>If you lose your wallet PC, replacing the actual device may cost about what it does to replace a good camera -- several hundred dollars, at least -- so you won't want to lose yours.
>On the other hand, replacing almost anything "in" the wallet, from money to photos, will be simple and inexpensive because the wallet will contain only digital information that can be traced, replicated or retrieved from another location.
Love him or hate him, Gates had pretty damn good future sight back in the 90s. It turned out not to be a panacea (see recent events), but his focus on feeding a corporate world with money to burn made him a rich man very quickly.
Just a year before this article, everyone thought smart cards were the wave of the future. All of your credit cards, IDs, and medical records were going to be stored on one card.
The rest of the world did move on to smart cards in limited form, from phone cards to credit cards. The USA never did implement these cool ideas; and our credit-card companies JUST NOW put chips in their cards... but then blew it by still resorting to signatures instead of PINs.
It's fascinating to go back and read predictive stuff like this. He got so much right (digital wallet, replaceable, a small screen in your pocket), yet missed the big picture that made it reality: It's not a Wallet PC, it's a PC in your pocket that happens to include a wallet as just one piece of available software.
There's an alternate reality where he figured that out sooner and beat Apple and Google to the punch.
I’m reading Stephen Sinofsky’s new book as he writes it, he’s blogging the chapters, and it up to just a few years earlier, about 1993.
These are the operating systems they were developing at that time. DOS, OS/2, Windows, Windows NT and Cairo. Each was a different code base, different strategic vision and different technical requirements. That’s unbelievably stupid. They soon ditched OS/2, DOS and the failed Cairo project, but then added Windows CE.
They never valued and core technology. Each product or market segment was addressed separately, from scratch by a new product team. The compiler team barely talked to the tools team, who developed separate tech from the applications teams who used their own frameworks different from those provided by the OS team. Most of the narrative is about teams talking past each other in meetings and struggling to get them to work together. It’s nuts.
OS/2 was technically ditched by IBM as sole owners (well after a while). And many Cairo components landed elsewhere sometimes as separate products - Windows 95 GUI, COM, Active Directory, Exchange... so where coordination definitely failed, technology seems to have produced lasting results.
I think that's not what he got wrong. Wallet is just the form factor. He definitely did list all the different applications and he called it a PC for a reason.
What he got wrong was that he thought that it would be a computer that would contain a phone as an app, while what happened is that it's a phone that happens to be a computer. And it wasn't even Apple or Google that showed the way, but Nokia.
And it's pretty funny how it happened. So we had these pocket computers a few years later in the late nineties, the PDAs. Some of them were running an OS called EPOC. But nobody (well, very few people) really wanted a PDA, because why would you? It was clumsy and inconvenient with the stylus and it didn't do much.
However, when they appeared, everybody wanted a mobile phone. Because then you could actually call and talk on the move. And then, almost by accident we had text messages. (Initially created for broadcasting messages from the operator to the users. Because who would want to type messages on a number pad when you can make a call, right?)
So then as these phones became more powerful, they would have more and more complex software. At some point Nokia figures out that they could put an actual PC into a phone that people could nickname "the brick". That's the original Nokia 9000 communicator. It had (I'm just seeing) an intel 386 CPU. It's actually the same year Gates wrote this article, 1996.
Then probably others came up with similar products, but the next one I saw was the Nokia 9210, built on that oldish PDA OS I mentioned above, EPOC. And it already had internet connectivity (although not permanent, you had to manually connect through GPRS), with a browser and email, etc. That's 2001 and I happened to have one (and happened to work at Nokia back then).
And then people started saying that "phones are for making calls" and mobile companies like Ericsson and Sony (besides Nokia) start to roll out smart phones based on an OS called Symbian, that is basically a newer version of EPOC. And these are already what Gates was talking about. They started to have a GPS, a camera, always-on internet connectivity (with 3G), installable software, etc.
