This is the third of a group of of posts on "Smart" appliance. You don't strictly need the first and second entries one to read this, but they're meant to be building up a common context. In this episode I talk about a mechanism that would relieve most of my worries about these devices while allowing manufactures to maintain control of their trade secretes and the presentation of their interfaces.
My complaints in the first post aren't intrinsic. Instead they are complaints about a particular implementation of the smart model where the physical device requires a specific (rather than generic) piece of paired software; in that implementation our intellectual property regime around software puts the manufacturer in control your ability to have that software, and consequently puts the manufacture in control of your ability to use an physical device that you bought. That is totally unacceptable.
Out strategic goals are
- Possession of the physical device grants access to its functionality1 because the requisite software is generic enough to be re-implemented on any suitable platform.
- The manufacture gets to keep their trade secrets to themselves.2
That's an interesting pair, because the first requires that the trade secrets be physically embodied in the machine (otherwise you can't guarantee that the functionality moves with the physical object). But that seems to be in tension with the second requirement, because how can the manufacturer control trade secrets if they're trading freely around the economy?
The thing is that the control software (which is already on board) also encodes the trade secrets. Anyone with the right tools and knowledge can already can extract the firmware, decompile it, and sus out the meaning of resulting code. It's just that that's a pretty hard trick (those boards don't need debug ports and I'd be unsurprised to find that many don't have them) and consequently time consuming and expensive. Then, as always, the legal regime puts up further barriers to someone trying to compete using that approach.
And we deal with systems that have those properties all the time. I'm describing a client-server architecture. The appliance is the server, your phone or tablet is the client, and the manufacturer can hide as much detail as they want server-side. By using open protocols for interchange and open standards to present the interface consumers get a extortion-free way to talk to the appliance, and in return manufacturers get reduced software development costs and all-platform3 functionality for free. It's that easy.
Literally put a little web-server inside every appliance. They already have non-trivial computers and at least one of WiFI or Bluetooth, so this is not a stretch. In the worst case users can use a plain web-browser to access it.4 With HTML5, manufacturers can control every aspect of their interface (I mean their pages can just be a canvas if they're that hung up on controlling the appearance), control how much functionality is pushed to the client-side, and so on.
What's not to like?5
1 All of it. If you own the thing, you own it. This is non-negotiable.
2 Within reason. There is no way to guarantee this absolutely, and (importantly) never has been. Anyone with the tools and expertise has always been able to reverse engineer a product, and it was only ever the high cost of reverse engineering and IP law that prevented them from taking that route to develop a competing product. We're looking for a regime where the level of difficulty in obtaining and profiting from the trade secrets remains similarly high.
3 And not just iOS and Android, either. Everything, everywhere, all at once. As it were.
4 I imagine the ecosystem will rapidly spawn a genre of specialized appliance control apps with a HTML renderer at the core, and featuring convenience functions for organization and access, but a plain web-browser provides a fallback position.
5 Okay, so there is the addressing problem for devices that use WiFI. Some kind of discovery mechanism will be needed, and I don't know— off the top of my head—what the options for that are. But it's not like this is a new problem: printers and scanners, especially, already handle this in a variety of ways. Similarly bluetooth has a pairing problem to solve, but that's an issue for existing bluetooth devices as well.
No comments:
Post a Comment