(the can opener was invented
forty-eight years after the tin can)
When you asked me for a love poem,
(another love poem) my thoughts
were immediately drawn to the early days
of the food canning industry –
all those strangely familiar trade-names from childhood:
Del Monte, Green Giant, Fray Bentos, Heinz.
I thought of Franklin and his poisoned men
drifting quietly northwest by north
towards the scooped shale of their graves
and I thought of the first tin of cling peaches
glowing on a dusty pantry shelf
like yet-to-be-discovered radium –
the very first tin of cling peaches
in the world, and for half a century
my fingers reaching out to it.
by John Glenday
DO YOU have plans for next weekend? If not, don’t worry: perhaps a friend will be throwing a party to celebrate the launch of Windows 7, Microsoft’s new operating system, on October 22nd. You’ll get help installing the program and be shown how to use the new features. To maximise the fun, your friend will get tips from the “HostingYourParty” video on YouTube or go to the dedicated website, complete with downloadable party favours and a trivia quiz (sample question: “The Microsoft Pretzel Hunt is an annual pretzel hunt held at the Redmond campus. True or false?”).
This is not satire. It is a toe-curling attempt by Microsoft to create some buzz for its new software. Fortunately for the firm, it will hardly matter, because Microsoft dominates the market for operating systems. After the let-down that was its predecessor, Windows Vista, Windows 7 is certain to be a success. There is plenty of pent-up demand, because Vista’s aged predecessor, XP, is still widely used. Reviews of Windows 7 have been positive, some even glowing, although the software is sometimes hard to install.
Windows 7 is not just a sizeable step for Microsoft. It is also likely to mark the end of one era in information technology and the start of another. Much of computing will no longer be done on personal computers in homes and offices, but in the “cloud”: huge data centres housing vast storage systems and hundreds of thousands of servers, the powerful machines that dish up data over the internet. Web-based e-mail, social networking and online games are all examples of what are increasingly called cloud services, and are accessible through browsers, smart-phones or other “client” devices. Because so many services can be downloaded or are available online, Windows 7 is Microsoft’s first operating system to come with fewer features.
The launch of Windows 7 coincides with the closing of the book, after more than a decade, on Microsoft’s antitrust woes. The company got into hot water in America and Europe mainly for abusing its dominance of PC operating systems to promote its web browser. On October 7th the European Commission said it had all but reached a settlement with Microsoft. The firm has agreed to give Windows users in Europe a “ballot screen” that allows them to choose a rival browser in place of its own Internet Explorer.
Windows is not going to disappear soon, but cloud computing means it is no longer so important. Other products, some being launched this autumn with less fanfare than Windows 7, represent Microsoft’s future. Last month the company opened two data centres that between them will contain more than half a million servers. This month it released a new version of Windows for smart-phones. And next month it will launch Azure, a platform for developers on which they can write and run cloud services.
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The rise of cloud computing is not just shifting Microsoft’s centre of gravity. It is changing the nature of competition within the computer industry. Technological developments have hitherto pushed computing power away from central hubs: first from mainframes to minicomputers, and then to PCs. Now a combination of ever cheaper and more powerful processors, and ever faster and more ubiquitous networks, is pushing power back to the centre in some respects, and even further away in others. The cloud’s data centres are, in effect, outsize public mainframes. At the same time, the PC is being pushed aside by a host of smaller, often wireless devices, such as smart-phones, netbooks (small laptops) and, perhaps soon, tablets (touch-screen computers the size of books).
Although Windows still runs 90% of PCs, the fading importance of the PC means that Microsoft is no longer an all-powerful monopolist. Others are also building big clouds, including Google, a giant of the internet, and Apple, renowned as a maker of hardware, with a market capitalisation that now exceeds those of both Google and IBM, its original arch-rival (see chart above).
Granted, there are hundreds if not thousands of firms offering cloud services—web-based applications living in data centres, such as music sites or social networks. But Microsoft, Google and Apple play in a different league. Each has its own global network of data centres. They intend to offer not just one or two services, but whole suites of them, with services including e-mail, address books, storage, collaboration tools and business applications. They are also vying to dominate the periphery, either by developing software for smart-phones and other small devices or by making such devices themselves.
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These three giants (for their vital statistics, see table) are already preparing for battle. In July Google mounted a direct attack on Windows by promising to launch a free PC operating system, Chrome OS. Rumour has it that a basic version may hit the market on the same day as Windows 7, or soon after. Microsoft’s new operating system for smart-phones represents its latest effort to catch up with Apple’s iPhone and Google’s operating system for handsets, called Android. On October 12th Apple and Google severed a tie when Arthur Levinson, a member of both boards, resigned from Google’s. In August Eric Schmidt, Google’s chief executive, had quit Apple’s board because “Google is entering more of Apple’s core businesses,” in the words of Steve Jobs, the gadget-maker’s boss.
Despite the growing similarities among the three, each is a unique beast, says Michael Cusumano, a professor at Massachusetts Institute of Technology’s Sloan School of Management. They can be classified according to how they approach the cloud, how they make money and how openly they approach the development of intellectual property.