Microsoft also tried to enter the market (with various versions of windows mobile/ce/whatnot), well before Apple and Google. What they didn't figure out probably is that they would have to build the phone. Back then there was no other way around. Especially if they wanted to make money. Even Google doesn't make money on selling android for mobile manufacturers. And MS didn't have another business model other than that, I think. Though they could have tried given it away for free, just to dominate the market, like they did with IE. I don't know if they tried that or not. But their OS wasn't that good and making smart phones wasn't that easy back then, so you didn't have a lot of companies doing it, and of course, the market was much-much-much smaller. Because that was still the time when people kept saying that "phones are for making calls". (At least that was something I heard frequently when people saw my phones and learned that I work for Nokia and that I write software for smart phones.)
And then Apple came and they made smart phones sexy. Actually the original iphone was way dumber than a generic Symbian smart phone. Like no MMS and no "push" email and, IIRC, no user installable software. But it had a phenomenal UX. So it actually sold the concept to all those people who used to think that these were actually phones (and thus mainly for making calls). And then people wanted iphones and soon a smart phone (i.e. an iphone or an android phone, because Nokia was done with pretty quickly). And after a while they learned that the smart phone is indeed a PC and can do a lot more than taking pictures and pinch-zooming them or the map.
I wanted a PDA, and owned one: the Handspring Visor. And I did want it to be melded with a phone, which did happen.
Palm OS solved the handwriting-recognition problem with Graffiti and a dedicated character-entry area, while Apple STILL hasn't implemented this simple solution for universal handwritten text entry on the iPad. Or has it? How do you release a stylus for a computing device in modern times without any OS-level affordance for handwritten text?
Good writeup. I'd add in there near the end that while Apple spruced up the UX, it was BlackBerry that laid just the right amount more of groundwork to get people on the PC-in-the-phone idea, in certain business circlew of course but that mattered, and then Apple took it to the next level.
I suppose it wasn’t obvious in 1996, even to someone like Bill Gates, that mobile telecommunications and the “pocket PC” would become intertwined and the former would drive the adoption of the later.
Indeed, and General Magic was working on similar concepts. Psion was doing well. The first Palm PDA came out the same year, 1996. The DynaBook concept had been around for decades. It’s all about execution.
Is there anyone out there discussing things like Ecash in the cryptocurrency space, or has blockchain essentially eaten all those brains in the short term?
Just seems like Ecash got so much right in terms of the properties one would want for digital cash...
Because people who are into cryptocurrencies are in it for the "not fiat" aspect, not the "electronic transactions" aspect. If you care about the latter, credit cards and/or mobile wallets adequately covers 90% of the use cases.
Am I wrong? Is there a silent majority somewhere who thinks that bitcoin's 1T valuation can be justified by being a slightly better paypal/alipay? As for the "generalize" bit, would adding a "most" qualifier in there placate you?
You're not wrong, but I wouldn't be surprised if the "in it for the tech" people are doing some really heavy rationalization about how number go up is just market validation of superior tech and not a massive bubble.
It's a combination of both. You can think that the bottom price of every cycle is the actual non-hype price for Bitcoin. Hype drives adoption and when the hype dies, there's always people who want to be in it for the long run.
>would adding a "most" qualifier in there placate you?
Yes probably, there are a decent number of people that see crypto as an alternative to paypal. The SMS/MMS over IP provider I use primarily uses bitcoin for payments probably because paypal did something stupid that made it unusable. There are lots of smaller projects like this where the maintainers just don't want to deal with paypal and bitcoin works very well.
That's true. The primary purpose of Bitcoin is to replace central banks who steal wealth away from savings accounts.
Millions of people are already using Bitcoin-backed debit cards to make payments. This way it's possible to get the benefits of sound money while being able to use it for daily spending.
I think the idea of Bitcoin enthusiasts is much more foundational, than just having "digital cash".
I have been reading a book called "The Bitcoin Standard" which highlights that the goal is a switch for society towards Austrian economics and getting back to something like the gold standard (Hint: Bitcoin is the better gold).
The book is quite good and I learned a lot about the history of money - so I'd recommend it.
To paraphrase, the current cash printing is vaporware and not backed by anything anymore - making it quite weak and easy to attack - disaster waiting to happen. Central planning of currency should be replaced by a democratic and capitalist system where the best currency evolves naturally. Which might or might not possibly happen with Bitcoin.
