“…Amazon also said that three newspapers, The New York Times, The Boston Globe and The Washington Post, would begin offering devices this summer at a reduced price to subscribers who sign up for long-term subscriptions. But few details were available, and both Amazon and the newspapers described it as a pilot program.”

Since the new Kindle is very expensive at $489 list, I doubt this meets the necessary price point, but I’ll be looking at the deal as a way to supplement the fast- evaporating LA Times.

The discussion about what to do about the death of newspapers has been marked by futile hand wringing from obsolete newspaper people, and silly statements from the internet Pollyannas, with a few interesting experiments in hyper-local news coming online. But it comes down to the fact that reporters and editors need to be paid , and so news organizations need a revenue stream.

On the hardware side, newsprint will be replaced by something. Laptops, iPhones ( yes, really) , and desktops, are not comfortable for sitting around reading, especially for the over 40 set who actually read newspapers. The technical problem is the screen. Size, weight, resolution, power need, and color are all issues to be solved. In the small formats, like the Kindle and Sony eReader, the E Ink screen is said to be quite good, but lacks size, and color. Large format screens like your desktop suffer from weight, power, portability, and illumination issues. Laptops fall into the barely good enough for a work-around category. News reports have been saying that larger color versions of the E Ink screen will solve the hardware problem. And today stories appeared saying just such a screen is near delivery, and deals are being made with newspapers ( see references below).

Stretched Kindle Image by Gizmodo

Selling the new screen will not solve the news organizations’ revenue problem, even if they get some of the profit from screen sales, which is doubtful. Until and if ad revenue fills the gap, they need subscription sales to fund the business, and likely thereafter. The Wall St Journal and Bloomberg have had some success at selling content, but few if any other services have attracted subscribers. (and Bloomberg uses dedicated terminals)

Proposed: Subscribe the Screen

News organizations could rent you a reader, as cable companies do now with set-tops and DVRs. Twenty to forty dollars a month should be quite a nice sum over three years hardware lifetime say, and subscribers would be tied, but not locked-in, to the supplier, in the way they are tied to cable companies. Subscribers wouldn’t have to worry about getting stuck with an unusable reader, or repairs. Because they would have hardware and software control, news orgs could figure out the marketing balance of exclusive content ( perhaps lasting 24 hours) vs free internet. Obvious tie-ins would be available like click-through ads to generate more revenue. There are many angles to be worked out in this model, but the elegance of it is that it removes the two essential problems: the initial cost hurdle of the $300+ readers and reinstates control over content distribution ( like the Bloomberg terminal), yet leaves an open platform that can be upgraded. Additional services can be tested later in the market because the basic platform would be there, and generating income.

Less Appealing Alternatives:
Google and the other companies with major internet ad revenue could set aside some percentage of their take for a non-profit AP-like version of NPR and PBS, without government support, or corporate interference. Or we could have a BBC, funded by a tax on devices. Or we could have ad-funded internet sites and flabby TV news as we do now, with virtually no local coverage (hooray! say the local pols until they realize “no coverage” means invisibility) and reality-show news aimed at the ninth-grade set.

What Amazon May Be Planning:
The Kindle costs over $300 and requires a monthly subscription, and creates a locked-in market for Amazon e-book sales. If Amazon lowered the initial cost for the new large-format reader to compete with monthly newspaper subscription costs, they undoubtedly would get a huge customer response. But if this is Amazon’s model, it won’t feed the reporters who create the content. In effect it feeds the weakest link in the delivery system, the aggregator, where the actual value is created by the device maker and the content provider. It is being reported that News Corp, Hearst and Plastic Logic are also planning to market large-format readers soon, so we might see multiple strategies.

So count this as gallows humor.

AIG has been given roughly $185 billion.

Zero electric motorcycles announced today that they are selling a street legal version of their electric dirt bike at about $10,000 less a ten percent federal tax credit.

Zero street legal lithium-powered supermotard

Tesla automobiles has already sold a few of their all-electric high-performance sports cars at about $100k.

Tesla electric roadster

If we had used the money from the AIG bailout to actually support American companies that make things, it could have funded:

9,250,000 Zero electric motorcycles or equivalent.

(Honda sold about 15 million units world-wide in 2008. All makers sold about 1 million motorcycles and scooters in the US in 2008.)

Plus,

925,000 Tesla cars.

(BMW sold about 1.4 million cars in 2008 world-wide.)

So with one bailout package we could have created an American motorcycle company selling electric bikes as the second-largest motorcycle manufacturer in the world. And we could have jump-started an all-electric car manufacturer to nearly two thirds the size of BMW. Not to mention establishing a dominating presence in the clean transportation industry of tomorrow.

Somehow I’m not laughing all the way to the bank.

references:
motorcycle sales
Zero
Tesla
AIG bailout

Accounting methods which shortsightedly neglect maintenance across all types of private infrastructure, causing future breakdowns and vast repair costs.
The declining maintenance and investment curve of oil companies as they see increasing taxation, and reduced assets into the future.
A nasty interaction between fluctuating oil prices, supply, credit, and infrastructure maintenance.
Yet another example of simplistic free-market economics failing to handle long-term community issues.

