Month: May 2003

Responding to uber-libertarian William Safire’s condemnation of media concentration, Arnold Kling says that big media are failing because they have too much competition. I wouldn’t disagree with that. He goes on to say that they should be allowed to fail if they can’t make it in the marketplace. He’s right. And then he says that therefore we shouldn’t stand in the way of media mergers. And he’s dead wrong about that.

Given my view of the causes of the decline of newspapers, broadcast TV, and radio, trying to save those media by preventing mergers is pointless. Big media is failing, not succeeding. As an economist, I say let it fail.

People’s use of media is changing. Newspapers are in a steady decline before they drop off the cliff of an inflection point. The networks are living on borrowed time. The recording industry is circling the wagons. And radio is in chaos.

Yet, none of these media are going away. They’re going to be savagely restructured, find new audiences, dramatically alter their value chains, and generally change into something we can’t even anticipate.

No one is trying to prevent the “failure” of existing media businesses. On the contrary, the fight against media concentration is a fight to preserve a competitive market from becoming an oligopoly of protected franchises.

I’d rather have thousands of individual media outlets desperately seeking new markets and ideas, rather than six big companies struggling to find synergy where none exists by stripping the media of assets and talent, using “convergence” as an excuse for eliminating local production, using the media they own to subsidize their other failing businesses, and generally managing our media as a dying cash cow.

I received a call from my wife’s credit card company (MBNA) yesterday while she was out. The caller wouldn’t say why he was calling because of “confidentiality”.

In the past, the only time a credit card company cites “confidentiality” is if there a problem with the account or the card may be stolen, so I gave her the message. Once she called them back, she discovered that they wanted to sell her a loan.

Not only is MBNA decreasing the likelihood that their customers will respond to legitimate calls about security and account problems, they’re projecting that same problem onto the rest of the industry.

This is an extraordinarily deceptive and self-destructive practice.

Jay Small has written a great newsletter on why you should learn HTML if you don’t know it already and should create your sites using “raw” HTML instead of a WYSIWYG editor like GoLive or Dreamweaver.

I created an early version of MediaSavvy using GoLive and it just made me miserable. Not only was the code it to created too complex, but the program itself was way too hard to use.

Now that I’ve gone back to hand-coding my pages using BBEdit, I know what’s going on under the hood, my pages are smaller and lighter, and it’s actually easier to tweak them when I need to.

Now that more users and designers are using templates and style sheets, it makes even more sense to use HTML. Once you start working with style sheets, you’ll find there’s a logic and flow to working in HTML that you didn’t have when you were doing your layouts with tables.

There’s something about editing raw HTML templates that requires you to keep things simple. I think that the result is better-looking pages that are actually less complex for the reader to understand.

I love the idea of micropayments, but they never caught on. Andrew Odlyzko’s The Case Against Micropayments summarizes the obstacles to micropayments. [PDF]

Clay Shirky also wrote an article called “The case against micropayments” about two years ago, which is what finally convinced me that micropayments are going nowhere.

If you’re fighting micropayments in your organization, these articles provide great ammunition. If you’re considering, or waiting for, micropayments, you might want to consider moving on.

CMS Watch has a great editorial about the proliferation of open-source content management systems.

I’m thinking about getting an open-source CMS, and I am indeed overwhelmed by the variety of choices. My guess is that it won’t be too long before the Darwinian process of adoption and abandonment selects the fittest of the projects and narrows it down to a few choices. In the meantime, we’re going to have to spend a little extra time sorting through this mess.

However, I don’t think this chaos gives a huge advantage to commercial CMS vendors, who haven’t addressed the rampant dissatisfaction with their “solutions”.

Shortly after i posted by rant about the lack of simplicity and quality in cell phones, I saw that T-Mobile has decided not to release a Microsoft “powered” phone.

That’s good news. But even if this phone was bug-free, the last thing I’d want in my cell phone would be Windows. We’ve become so used to used to the complexity of Microsoft’s products and so obsessed with compatibility with Windows that we’ve forgotten what we wanted them for in the first place.