« November 2004 | Main | January 2005 »
Socket it to me
Electronics | Dec 29, 04
For the last trip I took on an airplane I had to pack:
A Transformer and cable for my laptop;
A Transformer and cable for my PDA;
A Charger and cable for my digital Camera battery;
Two transformers and plugs for my two cellphones;
A car charger for one of my cellphones;
A download cable for my GPS;
A power cable for my GPS; and
A transformer and cable for my iPod.
That's enough to start a small electronics outlet. And therein lies a story.
First, in days of terrorism, this is a bewildering load of stuff. There is no way that any average agent at a check-in station could have any reasonable idea of what all of the electronics are. It's tough enough for me to understand and I have 50 years of experience with computers. I can only be sympathetic with how difficult it would be for someone untrained in the electronic arts. If there is any serious threat that could be delivered (I'm not sure there is) I'd expect this kind of stuff to be banned if anti-terrorist departments ever get their act together.
Second, there are some much more mundane and practical considerations that have nothing particular to do with travel and/or terrorism. These have to do with the simple activity of plugging in devices in your home. The number of devices that I have that need to be plugged in seems to have grown dramatically in the just the past few years.
Those of you who are old enough might want to think back a few years. If I remember correctly, my first PC had just one major power cord. The display also had a power cord, but there was a socket on the backplane of the computer that fed this and so there was only need to use one wall socket to power the whole thing. By contrast the computer I am using as I write this has separate power cables for:
- the computer,
- the sound system,
- the master display,
- the support display,
- an auxillary storage unit,
- a joystick,
- the cable modem,
- my network hub,
- and the printer,
not to mention any of the support equipment which also shares my desktop with the computer. To handle it I now have a twelve socket power cable to supply the necessary local connections. It's nearly full.
It's nuisance enough just to manage the plugs. What makes the problem worse is that these days it is not uncommon for plug heads to be imbedded directly in transformers which are not only ugly, they are huge and unwieldy. This often means that a single plug will cover two or three sockets, and I am lucky if the plugs mentioned above will even fit in a twelve socket power distribution strip.
Even Apple, which normally gets such high marks for human design, often fails on this front. Their equipment almost invariably looks good, but runs into the same kind of problem. For example, the head of the power train for my iPod is a nice looking little box that often has to be plugged into a wall in such a way that it covers more than one socket. This makes an unnecessary problem in lots of situations.
One must guess that proprietary plugs are a real profit item for the companies that insist on them. They surely aren't in the interest of most of us as consumers. It would be nice for all of us if there could be some decent standardization in this area, but I suppose that will have to await a time when the profits from the proprietary aspects of the current situation dwindle sufficiently that the customer's good can become the driving force.
Posted by david.ness at 12:52 PM | Comments (1)
Steve Jobs: Lord of the Dance
Electronics | Dec 21, 04
...and just about any other form of music, if he has his way. With Apple’s iPod the 'must-have' item this holiday season, Jobs is once again humming his own favorite tune, that being of course the song of proprietary standards. To wit, Apple's new iPod Photo has been released with software that prevents the play of downloads in RealNetwork's Harmony format. Apple has been loath to license its own Fairplay digital rights management (DRM) technology to firms like Real or the recording industry, and of course the iPod dosen't let you play other formats from download sites. Result: if you want any music to come out of those iPod earbuds, you're going to have to rip it from a CD or buy it from iTunes. Hey, who’s your daddy.
Now the odd thing about this strategy is that Apple doesn't own the content – they license those tunes from the recording companies, and as a result make very little from iTunes downloads. Perhaps Jobs hopes the iPod audience will become so large he'll gain leverage on the music houses and be able to lower those licensing fees enough to achieve meaningful earnings from downloads. But for the moment, he's making his green on the iPods themselves. Of course there's some competition out there, notably from some very slick MP3 players like the iRiver iFP-799T, which goes for around $220 and is a lot easier to find right now.
For now it doesn’t matter. Downloads are a small fraction of music sales as compared to CDs (meaning, I suspect, that most iPods are filled with CD rips, not downloads), so the recording industry has limited interest in forcing Apple to share its standard or in putting music out with some universal DRM method. But if people start downloading enough for the industry to care, they may not want Apple to be the only store on the block. In the long run, will consumer infatuation with the elegance of Apple's design really mean they'll submit to the closed world Jobs seems to dream of? Will so many people own iPods that even the content providers will have to sell through Apple on Cupertino's terms? Or, as with the PC back in the day, will Jobs' decision not to let others use his DRM scheme mean a more open standard will take hold, perhaps this time backed by a recording industry which can kill the music at Apple.
