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October 31, 2002

Go read the speech

Michael Powell: Broadband Migration III: New Directions in Wireless Policy

The tip-off that this is important is the title. The Digital Broadband Migration series is Powell's favorite set of speeches. And his thinking has evolved in the right direction over the past year. He nows says that "Sound spectrum policy is a central component of the great digital migration for all Americans."

It gets better: "Modern technology has fundamentally changed the nature and extent of spectrum use. ... I believe the Commission should continuously examine whether there are market or technological solutions that can – in the long run – replace or supplement pure regulatory solutions to interference."

And the kicker: "...[S]o too must we question the continued utility of the pervasive scarcity assumption for spectrum-based services." As I've written, the scarcity rationale the centerpiece of the outdated licensing model for spectrum policy. For an FCC Chairman to publicly call it into question is visionary and courageous. Of course, this doesn't mean the open spectrum forces have won; not by a long shot. There are plenty of qualifications in Powell's speech, and the hard work of turning these ideas into policy has just begun. But if we do succeed, we'll remember this speech as a turning point in the fight to open up the airwaves as a fountain of innovation.

Posted by Kevin Werbach at 9:41 AM | Comments (0) | TrackBack

Into the Matrix

Brad DeLong: "Perhaps the most interesting thing shown by the 'components' figure is that the 1990s--the decade that saw the steepest decline in the prices of computers--saw a tremendous growth not in the share of spending on computers but on computers' complement, software."

The good news is that as computing becomes a commodity, more of the value shifts from hardware to software. Software is generally more flexible than hardware, and lends itself to new models such as utility computing (see the entry earlier today) that abstract out the hardware underneath. That promotes, innovation, wealth creation, etc.

On the other hand, the rising share of investment going to software should raise warning flags. Software value doesn't reduce to a single metric of computing cycles. Moreover, because the legal structure governing software is licensing rather than sales, it's not subject to the market pricing pressures we would normally expect. The first issue leds to the situation where an entry-level PC today costs about a quarter of what it did five years ago, but the operating system (Windows) costs the same. The second issue leads to oddities like clickwrap agreements, Microsoft's insistence that it can cancel K-Mart's Windows licenses if it sells its Bluelight.com subsidiary in bankruptcy, and the fights over digital rights management.

Software is, well, soft. It doesn't have hard edges, which makes it a round peg in the square holes of the law. As David Weinberger thoughtfully points out in the latest JOHO, society functions because we all have leeway to break the "rules" when they don't make sense. Software + law = no leeway, and that's a problem.

So we're going to face a business challenge and a social/policy challenge. As hardware costs tend toward zero and software costs tend toward infinite, we'll see power shifts in the IT industry and enterprise IT customers worrying about escalating software costs the way they now look at pension liabilities and health care expenses. Meanwhile, we'll have more cases where people's assumptions about how the world works conflict with the way it actually does. Of course, by clicking on that button or listening to that music file, you gave up all your rights -- didn't you read the licensing agreement??!?

If I were a pessimist like Larry Lessig, I'd say we're going to wake up one day and find we're living in the Matrix -- a prison built of software. But I'm an optimist. Unfortunately, I haven't yet come up with the counter-argument.

Posted by Kevin Werbach at 9:24 AM | Comments (0) | TrackBack

Progress on the WiFi security front?

Infoworld: " THE WIRELESS ETHERNET Compatibility Alliance (WECA), which certifies IEEE 802.11 wireless LAN products with the WiFi label, on Thursday will announce a new set of mechanisms to combat the security problem that has plagued wireless LANs."

Posted by Kevin Werbach at 8:58 AM | Comments (0) | TrackBack

Utility computing goes mainstream

New York Times: "a speech in New York yesterday at the start of a costly and quirky marketing campaign, Samuel J. Palmisano, I.B.M.'s chief executive, declared his company was making a $10-billion bet on a strategic shift toward what it calls 'on-demand computing.'"

I know, I know... everyone else is working on the same thing, and it's an idea that has been around for a few decades. But don't dimiss the impact of IBM's bet on what it calls "e-business on demand." IBM is the company that made the Internet safe for big business, and if anything it's more important in this period of market uncertainty. No one will get fired for buying IBM's vision.

