Yglesias is right about this:
Near the end of The New York Times’s article on new NBC TV downloads, Jeff Gaspin, NBC TV’s president, says “Our research shows that 83 per cent of the viewers would still rather watch on a TV than a PC.”
This doesn’t necessarily seem relevant to me. I would want to watch shows on as high-quality a display as possible but whether that display is a “monitor” connected to a computer or a “television” connected to a cable box doesn’t matter at all. I don’t, in practice, connect my TV to my computer but if you made it possible to download files that were worth watching on a large high-definition screen, then I’d do it in a minute.
Another aspect of consumers’ preference for TV-watching is a matter of convenience. That is, they want a compact, simple, and user friendly box that will fit on their TV stand and be operated with a remote. Right now, TVs fit that profile and computers don’t.
But that’s surely going to change in the next decade. Already, set-top boxes like the Apple TV provide a mostly TV-like experience. Sometime in the not-too-distant future, you’ll be able to buy a user-friendly $200 set-top box with an ethernet port on the back that allows you to download and play video files. What’s lacking is a robust, user-friendly distribution network for large quantities of free video content. This is a bit of a chicken-and-egg problem because nobody is going to buy a set-top box unless there’s content available for it, but few people are going to produce content for a given network unless there’s a large enough installed base to make it worthwhile.
But sooner or later, someone’s going to figure out a way to solve the dillemma. It might take the form of a peer-to-peer network like Joost or it might be a next-generation version of Netflix, where you pay $20/month for access to an unlimited amount of Internet-based streaming video. Technologically speaking, the set-top box will be a “computer,” but consumers will simply perceive it as a cable box with a virtually unlimited number of “channels.”
Incidentally, it’s rather bizarre that TV networks are so determined to charge consumers for copies of their TV shows. TV networks have been giving TV shows away for free for half a century. They’re the world’s experts at monetizing eyeballs. And if anything, selling ads on the Internet should be easier because they can precisely measure the size and demographics of their audience. So why do they continue giving their TV shows for free over the air (and even spending millions of dollars advertising those free shows) while fretting about the possibility that someone might get the exact same TV shows for free via the Internet? They should be creating MPEG files featuring their TV shows with embedded ads and giving them away for free on peer-to-peer networks.
Arnold Kling links to this article at the American about the large drop in computer science majors and the concurrent surge in economics majors over the last seven years. It’s an interesting trend, but I don’t think it’s something to be worried about. I think aptitude for computer programming is pretty close to a congenital condition. The most talented programmers are the ones who really enjoy it, and often they’re the ones who have been tinkering with computers since they were 8 years old. Most of them will choose computer science as a major regardless of whether it’s considered trendy or lucrative.
On the other hand, when I was in school in the late 1990s, there were a ton of people in the computer science program who really didn’t belong there. The tech bubble had inflated the demand for programmers and so lots of people who didn’t really know what to do with their lives chose computer science more or less by default. Some of them switched majors or dropped out before they graduated. Others stuck it out but had trouble finding jobs when they graduated.
I think a lot of them ended up in mid-range tech support jobs that really don’t require a computer science degree. Although those workers are obviously an important part of the economy, they’re not likely to be a major driver of economic growth, and I doubt there are many people out there who find them particularly more enjoyable than being accountants, A/V technicians, or other jobs that require a similar skillset. They could just as easily have majored in something else and gotten a student job in an IT department–or for that matter gotten a 2-year degree in IT.
So if I had to guess, most of the 50 percent of students who have apparently switched from CS to other majors like economics are probably people who probably didn’t belong in a computer science program in the first place and probably will be just as happy with an econ degree. On the other hand, the 50 percent who are continuing to major in computer science probably includes the vast majority of the people who would have gone on to produce groundbreaking technologies in any event.
There are two related articles in today’s papers that – one on technology and the other on yesterday’s Microsoft antitrust hearing. A New York Times article discusses thin client computing, a technological development that will provide new competition to traditional PCs and desktop software. And a Washington Post article describes how a group of six states and the District yesterday asked a judge to extend the terms of Microsoft’s antitrust settlement through 2012.
The more I read about the state AG request for continued oversight of the Microsoft antitrust consent decree, the more I’m convinced that they’re engaging in political grandstanding instead of sound legal principles.
