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<body topmargin=0 leftmargin=0 marginheight=0 marginwidth=0><script> (function(i,s,o,g,r,a,m){i['GoogleAnalyticsObject']=r;i[r]=i[r]||function(){ (i[r].q=i[r].q||[]).push(arguments)},i[r].l=1*new Date();a=s.createElement(o), m=s.getElementsByTagName(o)[0];a.async=1;a.src=g;m.parentNode.insertBefore(a,m) })(window,document,'script','//www.google-analytics.com/analytics.js','ga'); ga('create', 'UA-47423994-1', 'fortunecity.ws'); ga('send', 'pageview'); </script> <center> <br> <div> <script language="javascript" type="text/javascript" src="http://ad.broadcaststation.net/ads/show_ad.php?width=728&height=90"></script> </div> </center> <table cellpadding=0 cellspacing=0 border=0 height="100%"><tr> <td valign="top" width=200 BGCOLOR="#003333" TEXT="#F7F7FF" background="05dd4c00dduajq.gif"> <div> <TABLE BORDER="0" CELLPADDING="2" CELLSPACING="0" WIDTH="95" BORDERCOLORLIGHT="#C0C0C0" BORDERCOLORDARK="#808080" FRAME="BOX" RULES="ALL" ALIGN="BOTTOM" HSPACE="0" VSPACE="0" > <tR> <tD VALIGN=TOP HEIGHT= 46 WIDTH="91"><IMG BORDER="0" SRC="1x1.gif" HEIGHT="46" ALIGN="bottom" WIDTH="91" HSPACE="0" VSPACE="0"></tD> </tR> </TABLE></div> <bR> <bR> <DIV ALIGN="LEFT"></DIV> <div> Tracking trends, strategies and policies in ecommerce</div> <bR> <bR> <div> <A HREF="id22.htm" TARGET="_top" TITLE="Previous Editions"><U>Previous Editions</U></A></div> <div> <A HREF="id20.htm" TARGET="_top" TITLE="Subscribe"><U>Subscribe</U></A> (it's free)</div> <div> <A HREF="id17.htm" TARGET="_top" TITLE="About Us"><U>About Us</U></A></div> <bR> </td> <td valign="top" BGCOLOR="#FFFFFF" TEXT="#080000"> <div> <B>eComWatch</B></div> <div>  <A NAME="ecomwatch_15"><IMG BORDER="0" SRC="1x1.gif" HEIGHT="1" ALIGN="bottom" WIDTH="1" HSPACE="0" VSPACE="0" ></A></div> <div> Issue 15</div> <div> November 3rd, 2000</div> <bR> <div>  <A NAME="1__musical_interlude"><IMG BORDER="0" SRC="1x1.gif" HEIGHT="1" ALIGN="bottom" WIDTH="1" HSPACE="0" VSPACE="0" ></A><FONT SIZE="3" COLOR="#339966" FACE="Arial" ><A HREF="#1__musical_interlude_1" TITLE="eComWatch"><U><B>1. Musical interlude</B></U></A></FONT></div> <div>  <A NAME="2__runes"><IMG BORDER="0" SRC="1x1.gif" HEIGHT="1" ALIGN="bottom" WIDTH="1" HSPACE="0" VSPACE="0" ></A><FONT SIZE="3" COLOR="#339966" FACE="Arial" ><A HREF="#2__runes_1" TITLE="eComWatch"><U><B>2. Runes</B></U></A></FONT></div> <div>  <A NAME="3__feeling_groovy"><IMG BORDER="0" SRC="1x1.gif" HEIGHT="1" ALIGN="bottom" WIDTH="1" HSPACE="0" VSPACE="0" ></A><FONT SIZE="3" COLOR="#339966" FACE="Arial" ><A HREF="#3__feeling_groovy_1" TITLE="eComWatch"><U><B>3. Feeling groovy</B></U></A></FONT></div> <div>  <A NAME="4__letter_director_of_bt_gives_the"><IMG BORDER="0" SRC="1x1.gif" HEIGHT="1" ALIGN="bottom" WIDTH="1" HSPACE="0" VSPACE="0" ></A><FONT SIZE="3" COLOR="#339966" FACE="Arial" ><A HREF="#4__letter_director_of_bt_gives_the_1" TITLE="eComWatch"><U><B>4. Letter: Director of BT gives the game away</B></U></A></FONT></div> <div> <FONT SIZE="2" COLOR="#000000" FACE="Arial" > <A NAME="about_ecomwatch"><IMG BORDER="0" SRC="1x1.gif" HEIGHT="1" ALIGN="bottom" WIDTH="1" HSPACE="0" VSPACE="0" ></A></FONT><A HREF="#about_ecomwatch_" TITLE="eComWatch"><U><B>About</B></U></A><A HREF="#about_ecomwatch_" TITLE="eComWatch"><U><I><B> eComWatch</B></I></U></A></div> <bR> <bR> <div> <B> <A NAME="1__musical_interlude_1"><IMG BORDER="0" SRC="1x1.gif" HEIGHT="1" ALIGN="bottom" WIDTH="1" HSPACE="0" VSPACE="0" ></A></B><B>1. Musical interlude</B></div> <bR> <div> This is probably more about electronic NON-commerce but the rise of the MP3 distribution industry is an aspect of Web use that warrants inspection, if you haven't already done so. For no marginal expenditure, bar that of some download time, you can get hold of free software that will:</div> <bR> <div> <IMG BORDER="0" SRC="Wing0a73007700dc00000000.gif" HEIGHT="15" WIDTH="24" ALIGN="bottom" HSPACE="0" VSPACE="0">search for a piece of recorded music (or spoken word) that you like, by title of the piece or album,  composer or performer,</div> <div> <IMG BORDER="0" SRC="Wing0a73007700dc00000000.gif" HEIGHT="15" WIDTH="24" ALIGN="bottom" HSPACE="0" VSPACE="0">download that music, more or less reliably, as an MP3* file, usually from a variety of sources</div> <div> <IMG BORDER="0" SRC="Wing0a73007700dc00000000.gif" HEIGHT="15" WIDTH="24" ALIGN="bottom" HSPACE="0" VSPACE="0">arrange those downloads into whatever categories or sequences you choose</div> <div> <IMG BORDER="0" SRC="Wing0a73007700dc00000000.gif" HEIGHT="15" WIDTH="24" ALIGN="bottom" HSPACE="0" VSPACE="0">play back that music on your computer, as often as you like (if it's suitably equipped, as most new ones have been for the last few years), and</div> <div> <IMG BORDER="0" SRC="Wing0a73007700dc00000000.gif" HEIGHT="15" WIDTH="24" ALIGN="bottom" HSPACE="0" VSPACE="0">additionally, record ('burn') those MP3 files on to blank CDs, for use on a domestic h-fi or in the car, or to pass on to others.</div> <bR> <div> <I>*MP3 (or, as it says on its birth certificate, Moving Picture Experts Group-1 Audio Layer-3) is a handy way of compressing aural data. Some detail is lost in the compression process but the resulting digital file is relatively small and plays well enough for most types of music. It all depends on your ear and your fussiness. A typical track will boil down to between two and five megabytes of disc space. This is less than a tenth of its original size but can still eat up a lot of disc drive if stored in quantity.</I></div> <bR> <div> If you wish, you can convert the tracks on existing commercially-sold CDs into MP3 files, also playable on your computer (and thus printable on to other CDs). While doing so, you can download the album and track details and import them into the player software. The details of each track then appear on the player when you replay each MP3 file.</div> <bR> <div> The most popular database for these details is Gracenote, formerly CDDB, at <A HREF="http://www.gracenote.com/story.html" TARGET="_top" TITLE="http://www.gracenote.com/story.html"><U>http://www.gracenote.com/story.html</U></A>. Annotating MP3s is done through the player software, using ID3 methods (see <A HREF="http://www.id3.org/" TARGET="_top" TITLE="http://www.id3.org"><U>http://www.id3.org</U></A> for more on this metadata standard.) You can also convert files from other formats, such as Microsoft Windows audio files (.wav and .wma), to MP3.</div> <bR> <div> Some players link straight to record shops' Web sites, letting you buy CDs online. For the moment, though, you still must wait for the postman to deliver the CD.