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| Saturday, October 15, 2005 |
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A silo for where the iMoon don't shine 
Hope for life beyond Service of the Living Dead
| | Tim Jarrett: I want a moratorium on the word consumer—both because it is disrespectful and because it builds bad thinking habits in companies that sell to "consumers." He adds, |
| | First, where is the service offering for geeks? Second, how insidious is this C word that there are not even product offerings to meet the needs of real people for symmetric download/upload speeds? No, all "home users" (my other favorite condescending euphemism for real people) need to do is download other peoples' stuff. |
| | I knew a company once that had two businesses. Sometimes Business A would pull the wagon more than Business B; and sometimes it would be the other way around. Whenever Business B carried the company, no big deal was made about it, other than the need to beef up Business A. But when Business A carried the company, Business B was considered a burden. |
| | Truth was, the company only did Business B because it had to. But Business A was where it came from. That was the legacy, the anchoring understanding of What Kind of Company it is. When it looked in the mirror, it saw Business A. |
| | Phone and cable companies will never be Internet companies. Never. Nor will Newspapers or TV networks. But the latter don't matter as much, because they don't deliver Internet service to homes and businesses. Phone and cable companies do. The Net depends on them. |
| | If Phone and cable companies took the trouble to provide unencumbered symmetrical service — same speeds up and down, with no port blockages (or at least the option for responsible customers to operate through unblocked ports) — and stood prepared to help individuals and businesses of every size use the Net in original ways that they, the customers see fit — to engage in Free Enterprise in the free and open marketplace the Net truly is — countless ways of making money on service to those customers would manifest themselves to the providing companies. |
| | For example, I would gladly pay $100 per month for a block of six IP addresses, no port blockages, and 1Mb of symmetrical service to my home. I would also gladly pay more on a tiered basis for higher levels of traffic and higher grades of provisioned service. Also perhaps for hosting. Offsite data backup (a potentially huge business for which high upstream speeds are required). And perhaps much more. And I'm sure there are millions of small businesses out there that would be glad to do the same. But most of us are stuck with a choice between 1) a shitty asymmetrical service from a phone company that wishes it could still charge for time and distance; and 2) and a shitty asymmetrical service from a cable company that wishes it were still just in the TV channel delivery business. Worse, when these two kinds of utilities each think of expanding beyond their shrinking legacy business, they look to compete with the other utility's shrinking legacy business: TV over phone lines vs. VoIP over cable. |
| | The answer won't come from fixing the phone and cable companies. There is no hope for them; and they will suck to death. Eventually. (Yes, the ice caps may melt faster, but the trend is still clear.) |
| | The answer can only come from large native Internet companies. Of which there are only two candidates: Google and Yahoo. (Microsoft should be a candidate too, but what Dave said about Microsoft and RSS applies here too. If Microsoft were as smart as they always say they are, they'd have bought and ruggedized a Live Web (RSS) search company a long time ago, and mooshed results together with their equivalent of PageRank in their main engine. They'd have time-based Live Web along with Wide Web search. They could offer a zillion ways to dig down in the domains of time and tags and much more than The Usual Search Stuff. But I see few signs they get the possibilities here; beyond Scoble, who sounds like a voice in the company wilderness. They don't get it because they're not a native Internet company. They're a PC software company trying to cope with Life on the Net, just like the rest of the non-natives.) |
| | Google wants 'dark fiber', we've been hearing for awhile. Good. I hope they get plenty of it, and fill the air with Wi-Fi too — or whatever else it takes to bypass the "last mile" of asymmetric nonsense we've had for the last ten years from the cable and phone companies. And I hope Yahoo competes with them, to make the market truly competitive. |
| | Meanwhile, we mull the offerings of corpses. |
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