It’s hard to explain to someone who didn’t live through it how transformation technology has been. When I was a child a computer was something mysterious. My Dad has managed to work his way up from the shop floor of the shipyard where he worked and into the planning office.
One evening he broad home some computer paper. I was fascinated by the the way the paper hinged on perforations and had tear off side edges that allowed it to be pulled through the printer with plastic sprockets connecting through holes in the paper.
My Dad used to compile and print off work orders using an ICL mainframe computer that was timeshared by all the shipyards that were part of British Shipbuilders.
I used the paper for years for notes and my childhood drawings. It didn’t make me a computer whiz. I never had a computer when I was at school. My school didn’t have a computer lab. I got to use Windows machines a few times in a regional computer labs. I still use what I learned in Excel spreadsheets now.
My experience with computers started with work and eventually bought my own secondhand Mac. Cut and paste completely changed the way I wrote. I got to use internal email working for Corning and internet connectivity when I went to university. One of my friends had a CompuServe account and I was there when he first met his Mexican wife on an online chatroom, years before Tinder.
Leaving college I set up a Yahoo! email address. I only needed to check my email address once a week, which was fortunate as internet access was expensive. I used to go to Liverpool’s cyber cafe with a friend every Saturday and showed him how to use the internet. I would bring any messages that I needed to send pre-written on a floppy disk that also held my CV.
That is a world away from the technology we enjoy now, where we are enveloped by smartphones and constant connectivity. In some ways the rate of change feels as if it has slowed down compared to the last few decades.
I, Cringely Red Hat takes over IBM – I, Cringely – interesting Cringely Red Hat analysis. The IBM buyout of Red Hat is about cultural rejuvenation. In return, Red Hat gets scale. More related content by Cringely on IBM here. Red Hat is one of a few businesses that have managed to build themselves on open source and have a success exit. Open Source Software is a difficult category to build a successful enterprise of business of the ilk of Red Hat.
iOS vs. Windows – Input and Office – Radio Free Mobile – no real surprise here. One only has to go back to the late 1970s / early 1980s experience of the HP 150 mini computer with a touch screen to see the productivity issue that the Microsoft Surface represents. Keyboards work, and they work better now that more people are reasonable touch typists. When you pair them with a GUI, you want the cursor to be controlled from close to the keyboard. You’re more likely to have touchpads rather than touching the screen. Tablets are still interesting as consumption devices, the question is what the market is?
Oath will soon be rebranded as Verizon Media Group – The Verge – what is more interesting is how Verizon changes management approach (presumably after losing Tim Armstrong). It no longer feels ‘media industry’. It is interesting that Verizon has put its own name on the business. If it fails it will adversely affect the corporate brand. Oath gave them a bit of brand space. More related content here.
Snapchat Lenses are coming to the desktop and Twitch streams | TechRadar – integration with Twitch will fuel further speculation on an imminent Amazon buy-out, even though it doesn’t make that much sense on paper. Twitch does start to look as if it has similar capabilities to Chinese live streaming social selling platforms.
Ermenegildo Zegna now looks to China for fashion’s vanguard, not the US — Quartzy – Ermenegildo Zegna, grandson of the brand’s founder and current CEO of the group, explained at the WWD Apparel + Retail CEO Summit in New York yesterday (Oct. 30). “Now we test new things in China, and then if it works, we bring them around the world.” – the problem with this approach is threefold:
What about the Italian heritage and expertise that one buys Zegna for?
Chinese sizes are considerably different to westerners
Chinese consumers lack the kind of soft power of Koreans or Japanese and the innovations may not travel that well
IBM’s Old Playbook – Stratechery by Ben Thompson – interesting analysis about the Red Hat acquisition. Red Hat is as much a culture and business model injection as an acquisition for IBM. Of course it could all go wrong if IBM internal realpolitik kicks in and smothers the transformation.
Brandwatch presentations channel – slides from NYK London 2018 are well worth looking at from a marketing data and analytics perspective.
Facebook: the court of King Mark | Financial Times – Facebook shareholders should be alarmed about Mr Zuckerberg’s insularity, he adds. “Zuckerberg’s absolute control can increasingly be seen as Facebook’s Achilles heel.” – Is this even news? Zuckerberg’s control has been baked in since the IPO. His poor judgement is also exceptionally well documented. Sony believes it is a manufacturer— and innovator and creator of consumer electronics. It still employs fantastically talented engineers, but that doesn’t seem to be enough. Manufacturing allows copying so fast that there is not longer an easy way to get blue water between you and your competitors
Enron: even now is a byword for dodgy dealing and corruption. Back in the summer of 2000, Enron was a large respectable corporation. Three people came over from Portland, Oregon to London. They looked to pioneer a new way of thinking about broadband capacity and they came to Europe to do peering agreements and business deals. They were ‘Enron Broadband Services’.
