Tuesday, July 30, 2002

The case against Case

Here's Scott Herhold in the San Jose Mercury News:

In fact, when you look at the intrinsic value of AOL, it's clear that the online division — once mighty, once so arrogant — actually subtracts from the value of the overall company, which reported encouraging net income of $394 million last week.

"While the online advertising revenue recognition practices seem to have been aggressive, AOL online has been essentially afforded zero value by the markets,'' wrote Patricia Lee, an analyst with CreditSights, which analyzes companies for bondholders. ``And discounting further from zero is a difficult exercise."

No wonder Ken Layne recently wrote —

Please, Time-Warner, fire Steve Case. I'm sure he's a nice guy and all, but Steve Case is the Internet Bubble in semi-human form.

To be fair, Scott goes on to recommend buying AOL stock, because "...sooner or later, the adults will find a way out."

Not if online readers don't like advertising and never will. Big problem there.

Jeff Jarvis (who led me to that Ken Layne line, which somehow I had missed) has the best plan I've seen for saving AOL. But it's gonna take a self-morphing move as radical as a sex change for AOL to pull it off. (But it can be done. RealNetworks did it last week.)

AOL has never been a real software company, and their crown jewell app — AOL Instant Messenger — is a client-only lock-in that will be undermined totally once the Jabber protocol (or some other IM protocol) ubiquitizes into the same grade of Internet infrastructure as SMTP and POP3 provide for mail service and HTTP provides for Web service.

AOL and Microsoft are both on dead-end courses with their instant messaging (IM) strategies as long as nobody else can use their protocols or communicate with the clients they won't let talk to anything other than their own kind. (Think about how anybody can look at any Web page with any browser, or exchange email using any mail software. Meanwhile, AOL and Microsoft IM clients still can't talk to each other — or anybody other than themselves — Apple's new iChat notwithstanding).

So, what we have here are two "competitive" companies deeply stuck in 1983. (It's amazing that nobody in the mainstream press isn't calling them on it.) And since both companies' IM strategies are stuck equally far back in the past, either one has a terrific opportunity to obsolete the other's strategy in an instant.

If AOL wants to undermine Microsoft's IM position while maintaining (or advancing) their own dominant one, they should either release their own IM protocol into the public domain, letting it become part of the Net's infrastructure — or adopt the Jabber protocol that's already flourishing there. Either strategy will have roughly the same strategic effect, and either would leave Microsoft high and dry, talking only to itself. (Of course, Microsoft could use the same strategy against AOL. In fact, I'm kinda surprised they haven't yet.)

Causing instant ubiquity (and instant infrastructure) is exactly the kind of strategic anarchy Craig Burton and I talk about in this presentation, starting here.

AOL could look at it this way: it's inevitable anyhow, so why not do it now? Or before Microsoft does?

Here's one reason: Steve Case is the only guy in the entire combined company in a position to make it happen, but he's been kicked off his own case. So to speak.

Damn shame.

Say where?

It's been a bitch to find the actual text of the Internet Radio Fairness Act that was introduced last week by Representatives Rick Boucher, George Nethercutt and Jay Inslee last week. Thomas has nothing on it. None of the stories about it (that I could find, anyway) point to the bill itself.

And two out of the three congressmen sponsoring the bill have nothing about it on their sites. But the third, Jay Inslee, does. Good man. Now I can go finish my piece for Linux Journal on this whole thing.

By the way, to get a sense of how green the journalistic grass grows over our common musical roots, read Radio Crow's report on the RIAA's Hillary Rosen at a recent hearing. Or visit the Boycott RIAA site. Thanks to Internet Radio Hawaii for those pointers.

Put your hands on the car and spread your feet. Now wouldn't you rather be on a bullet train?

Police in Florida are pulling motorists over to conduct random.... marketing.

Wonder what the links in this post will do to my ranking...

Says here I'm second only to Dave among the most linked and third to Dave and Ye Olde Phart among the most prolific linkers. Thanks Phillip Pearson for creating the blog ecosystem crawler behind the list, to Dave for pointing us at it (and for creating the original blogroll), and to N.Z. Bear for getting the meme rolling.

The inside angle

Remember the DRM workshop the commerce department put on a couple weeks ago? The one that a bunch of geeks reportedly crashed? That's how the news went down at the time. For a sense of it, here's Declan at CNET, Thomas at Geek News, Grant Gross at Newsforge, and a Slashdot report by a local attendee who was friendly to the dissidents' cause, but disappointed by their behavior. (Thomas in Geek News suggests that this author, identified ony as "al3x," was Declan.) [Later...] I've just learned that it was Alex Payne of (what else?) al3x.net. Shoulda looked it up. Also wrote this first hand view on the DRM workshop at Kuro5hin.

Now Ruben I. Safir has written his own account, at Linux Journal, of how it all went down. Ruben is a co-founder of New Yorkers for Fair Use and president of NYLXS (New York Linux Scene). Those organizations and the Free Software Foundation attended the workshop and caused most of the news there.

Ruben's piece highlights the fascinating differences between making, covering and reading news.

Whatever else happens, it's clear that these activists made a difference. Bravo to them.

[Later...] Eric Norlin wants to get Ruben in dialog with the Microsoft Palladium people at Digital ID World. I'll be there. Should be interesting, if it comes off.

Affirmative Distraction

Thanks to Ann Sullivan for pointing to Lean Left, which has a growing list of other lefty blogs.

When somebody asked me to describe my own political leanings the other day, I replied "over." But the truth is more like another preposition: out. As in outward, going all directions at once. Kinda hard to pin down, but kinda like the Net itself.

(But I tend to test out Libertarian, for whatever that's workth.)

Whereware

I was looking yesterday for a way to read arcane geological map files of the Santa Barbara area, and readers came back to me with some of the most amazing stuff.

Here are some of the clues they floated my way:

News that the files I want are GIS (Geographical Information System), and require special readers.

Java ArcExplorer, which reads those files on Windows and Linux (alas, not OS X yet)

.pdf files of the area (gorgeous, too)

FreeGIS.org, whcih has all kinds of stuff, including Linux and OS X

An amazing huge TIFF file that downloaded and came up in seconds (love that broadband).

Big thanks to Kevin Marks, Frank Horowitz and Sam DeVore.