Quoting from the Post:
Kollar-Kotelly said that its [the consent decree’s] effectiveness should not be measured by
Microsoft’s market share, because the 2002 decree did not specifically
set out to reduce Microsoft’s dominance. Its intent was to correct
Microsoft’s anticompetitive practices, she said.
Remember that in the U.S. monopolies are not per se illegal – just the illegal maintenance of a monopoly. But Microsoft’s desktop dominance is far from secure. Quoting from the Times:
The business strategy behind the thin-client push is different than it
was a decade ago. Today, thin computing is not part of an
anti-Microsoft crusade. The technology has “matured, by and large,
around delivering the Microsoft desktop experience remotely,” said Tad
Bodeman, the global director of Hewlett-Packard’s thin-client business.
Continue reading →
For reasons I don’t really understand, Apple has slashed its high-end iPhone from $599 to $399. You know what that means? If you move fast you can get the old, discontinued, 4 GB model for $299. That sound you hear is Jerry groaning.
I agree with Jack Shafer about this:
Upon waking, I’m delighted to desack the morning papers, discard the never-read sections—classified, food, home, travel, real estate, health—and arrange the buffet before me. But even if all I’ve pre-read from the Web are the Page One headlines, the print stories don’t really pop out at me unless they’re packaged with a terrific photo I haven’t seen before. Horrible as it may sound, on many days the newsprint front page tastes of already chewed gum.
I’m not the average reader, but anecdotes convince me that the average reader is becoming more like me every day—reading tomorrow’s news today. This time-shift is as historically significant as the great migration of newspaper readers from afternoon to morning dailies, or the adoption of AM news radio by sequestered commuters. Where the newspaper was once considered the day’s complete news, it’s now just all-the-news-that-fits. The genuine news enthusiast trolls the AP wire, foreign news sites, and the usual aggregators for the biggest picture.
I think, however, that Shafer gives newspapers too much credit later in the piece:
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Is it even possible for companies to strike exclusive deals when teams of nerds across the country have been at work on hacking the iPhone since it’s release in late June? Engadget declared the Apple/AT&T exclusivity deal dead at noon on Friday, so sorry if this story is a little old, but now that media outlets like Wired, BusinessWeek, and CNN are covering the story, I thought that TLF should also weigh in.
I don’t know if I should view this as good news, bad news, or just another lesson in the folly of trying to lock-out the tech set from something as desirable as the iPhone. Exclusivity deals, from a policy standpoint, are like most any other private, legal arrangement to me–they’re perfectly fine. However, the corporate managers of the world may want to start reconsidering exclusivity arrangements that rely on hack-proof tech. Why? Because no such thing exists.
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Tim Wu announces AltLaw, a search engine for legal decisions. This is a fantastic idea. I wonder why Google hasn’t jumped on it yet. The case coverage is still somewhat limited—Supreme Court decisions only go back to 1991—but it’s an excellent start, and I imagine they’ll be adding additional cases over time.
We’ll see if I agree with Larry Lessig’s ultimate concluions regarding problems of corruption, but he has certainly started things out on the right foot, with a wiki seeking examples for study. Here are my contributions, under the heading of “The Market”:
* Dan Morgan, Sarah Cohen and Gilbert M. Gaul, Dairy Industry Crushed Innovator Who Bested Price-Control System. ”’Washington Post”’, December 10, 2006
* Eric M. Jackson, The PayPal Wars: Battles with eBay, the Media, the Mafia, and the Rest of Planet Earth, World Ahead Publishing, 2004.
* The incestuous relationship between real estate developers and local government officials is certainly an example of corruption. No specific work to cite, but Kelo v. New London is obviously a good example of the interests of ordinary citizens being shoved aside for the interests of large corporations.
* Tim Carney, The Big Ripoff: How Big Business and Big Government Steal Your Money has some good examples of corruption.
And under “history”:
* Gabriel Kolko, Railroads and Regulation, 1877-1916 Greenwood Pub Group; New Ed edition (January 1977). An excellent history of the origins of the Interstate Commerce Commission and its corruption by railroad interests. Ralph Nader produced a report documenting the outcome in 1970, which was reported on by Time magazine.
What else should be on the list? Add your suggestions in a comment here and then head over to Lessig’s wiki for more details. Be sure to read the directions at the top.
The Technology Liberation Front is the tech policy blog dedicated to keeping politicians' hands off the 'net and everything else related to technology.