The whole thing was moving at ‘internet speed’, which is a euphemism for crazy fast and with money flittered everywhere. So I ended up working agency side arranging everything from pre-paid mobile phones to a dinner for 150 internet geeks at The Hempel – a luxury hotel with a minimalist restaurant that used to be in Bayswater.
Enron acquired Portland General Electric (PGE) back in the mid-1990s. This was part of Enron’s play in deregulated electricity markets. With PGE also came an optical fibre network. The company had been dropping fibre into the ground every time it did reinstatements. Enron then built and leased optical fibre from the likes of Level3.
While I was trying to get these guys in front of the European telecoms press I was hearing from my media contacts that Level3 were actively briefing against them, saying that their business model was full of shit. They were right it was. Enron Broadband Services depended on their ‘Enron Intelligent Network’ a set of proprietary technologies that was supposed to prioritise traffic for quality of service and commercial traffic reasons.
Like many things at the time the technology was less developed than one would believe. Much of the functionality replicated existing technology such as MPLS. IBM developed their e-commerce offering on the back of ‘suckered’ customers like Boxman.com. Technology was a sketchy business at the time; but it seemed to matter less as the world was being changed. This was pre-9/11 and Gap was convincing many people that khakis were cool.
https://youtu.be/OLSjcGjLQ7s
In the case of IBM, they seem to be still doing similar practices two decades later; this time with their Watson machine learning offering.
The problem was that the ‘Enron Intelligent Network‘ was a relatively minor sin compared to everything else that was going on in the corporation.
What happened to the companies mentioned in the Enron slides?
ARC
Atom Films – Founded in 1998, Atom was bought in 2006 by MTV Networks, Google had considered buying it when it eventually purchased YouTube. Eventually it was absorbed into Comedy Central
Avici Systems – was hit hard by the dot com bust. It eventually pulled out of the core network router business and changed its name to Soapstone Networks
Ciena – Ciena still exists as a networking equipment and software company. It managed to ride out the dot com bust by diversifying its portfolio of networking equipment
Cisco Systems – continues to be one of the world’s largest companies in networking equipment
Compaq – never managed to fully integrate its acquisition of the Digital Equipment Corporation (DEC) and ended up being acquired by Hewlett-Packard. In 2015; Hewlett Packard split into two businesses. HP held the PC, printers and related businesses. Hewlett Packard Enterprise contained business software (subsequently merged with Micro Focus), services business (merged with Computer Sciences Corporation) and a hardware business.
CountryCool.com – started as a country music site and seems to have morphed into an analogue of Comedy Central
The Drew Carey Show – ABC situation comedy that finished its run in 2004
EasyStreet – ISP that is still going, mostly reselling other vendors products
Epoch Internet – was the first tier one ISP on the west coast when it was founded in 1994 and played a crucial role in some of the first commercial peering points. It was eventually acquired by MegaPath in 2004. MegaPath in turn is owned by Fusion Connect, who were recently acquired by Birch Communications Inc. as part of a further consolidation of business ISPs in the US
Firstworld
FlashNet – FlashNet now only exist as a legacy domain that AT&T supports for customers. FlashNet Communications was founded in 1995 as a Fort Worth, Texas-based internet service provider. It had an IPO on the NASDAQ in March 1999 and was acquired by Prodigy Communications in November that year. Prodigy was acquired by AT&T in September 2001
FYINet.com – FYINet was a Houston, Texas based company that provided training materials on CD ROM about networking technology. They then moved their content to the web and promoted their 3D animation and interactive design capabilities. They seem to have disappeared sometime around 2002.