</div> <bR> <div> Certain player software also incorporates a radio 'receiver', so you can listen to Internet radio broadcasts, for instance, while copying your CDs. MP3 compression is still too slow a process to do 'off air' in real time yet -- some buffering is needed -- but that too will no doubt be possible soon.</div> <bR> <div> The end result is a continuous supply of the music you like, without the need to keep swapping CDs or cassettes. Imagine your own personal radio station sans jingles, adverts, traffic warnings, news and, best of all, disc jockeys.</div> <bR> <div> <B>Counting the cost</B></div> <div> These players are the software equivalent of what hi-fi shops were calling a "music centre" just decade or two ago. One important difference is that these pieces of software don't take over your sideboard. What's more, they can keep you constantly supplied with information about the music they are playing, something no music centre could do.</div> <bR> <div> Another big difference is that player software doesn't need to be bought on hire purchase. The financial cost is truly trivial, comprising:</div> <bR> <div> <IMG BORDER="0" SRC="Wing0a73007700dc00000000.gif" HEIGHT="15" WIDTH="24" ALIGN="bottom" HSPACE="0" VSPACE="0">the time and effort needed to download and install the software,</div> <div> <IMG BORDER="0" SRC="Wing0a73007700dc00000000.gif" HEIGHT="15" WIDTH="24" ALIGN="bottom" HSPACE="0" VSPACE="0">the time to build up a good library of music files on your machine, either from the 'Net or your (or borrowed) CDs, and</div> <div> <IMG BORDER="0" SRC="Wing0a73007700dc00000000.gif" HEIGHT="15" WIDTH="24" ALIGN="bottom" HSPACE="0" VSPACE="0">the notional cost of the space they take on your hard drive.</div> <bR> <div> There is, for some folk, a moral cost as well. Most people can justify to themselves the taking of a copy of a CD they have paid for, for, for their own use. Their precedent is the software site licence. On the other hand, taking a copy of a CD paid for by someone else umpteen times removed seems to many Web users to be theft, plain and simple.</div> <bR> <div> It also seems so to some (already extraordinarily rich) recording artists and to the four or five corporations who control most of the recorded music business around the world. They call it piracy and are fighting back on the legal, technical and commercial fronts. One wonders if they're too late.</div> <bR> <div> They are certainly not getting much sympathy. In a much-publicised soundbite, the singer Courtney Love said: "What is piracy? Piracy is the act of stealing an artist's work without any intention of paying for it. I'm not talking about Napster-type software -- I'm talking about major label recording contracts." (From <I>Salon</I>, 14 June 2000.) The greater evil outweighing the lesser, perhaps?</div> <bR> <div> Many consumers are also no great admirers of the business practices of the music publishers. Buyers are, it seems, fed up with the high price of CDs in general, their inability to legitimately buy just the tracks they want and the iron grip the big publishers have over the distribution of recorded music.</div> <bR> <div> The word "rapacious" seems unwontedly gentle for these organizations (and their colleagues in print publishing). Here's what Napster's attorney says about them and their pet poodle, the Recording Industry Association of America (RIAA): <A HREF="http://www.wired.com/wired/archive/8.10/boies_pr.html" TARGET="_top" TITLE="http://www.wired.com/wired/archive/8.10/"><U>http://www.wired.com/wired/archive/8.10/boies_pr.html</U></A>.</div> <bR> <div> Supporting RIAA's arguments is the latest survey -- see <A HREF="http://www.theregister.co.uk/content/1/14363.html" TARGET="_top" TITLE="http://www.theregister.co.uk/content/1/1"><U>http://www.theregister.co.uk/content/1/14363.html</U></A> -- which suggests that CD sales are affected by the availability of free music. Register has done a handy summary of the whole RIAA-Napster soap opera, at <A HREF="http://www.theregister.co.uk/content/32/12147.html" TARGET="_top" TITLE="http://www.theregister.co.uk/content/32/"><U>http://www.theregister.co.uk/content/32/12147.html</U></A>. </div> <bR> <div> A survey conducted earlier this year, by The Pew Internet & American Life Project (see <A HREF="http://www.pewinternet.org/" TARGET="_top" TITLE="http://www.pewinternet.org"><U>http://www.pewinternet.org</U></A>), highlights the prevalence of music 'piracy' in the USA. Its Online Music Report, published on 28 September 28, also carries some revealing statistics about people's attitudes:</div> <bR> <div> <IMG BORDER="0" SRC="Wing0a73007700dc00000000.gif" HEIGHT="15" WIDTH="24" ALIGN="bottom" HSPACE="0" VSPACE="0">22% of Internet users, or about 21 million Americans, have downloaded music online</div> <div> <IMG BORDER="0" SRC="Wing0a73007700dc00000000.gif" HEIGHT="15" WIDTH="24" ALIGN="bottom" HSPACE="0" VSPACE="0">54% of those people (more than 11 million Americans) have used Napster, the most popular program for finding and getting MP3 files. (Napster reckons to have 38 million users - not bad in just over a year)</div> <div> <IMG BORDER="0" SRC="Wing0a73007700dc00000000.gif" HEIGHT="15" WIDTH="24" ALIGN="bottom" HSPACE="0" VSPACE="0">78% of those people don't think it's stealing to save music files to their computers. The same view is held by 53% of the general Internet population. (The report does not say what these poeple think it is if it's not stealing.)</div> <div> <IMG BORDER="0" SRC="Wing0a73007700dc00000000.gif" HEIGHT="15" WIDTH="24" ALIGN="bottom" HSPACE="0" VSPACE="0">61% of music downloaders say they don't care if the music they are capturing is copyrighted</div> <div> <IMG BORDER="0" SRC="Wing0a73007700dc00000000.gif" HEIGHT="15" WIDTH="24" ALIGN="bottom" HSPACE="0" VSPACE="0">Whether they are Internet users or not, the young, the highly educated, and the relatively affluent support downloaders' right to get music online "for free". (This is a surprise? Since when have the professional classes ever turned down a freeby?)</div> <bR> <div> One could argue that MP3 swapping is an area where the desire to get owt for nowt overcomes moral scruple. This seems also to be the case with some of the developers of the software for downloading MP3s. Here's economist, Pullet Surprise-nominated author, media consultant, freelance writer and lead singer with the Tabloids Michael Robinson (no, I've never heard of him either) having a go at Shawn Fanning, the author of Napster: "a company that masquerades as a "community" while raising money from venture capitalists with an eye toward cashing out as dotcom millionaires -- all of it off the backs of recording artists".