Something like a government bailout using tax payer money of a "too big to fail" organization would not happen in such a world - making the economic system a lot stronger for the individuals.
> government bailout using tax payer money of a "too big to fail" organization would not happen in such a world - making the economic system a lot stronger for the individuals.
At the risk of starting a flamewar over Keynesianism (or MMT): while I agree that tolerating "TBTF" firms leads to serious moral hazards, let's just say it is highly disputed among economists whether or not it's advantageous for states to have macroeconomic levers. I'm happy to acknowledge the Austrian school's perspective, but it's not exactly a universal consensus.
> a democratic and capitalist system
These two things are in tension. That's not necessarily a problem, a free and just society has to balance multiple concerns (minority rights vs. majority rule); but the very issue with monetary or economic policy is that it lives at an intersection point between public and private interests, and any policy decision (or non-decision) is likely to have winners and losers.
China's digital Yuan has some similar properties to Ecash. You have horizontal privacy (you can spend your money without your partners knowing how much you have or what you do with it), but not vertical privacy (the government gets to know _everything_).
They're even working on extending it to support offline transactions.
This is a scary thing to put into any government's hands, let alone the Chinese government's, but it has enough attractive properties that it has a good chance of catching on.
I don't think people care. They don't really care about traceability/anonymity. By now basically everybody is happy to buy (almost) anything with their card.
Also, you almost never need to do an offline transaction. (I'm not 100% sure, but IIRC that is a feature of at least some of those digital cash solutions based on blind signatures.) And if you can do prompt online transactions and you don't care much about privacy (because you trust the banks) then you don't need digital cash.
BTC and all the other blockchain bases solutions are speculative assets. They hold the promise of creating value out of nothing. So it's a strong motivation for at least some of the developers and most of the adopters. Digital cash, on the other hand, would be issued by banks, so no one could earn a profit from holding them (well, compared to holding the actual currency on their account). Though, in theory digital cash could be issued by its developers (just as blockchain based ones), but since it would sound new and obscure, people wouldn't trust it. (BTC and the blockchain took quite a few years too.)
BTC (actually Ethereum) are incredibly handy when doing international transactions. That these things are effectively global also makes them very useful, because of bank fees and the difficulty.
At one point I actually sat down with a bank consultant to "design" a way to move money between (sets of) bank accounts in 2 countries just so we can do business. Still takes 4+ days (non-bank holidays) to actually happen. Ethereum can certainly match that and with much less costs.
I still believe that the anti-trust case against Microsoft completely changed the course of history.
Microsoft was left a shell of its former self, a wolf without fangs, tired and exhausted from a battle of attrition, with the biggest casualty being Gates himself who lost the inner drive to lead such a huge company.
I do hope he plans to write a detailed biography one day, so that we can see what his thought process back then was.
Apple wouldn't even exist honestly today if the anti-trust case wasn't launched against Microsoft.
That is the very reason I cannot wait for Apple to get launched with its own anti-trust, who knows what company will come to take it's mantle.
You are comparing Microsoft from the 90’s to Apple today, which is absolutely preposterous. That Microsoft makes Facebook look like Habitat for Humanity. You cannot be serious.
The comparison to 90's Microsoft is today's Apple is a tenuous one at best, but IMO not a specious one. While it's easy to forget how oppressive MS's 90%+ market share felt at the time, and the impact of their "Embrace Extend Extinguish" strategy, neither did Microsoft ever exert the same degree of control over their software ecosystem as Apple does over third-party software in iOS (30% of all revenue, unilateral gatekeeping privileges, etc).
The opinion piece by Gates was meant to describe a device that could help sell more Windows software. None of the "industry forecasting" really applied. He didn't care how much power the device would use or how long the battery would last. He wanted to sell more software.
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52 comments
[ 2.6 ms ] story [ 91.7 ms ] thread>On the other hand, replacing almost anything "in" the wallet, from money to photos, will be simple and inexpensive because the wallet will contain only digital information that can be traced, replicated or retrieved from another location.
