I first read this article in Business 2.0 back in March (on the
plane on the way to Ottawa, I think), and I meant to send it here
at the time but never got around to it.
Today I saw another article by this guy that I liked (to follow),
so I thought I'd send this one too:
http://www.shirky.com/writings/cable.html
> shirky.com: Clay Shirky's Writings About the Internet Economics
> and Culture, Media and Community, Open Source
>
> Cable Internet Access, an Over-hyped Meltdown in the Making
>
> Cable internet access is the next CD-ROM industry: an over-hyped
> meltdown waiting to happen. In the middle of this decade, CD-ROMs were
> vying with the Web for multimedia supremacy, and at the time, CD-ROMs
> seemed a better bet: more computers had CD-ROM drives than modems, and
> CD-ROMs had been annointed "The Next Big Thing" by a blue-chip
> coalition of hardware and software manufacturers, while the Web had
> neither this installed base nor this commercial enthusiasm. As late as
> 1995,even Web-savvy outlets like Interactive Age were predicting that
> revenues from the Web and multimedia CD-ROMs would be neck and neck in
> the Year 2000.
>
> The actual change during those five years has been quite different.
> The Web has become the trillion dollar locus of the future economy
> while CD-ROMs have disappeared as medium altogether. In hindsight, its
> easy to see that CD-ROMs supposed strengths were its actual
> weaknesses, and the Web's supposed weaknesses were its strengths.
> CD-ROM production was limited to professional companies, while the
> Web allowed amateurs to put up content. CD-ROMs were a fast way of
> delivering content in one direction while the Web was a slow way of
> delivering content in two directions. CD-ROMs gave you predictable,
> carefully structured interactivity, while the Web was (and is) little
> but chaos. Perhaps most importantly, CD-ROMs linked content with
> delivery, while the Web completely separates those two functions. What
> almost no one foresaw was that people would prefer, overwhelmingly, a
> chaotic two-way medium where anyone could publish anything to anyone,
> over a closed one-way medium which featured only professionally
> produced content. CD-ROMs were all about one-way consumption, while
> the Web was also about two-way communication.
>
> Its tempting to assume that we now know to bet on communication over
> consumption and open systems over closed ones, but don't look now: its
> happening again. In the fight for broadband access, the cable-vs-DSL
> battle is reprising the CD-ROM-vs-Web battle, and the people betting
> on cable now are making exactly the same mistakes that the people who
> were betting on CD-ROMs made. Cable is attractive to investors
> because it holds out the same false hope of a walled garden that
> CD-ROMs did, and cable will fail for precisely those reasons.
>
> There are two ways of thinking about broadband - size or time.
> Broadband-as-size focusses on passive downloads: "You can download
> 'The Titanic' in 8 minutes!". Broadband-as-speed focusses on active
> communications between multiple parties -- twitch-heavy networked
> games like Quake III and Unreal, sharing mp3s via Napster or Hotline,
> releasing self-produced music videos to the world. Cable is squarely
> in the broadband-as-size camp: the proponents of cable believe that
> what the Web is really waiting to become is another form of cable TV -
> a myriad of one-way entertainment choices, with little interactivity
> other than placing orders. The cable companies are desperate to
> suggest that users are clamoring for this kind of one-way Internet,
> because thats all the cable industry knows how to provide, and because
> that is the only way to extend their monopoly. They are both unable
> and uninterested in providing a service which allows their subscribers
> to create broadband content; they merely want their subscribers to
> consume it.
>
> DSL, meanwhile, reprises the initial advantages of the Web. DSL allows
> its customers to be consumers _and_ producers of broadband content -
> with an 'always on' connection aND fast upstream bandwidth, DSL will
> be the medium that allows the most amateur content, the most
> interactive content, and the most two-way content. Metcalfe's Law --
> the value of the network rises with the square of the number of users
> -- only applies to networks where all of the users can communicate
> with one another, and Metcalfe's Law favors DSL (and any other
> high-speed two-way network) over cable's "Home Shopping Network++"
> approach. The Web grew because amateurs jumped in, and then they
> turned pro: it is impossible to say who the Yahoo or Blue Mountain
> Arts of the broadband world will be -- maybe a net gaming company,
> maybe a group of musicians, maybe a 'micro-films' outfit -- but you
> can be sure whatever the broadband 'killer app' is, it won't come from
> the cable industry. The people running the most profitable cartel this
> side of OPEC are the people least likely to create a network which
> allows amateur content to flourish and grow into serious businesses.
>
> If we learned anything from CD-ROM vs. the Web in the mid-90s it
> should have been this: people prefer communication to consumption.
> Interactivity beats passivity. Separating content from delivery allows
> both functions to grow faster. Opening a network up to amateur content
> puts it on steroids. In other words, competition is good. This
> conclusion wouldn't seem all that surprising in a market economy, but
> the cable industry has never faced real competition before, and they
> don't much relish the prospect now. Competition is a bitch, and no
> matter how much lip service people pay to competitive markets, there
> will always be investors who salivate over the prospect of backing a
> cartel, and that is exactly the promise cable is holding out. It will
> fail, for the same reasons CD-ROMs are not neck and neck with the Web
> this year; an economy where power has moved into the hands of the
> individual is a lousy place for people who treat their customers as
> mere consumers.
(btw, I had a small flamewar with this guy in comp.lang.perl.misc
in August 1995, about HTML and regular expressions.)
--
Gerald Oskoboiny <
[email protected]>
http://impressive.net/people/gerald/