MP attacks Microsoft for extortionate pricing of school software licences

Eastern Daily News report on MP Bob Blizzard’s Parliamentary Question to an Education minister about why schools apparently pay more than colleges and universities.

Good Salon article about Palladium

Will online customer service quickly become an automated activity?

John Robb thinks it can. “Check out the incarnations of the Alice Bot (the engine can be downloaded in multiple forms).  Then check out the animated 2D pictures available via the Pulse Veeper.   Now check out the quality of Loquendo’s text to speech engine.  The art of the interaction would be to create a set of responses that cover all classes of customer service inquiries (suprising easy I would suspect given the time I spent doing something similar at my last job), enable access to customer account and inventory data, and combine the three different programs detailed above for an integrated experience. 

After this is done, provide data-driven flash animations of actions taken by the automated customer service rep.  For example: 1) making a credit to an account, 2) transfer of funds, 3) selection of an item for purchase, 4) instructions on how to assemble a product, and 5) instructions on how to send back an item.   Visual animated display of complex actions or info is extremely important for retention. 

In thinking about this, customer service may not be the appropriate place to apply this technology.    E-learning may be a better application.  A free form, seemingling intelligent Q&A bot that incorporates prerecorded bits of audio/animation to walk you through modules of instruction would be very cool.  Add voice to text so you can verbally interrupt a presentation to ask a question and it gets eerie.  Given that home schooling is a large market that is growing by 15% a year, and the basic modules of instruction are well understood, this could be extremely profitable at a low cost of development.

It could also be done in an app that runs on your desktop.”

It could also be useful in my TSCP project. Hmmmm….

Lovely, lyrical meditation about Napster (RIP) by Tom Matrullo.

The trouble with (modern) journalism

Extremely thoughtful New York Review of Books review by Russell Baker of five books on the parlous state of modern journalism — especially the way it has been perverted by corporate needs. “The history of journalism is quite clear about what makes the difference between great and mediocre papers: it is the quality of their ownership. Reporters and editors may disagree, but no matter how splendid the quality of an editorial staff, a publisher too timid, too indifferent, or too chintzy to support it will produce a timid, indifferent, and, at best, second-rate paper.”

James Fallows on the Internet bubble and the Enron/WorldCom business
The Atlantic exchange.

“But everything has changed because of the corporate collapses too. It is remarkable how rapidly a number of public assumptions have shifted. It was not even a year ago that The Industry Standard magazine went under. One year before that, the Standard (which covered the Internet industries, and for which I wrote a column), had sold more ad pages in a single year than any other magazine in history. To people outside the “new economy,” the Standard’s boom and bust was a symbol of the hubris and delusion of the Internet bubble years. Yes, America as a whole might suffer as the failure of dot-com firms drove the NASDAQ down. But last summer, the prevailing reaction from people in the “normal” economy was: hah hah hah! You phonies have been brought back to earth!…”

My Observer column about how to keep search engines honest is on the Web.

Music labels planning to go after individual file-sharers
MSNBC story.

“Major music companies are preparing to mount a broad new attack on unauthorized online song-swapping. The campaign would include suits against individuals who are offering the largest troves of songs on peer-to-peer services….”

The problem of Microsoft

Uncomfortable thoughts department. I’ve been pondering — under pressure from a terrific essay by Scoble — about the problem posed by Microsoft. It’s easy to slip into the ‘Evil Empire’ view of Gates & Co. (and I do slip into it from time to time), but really it’s not a fruitful way to understand what’s going on. Microsoft is a tough, highly aggressive, company, but not uniquely so. I guess that anyone who came up against John D. Rockefeller’s Standard Oil in the early 1900s would have reckoned that was a uniquely aggressive, ruthless company. Ditto for Disney. The truth is — as Scoble points out — that there are some very good reasons why Microsoft has become as dominant as it is. In the early days of the PC, for example, many of us wanted a technical standard — any standard — that would liberate us from the curse of incompatible software and document formats. The rise of MS-DOS and (later) WIndows gave us that. We just weren’t very good at forward thinking — at extrapolating what ownership of that technical standard would lead to.

Secondly, Microsoft hasn’t become as successful as it is solely by forcing its products on customers. Indeed you could argue — and Nathan Myhrvold for one has argued — that much of the feature bloat which disfigures Microsoft software comes from user demand, particularly the demands of corporate customers. Microsoft is very good at listening to its customers.

Which brings us to Palladium. One way of looking at it is to see it as Gates’s bid for global domination. Another way is to see it as a response to corporate demand for more security and control over their employees.

There is a public policy dilemma here too. On the one hand, we want to preserve the unique possibilities for innovation introduced by the open architecture of the Net and the PC. On the other hand we have to face the terrifying possibility that the communications infrastructure of our societies is incredibly vulnerable to attack — whether by script kiddies, terrorists or rogue states. Of course the security deficiencies of Microsoft software (especially the raw socket capabilities of Windows XP) greatly contribute to this vulnerability. But even if we remove that from the picture, we are left with the awkward reality that we have a terribly vulnerable infrastructure. That’s the problem to which the Trusted Computing Platform Alliance (TCPA) and Palladium are proposed solutions.

News.Com: Copyright fight comes to an end. Hacker publication 2600 magazine won’t appeal a ruling prohibiting it from linking to code that can crack copy protections on DVDs, bringing a closely watched digital copyright fight with Hollywood to an end Wednesday. [Tomalak’s Realm]