Category: observations

In the High-Tech Sector, Optimism Is Just a Faded Memory

. . . . . but those who control it are afraid of the new markets that the tech boom has created: they understand how to get revenue from theaters and DVDs and CDs, but not from mediumless digital media, like streams or music/movie files.

The most heated debate of the event came during a panel of Hollywood executives who criticized the technology industries for their lax adherence to intellectual property protection and copyright issues in the digital era.

That evoked a response from many executives here that the entertainment industry’s unwillingness to explore new business models was primarily responsible for the industry’s lack of growth.

“We’re in a real technology gridlock,” said Peter Schwartz, co-founder and chairman of the Global Business Network, a consulting group based in Emeryville, Calif. “All of the entrenched industries are attempting to protect their positions so that in broadband, digital television and digital distribution of content, we’re stuck.”

It’s not the tech companies job to worry about copyright: if that had been the prevailing attitude 25 years ago, we may not have had VCRs or even photocopiers. It’s the media cpmpanies job to come up with ways to make money, given a larger market — anywhere that TCP/IP can reach — and little or infrastructure cost — no need to build a theater or ship a print to every small town when you can send the content as bits.

Having worked in a large media company, on both the news and entertainment sides of things, it was frustrating to see how hard people were trying to map their experience onto this new amorphous opportunity. The quality concerns in those early bandwidth-contrained days were valid, but now with increasing penetration of broadband in the home and almost universal high-speed internet access in schools and business, what are the media companies doing to capture an audience? I would guess the big three segments of the Internet are news sites, weblogs, and porn, but not in that order, and of them, news is where you’ll find the big media combines.

In entertainment, the key was driving people back to the TV set with ancillary programming like games and trivia: early attempts to build internet-exclusive programming were not well understood and were ultimately scuttled. Ad sales models from TV and cable broadcasting didn’t translate to the web, and rather than come up with new models, it was easier to kill off the new media products.

Between the potential of broadband and the increasing buzz around TiVo, I wonder if anyone will figure out how to get the content people want served up on demand, rather than clinging to the “must-see TV” model.

It’s getting to the point where I think the English model of a TV license or subscription that would fund a reliably high-quality broadcasting effort makes more sense than the continued commercialization and resulting cheapening of the content. 100 million households times a $10 license fee is a pretty nice budget: of course, my dream of high quality arts and education programming coupled with serious films and documentaries doesn’t appeal to everyone. More’s the pity . . . .

The Humane Environment

But interfaces have not moved with changing times. After a decade of research into cognitive psychology and by paying attention to people’s constant computer complaints (and his own annoyance), [Jef] Raskin realized that today’s GUIs are fundamentally flawed. The interface-building tools that companies and open-source prouducts provide enforce bad interface design practices. They are wrong. Period. Raskin figured out how to fix the problems. His popular book, The Humane Interface (Addison-Wesley, 2000) explains all this in some detail.

This makes for some pretty compelling reading: if you’re as fed up with the lack of progress in human-computer interaction as I am (and not just because I’m a lousy typist), it’s worth a look at the book, the running example, or both.

Yahoo! News – WAR CRY

“Even before [the current head of state], the [ . . . ] political system was a shambles,” said Prof. Salvatore Deluna of the University of Madrid. “Their single-party plutocracy will have to be reshaped into true parliamentary-style democracy. Moreover, the economy will have to be retooled from its current military dictatorship model–in which a third of the federal budget goes to arms, and taxes are paid almost exclusively by the working class–to one in which basic human needs such as education and poverty are addressed. Their infrastructure is a mess; they don’t even have a national passenger train system. Fixing a failed state of this size will require many years.”

Click the link above or below to learn more.
Continue reading “To what nation is he referring?”

Mr. Swartz Goes to Washington (Aaron Swartz: The Weblog)

I was impressed by how smart the Justices were. These were people who very thoroughly understood the issues and thought quickly on their feet. They were interested in long-lasting effects and classics, I doubted many cared much for Mickey or Steamboat Willie. It’s sad we don’t have this level of intellectualism and intelligence in the rest of our government today.

The justices are appointed, not elected, which has a lot to do with it. Since they don’t campaign for the the job, their work within the judiciary is what gets examined. Imagine our representatives and senators having to write a defensible opinion on a legal issue, using the Constitution or case law as their examples.

