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Two Years With Harry, 22This is sort of a post script to my adventures with Harry Newton. An E-Mail ConversationSUBJ: Rumor Harry: I keep getting rumors that you have sold your empire to the Philistines for $500M or so. Is this true? Somehow I cannot visualize your empire without you at the helm, and I cannot even begin to visualize you without all your toys. Lee SUBJ: Rumor $130M SUBJ: Sale Did you just cash in like a good little MBA and stay on to manage, or are you going to retire to Asia and straighten out their economy? SUBJ: RE: Sale I cashed in. 100% cash. I’ve got a short term contract to help them with transition being associated with them has given me great confidence in being able to run something much larger. watching the disinterested incompetence is an amusement way beyond anything I’ve seen in the movies in years. Harry Newton SUBJ: Wot Now? Cash?! Wow!! But what can you do for an encore? Although SE Asia might be ripe for a takeover, a project more suitable for your talents would be to make the Internet a commercial enterprise rather than a conveyor for downloading “thousands of free files.” Having watched Telephony and TE&M change hands, I cannot help but feel sorry for your creations in the hands of the unwashed. But I will hope for the best. I might still get them to publish one of my books some day. Lee. SUBJ: RE: Wot Now? 1. I’m still looking for the encore. 2. Talk to me some more about making “the Internet a commercial enterprise rather than a conveyor for downloading thousands of free flies.” 3. I have the same trepidations you express. I’m doing my best to steer them correctly. SUBJ: Making Internet Pay Harry: You inquired what I had in mind about making the Internet a paying proposition. I had to think about it a little before trying to write it down. First: One of my hang-ups is that, in a free, capitalistic society, our votes with our bucks are as important as our ballots on election day. Whenever we buy (or accept) something we don’t want, we are sending a message that encourages the powers that be to do things wrong. If we DON’T get to choose what we want, others will choose for us, and we are liable to end up with crap. Second: The “entitlement mentality” we see so much of today is NOT the result of the would-be welfare state, but of TV. When the most interesting, vital, colorful, important thing in most people’s lives is FREE, why should they have to pay for food, clothing, shelter, taxes, etc.? We have come to the point where the TV Networks can’t even GIVE it away any more. They now have a second season each year when they throw in new shows to replace the original new shows that nobody will watch. And on my DirecTV, there are at least 50 channels I have never even looked at. All this comes from somebody ELSE deciding what I should want, and the answer turns out to be “None of the above.” DirecTV also offers about 50 pay per view movies at any given time; this should make me happy, but the quality of movies has been so awful for the last three or four years that I can hardly find one a month I can stand to sit through. Even when you get to pay, it doesn’t always send the message, apparently. Anyhow, the Internet seems to be following the example of you magazine publishers and moving toward the “right” balance between advertising and customer-supplied revenue. And maybe the Internet IS the next big advertising opportunity. But it seems to me it is capable of being much more than a very expensive copy of TV, and if advertising takes over, we’ll never get a chance to buy the stuff we really want. For instance, I have the $4.95 a month cheapie package from AOL, because the only thing AOL has that I am interested in is e-mail, and e-mail can handle a lot of messages before you use up your 3 hours. But I get so much junk mail, in spite of my efforts and what appears to be the honest efforts of AOL, that the memory they have allotted to me in their servers is sometimes overloaded with crap, and real messages I am expecting have no place to go. If I log on and go into their mail registers to clean the stuff out, it uses up more time than all my e-mail combined, and I get charged extra. In short, I cannot get what I pay for, and I cannot pay for what I want and be sure of getting it. Another problem with the Internet is that, even though we are told over and over how great it is, none of the ISPs seem to use it. That is, you do not go to AOL or CompuServe via the Internet. You dial up a connection to THEIR network which connects you to their servers. They hope to keep you within their system with chat lines, “favorite places,” etc., but now they will also cut your through to the Internet, and of course they use the Internet to clear e-mail (only 3 of my correspondents are on AOL; the dozens of others are all on other ISPs). But the point I am making is that the Internet is not good enough for the ISPs, who are presumably professionals in the business. What does the Internet have that we regular customers want or need? The answer, based on the spam that fills my e-mail-box every day, seems to be porno, devices for getting PPV movies free on cable, and e-mail access to a million eager readers, even if they have tried to block unsolicited advertising. And all the ISPs load their print ads for Internet Access as something that lets you