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Year-End
Rapp Up
2006 saw the tech world party like it was 1999. After a number
of dark years, suddenly the news services were ablaze with
new products, services, “strategic partnerships,” and many
of these things appeared to have at least a fighting chance
of surviving, unlike the madness that prevailed during the
first dot-com boom-bust. I still have an old bumpersticker
that reads idon’twanttobuytoothpasteonline.com.
With powerhouse computers, massive storage, and broadband
connections within the reach of almost everybody, the world
seems to be pouring itself into the Internet, and there’s
plenty of winners and losers in this strange new world where
everything is at-stake and uncertain, where fortunes are made
and lost by invisible movements of micro-digicash and pure
speculation about the value of eyeballs, and where people
are more inclined to repeatedly watch Mentos-Coca-Cola geysers
on YouTube than actually sit down and read a book.
Sony is sure not looking good right about now. First the company
got caught putting viruses on its music CDs that gummed up
its customers’ computers, and then it had to replace millions
of laptop batteries because its old ones had a disturbing
habit of catching on fire. Toward the end of the year I was
reading some analysts saying that Sony’s future was riding
on the success or failure of its new PlayStation gaming console,
which struck me as remarkable. For one thing, if the entire
universe of video games simply vaporized right now, my life
wouldn’t change one iota. I wouldn’t even notice. On top of
that, I think the world would be a much better place if video
games didn’t exist, once the hordes of pimply-faced suburban
boys figure out something productive to do on sunny afternoons
and with their parents’ money. In any event, the fact that
anyone would even think that a massive corporation like Sony
will rise and fall on the basis of inanities like “Grand Theft
Auto” or “Final Fantasy” shows just how frail and decrepit
the company has become.
And it looks like Sony’s losing the gaming fight big-time.
Coming off the holiday season, the clear winner appears to
be Nintendo’s Wii system, followed by Microsoft’s Xbox, with
Sony’s new PS3 platform a fairly distant third. And it turns
out Sony had created a fake blog written by a fake hip-hop
teenager who wanted to help convince his fake friend’s fake
parents to buy him a new $600 PlayStation! And the fake blogger
could help you persuade your parents, too!!! This idiotic
exercise in fraud was uncovered pretty quickly, resulting
in Sony looking like not just a loser, but a big, lying, deceitful
loser.
Microsoft also seems to have trouble getting out of its own
way. With its ridiculous Zune MP3 player logging in this week
as something like the 19th-most-popular MP3 player on the
market, Microsoft decided to try to hip itself up in the blogosphere
and to hype its new Vista operating system. Microsoft quietly
sent 90 tech bloggers free hot-rodded Ferrari-branded $2500
laptops with Vista installed. Well, it was quiet till the
machines showed up. Many of the recipients, not particularly
big Microsoft fans to begin with, started screaming bloody
murder that their views and opinions weren’t for sale, at
least not for a $2500 laptop. Non-recipient bloggers, feeling
neglected and rejected, wailed inconsolably that A) they didn’t
get a free laptop, which sucks, and B) even if they had, their
views wouldn’t have been for sale either. (The whole episode
raised interesting questions about bloggers, journalism, and
ethics that we’ll let slide for right now.) Microsoft sheepishly
first said that it was providing “evaluation” machines that
it wanted returned, then reversed course and said no, they
were “gifts” for which Microsoft, like any good K Street lobbyist,
didn’t want or expect anything in return. Um-hmm . . .
And Apple’s had a rough couple of weeks, too. First an investigation
showed that some Apple executives had been playing cute with
post-dated stock options. Steve Jobs, the only Apple exec
that matters, hasn’t gotten any stink on himself, though.
Yet. Meantime, a federal judge has refused to dismiss a private
anti-trust lawsuit against Apple, claiming that Apple’s tying
of its iPods to the proprietary iTunes music format is an
illegal restraint of trade. And given that Apple controls
something north of 80 percent of the market, for gizmos and
digital music respectively, there may well be something there.
And then there’s DRM, the gooey code the labels and digital
music stores stick on digital music so you can’t copy it.
People are getting sick of DRM, and little by little, labels
are allowing music to be sold without it, and are finding
out that the world does not end as a result. Yahoo’s music
store has been allowed to sell a number of unencumbered MP3s,
and word has it that Amazon is hammering the labels to allow
it to sell DRM-free, iPod-compatible music, and is staying
out of the market until this happens. Which would bust the
music market, finally, wide open.
—Paul
C. Rapp
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