Submitted by acohill on Tue, 02/02/2010 - 09:36
The iPad continues to generate enormous discussion on the Intertubes; while I have seen a lot of commentary about how it might be used in higher ed, I have seen very little about how it might be used by kids. The most obvious higher ed connection is as a replacement for textbooks, which are murderously expensive. A college student with an iPad can carry around an entire library of textbooks and should be able to save a lot of money at the same time. Textbook costs ought to decline over time, not to the $15 dollar level, but perhaps by 50% from $60 to $30 (and many technical textbooks are pushing $100 or more).
But the iPad strikes me as the perfect computer for middle school and high school. Smaller, lighter, no moving parts, much less to go wrong, and with plenty of horsepower to handle routine school assignments, which are mostly typing essays and papers. And you could do a lot of interesting basic math with a program like Apple's Numbers spreadsheet application. Apple is selling its three productivity programs for $9.99 each (word processsing, spreadsheet, presentations), about a third of the price of the cost of them for a laptop. With the dock and keyboard and wireless printing to a shared printer, kids have everything they need for school at much less than you might spend for a bare bones Apple laptop. I know there are very inexpensive Windows laptops available, but they still come with all the drawbacks of a laptop--heavy, moving parts, more susceptible to viruses, expensive software, etc.
Like the iPod, the iPad is going to change the way we do a lot of things. And like the iPod, it will create a lot of new business opportunities.
Submitted by acohill on Mon, 01/25/2010 - 17:24
A short, good analysis of six industries that Apple's tablet computer could change. Apple is expected to roll out the device next week.
Submitted by acohill on Tue, 01/05/2010 - 10:15
Here is a roundup of rumors about the new Apple tablet. Apple has announced a media event late this month, but is not saying what the announcement is about. Until very recently, most pundits were guessing Apple's table computer would not be announced until June of this year, but I think the increasing interest in the Google Android phone may have caused Apple to move up their announcement to suck all the oxygen out of the room and take the media focus off Android.
If that is Apple's strategy, it is likely to work. The iTablet or iSlate (nobody really knows what the final name will be) will relegate the Amazon Kindle and other bookreaders to strictly second tier status, much like the iPod put all other MP3 music players into a permanent also-ran status, and completely transformed the music industry.
There is still much debate about whether the new device will have an iPhone style interface or a Mac style interface, with the conventional wisdom betting on the iPhone. But what a lot of people forget is that it probably does not matter very much, because the iPhone is a Macintosh underneath. Every single iPhone has the full power of a desktop or laptop Macintosh. So the iSlate may look more like an iPhone, but as it evolves, Apple can easily and quickly add more functionality just by peeling away the cover on the hidden power.
Why is this device going to be revolutionary? It won't be just the technology--Microsoft has a tablet operating system for years. What Apple is likely to unveil along with the iTablet is a new section of the iTunes Store, stocked with magazines and newspapers. iSlate owners will be able to subscribe to a wide variety of publishing content and get the content wirelessly on their iSlate. This will save the rapidly collapsing magazine and newspaper businesses, which have been unable to find or build their way out of the two century old paper-based distribution model. With the cost of distribution of a newspaper or magazine slashed to nearly zero, papers and magazines will be able to focus on high quality writing and reporting, which is always in short supply.
As with other breakthrough Apple technologies, new kinds of opportunities will emerge quickly, creating new businesses and jobs where none existed before. One big sea change will be in higher ed, where colleges and universities that are smart will simply issue every student an iSlate on the first day of freshman year. Faculty will be able to provide their students with very high quality (book quality) class notes, multimedia presentations, and even administer tests via the iTablet. Can't they do all that now? Sure, but not with the kind of high quality interface and superb usability that the iSlate will bring. And textbook prices should come down, although some textbook publishers will resist.
The iTablet will allow new college textbook writers to enter the marketplace quickly and easily, just the way the iPhone App Store has created thousands of new software publishing businesses. Writing a textbook will no longer require years of negotiation with publishing houses still operating on a business model developed during the era of Charles Dickens. Instead, textbook writers will be able to market directly to faculty at colleges and universities, with the textbook distributed at very low cost via the iSlate Textbook Store.
The big, sheet of paper size screen of the iTablet will allow colleges and universities to create "virtual registrar" interfaces that will give students the ability to fill out and submit forms quickly and easily from anywhere, with much better interfaces and ease of use than Web forms (because of the direct input pen interface).
The iSlate will also boost TV show and movie sales, with the existing iTunes TV/movies section all ready to send video content directly to a large, comfortable, easy to watch screen.