Posted by Kevin Werbach at 8:44 AM | Comments (0) | TrackBack

October 30, 2002

USA Today: Powell Takes

USA Today: Powell Takes Path to Free Up Airwaves

Posted by Kevin Werbach at 5:08 PM | Comments (0) | TrackBack

So I'm trying to

So I'm trying to get from Philadelphia to Boston in two weeks for a meeting. Two major cities in the Northeast, 300 miles apart. All the flight options are over $600 (though according to Expedia, I can get from Philly to Providence, RI for the low, low price of $430... by connecting in Chicago, South Bend, *and* Cincinnati! No thanks.). The Acela train is "only" $315, but takes five hours in each direction. This after I paid $241 round trip for two cross-country flights last month. And the airlines wonder why they are losing customers....

Posted by Kevin Werbach at 9:45 AM | Comments (0) | TrackBack

The half-full glass

Brad DeLong: "Real computer investment today is higher than at any time in history--6.1% above its previous all-time high reached at the peak of the late-1990s boom and bubble." On the other hand, nominal investment (actual dollars, vs. constant "real" dollars) is down 24% from the peak values reach in 2000.

Posted by Kevin Werbach at 8:38 AM | Comments (0) | TrackBack

October 29, 2002

Brad DeLong, commenting on the

Brad DeLong, commenting on the New York Times article about AOL Time Warner that I mentioned earlier, invokes the Coase Theorem:

"The big place where the economy is threatening to fail to attain its efficient frontier today is in the intellectual property wars: consumers want a lot of high-quality entertainment and information cheap, but one set of producers makes money by selling bandwidth and another set of producers makes money by selling content."

An instructive way to look at the problem.

Interesting aside -- Brad describes the Coase Theorem as saying that if the market doesn't produce an efficient result, there must be a breakdown in bargaining (wealth effects, transaction costs, hold-out problems, etc.). In law school, we were taught it as: "markets will produce the same outcome, regadless of how rights are assigned... unless there's a bargaining problem." A subtle but significant shift in focus. I wonder if this is why policy advocates (usually lawyers) so often mis-paraphrase the Coase Theorem as "markets always work".

Posted by Kevin Werbach at 1:21 PM | Comments (0) | TrackBack

October 28, 2002

A new home media device

Rafe Needleman: "[Prismiq] is building a relatively inexpensive box that sucks audio, video, and some Internet functions from a household PC and routes them to one or more televisions." This bears a resemblance to the Intel device Marc Canter recently wrote about. We're starting to see the next generation of home media devices.

Posted by Kevin Werbach at 12:51 PM | Comments (0) | TrackBack

Latest fun predictions from InStat:

Latest fun predictions from InStat: "Worldwide annual Wi-Fi node shipments will be 33 million in 2006, up from the approximately 6 million
nodes expected to ship out in 2002."

Posted by Kevin Werbach at 9:46 AM | Comments (0) | TrackBack

Girding for grids

Some validation for grid computing in this New York Times article about IBM:

"All these advances -- faster and faster processing, better systems administration tools and the maturity of software communications standards -- have really turned utility computing into a much more doable proposition," said Glen Salow, the chief information officer of the American Express Company. Earlier this year, American Express agreed to a seven-year computing-on-demand deal with I.B.M., after Mr. Salow became convinced that the pay-for-use, utility model would afford his company both reliability and cost-saving flexibility.

As Dave Farber and others have pointed out, the basic technology behind grid computing isn't new... but neither was the basic Internet technology when Mosaic appeared. Grids becoming less interesting as basic science actually means they are ready to have a significant impact on business.

Posted by Kevin Werbach at 8:58 AM | Comments (0) | TrackBack

New York Times: AOL Time

New York Times: AOL Time Warner faces the conundrum of digital media within its own divisions. Some good data points on the long, twilight struggle to keep TV out of the 21st century, including this one: "The satellite and cable companies say they are giving viewers what they want, but networks and studios sometimes feel they are being robbed."

Posted by Kevin Werbach at 8:52 AM | Comments (0) | TrackBack

Nonprofit to Create Open Source Software

Mitch Kapor in the New York Times, commenting his new the open source personal information manager: "Individuals and small organizations are at a disadvantage today," [Kapor] said, "and I'm an old PC guy. I'm in favor of end-user empowerment and decentralization." I'm not an old PC guy, but I completely agree those are the right goals.

Posted by Kevin Werbach at 7:44 AM | Comments (0) | TrackBack

October 27, 2002

Gotta keep an eye on

Gotta keep an eye on Zigbee -- a personal area networking protocol that will compete with Bluetooth and, to some extent, 802.11.

Posted by Kevin Werbach at 9:25 AM | Comments (0) | TrackBack

October 26, 2002

Broadband and copyright

The idea that overcoming the digital copyright mess is crucial to broadband adoption seems to have become conventional wisdom. I first saw this argument in a piece by Larry Lessig in the Industry Standard. He was using it to point the finger of blame at the content owners. As the article linked above shows, though, the content owners use the same argument to blame the greedy technology industry for balking at the digital rights management technologies that will user in movies on demand.

