The War For Eyeballs: Communiques From The Front
Roger B. Wyatt
Communique 4: Under the Oxtail Banner

So what was his Billness doing at NAB?

Acting like the Mongol Horde.

Of late Microsoft reminds me of the Mongol Horde. Genghis Gates under the oxtail banner of Windows 95 and NT, charging at the head of his hard coding programmers and marketeers, is galloping into battle all across the length and breadth of cyberspace. In their wake they leave a blackened trail of broken competitors behind him, the smoke from the broken code of the defeated rises into the air staining the sky and obscuring the mounds of vanquished programmer skulls. IBM and Apple, have been routed from the field along with countless others, large and small. Now Netscape is locked in a struggle for survival with the cyber-mongols from Redmond.

Mr Hard Drive himself at Comdex 96.

The great conqueror turns his gaze upon realms beyond cyberspace. Broadcasting is one of them. Utilizing the great Redmond buyout battering ram, WebTV has been converted into a vassal state. They bought it. WebTV is one of those information appliances under discussion several sections back. The device enables televisions to be utilized as a web surfing and e-mailing device. It is cheap and easy to use. For Microsoft the acquisition seems to be another probe into consumer electronics right along side Windows CE PDAs. It may be a way for Microsoft to understand this new industry. Embrace and extend. The buyout can be seen as a computer industry counter-raid into consumer electronics. Clearly the front is quite fluid.

Interesting as WebTV may be, Microsoft's big club though is a vision of an interactive merging of television and computing into a PCTV. With this one Bill has realware, not vapor, on the table. Microsoft will be adding interactive television features to Windows. Another Redmond product is Netshow 2.0, server software for streaming audio video multimedia programming across the Internet and intranets. Hardware allies Intel and Compaq are gearing up to build PCs that receive high def signals as well as the Web. Microsoft is introducing its Entertainment PC98 initiative, software standards for the PCTV.

And the broadcasters are whining about no business models for HDTV?

Some things to think about.

Tool makers have a mixed record when they become hands on in the content creation industry. Microsoft appears to be edging in this direction. Program code is not synonymous with program content. Take a look at Hollywood, dream capitol of the world. It wasn't so long ago that the big Kahunas of consumer electronics, Sony, Matshuista among them, were buying film studios like they were luncheon specials at Spagos. It didn't work out too well. Corporate heartburn. Today only Sony remains as a Hollywood force. Making tools for content isn't the same as making content with tools. Two different mindsets are at work in these two very different industries, success in one doesn't guarantee success in the other. Flip it around. Would you want to boot up with Warner Brothers 95?

The blacksmith who made the sword has no claim to wield the blade with the skill of the warrior. Brilliant tools are not brilliant stories. The entire PC industry has not put forth the digital equivilant of a Shakespeare, let alone a John Grissom for that matter. Can you name a prominent hypertext author? OK you came up Michael Joyce. Good. Now can you name fifty more? It's hard to get beyond five, isn't it? To do it with authors of books would be no problem at all. Conceptually games are in a shoot em up sword and sorcery battlefield space opera rut and have been so since 1978. They haven't broken out of their original pubescent fourteen year old male audience. Are there any game theorists out there other than Chris Crawford and Herman Kahn? Technical imagination doesn't translate into artistic imagination. Computer entertainment is to entertainment as military music is to music. As mediocre as broadcast entertainment is, computer entertainment isn't any better.

That vision of an interactive merging of television and computing into a PCTV is a bit problematic. After working a sixty hour week or holding down two jobs bundled with a two hour commute, exactly who is it that is revved up to interact and engage with interactive PCTV after the evening meal? It remains to be proven that sports statistics on a web "channel" will get more than a cursory once over from that Bears or Bulls fan. They just may only be interested in watching Michael Jordan move with decisive grace and force across their TV screen. That in fact may be interaction enough. The guys in Redmond must throw some pretty tepid Super Bowl partys. By halftime most of the guys in Cicero, Gary, or Queens would be looking for the next case of Bud not where to click the mouse for the next screen.

Theory contains many pitfalls for the Digital Sarnoffs of Redmond. First Sartre tells us that hell is others. Ever ridden a rush hour subway? Well you know what he's talking about then. TV may have started as a mass medium but it's an individual experience today. All mass media have been fragmenting steadily for at least thirty years. Ours is a customized and individualized world and gets more so every year. How else to account for all the single viewer bedroom sets in contemporary households. Yeah there's the family room set but it's dominated by Mom and Dad. So both Junior and Sis have their own. Don't forget Grandma with her tube too. Often television is viewed by individuals in proximity to each other not in engagement with each other. TV isn't a throwback to a nineteenth century parlor game with everyone gathering around to interact. If that is what the new WebTV owners have in mind, some sort of spin the statistics, then they better sell now before it goes bankrupt.

