Date: Thu, 16 May 2002 09:10:31 +0200 From: Nils Holland <nils@daemon.tisys.org> To: Terry Lambert <tlambert2@mindspring.com> Cc: freebsd-chat@freebsd.org Subject: Re: The road ahead? Message-ID: <20020516091031.A2259@daemon.tisys.org> In-Reply-To: <3CE34A8B.7D999E2C@mindspring.com>; from tlambert2@mindspring.com on Wed, May 15, 2002 at 10:58:35PM -0700 References: <20020516004909.A9808@daemon.tisys.org> <15586.61471.456290.764885@guru.mired.org> <20020515211922.J1282@darkstar.gte.net> <3CE34A8B.7D999E2C@mindspring.com>
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On Wed, May 15, 2002 at 10:58:35PM -0700, Terry Lambert stood up and spoke: > > In a market where everyone is falling over each other to bring out WAP, > > why don't good features ever show up? > > Ah, an easy one! > > Because the idiots behind WAP look at it as a means of pushing > content at you, the same way they look at the Internet as a > means of pushing content at you, rather than as a person-to-person > communications medium. We have another two things that should be mentioned here: 1) The fact that computers these days are sold today mor or less like normal appliances doesn't make things much better. Today, these doesn't seem to be much of a difference between a computer and a TV set. Serious companies (Microsoft, for example) seem to think that they have to produce something that you turn on and then information comes out of it. This brings us to the second thing: 2) The Internet in fact was very much different from television when initially invented: It allowed people to communicate with one another. It allowed people (and companies) to put up places of information (=web sites), which were always meant to be an interactive experience. As time goes by, however, the Internet seems to be mutating into "another TV": It's being commercialized and (from the content point of view) ruled by a bunch of big companies, just as is true for TV. The fact that initially made the 'net interesting, i.e. allowing people from all over the world to communicate, and allowing everyone to become a "publisher", no longer seems to interest anyone. I guess by now the Internet is like TV with a whole lot of home-shopping stations ;-) Another thing I'd like to mention is that I guess the Internet is successful because it's free. As such, I remember that a while ago all the world seemed to swap music via Napster. Then Napster was closed down, and started to come back, using the Internet to seel online music for money. I find this idea a little strange, as I don't think Napster was successfull because it made music available via the Internet, but because this music was *free*. On the other hand, if people now had to pay in order to download music from the 'Net, they might as well buy the CD. In addition, if we'd turn the concept around, i.e. selling Napster music for mony and making CDs available for free, everything would be reversed, so that everyone would get the CDs. This seems to prove that the popular thing about Napster was *not* that it "worked over the Internet", but that the music it provides was free. As such, I don't think business plans that want to make money from the Internet could be very successful. Only imagine if you'd have to pay a monthly fee for every (commercial site) you visit, or for every document you download at such a site. I guess that would highly decrease the popularity of the web, yet I guess there are at least some commercial content providers that would like to charge you money for accessing their stuff... Greetings Nils -- Nils Holland <nils@daemon.tisys.org> Ti Systems - http://www.tisys.org Addicted to computing since 1987 High on FreeBSD since 1996 To Unsubscribe: send mail to majordomo@FreeBSD.org with "unsubscribe freebsd-chat" in the body of the message
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