Catallaxy Files

I am an early adopter or, as my family puts it, a sucker for new techie toys.

I am currently using an iPod (well, several), an iPad and a Kindle. I don’t have an iPhone, mostly because I don’t like phones much, but am thinking of the Nexus S using the latest version of Google’s Android operating system.

I am not sure about the Kindle. It is a neat piece of technology . It uses a process called e-ink which results in a screen much easier to read text on than the iPad or any other similar product I have seen. It handles text very well, but only in grayscale and it does not do pictures or graphics well. I understand a colour e-ink is coming. You order books or magazines for the Kindle through the Amazon store. They arrive through the 3G network (Telstra, I think) and the delivery cost in included in the price of the book. The price is, at this stage, not too different to the hard copy price, though that will surely change. Cross subsidizing the printing and distribution costs of books from the price of e-books won’t work for long. It is very neat to order a book online and have it turn up on your Kindle within seconds.

Still, I find I don’t read from the Kindle all that much. Perhaps I’m just not comfortable with the format yet – I still prefer a paperback.

The iPad is a different kettle of technology. I am still not sure what it is for – what it does that nothing else can do for me. It connects to the net via wifi and (some models) 3G so it is a mobile device. It does email very well – the only drawback being the virtual keyboard which touch-typers don’t like much. It has a browser – Safari – though Apple is betting on apps which you download through the iTunes store. Some are free, other cost a few dollars. Apps include games, news, weather, Facebook, Twitter, Youtube and so on. If you have young kids around, I recommend Itsy Bitsy Spider. MOMA (New York) has a wonderful app through which they will make their whole collection available. Most things that you might normally access through a browser have an app. But I suspect we ain’t seen nothing yet – thousands of developers are out their writing apps. Although Apple is technologically a walled garden (that is the big battle building between them and Google) they recognise that a decentralized network of developers can create much greater innovation than a central department.

The screen of the iPad is beaut. Photos (you can store your photo album on the iPad) are spectacular. Some magazines with a lot of graphics look better than in the dead tree version. New Yorker, Wired, Travel and Leisure are especially good.  Strangely, you can’t subscribe to a magazine, you have to buy each issue separately. It does, by the way, have a Kindle app which I have not seriously investigated.

So, so far, my conclusion about the iPad is that it is a beaut product but I’m not sure that many people will find they can’t live without it. I don’t think I will travel with it alone. The fact that the iPad is selling like gangbusters shows the trust people have in Apple and its products. I can’t think of  another business with that degree of trust.

But of all these, it is the iPod that I use most often. I have three: the Classic with a fair chunk of my music collection onboard, an iPod Touch and an iPod Nano (the model before the latest).

I use the Classic to listen to stuff on long flights and to carry music to the beach house. It has a 160GB harddrive and I use it really as a portable storage device. There is talk of the Classic disappearing as the solid state storage on the Touch increases. The Touch is an interesting machine. It’s like an iPhone without the phone. It stores Music, photos, calender, address book and all that stuff as well as many apps designed for the iPhone. It connects to the internet  by wifi so you can use Skype or iChat for phone or video calls. On a bike trip we did in Spain and Portugal a while back, I used my Touch through the hotels’ wifi to investigate and book the next hotel through Tripadvisor . You can do that with the iPhone (I was the only one of the four in the team that did not have one) but the iPhone roaming charges are horrendous.

Finally, the iPhone Nano. I use it most of all. On it I have lots of podcasts and several audiobooks, bought from audible.com. I listen to these on long walks, at the gym and on flights. In other words, in situations that might otherwise be very boring. So far, an audiobook is just about my favourite way of reading, partly, I think, because I can do something else at the same time.

At the moment I am listening to Tim Wu’s The Master Switch, a book about technology I recommend highly.

I have been playing with online stuff since before the internet opened to the public. I still have no idea where it will lead and which products will prove indispensable.  Most predictions have proved to be empty. We can be pretty sure, though, that it is a disruptive technology  that will bring about much creative destruction (two ideas discussed in Tim Wu’s book). And unless we work for one of those industries that will die, it will all be a lot of fun.

The NBN business plan is here. The pricing section contains this table

The following table describes wholesale access pricing for NBN Co services.

Table 1 – NBN Co monthly wholesale access pricing (source: NBN Co Corporate Plan, Dec 2010)

I don’t know what retail prices this will turn into, though I’ll bet there will be ISP bashing alleging “price gouging”

I pay (ADSL 2+ with TPG) $50 a month and get a speed of 10-15 mps. My guess is that the retail price under NBN will be higher than this.

The upload speeds are pretty much what they are now with ADSL2+. I believe that demand for higher uploads will increase as users do more in the cloud. I have a backup in the cloud – it took me about two weeks for the first one. Fortunately TPG does not charge for uploads.