</div> <bR> <div> Sums up the situation in a nutshell -- see the deal Napster has just made with Bertelsmann. (Robinson rants on at <A HREF="http://www.stopnapster.com/" TARGET="_top" TITLE="http://www.stopnapster.com"><U>http://www.stopnapster.com</U></A>.)</div> <bR> <div> The music publishers would do well to consider the example of William Henry Fox Talbot, the English pioneer of photography. He was no teenage dabbler but a mathematician, classicist, Biblical scholar, archaeologist, Fellow of the Royal Astronomical Society, Fellow of the Royal Society and MP (see <A HREF="http://www.r-cube.co.uk/fox-talbot/index.html" TARGET="_top" TITLE="http://www.r-cube.co.uk/fox-talbot/index"><U>http://www.r-cube.co.uk/fox-talbot/index.html</U></A> for more on him). In 1841, he patented the Calotype photographic process, which introduced the idea of post-exposure processing of a negative. </div> <bR> <div> Although the Calotype (later called Talbotype) did not reach the quality of the rival French system, the Daguerreotype, it offered other advantages. It allowed the use of much higher shutter speeds (one minute instead of one hour) and gave the ability to print as many positive copies as one wished. Louis Daguerre's process was slow and produced a just single positive image direct to a sensitised metal plate.</div> <bR> <div> Where Talbot went wrong was to get greedy. Daguerre let anybody use his process, free of charge, but Talbot, who lived in comfort on his family estate, Laycock Abbey, extracted a high price. He charged £21 to amateurs, for instance -- a huge price in those days -- and chased infringers through the courts.</div> <bR> <div> His stifling of the 'illegal' use of his methods continued for a decade, until the collodion or wet-plate process became available, enabling photography to become a mass pursuit. Talbot then recanted and let people use his method for nothing. It would be over another thirty years before dry film dominated, when George Eastman launched the Kodak camera in the USA. (But you should see what Fujifilm has to say about Kodak's commercial behaviour a hundred or so years on -- <A HREF="http://home.fujifilm.com/info/wto/index.html" TARGET="_top" TITLE="http://home.fujifilm.com/info/wto/index."><U>http://home.fujifilm.com/info/wto/index.html</U></A>.)</div> <bR> <div> Like that over Talbot's patents, the debate over online infringements of musical copyright will continue, and we shall keep track of in ECW. For now, though, I want to look briefly at some of the technical and market developments taking place with digital music.</div> <bR> <div> <B>MP3 is king, for the moment</B></div> <div> As is widely known, the main American patent on the telephone was gained by an emigré Scottish elocutionist, Alexander Graham Bell. In his patent application, he foresaw the device's use for "the simultaneous transmission of musical notes". Little did he know that, 120 years later, nearly 40 million of his adoptive fellow countrymen would be doing that very thing -- and I'm not talking about listening to the 'on hold' music for switchboards.</div> <bR> <div> Just to show how much a grip MP3 has, consider what you can do with it. Here, divided into three sections -- sources, processing and output devices -- is a lightning tour of what's possible today, with some examples of products and makers. Many of these examples came from ZDNet's excellent site at <A HREF="http://music.zdnet.com/index.html" TARGET="_top" TITLE="http://music.zdnet.com/index.html"><U>http://music.zdnet.com/index.html</U></A>.</div> <bR> <div> SOURCES OF MUSIC</div> <div> <IMG BORDER="0" SRC="Wing0a73007700dc00000000.gif" HEIGHT="15" WIDTH="24" ALIGN="bottom" HSPACE="0" VSPACE="0">Own/borrowed CD/MiniDisc</div> <div> <IMG BORDER="0" SRC="Wing0a73007700dc00000000.gif" HEIGHT="15" WIDTH="24" ALIGN="bottom" HSPACE="0" VSPACE="0">Own/borrowed tape - cassette, VCR or open reel</div> <div> <IMG BORDER="0" SRC="Wing0a73007700dc00000000.gif" HEIGHT="15" WIDTH="24" ALIGN="bottom" HSPACE="0" VSPACE="0">Own/borrowed LPs/vinyl</div> <div> <IMG BORDER="0" SRC="Wing0a73007700dc00000000.gif" HEIGHT="15" WIDTH="24" ALIGN="bottom" HSPACE="0" VSPACE="0">Broadcast radio</div> <div> <IMG BORDER="0" SRC="Wing0a73007700dc00000000.gif" HEIGHT="15" WIDTH="24" ALIGN="bottom" HSPACE="0" VSPACE="0">Internet radio (thousands of 'stations')</div> <div> <IMG BORDER="0" SRC="Wing0a73007700dc00000000.gif" HEIGHT="15" WIDTH="24" ALIGN="bottom" HSPACE="0" VSPACE="0">Online supply (e.g. MP3.com, Napster)</div> <div> <IMG BORDER="0" SRC="Wing0a73007700dc00000000.gif" HEIGHT="15" WIDTH="24" ALIGN="bottom" HSPACE="0" VSPACE="0">Own live input (microphone, synthesizer)</div> <bR> <div> PROCESSING</div> <div> <IMG BORDER="0" SRC="Wing0a73007700dc00000000.gif" HEIGHT="15" WIDTH="24" ALIGN="bottom" HSPACE="0" VSPACE="0">Find/swap MP3s (Napster, Gnutella, etc.)</div> <div> <IMG BORDER="0" SRC="Wing0a73007700dc00000000.gif" HEIGHT="15" WIDTH="24" ALIGN="bottom" HSPACE="0" VSPACE="0">Convert format (see below), including radio-to-MP3 (Voquette)</div> <div> <IMG BORDER="0" SRC="Wing0a73007700dc00000000.gif" HEIGHT="15" WIDTH="24" ALIGN="bottom" HSPACE="0" VSPACE="0">Index /annotate files, manually input or from online (CDDB/Gracenote)</div> <div> <IMG BORDER="0" SRC="Wing0a73007700dc00000000.gif" HEIGHT="15" WIDTH="24" ALIGN="bottom" HSPACE="0" VSPACE="0">Sort/categorize files (usually part of the player software)</div> <div> <IMG BORDER="0" SRC="Wing0a73007700dc00000000.gif" HEIGHT="15" WIDTH="24" ALIGN="bottom" HSPACE="0" VSPACE="0">Edit/merge files (Cool Edit, Sound Forge)</div> <div> <IMG BORDER="0" SRC="Wing0a73007700dc00000000.gif" HEIGHT="15" WIDTH="24" ALIGN="bottom" HSPACE="0" VSPACE="0">Play, often, with the same software for finding (or Winamp, Windows Media Player, MusicMatch)</div> <div> <IMG BORDER="0" SRC="Wing0a73007700dc00000000.gif" HEIGHT="15" WIDTH="24" ALIGN="bottom" HSPACE="0" VSPACE="0">Save to CD, computer hard disc, etc.</div> <div> <IMG BORDER="0" SRC="Wing0a73007700dc00000000.gif" HEIGHT="15" WIDTH="24" ALIGN="bottom" HSPACE="0" VSPACE="0">Export to other connected users (Napster, etc.)</div> <div> <IMG BORDER="0" SRC="Wing0a73007700dc00000000.gif" HEIGHT="15" WIDTH="24" ALIGN="bottom" HSPACE="0" VSPACE="0">Export to online storage service (Sprint)</div> <div> <IMG BORDER="0" SRC="Wing0a73007700dc00000000.gif" HEIGHT="15" WIDTH="24" ALIGN="bottom" HSPACE="0" VSPACE="0">Export to other devices.</div> <bR> <div> OUTPUT DEVICES</div> <div> <IMG BORDER="0" SRC="Wing0a73007700dc00000000.gif" HEIGHT="15" WIDTH="24" ALIGN="bottom" HSPACE="0" VSPACE="0">Personal computer (headphones/loudspeakers)</div> <div> <IMG BORDER="0" SRC="Wing0a73007700dc00000000.gif" HEIGHT="15" WIDTH="24" ALIGN="bottom" HSPACE="0" VSPACE="0">PDA, built-in (Casio Cassiopeia) or through an add-on (Innogear)</div> <div> <IMG BORDER="0" SRC="Wing0a73007700dc00000000.gif" HEIGHT="15" WIDTH="24" ALIGN="bottom" HSPACE="0" VSPACE="0">MP3 handheld player (Diamond Rio, Creative Nomad [6Gb of music files!])