November 23, 2002
Sat, 23 Nov 2002 17:55:38 GMT
Tom notes over at Plasticbag (thanks Doc) that "the future isn't in protecting traderoutes, its about making everyone a pirate". Quite the statement. His description of the dynamic is largely correct - the way that people get their data is changing in extremely fundamental ways. But, doesn't mean that, as he notes, that "Apple is out to make everyone a pirate" just because they are completely out ahead of everyone else in the industry. Apple is amongst the first set of the Big Players that has realized that the "real deal" is about making sure that everyone participates in your traderoute.Apple is doing it again. No longer satisfied with jousting against Microsoft, they've chosen another large foe that has to defend its traderoutes in order to survive. The problem is that while companies like Sony have vast traderoutes, the traders are fleeing in large numbers to players like Apple amongst others. And Apple, despite the fact that is has a huge number of traders (Napster refugees and the like), they don't have anything that they can legally traffic in. Of course something will have to break, resulting in a (please pardon the expression) huge paradigm shift. The fact that everybody is a pirate in the meantime is simply indicative of the trend, and not the trend itself. The showdown comes when both Apple (and its complicit allies) and Sony realize that they both have what the other wants - consumers and distribution. The result will be both good for consumers and a bloody mess in the meantime.
Sat, 23 Nov 2002 17:24:02 GMT
I've received a number of emails recently about an article that I wrote a while back - a small burst of fan mail I suppose. The burst got me to thinking that the way the Internet links changed in some small way over the last little while - like the recent google dance for instance. Checking the referring logs to my website I couldn't come up with anything concrete, so on a lark I did a Google search for "History of DNS" and lo and behold, in some small way it looked like I found a keyword that was mine. (Considering that I don't own Ross" or "Rader" this wasn't a bad consolation.). The problem is though that while my *words* own the link, my website doesn't. See, I wrote the article for Webhosting Magazine a long time and ago and the version that they put up on their website is substantially more popular than mine. The problem? They don't have publication rights for the Internet. I would never say anything to them - no harm, no foul, I'm not a "real writer" and there is no real economic losses of material consequence (although I'm sure that under the legal definition of loss that there would be). What bugged me about this initially, and still does today, is that I *gave* them the article on very specific grounds and they essentially ignored me.And now I have to share my keyword with them.