I understand and agree with Aaronbut I’m not surprised at the intellectual heft of the Court: I expect it. Imagine how things would be if the Court were an elected body or otherwise subject to the vicissitudes of politics.

This time I was coming out a store at the UVillage and saw someone bring one to a stop, turn it on its axis, and then go about the business of meter reading.

I went for a closer look, and the meter reader filled me in on how fun it is, though bumpy sidewalks are a bit uncomfortable (apparently, they’re not sprung at all). While she was off the machine talking to me and doing her work, it just waited patiently on its two wheels, rocking gently back and forth: it reminded of a horse grazing or a boat rocking on a swell more than anything on wheels.

They look bigger and more robust in person, bigger tubes and much bigger tires than I imagined from the pictures. I could see a whole population riding them, rather than cars or even bikes, for medium commutes and errands.

O’Reilly Network: Googling Your Email [Oct. 07, 2002]

At InfoWorld’s recent Web services conference, Google’s cofounder Sergey Brin gave a keynote talk. Afterward, somebody asked him to weigh in on RDF and the semantic Web. “Look,” he said, “putting angle brackets around everything is not a technology, by itself. I’d rather make progress by having computers understand what humans write, than to force humans to write in ways computers can understand.”

Sergey Brin and Jon Udell are smart guys, but then I always say that about people who agree with me:

What this sounds like to me is that computer scientists want to — still — require us to learn a language that computers can handle (like typing, for example: if typing were a natural motion, would we have Carpal Tunnel?) as opposed to taking the tremendous power now available — cheap 1 and 2 GHz CPUs — and making the machines meet us halfway for once.

CNN.com – Schools reviving a dead language – Oct. 14, 2002

A funny thing happened on the way to higher standards: Schools remembered Latin.

As educators work to improve student performance in basic subjects such as reading, math, history and science, a few are finding that Latin, long thought stuffy and irrelevant, can help.

Blog

Citrix is a company whose products– and, indeed, whose entire business plan– is founded upon compensating for a ridiculous design flaw in Windows.

Likewise Novell: their roots in fileservers and networking products stem from the lack of any networking in early versions of Windows.

Ray Ozzie’s Weblog

What if all engineers within a company were given a new email address when they started, and were told “just use it for business” and “please note that everything that you do in email is in public view. In order to prevent embarassing moments, please keep matters of your personal privacy OUT of your assigned email box; use Groove for private matters. Oh, and by the way, here are the URLs of all of your team members’ mailboxes, in case you care. Oh, and by the way, here’s a site where you Google across all of them. Oh, also, I should mention that we never delete any email, by policy.”

John Seely Brown in Forbes
“Let’s look at email. Email plays quite different roles than it did five years ago. Email has started to seriously change hierarchy. It keeps you more aware of the edge of what’s happening in your company. You can sense the heartbeat of the organization when you skim the messages. It’s
like reading body language: The velocity of [email] messages, the rhythms tell you something. You’re beginning to read the context of email technology rather than merely the technology. You become “attuned to” rather than “attend to.” Almost all our technology has been designed around the theme that you have to attend to it. How do you survive an information overload? You’re attuning to all sorts of things that you may then choose to attend to.”

At first, the question posed by Ray Ozzie sounds a lot like a description of a newsgroup or a mailing list: it’s publicly viewable yet still person to person or person to group.

What if all the conversations over email were public (and this excludes having a rogue sysadmin sending juicy bits from management emails to his friends at other companies)? Everyone would know about the issues surrounding a project or customer.

As Linus Torvalds has been quoted, “Given enough eyeballs, all bugs are shallow.” This describes the opposite of what happens in a meeting-centric culture, as opposed to a knowledge-centric. The meeting’s attendees will iinclude all the same people who have been working on the problem individually or in smaller groups. If instead the conditions and circumstances of the problem or issue were accessible by everyone across an organization, you have more, not fewer, minds at work.

Apple – Switch

Who cares if 30,000 programs are available for Windows, if the five you want most are available only on the Mac?

I don’t even care if they’re Mac-only, so long as they play nicely with the other children. How many programs do you use in a given day? Five? Ten? Anywhere near a hundred? Or a thousand?

30,000 programs is about as useful as the plethora of choices in the breakfast food aisle: demand creation, to make you buy stuff you wouldn’t otherwise bother with, and brand dilution, as more varieties of the products you like appear on the market, each more like a competing product than the one(s) they share a brand name with.