Dana Blankenhorn

What If Steve Jobs Were Evil?

If Steve Jobs were evil, he would be Mark Zuckerberg.

Zuckerberg was born in 1984, the year the Apple Macintosh was introduced. He founded Facebook in 2004. He launched Facebook’s program to build cloud data centers in 2011. His fortune was estimated October 5 at $117 billion, but that underestimates him. That’s because he controls the voting stock of Facebook, now worth $913 billion, so his power is greater than his money.

Facebook isn’t its eponymous service. It’s not Instagram. It’s not WhatsApp. Facebook is its 16 data centers, the thousands of miles of fiber cables connecting them with local centers, and with the world. About 1.6 billion people use Facebook services every day, according to its most recent quarterly report. Americans can take or leave Facebook, but people in the “Global South” depend upon it.

Bottom Rail on Top

It’s a fight as old as the century. (There's a signed copy available at Amazon.Com.) 

Cable operator doesn’t want to pay too much for programming, lest they be forced to raise prices and lose customers. They play hardball with the cable programmer, who tells cable viewers they’re about to “lose access to your treasured programming” should a deal not be made.

Sometimes a deal is not made. Sinclair Broadcasting, now running the regional sports networks it bought from Fox and renamed Bally’s, has lost a lot of these deals. If I want to watch Atlanta United home games, I either take MARTA to the stadium or go to a bar.

It happens a lot with sports. That’s because sports programmers overpay for their rights, then jack up the price they’re charging operators (thus you). If MSG, which has rights to New York teams, can’t get a new deal from Comcast by September 30, for instance, you may miss the New York Red Bulls’ playoff push.  (It’s going nowhere, by the way.)

So, you have the big, bad cable operator against the poor, beleaguered programmer. Comcast is a meanie, you say.

But what if it were Comcast that was doing the begging? That’s happening right now.

Comcast has owned NBC Universal for a decade. It bought the asset from GE. (This was covered extensively on the documentary series 30 Rock.) It’s a sweet deal. Programmer NBC negotiates with operator Comcast for the best possible deal, then Comcast moves money from one pocket to the other.

Electrify My World

When we moved to our current house in 1983, the heavy rail MARTA station next door seemed futuristic. Between 1983 and 2020 my wife took the train to work nearly every day, while I worked from home.

Today MARTA and the urban design it was meant to serve are obsolete.

Electric motors can be made in any size. Batteries are more efficient and cheaper. The cloud means warehouses can break bulk for less than physical stores. The pandemic let my wife recapture 3 hours each day, for chores and for living. She’s not giving that time back.

Work can happen anywhere. The world I wrote about 30 years ago in my book A Guide to Field Computing has arrived. An iPad can do the work of a PC, a phone, and a TV, plus it’s rugged enough for use in a manufacturing plant or warehouse.

The Decade of Immersive Technology

Back in 2019, while at the Heidelberg Laureate Forum in Germany, I wrote about three key trends that would define the 2020s.

They were the end of oil, the Machine Internet, and DNA as a programming language .

Since then, there has been progress in all three areas. The pandemic, and resulting parts shortages, have delayed but won’t prevent the end of oil. You can see the Machine Internet in all the hype over 5G. The Moderna vaccine is indeed using DNA as a programming language.

Turns out there’s a 4^th trend, and there may be more.

Living With Moore's Law: Past, Present and Future

This is actually the fourth edition of this book, which I have been writing and rewriting for 20 years now. 

Living With Moore's Law: Past, Present and Future is a collection of essays I have been working toward all my working life. It describes what Moore's Law is, how it developed, and how it extended into every area of computing through the 20th century.

Then it does more. I take the story into the present and explain just what we need to do, as a society, to take advantage of these miracles.

Then it does more. I have written an extra chapter about what comes next, the miracles that await us by harnessing the capabilities created by Moore's Law -- clouds, devices, and wireless networks. 

I consider it must reading for anyone interested in technology, in what it has done for us, what it's doing to us, and how we need to work with it to save the planet. 

Also, it's just $2.99. Free if you get it through Kindle Unlimited, Amazon's $10/month lending library. 

Cheap as chips.

Previous versions were offered as The Blankenhorn Effect in 2002, as Moore's Law: Better and Better, Faster and Faster in 2010, and as Technology's Big Bang: Yesterday, Today and Tomorrow with Moore's Law, in 2019. 

Virtual Staging

Right now, production for films, TV, video games, and Web sales are all done differently.

Five years from now, they will all be done in the same way, using “virtual stages” and virtual reality software.

