(...) There is no monitoring mechanism, so listeners cannot tell what the labels are doing; conversely, labels cannot really tell what listeners' preferences are.
To start, of course labels can tell what listeners' preferences are: 1) Focus Groups/Market research 2) Sales Charts 3) Payolla effectiveness
On the other hand, listeners do not know less about what labels are doing than, say, drivers do about what automakers are doing. In both cases the final output offered to consumers is the monitoring mechanism.
In an extreme case, the labels might begin to impose costs beyond the actual search and production costs for which listeners are actually interested in paying (...)
And, in any case, how might they not ? For any price above zero there are always listeners for whom the price is "beyond what listener is interested in paying".
The problem is compounded because music is an experience good - its value is not directly knowable to buyers until they have begun to consume it.
I can hardly think of a good more experienced before purchase than music. Even before napster. Its not like looking at a brochure for a caribbean cruise.
(...) it is important to note that the mechanism used should make strategic sense, (...) for example, reimburse listeners for a certain amount of music that they find unsatisfactory with cash, free music, or music vouchers.
Strategic sense ? Does this article sound like a consumer advocate making believe that what is good for the consumer is automatically good for profit oriented corporations ?
Right. And I thought maybe they were normalized to fit in the 0-1 range, so that the formula would give 0.0 for the worst game, and 1.0 for the best game. But this does not work, because the sum of all coeficients is 0.928, not 1:
It is not really a blogger, but it lets your folks write articles with pictures in them, and publish them hitting one button. Unlike most CMS this one is a program in Windows, and archives all files locally. When you hit "Publish" it generates tables of contentes, indexes, etc. and uploads what changed through FTP.
http://www.fogcreek.com/CityDesk/index.html
The starter version, which lets one publish up to 50 articles, is free. Do take a look at it for a nice and easy CMS. Also, for your templates, don't forget to check Open Source Web Desgins -- http://www.oswd.org/ )
Maybe they can have photocells, and convert the energy they need from natural or artificial light sources. So, at night we could see a bunch of those thingies hitting their heads on street lamps.
Maybe they can fly down for a recharge every once in a while, landing on a bigger robot's back and sucking some electricity.
And maybe, if all else fails, we can leave them energized by a thin wire, hanging from the tip of a long rod. They won't get far, but if you leave the rod close to the water you may be able to fool and electrically stun an obtuse trout, which you will then take home for dinner.
It ran on my US Robotics' Pilot 5000. It was RPN, offered drag-and-drop on the stack, and you could download function libraries to suit your taste -- and there were many. Very neat. I did not miss my HP.
My last calculator (the one I went through engineering school with) was an HP 27S . Now that is rare (try to find one on ebay)! It was *algebraic*, and neither scientific nor financial, but both. The most remarkable thing for me, though, was that it did not do complex number operations ! Even cheaper/simpler TIs at the time did that. That was one serious handicap in Electrical Engineering. A couple of guys had 48Gs, which not only did complex, they did matrix. How unfair.
My grandmother, which knew not much about calculators, except that HP was a good brand, bought the 27-S for me as a gift. So it had emotional value. I probably would have chosen another. Today it is at my parent's, where my father uses it occasionaly.
Speaking of that, my father was also an engineer, graduated in the sixties. His fond memories are not of HP calculators, but of slide rules. Does he get to get one with IrDA, USB and SD memory too ?
Next week the Brazilian Government will get fat check for $300 Million for its schools and government. Next they will the option to purchase Windows Xp and Office 2003 for the low low price of two coconuts.
Very good point!
Yet I believe the odds for Linux in Brazil today are much better than one would expect from looking the same country a year ago, or from looking at other Latin American countries.
In the last semester of 2002 a new president, named Lula, was elected in Brazil. He is the first left-wing president to have a chance of finishing a mandate (democratic institutions being now more solid than in the sixties). So, President Lula comes from the left, from the traditional government opposition, and his party, PT- Partido dos Trabalhadores (Worker's Party) has always had a discourse and a posture which included:
1) Anti-Corruption 2) Antagonism with big corporations and 3) Nationalism
If you add the three points above, and give them some credit, you will see why I am optimistic about the chances of Linux threading forth in Brazil. I do not want to advocate that those guys (or anyone) will "do the right thing"(TM).