Apple has been planning this for years. Note that Apple has had wireless keyboards and mice for some time, and continues to roll out improved wireless devices like the popular Magic Mouse. Prop the iTablet up on a desk, start typing away on your wireless keyboard, and you have most of the functionality of a laptop.
If the first decade of the 21st century was dominated by Apple and the iPod, the second decade will be dominated again by Apple with the iSlate. Stand by and watch the fun begin as the publishing world is turned upside down.
Submitted by acohill on Tue, 12/29/2009 - 15:05
The recently announced Blockbuster store closings will cut about 20% of the firm's stores. Blockbuster plans to replace them with kiosks and smaller stores in more densely populated urban areas. Blockbuster also has a Netflix-style subscription service, but will only one-fifth the customer base of Netflix.
Based on my own experience, Blockbuster may have alienated too many customers with their outrageous late fees. They "eliminated" late fees two or three years ago, but replaced them by billing you for the full retail cost of the DVD if it was late. Once you returned it, they credited your account for the DVD, less a "restocking" fee, which, of course, is a late fee by any other name.
In practice, the service being sold (watching a movie) is identical no matter which company you get the movie from. So the movie rental business is based 100% on the quality of service. And so this is why Blockbuster is losing--Netflix does not have the late fee baggage of Blockbuster, and Netflix service is great--so great, you don't even think about it.
Watching movies may not seem to have much to do with economic development, but communities that don't have their eye on this ball will be losers later, in two different ways. High performance community-owned broadband is the only way some communities are going to get to watch movies over the Internet. Cable companies are just barely keeping up with the bandwidth demands now, but as more homes dump driving to the video store in favor of watching movies on demand, legacy cable and DSL networks are going to begin to influence where people WON'T live. That's right--young professionals don't want to live anywhere now where broadband is not available, and within a couple of years, they won't want to live in communities that only offer "little" broadband--that is, the low performance cable and DSL services.
So attracting and keeping the right kind of workforce is a community broadband issue. The second issue is how broadband is changing retail. Video stores have served as anchor tenants in retail shopping districts, as the stores provide a steady and predictable flow of people to a shopping area. As the video stores disappear, what happens to those retail buildings? What happens to the rest of the stores nearby that relied on that traffic?
In our broadband planning work, we continue to see too many communities clinging to a 1960s style of retail planning and economic development. Retail is going away entirely, but the combination of big box stores and the Internet has changed it drastically, and few places can lead with retail as an economic revitalization strategy--perhaps none can. Instead, communities need to think more broadly about how to put empty retail locations to new uses, including office space for entrepreneurs, start ups, and established white collar businesses. And the way to start that process is to begin placing duct and fiber in commercial and retail areas. Call Design Nine if you want help with thinking about your retail and economic development strategies.
Submitted by acohill on Mon, 12/14/2009 - 09:27
The "Did you know" video has been around for years, but I just noticed it has been updated recently. It's worth watching again, and really should be required viewing for community leaders who are skeptical that community investments in broadband are important for economic development and jobs growth.
Submitted by acohill on Thu, 12/03/2009 - 17:29
With newspapers and magazines going belly up almost weekly, is there any hope for them? The much speculated upon iPad or iTablet from Apple may end up saving the day. Part of the appeal of a newspaper or magazine is the convenience--easy to carry, easy to read, and you can get up close with them. It's hard to get up close to your computer, even a laptop, the same way. The mouse or a trackpad is no substitute for just turning the page. But what if you could subscribe to Sports Illustrated and have it turn up on a light, easy to use tablet device with full color, high resolution images and text that looked just like, well, a magazine page?
One thing that could happen is that we could break out of or away from the Web browser as the catch all container for content. Why or how would this happen? Just look at the iPhone. It comes with a Web browser, but Apple's superb operating system and programming interface makes it easy to create custom applications for specialized content. So when you subscribe to Sports Illustrated, you don't view through the still clunky Web browser, but instead view it using a specially designed application that really unleashes the content and graphic design without the legacy restrictions that have to be dragged along when squeezing content through a Web browser.
As the Internet destroys old business models, it enables the creation of new ones. We may be at the dawn of the golden age of newspapers and magazines, if they can just let go of the paper and barrels of ink they keep in the back room.
Oh, and one more thing....
If you play the YouTube demo of Sports Illustrated, you will notice they plan to include high resolution video, which will really change the way we think about newspapers and magazines--suddenly a magazine looks a lot like a TV channel. Interesting all by itself, but when we all sit down to the breakfast table in the morning with our coffee and iTablets to read/watch the news, guess what we will need?
