Who Will Audit the Red Cross?
Everyone is on the Red Cross bandwagon these days.
But that was not the case before Katrina. The Red Cross was fiercely criticized for its reaction to 9-11. The criticism was bipartisan.
All was forgotten once Katrina hit. The only alternatives offered for giving wre overtly-religious organizations, ranging from the Salvation Army to Pat Robertson's Operation Blessing (number two on the Administration's hit parade).
Besides, you've got to figure, this was really more up the Red Cross' alley than 9-11, which in the end only took out the center of a well-insured central city, and completely displaced only a few tens of thousands. This was different, not just New Orleans but the parishes around it, and Mississippi all the way up to Jackson.
So how are they doing?
Google Flattens the World
Let me take a stab at explaining Google's grand strategy.
My friends at ZDNet call this the Google PC, or a network computer.
Well, sort of. You may, instead of buying Microsoft Office, suscribe to Google's GMail and have a rudimentary office system with a gigabyte or two of storage.
But to say Google is going after Microsoft, the way we said Microsoft was going after IBM, is really to damn with faint praise.
If that were all there were to it, why would Google be planning on building out WiFi, or build out an optical network?
Google isn't aiming at Microsoft, or at IBM. It's aiming at the entire computing-telecommunications complex, building out what I'll call the Google TeleComputing Environment.
The idea is to take advantage of not only the Internet's ability to disintermediate clients, but its ability to disintermediate the phone network at the same time, and to do this in an entirely open source way.
What do I mean? Here are the ingredients:
- Universally-accessible applications, based on search.
- Universally-acessible networks, at broadband speeds.
- Universally-competitive systems, worldwide.
Google is flattening the world. More on what this means after the flip.
Why eBay-Skype Could Be AOL-Time Warner
Skype, like most VOIP companies, is a tax arbitrage play.
The idea is that you avoid the tax costs of telephony by running your voice calls over an Internet connection. As everyone gets broadband, telephone service dies a natural death.
But neither the Bells, nor the governments they feed, are willing to go away quietly. I've written often about how it's done here. But it's done everywhere.
The same day eBay announced it would buy Skype, China started cracking down harder on Skype, and its Internet-Phone version SkypeOut. Unlike the situation with, say, Falun Gong, this is an effort where telephone firms are, not reluctant, but eager co-conspirators.
eBay Changes its Business
"I'll take Bubble for $100, Alex." (That's 2004 Jeopardy mega-winner Ken Jennings, whose 15 minutes of fame are now up.)
And the answer is, "The final proof of the second Internet bubble, in 2005."
"What was eBay's purchase of Skype."
"Correct. eBay paid $2.6 million in cash and stock for a company that had few revenues, no profits, and hardly any business model, and whose operations were completely incompatible with eBay's own."
"I could understand the stock, and even understand the press claims the deal was worth $4.1 billion. It's the cash that gets me."
Upgrade-itis
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.
I call it Upgrade-itis.
Keychain Computing
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.
The Spoils System
George W. Bush's Bridge to the 19th Century has deposited us in 1881, in the era of the Spoils System.
The spoils system was instituted by Democratic President Andrew Jackson. "To the victor goes the spoils" meant that every government job belonged to the party in power. Postmasters, and port managers (big jobs in those days) were all political hacks.
The movement against the spoils system was led by a Republican named James A. Garfield. He was elected President in 1880 alongside a representative of that system, Chester Alan Arthur, former port commissioner for New York. He wasn't a perfect vessel for reform, but he moved in that direction.
The picture illustrates what happened next. Garfield was shot, killed, by Charles J. Guiteau, a "frustrated office seeker," in other words, a party hack who was upset that Garfield wanted to bring competence to government. (Guiteau, in fact had visions of becoming Ambassador to France.)
Sacrifice to Get 'R Done
I think nearly all Americans can now agree that the biggest mistake made after 9-11 was avoiding a call to sacrifice.
(Picture from the BBC.)
My generation has never been "in" to sacrifice. It was our parents' thing. They went hungry during the Depression, they risked their lives during World War II, and then they stayed together, working hard, so that their kids (us) would have "everything."
Which we do. Our lives are very comfortable. Most Americans have cars, and TVs, and air conditioning, and healthy food in our refrigerators whenever we want it. We can take vacations. We can get fat. Then we can pay to have the fat stripped away and get fat again.