Google, you might say, has been a cloud company since its birth in 1998. It is best known for its search service, but now offers all sorts of other products and services, too. It has built a global network of three dozen data centres with 2m servers, say some estimates. Among other things, it offers a suite of web-based applications, such as word processing and spreadsheets. Lately it has branched out, releasing Android for phones, and its Chrome web-browser and operating system for PCs.
It took Google a while to come up with a way of making money, but it found one in advertising, its main source of revenue. It handles more than 75% of search-related ads in America. Worldwide its share is even higher. Google is also trying to make money from selling services to companies. On October 12th it said that Rentokil Initial, a pest-control-to-parcel-delivery group, would roll out Google’s online applications to its 35,000 employees, making it the biggest company to do so.
Google’s reliance on advertising explains its open approach to intellectual property. Giving Android and Chrome OS away as open-source software not only makes life difficult for rivals’ paid-for products but also increases demand for Google’s services and the reach of its ads. Its openness has limits: Google says little about the architecture of its data centres and search algorithms, because they give the company its competitive edge. The way it organises R&D internally is open and decentralised: self-organising teams come up with ideas for most new services.
If Google was born in the sky, Microsoft started on the ground. Office, its bestselling suite of PC programs, is almost as ubiquitous as Windows. But the company is less a stranger to cloud computing than it may seem. It has built a network of data centres, and is starting to gain traction after losing billions developing online services. Its Xbox games console has powerful online features. Bing, its new search engine, has gained a shade in market share (though it is still miles behind Google). It is even preparing a stripped-down web-based version of Office, and it now offers much of its business software as online services.
However, most of Microsoft’s revenue and all of its profit still come from conventional shrink-wrapped software. But the company cannot leave online advertising to Google, because consumers expect cloud services to be free, financed by ads. Hence Microsoft’s efforts to convince Yahoo!, another online giant, to merge its search and part of its advertising business with Microsoft’s. The deal, sealed in July, means that Microsoft will handle 10% of searches, against Google’s 83%, says Net Applications, a market-research firm.
Given Microsoft’s history, it is hardly surprising that its treatment of intellectual property differs from Google’s. It gives other software firms the technical information they need to write programs that run on, say, Windows. Otherwise, it guards the underlying recipes of its software jealously. That said, the firm now supports many open standards and has even started using bits of open-source software. Internally, its R&D is somewhat more centralised than Google, at least in its online division: teams are bigger, work with more co-ordination and get more guidance from above.
Apple, too, came from outside the cloud. Online services have always been a bit of an afterthought to what the company excels at: pricey but highly innovative bundles of hardware and software, of which the iPhone is only the latest example. Its online offerings—the iTunes store for music and video, the App Store for mobile applications, and MobileMe, a suite of online services—were all originally meant to drive demand for Apple’s hardware, but the firm’s interest in the cloud has grown. It is building a $1 billion data centre, possibly the world’s largest, in North Carolina.
Still, Apple’s financial health thus far has depended mainly on selling hardware. Gadgets generate most of the firm’s revenue and profit. The firm does not reveal its revenue from services separately, but it is not to be sneezed at. Apple accounts for 69% of online music sales in America and 35% of all sales, more than Wal-Mart, reckons NPD Group, a market-research firm. Apple has so far forgone advertising revenue: its services are ad-free, but most of them require payment. Apple’s services are aimed at consumers, not businesses.
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Apple is also the odd one out when it comes to openness. The word does not appear in its vocabulary. It does not allow any other hardware-maker to build machines using its operating system. It blocks iPhone applications it does not approve of from appearing in the App Store. Apple is also secretive about the way it conducts its internal R&D. Mr Jobs clearly calls most of the shots. But insiders say that there is a system of teams that pitch projects to him.
How will this three-way contest play out? The last similar war was in the 1980s and early 1990s, when Apple, IBM and Microsoft fought for mastery of the PC. After much fire and smoke, Microsoft was victorious. Thanks to what economists call strong network effects, which allow winners to take almost all, Windows relegated its rival operating systems to mere sideshows, securing fat profits for its owner.
Such a lopsided result is unlikely this time. One reason is that the economics of the cloud may be different from those of the PC. Network effects are unlikely to be as strong. Much of the cloud is based on open standards, which should make it easier to switch providers. To underline this point and to counter arguments that it is trying to lock users in, Google has set up the Data Liberation Front, a team of engineers whose job is to devise ways of allowing people to transfer their data.
Unfortunately for Google, it is equally unclear whether the most open player will win, as Microsoft did last time. Many of Google’s new services have failed to take off. Having control over the software on the PC, smart-phones and other client devices, Microsoft can more easily create what it calls “seamless experiences”, for example by keeping a user’s address book and other personal information in step. Consumers may also prefer Apple’s tightly integrated, easy-to-use devices and services, despite the restrictions they impose. Lots of people buy iPods and download music from iTunes even though it is difficult to play the songs on other devices.