Posted by jeffrey.trester at 4:09 PM | Comments (1) | TrackBack
Talking the Walk: Sonywonder Technology Lab
Electronics | Dec 20, 04
I recently visited Sony's NYC Headquarters. The ground floor of the building is a small-scale Metreon-like display area and store(s). (If you haven't been there, Metreon is 350,000 sq feet of space in downtown San Francisco devoted to an entertainment complex, part of which is store-like displays.) There is also a walk-through display area called Sonywonder where you are given the opportunity to `use' some of the technology (Perhaps the name comes from "I Wonder what Sony could have been thinking..."?). I'll review this all in a moment.
But first, a couple of words to qualify (or disqualify) my review. I am not much of a computer-based gamer. I played a little PACman and knocked off a couple of Klingons in the very early stages of each of computer based gaming, but since I've always had a job that kept me at my computer for many too many hours anyway, I've never found the games to be of much interest.
I can also add that I'm no longer 10 years old. If I were, I might have a more charitable view of this. But then, again, if I were I'd probably be more interested in angling my parents to take me to Disneyland rather than go through this rather dull display.
However, I do like to use computers for information storage (particularly my photos and my music) and as a control element in my (largely TV based) entertainment system. Nothing very elaborate, mind you, but I like having 30 or 40 hours of reasonably findable television available.
So, insofar as the "Sonywonder"land is devoted to gamers or 10 year olds, it will miss me. Otherwise, though, I am a pretty good market for their products, typing this review on one of my desktop Sonys, carrying a couple of laptop Sonys, having a reasonably elaborate (but sub-aficianado) home HiFi setup from Sony, an MD walkman or two and other pieces of Sony flotsam and jetsam from previous ages.
There are three pieces of the Sony Headquarters Experience to discuss.
The store was a disappointment to me. It seems much smaller than the one associated with the Metreon in San Francisco. I saw some of the low-line headphones and walkmen there, but have a hard time believing that it is anything like a complete presentation of Sony's line. But perhaps in the rush of a pre-Christmas weekend, the crowds made everything seem smaller, narrower and harder to look at. In any event, I'd expect to see a more interesting display at a J&R or other large volume sales outlet. The Sonywonder struck me as a bit bizzare. First, you wait in line for an elevator which takes you up about 4 stories in the atrium of the building. Coffee is in sight, a giant Spiderman hangs upside down on the wall, but there's no opportunity to investigate Sony products. You just stand there. The elevator takes you up four stories and from there you will gradually walk down ramps for two or three stories. All of this seems to be necessary to accomplish some crowd `control', and to space out the arrivals as some of the steps in the process of going through the `maze' take a considerable time and otherwise backed up lines throughout the exhibit would be unavoidable. Your first offical activity is to get `registered' by creating a picture and voice record that can be used to follow you through the exhibit place. Most of the time all that is done with this is that your picture will occasionally appear on some screen as you wander through the exhibit. I guess I am not Narcissistic enough for this. I'd actually rather see Britney Spears on the screen rather than my own face. I get enough of that shaving in the morning. As one of the many available experiences I did the `Sound Lab'. What it was supposed to be about I'll never know. All I can say is that I managed, along with some of the other visitors who shared the experience with me, to produce a perfectly terrible sounding piece of musical junk for which I kept getting wonderful congratulations about how well I was doing and how wonderful it sounded (from the machine, of course, not from anyone associated with the Philharmonic). If kids have to put up with this kind of barrage of compliments for the terrible junk that they, on occasion, produce, it is no wonder that we witness a decline in `taste' I might add, I guess, that I found the description of what we were supposed to be doing quite incomprehensible. Perhaps there was no point to it. If so, they managed to ommunicate that---at least by example. At the end of all of this you're given a `document' with your name and picture on it. No sound clip, and a reproduction on pretty uninspiring piece of paper. I think I'd rather have had a shot of Britney Spears, Lindsay Lohan, Mischa Barton or whomever. I would have thought that the kids might too---perhaps with a breathy bombshell saying something come hither with your name. Oh well.