Clump it altogether under Peak Oil, and the interrelationship of a pessimistic oil future ( POV: oil companies), unpredictable supply vs demand and hence price, plus a crashing world economy, the general failure of political institutions to plan for the future, and the complete failure of macro-economics to guide us though this change from an oil economy to some other energy source(s).

Unlike almost all other Web2.0 sites, the comments are a must-read. In an area ripe for conspiracy theorists, actual oil industry engineers weigh in. Just like grown-ups. Imagine!

by sicasu

My comments: Just yesterday articles ran on the anniversary of the Exxon Valdez spill pointing out that Exxon still runs the same type of tanker today. If Exxon thinks that a fresh fleet of tankers won’t be have enough oil in future to carry to full amortization, then this makes a lot of financial sense for them, but not for us. In fairness to the oil companies, their supplies outside the developed world are more and more being controlled by governments, including China, their distribution and sales in the developed world are likely to be squeezed harder and harder by various carbon taxes and environmental rules, and the two great growth markets, China and India, are closed or government controlled. Yet they sell an absolutely essential product, one that will remain essential for decades. Perhaps just knowing it will all come to an end in their childrens’ lifetime is enough to deflate them a bit.

One point rarely covered in the economic press, but with almost daily comment on The Oil Drum, is the connection between the end of the petroleum economy (Peak Oil) and our current financial meltdown. Failure to plan our energy infrastructure worldwide is central to our current crisis. Later on we will be hit with the costs of global warming, and right now we have to spend immense sums to retool for more sustainable energy sources. The few billion allocated in Obama’s first budget is just a trickle of what’s to come.

If Reagan had not been elected to wipe out the nascent Carter-era sustainable energy subsidies, we in America might be 10 or 20 years ahead of our current situation. If Bush had not wasted eight years… but that’s all the past now.

try
“motorcycle=red”
“chair=brown”

here’s more information from Google.
They say “(you can replace “red” with “blue”, “green”, “teal”, “purple”, “yellow”, “orange”, “pink”, “white”, “gray”, “black” and “brown”)”

Messing with the URL also works, and produces different results:

http://images.google.com/images?q=bird&imgcolor=red

If I was the only person who didn’t know this, so be it.

Listening to NPR today ask a pundit about the proposed shut-down of Saturday mail service, I went through the usual 3 steps of techno-guy reaction.
First I sneered at snail mail. Second, I questioned the value of Saturday mail and mail delivery in general. Third I thought of one entity that would be hurt, the biggest single user of the US Mail, Netflix.

But then it hit me: ending Saturday mail delivery will save one sixth of the greenhouse gases and nasty pollution and fuel use and depreciation caused by that huge fleet of mail trucks. It might also have a tiny, but measurable effect on traffic, which would also save a little pollution and fuel. Plus all those workers won’t be commuting, and those long-haul trucks won’t be delivering to the distribution centers.

Then I thought: what if all non-retail non-essential business shut down on Saturday, wouldn’t that have the same positive result, only much larger?

Last I realized that the very best way to do this is just have a voluntary 4 day work week. Sure, some large segment of the economy can’t do this, but I bet the majority of firms could. We could run the stock exchanges 4 days, the government offices 4 days, office workers could go 4 days. It doesn’t need to be enacted into law, that’s too rigid and inefficient. But here’s a chance to ask for a nationwide sacrifice that might actually have personal benefits, like more time with children, more time to help others, more time to learn new skills. More time for relaxing would itself pay dividends. Employers would save money on energy, at least.

Victory gardens and war bonds may come later in this down cycle, but for now, I think a four-day work week would be a good idea.

here are three of thousands of sites that have also suggested it:
MotherJones on a 4 day school plan
Utah tries it
a blog discusses the ramifications

What’s to be done?

The choices:
	The ice floe: Let them die with the polar bears. Suppliers will crash and burn, and who knows how Michigan will survive.
photo by Reason	Show them the money: Nobody will buy their assets in this market. ( Solarworld offered to take Opel as a freebie today) Bankruptcy isn’t going to provide quick revenue to support the whole rickety framework, so the Feds would have to provide some kind of guaranteed market like Federal fleet sales and buyer rebates, and support for R&D, and try to get a rapid program in place to retool.

The problem with letting them die, is that they may drown us too. A huge number of jobs and businesses depend on the Big 3 car businesses. Numbers are quoted as high as 10% of all jobs are indirectly affected by the car business. Cities will be besieged with falling taxes, failing business, collapsing housing. Unemployment will soar, and Federal costs will too as the safety net gets hit with a wave of the jobless.

The problem with bailing them out is that it may be throwing good money after bad. The basic problem with pumping money into failing behemoths is you are using a very expensive, blunt instrument to do surgery. It very well may not work, and political pressures could easily pollute the Congressional effort with giveaways. Bickering between the Democratic leadership in Congress and the lame-duck Bush administration is not helping. The folks in Richistan have long ago taken their money out of manufacturing, and indeed out of the country, so they don’t care.

