As Bert Goff noted in his introduction, this was John R. Patrick’s 24th presentation at a DACS General Meeting. We invite him back because we learn something new every time. Year after year, John’s presentation is always our best-attended meeting. The kicker to all this is that it really puts the onus on the reviewer and, this year, that would be me.
This year John has released an updated edition of his first book, Net Attitude: What it is, How to get it, and Why it is More important than Ever. First published in 2001, John’s book is about how companies can best use the Internet by adopting a “Net Attitude”. The new edition updates and expands the first book.
Ok, back to our meeting and John’s presentation. To start, he gave examples of Net Attitude and not-Net Attitude. By John’s estimate, amazon.com has roughly 20% market share of all retail sales online. Of all the millions of companies selling online, how can one company capture 20% of all online sales? Because Amazon has Net Attitude. John gave several examples; here is one: when you have a problem with a typical company and need to talk to a customer service representative, assuming you can find a phone number, you call the company and get, “Press 1 for Spanish, then press 1 for sales, press 2 for support,” and so on. At Amazon you look on the website for support. The website offers support by email, chat or phone. You choose phone and the website asks “do you want to call us or should we call you?” So you pick to have them call you, the website then shows you the number they have on file and asks, “Is this still the correct number?” When you click, yes, your phone rings with a support person from Amazon. That’s the kind of customer-pleasing interaction that shows Net Attitude.
John has always talked about the seven attributes of the Next Generation Internet:
- Fast
- Always on
- Everywhere
- Natural
- Intelligent
- Easy
- Trusted
Over the years the examples change. This year?
Fast: The latest wireless technology is MIMO (multiple-input and multiple-output) which can provide 4.6 billion bits per second, which makes for fast Wi-Fi and cellular. John noted that soon wireless networking will be faster than the Ethernet typically used today.
Always on: John spoke about his electric car which is always connected to the Internet, either by Wi-Fi in the garage at home or LTE (Long Term Evolution) cellular on the road.
Everywhere: Today the cloud is everywhere. Cloud providers have their entire business riding on the provision of a secure and reliable platform. They hire the brightest people to design their systems – and to test the security by trying to break in. Even for healthcare, there are HIPAA-compliant cloud providers. Kaiser Permanente, the large healthcare provider in California, has moved 25% of doctor-patient interactions to email. Imagine the savings in time (and cost) this would mean if you could ask your doctor a question between visits – and get an answer!
Natural: What’s becoming natural today is virtual reality, made of a set of things: artificial intelligence, augmented reality, virtual reality, which are all somewhat related. An example is an app for the iPhone that provides a 360° view of surroundings. After selecting a place, you hold your phone out as a viewer. When you move the phone, the view changes to whatever one would see in that direction – so if you look up you see the ceiling, if you turn around you see what is behind you in a totally natural way. VR will have a big role in medicine enabling a surgeon to plan an operation in collaboration with other doctors.
Intelligent: John’s example here is his iPhone that, together with an attachment on the back, can take a basic (single lead) EKG in just 30 seconds. The attachment is called Kardia from AliveCor. The EKG is analyzed by the iPhone for several common heart conditions and can even be sent directly to a board-certified doctor who will provide a “second opinion” for $12. Another part of Intelligent is IBM’s Watson super computer. Watson is now being used against cancer. The computer can analyze more data for more variables than any human researcher.
Easy: Easy is becoming about wearables. There are all kinds of wearables but his example was the Apple Watch which can monitor your heart all the time. You don’t need to tell the watch to start recording, it just does it all the time – that’s why it’s Easy. The data is recorded in the Apple Health app on your iPhone. Cedars-Sinai Medical Center in Los Angeles has linked the electronic health records of 80,000 patients so, if the patients choose, the data they collect in the Apple Health app is automatically transferred to the same system used by their doctors. Imagine that!
Trusted: Do we trust the Internet? What other systems do we trust? Do we trust the voting systems we have now? Remember the election in 2000 and the “hanging chads” in the recount in Florida, ending with Bush v. Gore in the Supreme Court? Following that election, Congress authorized $2.9 billion in grants to the states to buy new voting machines. Some of those machines have already been replaced because of security problems. John is researching our voting systems for a new book to be called Election Attitude. (I can’t wait to read it.) What he has found is unbelievable in how untrustworthy the existing systems are, so to say that we can’t trust the Internet to vote is just not accurate. The solution, John believes, is a combination of the Internet, mobile phones, and the block chain. The block chain is the infrastructure of the Bitcoin digital currency. With seven years’ experience, without ever being hacked, John called it “completely secure”. It is a peer-to-peer, public, distributed ledger that is also private in that no name is associated with each transaction. With thousands of servers around the world running the same software, an attempt to change a block on one server would be instantly detected and rejected by the network of other servers. The block chain’s ability to instantly and securely record transfers of Bitcoins anywhere around the world at essentially zero cost will make this an important technology in the future. There is no reason that block-chain technology could not be used to record votes.
