"Where is the Market?"

[tcmay@sensemedia.net (Timothy C. May)]

I want to elaborate on the words from last December that I just posted, in
response to some comments about how I had just "discovered" the Web.

L. McCarthy just had some good points about differing privacy/political
goals here on this list.

When we first formed, almost three years ago, one of the first things we
did at a physical meeting--and the issue was echoed on the new mailing
list--was to conduct a poll of who was using what mail tools, e.g., pine,
elm, emacs, Microsoft Mail, MCI Mail (?), Lotus Notes, Eudora, etc. The
results--which should be in the archives for sometime around
November-December 1992--were, as expected, all over the map. No clear
winner. The reason for the poll was obvious: to determine what sort of
target markets the various PGP integrators would have.

Even then, there were religious wars, with, for example, the emacs crowd
arguing that PGP should be integrated into emacs and then the world could
just switch to emacs (as they should have long before :-)).

Now I wish I could draw pictures here---and that I can't draw pictures here
and still communicate with most of you here makes an interesting point
about the still-dominant nature of ASCII, which ain't about to change
anytime soon for lists like this---so I could better explain my "stable
attractors" line of reasoning. But I'll do it instead with more words.


Here's an elaboration on my points made last December 15:


"I see two "stable attractors" for text/graphics/multimedia/etc. sent
over the Net:"

What I mean by "stable attractors" are the "islands" or regions in product
space that have solidity and success. Leading commercial products are
obvious examples, with a cloud of related or ancillary products supporting
them. Product versions are like a chain of these islands.

As with "attractors" in general (and I assume everyone on this list has
read much about attractors, usually in the context of strange attractors),
there are not many "occupied" regions in the nether-realm between
attractors. That is, between the islands lies open water. "Survival" is
difficult in these open waters.

My main model for software, borne out by everything I see, is that this
"island colonization" model is appropriate.


"1. Straight text, ASCII, 80 column format. All systems can handle
this, all mailers and newsreaders can handle it, it's what the Usenet
is essentially based upon, and it gets the job done. It meets the
needs of 95% of us for 95% of our needs."

By this I mean just what this list is doing _now_. ASCII is the de facto
lingua franca. People with PCs, various operating systems on their PCs
(DOS, Win3.1, Win95beta, Linux, OS/2, NeXTStep, Solaris, etc.),
Macintoshes, terminals, Amigas, Ataris, Suns, SGIs, NeXTs, and so on, are
all mostly able to read what is distributed here.

Deviations occur, but mostly unintentially or as "experiments."
Occasionally people will still try to send NeXT-formatted mail--I forget
what it was called--and various people send their messages as
"attachments," even when the text is apparently just straight ASCII.

(Hint to the attachment-senders: I periodically go into the "Attachments"
folder on my system and empty it of the unread big and little attachments
that have accumulated in it...others have said they do the same. So, if
your message will fit into the standard text/ASCII "primary format" of the
Cypherpunks list, that is how you should send it...and if it _isn't _
straight text, but instead includes attached spreadsheets, JPEG movies of
the Waco raid, etc., you might ask yourself just how many people will
bother to read or view your message?)

Hence my comment that "the written word" is a massively stable, heavily
colonized "island" or "attractor." It can be handled in foreign languages,
with some difficulty, and on nearly any computer system in the world. It is
the language of legal briefs, of economic reports, of crop reports, and of
a zillion other forms of communication. Pure text is powerful stuff.

But what about pictures, illustrations, diagrams? Magazines and books use
them widely, so why can't we? And what about styled text, footnotes,
superscripts, hypertext links, etc.?

Well, in a different world we might have adopted standards earlier than we
did and such things might be more common and acceptable today.

(For those who will argue that it is "possible" to exchange e-mail with
embedded diagrams, equations, footnotes, etc., "sure."  But ask yourself
how many times you have ever actually _done_ this, with friends and e-mail
correspondents? Some who have done this point out that it usually involved
folks within corporations who can standardize on the tools and default
settings to make this transparent...then they can send richly-formatted
stuff without excessive work. And how many other mailing lists, besides
Cypherpunks, have such embedded diagrams and illustrations? I'm not talking
about the Web here--I'll get to it in my next point--but about what this
list is and what NetNews, for example, is.

What will "the masses" likely use to implement a richer communications
channel, one that encompass pictures, illustrations, movies, spreadsheets,
etc.? What will be the _next_ big island people colonize? (Which is of
obvious interest for the deployment of crypto to users.)

From Dec. 15:


"2. The Web, for graphics, images, etc. This will be the next main
stable attractor, deployed on many platforms. (I'm assuming the debate
here about Netscape standards does not imply much of a fragmentation,
that Mosaic, Netscape, MacWeb, etc., will all basically be able to
display Web pages in much the same way.)"

Enough people are starting to "surf the Web" (whatever you think of that
expression) that this is becoming the _de facto_ next attractor, or island.
_Millions_ of users will have whatever tools and "helper apps" in their
versions of Mosaic, Netscape, MacWeb, etc. such that this will be the
platform/environment of choice. As the browsers add e-mail (receiving, as
most or all can send mail), and as applets/helpers proliferate, then these
platforms/environments will allow new forms of e-mail to finally become
_widespread_ (note that I did not say "possible," but instead said
"widespread").

