This is what people are talking about when they use the phrase "disruptive technology." In terms of business models, there's no revenue-smooth way to get from current business practices to support the new technology.
When disruptive technologies surface, companies are faced with two impossible choices: ignore the incompatible technology and watch their business model go down the drain, or completely trash their current revenue streams in favor of the new business model.
The bigger the company, the less possible it is to change business models - unless they have an absolute dictator at the helm (e.g. Apple, Oracle), the addiction to the old revenue stream overrides any speculation on future business models until it's too late. A company needs to be prepared
I find this process fascinating - to me, the study of how companies, business models and emerging technologies interact tells the real story of how long term technological changes make it into our society and determines what their impact upon history will be.
As for the cheap power in France I cannot get the numbers due to the nuclear electicity generation being part of a defence program so it is SECRET - how did you get that information or are you guessing?
60 Minutes says:
Because nuclear plants emit no greenhouse gases, France has the cleanest air in the industrialized world, and because the price of oil is now around $60 a barrel, it has the lowest electric bills in Europe. In fact, France has so much cheap electricity, it exports it to its European neighbors. French nuclear plants supply power to parts of Germany, Italy and help light the city of London.
And now that oil is $100/barrel instead of $60, I'm sure that's looking even better.
Nicholas Negroponte has a concise way of describing this: people do not say "the resolution is really crappy tonight," they say "there's nothing good on TV to watch tonight."
Yeah. As the revenue model evolves, we're going to see content that better suits narrower and narrower groups - fewer big smash hits (which risk huge flops) and more cult hits. Science Fiction will probably be first since its fans are so Internet-centric, but I'd expect other fanatic cultures (like sports fans) to soon follow.
Even though its numbers were borderline, Firefly is interesting in that it was fueled by DVD sales, promoted by on-line fans, of a TV show that failed. Babylon 5: The Lost Tales is really interesting in that it was straight-to-DVD and promotion has been almost entirely through the Internet.
I can't wait until the delivery model - of any TV show - is primarily over the Internet. Once that business model is proven from end to end, all bets are off - we won't be dependent upon the whims of TV and motion picture studio executives. Someone like JMS or Joss Whedon will just have to show financiers x number of fans on the Internet to get the money to green light production - and at some point, the fans themselves will be able to provide the seed capital. And anybody who can get their own pocket-bankrolled film (I'm thinking of a future version of Kevin Smith's Clerks, for example, which cost $27,575) to bootstrap over YouTube will be able to enter this business model. And even more excitingly, it's getting cheaper and cheaper to produce content.
why in gods name would anyone want to carry 3000 mp3's with them anyway? wtf is the sense of carrying your entire music collection around on an iPod or whatever else?
I have to say, I'm really impressed by the degree of anal retention that it must require to know exactly what music you'll want to listen to every minute of the next day, week, or month.
If I have my whole collection with me I can say, "hey, I'm really in the mood to hear that Tuatara CD right now" and do so.
Sorry, but your$29,000,000,000 was used to pay interest to the People's Republic of China for the loan we took from them to pay for the first year in Iraq.
I've seen some business interviews about this. In the mid-to-late 80s, MTV executives had a choice to make: follow their current audience and continue feeding us what we expected from them, or keep "young," and supply the up and coming audience with whatever they wanted. In short, it was a choice between changing their "real" customers (the advertisers) or just change their viewers.
They made the latter choice, of course, and from a business perspective it was probably the right one. They were able to maintain all of their existing business and marketing relationships instead of having to change those relationships as the needs of their audience changed - different companies sell different stuff to 40 year old of any generation than they do to 20 year olds.
You're telling me you want to rely on a hard drive thats been sitting in storage for half a century
Absolutely, if that content is raw, uncompressed DV and the "hard drive" is a network of NAS systems duplicated across several storage depots across the world. It's not like we're talking about home hobbyists here.
You've got to live somewhere, which means you've got to pay. Unless like many Slashdotters you live in your parents' basement, of course.
When you rent, you're throwing away some of the cash every month - when you buy, you're keeping a fraction of the money in equity. The only problem is that some people overreach and get mortgages larger than they can afford instead of something with monthly payments that are roughly equivalent to rent minus a maintenance budget and insurance. People do get into trouble and forget to budget for maintenance and such, but that's not a problem inherent to buying.
There are reasons not to buy of course - if you don't expect to live in the same place, the overhead of buying a house is substantial. But the idea of owning a home rather than renting is solid. But that's funny, germans are usually better at math.
As to the final point, sure, keep an eye on impact on resale value. But don't ignore your dreams just because it might make a few $k difference down the road - life is for living.