Second, all three giants have reliable sources of cash to sustain them. Windows may be under attack, not least because of the boom in cheap netbooks, which has forced Microsoft to reduce prices, says Matt Rosoff of Directions on Microsoft, a newsletter. Even so, the operating system will keep on giving for some time. Microsoft has other strong divisions too, including business and server software. Google may lose some market share in search (and some advertising) to the combination of Bing and Yahoo!, but it is unlikely to be dethroned. Apple is still able to command premium prices, although others make hardware just as slick.
This means that all three will have ample resources to spend in the main areas of the fight: data centres, cloud services and the periphery. In data centres, Google is ahead, but Microsoft is catching up in size and sophistication. Apple has most to learn, but this, too, seems only a question of time and money. Just as much of hardware has become a commodity, knowing how to build huge data centres may not be a big competitive advantage for long. And data centres can get only so big before scale ceases to be an advantage.
In services too, Google is ahead. But in Bing Microsoft may at last have created a worthy rival. The “decision engine”, to use the company’s term, does a good job of helping people choose a new camera or book a holiday. The big question is whether Apple can catch up. Its iTunes and App stores are successes, to be sure, but for now they are highly specialised. Its broader suite of cloud services, MobileMe, is nothing to write home about.
At the cloud’s periphery, however, Apple has a strong position, thanks to the success of the iPhone. More than 30m have been sold so far, 5.2m in the quarter ending in June. Its share of the American market is pushing 14%. The App Store now boasts 85,000 applications and a total of more than 2 billion downloads. But recently Google’s Android has gained momentum. Several handset-makers have released smart-phones based on it, or will do so in the next few months. In early October it received the backing of Verizon, America’s biggest mobile operator. At the end of 2012, predicts Gartner, a market-research firm, Android phones will have a bigger share of the market than iPhones.
Microsoft’s mobile strategy, though, is in disarray. This could prove to be a serious weakness, as people increasingly use mobile devices to reach online services. Plans to build smart-phones of its own seem to be going nowhere. Its music player, Zune, will remain just that, Steve Ballmer, Microsoft’s boss, said recently. Pink, a project to develop phones based on technology from Danger, a start-up acquired by Microsoft in 2008, is said to face death by cancellation—even more likely after Danger lost personal data belonging to tens of thousands of its customers earlier this month. And the latest version of Windows Mobile is no match for the iPhone and Android. Some handset-makers, including Motorola, have ditched the software.
However, as with Bing, Microsoft has only recently been getting serious. It has put Windows Mobile under new management. Another version is expected by the end of 2010. Some analysts fancy Microsoft’s chances. According to iSuppli, a market-research firm, “Reports of Windows Mobile’s death are greatly exaggerated.”
What could disrupt the three-sided struggle? The antitrust authorities, possibly. Now that Microsoft has made peace, the other two are likelier targets. Most observers imagine Google would be first, pointing to the hullabaloo caused by a settlement with book publishers that allows Google to create a vast digital library. But Apple may beat Google to the dock. The firm’s tight control over its technology is no problem in markets where its share is small (in PCs, it is a mere 7.2%). But in mobile applications and digital music distribution Apple is by far the market leader. America’s Federal Communications Commission is looking into its refusal to carry Google Voice, a telephony and messaging application for the iPhone. Its bar on rivals’ devices connecting to iTunes may cause trouble too. Tellingly, Apple recently hired a lawyer with antitrust experience: Bruce Sewell, the former general counsel of Intel, the world’s biggest chipmaker, which the European Commission wants to pay a fine of more than €1 billion ($1.5 billion) for abusing its dominance.
Then there are market forces. One of the three may come up with something “insanely great”, an expression used at Apple in times past to describe the original Macintosh computer. Apple itself may do so with a tablet computer, rumoured to be ready for release as early as January. Others have built such a dream device, but none has yet overcome the problem of input: typing on a screen is difficult and handwriting recognition has never really worked. If Apple has cracked it, it could upend the PC industry, as the iPhone did the handset market. If the tablet is also a good substitute for paper, the publishing and newspaper industries could be in for more upheaval. The blogosphere is abuzz with rumours that Apple is talking to publishers about offering their content on its device.
The final possibility is for another contender to emerge. The obvious candidates are Amazon, the world’s biggest online retailer, and Facebook, the leading social network. Amazon already has a cloud of sorts. It offers cloud computing services to other online firms and has developed the Kindle, an electronic reader, which is due to be available worldwide from October 19th. Facebook runs what is arguably the most successful cloud service, with more than 300m registered users. It provides a platform for people to communicate, share information and collaborate online—all things that businesses want to do, too.
Only one thing seems sure about the future of the digital skies: the company or companies that dominate it will be American. European or Asian firms have yet to make much of an appearance in cloud computing. Nokia, the world’s biggest handset-maker, is trying to form a cloud with its set of online services called Ovi, but its efforts are still in their infancy. Governments outside America may harbour ambitious plans for state-funded clouds. They would do better simply to let their citizens make the most of the competition among the American colossi.
