On Apr 1, 2020, at 04:46 , Mark Tinka <mark.tinka@seacom.mu> wrote:
On 31/Mar/20 23:22, Owen DeLong wrote:
From my perspective, anyone born in this century pretty much qualifies as a kid at this point. Maybe even the last 3-4 years of the previous one.
To a great extent, yes. But I'd say the last 15 years have been very telling.
Turning consumers into products. Personally, not a fan and I think GDPR is a sure sign that there is a backlash coming. The main reason it is tolerated so far is most people aren’t aware of what it really means or even that it is actually happening.
Right - I'm speaking to the global view, and not a personal one.
I don’t pretend to have a global view. I have my own perspective. I do my best to understand perspectives of others. Claiming to be able to speak from a global view is beyond my abilities. I am truly impressed that you are able to do so. Please teach me how to develop such a perspective.
I do everything to stay away from being surveilled beyond what I am comfortable with, but taking a global view, we are the minority.
Yes, but the solution to that is education.
For as long as I can foresee, I don't see us becoming the majority.
Not so sure about that. I think that GDPR and similar legislation sweeping through the world is an indication that more and more people are becoming aware of the issue, even if the tide is not yet turning against the surveillance economy.
4-5 year olds don’t define the economy today and likely won’t have significant input into it for at least 10-11 years.
My observation is that they are _NOT_ the ones influencing this.
Ummh - the kids aren't "directly" participating in the economy, but they are certainly influencing.
Only among the weakest-minded parents.
When your kid cries his lungs out because the walk from home to grandpa's meant he wasn't on Twitch, it makes you, the parent, re-think how you keep them connected between dead zones. What devices you buy them to keep them happy. What car you drive to keep them connected. Which services you purchase that support that mobility. Which restaurants or playgrounds you take them to where they can get free wi-fi, and on and on and on.
Actually, it makes me rethink whether the child should be using Twitch at all. When my child cries her lungs out because she’s deprived of some app or connectivity for some period of time, the result is that she loses access to that item for a significantly longer period of time. It only took a few instances of this for her behavior to shift from temper tantrum to negotiation. Keeping my child connected is absolutely NOT a factor in an automotive purchase decision in my household. It’s a byproduct of keeping me and/or my wife connected, if it is a consideration at all. (So far, not). Mobility services, again, focus is the needs of the adults in this area. The child has a wifi-only iPad and a bare-bones unlimited plan on her mobile that comes with 2GB of LTE high speed data per month and drops to 128k after she burns through that (usually in the first 5 days of the billing cycle, though she is getting better about rationing it and paying attention to when she’s using mobile data vs. wifi. IMHO, if parents are catering to a greater level of screen addiction in their kids, they’re not teaching their kids a variety of important life skills.
The kids don't have to be direct economic contributors to have an influence on those that do. That has always been the case since we had to raise them, but now more so because of the new economy this Internet thing is birthing.
I’m not as convinced of this as you are, but time will tell. There is definitely behavior in evidence that aligns with your statements. However, there is less evidence to support your conclusions of the reasons behind that behavior.
For the last 8 or so years, I've resisted my wife's persistent pressures to get the kids a phone. They are now going to be 13, and I promised them phones when they either turn 20, or go to work and earn their own cash to buy their own phones if they want them sooner than that. I feel I had a handle on that for as long as I can remember, but in this hyper-connected world where school assignments are sent via e-mail, I may have to give in sooner than I planned :-\. Ah well, I had a good run :-).
LOL My daughter has a phone. She’s 11. She’s had a phone since she was 7. However, she has that phone for the convenience of the adults. It provides an easy way to track her whereabouts and an easy way for us to get in touch with her to coordinate things. Any other benefit she derives from the phone are “privileges” subject to restriction (her phone has parental management on and most of the settings are locked down. She cannot install new apps without specific permission (enforced via the app store) and she has a very limited set of apps on the phone.). The web browser is disabled on her phone. She’s required to put it in “airplane” mode before school each day and take it out of “airplane” mode when she leaves school each day. Again, not because she wanted a phone, but for the convenience of the adults in the household.