Maybe that's the real Vietnam syndrome. Those of my generation who felt the call to sacrifice as young people died in rice paddies, or had their dreams shot away. Frankly it doesn't matter why anymore. No matter what side you took in that war, get over it. We're in a different era.
These days sacrifice must be forced on us. And for many this week it has been.
Some Good News
Cingular has apparently agreed to offer the Motorola-made iTunes phone.
Don't you all feel better now?
Logistics of New Orleans' Kidney Transplant
A Great City must be evacuated. Then it must be rebuilt.
After the people are gone -- all the people -- the logistics of what must happen in New Orleans next are daunting. We're talking about debriding America's gaping wound and rebuilding a kidney on a massive scale:
- Two levee breaks -- one of which is 300 feet long -- have to be repaired. You ever try to stop water from going where it wants to go?
- The water inside New Orleans has to be drained, to somewhere. It's filthy, deadly, where is it going to go? It might kill the Gulf, but were else can we put it?
- The sewer system has to be re-built, because until it is you can't get to
- Everything has to be hosed down, cleaned, and disinfected.
- Only then can you begin a true damage assessment, and chances are nearly every wooden building in the city will then have to come down. Where will all that debris go?
- Only then can we even talk about rebuilding.
It's the biggest civil engineering job ever attempted.
Continue reading "Logistics of New Orleans' Kidney Transplant"
The Killer App for Broadband
Om Malik has a wise commentary today on how peer-to-peer services (p2p) is the killer app for broadband.
He offers a Cachelogic chart showing how p2p services (but more specifically eDonkey) are driving total Internet traffic. In fact, more than half the total Internet traffic monitored by Cachelogic, according to the chart, is eDonkey traffic. (The illustration was copied from Malik's blog, but credit should go to Cachelogic.)
Then Malik makes some really key points (boldfacing is mine):
- In the long term, however P2P traffic if not managed properly is going to become a big problem.
- The explosion in P2P traffic is going to have an impact on the people who don’t use the P2P services as well.
- Due to P2P’s symmetrical nature on average 80% of upstream capacity is consumed by P2P.
Hawaii Should Be Texas
There's a news report out that Hawaii wants to cap the wholesale price of gasoline, because it has gotten too high.
Of course we know that won't work. Refiners will simply ship their product elsewhere if it can get a better price elsewhere.
But ever since I visited the Big Island in 2001 I have felt that Hawaii's energy situation is, frankly, reversed. The island has immense stores of natural energy -- waves, wind, and vulcanism.
All you have to do is tap it.
See if this sounds silly.
Corruption of the Lists
There's a chain of bookstores in South Georgia that hold a secret.
I discovered it on the way back from a convention in Orlando one day, desperate for some present to give my book-loving wife.
Stacked floor-to-ceiling in these stores are "best-sellers," nearly every "big" title from a right-wing hack delivered over the last decade or more. There's Laura Bush's autobiography, alongside the Swift Boat attack on John Kerry and titles from the whole Fox News pantheon. There are right-wing preachers, firebreathers, and a ton of get-rich-quick books by folks who, if they really knew that much, would have gotten rich some other way.
I think about those stores whenever I see "books" like Kevin Trudeau's Natural Cures or Neal Boortz' Fair Tax Book topping things like The New York Times best-seller list, week-after-week.
Do you know anyone reading this dreck? You might not.
Google's VOIP Play
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.
So can anyone else, anywhere else.
More from Tariq after the break.
Not All HotSpot Advantages Obvious
Krystal restaurants (think White Castle with mustard, Kumar) have finished a full year with their free WiFi hotspot program, and have decided to extend it to all 243 company-owned restaurants (as well as recommend it to their 180 franchises.)
The evidence of increased sales are anecdotal, but CIO David Reid told CMO Magazine he has already tracked a bottom-line advantage.
Dating the Next Recession
The next U.S. recession will start in earnest on October 17. (If it hasn't already.)
That's the day the new bankruptcy law kicks-in, and credit card banks get hit by a double-whammy of their own creation. (Illustration is from Howstuffworks.) Be careful of what you ask for, because you just might get it:
- Borrowers must begain paying back credit card loans based on a 10-year payback, doubling many minimum balances, and
- New rules force borrowers to repay those debts, even after filing bankruptcy.