The long view:
Either the prognosticators are right and the Big 3 are already zombies, or they aren’t and there is some hope for restructuring of one or two. In both cases it’s the suddenness of the collapse and the terrible timing that make it so awful. The Big 3 have been giving away market share for decades and the Republic is still standing, sort of. So if you could slow the demise, and at the same time strongly encourage lightweight, modern cars and trucks, with a frantic race to hypercar manufacturing, it might be possible to avoid the worst effects of the collapse, and use the direness of the situation to push through much-needed restructuring of labor and management.

The greatest obstacles to this approach are the blockheads in management, the blockheads in Congress, and the desperate UAW. Bankruptcy of some sort is so attractive because it means some judge, and not an elected representative, will be telling the UAW folks that 50% are laid off and the other 50% are getting wages cut in half. Presumably the same judge would seize control and clean house in the white-collar departments, sell off the fancy buildings, cancel the golden parachutes, and generally machete his way through the mess. It still might not work, because car sales are so slow that competing with the healthy carmakers is a daunting prospect. It would take a big discount to get a sensible buyer into a Ford Focus/Chevy Cobalt over a Toyota or even Hyundai, when everyone knows Ford and Chevy may go kaput, taking their dealers with them.

The ugly:
I think a lot of the pious declarations of free-market discipline are fueled by irrational anti-union sentiment. It is clear the UAW is dying, but union inefficiency does not mean jobs ought to be wasted. Sure a Democrat really can’t deliver the death sentence to a unionized industry, but they might well allow the lame-ducks to do it.

What if:
What if a benevolent industrial dictator from the WWII era were given the nationalized hulk of GM? Leaving Chrysler to die, and Ford to try it alone, he could forget profits while revamping the company from top to bottom. Of course this presumes there is something worth saving.

My guess:
Stretching out the process may be the best that can be done with the Big 3. Facing extinction, might, just might, startle them into serious change. Ford is most likely to survive. The most important long-term goals for the nation are restoring our manufacturing capability, and providing 21rst century green transportation as soon as possible. The Big 3 and the UAW can get on the train or be left behind. For the computer-biz kids from the coasts the idea of re-starting an industry from scratch may seem commonplace, but if that’s the way it goes, then surely those people in the Midwest are in for some cascading failures of small business, and some really tough times.

The Problem:
GM, Ford and Chrysler are spending more money than they take in. The burn rate is fast enough to leave GM penniless in a few months. No one, except possibly the taxpayer, will lend them money, figuring it would be good money after bad. The stock market is devaluing GM to the point than a billionaire could simply buy all the stock (which is really buying the debt).

GM falling stock price chart There is not much value left there….

A good article at Seeking Alpha

	Two truly stupid models.
Pontiac Aztec		Ford Excursion

The Money Situation:
The market seems to think privately-owned Chrysler is a goner. Ford has a little more money than GM, but is essentially in the same boat, even if it could take over GM’s domestic market share. Vast numbers of vendor and related jobs depend on the Big 3, 2-3 million has been quoted. Its easy to guess that a sudden loss of that many jobs would tip us into a depression. Worldwide, manufacturing and transportation businesses are in deep trouble, from Boeing and Airbus, to the world-wide shipping industry, to China itself.

The Political Situation:
It’s hard to see how any President, let alone a Democrat who just carried the Midwest, can suck it up and let GM die. And then there is that Depression looming. Nobody wants to be Herbert Hoover.

The Design Problem:
American companies have once again ( see 1970’s) failed to plan for rising gas prices, and are caught with aging designs that weigh too much, push too much air, and consume too much. They have not diversified with small vehicles, in spite of having successful off-shore small-car companies. They have not invested in in-house powertrain research, like hybrids and batteries. Their bit of fuel-cell research is pie-in-the-sky stuff, with no path to manufacture. The one bright spot is the Chevy Volt, not yet ready for manufacture, and never intended to be sold in large quantities.

The Culture Problem:
In four decades while the Japanese and Germans were optimizing their labor-hours-per-car, time-to-market, and reliability, Detroit was selling SUVs and trucks as commuter cars, with haphazard work on future manufacturing. With a few loss-leader exceptions like the Dodge Viper and Ford GT40 and long-running Chevrolet Corvette, Detroit made cars carelessly for people who are careless about cars, neglecting both the Apple Computer (cars as digital appliances) end of the market and the performance end (import tuners). They did great with the size-is-status market.

The Labor Problem:
The labor problem is partly the healthcare and pensioner problem. The Big 3 hourly employees are still dependent on the mother company for healthcare ( there’s an unfunded plan to transfer to UAW) and so are the pensioners, whose healthcare and pensions are not fully funded either. Further, the future is not with the UAW, so it may end up fighting the greater communal good in favor of its own survival.