</div> <div> <IMG BORDER="0" SRC="Wing0a73007700dc00000000.gif" HEIGHT="15" WIDTH="24" ALIGN="bottom" HSPACE="0" VSPACE="0">MP3 in-car player (PhatBox)</div> <div> <IMG BORDER="0" SRC="Wing0a73007700dc00000000.gif" HEIGHT="15" WIDTH="24" ALIGN="bottom" HSPACE="0" VSPACE="0">MP3 cellphone, (built-in or add-on (Ericsson, Samsung)</div> <div> <IMG BORDER="0" SRC="Wing0a73007700dc00000000.gif" HEIGHT="15" WIDTH="24" ALIGN="bottom" HSPACE="0" VSPACE="0">MP3 digital camera (Samsung again [Smile and _sing_ "cheese"?])</div> <div> <IMG BORDER="0" SRC="Wing0a73007700dc00000000.gif" HEIGHT="15" WIDTH="24" ALIGN="bottom" HSPACE="0" VSPACE="0">Internet radio player (Kerbango)</div> <div> <IMG BORDER="0" SRC="Wing0a73007700dc00000000.gif" HEIGHT="15" WIDTH="24" ALIGN="bottom" HSPACE="0" VSPACE="0">Game player add-in (SongBoy, Dreamcast)</div> <div> <IMG BORDER="0" SRC="Wing0a73007700dc00000000.gif" HEIGHT="15" WIDTH="24" ALIGN="bottom" HSPACE="0" VSPACE="0">Home hi-fi component (Kenwood)</div> <div> <IMG BORDER="0" SRC="Wing0a73007700dc00000000.gif" HEIGHT="15" WIDTH="24" ALIGN="bottom" HSPACE="0" VSPACE="0">Cassette player add-in (C@MP, Duo)</div> <div> <IMG BORDER="0" SRC="Wing0a73007700dc00000000.gif" HEIGHT="15" WIDTH="24" ALIGN="bottom" HSPACE="0" VSPACE="0">Mixer deck (Mixman)</div> <div> <IMG BORDER="0" SRC="Wing0a73007700dc00000000.gif" HEIGHT="15" WIDTH="24" ALIGN="bottom" HSPACE="0" VSPACE="0">Wristwatch (Casio).</div> <bR> <div> Seeing household names like Kenwood, Casio and Samsung in the hardware section says as clearly as any statistic that the retrieval, management and use of MP3 files is not a minority interest, engaged in solely by geeks and teenage boys full of acne and attitude. This is well on the way to becoming a huge business.</div> <bR> <div> The sooner the 'pirates' and music industry come to terms, and in a way that allows both to walk away with something positive, the sooner this new industry will become legitimized. I don't think another ten-year wrangle, as with Fox Talbot, is what anybody wants. There is vast potential here, not just for music files, but also for images, videos, games and programs -- anything digitally-encodable.</div> <bR> <div> Meanwhile, sticking with music, there are competitors to MP3. Microsoft, for example, is pitting its Windows Media Audio (.wma) format against it. This provides, so Microsoft says, high quality music in a very small file. It also incorporates digital rights management (DRM) features, something of obvious significance for the wider adoption of online distribution by 'official' sources of music.</div> <bR> <div> A recent test on behalf of Microsoft by the National Standards Testing Laboratory (NSTL) tried out .wma against RealNetworks' RealSystem G2 (now replaced by RealAudio 8) and a moderate-quality MP3. See <A HREF="http://www.nstl.com/html/nstl_lab_reports.html" TARGET="_top" TITLE="http://www.nstl.com/html/nstl_lab_report"><U>http://www.nstl.com/html/nstl_lab_reports.html</U></A> for the results. (Despite its official-sounding moniker, NSTL is a commercial operation, owned by CMP.)</div> <bR> <div> Other formats whose hats are in the ring are Audio Interchange File Format (.aiff), as used by Apple in its Quicktime videos, Liquid Audio and Ogg Vorbis. (This is nothing to do with my esteemed co-editor. It's open source stuff, named after Terry Pratchett characters.) See <A HREF="http://www.borg.com/~jglatt/tech/aiff.htm" TARGET="_top" TITLE="http://www.borg.com/~jglatt/tech/aiff.ht"><U>http://www.borg.com/~jglatt/tech/aiff.htm</U></A>, <A HREF="http://www.liquidaudio.com/" TARGET="_top" TITLE="http://www.liquidaudio.com"><U>http://www.liquidaudio.com</U></A> and <A HREF="http://www.vorbis.com/" TARGET="_top" TITLE="http://www.vorbis.com"><U>http://www.vorbis.com</U></A>, respectively, for more on these three methods.</div> <bR> <div> There's also a threat to the popularity of MP3 from Fraunhofer Institut Integrierte Schaltungen (Fraunhofer IIS-A), the very research centre that created it. Once again, it's a question of money. Fraunhofer IIS-A wants to charge royalties for the use of its technology. The tariff includes $5 per copy for encoders like Winamp and 1 percent of total revenues for distributing electronic music.</div> <bR> <div> It's that Fox Talbot feeling all over again, and also reminiscent of Unisys's deeply unpopular attempts to extract royalties for the use of its .gif format for picture files. See <A HREF="http://mp3licensing.com/royalty/summary.html" TARGET="_top" TITLE="http://mp3licensing.com/royalty/summary."><U>http://mp3licensing.com/royalty/summary.html</U></A> for more on this. And <A HREF="http://www.iis.fhg.de/amm/index.html" TARGET="_top" TITLE="http://www.iis.fhg.de/amm/index.html"><U>http://www.iis.fhg.de/amm/index.html</U></A> for background and for how the Fraunhofer lines up with the Secure Digital Music Initiative -- SDMI -- another dèbacle in the making.</div> <bR> <div> So, while you can, grab yourself some free software and some free music. I'm presently using the simply brilliant MusicMatch player (free from <A HREF="http://www.musicmatch.com/" TARGET="_top" TITLE="http://www.musicmatch.com"><U>http://www.musicmatch.com</U></A>, with a more gizmodally replete version available for a meagre US$19.99). To get music, I still prefer Napster (also free, from <A HREF="http://www.napster.com/download" TARGET="_top" TITLE="http://www.napster.com/download"><U>http://www.napster.com/download</U></A>).</div> <bR> <div> Yes, shipmates, I'm a pirate, too.</div> <bR> <div> Jolly Roger.</div> <bR> <bR> <div> <B> <A NAME="2__runes_1"><IMG BORDER="0" SRC="1x1.gif" HEIGHT="1" ALIGN="bottom" WIDTH="1" HSPACE="0" VSPACE="0" ></A></B><FONT SIZE="3" COLOR="#339966" FACE="Arial" ><B>2. Runes </B></FONT><A HREF="index_m.htm" TITLE="eComWatch"><U><B>[click here for top of page]</B></U></A></div> <bR> <div> As DotCom carnage spreads to the 'backbone' companies such as Cisco and Nortel, all sorts of interesting runes are drifting, drifting...</div> <bR> <div> <IMG BORDER="0" SRC="Wing0a73007700dc00000000.gif" HEIGHT="15" WIDTH="24" ALIGN="bottom" HSPACE="0" VSPACE="0">On September 22nd, Moneybox in Slate (http://www.slate.com) published an intriguing rant on "Go.com, Disney's Dumbest Brand".  They argued: "(but) Go.com as a proposition for consumers remains roughly equivalent to a Procter & Gamble retail store: Sure, you could go to such a place (if it existed) to buy Tide, but why would you? Chances are your loyalty is to the Tide brand, and if detergent is what you need, then you couldn't care less what else Procter & Gamble might have to offer."