download a thousand files, FREE! If people actually DO download thousands of free files, the ZIP drive came none too soon. There is NO hard disk available that can store all the free files you could download in an evening. If they were text files, nobody could ever read them (life is too short). But they are not. I am pretty well convinced that multi-media was invented to fill up CD ROMs, and is now being used to occupy the bandwidth optical fiber makes possible. We’d never fill it up with text. The things that bother me here are (a) the loss of a cost factor to get people to decide what they really want, and (b) the way the Internet is financed in the first place. As I understand it (and I may be wrong), much of it is still funded by huge government grants for University access to facilitate government research. If this funding was pulled out, or moved to a separate network, could the access fees paid by the present ISPs carry the load? How much more would they have to pay, and how much would that jack up the monthly fee to the customer? In short, would the customer actually be willing to pay what the service costs? Personally, I doubt it. Having become an elderly grinch, I have a feeling that in four or five years, the Internet, as it is going at present, will be very much like CB Radio. Remember CB Radio? Not many do, but it was all the rage for 2 or 3 years. You could even get it built into your car radio as a luxury feature. Another problem with the real cost of the Internet is that so much of it depends on “dark fiber” bought or charged off at rates far below cost (maybe incremental cost, like Telpak, maybe even lower). After all, when you have an installation crew out there, you know damn well you can’t afford to install a single strand of fiber. You have to put in a cable with a whole bunch of them; the cost of the fiber itself is zilch compared to the cost of the installation. Particularly when you know you can’t come back later and put in another cable because the guy with the back-hoe will cut the first cable in the process. (Ducts are good, but pulling cable in ducts has its problems and expenses, too.) Anyhow, whether it is AT&T, MCI, Sprint, or your local cable company, they always put in a bunch of fibers while the path is available, then activate what they need. Because the capacity of each fiber is so huge, most of what they put in remains “dark,” waiting for business to expand a thousand-fold or more. In the meantime, why not rent out the unused fibers cheap? Again, like Telpak. Mitel’s whole distributed PBX scheme depends on customers being able to tie RSUs to the Main via inexpensive optical fiber from the local cable company. Is dark fiber warping our values? Is it leading us to expect for free what will, sooner or later, have to be paid for? What I would really like to see is somebody figure out a good package of services that is useful to grownups, or at least to business. Something that lets real information like business letters move at least as fast as fax (I am told that it sometimes takes e-mail 2 hours to get from Crystal City to the Pentagon, two stops away on the Metro). Something that makes manufacturers’ data available in a timely and accurate way (I have a basement full of PBX information, all on paper). Something that gives access to stock prices, sports scores, tariffs and other government documents, quickly and easily. I would have no objection to it handling voice and interactive video, although personal calls, computer games, and movies at a “worker’s” desk are not always a benefit to the business itself. But I would resist “multi-media” used primarily as fill just to occupy bandwidth or disk space. If AOL offered a service WITHOUT all its multi-media crap (which eats up hours of my time and megabytes of MY hard disk), I would pay twice as much for it. One final thought. Note that “packet switching,” although at the moment is as popular as “digital,” is primarily a pricing gimmick; in a packet system, IF you are paying for it, you don’t pay when you are not sending or receiving data (because the transmission and switching facilities are not being used by you, and thus can be shared by others). For interactive data, this is great. But note: you and I are both fast typists, but neither of us can send at faster than about 60 or 70 BITS per second. And I can’t read much faster than that, either. So what packet switching actually does is make interactive data economical under certain types of tariff. But for file transfer, TV transmission, interactive video, etc, it has vastly more overhead and is much slower than a circuit switched connection of the same bandwidth. Any real system based on actual costs would recognize this. Obviously, this is not helpful to you, but I would love to see somebody make real business communication make a profit based on real costs, and I would like to see if there is any way VU-data (from 1980), quite similar to the present Internet stuff, could actually make a profit rather than be a loss leader so Gates can sell us his next software release. I hope you find a really good task to engage your energies. Personally, I would look at water de-salting plants or new vegetation to produce fresh air for people’s apartments. I think the next wave for both real work and investment will NOT be in the communication business, much as I love it. Lee SUBJ: