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about the incident (from the hallway this time). Forbidding live blogging at a technology conference, he remarked, "seems a very retrograde move." Mossberg responded hours later. "It is untrue that Kara and I banned live blogging at D3, from the ballroom or anywhere else," he explained. "We merely declined to provide Wi-Fi, to avoid the common phenomenon that has ruined too many tech conferences--near universal checking of e-mail and surfing of the Web during the program."
Other bloggers
Other bloggers: Including me. See www.continuousblog.net/2005/05/ disconnected_at.html.
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soon pounced on the minicontroversy. Some commended Mossberg's decision and warned against the perils of "continuous partial attention,"
Continuous partial attention: A phrase coined by Linda Stone, a former Microsoft vice president and a widely respected authority on human-computer interfaces.
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the state of mental blurriness thought to be induced when information is constantly pouring in from multiple sources. Others extolled the social benefits of "always on" connectivity. "During conferences the back channel can and does enhance the fore channel, especially if I'm able to look up information that would be too tedious, basic, or digressive to ask about during a Q&A," wrote Gardner Campbell, an assistant vice president for teaching and learning technologies at the University of Mary Washington in Fredericksburg, VA. "I can also share the experience, and be newly energized, by being in touch with staff and friends and family who are not able to attend with me."
Both sides had a point. But the most telling thing about the debate was that it happened at all. Without much hoopla, many conference centers and university and corporate campuses--even entire metropolises, in the case of Philadelphia and a few other cities--are being turned into giant Wi-Fi hot spots. Trains, planes, airports, and libraries are also installing wireless networks to serve customers carrying wireless gadgets. As a result, many businesspeople, students, and Starbucks addicts now expect cheap, easy access to the Internet as a matter of course. Losing it can feel like being stranded.
Constant connectivity has changed what it means to participate in a conference or any other gathering. Using chat rooms, blogs, wikis,
Wikis: Web pages that allow users to add content or edit existing content.
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photo-sharing sites, and other technologies, people at real-world meetings can now tap into an electronic swirl of commentary and interpretation by other participants--the "back channel" mentioned by Campbell. There are trade-offs: this new information stream can indeed draw attention away from the here and now. But many people seem willing to make them, pleased by the productivity they gain in circumstances where they'd otherwise be cut off from their offices or homes. There is meaning in all of this. After a decade of hype about "mobility," personal computing has finally and irreversibly cut its bonds to the desktop and has moved into devices we can carry everywhere. We're using this newly portable computing power to connect with others in ways no one predicted--and we won't be easily parted from our new tools.
Continuous Computing
To grasp how rapidly things are changing, consider all the things you can do today that would have been difficult or impossible just a few years ago: you can query Google via text message from your phone, keep an online diary of the Web pages you visit, download podcasts
Podcasts: Amateur radio shows without the radio. Podcasters produce MP3 recordings on whatever subjects interest them and publish the files on the Internet, where listeners can subscribe to shows, download files to their computers, and then transfer them to their portable music players, such as the Apple iPod.
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to your iPod, label your photos or bookmarks with appropriate tags at Flickr
Flickr: The photo-sharing site of choice for many digital photographers. One of its trademark features is the ability to add descriptive words, or "tags," to photographs, so that the photographer or others can find them more easily later. See www.flickr.com.
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or Delicious,
Delicious: A "social bookmarking" site created by freelance software developer Joshua Schachter. Users can store URLs, personal comments, and descriptive tags that will help them identify Web pages they want to find later. See del.icio.us.
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store gigabytes of personal e-mail online, listen to the music on your home PC from any other computer connected to the Net, or find your house on an aerial photograph at Google Maps. Most of these applications are free--and the ones coming close behind them will be even more powerful. With more and more phones carrying Global Positioning System (GPS) chips, for example, it's likely that companies will offer a cornucopia of new location-based information services; you'll soon be able to find an online review instantly as you drive past a restaurant, or visit a landmark and download photos and comments left by others.
This explosion of new capabilities shouldn't be mistaken for "feature creep," the accretion of special functions that has made common programs such as Microsoft Word so mystifyingly complex. There is something different about the latest tools. They are both digital, rooted in the world of electrons and bits, and fundamentally social, built to enable new kinds of interactions among people. Blogging, text messaging, photo sharing, and Web surfing from a smart phone are just the earliest examples. Almost below our mental radar, these technologies are ushering us into a world of what could be called continuous computing--continuous in the usual sense of "uninterrupted," but also in the sense that it's continuous with our lives, in all their messy, social, biographical richness.
The arrival of continuous computing
Computing: Blog reader Hannu Leinonen comments: "I feel uneasy about the word 'computing.' It sounds like counting. In Spanish the word for computer is 'ordinador' and in Finnish it's 'tietokone.' Tietokone translates to 'knowledge machine.' We are not there yet, but have we passed computing?"
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means that people who live in populated areas of developed countries (and increasingly, developing ones such as China and India) can spend entire days inside a kind of invisible, portable "information field." This field is created by constant, largely automated cooperation between
1. the digital devices people carry, such as laptops, media players,
and camera phones,
2. the wireline and wireless networks that serve people's locations as
they travel about, and
3. the Internet and its growing collection of Web-based tools
for finding information and communicating and collaborating
with other people.
People: Blog reader Gene Becker comments: "In your definition of continuous computing, you might consider adding '4) and the devices they encounter along the way, such as situated displays, networked entertainment systems, printers, and connected vehicles.' We are just around the corner from these situated networked devices' becoming active participants in our digital experience. I wonder if you also want to pull in physical-tagging notions (RFID, bar codes, semacodes, visual tags, etc.) as the 'physical hyperlinks' that bring everyday objects into the digital mix. In the same spirit, GPS and other location technologies are starting to make physical place a first-class element of the digital experience. Oh, and can we all please work on a better term, one that doesn't use 'computing'? It's so not about that."
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This information field enables people to both pull information about virtually anything from anywhere, at any time, and push their own ideas and personalities back onto the Internet--without ever having to sit down at a desktop computer. Armed with nothing more than a smart phone, a modern urbanite can get the answer to almost any question; locate nearby colleagues, friends, and services; join virtual communities that form and disband rapidly around shared work and shared interests; and self-publish blog entries, photographs, audio recordings, and videos for an unlimited audience.
The ingredients of continuous computing have emerged piecemeal. Japanese companies, for example, have long been testing new social and personal uses for cell phones. Model smart homes
Smart homes: A leading example in the United States is the Georgia Tech Broadband Institute Residential Laboratory, a three-story home outfitted with people-tracking sensors, gesture-sensitive remote controls, and other widgets. Part of the Aware Home Research Initiative funded by Hewlett-Packard, Intel, Motorola, and the National Science Foundation, the Residential Laboratory is a classic instance of computing research that starts with a perceived need--assisting the elderly with complex, information-intensive tasks, for example--and invents gadgets and software that supposedly address the need. But as we'll see, continuous computing is an emergent phenomenon--a complex pattern of social behaviors that arises from the use of a variety of simpler digital tools. It advances in unexpected directions as people find innovative ways to put these commercial and open-source technologies to use in their social lives.
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that demonstrate how intelligent appliances will converse with each other are a perennial favorite in both Japan and the United States. But the final pieces fell into place only recently. These include the spread of Wi-Fi and other types of wireless access to millions of offices, homes, airports, and cafés; the enormous popularity of camera phones and mobile audio players; free or inexpensive voice-over-Internet phone calling; the rise of blogs as a means of both personal and political communication; personal and professional social-networking sites; tagging and social bookmarking; collaboration tools such as wikis and Microsoft's Groove Virtual Office; new tools for gathering chunks of media "microcontent" into something resembling a personalized electronic newspaper; location-based services and other applications tied to specific geographic coordinates; and new computer languages and standards that make it easy to offer powerful, personalized software services over the Web. What makes all these tools different from the computing styles of the past is that they fit more naturally into our real lives--meaning, for example, that they adapt more readily to our locations, our preferences, and our schedules.
One analyst who writes about these issues is Alex Pang, a historian of science and former managing editor of the Encylopædia Britannica who now works as a research director at the Institute for the Future, a Palo Alto, CA, think tank. Software engineers, he says, have discovered that computer science's decades-long effort to make computers smart enough to understand humans is simply irrelevant; they can make computing truly personal and social using simple Web-based programming tools. After all, we don't really want to talk with computers--we want to talk through them. "The brilliance of social-software applications like Flickr, Delicious, and Technorati
Technorati: A search engine built by software developer David Sifry that scans millions of blogs and displays the most recent posts relating to any given keyword or tag.
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," Pang says, "is that they recognize that computers are really good at doing certain things, like working with gigantic quantities of data, and really bad at, for example, understanding the different meanings of certain words, like 'depression.' They devote computing resources in ways that basically enhance communication, collaboration, and thinking rather than trying to substitute for them."
The Computer That Wouldn't Disappear
While continuous computing is now a practical reality, it has been a long time coming. The first serious work on it began 17 years ago at Xerox's famed Palo Alto Research Center (PARC). That's where computer scientist Mark Weiser set out to study the notion of ubiquitous computing,
Ubiquitous computing: Weiser’s original Web pages on the subject are preserved at www.ubiq.com/hypertext/weiser/UbiHome.html.
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which he defined as "activating the world"--creating networks of small, wireless computing devices that permeated the physical structures around us, where they would supposedly anticipate our needs and act without requiring our attention. Weiser's earliest experiments, funded by the U.S. Department of Defense, involved a network of infrared sensors scattered around PARC. The sensors communicated with prototype "tabs"--small, wireless displays that functioned as labels or sticky notes--and with tablet-sized handheld computers and large display boards. Weiser envisioned hundreds of these devices installed in rooms, homes, and office complexes, where they would eventually become "invisible to common awareness," as he predicted in a 1991 article for Scientific American. "People will simply use them unconsciously to accomplish everyday tasks," he wrote.
Tragically, Weiser died of cancer in 1999, at age 46. But by then, others had taken up his call, including the famed product-design consultant Donald Norman, who squeezed an entire thesis into the title of his 1998 book, The Invisible Computer: Why Good Products Can Fail, the Personal Computer Is So Complex, and Information Appliances Are the Solution. People might be more efficient if their spaces, work flows, and communications were fully digitized, but this wouldn't happen until improved technology relieved them of the sense that they were interacting with "computers" at all, Norman argued. He called for a new generation of "information appliances" that would facilitate specific activities--such as teleconferencing, shopping, photography, or exercise--without calling attention to themselves. Echoing Weiser, Norman wrote that these appliances would "become such an intrinsic part of the task that it will not be obvious that they are there. They will be invisible
Invisible: Blog reader Gardner Campbell comments: "These are compelling essays and concepts, but a small worry persists: will the grail of invisible, continuous, ubiquitous computing turn out to be a cognitive deadener, too? Some things work best when they’re visible and a little recalcitrant: writing, for example, or thinking, for another example. If we use symbols effortlessly, there’s a risk we’ll settle for the path of least resistance automatically rather than go for the more ambitious and difficult goals, the computer equivalent of a set of grunts and gestures instead of a language, which involves a fair amount of work to acquire and use well but has rich payoffs in terms of semantic density."
Author’s response: I agree. That’s why I point out in this section and elsewhere that continuous computing is not about making computers invisible.
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like the embedded processors in the automobile or microwave oven."
Researchers got busy building these appliances at places like MIT's Laboratory for Computer Science and Artificial Intelligence Laboratory (since folded into one large lab). In 2000, the lab launched a five-year, industry-funded initiative called Project Oxygen,
Project Oxygen: See oxygen.lcs.mit.edu/Overview.html.
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so named because the founding scientists believed that computation would eventually be "freely available everywhere, like batteries and power sockets, or oxygen in the air we breathe." Like Weiser, the Oxygen researchers have focused on a combination of handheld devices and networks of sensing and communications equipment embedded in the environment--cameras, microphones, displays, wireless transmitters and receivers, and the like. Their most famous prototype is the Intelligent Room, a conference room rigged with sensors and displays that responds to voice commands, saves audio records of users' discussions, and calls up presentations or recordings of prior meetings. The idea, according to the MIT researchers, is to automate as many aspects of human collaboration as possible.
