Free software activist Richard Stallman is taking a break from his campaign to stop people from buying Harry Potter books to blast the concept of cloud computing. “It’s stupidity,” he tells the Guardian. “It’s worse than stupidity: it’s a marketing hype campaign.” He’s right, of course, about the “marketing hype campaign,” but his real beef with the cloud is the same as his beef with corporate-owned software programs. “Do your own computing on your own computer with your copy of a freedom-respecting program,” he says. “If you use a proprietary program or somebody else’s web server, you’re defenceless. You’re putty in the hands of whoever developed that software.”

And while you’re at it, stock your cellar with lots of canned goods.

Stallman is a little late to this party. People have been voting for web apps, at least in rudimentary form, since back in the heyday of AOL. And they’re going to continue using Facebook, MySpace, Yahoo Mail, TurboTax Online, Google Maps, Wikipedia, Photobucket, Twitter, etc., just as they’re going to continue to buy J.K. Rowling’s books. Why? Because, for better or worse, they like ’em. It’s a done deal.

More on target was Larry Ellison’s rant against the cloud last week:

The interesting thing about cloud computing is that we’ve redefined cloud computing to include everything that we already do. I can’t think of anything that isn’t cloud computing with all of these announcements. The computer industry is the only industry that is more fashion-driven than women’s fashion. Maybe I’m an idiot, but I have no idea what anyone is talking about. What is it? It’s complete gibberish. It’s insane. When is this idiocy going to stop?

It’ll stop as soon as the computer industry succeeds not only in rendering the term “cloud computing” meaningless but also in draining it of its marketing oomph, at which point the industry will move on to a new buzzphrase. Same as it ever was.

But the technology of utility computing, unlike the hype about the cloud, will continue on its appointed course, and, no doubt, Larry Ellison will be there at the appropriate time to ensure that Oracle milks the utility model for whatever profits it can churn out. Oracle is the giant cockroach of the IT business – it thrives under any conditions. That’s because Oracle, though based in Silicon Valley, is not of the Valley. Ellison long ago came to understand one of the fundamental truths about the corporate IT business: there’s more money to be made in exploiting old technology than in pioneering new technology. Hedge your bets, bide your time until the cash begins to flow, then make your move.

A few months ago, Oracle announced that, with its software-as-a-service business growing at nearly a 25% a year clip, it was breaking ground on a big new data center in Utah to help power its web apps. And at the very same conference at which Ellison went on his anti-cloud rant, Oracle announced an extensive partnership with Amazon Web Services to incorporate Oracle products into the Amazon cloud.

It’s healthy for big guns like Ellison to shoot holes in the cloud hype. But also keep your eyes on what Oracle is actually doing at ground level. Cockroaches don’t lie.

Stephen Colbert and I chat about the Net and the future of man:

Give it up.

Programming note: I will be a guest on the Colbert Report on Comedy Central tomorrow (Thursday) night. Tune in.

Recent months have brought a burst of innovation in data centers. We have seen data centers in semitrailers, data centers in caves, data centers in Siberia, data centers in the Las Vegas desert, and data centers that float in the middle of the ocean. Today we have word, via Data Center Knowledge, that Microsoft has been testing data centers in tents. (They’re calling it In Tents Computing.)

What’s next? Here’s my prediction of the ten top data center innovations we’ll see over the course of the next year:

1. Data centers in blimps

2. Data centers in shoes

3. Data centers in termite nests

4. Data centers implanted under the skin of people’s forearms

5. Data centers in canoes

6. Data centers constructed entirely of post-consumer waste

7. Data centers rolled in seaweed like maki

8. Data centers worn by Japanese schoolgirls

9. Data centers in trees

10. Data centers as figments of the imagination

Sun Microsystems reportedly has a working prototype of a data center in a kangaroo’s pouch, but that’s unconfirmed.

It was painful to watch, at Apple’s big media event on Monday, Steve Jobs attempting to pawn off a retread music-recommendation system as some sort of great technological breakthrough. Yes, iTunes will now be able to suggest songs you might like based on what you and other like-eared users listen to. Wow. That’s so 2002. And the company even has the gumption to call the feature Genius. A better name, if the experiences of early users are any guide, would have been Halfwit.

But that’s nothing. Today, reports New Scientist, Apple has applied for a patent to – no joke – extend digital rights management to tennis shoes and other articles of clothing. “What is desired,” the patent application says, “is a method of electronically pairing a sensor and an authorized garment.” It continues:

As used herein an authorized garment is a garment sanctioned to be electronically paired with an authenticated (i.e., certified) sensor. Once the garment and sensor are electronically paired, the sensor can receive (and in some cases process) sensing information (such as garment performance data or user performance data) received from the garment. Since only authorized garments are configured to electronically pair with authenticated sensors, a user (or manufacturer) can be assured that the sensing data received by the sensor is both accurate and consistent with its intended use (a sensor designed for use with running shoes can not properly be used with dance shoes, for example).

