|
|
|
|
|
|
|
|
|
Posted Friday, November 29, 2002 Cheap, Theft-proof ID?This essay by Clay Shirky is one of the most interesting things I've come across in months. The central assumption that he makes is this:
Shirky draws many interesting implications from this assumption. Perhaps most striking is his view that it will facilitate identification and validation systems as peer-to-peer applications rather than a centralized database. This creates a very different set of risks and opportunities than those that are usually part of the privacy/security discussion. Go read the entire essay. Two or three times. . . . . . .
Posted Tuesday, November 26, 2002 Developing-Country Wireless FactoidsIt was worth scrolling through a long, kinda boring Howard Rheingold chat recap to uncover these.
On another topic, Rheingold says that economists do not understand how eBay can exist. Presumably, this is because there is a problem of rip-offs in one-time transactions. But that problem exists in all sorts of contexts, and people manage. My own view has always been that eBay had the best business model on the Web. Terrific network effects--very hard to undermine your franchise once you're established. They're taking the classified advertising franchise away from newspapers. I cannot think of any reason why eBay should function less well than newspaper classifieds, and I can think of a ton of reasons why they can function better. So whoever the economist was who said that eBay cannot work is a, is a...well, let's just say that their thinking was a little different from mine. . . . . . .
Posted Monday, November 25, 2002 Convenience is KingBack when AOL had a brain, Barry Schuler used to say that "Convenience is King." This Microsoft paper says the same thing.
Somebody tell that to Movielink. It really is simple. If you have the most convenient distribution system, then you do not have to worry about somebody "stealing" your songs, or you movies, or what have you. People will pay for convenience. On the other hand, the more you try to "protect" your content, the less convenient you make it, and the less revenue you are likely to earn from it. The entertainment industry is being steered by its lawyers in a direction that minimizes profits and consumer welfare. . . . . . .
Posted Sunday, November 24, 2002 Tax ReformEver wonder what kind of tax system an economist would like to see? Try the 'Jane Galt' plan. I have a few more comments on her plan here. . . . . . .
Misc.This column by Peter Lewis touches humorously on a number of issues. He is less thrilled than Dan Bricklin with tablet PC's. He's more impressed by the idea of taking a flat-panel monitor for a standard PC and making it portable with a wireless connection. He reports that these so-called "smart displays" will be available early next year. But my favorite line comes from his retrospective on past years of Comdex.
That suggests a slogan: Unix--the Chicago Cubs of operating systems. . . . . . .
Why Tablets Now?My view is that when a concept fails once, it is destined to fail again. Dan Bricklin argues that tablet PC's can succeed now, because
. . . . . .
Posted Friday, November 22, 2002 How to Kill an IdeaThe issue of whether anonymity is a bug or a feature of the Internet is widely debated. But if your objective is to treat it as a bug, then you do not invite these people to discuss it.
Asking Whit Diffie about ending anonymity on the Internet is like floating the idea of gay marriage with Jerry Falwell. Obviously, somebody at the Defense Department did not want the government to get tangled up into the whole digital identity thing. Meanwhile, I find it fascinating that when a "cool Netizen" like Jon Udell or Kevin Werbach knocks anonymity, people engage in a rational discussion. When a government agency brings it up, the knees start jerking. For example, Philippe DeCroy offers up this principle:
And the Great Mentioner sees this as profound. I'm sorry, but if you think about that principle for awhile, you will realize it's a crock. Would you give your enemies the power to serve as judges if you were on trial? No. So therefore there should be no judges at a trial. Would you give your enemies your credit card number? No. Therefore, you should never use a credit card. Trust is an important asset. As Brink Lindsey points out, a major difference between advanced economies and backward societies is the superiority of our trust networks. If everyone were as keen on anonymity and distrustful of government as DeCroy and Reynolds, we would be rather backward. . . . . . .
Cable TV With Training WheelsAOL used to be derided as the Internet with training wheels. The Time-Warner crowd wants to change that.