Bandwidth. Lots of it. More than you are going to be able squeeze over WiFi connections. Fiber to the home is the only technology that will deliver the bandwidth for these next generation news and magazine services. Communities that are building fiber to the home, next generation infrastructure will have a huge edge over communities that rely on incumbent copper-based solutions or wireless only.
Submitted by acohill on Tue, 12/01/2009 - 11:22
Barnes and Noble is about to release an ebook reader called Nook. The bookseller and publisher wants to compete with the Amazon Kindle and the Sony Reader. It is easy to find people who say they love their Kindle, but I remain skeptical. I do think that within a few years, we will reading many more books using some kind of reader device, but I think the long-rumored Apple tablet is likely to crush these dedicated devices.
One of the arguments for dedicated book readers is that it is no different than lugging around a paperback--which I do all the time when I travel. But a paperback can be handled roughly--I don't have to worry about cracking the screen of a paperback, it never runs out of battery life, and it requires no charger. Once you have an ebook reader, you have to think constantly about charging it, loading the books on it, handling carefully, and even losing it--lose a paperback, and you are out $10. Lose or misplace your ereader, and you are out hundreds of dollars, and the hassle of replacing all the books stored on it.
A tablet device the size of the Nook or the Kindle that also does email, Web browsing, and handles light office tasks is going to be much more popular than adding another electronic device to your life.
Submitted by acohill on Wed, 11/18/2009 - 09:46
In case you have been worrying about Planet Nibiru swinging too close to earth and destroying the planet in 2012 (just two years away!), the good folks at NASA have a handy FAQ on the whole 2012/Nibiru/doomsday thing. In case you have been living off the grid and only just yesterday got an Internet connection, the new movie "2012" posits that the mysterious planet Nibiru makes its every 3600 year swing near earth and just about wrecks the planet. The movie trailers look like the whole film is just a pretty flimsy excuse for two hours of computer-generated disasters, but apparently some folks are writing to NASA asking how to prepare for the coming apocalypse. Hence the handy FAQ to try to quell the hysteria. Note that the end of the world was predicted on May 5, 2000 when a major planetary alignment was supposed to rip Earth to shreds. And apparently, according to NASA, Nibiru was supposed to do that in 2003, but it never happened, so it's now scheduled for 2012.
Submitted by acohill on Tue, 10/27/2009 - 07:50
We've been telling our clients for over a year that they need a plan for a pandemic in which people are told to stay away from the office and work from home. But the Internet was never designed for that--at least not the cheesy "entertainment" Internet that most of us have at home. I put the word "entertainment" in quotes because once when I was working at home and was having Internet problems, my Internet provider told me their home Internet service was strictly for "entertainment" and they could care less about my inability to get any work done.
And there is the whole flu pandemic/work from home problem in a nutshell. DSL and cable modem Internet services were never designed to support business class work. Cable modem service, while typically faster than DSL, is a shared service, so in peak load times, your cable modem connection can quickly slow down to dial up speeds. And the asymmetric bandwidth (very small upload capacity) means you can forget about trying to upload business documents of any size from home.
If we all have to stay home for two weeks because of a major flu outbreak this winter, don't expect to get much work done. The Intertubes will be as clogged up as our nasal passages.
Submitted by acohill on Thu, 08/27/2009 - 08:33
A sure sign that interest in TV is waning is the fact that major media firms like Disney, Viacom, CBS, and Time Warner have announced a partnership with some of the biggest advertisers in the country (Proctor & Gamble, AT&T, Unilever) to create a new ratings system that will more accurately measure viewer habits. The current Nielsen system is decades old, and the complaint is that it does not accurately measure the effect that DVRs and broadband are having on viewing habits.
People are not watching less "TV." In fact, they may be watching more when you add in video on demand services like Netflix, YouTube, and Hulu. But content developers and advertisers can't really tell from the antiquated Nielsen ratings system.
Design Nine is already working with some of the most innovative and technologically advanced IP TV service providers in the country. Firms like Cisco are building sophisticated new video on demand head end platforms for providers. Over the next ten years, TV as we know it is going to morph into a much richer, interactive, on-demand service that will blend access to "TV" shows, movies, live performances (e.g. NASCAR races, concerts, etc.), gaming, reality shows, and audience participation format shows like American Idol.
Where will this be available first? Communities with high performance open access broadband networks will have it first, because they have the business model to accommodate these new IP TV providers and the open access networks will have the bandwidth to make them work.
