Dana Blankenhorn

Productivity Explosion

Soon after being given a high tech beat at the Atlanta Business Chronicle, in 1982, I bought my first computer. (The picture was taken in 1981.)

I could suddenly write up an interview or press event in an hour. I would read it out loud and make corrections. Then my super-loud C. Itoh dot-matrix printer would buzz it up onto fanfold paper.

The fanfold would go to typesetters, who created long sheets they would paste onto boards, which became the paper. Plastic squares would be turned into pictures at the printer. The pictures would be clipped to each board and the whole collection driven 50 miles. Most papers were then mailed to subscribers, but some were bound for retail sale.

Back at the front end of this process I bragged I could do the work of three men. The noise, and my attitude, caused the paper to fire me the next year and hire the three men.

A few years later I visited my former boss in Houston and found everyone was working at terminals.

40 Years an Internet Client: A History

I have been using the Internet since moving into our present house 40 years ago.

It doesn’t seem that long. It was a lifetime ago.

To the right is my original set-up. It cost $2,799. The $300 modem ran at 300 baud. That was enough in a text Internet era. I used MCI Mail to file stories with those editors advanced enough to take them that way. (MCI printed them for the rest.) I still remember a 1989 Tokyo trade show where I used my TRS100, which also had a 300 baud modem, to send copy to San Francisco, then London. Good times.

Over time modems got better. My 300 baud became a 1,200 baud when I switched to an IBM PC. Then there was a 9,600 baud unit I got for a PC compatible later in the decade. Eventually I even had one with a claimed speed of 56,000. Its maker tried to support the phone companies’ ISDN efforts and went bankrupt.

E-Books are Better

This is a take that’s going to be surprisingly unpopular, despite being obvious.

E-books are better than paper books.

They cost nothing to deliver. They’re cheaper than paper books. They don’t kill trees. They’re lighter and easier to read.

They can also be updated, and that’s important.

I got a call recently from a company wanting to reprint my 2001 book on tech history, which I called (unfortunately) The Blankenhorn Effect. I later re-issued it twice, each time under a different title, as I came to understand that tech changes too fast for books to keep up with. My next project will be another update, tentatively titled Moore’s Lore 2024: More After Moore.

What’s the advantage of a paper book? It’s permanent. Its sale process offers serendipity. There’s nothing like the smell and feel of a bookshop, or a library. You can make the same arguments for LPs over a streaming service.

There’s one more argument that book lovers use. They hate Amazon.Com.

I get it. Amazon, and its Kindle, rule the e-book market. It’s the format of choice. It holds a market monopoly. This has made Amazon lazy. The whole Kindle business is now a pimple on the butt of Amazon.Com, which was founded almost 30 years ago to sell paper books.

A Lesser Class of Billionaire

I’m old enough to remember when the image of a billionaire was of a man like Sam Walton, who walked humbly and became the source of stories focused on how he was just like the rest of us.

He was followed by people like Bill Gates and Warren Buffett, who saw wealth as a tool, and who resolved to give that tool away when they were done with it. Other wealthy people emulated them, signing pledges to give their wealth back to the commons, because everything we have is merely borrowed from our time and must be recycled when we’re gone.

Over the 15 years, however, a new kind of billionaire has emerged. They’re malevolent, not benevolent. Some of their fortunes, like that of Elon Musk, are self-created. Others, like that of David Sachs, are built using other peoples’ money. Still others, like Harlan Crow, just inherited their wealth.

But this new class of billionaire is uninterested in their fellow citizens. They see wealth as a means with which to both obtain political power and maintain it even after they’re dead. They now control our courts, they fund our elections, and they think they’re better than anyone else.

Billionaires are now threatening the very structure they built.  

Manhood vs. Brohood

I don’t pretend to be a great man. I’m barely average. I try to get better. I try to overcome an upbringing of white privilege, in the Long Island suburb of Massapequa, where I lived until I was 18.

My father passed away in 1999. He could be sexist, racist, and misogynistic. He could also be wildly creative, imaginative, and a great salesman. When he got very drunk (he was a WWII veteran) he’d call himself a “true Aryan.” But he did the best he could. He ran Tower TV, the local TV repair shop, then got into security and locksmithing after moving to California. All four of his kids wound up solidly in the American middle class. His younger son (not me) taught calculus to generations in Los Angeles public schools.