Apple views tennis-shoe DRM as a way to head off what it sees as a potential plague of sneaker hacking. “Some people,” the patent application observes, “have taken it upon themselves to remove the sensor from the special pocket of the [iPod-linked] Nike+ shoe and place it at inappropriate locations (shoelaces, for example) or place it on non-Nike+ model shoes.” Oh my God: Geeks are ripping the sensors out of their sneakers and sticking them on their shoelaces! Unleash the shoe nazis!

It used to be cool to be an Apple fanboy. Now it’s starting to be embarrassing.

“Some say Google is God,” Sergey Brin once said. “Others say Google is Satan.”

The confusion about Google’s identity may not be quite that Manichean, but it does run deep. The company, which today celebrates the tenth anniversary of its incorporation, remains an enigma despite the Everest-sized pile of press coverage that has been mounded around it. People can’t even agree what industry it’s in. The many businesses that see the young company as an actual or potential competitor include software houses, advertising agencies, telephone companies, newspapers, TV networks, book publishers, movie studios, credit card processors, and Internet firms of all stripes. If your business involves information, you probably fear (and admire) Google.

The sheer breadth of Google’s influence and activity – just this past week it unveiled its own Web browser, introduced face-recognition software, and shot a satellite into orbit – can easily be interpreted as evidence that it is an entirely new kind of business, one that transcends and redefines all traditional categories. But while Google is an unusual company in many ways, when you boil down its business strategy, you find that it’s not quite as mysterious as it seems. The way Google makes money is straightforward: It brokers and publishes advertisements through digital media. More than 99 percent of its sales have come from the fees it charges advertisers for using its network to get their messages out on the Internet.

Google’s protean appearance is not a reflection of its core business. Rather, it stems from the vast number of complements to its core business. Complements are, to put it simply, any products or services that tend be consumed together. Think hot dogs and mustard, or houses and mortgages. For Google, literally everything that happens on the Internet is a complement to its main business. The more things that people and companies do online, the more ads they see and the more money Google makes. In addition, as Internet activity increases, Google collects more data on consumers’ needs and behavior and can tailor its ads more precisely, strengthening its competitive advantage and further increasing its income. As more and more products and services are delivered digitally over computer networks — entertainment, news, software programs, financial transactions — Google’s range of complements expands into ever more industry sectors. That’s why cute little Google has morphed into The Omnigoogle.

Because the sales of complementary products rise in tandem, a company has a strong strategic interest in reducing the cost and expanding the availability of the complements to its core product. It’s not too much of an exaggeration to say that a company would like all complements to be given away. If hot dogs became freebies, mustard sales would skyrocket. It’s this natural drive to reduce the cost of complements that, more than anything else, explains Google’s strategy. Nearly everything the company does, including building big data centers, buying optical fiber, promoting free Wi-Fi access, fighting copyright restrictions, supporting open source software, launching browsers and satellites, and giving away all sorts of Web services and data, is aimed at reducing the cost and expanding the scope of Internet use. Google wants information to be free because as the cost of information falls it makes more money.

There’s one more twist. Because the marginal cost of producing and distributing a new copy of a purely digital product is close to zero, Google not only has the desire to give away informational products; it has the economic leeway to actually do it. Those two facts — the vast breadth of Google’s complements, and the company’s ability to push the price of those complements toward zero — are what really set the company apart from other firms. Google faces far less risk in product development than the usual business does. It routinely introduces half-finished products and services as online “betas” because it knows that, even if the offerings fail to win a big share of the market, they will still tend to produce attractive returns by generating advertising revenue and producing valuable data on customer behavior. For most companies, a failed launch of a new product is very costly. For Google, in general, it’s not. Failure is cheap.

But while Google has an odd business model, it’s not an unprecedented one. The company it most resembles is, ironically, its archrival, Microsoft. Just as Google controls the central money-making engine of the Internet economy (the search engine), Microsoft controlled the central money-making engine of the personal computer economy (the PC operating system). In the PC world, Microsoft had nearly as many complements as Google now has in the Internet world, and Microsoft, too, expanded into a vast number of software and other PC-related businesses – not necessarily to make money directly but to expand PC usage. Microsoft didn’t take a cut of every dollar spent in the PC economy, but it took a cut of a lot of them. In the same way, Google takes a cut of many of the dollars that flow through the Net economy. The goal, then, is to keep expanding the economy.

God or Satan? When you control the economic chokepoint of a digital economy and have complements everywhere you look, it can be difficult to distinguish between when you’re doing good (giving the people what they want) and when you’re doing bad (squelching competition). Both Google and Microsoft have a history of explaining their expansion into new business areas by saying that they’re just serving the interests of “the users.” And there’s usually a good deal of truth to that explanation – though it’s rarely the whole truth.