Submitted by acohill on Mon, 07/06/2009 - 08:31
Michael Jackson's death crashed Twitter and several other online services, demonstrating the popularity of these things. But Twitter may be about to peak, as one company prepares to sell Twitter followers to advertisers.
Twitter is most interesting as an experiment in computing and social networking, with an emphasis on experiment. Twitter's popularity could diminish just as quickly as it rose if tweets start to be dominated by messages like "Buy Sugar Cola--It's good for you!"
Blogging has already passed its heyday. Blogging is not going away--in fact, it has proved to be an extraordinarily useful method of writing and disseminating news, information, and opinion. But hardly anyone still believes everyone will blog, and most now understand that blogs are just one more writing tool, and nothing more--a good writing tool, but that's it. Good blogs prosper because of good writers--just like every other kind of tool. Owning an expensive paintbrush does not make me Michaelangelo, and thankfully, we've passed through that phase of blogging where people thought a blog made them a good writer.
We're still trying to figure out what the long term purposes and uses of Twitter are--it's an interesting new tool, but not all of us need to tweet all day long.
Submitted by acohill on Thu, 06/25/2009 - 09:02
There are two kinds of spam--the obnoxious stuff that is clearly junk, and then what I call "legitimate" spam, although the word "legitimate" is probably not the right word to describe it.
Every morning, I have to wade through a bunch of email from legitimate firms offering legitimate services--business seminars, webinars, conferences, deals on their products. All real stuff, but also stuff I'm rarely interested in.
Email is a powerful tool that really has transformed the way we work, but we still don't have good, well understood rules for using it. In my view, most of these companies are abusing their email privileges by bombarding me with their email promotional offers. They think that sending one email or a week or even one or two a month is no big deal, but every firm that ever glompfed onto one of my email addresses is doing the same thing, which leads to the daily clogging of my inbox. And what that means is that I rarely bother to read any of them.
And in our personal lives, we also still don't have a good grasp of when and when not to use email. Look at this mess with the Governor of South Carolina. Somehow the private emails between him and his Argentine "friend" became public, and they are barely safe for work. What the heck was he thinking? If you are going to have an affair, at least have the good sense not to document it in electronic missives that often end up being backed up in numerous places beyond your control. If anyone thinks that using a Gmail account with a fake name somehow provides some protection, think again. Any electronic service provided by firms like Yahoo, Microsoft, or Google never throw away anything, because those emails can be mined for marketing info.
I don't know if Sanford was using Gmail to correspond with girl friend, but if he was, I can almost guarantee that ads for cheap travel to Argentina were popping up every time he logged into his Gmail account.
I'm reminded of the crusty old sergeant in "Hill Street Blues," who ended the morning staff meeting with the same admonition every day: "Be careful out there." The Internet is a messy place--businesses that want to attract customers need to be careful about spamming--even if they have the best of intentions, and we need to be careful about whom we correspond with and under what conditions. Email, like diamonds, can be forever.
Submitted by acohill on Tue, 06/09/2009 - 08:04
A story in the New York Times about the decline in blogging suggests the future of Facebook, Twitter, and other social networking tools. It turns out that only about 5% of all identifiable blogs have been updated in the past 120 days. Put another way, 95% of blogs have been abandoned for all intents and purposes. I have always maintained that blogging is about writing, not about publicity or fame. If you like to write, blogging is easier (though not necessarily easy). If you don't have writing in your blood, blogging is just plain hard work.
Fast backward seven years to 2002 as the blogging craze was taking off, and if you believed all the techno-pundit hype, we were all going to be bloggers. I never believed it, and we are now going through the same overwrought hype with things like Facebook and Twitter. Five years from, both tools will still be around, but most people will have moved on and will use Facebook and Twitter for a few well-defined and generally narrow purposes, and that's it.
Submitted by acohill on Sun, 05/31/2009 - 07:56
I downloaded and installed Hulu Desktop this weekend, and I have seen the future of TV. The folks that designed this paid careful attention to the user interface, and the overall look and feel of this software is terrific. It is easy to browse, and you can drill down quickly into a specific area (e.g. Movie Trailers, TV Shows). I have a feeling the designers spent a lot of time looking at the iTunes Store and Apple's Cover Flow interface, because there are not only similarities, but improvements.
If I was a cable company senior manager, first I'd spend some time curled up in a fetal position bawling for Mommy. Then I'd call an emergency meeting of my staff and create an emergency task force to find a new business to get into, like becoming an open access digital transport provider. Once I did that, I'd call Hulu and make a deal to carry their "TV" programming.
