“”We believe that the vast majority — perhaps 95
to 98 percent — of all dot-com companies will fail
over the next 24 months,” said Michael Fleisher,
president and CEO of GartnerGroup, in his
keynote speech kicking off the market research
company’s annual Spring Symposium/ITxpo on
Monday at the San Diego convention center.
Conversely, “virtually no traditional companies
will be able to survive without a significant
Internet component as part of its business
model,” Fleisher said. ”
while this smells of headline-grabbing sensationalism, if they are even 50 percent right, then there are going to be a boatload of people caught holding the money bag and wondering where their retirement money went.
people have been talking alot about the impending wireless web and m.commerce. however, all is not rose-colored since it appears that some users aren’t so happy with the wireless application protocol or WAP:
“According to a new survey by Tamkang University’s Department of Mass Communications, the three million Taiwanese people who use WAP (Wireless Application Protocol) facilities on their cellular phones are dissatisfied with the cost, speed and range of services available.
Some 86.5 percent of respondents said that WAP services were too slow, while 85.5 percent
complained about the price.”
to make matters worse, a .com genious (ahem) has figured out how to spam cell phones:
“Mike Malarkey, a business-development manager for the District-based educational Web developer Blackboard Inc., was in the middle of a meeting last Thursday when his Nokia cell
phone chirped, sounding a bit like the low-battery warning.
When he checked it after the meeting, he saw that the battery was fine, but he’d just received a text message on the phone’s screen–an advertisement for a Web site selling
cell-phone accessories. ”
hah – evidence that it’s impossible to have an original thought! jacob levy posted a critique of gnutella that draws some of the same conclusions as my previous post:
“…most importantly, it sucks bandwidth. I can easily see how network admins will want to outlaw this beast, if they can. For my evening of experimentation, I downloaded a total of 65 MBytes of files, while my total incoming consumed bandwidth was 365 MBytes, and my upstream bandwidth was 755 MBytes. Yes, really — all that, in a measly five hours.”
“…aims to assemble the open-source programming community’s work on Gnutella, a popular piece of file-swapping software capable of turning anyone with a computer into a music pirate.
Gnutella is similar to online music-sharing program Napster but allows anything in a digital format to be traded–from pirated MP3 music files to grandmothers’ secret pie recipes.
Started by a group of programmers at the America Online-owned Nullsoft, the Gnutella project was shut down after AOL discovered the “unauthorized” development effort. But before AOL’s action, the software escaped into the wild, and programmers around the Net quickly began developing their own sets of “clones” that worked like the original.”
aside from the fact that gnutella isn’t technically open, the article also focuses on the the rather obvious copyright brouhaha and completely neglects issues related to mass market peer-to-peer networking as well as what these programs can do to your bandwidth. of course these problems will only get worse as more and more people get a taste for downloading free ricky martin singles.
“”Skins” are a recent product of the hyper-democratization of code. The computer equivalent of back-ally chin tucks, skins allow a growing number of applications to change their looks in a growing number of ways, almost all of them bad. In a scenario that undoubtedly leaves DeTocqueville twitching uncomfortably in his grave, an unthinking Jolt- and marketing-fueled push towards visual freedom — is leaving 15 years of common-sense progress in user-interface design bleeding in a ditch.”
this is in response to the fact that mozilla allows one the freedom to develope skins via xul. as suck points out there are plenty of poor examples of skins, but there are also handful of great ones and it should be obvious that the skins don’t need to get thrown out with the user interface bathwater. or something like that.
msnbc is running a piece that makes it appear as if maybe we do have something to fear in big brother [see previous post]:
” In 1999, police officers searched for individuals in the National Crime Information Center database 2 million times daily, up from the 600,000 daily transactions averaged in 1988. Likewise, wiretaps are expected to rise more than 300 percent in the next 10 years, according to the 2001 FBI budget request.
The trends will only get worse, as technology lowers the barriers that face law enforcement surveillance, said Thomas M. Cecil, a superior court judge for the county of Sacramento, Calif. “In reality, most of what we have is the illusion of openness. Today, we have de facto privacy policy because we are inefficient; probing and gathering are time consuming and expensive. That protects our privacy,” he said. ”