The Rewards Problem:
The short-sightedness of Detroit has long been publicly discussed. Foreign manufacturers seem to be planning design changes in sync with changing market conditions with success, though all will be hurt by the sudden downturn in world-wide sales. Rewarding dismal failure just ain’t American somehow.

Past Examples

examples of the kind of thing I mean:
Switch from whale oil to petroleum
The rudder
Industrial steel
Aniline dye and the synthetic chemical industry
Packet switched computer networks
Semiconductors
Telegraph and so on…

Past successes look obvious from the future, but it is inherent in the nature of disruptive technologies that the really important ones solve problems that aren’t obvious at all. So by this measure whatever is not on this list could be a real whiz-bang idea. But I’ll plunge forward anyway, heedless of the cost.

Future

With the looming greenhouse gas crisis, and massive over-population, energy ideas top the list. But some think that water and good agricultural dirt may be the scarcest resources in the future.

Energy

Most obvious:
Cheap and efficient solar cells. Solar roofing, thin flexible films, solar paints and printing. Current glass-mounted cells cost roughly $700 for 100W, which is too much to pay back even with $0.15/kwh grid power. Many researchers are working on the problem, and new announcements come weekly. For example catalytic breakup of H2O.

The low-tech route: cheap parabolic solar and MIT group builds a low-cost reflector to generate steam.

infra-red solar power Useful for both daytime, and nighttime, plus waste heat recovery.

Everybody’s favorite, fusion power:
Imagine multi-megawatt generators without pollution. Commercial success is still decades away, though the Europeans and the Brits are spending on research.

One attempt to commercialize fusion.

Small energy harvesting:
Various schemes have been proposed for reclaiming small amounts of waste energy. Just as hybrid vehicles recover some motive energy from braking, we could recover energy from waste heat at air conditioners, auto engines, sun-heated paving. Medical researchers are proposing to generate electricity from body chemistry, and from movement. More radical are the self-powered sensors that harvest enough energy from their environment to forgo batteries.

Using radio signals to power sensors
Parasitic power devices.

Artificial photosynthesis
The grand pattern for harvesting solar energy is photosynthesis. An understanding of how it works could lead to genetic manipulation, and creations of more efficient bio-fuels.

One of many starts

Small scale wind power without tall towers:
Efficient wind turbines need to be well above rooflines and trees. This is a problem for residential generation. Some have proposed tethered kites and blimps. Windbelt. There are pilot projects that use harmonic vibration in wires to make small amounts of power. These do not require complex turbines or towers, and so may be useful in the third world.

Clean, sustainable bio-fuels:
Bio-fuels are already being made from all manner of organic materials, from sewage and manure, to algae, to waste agricultural products, crops, even coal. The problem is that none of these processes are truly carbon-neutral and most have other negative side-effects like disruption in agricultural markets.
Craig Ventner has announced that he will produce carbon-negative fuel from genetically-engineered bacteria that feed on CO2.

Efficient hydrogen storage:
Hydrogen is extremely clean, and good for fuel cells, even internal combustion engines, but it is devilishly difficult to store. Current technologies use extreme pressure, liquification or chemical matrices, none of which are suitable for cars. Some work is being done with ammonia and catalyzed water, as liquid fuels are ideal for transportation.

Efficient hydrogen production:
Hydrogen is extremely common, but bound up in compounds which are expensive to break down. Researchers are working on various biologic methods of producing hydrogen, similar to those for methane and the alcohols. This gets into artificial photosynthesis, where the bio-fuel research is also headed.
Here is a very interesting development.

Cheap powerful batteries:
Today’s Lithium batteries today are expensive, and extremely awkward to make into usable packs for electric cars. Researchers are working on nanotech methods of improving the weight, cost, and maintenance, though the power density may not go up much. And today’s power density isn’t high enough for gasoline-like range at low weights.

Low power lighting
Low power lighting has been with us since the 1980’s, but in the form of compact flourescents that use mercury and have an awkward package. LEDs are reaching the same efficiency, their price is coming down, and they are wondefully small and long-lived. For instance, Toshiba makes white LEDs at about 51 lumens per watt (a 100 w oldfashioned lamp is 17 lumens per watt) and is comparable with CFLs and even with the best gas discharge lights like automotive HID.
Cree may be even better.
More data.

Materials

You can argue that much of the quest for new materials is just the flip side of the quest for cheaper energy. After all, the problem with current materials is that they are too heavy or they require too much energy to mine, process, or machine. But Nanotechnologists may also claim that they are making materials that do things that couldn’t be done at all before. There are two basic patterns for new materials: lighter-stronger-cheaper-less corrosion, and chemically or electrically active.

Cheap wiring:
Electrical wiring is almost exclusively copper. It is expensive and environmentally unclean in production, prone to corrosion, heavy, and inelastic. A cheap, elastic, conductive alternative could save money and weight in all kinds of machines.

High temperature superconductors:
(see cheap wiring)
Transmission wires for the electrical grid that have little to no resistance at room temperature.