With this kind of thinking at AOL, maybe MSN will become a monopoly after all. People don't go online for "programming." They want opportunities to connect with one another. AOL used to understand that. . . . . . .
Posted Thursday, November 21, 2002 Network Consumer ElectronicsIntuition suggests that this is the next big thing. As one person put it,
I guess "network consumer electronics" has more gravitas than "thingies." I keep thinking about two questions. First, what will be the right form factors? I continue to think that headsets will be important. Maybe it's the fact that I am penmanship-challenged, but I can't get excited about writing on a tablet PC. Second, what will be the compelling application? People always like to make free phone calls, so I think voice-over-IP on wireless networks could be a sudden craze (I feel a song coming on). Otherwise, I would look for vertical applications in the "productivity-resistant" sectors of the economy, notably health care and education. I cannot see a new general-purpose killer application on the horizon. But then again, who saw spreadsheets? Finally, I'm bearish on the future of Windows in network consumer electronics. It seems to me to be way too much baggage. The chips may be able to handle it, but what about the batteries? If you want long battery life, my guess is that you want an operating system with a much smaller footprint. . . . . . .
Characteristics of EntrepreneursAccording to this article,
Thanks to Dan Pink for the pointer. . . . . . .
Posted Tuesday, November 19, 2002 Unix: a Fossil?In a wide-ranging talk on artificial intelligence, Marvin Minsky says,
One picture of the future is that there will be a lot of embedded computing, with radios/computers in devices talking to one another. A personal computer reacts to conscious input from a human, and operating systems like Unix or Windows have evolved to serve in that context. But an embedded computer may react more to environmental stimuli or to signals from other embedded computers. Maybe the operating system that is optimal for that context is nothing like the operating systems that are prevalent currently. . . . . . .
Microsoft Divides up P&LMicrosoft released a profit report that allocated profits and losses by division. These reportedly showed a high profit margin in the divisions that sell Windows(tm) and Office(tm). But they showed losses in four other division, including MSN. Kevin Werbach asks
First of all, who knows how the accounting tracks the economics? For example, the MSN "icon" on Windows is deemed by competitors to be highly valuable. How did Microsoft account for this? Did they charge the MSN division a shadow price for all the promotion it received from the Windows division? If so, did they charge too much? Too little? My guess is that, if anything, MSN lost more than what the accounts show. To me, this shows that Microsoft's monopoly power and marketing prowess are over-rated. . . . . . .
Will Spam Kill Email?Kevin Werbach thinks so.
He thinks that filtering will never defeat spam. I completely disagree. I think that statistical filtering, implemented at the individual level, will work. Spammers may be able to defeat generic filters, but a filter that I tune myself, by sorting my own email, will beat the spammers. I use something called Pocomail now. Its filters are rule-based, rather than statistics-based, but my ability to add new rules with a click of a mouse makes it easy to convert it into a pretty decent filter. . . . . . .
Posted Sunday, November 17, 2002 Camera Phones to Outsell PDA'sI continue to believe that Palm-thingies are not a success. One of the weblogs that I check regularly, gizmodo.com, points to an article comparing the market for camera phones to the market for PDA's.
. . . . . .
Posted Saturday, November 16, 2002 Strict or Nurturant?When Democrats like Paul Krugman argue that the country is polarized along economic class lines, I wonder if they have looked at an electoral map. The richest counties in the country, including mine, are reliably Democratic. The broad middle of the country is reliably Republican. To understand the real basis for political division in America, everyone should read George Lakoff's book, Moral Politics. Lakoff argues that people think of government metaphorically as a parent. Conservatives want a "Strict Father" and liberals want a "Nurturant Parent." For example, today's Washington Post has a story about a new policy in Virginia not to enroll illegal immigrants in the state. The Republican Attorney General speaks in Strict Father dialect.