Television is also ambient, some kind of video wallpaper. The set is on but not watched, only glimpsed. From this perspective television is about environments not interactions.

Marshall McLuhan, the greatest culture, technology, and communications theorist of the Twentieth Century, points out that new media rarely eliminate older media. Rather they reposition them for new purposes. Here's an obvious example. Since the advent of television, radio is rarely a carrier of drama. Television does that. Instead radio developed new forms; talk radio, drive time radio, top forty, oldies, and all the rest. Radio changed because of television, but it didn't disappear. Nor will television with the arrival of PCs with tv programming.

Whatever PCTV becomes, it must move into original content in order to succeed. Most certainly it will start out with a horseless carriage phase, mimicking the content of the old medium. New media do that. At some point though, the automobile phase must arise where original content unique to the new medium emerges. This tells us that Microsoft wouldn't beat the broadcasters at their own game. They must develop new games. Maybe they can.

Then there's that complexity thing again. I don't think Bill gets it. There must be some disconnect, a blind eye, in the Microsoft corporate culture that leads them to value obscure complexity over complex clarity. Could Windows 95 be the operating system equilivant of the blinking 12:00 on the front of the vcr timer? Is it so complex that consumers let it blink rather than learn it? Do you know what "Windows protection error. You need to restart your computer." means? When you reboot nothing changes. When you check that bad joke of a documentation manual there is no listing for this issue. Don't feel bad, you're not alone in this. By the way, if you do know what "Windows protection error. You need to restart your computer." means. Please let your humble scribe know at techheadstories@yahoo.com.

What will happen when the family gathers to watch their favorite show and the TV set wouldn't boot?

The Kahns in Redmond might consider this question, how long did the Mongols last anyway? Not long. It's the same with corporations too. More than 70% of the Fortune 500 companies of the 1950s no longer exist. How many companies that were prominent a century ago are even still in existence today. Do you know here New York Central is on the big board these days?

There is another way to look at this.

Does Bill dream?

Conquerors do that. Have dreams.

Could it be that 'round midnight the dreaded Java just might tip on by, like a spectral Ghost of Christmas Future, an unwanted feature (or bug) in the dreams of Bill?

Java.

On go the lights, out come the Melatonin tablets. Again.

Bill may know that in the long term Microsoft has no future in operating systems. An open standards, cross-platform, netcentric computing environment is at odds with a monopolistic operating systems world view. We live in a customized world. Once Henry Ford said that a Ford customer could have their car in any color as long as it was black. Or Windows 95.

Oops, I forgot you can choose Windows NT too.

The closed system view is at odds with a primary characteristic of the Age of Information and its Global Information Economy. Open systems. Think about what I just told you about the variable characteristics of both the DVD and HDTV standards. This will not be unusual in our emerging Information Culture. The best that Microsoft can do against Java is fight a delaying action. It may be that within a decade there is no place for a closed operating system like Windows. In fact the struggle may transform Wintel into a Java or Java-like system, just like everybody else, nothing special. From this perspective moving on to dominate other niches is the long term strategy for Microsoft survival.

In any case Wintel is serious about the War for Eyeballs.

Communique 5: Vertical Envelopment From Satellites

"In Switzerland we have 3 dimensional weather", Lars Tevede told us. Perhaps that's why he and his colleagues were inspired to look to the sky for Internet and other data delivery by satellite. Lars is VP for Business Development at the Fantastic Corporation.

Fantastic does data uplink of Internet and other stuff by satellite and downloads it to a $200 or less PCI card located in your computer. You don't need a dish. Actually you don't even need the card, a wristwatch will do. Or a cable system, cell phone, broadcast station, HDTV data channel, whatever. They aren't tied to any particular distribution technology. Using LEO (Low Earth Orbit) satellites, their signal can pass through concrete. The signal can penetrate right through the roof. Do you remember what happened to the White House in Independence Day, sci-fi supremo flick of summer 96? Well that was an early trial of this stuff. Just joking... I think.

Their marketing guy Frank Ewald said,"On the Internet there is growth but no speed." There is now. A satellite download of the Internet is 1000 times faster than T1 fiber optic cable. For example a 2 meg file could be broadcast globally to all users in oh 5, maybe 8 seconds. They could trickle download stock quotes of your ten favorite stocks picked up on your watch in real-time all day wherever you are. Maybe you could place a trade from your watch. Fantastic's got serious mojo working here.

Hello operator, get me Wall Street! I'll talk to anyone! Dump all my Corning stock, fiber is toast!

Fantastic wants to convert that PCI card into components manufactured right on to the motherboard itself. Perhaps Compaq will do that.

Data? So what's data and why do I want it?