I guess this must have all prepared me for the visit to the Qualia part of the store. I don't get that either. Here we have considerable incredibly expensive New York floorspace devoted to displaying (along with TVs you'd see at a Best Buy) three of the current four items in Sony's `Qualia' line. The items I saw were numbers 10, 16 and 17. I know a number 4 exists, but I don't think I saw it. I suppose numbers 11, 12, ... exist too, but I don't have even the vaguest clue of what they are about---the may well exist only in Japan for all I know---so I can only review the three items I saw. And bizzare items they were, too. Headphones One was a set of
headphones. You might ask `What's odd about that?' Well, nothing is odd about that until you look at the price tag and realize that it is not saying $26.00, it is saying $2600.00. (The first listed prices were $3200.00, but as time has passed it has fallen, even with the dollar's collapse) Just let little Johnny get his peanut-butter hands smeared all over that one. But these days it's probably only a fifth of his tuition to grade school anyway. I understand that there is a group headphone aficianados---HeadFi people---who are deeply into headphones, but I rather suspect that they are small in number, and while some of them may be willing to spend huge amounts, it is hard to make up much sales volume out of
items that have prices so far out of scale. MD Player Then there's a $1900.00 MD player. Certainly it's very nice looking. But it looks more designed to sit on a desk than to actually be carried about, and I thought that being carried about was why MD players were so useful. Camera A $4000+ camera completes the list. This looks fine too, but their specs don't seem to indicate that they are really all that wonderful. The camera itself seems oddly conflicted. It is incredibly tiny, but a 2 megapixel camera is nothing special these days, and while the camera itself is tiny, it comes packed in briefcase-sized case, necessary to handle all of the addons that connect it to its world. So where's the market? I haven't got a clue. Certainly only the rich. Given the emphasis on style, one would have to suspect that looking good is an important part of it. None of this stuff looks durable enough to put up with `pro on the battlefield' conditions. None of the specs indicate to me that any normal person will be able to see or hear the differences between what is produced by this equipment and stuff that costs about one-tenth its price. Sony might say: "Sweets to the sweet..." I keep thinking "Have some nuts!"
Posted by david.ness at 5:30 PM | Comments (0)
New Watches from Fossil and Philippe Stark
Watches | Dec 15, 04
Check out these cool new watches from Fossil and Philippe Stark.
The first watch is based on L.E.D. technology. The orange acrylic light pipe digits extrude out of the soft polyurethane strap. Check prices.
The second watch is based on reinterpreting the analog in a digital format. The minimalist LCD hands and seconds float in a flattened Lucite sphere. The second's numerals tick around the perimeter and correspond to the location of a traditional second hand. Check prices.
Posted by david.cost at 2:17 PM | Comments (7)
Hell's Bells
Electronics | Dec 14, 04
At the moment I only have my cellphone and a couple of other devices that "beep" at me. Yet, between the trouble recognizing just what it is that is beeping, and then finding it, it is already a problem. And with each device I get that uses an andible signal the problem gets worse and worse.
And then there's a variant of this problem that you encounter in a room full of Bluetooth. If you're not careful, one device may talk to another without you intending it---or even thinking about it. Sometimes this produces results that are difficult to manage. It directly suggests that our signal space is filling up with both signals we can hear and signals that our devices hear and process.
For example, I made the mistake of buying a Bluetooth phone unit for my land line. After I had screwed things up while getting it working the first time, I decided that it would be best to simply reset the thing to factory conditions and start over. When I tried, the handset recognized my computer---which has a Bluetooth keyboard and mouse---and wouldn't find the land line base unit. And the base unit needed a handset already talking to it so that it could be reset. I had to call the manufacturer in desperation, and he basically told me to shut down all my computer gear so that the only signal in play was the base unit. I asked (jokingly) if that meant I had to shut down my computer every time my phone rang. The tech I was talking to was not amused. Perhaps he had heard the question before. Several times. Fortunately, once the handset had been linked to the base I was able to restart the computers without any particular difficulty.
But imagine a normal person in this situation. In order to connect a new phone---a task which used to only involve plugging an RJ-11 cable into the wall---one first has to coordinate and make peace with all of my Bluetooth devices present in the environment. Bad enough if there is one such device. If there are two, or more, the task can quickly become so complex that the best thing to do seems to be to return the phone and get one that just plugs in to a regular jack.
So I need to limit my bells and to simplify my world. It's fine if my phone has a different ring for each function and for each person, but it's only fine if I live alone and have only one cel line. Multiple cel lines and multiple people produce a bewildering audible environment. Things are tough, even when they work. And if something goes wrong, and no longer works, forget it. You might as well start over.
Remember the days that the most complicated diagnostic gear that we needed was a battery tester? No longer. What I want for Christmas now is a "beep translator and finder" along with some rather complicated signal tracking and logging devices. I don't think anyone makes these yet, but when they do I'll sure be a customer if the prices are reasonable.
Hear me Santa?
Posted by david.ness at 12:55 PM | Comments (0)
NVIDIA and Sony working on the PS3
Video Games | Dec 10, 04
On December 6, 2004 NVIDIA broke the silence that they have been working with Sony on the GPU for Sony's next generation computer entertainment system. We all know this to be the PlayStation 3.