Other losers: Google. Google senior execs should also visit the curled up fetal position, because Hulu has completed short-circuited the Google game plan. Hulu has cut out the Web browser, meaning Google will never see a single penny of ad revenue from Hulu Desktop. YouTube, which is a Google company now, is also a big loser. Compared to the stunning quality and ease of use of Hulu Desktop, YouTube looks like some old TV show from the sixties in black and white. In other words, YouTube looks old and tired.
Submitted by acohill on Fri, 05/29/2009 - 13:19
Hulu continues to push the envelope. The popular streaming video site has a lot of TV shows on it, and it just released a Macintosh application so that you can watch TV shows on Hulu without the bother of using a Web browser. It means a better viewing experience with higher quality.
It also means that the disintermediation of the TV business is well underway. The Internet is forcing out costly middle man businesses that were vital and necessary parts of the distribution chain in the old days, ten years ago, but are no longer needed. The rise of broadband and Apple's iTunes store was the end of the music store on Main Street--there are hardly any left.
In the TV business, the cable and satellite TV companies are the middle man. They don't own the content, they just pass it along. But if you can watch American Idol on Hulu via your Internet connection, why pay $60/month for cable TV service? We've been here before. The Internet is relentless, and the new is forcing out the old. The cable TV companies could remain viable, but they can only do so by changing their business model and becoming an open access transport system. They could actually make more money by doing so. But so far, none of them seem willing to even consider it. So they will likely go the way of the music store. In ten years, cable TV will be completely gone.
Submitted by acohill on Wed, 05/20/2009 - 08:42
Connectivity via the cellular network is also appealing, as the long hyped vision of massive WiFi clouds everywhere and universal net access via WiFi has never materialized. Airports are particularly aggravating, with a range of options--at one end, you have the excellent free WiFi in the Roanoke airport to places like Atlanta where you have a choice of several overpriced commercial WiFi services that offer poor service. And hotels are another trouble spot for travelers, with budget hotels offering free but often slow service and high-priced hotels charging extra for service that is often worse than the their competitor's free service. I'm still trying to figure that one out.
But it all adds up to using the cellular phone network for Internet access. The iPhone has spiked a huge increase in mobile access because of the excellent design and great software, and one of the nicest things about the iPhone, compared to a laptop, is that it works almost everywhere because of the cellular data connection.
But as more and more users migrate to the cellular data services, the cellular networks will overload quickly. AT&T's heavily advertised 3G network is nearly useless, and I don't even bother to turn it on, because I usually get dropped calls and slower data speeds than the slower but more reliable Edge service. Wireless remains an expensive business, with steep operating costs. But we all want mobility access to the network. Communities planning broadband infrastructure have to be thoughtful about wireless investments, because it's possible to spend a lot of money on wireless broadband and not have very much when you are finished.
Submitted by acohill on Thu, 04/23/2009 - 14:15
A new report by Nielsen says time spent watching video online has increased in the past five years by 2,000%. And the number of people watching video online is increasing by 10% per year, meaning in about seven years, everyone will be watching video on the Internet. TV is dead, dead, dead.
And as I have been saying for years, the Internet business model being used today by the incumbents and smaller providers is upside down and unsustainable--bandwidth by the bucket does not work when users are asking to refill the bucket faster and faster each day, week, and month. And charging to refill the bucket does not scale up, as the bandwidth quickly becomes unaffordable when watching lots of video.
The solution is to change the business model. It's not hard, and the incumbent providers would actually make more money after the conversion. But some of them are going to go bankrupt rather than admit they need to change.
Submitted by acohill on Tue, 04/21/2009 - 09:06
A recent report says YouTube is losing more than a million dollars a day. Even for Google, that eventually adds up to a lot of money. Since Google acquired YouTube, the advertising giant has begun including advertisements on YouTube pages as well as embedding ads in some videos. But the huge cost of dishing out video to the world is still much higher than the ad revenue earned.
I think there is a longer term problem that will eventually force YouTube to change direction or even fade away: YouTube fatigue.
Remember when email first became really popular in the late nineties? Everyone you knew was busily forwarding every stupid joke they had heard, and you happily forwarded the jokes on to everyone you knew. Eventually we all tired of that and went back to work. Well, sort of. Instead of reading recycled jokes and forwarding them on, many of us are busily watching YouTube and forwarding links with "Watch this one...really funny! Ha ha!" to all our friends and family.
