Tech

A WSJ (subscription only) column explains the issue WRT to telephones, but the point applies to all media that transmit information at the pace of speech:

. . . Given a choice, who uses the phone anymore? Talking — whether on a cellphone, a landline, or some VOIP-y instant-messenger doodad — can be time-consuming and ponderous, and costs money. E-mail is a cold and barren medium, but it’s efficient, and we don’t have to wait for the bozo on the other end to hang up — we just hit escape. Anyway, we can read much faster than we can listen — all that spam in your inbox is annoying, but just imagine if it were voicemail.

Not only can we read much faster than we can listen, but with text we can easily read ahead or reread what we’ve already read. Simple and efficient.

Text is for communication, speech is social. While speech is useful for communication, text tends to displace it in uses where efficient communication is more important than sociability. For example, text messaging and text email access are popular cellphone features but email-to-voice translation never took off.

The use of text to transmit information will continue to increase as productivity increases continue to make everyone’s time worth more. The model for the future is not video blogging or video phones but specialist blogs and RSS feeds, and other text-based information filters on the margins of the network. Voice and video will remain the province of calls to your mom, business meetings, some news reports and a narrow range of other applications, where the social information conveyed by speech or the visual information conveyed by video is valuable enough to outweigh the speed advantage of pure text.

Sanford Lakoff’s “Higher Education Needs Guardians of Learning” is nostalgic but acknowledges technology helps us become better writers (as well as freeing us from spending our lives on others’ words). Sure, ink wells and the Palmer method were aesthetically pleasing. (Not that all that penmanship was lovely – ask anyone who has struggled through manuscripts by Thoreau or Faulkner.) The advances are greater than he implies, since the future he describes in his penultimate sentence is here: “Then will come virtual courses, with no need for personal attendance in classrooms.” Nor are the readers of this blog likely to embrace his conclusion: “No wonder Socrates thought that, in a utopia, we would need guardians to set the rules and control change.” Our passion is for the beautifully turned phrase and the precise wording that captures an idea; this is the essence – we respect that whether it is on papyrus or paper or typed or word processed or blogged. We learn from and admire the understanding of the human condition whether it is in Sophocles or Lileks. The traditional genres may win out – but I don’t think we know that yet. Right now, blogs are defining it as we go. We know what we do now is transitory; but, in that future, will it all be? It won’t be guardians but experience and time that will mold this medium–as well as the art of teaching.

This post by Dan Gillmor contains a remark about spammers using non-existent return addresses that reminded me of something I learned from experience. Big-ISP email addresses that consist of short letter combinations are subject to use as phony return addresses on spam messages. (They are also subject to receiving spam generated by bots that spam all addresses from “aaa@xxx.com” to “zzz@xxx.com”.) One of my email addresses is “xxx@bigISP.com”, where “xxx” is a meaningless three-letter combination that I invented for reasons that don’t matter here. I rarely send mail from this address, yet it receive lots of spam. And from time to time I receive waves of bounced messages in which my address appears in the “reply to” field — IOW, a spammer forged my email address in his messages, and now, out of the thousands of unsolicited messages that he sent, the ones to bad addresses or full mailboxes get bounced to me. I’m sure that many of us have had similar experiences. Maybe the way to minimize this sort of thing is to use one’s own domain for one’s main email address. There may also be some value in making sure that the part of one’s email address that’s on the left of the “@” sign isn’t too short.

I just watched CNBC interview the CEO of a company that has introduced a disposable digital camera. The camera is inexpensive, and the idea is that you take pictures, then bring the camera to a Ritz Camera store to have the images printed and copied to CD.

Reviews (e.g., here and here) have been skeptical. The CNBC interviewer, who for a change knew what he was talking about, pointed out that the digital disposable combines the worst features of digital and film: the camera lacks an LCD preview/review window, is costly to use and still has to be taken to a store to have the pictures developed. The CEO, when questioned on these issues, replied with marketing spin.