It wasn’t until I moved to Atlanta that I found true manhood. I found it in our “block club,” a group of families on our street who met monthly to exchange news and advocate for services.

Apple: What to Worry About, and Not Worry About

Tim Cook taught Apple to play a long game.

Cook became CEO in 2011 on the heels of the iPhone revolution. By turning a PC into a handheld device, as I wrote about 20 years earlier in “A Guide to Field Computing,” Steve Jobs’ Apple changed the way we live.

Cook doesn’t roll sell revolution. He sells evolution. Turning Apple into a Cloud Czar was evolutionary, being built on an existing services business. The Apple Watch was the same, built on an existing health business. Both efforts were widely ridiculed. Services are now a $40 billion/year business, wearables lilke the Watch an $18 billion/year business.

So the $3,500 Vision Pro headset doesn’t have to be huge out of the box. It can be an executive toy, used for going to the NBA Finals from Dubai, or delivering multi-million dollar presentations to a single executive decision maker. Apple can build the business organically, letting tenants experience a newly built building or showing doctors how to do an operation with the DaVinci robot.

Harbingers of Change

There are lots of harbingers that change is in the air.

You just don’t read about them.

If you look at polls, or headlines from various states, you’ll think Democrats are on the run and Republicans have absolute impunity. Polls are mostly statistical noise it takes an expert to understand. It’s what a party does with its impunity, and how folks in a democracy react, that decides the future.

I don’t care that Trump was indicted, or that Jean Carroll won her suit, or the George Santos was indicted. I don’t care about the latest stupidity from Meatball Ron or the chair-bound governor of the Great State of Texas.

Save the Kindles

You can be comfortable in a big company. But you can also miss opportunities because they don’t look big enough.

Take Amazon.Com. They’re on track to bring in $500 billion this year. About half will be in merchandise sales. The other half will be in services of various kinds. The stock fell after earnings because the cloud unit projected slower growth, some of it driven by its own effort to help customers lower their cloud costs, some by the cost of adding AI software to AWS. Overall, Amazon stock is a buy.

My problem is Amazon has become such a sprawling business that some divisions are just too small to merit attention.

Take the Kindle book division. This is funny because Amazon started as a bookstore.  

I like the Kindle. An e-book reader is lighter than almost any book. You can use it with the lights off. A Fire Tablet can cost just $40 and serve as a personal TV. You can get refurbished Kindle readers dirt cheap.

E-books make printed books seem an environmental disaster. E-books also save money. Amazon offers a $10/month library service called Kindle Unlimited. I consider it a bargain. It offers lots of e-books at $1 to $3.

But in all the efforts by some states to ban books and close libraries, you haven’t heard a word from Amazon. That’s because the Kindle business is so small, by Amazon standards, that the company would rather keep quiet than pursue an opportunity that might be controversial.

Democracy is Hard

Here’s a truth no one likes to admit.

Being a citizen in a democratic state is much harder, and takes much more work, than being a citizen in an autocratic state.

You need to think about things that may not matter to you. You should vote. If called upon, you have to drop what you’re doing and be a juror. Even if it takes weeks.

It’s a lot easier to just complain about government and keep your head down than take public affairs seriously. You have a life. You’re just trying to get by. Democracy, if you’re poor, comes off as a middle class affectation. Most people in this world are poor. Very poor. Even wretchedly poor.

Beating Moore’s Law

I spent 20 years, off and on, researching Moore’s Law, its history, and how it worked. 

As I wrote my book, and rewrote it twice more, most industries succumbed to its charms, its promise of productivity. Journalism succumbed. Retailing succumbed. So did distribution and management.

Three industries have not yet succumbed, and I have a chapter in the book devoted to them.

These are health care, the law, and education.

It’s not that there aren’t solutions. Law libraries are obsolete. So, too, college libraries. Health care has finally surrendered to electronic records, lured by sweet, sweet stimulus cash.

But final costs, and prices, have gone up in all these areas.

It’s politics.

States refuse to define what graduates need, and unions insist teachers must give the lesson, not just test and tutor. Courts have used technology to pile more work on lawyers and judges. Time is money. Doctors have used their gatekeeping function to stop standardization of treatment, while drug companies have used regulatory capture to create pricing based on the value of your life.