Dana Blankenhorn

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.

Facebook vs. Apple

It’s not as black and white as you think.

To hear the tech press tell the story, Facebook is promoting evil by admitting to its ad tracking and asking users to opt-in. Apple, meanwhile, is on the side of the angels by loudly promoting privacy.

But here’s the deal. Facebook services are free. Apple services are not.

The tech media is cheering for the global elite against the global poor.

The free web has been the greatest wealth production effort in history. Over the last 20 years over 1 billion people, a substantial portion of the world’s population, has been lifted out of extreme poverty by the free web. The freedom of the web, free as in beer, has been driven by the cloud, which pushed costs low enough that they could be supported by advertising.

Moore’s Third Law of Management

What other analysts call “big tech” I refer to as “Cloud Czars.”

I do it for a reason.

What distinguishes Apple, Microsoft, Amazon, Google, and Facebook isn’t their managements’ “ruthlessness.” It’s their heavy investment, over many years, in cloud computing centers.

Even early in the 2010s, it took $1 billion of capital each quarter to get into the cloud market. That has only increased with time. Now it averages $4 billion each quarter.

The money must come from somewhere. Cloud is a capital-intensive business. If you’re handing out dividends, it’s because you don’t know what else to do with the shareholders’ cash.

Netiquette: The Issue for 2020

I covered the biggest issue of 2020 back in 1988.

I covered it in two ways.

On the one hand I covered the Electronic Networking Association for Newsbytes.

The ENA featured such cutting-edge minds as Mike Godwin and Joichi Ito. They met online, using software called PARTIcipate. They were communicating across nations and time zones. It was exciting.

They didn’t want to spoil it. They developed rules known as Netiquette to define proper behavior.

Netiquette can be summarized thusly: be nice. Assume goodwill. Be polite. Accept disagreement as legitimate. Don’t lie to make a point. Remain inquisitive and friendly. Understand that the person reading what you “say” can’t read your body language. Account for that.

Instant Family

Last year a real Hollywood movie was made on our street. 

It came out early this year, and Wikipedia says it grossed $120 million. It found life on Amazon Prime and, when I saw it was available, I gave it a look.

The film stars Mark Wahlberg and Rose Byrne as childless adults who spent a month being driven up and down the street in black cars on their way to filming. Primary filming was done at 262 Winter. We’re at 215. Our house was never shown.

I remember 262 from back in the day, in the early 1990s, before the neighborhood became gentrified. It was barely a shell when a man named Michael bought it and renovated.

Some history. These houses all look like Craftsman barns, a central beam and a roof that slopes to the sides. My son John calls them “double-barreled shotgun shacks.” The homes on the east side were built around 1908, in the City of Oakhurst. Oakhurst folded in 1915, and the homes were joined to Decatur. Those homes on the west side were built in the early 1920s, when the City of Kirkwood folded and became part of Atlanta. Our house dates from 1923. The developer of the Oakhurst homes was a woman in Kirkwood named Lavinia Winter. Hence the name Winter Avenue.