Love him or hate him, Gates had pretty damn good future sight back in the 90s. It turned out not to be a panacea (see recent events), but his focus on feeding a corporate world with money to burn made him a rich man very quickly.
The rest of the world did move on to smart cards in limited form, from phone cards to credit cards. The USA never did implement these cool ideas; and our credit-card companies JUST NOW put chips in their cards... but then blew it by still resorting to signatures instead of PINs.
DoD kinda did: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Common_Access_Card
There's an alternate reality where he figured that out sooner and beat Apple and Google to the punch.
I mean, that's what he's describing and what PocketPCs were? That's not what the current crop of smartphones beat Microsoft at.
These are the operating systems they were developing at that time. DOS, OS/2, Windows, Windows NT and Cairo. Each was a different code base, different strategic vision and different technical requirements. That’s unbelievably stupid. They soon ditched OS/2, DOS and the failed Cairo project, but then added Windows CE.
They never valued and core technology. Each product or market segment was addressed separately, from scratch by a new product team. The compiler team barely talked to the tools team, who developed separate tech from the applications teams who used their own frameworks different from those provided by the OS team. Most of the narrative is about teams talking past each other in meetings and struggling to get them to work together. It’s nuts.
What he got wrong was that he thought that it would be a computer that would contain a phone as an app, while what happened is that it's a phone that happens to be a computer. And it wasn't even Apple or Google that showed the way, but Nokia.
And it's pretty funny how it happened. So we had these pocket computers a few years later in the late nineties, the PDAs. Some of them were running an OS called EPOC. But nobody (well, very few people) really wanted a PDA, because why would you? It was clumsy and inconvenient with the stylus and it didn't do much.
However, when they appeared, everybody wanted a mobile phone. Because then you could actually call and talk on the move. And then, almost by accident we had text messages. (Initially created for broadcasting messages from the operator to the users. Because who would want to type messages on a number pad when you can make a call, right?)
So then as these phones became more powerful, they would have more and more complex software. At some point Nokia figures out that they could put an actual PC into a phone that people could nickname "the brick". That's the original Nokia 9000 communicator. It had (I'm just seeing) an intel 386 CPU. It's actually the same year Gates wrote this article, 1996.
Then probably others came up with similar products, but the next one I saw was the Nokia 9210, built on that oldish PDA OS I mentioned above, EPOC. And it already had internet connectivity (although not permanent, you had to manually connect through GPRS), with a browser and email, etc. That's 2001 and I happened to have one (and happened to work at Nokia back then).
And then people started saying that "phones are for making calls" and mobile companies like Ericsson and Sony (besides Nokia) start to roll out smart phones based on an OS called Symbian, that is basically a newer version of EPOC. And these are already what Gates was talking about. They started to have a GPS, a camera, always-on internet connectivity (with 3G), installable software, etc.
Microsoft also tried to enter the market (with various versions of windows mobile/ce/whatnot), well before Apple and Google. What they didn't figure out probably is that they would have to build the phone. Back then there was no other way around. Especially if they wanted to make money. Even Google doesn't make money on selling android for mobile manufacturers. And MS didn't have another business model other than that, I think. Though they could have tried given it away for free, just to dominate the market, like they did with IE. I don't know if they tried that or not. But their OS wasn't that good and making smart phones wasn't that easy back then, so you didn't have a lot of companies doing it, and of course, the market was much-much-much smaller. Because that was still the time when people kept saying that "phones are for making calls". (At least that was something I heard frequently when people saw my phones and learned that I work for Nokia and that I write software for smart phones.)
And then Apple came and they made smart phones sexy. Actually the original iphone was way dumber than a generic Symbian smart phone. Like no MMS and no "push" email and, IIRC, no user installable software. But it had a phenomenal UX. So it actually sold the concept to all those people who used to think that these were actually phones (and thus mainly for making calls). And then people wanted iphones and soon a smart phone (i.e. an iphone or an android phone, because Nokia was done with pretty quickly). And after a while they learned that the smart phone is indeed a PC and can do a lot more than taking pictures and pinch-zooming them or the map.
