Web Excursions 2022-06-15
The Secret to Getting What You Need in Ghana
In Ghana, the inside connection that likely allowed the people in the cars to skip the vaccine line is called protocol, or “proto” for short.
Paradoxically, protocol often means expedited access that circumvents established procedure.
People in Ghana do not follow protocol;
they have it, through kinship or a social connection.
One might use protocol to quickly access a public service, while applying for a job, or to get into a good school.
Its prevalence reflects how equal rights and access are becoming a mirage in Ghana,
fueling disillusionment with the government and the country’s supposed meritocracy.
But many Ghanaians have largely accepted the system, even as they complain about it
The term’s origins to the era after Ghana’s independence in 1957.
As a complement to their low wages, public servants could take advantage of a quota system for job or university openings for themselves or their family members—known as a protocol list.
Even then, the system was prone to abuse
Thin Platforms
In retrospect, the complaint [against Microsoft’s monopoly in the web browser market] feels quaint for three reasons
First, Microsoft won the browser wars, and it didn’t matter
the company leveraged its operating system dominance to gain browser market share,
but the company also made a great browser
Microsoft controlled (and allegedly abused) what could be preinstalled on a new computer,
but once said computer was in a user’s hands they could install whatever they wanted to, including alternative browsers
The third reason has to do with Microsoft itself.
today having a browser pre-installed is de rigueur for operating systems
one of the overarching themes of CEO Satya Nadella’s Build developer conference keynote was the seemingly eternal tech debate about thin versus thick clients
there is and will continue to be a lot of work that happens locally;
all of the assumptions around that work, though, will be as if the work is being done on the server
What makes this shift so striking is that it is being articulated by Microsoft
The new OS is not going to start from the hardware,
because the classic OS definition, that Tanenbaum, one of the guys who wrote the book on Operating Systems that I read when I went to school was:
“It does two things, it abstracts hardware, and it creates an app model”.
Right now the abstraction of hardware has to start by abstracting all of the hardware in your life,
so the notion that this is one device is interesting and important,
it doesn’t mean the kernel that boots your device just goes away,
it still exists, but the point of real relevance I think in our lives is “hey, what’s that abstraction of all the hardware in my life that I use?” –
some of it is shared, some of it is personal
Slack may have infused its chat client with love, but chatting is a means to an end,
and Microsoft often seems like the only enterprise company that understands that.
When you combine the Microsoft Graph with Microsoft Teams,
you combine the data that describes how people work together with the place they work together
in the PC era the monopoly that mattered was being the only operating system on a single device
Once mobile came along, though, not only did the number of devices proliferate,
but so did the need for new user interfaces, power requirements, hardware re-imagining, etc.;
this made it inevitable that Microsoft would miss mobile, because the company was approaching the problem from the completely wrong perspective.
At the same time, this proliferation of devices meant that the point of integration — which enterprises still craved — moved up the stack.
developers had much more power and flexibility in the old model, because they had direct access to the underlying PC.
This had both advantages — anyone could make an app that could do anything, and users could install it directly — and
disadvantages — anyone could make an app that could do anything, and users could install it directly
Mobile set the expectation that developer freedom — and by extension, opportunity — would be limited by the operating system owner
thin platform like Teams takes this even further,
because now developers don’t even have access to the devices, at least in a way that matters to an enterprise
Stripe also held Stripe Sessions, and one of the tentpole sections of the keynote was called “Finance OS
The rate limiter for so many new opportunities isn’t the idea for a great product; it’s the mundane foundations
Stripe is even including pre-made UI components so that 3rd-party apps look like they were designed by the fintech company
Not only was an operating system monopoly inevitable, it also
made perfect sense from a user perspective that important functionality — like browsing — became integrated with the core OS.
What could go wrong and the necessity of IT created the conditions for massive upside, in this case the opportunity to make new apps — and
by extension, new companies — without needing any permission, “connectors” or pre-made UI components.
Alas, the tech industry is past the end of the beginning; welcome to middle age, where the only thickness is your waistline.