That rather, it is the very large corporations and their ability to leverage big data and the surveillance economy for fun and profit that are driving this.
I won't argue with you there.
I will admit that 4-5 year olds are probably the most likely demographic to have no inkling as to what giving up their personal data means. I suppose rather like tobacco companies that getting them hooked in young does serve as a competitive advantage.
Haha, you place plenty of faith in the adult public.
Not at all. I believe that a higher percentage (3-5% or so) of the adult population understand and actively try to avoid surveillance vs. the 4-5 year old population (close to 0% even know the word surveillance).
Almost everyone that I know who has no idea about how the Internet works (or cares to), will click "Yes", "OK", "Submit", "Proceed" without hesitation, just so that they can start using that app immediately.
Yep… As I said, 95-97% of adults are in this camp. But I bet it’s closer to 100% of the 4-5 year olds, given the chance.
Where you and I may care why Apple will automatically sync. call logs between devices signed into the same iCloud account - and maybe even detest it - the majority of the adult population will see that as a convenience, as they can then remember who they called when, just by looking at any device.
Actually, I appreciate the way Apple has done this. They specifically don’t use your data, they just transport it. They encrypt it so that even they can’t see it. Google, OTOH, not so much. iCloud is the opposite of what I am railing against. It’s rather well implemented and does contain strong privacy protections. So much so that it has frustrated multiple governments. Subpoena — Give us user X’s data. Apple — Well, we can give you the encrypted stuff we have, but we don’t have the key, so good luck with it. Government — Decrypt it for us. Apple — We don’t have the key, we can’t do that. Government — Install a back door. Apple — Uh, no. This almost went to a US test case after the shooting in San Bernardino in 2016. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/FBI–Apple_encryption_dispute Though that was an iPhone and not iCloud, it showed Apple’s commitment to getting this right. The only reason it didn’t become a test case was because the FBI found a third party that hacked the phone for them (the vulnerability they exploited was limited to older phones, Apple hardware of the time could not be broken this way). It’s not clear how the case would turn out or what Apple would do if they lost.
I wouldn’t know. I’m not a subscriber and not particularly interested in any of their products.
Fair enough.
Again, my view is not a personal one, but rather, what the wider world is doing.
Sure, but again, not being in that class of users, I have no ability to view the world from their perspective.
As I said, I wish I could get the local $CABLECO to turn off my “access to local sports” and stop charging me a monthly fee for something I don’t want.
Sounds like you should, as some like to say these days, "Cut the cord" :-).
Well, $CABLECO is also $ISP and $ISP+$CABLE < $ISP alone in this weird world of perverse economic incentives, even after accounting for that annoying unnecessary charge. I’d love to switch to a different $ISP, but unfortunately, the choices here are Comcast ($CABLECO) CMTS and AT&T ($TELCO) DSL. I get 200M/5M from $CABLECO. The best $TELCO can do is 1.5M/384k (on a good day when it’s dry outside). As such, I’m kind of stuck.
All genders seem to be relatively equally represented. Age range is probably about 7-25. Here, it seems there are as many female sports fans as male among the younger crowds.
That's interesting. It's not the sense I get in Africa (or in Asia-Pac, when I lived there). Don't get me wrong, I'm not saying women aren't into sports, I'm saying my observation on this side is not as much as men.
Oh, gender roles remain much more traditional in Africa and to some extent in Asia than in the North America, Europe, and Australia, no question about that based on my observations in fairly wide travel. LATAM is a mixed bag, with some countries more like NA/EU/AU and some more traditional.
I wonder if the female sports lovers in the U.S. mostly gravitate toward a single sport, or if that is evenly spread across the sport spectrum.
I don’t have data to support this, but it seems to apply equally well to at least Football and Baseball. Less so to the gear-head sports, but the female audience for those seemed to be growing there too.
Sure, they’re all desperate to try and find a way to preserve their revenue stream.
Being an F1 fan, Mercedes and Red Bull are now manufacturing breathing aids to help with Coronavirus patients. Talk about that ugly "business strategy" word I hate to use - pivoting :-).