</div> <bR> <div> <IMG BORDER="0" SRC="Wing0a73007700dc00000000.gif" HEIGHT="15" WIDTH="24" ALIGN="bottom" HSPACE="0" VSPACE="0">There was a great fuss on this side of the water about the lengths television went to in order to ensure that their delayed coverage was what you saw of the Olympics, not nasty intrusive real time coverage on the Internet. [And didn't NBC pay the price for doing so?, says Roger. I watched a lot of the Olympics, live on BBC and then replayed later on Eurosports (on cable). The Australians came out of it with great credit -- for the sportsmanship and good humour of the home crowds (even when Australia wasn't doing well), for the friendliness and efficiency of the organization, for the way they subverted the insidous venality of the International Olympics Committee and for the beauty of the stadiums and the setting. A greater contrast with the tawdry, tasteless, overbearing, money-grubbing and aggressively jingoistic display of national small-mindeness that the world had witnessed at Atlanta four years earlier could not be imagined. Perhaps it's as well for the USA's amour propre that so many of its citizenry were not shown how a major international sporting event should be run.]</div> <bR> <div> <IMG BORDER="0" SRC="Wing0a73007700dc00000000.gif" HEIGHT="15" WIDTH="24" ALIGN="bottom" HSPACE="0" VSPACE="0">ISPs squawked as their cable provider suggested that 75% of their revenues might be a fair price for access to high-speed cable connections. Then AOL/Time-Warner woke up to the fact that this sort of flexing of monopoly muscle could be just what US regulators might worry about if their merger went ahead.</div> <bR> <div> <IMG BORDER="0" SRC="Wing0a73007700dc00000000.gif" HEIGHT="15" WIDTH="24" ALIGN="bottom" HSPACE="0" VSPACE="0">This week peace and love broke out in the war between Napster and the music industry, with Bertelsmann apparently making an offer Napster couldn't refuse. Napster, it appears, will be co-opted into the world of retail music distribution.</div> <bR> <div> <IMG BORDER="0" SRC="Wing0a73007700dc00000000.gif" HEIGHT="15" WIDTH="24" ALIGN="bottom" HSPACE="0" VSPACE="0">Canada's National Post published a soothing piece suggesting that the current devastation of IT share prices is just business as usual in the long cycle of the market reacting to new technologies. It will spit out the mad, the bad and the sad, and then set more traditional prices on the long-term winners. These will join the Blue Chip ranks and begin to produce boring forecastable numbers and generally comply with the perception that P/E ratios should actually mean something.</div> <bR> <div> <B>Full of sound and fury, signifying?</B></div> <div> You could draw one of two conclusions from this gallimaufry. Either the markets have digested the impact of the new, sorted the sheep from the goats, and got a handle on things with familiar and comfortable faces reasserting control, or the big battalions are even further out of touch than anyone could have dreamed.</div> <bR> <div> Let's argue the second case for the moment, as most other commentators are climbing on the "return to value" bandwagon. </div> <bR> <div> As is our wont, let's look back to other disruptive technologies. The National Post was pleased to cite canals, railroads, oil, telephones and the motor industry, among others, as having produced similar bubbles, with similar outcomes. Most particularly they signalled (no pun intended) a return to 'value' and market sanity, in the form of an oligopoly emerging to control each of those sectors.</div> <bR> <div> The superficial appeal of this argument is the apparent correspondence between yesterday and today. Both have, or appear to have:</div> <div> <IMG BORDER="0" SRC="Wing0a73007700dc00000000.gif" HEIGHT="15" WIDTH="24" ALIGN="bottom" HSPACE="0" VSPACE="0">new technologies requiring massive infrastructural investments</div> <div> <IMG BORDER="0" SRC="Wing0a73007700dc00000000.gif" HEIGHT="15" WIDTH="24" ALIGN="bottom" HSPACE="0" VSPACE="0">aggressive and visionary new players emerging out of a chaotic ruck of con men, chancers and wayward geniuses</div> <div> <IMG BORDER="0" SRC="Wing0a73007700dc00000000.gif" HEIGHT="15" WIDTH="24" ALIGN="bottom" HSPACE="0" VSPACE="0">an initial stockmarket bubble, followed by a rigorous weeding out, and</div> <div> <IMG BORDER="0" SRC="Wing0a73007700dc00000000.gif" HEIGHT="15" WIDTH="24" ALIGN="bottom" HSPACE="0" VSPACE="0">the incorporation of the newcomers into the fold of predictable and safe performers, suitable for the savings of widows and pension funds.</div> <bR> <div> Central to their argument is the idea of the emergent oligopoly ('though, truth to tell, in most cases ruthless monopolies became oligopolies through government intervention). By this thesis, the new technologies will be gathered up into the wise managerial hands of (presumably) the Nortels and Ciscos, battered but wiser industry giants such as IBM and the more visionary and stable of the newcomers: Sun, Oracle, Microsoft and AOL, to pull some names out of the hat at random. It is convenient, perhaps, that most of the latter feature the same sort of buccaneering CEOs as Standard</div> <div> Oil's Rockefeller or financier JP Morgan.</div> <bR> <div> <B>Is there anything wrong with this picture?</B></div> <div> We have been known to think you have to look rather further back to get a real picture of a disruptive technology. If you consider Gutenberg and movable type, you are looking at something rather different, but probably with closer parallels to the string of disruptive technologies we have seen over the past two decades since the introduction of the IBM PC.