TEDx Talk: The Next Big Shift in the Internet
"The next big shift in the Internet is now, and it’s not what you think: Facebook is the new Windows; Google and Windows must be sacrificed. Ten years from now we will interact with the Internet in completely different ways. In this TED talk, Roger McNamee identifies six changes that are already transforming the ways we consume and create content."
HT: Buddy Pacifico
16 Comments:
This guy doesn't really know what he's talking about and exhibits some curiously muddy thinking. He's grappling with the right issues, but largely states the obvious- Windows is dying and tablets are a big deal? No shit- or extrapolates weird conclusions, probably because he doesn't understand the tech too well. HTML5 is a resoundingly dumb idea, not because it doesn't have new features like he says, but because it is a bloated, badly engineered mess, like Flash. That's intrinsic to its design, because it tries too hard to be backwards-compatible with HTML4, so its glaring flaws can't really be engineered away. He does grasp some salient points though, like commoditization being trumped by differentiated experiences, but for some unknown reason, he thinks HTML5 will magically be the solution, when the real problem is the lack of micropayments.
Facebook is not "the new Windows".
No way.
"...he thinks HTML5 will magiccally be the solution, when the real problem is lack of micropayments."
As a seller is a charge of 5% + 5cents ok for sales of twelve bucks or less? If so then -> PayPal's Digital Goods Micropayment Solution will work in 190 countries, universe wide.
this guy is a clown.
not only is his thinking muddy, but his facts are provably wrong.
android os going gangbusters. they sell more phones than apple.
their tablets have just jumped to 27% market share and are climbing rapidly.
this notion that somehow apple and the walled garden is the victor is just plain stupid.
the vibrancy of the open android development has totally overtaken apple.
it took a while to catch up, but it is now pulling way ahead.
he's pitching himself as a futurist when he does not even have good info on what's going on NOW.
he also totally fails to see the contradiction in his views.
he's huge on html5 and on mobile.
those two things go together like sand and motor oil.
where is that bandwidth going to come from?
the fact that he cannot see that his visions of the world contradict each other pretty much tells you everyhting you need to know about the accuracy of his visions.
perhaps his 55 year old friends are having trouble debunking his ideas, but if that is true, he needs smarter friends with a better tech vision.
he's talking a combination of the extremely obvious and total rubbish and supporting it with out of date data. apple is hemorrhaging share already.
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This guy's claims about Facebook might have some credence but he seems to have forgotten the lesson of MySpace...
When MySpace's security was cracked there went it cache...
morganovich mentions something I've also read previously: "android os going gangbusters. they sell more phones than apple"...
Yet consider the following from comScore for what its worth and dated October 10, 2011: iOS Accounts for Largest Share of U.S. Smartphone and Tablet Devices while Driving the Majority of Non-Computer Traffic
I concur, possibly right idea, wrong platform.
Apple is DOOMED, without Jobs to find them the "next great thing", they will get passed by Android on the phone platform (already sorta happened, but with serious implications about 3-4-odd years from now), and later by Android on the "book" platform(ca. 6-7 years).
This is the same thing as happened with the Mac and the Wintel box.
Apple does not understand that its "locked-in", "fascist" model is not long-term viable under any circumstances. Its main appeal is to a narrow range of overpaid yuppies who don't understand "how to learn to use computers better with time". Everyone else likes some aspects of the Mac type model, but not the straightjacket.
P.S.:
How Apple screwed the pooch the first time through:
They Coulda Been a Contender
Now, read that carefully, and explain what, if anything, you think Apple is doing *differently* this time through, on either the phone or the book front...?
Buddy, I'm well aware of Paypal's "solution," let me tell you why that's not real micropayments. Micropayments refers to when you can make payments of down to 1 cent or less, which you obviously can't do with Paypal's minimum fee of 5 cents. Amazon so far has the closest thing to real micropayments in terms of minimum threshold, as you can go down to 1 cent there, though not much farther, but their tech has other problems. Being able to go down that low in price is crucial, for the following reasons.
