One Feature too Few

I spent a small part of CyberMonday on the edge of spending $1700 on an electric bicycle. There were lots of good reasons to like the bicycle I was looking at, but one really big reason I ended up passing on the sale: no service information. None. Zero information on how to repair or maintain this relatively expensive (by my standards) vehicle.

The kiddies who buy, modify, and farkel-up this particular brand of eBike are convinced “the future is internet based” and YouTube is the “wave of the future.” Obviously, YouTube is today and will most likely not even exist in the near future. Everything gets replaced by the next thing and YouTube is barely this century technology. We’ve gone through at least a dozen iterations of the “next new thing” that will replace decent service manuals and we keep coming back to the one way humans have learned to transfer complicated information: writing and technical illustrations.

In the 1940’s, television was the great educational hope. Television’s promoters spent a small fortune convincing the government that television would be the educational wave of the future. It wasn’t. However, the con job worked and television’s promoters got some powerful monopoly protection in the form of FCC regulation under the guise that something about television would be “public service.” For almost 40 years, the only public service provided by television (and radio) was forced by the Fairness Doctrine, but Reagan eliminated that in 1987. For-profit “education” companies are really spending big bucks trying revive television and on-line media as educational tools because it is incredibly cheap to provide. Cheap and good are not often comfortable bedfellows.

Of course those early video training films weren’t cheap, because film and unions were involved, but they also weren’t effective. I remember watching a Burroughs Corporation film training program on cassette tape head alignment in 1975. The presenter had to stop the projector multiple times to explain what we’d just seen because the complicated task of getting azimuth and zenith exactly right was barely mentioned in the video and, with the heads used and the tape speed, that was critical for both data acquisition and storage and head and tape life. Some Burroughs word processing machines couldn’t make it through a day without wreaking a tape or two and losing a day’s work when the tape broke during backup. The video, typically, dwelled on easy shit like installing a tape drive or cassette, magnetic tape theory, and Burroughs’ corporate history and blew past the actual information like it was some sort of contagious virus. A month later, Burroughs flew me from Omaha to Hauppauge, New York to teach a class on cassette head alignment to their in-house techs. A year or so later and Burroughs was out of the mini-computer and dedicated office machine business.

Over the next 40 years, I have had several equally disappointing (if you take training seriously) or hilarious (if you don’t take humans seriously) video training experiences. For the last 25 years of my career, I taught industrial technology in medical devices and, later, music technology at a music college. In that time, I experienced a whole “video revolution” in training; from VHS (far cheaper than film) to digital video and non-linear editing to PowerPoint with a little of everything included. I used both video and PowerPoint in my own presentations, but I never relied on either for conveying complicated information. For that, I had reading assignments, homework, and labwork. After I retired, I took a couple of on-line courses through my local community college; because they were cheap and I was curious. Both classes were, by design and out of necessity, remedial. The instructors were remote and barely technically qualified to instruct in their subjects and the video material used was . . . freakin’ terrible. Obviously, I am infected with confirmation bias, but I doubt that you could present evidence that would make me doubt my opinion even slightly.

So, when I criticized the short-term and lazy thinking of an eBike manufacturer’s simplistic and mostly-useless video “manuals,” I got this response, “Funny you think you are correct because you are in the older generation and your years of experience tell you this FACT. Realistically the future will all be YouTube. The headlight LED kits I buy are all online links to installation (for my truck). My generation prefers online links to learn from watching vs reading. Its all opinion and your views vs others. The difference is your generation thinks your way is better when mine thinks our way is different and works for us. Get off your high horse. The future is internet based.” We’ll see, kiddy. I have been there and done that and while you live in luxury in your mommy’s basement watching YouTube and convincing yourself you’re learning something, I doubt that you’ll have a 55 year career doing anything that requires skill or knowledge.

In the end, I let the lack of product support make the decision for me. I let the sale price pass and decided to stick with repairing (on my own) the used bike in my basement. Nearly $2k for an unsupported product (last year’s model) with an undetermined life-expectancy and no useful repair information is beyond my personal and economic means.

Apple's Inventions

What wouldn't exist without Apple and Steve Jobs? 

Personal Computers
1976 - Steve Wozniak was selling a 30-chip circuit board, the Apple I computer.
1977 - The Commodore PET was the first commercially available personal computer.
1978 - The Tandy TRS-80 computers and the Apple II began shipping.
1980 - The  Commodore 64 sold 17 million units and was the best-selling single personal computer model in history.
By 1980 there were dozens of personal computer companies in the US, making a variety of computers using a collection of operating systems.