Ubiquitous-computing research continues at PARC, where researchers are working on technologies such as embedded sensors trained to zero in on specific conversations in busy rooms so that people watching by videoconference can join in. And in Europe, a three-year, $28 million "Disappearing Computer" initiative from 2001 to 2003 resulted in several ongoing projects on "ambient computing," the idea of augmenting everyday objects with small, wirelessly networked sensors.
But here's the surprise: the tools that are actually bringing us continuous computing aren't invisible. In fact, they are the very technologies Weiser and his successors were trying to sideline: off-the-shelf computing devices such as laptops and cell phones,
Cell phones: They’re now constant companions for 1.7 billion people worldwide. According to market research firm IDC, more than 690 million phones were shipped in 2004 alone. In the first quarter of 2005, vendors shipped 8.4 million "converged mobile devices," meaning phones that also function as PDAs and can run many types of software applications—an increase of 134 percent over the first quarter of 2004. More than 182 million people in the United States subscribe to cellular services, and in 2004 they spent more than a trillion minutes using their phones.
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both of which allow users to tap into Web-based social-software systems built in a largely unplanned way by people using common programming languages and shared, open communications protocols and development tools. These systems don't have to be designed as unified, integrated systems, like Project Oxygen's Intelligent Room, in order to be useful tools for social computing; they can just as well emerge from the bottom up, the way peer-to-peer networks and the Web itself did. (Indeed, one reason that projects at PARC, Project Oxygen, and other labs have never really blossomed into commercial systems may be that they are too heavily engineered
Too heavily engineered: Blog reader Gene Becker comments: "I agree with your assessment and would add that in many cases, they are technology solutions in search of a problem. What is the question to which ‘ubicomp’ is the best answer?"
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for preconceived uses.) And we don't really need computers to disappear into the woodwork, or to have elaborate spoken-word interfaces. In fact, today's social-software boom rests on common devices such as mobile phones, computers, digital cameras, and portable music players.
"One of the things that really blew my mind was a trip last year at Christmastime to a mall in the DC suburbs," says Thomas Vander Wal,
Thomas Vander Wal: Best known for popularizing two concepts, the "infocloud" (the aggregate of one’s personal digital data, which increasingly resides on networks rather than on desktop PCs or permanent media) and "folksonomies" (the knowledge structures that emerge in place of hierarchical taxonomies when groups of people tag digital data using an -unconstrained vocabulary).
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an Internet-application designer whose writings are widely followed by developers of social-software applications. "Which is, as places go, a little bit more technically advanced than the more rural areas at the center of the U.S., but it's still not the Bay Area or New York. But I was seeing people 50 and older waiting in line to get their packages wrapped and staring at their mobile devices. I don't know if they were text-messaging their kids or browsing the Web or what, but their mobile devices were being used for more than just calling somebody. It was at that point that I thought, 'We're almost there'--wherever 'there' is."
The Enabling Technologies
Three broad technology trends are making computing continuous. The first, as noted earlier, is easy, inexpensive Internet access. The second is the spread of inexpensive, wireless computing devices. Above all, this means wireless laptops. Only a computer capable of running a full-blown Web browser allows access to the full range of Web-based software applications, which are, as we'll see in a moment, the third major source of technologies making computing more social. But laptops can't be carried everywhere, and smaller devices such as digital cameras, video recorders, voice recorders, portable CD and DVD players, MP3 players, PDAs, pagers, GPS receivers, and wearable gear like Microsoft's wireless SPOT (for "Smart Personal Object Technology") watches have the important function of maintaining the information field when there isn't a computer at hand. Then, of course, there's the smart phone--in essence, a miniature computer juggling tasks that formerly required half a dozen separate devices.
Separate devices: PalmOne’s Treo 650, for example, is styled like a phone but also acts as a still and video camera, an e-mail and instant-messaging platform, an MP3 player, a game player, a personal organizer, a Web-browsing device, an e-book reader, and a short-range communicator (using the Bluetooth wireless standard).
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The smart phone is "an ideal system for pervasive, supportive social computing," writes Russell Beale, director of the Advanced Interaction Group in the computer science department at the University of Birmingham, England. It's "a two-way device, creating and consuming information, is highly personal, and is almost always available... ."
The third trend nudging us into a new era of computing is probably the most important and the least expected. It is the emergence of the Web as a platform for personal publishing and social software. The examples are as diverse as informational sites such as blogs, craigslist, and Wikipedia
Wikipedia: An online encyclopedia built using wiki software, meaning that anyone may add entries or edit existing ones. With1.8 million articles written by 51,000 contributors in 109 languages, it is the world’s most comprehensive (though perhaps not its most reliable) reference work. It may, in fact, be the largest collaborative literary work in history. (See "Larry Sanger’s Knowledge Free- for-All," January 2005.)
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and services such as Gmail, LinkedIn, Flickr, and Delicious. All of these are examples of what software developers and Internet pundits have begun to call "Web 2.0": the transformation of the original Web of static documents
Static documents: Web 1.0 consisted largely of text files jazzed up with browser-readable HTML instructions on how to display the text and where to find related files. Web 2.0 is more like a collection of programs that talk to one another.
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into a collection of pages that still look like documents but are actually interfaces to full-fledged computing platforms. These Web-based services are proliferating so fast because they can be built using shared, standardized programming tools and languages developed, for the most part, by the open-source-software community.
The list of popular social-software applications is almost overwhelming. The oldest examples include text messaging on phones and pagers, instant messaging between computers, and good old e-mail. But while these technologies may be familiar, they are being radically upgraded to work with the Web. Classic circuit-switched landline and cellular telephony, for example, faces growing competition from packet-switched systems, including Voice-over-Internet-Protocol (VoIP) networks such as Vonage and Skype. Calls placed within Skype's peer-to-peer network are free, which has made the service a favorite among startup companies with employees in far-flung locations. Adam Curry, a former television-show host on MTV who coinvented the idea of podcasting, gushes frequently about Skype in his own podcasts, saying it's the main way he conducts business at Podshow.com, a podcasting network he is launching soon. "Skype is going to be the phone company," Curry intones.
Wi-Fi cell phones that let people use Skype even if they're away from their computers may soon hit the market, and new techniques for handing active calls from a cellular network to a Wi-Fi network will allow people with dual-band phones to switch to the lowest-cost service available at any given location. Meanwhile, the Short Messaging System (SMS) for text messaging is giving way to the Multimedia Messaging System (MMS), which can handle pictures, sound, and video in addition to text. Then there's Google's Gmail service, which offers a practically unlimited amount of storage online and an extremely efficient search mechanism for rummaging through it. Some users consider Gmail to be at least as powerful as client-side e-mail programs such as Outlook and Eudora (which store e-mail locally on a desktop machine), with the added advantage that it is accessible from any computer with a browser.
Tools that turn private individuals into Internet broadcasters are another booming application. When blogs were first emerging, publishing one was a tedious and forbidding process that involved rewriting HTML code and manually uploading files to a Web-hosting service. But with the advent of Blogger, LiveJournal, Movable Type, WordPress, and other services, the task of blog publishing has been reduced to writing something cogent and clicking on a couple of buttons. As a result, blogs have become the personal launching pads for millions of Web users' social activities online--the place where they gather their own thoughts and artistic creations, invite others to react, and share links to and commentary about content they find elsewhere on the Web. Lately, it's become cheap and easy to publish audio and video blog entries. And new tools for transferring audio blog posts to portable digital-music players like the Apple iPod have created a platform for podcasting,
Podcasting: Podcasters don’t agree on much about their craft—both Adam Curry and software guru Dave Winer claim to be the technology’s godfathers, for example—but they do seem to agree that the term "podcasting" was coined by Ben Hammersley, a writer for British newspaper the Guardian, in an article published February 12, 2004.
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an entirely new form of personal publishing. In 2004 there were only a handful of regular podcasts; now there are several thousand, ranging from the sexually graphic "Dawn and Drew Show" to "The Catholic Insider," in which Father
Roderick Vonhogen, a priest of the Archdiocese of Utrecht, the Netherlands, ruminates on the new pope, run-ins with airport security guards in Rome, and Revenge of the Sith.
But bloggers and podcasters wouldn't have much to publish without a constant stream of incoming information, and another set of Web technologies is helping Internet users to personalize that stream. Even before the Web, futurists predicted the advent of the personalized newspaper. Nicholas Negroponte, the founding director of the MIT Media Lab, called it "The Daily Me," a collection of items plucked from a variety of media outlets by your home's main computer, which would supposedly learn your preferences by watching what you read and what you ignore. But Negroponte's future has arrived: one of the most earthshaking developments in information management in the past half-decade is a straightforward Web-programming hack called RSS.
RSS: There is some contention over who invented RSS and what the name actually stands for. In 1999, as part of the World Wide Web Consortium’s effort to build a Resource Description Framework (RDF) to support Tim Berners-Lee’s concept of the Semantic Web, engineers at Netscape created a document-mining tool called "Rich Site Summary," but they abandoned it in 2001. Meanwhile, programmer Dave Winer wrote a script for publishing chunks of one site’s content on another, and called it "Really Simple Syndication." This is now the most commonly accepted meaning of RSS, but the Netscape definition still has its proponents, and still others say RSS stands for "RDF Site Summary."
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It's a way of packaging Web items such as blog entries in a stripped-down, XML-based format so that they can be imported into other Web pages. Most blog-hosting services automatically create RSS versions of blog posts. That means bloggers can "syndicate" their content across the entire Web, while readers can subscribe to RSS feeds
Feeds: An RSS feed can be created for just about anything. RSS is a key technology behind podcasting, which is essentially a method of delivering audio files via RSS subscriptions. And social-bookmarking services such as Delicious and Rojo let users subscribe via RSS to the links their friends save and annotate as they voyage around the Web.
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from all of their favorite blogs or news sites, and view them in a single place using an "aggregator" service such as NetNewsWire, NewsGator, or Bloglines. These services make it easier than ever for people to monitor developments in their areas of interest. (On the downside, perhaps, aggregators also allow people to filter out news and ideas that don't accord with their views.)
The most radical ideas in Web-based software, however, are flourishing in an area that might be called "social knowledge management," represented in part by sites like Friendster, LinkedIn, and Ryze. Such social-networking sites
Social-networking sites: See "Internetworking," April 2004.
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generated a wave of venture investment and new users in 2004. At their best, they are like human search engines: they exploit the "six degrees of separation" concept to help people make connections with friends of friends of friends who may share similar interests or business goals. Now a twist is on the way: a Boston startup called Proxpro is testing a cell-phone-based service whereby a traveling businessperson can register a change in location with an SMS message; if a potential contact who matches the traveler's prespecified areas of interest (say, Oracle databases) is nearby, both parties are notified, and they can use SMS to arrange a meeting.
The social-networking sites, in fact, were only a preview of what Web 2.0 technologies will make possible. Using a few basic building blocks such as XML, open-source database software, simplified programming languages and environments like Ruby on Rails, and protocols, like SOAP and REST, for exchanging data between Web applications, Web developers can build elaborate yet practical "social services" that collect and redistribute the knowledge of large communities of people. (See the box on page 52 for a tour of some of the most interesting new services.)
The more people who use the new services, the more powerful
More powerful: This is one manifestation of Metcalfe’s Law, the observation by Ethernet inventor (and Technology Review board member) Bob Metcalfe that the value of a network increases as the square of the number of nodes in the network.
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those services become. That's because they're all about cooperation: people are usually happy to share their knowledge, experiences, creations, schedules, and locations if it means that they can learn what the people who are important to them are thinking and doing. The most successful services are always about shared interests; Jyri Engestrom, a PhD student in the Department of Organisation, Work, and Technology at the Lancaster University Management School in Britain, calls this the rule of "object-centered sociality." "The fallacy is to think that social networks are just made up of people," Engestrom wrote in a much-cited entry on his blog, Zengestrom.com, in April. "They're not; social networks consist of people who are connected by a shared object," such as the photographs they upload to Flickr, the URLs they bookmark at Rojo or Delicious, or the articles they write for Wikipedia. Of course, social software can also be put to less community-minded uses: the same Internet-based services that keep businesses and families connected can be used to arrange casual sexual encounters, distribute pornography, or run terrorist networks.
