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Archives for August 2002

RIAA’s new brainstorm: Let’s sue our customers

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In Feb. 2000, I wrote a column about Napster and the future of online music that noted:

  …if the RIAA goes after the entire Napster user base, the music industry will find itself in the awkward position of suing a whole lot of its best customers. Which doesn’t sound like smart business.

Well, it now appears that — having successfully crippled Napster and several successor outfits — the RIAA is getting set to do precisely that. As Declan McCullagh reports on News.com, the record companies’ trade association is adopting a two-pronged strategy: sue individual file traders and get the federal government to take action against them, too.

And when all the file traders are in jail, who’ll be left to buy music?

Up, down, turn around

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This vacation thing is upsetting all my routines, and I haven’t been crawling around the Salon blogspace as regularly. Sorry — will catch up with all of you soon. I’ve actually been trying to do some offline reading, including the latest Wired, in which I find this prediction from Marc Andreessen: “All of the technology underneath the Internet is hitting critical mass, at the exact point when people expect nothing. That’s a prescription for the next boom. But I don’t know when.”

As a dyed-in-the-wool contrarian I’m inclined to agree. At the height of the boom, in 1999, no one wanted to hear a voice of moderation suggesting that markets could head south. And today, too many depressed stockholders are so deep in their funks they can’t imagine a scenario in which technology could grow again. It will. Maybe it’s time we simply demanded that every technology-company CEO tattoo on his or her forehead “THIS IS A CYCLICAL BUSINESS.” Always has been. Just remember to sell the next time someone tells you “The business cycle has been rendered obsolete!” And to keep in mind that whether the stocks are up or down, your computer on the Internet can still do extraordinary things undreamed of less than a decade ago.

Old CD-ROMs never die, they just become unreadable

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The basement cleanup continues, and I have now made my way back to the corner where I have stashed a pile of cartons full of unopened review copies of CD-ROMs.

Back in the day — which means almost a decade ago — my career as a technology & culture pundit centered on these shiny little discs that, some portion of the punditariat (most of the time not including me), thought would become a wonderful new publishing medium. Of course it didn’t turn out that way; for about two years every media company under the sun opened an electronic publishing division and scrambled to join the CD-ROM revolution. Aside from a couple of companies — Voyager was the most prominent — most CD-ROM publishing was hopelessly inept, involving the “repurposing” of old catalogs of content rather than creative use of the technology’s limited but real potential. Then everyone realized that the public was simply not buying CD-ROMs, and the bottom dropped out. Though there are some parallels to the later Internet boom, at least the Web achieved a significant presence in large numbers of people’s lives. CD-ROMs just sat on the shelves — or in basement boxes.

What’s depressing to realize today is that most of these old discs are not only not terribly interesting but, today, actually inaccessible. The software they depend on to run is no longer part of computer operating systems, or is configured in such a way that it simply won’t work with today’s systems. Some stuff still works — a lot of the simple Microsoft reference titles manage to pop open delightfully archaic Windows 3.1-style dialogue boxes. But some of my favorite titles — like Rodney Alan Greenblat’s Dazzeloids, which I reviewed in Salon’s very first issue and hoped to introduce my kids to — simply won’t play; the software gets hung up looking for an older version of Quicktime. I don’t know whether, if you buy a new copy from the successor company to Voyager that’s still selling it, that will work better. I kind of doubt it — “back catalog” software rarely gets updated to deal with changes in technology.

Levy on blogs

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Newsweek’s Steven Levy can almost always be trusted to get the story right, and his report on Weblogs is no exception: “…the bigger story is what’s happening on the 490,000-plus Weblogs that few people see: they make up the vast dark matter of the Blog-osphere, and portend a future where blogs behave like such previous breakthroughs as desktop publishing, presentation software and instant messaging, and become a nonremarkable part of our lives.”

Send Perle to Baghdad?

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The disagreements among Republicans over the Bush administration’s obsession with invading Iraq are becoming a gaping divide. Brent Scowcroft’s Wall Street Journal op-ed, arguing that an invasion in the short term would be a disaster, is getting most of the press, but this quote in this morning’s New York Times lead story jumped out at me for its sheer venom directed at Richard Perle, the hawk who has been ring-leading the “Get Saddam” campaign: “Maybe Mr. Perle would like to be in the first wave of those who go into Baghdad.” That’s not some pinko talking — it’s Republican Sen. Chuck Hagel.

An e-mail program that works

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“All I want for Christmas is … an e-mail program that works,” revisited
Rafe Colburn notes how accustomed to the Microsoft monopoly we’ve become that people don’t expect more from the e-mail software that so many of us build our work lives around. Outlook has severe limitations. “The thing is, though, I don’t even see people clamoring for something better. That’s frustrating.” Some of us have been clamoring for years! My Eudora is much more stable under Windows 2000 and able to handle massive message loads that brought Win98 to its knees, so maybe the problem was with the OS and not the software. Still, Microsoft’s to blame either way. The main problem is that entire continents of end-user software get little attention, development or investment because Microsoft’s tanks moved in and leveled the market.

Devil in the Details

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How can a high-profile magazine like Details have published a piece by a high-profile guy like Kurt Andersen — and not know that the piece wasn’t by Kurt Andersen? Does Stephen Glass walk among us still? Or did someone at Details not, uh, bother to wonder whether that e-mail submission from a well-known writer was a forgery? One thing’s for sure: The details will be fascinating when they come out.

Dowd scores

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After criticizing Maureen Dowd for her column on indie film, it’s only fair for me to note that her tone of short-attention-span mockery was the perfect fit for Bush’s Potemkin-Village-style “economic summit.” Choice description:

  He managed to last for 20 minutes each in four economic seminars at Baylor University. He dutifully scribbled some notes as participants talked, looking as happy as a high school kid in trig class, and bounded out of his chair when Treasury Secretary Paul O’Neill told him he could be excused.

“Yes, well,” a visibly relieved Mr. Bush said, jumping up after an exhausting 18 minutes in “Economic Recovery and Job Creation,” “that’s the life of the president. Always has to go.”

Where old computers go to die

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Today I did the kind of thing you only really have time to do on vacation — cleaned out the basement room and dragged two old monitors, one old CPU and an ancient scanner on down to the Computer Recycling Center in Santa Clara. It’s the third time I’ve had occasion to make this pilgrimage, and each time is eye-opening. I don’t spend a lot of time in the Valley, and traveling past those endless low-slung office parks with interchangeable names always leaves me in a kind of daze: The landscape is impenetrable. You just can’t tell from the outside whether any particular building harbors some amazing new technology on the verge of our lives — or just some dead-end venture-capital mistake.

While there are a lot more “space available” signs in the Valley today than two years ago, the pace of development remains intense. I drove down 237, which once was a quaint cut-over road through the South Bay wetlands and is now a mega-freeway racing past new malls and office complexes, and into the heart of Silicon Valley, past National Semiconductor and down a tiny side road, and there it was: in the back of a prefab warehouse, to the sound of a boombox blaring heavy metal, the folks at the CRC were heaping up mountains of old CPU boxes, stacks of monitors, dumpsters full of the Valley’s detritus. And I was hauling them my own little addition to the mounds.

So much money, energy and talent devoted to inventing, manufacturing and marketing the new stuff. And just one little ramshackle operation to deal with the discards.

Now would be a good time to re-read Jim Fisher’s definitive piece on “Poison PCs.”