No industry is safe.
Ford had to be ordered to do so. First reasonable EO to come from the Orange Idiot. (though he resisted doing it as long as he could)
Perhaps Twitch won the lottery as professional sports may be forced to move to remote competition via gaming consoles. :(
I tend to doubt it as I think fans will find other things to do rather than make the migration.
Yes and no.
I think traditional fans that like to enter stadia or go to the track will find other things to do because they are purists.
Agreed… (Hence my second paragraph of the group above)
But there are plenty of kids that are into gaming, play eSports and are used to congregating on Twitch. They'd rather spend ticket money for a real live event on a new computer rig to improve their online sporting/gaming presence. The kids (and anyone else with an affinity for that avenue) will likely be the ones to take sports digital.
Perhaps. The question remains whether that will result in long term economic viability.
Hard to predict, but will be interesting to watch, as it definitely has an impact on network operations, going forward.
Not really. Online games are relatively low bandwidth compared to streaming video. Of course the live streaming of video of online game contests could be a different matter, but I suspect that if the network becomes an issue there, they’ll simply develop “watch-only” clients for the games in question that take the same stream from the play server as any other game client. At that point, it’s a low-bandwidth thing again. Now if you’re still operating a high latency or worse, a high-jitter network, then you’ll have some issues you’ll need to address as games are very sensitive to both latency and jitter, but that’s a solved problem in most of the developed world already.
I wasn’t the one arguing that they would. Seems your trying to argue both sides of the coin here.
And there's nothing wrong with that.
My view of the new economy is not an all-or-nothing scenario. Many shifts will happen, but we'd be wise to understand why some either won't, or will have a significant lag in doing so.
My prediction is that those who offer the most basic services, i.e., where your hands, feet, and muscles are required, will always sustain, simply because we can't eat bits, or wear them, or sleep in them, or bathe them.
Truth.
Well, I don’t see the 49ers ever offered value, or product, but that’s just my opinion, obviously.
Right, but again, the view is a global one, not a personal one.
Sports is big business because ordinary people are willing to pay good money to enjoy it. It gives them value, whether that makes sense to some of us or not. Rinse and repeat for every other business out there, and its patrons.
Understood. But hard to judge relative value when I can’t perceive any value.
Uh, no… You’ve got that ratio way out of proportion and it’s not an accurate statement at all, except the last part.
My example about Google Maps and the atlas was meant to be overarching, and not specific.
My point is that many things we used to either do or pay for in the traditional economy have now been simplified and made available online. Either via a web site, or most likely, an app.
As much as I criticized the specifics of your example, I didn’t actually miss your point. I thought that would be evident from my subsequent comment.
When we buy stuff online, the shop down the road suffers. The gas stations suffer because we don't drive our cars to that shop. The little coffee shop inside the gas stations suffers because we are not at the gas station to buy gas. The company that makes the straws that you use to stir the sugar in the coffee you would have bought will suffer because, well, you didn't buy the coffee.
One of the reasons I tend to buy stuff from the shop down the road whenever it makes sense. I’m not above letting them know what the price online was and negotiating something reasonable. (I don’t expect them to be able to match the online price, but I do usually manage to get close enough that the spread isn’t prohibitive). Admittedly, that means the shop down the road is still suffering to some extent from the online stuff, but, less so than if I just bought on line. In my observation, gas stations are not suffering from online business. If anything, people seemed to be driving more and more prior to the shelter in place order. The coffee shop inside the gas station here mostly suffers from the fact that you can’t go more than 2 blocks without encountering a Starbucks and a lot of the Starbucks around here have drive-thru service as well (which, oddly, the gas station coffee shop doesn’t). In my observation, people are still buying plenty of coffee and not usually on-line. The proliferation rate of Starbucks shops seems to back up my conclusion here. As to straw manufacturers, I think they’re more endanger from the rabid anti-plastic environmentalists than from any fall-off in beverage sales.
The newspaper kiosk that is right next to the gas station won't sell any papers because you are not going to the gas station anymore, but more likely, because who reads newspapers in 2020? When the shopping centres start to close because we prefer to buy online, what about the security guards that worked there?