</div> <bR> <div> Print was a low cost technology. While there was a touch more involved than just knocking together on old olive press in a slightly different configuration and carving some type, it was a technology accessible to an entrepreneur of modest means and its output was affordable by a significant and increasing percentage of the population. Ditto the IBM PC and the joys of the world of the bulletin board service, precursor to the Internet. </div> <bR> <div> Unlike canals, telephones, etc, the Internet did not of itself generate the need for major infrastructural investment. While multi-megabyte speed is nice, the old steam Internet chugged along just fine on a 2400bps modem over a twisted pair telephone line, with a telco sitting there wondering what it was all about. A modern newspaper may look prettier produced on a multi-million dollar four-colour press, but the pamphlet or paper that will inflame a nation or change scientific thinking may just as easily be produced on a thirty year old Gestetner. Why else do totalitarian regimes sweat so much over access to photocopiers? The power of the Internet is the connectivity, not the number of very expensive Fortune 500 sites. </div> <bR> <div> Print was a heterodox technology. The Protestant Reformation (and the Counter-Reformation) is almost inconceivable without it. The history of revolution in the modern world is the history of print, of books, and of people educated to read and act upon them. </div> <bR> <div> Despite the attempts of the commercial, political, technical and financial establishments to co-opt the Web, it remains a subversive technology or family of technologies. Change continues to emerge from the edges of the network -- not the centre. It was the sheer subversion of Napster that called down the wrath of the music community. School Sucks (<A HREF="http://www.schoolsucks.com/" TARGET="_top" TITLE="http://www.schoolsucks.com"><U>http://www.schoolsucks.com</U></A>) similarly incurs the ire of the educational establishment [and students? Its prices are a rip-off - Roger] and warez sites therage of the software establishment. </div> <bR> <div> While Cisco and Nortel may still be market darlings despite their recent drubbings, the wild-eyed fanatics running ISPs know them to be producing staid and old-fashioned technologies, hugely over-priced and vulnerable to exactly the same sort of gang of visionaries who started Cisco in the first place. These once pioneering organizations now selling to telcos and large corporations, for whom "reassuringly expensive" is a mantra (echoes of "No one ever got fired for buying IBM"). The idea of being able to price upstarts out of the market is a viable and valuable strategy for these customers.</div> <bR> <div> Oddly, the market is writing the 'Cistels' down because of their vulnerability to the downturn of big telco investment, not their very real vulnerability to "me-too" imitators at more modest profit margins.  We have already seen this happen to all other parts of the computer hardware market.  Even more dangerous to them are the smarter, faster and cheaper solutions out of a garage somewhere in Boston or San Francisco - or even Palermo. They are discounted, too.</div> <bR> <div> Like the print revolution -- and unlike canals, oil, telephones and even the motorcar -- the Internet Revolution was bottom up. Roger and I can well remember trying to persuade large companies five years ago that the Internet mattered [and that TCP/IP was something an IBM mainframe network manager should be familiar with - Roger]. It couldn't, we were assured, because the Net was populated almost entirely by socially underdeveloped and impoverished geeks, students and other malcontents who would never appreciate the overwhelming importance of spending much, much more to have the</div> <div> right brand name.</div> <bR> <div> Despite the fact that the Internet now dominates a fair chunk of the financial pages, it remains bottom up. Even AOL users become sophisticated and switch to the 'real' Internet. Hugely expensive adverts during Superbowl Games might still sell very expensive trainers but they don't drive traffic to commerce-hungry Web sites. </div> <bR> <div> Big established businesses want the convenience and cachet of the Internet, but they don't want to change their business model to achieve it. The same music industry giants who thought it would be neat to sell a CD for more than a cassette think it would be even neater to charge the same price but have no reproduction or distribution costs. Banks would prefer you do you own banking, thus saving them the time and cost of a teller, but their executives and shareholders need the benefits of the saving much more than does the customer. [And, in Britain, they'll charge you, the customer, for the privilege -- Roger]. Airlines would like to cut out the expensive middleman, but charge you the same for a ticket.</div> <bR> <div> All manner of traditional businesses would like to disintermediate the people between them and you, but charge the same amount -- cut distribution costs but keep the same cover price. Big businesses turn to expensive lawyers to tie up small companies posing big threats in expensive litigation. Companies covering events using traditional technologies try to impose the same television blackout that local teams would use to try to drive hometown crowds to their games. </div> <bR> <div> The existing order always fights back. Co-opting the new is always a powerful and attractive tool, but it only works if you actually understand the new, and reshape your business to it. (Full marks here to Bill Gates who, three years ago, turned the world's most powerful software company on a dime to "embrace" the new technology.)</div> <bR> <div> What the National Post seems to have forgotten in its cosy picture of a newly mature market sorting itself out and rediscovering value is just how few businesses survive a disruptive change. Read 1970's list of top IT companies. Consider the number of canal companies that became successful railroads, telegraph companies that transmogrified themselves into telephone companies or steamship companies that became successful airlines. Then consider that those were changes affecting just a single industry.</div> <bR> <div> What we are seeing today is broader: with Coke just about to make the humble soft drink machine capable of accepting payment via your mobile phone, the changes taking place affect virtually every activity -- from commerce, to education, to medicine to politics. If the markets -- driven by the herd instinct as they are -- really think they have got the measure of that, the ride ahead should be very interesting indeed. </div> <bR> <bR> <div> <B> <A NAME="3__feeling_groovy_1"><IMG BORDER="0" SRC="1x1.gif" HEIGHT="1" ALIGN="bottom" WIDTH="1" HSPACE="0" VSPACE="0" ></A></B><B>3. Feeling groovy </B><A HREF="index_m.htm" TITLE="eComWatch"><U><B>[click here for top of page]</B></U></A></div> <bR> <div> Well, we groupware old-timers just knew that if we stayed around long enough we'd be fashionable again. The launch by Ray Ozzie of Groove, his peer-to-peer (P2P) groupware product, means that people will once more be looking at computer-mediated communication as a way of helping them work more effectively.</div> <bR> <div> Q. "And how is that to come about, oh wise grey-bearded one?"</div> <div> A. "Because they'll be working TOGETHER, grasshopper."