MediaSavvy

It’s a cliche that “New media don’t replace old media”. However, this ignores the massive disruption new media do cause.
Think about what TV (and then FM) did to AM radio. The movies were changed profoundly by television–twice. First, they moved to big screen production in the fifties and then to action in the eighties. Cable pretty much made the broadcast TV networks irrelevant and set them up for acquisition.
This kind of disruption may preserve media, but destroys the companies that control them.
The next media scheduled for disruption are compact disks and newspapers.

I agree with Vint Cerf that The Internet is for Everyone — but it won’t be if it is based on proprietary protocols that are protected by intellectual property laws. We must based the Net on protocols, business processes, file formats, markup tags, and display technologies are that are free for anyone to use.

The mobile telecom industry is cutting its own throat.
They’re trying to cover their capital expenditures and spectrum costs by increasing revenue per customer, rather than gross revenue. This results in counterproductive behavior by the carriers:
* increasing customer acquisition costs, feeding a retail distribution system that is comparable to that of the automobile dealers in its dishonesty, sleaziness, and customer unfriendliness.
* relying on proprietary handsets and services, so they can sell more stuff to their customers.
* creating pricing plans that are incomprehensible to their customers and to their sales force. I recently went phone shopping and found that neither my local AT&T dealer nor his company rep understood the plan he wanted to sell me.
The mobile industry needs a makeover if it’s to be saved.
* Open the network. Allow ISP’s and others to provide competitive services on mobile networks. Allow any device with the correct protocols and an account (or a credit card) to use the network. Support hardware, software, and service developers who want to use your net to sell to your customers. This will increase service to your customers and their switching costs at no cost to you.
* Rationalize pricing. Provide a simple, usage-based pricing model that lowers price per minute as use increases and treats all minutes (local, long distance, roaming, data) equally.
* Move to a direct-sales model. If pricing were rationalized and equipment were opened, customers would come to the carriers and cost per sale would be lower. We’d also be spared the current tedious branding advertising for mobile carriers that promise dubious benefits to consumers.

It’s important to keep things simple. One of the keys to the success of the Web is its simplicity. That’s one reason Apache is still a great server, it’s the reason why some many people have web pages, and it’s the reason the Web spread so quickly.
Clearly, any large-scale Internet project is going to be complex at the back end, but there are plenty of reasons to keep it simple at the front:
* It’s easier to debug your work and to maintain it.
* Your pages will display faster on slow connections.
* More people will be able to use your site the way it was intended on a wider variety of devices and browsers.
* You site won’t become obsolete as quickly.
* You will be less beholden to Microsoft, Sun, Macromedia, and others.
Don’t use Java on the client side. It’s slow to load, leads to nonstandard interfaces, and the current war between Microsoft is problematic. I have no opinion on whether you should use it on your servers.
Don’t use Javascript, except in the simplest of cases: automating dropdown menus, opening new windows (with the user’s permission), and the like. In my experience, the resulting code is comples, slow, buggy and inconsistently rendered. Don’t require it for forms, for example.
Don’t use Dynamic HTML. It’s nonstandard and is guaranteed to lock you in to Microsoft’s word. It’s almost never the right solution to the problem.
Don’t use Flash for anything other than entertaining animations and explanatory graphics when nothing else will do. Don’t open your website with a flash animation. Why on earth burden your home page with something that requires a “skip intro” button? Why not skip the Intro for your users and save yourself some time and money?
Make Cascading Style Sheets optional. I love the way you can make your pages look with CSS. But it’s important to create pages that display attractively on browsers that don’t support CSS or support it poorly. That’s most of the browsers out there.
What’s left? Plain Jane HTML, the technology that started it all. Clean, minimally-nested tables, text, graphics and links. HTML is the NTSC of the Web, a primitive technology that gets the job done and isn’t going away for 50 years. What could be sweeter?

I wrote Notes on Notes a while back for a company that will remain nameless. The gist of the document was that Lotus Notes, while it may be a fine piece of groupware, was being used primarily for email within the organization. And Notes could be the world’s worst email client.
I mailed this rant to the company CIO, and he told me: (1) he couldn’t defend Notes as an email client, (2) lots of users were perfectly happy with Notes, (3) it was still being used for groupware applications, (4) his top priority was “customer-facing” applications, and (5) if he started to move away from Notes, he’d lose all the skilled Notes techies who were keeping the system running.
This seems reasonable, until you consider that Notes servers also support POP clients. That means that their employees could use any POP client if they wanted to, or keep using Notes if they were perfectly happy.
Meanwhile, inside the IT, department, they’re using POP.
What’s really going on here? It goes beyond the practical rationalizations cited by the CIO. It’s about the cost of support. Support is a real cost, of course. But the company is full of power users who are using email to create the company’s product and to sell it. And the IT department doesn’t want to support the best tool for the job. They prefer the cheapest possible tool for the IT department. And the ultimate rationalization is that email isn’t a customer-facing application.

It should be obvious that the future of online publishing is bright. In the future, people will get a larger and larger proportion of their news and information from online sources, and many of these sources will be profitable. Some could be be extremely profitable.
Some of the audience will come from television viewership, but most of it will come from print.
Newspapers are about to lose half their revenue — the most profitable half. Classified advertising is going away and never coming back. This meanst that in the near future newspapers are going to be thinner and more focused. They’re going to have to make some incredibly difficult choices between hard news and features, local coverage and US and world coverage. I expect newspapers to become a lot more locally oriented. They may look a lot more like the (free) Palo Alto Daily than their owners (or newsrooms) are comfortable with today.
Specialty magazines could lose a lot of their audience (especially at the newsstand) over a somewhat longer period of time as more and more readers discover their needs are met by sites like CNET and dpreview. Also, there are external changes going on in the newsstand market, which is consolidating and squeezing out smaller titles and publishers. Fashion and celebrity titles will dominate magazine readership and advertising even more than they do now.
Book publishing is more complex, but reference, how-to, and other ephemeral non-fiction seem to be the most challenged by the Net. It’s going to be a while before bestselling fiction or non-fiction, literary fiction, or novelty and gift titles are threatened by online media. But, why buy a cookbook if you can get recipes off the Net?
The time the people aren’t spending with newspapers and magazines for news, information, or diversion is going right to the Net. The sources there will be more varied, entertaining, up-to-date, and individualized.
Later:
* How will the business be structured?
* Where does the money come from?
* Who are the winners and losers?
* What do these new sites look like?