I think both sides are mistaken. Digital entertainment will be a big part of the broadband market, but we should be skeptical any time someone tells us they can foresee a "killer app". Video on demand is actually a hoary example of an app that didn't kill, despite lavish funding and high expectations. It was the centerpiece of the failed video dialtone networks of the 1990s, remember?

Real killer apps tend to surprise people. No one in the early 1990s thought that interoperable email would be the driver of the Internet boom. And who would have predicted that the most successful of the countless Internet startups was the one that made it easy for people to swap Pez dispensers? eBay looks obvious only in hindsight.

Broadband isn't an application; it's a platform. No one magic bullet will suddently convince everyone to adopt it. That's also the fallacy of legislation such as the Tauzin-Dingell bill that thinks one regulatory change, whether deregulating the incumbent phone companies or regulating them more, will transform the market overnight. We can do things that will speed up or slow down broadband. The difference matters to investors and to companies seeking to capitalize on the broadband opportunity. It's dangerous, though to set up a straw-man broadband nirvana and fight an all-or-nothing battle about it.

There will be killer apps on the broadband platform. However, I suspect online multiplayer gaming, personal videoblogging, and on-demand do-it-yourself and personal-improvement videos will rank far above downloadable movies on the list.

Don't get me wrong. By insisting on extreme restrictions on content, the copyright holders, especially in the movie industry, have done a disservice to their customers and to the economy. There's an attainable middle ground that addresses realistic concerns about piracy, while no throwing the baby out with the bathwater. I personally think the content owners' intransigence is the primary reason we haven't gotten there. Yet both sides are guilty of ratcheting up the doomsday rhetoric instead of negotiating. And that's why the "killer app" question matters.

If you think your opponents are the only thing standing in the way of immediate ubiquitous broadband adoption, you're going to fight tooth-and-nail for your point of view. If you have a healthy humility about your ability to foresee killer apps, you'll do what the founding Internet technologists did. They built a network on the principle of end-to-end, meaning that the network didn't pre-suppose the applications. Now, more than ever, we should adhere to this approach.

Posted by Kevin Werbach at 5:01 PM | Comments (0) | TrackBack

Joi Ito's Web: Will it be called blogging

Joi is right. Blogging isn't the right term, but it's the one that caught on, just like "the Net" (remember "infobahn"?) or "peer-to-peer".

Posted by Kevin Werbach at 7:29 AM | Comments (0) | TrackBack

October 25, 2002

NewsFactor: "Despite efforts to ferret

NewsFactor: "Despite efforts to ferret out truly insidious hacking on Wi-Fi systems, security experts generally have turned up little evidence of nefarious activity.... One possible explanation is that hacking Wi-Fi is too easy."

Posted by Kevin Werbach at 1:58 PM | Comments (0) | TrackBack

That's Intertainment?!

Intertainer: "As many of you already know, On September 24th we filed a Federal Anti-trust suit against AOL Time Warner, Sony, Universal and Movielink. On October 21st we plan to take the site down until we can work out a fair business model with the defendants, who control more than 50% of the theatrical motion picture business and more than 60% of the music business."

Something is wrong here.

Posted by Kevin Werbach at 1:20 PM | Comments (0) | TrackBack

King of the jungle

Amazon.com continues to blaze a trail towards a successful consumer e-commerce business model. Did you know that almost a quarter of its transactions in North America were from products Amazon didn't sell? In other words, it hosted the transaction for a third party, and took a cut.

Posted by Kevin Werbach at 1:09 PM | Comments (0) | TrackBack

MS and the Mouse

New York Times: "Microsoft is not a media company," said Bill Gates, Microsoft's chairman, at the event. "We use channels with content that partners create managed by software that Microsoft creates."

This quote, in an article about Disney's new partnership with Microsoft to offer a customized version of the MSN online service, is worth reading twice. Especially the last sentence. Microsoft is, in effect, saying that it's not a media company, it's a cable TV company. And this after AOL recently concluded that it's not an online service, it's a premium cable channel. Innnnnteresting! More on this later.

Posted by Kevin Werbach at 12:14 PM | Comments (0) | TrackBack

FCC report on emissions and

FCC report on emissions and interference potential of ultra-wideband wireless systems (PDF).

Posted by Kevin Werbach at 11:45 AM | Comments (0) | TrackBack

Step right up, folks...