RE: Making Internet Pay thanks. what echoes through our note is huge lack of creativity among the major populous. if there were more, we’d have better movies, a better Internet and better content all around. sadly, we’re stuck with one Stephen Spielberg, one lee goeller, one harry newton. you may be 100% right about my next venture. i’ll keep you informed. p.s. i subscribe to MSN for $4.95 a month, use it primarily for email but don’t get all the junk email and advertising that you do. switch. msn is really running nicely. make sure you install 2.5. SUBJ: RE: Making Internet Pay Harry: There are a few more things I would like. For instance, something to replace the book, for electronic reading. I cannot read long files on a terminal. Like most, I print them out and go out on the patio, put my feet up, and read them in comfort. There are several guys out there who are making things the size and shape of books that can be read as easily. One even lets you make marginal notations. Some think the gadget should read CD ROMs and display text. I see it as something that plugs into your computer like an external drive, allowing you to download files to it. Then it displays the file on a something that looks like a book. Or, if you’re tired and the file is text, it reads it to you through a voice synthesizer. Xerox has a scanner/OCR/synthesizer combo for reading books to the blind that costs something like $14K, but that cost is preposterous for general use. My desire would be to download books from wherever books come from, putting each type on a CD ROM reserved for its type (detective, science fiction, history, etc). I would get my NYTimes daily, and record it the same way. DirecPC has been working on this kind of distribution via satellite, supplying computer stores with complex programs in seconds, and always having the most up-to-date version available. Just as Egghead seems to be closing its stores and selling via net direct to the customer. But they could dump the NYT every morning, to a million customers across the country. (I calculate that, if space is used for ad-graphics, it would take about 2 CD ROMs per year for NYT; a lot better than microfilm, and easier to recover something you wanted). I would also like to see book publishers eliminating inventory and the tax problems that come with it, so that books that sell only a few hundred copies a year could be kept in print indefinitely. You want it, you download it. The generally recognized problems with all this are getting payment back safely to the publisher and not to various hackers who will rip off the reader, and keeping the reader from going into business himself, reselling the publisher’s books which come in easily transmitted form, by definition. Music can be, and is, apparently, being sold this way already, as is software. But the opportunities for fraud and theft are still pretty big. Something like insurance would be a natural to sell via the net, but some years ago, when I was doing a job for the Insurance Institute, they found their agents didn’t even want standard forms which would provide a “level playing field.” One of my favorite success stories is Franklin Computer (South Jersey’s only remaining computer company—Mt. Laurel, I think). The guy who sold me my first computer in 1978 sold his computer store and founded Franklin to clone Apple Computers. Apple beat him in court, and the company got rid of him, but they went into the business of making little hand-held dictionaries, language translators, etc., and are doing very well, it appears. One of my high-school friends, an MD who hates all forms of technology, loves his pharmacopoeia which he carries in his pocket and whips out to check drug interactions, etc. And each year, he buys the new ROM that updates it. The idea of the small specialty house that makes computers that don’t look like computers impresses me as interesting. They could even make a book, if they wanted, I’ll bet. I keep coming back to books, even though I realize that my tastes are statistically insignificant, because of the way the new Border and Barnes&Noble stores with 100,000 paper titles on the floor are popping up like mushrooms. The book may be the killer ap for all sorts of things, one way or another. I would like to have an electronic book to stem the sinking of my book-loaded house into the Jersey swamp. Lee SUBJ: RE: Making Internet Pay In what you’ve written there are some great product ideas... I’m mulling. SUBJ: Some more dumb ideas. Harry: More things I would like to see somebody else do something with. I sure ain’t gonna. 1. Make video tape a standard output for PCs. With all the multi-media that is being generated, it would seem that more people might like to play it back on a VCR than when they are hunched over a computer. Slide-shows would be a natural and marketable item, but mixtures of text, live video and graphics are a just as easy. They have scan-converters that fit between a PC and a VGA or SVGA monitor which let you see the screen on TV or record it on a VCR. These do not seem to appear in PC support catalogs, but they do show up in office supply catalogs like Global. I have been meaning to get one for years and see what I could do with it, but life intrudes. 