Hack This, Please

Andy Kessler, the author of Wall Street Meat had a recent piece in the WSJ, and now reprinted on his own site. It's a piece about how companies are shifting much more to "hacker" friendly models. It's a particular area of interest for me, as it's something that I've talked about with the folks at BCG for a while.

Comments

Not smart to sue your customers

[AubieTurtle]

The hacker hostile business methods of cue:cat and iOpener sure helped those companies... helped them disappear!

In summary..

[Anonymous Coward]

he preliminary results of the BCG/OSDN survey reveal that:

* Participants note extremely high levels of creativity in their projects.
* Having fun, enhancing skills, access to source code and user needs drive contributions to the Open Source community. Defeating proprietary software companies is not a major motivator.
* The Open Source community is truly global in composition with respondents coming from 35 countries.
* Most participants dedicated at least 10 hours per week in their shared programming efforts
* Contrary to popular belief about hackers, the open source community is mostly comprised of highly skilled IT professionals who have on average over 10 years of programming experience.

They're wrong...

[robslimo]

in implying the the customers at large wish to hack products. We (yes, I'm including myself) are a minority, though numerous.

Where the average customer can win is through the end products of hacking. Third party ring tones and games, etc for cell phones are passe now. So are "performance chips" for engine control modules. Third party hacks and add-ons for other embedded systems, like PVRs are here or on the way. In one way or another, all of these are the result of 'hacking' and have direct benefit for the non-hackers.

My toaster

[kir]

I hacked my toaster to only burn the toast. It's not *exactly* what I wanted, but I did it ALLLL by myself.

Ownership vs. Usage

[dozek]

I heard Dr. Ed Felton from Princeton lecture on this very idea...that we are used to purchasing a product and owning it. If that means we want to take a screwdriver, dismantle our toaster and find out how it works, then that is the right of ownership. However, he continued, with more technical products (ranging from commercial software to embedded components) we do not get ownership, rather a license agreement. Thus, we lose the "right to tinker" and subsequently improve products as we see fit.

He referenced several lawsuits involving this idea...one in particular regarding aftermarket garage door openers.

I've always asked the question "Why can't I change how long the snooze button silences the alarm?" My clock has a 9 minute snooze...but what if I just want 6 minutes? I'd have to keep buying clocks and find the right one through trial and error. I'd be totally willing to pay more for a clock with a variable snooze.

Sounds good to me.

[dealsites]

I have the Linksys WRT54g. There are currently 3 groups creating custom firmware. The fixes and features are rolled out quite a lot faster than Linksys provides. I feel that I have one of the most powerful wireless routers on the market for around $80 now. The bandwidth management and remote VPN features are sweet. Linksys would have never implemented that.

I always wondered why a few engineers don't create an open source hardware solution. I imaging a wireless router isn't more than a few chips laid down on a board. A group should get together and create an open-source hardware platform and then sell it at a slight margin to make up the manufacturing costs. Then let the software gurus continue to add features. Just make sure that the unit has enough ram and MIPS to process future functions. I'm not sure of the BOM cost for a wireless router, but I'm sure it's pretty cheap. An open source hardware router could probably sell for $20 when massed produced. There are 802.11b routers selling that cheap now.

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Sheesh indeed!

[despik]

Jesus F. Christ, not Steve Jobs, Steve Wozniak, better known as Woz. In his own words:

My company was CL9 and we built the CORE universal remote control. This was before the simple idea of preprogramming all the codes used by the common companies was done. My device looked at the IR signal and analyzed it and recreated it. It also had to determine if certain codes needed to be emitted more than once to work. My device had 16 user buttons and a few more control buttons. They were all large and finger sized. You could put the CORE into one of 16 keyboards, so you really had 256 total keys to use. Any key could have a sequence of any of the other keys and any IR codes that you read in. So a single key could turn on the TV, then turn on the VCR, then select channel 4, etc. More than that, the 'sequence' attached to a key could access all the control buttons. The lessor used control buttons were covered by a slider to keep things looking simpler. This remote control kept it's own time and could emit IR signals at certain times. You could hit "AT-5-PM-6" (4 buttons total) to execute button 6 at 5 PM. Even the buttons that programmed the main user buttons could be included in a program. Thus button 1 could reprogram button 2, etc. This allowed a simple level of programming without normal program loops. You could program the remote control to skip daylight savings time with a sequence like "AT-2-AM-Set-Hour up" (5 buttons). I was able to create a program that would keep daylight savings time going up and down on the right days forever, including leap years, but it was quite an effort and required a lot of keys to hold current states.

What else are we missing?

[SilentJ_PDX]

I love my iPod, but the most frustrating thing about it is what it could do if Apple allowed people to hack them. For instance, thanks to all the mix CDs and compilations I own, I have over 1700 unique artists in my MP3 collection. Of those, only about 500 have more than one song and only 300 artists have more than 3-4 songs. On the iPod, that means I have to scroll through 4 one-track artists for each of the artists that I own an entire album of. It would be great to have a second "Popular Artist" list that would only show the artists that have more than 3-4 tracks. For a coder, something like that would be easy to write. But because Apple doesn't allow iPod hacking, I'll probably never see that feature. How many other great features are our mp3 players, DVD players, microwaves, automobiles, etc missing becuase people can't hack them? I think one could apply the same argument to Microsoft: what nifty OS features aren't we seeing becuase the only vision of OS we see is the MS vision?

Bad Idea

[CreatureComfort]

The biggest problem with this idea is that allowing your product to be easily changed by the end user is a recipe for technical support disaster. That's why every branded PC you buy these days doesn't just come with a disk to reinstall the OS, it comes with a "System Restore" CD. So that when you call Dell, HP, Gateway, eMachine, etc. with a problem, they walk you through the few simple things to determine if it is a hardware or software problem. As soon as they feel they can eliminate a hardware failure, the next suggestion is use the restore CD, simply because they can't afford to spend the time trying to figure out what you did to your PC to mess it up.

If your toaster becomes deliberately (by the manufacturer) "hackable" then they can no longer have those big warnings that tinkering with the device voids the warranty, and they will also have to hire a massive support group to get all those messed up toasters working again.

Making money from it

[nenya]

There are two primary reasons that are holding back major corporations from opening their goods to hackign. The first is liability, the second is money.

Concerning liability, companies are rightly paralyzed with fear that they could be held responsible for making a product that can be modified to do illegal and/or unpleasant things. Take, for example, the TiVo situation. Just because they took out the ad-skipping feature by default, doesn't mean that they cannot theoretically be held responsible for allowing their product to be hacked in such a way to put the feature back in. And hacking cars is even more legally dangerous. In short: while corporations ensure that their goods meet the requirements of current legal code, there is no way to ensure that a hacked product will still be in compliance. It is highly likely that corporations can be held liable for this.

Second: corporations exist to make money. The reason that most companies don't want their product to be hacked is that they don't want you to find that feature for yourself, they want to find it first and sell it to you. If you add a feature they didn't sell you, they lose. There is a way around this, fortunately, and Apple has already taken it. Simply reserve the right to include and market any hacks that consumers come up with. But finding the hacks that would have market value is hard enough: finding the hacks with market value that are legal is even harder.

Re:Sheesh

[Peridyd]

With all due respect, it's you that missed the point. The piece is actually arguing that hacking should be incorporated into product lifecycle process. It's not arguing that products need to be so pliant that the "painted footprints on the floor" crowd can't use them, but rather that companies embrace the fact that some of their consumers will hack their products and that some of those hacks will be better than the original.