Author Archives: Hamish MacEwan
Bye Bye BlackBerry. How Long Will Apple Last?
Consider some of the pessimistic predictions that preceded Apple???s entry into the smartphone business:
- In December 2006, Palm CEO Ed Colligan summarily dismissed the idea that a traditional personal computing company could compete in the smartphone business. ???We???ve learned and struggled for a few years here figuring out how to make a decent phone,??? he said. ???PC guys are not going to just figure this out. They???re not going to just walk in.???
- In January 2007, Microsoft CEO Steve Ballmer laughed off the prospect of an expensive smartphone without a keyboard having a chance in the marketplace as follows: ???Five hundred dollars? Fully subsidized? With a plan? I said that???s the most expensive phone in the world and it doesn???t appeal to business customers because it doesn???t have a keyboard, which makes it not a very good e-mail machine.???
- In March 2007, computing industry pundit John C. Dvorak argued that ???Apple should pull the plug on the iPhone??? since ???There is no likelihood that Apple can be successful in a business this competitive.??? Dvorak believed the mobile handset business was already locked up by the era???s major players. ???This is not an emerging business. In fact it???s gone so far that it???s in the process of consolidation with probably two players dominating everything, Nokia Corp. and Motorola Inc.???
This serves as a classic example of those with a static snapshot mentality disregarding the potential for new entry and technological disruption.
via forbes.com
Hindsight perhaps, but there was huge suppressed customer satisfaction demand, functionality of networks and handsets was exploding (still is), replacement cycles were short, subsidy was available, proprietary systems were past their use by, open source credibility was high. Excellent entr??es for Apple customer marketing and Android open model with Google behind it.
A Whip to Beat Us With
The millions of dollars that Amazon customers spend on Macmillan???s DRM-locked e-books represent millions of dollars of e-books Macmillan customers lose if they wanted to follow Macmillan away from Amazon. Publishers believe DRM protects their books. But DRM has created a world where publishers who walk away from negotiations with a DRM vendor like Amazon leave their customers behind.
DRM, live by it. Die by it.
For one week only, I’m allowed to say it: I get babies
And in this moment, your universe momentarily pauses while a fundamental shift in perspective takes place.
via guardian.co.uk
I remember it just that way.
April Fools
Patent Office Sued Over Patent on Issuing Patents
The US Patent and Trademark Office has been forced to halt the issuing of new patents after being sued for violation of patent number #4608919, “System and Method For Granting Limited Monopolies On Inventions.”
Reddit Rolling Out “Real Names of Chuck Norris Only” Policy
In a misguided attempt to stifle anonymous speech while “preserving the culture” of the service, the popular social site Reddit recently announced it would institute a “real names only” policy that only allows user to select the name Chuck Norris. While we applaud their ingenuity in avoiding the pitfalls other sites have encountered in determining what does or doesn’t look like a “real” name, we remain concerned over the closure of another venue for pseudonymous speech.
The leaked draft of the Trans-Pacific Partnership has not been confirmed by the negotiating parties, but a highly-placed source claims to have overheard the US Trade Representative saying, “Who wouldn’t want to snuggle with a puppy while watching their pirated copy of Season 1 Game of Thrones?”
But some of course are fools all the time.
Protect your teenagers
“Doubting is a gateway to thinking. Stop it before it starts.”
The numbers behind the Copyright Math
A few weeks back, I gave a short TED talk about ???Copyright Math.??? Since TED draws both Hollywood and Silicon Valley bigwigs, I thought it would be a great venue for raising certain rights issues that have been a sore point between the two industries for years. But January???s brawl over the proposed SOPA law was a raw and recent memory. So I decided to make my talk playful, rather than sermonizing. Everyone can laugh at silly infographics. And who DOESN???T want to deface a Leave-it-to-Beaver-like Christmas scene with pirate-and-Santa graffiti?
Since the talk was so short, I couldn???t dive deeply into the numbers and sources that I based it on (which would have shattered the whimsical tone anyway). But even my silliest numbers were derived from actual research, performed by an actual Copyright Mathematician (me, that is). So I thought I???d use this blog post to put my sources and calculations out there for anyone who???d like to nerd out on the details.
via blog.ted.com
Same old, but like, funny. Except perhaps for Kim Dotcom.
Apparently copyright mathematicians can go on to this line of work:
“This has not, however, stopped their earnings from pushing back the boundaries of pure hypermathematics, and their chief research accountant has recently been appointed Professor of Neomathematics at the University of Maximegalon, in recognition of both his General and his Special Theories of Disaster Area Tax Returns, in which he proves that the whole fabric of the space- time continuum is not merely curved, it is in fact totally bent.”
Even more advice for David Shearer
Explaining is everything: Some pundits love to repeat the phrase that ???in politics explaining is losing??? ??? the subtext being that the public are too stupid to understand any complex political or policy issues. But the political science consistently shows that in matters of controversy the public looks to their political leaders (amongst other people) to explain what???s happening and to argue their case. This is something National is really good at ??? Key especially ??? and Labour generally doesn???t do at all, which means our window of political debate is constantly being shifted to the right as National wins almost every argument by default (Welfare and education being the obvious examples). The great exception to this phenomena: Capital Gains Tax. The conventional wisdom was that this policy was political suicide, but David Cunliffe went out, made the arguments and won them all. By the time the election came around public support for Capital Gains was roughly double the level of support for the Labour Party. Not explaining is losing.
That paragraph alone. Always a bit suspicious of aphorisms.
50 Shades of Grey and the Twilight Pro-fic Phenomenon
Not only are these authors eschewing traditional publishing, they???re eschewing digital publishing outside of their own communities. They made their own fandom spaces, and then they made their own publishing houses within those spaces. These women weren???t satisfied with the options modern publishing gives them (oh, gee, I wonder why)???but it turns out that they don???t need modern publishing in order to be successful. As reader ???Wildwood??? comments on the Daily Beast:
The article points out a phenomenon that I see happening across all areas of artistic endeavor, which is the marginalization of the ???suit???. In the past, there has always been a solid wall of judges ??? in the form of editors, publishers, producers, agents, etc ??? who decide what will be offered up for public consumption. Their decisions were not always correct, nor were they always made purely or ethically. The internet takes out the middle-man decision makers and allows artists to put their work directly into the consuming public hand???. For the first time, nobody is in control of what we are offered except ourselves and the artists who create it!
via themarysue.com
Copyright isn’t dead just because we’re not willing to let it regulate us
The inability of copyright to regulate cultural activity isn’t anything new. It’s probably true that this inability reduces the profitability of some entities in the entertainment industry’s supply chain, just as it increases others’. But that’s just a question of profit maximisation, not survival.
The problem is that the entertainment companies treated the increased ease of copying in the age of the internet as a signal that copyright should be expanded to cover more people and more activities, far outside of the entertainment industry. What they should have done is picked a new proxy for “this is an industrial activity within copyright’s scope” and soldiered on regulating themselves, without trying to regulate the whole world at the same time.
It’s time to stop declaring copyright dead because we aren’t willing to let it be the ultimate regulator of everything we do with a computer.
via guardian.co.uk
Hamish MacEwan 