Exploring the impact of broadband and technology on our lives, our businesses, and our communities.
Birth of the Diamond Age
Neal Stephenson, some years ago, wrote a prescient novel called "The Diamond Age," about a time in the near future when diamonds are, literally, cheap as dirt. Stephenson, who is arguably the best novelist of the past fifty years with respect to taking emerging technology trends and crafting intriguing storylines around them, imagined a world where even the most common of objects could be made from diamonds--kitchen knives, as an example, that are much sharper than razors but never need to be sharpened because of the, well, diamond-hard edge.
If it sounds far-fetched, think again. A company in Florida has been making gem quality diamonds for years, as one example. And industrial diamonds (much smaller than gems used in jewelry) are used everyday in mundane equipment like the saws used to cut slits in asphalt for traffic light control cables and telecom cables. Remember that diamonds are just a special form of carbon, one of the cheapest and most widely available materials on earth.
Now, some American scientists have developed a process to use diamond dust to create new, cheap, large screen flat TVs, using nanotechnology manufacturing techniques. These new TVs and monitors are probably several years away from production, but Stephenson's prophecies are beginning to emerge.
How about your community or region? Have you assessed current businesses for the emerging potential of the Diamond Age? Think it's so far-fetched that it's not even worth a little consideration? Remember that the raw material of diamonds is carbon. What's the most convenient and prolific source of carbon in the world?
Coal......have any coal mines in your area?
Technology News:
Cheap solar cells can be sewn into clothes
European scientists have developed a new way to manufacture thin, flexible solar cells that are so lightweight that they could be sewn into clothes. Sound dumb? Not if you have to lug around a bunch of AC chargers for your laptop, your cellphone, your iPod, your camera, your PDA, and all the other electronic junk we burden ourselves with these days.
The cells are not as efficient as rigid solar cells, but the energy is free, so who really cares if all you need are a few watts to keep small devices trickle-charged. Cheap solar cells could transform the economies of impoverished nations that can't afford the expensive first world AC infrastructure.
Is your region ready? Think you don't have any existing assets that might be leveraged to manufacture this stuff? Think your workforce is not ready?
We're talking about clothing....do you have any shuttered textile plants?
As always, look ahead twenty years and ask where your region and community wants to be. Set goals, make prudent investments, and stay the course.
Technology News:
Wind powers the Energy Economy
The Roanoke Time business section reports that a GE plant here is hiring 30 new electrical engineers to meet growing demand for power inverters. Inverters convert DC power to the AC power needed by the electrical grid.
GE is a major supplier of industrial inverters, and the company reports strong growth in wind energy generation is driving the company expansion.
How about your region? Have you done a systematic evaluation of the businesses in your area for potential growth in the Energy Economy? Could energy (hydrogen, solar, wind, tidal, nuclear) be an economic development strategy for your region over the next thirty years, as the world moves away from fossil fuels to other alternatives? As always, affordable broadband is going to the railhead and highway of these emerging trends. Are you ready? Do you have job force training and retraining programs in place? Are your high schools and community colleges teaching the high tech manufacturing skills that will be needed? Do those schools have a CNC program? Hint: if you don't know what that means, you're already in trouble).
Technology News:
Congress gives IT industry cheap overseas labor
The online site Human Events chronicles what it calls a "cynical" backroom deal that Congress made with the IT industry to allow more foreign IT workers in the country on work visas in the coming year.
Not surprisingly, Oracle was apparently one of the industry "leaders" behind this kick in the pants to American workers, and by extension, to American communities where those workers live. I just wrote about Oracle and it's lack of innovation. Instead of retraining perfectly capable American workers, these companies are bringing in workers from overseas, who are happy to work for half to two-thirds less than their American counterparts.
Another part of the problem was also created by the IT industry itself, during the drunken orgy of escalating IT wages during the dot-com bubble. Fueled by venture capital funds, Internet startups, over a period of three years or so, ran IT wages up to ridiculous levels. Many of those overpaid and underqualified workers were eventually laid off, but the damage was done--the average IT wage remains higher than ever.
So the companies and industry that happily inflated its own wage structure now won't take its medicine and restructure wages or find ways to use perfectly capable American workers, of whom there are plenty. Instead, these companies have run to Congress for a handout.
