The President’s Challenge

Interesting perspective on SOPA and PIPA that echoed my thoughts almost exactly (plus it is well-written and tells a great joke):

Take the truck, the boat, the helicopter, that we’ve sent you. Don’t wait for the time machine, because we’re never going to invent something that returns you to 1965 when copying was hard and you could treat the customer’s convenience with contempt.

Interesting education/textbook presentation from Apple today. I personally am very excited and think Apple is targeting at least one big thing — access and availability of curriculum — from my education issues list. That one alone affects a number of my bullet points.

But it is important to point out that technology can’t solve every education problem. Nor can it solve every problem the content owners — music, movies, books, newspapers — have in this increasingly digital and connected world. And in the end, that was the primary impetus behind SOPA and PIPA (great video by the Khan Academy by the way. Go click that link and watch it).

But as SOPA and PIPA are beaten to death by a tech industry that got this one right, their defeat could be a boon to Apple. And today’s event demonstrated to me why.

Notice where the event was held? New York City. The heart of publishing. And I don’t believe that that was an accident.

As the content industries flail for revenues, Apple (along with a few other companies like Netflix, Amazon, and Hulu) continues to stand by them, providing a new way to distribute and stay relevant in this new world. And while Apple’s tactics may appear strong-armed, there is a certain reality that these content companies need to face. Namely, we have other ways of accessing this stuff and most of it is free.

See, says Apple, we are still here trying to help you make money. Look how bad off the music industry would be today if not for iTunes and iPod. The iPad and App Store have made access to your newspapers and magazines possible everywhere and opened new possibilities for revenue streams. We are trying to help movies and textbooks, too. But the reality, friends, is that you can’t charge $18 for a CD that has one good song, you can’t charge $30 for a movie or $200 for a textbook, at least not if you actually want people to buy legal copies. SOPA and PIPA can’t save you. And if you trust us, we will help guide you in this new world.

Far fetched? Maybe. Maybe Apple’s ultimate goal is to bludgeon the content industries to death, wait for their wells to run dry, or just lop them all off at the knees so the company can deal directly with creators. But I don’t think so. I think Apple’s goal is to sell hardware and they know damn well that having excellent, well-supported content at a reasonable (to consumers) price is critical to its success.

Tim O’Reilly: Why I’m fighting SOPA

Tim O’Reilly in an interview with Gigaom’s Colleen Taylor:

I talked with Nancy Pelosi about SOPA the other day, and she said that the experience with piracy is different for people in the movie industry. Maybe — I’m not a movie producer. But I do know that right now the entire content industry is facing massive systemic changes, and to claim that declining sales are because of piracy is so over the top. Any company that is providing great content online in a way that’s easy to use with a fair price has a booming business right now. The people who don’t are trying to fight that future.

So here we have this legislation, with all of these possible harms, to solve a problem that only exists in the minds of people who are afraid of the future. Why should the government be intervening on behalf of the people who aren’t getting with the program?

Isn’t this what we are all fed up with? Government doing the bidding of special interests, special interests that use government like it’s a personal shield against every affront that might affect its business. Isn’t this, at its core, what both Occupy Wall Street and the Tea Party are upset about? Using money to influence markets and pervert government.

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[article via bryce.vc]

An interesting thought came to me this morning: could Microsoft be resurgent?

It seems that for the better part of the last decade Microsoft has been reeling. It started with the Clinton administration’s anti-trust efforts and the EU’s constant fines. While in the end Microsoft wasn’t broken up, these proceedings seemed to leave a deep scar on the company. Then the heart-and-soul of the company stepped out of day-to-day operations when Bill Gates focused his attention on philanthropy.

Looking at its operating system business, Windows Mobile was a piece of junk that people used only because they had to and Vista was eviscerated as a horrible operating system. Both lost mind-share and market-share to other systems. The Office suite has stagnated and Microsoft’s excellent developer software means nothing if you aren’t writing software for Microsoft systems. For twenty years Microsoft followed their noses to enterprises but suddenly the world became consumer heaven, elevating Facebook, Twitter, and Apple into the spotlight. Their online division has lost billions (with a b) during this time period while Google’s revenue went the other way.

But then came XBox 360 and slowly, it seems, the company is turning a corner. Windows Phone 7 is an interestingly designed operating system that, I think, has finally found the hardware it needed to be successful. Windows 8 also looks interesting in its early incarnations. And the Office 360 online suite, if coupled with some really good contact and calendar management that doesn’t take an IT department to manage, could turn the tide back to the company.

But the real kick here is whether Microsoft can take advantage of Google’s constant mis-steps, particularly there is a huge opportunity to market search and Bing as the product that will return results we can trust for the services we use the most. There’s an opening Microsoft. Are you going to exploit it?

Google announced yesterday that they are going to start pushing more Google+ stuff into your search stream, “customizing” it for you specifically. It is weird that if you search on Google and I search on Google, the two searches could very well turn up a different list. And of course adding Google+ to the stream has raised the hackles, at least at Twitter.

The part that bothers me, though, is that it is just another way for Google to treat you and me as the product. Twitter, Facebook, Google, Yahoo!, even now Instagram, are all doing the same thing. At what point, as consumers, do we say the experience is important to me and I want to own it so charge me? I want to pay because I want to be the customer.