Ajax Girl

In this Newsweek article from 1995, Clifford Stoll suggested it would be unlikely we’d buy books over the web or read newspapers online.

But he didn’t stop there. He didn’t think internet shopping would work because the internet was missing salespeople:

We’re promised instant catalog shopping—just point and click for great deals. We’ll order airline tickets over the network, make restaurant reservations and negotiate sales contracts. Stores will become obselete. So how come my local mall does more business in an afternoon than the entire Internet handles in a month? Even if there were a trustworthy way to send money over the Internet — which there isn’t — the network is missing a most essential ingredient of capitalism: salespeople.

Anyway, 1995 was definitely the early days. Plenty of predictions were wrong. Who knew what was going to happen. We can’t fault him for having an opinion.

But reading his opinion today does highlight just how far we’ve come in such a short time. Just about everything in his piece — from news to shopping to government — has been fundamentally changed by the web. What he thought wouldn’t work has actually worked so well that it’s hard to imagine our lives without it.

Further, his article shines a light on the burden of assumptions. Stoll assumed one of the reasons online shopping would fail was because it lacked salespeople. That was an assumption tied to his present day experience; a person had to sell you something.

How much of what you say can’t change is tied to your present day assumptions? “We can’t do that in our business” or “That would never work here” or “We have to have that” or “We need this in order to do that” or “That’s just how its done.”

Vision is about demolishing today’s assumptions and recognizing that new things are possible. It takes real guts to fight for the side of the non-obvious.

It also reminds me of one of my favorite quotes by Daniel Burnham. I usually just excerpt the first part of this quote, but in this case the end is what’s relevant:

Make no little plans. They have no magic to stir men’s blood and probably themselves will not be realized. Make big plans; aim high in hope and work, remembering that a noble, logical diagram once recorded will never die, but long after we are gone will be a living thing, asserting itself with ever-growing insistency. Remember that our sons and grandsons are going to do things that would stagger us. Let your watchword be order and your beacon beauty. Think big.

As far as the internet goes, we didn’t have to wait for our sons and grandsons to surprise us. We surprised ourselves.

On the bright side, it seems Clifford has come around. He sells Klein Bottles over the web. Curiously, doesn’t it look like his site was designed in 1995?

Source: Signal vs. Noise
Original Article: http://www.37signals.com/svn/posts/925-clifford-stoll-calls-bs-on-the-internet-in-1995

Why is it the Brits have all the crazy-stupid ideas about how to screw up the music industry even more than it is already?

British musician Billy Bragg argues in the New York Times today that some portion of Bebo’s $850 million sale price should go to the musicians who uploaded their music to the site.

Note that Bragg neatly sidesteps the fact that music was uploaded to the site by artists (or their labels) themselves, with full knowledge that they would not receive payments of any kind (except free marketing, of course, and access to Bebo’s tens of millions of music loving users).

His argument is based on the notion that Bebo’s success was based on the availability of streaming music on the site: “The musicians who posted their work on Bebo.com are no different from investors in a start-up enterprise…Now that the business has reaped huge benefits, surely they deserve a dividend.”

Bragg also tries to take direct credit for Bebo’s success:

Mr. Birch has cited me as an influence in Bebo’s attitude toward artists. He got in touch two years ago after I took MySpace to task over its proprietary rights clause. I was concerned that the site was harvesting residual rights from original songs posted there by unsigned musicians. As a result of my complaints, MySpace changed its terms and conditions to state clearly that all rights to material appearing on the site remain with the originator.

A few weeks later, Mr. Birch came to see me at my home. He was hoping to expand his business by hosting music and wanted my advice on how to construct an artist-centered environment where musicians could post original songs without fear of losing control over their work. Following our talks, Mr. Birch told the press that he wanted Bebo to be a site that worked for artists and held their interests first and foremost.

Bragg does attempt to argue his case, primarily by (1) saying that social networks are as much to blame for declining music sales as the people who are downloading songs in violation of copyrights, and (2) saying that arguments that social networks are doing musicians a favor by marketing their music are “disingenuous.”

Both arguments have holes in them so large you could drive a BitTorrent stream through them.

Social networks have absolutely nothing to do with the decline in music sales. The fact that recorded music can be reproduced at a zero marginal cost is why music sales are declining. You can hate that or love that, but it’s simple economics that drives it.

And in fact the argument that social networks actually provide free marketing to artists is not disingenuous. In fact, it’s quite correct. Bragg notes that radio stations pay royalties for playing songs, even though they also obviously provide free marketing for artists.

His argument isn’t quite factually correct - In the U.S. royalties are paid by radio stations to song writers but not artists (it comes to about $450 million per year). In most of the rest of the world, though, artists are paid royalties. But a much more interesting analysis of the radio industry is the very strong desire for labels and musicians to pay them to play songs. Payola is now illegal, but the practice almost certainly continues. As recently as 2005, former New York State Attorney General Eliot Spitzer prosecuted payola-related crimes in his jurisdiction.

Recorded music is nothing but marketing material to drive awareness of an artist. Websites that bring that music to listeners are doing artists a favor. In fact, they’re doing them a favor that they should (and will) be paid for. Young artists and songwriters in particular benefit from these services - Until a few years ago they had almost no way to break into the mainstream without getting a label to promote them. Now those walls are being torn down, and Bragg has the audacity to complain about it.

I think the main reason Bragg wrote this article is jealousy over the massive success of someone he once met - Bebo cofounder Michael Birtch. The paragraphs quoted above where he takes credit for their business model reveal his angst in that regard. Bragg had absolutely nothing to do with Bebos’ $850 million payday. And everything else he wrote in that article is dead wrong, too.

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Source: TechCrunch
Original Article: http://feeds.feedburner.com/~r/Techcrunch/~3/256237550/

New platforms like Adobe Air and Mozilla Prism are evolving that combine the benefits of Internet flow with the flexibility and power of desktop applications. They are part browser, part desktop app and are extremely efficient for certain types of applications.

Flash, Silverlight and Ajax get most web applications over the hump in terms of usability and are the technologies behind the fast transition of desktop applications to the web. But it’s not clear that they’ll ever kill off all desktop applications entirely. The bridge between them may very well be Air and/or Prism.

Matthew Gertner, who was a co-founder and CTO of startup AllPeers before it shut down earlier this year, is now working with Mozilla on their Prism project. I asked him to write a guest post discussing Prism and how it fits into the ecosystem v. Air as well as a number of emerging technologies for using web applications offline (Firefox 3, Google Gears).

Read Matthew’s blog, Just Browsing, here.

Thanks to innovations like Ajax and Flash video, web apps are quickly gaining ground on their desktop counterparts. With a few notable exceptions like Firefox and Skype, the big software hits of recent years have been websites such as Flickr, YouTube and Facebook. And yet web-based software cannot yet equal the high-quality user experience of the best native apps. This is the reason why Apple was forced to reverse its original decision to make Safari the official SDK for the iPhone. It also explains why online productivity suites like Google Docs are still struggling to compete with stalwarts like Microsoft Office. Web apps simply don’t provide the responsiveness, performance, whizzy graphics and access to local data that users crave, and they only work when you’re connected to the internet.

(more…)

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Source: TechCrunch
Original Article: http://feeds.feedburner.com/~r/Techcrunch/~3/256202426/