This kind of thinking is going to continue to depress the future of IT innovation in the U.S., and the industry itself will slow atrophy as parallel universe efforts like the Open Source movement simply eliminate the need for whole chunks of the IT industry (Oracle's problem is that it is increasingly irrelevant).
In the Knowledge Economy, you have to be either very big (e.g. Walmart, Fedex, etc.) or as Schumpeter would put it, small and beautiful (e.g. Open Source). And you have to be flexible and innovative.
Technology News:
'96 Telecom Act a "nuclear winter"
Holman Jenkins, an editorial writer for the Wall Street Journal, has an article (p. A21) about DSL and the future of that technology. Jenkins calls the '96 Telecom Deregulation Act a "DSL nuclear winter." That's probably a bit strong, but hardly anyone on either side of the linesharing issues of the telephone companies would say the law was crafted properly.
The original law forced the phone companies to share their copper lines with competitors, and it was only this fall that the FCC relaxed those rules. Again, no matter what side of the issue you are on (phone company or community), the outcome of the original ruling was to stall broadband investments by the incumbent phone companies.
As so many Federal initiatives ("We're from the government and we're here to help you..."), unintended consequences kicked in, big time. While the phone companies dithered, moaned, and complained, the cable companies upgraded their systems and captured 75% of the current broadband market, leaving DSL (the phone companies) with a paltry 15%.
Since the FCC changed the rules to free the phone companies from line sharing at wholesale prices, DSL costs have fallen dramatically--by as much as 50% in a lot of markets, and the service is generally priced below cable modem service.
But from a community perspective, the news has been bad and still looks bad. The marketplace, because of all this, has been effectively re-monopolized, but instead of a regulated public monopoly (pre 1996), communities are stuck with marketplace monopolies by the phone and cable companies.
To make things worse, in places like Pennsylvania, Verizon says it must be consulted before communities start their own broadband services. Even worse, lawmakers like Pennsylvania Governor Ed Rendell (D) thinks it is just fine to give a private company control over the future of rural communities.
The solution is for communities to stay away from the service end of the business. Treat broadband infrastructure just the way communities manage roads--build digital roads, but let private companies deliver the services while paying a use fee. That opens up rural communities to smaller providers and real competition, but keeps Verizon safely away from meddling.
Technology News:
Penn State says "No" to Internet Explorer
Penn State, one of the country's largest universities, has recommended that faculty, staff, and students stop using Internet Explorer because of persistent security flaws, according to the Chronicle of Higher Education.
The university recommends Opera, Firefox, or Netscape. FireFox is a highly popular Open Source project. The most recent version was downloaded more than 10 million times in less than a month. It's just one of several browsers we use regularly here at Design Nine, and we can attest to the fact that it is fast, robust, and easy to use. It has excellent pop-up blocker controls that work far better than the one on IE.
Technology News:
Oracle runs out of steam
My experiences with Oracle date back to the early eighties, when the database ran only on DEC's VAX system, and the company was working with AT&T to port the system to Unix. At that time, Oracle's chief software developer lived in a cabin in the woods somewhere in the northwest, and phoned in his work to the Silicon Valley company.
My Irish boss, Frank, used to get Larry Ellison on the phone weekly and scream at him about the all the problems we were having with the beta Unix port of Oracle.
Twenty years later, Oracle has run out of steam. Like IBM, the company seems to have run out of intellectual capital, and so has given up innovation and bought an applications company.
Oracle's been in trouble for a while. Like Microsoft, they had a virtual monopoly in their product space through the eighties and nineties, but have not been able to develop a strategy to deal with the increasing robustness and high quality of Open Source database systems like mySQL and Postgres. These free database systems have been quietly trimming Oracle's customer base, and it's largely Oracle's fault. The company became fat and happy charging high prices for its products when there was little competition, and any customer who could make the switch to an Open Source product has either done so already or is seriously considering it.
Instead of innovating, changing its price structure, or competing on service, Oracle has effectively given up and bought an entirely different business. Oracle is going to go away, but the company is likely to lose focus as it tries to be both a database company and a software application company. The move will accelerate the loss of customers for its database product, and like IBM, there will likely come a time when Oracle will regret the decision.
Technology News:
IBM gives up
IBM has sold their PC business to a Chinese firm. There has been much news coverage about this. They sold it for just over $1 billion, which is a paltry sum, considering the global market.