Take a typical blog post or news article, let's say the author cranked it out in 10 hours. If he values his work at $30/hour, the value for him of those 10 hours was $300. If you can't pay him $300 for that time, he won't spend the time writing the post. Now, let's say he usually gets 20k people reading his posts, not some tiny unknown blogger but not huge either: that means he should charge 1.5 cents for each person who reads it. However, he can't currently do that online, which is why the online model breaks down. The way this problem was solved in the past is that you had 3 newspapers and 5 magazines and they bundled together articles from a bunch of popular journalists and writers, then charged you $3 for the entire selection. Well, that narrow publishing model doesn't work online anymore, as people surf from site to site online, so that form of bundling can't be done anymore.
The way it has to be "bundled" now is you have a micropayment provider, could be Paypal or Google, who accumulates those 1 cent charges in each blogger's account until they grow up to $10, then pushes a $10 charge through the antiquated ACH system. That way, they still get their same 5-6% cut of the entire amount, but the reader can pay with micropayments. The fact that neither Paypal nor Google has done this after almost a decade of success online is a testament to the great stupidity of the people working there, no two ways about it. Micropayments were widely considered to be the way the internet would be monetized in the '90s, but most internet companies have since preferred to run pump-and-dump scams like Myspace or Yahoo or the dot.com du jour, rather than really try to make money. As a result, there have been only two successes to come out of the dot.com boom, Paypal, which makes all of eBay's profits, and Google, a pathetic record. When we have a real micropayments system, we will have a real tech boom, mark my words.
morganovich, I too wanted to slam him because of some of the head-shaking things he says, like when he jumps on the HTML5 bandwagon with everyone else, but he does grasp some of the issues. His point about index search vs app search, though somewhat well known already, is an important distinction these days. That's why Google went into Google+, as they think they're losing such data to Facebook. Also, I don't think he's as wrong about Apple vs Android as you think. You correctly note that Android sells a lot better these days, but non-Android companies, like Apple and RIM and Nokia, make 90% of the profits because Google gives Android away for free. It used to be that market share led to revenues, but that's not the case with Android.
That's an important development, as Android's market share doesn't get them the billions of dollars that Apple can plow back into iOS development. Of course, Google is making billions off search, so they can redirect that money, but you have to wonder how long they can sustain throwing billions into a money-losing venture. Now, don't get wrong, Apple's walled garden is just plain dumb, but certainly not as dumb as just giving it away for free. ;) The problem with html5 and mobile isn't really bandwidth, particularly with high-speed LTE wireless around the bend. The real issue is it's not very efficient when it runs on the device, though that too is mitigated by the quad-core mobile CPUs about to be released. I don't think this guy is completely clueless, I'd say he only understands about half of what he's talking about, ;) perhaps a deadly place for an investor to be.
Heh. I don't take seriously someone who is so unkempt and poorly dressed for a keynote speech. Even a techie.
If anything, Facebook has peaked. The pretty girls are leaving or otherwise using it much less (which is the ultimate indicator).
Heh. I don't take seriously someone who is so unkempt and poorly dressed for a keynote speech. Even a techie.
**************
I agree the guy, has yet to discover the technology of hair clippers.
I have seen better groomed unemployed Occupy protesters.
When he dscovers a barber shop and a mens clothing store I will watch more of his flawed video.
Sprewell,
Thanks for the explanation about micropayments, and the lack of aggregation for below five cent charges. I would give you my two-cents on the subject, if I could charge for it. :>)
"It used to be that market share led to revenues, but that's not the case with Android."
that's the whole open source model.
i actually think you are drawing precisely the wrong conclusion there.
android is a loss leader. google uses it to drive search and location based revs.
the fact that it is not trying to make money makes apple's life harder, not easier.
google has tons of money, they are just not making it on the OS.
apple is like netscape trying to charge for what microsft is willing to give away and fund through another profit center. remember how that worked out?
no one can sell a browser anymore.
android is essentially linux based. a lot of future development is going to come gratis and i would not be surprised to see goggle open source whole parts of it going forward.
