January 9, 2023

s14e05 - The Software-Defined Cost of Doing Business

0.0 Context Setting

It’s a grey Monday in Portland, Oregon, where, for now at least, it isn’t raining.

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1.0 Some Things That Caught My Attention

1.1 The Software-Defined Cost of Doing Business

The most recent issue of The Difference Engine’s newsletter covers electrical vehicles’ potential to mess with car brands¹. This note about differentiation in electric vehicles (EVs) caught my eye:

With every Marques Brownlee EV review video I’ve watched it gets clearer and clearer: more than anything else in EVs, the luxury cues come from the software, not the hardware.

When CarPlay came out, there was a sort-of joke about people now suddenly basing car decisions on whether or not their car supported their iPhone or not. It’s still true - I’ll get annoyed if I’ve got a rental car and it doesn’t support CarPlay.

For me there’s been something weird or guilty about this feeling. As if: imagine out of everything to do with a car, one of your deal-breakers is “whether it works with your phone or not”. Does that feel stupid? Or overly sensitive, or picky?

I made the observation a while back that it’d be trivial² to integrate the equivalent of wired CarPlay into inflight entertainment systems and then you’d get the choice of using the slightly-larger bigger display of a setback while on a plane as well as using your phone or whatever. I do think people would choose to fly on a plane that had, er, AirplanePlay, over one that didn’t, all things being equal.

But back to Farrah’s point about luxury cues. The general category here is “can the business that isn’t a “tech” business get better at software faster than a business that is a “tech” business but isn’t a {car, film, tv, sports} business”?

This is all in a week that saw CES’ annual unveiling of Cars You Won’t Be Able To Drive, from the Sony/Honda Afeela to the updated colour version of BMW’s i Vision Dee, and the resurfacing of Swedish car magazine Vi Bilägare’s article from 2022 on the performance of physical controls over touchscreens in cars³.

So Farrah poses an interesting question: what is luxury software? In my mind, luxury software isn’t “stuff that you have to pay to unlock” like heated car seats, it isn’t corinthian leather and stitching (although I imagine it may be to some people), and it isn’t (in the way that videogames are, for example), exclusive unlocks or uh digital hats or cosmetics.

One way of looking at luxury software might be ways in which luxury software could replicate another kind of luxury, the kind where you simply have so much money that things go away. Not in the sense of “here’s another $19.99/month subscription to a purported concierge service”. Because the deal with those concierge services is that they’ll still send you notifications and they’ll still have (in my limited experience) irritating interfaces. No, the kind of luxury software where you don’t need a computer, or where someone prints you emails and then you read them and tell other people what to do with them. What’s that kind of luxury, in a doable sense? Luxury, I think, would include not being bombarded with gazillions of red notification dots and numbers.

But one of the problems here is that the same software evolution “we put computers in cars, so cars are computers now” throws havoc with business models, or at least would throw havoc with business models depending on how a particular organization thinks about software.

One way of viewing this is that there’s no such thing as software maintenance⁴ because you’re just continually developing software. That’s it. It’s never done. Which isn’t necessarily a new thought if you know all about continuous development. But maybe here’s another helpful way of looking at this:

Canon, who make Proper Big Digital Cameras that cost thousands and thousands of dollars, used to have a piece of software called EOS Webcam Utility that would let you use your expensive camera and lenses as, well, what it says on the tin. After a while of nothing happening, EOS Webcam Utility came back as a free/subscription product, complete with new features like being able to run on Apple’s new processors without needing to go through emulation.

A subscription product? Well, this makes sense. Computers keep changing. Apple keep doing things like changing architecture or deprecating APIs like nobody’s business. It’s work to keep all of this up to date and fix bugs! So, Canon need to charge for it.

I mean, do they? I mean, do they need to charge that way? Leaving aside the fact that subscription pricing for software isn’t necessarily bad in itself, what’s clearly happened here is a bunch of products that used to exist slightly apart from software are now inextricably linked with software. They came with elementary software before which they didn’t charge for, but now software’s gotten more complicated, so they’re charging for it explicitly.

Could it be that keeping the EOS Webcam Software up to date is just a cost of doing business? Would that mean cameras need to be a little bit more expensive, if the software were given away freely and continually updated? The expectation here is that “I’ve got a camera” and “I should be able to do things with it”, and if the manufacturer is selling me things that the thing is clearly capable of doing, then… it’s screwing me over?

Quick, somewhat tired comparisons and examples in this space:

BMW in its wisdom of trying out a heated seat subscription service may genuinely be trying to figure out “how do we pay for this continual software development we have to do now” as well as experimenting with new and exciting ways to squeeze more money out of its customers.

Southwest Airlines is apparently an example of forgetting to invest in software continually as a cost of doing business, but from my point of view they appear to be doing just fine. Sure, their airline fell over over the holiday period, sure thousands of people had a terrible experience, but from Southwest’s point of view, what, are people going to stop flying with them? Their product is based on price and there aren’t really significant competitors in their bracket. That holiday disruption may as well been their cost of doing business, and it might continue to be so long as demand is up and software doesn’t break much further. Remember: you’ve decided that the effect of not investing in software is the cost of doing business, not that investing in software is the cost of doing business.

I suppose the shorter point here, at least on the consumer electronics or “everything a consumer uses has a computer in it now and if it doesn’t it will soon” side is that if you have a thing that works with computers and you buy that thing, you expect it to work with computers and not to have to pay any more for it.

Software-defined lack of functionality is getting really obvious to people. It’s not even that you’re getting the camera for less, or that you’re getting the car for less. You paying exactly the same for the car or the camera, as far as you can tell.

The part about all this software business being continual and there being no “maintenance” is that your company’s thing does not absolutely does not exist in a vacuum and your executive leadership need to understand this and at the very least then own the results. Everything else is moving around the product, and if you don’t keep moving, then your product becomes less valuable. Sure, Canon, it’s annoying that Apple changed processor architecture, but hey: it happened. Your cameras are pretty reliant on being used with other peoples’ computers.

So perhaps one interesting side question is: how reliant is that car on being used with your phone?

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1.2 Some little things

Miriam Posner on Ghost Ships in Logic Magazine⁵, about what happens when ships become data.

Caught my attention because: Posner goes into detail about the paperwork involved in international shipping and supply-chain data.

Fonts in Use has an article about Philip K. Dick paperback covers⁶, specifically the use of Roslyn Gothic – you’ll recognize it when you see it.

Caught my attention because: a) that 70s science fiction cover art⁷ and b) the brief notes on the recent digital reworks of Roslyn Gothic Bold.

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Well, that’s it for today. How are you doing?

Best,

Dan