Dana Blankenhorn has been a business journalist for over 25 years and has covered the online world professionally since 1985. He founded the "Interactive Age Daily" for CMP Media, and has written for the Chicago Tribune, Advertising Age, and dozens of other publications over the years.
About this Site
Moore’s Law defines the history of technology. It held that the number of circuits etched on a given piece of silicon could double every 18 months as far as its author, Intel co-founder Gordon Moore, could see. Moore’s Law has spawned constant revolutions since then, not just in computing but in communications, in science, in a host of areas. Moore’s Law applies to radios, and to optical fiber, but there are some areas where it doesn’t apply. In this blog we’ll take a daily look at new implications of Moore’s Law in real time, as it rolls forward to create our future.
News that David Edmondson, the CEO of Radio Shack, had to quit after a week because he phonied-up his resume was sad to read.
The more I thought about the story, the sadder I got.
That's because Radio Shack had every opportunity to be a dominant player in the computer space. Back in the early 1980s, when investors thought Microsoft CEO Bill Gates needed "adult supervision," a Radio Shack executive named Jon Shirley was hired to provide it. Before that, Radio Shack was one of the very first PC makers,
Its TRS-100 was still one of the best portables I ever had -- $400, an internal modem, a decent keyboard, 4 pounds in weight, and enough storage to deal with most writing assignments. During a 1984 documentary on the failed Gary Hart campaign, "The Boys on the Bus," the TRS-100 stole the show. As time went on the boys started ignoring the story around them and gathered around the machine, exchanging tech tips.
Even after leaving the PC business Radio Shack remained a very vital retailer, surfing from PCs to cellphones to satellite dishes, and keeping up its quirky stock of electronic parts -- batteries, headphones, etc. In many small American towns, in fact, Radio Shack is the only game in town.
The funniest Super Bowl ad was probably the FedEx bit with the caveman saying "it's not my problem" FedEx hadn't been invented and the other caveman's package got stomped by the dinosaur. (Although my 14 year old son howled at the Diet Pepsi Jackie Chan set-up, with a Diet Coke getting squished as a "stunt double.")
The most important ad, however, came at the end. It was a fairly straight ad, although (like everything else about the game) horribly overdone. In it a man with a cellphone walks through a world populated by sports of all kinds -- baseball, football, basketball, NASCAR and track all going on around him.
It was a house ad, really. It was for Mobile ESPN. ESPN is owned by Disney, which also owns ABC, which ran yesterday's game.
So why was it important? It was important because neither ESPN, nor ABC, nor even Disney owns any cellular assets. They don't hold frequencies, or towers, or run networks. They are re-selling.
Richard Branson's Virgin Mobile has already created billions of dollars in equity value through cellular wholesaling. Others want into the business. It's a good business, good for the wholesaler, and good for the network (usually Sprint) doing the wholesaling.
Yet this is the business the Bell companies have spent the last decade destroying when it comes to Internet access. They ignored the promises of the 1996 Telecommunications Act. They killed all the CLECs, claimed they didn't have to wholesale on "new builds," made everything a new build (even cutting copper to guarantee it) and topped it off by getting governments on the state and federal level to sign-off on the scheme.
The Walt Disney Co., including ABC, ESPN, the movies, the theme parks -- the whole shebang -- is presently valued at about $50 billion. That's actually about one-sixth less than it was worth five years ago.
Apple Computer Corp., by contrast is worth $65 billion. That's about eight times more than it was worth five years ago.
I decided to note this after reading about how Disney wants to make a move on Pixar, for $6.7 billion, and how that would result in a "pivotal" role for Jobs at Disney, with Steve as Disney's largest shareholder. But before he bought that pig in a poke, you'd think Steve would consider how becoming the "largest shareholder" of a media company worked out for Ted Turner.
Uh, uh. Instead of selling Pixar, Jobs could easily offer a three-way Apple-Pixar-Disney tie-up, in which Jobs and his team would own about two-thirds of the resulting company.
So the question occurs, does Jobs want to run Disney?
NOTE: I'm promoting this to the top today because of its comment thread.
When I first interviewed Richard Wingard back in September, I thought little of it. He seemed to have a clever way to research basic research, using individual investors. He promised new technology enabling video compression on cellular and dial-up lines. Cute.
Then some of Wingard's investors started commenting here. The number of comments grew and grew. They've turned this comment thread into their own little clubhouse, swapping takes and rumors on the company's promised sale, which in the interview Wingard said would happen some time this year.
Interesting. Enjoy the thread, and if you're part of it, thanks for visiting. We do other stories.
Richard Wingard has figured out a way to fund cutting-edge technology with angel investors, and hold them in their investments for nearly 7 years. (The picture is courtesy the University of New Hampshire alumni association.)
Wingard runs Euclid Discoveries, which is working on an object-based video compression technology he says will deliver 10 times the performance of MPEG-4, enough to "turn your iPod into a DVD player."
And he's done it all with angel investors, who are best-known for backing only early-stage customers. Wingard has rejected the entreaties of venture capital firms, saying their time frames for pay-outs are too short. Yet he has succeeded in getting angels who will wait as much as 7 years for a private auction of his technology, and a distribution.
It’s part of the future, no doubt. It’s even part of the present.
But the assumptions that Internet traffic is growing mainly in response to video, that Internet-capable networks must give video 99% of their capacity, or that Internet Law must be changed to accommodate video are fictions.
The Video Fictions are relics of the pre-Internet age. They’re wrong for three reasons:
Video is passive -- When you’re watching a video you’re watching, you’re not interacting. The Internet is all about interaction. It’s about ideas. It’s about interruptibility. It’s about cutting your attention into as many pieces as you can, multi-tasking in order to do more. Video takes all your attention, and demand for it is limited by audience attention.
Video is expensive -- A quality blog item, like this one, can be created by one person in a few hours. A quality video takes the work of many people over many days, and bad video takes just as much time to make as good video. You can’t have both good video and interactive video. Good video just takes too long to make.
Video has plenty of channels – Most of your cable bill is taken up by worthless nonsense already. There isn’t enough quality programming to fill the DirecTv and Dish Network satellites. Broadcasting has worked for almost 90 years. All these deliver more programming at far less cost than the Internet ever could. The Internet, as a video medium, is best served for tiny niches, with low demand, and it already does this.
The assumption that “the future of the Internet is video” is driving just about all the stupidity we see among big companies and policymakers today.
There are video applications which have value on the Internet, but they don’t need the bandwidth or Quality of Service (QoS) up-sells of true video. Videoconferences are of value (sometimes) and video VOIP calls can be of value (to long-separated family members). But the idea that we need the Internet to watch the same TV that comes to us via satellite and cable is nonsense.
There are also some applications that can use QoS standards, and payments. Interactive games can use QoS, especially when players are going against one another in real time. Medical applications can use QoS, although those applications that really need it should be done in clinics or hospitals with ample bandwidth, not the home.
Meanwhile, there is an enormous, and growing bandwidth shortage in the average Internet home. I face it every day. Why?
The Media PC ain't gonna happen. The "walled gardens" of the cell companies are going to come down. The telcos' plans in cable are non-starters.
All these huge corporations are subject to the Content Chimera, the idea that networks are pipes for selling content to people, and that it will all "converge" somewhere.
This is nonsense:
TV standards are moving toward those of movies. None of the "Media PC" offerings at CES took HDTV into account.
Networks are not pipes for selling content to people. They are two-way bit pipes. The future is synchronoussymmetrical, not asynchronousassymmetrical.
It's not all going to "converge" in any particular place. We will seek to consumer entertainment where we are, with whatever attention we can give. But we also create, we communicate, we interact. Different levels of attention require different types of devices.
The Content Chimera goes nowhere. It's the technology version of the Oil Chimera that now drives America's relations with the world. The solutions in both cases are remarkably similar.
Interactivity.
The "choke point" for the content market is NOT in production, or distribution, or marketing. It's in each one of us. It's in the time we have to consume, and the attention we can give to creation. Creation of content, by its nature, involves the consumption of older content, and the laws must reflect this, or they're economically non-productive. (Energy creation and consumption must similarly become a two-way street, all of us creating what we can from the Sun or wind or heat around us, and the current grid evolving into something remarkably like the Internet. But that's anoither show.)
There were two winners at the end, and one ultimate winner. The first kid would pile all his counters up in one spot (usually Greenland, because it was big on the Risk board) and place one or two on adjacent squares. The second kid, the one who won, would right their way across the board strategically, taking on the first kid only at the end. Once the final battle started, and everyone knew how it was going to go (the first kid was going down), they'd walk away, someone would upend the board, and the first kid would claim he won, or got a draw, or something.
In computing Bill Gates is the first kid. The desktop is Greenland. Everything is focused on Windows and Office. And when computing was based on the desktop -- in the early days of the Great Game -- Gates looked dominant.
But the world is connected. Larry Page is playing the role of the other kid. He's sweeping the board right now, thanks to the Google Bubble, and today at CES he showed the hand he'll play against Gates over the next year.
The talk is going to all be about Google TV, and the scuttlebutt will all be about the Google PC, while software types (like me) will look really closely at the Google Pack of software.
It's what the Google Pack doesn't contain that most intrigues me.
As the first non-engineer to rise to the top at the chipmaker, he said he would push platforms, and communications, and low power, and change the corporate culture. He would also push more product internationally, and put consumer products (not just ingredients) under the Intel brand.
Whether he is moving rapidly enough remains an open question.
There are enormous claims of movement this week at CES, where Intel built a booth that would have made its former Comdex managers blush, and changed its slogan besides. But is Intel really leading? Or is it following?
What's with this getting in bed with Microsoft on a Media PC? Don't they know those things don't sell? Microsoft does.
Why is Intel continuing its campaign to pollute the developing world (this time Vietnam) rather than deal with the pollution problems caused by semiconductor manufacture?
The story is that old file-sharing sites are closing up shop. The RIAA beat them.
But what really beat these shops was technology.
Systems like BitTorrent don't depend on a central site. Its legitimate uses -- for distributing software, and for breaking international censorship regimes -- are compelling. Many copyright holders, like GE, have found that releasing videos (like CC-Chronicles of Narnia) directly to sites like YouTube is good for business. MySpace (and its imitators) are giving music lovers what they really wanted, community. A host of companies are now working to make file sales online a legitimate business, and some, like Apple, are succeeding.
This is what users wanted. They wanted access to files, they wanted the copyright industries to come to them. Gradually, grudgingly, the industry is obeying the market. But the market won't sit around and wait forever. That's why music sales are declining. (That and things like Sony's Rootkit fiasco, which causes people to distrust all CDs and DVDs they see.)
Folks who were wondering how Rupert Murdoch and Fox would try and capitalize on the purchase of MySpace over the summer don't have to wait any longer.
They're doing it by trying to break network neutrality, from inside a Web site.
Net neutrality is a basic principle of the Internet. It means you can go where you want. But if you are a registered user of Murdoch's MySpace today, you can't go to YouTube, which MySpace has deemed (without telling anyone) a competitor.
Alice Marshall's Technoflak reports that Murdoch's site has blocked access to YouTube from MySpace users, giving them white space instead. The site has also erased all references to YouTube from MySpace posts.
I thought that as word of this gets around the MySpace site it would be interesting to see how enthusiastic people are to remain there, and how many might be looking for a new online home. Oh, wait, it's already getting around. (Things happen fast in the blogosphere.)
Here is the story at the BlogHerald, with more details (the idiots are even modifying user profiles to erase references to YouTube) and while the rebels tried to get organized against this, they made the mistake of trying to launch their campaign from within MySpace.
I have long believed that the Internet makes us all journalists.
By that I mean all of us -- as people, as companies, as institutions -- have an account called credibility. You build that account slowly, through words and actions. But withdrawals from that account can be sudden and total. You protect your credibility, it's your reputation, by getting in front of trouble, even over-reacting to it, acknowledging fault quickly, making amends, using it as a learning opportunity.
Never was this more true than in 2005, as Mike at Techdirt reminded me this week.
Each leaves 2005 with a quite different credibility value than they entered it with, all based on how they responded when they were attacked. Google and Apple responded aggressively, with an eye toward alleviating problems. Sony and WalMart acted defensively, grudgingly.
The proof is in the market. Apple Computer, which at the beginning of this decade was worth a fraction of what Sony Corp. is worth, is now worth 50% more. (Wal-Mart is still worth more than Google, but the margin is now less than 2-1. At the start of the year it was over 4-1, and Google was considered overvalued at that price.)
It is inevitable that success brings jealousy. It is true that those who disparage you may have impure motives. But how you respond matters, too. If you respond with petulance, you increase the number of enemies you have dramatically, and this damages your credibility, which will eventually impact your growth rate.
In line with that, let's look at what must be the stupidest decision of 2005.
It's actually the beta test for something called MyHeritage. It will act as a genealogical research site, helping folks find relatives based on facial characteristics.
The beta test lets you input a mug shot into the site, and have it select, from a collection of 2,000 celebrities, who you most look like. I know of one family where the father looks like Donald Rumsfeld (supposedly), the mother looks like Shirley Temple (supposedly) and the kids look like Muhammed Ali (also supposedly). And they're not even black!
Mingaling looks like Luci Liu (lucky girl). Who do you look like?
A posting from Bernie Goldbach in Ireland helped remind me of just how much progress we've seen in the last decade.
The best way to see it is through the eyes of people who are growing up.
I've got two right here.
Robin and John are part of the Internet Generation, just as I am part of the TV Generation. It's their vocabulary. It's where they're most comfortable. We have one TV in our house, and not too many fights over it, because both kids are more likely to be spending time online than slumped in front of the Idiot Box. (He likes Comedy Central, though, and she still likes cartoons.)
A decade ago they were well ahead of the curve.They're not anymore, which is fine by me.
A few points about their own use of technology:
They assume technology. (Robin's shirt refers to a robot her club made this fall.)
They assume an immense amount of choice.
They assume a PC will be available, at hand.
They take e-mail connections as a given. Also IM.
They type fast, although they don't know they're doing it.
They assume broadband is available. When it was down earlier this fall, well, it was rough.
They know how to avoid bad people, liars, and predators.
They are dedicated to favorite activities, no more likely to stray from them than, say, I am. The difference is their favorite activities change.