</div> <bR> <div> One of the elements glaringly lacking from the high-flown waffle that the big consultancies have been spouting about electronic commerce is the need for people. (I'm talking about real live individual human beings here, as opposed to abstracted and standardised units of 'human resource'.) Amid the sloganeering we've been subjected to for the last five years has been an almost complete silence about the role of human collaboration in any kind of commerce, electronic or otherwise.</div> <bR> <div> All the orgiastic expatiating on topics such as B2B exchanges and supply chain optimization has really been lads talking about their latest Meccano sets. The average industry landscape as drawn by these nerds is just them envisaging a new and shinier production and selling machine than the one they had so expensively described the previous year, nothing more deeply or maturely thought-out than that. They're simply playing Fantasy Etailing League.</div> <bR> <div> There has been in some reports the occasional, usually glib, reference to better information flow and up to date information and so on, but at heart the e-commerce world depicted by the big consultancies and the system suppliers is about machines dealing with machines. ("Yes, little one, software <B>is</B> a machine.")</div> <bR> <div> We -- that is, ordinary folk not wearing ideological blinkers -- have known all along that organizing things to suit computers is a quick way of screwing up previously functional systems and structures. We also know that just throwing data at people doesn't actually achieve anything worth having.</div> <bR> <div> From the arrival of the first ever doorstop of fanfold to the latest blob of numbers from the neighbourhood datamart, for over thirty years human beings have struggled to make sense of what a computer is trying to tell them. Without temporal, geographical, social, linguistic and other contexts into which to anchor it, the data the machine disgorges is just so much refined but free-floating noise.</div> <bR> <div> The necessary contexts are, for the most part, given by other people and what they do and say. This is the basis of knowledge management, a once noble attempt to encourage that essential mind-to-mind communication (1).</div> <bR> <div> These days, like so much else in computing, the idea of knowledge management has been degraded and devalued until it is just a set of product features. There was too much money to be made out it for the concept to stay at the elevated level at which it began. You can't sell consultancy reports, conferences or software on the back of anything so ethereal; it has to be dragged down into the mercenary mire along with everything else.</div> <bR> <div> <B>Excreta tauri cerebrum vincit(2)</B></div> <div> There's a standard trajectory traced out by such ideas, once described to me as the "bullshit curve".This is a bell-shaped arc through which an idea or product travels in its life's course. At first, at lower left, there's little demand for this new thing, whatever it is, and little awareness of it. Its supporters therefore launch a publicity-cum-educational blitz, consisting of seminars, demonstrations, planted speakers at conferences, planted articles in the press, advertisements, stands at exhibitions, sales visits and all the other paraphernalia of modern marketing. These help drag the thing up the left side of the curve.</div> <bR> <div> Potential buyers and users gradually learn about the product and the idea and slowly begin adopting or purchasing it. What they learn goes back into the educational wash as positive reinforcement, increasing other people's learning. This moves the thing up further and faster.</div> <bR> <div> This process carries on until the product or concept is well rooted in the public consciousness, part of the mental furniture. By now, it will be at or near the top of the curve. It is not until this stage, my informant reckoned, that companies like his would begin to get interested, because that's when serious sales volumes would begin.</div> <bR> <div> By now, the thing will no longer a hot topic and will have become deeply unfashionable. It is, on the other hand, now starting to be put to real use. One indicator of this for any product or technology is when PC Week and Wired stop writing about it and Computer Weekly and Datamation start doing user experience surveys on it. This is the point, said my interlocutor, at which one really begins to make money.</div> <bR> <div> The amount of bullshit diminishes rapidly thereafter, being replaced by fact, knowledge and experience. Unfortunately, this presents product developers and marketeers with a problem (aka "challenge" or "issue"). How do they reap the benefits of all that expensive educating of the buying public while restoring novelty and sexiness to the idea?</div> <bR> <div> The marketing aphrodisiac they use is called rebadging. By tweaking the underlying technology or by repositioning the 'thing', it immediately jumps back to the bottom of the left side of the curve and is perceived as something new. The people behind it are thus able to reuse much of what they did before in getting it up that slope. This time around it does not cost them anything so much in time, effort or money.</div> <bR> <div> <B>Collective bullshit</B></div> <div> A good example, which conveniently plants us back on our original topic, is groupware. This originated as 'office automation' in the 1960s. It stayed such for a couple of decades, mainly because the computer market was small, the buyers were specialists, the machines were large and the networks few. IBM's mainframe-hosted DISOSS was a particularly repellent example of the breed.</div> <bR> <div> In the 1980s, office automation turned into 'integrated office systems', or IOS. Same thing; different marketing emphasis. DEC's ALL-IN-1 (in truth, SOME-IN-PART) and Data General's CEO (Comprehensive Electronic Office) were widely used types of IOS, based on minicomputer servers.</div> <bR> <div> With the rise of networks and personal computers in the late 1980s, the term 'groupware' became popular. The concept goes back to Douglas Englebart, in the 1960s, but the expression did not arise until 1978. (The bullshit curve was clearly around even then.)</div> <bR> <div> Numerous small suppliers introduced groupware products, typically of interesting design but dubious stability. One of the first was Action Technologies' Coordinator. So restrictive was this on users' behaviour that, on the West Coast of the USA, it was nicknamed "Naziware from Achtung Technologies" (not that we're mentioned the war in any way).</div> <bR> <div> There were, in fact, some technical and operational differences between IOS and proper groupware but this did not stop the makers of the former from promptly slapping the new label on their products.