How can this be bad for banks, who after all pushed for the legislation?
The Real Estate Bubble Pops Here
A post card came in the mail, from a Keller-Williams agent. (Is it just my imagination or have they taken over the market lately?) It was about the Gary house, down the street from me.
The asking price is $334,900.
I remember the Garys, from back in the day. Nice people. Salt of the earth. He was a deacon at the church. She loved him desperately. The mantle was already filled with pictures of grandchildren when I met them, in the early 1980s. I went there regularly for block meetings. They said we were crazy to pay $49,000 for our house.
Mr. Gary passed away in the late 1990s. (God rest his soul.) She finally moved out with some of those grandchildren, a few years later.
They had gotten an unbelievable offer.
Why Is Oil So High?
Oil, like other commodities, is priced based on a contunuous auction, demand measured against supply. (The picture is from a primer on peak oil, courtesy Energybulletin.net.)
Supply has become inelastic. Not just the oil, but its refining. No one is building new refineries (not in this country). When supply gets really tight we actually import gasoline.
The problem is that demand has also become inelastic. I'm talking to you, mister. No one seems willing to make a change, to reduce their demand for oil, gas, and electricity. Back in the 1970s people switched to smaller cars, they didn't drive as much, they even boosted the thermostat. Now, nothing. We get in our SUVs, we take the freeway 40 miles to work and back, we drive all over hell-and-gone for various reasons (kids, shopping, etc.) and we usually leave the A/C on high while we're gone.
So we have an episode of the BBC's show Cash in the Attic.
Time of Confusion
When old business patterns die, those who lived by them become confused. They often start throwing money in a variety of different directions, many of which they probably know are Clueless, in hope of picking up the scent of profit. (This picture, from Pravda, came up in Google Images when I entered the keyword mystery.)
It's unusual for many industry leaders find themselves in this position without a full-on economic panic ensuing. In fact, the economy is in pretty good shape right now.
But the tech portion of the U.S. economy is in full-on crisis mode, as you can easily see by looking at a few headlines:
The Moore's Law Dialectic
Today's politics is cultural.
Even economic and foreign policy issues are, in the end, defined in terms of social issues. This creates identification, and coalitions among people who might not otherwise find common ground -- hedonistic Wall Street investment bankers and small town Kansas preachers, for instance.
I am coming to believe the next political divide will be technological. That is, your politics will be defined by your attitude toward technology.
On one side you will find open source technophiles. On the other you will find proprietary technophobes.
It's a process that will take time to work itself out, just as millions of Southern Democrats initially resisted the pull of Nixon. Because there are are divisions within each grand coalition we have today, on this subject.
- On the right you see many people who work in open source, or who worry about their privacy, asking hard questions of security buffs and corporate insiders.
- On the left you see many people who consider themselves cyber-libertarians facing off against Hollywood types and those who create proprietary software.
This latter split gets most of the publicity, because more writers are in the cyber-libertarian school than anywhere else.
Initially, the proprietary, security-oriented side of this new political divide has the initiative. It has the government and, if a poll were taken, it probably has a majority on most issues.
But open source advocates have something more powerful on their side, history. You might call it the Moore's Law Dialectic.
The Identity Wars
As previously noted, I became an un-person last week as the Social Security decided to waste my time over a "mistake" some one made back in 1970. (Image from Mindfully.Org.)
Either my wonderful mother (who still walks among us, to my great joy) failed to check the box indicating I was a citizen on my Social Security application, or some clerk failed to do so when the data was entered because there were separate forms then for citizens and non-citizens.
The clerk who put me through this hell blamed "Homeland Security." But I think he was really responding to the reality of how this number is used.
As I've noted many times before, the Social Security Number is an index term. Everybody has one. Everyone's number is different. By indexing databases based on Social Security Numbers (SSNs), government and businesses alike can make certain there's a one-to-one correspondence between records and people.
Stories like this AP feature don't really address this need, this fact about how data is stored. Without the SSN we'd have to create one. Some companies like Acxiom do just that. Every business and individual in their database has their own unique identifier, created by the company. Which also means that the Acxiom indexing scheme is proprietary. The only way toward a non-proprietary indexing scheme, in other words, is for government to provide one. Which gets us back to the need for an SSN.