Your mileage, of course, will vary.
There are also the usual accoutrements of youth -- an assumption and acceptance of constant, even accelerating change. Optimism, impatience, curiousity, energy, humor, mood swings. And something I can't explain -- they get along with their parents. (I have no idea how we lucked into that one, frankly. But I treasure it.)
The patent case concerning the RIM Blackberry has taken a twist that could have come out of the TV show Law & Order. You know, those shows where the fights are over which of two adults killed the mistress and it turns out to be one of the kids?
The USPTO is worried that NTP is winning the court case based on what they now know to be bad patents, but patents which they mistakenly granted. Not only is this massively unfair to RIM, but the credibility of the entire intellectual property system in the US is in jeopardy.
The case points to a need for reform in the patent system, major reform. But that should not start with changing how we apply for patents, or who should win them. It should start with higher fees for patents, which could perhaps be paid out of future revenues, and an immense expansion of the Patent Office's ability to investigate such things as prior art, originality, and editing the patent to cover only the new stuff -- no more broad claims.
While you're all tucking into your Christmas turkey the hype machine for the next round, the Consumer Electronics Show in Las Vegas, is already filling media inboxes.
CESlong-ago replaced Comdex as the technology industry's premier trade show.Somewhere between the Internet and the iPod, computing bifurcated into a gadget market, which is CES' bailiwick, and a server market, which doesn't need the trade show hassle.
One 2005 success you've probably got under your tree right now is the games DVD. It may be a sports title, a fashion title, or a trivia title. It sells based on the brand (ESPN, Trivia Pursuit) standing behind the maker (as opposed to a publisher's brand). Play is divided between some sort of game board and the TV, on which the DVD plays the answers.
The next step in that evolution is bringing the Web into the mix, making the whole thing instantly updateable, and providing a continuing revenue stream in terms of new content and Web stores. That's what NetBlender is touting. They sent two PDF press releases here today (the bulk of the site is password-preotected) and the language would make P.T. Barnum proud.
This time it's Google, which has promised to rescue Time Warner's AOL investment by valuing the failing online service at $20 billion.
For Google, this is funny money. When your stock is like gold, while you know it's water, it's easy to give everyone a drink. Bubble companies always go through this phase. Yahoo did, Microsoft did, and now Google could buy Time Warner about five times over so why not toss it a bone?
Google has been at the forefront of the Copyright Wars and has always taken an aggressive position in favor of the free flow of information. It has yet to back down in court, although it has watched some things (newsgroups and Blogger) wither on its watch.
In this case, Google insists it will only act as a link, using legitimate "music partners" like iTunes and providing only snippets of data on its own, like song lists. In fact, there is no Google "tab" as there is with News, for instance. Instead, a "search music" button appears when you do a search on a relevant term in the regular Google search box. This can be based on a specific term, or the button can lead you to music-related results even on a general term.
By combining with other tech companies in this effort, Google seems to be pushing a compromise on the recording industry, which has tried to force users into accepting its technology choices, its terms and conditions.
The sale of Dreamworks to Viacom's Paramount unit, for cash and the assumption of debt, is teaching the media and the Bellheads the wrong lesson.
They lesson they're hearing is that distribution trumps production. Phone companies hear this and think that, if they can force information providers to pay for reaching "their" customers (something they can already do with cellular) that they will be in the same "catbird's seat" Viacom and the other media behemoths (Time-Warner, GE, Fox, Disney) are in now.
The background to this deal proves that is not the lesson.
Dreamworks co-founders Steven Spielberg and David Geffen come out of this with $1 billion cash and their debts cleared.
Viacom itself is splitting in two, with its distribution arm being separated from its production arm. This is because its growth has been sub-par -- the parts are worth more than the whole.
Jeffrey Katzenberg, the third member of the Dreamworks triumvirate (the K in SGK) is not part of this deal. His production capacity remains intact. So does Geffen's record company. The only production asset moving is that of Spielberg.
Even the assumption this is all about the "library" is bogus, because the library is being spun-off, which Viacom thinks will net nearly $1 billion.
What's really happening is simple:
Spielberg is being hired to run Paramount for $600 million in debt. It's Dreamworks' movie operation that is taking over Viacom's, not the other way around. It takes a peculiar genius, a rare talent, to make money in the movies consistently. Spielberg proved, through his time with Dreamworks, that he has that talent. And that is what Paramount is acquiring. Spielberg will have his own studio, just as Geffen retains his, and Katzenberg retains his. Everybody is happy. It's just that Spielberg's studio will be called Paramount.
America's biggest tech companies are focused today on the problem of creating, not technologies, but platforms.
Not that there's anything wrong with that. Intel and Microsoft and Cisco all rose to prominence with platforms. The first two had "WinTel," a marriage now on the rocks (Windows works fine with AMD, Intel will make Apple chips). Cisco had the Internet platform.
These companies changed the world. But the world is a funny place, a "what have you done for me lately" place. In business, it's a "what are you going to do for me next" sort of place.
Microsoft, like it or not, has defined a platform strategy. To that extent, Windows still works. The problem is seen most visibly at Cisco and Intel. Let's tackle Cisco first.
One tragedy of the late Richard Smalley's life was that his beloved Buckytubes did not make more progress into the world of real products.
So I'm sure he's smiling from heaven at this news, word that Fujitsu has learned to use carbon nanotubes in a "heat sink" for mobile base station amplifiers.
Fujitsu has even learned to grow tubes on a wafer substrate, using iron as a catalyst. The problems of manufacturing Buckytubes in commercial quantities has long been daunting -- Smalley's own company, CNI, pioneered a process using carbon monoxide.
It's that simple. Wireless assets are rising in value, wired assets are plunging in value, so the Bells figure if they can run the wired like the wireless they'll create more value.
The problem is they're looking at the wrong lesson. As usual, the Bellheads are being dumber than dirt.
The light bulb went off in my head when I saw, today, that NTL (a cable company) offer abougt $1.5 billion (817 million pounds in real money) for Virgin Mobile, which is no more than a reseller.
But can the blogosphere cause the break-up of Sony?
Sony's marriage of content to technology was always a dicey one. It's been underway for nearly a generation, since founder Akio Morita led the purchase of what was then Columbia Pictures from Coca-Cola.
Early failures were blamed on the consumer electronics part of the business. Eventually Howard Stringer was named CEO, because he came from the content side.
But now the scandal launched by the blogosphere is getting completely out of control. California and Texas have launched lawsuits. Eliot Spitzer of New York, who is already running for Governor, is now sniffing around the company.
The smart financial play at this point? Spin-off the content arm.
Separating the content from the technology arms of Sony would hold many advantages:
It would "unlock value" as the investment bankers say, another way of saying it would generate enormous fees for Wall Street.
It could get many lawyers off the company's back.
At minimum it would lay off any liability on the content side of the business.
Maxell is planning to release a holographic disk next year that can hold 300 GBytes of data, and transfer it at speeds to 160 Mbps. (The animated chicken is from Krittercards. Get yours today.)
While they've been competing to be "the next standard" for optical storage, in other words, they've been leapfrogged by a better, faster, more data-intensive technology.
They've both lost what I'll call the game of Moore's Chicken. Neither blinked. Neither compromised. Both fought this out over years while the technology clock ticked, and Moore's Law of Optics continued to run.
A lot. History. Image. Attitude. Branding. A rose by any other name would smell as sweet, but might not sell so well. Patagonia toothfish sounds nasty. Chilean seabass, on the other hand, we'll hunt that practically to extinction.
Names, in other words, have meaning. In the case of the new AT&T, the old SBC, the older Southwestern Bell, the name means control. Control of your telecommunications experience, of what comes out of the wire or through the air, control like the old Ma Bell had. (A gracious good afternoon...)
But control is beyond the reach of any phone company in an age of Moore's Law. Moore's Law of Fiber makes it impossible to control the backhaul market. Moore's Law of Radio makes it impossible to control the wireless market. The only way to maintain control, in order to pay-off capital costs, is through government fiat.
The Bell System, the old AT&T, had that kind of control because capital was short and beause it accepted strict regulation of its rates. The new AT&T can never have that control, because capital is abundant and because it refuses to accept rate regulation.
Competition for mobile services are limited by government fiat. Services have to buy the frequencies they use. In fact, most service is held by a small oligopoly, often Verizon on one side, Cingular (soon to be AT&T) on the other. Sprint and T-Mobile are secondary players.
The limited number of suppliers have complete control of their channels. It's hard for a consumer to know whether the store they're in is company-owned or a franchise. And it doesn't matter. Customer service is terrible regardless.
Want proof? NPD says only one-fourth of consumers, 24%, are satisfied with their mobile phone retail experience. This despite the fact that the service has become so essential in modern life that just about everyone has a phone.
The biggest problem? Turnover. No one knows anything. There are no incentives in place for anything except getting contracts signed. And since sales remain strong, there seem to be few incentives for anyone to get better.
This is a general problem throughout the chain retailing industry. Everyone wants to be Wal-Mart and keep costs as low as possible. No one has any ties to the community or loyalty to the customer.
A few simple questions are all that's needed to knock this one down like a last-second Hail Mary:
The Media Center PC spec has been a market failure.
Nothing here about who's going to make these boxes. Notice?
TV displays, in the age of HDTV, have moved miles from the standard PC aspect ratio.
The fact is the actions of watching TV and using a PC are different. With a TV, you're mostly passive, except for that remote in your hand (and we know who you are). With a PC you're constantly active.
Sony says it's (sort of) sorry. They say they'll take the CDs back (although they don't say how they will find the things). They say they won't do that again, exactly, but might do something close to it.
Not enough. Because by this action Sony has done more to encourage the piracy of intellectual property than a million real pirates could have. Sony has also poisoned its entire sales channel, and for years to come. How many small used CD stores are going to go out of business over this?
A CD is not like most products. CDs have an active after-market. Since you can't tell which CDs have the virus, all CDs are suspect. So Sony hasn't just ruined its own business, but the businesses of its competitors. It has destroyed their goodwill, and made the entire industry out to be a bunch of crooks who don't care about their customers. (And by the way, why haven't we heard from the RIAA on this issue?)
This is not an honorable company right now. Sony's honored ancestor and great founder, Akio Morita, is spinning in his grave over this.
At the very minimum Sony CEO Howard Stringer MUST BE FIRED. NOW. If he's not then some district attorney somewhere is going to come up with a piracy charge that will throw top executives in jail. And deservedly so. If anyone else had mass produced a virus precursor and infected CDs with it, they would be in jail. Just because Sony claims a clean motive doesn't change the facts of the case.
Unless Stringer is fired, and restitution is paid, this scandal is going to destroy the company. They're still behind the curve, and they will remain behind it until they make a clean break with the policies that got them into trouble in the first place.
There are two salient points about the Sony scandal you will only read at Mooreslore. (Or at least you'll read them here first.)
The first point you've already gotten. Who's behind the scandal? It's not a Japanese.
It's a U.S.-based executive, Howard Stringer. He became chairman and CEO in March, after heading up the company's film and TV units. (He was pictured in my previous note on this topic.) Before joining Sony Stringer was at another American company, CBS.
Stringer is the key to the motive. Go back to that first link again.
As manager of the U.S. Operations, Stringer cut back a total of $700 million a year since 2001, and overhauled the studio operation by cutting TV producer deals and sharing costs on films.
Stringer reached his position of eminence by cutting budgets and cutting deals. Previous Sony chairmen were Japanese gadget heads. Stringer is a card carrying member of the American Copyright Autocracy.
The motive, then, is a simple truth about DRM systems.
DRM systems aren't about software. DRM systems are about hardware.
Two press releases came in today and demonstrated to me that the biggest problem we have in this world right now is a lack of ethics.
In one a business research group, Info-Tech, is asking us to ban eBay's Skype from corporate system, saying the software is dangerous. In the other, the Electronic Fronter Foundation basically wants us to boycott Sony CDs because they're secretly installing malware disguised as a DRM that keeps people from fairly using what they thought they bought.
What these stories share is an assumption, a very dangerous assumption in an interconnected world.
The assumption is a lack of ethics by all. Sony is treating all its customers like criminals, and acting in a criminal manner in response. Info-Tech is assuming that Skype, along with other "peer to peer technologies" such as "IM," (as noted in their press release) is dangerous and must be outlawed from corporate networks.
We can speculate over why this has happened, but a fish rots from the top. CEOs get the big money because they're responsible. So in the case of Sony Corp., it rots from Howard Stringer. In the case of Skype, it rots from eBay CEO Meg Whitman. If we can't assume good ethics in their products, nothing their employees do matters much.
It's one thing for large institutions to be on guard against consumers or employees, to take precautions against theft. It's quite another for them to take the law into their own hands, or to take on the characters of a police state in response, to assume by their actions that everyone is a thief.
Once that line is crossed, all bets are off and the market becomes a war of all against all.
Microsoft is not a Big Time Brand, as my friend Rob Frankel would say. It doesn't give most of us the warm fuzzies. It's not a trusting relationship. There's no love there, as there is with Apple or Google.
So while I enjoyed Russell Beattie's brilliant summing-up of the strategy, I am far more confident in Om Malik's competitor sum-up. Look at the left side of Om's chart, then look at the right. Is the right side of the chart going to collapse because the left side is tightly integrated?
Remember what's coming, please. Apples are going to be on the Intel platform next year. That means they'll be just as cheap as Dell machines, maybe cheaper, and more stylish to boot. Google dwarfs what Microsoft is doing online, because they know where their business starts (search).
It's good that Microsoft is understanding where their business starts (the desktop) but just putting extensions on that into others' turf isn't monopoly.
Intel's strategy of delivering a fixed 802.16 WiMax standard, then moving immediately to a mobile version, is fizzling.
There's not enough equipment for the fixed, because everyone is waiting for the mobile. And anything for the mobile has to face down cellular providers (potential Intel customers) who have lots of weapons to knock it down.
While hotspots are becoming hotzones, and cities are handing out franchises (exclusives on rights of way and poles) to WiFi everything in their borders, the whole thing looks ready to collapse as SBC and Verizon (AT&T and MCI) consolidate their control of the backhaul market, then squeeze prices.