2. Reverse the trend to having everything inside the computer. That is, make a bus extender and standardized box into which appliances could be plugged. SCSI is a start in this direction, and Gates has something similar for Microsoft, but I, for one, would love to have an external location with, maybe, extra disk drives, CD ROM drives (so I could have my encyclopedia on line all the time), things like Zip Drives and back-up tapes, etc. A package of toys, plus a thing to plug them into would be something that could be sold, I think. I would like a board with 8 scan points and 8 relay outputs on it, and a nice software package that would let me write programs to read the scan points and do things with the relay outputs. What good is having a computer if you can’t have it turn on your coffee pot at 6:30 a.m. and turn off the air conditioning after you go to work? And consider: if you had to send your computer out to the shop to get it fixed, would you really like to have all your personal finance info on the internal hard disk? Further: I have had my present computer for over 2 years now, and I still haven’t moved all my files off the old one. How nice it would be to simply plug my archives into the new computer and continue where I left off. Of course, at the going rate, you could produce about 2 movies. But here the law of averages is against you. I don’t recommend it. Lee. SUBJ: One more suggestion. Harry: I love your problem. Because it is one I will never have, I cannot resist the opportunity to offer you one more suggestion. As you know, TV is in the advertising, not entertainment, business. However, in most major markets, at least, a TV station reaches a regional market, delivering many listeners per dollar, but for a small, suburban business, requiring too many dollars for listeners on the far side of the metropolitan area. Satellite TV is even worse; all it can deliver is the entire country. Thus a jeweler or hardware store on King’s Highway, Haddonfield, cannot afford to use the most effective advertising technique in the country, and all such small merchants are going out of business in droves while chains (like Circuit City, or Burger King) with regional and national advertising seem to be doing a lot better. The trick is to provide TV advertising in a way that will help small merchants in the many suburbs of metropolitan areas. What seems to me to be the obvious way is to used wired TV, such as Cable TV or, if they ever got off their butts, Telco TV via twisted pair. The way such wiring runs, you can deliver very small, very select groups of listeners to an advertiser, at a cost he can afford. The cable companies are doing a little of this. In many localities, you can buy a spot announcement on USA, A&E, the Weather Channel, etc., and have it delivered just down the “trunk” that serves your community (and perhaps one or two others nearby). But the local cable companies want to keep all the money for themselves (not only viewer fees, but advertising dollars). Unfortunately, they have managed to alienate most of their viewers, and have created enemies of such local advertising as exists (newspapers, flyers, other stuff mostly printed) while not reaping the profits that real selling of advertising in local markets could produce. What I think is needed is a company that acquires local advertising rights from Cable Companies and establishes local sales people in each town to sell ads. It would also, probably, have to have some sort of centralized production facility to produce the ads in CATV-readable form. But by providing some sort of “franchise” environment for the local sales people, it could move them ahead in their communities, and open up TV advertising in a way never really seen before. It could even make CATV companies allies of these local small business people, and bring about better relations between CATV and local citizens. I wrote an article some years ago in BCR (Border to Border Fiber Optics, June, 1993) which discussed some of this stuff. I am surprised at how little has been done along these lines. It might be the kind of thing you would find amusing. Lee. SUBJ: RE: One more suggestion. This is actually being done in Southern California. There’s a company with a gigantic network piping ads to regional CATV companies all over Southern California. And it’s doing very well. They use video servers, t-1 lines, etc. But it’s not my bag. Publications and trade shows are my bag. Thanks for the idea. SUBJ: Final suggestion Harry: If you limit yourself that way, there is one obvious suggestion: make videos, starring yourself and your laptop with the 1G of RAM. People come from all over the world to see your performances, even when they don’t care two hoots about Computer Telephony. In the first place, you should be preserved for posterity, and in the second place, you could sell a million of these things, with a continuous stream pouring out. Another nice advantage is that you could cut me in on it. I am not as funny as you are, but I do have an entertaining grasp on the technical details. Could make a great package: the new Purple Passion,* plus 2 hours of ME doing my verbal act on the same material. Lee *.. I called one of my books, Design Background for Telephone Switching, “The Purple Passion” in honor of its cover color. Similarly, Voice Communication in Business became “The Red Menace.” [ Top ] [ Table of Contents ] |
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Copyright 2005 Lee Goeller. All Rights Reserved. |