Actually, in the real world you should take the helo's tail number and complain to the FAA. The FAA does go after aircraft that fly too low, community noise complaints are something they take seriously - and that includes bumping heads with local police departments.
... we'll have a big internet furor over whether a child was unfairly sent to their room. We'll start out assuming that the child was correct when they detail it as "no fair!"
Would an intelligent person say, "Obvious to I?" Then why does someone claiming to be intelligent say, "Obvious to you and I?"
Ugh, thank you - this is extremely grating. I think people somehow have the impression that this construction makes them sound sophisticated, while in reality it just makes them sound ignorant (and you can just suck it, natural language descriptivists).
The thing is, the CO2 is not from carbon being pulled out of the ground but instead from carbon dioxide being scrubbed by crops from the atmosphere, so it's atmospheric CO2-neutral regardless of the efficiency.
Things are a bit different now. Just a few things immediately come to mind:
Russia/The USSR wouldn't feel they can win big points for walking away with our capsules now (and couldn't do so without our knowing about it and immediately have warplanes overhead). China might, but they don't have a world-class navy yet.
Location technology is trivial now - encrypt and broadcast the GPS location from the capsule and we know exactly where it is.
There's a good chance now that useful real time satellite imagery would be available now, as long as it's brought down somewhere not overcast.
And so on. Everything had to be brute-forced back then, it really was a potential needle/haystack situation with comparably unpredictable weather and a potential for a competing power in the race. We could probably get by with a carrier group already in the same ocean (in case it comes down by a Chinese warship or something) and less than a tenth of the support craft for actual retrieval now.
I think it's completely reasonable to have business or government override the decisions of the regulators regarding the reactor - just as long as those people are required to stay on-site until it's cleared by the regulators. If it's safe, no problem. If it's not... well, at least there's some evolution going on here.
I don't think "80s" is specific enough - a lot changed through the 80s.
For me:
In 1981, the Osborne 1 - 132 columns of text! Perfect for 300 bps BBSes and Infocom games as long as you didn't mind getting LASIK 20 years later
1982 - Timex Sinclair TS1000 - Sucked, returned it after two days and got a...
1982 - Vic-20 - Hey, it had some games. Lasted until
1984 - Apple ][+ - First *real* computer - shout out to the Apple-Cat II and CatFur users! GraFORTH and UCSD Pascal rocked! Call-151!
I toyed with TRS-80s in the late 70s and C-64s in the early 80s at school of course, but the Apple ][+ (and a Laser 128:) ) was always the computer that fit me best, until I went to college and got a Mac SE in 1987.
Slashdot Mirror
That might have been funny in the post-Columbine era.
Ed is the true path to Nirvana! Ed has been the choice of educated and ignorant alike for centuries! ED WILL NOT CORRUPT YOUR PRECIOUS BODILY FLUIDS!! ED IS THE STANDARD TEXT EDITOR! ED MAKES THE SUN SHINE AND THE BIRDS SING AND THE GRASS GREEN!!
(Goddamned "Lameness filter" has lessened the correct impact of this holy rant.)
This is what people are talking about when they use the phrase "disruptive technology." In terms of business models, there's no revenue-smooth way to get from current business practices to support the new technology.
When disruptive technologies surface, companies are faced with two impossible choices: ignore the incompatible technology and watch their business model go down the drain, or completely trash their current revenue streams in favor of the new business model.
The bigger the company, the less possible it is to change business models - unless they have an absolute dictator at the helm (e.g. Apple, Oracle), the addiction to the old revenue stream overrides any speculation on future business models until it's too late. A company needs to be prepared
I find this process fascinating - to me, the study of how companies, business models and emerging technologies interact tells the real story of how long term technological changes make it into our society and determines what their impact upon history will be.
And now that oil is $100/barrel instead of $60, I'm sure that's looking even better.
It is a little bit notable that he's trolling Microsoft fanboys now instead of keeping it to Mac fanboys.
Nicholas Negroponte has a concise way of describing this: people do not say "the resolution is really crappy tonight," they say "there's nothing good on TV to watch tonight."
Yeah. As the revenue model evolves, we're going to see content that better suits narrower and narrower groups - fewer big smash hits (which risk huge flops) and more cult hits. Science Fiction will probably be first since its fans are so Internet-centric, but I'd expect other fanatic cultures (like sports fans) to soon follow.
Even though its numbers were borderline, Firefly is interesting in that it was fueled by DVD sales, promoted by on-line fans, of a TV show that failed. Babylon 5: The Lost Tales is really interesting in that it was straight-to-DVD and promotion has been almost entirely through the Internet.
