Interesting piece by Farhad Manjoo of Slate today entitled “So Gmail Was Down. Get Over It.” Manjoo notes that Google’s Gmail service went down briefly this week — for an hour and a half — and that led to a lot of people “freaking out” over the downtime. He asks” “Google’s e-mail service works 99.9 percent of time. Why do we freak out during the other 0.1 percent?”
That’s an good question, but I actually didn’t hear all that many people bitching about it this time around. In fact, I am rather surprised
how little I heard about this incident. I think that’s because many of us are gradually growing accustomed to a world in which communications networks and digital devices deliver something less than the holy grail of “five 9s” uptime. That was the standard for telephony and computing in the world I grew up in: 99.999% was the magic number that network engineers aspired to and that many of us in the public generally demanded.
Today, however, we settle for something less. As Manjoo’s piece about Gmail suggests, we’ll settle “three 9s,” as in 99.9% reliability. And sometimes we’ll settle for far less than that. Why is that? I think Robert Capps has part of the answer in his recent
Wired essay, “The Good Enough Revolution: When Cheap and Simple Is Just Fine.” Capps points out the modern Digital Age has seen the “triumph of what might be called Good Enough tech. Cheap, fast, simple tools are suddenly everywhere.” He continues: Continue reading →
“Hasn’t Steve Jobs learned anything in the last 30 years?” asks Farhad Manjoo of Slate in an interesting piece about “The Cell Phone Wars” currently raging between Apple’s iPhone and the Google’s new G1, Android-based phone. Manjoo wonders if whether Steve Jobs remembers what happen the last time he closed up a platform: “because Apple closed its platform, it was IBM, Dell, HP, and especially Microsoft that reaped the benefits of Apple’s innovations.” Thus, if Jobs didn’t learn his lesson, will he now with the iPhone? Manjoo continues:
Well, maybe he has—and maybe he’s betting that these days, “openness” is overrated. For one thing, an open platform is much more technically complex than a closed one. Your Windows computer crashes more often than your Mac computer because—among many other reasons—Windows has to accommodate a wider variety of hardware. Dell’s machines use different hard drives and graphics cards and memory chips than Gateway’s, and they’re both different from Lenovo’s. The Mac OS, meanwhile, has to work on just a small range of Apple’s rigorously tested internal components—which is part of the reason it can run so smoothly. And why is your PC glutted with viruses and spyware? The same openness that makes a platform attractive to legitimate developers makes it a target for illegitimate ones.
I discussed these issues in greater detail in my essay on”Apple, Openness, and the Zittrain Thesis” and in a follow-up essay about how the Apple iPhone 2.0 was cracked in mere hours. My point in these and other essays is that the whole “open vs. closed” dichotomy is greatly overplayed. Each has its benefits and drawbacks, but there is no reason we need to make a false choice between the two for the sake of “the future of the Net” or anything like that.
In fact, the hybrid world we live in — full of a wide variety of open and proprietary platforms, networks, and solutions — presents us with the best of all worlds. As I argued in my original review of Jonathan Zittrain’s book, “Hybrid solutions often make a great deal of sense. They offer creative opportunities within certain confines in an attempt to balance openness and stability.” It’s a sign of great progress that we now have different open vs. closed models that appeal to different types of users. It’s a false choice to imagine that we need to choose between these various models.
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The Technology Liberation Front is the tech policy blog dedicated to keeping politicians' hands off the 'net and everything else related to technology.