Category Archives: Observer

A handbag?

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This morning’s Observer column…

Regardless of what happens on appeal, these lawsuits, and others like them, are bad news for eBay. It now seems likely that at least some of the jurisdictions in which the company operates will insist that it becomes much more rigorous in policing activity on its site. And that spells trouble for the company’s business model because policing is expensive, and eBay relies on skimming modest fees from billions of transactions run entirely by software with no human intervention. The key to its success is scale – it has 84 million active users, handles more than 500 million auctions every quarter and last year the total value of everything sold on its sites approached $60bn.

Policing is a labour-intensive business, so eBay’s profitability would be drastically impaired if it were compelled to do it on any realistic scale…

Apré Billg

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This morning’s Observer column…

There’s been a lot of ‘end-of-an-era’ talk about the departure of Gates from the company he founded with Paul Allen in 1975. There have also been acres of speculation about ‘whither Microsoft after Gates?’ Both topics are, well, a bit passé. The eclipse of the Gates ‘era’ began with the arrival of Google 10 years ago. And the succession plan that he and Ballmer engineered nearly two years ago effectively handed direction of Microsoft to a triumvirate of Ballmer, Ray Ozzie and Craig Mundie. So let us dispense with the Kleenex and take a detached view of Mr Gates’s contribution to civilisation.

The headline is that he is the John D Rockefeller de nos jours in the sense that he shaped an emerging industry and revolutionised philanthropy. The big difference is that, unlike Rockefeller, Gates did not wait until the closing years of his career to engage in good works, and the $100bn endowment of the Bill and Melinda Gates Foundation will ensure that his name lives on…

The point I was trying to make about Microsoft is also taken up by the Economist in its piece about the end of the Gates era. The article includes this chart:

I Google, therefore I forget

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This morning’s Observer column…

To judge from the volume of commentary that has followed his article, Carr has touched a nerve. He was ‘flooded with emails and blog posts from people saying that my struggles with deep reading and concentration mirror their own experiences’. Various über-bloggers such as Andrew Sullivan, Jon Udell and Bill Thompson took up the theme, adding their own twists. And prominent newspaper columnists such as Leonard Pitts (Miami Herald) and Margaret Wente (Toronto Globe & Mail) also revealed their private fears that addiction to cyberspace, and online media generally were, in fact, rotting their brains.

What’s surprising in a way is that people should be surprised by this. The web, after all, was designed by a chap (Tim Berners-Lee) who was motivated to do it because he had a poor memory for some things. Add powerful search engines to what he created and you effectively have a global memory-prosthesis. Who won the Ascot Gold Cup in 1904? Google will find it in a flash – and remind you that the race that year was run on 16 June, which is also the day in which all the action takes place in James Joyce’s Ulysses. What was the name of Joyce’s father? A quick Google search turns up the DNB entry, which reveals all. And what was the name of the woman who proved to be Parnell’s downfall? Ah yes, here it is: Kitty O’Shea… and so it goes on.

The combination of powerful search facilities with the web’s facilitation of associative linking is what is eroding Carr’s powers of concentration…

Mcdonalds outsourcing burger manufacture to Burger King

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Well, that’s what one observer said when he heard about the Yahoo-Google agreement. I also wrote an Observer piece about the deal. Excerpt:

Since Icahn has eaten other corporate boards for breakfast, it would be foolish to underestimate him. Especially as he’s claiming that Yahoo!’s standoffishness has destroyed ‘shareholder value’. Yahoo!’s leadership then looks for ways to undermine his campaign and ensure a Microsoft-free future. Since the date with Google seemed to go okay, they reason, why not ask them for a live-in partnership? Not a conventional marriage, you understand, but still the kind of relationship that makes you feel good at the end of a long day in the markets. Google may be awkward in an adolescent way, but it’s fabulously rich and successful. And it scares Microsoft to death.

Last week’s episode involved Yahoo! and Google signing their prenuptials…

Apple’s Trojan Horse

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This morning’s Observer column about the long-term implications of the iPhone.

There were murmurs of discontent that the camera delivered a measly two megapixels, still declined to do video and lacked a flash. There was a frisson of excitement when it was revealed that the phone had onboard GPS, and contented murmurings as some new games and other third-party applications were demonstrated. But the only big news was that Apple is to halve the price in a dash for market share.

Of course this is bad news for Nokia, Motorola, Samsung, Sony Ericsson and others, none of whom have yet managed to come up with a device that can compete head-on with the iPhone. But in fact the possibility that Apple might become as dominant in the mobile phone market as it is in the online music business should ring warning bells everywhere…

Beating the Drudge effect

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This morning’s Observer column…

There is a way out of the morass, but it requires the application of old-fashioned journalistic skills and values. Or, more prosaically, sceptical, investigative reporting. The fact that something is circulating on the net is not, in itself, news – any more than is the fact that microbes circulate in drinking water. You can find anything you want on the net, and I mean anything. So what?

The rot that so offends Obama set in when ‘mainstream’ reporters began to relay what they found on the net in their own publications. And that happened a long time ago with the Drudge Report and the vicious right-wing campaign to bring down Bill Clinton.

A good example of how to deal with internet rumours was provided last week by David Weigel of Reason magazine…

Chatter in Cyberspace

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This morning’s Observer column…

Q: WHAT DO Cyberspace and Cranford have in common? A: Both are places capable of being driven wild by rumour. Viewers of the landmark BBC1 series will recall how the most trivial aside could instantly be transformed into an incontrovertible fact. When it was rumoured that the railway would be coming to Cranford, for example, Eileen Atkins exclaimed with horror that this meant that the Irish were coming, and promptly expired at the prospect.

I was reminded of this while listening to the chatter of the blogosphere on Thursday night…

XO+XP=POXX?

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This morning’s Observer column…

Much heat and little light were generated last week by the announcement, made jointly by Microsoft and the One Laptop Per Child (OLPC) project, that Windows XP is to be made available on the project’s ‘XO’ laptop, the little green machine aimed at the world’s poorest children. Next month, trials of Windows on the XO will begin in what Microsoft – in a telling phrase – describes as ‘key emerging markets’.

The news has been hailed as welcome pragmatism on the part of Nicholas Negroponte, the project’s director. But among some of his colleagues and in the wider Open Source community, it has also been excoriated as a betrayal. Which view is correct? Both…

Two machines are better than one

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This morning’s Observer column…

If you’ve signed up for a new web service recently, you may have noticed that a final stage of the enrolment process presents you with an indistinct image of a number of letters and numbers, often in a wavy line, and sometimes displayed against a confusing background. You are asked to identify the sequence and type it accurately into a text box. You have just encountered a Captcha…

Thirty years on…

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This morning’s Observer column marking the 30th anniversary of Gary Thuerk’s famous email mistake.

Looked at from the perspective of today, when my spam filter is reporting that it has blocked 5,700 messages in the last month, Thuerk’s unsolicited email seems touchingly innocent. For one thing it actually imparts some useful and interesting information.

If I had been an Arpanet researcher on the west coast in 1978, I would have been genuinely interested to learn that the network’s protocols had been incorporated in the operating systems of a major vendor. In that sense, it provides a stark contrast with the invitations to purchase penis-extending drugs, fake Rolexes and mining shares which nowadays clog my spam filter. And it’s sobering to see how such pernicious weeds can grow from such an innocuous beginning…