As promised, I'm back with more analogies to chemistry and physics. If you enjoyed
yesterday's post, you're in for a treat. If not, this post is completely different.
Technology is cooperative
It's no big revelation that change
is difficult but important. We've talked about it
before, and
we've talked about how trying to keep up with the bleeding technology
front at all times is
probably not worth it. But there's
another aspect of the upgrade path that is easier to overlook if you're
not careful. To set the analogic* stage, I briefly want to talk about
the concept of cooperativity. Basically, cooperativity is the idea that
an initial event can lower the activation barrier for following events (see
yesterday's post if that doesn't make any sense).
The classic example of this in biology is oxygen binding to hemoglobin.
Hemoglobin is the main oxygen transporter in your blood carrying oxygen
from your lungs to the rest of your body. Each hemoglobin molecule can
bind up to 4 oxygens, and there is some energy barrier to bind each of
them. The cool thing is that once the first oxygen binds, it changes
the shape of hemoglobin such that it's easier to bind the second, which
makes it easier to bind the third, which makes it easier to bind the
fourth. The result is that hemoglobin almost always has either zero or
four oxygen molecules bound. This is an important property for
hemoglobin because it lets it pick up oxygen easily in the lungs, and
then dump it all in the tissues of the body. That's cooperativity.
Technology has a tendency to be cooperative in similar ways, both by
it's nature and by design. Apple originally released the iPod to try
and get people to buy their computers; the iPod experience was much
better on a mac, encouraging users of one to get one (many people
would either have both or neither). Now this plan didn't work out
exactly like they planned (plenty of windows users with iPods,
obviously), but that was the original idea. Microsoft has done similar
things with Office and Windows. Until recently, Outlook didn't even
exist on the Mac, and Office in general was slow and close to useless.
As such, if you wanted to use Outlook or the rest of Office, it was
much easier to use Windows. To finish the software giant triumvirate,
anyone who has ever used Google's services knows they exhibit extreme
cooperativity. Gmail, Google Calendar, Google Docs, and Android are all
pretty great services on their own, but using all of them together is
much more useful than any individual product by itself.
So cooperativity is everywhere in technology, and there's nothing
necessarily wrong with that. As I've said, the Google suite of software
is much more useful all together than it possibly could be in separate
chunks. The extreme success of Office (which I still think is a good
product, despite what Tyler would likely say) is largely due to similar
properties. The problem with cooperativity, however, is that it can
make upgrading even harder. If all of your software is codependent, you
basically have to simultaneously overcome the activation barriers for
all of them at once. I think that a large amount of the backlash
against Vista had to do with the fact that most people who upgraded
also got a new version of Office and weren't able to change so many
things at once.
As for how to combat the problems of cooperativity in technology, I
think open (adhered to) standards is the answer, and are worth sticking
to whenever possible. The increased trending of web software is a huge
plus. For most online software, any browser provides a valid platform
for the software. If you decide to switch to a mac, or upgrade to
windows 7, or just use your smart phone full time, you can still get
basically the same gmail (yahoo mail, hotmail, etc) experience. That's
possible because HTML is a well-defined standard (even if Microsoft
doesn't care). Similarly, the fact that I can export my gmail contacts
as a csv, or my calendar events as ical, or my docs as rtf, means I can
decouple the services if I want to. If a better document editor comes
along, it's not hard to switch just that (without upending everything
else I use through Google).
Cooperativity is great when used right, but don't let it be used to
lock you in to a specific combination of software without a clear
upgrade path.
*not a real word