"Innovation ? That, Mr Andreesen, is the sound of inevitability".
I could argue that Napster, Gnutella and Kazaa are in some way huge innovations for "browsing" lovers, as they do allow you to browse content, even if not through hyperlinks/html. And, why, instant messengers let you browse people !
But instead I'll just say, I wouldn't trade the last version of Internet Explorer for a previous version of it. Or for Netscape 4.5. Functionality, performance and format support have improved. Improved format support means more forms of content (Flash, Shockwave, Java, etc.).
Despite what I said I use not IE, but Avant Browser instead. The reason is that I think it (ahem) *innovates* enough over MS's vanilla offer. MyIE2 is also good looking and functional. Both are free. Both add tabbed browsing, gestures/click sequences, ad blocking etc.
If you use windows try this: http://www.avantbrowser.com/
Or, take a look at this: http://www.myie2.com/
How much a 2003 car model innovates over a Ford T is a matter of debate. We still have combustion engines, rubber tires (four of them) and a driving wheel behind a wind shield. But if you were the Ford T chief designer and engineer, and had a big ego, in what side of the debate would you be ?
Spending money to make a better product only works as long as your competition is not also doing the same. Said another way, R&D provodes no clear competitive advantage for companies unless the competition cannot afford to finance R&D spending.
Your point that R&D only makes sense if you can get away with it not being replicated by competitors is wrong. The fact is, companies can only afford not to invest in R&D if their competition is not doing the same. If competitors are investing in R&D, they generally must invest in R&D as well, in order to keep up.
Welcome to Equilibrium, the Game of Life (c). You are at the north end of the Shrine of Delphi. There is a plaque in front of you. Exits: S >read plaque The plaque reads "Know thyself". >S You are at the south end of the Shrine of Delphi. There is a plaque in front of you. Exits: N >read plaque The plaque reads "Nothing in excess". >N You are at the north end of the Shrine of Delphi. There is a plaque in front of you. Exits: S (...)
Taiwan comes from a position of power in the computer world. Piss them off, and memory prices could triple.
Duh!
By tripling the price of memory prices they would make much less, not more money, in the long run. Otherwise they would already have tripled it ! So what you are saying is that taiwanese businesses would hurt themselves badly just to see MS affected -- not likely, not at all.
Consider why they may not be able to play with prices, even if that's what they wanted. Look at competition in that market (other suppliers in US, Korea, Japan, Europe, or even withing TW). Taiwan has a large share *because* it is a leader in cost/price. Raise prices, and see share going down, down, down.
However there *is* a position of power: the Taiwanese government playing with their institutional weight *within* the Taiwanese market, for instance in regard to the strictness of piracy control. Another bargaining token (not necessarily explicit) is the potential official support to use of MS product alternatives (e.g. consider all public service computers migrating to Linux/OpenOffice).
Do not confuse marketing with sales. The purpose of sales is to answer the customer's questions about a product. It's inherently an educational process, where the customer is taught the answer to the question "why should I choose this product over a competitor's product."
Are we being naive in here ? Sales being an educational process ? Come on, in general sales people will do and say what is necessary to maximize their variable compensation (to maximize the formula that calculates their bonuses). IF that happens to be educating the customer, great, if not, well, misleading or incomplete information will come out.
Less-than-best products also have salesforces, remember. Not all salespeople can afford to be selling "the" best alternative to a client, among all possible ones.
And, by the way, in the real world sales will often do as marketing tells them to -- prices, product design and choices, promotions, advertisement, quotas, even sales argument, all of that more often than not comes from the marketing guys.
... and it has been sometime already since I first thought they had one of the best ideas being rolled out on the internet, an idea of a magnitude, I believe, comparable to Hotmail, Yahoo and Ebay.
The reason is that their business is geared by the creation of network externality forces -- you know what that is: many people already in make it slightly more likely that you will to join them than competitors, which in turn brings more people in and so forth.
Is the network externality force all there is to this game ? Of course not! But it is, in my view, *the* differentiator. They need to do well in customer service, in fee setting, service design, in marketing, in providing guarantees and all the rest. But they can do any of those things, in principle, just as well as any other competitor. However, no competitor can really replicate the network externality, for as long as PayPal leads. What I am trying to say is, all things being equal -- and I think they *could* make all things equal -- PayPal would be dominant (I mean MS vs Apple dominance) in this P2P payments field.