further, android is a better market to make money selling aps.
they do not gouge you like apple does nor run you through such nasty qualification etc.
google got this right: make it easier for ap developers to go android, and they will.
that's the real problem with the walled garden. you wind up getting lapped on development.
you also wind up with really nasty DRM and licenses. this is why i really dislike apple. buying itunes music is ridiculous. it's a crappy format (mp3) that you cannot save if another standard arises (going lossy to lossy is a disaster) and that times out in a few devices and "expires".
further, unlike apples, android does ot have hardware development costs. that's done bt motorola, LG, samsung, HTC, tec.
the hardawre platform has far more variety, more feature breadth, more price points, etc and that gap will only widen.
apple has already lost. they did a great job of breaking trial, but they have been overtaken. the speed with which this happens has accelerated massively.
the other tablets were right behind. there is no 2-3 years of having the market to yourself anymore.
apple was steve. his roadmap may hold for a little while, but this whole "it's apple's world and we just live in it" idea is already over.
morganovich, wait, so that's your argument, Android is open source so it wins? Open source is a resounding failure as a business model, it's only in some of its decentralized development methods that you find something worthwhile. Android is a loss leader for what? All it did is piss Apple off so that they're integrating Bing more now, so congratulations, you lost money on Android so you can lose potential search revenue! Would any mobile platform not have kept Google as the default, as long as its search remained the best, if Google hadn't created Android? Of course not. As for location services, mobile providers are not in the business of blocking high-revenue apps. Apple could care less about Android, as they don't care about the budget customer, only the luxury end of the market. And with the billions they are minting off iOS, they can always go downmarket and kill off Android whenever wanted.
Just because google has tons of money doesn't justify the many moronic decisions they are making. That always comes back to bite you, just like it has for Microsoft. Your netscape analogy is flawed because a browser is an app, much easier to develop than an mobile operating system, or at least it was back in the '90s before HTML5 ballooned the browser into something approaching an OS. ;) You can give away an app, you can't give away an OS, at least not for long. People have been saying linux and open source "gratis" development would take over for decades now, yet open source software market share is still tiny: that tells you something.
Android is a better market because it is open to all apps, but they miss one important point. Apple carefully controls their market to maintain quality, a dumb solution to a real problem of crappy apps and malware. However, Google has no solution to this problem, which is worse for them. You need to combine some form of voluntary certification system with their more open market, something they have been too dumb to realize. You may think Apple is "gouging" but they still sell a lot more apps than anyone else, that's all most app developers ultimately care about. As for DRM and music formats, Apple removed DRM for their music two years ago and their format is (lossy) AAC, not mp3, so you're a bit off there.
Even Apple's hardware development is mostly handled by a bunch of highly commoditized suppliers, Apple just spends a bit more integrating the hardware and putting their polish on it, minimal hardware costs which don't push the needle compared to software costs. Android does have the benefit of more diverse hardware, but that won't matter when nobody is around to dump billions into Android software development anymore and the software side dries up. I too think Apple will lose in the long run- and I'm no fanboy, bought my first and last Apple product in 2004 and will never buy one again because of how ridiculously closed they've become- but unfortunately they are not only winning now, they are gaining, because they make so much more money than anyone else. Android may have surged ahead in unit market share, but that was only ever a proxy for profit share, which Apple dominates and Google can't hope to reach with a free product. The other tablets have little market share, as the iPad dominates and surges even further ahead. They certainly seem to have 2-3 years all to themselves. :)
Apple was not Steve. Somebody gave me his recent biography to read and it is amazing how many blatantly stupid decisions he wanted to make, that his executive team dragged him out of. He didn't even want to sell third-party apps on the iPhone! Think about that, his executives had to force that decision on him. They will lose some product and marketing focus with Jobs, by all accounts a supreme negotiator, but his absence will not be the reason Apple goes down. Trust me, I don't want Apple to dominate with their flawed closed model, and in the long run it can't, but I don't see any of the even dumber models from their competition so far beating it.
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