Progress towards making the net more multi-lingual is welcome says Bill Thompson.
It is 40 years to the week since the first data packets were sent over the Arpanet.
That was the research network commissioned by the US Department of Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency (Arpa) to see whether computer-to-computer communications could be made faster, more reliable and more robust by using the novel technique of packet switching instead of the more conventional circuit switched networks of the day.
Instead of connecting computers rather as telephone exchanges work, using switches to set up an electric circuit over which data could be sent, packet switching breaks a message into chunks and sends each chunk - or packet - separately, reassembling them at the receiving end.
Late on October 29 1969 Charley Kline sat down at a computer in the computer laboratory at UCLA, where he was a student, and established a link to a system at the nearby Stanford Research Institute, sending the first data packets over the nascent Arpanet.
Later in the year permanent links were made between four sites in the US, and over the following years the ARPANET grew into a worldwide research network.
Arpanet was one of the computer networks that coalesced into today's internet, and the influence of the standards and protocols established there can still be seen today, making this anniversary as important for historians of the network society as July's celebration of the 1969 Apollo 11 landing is for those who study space science.
Technology does not stand still, and over the years the way computers communicate with each other has changed enormously. Early Arpanet computers used the Network Control Protocol to talk to each other, but in 1983 this was replaced with the more powerful and flexible TCP/IP - the transmission control protocol and internet protocol.
Today we are in the process of migrating our networks from IP version 4 to IP version 6, which allows for more devices to be connected to the network and is more secure and robust, but work continues to improve and refine all aspects of the network architecture.
One area that is changing is the domain name system, DNS. This links the unique number that identifies every device on the internet with one or more names, making it possible to type in "www.bbc.co.uk" and go to the right web server without having to remember its number.
Designed by engineer Paul Mockapetris in 1983, DNS is a vital component of the network as well as the web, including e-mail and instant messaging. Every time a programme uses a name for a computer instead of a number, DNS is involved.
However DNS, like so much of the network's architecture, was developed by English-speaking westerners, and its original design only allowed standard ASCII characters to be used in names.
ASCII, the American Standard Code for Information Interchange, is a way of representing letters, numbers and punctuation in the binary code used by computers, and was originally based on old telegraphic codes.
It works really well for English, but had to be extended and updated to cope with other alphabets, and has now been replaced by the much more powerful and capable Unicode standard, able to represent non-Latin languages as well as those based on the Latin alphabet.
Being able to write in your own language is one thing, but it's also important to be able to have e-mail or website addresses that use it. Unfortunately the design of DNS meant that key aspects would not work with anything other than ASCII, making it impossible to simply add in Chinese or Arabic characters to domain.
Work has been going on since the mid 90's to change this and provide what are called "internationalized domain names", and many organisations are now able to have websites and email addresses that include Chinese, Cyrillic, Hebrew, Arabic and many other alphabets.
The process took a significant step forward this week when Icann, the international body that looks after domain names, fast-tracked a proposal to provide internationalised versions of two letter country domains, such as .uk and .jp.
This will finally allow users of these domains to have a domain name that is entirely in characters based on their native language, and marks an important point in the internationalisation of the whole internet.
It has taken a long time to make this happen, but the problems of re-engineering such a key part of the network infrastructure without breaking anything are enormous, and anyone who reads through the technical documentation will see just how complex the process has been.
And it was definitely necessary to do it properly - the fuss over the recent retuning of Freeview boxes in the UK was bad enough, but trying to persuade a billion internet users to update their software to support a new form of DNS would have been impossible.
Over the next five years the majority of new internet users will come from the non English-speaking world. It's good to see that those of us who have helped build the network so far are making it more welcoming for them.
Bill Thompson is an independent journalist and regular commentator on the BBC World Service programme Digital Planet.
Try to think back to your life at the end of the last century. What was it like? Do you remember listening to music on CDs? Owning a phone primarily in order to make phone calls? Going to a library to search for information? Buying a map when embarking on a journey? Now compose a list of 10 ways in which your life has changed since. Here are mine:
1 Google In 2002, this was still a bunch of visionaries without a business plan. In just under four years, it went from earning nothing to earning $20bn a year. It accounts for 70% of all searches for information in the world. In October 2006, it splashed out $1.6bn for YouTube, another company without a business plan that was itself barely 18 months old. YouTube now notches up 1 billion searches a day. During the first nine years of the 21st century, American newspaper revenues declined by roughly 50%. Google is on a grandiose journey to digitise just about every word, painting, note, street, mountain, stream, ocean, book, newspaper, animal, insect, photograph and email that ever existed. "Google" passed into common parlance as a verb in around 2002. You google, I google, we all google. It is the most revolutionary word of the decade.
