Dana Blankenhorn

Bad News is Good News

A few weeks ago, I noted how the “bad news” at Snap, Twitter and other social media companies can easily be interpreted as good news.. If people are no longer interested in rage tweeting, they could be becoming more thoughtful. They could be reserving judgment. They could have found real lives.

The same is true, doubly so, with the recent “problems” at chip stocks like Nvidia, Micron and Qualcomm. Prices for commodity chips are falling. The “chip shortage” is easing. In the near term it means lower profits for big chip companies. Sell, sell, sell.

But it also means falling prices and more supply for companies that use chips. It means car prices could start declining. It means the Machine Internet can get a fresh start.

Beyond Even the Cloudless Cloud

The impending failure of the “Cloud Gaming” movement points toward the end of the cloud decade.

Google’s “Stadia” cloud gaming service is proving a technical failure. The company claimed it would reach hundreds of countries. It reached fewer than two dozen. The company claimed it would solve the game latency problem. It didn’t.

It turns out that for a low latency application like gaming to work, content must be cached close to every player. If it’s centralized, then some players have advantages that render the game worthless. Or you can create a delay, making the whole game worthless.

Forced delays happened over a decade ago, in stock trading. A trading platform found that, by putting their data center close to the Hudson River, it could act on orders from Wall Street before centers further away, based on the speed of light.

Saving Facebook (Uh, Meta)

Shares in Facebook, uh Meta Platforms, continued to fall on February 7.

The most recent price, about $230/share, is just 16 times last year’s earnings. Considering that the average stock in the S&P 500 now has a PE of over 25, and that Facebook is bringing a quarter of its revenue to the net income line, that’s absurdly cheap.

It’s cheap because analysts are reading a shortfall in growth as a harbinger of doom. The three main apps – Facebook, Instagram, and WhatsApp – are losing popularity because people don’t trust the company. A lot of its future gains are going into “metaverse” software that analysts don’t understand.

Controlling Data for Good

When we talk about control over data, we start with metadata. These are vast stores of data on what people are searching for online, data about data.

Google and Meta Platforms (Facebook) use metadata to control advertising. Metadata lets advertisers reach specific consumers for the same price as the general network. The aggregation and organization of markets, once done through journalism, no longer pays.

The same techniques, applied to content, led us to Trump. Victims stay within a walled garden of propaganda. Facts can never get in. People don’t just vote based on this. They refuse vaccines, buy guns, and die. He who controls the data makes the rules.

Cloudflare and the Cloudless Cloud

The Cloud Czars gained dominance by putting cash flow into cloud infrastructure.

Apple, Microsoft, Amazon, Google, and Facebook now spend billions of dollars each quarter on data centers. They upgrade the ones they have, and they build new ones. This is the cloud world we know.

Cloudflare wants to change that. The company is selling a concept called “Web3,” in which every server can be a node on the cloud network.

The offering is based on distributed technology already used for cryptocurrency like Bitcoin and Ethereum. Cloudflare supports these efforts with gateways. The idea is that distributed software can now support cloud storage for less than what Amazon (for instance) charges to move data out of its S3 repository. It’s in moving data out that Amazon Web Services sees its biggest profits. Cloudflare says it can disrupt that. Amazon calls its storage offering S3. Cloudflare calls its new one R2.

Great theory. Harnessing the edge to take on the center makes sense. Letting anyone with unused space play in cloud markets sounds great. Exporting data with S3 is expensive.

The 2020s: The Machine Internet

(This is Part II of a three-part series on technology in the 2020s, for publication while I’m at the Heidelberg Laureate Forum in Germany.)

The 2010s were the decade of clouds and devices.

But it was done through human intermediaries. People did the input and the output came from people.

Even if you’re talking to your computer, you’re still in there directing it. Our interfaces in 2019 are, in that way, not that different from what they were in 1979. Fingers are replacing mice, voices are replacing keystrokes, but you’re still making the decisions.

That’s what I think will change most in the 2020s.

It all seems frightfully late to me. I wrote about this stuff as The World of Always On as far back as 2002. Then again, I wrote A Guide to Field Computing in 1993, before the iPhone was a gleam in Steve Jobs’ eye.

The Machine Internet has been delayed by the human element. Right now, most “analysts” still assume this will keep it from happening. They’re pushed out the date for self-driving cars from 2019 to 2029. They think autonomous technology must be perfect to be useful.

It only needs to be better than you.

A New and Better Future

Think of this as Volume 17, Number 26 of the newsletter I have written weekly since March, 1997. Enjoy.

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Living as we do in the now, we often fail to appreciate how the future is changing before us.

I know the future isn't what it seemed to be when I was young. Technology moves through the path of least resistance, and in my lifetime that has meant Moore's Law. Extending the exponential gains in computing power made possible by silicon into other areas of technology – wired and wireless networks, aluminum and optical drives – has transformed us in many ways without seeming to change society all that much.

I currently drive a little four-door hatchback that, in many ways, isn't much different than the Jeep wagon my dad took to California in 1970. (I inherited it durng my college years, and thank god fashion has made so much progress since the mid-1970s.) I live in a house that has stood since 1923, the year my mom was born, and looks from the outside just as it did then.

Facebook Knows It Can't Beat Google

The silly scandal of Facebook running off to Hillary Clinton's old campaign manager, trying to launch a privacy investigation over Google Social Circle, actually has a serious point behind it.

Facebook can't beat Google. And they know it.

The issue that has reporters Twittering is privacy and even the fact we're all talking about that means that Facebook has succeeded in its campaign, because we're talking about something Facebook has long had to deal with, and in that it can be seen as existing on a level playing field with Google.

But in evaluating the two companies that's not the real issue. Raw traffic is not the real issue. Ads are not the real issue.

The real issue is infrastructure.

Scott Cleland's Game: Turn Google Into AT&T

Scott Cleland is a Bell troll.

He is what he has always been, an apologist and paid advocate for the Bell companies and their causes. He hides his source of funds, and reporters new to every beat keep buying the act. It's crazy. Crazy like a Fox.

This week he's a concern troll, having issued a "book" (the same way Regnery publishes "books") that is nothing but a long hit piece against Google. USA Today gave him an admiring interview without once asking him where his money comes from, which is like treating Glenn Beck as an unbiased journalist.

Cleland's theme is that you can't trust Google, that Google always lies, that Google is not out to serve anyone but its own shareholders, and that it deserves the strict government scrutiny given his clients, the Bells.

The aim is simple. To hobble Google with lawyers and layers of bureaucracy, hordes of people who spend their days focused inward, taking big salaries to prevent innovators from innovating.

Free the WiFi

There are two reasons to share things via open source. So they won't become worthless, and so they can become more valuable.

The Sega game machine is an example of the former principle.  Had Sega been able to donate the code when they killed the product, it could have had an after-life. As it was, owners now have bricks.

WiFi is an example of the latter principle.  The Electronic Frontier Foundation now says it wants the WiFi protocol “opened,”  allowing free sharing of unused bandwidth.

Peter Eckersley calls fears of privacy and security that have made people lock their WiFi routers a “tragedy of the commons” and suggests the launch of an Open Wireless Movement to fight back.

I wrote something very similar two years ago, from Chengdu, where I was able to post stories only because of open wireless connections in a Chinese condo project. My hosts let us use a great apartment, but it had no computer, no Internet. Without the open connections of nearby units, which admittedly were on intermittently and didn't provide a ton of bandwidth, I would have been gone from the Web all that week. As it was, I delivered some of the most popular things I ever did write at ZDNet.