Graphical User Interface
1973 - Xerox developed the Alto personal computer with a bitmapped screen and a graphical user interface (GUI), but didn't use it in a commercial product until 1981 with the Star personal computer.
1982 - Tandy pasted the Deskmate GUI over MSDOS and made it available on their  TRS1000 machines and for other PC's.
1984 - Digital Research Inc. offered the GEM GUI operating system for Intel machines and the OS came standard on the Atari ST personal computers.
1984 - Apple introduced the Mac computers.
1985 - Windows 1.0 was introduced, the GUI-based operating system for the IBM and clone computer market.
1985 - Commodore introduced the Amiga with its Workbench GUI that introduced widgets, graphics library, multi-tasking capability, keyboard, mouse, and and other input devices.
1985 - Sun Microsystems introduced PostScript-based NeWs OS. Sun's systems ran both NeWs and X-Windows concurrently. 
1986 - X-Windows or the early version of UNIX was introduced by MIT engineers, this has become the standard layer for GUI systems, including Apple's OS X, since its introduction.
1986 - Apple released the Apple IIgs, an upgraded Apple II that ran Apple GS/OS with the introduction of the4 "folder" concept (instead of the more technically correct "directory" terminology) and a new video graphics chip.

Laptop Computers
1968 - Alan Kay began to work on his Dynabook concept at Xerox PARC facility and demonstrated the first concept portable personal computer in 1972.
1975 - IBM introduced the first commercially available laptop, the IBM 5100.
1981 - Epson introduced the HX-20 portable computer, with an LCD screen, a rechargeable battery, and a small printer. HP and Tandy also offered portable computers with similar features that year.
1982 - The GRID Compass, followed by the GRID Gavilan, portable laptops were used by NASA and the military. The GRID products were commercially available, but at an $8,000 price tag they were rare.
1991 - Apple introduced the Mac Portable to slight notice from consumers. By 1991, IBM, Compaq, HP, Epson, and several other companies were on their 3rd and 4th generation laptop product lines.

MP3 Players
1979 - Kane Kramer designed a digital audio players, the IXI, which managed about 3 minutes of playing time and never became a commercial product. but it did not enter commercial production. Apple hired Kramer as a consultant and used his work to claim "prior art" when Apple tried to take ownership of personal players.
1996 - Audio Highway announced the Listen Up player, but only a few were sold.
1998 - SaeHan Information Systems marketed the  “MPMan” player sold as the "Eiger MPMan" in the US. The MPMan had 32M of flashRAM and could manage about 20 minutes of playing time.
1998 - Diamond Multimedia introduced the Rio PMP300, another 32M player.
2000 - Creative released the 6GB micro-drive based Creative NOMAD Jukebox.
2001 - Apple introduced the first generation 5G iPOD. 

 Smartphones
1992 - The IBM Simon is demonstrated as a concept product at COMDEX.
1996 - Nokia introduces the Nokia 9000, which combined a cell phone with HP's personal digital assistant (PDA) features.
1997 -  Ericsson coined the name "smartphone" when the company displayed the concept phone GS88
2000 The touchscreen Ericsson R380 Smartphone was the first device to use an open operating system, the Symbian OS.
2000 -  Nokia 9210 communicator was the first color screen smartphone.
2001 - Palm  introduced the Kyocera 6035, the first widely used smartphone in the US.
2007 - Apple release the company's first iPhone.


Graphical Pads
1968 - Kay's Dynabook was the first concept for a graphical pad.
1991 - GO Corporation, Pencept, and Linus introduced a variety of tablet computers to little consumer success.
1993 - Apple introduces the Newton to minimal customer notice.
2000 - Microsoft attempted to market a line of Windows-based Tablet PC  touchscreen pads to little consumer interest. The Windows CE operating system was used by several Japanese and US mini-computer companies, including the NEC MobilePro product line that used touch screen operation, a drawing pad feature, and communications. Compaq, Acer, and other computer companies introduced and attempted to market a variety of touch-screen computer devices.
2010 - Apple introduces the iPad and the iOS interface.

Capitalism and Invention

I'm facinated by a lot of the uninformed argument about health care, relative to technology. Without Medicare and Medicade, the profitibility of the major medical device companies would be so slim that they wouldn't exist in any recognizable form, but those corporations are fighting "the public option" as hard as the more obviously self-interested insurance companies.

People claim that our capitalist system "produces" innovation and it does seem that many of the more socialist countries are less inclined to develop new drugs and devices. On the other hand, we're consistently generations behind in surgical procedures and preventive therapies and our physicians often go to Europe, Japan, India, and Singapore to learn the newest surgical tactics.