Good question. Data is tekspeak for content. With content uplinked to satellite, downlinked either to that card in an end user pc or downlinked to some system, that makes Fantastic a content highway. Their client software is free to end users and works with existing browsers. Fantastic works with many content producers, Ziff Davis, Sega, and others have been announced currently. They also see extreme narrowcasting by individual journalists. Are they thinking of Wayne's World? Because of the wide and fast bandwidth, the content can easily include video that looks like video, audio at CD quality, 3D worlds that don't lag, animation, in fact the full spectrum of data intensive materials that are choking the Internet today. Fantastic will organize and sequence all this content into channels. Fantastic acts like digital DJs, sequencing, repackaging content into about a 100 "channels". I like that, digital DJs programming the pulse of the planet.

Here comes the satellite! Shake a leg, shake a leg, thak-a-wakka, thak-a-wakka, yeah, yeah! Who did that song Telstar anyway?

The Tornadoes of course (are they from Kansas?) and covered by the Ventures in 1962.

At launch (in 1998) the first channels will be: News, Music, Movies, Careers, Him, Her, TV Guide, Games, Fashion, Satellite, Cable, Marketing, Finance, Home finance, Kids, Time, Health, Fitness, Computer, Weather, Wine, Sport, and Travel. Users subscribe to whatever they want. This is serious push technology. There can be background file download, download overnight, or constant trickle download. Think of content pushed out to 1.4 billion families from the sky. There could also be realtime pay per view of events. Why not put a pov (point of view) camera in an Indi 500 race car? Customized mass communication.

The Fantastic thing is a merged technology of pc, tv, and satellite. In a certain sense Fantastic is setting up a global extranet in the sky with the potential to be bigger than the Internet. By branding the channels, working primarily with recognized brand names, they are creating materials that will compete quite easily with mass audiences within a mass market. But remember it will be customized and interactive. After so many false starts, it could be that interactive television is really here coming at us through the skylight rather than through the telephone line. Fantastic.

Is this workable? Or are the Fantastic guys smoking some seriously good shit? Well let's take a look. There are 128 known communication satellites up there now in geostationary, middle Earth, or low Earth orbiting positions. When you think of all the demand for limited transponder space, the cost of bandwidth is high. How many two-way full audio and video teleconferences have you been in recently? However 1,700 deployed satellites are planned over the next 15 years. Can you say Iridium and Teledesic? With so much transponder space available, the cost of bandwidth is going to plument. It's a Moore's Law kind of thing laced with serious doses of capitalist competition. Satellite distribution is going to jump over cable. Why get a wire when you can catch an (air)wave?

Now terrestrial broadcasters have to worry about vertical envelopment. Death from above, the motto of the 82nd Airborne somehow seems appropriate here.

Fantastic is looking for early adopters of satellite content developers. They will start in 1997 with business to business communication with the consumer channels to follow in 1998.

These guys are together, first rate, and very credible. It's a management team with a clear vision of the dynamics of satellites, Internet, content, and consumer use. They are on to something. I think their biggest problem will be finding people in the US who understand the implications of wireless communications for the dissemination of information.

I look forward to further fantastic developments from Fantastic.

Check their website at Fantastic Corporation.

Understanding what is coming with technology and what to do about it is always a problem. Consider this.

There has been a lot of buzz in academic circles over the last few years about Internet II. As a matter of fact there is a consortium of 32 universities working on this with NSF (National Science Foundation) funding. They are missing the future, if not the present, on two levels.

First, on the technical level the satellite in particular and wireless in general has emerged as a solution to a lot of wire based problems. For years there has been a debate about the installation of a national fiber optic telecommunication network. Remember all the National; Information Infrastructure talk? Who would pay for the last 150 feet of fiber from the trunk line into the building? The public? Telecommunications companies? The Feds? With Fantastic, and they wouldn't be alone in this, Internet from the sky, all those fiber optic hook-up questions are mute. Irrelevant. We might be moving into a world where in is not only Internet II, but III, IV, V, and many more.

The second miss is conceptual. To think that a collection of universities along with a government agency can forge Global Information Infrastructure policy on their own is ludicrous. The Cold War model of government funded research within a small group of technological players is over. It's not just because the Cold War is over, though that is an important point. In the seventies and early eighties, when the Internet was being developed, the computer industry was very small. Then it was hard to tell the computer industry apart from either government or academic research. Today 32 academic institutions haven't a prayer of determining Internet development on their own. Have these guys heard of Silicon Valley or Redmond, Washington? Though ENIAC, the first computer came out of a university, the rest didn't. Today new technology mainly comes out of research labs that might often as not be corporate or governmental. It can emerge from high-tech start-ups, like Fantastic. Sometimes it can even come out of garages. It is an open systems open standards world. Next