Smart mulch:
An agricultural mulch that generates electricity from sunlight to power irrigation pumps, and controls moisture loss, rain penetration, insects, and diseases.

Structural composites:
Composites to substitute for aluminum and steel, with less weight, more elasticity, more corrosion resistance, lower manufacturing costs, Carbon fiber and its relatives already hit some of these points, but it is inelastic and very expensive as a material and in the manufacturing process. Amory Lovin’s Rocky Mountain Institute has been developing a carbon-reinforced plastic that can be mass-produced.
Here’s a patent.

Spider silk:
Spider silk is famously the strongest fiber known. It is also bio-degradable. Various genetic engineering and nanotech approaches are being used to copy or duplicate it in industrial form. Tensile strength is one of the most important qualities in hundreds of products, from tires to structural composites to cables and ropes, so success here will make all manner of light, strong products available.

Resources

Water purification and desalinization:
The third world especially will need small, cheap, low-energy ways to clean water for drinking and irrigation. Global warming changes are accelerating damage done by over-pumping and polluting.
Deka generator/purifier

Farming without soil degradation:
The Romans knew how to do it, but failed to execute. So too the Mayans and virtually every other agricultural civilization. Soil is produced naturally from rock, but the process is much slower than the erosion cuased by bad tillage, and the ecologic depletion caused by hyper-cultivating monocultures.

Robots

The harder problems in robotics – machine vision, autonomy, voice recognition and speech synthesis are finally yielding to sustained research. ( see jawfish ) The first widespread use of mobile robots is in the military, where the cost equation is very favorable. Surely just as cheap IEDs defeat expensive Humvees in Iraq, there will be a tidal wave of cheap, disposable, attack robots used against expensive complex and human targets. I can’t see any good coming out of this prospect, but I can see disruptive change.

But civilian robotics could restore some manufacturing to first-world countries, making supply-chains shorter, and re-invigorating the economy. But don’t expect a good house-cleaning bot any time soon.

Medicine

There may be more innovation coming in health and medicine than all the other fields listed combined, and so I’ll just focus an a couple that might have very-wide reaching effects.

Brain science:
Suddenly, teams of biologists, physicists, doctors, and engineers are building an empirical science of the how the brain works. While the anecdotal guesses of Freud are long behind us, understanding of even the most basic brain traits is a long way ahead. At least we know and agree that we still don’t understand very much, but we do know some things about brain performance. It’s not unreasonable to think that great advances in brain-drugs and brain-training are possible, leading to greater happiness and intelligence, however unmeasurable. Simply learning to control our metabolism to keep neurons strong and fat low would be a huge boon in the developed world. The dark side is also always there, though, development of these drugs will also target addiction pathways and abuse.

Long range birth control:
Pure Speculation Department- if the political will existed, use of cheap, long lasting implantable birth control would be a huge boon. We seem so close to this, and yet we still can’t have programs that pay girls to avoid pregnancy.

Who’s holding up the train?

What’s stopping all this innovation? In some cases nothing, for instance, the cost of petroleum is now high enough to create a bio-fuel industry. Lack of capital and researchers may hinder many projects, though venture capital is finding its way into many of these ideas because the commercial prospects are huge.

But there are many technical solutions that require infrastructure changes, or market regulation, or temporary subsidy. There are many powerful entrenched Luddites who deny the science of global warming out of ignorance or for political ends. American governmental capital has been re-routed into war in the oil-fields for more than five years, and now into the Wall St. bail-out. Many solutions require global cooperation, which is increasingly difficult across the developed vs developing vs undeveloped divides. In short, while our mechanical and chemical and computing skills increase every year, our human skills and institutions barely change. And the very worst of all the human problems, over-population, is not up for discussion in the fastest-growing parts of the world.

Over-population is like a rising flood that will eventually negate the ability of third-world countries to develop, and will continue to plague first-world countries with intractable immigration issues.

So the technology that is going nowhere is human-management. We don’t seem to be much better at making group decisions based on rationality than we were as cavemen or even chimps. And our innate aggression has been outrun by our technical ability to make weapons. The coming robot revolution in the military may make that dilemma even worse.

Nice things will be said about Microsoft.

(afterthought: today it was announced that Microsoft has started funding Apache, see end of this article for more)

I ran across this MS research project page recently when I googled “intelligent adaptive interface.” I was looking to see if anyone was working on making computer and small device interfaces that adapt to the user’s behavior. What I had in mind was using one of the newly-ubiquitous tiny Linux devices as a remote control. On my conventional low-budget stereo and tv devices, the remotes have a gazillion buttons, with no logical placement and no hierarchy. The labels are invisible in the dark and require reading glasses in the light, and inscrutable when actually read. You all know the drill.

Well this very scientific and academic page shows a whole series of Microsoft Research projects on the general notion of adaptive interfaces. At a glance you can tell this is Serious Stuff done by Serious but Nice People ( their pictures are there). They are well-organized, use big-time ideas like Bayesian filters and Matrices, 3D interfaces, “a state-of-the-art psychological studies laboratory,” and so forth. They get to re-examine human-machine physical interfaces, and all sorts of interesting problems.

