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Wednesday, September 03, 2003 |
 First day of school for the girls (Aaron goes tomorrow):
 Elena
 Rachel
 Irene
6:08:24 PM 
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AP: Ousted Army secretary, Thomas White, blasts Pentagon handling of Iraq and Afghanistan in new book. The payback is just starting.
"We did not conduct the war this way and we should not continue rebuilding the country in a haphazard manner," he wrote. "The result will be a financial disaster, more lives lost, chaos in Iraq and squandered American goodwill."
2:57:12 PM
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This last weekend my brother and I were discussing how long it would take for reusable digital cameras to become as inexpensive as calculators (from $1 to ~$125). It's fairly clear that the feature set for digital cameras can't extend indefinitely, as has the personal computer (many people thought that PCs would go the way of calculators in the early 80s). So, the question is: when does the market run out of gas (product differentiation) and move to pure price competition? There clearly isn't much more headroom in megapixel growth (4 MP is fine for most purposes, particularly when the photos look fantastic on a $150 photo printer or on a 21" monitor). I expect that differentiator to fade when we hit 7 MP in less than 2 years.
Next is storage. Disk drives, ala personal storage devices (iPod and Archos), will clearly eliminate memory sticks and insertable memory soon. 10 gigabytes of storage will hold 10,000 photos. The next phase will be digital video features and increased memory to hold those videos. That race will end in the next five years with 1600x1200 XGA resolution and 500 gigabytes of memory (enough to hold ~5,000 3 minute clips). Other items we will see on the way include solid state lens technology, larger viewing screens, and wireless connectivity (all of which have limited headroom for differentiation).
Pure price competition is on the way and I suspect we will see the first reusable 7 MP digital camera available for under $20 in five years.
2:09:57 PM
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Bloggingworks is a new company focused on blogging workshops.
1:43:37 PM
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Scott Reynan is moving his RSS job feeds tool to Disemployed.com. He is planning on doing some work with OPML directories of employers too. Very cool. To make this really zoooom a browser that could read OPML with all the bells and wistles provided by a desktop O/S is needed.
1:35:50 PM
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Macnn. Laptops are now outselling desktops. The trend towards laptops will continue. So, Apple's 7% market share in laptop sales indicates that its overall market share will climb over the next couple of years. Is platform lock-in declining as we move to a) higher levels of ergonomics and usability required for the efficient use of laptop PCs (Apple's strength) and b) an increasing trend towards Web based software (which is platform agnostic)? Mitch switched.
1:30:02 PM
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Ed Cone asks: "What would Jesus do?"
1:13:09 PM
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Lots of people are talking about links as the currency of the weblog world. I like the market metaphor. Biological metaphors for this are better. A link within this context is the firing of a neuronal synapse in the emerging global mind. A formal connection is an RSS subscription through the physical extension of an axon terminal to an adjacent neuron.
1:10:30 PM
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© Copyright 2004 John Robb.
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