Some Nice Things Come for Free

Devices with embedded software should be easy to use. To paraphrase the late Jef Raskin, "There's no Maytag Users' Group, because there doesn't have to be." Many people think we should adopt an "appliance" model for these devices.^[2]

^[2] I acknowledge that a Maytag washing machine is not a handheld device.

Unfortunately, software sometimes gets in the way of this.

But consider some of the benefits of packaging batteries and software together. Want to install your software? Plug in the batterychip.^[3] This would bring new meaning to the term "plug and play." Want to move your software from one device to another (compatible) device? Just move your batterychip from one device to the other. If the devices weren't compatible, then you would have the equivalent of trying to use the wrong battery. Most people would understand that.

^[3] I thank Kate Jones for this improvement over my original made-up word, softerry.

Note that for this scheme to work, the batterychip would have to contain some kind of writeable memory in order to store user-specific information (such as settings and files), otherwise it wouldn't be too useful to plug the batterychip into another device. The memory could be PROM or NVRAM, but because it would be integrated with the battery, it could even be normal RAM. One reason you might want to upgrade the batterychip would be to get more memory.

Our European friends have already started down this path. My friend and colleague Pascal Leroy writes from France:

"The GSM phone system in Europe relies on a chip called the SIM card, which contains (1) information about your rights, subscription, phone number, and so on, and (2) your settings. People have gotten used to plugging their SIM card into just about any phone to place a call: I was on the train the other day next to two girls, one of whom had a cell phone with a dead battery; she just borrowed her friend's phone, plugged in her own SIM card, and was able to chat on the phone for the entire trip. And they didn't exactly look like nerds, so this kind of technology is probably usable by just about anybody."

This "ease of use" example demonstrates some of the potential benefits of the batterychip, which would take the idea one step further.

Do you have multiple devices, each of which needs the same software? Well, in the old days, software manufacturers might have worried about you. In many cases it was rather easy, although technically illegal, to purchase a licensed copy of the software and install it on multiple machines. With the batterychip, the question would become moot for both you and the manufacturer. You could either buy multiple batterychips to use simultaneously, or you could put a batterychip into the device you wanted to use right away, and then transfer it to another device later if you wished. As with ordinary batteries, it would be your choice: cost versus convenience. Here we see the instantiation of the ideal model that maps one copy of the software to one physical device. By making these batterychips simple and cheap enough, we would reduce the incentive to copy software illegally.