I, Cringely On A Momentous Week

rocketjam writes "Robert X. Cringley offers his take on three recent high-tech occurrences, saying they add up to an 'inflection point' that will change the landscape of the personal computer, video game, and electronic entertainment businesses forever. He briefly points out that Bill Gates' revelation that the next-gen XBox will offer music and movie playing capabilities as well as web-surfing will put MS into direct competition with its hardware OEM customers. He also touches on Yahoo's new music service and Apple's rumored movie download service. The meat of the article though is his take on the significance of Google's Web Accelerator. He says, 'If surfing can be doubled in speed for nothing, of course nearly everyone will go for it', the upshot of which is that AOL, MSN and Earthlink lose their relevancy. From this point more speculation on the implications of Google's success in this endeavor ensues."

Comments

Gasp!

[Meagermanx]

The computer world is changing? OMFG!!

Re:More on XBOX 360.

[Rorschach1]

Yeah, the 'install modchip here' silkscreen on the motherboard was a dead giveaway.

Re:Nothing to see here

[VGR]

Indeed.

One of the more prized members of my collection is a CompuMate. It's a keyboard that plugs into an Atari 2600, making the machine into a computer with a usable BASIC.

For over 20 years, every damn console has tried to say, "Look, it's also a computer!" And every single time, it's an utter flop. No one will use a console to do what a computer does, because the console invariably is a substandard personal computer.

Seriously, how many times have we seen this? The CompuMate, the Intellivision Computer Adaptor, the Coleco Adam, the FamiCom, the Sega Channel ... in fact, I just saw a Dreamcast Web Browser CD in a flea market the other day. Anyone ever use that?

No gaming console will ever threaten personal computers in any area except gaming (and even that's arguable). I don't know that I've ever seen a single business lesson which has been so forcibly resisted by one generation of companies after another.

lots of noise, not much here

[klossner]

Cringely had a lot of interesting things to say in his prime. But now he's moved out of the valley, and many of his columns trumpet the Next Big Thing when it's not really.

Here, he seems to have missed the fact that Google Accelerator has already failed and is being withdrawn. The world is not going to redesign their web pages so that GETs have no side effect.

A couple of weeks ago, he waved his hands and explained that airline scheduling is just like network scheduling and you can speed up the net by eliminating the hubs and running traffic directly from one host to another. Then he waved his hands again and said that hubs are servers.

Last December after the tsunami, he told us how to build a warning system that could be deployed by putting a networked PC "on every populated beach a month from now." Never mind that third-world populated beaches usually don't have electricity, much less an internet connection.

Last July he designed a scheme to compress video for broadcast by encoding only what the retina was focusing on. But it would work only if every person receiving the broadcast always pointed their retinas to the same place as everyone else.

Cringely is at his best when describing a funky experiment that he's actually done, like when he was one of the first to put a WiFi antenna in a Pringles can. But his blue-sky predictions just don't fly anymore.

Re:As Seen On TV is in trouble....

[Hawthorne01]

So now we have a Slashdot article about a tech writer who referenced a Slashdot post who wrote to the writer and mentioned it in the comments in the comments of the Slashdot article about a tech writer who referenced a Slashdot poster who...

--CTRL - BREAK --

Phew. Got out of that one... :-)