The two principles of Net Attitude:
Think big, Act bold, Start Simple, Iterate fast – Think big and act bold: Uber, Tesla, Airbnb are examples of acting bold. John relates a conversation with Jeff Bezos in 1995 when he asked Bezos why he was selling only books. The answer was “It’s simple; nobody returns books. It’s a good business to be in.” That was the simple start. Ebay started with just baseball cards. When people laughed that there was no business there, they thought bold and iterated into other goods. On the other hand we have healthcare.gov. They thought big and acted bold, but starting big led to failing big.
Think inside out – not outside in – Start thinking on the inside where the people are, walk in their shoes, please them. The example of outside-in thinking is the call center with the endless menus and no tolerance for pressing the wrong key, when what you really need is to talk to an actual person.
John intentionally kept his talk short to leave extra time for questions and answers, so at this point in the meeting, we took a short break.
The following is a summary of the best questions:
Q – Apparently governments around the world hate encryption and the FBI wants Apple to break their own encryption. So will companies still be able to offer products with strong encryption? How do you see this resolving?
A – Excellent question. John related a story from the mid-90’s when he was working with a group and the question of e-commerce came up. At that time, many people said that e-commerce was impossible – couldn’t be done. John and others thought it could be done and the key was encryption to scramble the contents of a transaction without danger that it could be altered en route. Today some people don’t like the idea that encryption can be used to scramble a text message that no one else can read. Encryption can be used to send pictures, email, files, anything. Once this data is scrambled, it can only be unscrambled if you have the encryption key. Most technology companies think that encryption is how products can be made more secure. For example, we don’t want someone getting our health records stored on the Internet; encryption is the answer and we want the encryption to be unbreakable. The irony is that parts of our government have spent millions to create secure technology so that dissidents living in countries with repressive regimes can communicate and have free access to uncensored information, while law enforcement doesn’t like it and must find alternate ways to learn what people are saying and doing.
Q – Do you feel that Google has a Net Attitude when frequently they change their search algorithms? Sometimes it seems to be harder to find things than it should.
A – John mentioned that many people don’t trust Google, but that he does in that he feels they try to do the right thing most of the time. It’s natural that people want to understand exactly how that algorithm works, but Google doesn’t want people to be able to ‘game’ the system. An industry has developed of companies who offer to get your company or website to the top of the list for a fee. When you don’t get good search results, try using ‘advanced’ search. This allows you to specify words you want to exclude, set limits on when the page was updated, and more.
Q – Do you have suggestions for how individuals can deal with information overload? Sites like Wikipedia are helpful but do you have other suggestions?
A – One way is to use filters. For email there something called Sanebox which reads your email and figures out which are ads and which are likely to be important. The important ones are delivered to your inbox while the others are set aside for later. Over time it ‘learns’ your email preferences as you indicate what you do or do not want to see in your inbox. This is an example of a tool that can help, a Google search for “how to deal with information overload” will find many tools.
Q – Two questions: I recently saw an article that Google has been able to manipulate elections around the world by how they present search results to influence the person searching. And I hear that Windows 10 seems to include a key logging system to learn about the person using the machine. Could you comment?
A – Many people are trying ways to learn about your likes and dislikes so they can present “better” information like advertising. Some people like this; I don’t. Most browsers now have a “do not track” feature. It’s up to the website to obey it, but it’s a start.
Q – There seem to standards for many things, why not passwords? Some sites want a number, some want upper and lower case, why can’t there be a standard? There are standard formats for much of the information we all use, why not passwords?
A – Passwords are a case where we don’t want a standard. The best solution is to use a program to manage your passwords. There are many good password managers; John mentioned 1Onepassword, but there are many. The Net Attitude approach would be to show the rules when creating an account for what a password can contain plus the minimum and maximum length.
Q – The Internet of Things (IoT) is not as much in the news lately, but could you talk about how it relates to the seven attributes like Trusted, Always on, Everywhere, etc.?
A – While it’s not in the news, IoT is being rapidly adopted and is a really good thing. On the consumer side, John spoke of more than 100 devices in his home that are networked – like three thermostats, lighting that can randomly turn on and off to make it look like someone is home, digital door locks, and sensors like leak detectors. Over the last few years the cost of these home automation devices has kept going down. These devices will mushroom into many, many areas. Smarthome.com is a place to start. The software John uses for home automation is called Indigo.
In healthcare, hospitals are full of devices that don’t but should communicate. John gave the example of infusion pumps. These devices are everywhere in a hospital, some break, some need a battery or other service. How can anyone keep track of all that? But if the devices had a Wi-Fi chip, they could communicate their status (idle, in use, needs service) to a central location that would always know where they are and when to schedule service. Think how much more productive it would be if, when you need one, you could just check your iPhone for the location of the nearest one not in use.
John’s website is attitudellc.org where you can sign up for his weekly blog update that comes out each Saturday morning.
John mentioned Internet voting. From the Freedom to Tinker blog, here is a Tedx talk entitled, “Internet Voting? Really?” by Andrew Appel given in April of this year. Andrew Appel comes to the opposite conclusion from John but analyses only existing technology and never mentions the block chain which just could be the technology that allows us to vote online, securely and most importantly, fraud-free.
By the way, Freedom to Tinker produces many interesting articles including a recent one on Tesla cars and privacy.