The apparent idea behind this product, which seems generally inferior to conventional digital cameras and even disposable film cameras, is to make money for the retailer by forcing the consumer to pay to have his photos printed. (Given the flimsiness of the camera, I suspect there is also substantial markup built into its price.)

This business model won’t work, for the same reason FedEx’s ZapMail business model didn’t work. In both cases the merchant attempts to rent technology that consumers find more advantageous to own outright. Once you own a fax machine you eliminate any need to rent someone else’s. Once you own a digital camera and printer you remove the photo finisher from the print-production loop. There is no reason to go back, and attempts to convince people to go back — via gimmicks like “single use,” which has little if any benefit for digital cameras — are doomed to fail.

Clay Shirky wrote a brilliant essay about ZapMail and similar schemes. The gist of his argument: businesses that set themselves up to compete with their own customers are not likely to succeed. I think this argument applies perfectly to the business model here.

UPDATE: Kevin Brancato posts a thoughtful response to my argument. He is less skeptical than I am about the viability of this business model. I have some thoughts about his response and will post them later.

UPDATE 2: Here are my thoughts on Kevin’s argument.

Kevin argues that disposable digicams compete mainly with disposable film cameras, and that

There are two ways I see that Ritz can make money with the digital disposable model–both require lowering the total costs of disposable camera renting and printing. The first cost savings will come from the elimination of film development. The second could come if inspecting and reusing the “disposable” camera is cheaper than making a film throwaway.

Certainly there is a benefit from eliminating film development and from reusing cheap digital cameras. The problem for Ritz is that it can’t prevent consumers from capturing this entire benefit for themselves by buying their own digicams and printers. All that is necessary is for someone to introduce a cheap reusable digicam, which is surely not more difficult to develop than a cheap digicam that is fitted with devices to prevent consumers from downloading their photos on their own. (There are already $20 reusable digicams. Image quality is low, but there is no reason to think price and quality won’t improve.)

Kevin continues:

I think this will be profitable only when they 1) upgrade the picture quality to meet disposable film camera standards, and 2) get enough volume to pay off their fixed investments in technology.

Any technological improvements here will apply to cheap reusable digicams as well, so it’s unclear to me what Ritz’s edge is.

Kevin finds my argument — that a business model, based on merchant attempts to rent technology that consumers find more advantageous to own outright, will probably fail — unconvincing in this case because many consumers already show a preference to rent cheap camera equipment that they could own:

Consumers are already renting a particular technology (disposable film cameras) because they find it cheap and convenient to do so. The existence of digital cameras that people can own has not changed their minds. (In fact, since 19% of all film developed is from single-use cameras, customers demand to rent disposable technology is high).

Do customers who want the convenience of a disposable camera care how their pictures are stored inside the camera?

If you have to bring the camera to a store for processing, single-use film cameras still produce better results than does Ritz’s digital. They also take more pictures (27 vs. 25) and you can get the film developed anywhere, not just at Ritz. Against these advantages, the Ritz disposable digicam allows you to delete and retake the last picture, a minor benefit. But, as Kevin points out, it lacks the LCD preview/review screen that digicam users find so important (though there seems to be no reason why this feature won’t eventually be added).

But the big question, still, is not whether consumers will prefer single-use digicams to single-use film cams — it’s why anyone would pay for a single-use digicam if similar reusable digicams are available for comparable cost, as will inevitably become the case. Single-use is an artifact of film: the fact that inexpensive film cameras are cheaper to make and easier to use if they are not reloadable. Digicams face no such constraints, so why would consumers prefer to rent when they can buy at around the same price?

Once you have a choice to buy a cheap reusable digicam and download the photos to your own computer and print them (or bring them in to be printed), or repeatedly buy single-use digicams and have no choice but to bring them to a particular shop for printing, why would you continue to buy disposables? Ritz’s scheme may work for a while but seems unlikely to succeed in the long run. Simple reusable digicams of snapshot quality are going to cost $3 in a few years. It’s inevitable. Ritz might be smarter to go into the ink-cartridge business.