Terrorist networks: See "Terror’s Server," February 2005.
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But in a way, the fact that the technology can support the full spectrum of human enterprises--whether socially productive or not--only underscores its power.
Computing Is Real Life
It's clear that new technologies are making computing continuous--meaning both "always on" and "smoothly shading into our real lives." But what's actually new about the experience of continuous computing? How is life changing for those with the money
Money: It must be said that in many parts of the globe, low incomes and political restrictions mean that citizens are very far from achieving a state of continuous computing. At the same time, however, cellular networks cover an increasing portion of the planet, efforts such as Nicholas Negroponte’s Hundred-Dollar Laptop project may bring cheap computing to many markets currently underserved by major manufacturers, and countries without an entrenched infrastructure of landline telephones are often leapfrogging to broadband wireless networks.
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to buy a few mobile devices and the time to sign up for Web-based social services?
At bottom, the shift is bringing computing far closer to our everyday experience. We've just seen how social software can give us new ways to tap into the collective wisdom of the people in our social groups. But that's only one consequence of continuous computing. On a more personal level, for example, the portable devices that sustain the information field are more respectful of our bodies and our perambulatory nature. No longer do we have to slouch over desktop computers all day to stay connected to the Net: computing devices have become so small, light, and ergonomic that we can take them almost everywhere.
Almost everywhere: There is, however, one limitation still tethering us to the grid: battery power. Even today’s best nickel-metal-hydride, lithium-ion, and lithium-ion-polymer batteries will keep a laptop running for only eight to 10 hours, and a cell phone for about five hours (assuming continuous talk). Compact fuel cells could quintuple these times, but they aren’t expected to be widely available until 2010.
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Visit any airport, beach, or city park and you'll see people carrying laptops, cell phones, and dedicated devices such as cameras and music players as naturally as if they were part of their clothing. For people who must take their cell phones absolutely everywhere, there are even "ruggedized" devices like Motorola's new i355 handset, which meets U.S. military specifications for resistance to dust and blowing rain.
Mobility, in turn, has created a demand for software that's sensitive to our ever changing locations. Already, many cell phones sold in the United States contain systems such as GPS receivers that report users' whereabouts during 911 calls. So far, few carriers have created ways for third-party software developers to put this location information to other uses, but in time, navigation tools and automatic-access location-specific shopping or dining information will become standard fare for cellular subscribers. In this area, Japanese and South Korean companies are, as usual, showing the way. Tokyo-based cellular provider KDDI, for example, sells phones that use GPS and onscreen maps to guide urban pedestrians to their destinations.
The new technologies also allow people to create more-detailed, true-to-life online identities. A decade ago, it was common for consumers opening online accounts to disguise themselves behind fanciful usernames like "Sk8rdude." But today it makes little sense
Little sense: Blog reader Erik Karl Sorgatz comments: "I disagree to the extent that there is an old maxim about the system: ‘If you build it...they will hack it!’ Disguise, deception, and outright identity theft are also amplified by the very same tools that can bring us together in our creative phases. In some ways, this dependence upon a technology-based infrastructure makes us both stronger and weaker. It might be better to blend this all with a little self-reliance, some non-computer-based learning, a little apprenticeship involving real mechanical skills—they don’t even teach the kids shop classes anymore."
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for a blogger or a member of a photo-sharing or social-networking community to stay anonymous; after all, taking personal credit for the viewpoints we express or the creations we share is often a way of gaining clout and attracting new acquaintances.
The best continuous-computing applications also mesh with our lives by understanding our preferences. Think of Amazon.com's recommendation engine, which suggests products based on the purchase histories of other customers with similar tastes. Newer Web tools apply the same idea to other types of content; for example, Bloglines, owned by search company Ask Jeeves, analyzes a user's RSS subscriptions to come up with a daily list of new feeds that might be of interest. The creators of Backpack, meanwhile, built in many ways for users to adjust the site's behavior to their needs. For example, users can publish files and to-do lists from their cell phones if they aren't at a computer, make their pages public or restrict them to specified associates, and program the system to send SMS reminders to their phones at general times like "next Tuesday" or at specific moments like "30 minutes from now."
Which leads to a final feature of continuous-computing technologies: they adapt to the chronology of our lives. Shared calendars like EVDB and Upcoming make it easy to synchronize our activities with those of our friends and colleagues. Soon, our mobile devices may even track our activities, extract patterns,
Patterns: Blog reader Ian Wells asks, "How do we teach ourselves and our children to develop a rhythm of communication that is helpful to our relationships and our human pace of life? What patterns of communication will drive us crazy? What helps our families? What helps our relationships? Why do so many people spend so much time watching TV instead of doing something active with real people? We had part of the same issue with cheap phone calls, with continuous TV, with broadband Internet. Now we go up a level of choice. Because we can communicate continuously, should we? What do conscientious parents teach their children about healthy continuous computing? Are there healthy limits?"
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and predict what information or services we need at specific times of day. That's an area being explored by Nathan Eagle, a postdoctoral student at the MIT Media Lab. "There are patterns in when you go to Starbucks, when you go out to the bar, and when you call your mom, to the point that you can start predicting what the person is going to do next," Eagle says. A phone sensitive to your schedule and your location might realize, for example, that the office is always your next stop after the coffee shop and would start gathering your e-mail and voice-mail messages from the Internet as you take your first sip of latte.
Of course, you don't need futuristic gadgets
Futuristic gadgets: Blog reader Jim Haye comments: "Very interesting, but I’m surprised at the lack of coverage of the devices we interact with each day that have the most computing power of all—automobiles. The typical car today has numerous microprocessors operating over several networks and runs incredibly complex software in a highly risky environment. Sure, you don’t carry them in your pocket, and they’re transparent to most users, but automotive information systems are a big computing application."
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like this to create a personal information field. Just look at Ross Mayfield, CEO of Socialtext, a company that sells Web-based collaboration software based on wikis. The 34-year-old serial entrepreneur lives in Palo Alto with his wife and two children. Until Socialtext obtained venture-capital funding this spring, Mayfield's office was entirely virtual. But even though the company now has a real headquarters, Mayfield still carries a small armory of digital devices around with him, including a Treo 600 smart phone, a 17-inch Macintosh PowerBook G4 laptop ("It sounds like it wouldn't be portable, but it is," he says), an Olympus 5060 digital camera, an Apple iPod with an iTalk attachment for recording voice memos, a Jabra wireless headset, a Wi-Fi network detector, an Apple Airport Extreme Wi-Fi base station, a USB memory key, and, of course, the obligatory tangle of power cords and chargers.
Together, these devices ensure that Mayfield is never out of touch with his colleagues or his family. For one-to-one communications, Mayfield says, he uses the Treo, Skype's free VoIP service, and the e-mail system built into Socialtext's own software. To conduct company meetings and client calls, he uses the conference-calling services at FreeConference.com. When he's at a convention, a hotel, or a rented meeting room, he connects the Airport to the local network, which creates his own Wi-Fi zone and gives him access to the Web, Skype, instant-messenger software, and his company's always-on
Always-on: Blog reader Daniel Barkowitz writes, "This ‘hands-on’ participatory back channel even now pertains to the world of college admissions. At MIT, we are conducting our own social experiment with blogging about the college admissions and financial-aid process with our incoming MIT freshman class. The experiment has been a tremendous success, providing students a much more interactive way to get their questions answered and their issues addressed. As the director of financial aid at MIT, I walk around with my AIM channel always open on my cell phone and constantly am monitoring the blog for feedback. Not only does the technology exist to allow this, but the next generation of customers is expecting it."
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IRC channel. He also advertises his whereabouts by registering his temporary Wi-Fi zone with a service called plazes
Plazes: A Web service based in Cologne, Germany, that allows users to set up new "plazes"—representations of local networks complete with pictures, maps, comments, and lists of the people online —wherever they go.
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and by describing on EVDB the events he's attending. He uses Movable Type and TypePad to maintain multiple blogs, including one for his employees, one for the public, and several restricted to his customers. He bookmarks interesting Web pages on Delicious and sends them out on his personal link feed, titled "Linkorama." He reads the news and follows his favorite blogs using the NetNewsWire and NewsGator RSS aggregators, which also supply him with regular podcasts. Almost daily, he uploads photos from the Treo and the camera to Flickr, where anyone can view his photo stream. He even has a dedicated wiki for his family.
Though Mayfield is a self-confessed early adopter, he isn't using all these socialcomputing technologies just for the sake of being wired.
Being wired: Blog reader Pete Sulick comments: "Are we taking the first steps toward digitizing our lives, or is this just an inevitably more efficient way to share information, like e-mail, TV, the telephone, radio, the pony express?"
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They're "rewarding in all kinds of ways," he says. He uses Skype to save money on long-distance calls; he announces his location to increase the chances of meeting useful business contacts; he posts photos on Flickr because he wants his family and his friends to know what he's been up to; and he blogs because it's an efficient way to keep his employees up to date, care for his customers, and get his message out to the larger world.
And this, in the end, is what's truly new about continuous computing. As advanced as our PCs and our other information gadgets have grown, we never really learned to love them. We've used them all these years only because they have made us more productive. But now that's changing. When computing devices are always with us, helping us to be the social beings we are, time spent "on the computer" no longer feels like time taken away from real life. And it isn't: cell phones, laptops, and the Web are rapidly becoming the best tools we have for staying connected to the people and ideas and activities that are important to us. The underlying hardware and software will never become invisible, but they will become less obtrusive, allowing us to focus our attention on the actual information being conveyed. Eventually, living in a world of continuous computing will be like wearing eyeglasses: the rims are always visible, but the wearer forgets she has them on--even though they're the only things making the world clear.
Wade Roush is a Technology Review senior editor based in San Francisco.
Socialized Computing
Socialized Computing
By Craig Newmark August 2005
My title at craigslist is "customer service rep and founder," and my customer service role is at least a full-time gig. A CEO runs the actual organization now. I've always had difficulty articulating why I have this obsession. I work anywhere from two to ten hours a day, seven days a week, doing stuff like deleting "bait and switch" posts from New York apartment brokers, moderating discussion boards, and sharing community suggestions with the team. If you e-mail me about the site, I'll probably write back--quickly, too.
Craigslist was originally a very simple e-mail list for my friends, focusing on arts and technology events in San Francisco. People suggested doing more, like job and apartment listings, so I did that; then I got more feedback--so I did even more stuff. Today, craigslist helps people in more than 100 cities in 24 countries with everyday needs, like finding a place to live or getting a job or selling furniture. With nine million unique visitors a month, it's a big site, though a simple one. We have a pretty good culture of trust and goodwill.
I figure that reasonably good customer service is part of the social contract between producer and consumer. In general, if you're going to do something, you should follow through and not screw around. As a nerd, I have the tendency to take things pretty seriously, so if I commit to something, I try really hard to stay committed.
This isn't altruism or social activism; it's just giving people a break. Pretty much all world religions tell us that one moral value is to help other people if you can. I feel that customer service, even when you get paid for it, is an expression of that value, an everyday form of compassion.
Also, I've learned from the open-source movement that people want to contribute to endeavors of mutual benefit. So at craigslist, we've turned over a lot of control over the site to the people who use it. We seriously listen to suggestions and actually change the site in response to them.
Anyone who feels a posting on our site is wrong, for whatever reason, can flag it for removal; if enough people agree, the ad is removed automatically. A similar philosophy is embodied in the Wiki movement, particularly in Wikipedia (an online encyclopedia whose roughly two million entries are created and corrected by the site's users). We plan to turn over even more control of our site to the people who use it. Mainly, we need suggestions about what to do next.
Currently, we're trying to figure out how to charge the New York rental agents for apartment listings (they've suggested this as a way to improve site quality) while giving a break to the smaller agents.