{commercial interruption}Today is the last day to get the discounted early-bird registration fee for Supernova. Sign up now to save $300! {/commercial interruption}

Posted by Kevin Werbach at 10:23 AM | Comments (0) | TrackBack

CustomerRespect.com: "[T]he report found that

CustomerRespect.com: "[T]he report found that 37 percent of Fortune 100 companies offered no reply to a general inquiry submitted to their Web site, despite offering either an online form or email contact details for inquiries."

Posted by Kevin Werbach at 10:22 AM | Comments (0) | TrackBack

October 24, 2002

CNet News.com is running my

CNet News.com is running my column, "Tech's big challenge: Decentralization" today. It's an overview of why I think decentralization is the key technology issue of the next 10-20 years, and some of the themes we'll explore at Supernova. I welcome your comments.

Posted by Kevin Werbach at 11:27 AM | Comments (0) | TrackBack

October 22, 2002

I'm a signatory to the

I'm a signatory to the open letter to FCC Chairman Michael Powell organized by David Isenberg, urging the FCC not to irrationally protect old technologies.

Posted by Kevin Werbach at 5:47 PM | Comments (0) | TrackBack

October 21, 2002

Going Dutch

I'm off on a quick trip to Amsterdam for a speaking engagement. Not sure what the connectivity will be like, so this may be the last blog entry for a couple days.

Posted by Kevin Werbach at 12:48 PM | Comments (0) | TrackBack

According to a news article

According to a news article I just saw (no URL -- sorry!) the FCC's Spectrum Policy Task Force is due to release its recommendations by October 31.

Posted by Kevin Werbach at 12:36 PM | Comments (0) | TrackBack

Mitch Kapor has finally begun

Mitch Kapor has finally begun to lift the covers on the Open Source Application Foundation, his new effort to build a decentralized, open-source personal information manager. Appropriately enough, he's doing so via a Weblog. Way to go Mitch!

Posted by Kevin Werbach at 11:06 AM | Comments (0) | TrackBack

October 20, 2002

Goooooooooooo Iggles!

Just got back from the Philadelphia Eagles football game. There's nothing better than sitting outside, screaming at the top of your lungs for three hours with 60,000 other people. Especially when your team wins. You should try it sometime. It's therapeutic.

Posted by Kevin Werbach at 9:37 PM | Comments (0) | TrackBack

Werblist is up and running

I've sent out the first edition of Werblist, my new email newsletter.

Posted by Kevin Werbach at 11:03 AM | Comments (0) | TrackBack

Web services start to grow up

Service Grids: The Missing Link in Web Services is one of a series of working papers by John Hagel and John Seely Brown. As expected, the initial excitement about Web services has given way to disappointment. The IT landscape hasn't changed overnight, nor have Web services brought a World Series victory to the long-suffering fans in Boston. Meanwhile, the inevitable spread of Web services continues.

Hagel and Brown point out a key issue -- the need for management and monitoring infrastructure to make Web services function in real enterprise environments. (As Dave frequently points out, there's much more to Web services than what the bigcos are doing, but enterprise adoption is an important piece of the story.) Where a year ago all the Web services companies were building development tools and basic SOAP wrappers, now the emphasis has shifted to ensuring performance, reliability, security, and cross-organizational integration. This is nuts-and-bolts stuff, for the most part. But it's essential, I believe, for creating the software architecture of the next 20 years.

That architecture will be something more than Web services, as commonly understood. It will be distributed infrastructure -- at least, that's what I'm calling it for the panel at Supernova! The good ideas emerging around P2P, grid computing, and the semantic Web will all play a role.

Posted by Kevin Werbach at 10:25 AM | Comments (0) | TrackBack

October 19, 2002

There is now an HTML

There is now an HTML version of my open spectrum working paper, "The New Wireless Paradigm." It's still a little messy, but readable if you don't want to use the on the New America site.

Posted by Kevin Werbach at 8:33 PM | Comments (0) | TrackBack

Yale Law School is holding

Yale Law School is holding a conference on Weblogs November 22, featuring Glenn Reynolds, Mickey Kaus, John Hiler, Donna Wentworth, and others. This follows a recent blogging panel and course at Berkeley. It's great to see blogs getting serious attention in academia, at the same time as they are gaining interest in the business world.

Posted by Kevin Werbach at 8:35 AM | Comments (0) | TrackBack

October 18, 2002

Thank you to Ross and

Thank you to Ross and Jon for telling people about the Open Spectrum working paper!