As with everything else in tech, it’s starting at the top of the cost curve but will head down rapidly. Tools like the Unreal Engine cover the software side. Virtual stages represent the hardware side.

The cost of this gear is very high. But the gear is just the tip of the cost iceberg. You need people who can run it, you need people who can write code around it. You need people to integrate it, people who can tell stories using it, and you need big bandwidth to distribute it.

The New Hybrid Cloud

You get a cloud. And you get a cloud. Everybody gets a cloud.

Well, most people.

Several years ago, the idea of the “hybrid cloud” died. The idea that companies should keep their data centers while moving “customer facing” applications only to the public cloud didn’t make economic sense. Cloud applications ran so much cheaper than systems designed for mainframes or internal networks.

It wasn’t just about hardware. It was also about software. Proprietary software couldn’t compete with open source. Linux won. Even Microsoft admitted it. Tech companies acted rationally, by extracting the equivalent of “monopoly rents” from their data center offerings, which hastened the move to public cloud.

Now things may be about to reverse. That’s because, as companies and organizations have gone “all-in” on cloud, they’re finding themselves with huge bills. If Google or Microsoft or Amazon is the “one throat you can choke,” they’re the ones choking you.

Pay for the Clouds

Right now, the roughly $150 billion/year going into cloud infrastructure is paid for with cash flow. Most of that cash flow comes from free services.

It’s ad-supported services that are holding up the free Internet. It’s these ad-supported services that the clouds were first built to support.

The antitrust bills now zipping along in Congress try to end all the perceived “sins” of the Cloud Czars – Apple, Microsoft, Amazon, Google and Facebook. But they don’t answer the big question, which is where new cloud investment will come from if the Czars are broken up.

Amazon can do fine on its own. There is plenty of cash flow coming into Amazon Web Services to support its capital spending. Most of Amazon’s investment these days, in fact, is going into warehouses and transport fleets, which aren’t as profitable. Splitting AWS from Amazon, along with its digital services like Amazon Prime video, the Kindle eBooks, and Alexa cloud-based speaker, would be a stupendous opportunity for investors. It would let AWS grab share from Google and Microsoft because their clouds are tied to software that competes with their customers.

Cloud Czar Conundrum

In 2021, governments around the world hate the Cloud Czars.

They don’t like seeing companies both build infrastructure and rent it out to competitors. They don’t want Amazon to compete with Netflix or Walmart. They don’t want Microsoft hosting Salesforce, then building its own suite. They don’t like Google doing search while it rents its cloud. They don’t like the Apple app store. They blame Facebook for Trump.

It’s not just here. China is doing all the things Americans just pretend to want, taking down Alibaba, Tencent and Baidu with new regulations and demands. Of course, the same people who want Facebook destroyed pretend that China is going after Alibaba because “it’s communist” and Jack Ma a threat to the regime. (As if Mark Zuckerberg isn’t?)

Here’s the problem. Clouds are expensive. The price started a decade ago at $1 billion/quarter. Now it’s about $5 billion/quarter. That money isn’t borrowed. It all comes from cash flow. The game was said to be too rich for AT&T, too rich for IBM, too rich for HP and Verizon.

Free TV is an Invisible Scandal

When TV was made digital to free up spectrum  stations were given “extra” channels in the new bandwidth, to do with as they wanted.

Something similar happened in the 1940s, and it made many fortunes. Big radio stations in major markets were literally handed new TV stations. If they also owned newspapers the bonanza was doubled. This was the foundation of Cox Enterprises, originally a newspaper chain founded by failed 1920 Presidential candidate James M. Cox.

The current transition is making no billionaires. In fact, it’s a scandal. A scandal no one is talking about.

Before the transition there was lots of talk about TV stations creating multiple channels with their new spectrum rights – news channels, cultural channels, ethnic channels. Instead, these rights have been sold or rented to a host of ad-based garbage programmers. Most stations just took the money and ran.

In Atlanta, for instance, there are channels running 1950s re-runs, a bunch of home shopping channels, foreign language channels, religious channels, even foreign channels. These are the kinds of channels that are too worthless to make it onto cable. There are also a lot of empty channels, or channels running the equivalent of radio. If you only have access to “free” TV (through a special antenna and, perhaps, a set-top box) you’ve been ripped-off. It’s not worth what you paid for the antenna.

The frequency spectrum is not supposed to be property. It’s not supposed to be a private slum. It’s supposed to be a public good. That was the idea of the Radio Act of 1926, and the Federal Communications Act that followed it. But this concept has been lost in our time.

If you want to make some meaningful change, demand we go back to that.