Future trends

This decade's format battle, largely ignored by everyone except the entertainment industry and unmarried nerds with lots of disposable income, has been the fight between the two HD disc formats--HD DVD and Blu-ray. In the past year, the movie studios have been releasing some movies in one format, the other, or both. Normal people have not been interested in buying movies in formats that could disappear in a year or two, so sales have been tepid.

I have been on the 'net since the late 1970s. In the seventies, what passed for the 'net was small groups of bulletin board systems, with the amazing FreeNet and the later FidoNet cobbling together small groups of mostly local users.

There are numerous news reports on the "awful" sales figures coming on from online vendors--it looks like "only" 18% growth for the Christmas season, compared to last year's 27% growth.

Eighteen percent growth is pretty good by any measure, since most retailers would say a good year is one that averages 4-5% growth. Any other business in America would be delirious with 18% growth, but somehow the news media wants to spin this as the world coming to an end.

AT&T has announced it is dumping all its payphones. The "new" AT&T says they don't make any money. Payphone use has been declining dramatically as the use of cellphones has risen. Oddly enough, Verizon claims it still makes money from pay phones.

Even stranger: AT&T had more payphones in 1902 than it does today.

Here is an article about how Northrop Grumman is moving jobs to small towns and cities. The company reports that labor savings can be more than 40%--a substantial amount that pays off year after year, and more than covers the initial cost of moving facilities. One of the locations cited is the small Virginia town of Lebanon. Lebanon is a small town located deep in the heart of the Blue Ridge mountains, a good 30 minute drive from the interstate.

Here is yet another article proclaiming that the Internet will run out of bandwidth in two years. This article is not all that different than articles I read in 1997, 1999, 2001, 2003, and 2005. I would have to check, but I bet many of them were written around this time of year--the holiday season. Vendors save new product announcements for after the New Year, local projects slow down, and for the next six weeks or so, there is not a lot of technology news.

Apple released its quarterly earnings statement, and some analysts have noted that its market cap has surpassed that of IBM. Market cap is calculated from the stock price, and Apple has left computer rival Dell in the dust; Dell is barely one third the value of Apple right now. Dell's founder, Michael Dell, is famous for stating a decade ago that Apple had no future and should be just shut down.

Pundit Bruce Nussbaum writes about a report by analyst Bill Tancer that suggests most of us are using the 'net as a kind of glorified TV, meaning we sit and watch. Only a small percentage of 'net users are actively participating in online "social networking" sites and an even smaller number is actually creating content and posting it.

USA Today's front page article on long commutes could be good news for smaller towns and cities that are focused on enhancing quality of life. Commutes in big cities are now beginning at 5 AM so that commuters can reduce the amount of time spent on the road.

The 'net is abuzz with discussions about the dramatic price cuts announced yesterday by Apple. The price of the pricey iPhone was cut by $200, and Apple also introduced an new iPod, called the iPod Touch, which is an iPhone without the phone function.

Those of us who have been on cable or satellite connections for our TV service for many years can easily forget that a lot of people still watch TV the old-fashioned way, from signals coming through the air from a nearby TV tower. In just about a year and half, all those TVs will stop working because Congress has mandated a switch to digital TV. The old TVs will need a converter box that is able to pick up the new digital over the air signals.

Those of us that have been watching how people use public networks (I started in 1982) know that there is a certain "newbie" phenomenon that takes place when some new feature or service is introduced. I have always been skeptical of the "social networking" trend, which is best represented by sites like FaceBook and MySpace.

The hype over the iPhone is reaching the boiling point as the release of the new gadget is now just a week away. Speculation over still unknown features, frustration over the price, and the lure of the touch screen interface that no one really knows much about is fueling the furor.

This article notes that the number of cellphone calls has declined in the UK for the first time ever, suggesting that the "newbie" period for cellphones is over. Since 1993, I have been able to observe the "newbie" phenomenon firsthand as new systems and technology are embraced by the public, and in fact, it is a well known process that is often ignored, strangely enough, by many in the IT business, who want to believe in endless growth and by extension, endless profits.

The tragedy here in Blacksburg earlier this week highlights the dark side and the bright side of technology and the Internet, and is a useful reminder that technology is neither good nor bad--how people use it--for good or for evil--determines its value at any point in time.

I am a member of several hotel frequent traveler programs, and all of them seem to have launched a new strategy of annoying their most important customers by bombarding them with surveys. Lately, every time I stay in a hotel (which is pretty often), a few days later I start getting email asking for my "valuable" input. I can delete the email without taking the survey, but some of the chains just keep sending you "reminders" that you have not yet filled out the survey. At that point, it is spam and nothing more than spam.

At lunch the other day, a group of us were trading horror stories of bad customer service--each story was worse than the previous one, and the whole table was groaning at the utter stupidity that was being described. The two common characteristics were big companies and highly automated customer service systems. Some of the examples include:

Word has leaked out that Verizon passed on an opportunity to be the exclusive provider of cellular service for the iPhone. Apple's choice of Cingular puzzled some because Cingular is not known for great customer service (note that "customer service" in the cellphone industry is a relative term, but generally Verizon has a better reputation than Cingular).

It has taken about five years, but the New Media revolution, which I think started in 2002 with the availability of easy to use blogging software, has started to put real pressure on Old Media. This article talks about huge job cuts among the Old Media newspaper and TV giants. It is not so much that Old Media is irrelevant--it is more about the fact that Old Media has stubbornly refused to rethink what it does and how it does it. The stubbornness has led to loss of revenue and job cuts.

First, AT&T and the regional Bell Operating Companies (RBOCs) were split up in 1984. Who knew then that there was a twenty-five year plan put into effect to put it all back together again?