In an interview over at IGN Entertainment they got to ask David Roman of NVIDIA a few questions.
Mr. Roman informed them that NVIDIA has been working on aspects of Sony Computer Entertainment Inc.'s next generation system for the past 2 years and that the GPU for the PS3 will be a custom version of our next generation GPU.
Sony also announced back in September that the PS3 will be using the Blu-ray storage format. Blu-ray Disc (BD) is a next generation high-density optical disc format that enables recording and playback of digital high-definition (HD) video signals and programs. BD-ROM format has a huge memory size of 54 GB (dual layer, single side), which is 6 times larger than that of DVD-ROM, and has the potential of becoming an ideal medium to distribute next generation entertainment content from movies and music to computer applications. Standardization of this format is currently underway lead by the Blu-ray Disc Association (BDA).
Microsoft and Nintendo will have their hands full with this one. But it will be interesting to see how everything will pan out over the next year.
Posted by tom.salvey at 11:10 AM | Comments (0)
Can Dell Compete with the China Price?
Computers | Dec 8, 04
So the Chinese PC-maker Lenovo is buying IBM's PC business, which will make the firm number three in the market with about an 8% share. But the real issue is what happens to PC prices and firms now that the PC is increasingly a commodity. As the world has seen, commodity manufacture tends to migrate to the cheapest labor market, and a movement of the personal computer hardware business to China would be just the latest example. Indeed, manufacturers in this country often complain of competing against the so-called "China price"; the price offered by Chinese firms availing themselves of super-low wages in their own country. So what might the Lenovo-IBM deal mean for consumers? Expect further downward price pressure on PCs. And for Dell, HP and friends? Unless they can make some case for "value-added" pricing driven by service and styling, they'll experience ferocious competition, and, at best, razor-thin margins.
Posted by jeffrey.trester at 5:20 AM | Comments (6) | TrackBack
Snow White and the Dwarfs
Computers | Dec 6, 04
In the 1970s it was common to refer to the players in the Computer Industry as 'Snow White and the 7 Dwarfs'. IBM was 'Snow White' and the 'Dwarfs' were DEC, Univac, NCR, ... One-by-one the dwarfs pretty much died, imploded or were (shudder) 'merged' to be replace by a second generation of firms, Compaq, AT&T, ... as PCs began to have an impact on the marketplace.
This brought a short period of time when pundits and seers would openly wonder if IBM was going to so dominate the world of computation that there would be no serious rivals left. We would have an essential monopoly of supply, and while some small specialist firms might still sell a few machines, the bulk of the business would belong to IBM.
It didn't work out that way.
Two funny things happend on the way to that scenario. First, the PC market began to grow at an astonishing rate. What were hobbyst toys and workbench technology in the late 1970s became, no small thanks to IBM, serious business machines by the early 1980s. Their use was still pretty much limited to assistants and secretaries (Debate about whether 'managers' would ever have computers on their desks was still a common item in the press) but nevertheless usage grew and gained momentum.
Second, as the quality level of some of the then off-brand suppliers began to rise, the mystique of 'blue boxes' gradually wore away, and by the middle 1980s the PCs produced by what had been the off-brand suppliers often became better known for quality than the IBM PCs that they started to replace. I had many an early Dell Computer which I would have rated as 'technologically superior' to the parallel IBM products.
And as the software that drove the machines moved from a thinly disguised version of Kildahl's CP/M into DOS, Bill Gates first began to prick the skin of IBM, and then continued by taking huge bites of the meat of its profitability. And as time passed more and more of that profitability moved from the building of the hardware --- increasingly left to Asian manufacturers and assemblers --- to the software where it was lawyers, not designers, that were the most important instruments in assuring profitability.
In addition, the hardware had increasingly been concentrated in two major architectures: Motorola chips supported Apples and Intel chips supported PCs. Apple, with a fractional market share (5% and tending toward less) concentrated on particular markets largely associated with 'the arts' (image and sound processing) while PC architectures covered 'the rest of the world.' There were a few other players, but they tended to be highly specialized and had little impact on the overall marketplace.
All of this has made the production and marketing of PCs more of a commodity-like market as each day passed. And the more commodity-like the market became, the less profitability there was to be shared among the producers. Most machines with US labels were actually built in Taiwan or Singapore or in other places that had highly skilled labor forces that were available for a fraction of what their cost would have been in the US.
So all of this leads up to a decision by IBM, in no small measure the very firm responsible for the `PC revolution' to now make a decision to sell that business. Whether this is a wise decision or not isn't going to be debated here. Instead, I think it might be interesting to contemplate the different kinds of buyers who are --- or at least should be --- thinking about buying that business.
