I, Cringely On A Momentous Week

rocketjam writes "Robert X. Cringley offers his take on three recent high-tech occurrences, saying they add up to an 'inflection point' that will change the landscape of the personal computer, video game, and electronic entertainment businesses forever. He briefly points out that Bill Gates' revelation that the next-gen XBox will offer music and movie playing capabilities as well as web-surfing will put MS into direct competition with its hardware OEM customers. He also touches on Yahoo's new music service and Apple's rumored movie download service. The meat of the article though is his take on the significance of Google's Web Accelerator. He says, 'If surfing can be doubled in speed for nothing, of course nearly everyone will go for it', the upshot of which is that AOL, MSN and Earthlink lose their relevancy. From this point more speculation on the implications of Google's success in this endeavor ensues."

ooOO

[Stanistani]

Cringely is somewhat more reliable than Dvorak...
but we still need the "pundit deduction" in force here.

I do wonder about the xBox 360 though... can you say, "PC?"

The Mysterious Future

[Scoria]

will put MS into direct competition with its hardware OEM customers.

And, once Microsoft begins to gradually dominate that market, their positions might become similar to that of a Wal-Mart supplier. Their business models will change as they begin to provide manufacturing services for Microsoft.

Re:3.2 GHz PowerPC Xbox? Has APPLE heard of that?

[NanoGator]

" I would say this is really just MORE proof that Apple has been ripping people off for years by putting out underpowered computers to save a few bucks and then jacking up the price."

Erm. Couple of things:

1.) Microsoft is almost definitely losing money on these units. That would be a dumb business move for Apple.

2.) It's not clear, today, whether or not those processors could do the general computing jobs they'd need to on desktop machines. I'm going to be honest, I don't know much about this. I just remember reading in another thread about how the XBOX 360 processors likely have several things trimmed out of them. (Note: If anybody can correct me, it'd be mucho appreciated.)

I'm not a huge fan of Apple's prices, but I really don't think you can draw those conclusions based on the data you have.

Re:More on XBOX 360.

[mufafa]

How does that make sense?

If the xbox is easy to mod.. then more ppl pirate games.

More games pirated doesn't equate to more sales.

In fact if anything, ppl being able to pirate and play games easily, means that less of the original games would be sold.
Unless you mean the very original person who pirated the game had to buy it at some point, but I doubt that would increase sales much - everyone else down the line would just copy/download the game and burn it.

Re:More on XBOX 360.

[Psychic Burrito]

Quote:
I'm not breaking an NDA here as I'm not actually on the dev team.

Well, but MS still hates you: modded xboxes will presumably also play warez games, so the game design houses now won't be convinced that easily that the plattform already has a hole in it...

no no no

[lo_fye]

First, using a "web accelerator" will NOT speed up your computer and turn it into a Thin Client. It will make things get to your computer faster, but if you don't have the juice to render it, it's still a no go.

Second, it is technically impossible for Google to pre-render Flash and pass it on to you. Flash isn't "server-side" -- it's done by your computer, which needs to be fat enough to run it.

Third, Yahoo's music service is priced well, but they're still misleading. They say "1 million songs" for $6.99/month, but that's to have them streamed to you, not downloaded. You can only download a handfull of tracks per month. Booo!

Fourth, why didn't Cringley (or anyone for that matter) ask if/when Google will try to buy Yahoo?

Lastly, no mention of Flickr? I think Google messed up when they let that puppy slip through their fingers and be purchased by Yahoo. Picasa? Puh-lease-a.

"Inflection point"?

[saforrest]

It's an expression made popular in Silicon Valley years ago by Andy Grove of Intel: "inflection point." It's that abrupt elbow in a graph of growth or decline when the new technology or paradigm truly kicks in, and suddenly there is no going back.

Man, I really wish that Cringely, as a supposed pundit to the geek masses, would not contribute to distorting into sensationalist manager-ese technobabble a phrase that already has a precise mathematical meaning [wikipedia.org].

