Modularity

Recently, I've come across two different examples that lead me to think about modularity. The first is a pretty obvious one, given current developments. The second is a tech that has just been displayed for the first time at the Mobile World Congress currently happening in Barcelona, Spain. The two offer a dramatic contrast in terms of size and highlight the benefits of modularity and its alternative, integration.

The first is the more obvious: the International Space Station. I've been following a Japanese astronaut currently on the space station on twitter. He's been charged with the task, among others, of taking pictures of the earth from the space station. The results are pretty amazing. But one of the coolest pictures he took was of the space shuttle endeavor approaching. This picture got me to thinking about modularity because of what the shuttle carries in its loading bay. The cylindrical object you can see there is called the "cupola" or Node 3. It provides some amazing views to the astronauts on board. One of the amazing things about the mission is how quickly they were able to attach the new piece. Within a couple days of arriving, the astronauts had already fully attached and made functional the cupola. Such ease of piece-by-piece construction is a prime example of one of the benefits of modularity. You can watch them continue to work on the ISS live here.

The second example is the new technology on display by SK Telecom. What they've presented is a SIM card (like the one's used by T-Mobile and AT&T in their cell phones) that carries the phone's processor, memory, 1 GB of storage, and even the Android OS. I know, I know, this is the opposite of modularity. Its an example of a competing trajectory of technology development. The benefit of such a SIM card is that when you want to change phones (whether for a new form factor, bigger screen, etc.) you can simply switch the SIM card from your old one to your new one. This means no worrying about contact transferral, or manual transferral of info from to the other at all. It also potentially means that you could have several devices (phone, netbook, tablet, desktop) that could all utilize the same SIM card for their data, OS, processing, memory, storage, and internet access.

Finally, while I was typing this, I thought of another example of modularity vs. integration. Android is an example of software modularity in that it is designed to be implemented on a wide variety of devices that have very wide-ranging processor power, screen size, ram, etc. Apple's iPhone OS is an example of software integration. The only device you can get that OS on is an iPhone. The benefits of this method are obvious. It is easier to design software for a very specific set of specs and ensure that the software utilizes that spec list fully. The difference of approach demonstrates the difference in business model. Apple is in the business of selling hardware, so designing an OS for their specific hardware makes sense. Google (developer of Android) is in the business of generating internet ad revenue . Thus, they simply want the greatest quantity of OS incarnations running on any phone possible to increase the number of people utilizing their services and hence, looking at their ads.