Here is the problem. If the average YouTube video runs 5 to 7 minutes, and you get an average of 10 "Watch this Ha ha" messages a day, you are easily spending an hour a day watching really stupid videos that you won't even recall an hour later. And you've wasted a perfectly good hour of your time--time you will never get back.
There is just not enough time in the day to watch all the video that's out there.
YouTube fatigue. Do you find yourself clicking the pause button on a five minute video 30 seconds into the video? If so, you probably have YouTube fatigue. There is only so much time in the day we want to spend watching really stupid time-wasting video. Over the past fifteen years, I've seen this "newbie" phenomenon over and over again as some new service (email, IM, chat, YouTube, Facebook, Twitter, etc.) catches on and everybody rushes to try it out. Facebook fatigue is kicking in as people realize there is more to life than getting messages from hundreds of "friends" about the most inconsequential information ("...brushing my teeth, out of Crest so had to use Gleem...").
Online video is going to grow, and it will continue to grow until it completely replaces cable TV and to a large extent, satellite TV. But alternatives like Hulu and iTunes, with better content and paid, ad-free content will eat away at YouTube.
Submitted by acohill on Wed, 04/08/2009 - 08:33
I finally signed up for Netflix, largely because the local Blockbuster has fewer and fewer movies these days. And I'm not the only one that has noticed that the video store chain seems ill. Despite the fact that Blockbuster claims it does not have late fees, the company continues to annoy customers by simply billing your credit card for the full retail value of a late movie. A recent $90 credit card charge for a stack of movies that I did not get back to the store on time was the last straw. Once you return the movies, they credit the charge back, after deducting a "handling fee." So technically, Blockbuster does not have "late" fees, but they have fees aplenty anyway.
Everyone I talk to seems quite content to watch much if not most of their in-home entertainment (TV shoes and movies) via the Internet, rather than via cable or satellite. The other phenomenon I notice is that even as there is a continued trend toward buying big, flat panel HD TVs, more and more people are reporting that they are watching "TV" on their laptop, mainly because it's so darned easy. Nearly all of the interesting TV is available via the Internet, any time you want to watch, so why even bother with the old-fashioned TV thingy in the basement?
The telephone and cable companies have a bright future only if they realize they can't be both monopoly content providers AND monopoly transport providers. There are simply too many new content and service offerings out there, and no one company can provide the quality and breadth businesses and residents are going to demand in the next several years. Only open access, open service networks like The Wired Road will be able to meet the community and economic development needs of regions. And open access can be done easily by the existing incumbent telephone and cable companies, and they would make more money than they are now. But they are resistant to change--which begs the question: Will they change before they go broke? And if your local cable company goes broke, what is your community's Plan B for offering telecom services?
Submitted by acohill on Tue, 03/31/2009 - 08:09
The Kindle (version 2) is getting rave reviews, and Amazon has released a version for the iPhone. It suggests that we may be seeing the beginning of the end of the era of the book. Unlike music, videos, and newspapers, I don't think books will disappear entirely. Think of art and architecture books, how to books with lots of pictures and illustrations, certain kinds of specialty topic books.... but the Kindle hints that printing books on paper is about to become much less common.
The Internet is a transport system that is making many other information transport systems obsolete. First it was music; vinyl records and CDs are not about the music itself, they are simply a transport system to get the music to the buyer. Video stores are on the way out, as Netflix and Blockbuster, by using the Internet, are making the video cassette and DVD transport system obsolete. Newspapers are beginning to collapse, as the news-PAPER is just a transport system for reporting the news itself. The news and journalism business, like the music and movie business, will survive and even prosper, but the underlying business models are collapsing because we don't need four different transport systems: one for music, one for movies, one for news, and one for books. And let's not forget the phone and TV transport systems; we don't need those either. So there is a total of six separate transport systems we no longer need. The 'net handles all of those quite nicely.
And that's why every home and every business needs a high performance broadband connection; without it, you might as well be living in 1400--before books, before newspapers, before any information distribution systems existed.
Now, here's one more question. If every source of information is delivered efficiently over a single network, who should be in charge of that network? Do you want a private corporation, which answers only to its stockholders, do decide what information your community can access, or should the community or region have some control? We're not talking about doing away with private sector providers--we need and want them to continue providing the services they already offer--telephone, video, news, etc. We're talking about managing the underlying transport system differently. What if all the roads in your region were owned by s single out of state firm? Would that firm always be able to act in the best interests of your community? Again, the private sector is critically important to the long term health of communities, but we need to manage the information transport system differently.
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