Posted by Kevin Werbach at 4:56 PM | Comments (0) | TrackBack

Letter from Congressman Markey of

Letter from Congressman Markey of Massachusetts to FCC Chairman Powell encouraging the FCC to make available more unlicensed spectrum. This is similar to the open letter I sent to the FCC last year.

Posted by Kevin Werbach at 1:29 PM | Comments (0) | TrackBack

BusinessWeek: Telecom -- When

BusinessWeek: Telecom -- When Regulation = Competition

Isn't it strange that we're just now debating whether regulation or deregulation of the incumbents is more important for competition and a healthy market? The Wall Street Journal even had a large article yesterday questioning whether deregulation was really a good idea. (Admittedly, it was in the news section, which is a separate paper from the editorial page....) Six-plus years ago, when the Telecom Act passed, the assumption was that we could have a win-win. It's not as though so much has changed, though, in terms of government policy or the laws of economics.

Posted by Kevin Werbach at 10:47 AM | Comments (0) | TrackBack

October 17, 2002

I've been workin' on a conference...

Busy nailing down details for Supernova. I hate conferences that just put a procession of execs on stage to give their spiel, with no context or flow. I've been to quite a few like that.

For my event, I'm working hard to pick people who not only represent good companies but have something interesting to say; organizing them into sessions that will generate meaningful discussion; and assembling the whole agenda carefully to make the most of my attendees' time. It's a lot of work! But I'm confident it will be worth it in the final product.

Posted by Kevin Werbach at 8:05 PM | Comments (0) | TrackBack

October 16, 2002

Open spectrum gains steam

I was in Washington, DC today to participate in the New America Foundation forum in conjunction with the release of my whitepaper, Open Spectrum: The New Wireless Paradigm. One thing is clear: people inside the Beltway are starting to pay attention to open spectrum. Unlicensed wireless is part of the debate over broadband and spectrum policy, which is an important step forward. Congress is basically done introducing new legislation this year before the election recess, but next term we can hope for some significant activity. And the FCC will soon release its Spectrum Policy Task Force report, which may initiate a significant review of spectrum management.

Posted by Kevin Werbach at 5:02 PM | Comments (0) | TrackBack

The incredible shrinking Internet

TeleGeography: "Since the invention of the Web browser, international IP bandwidth

Posted by Kevin Werbach at 4:55 PM | Comments (0) | TrackBack

October 15, 2002

Dan Bricklin: "EarthLink will use

Dan Bricklin: "EarthLink will use Trellix software to provide web site building and blogging".

Congratulations to Dan and the Trellix team. This means several million more people will be exposed to blogging.

Posted by Kevin Werbach at 3:07 PM | Comments (0) | TrackBack

John Patrick from Agenda 2003:

John Patrick from Agenda 2003: "Robert [Morris of IBM Research] made the point that blogging is not going to replace publishing as we know it any more than the web replaced newspapers. A blog is yet another component of the portfolio that we will all have at our disposal."

Of course blogs won't replace newspapers. The fact that people are discussing that question, though, is significant. It means blogs are hitting the mainstream in the way the Web did in 1994-95. It's a different economic environment, so we're not going to see a rush a blog vendor IPOs. But don't ignore what's going on because of that.

Posted by Kevin Werbach at 10:22 AM | Comments (0) | TrackBack

The ever-reasonable Andrew Odlyzko offers

The ever-reasonable Andrew Odlyzko offers three solutions to the broadband bottleneck, similar to some of the things I've suggested in the past.

Posted by Kevin Werbach at 10:01 AM | Comments (0) | TrackBack

October 11, 2002

SUPERNOVA 2002

I'm excited to announce Supernova, a new conference exploring the distributed future.

Supernova 2002 will be held December 9-10 in Palo Alto, CA. We'll consider the impacts of decentralization across software, communications, and media, addressing areas such as WiFi, Web services, Weblogs, broadband media distribution, and rethinking telecom. I'm producing the event in partnership with Pulver.com, organizers of the Voice on the Net events.

Visit the site for more details, and please help spread the word. I hope you can join us there! Sign up soon to get the early registration discount.

...And yes, we'll have a blog.

Posted by Kevin Werbach at 1:24 PM | Comments (0) | TrackBack

Anil Dash speculates that Tivo

Anil Dash speculates that Tivo users could hack a connection to the (free) TV listings that Microsoft's Media Center OS downloads. This raises a broader question about Tivo's business model. Tivo charges a monthly fee for downloading program listings, but that's not really what costs Tivo money. They need recurring revenue to be able to keep the price of the box manageable. Eventually, TV program guides will be freely available, despite the best efforts of the patent fiends at Gemstar. (If Carl Malamud has his way, this will be sooner rather than later.) Can the Tivo model work with other revenue streams, such as targeted ads and premium downloadable programming? I suspect so, but this hasn't yet been proven.

