Monday, June 17, 2002

Wired.  George Gilder is bankrupt.  Good article.  George was right about the technology, but wrong about the time to roll it out.  The problem he didn't anticipate?  That the baby bells and the cable companies wouldn't install fiber.  That meant that the rapid technological innovation in bandwidth that was going on at the core of the Internet wouldn't benefit most Americans (fiber bandwidth price/performance doubles ever 9-12 months -- coaxial and twisted pair do not).   The decision of these last mile players not to adopt the right technology was a monsterous blunder based on greed, a lack of vision, and a cozy oligopoly.  This would the be equivalent in the PC world of having 2 GHz processors doubling every 12-18 months in price/performance in combination with 320x200 screens with 10 Mb of hard-drives doubling every 5 years .  Of course, that couldn't happen because there is real competition in the magnetic storage and display world.  Once fiber is installed into the home, doubling rates for home bandwidth could be fierce.  What will it take to get this done?  [John Robb's Radio Weblog] 1:10:32 PM

"Strategy Letter V" [Daypop Top 40] Joel (on Software) gives a nice explanation of why many companies are trying to use Open Source, ie because software is a complement to their product, so they want to commoditize it. The availability of cheap complements drives up demands for you product. For example, IBM is a big seller of hardware and professional services, both of which have software as a complement -- so, IBM participates heavily in open source projects (esp in areas that are complementary to their established software products). I've tried to explain this before, but never quite had it come out quite this clearly. 1:02:29 PM