Here, I think newspapers are becoming an endangered species for a variety of reasons. I can’t remember the last time I saw a newspaper kiosk near a gas station. It’s never really been a thing here. Where you do see them is in high-traffic down-town areas. Those don’t seem to be in danger as they tend to sell a variety of things and newspapers aren’t likely a high fraction of their revenue.
The bakery that worked out of the shopping centre would close down because we buy online, and the airline that used to buy bread from them for inflight meals now has to increase prices because they had to switch supplier.
Uh, no. First, no airline (at least in the US) is buying their bread from some local bakery. Second, the bakeries in shopping centers aren’t suffering from on-line sales because people want their baked goods fresh, not via overnight fedex. In fact, the proliferation of new bakeries that was happening prior to COVID clearly indicates otherwise. At least here in the US, people like their fresh baked goods and are willing to pay for them in person.
When you choose to work out with an online session (as many are doing now due to the Coronavirus), there is a gym membership that could get cancelled. So your gym trainer suffers. The company that made the gym equipment suffers. The company that maintains the gym pool suffers. The power company that sold electricity to the gym suffers.
Sure… But really, I don’t think that’s permanent and most people that have gym memberships are paying for them on autopilot and don’t think to cancel even if they aren’t using it. Why do you think gyms never raise their prices on old memberships? They don’t want to do anything to remind that customer that’s paying and not using about that fact.
My point, for everything that we used to do in the traditional economy that transitions into the new economy, someone out there is suffering. Whether that's good or bad, or whether someone is to blame or not is irrelevant to Average Jane, because she just sees value in the convenience of buying online, regardless of the trickle-down effect.
Sure, but that’s been the case since before the industrial revolution. There’s nothing new about this from of economic evolution.
I don’t blame google or amazon. Just like I have no sympathy for the taxi cartels that were crying “they’re stealing our business” about Lyft and the other ride-share companies. In fact, when the taxi cartels were getting away with pressuring cities like Los Angeles to do crazy shit to stop Lyft and the others from doing airport pickups, I rather went to extremes to apply opposing pressure…
And the traditional probably will die, unless they find a way to adapt and play the game like Uber and the rest. That's the deal, short of gubbermint decree.
Well, in many jurisdictions, the taxi cartels tried the gubbermint decree route. They even got the decrees, until the gubbermint realized that the backlash was too strong and relented. There are still various moves afoot to try and cause additional regulatory burden and/or legislative difficulty for the app-based ride-shares and the so-called gig-economy.
In South Africa, the postal company (a gubbermint function) was asking for a new law to prevent private delivery companies from handling packages under 1kg. I have no sympathy for that... if you have the time and energy to spend in keeping yourself afloat through artificial means like litigation, then you have the time and energy to adapt your business model to the new economy and survive by offering value. Failing that, you're welcome to die.
Yeah, you should see the US model. It’s absurd. The USPS was converted into a government-mandated private enterprise with a monopoly on the delivery of mail. Others are allowed to deliver freight and small package express service, but not mail. It’s an utterly bizarre and byzantine set of regulations. Then if you really want to go through the looking glass, we’ve now got a president claiming that Amazon is “abusing the postal system” by being one of its largest customers.
I’m not in that position, fortunately. Old economy, new economy, either way, they still need pipes to move bits. I’ve always been mostly on the execution side of moving bits.
I'm not sure any of us can say we are "safe" from the effects of the new economy.
Nobody is ever safe, economically speaking.
Yes, pipes are needed to move the new-economy bits; people still need water, food, clothes, electricity, wood, fuel and all the other real things necessary for basic human function, despite some idea that all of those things can be "automated". We can't eat automation. And we can't eat bits.
My favorite version of this was the real estate investor that tried to explain to me that now that we had virtual servers, the next step would be to virtualize the datacenter and eliminate physical infrastructure altogether. I wished him the best of luck with that plan and walked away shaking my head.
If some large corporation is coming into your backyard offering their services for free so you can be their product, and forcing traditional companies that offered services for a fee into selling those services at or below cost, there will be an impact.