Here's a dirty secret for the boys and girls at Intel. You're no good at defining standards. Your single success, the PC standard, was set by Microsoft, not by you. And now you've lost big hunks of that market to AMD.
What you need, more than anything, is a big vendor willing to place big bets on whatever wireless standard you choose to set (and you need to set one, not several). If you think you're that vendor, you're kidding yourself. You're an ingredient brand, not a product brand, that's not your business.
I’m not talking about a phone that costs $50 to make (that retails for $250). I’m talking a phone that costs $50 or less to make at retali. Americans already get free phones, subsidized by one-year or two-year service contracts, they they may not get the implications here.
Readers of this blog know about the big growth in service to Latin America, Asia and Africa. What you may not know is that this is mainly a middle-class phenomenon, even there. Poor people, poor by the standards of those countries, either use middlemen for their limited phone service, or they do without.
With a $50 phone, service providers may be able to afford cell towers across the countryside, even in the poorest villages. Families in those villages may be able to afford their own phones. People from those villages may be able to have those phones, and access that service, when they are out in their fields, or in open country. Universal service may really be at hand.
Another implication of the sub-$50 phone is that a new mass market of voice-only customers will develop. For now data service relies on more expensive models. Eventually Moore’s Law will allow today’s data services to trickle down onto those $50 handsets, but that will take time. And at that point, the selling point for things like text messaging will be its lower cost. (In contrast, today’s text messaging is seen as an extra-cost add-on to your service.)
A third implication of the sub-$50 phone will be its increased use by criminals. A disposable phone means more disposable accounts, more pre-paid services that allow anonymity. It means more phones that can be used as triggers for car bombs by terrorists, or that can’t be traced to kidnappers and bank robbers.
In order to serve customers, phone companies must install expensive DSLAM equipment in each switch, and when that’s maxed-out they must install more. Cable operators, by contrast, made all their capital investment up-front. The “burden” of a higher market share is borne by the customers (who must share a limited resource), not the company.
Last week, as I noted here, I switched from DSL to cable modem for my broadband service. This was not the fault of BellSouth. It wasn’t really the fault of Earthlink, my DSL provider. A lightning strike hit my phone system, and the only way to learn that it also killed my PC’s Ethernet circuit was to come in and test it. The cable modem guy did that.
The question occurs, then, what about the rest of my phone service? I’m paying $60 for a single phone line, one I’ve used for nearly a quarter century, one I’m known for. That’s a lot to pay for a brand that, in theory, I can switch to a cell phone.
A decade ago, when I was with Interactive Age my employer, CMP Media, made me install an extra phone line they would be billed on. BellSouth actually had to replace the box outside my house with a new unit that could handle as many as six lines. Now one line lives where six were supposed to…and it’s hanging by a thread.
I was ready to write a slam against Earthlink this morning. Twice they have lost my order for a new DSL modem. On the phone yesterday I grew quite testy.
But this morning the UPS guy showed up at my door, with a box from Earthlink. A DSL modem. Hooray!
Well, not hooray. First I had trouble getting it to go on. Turns out one of the plugs on my UPS was fried in Friday's lightning strike. Then I couldn't get the DSL light to go on, indicating the modem was working. After several hours on the phone (and several times on my knees) I was sent to a local Radio Shack for a DSL filter.
I had just installed the filter, and the green DSL light was still not there, when a miracle occurred.
It was a cable guy.
In my anger on the phone the previous day, I followed through on my threat to call the cable company. I told them I was a long-time cable subscriber (true) and asked how long it would take to get modem service. Three to five days, I was told. So I forgot about it.
Yet here on my doorstep was a cable guy, in a white truck, promising to have me on the Internet within minutes. Oh, frabjous day, calloo callay! I chortled as he worked.
But the install took longer than expected, and the explanation showed why I was wrong to curse Earthlink.
My friends at ZDNet have another one of what I call "Business Week" stories about how big companies are fated to inherit the Earth.
This time the subject is Web 2.0. Jeff Clavier says that small innovators, like Jason Calacanis, are right to "flip" their companies now, because they're about to be crushed by GYM (Google, Yahoo, Microsoft).
I have seen this story repeated endlessly the last decades, and looking at that list of "big powers" should put the lie to it. Microsoft is 30 years old, Yahoo 10, Google barely 5. Yet they're fated to succeed and smaller companies should get out of the way?
Having written this before, I don't just want to bitch about it again. I want to explain why I'm right.
It's true big companies can move quickly, act quickly, implement quickly, and throw lots of money at problems like Web 2.0 (which, after all, simply requires adapting database techniques to what folks want from the Web). The speed of action, and its scale, do not determine success or failure.
What determines it is often the speed of deciding.
Once any company achieves success, and becomes filled with successful people, the decision-making process naturally slows down. It has to. People must compete for resources, and a single management's attention, in order to get their projects priority.
Good ideas don't reach market quickly in this environment.
One thing which unites the previous two stories here is that they are both about computer interfaces. (What is this? You'll learn after you click below.)
The iPod is a computer interface, as much as Apple might protest this. The addition of a screen completes the transition from radio to TV, and from storage device to computing device.
Microsoft Office is, if nothing else, a basic user interface.
The Web is a user interface. So is your e-mail system, whether POP3 or Web-based. The cellphone is a UI.
The point is there is more going on in this space than there has been since I first got into this business, over 20 years ago.
Jakob's more right than he knows. The user interface we've used for a long time now is broken. As I've said here many times, a computer is not a TV set, a tape recorder, and a typewriter. The computer is what is in the middle.
The first attempt at that, he adds, will be in the next version of (wait for it) Microsoft Office.
The new interface displays galleries of possible end-states, each of which combine many formatting operations. From this gallery, you select the complete look of your target -- say an org chart or an entire document -- and watch it change shape as you mouse over the alternatives in the gallery. The interaction paradigm has been reversed; it's now What You Get Is What You See, or WYGIWYS.
I don't know how far this will get. We already have elementary versions of this interface in blogs. Blogs are based on templates, which specify typefaces, page design, and other elements before the writer starts to work. Here at Corante, these specifications are made centrally, and all Corante blogs look similar. That's also the way it works with such community network services as Drupal. Drupal calls such designs "themes," and the theme you choose for your community is the design every user gets -- reader, writer or administrator.
But it's not something I want. It breaks the first law of the original design.
Quite simply it's an attention hog.
The older iPod, with its clickwheel design, required you to look at it only on occasion, when you wished to change the order of your songs, or find a new one.
The new one, with its insistent color screen, demands your full attention while the device is playing.
This is not a problem with Apple. It's in the nature of video. It requires full attention.
It is that the industry has become addicted to lawyers in order to maintain its business model. And those lawyers will bleed the industry dry long before pirates can.
Here is the money quote from John Kennedy (no relation), who chairs the International Federation of the Phonographic Industries (IFPI):
"Without the legal crackdown, it would be a different situation. You certainly have to have the legal services to make it all work."
In other words the industry assumes that without the terror of lawyers its current success would be unsustainable.
Nicholas Negroponte of MIT Media Lab fame, still trying to remain relevant, has announced a program called One Laptop Per Child, which wants to mass produce fully-loaded Linux laptops for schoolchildren in the dveloping world.
Negroponte's plan is to build low-powered units, 1 GHz chips with cheap LCD screens used in DVD players , and minimal storage (use the Internet instead) but the underlying problem, even if he can get things rolling, will remain.
The best way to kill a promising technology is to argue about it in standards bodies.
That's why UltraWideBand hasn't come to market yet. The technology works, but there are two ways to implement it.
One path is offered by the Intel-led WiMedia Alliance, supporting something based on OFDM, a technology already-implemented in newer WiFi standards.
The UWB Forum is concentrating on gaining members in China and Japan, supporting something called Direct Sequence-UWB. (That's the UWB Forum logo to the left.)
The technical merits of these two solutions is beyond my expertise. The plain fact is that they continue to argue, and now that we're ready to roll out product users will have to choose which side to support.
Most will simply choose to support neither. And by the time one side muscles the other out of the marketplace, there may not be much of a market worth competing for.
Palm has been faltering for years. Even before it split off from its operating system unit, PalmSource, it was losing market share in big hunks. Palm was killed by steady investment from Microsoft, which took away its corporate market, and by mobile phones, which took away the rest of the market.
The fact that Palm owners are going to be orphaned, left without upgrades, is not even tragic, since Palm for years has offered a Palm Desktop program that lets users transfer their files directly to a PC.
What's happening is that Microsoft, which continues to flail about in the mobile phone space, is putting out yet-another mobile phone, and dragging the Palm name along for the ride. Palm has nowhere else to go, so it's going.
But this is not big news. Want to know what the big news is?
Back in the 1970s most people who were at the age I'm at now were convinced these "PC" things were going nowhere.
It was left to teenagers -- teenagers -- to lead the world into the future.
Young people are essential to technology because they approach problems without preconceptions. Their new eyes often find solutions where older eyes find nothing but problems.
Take the problem of hit and run drivers. It's a big problem. But there are so many hurdles in the way of a solution -- privacy hurdles, timing hurdles, etc. -- that corporations just haven't tried to do anything.
Well, some kids at York University at Toronto have done something. Cameras and sensors were combined with a mobile phone into a system that snaps the car who hit you, and sends the owner an MMS message immediately.
It's primitive, it's not even a product -- it's a class project -- as Techdirt notes. But it's a prototype, something that can be productized and easily sold at prices car owners will accept.
This is the dirty little secret of science, that most scientists make their breakthroughs at relatively young ages, and then spend the rest of their lives sliding through on their reputations. How old was Einstein when he came up with general relativity? He was in his early 20s. (That is him, at the top of this item, from the Space and Motion Institute.)
Don't just bring in young people. Listen to them, give them autonomy, give them whatever you have to. Just get them.
There are benefits to age. I know about many of them. But there are also benefits to youth. And the best teams know how to mix the two.
One of the biggest mistakes you can make as a reporter is to become dependent on press releases.
When you do that, you're telling the story the vendors want you to tell. And you're ignoring the story the vendors want ignored.
Here's an example.
Fuel cells.
A few years ago the folks at NEC were very excited about fuel cells as a power source for laptops. They released a model that ran for five hours on a half-pint of methane, and predicted that in two years they would have one that ran 20 hours on that charge.
Did anyone follow up? I didn't until a reader at another blog I work for asked about it.
What I found was NEC was pushing an entirely-different system, the Organic Radical Battery (ORB) and for a completely different application, desktop battery back-up. Analysts admitted the fuel cell is "not ready for prime time" as a battery replacement.
With high fuel prices now a worldwide reality, the search for alternate technology takes on new urgency. The failure of fuel cells in this application should be a major story, a cautionary tale. But since no one was looking for it, the story was easy to bury.
Last week's tirade by Motorola CEO Ed Zander, set alongside the nasty noises about Apple from music publishers , Microsoft's noise about its entry into the market and iSuppli's autopsy of the iPod Nano design all point to one salient point.
Apple's friends are foreign.
Over half the device's hardware cost is going to Samsung, which supplied the flash memory. Samsung is giving Apple a 40% discount on that memory, according to iSuppli, meaning Apple can cut its prices on the existing device if sales remain soft. The iSupply analysis does not reveal who supplied the plastic case, which is drawing strongly negative reviews.
Apple has released iTunes 5.0.1, which it says fixes problems found on iTunes 5.0.
I was frankly surprised at the number and vehemence of responses to my earlier item about iTunes 5.0 The reason? Reports on the problems have gotten very little traction in the mainstream press.
George W. Bush must envy Steve Jobs in some ways. Kanye West, who famously dissed the President during a Katrina fund-raiser, actually sang at the Apple iTunes 5.0 announcement, and didn't go off-message either. This story is being carried mainly in the blogosphere, where there are currently 176 posts under iTunes 5.0 problem (although not all are on-point).
Instead, Jobs and Apple continue to be hailed as heroes in the mainstream press:
Americans are finally following the rest of the world toward the controlled interface of the cellular phone.
This has profound implications. Mobile carriers are not Internet Service Providers. They control where you go and what you do on their networks. They act as gatekeepers, and take a proprietary attitude toward every bit transmitted.
The difference between the Internet and a mobile network is like the difference between a downtown city center and a shopping mall. There is nothing inherently wrong with a shopping mall, but it is controlled by the mall owner, and everything which happens there must be aimed at making the mall owner (and his tenants) money, all assumptions of liberty to the contrary.
In other words, cellular turns the Internet into a shopping mall, neutering it, and making it solely a means toward a commercial end.
Thus, is has been difficult for mobile (Americans call it cellular) to gain the kind of reach and use that we find even in Africa. But that is changing:
Users are reporting that not only doesn't the software work, but they can't back out of it, and can't load older versions, once the upgrade button is pressed. Some complete computer failures have been reported.
Lauren Weinstein, co-founder of People For Internet Responsibility, reported on this to Dave Farber's Interesting-People list today:
I've personally now seen two systems that have fallen into this black
hole -- no working iTunes, no working QuickTime, and attempts to
install older versions (even just of QuickTime) fail miserably, even
after complex (and in some cases dangerous) attempts at cleaning out
the leftover muck. It's really a mess -- reminds me of early DOS
days.
Over at ZDNet, Steve Gillmor (left) has a wonderful commentary that got me thinking about a financial disease, one to which corporations like Microsoft are addicted and by which users like us are burdened.
Back in 1985, you would have spent big money to get an Intel 386 chip, with over 100 Megabytes of storage, and a local network that ran as fast as 1 megabits per second.
I know I didn't have one. The closest I saw to one that year was an entrepreneur 10 miles north of me who had a Digital Equipment PDP-8 minicomputer in his office.
Yet that is just what you see in the picture to the right:
Over on the left is a keycharm given me by the folks at Intel in the late 1980s. Inside the plastic is a 386 chip. Turn it over and you see a 486. These were real chips, discards from production runs, which were given to the press to illustrate what Intel did at the time.
That big round thing in the front-center of the picture is what we now call a stick memory device. This particular unit has 128 Megabytes of storage. Perfect for moving files, like this very picture, from a laptop to a desktop, or for bringing spreadsheets home to work on over the weekend.