I feel that all this is a deep expression of democratic values. From a business point of view, of course, it makes good sense, too: it lowers our costs and improves the quality of what's on our site. Finally, it helps keep management in touch with what's real--or at least that's what we hope.
Unfortunately, in contemporary corporate culture, customer service is often an afterthought, given lip service only. This seems to be part of the general dysfunction of large organizations. As a company accumulates power and money, the people who are skilled at corporate politics take control of it. Customer service never seems to be highly prized by people with those skills. Maybe it's because they lack empathy.
I speak with a lot of workers at many companies, and for the most part, they really want to provide good customer service. But they tell me they're often prevented from doing so because service is seen as a cost and not something that contributes to profits.
Me, maybe a lot of my motivation derives from the name of our site; I take things personally. Maybe sometime this year I can go part time as a customer service rep, and I could use a day off, maybe a Sunday. But I plan to be doing customer service forever.
No matter how hard I try, sometimes we screw up. Then we apologize and fix it. My lingering concern is that I'm missing something big, and that I need to hear about it from my team and the community. What am I missing?
Craig Newmark is a Web-oriented software engineer, with about 25 years' experience in coding. In 1995, he started craigslist, a community bulletin board with classifieds and discussion forums. Today, tens of millions of people use the site for free. In high school, he really did wear a plastic pocket protector and thick black glasses, taped together.
By Craig Newmark August 2005
My title at craigslist is "customer service rep and founder," and my customer service role is at least a full-time gig. A CEO runs the actual organization now. I've always had difficulty articulating why I have this obsession. I work anywhere from two to ten hours a day, seven days a week, doing stuff like deleting "bait and switch" posts from New York apartment brokers, moderating discussion boards, and sharing community suggestions with the team. If you e-mail me about the site, I'll probably write back--quickly, too.
Craigslist was originally a very simple e-mail list for my friends, focusing on arts and technology events in San Francisco. People suggested doing more, like job and apartment listings, so I did that; then I got more feedback--so I did even more stuff. Today, craigslist helps people in more than 100 cities in 24 countries with everyday needs, like finding a place to live or getting a job or selling furniture. With nine million unique visitors a month, it's a big site, though a simple one. We have a pretty good culture of trust and goodwill.
I figure that reasonably good customer service is part of the social contract between producer and consumer. In general, if you're going to do something, you should follow through and not screw around. As a nerd, I have the tendency to take things pretty seriously, so if I commit to something, I try really hard to stay committed.
This isn't altruism or social activism; it's just giving people a break. Pretty much all world religions tell us that one moral value is to help other people if you can. I feel that customer service, even when you get paid for it, is an expression of that value, an everyday form of compassion.
Also, I've learned from the open-source movement that people want to contribute to endeavors of mutual benefit. So at craigslist, we've turned over a lot of control over the site to the people who use it. We seriously listen to suggestions and actually change the site in response to them.
Anyone who feels a posting on our site is wrong, for whatever reason, can flag it for removal; if enough people agree, the ad is removed automatically. A similar philosophy is embodied in the Wiki movement, particularly in Wikipedia (an online encyclopedia whose roughly two million entries are created and corrected by the site's users). We plan to turn over even more control of our site to the people who use it. Mainly, we need suggestions about what to do next.
Currently, we're trying to figure out how to charge the New York rental agents for apartment listings (they've suggested this as a way to improve site quality) while giving a break to the smaller agents.
I feel that all this is a deep expression of democratic values. From a business point of view, of course, it makes good sense, too: it lowers our costs and improves the quality of what's on our site. Finally, it helps keep management in touch with what's real--or at least that's what we hope.
Unfortunately, in contemporary corporate culture, customer service is often an afterthought, given lip service only. This seems to be part of the general dysfunction of large organizations. As a company accumulates power and money, the people who are skilled at corporate politics take control of it. Customer service never seems to be highly prized by people with those skills. Maybe it's because they lack empathy.
I speak with a lot of workers at many companies, and for the most part, they really want to provide good customer service. But they tell me they're often prevented from doing so because service is seen as a cost and not something that contributes to profits.
Me, maybe a lot of my motivation derives from the name of our site; I take things personally. Maybe sometime this year I can go part time as a customer service rep, and I could use a day off, maybe a Sunday. But I plan to be doing customer service forever.
No matter how hard I try, sometimes we screw up. Then we apologize and fix it. My lingering concern is that I'm missing something big, and that I need to hear about it from my team and the community. What am I missing?
Craig Newmark is a Web-oriented software engineer, with about 25 years' experience in coding. In 1995, he started craigslist, a community bulletin board with classifieds and discussion forums. Today, tens of millions of people use the site for free. In high school, he really did wear a plastic pocket protector and thick black glasses, taped together.
Thursday, July 14, 2005
2009年 美邁入全數位電視時代
2009年 美邁入全數位電視時代
■ 編譯廖玉玲／綜合十三日電
美國電視業者12日表示，他們接受2009年以前停止類比訊號廣播的最後期限，屆時全美觀眾將只收看高品質的數位電視節目，而眾多的非數位電視機都將走進歷史。
美國電視業者過去一直抗拒聯邦政府的要求，不願轉換成數位訊號。如今他們突然轉向，願意配合政府。支持者表示，這一步的影響不亞於40年前電視畫面由黑白變成彩色的那一刻。
全美廣播協會（NAB）主席富里特（Edward O.Fritts）說：「電視廣播業者已經接受國會2009年起將強制讓類比廣播結束的事實。而我們也已經準備好。」美國參院與眾院目前都在考慮將完全傳送數位電視訊號的最後期限訂在2008年底或2009年初。
數位科技傳送的影像清晰、色彩生動、音質良好，而且類比訊號停用後，會釋放出價值數十億美元的廣播頻譜。但對廣大的電視觀眾而言，卻代表需要花好幾十萬美元錢換新機器。
由於現有的電視機大部分無法直接接收數位訊號，所以消費者勢必要花至少50美元至75美元購買特製的轉換器。接下來的問題是：政府可以出售釋放出的頻道，那這筆錢是否應該拿來補助民眾轉換數位電視時的成本？
目前全美逾1,500個電視頻道，同時傳送類比和數位兩種訊號。這些業者何時得停止傳送類比訊號，也是一個大問題。
美國聯邦政府1997年就要求電視台，2007年起得轉換成全數位訊號，但業者一再延宕。他們表示，改造設備的成本太高，也會因此流失負擔不起新設備的客戶。
業者不願配合，直接影響數位電視的製造和銷售，因為消費者搞不清楚政策為何，就不願投資新機器，消費電子製造商自然繼續生產市場較大的類比式電視。
如今廣播業者已不再堅持，受惠頗多的電視製造商莫不喜出望外，表示這對消費者最有利。
資料顯示，全美大約有12%至15%的家庭收看無線類比訊號頻道。若干人士指出，負擔不起轉換成本的觀眾大有人在。消費者聯盟（Consumers Union）資深幹部齊莫曼（Gene Kimmelman）說：「現在最大的問題，在於如何協助消費者使用他們現有的電視機，接收數位訊號，而不用另外花一大筆錢買新設備。」
【2005/07/14 經濟日報】
■ 編譯廖玉玲／綜合十三日電
美國電視業者12日表示，他們接受2009年以前停止類比訊號廣播的最後期限，屆時全美觀眾將只收看高品質的數位電視節目，而眾多的非數位電視機都將走進歷史。
美國電視業者過去一直抗拒聯邦政府的要求，不願轉換成數位訊號。如今他們突然轉向，願意配合政府。支持者表示，這一步的影響不亞於40年前電視畫面由黑白變成彩色的那一刻。
全美廣播協會（NAB）主席富里特（Edward O.Fritts）說：「電視廣播業者已經接受國會2009年起將強制讓類比廣播結束的事實。而我們也已經準備好。」美國參院與眾院目前都在考慮將完全傳送數位電視訊號的最後期限訂在2008年底或2009年初。