Posted by Kevin Werbach at 10:53 AM | Comments (0) | TrackBack

Michael Powell, antitrust hawk?

So after a parade of articles about how Michael Powell is leading us back to the dark days of monopoly, tolerating and even subtly encouraging consolidation in communications, his FCC finally got to rule on a merger. And guess what? It blocked the deal! Granted, Echostar buying DirecTV was a move from two satellite competitors to one. But in this market, and with satellite competing against cable, there were plenty of arguments for letting the deal through.

I haven't looked at the record enough to have a strong view about whether the FCC did the right thing. Powell used to be chief of staff in the antitrust division of the Department of Justice, so when it comes to the law in this area, he knows his stuff. It will be interesting to see whether the media revises its view of Powell after this decision. The image of him as being wildly pro-consolidation was always wrong, but it wasn't tested before now.

Of course, the more important question is where Powell, and the communications industry, goes from here.

Posted by Kevin Werbach at 10:45 AM | Comments (0) | TrackBack

Ask and ye shall be fulfilled

Posted by Kevin Werbach at 8:59 AM | Comments (0) | TrackBack

October 10, 2002

Dave Sifry of Sputnik concurs

Dave Sifry of Sputnik concurs with my point the other day about the wireless PBX as a killer app of WiFi.

Posted by Kevin Werbach at 2:28 PM | Comments (0) | TrackBack

Andy Oram doesn't get it.

Andy Oram doesn't get it. Spectrum isn't a limited resource. With intelligent devices, it can be shared as a commons. You'd think Andy would understand this, because he edited the excellent O'Reilly Peer to Peer book. Meshes of unlicensed smart radios are the P2P of wireless.

Posted by Kevin Werbach at 2:11 PM | Comments (0) | TrackBack

Wireless Forum on Wednesday in DC

On October 16, I'll be participating in The Future of Wireless: Broadband Networking on Unlicensed Spectrum, a forum organized by the New America Foundation. They will be releasing a working paper I wrote on open spectrum. Other participants are ierre DeVries, Program Manager for Future Home Technology, Microsoft; Carl Stevenson, Senior Manager for Standards & Regulatory Affairs, Agere Systems; and technologist David Reed.

If you're in Washington DC, I hope you can attend. The event is free, but you should RSVP at the link above.

Posted by Kevin Werbach at 12:35 PM | Comments (0) | TrackBack

David Weinberger on Microsoft's Palladium

David Weinberger on Microsoft's Palladium digital right managmeent system: "Ultimately, I think you have to ask what world will be better, one with enforceable usage rights that drive out the leeway and hard-codify fair use, or one in which there's reasonable (and even unreasonable) leeway where some genuine piracy happens, a lot of genuine cash-for-use happens, and a whole bunch in between goes on at every level of society."

Posted by Kevin Werbach at 9:52 AM | Comments (0) | TrackBack

October 9, 2002

Coverage of the Eldred orgal

Coverage of the Eldred orgal argument, from a WiFi-enabled PDA connecting to a warchalked access point near the Supreme Court. The Court's rules prohibit note-taking by spectators, let alone realtime laptop WiFi connections, so the authors of this report had to type it up from memory as soon as they got outside.

(Lessig outside the Supreme Court after the orgal argument, taken by Declan McCullagh.)

By the way, the consensus of legal scholars I speak with is that Lessig will lose the case. And these are generally people who agree with his position as a policy matter. In fact, most of them are perplexed why the Supreme Court even decided to take it.

Though a defeat may hurt in the battle to preserve the information commons, it may end up helping in the long term. The Eldred case shined a light on how out of whack our current intellectual property policies are, and upholding the copyright extension on legal grounds may help to stoke the political fires.

Posted by Kevin Werbach at 4:23 PM | Comments (0) | TrackBack

Microsoft's XML head-scratcher

Reuters - "Microsoft Corp. will introduce a new addition to its Office suite of productivity programs by adding an XML document authoring tool, the world's largest software company said on Wednesday."

Why does a business end-user need an XML authoring tool? Shouldn't that just be an output format from apps such as Word and Excel?

