Blang!

I’m waiting… Up until now I’ve been patient but I’m starting to get antsy. This should not be that difficult!

Apple’s iPhone, Google’s Android, the Blackberry whatever-is-out-now, blah! They all show the occasional flash of brilliance but in the end they all have the same fatal flaw. No matter how good they are at doing their thing while “mobile”, they all are horrible at non-mobile computing.

Not just mediocre. They are truly, sincerely, abysmal at anything approaching a desktop replacement and that means no matter what device you own, you are forced to own at least one other system where you do the bulk of your computing.

Therefore I make the following prediction: The first device maker who comes out with a mobile device that also has a docking station that supports an external monitor, keyboard and mouse, will blow the rest of the competition out of the market and control the path of computing for the next 5 years. (As a side-effect, the operating system on this device will become the dominate OS).

Picture it, a device the size of an iPhone that you plug into a docking station and instantly you get a full-size display, mouse, keyboard, audio headset, Ethernet, the works! It’s effectively a laptop the size of a phone.

I no longer need any other device! No desktop, no laptop, not even a desk phone. My one device does it all. And when I pull it out of its base, it still does it all (albeit on a smaller display).

Who could it be?

Apple? No. Ironically, I don’t think this device will come from Apple. They are stuck with the iPhone and unless they have some super-secret plan to merge OSX and the iPhone they are firmly rooted in the two separate worlds; Desktop & Wireless. This is about merging and I see no sign of it from Apple.

Google? Maybe. Android has some great things going for it and it has Linux at its core. This implies that it might be possible to come up with a full Android desktop operating system. It certainly has possibilities but Android is still in its infancy and even though most hardware makers announced they will back it, there hasn’t exactly been a deluge of hardware devices. Still, Google has no legacy baggage to deal with and can easily continue to develop Android until it becomes a fully functional desktop operating system. It also has the advantage of an open architecture which means the platform could improve very rapidly.

Microsoft? Not Likely. From an OS perspective Microsoft actually has a better shot at merging the two worlds than Apple by leveraging their existing desktop and mobile platforms which have always been designed to be similar. But unfortunately Microsoft doesn’t make hardware which means they would have to rely on one of their hardware partners to come up with the device and none of them ever do anything cutting edge. And besides, nothing kills innovative buzz better than a Microsoft Logo.

RIM? No. Blackberries are for mobile computing, period. RIM has never made any noise about desktops and while their devices do what they are designed for very well, they have zero chance of transitioning that into a full-blow open operating system that works on the desktop.

Someone else? No. The key to success is convincing people that they device has the backing to become a new standard. Only the above mentioned companies command enough respect from the buying public to convince people to change their entire daily computing lives.

Can you actually imagine a day when the only device you use does not run any Microsoft software? Surprisingly, most people can’t. Yet many people are very close to it now with thier Blackberries and iPhones without even realizing it.

A recently released report details the idea that consumers may be better off if they own their own fibre.

The CBC story has some more details. Of course the funniest part of the CBC stories are always the quotes from Bell defender Mark Goldberg:

“I can buy a water heater for a couple hundred bucks from Home Depot but I don’t want the problem of it,” says telecommunications industry consultant Mark Goldberg. “If I rent it, it’s not my problem.”

It’s the TUBES Mark! The TUBES! If you rent them then when they get clogged up it’s not your problem!

Maybe, rather than having enough capacity, the water company should “throttle” the flow to certain people depending on what they are using the water for?

And do people still rent water heaters? That’s an idea straight out of the 70s… Which probably explains why Mark is so comfortable with it. Why buy something when you can pay many more times it’s actual cost to rent it and get crappy service as a bonus!

By the way, I shouldn’t make it sound like I think this experiment will work. It won’t. Not because people won’t be interested but because they will still be stuck buying connectivity from the same providers! Just because you own your own fibre, even in a community network you still have to connect it to the internet and since Canada has no real competition, they will probably end up with Bell or one of the cable companies as their provider and what is the point of that?

Update (I posted these comments on the CBC Story): For anyone posting saying “I’m in!”, you haven’t read the story. The service doesn’t exist and will not exist because even if you own your own fibre you still have to buy internet service from someone and guess what? The ONLY providers are Rogers and Bell who will ensure it is priced so prohibitively it will never be competitive.