The Lessons of Walton and Ford
Sam Walton was devoted, first and foremost, to his employees. (That's the cover of his autobiography at right.)
He was famous for driving around the country, arriving unannounced at stores, leading employees in cheers. It was almost Japanese.
People forget today, but Wal-Mart salaries in its early days represented big raises for rural people who otherwise faced lives of poverty, absent the small luxuries city folk took for granted. Thanks to Sam Walton, Wal-Mart employees could afford to shop at Wal-Mart. He transformed America from a land of rich city-poor country to one of middle class uniformity, and if you once lived on the poorer side of that divide it made him a great man.
Henry Ford was the same way. His River Rouge plant didn't just turn out a low-cost car (the Model T) . It turned out well-paid workers who could buy those cars. Ford, too, revolutionized America, making this a nation on-the-move.
My point today is that, in both cases, there were side-effects, which demanded renewal and change. And the refusal to change just delayed these crises -- it didn't prevent them.
The Coming Crash?
I should not be a fan of Dr. John Rutledge (left).
His economic prescriptions are unrelentingly right-wing. He's a social Darwinist, a raging bull.
But he's not an idiot. He understands money. He knows trouble when he sees it. And, on his blog this week, he sees it.
As I've written in my novel, the name of this big trouble is little China.
The process of China's inevitable Yuan revaluation has begun.
In a series of blog entries Rutledge ticks off what's happening.
Bank of Wal-Mart
Amid the hullaballoo over CardSystems International, here's a little story that you missed.
Not just any bank. A special kind of bank. An industrial bank, in Utah.
No offices, no direct deposit. Mainly, they exist to handle credit cards and other consumer loans. I'm sure the terms are very favorable, because big corporations are hotter for these than Donald Trump is for endorsement dea.s GE, Merrill Lynch, American Express and Target all have them. Berkshire Hathaway is setting one up to make loans for its R.C. Willey Home Furnishings stores. (Betcha didn't even know Buffett sold furniture.)
First Shoe Drops on The Chinese Century
Readers of The Chinese Century know it begins with China allowing the Yuan to float against the Dollar, and then pushing the Yuan up in the market.
The first step toward that reality was taken today. (The image is from the China Daily article.)
Instead of having a fixed rate against the dollar, China will let the Dollar rate float against a "basket of currencies." So if the Dollar falls against, say, the Yen (and it did in response to this news) or the Pound (ditto) or the Euro (mega dittoes) further moves might be made.
The Optimist Club, otherwise known as Wall Street bulls, suggested this will make our exports more competitive. That would be great if we had exports. In fact, it makes imports more expensive. It imports inflation.
It also reduces China's own production costs, because oil (for now) is priced in Dollars. With fewer Yuan needed to buy Dollars, the price of oil to China goes down.
Pay for Play Is Already Here
Adam Penenberg channels IDC IDG head Pat Kenealy (left, by Jay Sandred) on another of those occasional "you're going to have to pay for Web content someday" pieces we see every so often.
Well, he's right. But he's also wrong.
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.
Corporate Death Penalty
Let us now praise a famous brand, Visa.
One of the differences between card processing and many other businesses is that you're totally dependent on a few big players for survival.
Of the three big guns -- Visa, Master Card and American Express -- the first is most important. The bank association's changing requirements are generally a road map for other processors, defining necessary changes under enforced deadlines.
When Visa pulls its business from a processor, even for a little while, it's terribly destructive. When they do it permanently, and publicly, it's time to get out the resumes. When they do it alongside American Express, it's a corporate death penalty.
UPDATE: My saintly wife (that's the original St. Jennifer there to the left) notes the AmEx decision is effective at the end of August. Visa's decision becomes effective at the end of October, so you might call them the "good cop" in all this.
So say goodbye to CardSystems International, the small (90 employee) Atlanta processor which revealed in May that a computer worm had exposed 40 million customer accounts to possible identity theft.
What I found most fascinating, however, was what was below the headline.