So what have they come up with?
The infamous talking paper clip.
Yep I am not kidding. OK there is a long list of other things of more substance from implementing encryption to new 3D rendering filters.

Now the MS people I have met have been really smart, and I don’t doubt for a minute that working with these folks would be a real intellectual thrill. But I assure you, bet money on it, they will never solve the remote control button problem, or even improve the visual mess that is Windows. How come I know this at a glance, without any special knowledge? You look at that page, what do you think? And chime in if you disagree.

So why can’t they make it work?
They have meetings.
They have too many people and too much money.
Whatever they do will be diluted and absorbed by the layer after layer of other groups just like them at Microsoft.
They start by going back and questioning premises about human psychology.
They have no test track and feedback loop.
They aren’t hungry.

Feedback
For me, the most interesting of these obstacles (because it could, in theory, be overcome at a big company), is the lack of feedback and test track. The rest are the result of working in a company with 30,000 other smart people, where overhead approaches 100% of total effort. What’s feedback in this case? Feedback is not focus groups. Useful feedback comes from actually writing some software and letting it loose on the public to see if anyone likes it, and actually paying attention to what they say and do. The test track is the venue where you can get good feedback with high frequency.

Let’s look at an analogy, motor racing. In racing you have an absolute test: the order of finish. You have a set of rules, intentionally designed to narrow the problem with constraints to the point where it becomes partially soluble, remains quite difficult, and always has room for improvement. You have competitors and a prize which provide motivation. Good engineering practice is reinforced in racing because at every level there are painful time and resource constraints.

Let me use a type of racing I am familiar with to explain why good practice is reinforced:
In motorcycle road racing a team typically races one or two times a month, but they only get to the track on Tuesday sometimes even Thursday before a Sunday race. Because of cost constraints of many kinds, they only get a few hours of practice, and then qualifying time on the track. Every track is different and requires a new chassis setup, and last year’s settings won’t work, because too many other factors have changed. There are multiple variables to set, and they have unpredictable interactions. Teams have no ability to use the track at other times for testing. There is an unshakable deadline, and somebody wins.

So does this incredibly difficult process produce better engineered bikes?
Lap times get faster every year. C’est tout.

Back to Microsoft, just how are they ever to get this sort of feedback, testing, and motivation? The giant company could spin off into small teams and create a competition. But then what is the test? Microsoft can’t afford to release a bunch of half-baked ideas to the public ( cynics disagree, but I promised not to mock ), so the test is inevitably arbitrary and maybe political. This engenders a kind of corporate navel-staring which can’t produce good work. So no, I don’t think they can innovate, because too much is at stake.

What about the famous iPod, iPhone model of innovation at Apple? The market has clearly voted for that in a big way. Apple is a huge company that nevertheless finds it possible to innovate. The Apple Macintosh approach to the personal computer was to control everything, the hardware, the operating system, the user interface, in the name of consistency, reliability and integration. All of which are other ways to say “control.” Yes Apple is more of a control-freak than Microsoft.

A recent Wired magazine article tried to take on the culture at Apple, inevitably making the question into the culture of Steve Jobs:

Jobs’ fabled attitude toward parking reflects his approach to business: For him, the regular rules do not apply. …
… Apple is … more like an old-fashioned industrial titan than a different-thinking business of the future. Apple operates with a level of secrecy that makes Thomas Pynchon look like Paris Hilton. It locks consumers into a proprietary ecosystem. And as for treating employees like gods? Yeah, Apple doesn’t do that either.

But by deliberately flouting the Google mantra, Apple has thrived. When Jobs retook the helm in 1997, the company was struggling to survive. Today it has a market cap of $105 billion, placing it ahead of Dell and behind Intel…..

It’s hard to see how any of this would have happened had Jobs hewed to the standard touchy-feely philosophies of Silicon Valley. Apple creates must-have products the old-fashioned way: by locking the doors and sweating and bleeding until something emerges perfectly formed. It’s hard to see the Mac OS and the iPhone coming out of the same design-by-committee process that produced Microsoft Vista or Dell’s Pocket DJ music player.

( I have cut out a rather silly comparison to Google)

This probably isn’t the most profound commentary on Apple, but it does try to get at the culture issue that is clearly different, if a bit distasteful. Jobs is famously a screamer, possessed of a legendary “reality distortion field,” in short, a real prima donna. I worked a long time ago for an outfit with a head man like that, The Santa Fe Opera under John Crosby. He ran the opera like a fiefdom, it was housed on his ranch North of Santa Fe, and he usually decided by fiat that he would conduct one of the operas each season. He used his own stable of buddies to conduct, design, and direct. He was known to summarily dismiss even lowly employees for simple offenses like a noisy muffler. Crosby was at best a mediocre conductor, and his taste could veer into the campy and maudlin, but it’s impossible to conceive of the SFO without him. He created a world-class summer residency for opera out of the juniper, sagebrush, and rattlesnakes of New Mexico. Santa Fe was interesting. It was something to sit outside ready for the incredible New Mexico stars, watching a thunderstorm approach down the Rio Grande valley, and have the orchestra break into the Der Fliegender Hollander, or Lulu, the most depressing show I have ever seen, or Falstaff. At its best, it was thrilling, and people cared.

