Internet

Unsung Technological Advances

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One truism on Technology is that the initial media splash and the early adopters skew trends by making them seem to have more impact than they actually do. It is often the slower, longer “tail” of a trend that causes the most significant change, even if by then the media has passed the story by because it is no longer “hot”.

Two items happened last week that show a profound technology advancement that is by now ubiquitous and thus rarely commented on by the media. These two items are 1) the vast scope of online gaming and 2) Craigslist and its impact on retail.

While watching the Bears get killed on Sunday during half time, my nephew put on Call of Duty – Modern Warfare 2 which just got released in November, 2009 for Xbox. Already, there were masses of individuals online playing the game – there were over 800,000 users online AT THAT MOMENT. He joined a game, which was simple, and the intelligence split up the team members based on their levels so that the two teams were balanced. It is just amazing how easy it is to join these games and play infinitely, against other human opponents – this used to be hard to do (Dan and I played online a long time ago) and now it is not only a snap but there are hundreds of thousands of opponents ready to play a huge variety of missions at any time day or night. Also, Xbox, which was viewed as behind Wii and PS3, is now a leader in online gaming which is a huge differentiator against the other consoles, while this wasn’t viewed as a critical factor at the time the consoles all emerged.

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Back to Business

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I usually read articles about business management the way my dog watches us eat dinner: with hope – never quite crushed, no matter how seldom fulfilled – that some toothsome morsel will come to me. This one was a nice meaty steak, fresh from the grill. If you have anything to do with corporate IT, whether as a member, manager, or customer, read it. The premise is that geeks value competence, logic, and contribution, and reward these attributes with respect. Looking at that statement logically, you can see that the contra-positive must also be true: if you are not getting respect from your IT department, you should look to yourself to see why not. If you ask a good IT person to do something dumb, illogical, or counter-productive, he will object. If you force the issue, you may get compliance but you will certainly forfeit respect. This is where a good IT department will start to rot. IT people tend to view management incompetence as a bug, and if they cannot fix it, they will come up with a work-around. If the bug is in corporate management, the IT department will pursue paths that they believe are better for the company’s interests than what they were told to do. If the bug is in IT management, there will be subversion, factionalism, and low morale, since the IT staff knows that IT management is not effectively representing them to the rest of the company. Either situation causes a split between IT and the rest of the company which may not even be recognized until there is a major failure.

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How the Apple Tablet Could Save Computing

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Popular Science bitches and moans about how the rumored Apple Tablet could ruin computing. [h/t Instapundit]

The Apple Tablet is rumored to be a cross between a laptop and an iPhone.  The iPhone isn’t really a cell phone, rather, it is a handheld computer employing a touch interface with a  cell phone  built-in. It uses a slimmed down version of Apple’s MacOS X operating system that Apple uses on all its computers. This makes it easy to make an actual laptop-like device that uses the iPhone’s operating system complete with the special cell-phone associated attributes of the handheld.

In PopSci’s thinking, this is a problem because the iPhone’s default setup only allows people to use software written by independent developers but approved by Apple installed exclusively by being downloaded from Apple’s App Store. According to PopSci, this is bad because if this model spreads to all computers, people wouldn’t have the same level of flexibility to run any software they please on the new type of computer as they do on current ones.

PopSci needs to rethink that because without a new business model to pay for the creation and distribution of software, there won’t be any software for people to run.  You can’t make money anymore writing and selling software using the current business models. PopSci isn’t saving freedom for end users, they’re killing it. Apple is saving the freedom of end users by making it possible for software developers who aren’t giant corporations to make a living at writing software.

The iPhone and its App store recently convinced me to return to writing software directly for end users and I am far from alone in doing so. The iPhone app store has ignited a renaissance in software development and PopSci shouldn’t be trying to abort that. We don’t need a software Bonfire of the Vanities.

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Quote of the Day

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But beyond humor that misses, with some audiences or with all, what characterizes snark? Two things, I think. One is that it is an appeal to emotion – it is a statement with a particular affect, and the affect is an appeal to an attitude in which both writer and reader participate, but they participate in an exclusionary way. This is what makes it a branch of irony. Instead of arguing to everyone on the basis of shared reason so that, at least in principle, everyone could be included in the shared sentiment, snark depends upon exclusion. It is a refusal to offer a public argument, with the possibility of reasoned inclusion, and instead depends upon prior shared views that merely exclude because snark does not make an attempt to persuade. It is ‘affectively exclusionary’ in the language of moral psychology.
 
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Two, because snark depends upon a prior shared commitment, it is a form of question-begging argument. Not precisely a form of argument, because it is about affect, not reason. So, more precisely, snark is the affective cognate of a question-begging argument, in which the sentiment of the conclusion assumes the sentiment of the premise. It assumes that one already shares the attitudes necessary to … share the attitudes.

–Kenneth Anderson

Blogging and Marginal Cost

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A recent article in the NY Times titled “Blogs Falling In An Empty Forest” described the apparently common phenomenon of people starting blogs, and then abandoning them. Per the article

According to a 2008 survey by Technorati, which runs a search engine for blogs, only 7.4 million out of the 133 million blogs the company tracks had been updated in the past 120 days. That translates to 95 percent of blogs being essentially abandoned

The article went on to describe some common situations; a stay-at-home mom trying to earn some money from her blog, or talking about their personal beliefs and such. The blogs seemed to promise profitability, but didn’t deliver, even if they had a reasonable amount of page views.

The writer of the article was clearly a journalist and not an economist – the economist would have immediately proffered the explanation for why this occurs

The marginal revenue for this product ultimately will be equal to the marginal cost

And what is the marginal cost for setting up a blog? Why it is roughly zero, of course. And with millions setting up blogs and “chasing” (or not, in the case of LITGM and many other blogs we know and like) page views and advertising dollars, the market was instantly overloaded with choices and soon became a mass of abandoned blogs.

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