Technology Futures

Via Stop the Cap!, some Lithuanian broadband customers are getting bandwidth increases that can range has high as 300 megabits, up from the current 100/40 bandwidth for the Premium plan. There is no price increase for the improved performance.

Since the U.S. Broadband Plan targets 4 meg as entirely adequate, we can imagine a catchy slogan: American broadband! 1/75 as good as Lithuania!

So Microsoft has purchased Skype and will integrate voice communications into various MS hardware and software products. The company paid an enormous amount of money for Skype ($8.5 billion), which is a projected future value of the voice communications firm. Microsoft obviously hopes to monetize what they bought, but what did they really get? VoIP technology is hardly cutting edge, and Microsoft has plenty of smart software folks that could cough up equivalent software in short order. What Microsoft really bought is the Skype customer list (hundreds of millions of people) and a brand name.

The problem Microsoft faces is a lousy track record of overpaying for technology and then running it right into the ground. Anyone remember WebTV? I do. It was doing extremely well when Microsoft bought it, then the whole product line disappeared rather quickly--Microsoft lost the entire investment. During the heyday of the dot-com era, Microsoft bought dozens of firms and then failed to execute.

What Microsoft has never been able to understand is that not everyone wants to use Windows, for a whole variety of reasons. Instead of trying to create great products, Microsoft has stubbornly tried to create scheme after scheme to force everyone to use Windows. How's that working out for them? Not so well.

If Microsoft is smart, they will maintain Skype as a completely separate unit within the company, keep the Skype brand, and avoid spamming current Skype users with forced efforts to drive them to Internet Explorer and/or Windows. If they don't do that and use heavy-handed marketing strategies that annoy Skype users, that will be a market opportunity for some other VoIP company to grow very rapidly--now that hundreds of millions of people are comfortable using VoIP instead of the phone, it won't be hard for all those folks to switch to some other service.

Broadband Properties has published its March/April 2011 in parallel with the Broadband Properties 2011 conference in Dallas. My article on "worst practice" in community broadband networks can be found on page 122 of the magazine, and is available online in the electronic edition.

Just last night, at the opening of the Broadband Properties conference in Dallas, I had a discussion about cloud computing with a gentleman who assured me in soothing tones that from a security perspective, there was "nothing to worry about" because IT folks would be very careful and make sure cloud-based data was secure from hackers.

So this morning I read via the InnerTubes that Sony's online Playstation database has been hacked. The hackers managed to swipe the personal information and credit card data of 77 million users, which is probably the entire Playstation user community.

I'm not really opposed to cloud computing; it's a great convenience and I already make use of several "cloud" services, but the industry hype about cloud computing is naive and dangerous to those who don't understand the risks. And as I've noted previously, mainly for the benefit of twenty-something "IT experts," cloud computing is nothing but a mainframe with a longer cord to the user. And many of the security problems that we will continue to see with poorly designed cloud applications and services will be the direct result of programmers who either did not pay attention in class or were poorly taught. Those who fail to understand history are doomed to repeat it.