Google differs from Microsoft in at least one very important way. The ends that Microsoft has pursued are commercial ends. It’s been in it for the money. Google, by contrast, has a strong messianic bent. The Omnigoogle is not just out to make oodles of money; it’s on a crusade – to liberate information for the masses – and is convinced of its righteousness in pursuing its cause. Depending on your point of view as you look forward to the next ten years, you’ll find that either comforting or discomforting.

This post draws on my article The Google Enigma, which was published last year in Strategy & Business.

There’s an exhilarating moment in the middle of the Clash’s “Complete Control” when, during Mick Jones’s brief, skittering, anarchic solo, Joe Strummer screams, “You’re my guitar hero!” The song is, along with the Sex Pistols’ “Anarchy in the UK” and X-Ray Spex’ “Oh Bondage Up Yours!,” one of the perfect expressions of the punk ethos of regeneration through degeneration, of accelerating the machinery of pop until it disintegrates, liberating, at least momentarily, both band and listener, and Strummer’s scream is the song’s climax, perhaps the climax of the entire punk anti-movement. Strummer, by turning himself, through his scream, into both the object and the subject of fandom, frees the fan from his prescribed identity as consumer, subverts fandom by turning fandom into an act of subversion. The band is the fan, and the fan is the band, and both stand as one outside and beyond the producer-consumer dynamic that would contain them.

“You’re my guitar hero!”

It’s a fleeting act, though, as Strummer well understood. When the song ends so does its spell. We’re “in control” – or, more precisely, “out of control” – only for three minutes. Then the prescribed identities reassert themselves. When the single came out, late in 1977, my friends and I would play it over and over again, renewing its promise and its illusion. We wanted to be uncontrollable – or at least to feel uncontrollable. But we were smart enough to realize that listening to “Complete Control” was also, and already, an act of nostalgia. The song was, as Jon Savage writes in England’s Dreaming, “a hymn to Punk autonomy at the moment of its eclipse.”

Strummer died in 2002, sparing him the despair, and humiliation, of seeing “Complete Control” turned into pure merchandise, a complete parody:

This is the perfect subversion of the Clash’s subversion, anarchy turned into routine, complete with a score-keeping mechanism. Now when Strummer screams “You’re my guitar hero!,” it’s an act of distancing rather an embrace. It’s also, bewilderingly, an act of advertising, the cynical come-on of a hawker. Strummer’s scream becomes a moment not of mutual liberation but of deep creepiness. The ironies are piled so high that the only way out is to ignore them, as Johnny Rotten and Steve Jones have learned to do so well.

“I’ve been puzzled by the popularity of the game Guitar Hero,” writes Rob Horning at PopMatters. “If you want a more interactive way to enjoy music, why not dance, or play air guitar? Or better yet, if holding a guitar appeals to you, why not try actually learning how to play? For the cost of an Xbox and the Guitar Hero game, you can get yourself a pretty good guitar.” Horning, apparently, doesn’t quite get the point of prosumerism; its joys are lost on him. He continues: “I can’t help but feel that Guitar Hero (much like Twitter) would have been utterly incomprehensible to earlier generations, that it is a symptom of some larger social refusal to embrace difficulty.”

What kills me about Twitter is how this perfect consumerist tool, this nifty agent for packaging intimacy as a product, for simplifying self-expression out of existence, can’t discover a business model to justify its own existence. Marx must have had something to say about this.

Speaking of which, Horning quotes the Marxist theorist Jon Elster in explaining the way that trivial, if diverting, pursuits like Guitar Hero provide an easy alternative to the hard work of self-realization:

Activities of self-realization are subject to increasing marginal utility: They become more enjoyable the more one has already engaged in them. Exactly the opposite is true of consumption. To derive sustained pleasure from consumption, diversity is essential. Diversity, on the other hand, is an obstacle to successful self-realization, as it prevents one from getting into the later and more rewarding stages.

“Consumerism and its infrastructure,” observes Horning, “keeps us well supplied with stuff and seems to enrich our identities by allowing us to become familiar with a wide range of phenomena – a process that the internet has accelerated immeasurably. (I encounter a stray idea, digest the relevant Wikipedia entry, and just like that, I’ve broadened my conceptual vocabulary! I get bored with the book I’m reading, Amazon suggests a new one! I am too distracted to read blog posts, I’ll check Twitter instead!) But this comes at the expense with developing any sense of mastery of anything, eroding over time the sense that mastery is possible, or worth pursuing.”

Distraction is the permanent end state of the perfected consumer, not least because distraction is a state that is eminently programmable. To buy a guitar is to open possibilities. To buy Guitar Hero is to close them. A commenter on Horning’s article writes, “To me, the radical move that Guitar Hero makes is to turn music into an objectively measurable activity that is more amenable to our Protestant work ethic. It brings the corporation’s focus on quantitative performance indicators to the domain of music, displacing the usual mode of subjective enjoyment.”

Who’s in control?