數位科技傳送的影像清晰、色彩生動、音質良好，而且類比訊號停用後，會釋放出價值數十億美元的廣播頻譜。但對廣大的電視觀眾而言，卻代表需要花好幾十萬美元錢換新機器。
由於現有的電視機大部分無法直接接收數位訊號，所以消費者勢必要花至少50美元至75美元購買特製的轉換器。接下來的問題是：政府可以出售釋放出的頻道，那這筆錢是否應該拿來補助民眾轉換數位電視時的成本？
目前全美逾1,500個電視頻道，同時傳送類比和數位兩種訊號。這些業者何時得停止傳送類比訊號，也是一個大問題。
美國聯邦政府1997年就要求電視台，2007年起得轉換成全數位訊號，但業者一再延宕。他們表示，改造設備的成本太高，也會因此流失負擔不起新設備的客戶。
業者不願配合，直接影響數位電視的製造和銷售，因為消費者搞不清楚政策為何，就不願投資新機器，消費電子製造商自然繼續生產市場較大的類比式電視。
如今廣播業者已不再堅持，受惠頗多的電視製造商莫不喜出望外，表示這對消費者最有利。
資料顯示，全美大約有12%至15%的家庭收看無線類比訊號頻道。若干人士指出，負擔不起轉換成本的觀眾大有人在。消費者聯盟（Consumers Union）資深幹部齊莫曼（Gene Kimmelman）說：「現在最大的問題，在於如何協助消費者使用他們現有的電視機，接收數位訊號，而不用另外花一大筆錢買新設備。」
【2005/07/14 經濟日報】
Monday, July 11, 2005
TD－SCDMA大陸釋善意 台商有疑慮
2005.07.11 工商時報
科技論壇 TD－SCDMA大陸釋善意 台商有疑慮
吳筱雯
大陸為了推展自有3G標準TD─SCDMA，近來頻頻透過兩岸科技交流論壇，對國內廠商釋出攜手開拓新局的訊息。雖然雙方都有合作意願，但相對於大陸國內的一頭熱，台灣廠商對於TD─SCDMA能否成功商用化運轉，大多還是抱持觀望態度。
由於大陸一直希望自訂的3G標準TD─SCDMA能夠跨向全世界，因此官方從一開始即表明，現行三項3G標準WCDMA、 cdma2000、TD─SCDMA，在大陸市場上都可以商用化，而且為了降低系統服務業者、消費者選用TD─SCDMA標準的心理障礙，該標準在制定時，也設計成與現有的GSM、GPRS標準完全相容。
自訂標準．廣結善緣
相較於之前大陸為推廣自行發展的WLAN標準WAPI，將 IEEE認定的WLAN規格排拒在外，最後導致全球業者、美國政府，一致抵制WAPI的情況，可說是大相逕庭。
在前年大陸官方進行3G頻段規劃時，TD─SCDMA一口氣贏得一五五MHz的非對稱TDD頻段，而WCDMA、cdma2000兩項技術，卻只各得六十MHz對稱的FDD頻段，當局對於TD─SCDMA成龍成鳳的期望，可見一斑。
除頻段規劃外，大陸官方還積極為TD─SCDMA，爭取國際輿論和技術支持，前年四月，促使歐盟轉變對TD─SCDMA的態度，同年六月下旬，進一步獲得3G國際標準組織3GPP的接納。
另外，大陸官方也表示，將投入七億人民幣資金以支持TD─SCDMA的發展，在大陸信產部3G外場測試中，有意爭取3G執照的六大系統服務業者均被要求測試TD─SCDMA。由此可見，大陸官方為了確保這項技術商用化成功，對於系統服務業者選用3G技術的意向，也積極「指導」。
大陸官方．積極指導
隨著主導TD─SCDMA設備發展的大唐電信，陸續完成各項測試，大陸3G執照最快可望在年底發放，外界盛傳，採用TD─SCDMA技術的執照，將會領先WCDMA、cdma2000發放。可以確定的是，大陸六家有意爭取三G執照的系統服務業者中，未來必定有超過一家將採用這項技術。
然而在資金、技術、系統服務業者均到位後，TD─SCDMA的市場接受度，還得視支援此一標準的手機效能、價位與款式能否符合消費者的需求。
TD─SCDMA雖然系統端晶片與設備漸趨成熟，但手機端相較之下，卻相當不成熟。目前還沒有哪個國際晶片大廠，願意為TD─SCDMA開發手機晶片組，提供手機晶片組都是大陸本土的IC設計公司，目前以擁有德儀資金的凱明、擁有聯發科董事長蔡明介個人資金的展訊，及天碁為主。
不過，即使是擁有國際大廠資金的大陸IC設計公司，在TD─SCDMA手機晶片組開發上，迄今成效不彰，甚至有一說認為，TD─SCDMA六月間數據服務測試結果不盡理想，就是因為手機端接收靈敏度太差，大陸希望在射頻晶片上尋求更多外援。
拉攏台商．強化戰力
也因此，過去只對大陸廠商開放的TD─SCDMA聯盟，最近才急著打開大門，五、六月間先通過迪比特（大霸在大陸經營的手機品牌）與英華達的入會申請，又透過兩岸技術交流論壇，對國內廠商頻頻釋出善意。
不過，對於台灣廠商而言，由於TD─SCDMA目前只有大陸採用，市場無法放大至全球，加上國際間3G服務尚未真正勃興，未來 TD─SCDMA能否成功商用化、廣被用戶接受，也還在未定之天。因此，業者對於是否投入TD─SCDMA手機或晶片組的開發，雖不排除，但也始終存在許多疑慮。
科技論壇 TD－SCDMA大陸釋善意 台商有疑慮
吳筱雯
大陸為了推展自有3G標準TD─SCDMA，近來頻頻透過兩岸科技交流論壇，對國內廠商釋出攜手開拓新局的訊息。雖然雙方都有合作意願，但相對於大陸國內的一頭熱，台灣廠商對於TD─SCDMA能否成功商用化運轉，大多還是抱持觀望態度。
由於大陸一直希望自訂的3G標準TD─SCDMA能夠跨向全世界，因此官方從一開始即表明，現行三項3G標準WCDMA、 cdma2000、TD─SCDMA，在大陸市場上都可以商用化，而且為了降低系統服務業者、消費者選用TD─SCDMA標準的心理障礙，該標準在制定時，也設計成與現有的GSM、GPRS標準完全相容。
自訂標準．廣結善緣
相較於之前大陸為推廣自行發展的WLAN標準WAPI，將 IEEE認定的WLAN規格排拒在外，最後導致全球業者、美國政府，一致抵制WAPI的情況，可說是大相逕庭。
在前年大陸官方進行3G頻段規劃時，TD─SCDMA一口氣贏得一五五MHz的非對稱TDD頻段，而WCDMA、cdma2000兩項技術，卻只各得六十MHz對稱的FDD頻段，當局對於TD─SCDMA成龍成鳳的期望，可見一斑。
除頻段規劃外，大陸官方還積極為TD─SCDMA，爭取國際輿論和技術支持，前年四月，促使歐盟轉變對TD─SCDMA的態度，同年六月下旬，進一步獲得3G國際標準組織3GPP的接納。
另外，大陸官方也表示，將投入七億人民幣資金以支持TD─SCDMA的發展，在大陸信產部3G外場測試中，有意爭取3G執照的六大系統服務業者均被要求測試TD─SCDMA。由此可見，大陸官方為了確保這項技術商用化成功，對於系統服務業者選用3G技術的意向，也積極「指導」。
大陸官方．積極指導
隨著主導TD─SCDMA設備發展的大唐電信，陸續完成各項測試，大陸3G執照最快可望在年底發放，外界盛傳，採用TD─SCDMA技術的執照，將會領先WCDMA、cdma2000發放。可以確定的是，大陸六家有意爭取三G執照的系統服務業者中，未來必定有超過一家將採用這項技術。
然而在資金、技術、系統服務業者均到位後，TD─SCDMA的市場接受度，還得視支援此一標準的手機效能、價位與款式能否符合消費者的需求。
TD─SCDMA雖然系統端晶片與設備漸趨成熟，但手機端相較之下，卻相當不成熟。目前還沒有哪個國際晶片大廠，願意為TD─SCDMA開發手機晶片組，提供手機晶片組都是大陸本土的IC設計公司，目前以擁有德儀資金的凱明、擁有聯發科董事長蔡明介個人資金的展訊，及天碁為主。
不過，即使是擁有國際大廠資金的大陸IC設計公司，在TD─SCDMA手機晶片組開發上，迄今成效不彰，甚至有一說認為，TD─SCDMA六月間數據服務測試結果不盡理想，就是因為手機端接收靈敏度太差，大陸希望在射頻晶片上尋求更多外援。
拉攏台商．強化戰力
也因此，過去只對大陸廠商開放的TD─SCDMA聯盟，最近才急著打開大門，五、六月間先通過迪比特（大霸在大陸經營的手機品牌）與英華達的入會申請，又透過兩岸技術交流論壇，對國內廠商頻頻釋出善意。
不過，對於台灣廠商而言，由於TD─SCDMA目前只有大陸採用，市場無法放大至全球，加上國際間3G服務尚未真正勃興，未來 TD─SCDMA能否成功商用化、廣被用戶接受，也還在未定之天。因此，業者對於是否投入TD─SCDMA手機或晶片組的開發，雖不排除，但也始終存在許多疑慮。
Sunday, July 10, 2005
美科學、工程學 優勢恐不再
美科學、工程學 優勢恐不再
■ 編譯曹前／路透華盛頓九日電
華盛頓全國經濟研究所（National Bu-reau of Economic Research）8日公布的研究報告說，美國科學和工程學大學畢業生的數量已少於歐洲和中國大陸與印度等開發中國家，使美國可能失去領先這些領域50多年的優勢。
撰寫該報告的經濟學家佛利曼（Richard Freeman）警告，全球科學和工程學就業市場的改變，需要相當長的時間。國際公司把資訊科技、高科技製造和研究發展工作移往低收入的發展中國家，是長期調整過程的先兆。
佛利曼說，美國必須採取緊急措施，以確保美國科學和工程學教育和研究下滑不致影響美國在全球的經濟地位。這兩個領域的教育和研究是1990年代美國生產力迅速成長與復甦的動力。
二次世界大戰以來，美國在科學和技術方面處於大幅領先地位。美國人口僅占世界總人口5%，但雇用世界近三分之一的科學和工程學研究人員，研究和開發經費占40%，科學和工程學研究出版物則占35%。
世界頂尖高科技公司中有許多設在美國，政府在國防相關科技方面的開支，也確保美國軍事科技在戰場上的支配地位。
然而佛利曼說，這種領先地位的根基可能受侵蝕。歐洲和亞洲大學科學和工程學畢業生的人數大幅增加，而美國大學的人數卻未見增長，使美國在這些領域所占的比率相對減少。
研究報告說，2000年的美國大學學士學位中，17%是科學和工程學，相比之下，世界的平均數是27%，大陸為52%。先進科學研究的博士學位的情況更驚人，2001年歐洲聯盟大學授予科學和工程學博士學位的人數比美國多40%；到2010年，領先率預料將達到近100%。
報告說，年輕科學和工程學畢業生的工作機會減少和薪水相對不高，使美國出生的學生不願讀這些學科。
【2005/07/10 經濟日報】"
■ 編譯曹前／路透華盛頓九日電
華盛頓全國經濟研究所（National Bu-reau of Economic Research）8日公布的研究報告說，美國科學和工程學大學畢業生的數量已少於歐洲和中國大陸與印度等開發中國家，使美國可能失去領先這些領域50多年的優勢。
撰寫該報告的經濟學家佛利曼（Richard Freeman）警告，全球科學和工程學就業市場的改變，需要相當長的時間。國際公司把資訊科技、高科技製造和研究發展工作移往低收入的發展中國家，是長期調整過程的先兆。
佛利曼說，美國必須採取緊急措施，以確保美國科學和工程學教育和研究下滑不致影響美國在全球的經濟地位。這兩個領域的教育和研究是1990年代美國生產力迅速成長與復甦的動力。
二次世界大戰以來，美國在科學和技術方面處於大幅領先地位。美國人口僅占世界總人口5%，但雇用世界近三分之一的科學和工程學研究人員，研究和開發經費占40%，科學和工程學研究出版物則占35%。
世界頂尖高科技公司中有許多設在美國，政府在國防相關科技方面的開支，也確保美國軍事科技在戰場上的支配地位。
然而佛利曼說，這種領先地位的根基可能受侵蝕。歐洲和亞洲大學科學和工程學畢業生的人數大幅增加，而美國大學的人數卻未見增長，使美國在這些領域所占的比率相對減少。
研究報告說，2000年的美國大學學士學位中，17%是科學和工程學，相比之下，世界的平均數是27%，大陸為52%。先進科學研究的博士學位的情況更驚人，2001年歐洲聯盟大學授予科學和工程學博士學位的人數比美國多40%；到2010年，領先率預料將達到近100%。
報告說，年輕科學和工程學畢業生的工作機會減少和薪水相對不高，使美國出生的學生不願讀這些學科。
【2005/07/10 經濟日報】"
Wednesday, July 06, 2005
Steve Jobs 對2005年史丹佛畢業生演講
放在這裡是因為Jobs應該是科技人，不過很明顯地，分類有所不足！
Steve Jobs 對2005年史丹佛畢業生演講
以下是蘋果電腦公司與Pixar動畫製作室執行長SteveJobs在2005年
六月12日對全體史丹佛大學畢業生的演講內容。
＝＝＝＝＝＝＝＝＝＝＝＝＝＝＝＝＝＝＝＝＝＝＝＝＝＝＝＝＝
今天，有榮幸來到各位從世界上最好的學校之一畢業的畢業典禮上。我從來沒從大學畢業。說實話，這是我離大學畢業最近的一刻。今天，我只說三個故事，不談大道理，
三個故事就好。
第一個故事，是關於人生中的點點滴滴怎麼串連在一起。
我在里德學院（Reedcollege）待了六個月就辦休學了。到我退學
前，一共休學了十八個月。那麼，我為什麼休學？
這得從我出生前講起。我的親生母親當時是個研究生，年輕未婚媽媽，她決定讓別人收養我。她強烈覺得應該讓有大學畢業的人收養我，所以我出生時，她就準備讓我被一對律師夫婦收養。但是這對夫妻到了最後一刻反悔了，他們想收養女孩。所以在等待收養名單上的一對夫妻，我的養父母，在一天半夜裡接到一通電話，問他們「有一名意外出生的男孩，你們要認養他嗎？」而他們的回答是「當然要」。後來，我的生母發現，我現在的媽媽從來沒有大學畢業，我現在的爸爸則連高中畢業也沒有。她拒絕在認養文件上做最後簽字。直到幾個月後，我的養父母同意將來一定會讓我上大學，她才軟化態度。
十七年後，我上大學了。但是當時我無知選了一所學費幾乎跟史丹佛一樣貴的大學，我那工人階級的父母所有積蓄都花在我的學費上。六個月後，我看不出唸這個書的價值何在。那時候，我不知道這輩子要幹什麼，也不知道唸大學能對我有什麼幫助，而且我為了唸這個書，花光了我父母這輩子的所有積蓄，所以我決定休學，相信船到橋頭自然直。
當時這個決定看來相當可怕，可是現在看來，那是我這輩子做過最好的決定之一。當我休學之後，我再也不用上我沒興趣的必修課，把時間拿去聽那些我有興趣的課。
這一點也不浪漫。我沒有宿舍，所以我睡在友人家裡的地板上，靠著回收可樂空罐的五先令退費買吃的，每個星期天晚上得走七哩的路繞過大半個鎮去印度教的HareKrishna神廟吃頓好料。我喜歡HareKrishna神廟的好料。追尋我的好奇與直覺，我所駐足的大部分事物，後來看來都成了無價之寶。舉例來說：
當時里德學院有著大概是全國最好的書法指導。在整個校園內的每一張海報上，每個抽屜的標籤上，都是美麗的手寫字。因為我休學了，可以不照正常選課程序來，所以我跑去學書法。我學了serif與sanserif字體，學到在不同字母組合間變更字間距，學到活版印刷偉大的地方。書法的美好、歷史感與藝術感是科學所無法捕捉的，我覺得那很迷人。
我沒預期過學的這些東西能在我生活中起些什麼實際作用，不過十年後，當我在設計第一台麥金塔時，我想起了當時所學的東西，所以把這些東西都設計進了麥金塔裡，這是第一台能印刷出漂亮東西的電腦。如果我沒沉溺於那樣一門課裡，麥金塔可能就不會有 多重字體跟變間距字體了。又因為Windows抄襲了麥金塔的使用方式，如果當年我沒
這樣做，大概世界上所有的個人電腦都不會有這些東西，印不出現在我們看到的漂亮的字來了。當然，當我還在大學裡時，不可能把這些點點滴滴預先串在一起，但是這在十年後回顧，就顯得非常清楚。
我再說一次，你不能預先把點點滴滴串在一起；唯有未來回顧時，你才會明白那些點點滴滴是如何串在一起的。所以你得相信，你現在所體會的東西，將來多少會連接在一塊。你得信任某個東西，直覺也好，命運也好，生命也好，或者業力。這種作法從來沒讓我失望，也讓我的人生整個不同起來。
我的第二個故事，有關愛與失去。
我好運－年輕時就發現自己愛做什麼事。我二十歲時，跟SteveWozniak在我爸媽的車庫裡開始了蘋果電腦的事業。我們拼命工作，蘋果電腦在十年間從一間車庫裡的兩個小夥子擴展成了一家員工超過四千人、市價二十億美金的公司，在那之前一年推出了我們最棒的作品－麥金塔，而我才剛邁入人生的第三十個年頭，然後被炒魷魚。要怎麼讓自己創辦的公司炒自己魷魚？好吧，當蘋果電腦成長後，我請了一個我以為他在經營公司上很有才幹的傢伙來，他在頭幾年也確實幹得不錯。可是我們對未來的願景不同，最後只好分道揚鑣，董事會站在他那邊，炒了我魷魚，公開把我請了出去。曾經是我整個成年生活重心的東西不見了，令我不知所措。
有幾個月，我實在不知道要幹什麼好。我覺得我令企業界的前輩們失望－我把他們交給我的接力棒弄丟了。我見了創辦HP的David Packard跟創辦Intel的BobNoyce，跟他們說我很抱歉把事情搞砸得
很厲害了。我成了公眾的非常負面示範，我甚至想要離開矽谷。但是漸漸的，我發現，我還是喜愛著我做過的事情，在蘋果的日子經歷的事件沒有絲毫改變我愛做的事。我被否定了，可是我還是愛做那些事情，所以我決定從頭來過。
當時我沒發現，但是現在看來，被蘋果電腦開除，是我所經歷過最好的事情。成功的沉重被從頭來過的輕鬆所取代，每件事情都不那麼確定，讓我自由進入這輩子最有創意的年代。
接下來五年，我開了一家叫做NeXT的公司，又開一家叫做Pixar的
公司，也跟後來的老婆談起了戀愛。Pixar接著製作了世界上第一部全
電腦動畫電影，玩具總動員，現在是世界上最成功的動畫製作公司。
然後，蘋果電腦買下了NeXT，我回到了蘋果，我們在NeXT發展的技術
成了蘋果電腦後來復興的核心。我也有了個美妙的家庭。
我很確定，如果當年蘋果電腦沒開除我，就不會發生這些事情。這帖藥很苦口，可是我想蘋果電腦這個病人需要這帖藥。有時候，人生會用磚頭打你的頭。不要喪失信心。