The plan contemplates a total capital expenditure of  $35.9 billion (that excludes the $11 billion going to Telstra) with the government contribution at $27.5 billion. The balance will be borrowed. Does that really keep it off the government’s books?

Apologies in advance to those who believe that Catallaxy should stay away from all this nerdy stuff. I do find it fascinating.

There is a very old joke (from the 50s I think) about the Communist Party organiser telling the crowd  how wonderful it will be under Communism. “When the revolution comes comrades, you will have caviar for every meal”

One fellow puts up his hand and says “But I don’t like caviar”

“When the revolution comes comrade you will have caviar whether you like it or not”

Reports earlier this week noted that only 50 per cent of homes in the Tasmanian towns of Midway Point, Scottsdale and Smithton had opted to have broadband fibre optic cable installed.

But Senator Conroy says the debate about take-up has become irrelevant, as eventually anyone who wants a fixed line will have to use the fibre network.

“The deal that we have with Telstra is that they are decommissioning, closing down the copper network,” he said.

“To have a fixed line in what we call the 93 per cent footprint, the only way at the end of this process you’ll have a fixed line is on the NBN’s fibre network.

This from the ABC news.

Do you trust Conroy more than Google?

“The Communications Minister, Stephen Conroy, has accused Google of launching “the single greatest breach in the history of privacy”.”

No, me neither.

Conroy is turning out to be one of those quite rare ministers  about who it can truly be said that everything they touch turns to mud.

Earlier this month, the Australian government released the implementation study for the National Broadband Network.  The scope of the study was to:

“advise Government on how best to implement its stated policy objectives, not to evaluate those objectives, given that the policies have already been agreed by Government. This report therefore focuses on translating high-level policy objectives into tangible actions for both Government and NBN Co to implement. Explicitly, it does not:

• Evaluate Government’s policy objectives;
• Evaluate the decision to implement the NBN via the establishment of NBN Co;
• Undertake a cost-benefit analysis of the macro-economic and social benefits that would result from the implementation of a superfast broadband network.” (NBN Implementation Study, 06/05/2010)

The report is clearly directed at answering the question of how to deliver the NBN in a way that meets the governments policy objectives. It very explicitly states that out of scope is if the NBN should be built, or built according to the governments objectives.

There’s a couple of ways to look at the decision to define the scope this way.

Read the rest of this entry »

One of the (many) reasons governments should not start or run businesses it that they have an irrestible urge to rig the game in their favour. Competition is wasteful and competitors usually try to just take the best bits of a market.

The NBN Implementation Study suggested that there could be a levy to discourage its competitors (Telstra) from cherry picking by supplying an optical fibre service to businesses in CBDs. “If we must supply fibre to 90% of the population, including many people who don’t need it, Telstra should not be allowed to provide it to those who do need it”. (My paraphrase).

Optus agrees. If there is to be cheap rent about, you can bet that companies will seek it.

I do hope that Telstra will not sell its pipes and ducts to NBN and remain as a competitor, but I suspect that NBN cannot afford to have competition so the government will make Telstra an offer it can’t refuse.

I am a tech junkie. I enjoy buying new toys. I do not wish to give up my addiction. In fact it gives me much pleasure.

I am also fascinated with the business side of technology – how the game is changing and how it creates winners and losers more quickly than in the FMCG markets I used to understand.

I came across this new product which got me thinking all over again about IBM. The story of IBM and the PC is pretty well known. The company was in a hurry to develop the product in the early 80s and cut a lot of corners. In the rush they allowed Microsoft to keep ownership of the DOS operating system developed for IBM and thus made Bill Gates very very rich. All Gates had done was to buy  someone else’s DOS and polish it up a bit. IBM’s carelessness over the OS must rank as one of the biggest business blunders of all time. Gates was not a technological genius but was, for this coup alone, a business genius.

For a while IBM just about owned the PC market, especially for business use. In my company during the 80s and early 90s, before any other PC could be bought or attached to the network, it had to be checked as “IBM compatible”.

IBM was never  comfortable in what was really a consumer market. Its heart was still in mainframes. By the early 90s the PC was a commodity and IBM’s share was sliding. It could not match the Dell model of making to order nor the Asian grey box prices.

In 2006 the whole IBM PC business was sold to Lenovo a company controlled by the Chines government. By then IBM was mostly interested in the IT service business (a very rare example of a large company successfully remaking itself) though it still makes mainframes.

Lenovo has done a very good job with the PC. It is innovative and fast on its feet – quite unlike IBM. It is almost impossible to imagine IBM launching the IdeaPad. That product might fail but Lenovo understands that in the tech market you need to keep pushing products out there. They also seem to understand the importance of design, something else IBM never did.

There is a lot of fascinating new stuff at CES. Most will disappear without a trace – Engadget has its own category of Crapgadgets which are as much fun to read about as the good stuff. The truth is it’s too early to say which is which.

This post was written on a Macbook Pro which will surely need replacing before too long.