Over on the right, in the back, that little blue thing is a Bluetooth dongle. It ran this picture from my cellphone, where it was taken, over to my laptop at a 1 mbps speed.
If you're of a certain age (anywhere from 35 to about 45) that should send you running screaming from the room. The band made a living off that for years, but by the mid-1990s even the Germans were tired of them.
So Katrina, who was an American Army Brat but has been in England since 1976, went back to the drawing board. She actually had some success, even winning the Eurovision Song Contest for England in 1997, but she wanted back in the pop game.
Every decade of computing technology can be summarized fairly simply. (That's an Apple ad to the right.)
The 1950s were the decade of the computer.
The 1960s were the decade of the mini-computer.
The 1970s were the decade of the PC.
The 1980s were the decade of the network.
The 1990s were the decade of the Internet.
The 2000s are the decade of wireless.
It's now clear that wireless technology defines this decade. Mobile phones are opening up Africa as never before. WiFi is making networking truly ubiquitous.
Walk or drive down any street, practically anywhere in the world, and you will find people obsessed by the use of wireless. Behaviors that in previous decades were shocking -- walking around chatting animatedly to the air for instance -- are now commonplace.
What's amazing, as we pass the halfway point, is how far this evolution has to go, and how easy it is to see where it can go:
WiMax to link islands of WiFi, and to make true broadband mobile.
Interlinks between cellular and WiFi networks.
Devices that truly take advantage of wireless broadband.
Applications that work automatically, with wireless as a platform.
NOTE: Many of the claims made in the item below have been questioned by Russell Shaw. See the full story here.
It's ironic, but my first invitation to use Google Talk came from Pakistan. From Karachi, actually.
Specifically it was from a long-time online friend named Tariq Mustafa (known as Tee Emm), who works in the high-tech sector there.
I am really excited on this Google IM thing (and so would be tens of millions of users very soon). I think I was ahead of you just because of the time-zone difference. Anyway, here is the summary I wanted to share with you of the excitement.
Why the excitement? IM has been around for ages.
The excitement is because this isn't really IM. Or it's not just IM. It's VOIP, integrated from the start with IM.
What this does is absolutely kill international long distance in a way Skype only dreamt of. I'm actually a naive user, but I was able to download, and load, a VOIP client (with IM) in less than a minute.
Where Bill Gates bests Steve Jobs, and always has, is in his willingness to build ecosystems.
Windows is an ecosystem. Microsoft is the biggest fish in that ecosystem. Since 1995, Windows has been eating the other fish in that ecosystem, but fish do that. It's still an ecosystem.
Apple has never been comfortable with living in an ecosystem. Apple builds products, not ecosystems. There were never any second-source Macintosh hardware producers with Jobs in charge, and they were all killed off when he returned.
Essentially this ties together the obsolete telephone network with the Internet Verizon is actually selling and tells customers it's the same thing. It pushes fancy PBX capabilities on residential customers who don't need them. (Just to make things a little better, it locks them into its cellular service, too.)
The FUD (Fear, Uncertainty and Doubt) can be easily seen in the phrase "DSL modem." DSL is a digital service. It doesn't need modulation or demodulation to trick an analog line into taking a digital connection, which is what a modem does. It is an oxymoron.
Dave Burstein wrote in to say this is a Westell device. Westell has a long history of making things on-demand for phone companies, so Verizon gets all the "credit" for this piece of nonsense.
What's ironic is I happen to know Verizon was talking to Netopia two years ago about a massive contract for DSL gateways that would have been far superior to this piece of nonsense. (Here's a 2001 press release, delivered in the early days of the relationship.) I have one of these gateways in my house now, a review unit. What would have made them powerful was a promised co-branded service providing full security to home users, saving them as much as $200/year on "security suites" from various software vendors. (There are currently no Netopia press releases, going back to 2002, referencing Verizon.)
More on what a truly clued-in person feels after the break.
It's advertised as a "peer to peer location service" combining "WiFi, cellular and GPS." But what exactly are you supposed to do with it? Where are the applications that will get Navizon's money out, let alone a profit? No clue.
While a straight look at technology and the desires of consumers could lead you to these conclusions, they're dumber than dirt.
Let's start with the first one.
Even if people start leaving their laptops at home, laptop sales are not threatened by mobile phones, because laptops are replacing desktops. It's basic ergonomics. Where does your lap go when you stand up? If you're standing, or walking, you can't use a laptop, you have to use some sort of handheld device. As PDA functionality moves into phones, as the two markets merge, then, yes, phones become the handheld of choice. But that doesn't mean they replace laptops. It means they replace PDAs.
He's right because there's already some Web content people do pay for. Dow Jones loses reach and influence, but does make money selling online subscriptions. Lexis-Nexis and Dialog haven't gone free with the dawn of the Web. Last time I checked iTunes was selling songs online, at a profit.
He's wrong because he insists that "micro-payment technology" will stimulate the growth of pay-for-play content. We've been hearing that one for 10 years now, and it's as wrong now as it was in 1995.
There's already a micro-payment program in place. A very successful one.
Since Mark Hurd left NCR to run the mess Carly Fiorina made of Hewlett-Packard in March, he has been fighting to turn the old boat around. The company turned in solid numbers in May, he hired away Dell's CIO, Randy Mott, and now he has the credibility with his board needed to prune the deadwood.
H-P has a lot of deadwood.
In buying Compaq, her signature move, Fiorina took on a lot of old, tired, even worthless brands, like DEC and Tandem. Compaq's latter-day strategy had been to buy these outfits for their book of business, and Fiorinia's deal was the apotheosis of this old-line industrial strategy. She insisted at the time there would only be a few survivors of the PC wars, and buying Compaq was the only way to make sure H-P would be one of them.
She was wrong. What works in steel does not work in tech. A book of business is worthless, because computers are short-term capital goods. It's not what you did for me, or even what you did for me lately, but what you're going to do for me tomorrow that counts.
As regular readers here know, there is no Moore's Law of Training.
Training, learning, adaptation -- call it what you will -- must happen at its own pace. This is why the productivity boom arising from the 1990s IT spending boom didn't become apparent until this decade.
But there is a way to accelerate Moore's Law of Training (which doesn't exist) -- publicity. If a good idea, an obvious use of existing technology, is heavily publicized, it can spread very, very quickly, and provide real benefits.
J.K. Rowling conceived her entire series on a train. It would be seven books, matching the years spent at an English boarding school such as Eton.
Book Six was released tonight. Rowling herself appeared at Edinburgh Castle at midnight, behind a puff of smoke, to read some of it to some of her fans.
The series was conceived, however, on a train, as a growing-up story. The first book would be an 11-year old's tale told from the point of view of the 11-year old. The final book would be an entrance into adulthood, a mature book.
No one could hit that kind of timetable. It's amazing to me that the 6th book went on sale just 7 years after the first one arrived.
My daughter is a big Harry Potter fan. Harry taught her to read, despite mild dyslexia. First my wife read it to her, along with the second and third books. Then she read them herself, several times. She has grown up on Harry but she will still be grown before Harry will. So will the actors who have been portraying the title character and his friends. It's very likely the actors will have to be replaced before the seventh movie can be produced.
The blogosphere's quick reaction to the London strikes was driven in large part by the mass market in camera phones and video phones.
Within minutes of the bombs going off pictures and short videos began appearing online. In many the smoke from the blasts was clearly visible. Cameras worked even where phone functionality was absent, and images could be sent as soon as connections returned.
A second notable fact was the willingness, especially at the BBC, to get this footage up quickly. One amateur picture, of a double-decker bus with its top end ripped off, was the site's feature picture for most of the day. (That's the picture, above, from the BBC Web site.)
NOTE: That's the royal crown magnolia from mytho-fleurs.com. Like it? It's yours.
A long evening spent reading Lasica's book brought the title to me: King of Irony.
Remember, this is a book. Thus it is subject both to a book's business model and its rights regime.
Want a copy? $25.95 plus tax and (if you buy it online) shipping get it for you. Or wait for it to appear at your local library. Or borrow one from a friend, free. Or wait some months for it to appear in a discount bin, or a remainder lot, or a garage sale. The price you pay is a function is a function of the time you're willing to wait for it.
What can you do with this book? I typed an excerpt today by hand. The length of the excerpt, again, is a function of time, and the cost of my time to produce it, unless I want to string it out a page or two. In that case, technology might be deployed -- a scanner -- plus a few minutes with the scanner's OCR software, some cutting-and-pasting, and voila!
Want to steal some more? Production costs are going to get you. A Xerography process may give you a bound book for just a few dollars, if your order is small. An offset process costs less per book, but the order in that case must be bigger. I guarantee the printer will want to know you're a Wiley fella (or lady) before they take the order.
And we haven't even cracked the cover yet. Easy to see where Lasica's crown comes from.
Given the direction of antitrust law recently I was surprised to see the recent suits by AMD and (more recently) Broadcom. They left me scratching my head.
But there is an answer to my quandary.
Antitrust has become a process. It's not a goal, but a weapon in the business war.
The idea that Qualcomm has a monopoly in the mobile phone industry is laughable. It may abuse what position it has, charging chip makers like Broadcom the equivalent of an "intellectual property tax" in areas which use CDMA (and its variants). But GSM is the major world standard. It would be like calling the Apple Macintosh a monopoly.
The Broadcom antitrust suit comes right after it filed a patent suit against Qualcomm, accusing it of violating Broadcom patents regarding delivery of content to mobile phones.
The first shot didn't open up the Qualcomm ship, maybe the second will. All lawyers on deck!
The service will be sold under the name Web'n'walk, with Google.Com as the designated home page. (Yeah, I know, in the real Internet world you could change the default to, say, http://www.corante.com/mooreslore. But one step at a time.) New devices, with larger screens, will also be sold as part of the campaign.
The decision is critical, because up until now all cellular providers have offered only their own "walled gardens," sometimes using a small i (for Internet, customers think) on their phones, but in fact offering only a tiny fraction of the Internet connectivity customers are used to.
But as phones move to offering true broadband speeds, and some users use cellular broadband on their PCs because of its better coverage, this is finally breaking down.
It will be interesting to see how, and when, T-Mobile starts advertising this feature, and what Verizon and Cingular will say (or do) in response. T-Mobile, while owned by Germany's formerly state-owned phone company, is the smallest of four major operators in the U.S.
Former RIAA president Hilary Rosen finally gets it about copyright.
This volume needs to be embraced and managed becasue it cannot be vanquished. And a tone must be set that allows future innovation to stimulate negotiation and not just confrontation.
Her column at the Huffington Post (she apparently chose not to take feedback on it) is filled with honesty about both the tech and copyright industries, honesty she never admitted to (in my memory) while shilling for the RIAA.
But is it possible that this honesty is what finally caused her to leave? (Or did her life, and its imperatives for action, take precedence?)
That would be a shame, because the fact is, as she writes, that the answers here must lie in the market, not the law courts. For every step the copyright industries take in court, technologists take two steps away from them. This will continue until the copyright industries really engage consumers with offerings that are worth what they charge, and which aren't burdened with DRMs that restrict fair use.
Due to low salaries and high turnover, journalism continues to face the problem of reporters seeing failed trends repeated, not spotting them, and repeating the same failed cliches of earlier years, mainly due to orgnaizational inertia.
Two examples.
First, from the Financial Times, a piece on Internet sites being bought by media companies, "falling prey" to them being the operative cliche. On the whole these are market losers cashing out. The buyers aren't getting much, and the story doesn't examine the track records of the sellers. There's a story here, but not the one written.
Most PC users have been conditioned, over time, into conserving disk space. This is true even though most of us have tons more disk space than we really need.
We're not used to thinking in terms of conservation of memory, taking programs out of memory that aren't doing us good and, in fact, may be doing us harm. (Yes, you Mac users can go to sleep now.)
The 1990s were all about the Internet. (The picture is from a great site called i-Learnt, for teachers interested in technology.)
This decade is all about gadgets.
Digital cameras, musical phones, PSPs, iPods -- these are the things that define our time. While they can be connected to networks their functions are mainly those of clients.
In some ways it's a "back to the future" time for technology. We haven't had such a client-driven decade since the 1970s, when it was all about the PC.
In some ways this was inevitable. The major network trend is wireless, so we need a new class of unwired clients.
But in some ways this was not inevitable. If we had more robust local connectivities than the present 1.5 Mbps downloads (that's the normal local speed limit) we would have many more opportunities to create networked applications.
Not only is Apple switching its chip supply contract from IBM to Intel, but it is moving to Intel processors in the bargain.
In making the announcement this morning, Steve Jobs said he didn't see how he could continue making great products beyond next year "based on the Power roadmap."
Right after his speech he had a cagey interview with CNBC's Ron Insana. "It’s not as dramatic as you’re characterizing it," he insisted.
"This is going to be a gradual transition. Hopefully a year from today we’ll have Intel-based Macs in the market. It’s going to be a two-year transition.
"As we look into the future, where we want to go is different (from IBM's product roadmap). A year or two in the future Intel’s processor roadmap aligns with where we want to go.
"I think this will get us where we want to be a year or two down the road." Jobs refused repeated requests by Insana to explain what he meant by that. (Jobs is also shaving even more closely than this picture shows. He's down to tiny stubble around a a still-brownish moustache. Hey, Steve, I'm 50 too.)
What I think he means, simply, is video.
Beyond this, most of what I wrote last week holds. This deal is not material to Intel, which continues to face loss of major market share to AMD among Windows and Linux users.
But there are also vital lessons here for followers of Moores Law, lessons I need to impart.
Assuming Apple does switch to Intel chips tomorrow, as News.Com reports, the value of Intel stock will likely rise.
That would be a mistake.
Intel is making a big investment here to gain a very small amount of market share. Meanwhile it's losing far more market share to AMD in what used to be called the Windows world.
WinTel has been broken. That should be the real headline here.
Microsoft is perfectly happy to have AMD supply chips for Windows machines. People are very happy to buy them. And right now AMD has a price-performance advantage there.
This move toward Apple will, if anything, accelerate that shift. Intel should be spending all its time addressing its loss of share in the Windows world, and in the Linux world, instead of wasting energy with a tetchy, demanding Apple, an outfit that even IBM couldn't please.
My free free weekly e-mail newsletter, A-Clue.com, has become very wide-ranging since its launch in 1997 as a discussion of e-commerce.