Being the traditional "ugly American," I have absolutely no personal experience anywhere but here and Canada. So I'm only getting what little I know from the media and second-hand reports and experiences. Still, it seems to me that trying to work both sides of the capitalist-socialist boarder has created an expensive, sluggish, marketing-based system that works pretty poorly for the majority of citizens. The link between capitalism and technical advances doesn't seem particularly tight.

A friend and I, about 6 years ago, came up with an invention for which he inisisted on applying for a patent. I was more convinced that we should build a product, first, and worry about the legal crap later. He went ahead, with his money, and dumped a load of cash into a New York patent law firm. The patent is still in the system, but another company is making exactly our product and selling it. They aren't making much money from it, as I suspected would be the case for our production. The whole process really made me thing about how I feel about invention, innovation, and business, though.

I've had about two dozen experiences with the patent process, in and because of my career. I invented a mobile electronic scale in the 1970's. I applied for a patent with that product, about six months after a company a friend owned went into production with the product. I did not follow up on the patent and the concept, as far as I know, is public domain now. It's also obsolete and went that way about 2 years after it went into use. I made some money. My friend got his company off of the ground with the product. I learned a lot about how corporations breech individuals' patent rights. I ended up in another industry and decided to keep my weight measurement ideas to myself. I wrote many of two companies' patent applications for a decade. I worked with patent lawyers and still communicate with one them, as a friend. The more I know, the less I want to participate in that system.

An engineer who worked for me in the 1980s had a common experience in lighting design in his own business. A Chinese company started copying his product designs and he ended up getting a consultant's fee for helping them steal his design. The feel-good stories and movies about inventors ending up rich after fighting off the corporations are mostly myth or massive good luck. My friend still creates some pretty amazing lighting controllers, but he submerges them in artwork and his customers could care less how he does what he does, so he's not as likely to get ripped off. The more he learned, the less he wanted to contribute to the corporate intellectual property theft system.

Just looking at my own experience, I don't think everyone invents and creates to get rich. I do think people might stop being publically inventive to avoid being robbed by corporations. I know people who create some incredible things for their homes and hobbies who will die with those secrets rather than lose them to some corporate scumbags. The Open Source computer world is a terrific example of that "look what I did" attitude and its disconnect from the profit motive. Moore's Law appears to be in stall-mode for the last near-decade. I wonder if the legal system has an effect on that?

Energy is an area where practically anyone in any area of technology and science could find the critical breakthrough that would save us all. Energy is probably the most tied-up-in-corporate-shell-games areas of invention law. Oil companies control Washington DC. They have the lawmakers, the lawyers, and paid technology thieves lurking around every corner looking to snag every invention that relates to their profits. Anyone foolish enough to announce "I've found the solution" to any energy problem is going to be sucked into a blackhole of corporate lawyers. Anyone smart enough to find the solution is probably going to be too smart to talk about it.

The founders of this country knew that the future belongs to invention and innovation. They created a patent office in 1790, George Washington signed the amendment. The office called itself "Commissioners for the Promotion of Useful Arts" or the "Board of Arts." Today, we talk about "intellectual property" and the associated rights, but that concept ought to be renamed "property of the powerful." Instead of protecting the rights of inventors, current law protects the corporate owners of concepts that were invented decades earlier. While stifling invention, our "property of the powerful" laws make sure publishing companies retain profits from art that was created decades ago, while ensuring that current artists are screwed multiple ways before their first fan experiences the art. The "property of the powerul" laws give priority to those with the most lawyers over those with the clearest claim to invention. The overall effect is to encourage inventors to stay out of the system, to keep their ideas to themselves.

Product design, today, closely reflects this constraining of mass participation in invention. Medical devices, for example, move in baby steps. New ideas find their way into products so rarely that you'd think human creativity had dried up. A friend described aeronautical engineering as "sued out," meaning that every new idea got so entangled into patent lawsuits that the industy has agreed not to do anything new. For an industry that is so dependent on the price of oil, you'd think that agreement would be the kiss of death. It probably will be. Auto manufacturers seem to have made a similar agreement. The movie "Who Killed the Electric Car" depicts an auto industry that is so connected to oil interests that the industry sabatoged its own best ideas to keep the oil companies happy. Today, every car company is offering exactly the same solutions to alternative energy and high efficiency vehicles. That ought to be proof that invention is not a significant part of those company's culture.

How do we fix this? We probably won't. If "necessity is the mother of invention," we're most likely going to be forced to wait for necessity. As it has taken a world-wide depression to force finance to mildly reform its corrupt practices, it will probably take a world-wide energy crisis to force industry to consider reforming creative property rights. Until then, we can enjoy the incremental, baby-stepping stutter-step of progress that we've learned to expect from our existing system.