The foreign companies thought the ownership rules would continue to be relaxed but it didn’t happen and they gave up and sold their investments to the incumbents. So now we sit with companies who have figured out it’s much cheaper to throttle than to add capacity.

It’s becoming prett clear that mobile devices will be what effectively finishes off Microsoft. The Redmond giant now finds itself on the wrong end of a mobile revolution. None of the hotest devices (iPhone, GPhone, or Blackberry) use Microsoft’s mobile platform.

The kind of people who like to flash their cell phones around like jewlry turn up their noses at anything that runs Windows. After all, Windows is sooooo 90s.

We are just one great device away from true mobile convergence. Think of an iPhone that, when dropped into a docking cradle on your desk instantly fires up a mouse, monitor and keyboard and becomes a fully functional desktop.

That one device instantly converges your cell phone, laptop, desk phone, and with the right data plan, your internet provider as well. You won’t need multiple devices and it won’t run Windows.

Here is a Linux Journal article on the topic.

Fresh off my prediction that video and movies are on the verge of suffering the same fate as music (see “The next big thing should already be here by now) comes word of a group called the Digital Entertainment Content Ecosystem (DECE). This group is comprised of the larger players in the digital world. Their “mission is to combat piracy by making the act of buying media so easy that people won’t be tempted to steal.” This means first and foremost, no DRM!

Wow…. Are they finally cluing in?

Sometimes it’s hard to sit back and watch entire industries self destruct. Back in the late 90s it seemed painfully obvious that the next wave of music distribution would be digital over the internet. Music and the internet are a match made in heaven which was obvious to everyone, or so you would have thought…

At the time, CDs were in the final stages of completely replacing cassette tapes as the distribution method of choice. According to the record labels, the reason they paid artists so little was because distribution of music was really expensive and accounts for 50-70% of the total retail cost of a CD.

As a business person, if you were able to eliminate 50-70% of your product cost and as a bonus sell direct to the consumer cutting out the middle man and increasing your profits even further, don’t you think you’d jump at the chance?

“The Next Big Thing” in the late 90s should have been digital music distribution over the internet but we all know what happened. Far from jumping at the chance, the music industry did everything in its power to protect the old business models (like sueing their own customers). But you can’t stop the music and Napster came along and destroyed them. Even now they have no clue how to make money on the Internet and are reliant on Apple iTunes for the little they do make. The point is, they (the labels) could have been iTunes but they were either too clueless or too scared to adapt (actually, they have admitted they were clueless).

Convenience Trumps Everything

“Convenience Trumps Everything” is one of my laws. It applies to any situation and it loosely states that in any given situation, if it is more convenient to do something the wrong way, people will do it the wrong way even if the results are less optimal.

Record executives believed it was quality that had compelled people to switch from tapes to CDs. They were wrong, CDs were better quality but they were also more convenient (rewinding and flipping tapes was a major pain). And so they wrongly believed people wouldn’t be motivated to switch from CDs to mp3s and well, we all know how that ended.

Now lets fast forward to today. As people have been predicting for some time, “The Next Big Thing” will be digital video distribution over the internet and history is about to repeat itself. Like music before it, video is perfect for distribution on the internet but the people who control the content seem unable to adapt.

The TV industry argues that the internet isn’t suitable for video because the quality is too low to deliver real-time video. They couldn’t be more wrong. It’s a classic example of “inside the box” thinking and It’s scary how that parallels record executives statements that people don’t want to download mp3s because the quality is inferior to CDs.

Almost nothing we watch on TV (besides sports) is live. That means the vast majority of programming can be delivered offline. Downloaded while we’re working or sleeping and then viewed when we feel like it on our own terms.

Secondly, bandwidth and compression is now at the point where it is perfectly reasonable to watch live TV over the internet at reasonable quality (for an excellent example of this, see “watch online” at PBS Frontline). This trend will continue and quality will improve to the point where even high quality sports programming will be reasonable. In fact i’ve blogged about exactly just such a project taking place right now.

Personally I have a PVR connected to regular cable that records the few shows I’m interested in. Occasionally I may miss a recording or start recording shows after the season has started. No problem, I just download the episodes I missed into my PVR. I never watch any of it “live”. Once you’ve made that jump the very next question you ask yourself is, why do I even need cable? Why not just download everything?