One of my continuing themes is the World of Always On, with wireless networking as a platform, running applications that use data from your daily life.
But before we get there we all have to become network managers. In today's issue I consider that question.
Enjoy.
I'm a network manager. (MG-Soft of Slovenia makes products for network managers. That's their mascot, Mr. Monet, at left.)
It's not that I want to be. I'm a homeowner. My kids have PCs. My wife and I have PCs. Some years ago a friend ran wires among the rooms so everyone could share my DSL line.
There are now millions of us network managers. Recently I sat on my porch, opened my laptop, and learned that three of my five immediate neighbors now have WiFi networking in their homes. The signals were faint, but my copy of Windows found them all as soon as I booted-up. And the nearest of the three was totally unsecured. If I had larceny in my heart I could have entered my neighbor's network, used their bandwidth, even prowled around in their PCs looking for porn, passwords or blackmail material. (Fortunately for them, I'm a very nice person.)
The other two neighbors had nets which, like mine, are protected by long identifiers, input once, which validate valid PCs. One even had encryption on their system (very nice). The neighbors on the unprotected net insisted later they had the same system I do, but I suspect they haven't taken time to activate the security features.
The point is that wireless networks make many of us network managers, and Always On applications will make most of us network managers. We're not qualified for the work. We may never be qualified. Those who do become qualified become that way as I did recently, in extremis.
Good news (at least in the short term) for file hoarders.
Given that both sides in the Copyright Wars know about language and framing, I'm urging use of this new term for the heavy hobbyist users on peer to peer networks.
Pirates (the copyright industries' term) is false. There is no economic motive behind most file trades. There is no assurance that, if trading ended tomorrow, sales would rise appreciably.
Traders (the term favored by users) isn't correct either. Most traders are asymmetric. Most are downloaders, not uploaders.
I think the word hoarding says more about the motives of the users, and the way toward ending the practice, than anything else. Thanks in part to the industry's rhetoric, and in part to its actions, many lovers of music and other files are afraid they will lose access to the culture they crave. Thus they demand to have physical copies of its artifacts, and grab all they can. It's classic hoarding behavior.
But time is the limit here, not space. You can only listen to one song at a time, watch one movie at a time. It doesn't matter how big your collection is, the only way to get enjoyment out of it is to play the files.
Many hoarders today already "own" more files than they can play in their remaining lifetimes. When you get your arms around this concept, you begin to see how self-defeating hoarding is.
Despite his ponytail and his sometimes counter-cultural language, despite being what I like to call a Truly Handsome Man (it's a brighter term for bald, people) Ted Waitt was always a follower, not a leader. (The picture is from a 2002 profile in the Sioux Falls, South Dakota Argus-Leader.)
Waitt was Gimbel's to Michael Dell's Macy's. He wanted to be Pepsi to Dell's Coke.
But computing lacks the stability of the retailing or the soda business. So when Waitt announced his resignation today (at 42 it wouldn't sound right to call it a retirement) it wasn't big news.
Waitt and Gateway did well in the 1990s, following Dell into mass customization. He made his big mistake when he tried to out-think Dell, opening a chain of retail stores that caused $2.4 billion in losses, according to The New York Times.
But I personally think the mistake was more basic than that.
Some time in the next month the copyright world may (or may not) reel from the Supreme Court's decision in the Grokster case.
The facts on their face are as favorable as the plaintiffs can make them. Grokster is all about making money for itself off the property of others. Its business model is to sell ads, including adware (sometimes a polite word for spyware and malware). It hoses both sides of every transaction. And the software really does little more than a good FTP server (with an automated database) would.
The vast majority of Grokster's use is driven by hoarding. People fear losing access to the music they love (or might love). So they load up, until they have gigs-and-gigs of it they have to haul around. (Thanks to Moore's Law of storage this gets lighter and less expensive over time, but it still has to be kept.)
The hoarding in turn is driven by the industry's threats. Threats of rising prices. Threats of lawsuits. Threats of copy-protected CDs.
The market solution to the facts is already in the pipeline. Many have proposed the idea of taxing people for unlimited access to the industry's wares and in fact schemes like Yahoo's Music Unlimited work just that way. Pay the "tax" (which starts at $5/month but could go up subject to negotiations with the industry) and download all you want. No need to hoard. Stop paying and all your files magically disappear. (The genie is found in Microsoft's DRM.)
Why is it that politicians have done a better job on the Internet than publishers?
It has to do with a concept I call Pitch Credibility.
Journalists understand the concept of credibility. It's the trust readers place in us. If there is a journalism profession, it's based on this idea of credibility. I took a huge hit to my own credibility when I screwed-up an item on Ev Williams. I went through hell on that not to regain my credibility, but to minimize the losses, and in hope the damage would not spread to innocent Corante authors.
But just as editorial work must have credibility, so must advertising. That is the innovation the Internet makes necessary.
Moveon.org understood this right away. It knew that if it suggested you give to Candidate X, then Candidate X better fit the desires of the Moveon audience, or the endorsement would damage Moveon. Because it had pitch credibility with its audience, Moveon was able to gain honest information (a mailing list) from its members, and even financial support, based solely on its promise to deliver.
While Moveon failed in these last two cycles as a political force (ask Presidents Gore, Dean and Kerry) it has succeeded in creating a business model that everyone else on the Internet needs to pay attention to.
So if Roger Simon, for instance, is to succeed in his efforts to unite the right-wing blogosphere and extract money from its members, he must retain pitch credibility. He better not let anyone like me in because I'd damage it. And he better use that credibility only to solicit for products, services and people the audience will surely endorse.
Perhaps you can see now why this idea is easier for a politician to understand than a businessman. Politicians are attached to what they're selling in ways businessmen aren't.
Belief is at the heart of pitch credibility.
How can we take advantage of this in the business realm?
I have not written much about Voice Over IP in this space because I'm not an expert in it. (Yes, I hear you say, this never stopped you before.)
Actually I didn't think I had anything original to add to the conversation. I still don't. But I want to point you to someone who does.
That someone is Tom Evslin (left). Evslin recently completed a wonderful series on the economics, politics, past and future of VOIP, on his blog, which I heartily recommend to anyone interested in this area.
Evslin calls this year a "flipping point" driven bythe mass distribution of VOIP software. It's not really free although, once you have your set-up, each call carries no incremental cost. The market battle between Skype and Vonage are driven by Metcalfe's Law, control of end points. Evslin offers the best explanation I've yet seen of Skype and its business model, which is rapidly evolving into an alternative phone network.
The best way to understand the future is to look into how chips are changing.
Two transitions are transforming Moore's Law. The original article, in 1964, described only the density of circuits on silicon substrate.
The rule implied that chips could get better-and-better, faster-and-faster. Doubling bigger numbers means bigger incremental changes in the same time. Over the years chemists and electrical engineers learned to apply this exponential improvement concept to fiber cables, to magnetic storage, to optical storage, even to radios, so that 802.11n radios will transmit data at over 100 Mbps -- twice what earlier 802.11g models could deliver, but still 50 Mbps more.
The transitions have to do with what we mean by better.
The success of Google has been based on the fact that technology drives its train. Technical success is the most-sought value.
This is becoming a problem.
In many of the new businesses Google has launched, technical values (while important) are not going to be the sole drivers of success. In blogging, in RSS, in Google News, in Google Desktop, in Google Local, and in other areas, other skills are required.
Business skills. Marketing schools. Journalism skills. Political skills. Artistic skills.
Leonardo DaVinci (celebrated above) could not get a job at Google today. In a well-rounded company, his genius would find a place.
The need for these various skills will only increase with time. Google must find a way to recruit these skills, and to reward these skills, without giving the people with these skills control of the company.
Evidence is increasing of a backlash against mobile phones and the behavior of those who over-use them. (The image comes from a page on celliquette from Indianchild.com.)
Increasing numbers of people are actually faking calls, either to embarrass people, impress them, or just make them go away.
The most popular ringtone? It's the sound of a ringing phone says MatrixM, which has no reason to lie about this since they sell ringtones.
The heavily-hyped IDC mobility study indicates nearly 20% of mobile consumers consider themselves "minimalists," with basic needs, no desire for frills, and a great need for comfort and simplicity.
Last month Intel's mobility chief Sean Maloney was in the hunt to head H-P, a job that eventually went to Mark Hurd of NCR. (Watch out. Dana is about to criticize a fellow Truly Handsome Man.)
But how well is Maloney doing his current job?
Intel's role in the development of Always On is crucial, and its strategy today seems muddled. It's not just its support for two different WiMax standards, and its delay in delivering fixed backhaul silicon while it prepares truly mobile solutions.
I'm more concerned with Maloney's failure to articulate a near-and-medium-term wireless platform story, one that tells vendors what they should sell today that will be useful tomorrow.
Intel seems more interested in desktops and today's applications than it is in the wireless networking platform and tomorrow's applications.
The answer is attention. The world is entering an attention economy.
In many ways this is not news. What's news is how we're bifurcating our attention -- splitting it into parts -- and how media must now compete for slices of it. (Would this item get more hits if I called it The ADD Economy?)
It's a worldwide phenomenom because cellular or mobile service is worldwide. Mobile service competes well in the Attention Economy. Watch people chat on their phones while driving. (It's like elephants tap-dancing -- what's amazing is they do it.)
I've seen the TV ads and maybe you have, too. "Get a free ringtone. Simply text (whatever) and get (name of hit song) as a ringtone!"
Well, it's a scam. It's not free. In fact, writes Stephen Lawson for The Industry Standard, it's a lot more costly than a regular ringtone. This is because you get multiple texts in reply, with directions for the download, and these texts cost money -- $1.99 plus call charges each. It's an easy case to make, it's simple consumer fraud, it's aimed at teenagers. A state attorney general who wants to make a name for himself (or herself) can have a field day with this.
Hitachi Eyes 1 Terabyte Drives, writes MacWorld, noting new technology the Japanese company says lets it put 4.5 Gigabytes of data on a single centimeter of hard drive.
I'm like, don't the first people read the second paper?
Moore's Law of Storage is rocketing along right now even faster than Moore's other "laws" (as described in The Blankenhorn Effect). Magnetic storage is eliminating the cost of physically maintaining content, any content, with profound implications for everyone.
Both Sony and Microsoft have recently announced efforts to "jump the iPod" with video downloads.
Neither effort is serious, in terms of 2005 serious. Both are attempts to place markers on the future and gain agreements with the content industries they think will mark the future.
And this is just what's wrong with them.
You don't open up a new market by focusing on the seller side of the transaction.
You open up a new market by focusing on the buyer side.
Dana's Iron Law of Laptops holds that an ounce on the desk is a pound in my hands.
My favorite laptop of all time was a 2-pound Sinclair ZX-81. It had a tiny screen (nearly non-existent) but it had a pliant membrane keyboard that let me write and send stories from a beach. I haven't seen anything so light, rugged and useful since.
Instead, laptops have been desktop analogs. When desktop power increased, so did that of laptops, and they became no lighter in the process. Even today most laptops on the market weigh 7-8 pounds.
The cost of making something good is directly proportional to the complexity of the tools needed to create it. (The picture is from Freeadvice.com.)
This blog item is quite good. The tools needed to create words are very cheap. Even if the tools were more expensive, as they were when I began writing, my cost to create this text would not go up much. And the likelihood of its being of high quality would be just as high.
If I read this on the radio it would not be as good. The tools needed to create a Podcast require knowledge of radio or music production values. Even if Podcasts were as cheap to make as blog items, the proportion of good ones would be smaller than they are for blog items.
And so we come to the latest moves by Microsoft and Sony to deliver consumer video.
I have made few comments about the so-called conspiracy against the Apple iPhone.
The story was that Motorola was ready to release a cellular phone that was also an iPod device, but it couldn't find any carriers for it.
What's more interesting to me is the tug of war now taking place among entrepreneurs between these two technologies.
And, surprisingly, cellular is losing.
The reason has to do with business models and open standards. (Thus the picture above of standard pawns, available from the good people at Rolcogames.)
The Grokster case is irrelevant. The studios have already lost.
The court cannot make file transfers illegal. There are too many ways to transfer them. They can be transferred in e-mail attachments. They can be transferred through Instant Messaging. They can be transferred via MMS.
File transfers are basic to networking. Without the ability to transfer files we're down to typing.
In all the arguments over copyright and patents the interests of the middle class creator are constantly invoked, then discarded.
The fact is that, while most western countries are middle class, the structure of their creative classes is pre-Marxist. That is there are a few writers, artists, musicians and actors who get rich from it, and a lot who get virtually nothing.
Unless you have business acumen, or constant success in your field, you're very likely to end up poor. And without a big hit, you're nearly certain to end up relatively poor from your work in the content industries.
At the same time, those who manage the industry, whether or not they have any talent, nearly all wind up rich.
Thus there's a difference between what we find in society as a whole and the content society.
Some accuse me of not caring about copyright or patent rights. This is neither. It's a trade secrets case. But this is a righteous bust.
The individual responsible for all this, according to the court, was Toshiba employee Hideo Ito. Ito joined the board of Lexar, then a raw start-up, in 1997, and leaked its trade secrets for flash memory not only to his employers but also to SanDisk, the leader in the flash memory field.
Why is this a righteous bust? Because small outfits like Lexar have to align with big outfits like Toshiba in order to take on large rivals like SanDisk. It's the only way they can reach the market. If that confidence is not secured then small companies never have a chance.
X.400, I should note, was an interoperability system for moving messages betwen X.25 networks, and for billing the costs through the carriers. It took years to negotiate, it was difficult to implement, and it was made obsolete by the Internet's basic agreement to move the bits first and settle later.
Today's mobile or cellular operators (take your pick on the name) are much like the old X.25 operators, such as GEIS and CompuServe. The networks they operate are walled gardens, very proprietary, so it takes both technology and diplomacy to get stuff over the walls.
This is not cool, once customers start taking pictures with their camera phones and (under operator urging) want to share them.
The Gibson Safety Dance, named for sci-fi author William Gibson, involves companies changing their software simply to keep other programs from accessing it.
It's increasingly common. We've seen it in Instant Messaging, we saw it recently with Microsoft Office, and now we're seeing it with Apple's iTunes.
