Category: Analysis

I loved this talk by Howard Rheingold: “The computer industry did not create the personal computer; it was created by people in their 20s who wanted a tool of their own. The Internet was created for the most part by people in their 20s, not the phone company. They didn’t know what the tool was for, but they knew that other people would invent uses — they built the Internet without a central control, to enable innovation.”
This is important to remember at this moment, another inflection point in the history of the Net. The intellectual property hoarders, the computer industry and the government are trying to find common ground in restricting our access to and ability to build on what we have already created.

I just saw an ad for Barbara Walters’ to-be-broadcast interview with Carol Burnett.
In the ad, Barbara asks Carol about the death of her daughter. You can see Carol’s eyes welling up before she answers the question. What a moment.
We, as a nation licking our wounds for the ninth consecutive month, cannot miss this. One National Treasure interviews another–and brings her to tears. Carol is unashamed to weep on national television, and ABC News is unashamed to put it there.
Barbara Walters has brought others to tears–Fidel Castro, Pope John Paul I, J.D. Salinger, Slobodon Milosevic–but each time it happens again it is more transcendent than the last.
Once again, Barbara makes it clear that these beings we call celebrities are all too human.
Until Internet news can do that, it’s not worthy of being called “journalism”.

Here’s a cardboard tag I found attached to the neck of a bottle of “Mystic Cliffs White Merlot”.
What caught my eye, even before the novel notion of white merlot, was the large “88” on the tag, which looks a lot like a Wine Spectator score.
You look a little closer and you see that “88 percent of consumers prefer…” Aha! They conducted a taste test and determined that the average shopping mall patron prefers it to…what?
Take another look: “88 percent of consumers prefer the color of White Merlot to White Zinfandel”.
Admit it: some days you’re ashamed to say you make your living in marketing.

Don’t confuse the future of news with the future of newspapers
It’s not a foregone conclusion that newspapers will dominate online news, unless you believe that the future of online news will be repurposed from other media. There’s a reason that newspaper experiments with television and radio have failed and their web sites will fail — media don’t converge, they diverge.
Read “The Innovator’s Dilemma” again. The news of the future probably won’t be copyrighted by Belo or Gannett or Knight-Ridder — or Disney or Microsoft or AOL/TW for that matter. The cost structures and margins are so much lower in online publishing that newspapers are constitutionally incapable of adapting. Someone else will do it for them. Just because this didn’t happen in 1999, that doesn’t mean it isn’t going to happen.
What percentage of newspapers’ budgets are spent gathering and editing local news? When you subtract production, distribution, advertising sales, world/national news and feature syndication fees, and all the editing and overhead allocated to these functions, what share of a newspaper’s budget is spent on the one thing they do that no one else does better?
Now, give that budget to a much smaller company with no unions, no corporate parent/stockholders demanding a 25% profit margin, zero marginal costs, and a drive to deep link promiscuously.
Smells like the future of news to me.

Recently A.H. Belo’s Dallas Morning News and Rodale’s Runner’s World have sent cease-and-desist letters to indepedent web sites to make them stop linking to stories on their sites (“deep-linking”) instead of to their home pages. [Thanks to Chilling Effects for posting the letters.]
Rodale and Belo are trying to exploit the Web while conducting their business so as to decrease its value for everyone else. They are strip-mining the commons.
They have three options:
1. Allow (or encourage) deep linking and take advantage of the network effect to increase their business and improve the value of their product to their customers.
2. Use simple technical means to prevent unauthorized deep linking. This is boneheaded and self-destructive, but it is legal, moral, and ethical.
3. Use lawyers to assert their unproven right to prevent deep linking. This is not only less effective than (2), but also has a chilling effect on linking globally, decreasing the value of the Web for people who have never heard of Belo or Rodale and have no interest in their products.
I have no problem with the media making money on the Web. My livelihood depends on it. But the Web doesn’t owe them a business model. If publishers want to move their product on the Web, it’s up to them to make the numbers work, and not up to everyone else to turn the Web into a “virtual newsstand”.
Belo and Rodale are pillaging the Web by trying to make it more like print so they can make a buck. The tragic irony is that they will fail. But the damage they do could be permanent.

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.