On Nov 10, 2005, at 10:18 PM, Christopher L. Morrow wrote:
My fingers are tented... can you see?
indeed I can... the evil empire installed a camera in your monitor. quick read: http://tinyurl.com/89v8h
I personally feature The Fez on Fridays. The chix dig it.
The odd thing is that consumer services seem to devolve into: "who is cheapest" not "who has best service". Even FIOS is really just as inexpensive as cable-modem these days (cheaper even in some cases) and does the home user need more than 6mpbs down for internet things? (just Internet, not to include video over ip)
Well, I think there's a presumption that Internet and video over IP are still distinguishable down the road, rather than blend into a new media form. Think back how the web showed up and did the same. And that is also the main reason why this legislative effort strikes me as very misguided. The legislators assume they are dealing with a mature product, and nothing could be further from the truth. As much as we try to categorize today, we will restrict innovation (and growth of all our businesses) in the end. So, there was a time when everyone said 'good grief, what would anyone do with 1.5mbps', and where in turn engineered bitrates ended up being several orders of magnitude lower. In fact, we all were worried what would happen to our POPs and backbone when 1.5mbps consumers showed up in volume back in the '98 timeframe. We're just at the edge of the step function. I have absolutely no worry that people will figure out what to do with bandwidth. Who knows, maybe somebody will actually be successful offering an online backup service if the bw ever catches up with the inflation in storage, for example.
call me crazy but it seems like cost is king for consumers, at the pipe level. So adding on services to that at a cost is a losing proposition (or atleast not very popular, how many AOL cusotmers bought into the secure-id auth?)
I think that's all a function of differentiation not being visible to consumers. Once new media types start emerging, this has to change.
Sorry, I have plenty of buddies at Verizon/MCI and SBC/ATT... Not slamming you guys, just worried and watching.
join the party :)
I'd offer to buy a round, but I think that'd break the bank. ;-) Best regards, Christian