Jan Johansen, the Norwegian programmer who wrote DeCSS so he could play DVDs under Linux, has entered the fray with a program that breaks the iTunes DRM so Linux users can buy them from the Apple store. Apple's response has been to change the software and keep this from happening.
If I'm on Cingular, and you're on Verizon, and our friend is with U.S. Cellular, in other words, we can easily exchange short text messages. But exchanging, say, photos or music is nearly impossible.
CTIA didn't answer that challenge, but it turns out CeBIT in Germany did . An outfit called conVISUAL in Oberhausen, Germany (near Dusseldorf, in the Ruhr, the heart of the Bundesliga), did.
Over in New Orleans, the assumption at this year's CTIA show is "The Next Big Thing" is video.
Video clips, sold like ringtones. The mobile Web is TV, just as last year's mobile Web was radio. (The picture is from the story linked-to in this paragraph, at PocketPCMag.com.)
I think this is wrong-headed thinking.
That's not to say video won't have a place. It will, especially where desktop Internet penetration is low. Within a few years, I suspect, we'll see a "mobile BitTorrent", because the kind of video that will be in highest demand will be that which is most likely to be suppressed, and not shown on TV.
But video still isn't the Killer App for the next wave. Video is going to remain a niche.
Several journalists (yours truly included) have had fun with Motorola's proposed name, printing pictures of NBC weatherman and FoodTv producer-host Al Roker alongside our stories.
Look, there he is on the cover of People. ROKR-Roker, get it? Since much of Roker the host has in fact disappeared recently, thanks to surgery that made his stomach the size of a chicken egg, the irony is even richer. There are laughs a-plenty. Tears are literally rolling down some journalists' faces. (Not.)
Anyway, the real story here is much more important and much, much nastier.
There is a move afoot among the world's mobile (or cellular) carriers to keep absolute control over all the money to be made with cellular (or mobile) broadband. It's not just the users they seek to control, and not just the phones.
If you download a bit, even megabits, the mobile (cellular) carriers figure they should look at what you're accessing, decide whether you should get it at all, and take a cut of the revenue as well. (A pre-operation Roker-sized cut.)
This is not Internet service they're offering. These are private networks.
Reporting on the judge's decision in the Apple lawsuit against three Web sites has been about as bad as it gets. (Celebrate the stupidity with this lovely vase of a wormy apple, from the Seekers Glass Gallery.)
While the company won the initial court ruling, the fight is far from won. And the decision wasn't germane to bloggers, as the actual story made clear. "Judge Kleinberg said the question of whether the bloggers were journalists or not did not apply because laws governing the right to keep trade secrets confidential covered journalists, too."
Trade secrecy, in other words, gets more protection than national security.
Then, a decade ago, he morphed into an entrepreneur, doing stuff at the intersection of virtual reality and gaming. The media left him behind and left him alone. (I met him at a few trade shows during the dot-boom. He should have been a pathetic figure. He wasn't.)
It seems Robertson has a talent rare among entrepreneurs, the ability to make lemonade out of lemons. He explained what happened to the Onion AV Club. It was a piece of blinding entrepreneurial insight.
There are more American labels around. Apple. Motorola. Microsoft. The U.S. companies are good at seeing the opportunity and writing software that works.
Our balance of payments is not helped by it.
As Cynthia notes (deep in the article), these boxes are being made in China. (Actually most of them are being made in Taiwan.) Some of the software conceptualizing is being done here, as is the marketing (although I suspect some of that software work was off-loaded to India).
Those failing, flailing Japanese outfits she mentions, meanwhile, are still doing everything in Japan. Or they're doing "too much" in Japan. Except for Sony and Nintendo Japanese companies were never good at anticipating demand. Mitsubishi, Canon, C. Itoh, Ricoh, et al -- they were manufacturing houses. They were China before China was cool.
The announcement at Germany's CeBit today means that HD-DVD, the rival technology, has lost yet-more momentum. Dell and H-P are already on the Blu-ray side.
It's easy for someone to criticize Wind River's strategy as an attempt to maintain proprietary control in a world of open source, but the fact is there are opportunities here for the Always On world that need to be explained, and then seized.
Fact is Wind River's VxWorks is the leading RTOS out there. RTOS stands for Real Time Operating System, folks. An RTOS is used to make a device, not a system. You find RTOS's in things like your stereo, and your TV remote. What the device can do is strictly defined, and strictly limited. Your interaction with the device is also defined and limited.
An RTOS is not a robust, scalable, modular operating system like, say, Linux. And over the last few years, Wind River has been creeping into your world. VxWorks is used in most of your common WiFi gateways. This limits what they can do. They become "point" solutions. You can't run applications directly off a gateway, only off one of the PCs it's attached to.
This is true for hardware, for software, and for services. Future hardware designs must make it easy to connect, hands-free. Software must have intuitive user interfaces, as simple as speech. Services need to be spur-of-the-moment.
A lot of the mobile services I see today violate these principles big-time. They're based on Web interfaces, and thus have a limited time horizon. The key is to get inside the phone, so you're bought as soon as the customer thinks of buying.
Sounds cool, but there's still a rival out there, Direct Sequance-Ultrawideband, pushed by the UWB Forum. The latter group has demonstrated things like home networks, while the former has pushed a Firewire replacement over a distance of 2 meters. (The illustration to the left is from Intel.)
So this is more than just a technical argument. The WiMedia folks see the technology as a Bluetooth replacement. The UWB Forum is aiming at the heart of local networking.
Even the tone of their press release is, in my opinion, abusive.
Everyone knows that iTunes allows a user to play purchased music tracks to up to 5 computers, without repaying the money, under the condition that the computers are registered. The computer registration involves a process of identity verification in which a user is required to key in into the computer the correct Apple ID and password he used to purchase the song.
This is certainly a patentable technology. If iTunes does not patent it, there must be a very good reason for them not to do so- someone else has patented this.
The whole case points to what should be a major reform in the patent laws.
Jan Johansen became infamous because he wanted a Linux-based DVD player. Nils Schneider merely wanted the iPod to be all it could be.
In order to get a Linux DVD player, Johansen hacked the standard DVD encryption scheme with a program called DeCSS. The result was one of the biggest legal hassles of our time.
Schneider, 17, has now managed to get Linux working on his iPod by hacking its Digital Rights Management (DRM) system , according to New Scientist magazine.
Johansen's program, of course, had a lawful purpose, the creation of a Linux DVD player. But in order to do that he broke the copyright act. Schneider's program also has a lawful purpose, namely to run Linux on the iPod. But to do that he got through the iPod's DRM system, which in theory could let the iPod run any file at all.
But it's how Schneider did it I found most intriguing.
High Tech Computer of Taiwan has sold versions of it to most major European cellular outfits. The Windows Mobile device features a QWERTY keyboard which can fold into the device, making it a touchscreen PDA. It also has two cameras (one still, one video), Bluetooth and WiFi standard.
It is what it is, a phone with a half-gigabyte of storage in it, enough room for about 500 songs.
Those songs are subject to Sony's DRM, just as iPod songs are subject to Apple's. Both now face the wrath of France because their DRM schemes are incompatible. Unfortunately for France, another unit of the government had previously ruled the link between its proprietary format and its iTunes store is OK so this is going nowhere.
And the Walkman phone is going nowhere in the market.
Haptics recreates touch and texture artificially. If your kid has a "force-feedback" joystick on their computer game console, they're getting a taste of haptics. Northwestern, USC and MIT are among the universities doing research in the field. (The image is from USC.)
It's vital that something like haptics comes to mobiles because, in a hands-free environment, you can't depend on just sight and sound. Bringing other senses, like touch (or smell) into the mix allows for communication to happen invisibly.
It's also vital for haptics to come to mobiles because this is a huge (in terms of installed base) platform. If the coding and messaging can be delivered in this space, we're talking about billions of users. And we're talking about a universal language.
As the Grokster case approaches the Supreme Court the "friends" of the court briefs (called amicus curiae) are flying.
The best is the technical brief, from a host of distinguished computer scientists including Dave Farber of Carnegie-Mellon (and the Interesting People list).
The short version. If a law against software is strong enough to do good it will do harm. And if it's weak enough not to do harm it can't possibly do any good. Thus the Sony vs. Betamax "test," that technology is legal if it can be used for legal purposes, should be upheld.
I still get a newspaper. I read books and magazines. I listen to the radio. So, probably, do you.
But all these technologies (and industries) have been "killed" several times by great new technologies. They are all supposed to be dead, thanks to various features of the Web, right now.
Words have power, and by saying that old technologies are about to be "killed" by new ones, we tend to give the sponsors of the new the power to do just that. By doing this before the market has a chance to decide where the new one will fit into its lifestyle, we do everyone a disservice.
Billions of dollars have been lost over the years, and millions of jobs have disappeared prematurely, because companies, and markets, bought into these false frames.
The last time Paris Hilton featured on this beat, she was leading to the rise of BitTorrent, and crying crocodile tears over the interest we had in a sex tape she made with a (presumably ex-) boyfriend.
That's because Paris Hilton is totally innocent this time. As with other Sidekick II users, her data was synced to a T-Mobile Web site, and it was T-Mobile that got hacked.
Now her calendar, phone list, and photos taken with her cameraphone are being spread all over everywhere.
This is very bad for T-Mobile, which is still advertising the Sidekick II as a way to have a private box to store connections to your rich-and-famous friends. (Snoop Dogg is the ad's star, although Paris does appear.) Those ads are still running, but what kind of impact are they making now, as the story of this hack (and how it happened) gains more prominence?
The 3GSM Conference in Cannes featured a lot of flash, a lot of optimism, even some good writing.
But Cannes is a place of fantasy, a willing suspension of disbelief. It even has Las Vegas beat in this regard. Hey, the French thought the Maginot Line would hold. Some of them no doubt think smoking is good for you. When a diet of red wine and goose fat leaves you without heart disease you'll believe anything.
What drives the optimism is what is happening in the developing world. Beyond the desktops of the Internet, mobile phones represent everything positive about the future. They're telephony and computing in one hand-held package. They have driven technological change in Africa as nothing before has, and they're just getting warmed up.
Still, if mobility wants to succeed in the developed world -- and the 3G explosion is all about Western markets -- it does have to compete. And most carriers are not yet willing to.
Obstinacy, over-expansion, and hubris killed the National Hockey League, killed it deader than Maurice Richard. They can kill 3G too.
Sony blazed new trails among Japanese manufacturers, preferring proprietary control of its technologies, emphasizing design and its brand name, acquiring American firms and integrating them. In the 1990s, on the other hand, Apple was a troubled PC maker with a small market share.
This was before two things happened. Apple's genius returned to his throne, and Sony's faded from the scene.
Sony Founder Akio Morita, who passed away in 1999, was a legendary entrepreneur, a visionary, a genius. In Tokyo, Elvis has indeed left the building.
Still, in the first year after Morita's death, Sony could have done the deal easily. And the spirit of a man equal to Morita in vision, Steve Jobs, would be working for Japan Inc.
First is a joint study by Harvard and University of North Carolina researchers indicating "Downloads have an effect on sales which is statistically
indistinguishable from zero." Felix Oberholzer (Harvard) and Koleman Strumpf (UNC) matched a set of downloads to record sales in coming to this conclusion. "Even in the most pessimistic specification, five thousand downloads are needed to displace a single album sale," they write.
The second piece of news comes from the industry itself.
It is, simply, the launch of Napster's "rental" service. For $15/month, you can download all you want. It all disappears when you stop paying, but the industry approved this business model, which estimates the actual value of unlimited downloads at $180/year. Spread that over 10 years, give Napster 15%, and you get an actual industry-estimated "loss" from unlimited downloading of $1,500. Not much.
If I were a rich man I'd want some of these new Oakley Bluetooth sunglasses.
Of course, I'd need the prescription version. And I really like photograys. And have you got that in a bifocal model?
As you can see there is a way to go before Motorola's Cannes fashion statement turns into a really big market. Yes, there are cool-types who will grab on to this, so they can walk down the street gabbing away, like well-dressed homeless. But how many are there? And are all these fashionistas going to be satisfied with just these Oakley wrap-arounds?
A better solution, to my mind, would mount this user interface on the frame, with the electronics hidden in one of those cool eyeglass retainers 49er coach George Seifert used to wear? (That's George, left and above, and you may be able to make out his retainers. From the Seifertsite on Earthlink.)
The mobile broadband business is at what Gandalf called "the pause before the plunge." Enough equipment has been deployed so broadband can be advertised. The time has come to define the experience and see if any money can be made from it.
In a New Yorker profile of chef Mario Batali (left) there's a wonderful scene of Mario rooting around a waste pail, looking for what the author-turned-prep chef has tossed away.
Our job is to sell food for more than we paid for it, Mario lectures him. You're throwing money away.
Apple Computer is the greatest exponent today of what I call Batali's Clue. Your job, as the maker of products, is to get more for your creation than the cost of the electronic "food" that goes into it.
It's a vital Clue because components in the Moore's Law age spoil like dead fish on a wharf.
Here's an example plucked from today's headlines. (Well, the ad pages.)
It's nice when someone in the "major media" gets the Always On vision, no matter how they get there.
The vision is simple. It's a wireless Internet platform. You get there by combining robust scalable PC applications with Internet connectivity and WiFi.
Mobile carriers are trying to make an impossible transition.
They want to move from a data world where every bit is precious, and where every file is controlled, into a broadband world where phones have PC functions. And they want to do it without changing their business models.
It can't happen. The industry's dirty little secret prevents it.
That secret is that most cellular minutes today are wasted. Perhaps as many as 80% of the minutes customers are allocated in their contracts each month aren't used. And this has been the source of immense profits. (The illustration, in time for Valentine's Day weekend, is a Korean product for women that also enables the creation of twin secrets.)
Modern cellular marketing is all built around contracts, with a fixed monthly charge for a fixed number of minutes over a fixed term. To get contracts incentives are offered, including free phones.
But look at what happens. Marketing convinces people to pay high prices for plans with high limits. Cingular's "rollover" plan costs a mininum of $40/month, which comes out to about $45 with taxes and other fees. Advertising convinces people they need high limits to deal with "ugly over-age charges." But it's difficult to measure your usage in the middle of the month, and the vast majority of customers don't come close to their limits.