Many folks I have expressed this view to have said "But the Web is not a
two-way medium like e-mail." That is, most people spend most of their time
on the Web "reading" (viewing) the stuff others have put on the Web.

Three points:

1. This is changing already, as "feedback" is included on pages. This
feedback is beginning to look like local newsgroups, and will become more
so (IMO).

(Speculation: The current Usenet "feed" is of course huge. It may get
replaced, via evolution/revolution, by a shift to a Web-oriented system of
local newsgroups. What I mean by this is that instead of reading, say,
"alt.cypherpunks," one points one's browser at
"http://www.cypherpunks.org/" and uses one's various Web tools to browse,
sort, search, read, and respond to comments of others. BTW, this could be
done today, and might be a better alternative than creating
"alt.cypherpunks." The current approach of shipping the entire Usenet feed
to all the sites that carry it is likely to eventually break down.)

(Even more speculation: Currently I point my Netscape at which news server
I wish, from a choice of several. The idea of "subscription-based" News
sites is an interesting one. I might pay extra money for a site that is
very current and carries all News groups, while parents might pick a site
that is sufficiently sanitized for them, a site they let their children
access. Much more to say here, but I see several Cypherpunks themes.)

2. The easy-to-use integration of helper apps into Web browsers will confer
the same capabilities on mailers that are now associated with these Web
browsers. (Again, don't tell me what _your_ mailer can now do, look to what
the millions of people are using...they'll gain a lot when their mailers,
whether part of Netscape or MacWeb or not, can automatically handle things
their browsers can now handle.)

3. The main development seems to me to be in Web tools these days. Being a
user of "tin" for several years, and seeing minimal development of it the
past two years, I've seen tin get almost no new features. Ditto for "elm,"
my mailer (when logged-on to Unix systems). (Before you comment, I can't
speak for trn, nn, rn, etc., or mailers such as pine. But friends of mine
have told me the same stagnation is happening with other mailers and
newsreaders. Many of the developers of tin, elm, archie, gopher, etc., have
moved on to bigger and better things.))

So, given that it has long been recognized as a valid Cypherpunks goal to
see what people are using for mail and newsreading, I think an analysis of
what's likely to be popular amongst the "masses" is valid. (I don't disdain
the "masses," at least not in this context. The needs of a lawyer wanting
to communicate securely with his client are not the needs of a C hacker
wanting to configure his Linux box to auto-sign his emacs messages.)

My views on the Web have *not* changed dramatically since last fall and
winter when I was talking in these terms, though all I had then was a
text-oriented browser (lynx), and it was not very exciting (as Ray Cromwell
also notes).

(And I recall this discussion on the importance of the Web going on several
times earlier, including a prediction/hope by the Extropians list
organizers, including Harry Shapiro (Hawk) that the Web could be the
solution for distributing graphics-content mailing lists...this was around
1993 sometime.)

I'm definitely not "dissing" Unix, though I personally never had much use
for it. The world is made up of all kinds of people. Some are hackers, some
are expert cryptographers, some are lawyers, and so on. The needs of a
lawyer for computer tools and writing aids are quite a bit different from
those of someone who wants to put together a Linux box for C hacking.

If I sound snide in my comments about Linux, I don't mean to be. What I
mean is that very, very few users, even fairly sophisticated users, are
going to be doing their work on Linux boxes. (If I'm wrong about this, and
Linux becomes a serious deployment system--as opposed to a Sun-killer,
which is what it looks like now--then I'll acknowledge that I was wrong.)

As cheap boxes to deploy remailers and Web sites on, Linux sounds like a
win. I'm unconvinced that it has a future for _general_ users, though. (And
by general users I don't mean computer-phobic newbies, I mean the folks
buying Windows in the tens of millions and Macs in the millions per year.
Wider use of crypto means these users, not just the current PGP users.)

Nothing has changed my view that the Web is clearly the next big attractor,
the next big island. Integrating crypto into it is likely the next big win,
which is how this latest thread started. (And by "integrating crypto into
it" I don't necessarily mean getting the source code from Netscape or Spry
or whomever and adding it...the integration can be done in multiple ways, I
think, and as several folks here are already thinking about.)

In any case, the future will unfold as it unfolds. Maybe I'm right, maybe
not. Maybe only partially right.

Debate is healthy, and at least this debate is closer to being on-topic
than discussions of red mercury (and the even rarer columbium-niobum alloys
the Japanese have developed) and Cypherpunks logos.

--Tim May

..........................................................................
Timothy C. May         | Crypto Anarchy: encryption, digital money,
tcmay@sensemedia.net   | anonymous networks, digital pseudonyms, zero
408-728-0152           | knowledge, reputations, information markets,
Corralitos, CA         | black markets, collapse of governments.
Higher Power: 2^756839 | Public Key: PGP and MailSafe available.
"National borders are just speed bumps on the information superhighway."