GST Telecommunications
GTE Internetworking – GTE Internetworking became Genuity when its parent company merged with Bell Atlantic to found Verizon. It was eventually acquired by Level3, which was in turn acquired by CenturyLink 2017
Inktomi- Inktomi was one of the leading providers of web caching for both content and streaming. It became a key provider for early content delivery networks. It was eventually acquired by Yahoo! in 2003. Yahoo! was acquired by Verizon and merged into Aol as part of Oath
iStream TV encoding – iStream continues to provide solutions for both video on demand and live streaming. Turner acquired a majority share in the business during 2015
latinsoccer.net – Mexican based site that covered Latin American football news. It featured both video and audio which wasn’t the norm for the time. According to Archive.org’s Wayback Machine, the site didn’t survive the dot com bust
Lucent Technologies – acquired in term by Alcatel and Nokia
MShow.com – Chicago-based Mshow provided interactive broadcast services. It was founded in 1986, had one round of funding in 2000 and is no longer in business
NetRail – provided backbone networks and hosting to ISPs. It was acquired by Cogent Communications Group in 2001
NextVenue – specialised in video and audio streaming, it was acquired by iBEAM Broadcasting – a satellite networking company. iBEAM went under in 2002, its assets were acquired by Williams Communications LLC. Williams is now owned by Level3
Oracle – Oracle remains a leading provider of enterprise software
OrcoNet.com – was a US ISP, eventually filed for chapter 7 bankruptcy in California
pdq.net – was an ISP. It was acquired by Internet America. Internet America was acquired by JAB Broadband and folded into Rise Broadband
Q4i.com – defunct online brokerage with video component for independent brokers
RCN – Boston-based ISP that has gone on to become the sixth largest cable and broadband provider in the US
rmi.net – Rocky Mountain Internet was an early provider of dial-up connectivity. It moved into e-business for SMEs and eventually became part of EarthLink, which went on to consolidate with Windstream
showdigital – provided broadband to the hospitality industry. Its assets were acquired in 2001 by STSN
Sun Microsystems – Sun Microsystems never managed to recover from the dot com bust and was eventually acquired by Oracle. Oracle now sells its own brand of hardware that can run Solaris UNIX – Solaris is now owned by Oracle who continues to maintain it alongside a distribution of Linux
Sycamore Networks – Sycamore Networks was wound up by its shareholders in early 2013. During the internet boom it had a market capitalisation of $44.8 billon. It was worth just $64 million when wound up.
TeleCommute Solutions – Atlanta based ISP that specialised in providing workforce connectivity to companies. Crunchbase lists it as closed
Telescan – founded in 1982 as a provider of stock charting tools, it eventually became part of TD Ameritrade’s Thinkorswim
TotalCricket
USWest – one of the original ‘baby Bells’. It merged with Qwest in 2000. Qwest was acquired by CenturyLink in 2011
Verio – founded as an ISP in Denver. Acquired by NTT of Japan in 2000
VillageNet – small Canadian ISP which is still running
Apple reportedly shifting more iPhone XR orders to Foxconn from Pegatron, says paper – Pegatron’s production has been affected by a lower-than-expected yield rate and shortages of workers at its plants in China – the manpower issue at Pegatron is very interesting and implies a possible rift between the factories and local government. Historically local governments have gone out of their way to facilitate large Taiwanese employers China has just begun to see a decline in worker numbers overall in its population. Pegatron used to be part of ASUSTek. When that business reorganised its OEM manufacturing business became what we now know as Pegatron.
Deepfakes web α | Generate your own Deepfakes – Japanese currency denominated service to create your own deep fakes. This service looks as if its designed for the curious, rather than virtual revenge porn creators, the accessibility of this capability brings with it a variety of issues
Smart cities — too clever by half? | Financial Times – hell is other people’s technology. Smart cities don’t have the attendant ethical considerations because that would dull their ‘smartness’. In addition law enforcement would prefer to have maximum choices on data. It was interesting that China Mobile’s key use case for 5G was urban crime fighting in the first adverts that they ran.
SPC Justice Data Service Platform on phone fraud in China
Spike in fraud cases as criminals adopt illegal software – Chinadaily.com.cn – A report released Monday by the SPC’s China Justice Big Data Service Platform said the number of online and telecom fraud cases concluded by Chinese courts rose more than 70 percent year-on-year in 2017. The report did not include exact figures on how many cases were heard in 2016 and 2017.”Not content with cheating people out of money with spam calls or texts, fraudsters have started using WeChat and illegal number-disguising software to deceive victims,” it said – SPC is China’s Supreme People’s Court. The SPC has documented mainland China scams. But these scams are also being run by Chinese in other countries like the Philippines and Thailand. More related content here.
For safety’s sake, we must slow innovation in internet-connected things – MIT Technology Review – Bruce Schneier points out the security issues surround the Internet of Things (IoT). Dystopian futures are here. We are already seeing bot nets built on IoT products and smart appliances. The UK has been looking at legislating against default passwords on IoT devices, which is a good start to harden the IoT
Hyundai Blue Link connected cars
Hyundai car company advert for Blue Link looks like an episode of Black Mirror. Teenagers if you are going to get your parents to buy a car for you, think carefully. Go for a cheaper, older ‘dumb’ vehicle with no Bluetooth stereo and really shitty fuel economy. Don’t get a new car that will grass you up. it will may also dime out adult drivers as well.