Now look closer at where they are, and where they could be evolving to. I see it in three dimensions. Dimension number one is type of payment. They started P2P, then they evolved P2B, perhaps they could go micropayments (something they haven't done yet) or B2B.
Dimension number two is financial services depth. Here we see them evolving (sooner or later) towards being a full service bank. It started with the investment accounts, then banking cards, credit cards -- what could come next ? Insurance ? Loans ? Pension plans ? Think retail financial products.
Dimension number three, and this is, in my opinion, both the most important for their future prospects and the most interesting of them all, is platform evolution. The vector is clear: from internet based to mobile devices. One fact to consider is that more people use mobile cell phones than the internet today. Another is that a cell phone is, together with your wallet and ID, one of the least likely objects you will leave home without. It is always there. Think paying your cab driver from your cell phone to his cell phone.
But WAIT! Not all things are rosy, and I do recognize (as other posters pointed) significant hurdles ahead -- Regulation is, I believe, the greatest one. Vertical challenges in their value chain is another. Others are related to management capability to set the company in the right course, negotiating the challenges as they lay ahead, and being faultless (or as close to that as possible) in execution.
So their probability of success is not 100%. But remember that their value is their probability of success times their value if they are successful. And, from my perspective, the position they are aiming -- becoming the financial "operating system" of internet and mobile transactions -- has immense value.
For the large majority of Freedom Plan customers, this allowance will not impact on their current usage patterns and will provide them with improved network performance. This is because around five percent of users take up 35 percent of total bandwidth at any one time.
I'd say that if their network does not have optimal performance today, it is because they designed it that way (knowing the current usage patterns, including the 5%/35% ratio and all). And just because they are going to force some high volume users to pay more for their traffic, or to change their usage pattern, or leave, does not mean that the utilization of their net will be lower. It could mean that they will be able to push their network investment schedule back a couple of months, and let the performance level crawl back to what it is currently. Considering the boom in the number of broadband users, and in the band used/user, this would not take long.
Another aspect, too, that should be considered, is: who cares about 3 Gb being downloaded/uploaded in off-peak time ? Why restrict it ? What impact does it have on costs, or on the network performance for the average user ? The answer is none -- no impact. Maybe we could one day evolve towards more economically sophisticated ways of charging for traffic...
I had the chance to walk aboard a huge seaship that carries iron ore from Brazil all the way to Japan, going under Africa. It then goes empty to Vancoucer, where it gets loaded with coal, and back to Brazil, by the straits of Magellan, under Tierra del Fuego (because the ship is so large, it is beyond the Panama Channel size). And then it flips coal for iron ore, and again it goes, always traveling eastward (it seems it the ocean currents favor that direction).
Turns out, for long haul, you can't beat the costs of sea transportation. It took large q's of rail wagons to load such a ship, you bet. And it is just unimaginable to make iron ore get to Japan more cheaply.
For the short haul, on the other hand, trucks tipically crush rail transportation -- simply because it goes from door to door, saving the change of transportation mode ("the last mile" is generally trucks, anyway).
Between a rock and and a hard place, rail companies are tipically subsidised (esp. in Europe) or having poor returns/facing consolidation (U.S.). Ok, I am not going to give the last word on this -- I haven't gone far enough in the analysis -- but it does seem to be a means of transportation under check. The "chunnel" was a money pit -- no investment return in sight, though a much more favorable situation than this pharaonic siberia-alaska tunnel.
The plan the article depicts is clearly aiming at long haul transportation. But, obviously (as it is a tunnel under the sea) it is competing with sea transportation. And, like the joke about the bear and the two hikers, it has to prove not simply that it can work, or that there are things to transport between Alaska and Siberia, but rather that rail would do it more cost efficiently than ships sailing over the pacific.
Slashdot Mirror
To pick a few points:
(...) There is no monitoring mechanism, so listeners cannot tell what the labels are doing; conversely, labels cannot really tell what listeners' preferences are.
To start, of course labels can tell what listeners' preferences are:
1) Focus Groups/Market research
2) Sales Charts
3) Payolla effectiveness
On the other hand, listeners do not know less about what labels are doing than, say, drivers do about what automakers are doing. In both cases the final output offered to consumers is the monitoring mechanism.