Harold W. Furchtgott-Roth (Gumby)
Monty Python used to have a running gag called the Gumbys. They would put on moustaches, shorts, place diapers on their heads, and talk sheer lunacy for effect. CORRECTION: There's an update to this piece below the fold which could make this reference even-more apt.
Former FCC commissioner Harold W. Furchtgott-Roth, now a fellow of the right-wing American Enterprise Institute , is a Gumby.
This guy is so Clueless that, in an age when any wingnut can practically become a millionaire by snapping his fingers, he can apparently get his stuff published only in the New York Sun, a right-wing daily with few readers, no business model, and a crappy Web site that won't let you inside its home page without giving them tons of personal information. So no link.
Instead, you'll have to read the whole thing:
Marky's Mark
I was pulled from a deep sleep this morning by another reporter, from CBS Radio News, asking for lessons from the latest H-P lay-offs.
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.
But enough about the past.
The New Interfaces (co-starring Steve Stroh as "The Expert")
For people who like gaming, their games (or online environments) are their main interface to the Web. This has been true for some time, and unremarked upon.
There are other new interfaces that many people depend upon. The iTunes player can be an interface, when linked to Apple's Music Store. Any music player, or multimedia player, is a separate Web interface, which may or may not connect to a Web page at any time. People who swap files use those programs as interfaces.
The point is in many niches the Web browser has already been replaced as the main interface to the Internet. Microsoft's five-year campaign to dislodge Netscape was worthless, which may be why they're letting Firefox run off with so much market share.
And now, even readers are getting their own, separate interface, the RSS reader.
I use FeedDemon. Steve Stroh uses NetNewsWire on his Mac and calls it fabulous. This field has yet to shake out.
I have noticed some big differences occur in my work when I'm using FeedDemon instead of the browser as my interface to the Web:
- I'm seeing more content, faster.
- I'm seeing fewer ads.
- I'm finding great differences among sources in how they react to readers. Some post just a few sentences to the reader, others let the whole article run. The latter sites are seeing far fewer "hits" on their pages than the former, thus far fewer page-views overall, and far-fewer ad reads.
- Publishers are waking up to this by shortening, even eliminating, the text that goes into the "newspaper" format of feedreaders. The Wall Street Journal is especially aggressive in this. US News is especially lenient.
Steve Stroh has more after the break:
Continue reading "The New Interfaces (co-starring Steve Stroh as "The Expert")"
Ballmer's Microsoft
A reporter can make a good living just covering Microsoft.
This is not a good thing.
One fact that attracted me to technology journalism in the first place was its social mobility. I often write about companies I call "Clueless" and find they have disappeared practically before I can get the piece into digital print. Those that are "Clued-in" can also fall quickly, corporate management in this space being much like tightrope walking.
Intense competition makes for rapid evolution. Call this Dana's First Law of Competition. Markets in India and China are intensely competitive. You can't let your guard down for an instant. This is a very good thing.
It's not what human nature wants, of course. As people we want to relax, to enjoy our lives, to set the competition aside sometimes so we can, say, raise our families, get more education, or retire with dignity.
Both Microsoft and the government had opportunities to prevent this, to re-ignite competition. They chose not to take these opportunities.
Bill Gates had one vision for Microsoft, but the company has gone beyond it. He was wise to pass the baton to his majordomo, Steve Ballmer. Ballmer is all sales, all the time, a whirling picture of aggression. (He's also, admittedly, what we call on this blog a Truly Handsome Man (grass don't grow on a busy street) but looks ain't everything.)
Ballmer's vision isn't really about technology. It's about exploiting advantages and making money.
So at Microsoft's recent Worldwide Partner Conference in Minneapolis (Minneapolis?) we got headlines like these:
- This used to be about software partners. Now it's mainly about hardware partners, like tablet PC makers. This is an important change.
- Microsoft continues to eat its young, entering profitable small business niches, aimed at engulfing and devouring them.
- Ballmer told his software developers to "stick it to IBM" even while Microsoft sticks it to them.
- Microsoft is telling its partners to "push Office ugrades," more evidence that the idea of Windows as a "software ecosystem" are ending.
This is just one corner of the news Microsoft made last week.
This Week's Clue: Mr. Pulitzer, Tear Down This Wall!
The search for online business models is a continuing fascination of mine at A-Clue.Com.