Most of the news coverage has been about whether or not it is a "good deal" for IBM. The conventional wisdom has been saying it makes sense for IBM to get out of a cutthroatl, commodity market with razor-thin margins.
But I see something different in the sale. What I see is a company that, like much of the rest of the IT industry, is intellectually bankrupt. It's almost beyond belief that IBM, with some of the brightest people in the industry on its staff, could not come with anything new, different, or interesting to differentiate IBM pcs from a cheap clone.
PCs are horrible devices. They work poorly, are virus-prone, are hard to fix and hard to maintain, and make simple things bizarrely complex much of the time. IBM could not come with a single thing that would make the PC better? This does not bode well for the American IT industry, for it IBM couldn't do it, with the resources the company has, who else will? Gateway can't. Dell won't--Dell makes it money selling stuff cheaper than everyone else, so it won't spend a nickel on research and development.
Microsoft is still two years away from the mythical Longhorn software upgrade to Windows. Longhorn has been in development for so many years now, it's almost a joke.
The only hardware innovation is coming from Apple. Apple has been delivering a major software upgrade every year for years, and issues minor upgrades almost every other month. Apple's hardware, year after year, wins design awards for it's good looks and functionality. Apple constantly strives to make its equipment simpler to use--the new G5 iMac requires, in one configuration, just one cable--the power cable--to be fully functional. That's right, you take it out of the box, plug it in the wall, and the machine is ready for use. And Apple's hardware is now cheaper, on a feature by feature basis, than Wintel pcs.
Open Source software continues to make significant inroads, despite Microsoft's weak claims about quality and support issues (a bit of the pot calling the kettle black). With companies like IBM throwing in the towel, I see it as the beginning of the end for the Wintel platform. Lack of innovation and overpriced, virus-prone software will continue to drive users to Open Source alternatives, which are more virus resistant, are being upgraded and refined continuously, and are increasingly becoming simpler to install, which has been a major hindrance with a lot of Open Source software in the past.
What does this mean for communities? Invest wisely, be cautious of the conventional wisdom, and look closely at alternative platforms and software that may be less expensive and easier to use.
Technology News:
The PaperHub--Technology hidden by good design
I'm appalled at my own computer. The box itself is fine, sitting on the floor next to my desk, but the complete rat's nest of wires next to it is just awful. Counting power cables that power numerous peripheral devices, there are more than thirty cables that are needed just to type an email or print a piece of paper.
But things are changing slowly. As computers become a necessity of daily life, the geek design ethic (that is to say, no design, pure function) is slowly giving way to technology that is largely hidden from view. The Apple G5 iMac has been described by many reviewers as the "most beautiful computer ever made." The G5 iMac effectively has hidden the computer by concealing it entirely in the LCD screen. No boxes, no sprawl of cables, no ugly little speakers cluttering up desk space. If you buy the wireless keyboard and mouse option, the G5 iMac is completely functional with just ONE cable--the power cord.
The PaperHub is obviously inspired by the new iMac, and its styling is clearly derivative, but it would look just as good on the desk of a Windows user as a Mac user. It clever conceals a FireWire and USB hub in the form factor of a paper tray. It cuts one power supply out where you would otherwise have two, and puts all the cables in the back, behind the tray itself, where you don't have to look at them. It's simply beautiful.
Technology News:
The coffeehouse as office space
Glenn Reynolds, better know as Instapundit, has an article on Tech Central Station about the emerging trend of using public WiFi hotspots as business meeting places.
I wrote about this a while back, but Reynolds makes some interesting points, including this one about the effect on the real estate market:
"On the other hand, offices are expensive. I've noticed a lot of small business people in my area giving up their offices, and having meetings in public places -- Starbucks, Borders, the Public Library, and so on. In fact, a real estate agent recently told me that the small-office commercial real estate market is actually suffering as a result of so many people making this kind of move."
Economic developers, planners, and zoning commissions need to take note--the traditional definition of the commercial business zone is long gone. The industrial and business park is changing as we speak. And residential neighborhoods are filled with businesspeople working out of their homes.
Communities can ignore these trends, but do so at their peril, especially when public funds are at stake for obsolete concepts like standalone business incubators, industrial parks out in the woods, and retail on Main Street.
Technology News:
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