In an extreme case, the labels might begin to impose costs beyond the actual search and production costs for which listeners are actually interested in paying (...)
And, in any case, how might they not ? For any price above zero there are always listeners for whom the price is "beyond what listener is interested in paying".
The problem is compounded because music is an experience good - its value is not directly knowable to buyers until they have begun to consume it.
I can hardly think of a good more experienced before purchase than music. Even before napster. Its not like looking at a brochure for a caribbean cruise.
(...) it is important to note that the mechanism used should make strategic sense, (...) for example, reimburse listeners for a certain amount of music that they find unsatisfactory with cash, free music, or music vouchers.
Strategic sense ? Does this article sound like a consumer advocate making believe that what is good for the consumer is automatically good for profit oriented corporations ?
The units should, of course, be normalized first.
0 5+ 0.011=0.928
Right. And I thought maybe they were normalized to fit in the 0-1 range, so that the formula would give 0.0 for the worst game, and 1.0 for the best game. But this does not work, because the sum of all coeficients is 0.928, not 1:
0.22+0.17+0.153+0.12-0.1+0.1+0.09+0.06+0.054+0.
Or maybe the formula is not complete and the article forgot a factor which has weight 0.072.
It is not really a blogger, but it lets your folks write articles with pictures in them, and publish them hitting one button. Unlike most CMS this one is a program in Windows, and archives all files locally. When you hit "Publish" it generates tables of contentes, indexes, etc. and uploads what changed through FTP.
http://www.fogcreek.com/CityDesk/index.html
The starter version, which lets one publish up to 50 articles, is free. Do take a look at it for a nice and easy CMS. Also, for your templates, don't forget to check Open Source Web Desgins -- http://www.oswd.org/ )
Maybe they won't need much in terms of batteries.
Maybe they can have photocells, and convert the energy they need from natural or artificial light sources. So, at night we could see a bunch of those thingies hitting their heads on street lamps.
Maybe they can fly down for a recharge every once in a while, landing on a bigger robot's back and sucking some electricity.
And maybe, if all else fails, we can leave them energized by a thin wire, hanging from the tip of a long rod. They won't get far, but if you leave the rod close to the water you may be able to fool and electrically stun an obtuse trout, which you will then take home for dinner.
It ran on my US Robotics' Pilot 5000. It was RPN, offered drag-and-drop on the stack, and you could download function libraries to suit your taste -- and there were many. Very neat. I did not miss my HP.
My last calculator (the one I went through engineering school with) was an HP 27S . Now that is rare (try to find one on ebay)! It was *algebraic*, and neither scientific nor financial, but both. The most remarkable thing for me, though, was that it did not do complex number operations ! Even cheaper/simpler TIs at the time did that. That was one serious handicap in Electrical Engineering. A couple of guys had 48Gs, which not only did complex, they did matrix. How unfair.
My grandmother, which knew not much about calculators, except that HP was a good brand, bought the 27-S for me as a gift. So it had emotional value. I probably would have chosen another. Today it is at my parent's, where my father uses it occasionaly.
Speaking of that, my father was also an engineer, graduated in the sixties. His fond memories are not of HP calculators, but of slide rules. Does he get to get one with IrDA, USB and SD memory too ?
Next week the Brazilian Government will get fat check for $300 Million for its schools and government. Next they will the option to purchase Windows Xp and Office 2003 for the low low price of two coconuts.
Very good point!
Yet I believe the odds for Linux in Brazil today are much better than one would expect from looking the same country a year ago, or from looking at other Latin American countries.
In the last semester of 2002 a new president, named Lula, was elected in Brazil. He is the first left-wing president to have a chance of finishing a mandate (democratic institutions being now more solid than in the sixties). So, President Lula comes from the left, from the traditional government opposition, and his party, PT- Partido dos Trabalhadores (Worker's Party) has always had a discourse and a posture which included:
1) Anti-Corruption
2) Antagonism with big corporations and
3) Nationalism
If you add the three points above, and give them some credit, you will see why I am optimistic about the chances of Linux threading forth in Brazil. I do not want to advocate that those guys (or anyone) will "do the right thing"(TM).
But there is certainly room for hope.