The story quotes some opponents of the policy, who take the Nurturant Parent stance. For example,
One of the reasons that I believe that this year's election results were ephemeral is that the election was conducted in an environment that was ideal for promoting the Strict Father point of view. With the memory of September 11, 2001 still fresh, the biggest story in the month leading up to the election was the DC sniper case. The suspects turned out to be an illegal immigrant and someone who had changed his name to Muhammad. My guess is that this helped energize the Strict Father voters and enervated Nurturant Parent voters. On the issue of enrolling illegal immigrants, I do not believe that colleges should be the border patrol. If someone is living here, legally or otherwise, I doubt that I want to create a disincentive for that person to attend college. However, we cannot have any kind of rational immigration policy until we know who the immigrants are. As long as we remain paranoid about efforts to obtain and store information about our population, our policies will be haphazard, ineffective, and abusive of the freedom that the anti-database Luddites claim to want to protect. . . . . . .
Posted Wednesday, November 13, 2002 Frankston on Bluetooth
I think he has strong feelings about the separation of connectivity from applications, and I gather that Bluetooth does not respect those feelings. . . . . . .
Posted Tuesday, November 12, 2002 Instead of a StylusI like the idea of a virtual keyboard. Some kind of virtual cursor control would be nice, also. Add in a flexible screen, that you can open up to any size, put in your lap, or put on the wall. Include a headset, and then you have the functionality of a phone and a PC, with a lot of portability. In my opinion, flexible screen size is important. If tablet PC's don't have that property, I think that will be a problem for them. I want the screen to be small when I'm selecting a phone number, and I want it to be big when I'm giving a talk in a classroom. When I'm writing an essay or surfing the web, I want something in between. . . . . . .
Expensing Stock OptionsHere is an interesting issue, from an Economist article spotted by Brad DeLong.
In other words, Scholes wants to expense the options once and then forget about them. Rubinstein wants to mark them to market in subsequent years. If what you are trying to do is measure the cost of attracting and holding employees, then a case can be made for Scholes' view. That is, if like Warren Buffett you see options as compensation, then the question is, how much value did the company have to give its employees in order to attract and retain them? That argues for looking at the expense at the time of grant. On the other hand, suppose that you are trying to measure the company's income as the change in its balance sheet. In that case, you need to mark its (short) option position to market continuously. I think that companies should report both. They should report the cost of options granted in the current period, and they should also report the effect of marking to market the options granted in previous years. That way, you get both a measure of compensation costs and a measure of the change in the balance sheet. . . . . . .
Posted Monday, November 11, 2002 Consumers Own the Infrastructure?Pundits talk about the Internet as consisting of a hardware infrastructure layer, a software layer, and a content layer. I can remember Mario Morino saying that the Washington, DC metropolitan area was strong in the hardware infrastructure space and strong in the content layer space. But Bob Frankston says that neither hardware infrastructure nor content will have business models, because both will be supplied by consumers. Here, Frankston is quoted thusly:
The idea is that the wireless last mile will involve people owning equipment that can communicate, rather than relying on phone company equipment. . . . . . .
Posted Friday, November 8, 2002 Re-trying a Failed ConceptOne of the most fascinating phenomena in technology is a concept that some people are sure will work but which nonetheless fails when first tried. Usually, on reflection it often is the concept, rather than the implementation, that is flawed. Examples include picturephones, micropayments, and video on demand. In fact, it is hard to think of many counter-examples, in which a concept failed the first time but later succeeded. If you are willing to call Palm Pilots a success, then that might be a counter-example, because the Apple Newton PDA was a conspicuous failure. So what about tablet PC's? Basically, every attempt to detach the keyboard from a PC has failed. Speech recognition is perennially promising, never satisfying. Touch screens and styluses also have not caught on (unless, again, you consider Palm-thingies a success). I can see in a classroom that it would be handy to have a tablet that connects wirelessly to a wall display, so you can sketch things for students. But that is a specialized use, not a generic one. . . . . . .