2 Wikipedia How do I know that the first recorded use of the verb "to google" was 8 July 1998, and that Google itself initially used lawyers to discourage the use of the word-as-verb? From Wikipedia – the half-baked, crazy idea of Jimmy Wales (and others) launched in January 2001. How could such a stupid notion – an encyclopedia written by anyone and everyone – ever work? Whatever next? Short answer: the English-language version now has 3 million articles and 1 billion words (which is – according to Wikipedia – 25 times the size of Encyclopaedia Britannica).
3 Twitter Another really stupid idea. As if anything worth saying could possibly be said in 140 characters. Who are these sad people who want to know that some other sad person is waiting for a bus or has just changed a nappy? OK, so there are roughly 18 million of them, but what on earth do they talk about? Yes, people still write/say that. Smarter people recognise that Twitter is one stage on from Google – applying human intelligence and recommendation to the ordering of information… in real time. It makes algorithms look so 1990s.
4 Comment Is Free A plug for the home team here. Launched in March 2006, CiF inverted the traditional model of newspaper comment. That model went as follows: a small number of columnists opined on politics, culture and events. The readers responded by letter or email: a tiny proportion of that response saw the light of day. This assumed if you were, for example, a New York Times reader, that Thomas L Friedman was the one voice you wanted to hear on Venezuela, the Middle East, Russia, Rwanda, Italy, China and Afghanistan. Comment Is Free started from the assumption that – with intelligent editing and moderating – there were thousands of people with voices and opinions worth hearing and that something powerful, plural and diverse could be forged from combining a newspaper's columnists with those other voices. Millions read it every month; around 100,000 actively take part. Work in progress, but it's difficult to imagine ever going back to the old model.
5 BBC iPlayer Launched at the end of 2007 and – again – already it's impossible to imagine life without the ability to view, or listen to, programmes in your own time. And, of course, that leads to the really radical thought that one day anyone will be able to access any BBC content created at any point in the last 70 years via the iPlayer… for free. Unless James Murdoch has really got David Cameron and Jeremy Hunt in some kind of headlock, in which case you'll have to pay for it. Assuming the BBC still exists in any recognisable form.
6 iPhone Launched in June 2007. Can you remember the moment when you first held one? The involuntary gasp as you saw what it could do? The touch screen, the rotating screen, the zooming screen! The satellite street view, the maps, the iPod and phone all in one slick sliver of beauty. And that was just the start. Jonathan Zittrain, the enormously brainy Oxford-and-Harvard web guru, denounced the original iPhone as "sterile" – on the basis that it was a device that only Apple could improve or change. That was way back in June 2008, since when 1 billion iPhone apps have been downloaded and the only limit to what a mobile phone could become is human imagination itself.
7 Craigslist Until 2000, this classified advertising database existed only in San Francisco. Come the new millennium, it expanded into nine more US cities. It is now in nearly 600 cities in more than 50 countries (thank you, Wikipedia). I remember a Guardian Media Group board meeting when one of our in-house digital gurus patiently explained its business model – essentially, free to both advertiser and reader. It then operated from a small building in San Francisco and had 17 employees. I sat there thinking, "This is the beginning of the end for local newspapers." Nothing has happened since to change my mind.
8 Facebook All the silly things people say about Twitter (see above), they said about Facebook. And still do. What a pointless waste of time! Who are these people with empty lives? Etc etc. It is so pointless that there are now more than 300 million people active on the site, doing their pointless things. But, really, to think that, you would have to think it was pointless to want to connect, to create, to share creativity or thought, to discuss, to collaborate, to form groups or to combine with others in mutual interests or passions. If you can't see the point of any of those things, you will not see the point of Facebook.
9 iTunes U Launched in May 2007 and still relatively unknown. The theory is that every university in the world – most of them benefiting from significant public funding – can share all their course lessons, lectures, language classes and laboratory demonstrations with everyone else. For those who haven't discovered it, you find it through iTunes itself. Tap in any search term you want, and it will deliver you content from all the partner universities, which you can then carry around with you on your iPod or iPhone (see above) to listen to on buses, at airports, on long car journeys or (if you are insomniac like me) throughout the night. Take the Workers' Educational Association (WEA) and the Open University, and multiply by 10,000.
10 Spotify Launched generally only eight months ago, Spotify is even more life-changing than iTunes, with a library of six million tracks, including a remarkable amount of really quite esoteric classical music. It is – at least at the time of writing – all free, providing you don't mind putting up with the occasional advertisement. Was there really a time when, in order to listen to a particular concerto or symphony, you had to either buy it or scan Radio Times to see if Radio 3 had scheduled it? Incredible to think of those dark ages. Now – so long as you don't mind not "owning" music – you can listen to more or less anything more or less any time. A small Eee PC, hooked up to your sound system, will cost no more than a mid-price tuner. A lifetime of musical exploration beckons.