Yes… The trick here is consumer education and regulation that requires fully informed consent by the consumer willing to become the product. The reason these meet with such high success today is that most consumers don’t realize they’re becoming a product.
It's difficult to "evolve" away from offering basic pipe, because physical infrastructure is the basic need for the new economy to develop. However, it doesn't mean that we won't need to make changes to how we've operated in the past, as cost and price pressures from "the big boys" shave those zero's from our P&L's, and all the pleasures and joys that come along with it:
Sure… But at the end of the day, someone still needs to deploy that infrastructure. Hopefully it will be a few years yet before that degrades salaries too far. Hopefully in about 15 years, I won’t care.
https://www.euronews.com/2019/03/11/vodafone-plans-1130-jobs-cuts-in-italy
Sure, this is every day news regardless of industry.
Meh… I think the most clever companies are the ones who have found ways to keep their products hooked to them while delivering their value to their true customers. Unfortunately, I think they are also among the most despicable form of parasite we’ve ever seen.
I don't disagree. We don't have to like them, but we can concede when they are "clever”.
Yep.
Market cap is merely one measure. It represents the current market opinion of the legitimate sale price of the company and little else.
I'm not a stocks guy - I find financial engineering annoying. But for those to whom it matters…
Did you ever see the movie “Wall Street”? (Not the recent remake which I haven’t seen, but the original with Michael Douglas) In the 1980s, this film was intended as a cautionary tale about how deregulation an inattentive regulation on Wall Street was destroying good companies in the US. By the early 1990s, it was being treated as a model for the new economy. There’s a speech in the movie by Michael Douglas about how “Greed is Good”. If you watch no other scene, this is the one worth watching. Most of us viewed it as a cautionary tale of corruption and how insidious unchecked greed could be as a corrupting influence. The financial engineers on Wall street viewed it as a model for success.
Nonetheless, even if Netflix turns out to be a better single-studio outlet than Disney, everything I said still holds true.
Probably, yeah. Curious to see where it goes.
Really? Are you sure you’re accounting for all that is Disney?
I know how large they are.
That wasn’t about how large they are, but about how diverse they are.
Having all these companies is great. Means nothing if you can't harness them all to show your customers value. They have a great opportunity here, I just haven't yet seen them execute it, globally.
That’s why I mentioned the specific ones that were global even before they were acquired by Disney. Disney’s been on a crazy buying binge ever since they got rid of Eisner (AKA Lord Farquaad and thank goodness he’s gone). A lot of their purchases have been aimed at expanding their international capability. That was my point. Domestically, they’ve been a very effective executor. Internationally, it’s just a matter of time and acquisitions before they find the right mix. Their domestic performance and conservative cash management has left them with a pretty strong war chest for international experimentation until they get it right.
Also, I'm a patient, observant man :-).
So can Disney, Comcast/NBC/Universal, and Time Warner.
Will the Hollywood legends be happy to release all their content in all their territories of business, worldwide, at the same time? They've been very keen on region rights, et al.
I think this will eventually evolve over time. If Netflix shows stronger success, then all they have to do to kneecap Netflix is start doing so. Why take that risk when you can sit back and see what happens to the other guy and make a later decision with very little cost and nothing at risk?
That's where I am saying Netflix - with their original content - have an advantage.
But it’s a fleeting advantage and it’s not clear yet whether it’s an actual advantage over-all.
Disney has a lot more of this than I think you realize.
I'm talking about their own network, not through the use of a 3rd party CDN. But if you have more information about this than I currently know, would be grateful to hear about it.
Disney’s own CDN is wider spread than I think you realize, but that doesn’t really matter… If you want to turn up a CDN overnight in a new territory, then all that is really required is VPS providers in the territory and the ability to deploy your CDN onto VPS. Disney definitely has both of those things. Beyond that, it’s just a matter of clicking the GO button for each territory you want to target. Then for places that show significant demand, you can deploy actual infrastructure later as a cost reduction measure to free you from the high cloud fees.
Not sure about the international extent of Comcast and/or Time Warner.
