Bloomberg is reporting that HBO Go may be coming to Apple TV this year. Sounds interesting, right? Well, guess again. Unless something changes with the release, you can only watch HBO Go if you have a cable subscription. I have to admit even though I’ve read a ton about the cable business and how the market dynamics work there, I still don’t get the benefit to HBO to not charge a subscription. Maybe it’s a contract obligation?

Since I personally don’t have a huge interest in HBO, let’s use ESPN as an example instead. According to this article, ESPN makes $4.69 per household per month from cable companies and the total average bill for sports is $8. This includes not just the other ESPN channels (ESPN2, ESPN News) but also the regional sports channels.

As I’ve mentioned here before, we cancelled all cable a while ago. In exchange we have Netflix and Amazon Prime subscriptions, streamed through an Apple TV and Roku box to deliver these channels to our television sets. In addition, I subscribe to MLB.tv each year. Netflix runs $20/month, Amazon Prime $7/month and MLB.tv $10/month [1]. That’s trading a $70 per month cable bill for $37/month. The point of this is to note that ESPN gets nothing from me.

So, ESPN, here’s what I propose: offer me streaming versions of ESPN, ESPN 2 and ESPN News for $10/month. We both win. You get about twice the rate you get from cable companies and I get sports. $47/month is still a bargain for me versus the $70 cable bill (and rising every year). I get what I want — more sports — and you get exactly what you want — money from me.

—

[1] Amazon Prime and MLB.tv are billed annually but that’s what it works out to monthly.

This past week Lotus 1-2-3 turned 30 years old. 1-2-3, if you are unaware, was the PC spreadsheet to Visicalc’s Apple version. Visicalc was the original electronic spreadsheet, invented in the late ’70s. Given that, it was Lotus 1-2-3 that made PCs a must-have for business people all those years ago. It was also the forerunner to Excel.

As a numbers lover, spreadsheets and their history is fascinating to me. It is amazing to me that the tools we use for calculation — spreadsheets and calculators — are both as old (or almost) as I am. Even though technology has changed drastically in that time, the same tools still persist.

A few links for those of you interested in the spreadsheet in general and Lotus 1-2-3 in particular:

• Mitch Kapor, Lotus’ CEO, on the anniversary
• Dan Bricklin, Visicalc and spreadsheet inventor, on the anniversary
• Lotus 1-2-3 history video
• Lotus 1-2-3 promotional video (amazing that people could get this excited over a spreadsheet)
• Dan Bricklin on the idea behind Visicalc (more history here)
• History of spreadsheets video
• Wikipedia article on spreadsheets

Enjoy!

Matt Drance writes in Apple Outsider that the judge has sent the Apple v. Samsung case to the jury. This seems to have been dropped by the tech press a bit but wanted to point out one line from Matt’s article:

In closing arguments, Apple attorney Harold McElhinny told the jury: If you find for Apple in this case, you will have re-affirmed the American patent system.

As Matt said afterward, not certain this is an argument in Apple’s favor. Our patent system is a mess. Companies, mostly big ones that can spend the thousands of dollars on patents and the millions more defending them, seem to patent everything, whether it makes sense or not. These companies argue that this is a good thing for innovation. But as many have pointed out before me there is no connection at all, at least in the software world, between patents and innovation. Almost all software is derivative. Real innovation in software comes from taking someone else’s ideas, melding multiple ideas together, and coming out with something new.

I’d love to see the patent system change but there is too much money wrapped up in the current system and too many other large problems facing the country. A patent fight will have to wait for another day.

The girls were at grandma’s this week, my wife and I were on the couch watching a movie, when I tried to look something up on my iPad. The iPad gods, though, had other ideas, possessing my device and sending a message. I don’t know what yyyytttttgggyyggtttgyygggtt means, but it has to be an X-Files-like code of some sort. I’m investigating now but watch the 20 second clip to see for yourself:

In the Palm days there was this really cool simulator mode called Gremlins. Gremlins would literally tap all over the screen, tap buttons, enter text (Shakespeare), anything it could do to your UI. Developers used it to test, primarily, for memory leaks. The benchmark was a million Gremlins. It was awesome to watch it spit out text and tap buttons and stuff, all in fast forward. I’d set it in the evening, go to bed, and in the morning see if it was still running.

Maybe Apple has some mysterious gremlins app running in the background that only comes out on January 27. Or maybe the aliens are sending me a message. They’re out there, you know.