http://adage.com/mediaworks/article?article_id=137088
How the $0 Netbook Might Just Help Save the Media Industry
Information Wants to Be Free; Now Hardware Does, Too. And That Could Be a Very Good Thing Indeed (((it kills me that it's an ad guy saying all this)))
by Simon Dumenco
Published: June 08, 2009
Here's why I'm suddenly hopeful about the media industry: Because the tech industry is screwed too.
OK, let me explain. (((This should be pretty good.)))
It's considered a truism that "information wants to be free" – a reality, aided and abetted by technology, that's destroying traditional media models. But it's increasingly turning out that technology itself wants to be as free as information. To get personal about it, your computer wants to be free! Your software wants to be free! (((Heresy! I hope you're not telling us that the ultimate cyberpunk slogan of 1984 has become a reality in our lifetimes.)))
To give you some background, in late 2007, I tested the Eee PC, a mini laptop from Taiwanese laptop maker Asus. At the time, the "netbook" moniker hadn't quite congealed around this emerging category of sub-sub-notebooks, so when I wrote a column in January 2008 about my experience with the 2-lb. wonder, I didn't even know what to call it. (((I've given up organized "trendspotting" and nowadays I just go to places where "people don't know what to call stuff." It works great!)))
But I knew then it was going to change everything. The $300 machine, I wrote, "has me contemplating nothing less than The End of Microsoft." That's because I tested a version that was Microsoft-software-free – it had a simple customized interface built around Linux (the popular open-source operating system) and was obviously set up to encourage users to compute on the "cloud," using free web-based services such as Gmail, Google Docs, Facebook, etc. I totally didn't miss Microsoft's balky operating system or its pricey apps, because I was mostly using my new little buddy as a front-end to the internet (sort of like an oversize iPhone, with a real keyboard) rather than computing locally on my hard drive. (((Maybe it's not the end of Microsoft, but the end of "netbooks," henceforth to be known as "LowCostSmallNotebookPCswithWindowsBing!" )))
http://gadgets.boingboing.net/2009/06/03/microsoft-wants-to-r.html
In fact, as the success of the Eee PC inspired basically every hardware maker to join the netbook fray, it turned out that Microsoft, which feared getting cut entirely out of this emerging market, had no choice but to offer hardware makers a bargain-basement version of its old operating system, Windows XP, because Windows Vista was way too bloated to run on netbooks. (Microsoft can charge manufacturers about $25 for the right to pre-install Windows XP on a netbook vs. $60 to $70 for Vista on a traditional laptop.)
In April, more than a year after I wrote that "End of Microsoft" column, Ars Technica published a widely linked story, "Microsoft earnings drop as netbooks take chunk of PC sales." And The New York Times finally got around to dissecting the phenomenon with a big story headlined "Light and Cheap, Netbooks Are Poised to Reshape PC Industry." Microsoft, the Times declared, "is particularly vulnerable, since many of the new netbooks use Linux software instead of Windows." (Nothing like getting your news 16 months late from the newspaper of record.) ((("Newspaper of record"? In a world of free software *and* hardware? How can such a thing be?)))
Microsoft keeps on insisting that the next version of Windows will run well on netbooks. We'll see. (((I've met a lot of Microsoft people in my day, and they all have IQs of about a zillion. If Microsoft is gonna perish like General Motors, then it probably means that intelligence is basically useless as an organizing social principle under capitalism. If "information is free" and "hardware is free," why does "business" have to run off to some long-tail niche where they supposedly make money? How? I'm thinking we really kinda have to let go here. We decide that a lot of vital human activities are not "business," that maybe "business" is not the business of society, but an eccentric niche activity that ought to be carried out by a rather small merchant class. The rest of us just, you know, hook our netbooks up to the sun and hang out chattering on Twitter.)))
http://live.pege.org/2009-intersolar/mini-home-system.htm
(((Then there's also the pressing issue of some free food and shelter, but, given free
Internet and free computers, I'm thinking a free tin-roofed digital-favela shack
and some homegrown tomatoes can't be all that tough.)))
What should really terrify Microsoft, though, is not Linux but ... yes, Google. Last week at a computer trade show in Taiwan, Asus and Acer revealed that they're working on launching netbooks that run on Android, the free operating system Google originally created for cellphones. (((Like an operating system matters now? I sat through that hour and a half Google Wave video. It's like you're creating an entire Facebook system and just throwing it at somebody. Plus Wave has got more room for plug-ins than a battalion of Swiss Army Knives. You can do pretty much anything you want with a Google Wave. You open a Google Wave and it's hard to understand why you would ever see your desktop OS again.)))
As for hardware makers, well, they're as screwed as Microsoft. Because even though netbooks are a "hot" category, prices are inevitably trending downward as competition heats up. Dell, for instance, makes terrific netbooks – but they generally sell for under $300, and there's not a lot of room for profit at that price. And in this recession, cheap netbooks are cannibalizing traditional, higher-margin laptop sales. No surprise that Dell just announced a 63% first-quarter earnings plunge. (((Well, cheap doesn't mean "free" but... well, as Chris Anderson likes to say, if it gets marginally cheap it's practically free. Check out these cellphone components lying around in the street on a mat downtown in Torino.)))
http://www.flickr.com/photos/brucesterling/3439395320/
By now you're probably wondering how any of this could possibly make me optimistic in any way. (((I am in fact wondering that, yes.))) Well, I'll explain, but first I want to quote the rest of the "Information wants to be free" manifesto, which was famously delivered just a little over 25 years ago at the first Hackers' Conference by Stewart Brand, the pioneering publisher of the legendary Whole Earth Catalog. After he uttered those five words, he continued, "Information also wants to be expensive. Information wants to be free because it has become so cheap to distribute, copy and recombine – too cheap to meter. It wants to be expensive because it can be immeasurably valuable to the recipient. That tension will not go away. It leads to endless, wrenching debate about price, copyright, intellectual property, the moral rightness of casual distribution, because each round of new devices makes the tension worse, not better." (((Well, how does that "debate" resolve? You might think a "debate" is fixed by a bunch of smart guys figuring out what to do, or you might take the General Motors paradigm and figure out that it was never a "debate" but a multi-decade process of abject collapse. Nobody ever grasped the nettle there, they just handwaved till the whole shebang broke down. The wrenching tension just keeps twisting until there's nothing left for a wrench to grip... Information and its hardware are noncommercial goods, they're like pollution, they're anti-goods, they're street-litter; they're hotel matches.)))
At the time, 1984, those "new devices" were still invariably expensive. Now, like information, they're trending toward $0. What this means, I believe, is that consumer-hardware companies increasingly have to become media companies...
(((And this is the part where he somehow gets optimistic. Go have a look at that, eh? I'll be here wondering how government survives when it no longer has any profitable industries as a tax base. "Governance wants to be free." Yeah, uh, maybe. What would you call that? Feudalism? Kellyian Socialism? If you're pried right out of commerce but offered infinite broadband, are you a prole, a Lord of the Earth, or both at once? Maybe a Mongolian Golden Horde is the right metaphor here: they thunder over the horizon, they set cities on fire, they steal everything not nailed down and then they gallop into the deep grass to drink horse milk.)))
(((Another little-noticed radical essay from the mid-1980s:)))
http://www.whywork.org/rethinking/whywork/abolition.html
