From: Adam L. Beberg (beberg@mithral.com)
Date: Fri Jun 09 2000 - 10:05:59 PDT
On Fri, 9 Jun 2000 ThosStew@aol.com wrote:
> In a message dated 6/8/2000 8:36:22 PM, sk@zotgroup.com writes:
>
> >In Parrish's keynote address at Internet World in Sydney on Wednesday,
> >he laid it on the line: it's email and instant messaging that will make the
> >money and draw the crowds.
>
> Don't we already know that from Finland etc, where short messaging is all the
> rage, not checking on the price of Nokia?
This is rather funny. The killer apps of course are the apps noone has
ever been able to monitize. Trying to charge for email or IM is
absurd...
BUT...
The companies that own the bandwidth are raking it in. And the ones that
own the stacks and stacks of patents on the hardware are raking it in -
for now. Just more evidence that software apps are dead, protocols are
free, and the past, present, and future belongs to the megacorps with
the IP or monopoly power. No patents or other element of monopoly = no
company.
As odd bits, we setup with Ingram Micro, one of the largest hardware
distributors for one of the startups I'm involved with. The prices we
can get for resale are _above_ those for sale at buy.com and several
other sites. I was telling my friend about this oddity and he said that
in invoices from buy.com and Ingram are inkjet-dot for dot identical.
Hmmm, no wonder their slogan is "cheapest prices on the net", noone
_can_ be cheaper. Obviously that plan went out the window in a hurry. I
predict a mass disappearance of hardware resellers in the next 6 months.
As that teen cookiecutter band says.. Bye bye bye...
The airlines announced something the other day too. The big 6 or so are
getting together and are about to nuke the travel agent business off the
face of the earth by mushing together all their web sites and databases.
Due to the geography of the real world, airlines are not really
competing, but are regulated. The same flight to Seoul is 800$ less on
nwa.com then travelocity.com. The travel agents are now bitching to
congress, but travel agents don't help the consumer keep prices down,
the regulation does that, so the travel agents can go and noone will
care.
People dont seem to see the long term effects of the net "detecting and
routing around damage". Well guess what, middlemen are innefficencies,
and profits are damage. Better have a legal document saying you can
enforce your ability to induce damage or inefficiencies, or a real world
defense against the net like geography. Bye bye bye...
I dont think a monopoly is a bad way to make money, I think it's the
ONLY way. This has always been the case, but geography used to work to
limit the effect so that noone noticed that the grocery store has a
monopoly on customers withing a few miles. That's gone now in an
information age where I'm all of 1 second from anywhere on earth - or
even the moon.
The NASDAQ and all the .com companies are starting to figure this out.
Even with patents, they are going down in flames as the net burns them.
Come up with an idea and you have 20 copycats by the next week selling
it for $0.01 less then you are and you wave goodbye to all your
customers due to a meta agent. If you're not _thee_ cheapest, you're not
in business. Long term you have to sell things at cost. Bye bye bye
profits.
We're reaching the point where all the fundamentals were done > 17 years
ago, and are no longer patented. No patents and thus no defense from the
network, and bogus ones don't count. Open source is the manifestation of
this network effect on software. Luckily for now there are enough bugs
that they can charge for support, but eventually the bugs will be fixed?
If Microsoft is split up, how exactly will they make money? People only
buy the OS becasse it's the only thing the apps run on, and visa-versa.
Remove that one-to-one dependancy, and it's a big "oh-oh" for Microsoft
and that billion dollar a year payroll.
I'm beginning to see why people don't like what I'm doing with the Cosm
CPU/OS and Util layers, it's just too dangerous a concept to let it
live, but if I dont do it, someone else will. I have inefficiency, but I
have bills. Maybe _this_ is that scientific self-restraint Bill Joy was
really talking about. Nanotech, genome tinkering, and robots wont
destroy the world, they will destory all hope of profit.
There is a long term problem here. Companies, much like the U.S., are
running on debt. Companies are getting the money from investors and the
stock market to sell things at a loss in the hope that people will be
loyal and not learn about meta agents, which they will. This money is
coming from consumers, which borrow to buy stuff, and borrow to invest
in the market with the money they "save" from the stuff they bought at a
loss, so even more companies can sell things at a loss. Along with the
retirement money, 401k's and everything else americans have in the
market, there is a trillion or so here from overseas. When this circle
of borrowing falls apart, and the bill comes due because noone can make
money, it's gonna get preaty bad.
Even scarier is that the network might allow those billion plus people
that make less than a dollar per day to enter the workforce. Luckily
the government is taking steps to make sure that never happens. Noone
wants a foreigner saying "would you like fries with that" (which sounds
exactly like like "oioqn jqwe qcion qc wfo fzzz" at any fast food
restaraunt anywhere) and pushing the button with the picture of fries
for a dollar a day. But someone typing some Java... or making
preaty pictures for a web site... hmmm...
Which all makes me wonder, how the hell is Mr. Greenspan gonna give us a
"soft landing"? Maybe this is why civilization collapses and disappears
very quickly every time it gets to an advanced tech state [egyptions,
aztek, 10,500BC, etc], they efficiency themselves to oblivion and noone
can make any money. Then when the one megacorp farming company goes out
of business, they all eat each other for food.
(I really gotta get my body clock in order, my left-brain seems to
lose control when i'm tired)
- Adam L. Beberg
Mithral Communications & Design, Inc.
The Cosm Project - http://cosm.mithral.com/
beberg@mithral.com - http://www.iit.edu/~beberg/
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