Re:More on XBOX 360.

[Tim C]

I'm not breaking an NDA here as I'm not actually on the dev team.

No, but you are a Microsoft employee, so you probably *are* breaking a general (perhaps even implied) NDA. Company employees generally are *not* at liberty to discuss unannounced stuff publicly, whether they're directly involved or not.

For example, I can't tell you about a number of projects being developed by my company, and I'm not involved with any of them, either. (Not that you'd care about them, of course)

Re:Nothing to see here

[VGR]

Indeed.

One of the more prized members of my collection is a CompuMate. It's a keyboard that plugs into an Atari 2600, making the machine into a computer with a usable BASIC.

For over 20 years, every damn console has tried to say, "Look, it's also a computer!" And every single time, it's an utter flop. No one will use a console to do what a computer does, because the console invariably is a substandard personal computer.

Seriously, how many times have we seen this? The CompuMate, the Intellivision Computer Adaptor, the Coleco Adam, the FamiCom, the Sega Channel ... in fact, I just saw a Dreamcast Web Browser CD in a flea market the other day. Anyone ever use that?

No gaming console will ever threaten personal computers in any area except gaming (and even that's arguable). I don't know that I've ever seen a single business lesson which has been so forcibly resisted by one generation of companies after another.

lots of noise, not much here

[klossner]

Cringely had a lot of interesting things to say in his prime. But now he's moved out of the valley, and many of his columns trumpet the Next Big Thing when it's not really.

Here, he seems to have missed the fact that Google Accelerator has already failed and is being withdrawn. The world is not going to redesign their web pages so that GETs have no side effect.

A couple of weeks ago, he waved his hands and explained that airline scheduling is just like network scheduling and you can speed up the net by eliminating the hubs and running traffic directly from one host to another. Then he waved his hands again and said that hubs are servers.

Last December after the tsunami, he told us how to build a warning system that could be deployed by putting a networked PC "on every populated beach a month from now." Never mind that third-world populated beaches usually don't have electricity, much less an internet connection.

Last July he designed a scheme to compress video for broadcast by encoding only what the retina was focusing on. But it would work only if every person receiving the broadcast always pointed their retinas to the same place as everyone else.

Cringely is at his best when describing a funky experiment that he's actually done, like when he was one of the first to put a WiFi antenna in a Pringles can. But his blue-sky predictions just don't fly anymore.

Re:Xbox replacing low end PC market?

[Locke2005]

Since Linux already supports PowerPC, methinks it would be a heck of a lot easier to get Linux to run on an Xbox 360. That and the fact that anybody in the world can hack Linux to run on Xbox, but only a Microsoft employee can hack Windows.

You can ALREADY buy a capable PC from Dell for $299... what makes you think the Xbox 360 price point will be $300??? Most guesses I've seen are closer to $500. Plus the accessories (e.g. 802.11 adapter) will be more expensive because it is a closed architecture. So while this would make a great Linux box, I don't see it really undercutting PC sales.

Re:Interesting in theory...

[Rakshasa Taisab]

Sure, because (A) already happened to MS and we see how they were crushed.

Re:If wishes were horses...

[Locke2005]

GWA compresses such content, which reduces the size up to 75% It compresses text and HTML by up to 75%. Unfortunately, MP3, GIF, MPEG, and JPEG are already compressed, so it can't compress them at all! Since HTML is already usually pretty small compared to audio and video, I don't really see how GWA helps much, unless you only surf to text-only sites! Yes, prefetching should help -- especially if your latency is large.

Re:More on XBOX 360.

[oGMo]

Congrats, you broke my bullshit detector.

First, if you work for someplace with an NDA, it covers any nondisclosure information unless they're totally incompetant... so even if you overheard someone while getting coffee, you're probably still breaking NDA. In fact, you could be breaking NDA even if it's not true.