I can't wait until the delivery model - of any TV show - is primarily over the Internet. Once that business model is proven from end to end, all bets are off - we won't be dependent upon the whims of TV and motion picture studio executives. Someone like JMS or Joss Whedon will just have to show financiers x number of fans on the Internet to get the money to green light production - and at some point, the fans themselves will be able to provide the seed capital. And anybody who can get their own pocket-bankrolled film (I'm thinking of a future version of Kevin Smith's Clerks, for example, which cost $27,575) to bootstrap over YouTube will be able to enter this business model. And even more excitingly, it's getting cheaper and cheaper to produce content.
If I have my whole collection with me I can say, "hey, I'm really in the mood to hear that Tuatara CD right now" and do so.
Sorry, but your $29,000,000,000 was used to pay interest to the People's Republic of China for the loan we took from them to pay for the first year in Iraq.
Hope that makes you feel better.
I've seen some business interviews about this. In the mid-to-late 80s, MTV executives had a choice to make: follow their current audience and continue feeding us what we expected from them, or keep "young," and supply the up and coming audience with whatever they wanted. In short, it was a choice between changing their "real" customers (the advertisers) or just change their viewers.
They made the latter choice, of course, and from a business perspective it was probably the right one. They were able to maintain all of their existing business and marketing relationships instead of having to change those relationships as the needs of their audience changed - different companies sell different stuff to 40 year old of any generation than they do to 20 year olds.
Except that I'm not talking about regulation altitudes, I'm talking about noise complaints.
You've got to live somewhere, which means you've got to pay. Unless like many Slashdotters you live in your parents' basement, of course.
When you rent, you're throwing away some of the cash every month - when you buy, you're keeping a fraction of the money in equity. The only problem is that some people overreach and get mortgages larger than they can afford instead of something with monthly payments that are roughly equivalent to rent minus a maintenance budget and insurance. People do get into trouble and forget to budget for maintenance and such, but that's not a problem inherent to buying.
There are reasons not to buy of course - if you don't expect to live in the same place, the overhead of buying a house is substantial. But the idea of owning a home rather than renting is solid. But that's funny, germans are usually better at math.
As to the final point, sure, keep an eye on impact on resale value. But don't ignore your dreams just because it might make a few $k difference down the road - life is for living.
2008 will be the year that people claim that Linux is finally ready for the desktop, unlike 2007.
2007 was the year that people claimed that Linux was finally ready for the desktop, unlike 2006.
You remember 2000? That was the year that people claimed that Linux was finally ready for the desktop, unlike 1999.
Actually, in the real world you should take the helo's tail number and complain to the FAA. The FAA does go after aircraft that fly too low, community noise complaints are something they take seriously - and that includes bumping heads with local police departments.
... we'll have a big internet furor over whether a child was unfairly sent to their room. We'll start out assuming that the child was correct when they detail it as "no fair!"
Here's an interesting thought...
Actually, if they can't break PGP, then the first thing they want people to think is that they can.
The thing is, the CO2 is not from carbon being pulled out of the ground but instead from carbon dioxide being scrubbed by crops from the atmosphere, so it's atmospheric CO2-neutral regardless of the efficiency.
- Russia/The USSR wouldn't feel they can win big points for walking away with our capsules now (and couldn't do so without our knowing about it and immediately have warplanes overhead). China might, but they don't have a world-class navy yet.
- Location technology is trivial now - encrypt and broadcast the GPS location from the capsule and we know exactly where it is.
- There's a good chance now that useful real time satellite imagery would be available now, as long as it's brought down somewhere not overcast.
And so on. Everything had to be brute-forced back then, it really was a potential needle/haystack situation with comparably unpredictable weather and a potential for a competing power in the race. We could probably get by with a carrier group already in the same ocean (in case it comes down by a Chinese warship or something) and less than a tenth of the support craft for actual retrieval now.I think it's completely reasonable to have business or government override the decisions of the regulators regarding the reactor - just as long as those people are required to stay on-site until it's cleared by the regulators. If it's safe, no problem. If it's not... well, at least there's some evolution going on here.
I don't think "80s" is specific enough - a lot changed through the 80s.
:) ) was always the computer that fit me best, until I went to college and got a Mac SE in 1987.
For me:
In 1981, the Osborne 1 - 132 columns of text! Perfect for 300 bps BBSes and Infocom games as long as you didn't mind getting LASIK 20 years later
1982 - Timex Sinclair TS1000 - Sucked, returned it after two days and got a...
1982 - Vic-20 - Hey, it had some games. Lasted until
1984 - Apple ][+ - First *real* computer - shout out to the Apple-Cat II and CatFur users! GraFORTH and UCSD Pascal rocked! Call-151!
I toyed with TRS-80s in the late 70s and C-64s in the early 80s at school of course, but the Apple ][+ (and a Laser 128