I make no claims for all of these being the most significant developments in communication over the last decade. They are simply 10 of the inventions and launches that have most affected me. I would find it hard to imagine returning to a life without any of them. Between them they have created the greatest explosion of democracy; access to information; potential for creativity; and the ability to connect and communicate the world has ever seen. They are, each of them, profoundly disruptive and revolutionary, and with consequences that will ripple on through time future. Some (most?) may be transitory, to be replaced by even more transformatory innovations; some more permanent. In just under 10 years they – and millions of developments, technologies and websites like them – have changed the world profoundly.
by Alan Rusbridger
Say it's a tradition. Explain to your children – or your nieces or nephews or grandkids – that half-term must, as a matter of faith or ancient custom, include a trip to the cinema. Say whatever you have to or, if that fails, then go alone. Just make sure you see Up.
It's the latest animated feature from Pixar, the studio with a claim to being one of the more insightful chroniclers of our times. There's plenty there for kids to enjoy – some nice gags and wonderful pictures – but that does it little justice. Yes, it's sentimental, but it's also elegiac, touching and oddly brave. It is a film that reveals the gaps in the rest of popular culture, exposing those areas where others fear to tread.
For Up has the unlikeliest of protagonists, a grumpy, lonely widower, Mr Fredricksen. It deals, matter-of-factly, with questions that rarely arise in any movie, let alone one aimed chiefly at children. So within the opening few scenes, we have not just the solitude of the elderly but the pressure on them to give up their independence and move into old-age homes. This is not ground covered in High School Musical.
Admirable though it is to raise issues normally confined to the pages of the Guardian's Society section, Up digs deeper. The film starts by showing Mr Fredricksen as a little boy, walking the 1930s streets of his neighbourhood, then staring wide-eyed at the black-and-white newsreels that brought word of Charles F Muntz, the Lindbergh-style heroic explorer who soared above the globe in an airship. This simple act of recollection sends a powerful message: it says that the elderly of today once had their own pop culture, their own celebrities, their own "new media". They are not just old people, those we might brush aside. They were children once, too.
There are regular, often acerbic, observations of the way we live now. The small, charming wooden house the old man has lived in for most of his life is under threat from developers, men in Matrix-style suits and shades, who are surrounding it with looming steel-and-glass skyscrapers. When Mr Fredricksen decides he's had enough, tying his home to a thousand balloons and heading for the skies, he is joined by a young boy scout whose father has given him all kinds of electronic gizmos – he has given him everything, in fact, except time.
Some will detect hypocrisy in a US entertainment giant such as Disney – which owns Pixar – making a target of both corporate greed and the marketing of consumer electronics to kids. But these are asides in what is a much larger story. Up deals with themes that are timeless and universal. In the most outstanding sequence, a wordless montage follows Mr Fredricksen and his childhood sweetheart from their infancy to adolescence, marriage and eventually her death. Silently, and movingly, we see the disappointment of childlessness and the deferral of dreams – in this case a long yearned for voyage to Venezuela – because reality always intrudes. Up shows us the truth of John Lennon's pithy observation: life is what happens when you're busy making other plans.
This is becoming typical of Pixar. Its last feature, Wall-E, asked whether waste and rampant consumption were choking our planet, so that eventually human beings would have to find somewhere else to live, while telling an eternal story about the need for companionship. The protagonists of their most recent films – a rat, a rusty robot, a curmudgeon – are not designed with one eye on the merchandising product line. Pixar is instead doing the work of great storytellers, holding up a mirror to the world even as it reminds us of those fundamental traits, and needs, that make us human. And Pixar manages to do all that while telling a funny, exciting yarn that appeals to the widest possible audience. How many of our literary giants can say the same?
The defunct DFS agency bugged the Nobel laureate's phone and monitored his movements from 1967 after he moved to Mexico with his family. The authorities suspected the Colombian author of One Hundred Years of Solitude because of his leftist sympathies and friendship with Fidel Castro. Declassified documents published in the newspaper El Universal revealed the DSF kept a bulging file at least up until 1985, after which documents remain secret. It was era of the "dirty war" waged by rightwing Latin American governments against suspected subversives.
In a tapped conversation with the director of Cuba's Prensa Latina news agency, Jorge Timossi, Márquez mentioned he had made over the publishing rights for his book, Chronicle of a Death Foretold, to Cuba's communist government.
"The above proves that Gabriel GarcÃa Márquez, besides being pro-Cuban and pro-Soviet, is a propaganda agent at the service of the intelligence agency of that country," a DFS document said in 1982. The same year he won the Nobel prize for literature.
The agency closely monitored the author's mediation between leftist movements and the French president, François Miterrand. It also kept tabs on Mexican writers such as Octavio Paz, who won the Nobel prize in 1990, and Salvador Novo.
Márquez, 82, affectionately known as Gabo throughout Latin America, divides his time between Mexico City and Cartagena in Colombia. He still visits Havana and has maintained his friendship with Castro.
His masterpiece Love in the Time of Cholera was made into a film but an effort to film his most recent novel, Memories of My Melancholy Whores, was derailed by objections to its alleged promotion of underaged sex.