For now the answer is convenience. Since there are no official distribution methods for this programming It is still a bit of a hassle to find a download programs and there are so many different compression methods and codecs that reliable playback can be a problem.

So what’s it going to take to make internet video “The Next Big Thing?”

We are close. Very very close but still missing some key components.

1. Set top boxes: There are already some very good candidates in this category. Sony’s PS3, Microsoft’s XBOX 360, and Apple’s Apple TV among others are already perfect for this purpose but they are all missing one key component, “distribution”.
2. Distribution: So far the content providers have not signed on to any meaningful distribution model. Only a fraction of the programming on cable TV is available for download and the small amount that is available is priced so outrageously that it will never have mass apeal.For example, $2.00 per episode of The Daily Show & Colbert Report!?! So let me get this straight, to replace watching on cable with downloading, those two shows would cost $4/day, 20 shows per month, or $80 a month for two shows?!! Give me a break. That will never fly.
3. Network Neutrality: Unfortunately, in most parts of the world the only method of getting broadband is through a provider who also supplies TV signals. These providers have zero motivation to make their networks suitable for digital video distribution because it can only erode their TV and Pay Per View business. So for as long as broadband providers are also in the content business, they will do everything they can to prevent downloads from replacing traditional cable TV.

So my prediction is simply this:

Content distribution companies have peaked and will only decline from now on. That list includes business like Blockbuster, local TV stations, national TV networks (ABC, NBC, CBS, etc.), cable companies, and so on.

Content makers (movie producers, TV shows, etc.) can, if they play their cards right, make a lot more money because they can distribute their content direct to consumers for a reduced price and still pocket most of what used to go to the middle man.

Will they do it? If the experience with the music industry is any indication, no they won’t.

Not that we needed any more proof that throttling is bad, the case against it is well documented, but a story appeared yesterday on the BBC web site which proves, beyond a shadow of a doubt that throttling has got to stop.

Net TV technology seeks testers “Testers are being sought for technology that may help TV migrate to the net. The P2P Next project has created a trial, or beta, version of software that can stream video across a file-sharing network.”

In short, the developers of software (called SwarmPlayer) have received 19m euros to develop software based on Peer to Peer (P2P) technology currently employed in software such as bittorrent, to deliver a Television over the Internet solution that is not only capable of delivering recorded content, but live television as well.

But one thing is certain, it could never happen in Canada.

All of Canada’s major ISPs throttle this kind of traffic making utilization of this technology impossible. And is it just a conicidence that this type of technology would compete directly with their other major business, TV distrobution? Of course not.

All of the ISP’s recognize that as long as they throttle the internet it can never develop to it’s full potential which assures internet based services can never compete against their other business areas.

Furthermore, as Google pointed out in their submission to the CRTC on this issue, investing in internet based technologies in Canada is currently way to risky. Would you invest in a technology that relies on the internet when you never know from day-to-day if the ISPs might decide to block it and wipe out your business?

Yes the Government (via the CRTC) needs to but a stop to the throttling. This will help a little in the short term but unfortunately it will not solve the problem because the ISPs will simply find other ways to keep our service slow.

Canada desperately needs foreign ownership restrictions to be lifted so that alternative Internet providers will be encouraged to invest here and give us some choice.

On May 16th, the government of Canada appointed Tim Denton to the CRTC. Ordinarily, CRTC appointments don’t generate much interest even for a CRTC watcher like myself, but this one was different.

For one thing I happen to know Tim Denton from the time I spent trying to convince the CSCN CRTC working groups that ENUM was a worthwhile thing. Tim has been a long time proponent of ENUM and is the maintainer of the www.enumorg.ca website.

But more importantly, Tim is a Nethead. And not just any nethead. Way back in the ancient internet time of March 1999, Tim wrote a report for the Federal Department of Industry entitled “Netheads Versus Bellheadsкомпютри.”

With the value of hindsight, we can see that some nine years latter the report predicted with startling accuracy exactly where the Bellhead mentality would lead.

In a recent MacLean’s magazine opinion piece, Andrew Potter advocated that the only way to save music was to tax Internet providers. I’d like to link you to the article but the MacLean’s web site is among the worst on the net and apparently does not contain any actual content. (Update: I finally found the article online (thanks Google) here)

Anyhow, here is my reply to this kind of backward thinking… Read more »