This week I returned to the theme, and readers of A-Clue.com got an earful. (You can get one too -- always free.)
Most online stores fail their editorial mission. (That's Joseph Pulitzer to the right, from his eponymous journalism school at Columbia University in New York.)
You may have great merchandise, you may have great service, you may have a nifty shopping cart. But if you can't bring the values of your shop floor to your Web site, you won't succeed online. Over time you may not succeed offline either.
An editorial mission replicates the value of your store online. What is your Unique Selling Proposition (USP)? For Amazon it's a database, a huge variety of merchandise. Works for Amazon, works for Wal-Mart, but it won't work for you.
In fact, Wal-Mart's failures online can be attributed to this editorial mission failure. They were unable to replicate the values of a real Wal-Mart in their online efforts. While the store looks a jumble, regular shoppers know you can actually get what you want there fairly quickly. What they should have enabled was a form of "shopping lists" that people could print-and-use at home, adapting to their own needs, then input regularly on the site, along with a delivery service.
The difference between editorial values and commercial values is that the one defines what you are, and the other puts your name in mind. If branding is to be worthwhile you must deliver the values the brand promises. That is exactly how editors think, too. What you call your reputation they call credibility.
Continue reading "This Week's Clue: Mr. Pulitzer, Tear Down This Wall!"
Lasica: King of Irony
Since I was handing out royal titles last week I thought it might be fun to consider what J.D. Lasica might deserve for Darknet.
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.
Antitrust: It's the Process, Stupid
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!
J.D. Lasica's "Darknet"
Don't like fiction? I understand.
But you still need your summer reading. The season is upon us.
So might I offer you the latest from my new friend J.D. Lasica, Darknet
I've been covering the Copyright Wars for nearly a decade, and wish I had looked up from the day-to-day to try something like this book. Its subtitle is Hollywood's War Against the Digital Generation, and it covers a ton of ground.
If you're not familiar with the digital underground, or what digital editing is capable of, then Lasica's book will be a revelation to you. Even for old hands like me it's good sometimes to get it all down so you can ponder it as a whole.
Comdex Lives in Taiwan
When the Comdex show closed its doors a few years ago a lot of people threw up their hands and decided it was some sort of secular turning-point, the lesson being that people didn't do trade shows anymore.
Well it was a turning point. But not of the ind they thought.
Fact is, Comdex lives. It lives in Taiwan, and it's called Computex.
The show just finished, and the reports are still dribbling in. But what's clear is that the same spirit of innovation, the same corporate social mobility, and the same establishment of distribution that marked the Comdex show in its heyday all took place in Taiwan.
This is meaningful on several levels.
An Always-On Endorsement
It's nice when "real" (paid) market analysts agree with one of your premises. Especially when it's a key premise to you, as Always On is to me. (This is advertised as an Always On Server, from Virtual Access.)
So I was pleased to read Chris Jablonski's recent piece at ZDNet, Forget P2P, M2M is where the next party is.
M2M stands for Machine to Machine (ironically this sits right below an item about how poor most tech nicknames are) but we're talking about the same thing, intelligent sensors linked to wireless networks. Programming the sensors to deliver some result, then automating delivery of the result in some way (sending an alarm, telling the user, etc.) is what I mean by an Always-On application.
As I have said here many times the tools are already at hand, and cheap. We're talking here about RFID chips, WiFi and cellular networks, along with standards like Zigbee that let these things run for years on a single battery charge.
There are problems with every application space, however:
AMD's New Legal Offensive
AMD is the most infuriating company imaginable.
If Intel is the big dog of the chip world, AMD is the little dog jumping around it, nipping at its heels, acting like it (not Chipzilla) owns the street.
Its latest legal assault may be its dumbest move yet.
Strictly from a timing standpoint, it sucks.
This Administration does not look kindly at anti-trust claims. They settled with Microsoft, they gave the cables and Bells a duopoly (leaving America a third-world broadband country), and they seem content to let China monopolize world trade while India gains control of services. All this is in pursuit of an ideology that becomes less-and-less distinguishable from Putinism and Kleptocracy by the day.
Short form. If they had a case they should have filed it in Europe.
Identity Theft Turning Point?
The recent theft of 40 million card numbers at CardSystem Solutions is a turning point in the identity theft wars.
