The Network is Still the Computer

Sabrina was telling me about her vacation plans just now, a good chunk of which will involve writing the story she's been periodically posting here (part 1, part 2) that I'm enjoying immensely. I had thoughts of her sitting at a coffee shop enjoying a nice late-Summer afternoon, letting the creativity flow while enjoying the day. But then I remembered that not all of us own laptops, least not ones with wireless connections and (ugh) decently-working batteries.

Which got me to wondering at the limitations of the current way Internet cafés are set up, and perhaps why they aren't successful, in that they haven't moved past the novelty stage in most places (South Korea being an exception, which I may post about later, but mentioning it is probably producing Starcraft-sounds in Chantal's head at the moment, for which I apologize). With an Internet cafe, you sit by yourself along a row of computers which take up the better part of your desk space, and are charged in 10 or 15 minute intervals for your use of the computer. This seems to mostly limit them to being used by travellers e-mailing home.

The bar that I would judge a 'successful' internet café would be that it would offer a compelling enough experience that I would be tempted to leave my laptop at home and just go there instead for my caffeine-and-atmosphere needs.

The Hardware Component

Instead of the public-library like row of clunky computers along a wall, I envision comfortable chairs surrounding round, low tables, perhaps with iBooks on them. Maybe like this, only take away the little kids and add nice, comfy, big-people chairs. The customer would be free to pick up the computer and use it on his or her knees if he or she likes, as long as it doesn't leave the store or get coffee spilled on it, what difference does it make? (noting that these risks are already there when you started mixing computers and beverages, so this isn't a new risk) A cup holder in the arm of a chair will go a lot further towards spill-reduction than chaining the user to a boring desk-style setup.

It's quite simple, really. To be successful, you have to start from what people already enjoy doing, sitting around enjoying their coffee in a comfortable setting, and adding your extra feature to that, rather than forcing them into a less-comfortable setting and hoping that what you're offering will be so compelling that they will put up with it.

And charging per minute of computer use, especially with Starbuck's' scheme of making people pay to even access wireless networks within their shops, is going to severely limit the appeal of any such endeavor. Your aim in running a business that sells coffee is to make a profit selling people coffee. If you sell them a newspaper, that's fine. But don't charge them $2 / 10 minutes to read the one they brought with them. That would be unthinkable to anyone trained outside of the East-German school of customer service. So don't try and do that for network access or computer use either. If the place isn't full, don't bother the (probably loyal) customer sitting a little too long with a book or a computer. And if it is packed, you'd probably politely ask someone who has finished his or her coffee to move along anyway. These rules of courtesy can work equally well in a properly set-up Internet café. And cutting off someone's network access because their time limit is up just before they send an important email is utterly rude.

The Software Component

This is the other side of my little plan that needs working on. And is perhaps a little more ambitious than comfy chairs and laptops. Our problem is that people are tied too tightly to their own computers. For this I blame Intel and Microsoft's inability to let go of an old computing model, and Sun and Oracle's inability to produce or market anything toward consumers. (Ever hear of the Oracle Network Computer? Of course you haven't.) The result is that people store all their important data on their own systems at home or at work, and are always a single ill-timed power failure away from total data loss.

Sure, having 200GB of space is great for storing your mountains of illegal mp3s and DivX movies, but the way I partition my home directories still tells me I don't need a great lot of space for general writing and non-dev work. And even if I did, my computers are all attached to a network anyway, why can't I access my data from elsewhere more easily?

People have come to rely on web-based email, most couldn't live with a standard POP account, which they can only access from one computer, instead of a GMail or hotmail account they can access from anywhere. Why not do the same for editing your documents?

OpenOffice.org's MS Word compatibility is as good as just about anyone needs already. And since it's open source, it could be integrated into an online document management system. One has to remember at this point that FTP is far too complicated a beast for most people to master, so a centralized document management system is going to have to be as dead easy as entering your password and seeing a list of emails. But that's no problem, you can even use some of GMail's search / sort / label ideas to make document management easier for people. Then, you click on the document you want to edit, make your changes in a full-featured editor, and 're-publish' it, just like a blog, only it's private.

E-Mailing documents to yourself fails in this task because they're all interspersed with email from other people, and given services like hotmail's limited space, you're always deleting the files after you use them, so you have to plan to only want to view or edit one or two files at a time. GMail's extra space helps a little, but you still have the problem of multiple versions of files clogging up the interface.

File that in my 'why the fuck hasn't someone done this already?' file.

The other thing people do on computers is manage photos on digital cameras. Now, cameras come with smart cards, which you can plug into a laptop to get the pictures off of. What is needed is for a service like Flickr (the best online photo sharing service I've used) to give their users a little tag file that would sit on their flash cards, and, when inserted into a computer, would automatically log them into their account on Flickr (or a similar service)'s account, and upload and publish their pictures seamlessly.

There's no reason why this can't be a one-button process. And I'm especially mad at Sun for not getting Jini-based java smart card technology out into the market as it would be perfect for such a task.

This is where I see an opportunity for Google to move in and un-chain people from their PCs. They're giving people 1GB of space for email, why not give them a document management system as well? And they already own Blogger, which has an association with Flickr, so the publishing side is also under their umbrella now. What they haven't done that will be critical is offer a single sign-on for GMail, Blogger & friends, and Orkut, without the creepy big brother-ish overtones of Microsoft's Passport. (*cough* Liberty Alliance *cough*).

The document management thing is something I might do myself, perhaps as a front-end to GMail's massive storage (they do publish an API, after all) or a simple FTP front-end with a much better interface. But I've got a lot of stuff on the go and likely won't get to it any time soon, I'm starting to realize :)