"Innovation ? That, Mr Andreesen, is the sound of inevitability".
I could argue that Napster, Gnutella and Kazaa are in some way huge innovations for "browsing" lovers, as they do allow you to browse content, even if not through hyperlinks/html. And, why, instant messengers let you browse people !
But instead I'll just say, I wouldn't trade the last version of Internet Explorer for a previous version of it. Or for Netscape 4.5. Functionality, performance and format support have improved. Improved format support means more forms of content (Flash, Shockwave, Java, etc.).
Despite what I said I use not IE, but Avant Browser instead. The reason is that I think it (ahem) *innovates* enough over MS's vanilla offer. MyIE2 is also good looking and functional. Both are free. Both add tabbed browsing, gestures/click sequences, ad blocking etc.
If you use windows try this:
http://www.avantbrowser.com/
Or, take a look at this:
http://www.myie2.com/
How much a 2003 car model innovates over a Ford T is a matter of debate. We still have combustion engines, rubber tires (four of them) and a driving wheel behind a wind shield. But if you were the Ford T chief designer and engineer, and had a big ego, in what side of the debate would you be ?
Your point that R&D only makes sense if you can get away with it not being replicated by competitors is wrong. The fact is, companies can only afford not to invest in R&D if their competition is not doing the same. If competitors are investing in R&D, they generally must invest in R&D as well, in order to keep up.
Welcome to Equilibrium, the Game of Life (c).
You are at the north end of the Shrine of Delphi. There is a plaque in front of you. Exits: S
>read plaque
The plaque reads "Know thyself".
>S
You are at the south end of the Shrine of Delphi. There is a plaque in front of you. Exits: N
>read plaque
The plaque reads "Nothing in excess".
>N
You are at the north end of the Shrine of Delphi. There is a plaque in front of you. Exits: S
(...)
Taiwan comes from a position of power in the computer world. Piss them off, and memory prices could triple.
Duh!
By tripling the price of memory prices they would make much less, not more money, in the long run. Otherwise they would already have tripled it ! So what you are saying is that taiwanese businesses would hurt themselves badly just to see MS affected -- not likely, not at all.
Consider why they may not be able to play with prices, even if that's what they wanted. Look at competition in that market (other suppliers in US, Korea, Japan, Europe, or even withing TW). Taiwan has a large share *because* it is a leader in cost/price. Raise prices, and see share going down, down, down.
However there *is* a position of power: the Taiwanese government playing with their institutional weight *within* the Taiwanese market, for instance in regard to the strictness of piracy control. Another bargaining token (not necessarily explicit) is the potential official support to use of MS product alternatives (e.g. consider all public service computers migrating to Linux/OpenOffice).
Do not confuse marketing with sales. The purpose of sales is to answer the customer's questions about a product. It's inherently an educational process, where the customer is taught the answer to the question "why should I choose this product over a competitor's product."
Are we being naive in here ? Sales being an educational process ? Come on, in general sales people will do and say what is necessary to maximize their variable compensation (to maximize the formula that calculates their bonuses). IF that happens to be educating the customer, great, if not, well, misleading or incomplete information will come out.
Less-than-best products also have salesforces, remember. Not all salespeople can afford to be selling "the" best alternative to a client, among all possible ones.
And, by the way, in the real world sales will often do as marketing tells them to -- prices, product design and choices, promotions, advertisement, quotas, even sales argument, all of that more often than not comes from the marketing guys.
Starship troopers ? Well, this old man here remembers Iron Man:m or.htm l
http://www.toymania.com/archives/ironman/ar
What ? Civ 3 is the greatest Civ !
Gosh...
Or maybe he received a Medal that is given annually because of funds raised way back by the Class of 1901 ?
After the de-linking amazon reports
hits on its web page down 0.0013%.
And the author's guild looks like
greedy meanies for that. Smart.
In truth I think they are advertising
a valid reason to go to amazon vs bn.com.
... and it has been sometime already since I first thought they had one of the best ideas being rolled out on the internet, an idea of a magnitude, I believe, comparable to Hotmail, Yahoo and Ebay.
The reason is that their business is geared by the creation of network externality forces -- you know what that is: many people already in make it slightly more likely that you will to join them than competitors, which in turn brings more people in and so forth.