我確信，我愛我所做的事情，這就是這些年來讓我繼續走下去的唯一理由。你得找出你愛的，工作上是如此，對情人也是如此。你的工作將填滿你的一大塊人生，唯一獲得真正滿足的方法就是做你相信是偉大的工作，而唯一做偉大工作的方法是愛你所做的事。如果你還沒找到這些事，繼續找，別停頓。盡你全心全力，你知道你一定會找到。而且，如同任何偉大的關係，事情只會隨著時間愈來愈好。所以，在你找到之前，繼續找，別停頓。
我的第三個故事，關於死亡。
當我十七歲時，我讀到一則格言，好像是「把每一天都當成生命中的最後一天，你就會輕鬆自在。」這對我影響深遠，在過去33年裡，我每天早上都會照鏡子，自問：「如果今天是此生最後一日，我今天要幹些什麼？」每當我連續太多天都得到一個「沒事做」的答案時，我就知道我必須有所變革了。提醒自己快死了，是我在人生中下重大決定時，所用過最重要的工具。因為幾乎每件事－所有外界期望、所有名譽、所有對困窘或失敗的恐懼－在面對死亡時，都消失了，
只有最重要的東西才會留下。提醒自己快死了，是我所知避免掉入自己有東西要失去了的陷阱裡最好的方法。人生不帶來，死不帶去，沒什麼道理不順心而為。
一年前，我被診斷出癌症。我在早上七點半作斷層掃描，在胰臟清楚出現一個腫瘤，我連胰臟是什麼都不知道。醫生告訴我，那幾乎可以確定是一種不治之症，我大概活不到三到六個月了。醫生建議我回家，好好跟親人們聚一聚，這是醫生對臨終病人的標準建議。那代表你得試著在幾個月內把你將來十年想跟小孩講的話講完。那代表你得把每件事情搞定，家人才會盡量輕鬆。那代表你得跟人說再見了。
我整天想著那個診斷結果，那天晚上做了一次切片，從喉嚨伸入一個內視鏡，從胃進腸子，插了根針進胰臟，取了一些腫瘤細胞出來。我打了鎮靜劑，不醒人事，但是我老婆在場。她後來跟我說，當醫生們用顯微鏡看過那些細胞後，他們都哭了，因為那是非常少見的一種胰臟癌，可以用手術治好。所以我接受了手術，康復了。
這是我最接近死亡的時候，我希望那會繼續是未來幾十年內最接近
的一次。經歷此事後，我可以比之前死亡只是抽象概念時要更肯定告訴你們下面這
些：
沒有人想死。即使那些想上天堂的人，也想活著上天堂。但是死亡是我們共有的目的地，沒有人逃得過。這是註定的，因為死亡簡直就是生命中最棒的發明，是生命變化的媒介，送走老人們，給新生代留下空間。現在你們是新生代，但是不久的將來，你們也會逐漸變老，被送出人生的舞台。抱歉講得這麼戲劇化，但是這是真的。
你們的時間有限，所以不要浪費時間活在別人的生活裡。不要被信條所惑－盲從信條就是活在別人思考結果裡。不要讓別人的意見淹沒了你內在的心聲。最重要的，擁有跟隨內心與直覺的勇氣，你的內心與直覺多少已經知道你真正想要成為什麼樣的人。任何其他事物都是次要的。
在我年輕時，有本神奇的雜誌叫做 Whole EarthCatalog，當年我們很迷這本雜誌。那是一位住在離這不遠的Menlo Park的StewartBrand發行的，他把雜誌辦得很有詩意。那是1960年代末
期，個人電腦跟桌上出版還沒發明，所有內容都是打字機、剪刀跟拍立 得相機做出來的。雜誌內容有點像印在紙上的Google，在Google出現之前35年就有了：理想化，充滿新奇工具與神奇的註記。
Stewart跟他的出版團隊出了好幾期Whole EarthCatalog，然後出了停刊號。當時是1970年代中期，我正是你們現在這個年齡的時候。在停刊號的封底，有張早晨鄉間小路 的照片，那種你去爬山時會經過的鄉間小
路。在照片下有行小字：
求知若飢，虛心若愚。
那是他們親筆寫下的告別訊息，我總是以此自許。當你們畢業，展
開新生活，我也以此期許你們。
求知若飢，虛心若愚。
非常謝謝大家。
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'You've got to find what you love,' Jobs says
This is the text of the Commencement address by Steve Jobs, CEO of Apple Computer and of Pixar Animation Studios, delivered on June 12, 2005.
I am honored to be with you today at your commencement from one of the finest universities in the world. I never graduated from college. Truth be told, this is the closest I've ever gotten to a college graduation. Today I want to tell you three stories from my life. That's it. No big deal. Just three stories.
The first story is about connecting the dots.
I dropped out of Reed College after the first 6 months, but then stayed around as a drop-in for another 18 months or so before I really quit. So why did I drop out?
It started before I was born. My biological mother was a young, unwed college graduate student, and she decided to put me up for adoption. She felt very strongly that I should be adopted by college graduates, so everything was all set for me to be adopted at birth by a lawyer and his wife. Except that when I popped out they decided at the last minute that they really wanted a girl. So my parents, who were on a waiting list, got a call in the middle of the night asking: "We have an unexpected baby boy; do you want him?" They said: "Of course." My biological mother later found out that my mother had never graduated from college and that my father had never graduated from high school. She refused to sign the final adoption papers. She only relented a few months later when my parents promised that I would someday go to college.
And 17 years later I did go to college. But I naively chose a college that was almost as expensive as Stanford, and all of my working-class parents' savings were being spent on my college tuition. After six months, I couldn't see the value in it. I had no idea what I wanted to do with my life and no idea how college was going to help me figure it out. And here I was spending all of the money my parents had saved their entire life. So I decided to drop out and trust that it would all work out OK. It was pretty scary at the time, but looking back it was one of the best decisions I ever made. The minute I dropped out I could stop taking the required classes that didn't interest me, and begin dropping in on the ones that looked interesting.
It wasn't all romantic. I didn't have a dorm room, so I slept on the floor in friends' rooms, I returned coke bottles for the 5¢ deposits to buy food with, and I would walk the 7 miles across town every Sunday night to get one good meal a week at the Hare Krishna temple. I loved it. And much of what I stumbled into by following my curiosity and intuition turned out to be priceless later on. Let me give you one example:
Reed College at that time offered perhaps the best calligraphy instruction in the country. Throughout the campus every poster, every label on every drawer, was beautifully hand calligraphed. Because I had dropped out and didn't have to take the normal classes, I decided to take a calligraphy class to learn how to do this. I learned about serif and san serif typefaces, about varying the amount of space between different letter combinations, about what makes great typography great. It was beautiful, historical, artistically subtle in a way that science can't capture, and I found it fascinating.
None of this had even a hope of any practical application in my life. But ten years later, when we were designing the first Macintosh computer, it all came back to me. And we designed it all into the Mac. It was the first computer with beautiful typography. If I had never dropped in on that single course in college, the Mac would have never had multiple typefaces or proportionally spaced fonts. And since Windows just copied the Mac, its likely that no personal computer would have them. If I had never dropped out, I would have never dropped in on this calligraphy class, and personal computers might not have the wonderful typography that they do. Of course it was impossible to connect the dots looking forward when I was in college. But it was very, very clear looking backwards ten years later.
Again, you can't connect the dots looking forward; you can only connect them looking backwards. So you have to trust that the dots will somehow connect in your future. You have to trust in something - your gut, destiny, life, karma, whatever. This approach has never let me down, and it has made all the difference in my life.
My second story is about love and loss.
I was lucky – I found what I loved to do early in life. Woz and I started Apple in my parents garage when I was 20. We worked hard, and in 10 years Apple had grown from just the two of us in a garage into a $2 billion company with over 4000 employees. We had just released our finest creation - the Macintosh - a year earlier, and I had just turned 30. And then I got fired. How can you get fired from a company you started? Well, as Apple grew we hired someone who I thought was very talented to run the company with me, and for the first year or so things went well. But then our visions of the future began to diverge and eventually we had a falling out. When we did, our Board of Directors sided with him. So at 30 I was out. And very publicly out. What had been the focus of my entire adult life was gone, and it was devastating.
I really didn't know what to do for a few months. I felt that I had let the previous generation of entrepreneurs down - that I had dropped the baton as it was being passed to me. I met with David Packard and Bob Noyce and tried to apologize for screwing up so badly. I was a very public failure, and I even thought about running away from the valley. But something slowly began to dawn on me – I still loved what I did. The turn of events at Apple had not changed that one bit. I had been rejected, but I was still in love. And so I decided to start over.
