Technology Futures

The music industry continues to anger both customers and bands. The RIAA inexplicably continues to sue users for downloading music. Even though there is little evidence that downloading copyrighted music has contributed to the decline in sales, the industry takes a baffling approach to the lawsuits by apparently picking names out of a hat. The suits seem to lack even basic information or investigations that would support wrongdoing, and the defendants seem to be picked mostly on the basis of whether or not they have the resources to fight back. This is a long article, and is written by a group of people that have been sued, but it is an interesting read if even half of it is true.

In an even more bizarre development, a band called Switchfoot has posted instructions on how to bypass copy protection that Sony put on the band's latest CD. Even stranger is that the information is posted on a Sony message board. Note that if the link does not work, it is probably because Sony has removed the information.

So the record industry is attacking their own customers, and has made the source of their products (the bands) angry. There is a lesson here for businesses trying to adapt to the changes wrought by the Internet: you can try to hold on to the old ways, but it is not likely to work. Distribution and marketing have changed irrevocably, and the only thoughtful option (in my opinion) is to look for new ways and new opportunities that take advantage of the medium, rather than trying to fight it.

Christopher Miller points to an interesting survey that says 87% of Americans don't know what VoIP (Voice over IP) is. Ten percent thought it was a "low carb vodka," and another group thought it was some kind of European hybrid car.

The results actually track pretty closely to the number of people that read blogs. The estimates vary a lot, but suggest that somewhere around 10-15% of Americans read blogs, which is about the same number that are familiar with VoIP as a new way of making phone calls.

As communities struggle with broadband, local blogs written specifically to help people learn about technology can be an important way of educating people and helping to create a market for new services. It is never just a matter of getting some money and building some fiber or wireless infrastructure.

Google has released a beta version of a new blog search tool.

Just a little playing around with it suggests they got it right: it is fast, and was able to find a lot of good stuff quickly. The advanced search is particularly useful, as you can search by author, by topic, by date, and by a bunch of other criteria unique to blogs.

The other refreshing thing is that so far, the results of completely free of commercial dreck--no phony link farms and the related tricks that try to get you click on results that are not really relevant. It will be interesting to see if Google can keep the results "pure." Unfortunately, what we are likely to see is a sudden rise in phony blogs written just to get into Google search results. But right now, it works great.

The Commonwealth of Massachusetts is considering a move away from Microsoft Office and toward Open Source products like Open Office.

Microsoft's proprietary XML formats that are being used in current and future versions of Office to store Word and Excel documents, among others, are licensed to users. What this means, basically, is that you have the right to open and use your own Word documents only as long as Microsoft allows you to.

The state government of Massachusetts is worried, and rightly so, that public documents may become inaccessible either legally (if in the future the state does not continue to renew MS software licenses) or may become incompatible and therefore unreadable because MS has changed document formats.

An emerging document interchange standard called Open Document is not supported by Microsoft and the company has publicly stated that they will not support it now or in the future.

I think Microsoft's heavyhanded licensing is going to be their downfall. The Office products, as software, are really pretty good. But the company's stubborn insistence on protecting the wheezing Windows platform with patents, copyrights, and restrictive licenses is only going to accelerate the move to other office productivity products.

As an example, Microsoft stubbornly refuses to issue a version of Office for Linux, even though it would be easy for the company to do so, and would make them buckets of money. On the Mac platform, the company petulantly refuses to update and improve a now very old version of Internet Explorer because Apple provides an alternative. Even more bizarre, Mac versions of Office are a cash cow for Microsoft, so it is hard to understand why the company refuses to update the product. And with Apple's surging computer sales (twice the growth as any other computer maker), Mac users are buying lots of copies of Office.

Microsoft is like the neighborhood kid who has the game ball and insists that he gets to make all the rules or will take the ball and go home. But alternatives are emerging--other game balls--and if Microsoft continues to play this way, the rest of the neighborhood is going to find another ball to play with, just like Massachusetts.