No clue, I haven't seen them feature in many places outside of the U.S.
Yeah, me neither (other than their content). NBC/Universal definitely has a pretty wide international audience, as does Warner Brothers.
This statement tells me that you CLEARLY have underestimated the vast extent of the Disney reach and don’t realize how many things you wouldn’t expect when you hear the name Disney are owned by Disney.
On the contrary, as stated earlier.
Disney do have an opportunity to pull it all together. Will they, remains to be seen.
Where I really think Disney and the Hollywood types have a huge advantage over Netflix is in cinema releases. They have, traditionally, made movies for cinema, and collect plenty of cash at the door during an opening weekend.
Sure, but at this point, it remains to be seen how many cinemas will exist post COVID-19.
The new economy (especially one in this Coronavirus era) considers that I can enjoy value and convenience without leaving the house. If they can adapt their business model to deliver box office cinema movies to the home, over the Internet, worldwide, at the same time, it would be a windfall of massive proportions, given even the kids don't mind leaving their devices and paying for another episode of "The Avengers”.
Well, they already have the streaming capability for all of their “old” content, so really, that’s just a matter of making the decision to release new content through that mechanism. Of course it would also involve either adjustments to their revenue expectations for that or to their current pricing models for that service. Maybe something like Amazon Prime where some content is free and other is available for an additional fee.
Of course, they'd have to "get over themselves", and that's where I feel they may miss the boat, if they don't. Short of that, it will be a slug-fest with Netflix.
I doubt that they will miss the boat entirely, but I think they’re watching CBS, Netflix, and Amazon Prime to see which model wins before jumping all in on digital.
I know some movies that have either just left the theatres or still there have been brought early to VoD:
Yep. I expect this to be an increasing trend. Netflix put a big finger-in-the-eye on the other studios when they simultaneously released the same feature in theaters and on streaming.
https://www.techhive.com/article/3532460/movies-available-for-streaming-earl...
But like I keep saying, every business will suffer:
No doubt. Never said otherwise. I figured this conversation was more about what would likely succeed vs. likely die as we move forward, not so much about the extent to which everyone would suffer.
https://www.vanityfair.com/hollywood/2020/03/coronavirus-movie-release-calen...
The Coronavirus has merely accelerated and amplified what has been in the pipeline for yonks.
Yes and no. I think it is also steering the mole machines to some extent. (to continue your pipeline metaphor)
Again, I don’t see every business squirming. I see lots of businesses squirming.
You seem to think some businesses won't feel the pinch. I wouldn't blame you. But every business will be affected, one way or the other.
Sure, but some are actually benefiting… Local grocers and warehouse stores as an example. Panic buying, more restrictive return policies, hoarding have all led to increased sales and reduced costs for them. Also, this probably isn’t something you’re used to, but hospitals are also seeing an increase in business in the US., as are urgent care clinics, testing labs, etc. That’s all big business in the US. Impacted — Yes, but in some cases, positively impacted, not negative. From a humanity perspective, an overburdened hospital is a terrible thing. From a P&L standpoint, it’s a goldmine. (at least the way health care works in the US) I’m not saying that’s a good thing or that it’s right. Just that it is how it works out.
Even Uber, which is probably the epitome of the new economy in its most simplistic form, can't carry on its business because the Coronavirus has us all locked up.
Well, yes and no. Uber is still allowed to operate here even in the lockdown, but I’m betting they are seeing significantly fewer riders.
NFL isn't big in Africa, hehe.
Count your blessings as far as I’m concerned.
Meh.
I’ve got an internet connection and lots of ideas. What I don’t have is the capital to hire the necessary additional expertise and convert them to products. Further, since I want to play in the anti-surveillance economy with products that are directly opposed to those in the surveillance economy, it’s unlikely I can get funding or that the products I would like to make would actually win in the market place.
No one said it would be easy :-).
But don't worry, there is a kid somewhere half way across the world that isn't worried about any of those things, hehe.
Well, if you find him, introduce us. I want to see the product implemented and deployed. If someone else has the resources to do that, I’m happy to work with them on the process. Owen