The various Apple iThings were brand-new products, and Jobs bet a good part of the company on them. Poker players call this kind of gamble, “all-in” and it requires an appetite for risk, and an environment where aggression is rewarded. Other companies don’t seem to be able to follow, even when there is such a clear example to copy. Let’s not just dump on Microsoft, why can’t the Japanese or Koreans or Finns make an mp3 player or cell-phone as good as an iPod or iPhone?

Hell, why can’t anybody even make a good remote control or car radio?

Microsoft goes Open Source?

an afterthought…

Well the cnet article points out previous areas of cooperation between Microsoft and the Open Source world, and favorable differences in the Apache license and the GPL used by many other open applications. So its not quite a shocker. But never mind these inside-the-silicon-axis matters, does this mean Microsoft might have to open up its platform to be able to innovate at all?

Windows is in a pinch. World-wide its tremendous market success has paradoxically left it with few new markets to expand into. Sure the Chinese market may eventually be as big as Europe and America combined, but its not at all clear that they will pay for the software they use. If somehow forced to start observing international IP standards on piracy, they might just use no-cost Linux instead. The latest Windows, Vista, has been a flop technically and in sales. In addition, the hot new market is phones and tiny devices, where Apple owns the flashy-bits and Linux, with help from Google and others, may be the gorilla in the room.

An admittedly far-fetched scenario:
If Microsoft moved very quickly and transformed Windows into a windowing application that could run natively on Linux, and provided software infrastructure ( libraries) for the applications developers to port to the Linux kernel-Windows hybrid, they might be able to drop thousands of developers from Windows, and replace them with some funding for the various Linux groups they’d need. Windows users would get the same look&feel, and Microsoft could probably charge just as much for a product with much smaller development costs. They won’t do it because its risky.

Not doing it might be just as risky, since the Open Source world is catching up quickly in all areas. Another far-fetched idea of three years ago, that one day Linux and friends might be a real competitor for Windows, doesn’t seem as outrageous today. Another and more likely option for Microsoft is to stay the course and milk the Windows franchise for as long as it can, and meanwhile focus on games, small devices, and phones. This might be more profitable in the near term, depending on how much labor costs could be saved or re-used on future-oriented development. It would be much easier for management to do, and therefore its the likely choice for them.

What do you hate most about personal computers?

They’re expensive and half the time make more work than they save.

When something goes wrong it is so frustrating. Then I have to pay somebody to come out and help me, which is worse than calling the plumber.

They are so much trouble, they become an end-in-themselves rather than a helpful appliance.

What if you spent some money on support (warranty and help) , but almost nothing on the computer? What if the money you spent on support also paid for storage space for your files and automatically backed them up?

How about a tiny, silent, desktop PC, that only costs $99 plus $14.95/ month and comes with lots and lots of software?

What is it?

Zonbu desktop

It’s a small desktop PC with no hard drive, no fan, and very little power usage. It does not run Windows, but you may not be able to tell much difference, and it comes with all the software you can use. It uses network storage provided by Amazon to keep your files.

Is it any good?

It is terrific for the price. It’s the best value I’ve seen in a long time.

Who is it good for?

Secondary school students ( college students need a laptop).
Folks who just want to read some email, look at some pictures, and use the Web.
People who want minimal electric usage and noise.
Perfect for Grandma and Grandpa.
Anybody who needs a hassle-free PC for a simple use.
Storing all your music and playing it on the stereo.
Second computer.
An Internet radio.

Who should NOT get a Zonbu?

People who cannot get a broadband network connection.
People who need a powerful PC to do multiple things at once, like download music while playing a DVD, or writing a book while editing a photograph. Or doing something that requires a lot of memory, like editing video.
Gamers look elsewhere. You need a $2000 PC not a $99 one.
People who know they just absolutely have to run a Windows or Macintosh program on it.

What else do I need?

Like any desktop you need a keyboard, mouse, monitor, and optionally, a USB CD/DVD drive. Well duh, it only costs $99. It uses VGA video and has no Firewire. Standard PC keyboards and mice and monitors work with it, I used whatever I had lying around the house. You must have an Internet connection and a broadband network, either wireless or with a wire.

You need: and (opt) USB CD/DVD drive

What software does it come with, what software do I need to buy, do Microsoft Word and Outlook come with it?

It comes with a huge amount of software, much more than Windows or Macintosh includes. It runs Gentoo Linux and uses special free software called Open Source which runs on Linux computers. What that means to you, is the software is free of charge. You don’t buy software for Linux computers, except when you need something scientific or commercial, and even then it’s often free. Windows or Macintosh software like Quickbooks, TurboTax, Garage Band, or iMovie will not run on the Zonbu.