Second, the revenue stream for a console is its games. Weak or no copy protection scares developers. The Xbox 360 will probably be sold at a huge loss, so there's no profit from just selling consoles. Is mindshare worth that much?

Third, even if you're telling the truth on both counts, I wouldn't be bragging about this. It makes the 360 reek even more of Dreamcast: out early, no protection, big hype... big flop.

rendering flash?

[blue_adept]

If Google adds power to its part of the Accelerator, you don't have to add power to your end, meaning your old PC can last longer. Part of that has to come from Google assuming a larger role over time, taking responsibility for rendering Flash, for example. And they'll do it.

wtf is this guy talking about? How is google going to render my flash? what a dumbass.

Re:More on XBOX 360.

[snuf23]

Then why do they currently actively ban modded Xboxs from accessing Live? Why have they changed the way they detect modded Xboxs on Live to get around newer mod chips that allow locking the hard drive?
The obvious statement about banning comes from the fact that modded Xboxs can run hacks which can lead to cheating. However the PC suffers from this problem anyway and the PC game companies provide things such as Punkbuster to block out cheaters.
I'd love to believe what you are saying and I'd love to see homebrew development on Xbox 360 - but it doesn't seem to jive with the current Xbox mod situation.

Speaking of inflection points,

[ewe2]

1. Cringley reads Slashdot for industry inside-information. It's the end of an era.

2. Microsoft is finally playing someone else's game. The surprise is that it's Apple, like always. Colour me astonished.

3. Google accelerator. So noone is bothered by privacy concerns about an Internet-sized cache? Never saw that coming.

Hmmm

[Zebra_X]

Cringley touches on some good points. However his analysis of Google accelerator is seriously lacking in imgaination.

There is a really, really, really, really good reason for Google to go through this "Heroic" effort. In fact, it is almost sickeningly self serving. Googles accelerator will allow them to capture the click stream of every participating user. That is, google will know where you are going, what you are reading, and how long you are reading it for. That is, they will have an entire stream of data to more accurately return search results and target ads. This will also help their page rank system be more "accurate".

This isn't a technology play as Cringely supposes - IBM's not doing this becuase umm, wait they don't do that sort of thing - MS isn't doing it becuase they don't really have a need for the data. Google is "catching" up to companies like double click and poindexter at the moment. Their plan will ultimately give them way more data than any other ad server out there. Online advertising is about data, the more data you have about a user, the larger a profile they can build about you. In google's case they can make their targeted ad offerings far more relevent which will equal $$$.

Re:His powers of prognostication astound

[fiftyfly]

Cringely is impressed that Google is offering a web accelerator service, something AOL has done for years;

Well something to think about - AOL grew out of their own network, which sucked but they had full control over, into an interweb gateway (which they still suck at) but google has done it simply as a side effect of having built the required infrastructure they use to do other tasks very very well. With a small effort they've nearly moved into another market and further solidified their status as valuable _required_ infrastructure and not some bolt on crap extra no one wants to pay for.

that the XBox will play music and video, something the playstations 1 and 2 did, respectively;

With the very likely possibility that it'll do so better and easier and offer enough generic processing power and apis to function as a general purpose computer. This is less like, say, ford building sports cars and more like ford winning a contract to repave interstates adding, along the way, their own toll booths.

that Yahoo is unveiling a service almost identical to the Napster service that appeared in the wake of the iTunes Music Store;

That yahoo can offer services, simlar to a couple of upstarts, at cost prices giving, for the first time, the dominate player a run for their money.

and that Apple may, at some unspecified point in the future be releasing a product.

This last one is a stretch but, as you've tried to point out it wouldn't be a Cringly article without such a device. That being said it's his job to editorialize a bit and he's said something that makes a lot of sense. Enough sense to be rather likely and remain exciting at the same time. Tasty.

Re:More on XBOX 360.

[BillyBlaze]

• Modchips currently exist for all major gaming platforms.
• Games on those platforms still make money.

Discuss.