Previous thefts involved third parties, insiders or numbers left in bins, things that are easily fixed.
The CardSystems case stands out, first, because it happened at an actual processor and second, because it involved the use of a computer worm.
My wife works at a payment processor in Atlanta (most processors, for some reason, including CardSystems, are based here) that has (knock on wood) not been hit (yet).
Hilary Rosen Gets It (Too Late)
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.
The Chipfather is Dead
Irregular readers of this blog may think Gordon Moore invented the microchip.
He didn't. Moore did have a major role. He was part of the Fairchild team, co-founder of Intel, and his Moore's Law article popularized the changes that chips would bring.
But Jack Kilby won the Nobel Prize for the microchip, in 2000. He died today.
The original invention, designing multiple devices on a single piece of substrate, was invented in two places at once. One team, which Kilby headed, worked at Texas Instruments. The other team, with Moore, Robert Noyce, and other key men, worked at Fairchild Semiconductor.
The resulting patent was shared, but it was Kilby's team that created the basic technology. The key contribution from the Noyce team involved manufacturing process.
More on Kilby after the break.
This Week's Clue: Two Trains
We returned to the topic of e-commerce, and the effort to make money in journalism, with this week's A-Clue.Com, which went out to subscribers this morning. (You can get one too -- always free.)
The topic this week might be called the new media's old media problem, with a proposal for solving it. (I have no idea whether the book here is good or not. If someone can send me a link to sales, we'll see.)
Enjoy.
In software terms blogging and commerce are incompatible. They're two trains running on different tracks.
Bloggers aren't really thinking of making money. They may put up begging bowls, and they make take BlogAds, or put in Google AdSense, but their Achilles Heel is that, when they think of money at all, it's in Old Media terms.
Let's sell ads.
Community Networking Systems like Scoop, Slash and Drupal also share this problem. They have an advantage over blogging systems in that they can scale. They can take a lot of traffic, and a lot of users. Those users are empowered to create their own diaries, or polls, or multi-threaded comments. But again commerce is secondary, in this case even tertiary. The most successful "commercial" community sites are those, like DailyKos and Slashdot, that direct people off-site to give money or time to important causes. There is no built-in business model.
Why the Housing Crash Will Happen
Critics of the idea we're in a housing bubble usually bring two main arguments to the table.
- There's great intrinsic demand. Populations are increasing.
- Mortgage payments only exceed rents in some areas, not all. Thus, any adjustments will be small, localized, and soaked up by aggregate demand.
I don't buy it.
The Journalism Crisis
It should surprise no one that "professional" journalists hate Wikis and blogs.
A little history lesson shows you why. Only this one's fun. As part of your summer reading get yourself a copy of H.L. Mencken's Newspaper Days. (That's Mencken to the left.) It's his memoir of Baltimore's newspaper business around the turn of the last century.
Newspapermen at that time were lower class, hard drinking, smoking, swearing, worthless ne'er do wells. You wouldn't bring one home to mother. They hid in saloons, spun lies, spied on people, made less than the corner grocer, and were generally shiftless, lazy bums. Despite this, they considered themselves a class apart.
This last is still the case. But today's newspaper writers are either middle-class bores or upper-class twits. Those who report on Washington, write columns or work on editorials are among the most twittish. Many make more than the people they cover, especially if their faces are on television.
Blogs, wikis and the whole Internet Business Model Crisis threaten these happy homes. (Although I've got news for them -- stock analysts treat newspaper stocks like tobacco stocks and their ranks are being thinned like turkey herds in September. They'd be a dieing breed even without the Net.)
What's most galling to "professional" journalists is not the loss of jobs, or money, but their continuing loss of prestige. On the upper rungs of the ladder they're being replaced by "players" -- sports stars, lawyers, politicians, former entertainers. On the lower rungs they're being driven into poverty -- we've talked before of the corrupted tech press. And in the middle rungs you've got these blogs, wikis and the continuing problems of being treated like a mushroom. (You're in the dark and they're throwing manure on you.)
Our times are, in many ways, a mirror image of the 1890s.
Who You Want Working for You
The people you want working for you are not necessarily the people who want to work for you.
This is one of those hard truths that everyone knows and no one talks about.
Gretchen Ledgard of Microsoft recently told this truth, and God bless her for it.