Just go to their very good website for more details.

Here’s a demo on YouTube:

It sounds too good to be true.

Zonbu works very smoothly: just plug in the monitor, mouse, keyboard and connect to your wireless or wired network. Power it up, and it asks for an account, which you get from Zonbu. If you are using a wireless network, then you’ll have to choose your network and enter the password or key. Then, you’ll setup your email. That’s it.

All of these steps are required with any PC you buy.

Once it’s setup, it will run fine without the network, but you won’t be able to save large files or get to your network-stored files. Since most personal computers exist to connect to the Internet, this isn’t going to be a problem.

Here is the news: for various technical reasons you likely don’t care about, it has recently become possible to make a very small desktop computer with no moving parts ( no fan! ) very cheaply. Some clever folks called Zonbu have packaged one of these tiny computers with a support system that warranties your computer and supports your programs ( applications) that run on the computer. Zonbu has two products at the moment, the desktop PC I am reviewing here and a more expensive laptop. I found that the desktop works very well.

The Company:

Zonbu is brand new, and so we know little about them. I do know:
They responded very rapidly to me. Their website is really first-rate. I think the business idea is terrific. (as it happens I was thinking of doing a similar system) I really like the way they have integrated the system of hardware and software. The performance is really quite good. So I feel sure they are some smart, level-headed folks. If you can’t stand the risk, then by all means buy an Apple, Dell, or a Compaq/HP PC for more money, then buy the warranty for more money, then buy some software for more money.

The Gotcha:

You must have a broadband network connection, at least some of the time. No, a modem ( dial-up) isn’t going to work.
I am sorry, there is just no way around it, you have to get a broadband connection. These days they cost little or no more than a dial-up anyway, and they are far far better in every way. A few people who live out in the country still can’t get broadband. The Zonbu will connect to either a wireless or a wired broadband connection.

Some Questions and Answers:

What about reading and writing Microsoft Word docs?
No problem, Zonbu comes with OpenOffice. I use OpenOffice to create complex 400 page books, it’ll work for you, and it opens and writes (.doc) Word format.

Can I watch youtube videos, and play music?
No problem, Zonbu comes with Firefox, music and video players, you can do everything you can do with your Windows or Macintosh. It does not come with a DVD drive, so if you want to watch DVD movies, or burn CDs, you have to buy a separate USB drive.

How about viruses and spam?
Zonbu runs Linux, which is much more secure than Windows, and has far fewer attackers. Spam, alas, has nothing specifically to do with your type of computer, rather it is endemic, like flu.

Can I still get my email?
Oh you bet. And even better you can get your mail, and all your files anywhere you take the computer. It’s all stored on the Internet at Amazon.

What happens when I lose my work?
Amazon backs it up for you. Just contact support and have them restore it.

Can I print?
Of course, either network printers ( you have a printer on some other PC in the house) or directly connect via a USB cable.

If this thing is so great how come they aren’t everywhere like those iPod things?
Well they just came out. Zonbu is a small company, I’m sure they can’t afford a lot of advertising. The market for these is with the most conservative computer users who don’t rush out to buy the latest thing. ( yes Computer People behave just like little kids with new toys).

FUD- The Great Microsoft Windows Fear, Uncertainty, and Doubt:
For almost twenty years Microsoft Windows has been the standard computer system. It was and is frustrating, expensive, fragile, and difficult to use. But people used it at work, and so felt, mostly correctly, that they needed it at home. The computer world changed a few years ago, and the Web became more important than the documents that dominated computer work. Email was always independent of the operating system, but it wasn’t until a few years ago that free Open Source software became Good Enough. In fact over the last few years all the essential desktop programs in the Linux world have crossed the Good Enough threshold.

If you really have an important program (application) that runs on Windows, you still need a Windows computer to run it. But 90% of people do writing, printing, Web surfing, email, photographs, and spreadsheets on their computer, and it really truly doesn’t fundamentally matter whether you use an Apple, a Windows, or Linux operating system.

Why am I qualified to write this review?
Well aside from wit and charm, the fact that they loaned me a Zonbu, and Cody The Hungry Beagle, I have two Linux home computers and a third on the way ( MythTV box) a Linux computer on my desk at work, plus I manage a small herd of Linux servers at a company which sells a Linux-based product. I write books, watch movies, listen to podcasts, make drawings, do email, write code, use the Web, and a lot of other things, all with Linux computers. I have used and managed all kinds of Windows computers in the past.

In order to get an Apple user’s viewpoint, I also called in a certified Mac expert, who was also very enthusiastic about Zonbu. Remember, Apple sells an equivalent sized box, the Mac Mini, which has a faster processor and better video and a hard drive, but costs $800 and doesn’t include as much software (note: some, but not all, of the Open Source software on the Zonbu, can be also downloaded for use on the Mac) Last, before the Zonbu came out, I had already been thinking and writing on Jawfish about how to bring low-cost extremely easy-to-use PCs to market.

Cody gives Zonbu four biscuits.

Another review at PC mag.