Column: Bits versus Electrons Living the Beta Life Bob Frankston A WAKEUP CALL & I ALMOST DIDN'T wake up this morning. OK, I'm being overly dramatic. My alarm clock failed to connect to the Internet. I still managed to wake up. The failure is a wake-up call (OK, I apologize for the pun). Even something as simple as an alarm clock has become a service that is dependent on a provider. That would be OK if we had resilience rather than a fatal dependency on everything in the path working just right. Do I need to say " alarm clock app " to distinguish it from a physical alarm clock? After all, my 1980 alarm clock was just a software app. The difference is that the 1980 version ran on dedicated hardware, whereas my modern version is an app on a generic computer-a Google device. In a way, the newer version is a step backward in that it fails if there isn't a connection to the larger Internet. I took the photo of the GE clock radio in 2013 when I realized I could just use a smartphone as an alarm clock. I didn't replace the clock radio with the SamDigital Object Identifier 10.1109/MCE.2021.3078049 Date ofcurrent version 5 August 2021. sung smartphone because I couldn't do much better than the fixed-function device without custom programming. I also failed to anticipate the power of voice when I wrote a column deriding the fixation on voice.1 Alexa was an accident of history. Amazon failed in its attempt to create a Fire smartphone, September/October 2021 Published by the IEEE Consumer Technology Society 2162-2248 ß 2021 IEEE 47