Posted Thursday, November 7, 2002 Misleading Election Results?The snafu with this year's exit polling deprives us of the data that we could use to understand the results. However, the last pre-election Gallup Poll offers some interesting insights. I was surprised to see that in the 18-34 year-old age group, Democrats were strongly preferred to Republicans. I thought that on the Social Security issue, the Democrats would have support from seniors and the Republicans would do better with younger voters. Also, the only issue that seemed to motivate people to support Republicans was terrorism. All the other issues were neutral or tilted people toward Democrats. Two years from now, assuming that turnout among young voters increases (as it tends to do during Presidential years) and that terrorism is not such a dominant issue, the Republicans could have problems. . . . . . .
Posted Wednesday, November 6, 2002 Schools of ThoughtIn the Microsoft trial, why was the economist who testified in favor of Microsoft (Kevin Murphy) from the University of Chicago and why was the economist on the other side (Carl Shapiro) from Berkeley? It could have something to do with what's in the water.
This is just one of many differences between the two major schools of thought that I discuss in my essay. . . . . . .
Posted Monday, November 4, 2002 Big Buzzwords, Loosely CoupledWhen I Googled "loosely coupled Web Services" today, I got 414 results. One of the hits was for a blog on Looselycoupled.com, which in turn had a pointer to an article by John Hagel, a consultant who specializes in buzzwords.
Another hit was for Microsoft, which evidently is down with the new jive.
Back when I ran Homefair, we had a calculator to help you estimate the cost of an interstate move. The calculator required mileage as one of the inputs, and we used Mapquest to compute the mileage, based on the origin and destination cities supplied by the user. Mapquest gave us an interface (for a fee), and in the background we passed messages back and forth to them. That was over five years ago, before we had these new buzzwords to describe what we were doing. On the other hand, when we wanted to interface with demographic cluster data from CACI, we had to get their data on a CD and build our own application. I guess they did not have a loosely-coupled version, probably because they were an older company that pre-dated the Web by many years. Hagel is correct that business philosophy matters. We wanted to use Freddie Mac information to create a calculator for people to estimate the current market value of any home, but their bureaucracy could not process the request. I find it fascinating that Microsoft, whose Evil Empire is built on the buzzwords "tightly integrated," is now aggressively pushing something that seems to be the exact opposite. Other people may see something sinister at work, but I see it as simply reflecting that Microsoft's core strategy is to mobilize the best software developers. The best software developers are psyched about loosely coupled web services. And I didn't even know the buzzword until today. . . . . . .
Taking Two SidesIt seems to me that Dan Gillmor is contradicting himself. On the one hand, he wants a government project to provide broadband.
On the other hand, he says,
It seems to me that if the wireless last mile works, then a government crash program to bring broadband is just as irrelevant as the "sleazy machinations of the cable and phone monpolies." . . . . . .
Powell sounds radicalFCC Chairman Michael Powell made remarks that are sympathetic to those who support radical change in spectrum regulation.
I find this quite remarkable. Usually, policymakers are clueless. They enact Internet censorship laws, or draconian "copyright protection" laws, etc. Instead, Powell seems quite willing to accept that new technology should change our thinking on regulation. . . . . . .
Posted Saturday, November 2, 2002 The Real Microsoft VerdictMultiple choice question: What was the net outcome of the Microsoft case? a) Consumers benefited b) Microsoft benefited c) Microsoft's rivals benefited d) the attorneys collected their fees The answer seemed obvious to me all along. I rest my case. . . . . . .
On the other hand...While IBM pursues no-demand computing, Intel goes after markets that look interesting.
. . . . . .
Posted Friday, November 1, 2002 Private Sector SurveillanceThe issue of surveillance is becoming increasingly important. People worry about government use of biometric ID's as a threat to freedom. However, Clyde Wayne Crews, Jr. sees less reason to worry about their use in the private sector.
I hope that we continue to discuss these issues. We need arrive at conscious decisions about the uses of biometrics and surveillance. My concern is that instead of thinking things through, we will stumble our way into practices that benefit neither security nor privacy. . . . . . .
Copyright 2002-2003 Arnold Kling. All rights reserved. Terms of use |
|
|
