55 Million Satellite Radio Subscribers by 2010?

I saw this today and thought I should address it since I have beat up on Sirius and XM in the past. The article starts out with this startling figure but quickly comes back to a more realistic outlook.

Twenty-three percent of the online consumers Jupiter Research interviewed expressed interest in the service, but only a quarter of them presently have a satellite radio. XM leads the nascent market for nationwide pay radio, with more than double the number of subscribers at rival Sirius Satellite Radio.

I suppose you could take this a couple of ways. It could mean that they have a large untapped market to pursue. If only 23% of consumers are even interested at this point, there is a lot that they can do to increase the public's awareness of the products. Even better, if only 25% of those who are interested- about 6% of consumers- actually have their products, that means that there is a huge growth potential here.

You could also look at this way. If only 23% of consumers are interested and only 6% have purchased a technology that has been mainstream and heavily marketed for the last five years, then you may have a problem. That problem may be that people don't believe that your product has enough benefits to justify buying the equipment and paying an ongoing subscription fee. Partly this is because the alternative is free! Unlike broadcast television, broadcast radio reaches the majority of American homes free of noise and clutter. Oh yeah, and if you think you are going to convince people that your product is worth that investment, time is running short.

"The primary challenges for Sirius and XM are price and competition with other portable media players and music services, such as iPods and iTunes, respectively," David Schatsky, senior vice president of research at Jupiter Research.

Right... and guess what, it only gets worse once Apple drops the next generation of cellular capability into the iPod and it becomes 100% connected to iTunes. That means not just music purchases, but podcasts and internet radio streams. So, who needs that satellite radio?

Patrick bemoaned the crapulence of the sat radio business model last month.

Ad Supported Windows?

Yes kids, its bandwagon time at Microsoft again! Yup, you gotta love those guys in Redmond. Google's gotten Mr. Softee's panties in such a wad that they are actually talking about ad supported versions of Windows as well as some of their applications.

I'm sorry, I just really can't imagine an ad supported version of Windows being anything but garish and obnoxious. I'm really curious to see how you insert advertisements into someone's desktop environment in a way that isn't garrish and obnoxious. Yes, Google does useful non-annoying ads with their text ads, but those are on webpages. Where is Microsoft going to put its adverts? Are they just going to randomly pop up when you're digging through your My Documents folder? Or maybe when you are watching a DVD they can target you for a popcorn ad. If anything, an ad supported Windows might encourage people to buy the full version.

Microsoft is responding to a bleak outlook in the consumer software market, I get that. They look out and see that more and more no one wants to buy software, they just want to use it. Microsoft needs to face up to the fact that they do not make software that fits with the idea of "Just use it!" Otherwise who is going to be willing to download, install, and endure the advertisements to use software that doesn't make life as easy as Google's (or some other web app developer) competing tool?

Since I am on the soapbox today...

This is a great piece on why government will screw up the internet if they get too much control over the networks or, God forbid, are able to "enshrine broadband access as a right." Ugh.

Taxing Voice over IP

Congress is working on legislation that would impose taxes on IP Telephony and other broadband services. Isn't this just indicative of how our "leaders" just don't get it. They can't seem to wrap their minds around the idea that sound is just another type of data once it is digitized. It goes on the same pipe, over the same lines as any other data. Imposing a tax on voice data carried over the Internet is just not going to be possible in the long term. Sure, you can put a tax on the subscription that a customer pays for a VoIP service, but in the long run VoIP is not going to be a subscription service (in fact if you tax it enough, it will be a shorter term). It is going to be an application that runs over your broadband connection the same way that your web browser or iTunes does. Apple's iChat software has for quite a while allowed you to have an audio chat with another iChat user, so long as you have the bandwidth to accommodate it. Google's new talk application does the same thing. And how long before video conferencing becomes the popular way to have these sorts of real time conversations over the net?

And why are politician's so interested in taxing voice services on the interent? Because they get a tremendous amount of money from all those extra fees and taxes that appear on your local phone bill. They need that money to buy votes, and if local telephone service is going to go the way of the dodo they are going to have to replace that somehow. And of course VoIP, the thing that is going to take that money from them, seems like the best target.

Politician's pandering to their niche constituencies and trying to buy votes need to stay out of the way of that which they do not understand.

Tough Road for Vista

Unsurprisingly not a lot of businesses are excited at the prospect of paying to upgrade to Windows Vista.

This may be the tipping point when we finally see businesses begin to implement Linux on the desktop. My advice? Buy Redhat stock.

XM Radio, Losing Money with More Subscribers

XM Radio posted its financials yesterday and it looks like the losses are increasing even as they add subscribers, mainly due to the cost of acquiring those customers. Much like with cell phone companies the idea is that once you have a subscriber you have a very dependable and consistent revenue stream.

Really though? It seems to me that by the time XM and Sirius have really built out their customer bases and are poised to become profitable... they are going to get hit with a nasty end around from the tech industry and telecom. Think about it, what are these satellite companies really offering? Greater choice.