Posted by Kevin Werbach at 10:57 AM | Comments (0) | TrackBack

WiFi + wireless + voice over IP

One takeaway from the presentation by Chris Fine of Goldman Sachs at the Fall VON conference yesterday was a deployment scenario for wireless voice over IP. Within the next few years most large corporations and highly traficked public areas worldwide will have WiFi wireless hotspots. (I believe he predicted 1 million worldwide by 2006, which at first sounds like a big number but actually feels about right.) If quality of service, roaming, and security issues can be worked out -- and all of these straightforward technically -- there is a killer app for companies to run "wireless PBXs." In other words, route their voice traffic within the company over the private WiFi network. This would save mucho costs, and give the companies features and management capabilities they don't have today. We're probably talking 2-4 years for even early adopters to go this way, but the numbers could get very big very fast.

Posted by Kevin Werbach at 10:24 AM | Comments (0) | TrackBack

Forbes article gives a mixed

Forbes article gives a mixed outlook for media-oriented home networks.

Posted by Kevin Werbach at 9:49 AM | Comments (0) | TrackBack

October 8, 2002

Andy Seybold: "The bottom line

Andy Seybold: "The bottom line for me is that the 'killer application' for wireless services is voice."

Posted by Kevin Werbach at 8:47 PM | Comments (0) | TrackBack

Congratulations to my old colleagues

Congratulations to my old colleagues at the FCC for having the best Website in the US government! And they do it with a far smaller Web staff than most federal agencies.

Posted by Kevin Werbach at 3:56 PM | Comments (0) | TrackBack

Give 'em hell, Larry!

Eldred arguments before the Supreme Court are tomorrow. If you're not familiar with the case, this is the Constitutional challenge to the radical extension of US copyright law, led by law professor Lawrence Lessig. His goal is to reassert the value of the public domain "commons," something I wholeheartedly support.

Posted by Kevin Werbach at 3:35 PM | Comments (0) | TrackBack

OK, maybe I wasn't the

OK, maybe I wasn't the only one who noticed that Ted Leonsis is taking on a greater role in the new new AOL.

Posted by Kevin Werbach at 1:07 PM | Comments (0) | TrackBack

It's bad, it's really bad (but in some ways that's good!)

Computerworld: "Our outlook for the next 12 to 18 months for all [telecom] segments is negative," said Robert Konefal, managing director of Moody's Investors Service [at an FCC hearing earlier this week].

In other words, this is the time for long-term thinking. Anyone expecting the telecom sector to turn around quickly, or betting that consolidation will produce nimble innovative local Bell companies is in denial. If you can't wait out the trough, you're dead. If you think you can survive, don't waste your time on the short run, because it's already a wash. Perversely, this means emerging technologies such as unlicensed wireless and broadband are more important than ever.

Jeff Pulver in his keynote at the VON conference this morning said the IP telephony industry should go back to a blank sheet of paper in developing applications and service offerings. I agree. Regulators should take the same tack, and think about how to get the legal structure for telecom right for the rest of the 21st century, even if that takes time.

Posted by Kevin Werbach at 11:21 AM | Comments (0) | TrackBack

Nice guys at the airport

Going through airport security this morning, I set off the metal detector and had to be wanded. (Gotta remember to lose the belt and watch....) No biggie. Philadelphia is one of the earlier airports to have federal Transportation Safety Administration (TSA) personnel handling security. The TSA staff acted with an almost exaggerted courtesy, which I've experienced every time I've dealt with them. It's a noticeable contrast from the staff of the private contractors who ran airport security pre-9/11.

But why? The TSA workers are better paid and screened, so I would expect them to be more effective and efficient. That doesn't necessarily make them nicer. Federal bureaucracies don't exactly have a great reputation for customer service, and you would think that in this case all the emphasis would be on security rather than politeness. TSA management must be making a point of training employees to be courteous. Make no mistake, I'm not complaining. I'm just pleasantly surprised.

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It's getting closer...

Supernova 2002

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October 7, 2002

Farewell, Teledesic

The grandest of the grand plans to wrap the planet in connectivity dies a quiet death... at least for now. Was Craig McCaw's dream of ubiquitous satellite Internet access simply too far ahead of its time, a long-term plan in an era that focused everything on the short term, or was it doomed from the start?

One of the great connectivity connundrums is that as communications technology decentralizes, getting bandwidth somewhere becomes easier and cheaper, but getting it everywhere becomes harder. Business models that assume huge up-front capital expenditures crumble. Yet bootstrapping from a small base, which is what the Internet did and what WiFi hotspot operators are trying to do today, may not work in communications. Or perhaps it will just take a long time. This is a critical question for the recovery of the telecom sector.

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House Approves Internet Radio Royalty Deal

Could it be that small Internet radio stations won't be forced out of business by the recent Library of Congress royalty decision after all?