Is the network externality force all there is to this game ? Of course not! But it is, in my view, *the* differentiator. They need to do well in customer service, in fee setting, service design, in marketing, in providing guarantees and all the rest. But they can do any of those things, in principle, just as well as any other competitor. However, no competitor can really replicate the network externality, for as long as PayPal leads. What I am trying to say is, all things being equal -- and I think they *could* make all things equal -- PayPal would be dominant (I mean MS vs Apple dominance) in this P2P payments field.
Now look closer at where they are, and where they could be evolving to. I see it in three dimensions. Dimension number one is type of payment. They started P2P, then they evolved P2B, perhaps they could go micropayments (something they haven't done yet) or B2B.
Dimension number two is financial services depth. Here we see them evolving (sooner or later) towards being a full service bank. It started with the investment accounts, then banking cards, credit cards -- what could come next ? Insurance ? Loans ? Pension plans ? Think retail financial products.
Dimension number three, and this is, in my opinion, both the most important for their future prospects and the most interesting of them all, is platform evolution. The vector is clear: from internet based to mobile devices. One fact to consider is that more people use mobile cell phones than the internet today. Another is that a cell phone is, together with your wallet and ID, one of the least likely objects you will leave home without. It is always there. Think paying your cab driver from your cell phone to his cell phone.
But WAIT! Not all things are rosy, and I do recognize (as other posters pointed) significant hurdles ahead -- Regulation is, I believe, the greatest one. Vertical challenges in their value chain is another. Others are related to management capability to set the company in the right course, negotiating the challenges as they lay ahead, and being faultless (or as close to that as possible) in execution.
So their probability of success is not 100%. But remember that their value is their probability of success times their value if they are successful. And, from my perspective, the position they are aiming -- becoming the financial "operating system" of internet and mobile transactions -- has immense value.
Well, what do I know...
-Ricardo
For the large majority of Freedom Plan customers, this allowance will not impact on their current usage patterns and will provide them with improved network performance. This is because around five percent of users take up 35 percent of total bandwidth at any one time.
I'd say that if their network does not have optimal performance today, it is because they designed it that way (knowing the current usage patterns, including the 5%/35% ratio and all). And just because they are going to force some high volume users to pay more for their traffic, or to change their usage pattern, or leave, does not mean that the utilization of their net will be lower. It could mean that they will be able to push their network investment schedule back a couple of months, and let the performance level crawl back to what it is currently. Considering the boom in the number of broadband users, and in the band used/user, this would not take long.
Another aspect, too, that should be considered, is: who cares about 3 Gb being downloaded/uploaded in off-peak time ? Why restrict it ? What impact does it have on costs, or on the network performance for the average user ? The answer is none -- no impact. Maybe we could one day evolve towards more economically sophisticated ways of charging for traffic ...
-RicardoI had the chance to walk aboard a huge seaship that carries iron ore from Brazil all the way to Japan, going under Africa. It then goes empty to Vancoucer, where it gets loaded with coal, and back to Brazil, by the straits of Magellan, under Tierra del Fuego (because the ship is so large, it is beyond the Panama Channel size). And then it flips coal for iron ore, and again it goes, always traveling eastward (it seems it the ocean currents favor that direction).
Turns out, for long haul, you can't beat the costs of sea transportation. It took large q's of rail wagons to load such a ship, you bet. And it is just unimaginable to make iron ore get to Japan more cheaply.
For the short haul, on the other hand, trucks tipically crush rail transportation -- simply because it goes from door to door, saving the change of transportation mode ("the last mile" is generally trucks, anyway).
Between a rock and and a hard place, rail companies are tipically subsidised (esp. in Europe) or having poor returns/facing consolidation (U.S.). Ok, I am not going to give the last word on this -- I haven't gone far enough in the analysis -- but it does seem to be a means of transportation under check. The "chunnel" was a money pit -- no investment return in sight, though a much more favorable situation than this pharaonic siberia-alaska tunnel.
The plan the article depicts is clearly aiming at long haul transportation. But, obviously (as it is a tunnel under the sea) it is competing with sea transportation. And, like the joke about the bear and the two hikers, it has to prove not simply that it can work, or that there are things to transport between Alaska and Siberia, but rather that rail would do it more cost efficiently than ships sailing over the pacific.
Dito.
-rcastro0