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Friday, May 24, 2002 |
 Baby Bells win FCC victory. Local telephone companies win a major victory when an appeals court overturns a Federal Communications Commission ruling that requires them to share lines with their competitors. [CNET News.com] Ooftah! Monopolists win. Of course, they never realy did offer competition due to service delays and outages, but hey, stupid monopolists never did compete fairly. This includes Microsoft. As smart as I think they were, that has passed. There are lots of mistakes/blunders/stupidity $30 b in cash and a guaranteed cash flow can hide. We are difinitely seeing that now. Sorry guys. Prove me wrong.
Hey, I remember the Hailstorm briefing. I sat in front of a row of Microsoft guys. Everytime someone asked about fairness and even mild forms of competition, they whined in unison: "how can we make money if we don't control it." Damn, that is weeny. Compete, acquire, and push forward. Don't avoid competition, it creates the best products. Create competition in areas that aren't decided or mature.
7:29:32 PM 
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Help Ed: Translation, Please: A Blogging Challenge
I haven't seen a full transcript posted on the Web of the embarassing speech delivered by Rev.Sun Myung Moon at the recent birthday party for The Washington Times, the Fox News Channel of newspapers, which Moon founded. English translations of the hour-long speech were made available to attendees, and I would love to see one.
The speech doesn't seem to be on the Washington Times site. In fact, judging from that paper's coverage, you would think the Reverend made the briefest of appearances. It's almost as if the editors were mortified that their supposedly hands-off boss commandeered the podium and undid some of the credibility his paper had garnered over the last two decades. I can't find the speech on Moon's site, either. [EdCone.com]
6:31:21 PM
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Anita Roddick. The display of this ad will entice a ceast and desist order. >>>This is not the first time I have had an ad censored. In 1998 Mattel sent The Body Shop a cease-and-desist order, demanding we pull our self-esteem posters featuring Ruby -- a rubenesque anti-Barbie -- from American shop windows, because she was insulting to the real Barbie. <<<
6:09:40 PM
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News.com. AT&T standardizes broadband speeds. 1.5 Mbs down and 256 Mbs up for $45 a month. Note: I just talked to an AT&T rep that was working on a neighbor's system about plans to roll out digital cable (a must for someone with a digital theater) and broadband access. He told me that the CableVision conversion is going to Stowe first, Littleton, and then Acton. Stowe should be up next month and Acton by the end of the year (this has been the first firm estimate I have gotten since the AT&T ran out of money last year). BTW, here is a quote from the article that is interesting, can you tell me what is wrong with this?
>>>A small but vocal group of heavy AT&T customers--known derisively as "bandwidth hogs"--erupted angrily when their services were reduced in December. That is when AT&T migrated about 850,000 customers from Excite@Home and standardized their downstream speeds to 1.5 megabits of data per second. Some customers said they could receive 4 megabits downstream from their old service--even though they didn't get a reduction in price.<<<
Answer: somebody at AT&T called customers "bandwidth hogs" How else could you explain this term turning up in the article? Now, I can understand a vendor being upset if someone was using a product in a way it wasn't intended (using a personal product for business use), or worse, stealing the service outright. We all know that companies (vendors) consist of people that are invested in the business (they like to get paid). But this isn't right.
5:36:40 PM
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Business 2.0 Futureboy on the state of online music. No solutions, just a sense that something is wrong. It's clear to me that an all-you-can download service is the way to go but Adam doesn't go there in this article. Monthly fees for a feed and not per unit pricing is the ticket to a vibrant online content market. Turn on the firehose that can fill up hard drive space and watch people line up to get in front of it.
12:01:35 PM
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The Economist. Are media conglomerates a bad idea? Not really, if creativity in distribution technologies and content can be hoovered up and integrated quickly. The key is to be able to recognize innovation and pump it through the system.
>>>Just as with “Spider-Man” and the latest “Star Wars” movie, however, these films were “pre-sold”: everybody knew about them before they were made, let alone released. A better test of what AOL can really bring to the party is whether it can lift a mediocre piece of content. “Cats & Dogs”, for instance, a forgettable part-animated children's film that Warner Brothers released last year, might have sunk into obscurity had AOL not picked it up and, as Bob Pittman, the group's chief operating officer, puts it, “turned the firehose” on it. AOL stuck images and news about the film on its welcome screen and devised competitions and games around it. The movie made a respectable $93m at the American box office. <<<
>>>The first force works with media because, unlike toothpaste or cornflakes, there is little extra cost in distributing a piece of content to 10m viewers or to 5m. As Christopher Dixon of UBS Warburg, an investment bank, argues: “The media business is all about the ability to spread the cost of content across as broad a distribution network as possible.” Once the cost of making a TV show has been recovered, the revenue gleaned from anybody else who can be persuaded to watch it flows straight to the bottom line.<<<
11:46:00 AM
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School Blogs. Marcus Mauller. Why doesn't each student get an iPod or equivalent to store all their work, and more importantly Radio? That would allow students to roam with their published work, personal music, and docs etc from shared computer to shared computer. A storage device is less expensive and more robust than a laptop, particularly for high school students. For professionals, this solves the home/work computer problem.
11:30:29 AM
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The Fortune Weblog. The video game industry is booming. Watch in November for "The Sims Online," from Electronic Arts. "The Sims" is the most successful video game ever, with nearly 17 million copies sold to date. (Here's an interesting demographic point: Half the players are female.) I saw demonstrations of "The Sims Online" yesterday, and the multiplayer aspects of the game add tremendously to its appeal. If the online version clicks, watch for rivals to accelerate their own online plans.
10:41:50 AM
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FT. Everything has to end sometime, including Japanese recessions. >>>If Japan cannot consolidate itself out of debt problems, it must grow its way out. But that too is difficult. Not only is the economy facing increasing pressure from China, which is sucking jobs and investment away daily; it is also burdened with a rigid labour market and a highly regulated economy.<<< The only way out is computer automation and its attendant productivity growth (computers in the hands of consumers as well as corporate employees). I-mode phones aren't going to do it.
10:30:06 AM
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© Copyright 2004 John Robb.
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