Palm OS solved the handwriting-recognition problem with Graffiti and a dedicated character-entry area, while Apple STILL hasn't implemented this simple solution for universal handwritten text entry on the iPad. Or has it? How do you release a stylus for a computing device in modern times without any OS-level affordance for handwritten text?
remember electric vehicles predates ICE ones
Just seems like Ecash got so much right in terms of the properties one would want for digital cash...
"Come for the greed, stay for the revolution."
Yes probably, there are a decent number of people that see crypto as an alternative to paypal. The SMS/MMS over IP provider I use primarily uses bitcoin for payments probably because paypal did something stupid that made it unusable. There are lots of smaller projects like this where the maintainers just don't want to deal with paypal and bitcoin works very well.
Millions of people are already using Bitcoin-backed debit cards to make payments. This way it's possible to get the benefits of sound money while being able to use it for daily spending.
I have been reading a book called "The Bitcoin Standard" which highlights that the goal is a switch for society towards Austrian economics and getting back to something like the gold standard (Hint: Bitcoin is the better gold).
The book is quite good and I learned a lot about the history of money - so I'd recommend it.
To paraphrase, the current cash printing is vaporware and not backed by anything anymore - making it quite weak and easy to attack - disaster waiting to happen. Central planning of currency should be replaced by a democratic and capitalist system where the best currency evolves naturally. Which might or might not possibly happen with Bitcoin.
Something like a government bailout using tax payer money of a "too big to fail" organization would not happen in such a world - making the economic system a lot stronger for the individuals.
Nano is more like digital gold as it can be passed from hand to hand with no fee, but like Bitcoin has a fixed deflationary supply.
Held up by a house of cards since it's so volatile (at least for now). Can't wait for it to become a stablecoin
At the risk of starting a flamewar over Keynesianism (or MMT): while I agree that tolerating "TBTF" firms leads to serious moral hazards, let's just say it is highly disputed among economists whether or not it's advantageous for states to have macroeconomic levers. I'm happy to acknowledge the Austrian school's perspective, but it's not exactly a universal consensus.
> a democratic and capitalist system
These two things are in tension. That's not necessarily a problem, a free and just society has to balance multiple concerns (minority rights vs. majority rule); but the very issue with monetary or economic policy is that it lives at an intersection point between public and private interests, and any policy decision (or non-decision) is likely to have winners and losers.
They're even working on extending it to support offline transactions.
This is a scary thing to put into any government's hands, let alone the Chinese government's, but it has enough attractive properties that it has a good chance of catching on.
Also, you almost never need to do an offline transaction. (I'm not 100% sure, but IIRC that is a feature of at least some of those digital cash solutions based on blind signatures.) And if you can do prompt online transactions and you don't care much about privacy (because you trust the banks) then you don't need digital cash.
BTC and all the other blockchain bases solutions are speculative assets. They hold the promise of creating value out of nothing. So it's a strong motivation for at least some of the developers and most of the adopters. Digital cash, on the other hand, would be issued by banks, so no one could earn a profit from holding them (well, compared to holding the actual currency on their account). Though, in theory digital cash could be issued by its developers (just as blockchain based ones), but since it would sound new and obscure, people wouldn't trust it. (BTC and the blockchain took quite a few years too.)
At one point I actually sat down with a bank consultant to "design" a way to move money between (sets of) bank accounts in 2 countries just so we can do business. Still takes 4+ days (non-bank holidays) to actually happen. Ethereum can certainly match that and with much less costs.
Microsoft was left a shell of its former self, a wolf without fangs, tired and exhausted from a battle of attrition, with the biggest casualty being Gates himself who lost the inner drive to lead such a huge company.
I do hope he plans to write a detailed biography one day, so that we can see what his thought process back then was.
Apple wouldn't even exist honestly today if the anti-trust case wasn't launched against Microsoft.
That is the very reason I cannot wait for Apple to get launched with its own anti-trust, who knows what company will come to take it's mantle.
But it is an interesting take.
A lot of his concepts were right, but the implementation isn’t as aggregated as predicted.
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[0] https://www.nytimes.com/2021/01/12/technology/bitcoin-passwo...