Archives for July 2004
Glaser to Jobs: F– Off
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This is a pretty brazen step by Real, and Apple’s reaction has been sharp, saying they are stunned that RealNetworks has adopted the tactics and ethics of a hacker to break into the iPod. The question to me is why Rob Glazer put Real into such a hopeless collision course with Apple? And why is Apple so pissed off? As the Motley Fool notes:
Both RealNetworks CEO Rob Glazer and Apple CEO Steve Jobs have admitted that selling songs for below a dollar a pop yields little profit at best. Each company has its own model of generating profits from downloadable music. For Apple, this entails selling the highly lucrative iPods. RealNetworks wants to make money by selling subscriptions to its Rhapsody service, where subscribers pay a flat $9.95 fee a month for unlimited streaming and an additional $0.79 per song purchased.
So it would seem that another iPod-compatible online music store would be in Apple’s interest, helping it sell more of the players. For whatever reason, Apple wants to keep the iPod to itself. Otherwise it would have licensed its Fairplay DRM to Real when it asked. And therein, I think, lies the key to this rowit’s a pissing match. From News.com:
In a private e-mail sent [in April] to Apple Computer CEO Steve Jobs, Glaser proposed a tactical alliance between the two companies in the digital music business against Microsoft. And oh, by the way, he added, RealNetworks sees very interesting opportunities that may compel it to switch support to Microsoft’s Windows Media audio-video format, if Apple refuses to play ball.
The translation? Glaser to Jobs: Do a deal or else.
After Jobs and his entourage had a good chuckle and a restful weekend, they promptly leaked the contents of the proposal to The New York Times.
The translation? Jobs to Glaser: Buzz off.
Publicly snubbed, and his ego bruised, this is how Glaser fires back, which is reckless for a CEO, I think. Glaser is very litigious, so he seems to be spoiling for a court fight with Apple. Meanwhile, Jobs isn’t low on ego himself and isn’t going to take this lying down. Sadly, this may all be bad PR for Apple if it is cast as the anti-consumer-choice meanie who wants to block access to its monopoly player. This could even turn into something like the IM wars, were each side competes to respectively protect and circumvent.
Whatever happens, though, the lawyers win. Hurrah.
What the 9/11 report says about ebooks
Gizmodo today has a long feature about the prospects of a real ebook revolution. In the end the piece is optimistic, but only after cataloguing all the hurdles a successful ebook device would have to overcome. To me, an ebook won’t ever be completely successful until it can improve on the paper book.
As Wired News points out, the 9/11 Commission Report is not only available from the government in PDF, but has also been converted to myriad other formats by restless netizens. Within hours of its publication, the report had been “guerilla converted” into HTML, text, audio, and a more accessible PDF format. Surely folks could drop these files into their iPods, cell phones, and Palms, and be on their way. But as it turns out, dead tree is the format of choice. From the New York Times:
W. W. Norton & Company, the publisher of the authorized edition of the report, said on Monday that an estimated 350,000 copies had been sold at retailers across the country, and that all the 600,000 copies in the book’s first printing had been distributed to wholesalers and retailers.
With a second printing of 200,000 copies under way and a third being considered, Norton has essentially covered its costs and begun to record a profit on the book, W. Drake McFeely, president of W. W. Norton, said in an interview.
The iPod is successful because you do want to have your entire music collection with you at all times and be able to shuffle among songs. With books, you only really read one or two books at a time, and you don’t need your whole library with you always. The iPod and the iPod mini are improvements over the portable CD player because they take up a fraction of the space a player and a few CDs used to take. But in contrast, you don’t really want the form factor of a book to get much smaller.
If the eBook succeeds, it will do so one price and distribution advantages. The day you can buy a digital copy of a book from Amazon for a quarter of the price of a paper version, and be able to download it immediately, then and only then would ebooks begin to make sense. Even then, as with the 9/11 report, readers may want to have the real deal in their hands and on their shelves.
This post was inspired by an e-mail exchange with KJT, and for that I thank her.
Hell hath no fury like an idiot in Boston
USA Today had planned to run a column by Ann Coulter each day of the Democratic convention, but dropped her after they saw her first piece. Brian Gallagher, editor of the paper’s editorial page, said of Coulter: “We had a disagreement over editing. We worked diligently to resolve the differences and couldn’t, so we decided to part ways.” He said the column had “basic weaknesses in clarity and readability that we found unacceptable.”Yeah, if by clarity and readability you mean any sort of argument besides unreserved hatred for fellow Americans who just think differently, then I’d say there was some weakness. I don’t see what kind of Christian or socially conservative (or intelligent, for that matter) person writes:
As for the pretty girls, I can only guess [they don’t like Democrats] because liberal boys never try to make a move on you without the UN Security Council’s approval. Plus, it’s no fun riding around in those dinky little hybrid cars. My pretty-girl allies stick out like a sore thumb amongst the corn-fed, no make-up, natural fiber, no-bra needing, sandal-wearing, hirsute, somewhat fragrant hippie chick pie wagons they call “women” at the Democratic National Convention.