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Coming soon...

SUPERNOVA 2002!

Stay tuned for details, or sign up to receive more information when it's available.

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October 6, 2002

Mori-no-no

A disappointing meal last night at Morimoto, the much-hyped neo-Japanese restaurant that opened in Philly earlier this year. It can take months to get a reservation, because the chef is famous from his stints on the show Iron Chef and at Nobu in New York. The man himself was in attendance, in the open kitchen and mugging with photo-seeking guests, which seemed like a good sign. But it was not to be.

We ordered the tasting menu -- $100 per person. A couple of the courses were excellent, but most were uninspired, both visually and in flavor. Morimoto built his reputation on unique combinations of Japanese and Western ingredients, but all we got were simple, relatively traditional preparations. The service was solicitous but slow and disorganized. The place felt like a tourist trap -- overpriced and overhyped, designed to extract the maximum revenue from a clientele only interested in saying they were there. If you want good Asian fusion food in Philly, try Pod, Buddakhan, or even the local outpost of Roy's. All were much better.

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October 4, 2002

A Trip to F.C.C. World

Nicholas Lemann has a piece in the New Yorker this week about FCC Chairman Michael Powell. It's one of the first articles I've seen that captures some of Powell's real personality, and the way he's viewed in Washington. Unfortunately, Lemann ends by endorsing conventional political wisdom. After describing how Powell isn't really a fire-breathing ideological conservative, he concludes that, in essence, Powell favors the inumbent local Bell telephone companies, while a Democratic FCC would favor new entrants. I know that's not how Powell sees the world, and though I disagree with him on many issues, I think he's right to resist the old dichotomy.

The telecom collapse should be a humbling experience for anyone who went through it. The disaster wasn't the regulators' fault, as some conservatives argue. But something clearly went horribly wrong, and policy-makers should learn from that experience. Contrary to Lemann's speculation, the upstart carriers won't be successful in a Gore administration, because it's too late. Virtually all of them are dead, and Wall Street has turned off the capital tap for the foreseeable future. Some may survive, but as small players rather than world-dominators.

The battle between CLECs and RBOCs that Lemann so astutely parodies is old news. The next important battle in telecom will be between those who want to stay within the traditional boxes, and those who use different models entirely. That's why open broadband networks and open spectrum are so important. Whatever the regulatory environment, there is going to be consolidation in telecom. Those left out in that consolidation will face increasing pressure to create new pipes into the home, or slowly die. The victors in the consolidation game will cut back on innovation and raise prices, which will create further pressure for alternatives.

Lemann is right that policy-making looks much drier and more ambiguous on the ground than through the lens of history. But he's wrong in thinking that telecom's future will be something like its past.

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10 billion spams a day?

IDC says 31 billion daily email messages sent worldwide in 2002.
Jupiter Research says 35 percent of all email is spam.

You do the math. That's two spams a day for every person on the planet.

Posted by Kevin Werbach at 9:39 AM | Comments (0) | TrackBack

The glass is half full

Cable Datacom News: "Since the spring, America's four biggest MSOs -- AT&T Broadband, Time Warner Cable, Comcast Cable and Charter Communications -- have all added independent ISPs to their high-speed Internet-access offerings or have signed pacts to add them. And at least two more big cable companies -- Cox Communications and Insight Communications -- are gearing up to add outside ISPs as well. "

Back in 1999, I argued that open access was actually in the best interests of the cable industry. They fought it vehemently, convinced in the need to control the customer. Look what happened. Excite@Home collapsed, and AT&T was forced to sell off its cable assets. The cable industry is finally realizing (though not in all areas) that open platforms can benefit everyone.

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Boomers

New York Times: "These magazines are gone until they come back, although they will probably come back in different clothing," [John Battelle of the Industry Standard] said. "There will be another boom in the business cycle, and there will be a new crop of magazines to cover it."

That's absolutely the wrong way to think about things. It's true that business is cyclical, but it's not a perfect sine wave. You could have said during the 1972-74 bear market that stocks would come back, and you would have been right. They came back... starting in 1982. The period between 1994 and early 2000 was extraordinary, the likes of which we may never see again in a lifetime. I'm an optimist about the future, both in terms of technology and business opportunities, but we have to put out of our minds the notion that the current doldrums are but a temporary pause.

By the way, has anyone noticed that the crash has now lasted as long as the bubble? The truly irrational upswing of the dotcom boom went from 1998 to March 2000, which is now two and a half years ago.

Posted by Kevin Werbach at 9:25 AM | Comments (0) | TrackBack