There are too many companies who might be interested to look at each of the possibilities in detail. However, I think we can concentrate our focus on four broad groups of potential buyers. For each of these groups buying IBM's PC business would or might perform a different function. Depending on economic forces, the value to some of the firms might be rather dramatically different than that to others. Let's take a look:
Buy Market Share
The most straightforward, and therefore the most boring, ploy would be to have Sony, HP, or Dell buy the business. This seems unlikely, but with reputations at stake, I don't think it should be ruled out of hand without at least giving passing consideration. Fiorina at HP, for example, may find herself in dire need of taking some dramatic step, and this might be one such step.
However, it is no longer clear that in 'buying the business' you buy much loyalty. HP has already found this out with Compaq. At the moment their commercial line is reasonably confused by overlap between HP products and some legacy Compaq devices, and adding a line of legacy IBM products would probably not help clear up any of these confusions.
The same might be said, though less strongly, for Michael Dell. He might like to 'have IBM for lunch', and his product line is certainly stodgy, even if effective. IBMs productline might be a better complement to his line than to HPs.
Finally, Sony has become a 'design oriented' PC supplier, but I see less reason for them to be interested, unless there are some 'ego' considerations at play in Tokyo. If so, I wouldn't know about them, but I rather suspect that Sony would be unlikely to want to tie up their capital with this investment at this time.
Go International
Current speculation focuses on 'China' being a possible buyer. This would make some sense. First, cost-concious engineering considerations are very much a part of the normal production process in China. Second, labor costs are very low, and would allow China to make a reasonable source of international currency earnings out of some of this labor if they became a major player in this marketplace. In this view, China would be buying jobs rather than a marketplace.
One further consideration should not be neglected. China might like to become its own sole-source for computer hardware. One of the most difficult tasks in an open PC and Internet world is keeping any semblance of control on what PCs are used for, and how they manage the flow of information. Were China to do something as simple as put 'label' chips in each PC, software might easily make use of such capabilites to manage much tighter control over information flow.
Western firms have been largely prevented from doing this because of competition. But a single supplier as large as China might decide to make use of this, and other more elaborate kinds, of related technology. True, westerners wouldn't have to buy the machines that were equipped with such controls, but if your choice is between a $2,000 machine without such controls and a $1,000 machine with controls that you didn't much care about anyway, I can well imagine cuting costs to overwhelm ideological arguments.
Take a Bite
An amusing prospect would be to have Apple take a bite of IBM. Apple's market share has been stagnant at about 3% for years now. While the company has done very well, particularly with the iPod, its PC-level sales have hardly budged. And with the growth of the iPod business and its potential follow-ons, more and more of the profitability of Apple seems to be coming from the 96% of the world that are not primary Apple users than from the 4% who are.
Whether there would be any real advantage to owning IBMs PC line remains to be seen. Aside from the fact that IBM's 'basic black' contrasts nicely with Apple's 'pure white' motif, IBM has almost a high enough design component to fit into an Apple portfolio.
And then there's ego. One would just have to guess that Steve Jobs might enjoy owning IBMs PC business. With his cash, and cash flow, there might be no small amount of pleasure in having that little two-man operation started in that infamous garage end up owning a major business component of one of the world's largest companies.
It might also give Bill Gates a small pause for thought. As Apple has absorbed Unix technology, it has become increasingly viable as a supplier to core businesses. Its penetration into that marketplace is still quite insignificant, but adding the IBM architecture to this picture might provide a sufficient corpus of strength to even tackle Gates' dominance of the software market place, and thus really give Windows a run for the money.
Support Currently Growing Markets
Finally, we are still looking for the 'killer application' that will become the spread-sheet of the next generation. It is not unreasonable to suggest that spreadsheets really created the hard core center of the PC market. Lotus 1-2-3 probably sold more early computers than anything else that the hardware did. That huge success has never been followed by another, no matter how hard we have been looking for it.
Now there are at least two contenders for that role. One is the PC as a core communications device, and the other is the PC in its role as the possible focus of the personal entertainment world.
Both of these are important marketplaces, each worthy of analysis in its own right. We don't have the time or the space to do that right here and right now, but it is at least worth thinking about in terms of a possible IBM sale. Both Sony and HP have started to make commitments in both of these spaces, and Dell is following on in what seems to be a halting way --- perhaps in need of just what IBM might be able to provide.
Once the sale takes place, we'll be able to focus more time and energy on its specific influences. For this time, however, while we await the direction dictated by the actual sale, it is at least interesting to contemplate some of the paths that might be taken.
Posted by david.ness at 4:43 PM | Comments (2)