I didn't see it then, but it turned out that getting fired from Apple was the best thing that could have ever happened to me. The heaviness of being successful was replaced by the lightness of being a beginner again, less sure about everything. It freed me to enter one of the most creative periods of my life.
During the next five years, I started a company named NeXT, another company named Pixar, and fell in love with an amazing woman who would become my wife. Pixar went on to create the worlds first computer animated feature film, Toy Story, and is now the most successful animation studio in the world. In a remarkable turn of events, Apple bought NeXT, I retuned to Apple, and the technology we developed at NeXT is at the heart of Apple's current renaissance. And Laurene and I have a wonderful family together.
I'm pretty sure none of this would have happened if I hadn't been fired from Apple. It was awful tasting medicine, but I guess the patient needed it. Sometimes life hits you in the head with a brick. Don't lose faith. I'm convinced that the only thing that kept me going was that I loved what I did. You've got to find what you love. And that is as true for your work as it is for your lovers. Your work is going to fill a large part of your life, and the only way to be truly satisfied is to do what you believe is great work. And the only way to do great work is to love what you do. If you haven't found it yet, keep looking. Don't settle. As with all matters of the heart, you'll know when you find it. And, like any great relationship, it just gets better and better as the years roll on. So keep looking until you find it. Don't settle.
My third story is about death.
When I was 17, I read a quote that went something like: "If you live each day as if it was your last, someday you'll most certainly be right." It made an impression on me, and since then, for the past 33 years, I have looked in the mirror every morning and asked myself: "If today were the last day of my life, would I want to do what I am about to do today?" And whenever the answer has been "No" for too many days in a row, I know I need to change something.
Remembering that I'll be dead soon is the most important tool I've ever encountered to help me make the big choices in life. Because almost everything – all external expectations, all pride, all fear of embarrassment or failure - these things just fall away in the face of death, leaving only what is truly important. Remembering that you are going to die is the best way I know to avoid the trap of thinking you have something to lose. You are already naked. There is no reason not to follow your heart.
About a year ago I was diagnosed with cancer. I had a scan at 7:30 in the morning, and it clearly showed a tumor on my pancreas. I didn't even know what a pancreas was. The doctors told me this was almost certainly a type of cancer that is incurable, and that I should expect to live no longer than three to six months. My doctor advised me to go home and get my affairs in order, which is doctor's code for prepare to die. It means to try to tell your kids everything you thought you'd have the next 10 years to tell them in just a few months. It means to make sure everything is buttoned up so that it will be as easy as possible for your family. It means to say your goodbyes.
I lived with that diagnosis all day. Later that evening I had a biopsy, where they stuck an endoscope down my throat, through my stomach and into my intestines, put a needle into my pancreas and got a few cells from the tumor. I was sedated, but my wife, who was there, told me that when they viewed the cells under a microscope the doctors started crying because it turned out to be a very rare form of pancreatic cancer that is curable with surgery. I had the surgery and I'm fine now.
This was the closest I've been to facing death, and I hope its the closest I get for a few more decades. Having lived through it, I can now say this to you with a bit more certainty than when death was a useful but purely intellectual concept:
No one wants to die. Even people who want to go to heaven don't want to die to get there. And yet death is the destination we all share. No one has ever escaped it. And that is as it should be, because Death is very likely the single best invention of Life. It is Life's change agent. It clears out the old to make way for the new. Right now the new is you, but someday not too long from now, you will gradually become the old and be cleared away. Sorry to be so dramatic, but it is quite true.
Your time is limited, so don't waste it living someone else's life. Don't be trapped by dogma - which is living with the results of other people's thinking. Don't let the noise of other's opinions drown out your own inner voice. And most important, have the courage to follow your heart and intuition. They somehow already know what you truly want to become. Everything else is secondary.
When I was young, there was an amazing publication called The Whole Earth Catalog, which was one of the bibles of my generation. It was created by a fellow named Stewart Brand not far from here in Menlo Park, and he brought it to life with his poetic touch. This was in the late 1960's, before personal computers and desktop publishing, so it was all made with typewriters, scissors, and polaroid cameras. It was sort of like Google in paperback form, 35 years before Google came along: it was idealistic, and overflowing with neat tools and great notions.
Stewart and his team put out several issues of The Whole Earth Catalog, and then when it had run its course, they put out a final issue. It was the mid-1970s, and I was your age. On the back cover of their final issue was a photograph of an early morning country road, the kind you might find yourself hitchhiking on if you were so adventurous. Beneath it were the words: "Stay Hungry. Stay Foolish." It was their farewell message as they signed off. Stay Hungry. Stay Foolish. And I have always wished that for myself. And now, as you graduate to begin anew, I wish that for you.
Stay Hungry. Stay Foolish.
Thank you all very much.
Steve Jobs 對2005年史丹佛畢業生演講
以下是蘋果電腦公司與Pixar動畫製作室執行長SteveJobs在2005年
六月12日對全體史丹佛大學畢業生的演講內容。
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今天，有榮幸來到各位從世界上最好的學校之一畢業的畢業典禮上。我從來沒從大學畢業。說實話，這是我離大學畢業最近的一刻。今天，我只說三個故事，不談大道理，
三個故事就好。
第一個故事，是關於人生中的點點滴滴怎麼串連在一起。
我在里德學院（Reedcollege）待了六個月就辦休學了。到我退學
前，一共休學了十八個月。那麼，我為什麼休學？
這得從我出生前講起。我的親生母親當時是個研究生，年輕未婚媽媽，她決定讓別人收養我。她強烈覺得應該讓有大學畢業的人收養我，所以我出生時，她就準備讓我被一對律師夫婦收養。但是這對夫妻到了最後一刻反悔了，他們想收養女孩。所以在等待收養名單上的一對夫妻，我的養父母，在一天半夜裡接到一通電話，問他們「有一名意外出生的男孩，你們要認養他嗎？」而他們的回答是「當然要」。後來，我的生母發現，我現在的媽媽從來沒有大學畢業，我現在的爸爸則連高中畢業也沒有。她拒絕在認養文件上做最後簽字。直到幾個月後，我的養父母同意將來一定會讓我上大學，她才軟化態度。
十七年後，我上大學了。但是當時我無知選了一所學費幾乎跟史丹佛一樣貴的大學，我那工人階級的父母所有積蓄都花在我的學費上。六個月後，我看不出唸這個書的價值何在。那時候，我不知道這輩子要幹什麼，也不知道唸大學能對我有什麼幫助，而且我為了唸這個書，花光了我父母這輩子的所有積蓄，所以我決定休學，相信船到橋頭自然直。
當時這個決定看來相當可怕，可是現在看來，那是我這輩子做過最好的決定之一。當我休學之後，我再也不用上我沒興趣的必修課，把時間拿去聽那些我有興趣的課。
這一點也不浪漫。我沒有宿舍，所以我睡在友人家裡的地板上，靠著回收可樂空罐的五先令退費買吃的，每個星期天晚上得走七哩的路繞過大半個鎮去印度教的HareKrishna神廟吃頓好料。我喜歡HareKrishna神廟的好料。追尋我的好奇與直覺，我所駐足的大部分事物，後來看來都成了無價之寶。舉例來說：
當時里德學院有著大概是全國最好的書法指導。在整個校園內的每一張海報上，每個抽屜的標籤上，都是美麗的手寫字。因為我休學了，可以不照正常選課程序來，所以我跑去學書法。我學了serif與sanserif字體，學到在不同字母組合間變更字間距，學到活版印刷偉大的地方。書法的美好、歷史感與藝術感是科學所無法捕捉的，我覺得那很迷人。
我沒預期過學的這些東西能在我生活中起些什麼實際作用，不過十年後，當我在設計第一台麥金塔時，我想起了當時所學的東西，所以把這些東西都設計進了麥金塔裡，這是第一台能印刷出漂亮東西的電腦。如果我沒沉溺於那樣一門課裡，麥金塔可能就不會有 多重字體跟變間距字體了。又因為Windows抄襲了麥金塔的使用方式，如果當年我沒
這樣做，大概世界上所有的個人電腦都不會有這些東西，印不出現在我們看到的漂亮的字來了。當然，當我還在大學裡時，不可能把這些點點滴滴預先串在一起，但是這在十年後回顧，就顯得非常清楚。
我再說一次，你不能預先把點點滴滴串在一起；唯有未來回顧時，你才會明白那些點點滴滴是如何串在一起的。所以你得相信，你現在所體會的東西，將來多少會連接在一塊。你得信任某個東西，直覺也好，命運也好，生命也好，或者業力。這種作法從來沒讓我失望，也讓我的人生整個不同起來。
我的第二個故事，有關愛與失去。
我好運－年輕時就發現自己愛做什麼事。我二十歲時，跟SteveWozniak在我爸媽的車庫裡開始了蘋果電腦的事業。我們拼命工作，蘋果電腦在十年間從一間車庫裡的兩個小夥子擴展成了一家員工超過四千人、市價二十億美金的公司，在那之前一年推出了我們最棒的作品－麥金塔，而我才剛邁入人生的第三十個年頭，然後被炒魷魚。要怎麼讓自己創辦的公司炒自己魷魚？好吧，當蘋果電腦成長後，我請了一個我以為他在經營公司上很有才幹的傢伙來，他在頭幾年也確實幹得不錯。可是我們對未來的願景不同，最後只好分道揚鑣，董事會站在他那邊，炒了我魷魚，公開把我請了出去。曾經是我整個成年生活重心的東西不見了，令我不知所措。
有幾個月，我實在不知道要幹什麼好。我覺得我令企業界的前輩們失望－我把他們交給我的接力棒弄丟了。我見了創辦HP的David Packard跟創辦Intel的BobNoyce，跟他們說我很抱歉把事情搞砸得
很厲害了。我成了公眾的非常負面示範，我甚至想要離開矽谷。但是漸漸的，我發現，我還是喜愛著我做過的事情，在蘋果的日子經歷的事件沒有絲毫改變我愛做的事。我被否定了，可是我還是愛做那些事情，所以我決定從頭來過。
當時我沒發現，但是現在看來，被蘋果電腦開除，是我所經歷過最好的事情。成功的沉重被從頭來過的輕鬆所取代，每件事情都不那麼確定，讓我自由進入這輩子最有創意的年代。
接下來五年，我開了一家叫做NeXT的公司，又開一家叫做Pixar的
公司，也跟後來的老婆談起了戀愛。Pixar接著製作了世界上第一部全
電腦動畫電影，玩具總動員，現在是世界上最成功的動畫製作公司。
然後，蘋果電腦買下了NeXT，我回到了蘋果，我們在NeXT發展的技術
成了蘋果電腦後來復興的核心。我也有了個美妙的家庭。
我很確定，如果當年蘋果電腦沒開除我，就不會發生這些事情。這帖藥很苦口，可是我想蘋果電腦這個病人需要這帖藥。有時候，人生會用磚頭打你的頭。不要喪失信心。
我確信，我愛我所做的事情，這就是這些年來讓我繼續走下去的唯一理由。你得找出你愛的，工作上是如此，對情人也是如此。你的工作將填滿你的一大塊人生，唯一獲得真正滿足的方法就是做你相信是偉大的工作，而唯一做偉大工作的方法是愛你所做的事。如果你還沒找到這些事，繼續找，別停頓。盡你全心全力，你知道你一定會找到。而且，如同任何偉大的關係，事情只會隨著時間愈來愈好。所以，在你找到之前，繼續找，別停頓。
我的第三個故事，關於死亡。
當我十七歲時，我讀到一則格言，好像是「把每一天都當成生命中的最後一天，你就會輕鬆自在。」這對我影響深遠，在過去33年裡，我每天早上都會照鏡子，自問：「如果今天是此生最後一日，我今天要幹些什麼？」每當我連續太多天都得到一個「沒事做」的答案時，我就知道我必須有所變革了。提醒自己快死了，是我在人生中下重大決定時，所用過最重要的工具。因為幾乎每件事－所有外界期望、所有名譽、所有對困窘或失敗的恐懼－在面對死亡時，都消失了，
只有最重要的東西才會留下。提醒自己快死了，是我所知避免掉入自己有東西要失去了的陷阱裡最好的方法。人生不帶來，死不帶去，沒什麼道理不順心而為。
一年前，我被診斷出癌症。我在早上七點半作斷層掃描，在胰臟清楚出現一個腫瘤，我連胰臟是什麼都不知道。醫生告訴我，那幾乎可以確定是一種不治之症，我大概活不到三到六個月了。醫生建議我回家，好好跟親人們聚一聚，這是醫生對臨終病人的標準建議。那代表你得試著在幾個月內把你將來十年想跟小孩講的話講完。那代表你得把每件事情搞定，家人才會盡量輕鬆。那代表你得跟人說再見了。
我整天想著那個診斷結果，那天晚上做了一次切片，從喉嚨伸入一個內視鏡，從胃進腸子，插了根針進胰臟，取了一些腫瘤細胞出來。我打了鎮靜劑，不醒人事，但是我老婆在場。她後來跟我說，當醫生們用顯微鏡看過那些細胞後，他們都哭了，因為那是非常少見的一種胰臟癌，可以用手術治好。所以我接受了手術，康復了。
這是我最接近死亡的時候，我希望那會繼續是未來幾十年內最接近
的一次。經歷此事後，我可以比之前死亡只是抽象概念時要更肯定告訴你們下面這
些：
沒有人想死。即使那些想上天堂的人，也想活著上天堂。但是死亡是我們共有的目的地，沒有人逃得過。這是註定的，因為死亡簡直就是生命中最棒的發明，是生命變化的媒介，送走老人們，給新生代留下空間。現在你們是新生代，但是不久的將來，你們也會逐漸變老，被送出人生的舞台。抱歉講得這麼戲劇化，但是這是真的。
你們的時間有限，所以不要浪費時間活在別人的生活裡。不要被信條所惑－盲從信條就是活在別人思考結果裡。不要讓別人的意見淹沒了你內在的心聲。最重要的，擁有跟隨內心與直覺的勇氣，你的內心與直覺多少已經知道你真正想要成為什麼樣的人。任何其他事物都是次要的。
在我年輕時，有本神奇的雜誌叫做 Whole EarthCatalog，當年我們很迷這本雜誌。那是一位住在離這不遠的Menlo Park的StewartBrand發行的，他把雜誌辦得很有詩意。那是1960年代末
期，個人電腦跟桌上出版還沒發明，所有內容都是打字機、剪刀跟拍立 得相機做出來的。雜誌內容有點像印在紙上的Google，在Google出現之前35年就有了：理想化，充滿新奇工具與神奇的註記。
Stewart跟他的出版團隊出了好幾期Whole EarthCatalog，然後出了停刊號。當時是1970年代中期，我正是你們現在這個年齡的時候。在停刊號的封底，有張早晨鄉間小路 的照片，那種你去爬山時會經過的鄉間小
路。在照片下有行小字：
求知若飢，虛心若愚。
那是他們親筆寫下的告別訊息，我總是以此自許。當你們畢業，展
開新生活，我也以此期許你們。
求知若飢，虛心若愚。
非常謝謝大家。
==========================================================
'You've got to find what you love,' Jobs says
This is the text of the Commencement address by Steve Jobs, CEO of Apple Computer and of Pixar Animation Studios, delivered on June 12, 2005.