When the contract term expires, usually in a year, customers can theoretically leave that carrier for another one, taking their phone number with them, and even get a new set of incentives, like a new, more advanced phone. But most are as ignorant of their contract expirations as they are of the status of their minute bucket. (Quick: what's your contract expiration date?)
Carrier profitability thus depends on ignorance, customers with old phones who don't take out new contracts and don't use their gear. And in that environment, who needs broadband? Where is the market for PC functionality?
Yesterday, I wrote about how the PDA was rapidly being transformed into the smart phone, so the rumors of the PDA's demise are somewhat exaggerated.
I actually wrote that while looking at a post from Palm Addict about a possible new Palm design. Sammy McLaughlin was virtually hanging about the Patent Office (he's in Manchester, England but the Internet lets you do that) and found an application , from PalmOne, for a device that looks like a "candy bar" phone but flips open to become a PDA.
We have read for the last year about the death of the PDA, and it's true the stand-alone version (one without a phone) is fast disappearing.
As Tom's Hardware notes, PDA sales have fallen to a five-year low. I have one, but it was free.
As David Linsalata, the IDC analyst who delivered the report noted, ""Consumers don't see the need to invest $600 in a handheld device if a smart phone can do the same basic tasks."
But isn't this "death of the PDA" business simply a matter of semantics? Isn't this merely the creation of analysts who put technology in boxes, when everyone knows the first thing people do when they get technology is take it out of the box?
To all those wishing to bury Moore's Law. There are more tricks left in it than are dreamt of in your philosophy.
We all know about "dual-core" chips. Intel has switched development here, AMD has them in droves. They're basically multiple chips drawn on the same piece of silicon, taking advantage of parallel processing on-the-chip. Great stuff. Makes chips faster, makes processing faster, and keeps Moore's Law going.
Now IBM (with Sony) is rolling out what it calls Cell technology . This extends the dual core philosophy, a single chip that passes instructions to as many as eight processors at once. (Think of it as an editor chip in the "slot" of a computerized editing desk.) IBM says it can handle up to 10 instructions at one time.
All the speculation surrounding the Cell involves where it might go, and what it might do. (They're putting it first into Sony's Playstation 3, but it's listed as a PowerPC advance.)
Nicholas Negroponte is getting all sorts of attention for his plan to sell Linux PCs to the developing world at $100/each. (The picture is from the EnGadget story.)
It sounds great, in theory. Although, as EnGadget notes, most people in those parts might prefer mobile phones, and they're already cheap as chips. (As we noted last week, literally.)
Negroponte might respond he's bringing poor people the full world of the World Wide Web with his cheap box, but if it's the Web you want you need connectivity, not just a box, and getting to fiber in Niger is a little more difficult than getting to it from, say, Atlanta. (Or Abidjan for that matter.)
But there is one more big problem with this "great futurist's" vision.
Has Microsoft, and its ecosystem, built planned obsolescence into PCs so as to force upgrades?
I know this is tinfoil hat territory, but hear me out. (The tinfoil hat on the left is being modeled by Elizabeth Kramer of Pleasantville, NY, daughter of the blogger Kathlyn Kramer.)
In theory the MTBF (Mean Time Before Failure) of all PC hardware extends not years but decades. There is no theoretical reason for an old machine to stop working, and refuse repair.
Yet that's just what is happening here.
It started a year ago. My 6 year old Windows 98 machine started acting up, refusing to boot, and Scandisk just wouldn't complete. A big part of the problem, I concluded, was the Norton security system I had installed.
But PCs were cheap so I changed it out. I got me a new Windows XP set-up for about half the price I'd paid for the original box back in 1998, and felt like I'd gotten off cheap.
If the last several months proves anything, it is that there are many ways to grow in the cellular business. (Birthdaycraftsandsupplies.com offers a fine selection of Pinatas. Ask them to bring back the dollar sign one to the right. Don't you agree it looks cool?)
You can grow organically, as Verizon has done, stealing enough AT&T Wireless accounts (better technology and concentrated marketing) so Cingular may find its prize (we're number one) turning to dust in its mouth.
You can grow by buying licenses, as T-Mobile is doing this week. Government spectrum auctions brought in nearly $1 billion this week and T-Mobile looks like a big winner.
You can grow through alliances, as Sprint is doing. Its latest catch - Earthlink is going to private label its spectrum.
Word that mobile phone makers (and some networks) want to embed WiFi and VOIP into phones brings up a crucial point about the VOIP market, and about how technology works in general.
There are two major threads of VOIP software out there. Most, like Vonage, work along a standard. Then there's one who doesn't.
But that one is Skype.
Guess which of these two "standards" leads?
Skype. By a bunch. This puts another twist into the whole discussion of VOIP, and VOIP-cellular in general. Because there are multiple models to choose from:
In the U.S., the only excuse for regulating TV content is based on spectrum scarcity. Spectrum is scarce, it's licensed, and because of that there is a public interest test, which the agency sometimes uses to crack down on content.
Absent the excuse of spectrum scarcity, the only grounds for regulating TV content are based on the First Amendment. (The Hayes Office, which kept movies chaste for decades, was private regulation, not public.) This is not an absolute. Any conservative will tell you "obscenity is not protected," citing chapter and verse, calling in Ashcroft's Dogs of War.
The point is this is not the case outside the U.S. In England, for instance, TV content is regulated because, well, it's powerful. Thus dangerous. And so Oftel, the U.K's new "super-regulator," is sniffing around regulating the Internet.
The idea is that you and your friends subscribe to Dodgeball, then text your location to one another at night, so you can get together. (And if they have friends with them, and those friends are attractive, voila!)
Absolut Vodka sponsored a "nightlife channel" on the service last year, like a traditional media buy, so Dodgeball members could associate the brand as a "friend." (Beats having an AA sponsor, I guess.) Now they're looking to make more money from things like Premium SMS and applications.
Along with all their other implications, the mass adoption of mobile phones represents the first step in the single-chip era.
If you look inside the guts of your phone you are unlikely to find a big honking circuit board. (The circuit board illustration is from Sciencetechnologyresources.com.) Instead you will find one, two or three single chips performing major functions in an integrated way.
This is happening across-the-board in technology. We've gone from circuit boards in the 1980s to modules in the 1990s, to single chips. Just as early IBM PC add-in board producers created "multi-function cards" to assure a price worthy of retail distribution 20 years ago, so chip makers today put multiple functions on many chips, creating entire systems no bigger than a finger-nail.
The idea is that you sync the phone to your home using a verison of the old Palm cradle, then control home automation applications remotely using the phone.
For the last year I've been harping here on the subject of Always On.
The idea is that you have a wireless network based on a scalable, robust operating system that can power real, extensible applications for home automation, security, medical monitoring, home inventory, and more.
As I wrote I often came back to Motorola and its CEO, Ed Zander. They would be the perfect outfit to do this, I wrote.
Little did I know (until now) but they did. A year ago.
It's called the MS1000.
The product was introduced at last year's CES, and re-introduced at various vertical market shows during the year. It's based on Linux, responds to OSGi standards, and creates an 802.11g network on which applications can then be built.
At this year's CES show, Motorola is pushing a home security solution based on the device, with 10 new peripherals like cameras and motion sensors that can be easily set-up with the network in place, along with a service offering called ShellGenie.
Previously the company bought Premise, which has been involved in IP-based home control since 1999, and pushed a version of the same thing called the Media Station for moving entertainment around the home.
What should Motorola do now? Well, the platform is pretty dependent on having a home PC. The MS1000 could use space for slots so needed programs could be added as program modules. They need to look at medical and home inventory markets, not just entertainment and security.
But they've made an excellent start. And from here on out everyone else is playing catch-up.
But the humble hard drive, the spinning aluminum platter called a "Winchester" by some of us old-timers, now dominates the storage scene. And the father of that technology was Al Shugart.
This era is Shugart's Revenge. (Buy his new book here.)
This is something of a surprise to some futurists. After all, optical storage is really cool. Imagine getting a half-gig, or several gig, or dozens of gig on the same CD form factor, and usually backward-compatible at that?
What was unexpected with hard drives was that they would become hardened and mobile. We were used to thinking of them as being fairly unwieldy and fragile, hidden away on our desktops, requiring that we treat our laptops like human newborns.
But they did become sturdy, and tiny, and thus mobile. Now they can go anywhere you go. And in the case of some products, like the iPod, they literally define the category (although you can also make an iPod with flash memory).
There's one other point to make about this golden age of storage.
At CES mobile phones (cellular to you and me) are no longer certain what they want to be.
Are they cameras? Are they PDAs? Are they going to be expandable? Will they be for games, for instant messaging, for fashion, what?
Normally, after a show like CES, the market would make those decisions. Some products would sell well, others would sell poorly, and next year we'd see copycats of the former, then scratch our heads trying to remember the latter.
If you haven't heard, Apple Computer Corp. gave DePlume's little site the best diploma a journalist could get the other day -- a lawsuit. Rival journalists put up a headline that Apple was "running out of patience with rumour mill web sites."
But if these are just rumors, if there is no truth to them, why the legal paper? Hmmmm? Who needs to file papers to squelch lies? (And we'll know the truth one way or another in a week or two anyway.)
As usual the press is being plain silly. This is not a threat to mobile carriers because WiFi, as yet, offers no real mobility. And that's just not likely to happen because most WiFi connections are not networked.
The enormous popularity of the iPod, and its dominant share of the market (some say as high as 95%) has created a new family fun game for reporters this Winter, which I call "Get Steven."
The idea is to find someone, somewhere, who can threaten the iPod's market dominance, then spin a story around it.
Others, like Hiawatha Bray (right, from Dan Bricklin), know what their editors really want -- a local guy who claims he can take down the giant.
And that's what Bray delivered, in today's Boston Globe. (This is why he gets a fat paycheck and I'm just a blogger.)
Bray found a little outfit in suburban Andover, Massachusetts called Chaoticom. Chaoticom is OEM'ing technology for putting music functionality into new mobile phones, the kind with hard drives in them.
Good story. And since in the Chaoticom universe the music delivery is under the control of the carrier, there's some momentum.
There is a lot of wailing-and-gnashing-of-teeth going on about ESPN entering the mobile phone business, through an agreement with Sprint.
It's not that big a deal. Sprint made these co-branding deals, called MVNO in the biz, a big part of its strategy. Virgin, Carphone Warehouse and 7-Eleven are signed-up, and Wal-Mart is reportedly taking a look.
What do you need to become a Big Time Mobile Phone Brand?
If you're a kid it's pretty exciting. But I've seen this parade before, many times. I can enjoy your pleasure, but that doesn't mean I'm not going to join "Santa" later at our favorite bar for a few pops and expect he'll make me pick up the tab.
The big truth is that it's now pretty trivial to put a TV tuner into a mobile phone. Yes, the days of Dick Tracy's wristwatch TV are really here. (Image from USA Today.)
Of course you remember what Tracy used the technology for? To see his boss while he was talking to him. I did the same thing at the 1964 World's Fair, where AT&T had a videophone demonstration. It was no big deal then, and it's no big deal now.
Entrepreneurs like Blake Krikorian of Sling Media, who is profiled in the Business Week story above, think you'll use the capability to watch their streams. Most people watch brief snippets of TV anyway, not whole shows, he says. No time. So offer them such streams for the moments where they're standing in line at the Airport, or waiting for a meeting to start, and they will pay through the nose for them.
The MORI survey showed 90% of home PC owners were getting into arguments over who would use the PC, and when. The kids nearly all say they're doing homework (90% of them), but 43% of users admit they're playing games. (Hey, games can be educational.)
The survey struck me because, at the Blankenhorn house, everyone has their own PC and the TV spent much of Thanksgiving turned off.
We all have our own obsessions. I write, my wife works, my daughter reads and my son plays historical games. It's a far more productive use of our down-time than would be any shared experience before the "boob tube."
For those not enjoying our online novel, The Chinese Century, here's a piece of non-fiction that may leave you even more upset. (That's a 1963 Time Magazine cover, by the way, of which prints are available for purchase.)
This story comes from our good friend Rajesh Jain. But it originated with the San Jose Mercury-News' Silicon Beat. (Let's see. China to San Jose to Bombay to Atlanta -- nothing but net!)
It's an interview with Ronald Chweng, chairman of Acer Technology Ventures. Acer is based in Taiwan which China calls a renegade province, and the U.S. once called the Republic of China. Chweng's charge is to find U.S. investments. He says there are plenty, but that the focus may be changing.
Take a real close look at this AP photo and see if you can spot the problem with the new version of Windows Mobile, Microsoft's mobile phone software.
Reviewer Bruce Meyerson missed it, so if you have problems I understand.
Give up?
I understand if you give up because it not only skipped past Meyerson, but it apparently skipped past everyone involved in the design and manufacture of this phone. Otherwise it likely would never have seen the light of day.
Still don't have it? OK, click below for the answer.
Hardware you already purchased is having its performance degraded, remotely, through "software updates."
Specifically I'm talking here of the iPod and TiVo. Both companies have shipped, or announced plans to ship, "patches" that actually reduce performance, that take away features you already bought, and that you might be using and enjoying.
All this is being done in the name of "fighting piracy" but I wonder whether Hollywood hasn't just jumped the shark on DRM.
If you're to take Always-On applications into the world with you, they have to be fashionable. They have to look smart. It would be very nice if they were machine washable.
With all the hoop-de-doo over mobile phones being bad for you, it makes sense that a wireless headset, connected to your phone or (maybe even) your iPod, would make sense.
Nokia's Preminet is a direct lift from Brew's business model. It solves a lot of problems, but leaves some intact.
The idea is to simplify how developers get their products certified, marketed, and paid for. All good. But there's one big problem that isn't addressed.
Consumers.
Here are some of the questions you might ask if you're a mobile phone user:
I'm thrilled to welcome our first major advertiser to Mooreslore -- Orb Networks.
Orb is a unique product that combines the best in Web, software, and mobile technology. You download the program, index all devices linked to your PC, and then get a Web client through which you can reach it all quickly and easily.
All sorts of devices can be indexed by Orb, including cameras and a DVR. You can then access the browser from any of those devices.