Because it's not just a truth at Microsoft.
Ledgard's post, which she later felt duty-bound to soften, told a real truth, and the fact she felt compelled to soften her tone speaks loudly to just how bad the problem is -- across corporate America.
The people doing the hiring, and the people seeking those positions, both think working at Microsoft (or wherever) is the greatest thing since pasteurized milk. In some ways it is. Look at the medicine cabinet you get to use at Microsoft (at the top of this item). Look at the salaries, the benefits, the family-friendly attitude. It's paradise.
This Week's Clue: Destroying the Village
I guess I felt a little down this week -- about the direction of technology, about the economy, about a lot of things.
So the readers of A-Clue.com got an earful. (You can get one too -- always free.)
There are times when history, like television, goes into re-runs.
We have literally turned Iraq into another Vietnam. But we've seen this movie before, so when Rumsfeld does his McNamara imitations, or Bush plays like LBJ's dumber brother, we change the channel.
Yet the fact is that when history repeats (unlike television) it does so in spades, in triplicate.
World War I was horrible. World War II was worse.
Iraq is not the only Vietnam repeat out there. We're doing the same thing with the Internet.
We're ignoring history. We know what would work to secure our computers, and the networks they run on. But we don't act. So we get this incremental escalation, this drip-drip-drip that leaves us, in the end, worse off than we would be had we taken decisive action at the start.
There are laws on the books that should deal with spam, with spyware, and with the problems of identity theft. They can be found under headings like fraud, theft, and fiduciary responsibility. Nothing is being done today that wasn't done before - only the means have changed.
Instead of moving against these problems together, as was attempted in the 1990s, we're leaving everyone on their own, and sometimes the cure winds up being worse than the disease.
Dana's Law of Bellheads
When evolution accelerates size becomes a disadvantage.
It's true in nature, and it's true in technology as well.
The Bells (and Comcast) are the big bottlenecks in our technology universe. With Moore's Law sweeping through the telecomm landscape they are competitive liabilities in our economic ecosystem.
There is no malice in saying this. The Bells can't help being pointy-headed bosses. They are bureaucrats. Their loyalty is to the inside of their system, not to the customer. In a stable environment the ability to retain such people is a boon. In an unstable one it's disaster.
More proof comes today from Techdirt. It's a so-called BellSouthWiMax trial. But it isn't WiMax. It isn't new technology. It's an excuse to keep charging $110/month for DSL ($60 for the phone line) when the phone component is (with VOIP) unnecessary.
The Gadget Era
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.
Bubbles
When something is overpriced there are always excuses.
I had a friend tell me the other day, with a straight face, that housing is still a great buy because the population will keep growing. Maybe so, but prices are a function of the amount of capital available to buy the goods, not the size of the population. Just because there are a lot of people in Soweto doesn't mean you should plunk down 100 million rand for a shanty.
The housing bubble, in other words, is based on unrealistic expectations. People are taking out interest-only loans, adjustable rate loans, and loans of over 100% of the purchase price, because they expect prices to go up faster than interest rates, indefinitely. True the length of a bubble economy is indefinite, but it definitely bursts in time.
Here's another bubble. Google. Sorry, it's not worth $80 billion. It's worth some multiple of its earnings, and with earnings growing quickly it's worth a premium on that. But it's not worth 25 times its sales of $3.2 billion. No company is. Some part of that valuation, maybe a large part of it, is pure speculation.
Rep Rap Rip
The folks at CNN fell for the hype from a project called RepRap, a rapid prototyper from the University of Bath in England. (The picture is from the CNN story and shows a robot built with RepRap.)
The machine that can copy anything was their breathless headline.
Well, yes. And no.
The folks at RepRap would like you to think they've got something truly revolutionary. But they don't. The technology has been around for some time. You need to input a lot of files to make anything, so there's a lot of intellectual capital involved.
And here's the kicker.
This Week's Clue: Deep Commerce
My free weekly e-mail newsletter, A-Clue.com was launched in 1997 as a discussion of e-commerce.
This week I returned to the topic.
Enjoy.
The reason why publishers have no editorial budgets with the move to the Web is simple. (Image from Websitecenter.)
None engage in Deep Commerce. Instead, they still just sell ads.