I am honored to be with you today at your commencement from one of the finest universities in the world. I never graduated from college. Truth be told, this is the closest I've ever gotten to a college graduation. Today I want to tell you three stories from my life. That's it. No big deal. Just three stories.
The first story is about connecting the dots.
I dropped out of Reed College after the first 6 months, but then stayed around as a drop-in for another 18 months or so before I really quit. So why did I drop out?
It started before I was born. My biological mother was a young, unwed college graduate student, and she decided to put me up for adoption. She felt very strongly that I should be adopted by college graduates, so everything was all set for me to be adopted at birth by a lawyer and his wife. Except that when I popped out they decided at the last minute that they really wanted a girl. So my parents, who were on a waiting list, got a call in the middle of the night asking: "We have an unexpected baby boy; do you want him?" They said: "Of course." My biological mother later found out that my mother had never graduated from college and that my father had never graduated from high school. She refused to sign the final adoption papers. She only relented a few months later when my parents promised that I would someday go to college.
And 17 years later I did go to college. But I naively chose a college that was almost as expensive as Stanford, and all of my working-class parents' savings were being spent on my college tuition. After six months, I couldn't see the value in it. I had no idea what I wanted to do with my life and no idea how college was going to help me figure it out. And here I was spending all of the money my parents had saved their entire life. So I decided to drop out and trust that it would all work out OK. It was pretty scary at the time, but looking back it was one of the best decisions I ever made. The minute I dropped out I could stop taking the required classes that didn't interest me, and begin dropping in on the ones that looked interesting.
It wasn't all romantic. I didn't have a dorm room, so I slept on the floor in friends' rooms, I returned coke bottles for the 5¢ deposits to buy food with, and I would walk the 7 miles across town every Sunday night to get one good meal a week at the Hare Krishna temple. I loved it. And much of what I stumbled into by following my curiosity and intuition turned out to be priceless later on. Let me give you one example:
Reed College at that time offered perhaps the best calligraphy instruction in the country. Throughout the campus every poster, every label on every drawer, was beautifully hand calligraphed. Because I had dropped out and didn't have to take the normal classes, I decided to take a calligraphy class to learn how to do this. I learned about serif and san serif typefaces, about varying the amount of space between different letter combinations, about what makes great typography great. It was beautiful, historical, artistically subtle in a way that science can't capture, and I found it fascinating.
None of this had even a hope of any practical application in my life. But ten years later, when we were designing the first Macintosh computer, it all came back to me. And we designed it all into the Mac. It was the first computer with beautiful typography. If I had never dropped in on that single course in college, the Mac would have never had multiple typefaces or proportionally spaced fonts. And since Windows just copied the Mac, its likely that no personal computer would have them. If I had never dropped out, I would have never dropped in on this calligraphy class, and personal computers might not have the wonderful typography that they do. Of course it was impossible to connect the dots looking forward when I was in college. But it was very, very clear looking backwards ten years later.
Again, you can't connect the dots looking forward; you can only connect them looking backwards. So you have to trust that the dots will somehow connect in your future. You have to trust in something - your gut, destiny, life, karma, whatever. This approach has never let me down, and it has made all the difference in my life.
My second story is about love and loss.
I was lucky – I found what I loved to do early in life. Woz and I started Apple in my parents garage when I was 20. We worked hard, and in 10 years Apple had grown from just the two of us in a garage into a $2 billion company with over 4000 employees. We had just released our finest creation - the Macintosh - a year earlier, and I had just turned 30. And then I got fired. How can you get fired from a company you started? Well, as Apple grew we hired someone who I thought was very talented to run the company with me, and for the first year or so things went well. But then our visions of the future began to diverge and eventually we had a falling out. When we did, our Board of Directors sided with him. So at 30 I was out. And very publicly out. What had been the focus of my entire adult life was gone, and it was devastating.
I really didn't know what to do for a few months. I felt that I had let the previous generation of entrepreneurs down - that I had dropped the baton as it was being passed to me. I met with David Packard and Bob Noyce and tried to apologize for screwing up so badly. I was a very public failure, and I even thought about running away from the valley. But something slowly began to dawn on me – I still loved what I did. The turn of events at Apple had not changed that one bit. I had been rejected, but I was still in love. And so I decided to start over.
I didn't see it then, but it turned out that getting fired from Apple was the best thing that could have ever happened to me. The heaviness of being successful was replaced by the lightness of being a beginner again, less sure about everything. It freed me to enter one of the most creative periods of my life.
During the next five years, I started a company named NeXT, another company named Pixar, and fell in love with an amazing woman who would become my wife. Pixar went on to create the worlds first computer animated feature film, Toy Story, and is now the most successful animation studio in the world. In a remarkable turn of events, Apple bought NeXT, I retuned to Apple, and the technology we developed at NeXT is at the heart of Apple's current renaissance. And Laurene and I have a wonderful family together.
I'm pretty sure none of this would have happened if I hadn't been fired from Apple. It was awful tasting medicine, but I guess the patient needed it. Sometimes life hits you in the head with a brick. Don't lose faith. I'm convinced that the only thing that kept me going was that I loved what I did. You've got to find what you love. And that is as true for your work as it is for your lovers. Your work is going to fill a large part of your life, and the only way to be truly satisfied is to do what you believe is great work. And the only way to do great work is to love what you do. If you haven't found it yet, keep looking. Don't settle. As with all matters of the heart, you'll know when you find it. And, like any great relationship, it just gets better and better as the years roll on. So keep looking until you find it. Don't settle.
My third story is about death.
When I was 17, I read a quote that went something like: "If you live each day as if it was your last, someday you'll most certainly be right." It made an impression on me, and since then, for the past 33 years, I have looked in the mirror every morning and asked myself: "If today were the last day of my life, would I want to do what I am about to do today?" And whenever the answer has been "No" for too many days in a row, I know I need to change something.
Remembering that I'll be dead soon is the most important tool I've ever encountered to help me make the big choices in life. Because almost everything – all external expectations, all pride, all fear of embarrassment or failure - these things just fall away in the face of death, leaving only what is truly important. Remembering that you are going to die is the best way I know to avoid the trap of thinking you have something to lose. You are already naked. There is no reason not to follow your heart.
About a year ago I was diagnosed with cancer. I had a scan at 7:30 in the morning, and it clearly showed a tumor on my pancreas. I didn't even know what a pancreas was. The doctors told me this was almost certainly a type of cancer that is incurable, and that I should expect to live no longer than three to six months. My doctor advised me to go home and get my affairs in order, which is doctor's code for prepare to die. It means to try to tell your kids everything you thought you'd have the next 10 years to tell them in just a few months. It means to make sure everything is buttoned up so that it will be as easy as possible for your family. It means to say your goodbyes.
I lived with that diagnosis all day. Later that evening I had a biopsy, where they stuck an endoscope down my throat, through my stomach and into my intestines, put a needle into my pancreas and got a few cells from the tumor. I was sedated, but my wife, who was there, told me that when they viewed the cells under a microscope the doctors started crying because it turned out to be a very rare form of pancreatic cancer that is curable with surgery. I had the surgery and I'm fine now.
This was the closest I've been to facing death, and I hope its the closest I get for a few more decades. Having lived through it, I can now say this to you with a bit more certainty than when death was a useful but purely intellectual concept:
No one wants to die. Even people who want to go to heaven don't want to die to get there. And yet death is the destination we all share. No one has ever escaped it. And that is as it should be, because Death is very likely the single best invention of Life. It is Life's change agent. It clears out the old to make way for the new. Right now the new is you, but someday not too long from now, you will gradually become the old and be cleared away. Sorry to be so dramatic, but it is quite true.
Your time is limited, so don't waste it living someone else's life. Don't be trapped by dogma - which is living with the results of other people's thinking. Don't let the noise of other's opinions drown out your own inner voice. And most important, have the courage to follow your heart and intuition. They somehow already know what you truly want to become. Everything else is secondary.
When I was young, there was an amazing publication called The Whole Earth Catalog, which was one of the bibles of my generation. It was created by a fellow named Stewart Brand not far from here in Menlo Park, and he brought it to life with his poetic touch. This was in the late 1960's, before personal computers and desktop publishing, so it was all made with typewriters, scissors, and polaroid cameras. It was sort of like Google in paperback form, 35 years before Google came along: it was idealistic, and overflowing with neat tools and great notions.
Stewart and his team put out several issues of The Whole Earth Catalog, and then when it had run its course, they put out a final issue. It was the mid-1970s, and I was your age. On the back cover of their final issue was a photograph of an early morning country road, the kind you might find yourself hitchhiking on if you were so adventurous. Beneath it were the words: "Stay Hungry. Stay Foolish." It was their farewell message as they signed off. Stay Hungry. Stay Foolish. And I have always wished that for myself. And now, as you graduate to begin anew, I wish that for you.
Stay Hungry. Stay Foolish.
Thank you all very much.
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