Installation
The installation process took over an hour, but once up and running Windows 7’s advantages were impressive. Gathering information from 168,941 user files, settings and “programs” was time consuming for the automated installer, and so was expanding 2340mb worth of files. Google’s new Chrome browser installs in seconds, and while that is not an operating system, Microsoft will be aware that everybody’s impatient for their computers to be faster in all respects. However, at least the process was clearly saying what it was doing, and made it obvious that it hadn’t in fact crashed midway through.
Homegroups and touchscreens
Essentially, this is the operating system Vista should have been – it starts up relatively quickly, drivers already exist to make peripherals such as scanners and printers work with it, and it does clever things that XP, the version of Windows most people still use, just doesn’t.
The two facets that are at the heart of that are based around the “Homegroup”, and new ways of inputting and viewing information. The Homegroup means that you can group together a number of things, from MP3 players to other computers, and so as soon as you join a network, you can instantly see everything you’ve seen before. Music, films and files really are available immediately. This idea is certainly not new, but the breakthrough comes in simplifying the sharing process to accommodate the countless videos, digital pictures and albums that people have taken using digital technology. Windows Media Player, too, now supports far more file formats.
The new ways of dealing with information, meanwhile, mean that touchscreens are much better supported – in the future they will need to be – and that forthcoming applications based around combining television and the internet will slot in neatly, too. The same integration applies to online services such as social networking site Facebook, and, for instance, Windows Live with its shared picture galleries.
The icons here are bigger, too, but they don’t look patronising. The idea is that fat fingers should be as useful as the tiny pointer of a mouse. Shaking individual windows can be used to activate certain features, as well, which could be a natural move with a finger on a touchscreen, but not with the mouse.
Vista’s desktop, improved
On many machines, Vista’s desktop quickly seemed to run slowly. Software updates fixed some issues, but at least three computers I’ve used didn’t seem to respond very effectively. Vista separates its gadgets out from the bar that previously occupied the right-hand side of the screen, and consequently feels considerably more friendly. The difference isn’t huge, aesthetically, but functionally it’s significant.
From netbooks to desktops
Another crucial improvement for Windows 7 over Windows Vista is that 7 will run on a range of machines, from low-specification netbooks to high-powered desktops. On our mid-range Studio Hybrid, 7 was certainly more impressive than Vista, although there were the bugs that are acceptable in a test beta version, especially to do with the anti-virus programmes that are currently still very specific to Vista.
Micorosoft say that the operating system will be happy on, for instance, an Asus EeePC. Given that the EeePC sometimes struggles to run its cut-down version of Linux, that’s quite some claim, and I’d be eager to see how true it really is.
Intelligent power management
There are substantial improvements in power management, too, with ports being turned off when they’re not in use, and so this is an operating system that does what it should: unlike Vista, it shuts up, and keeps things going while you, the user, can get on with whatever it is you need to be doing. Batteries will live longer, but the programme learns from your behaviour too. If the display is set to dim after 30 seconds and you move the mouse immediately it does, then you’ll get significantly longer before the computer dims its display again. So there’s time, say, to read something quite lengthy on screen without constant irritation.
But should you really go and download a beta?
Senior people at Microsoft say they’ve been using the current build of Windows 7 on their main machines for a few days now and that there have been no problems. Indeed, it is certainly true that the developer community is making surprisingly positive noises about Windows 7, especially when compared to Vista. So people will be taking the plunge in droves, right?
Geeks will, indeed. But does Windows 7 do anything you need so much it’s worth the risk? The answer is almost certainly no.
It offers impressive connectivity, it looks slick to the (Apple?) core, but, for instance, persuading it to ignore warnings about McAfee’s Security Centre being incompatible with this new version of Windows was difficult and annoying. For some unknown reason, too, web access sometimes just ground to a halt and crashed Internet Explorer. No computer or wifi network is perfect, but a consumer should be able to know that such problems are not in their browser, and with a beta you simply don’t have that kind of certainty.
Conclusions
Microsoft has learnt a lot from Vista. The PR for Windows 7 is already better, and the company, more than in the past, is keen to constantly remind users that Friday’s release is only of a test version. It helps, of course, that in truth Vista is now the operating system it should have been when it launched. People aren’t desperate for an upgrade, as they were in the last days of XP.
What Microsoft has realised primarily, though, is that Windows 7 needs to make everything easier – playing music, joining networks, sharing photos should all feel simpler than they do currently. The good news is that with this beta they already do; if Microsoft can really deliver on that vision in the full release, then Windows 7 should be a formidable programme indeed.
At an election night party during the primaries last year I made a throwaway comment disparaging those who believed Barack Obama's mixed-race identity gave him a unique understanding of America's racial problems.
"It does," said one woman.
I explained that I was joking. She was not. "It really does," she continued. "He knows how black people think and he knows how white people think."
"If that's what it took then Tiger Woods [whose father is of African American, Chinese and Native American descent and mother is of Thai, Chinese and Dutch descent] should be president and Nelson Mandela should have stayed in the Transkei," I said.