I know that we should all just ignore that woman and maybe she’d go away, but I can’t help it. It pisses me off to no end that she has a national column and I don’t. How did she get to where she is? Oh, yeah. That’s right.
If it ain’t broke…
Maybe it’s telling of the Web sites I visit, but I haven’t seen any George W. Bush campaign ads, while I see John Kerry ads on just about every page. From Slate to The New York Times to Reuters.com. The Washington Post reported on Saturday that Kerry has reached “rough parity” with Bush’s $228 million warchest. “Kerry has been raising more than $10 million a month on the Internet, for a total of more than $65 million, compared with $8.7 million for Bush in the past year, according to officials with both campaigns,” according to the paper.
What’s amusing about these ads is that they don’t feature Kerry. Instead they all have unflattering pictures of Bush (not hard to find) and revolve around a theme of “A $50 contribution can defeat George Bush.” This is interesting since the latest word has it that Kerry wants the Democratic convention to ease up on the the Bush bashing and focus on accentuating the positives of a Kerry-Edwards administration. That’s a mistake.
You don’t need me to tell you John Kerry is not that compelling a character. He’s done as well as he has in the polls, and in online fundraising, because he is the “anyone but Bush” candidate. His best strategy so far has been to lay low while Bush was stumbling. So why mess with a winning plan? Jimmy Carter’s speech explaining how Bush squandered the world’s support after 9/11 is the message the Kerry people should be drumming.
9/11 Commission staying in business
The L.A. Times reports today that the 9/11 Commission has decided not to disband, but to spend the next year traveling the country in bipartisan pairs urging the enactment of their proposed reforms. The article suggests the roving commission members will be a “new and unpredictable factor” on the election year political landscape.Commission proposals include the new intelligence tsar post that the Bush Administration has opposed, but which John Kerry has supported. Meanwhile, Joe Lieberman and John McCain plan to propose legislation to enact the panel’s recommendations. How long do you suppose before Bush “flip-flops” on this like he did on creating a Department of Homeland Security?
UPDATE: Justin Logan has another example of a Bush flip-flop.
Geo. Washington bought voters drinks, too
Here’s what’s wrong with publicly funded campaigns (and maybe the Libertarian Party). An Arizona Libertarian candidate for state senate has just been indicted for misusing public campaign money. The 33-year-old and his two roommates (also candidates for whom he served as treasurer) received more than $100,000 in public campaign financing and used it to “court young voters” at Scottsdale night clubs and bars. He faces three to 46 years in prison if convicted on all of the charges. From the Arizona Republic:Downing could not be reached for comment Monday. But when he defended his actions before the commission in August he said he needed to do something different as a Libertarian to stand out in the race in the Tempe/south Scottsdale district.
“To run a traditional campaign would be absurd,” Downing said then. Though he and his friends tried walking door to door in their attempt to win over voters 18 to 32 years old, that didn’t work.
“We realized we have to go where these people are in numbers,” he said. “That means ASU, around campus and in bars, restaurants and nightclubs. . . . Nowhere else can you find 4,000 people on a Friday night.”
Where could this guy have gotten the idea? He is the son of State Rep. Ted Downing, a Tucson Democrat.
When in blogosphere
This month the Utne Reader features an article that originally appeared in the Village Voice. In it, a non-blogger explains why blogs are ruining his life. As it happens, all his friends have blogs and, as those things tend to do, they have become central parts of their lives. Non-bloggers are left bewildered and left out.Here, you’re less likely to find breaking news about media culture, but you will learn a lot about the drinking patterns of articulate twentysomethings. They’re all friends, the bloggers on this level, and they’re in a constant state of link-swapping, making it possible to actually click through the Web in a giant circle all day, like Tigger bouncing through the Hundred Acre Wood. … bloggers are starting to have parties to which they only invite other bloggers.
Besides the obvious observations, what I find interesting about the article is that while he describes a New York-literary-entertainement-publishing-centric circle of bloggers, the same condition has been replicated by different cliques everywhere. Take the DC-policy-journalism circle. They have parties, too.
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This is the personal site of Jerry Brito, a lawyer and writer in Washington, D.C. He’s an academic researcher and the creator of Unclutterer and several other blogs. More »
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