Everything together, instantly. Give Orb a try. It's free for two months. Let me know how much you like it.
In a previous life I did some work for Intel's mobile and wireless folks. One thing I learned is they were inherited from Motorola and are based in Chandler, Arizona, rather than in San Jose.
They're pretty easy to scam.
Rather than insisting on the Intel way, which is to define a robust, modular scalable standard that can handle multiple generations of product, these guys follow their competitors' rules. They essentially beg manufacturers to take their products, then trumpet the announcement like it's a big deal when, in fact, it's not. Just beause the maker of a mobile product decides they'll try your stuff doesn't mean they're committing to it -- they commit to what sells.
Speaking of Microsoft, the Redmond company has a new keyboard and mice set-up out which replaces the clumsy problem of creating passwords with something simpler -- your fingerprint.
Here's the deal. To the left of the keyboard is a fingerprint reader. It lights up when you successfully have your left index finger scanned by it. (Never mind that, since it's to the left of the keyboard, this ought to be your left pinkie.)
The power of Windows lies in your ability to create and market profitable applications using it.
Yes, there's a limit. Once Microsoft decides it wants your market, your cost of defending the market will likely exceed any incremental sales from that effort.
But Linux lacks Windows' ability to make software profitable. And that is why Windows, not Linux, will lead the next evolution in cellular equipment.
The New York Times has reviewed the new Danger cell phone, under the name of T-Mobile, the cellular operator that will offer it this fall. (The illustration comes from the Times' story.)
The new device carries the name Sidekick II, and the Times likes it.
On the surface the charge is silly. Chip makers make chips, phones use chips. Phones are quickly replaced, which means the industry sells more chips. If by "black hole" you mean something that sucks up all the industry's capacity, that's not necessarily a bad thing.
But there is danger here, and it's based on the nature of the phones now being produced.
The company that now owns the show is spinning like mad, claiming this is just a postponement, that they could obviously run a profitable show this year. Some idiots are printing the spin. (The picture is from Softbank in Japan.)
Good movie. Thumbs up and all that. Fun for the whole family. (The image is from Cinepop in Brazil.)
The Dreamworks picture is breaking all sorts of box office records. And the use of technology is astounding. I actually recognized Jennifer Saunders (as the Fairy Godmother) before she spoke -- computer animation has gotten that good.
But the theater where we saw it was practically empty. Now, this was a matinee, and the movie was playing on six of the theater's 18 screens. But the place was empty.
This got my spidey-sense tingling. (Sorry, wrong movie.) Let's just say it made me think.
I say this with some confidence having looked not just at what BestBuy had to offer (which was not much) but at how little attention the store was paying to what it did have. Neither Palm nor Windows versions of the form factor were moving, and the chain had obviously given up.
The first Amida Simputer has been launched, an Indian-made PDA for $240 with Internet access, designed to bring the Web to the Indian masses.
Rajesh Jain, who's "on the scene" as they say in Mumbai (what's 500 miles from a distance of 8,000, right) has his own views on the matter, which he shared with me:
Most Indians don't need a portable device; they need something affordable with the form factor of a regular computer
I think Simputer is trying to go after the global Linux PDA different. In doing so, they also want to address the domestic low-cost portable computer market.
Price points are still too high. Need to be USD 100 or so.
These are all perfectly valid points. Let me add my own:
Because it's simpler, Palm's operating system had a big advantage when chips were simpler.
But that same advantage becomes a disadvantage when chips get more complex.
So Palm is fighting for relevance. (At right is the Palm 71, taken from Palm's sale Web site.)
One way it's doing this is by offering two versions of the OS -- one for connectivity, one use on the client. Skip the code words (Garnet for the client, Cobalt for communications) and you get one OS for the processing-heavy PDA, one for the communication-heavy cell phone.
Another way to stay in the game is with some powerful friends. Palm's most powerful friend remains Sony, which makes the Clie version of the Palm. Sony understands retailing, it understands price points, and it's rolling out three new Palms, only two of which have the Wi-Fi and MP3 capabilities computer geeks long for. But that's OK, because the $200 device will be a $100 device by Christmas, and people like my wife (who doesn't need communications capability and doesn't plan on listening to music on her PDA) will finally get a color screen.
The third way toward relevance is by finding more partners. Nvidia is filling that niche. The graphics chipmaker will be able to make the next generation of Palms more graphics-friendly. Only by getting to the chip level (Intel, ATI, M-Systems, Motorola, Samsung Semiconductor and Texas Instruments already license from PalmSource) can Palm get into new devices.
By having multiple partners, in multiple niches, and multiple versions, Palm hopes to have enough friends to withstand the continuing Microsoft onslaught. Now if they can just connect the Palm OS firmly to Linux...
Dana Blankenhorn has been a business journalist for over 25 years and has covered the online world professionally since 1985. He founded the "Interactive Age Daily" for CMP Media, and has written for the Chicago Tribune, Advertising Age, and dozens of other publications over the years.
News that David Edmondson, the CEO of Radio Shack, 
Disney.
Richard Wingard has figured out a way to fund cutting-edge technology with angel investors, and hold them in their investments for nearly 7 years. (The picture is courtesy the 
Video is NOT the future of the Web. (This picture, by the way, comes from 
Ever play the old board game Risk?
When Paul Otellini was named the 
The AP had a headline yestoday that Luddites and the RIAA will love. 
Folks who were wondering how Rupert Murdoch and Fox would try and capitalize on the purchase of MySpace over the summer don't have to wait any longer.
I have long believed that the Internet makes us all journalists.
Just in time for Christmas, Atlanta blogger Mingaling (right) offered me (and therefore you) access
A posting from 
The patent case concerning the RIM Blackberry has taken a twist that could have come out of the TV show 
While you're all tucking into your Christmas turkey the hype machine for the next round, the 
Like an addict going into a bar after just getting out of jail for their last bender, 
Google has launched a 
The sale of Dreamworks to Viacom's Paramount unit, 
America's biggest tech companies are focused today on the problem of creating, not technologies, but platforms.
One tragedy of the late Richard Smalley's life was that his beloved Buckytubes did not make more progress into the world of real products.
Wired phone assets are plunging in value.
Maxell is planning to release 
What's in a name? 
Where competition is limited, service sucks.
Sony says it's (sort of) sorry. They say 
One word: branding.
Intel's strategy of delivering a fixed 802.16 WiMax standard, then moving immediately to a mobile version, is 
Om Malik has an article that goes inside 
I was ready to write a slam against Earthlink this morning. Twice they have lost my order for a new DSL modem. On the phone yesterday I grew quite testy. 
One thing which unites the 
The Macintosh interface has been around, in one way or another, for 30 years. It has been the dominant computing interface for 15 years.
The big news in the recording industry's results today are 
Nicholas Negroponte of MIT Media Lab fame, still trying to remain relevant, has announced a program called 
The best way to kill a promising technology is to argue about it in standards bodies.
News that Palm is in the Windows Mobile business is 
Back in the 1970s most people who were at the age I'm at now were convinced these "PC" things were going nowhere.
One of the biggest mistakes you can make as a reporter is to become dependent on press releases.
Last week's 
Apple has released
Americans are finally following the rest of the world toward the controlled interface of the cellular phone. 
Over at ZDNet, Steve Gillmor
Back in 1985, you would have spent big money to get an Intel 386 chip, with over 100 Megabytes of storage, and a local network that ran as fast as 1 megabits per second.
While using the Web to track Hurricane Katrina (
Every decade of computing technology can be summarized fairly simply. (That's an 
Where Bill Gates bests Steve Jobs, and always has, is in his willingness to build ecosystems.
Two really stupid predications crossed my desk this morning. (The image is by 
Hewlett-Packard is apparently 
Adam Penenberg channels 
As regular readers here know, there is no Moore's Law of Training.
Hear me out.
The blogosphere's quick reaction to the London strikes was driven in large part by the mass market in 
Since I was handing out
Given the direction of antitrust law recently I was surprised to see the recent suits by AMD and (more recently) 
T-Mobile has become the first cellular operator 
Former RIAA president Hilary Rosen finally gets it about copyright. 
Due to low salaries and high turnover, journalism continues to face the problem of reporters seeing failed trends repeated, not spotting them, and repeating the same failed cliches of earlier years, mainly due to orgnaizational inertia.
Most PC users have been conditioned, over time, into conserving disk space. This is true even though most of us have tons more disk space than we really need.
The 1990s were all about the Internet. (The picture is from a great site called 
Assuming Apple does switch to Intel chips tomorrow, as 
Despite his ponytail and his sometimes counter-cultural language, despite being what I like to call a Truly Handsome Man (it's a brighter term for bald, people) Ted Waitt was always a follower, not a leader. (The picture is from 
Some time in the next month the copyright world may (or may not) reel from the Supreme Court's decision in 
Why is it that politicians have done a better job on the Internet than publishers?
I have not written much about Voice Over IP in this space because I'm not an expert in it. (Yes, I hear you say, this never stopped you before.)
The best way to understand the future is to look into how chips are changing.
The success of Google has been based on the fact that technology drives its train. Technical success is the most-sought value. 
Evidence is increasing of a backlash against mobile phones and the behavior of those who over-use them. (The image comes from a page on celliquette from 
Last month Intel's mobility chief 
In 
I've seen the TV ads and maybe you have, too. "Get a free ringtone. Simply text (whatever) and get (name of hit song) as a ringtone!"
Here's an interesting juxtaposition of headlines. (The lovely idiot is from 
Both 
I bought a new laptop yesterday.
The cost of making something good is directly proportional to the complexity of the tools needed to create it. (The picture is from 
John Carmack (right, from 
I have made few comments about the so-called conspiracy against the Apple iPhone.
As the Supremes prepare to take on the 
In all the arguments over copyright and patents the interests of 
A Santa Clark court has ordered Toshiba to pay Lexar 
The Gibson Safety Dance, named for sci-fi author William Gibson, involves companies changing their software simply to keep other programs from accessing it.
Over in New Orleans, the assumption at this year's 
Over on another blog where I work, 
Reporting on the judge's decision in the Apple lawsuit against three Web sites has been about as bad as it gets. (Celebrate the stupidity with this lovely vase of a wormy apple, 
Of all the American entrepreneurs you read about a decade ago, which do you think is doing the best today?
Remember a week or so ago when I wrote about how someone had cracked their iPod's DRM 
The logjam over the next optical storage standard may be about to break, as 
I don't always agree with Nicolas Negroponte (right), but he made a point in Korea recently that really makes sense. 
Failure to define a single standard for Ultrawideband is killing the technology. So say the experts.
I’ve seen it and seen it. A big company works its butt off to prove a market, and some little guy comes along claiming patent rights. 
Taiwan has the greatest OEMs in the world. They can take your design and turn it around faster than anyone.
Sony released 
Samsung is bringing 
I still get a newspaper. I read books and magazines. I listen to the radio. So, probably, do you.
Podcasting is the trend of 2005.
The last time Paris Hilton featured on this beat, she was leading to the rise of BitTorrent, and crying crocodile tears over the interest we had in a sex tape she made with a (presumably ex-) boyfriend.
The 3GSM Conference in Cannes featured a lot of flash, a lot of optimism, even some good writing.
A few years ago I speculated publicly about Sony buying Apple. (That's Sony chairman Nobuyuki Idei at right, 
The Copyright Police keep coming up against stubborn facts, some of their own making, that throw their arguments into the dumper.
If I were a rich man I'd want some of these new 
Microsoft may have as little as a year to take command of the mobile phone platform, or the opportunity will be lost. (Image from 
In a New Yorker profile of chef Mario Batali (
It's nice when someone in the "major media" gets the Always On vision, no matter how they get there.
We have read for the last year about the death of the PDA, and it's true the stand-alone version (one without a phone) is fast disappearing. 
Music companies are now pitching online music as a choice between 
Nicholas Negroponte is getting all sorts of attention for his plan to sell Linux PCs to the developing world 
Has Microsoft, and its ecosystem, built planned obsolescence into PCs so as to force upgrades?
If the last several months proves anything, it is that there are many ways to grow in the cellular business. (
Word that mobile phone makers (and some networks) want to embed WiFi and VOIP into phones brings up a crucial point about the VOIP market, and about how technology works in general.
In the U.S., the only excuse for regulating TV content is based on spectrum scarcity. Spectrum is scarce, it's licensed, and because of that there is a public interest test, which the agency sometimes uses to crack down on content.
Well, it might if you subscribed to 
I recently wrote in high praise of Motorola for the MS1000, calling them 
Along with all their other implications, the mass adoption of mobile phones represents the first step in the single-chip era.
Motorola has launched a very Clued-in strategy to push Always-On applications.
For the last year I've been harping here on the subject of Always On.
Andrew Orlowski 
At CES mobile phones (cellular to you and me) are no longer certain what they want to be.
When editor Nick DePlume is served with his copy of 
When UTStarcom announced it had a "WiFi Phone" (right) no one noticed.
The enormous popularity of the iPod, and its dominant share of the market (some say as high as 95%) has created a new family fun game for reporters this Winter, which I call 
There is a lot of 
The bandwagon on behalf of "Mobile TV" 
For those not enjoying our online novel, 
Take a real close look at this AP photo and see if you can spot the problem with the new version of Windows Mobile, Microsoft's mobile phone software.
If you're to take Always-On applications into the world with you, they have to be fashionable. They have to look smart. It would be very nice if they were machine washable.
Hey, kids! You can get this cool wallpaper of the Hollywood sign for your PC 
Nokia's 
I'm thrilled to welcome our first major advertiser to Mooreslore -- 
In a previous life I did some work for Intel's mobile and wireless folks. One thing I learned is they were inherited from Motorola and are based in Chandler, Arizona, rather than in San Jose.
Speaking of Microsoft, the Redmond company has a new keyboard and mice set-up out which replaces the clumsy problem of creating passwords with something simpler -- 
Michael Eisner would you please go now?
Over at The Feature Mike Masnick has a little piece 
It's like having a relative with a long painful disease and finally seeing the end come. You still mourn. 
Last month, on this blog, I asked 
I took the kids to see 
Because it's simpler, Palm's operating system had a big advantage when chips were simpler. 