"So why's he doing so well?" she asked. I suggested it was probably his stance on the war, the state of the economy and a desire to move on from the Clinton-Bush duopoly combined with his grassroots organising experience and use of new technology.
"There's more to it than that," she said. "It's him."
It is almost impossible to have an intelligent conversation about Obama. The problem isn't that people come to him with baggage. Everyone comes to everything in politics with baggage. It's that they refuse to check it in or even declare it. Any conversation about what he does rapidly morphs into one about who he is and what he might be.
In New Jersey more than a third of the conservatives literally think he might be the devil. A poll last month revealed 18% of the state's conservatives know he is the antichrist, while 17% are not sure. In Oslo, where he was last week awarded the Nobel peace prize, they think he might be Mother Teresa. A peace prize for a leader, nine months into his term, whose greatest foreign policy achievement to date is to wind down one war so he can escalate another, is bizarre to say the least.
Obama's particular biography, sudden rise and unflappable manner have certainly accentuated the contradictions between how different people understand his record. But the problem goes far wider than that. An obsession with celebrity, the cult of presidential personality and a culture of individualism (all of which long predated his election) have made understanding western politicians primarily within their political context a relative rarity.
We talk instead of "great men", who as Thomas Carlyle claimed, made history independent of the society and cultures that produced them. So tales of their moods, thought processes, psychological flaws and idiosyncratic genius become paramount. The emphasis shifts from policy to personality: their inability to trust, failure to lead or willingness to compromise become the questions of the day. The fate of the world lies not so much in their hands as in their gut and mind. Whether they take tablets or not sparks national conversation.
And so for all his individual talents, the fact that Obama is the product of a certain political moment and system, and therefore represents both its potential and its limits, is lost.
Nonetheless, the potential is not difficult to see. At home his election brought together a new coalition to transform the electoral landscape. He won the vote of 97% of black Americans, 67% of Latinos and white union members, 66% of those aged between 18 and 29 and 63% of Asian Americans. Black people voted in greater numbers by 14%, Latinos by 25% and young people aged between 18 and 29 by 25%. On his coattails came substantial Democratic majorities in both Houses of Congress.
He is now turning out to be the most progressive president in 40 years. The agenda he has set out of raising taxes on the rich, reforming healthcare, withdrawing from Iraq, softening the sanctions on Cuba, and boosting the number of student grants marks a far bolder vision of what government is for than either Bill Clinton or Jimmy Carter did.
Internationally, he remains incredibly popular, not least for who he is not – George Bush. A poll released last week revealing which country is most admired around the world showed America leaping from seventh to first. "What's really remarkable is that in all my years studying national reputation, I have never seen any country experience such a dramatic change in its standing as we see for the United States in 2009," explained Simon Anholt of the Anholt-GfK Roper Nation Brands Index. This is about as good a result as the left is going to get out of an American election.
But the limits are also all too apparent. Being the most progressive American president in more than a generation is not the same as being progressive. It's all relative. He has escalated the war in Afghanistan, continued rendition and maintained many of the most noxious presidential prerogatives that Bush claimed for himself.
The fact that Democrats have sufficient majorities in both houses of Congress to pass whatever they want but are struggling to pass anything that would make a decisive and conclusive break with the past suggests the problem in Washington is not "partisan politics". It's a political system and culture so crowded with corporate lobbyists, that it is apparently incapable of fulfilling the wishes of the people even when – as with a public option in healthcare – that is what they want.
The fact he is a product of that system does not mean he is not necessarily dedicated to reforming it. But we cannot measure his dedication, only his achievements. And so far those achievements have not been great.
Meanwhile, he has precious little to show for his global popularity. Nobody wants to increase troop levels in Afghanistan or take in Guantánamo Bay prisoners. By the time his climate change efforts emerge from Congress they are unlikely to impress the international community. "The problem is he's asking for roughly the same things Bush asked for and Bush didn't get them, not because he was a boorish diplomat or a cowboy," Peter Feaver, a former adviser to Bush, told the New York Times recently. "If that were the case, bringing in the sophisticated, urbane President Obama would have solved the problem. Bush didn't get them because these countries had good reasons for not giving them." That's not quite true. He is asking for less and prepared to give more. But the fact remains that he wants similar things and his concessions seem insufficient.
Put simply, he doesn't seem to have the numbers to implement change on a scale necessary to relieve the pain of people and the planet. This risks great cynicism and even the possibility of a backlash. People will say we reached out and nobody reached back; we tried to reform healthcare but nothing much changed. Predicting these disappointments, from the left, has taken no great insight. Given his own politics and the range of institutions in which he is embedded, the limits have always been clear. It is the potential for overcoming them that has been an open question.
This should neither absolve Obama of his responsibilities nor ignore his considerable abilities, but simply place meaningful criticism of him here on Earth – as opposed to in heaven or hell. The fact that he is pushing the country in the right direction does not mean he is able to push it fast or far enough.
It seems the world may need more for its future health and wellbeing than what US politics can produce right now. His best may just not be good enough.
by Gary Younge