But how can greater choice win against complete control? And that is what Apple and the rest are offering with mp3 players and mp3 enabled cell phones and now video iPods. Control over the media you consume.

Satellite radio's current competitive advantage is bandwidth and coverage. They have the ability to deliver a ton of content across a massive space. They are really in the business of delivering data. This is the same as moving a song, or any media, onto an iPod, nothing more than transferring data. Right now the bandwidth that moves that data onto an iPod or some other mobile device is tied to a physical broadband connection. But what happens when the cellular companies build out their networks to the point that everyone can get a broadband connection via their cellphone? Or a cell device built into a laptop? Or an iPod with cellular capability?

XM and Sirius will lose their competitive advantage, their ability to distribute content (data) in a way that others can't, and once that happens they will fade fast if they can't adapt. The companies that bring control to the when, where, and how of your media consumption will rule the marketplace. XM and Sirius are selling choice, not control.

An online web based spreadsheet, wow.

Just the other day I was thinking about how useful it would be if you could really share and collaborate on spreadsheets. Really, I was thinking about that, I am either a huge nerd or I have too much time on my hands. Probably both. Actually I was thinking about it because I deal with a merry-go-round of spreadsheets when I do my monthly forecasting at work. It would be really really nice to have a central copy and version control so that all of us could update one spreadsheet and always be assured that everyone else is looking at exactly the same thing. Of course, some people might argue that is what CRM software is for, they would be wrong. CRM is for documenting the false picture you are presenting to upper management.

Ok, so I am thinking about this and then I notice an article on c|net about how the new version of Microsoft Office is going to have a new server based system for managing spreadsheets. Oh interesting I think and continue to read. After finishing the article I am not really sure how useful this will be to the people who work on the spreadsheets. Useful to the people who make sure the wrong folks don't look at certain data, but otherwise nothing revolutionary to see here.

Anyway I was thinking if you wanted to get really fancy with AJAX you could actually build a browser based spreadsheet. I know, I know, you are probably thinking, how cool could that be? Well, pretty cool. There are number of companies out there reinventing business tools and taking them to the web. I'm not sure that a spreadsheet alone is a real killer app, but it is something that you could couple to your larger web based software project to give customers a tool they probably thought they would never have online. And you would really be taking that extra step to ensure that the data in the sheet (which would actually be in a database behind the sheet) is always the same for everyone who views it.

Well it turns out that someone is already working on it. Check it out, looks like Ruby on Rails and of course AJAX. Its small and limited in functionality now, but I'll bet this turns into something big.

Is Wikipedia a failure?

I've been hearing a lot of this talk lately and I have to wonder why it took this long. My confidence in the pedia was shaken when I read that the entry for GW Bush is updated something like once every five seconds. I went to the site and witnessed it myself by just hitting refresh repeatedly. Looks like this might have died down, but at one point every third refresh would return something like "Murderer" and then on the next refresh the White House bot would have things back to normal. Murderer or not, that is not good for an encyclopedia.

Regardless of the quality of the entries in the Wikipedia, I don't think the project is a failure. The software it has produced, and the myriad of knockoffs, may yet revolutionize collaboration software. Lord knows the intranet at my massive multinational employer pops up an article about the wonders of wikis at least once every two weeks. For all the hype, the software is fantastic for collaborating on technical documentation and business plans. At least amongst closed or small groups. And that's the problem with the wikipedia... too many people who don't have an interest in its quality, some of whom probably enjoy destroying what others have built up, have the access and the inclination necessary to have a greater impact than the people who are creating quality content.

The success of the Wikipedia was the creation of a new technology that fosters collaboration in a way that Microsoft Office probably never will. Projects like Writeboard demonstrate the real success and the future of wikis.

Re-write the Bill of Rights?

Apparently you have a right to broadband access. Somehow I don't think that our founding father's would have seen this as something that should be enshrined as a "right of citizenship". Setting aside all of the political and philosophical arguments, what does this mean to the future development and deployment of new world changing technologies?

Its one thing for government to drive the deployment of new technology for the sake of some great national interest; the railroads and telecommunications systems of the industrial age were great tools of both commerce and national defense. However, when governments take over entirely, things tend to stagnate. I understand that there is an underlying need for government to improve emergency communications systems and in someways free itself from landline communications systems. Fine. Does that mean that government should run the show? No. Does that mean that we should enshrine broadband access as a "right of citizenship"? No. Does that mean that government should reward (read: pay for services) private ventures for creating, managing, and making profitable the systems that government can use in time of emergency? Yes!

Politicians pandering for votes make our governments less agile and less capable to adapt to these longer term changes, changes that they aren't concerned with because they will be long gone from power. Enshrining broadband access as a right for all will only require that the government forever provide a backwards compatible solution for your connectivity needs. What happens when Google* wants to move on to the next technology and you are left sit on a park bench with an 802.11a wireless card that isn't supported? Are you going to sit by and let them take your "rights" away? I really hope we never have to have that debate.**

*Google is currently in the running for the contract to provide free wireless access across San Francisco.
**Surprisingly, I just couldn't set aside the political debate.