</div> <bR> <div> The archetypal genuine groupware product, launched in 1989, was Lotus Notes. This had its conceptual roots in an online teaching system used at the University of Illinois in the 1970s, called PLATO (Programmed Logic for Automated Teaching Operations). Several of the designers of Notes had been students there and had used PLATO. They included Ray Ozzie, whose brainchild Notes was and who founded the company that designed it, Iris Associates.</div> <bR> <div> Before long, Notes had such a grip on the market and on users' minds that, if you said "groupware" to people, they would reply, "Oh, you mean Lotus Notes". This was too much for Lotus's competitors, notably Novell and Microsoft. They got fed up with having to say how and where their products differed from Notes, so they began to use the expression, "workgroup computing" instead.</div> <bR> <div> So far as any real distinction between the two could be detected, workgroup computing was what you did and groupware was what you used to help you do it. Like all attempts at logical definition of marketing terms, this foundered. The two terms ended up as synonyms, a perfect example of the bullshit curve in operation.</div> <bR> <div> To my mind, the exemplar of a workgroup computing product was Microsoft's Exchange Server. Microsoft, latterly official supplier of software to the Imperial Russian Court, hated Lotus and particularly its success with Notes. It launched Exchange as a spoiler. This was never groupware, just MS Mail with a gold tooth and dangly earrings.</div> <bR> <div> One result of the launch, happily for the Redmondials, was that it confused people. By the 1990s, if you mentioned groupware, the response was now, "Oh, you mean Notes versus Exchange". And so it was in many an invitation to tender. Other, and possibly better-suited, groupware products did not get a look in, and the previous market diversity shrank to nothing.</div> <bR> <div> In the last few years, groupware has all but disappeared as a label, with people talking instead about "collaborative intranet applications" or some such. I take this as a sign that groupware is just past the cusp of the BS curve.</div> <bR> <div> <B>Would you like some manure for your rhubarb?</B></div> <div> <B> . . . No thank you, I prefer custard.</B></div> <div> So to today. The bovine excretion now being extruded in copious and steaming volume is labelled "P2P". This is an ambiguous expression, since it can mean both peer-to-peer and person-to-person. The former is a technical-level description of how computers can communicate (hands up all those who remember the introduction of LU6.2).</div> <bR> <div> The latter, person-to-person, is just another word for groupware. Products like Groove and Microsoft NetMeeting are synchronous groupware. So too are textual 'chat' products like AOL's ICQ. (Since text chat is an important element of MP3 downloading and playing, Chris has suggested "pirate-to-pirate" as a further expansion of "P2P".) Email and Lotus Notes are, by contrast, asynchronous, or store and forward, P2P software.</div> <bR> <div> Well, that's three definitions of P2P already, and the bandwagon has hardly started. Still, it's a jolly hot topic, so we had jolly well all look jolly interested in it. We at <I>ECW</I> will be taking a squint at Groove (once I get the beta software to work) and</div> <div> other neo-groupware products in future issues. Perhaps I'll even be able to persuade my publishers that my book of Lotus Notes case studies is worth refreshing!</div> <bR> <div> We will also be keeping an eye on the progress of peer-to-peer working. Some people reckon that this is how the Internet was really meant to be and are getting quite tumescent about the topic. Old soldiers like Chris and I are keeping our powder dry.</div> <bR> <div> Roger (... looking for fun, and feeling grooooovy)</div> <bR> <div> <B>Notes:</B></div> <div> (1) See "The Knowledge Creating Company", by Ikujiro Nonaka, a 1991 Harvard Business Review article (available from <A HREF="http://www.hbsp.harvard.edu/hbsp/prod_detail.asp?91608" TARGET="_top" TITLE="http://www.hbsp.harvard.edu/hbsp/prod_de"><U>http://www.hbsp.harvard.edu/hbsp/prod_detail.asp?91608</U></A> -- have $5.50 handy). This and the subsequent book he wrote with Hirotaka Takeuchi are the definitive texts. As he says, says, knowledge management is not to do with processing `objective' information but with concentrating on "tapping the tacit and often highly subjective insights, intuitions and hunches of individual employees and making these insights available for testing and use by the company as a whole". There's still no commercially available machine or software that can do this. Good groupware has, and has always</div> <div> had, the potential to help with it, though, as can Mike Lynch's Autonomy range of products.</div> <bR> <div> (2) Dog Latin for "bullshit baffles brains" -- a sentiment surely uttered by more than one member of the poor bloody legionary who had just got one over on his centurion.</div> <bR> <bR> <div> <B> <A NAME="4__letter_director_of_bt_gives_the_1"><IMG BORDER="0" SRC="1x1.gif" HEIGHT="1" ALIGN="bottom" WIDTH="1" HSPACE="0" VSPACE="0" ></A></B><B>4. Letter: Director of BT gives the game away  </B><FONT SIZE="2" COLOR="#000000" FACE="Arial" ><A HREF="index_m.htm" TITLE="eComWatch"><U><B>[click here for top of page]</B></U></A></FONT></div> <bR> <div> I thought this might appeal to your business sense of humour: </div> <bR> <div> "The only thing that prevents people downloading whole movies on the Net is bandwidth in the local loop ... It is not technological issues that prevent it, it is business and political issues which slow it down." </div> <div> Peter Cochrane, Chief Technologist, BT </div> <div> <A HREF="http://www.zdnet.com/zdnn/stories/news/0,4586,2637274,00.html" TARGET="_top" TITLE="http://www.zdnet.com/zdnn/stories/news/0"><U>http://www.zdnet.com/zdnn/stories/news/0,4586,2637274,00.html </U></A></div> <bR> <div> Oops, did he really say that... ?</div> <bR> <div> Gordon Rae </div> <div> Consultant and Researcher </div> <div> Centre for Information, Networks & Knowledge </div> <div> SPRU Science & Technology Policy Research </div> <div> Mantell Building, </div> <div> University of Sussex, </div> <div> Email: <A HREF="mailto:J.G.Rae@sussex.ac.uk" TARGET="_top" TITLE="mailto:J.G.Rae@sussex.ac.uk"><U>J.G.Rae@sussex.ac.uk </U></A></div> <bR> <bR> <bR> <div> <B> <A NAME="about_ecomwatch_"><IMG BORDER="0" SRC="1x1.gif" HEIGHT="1" ALIGN="bottom" WIDTH="1" HSPACE="0" VSPACE="0" ></A></B><B>About </B><I><B>eComWatch </B></I></div> <div> <I>eComWatch</I> is edited by Roger Whitehead and Christopher Ogg. For further information, see [URL]. Subscribe free by clicking <A HREF="id20.htm" TARGET="_top" TITLE="Subscribe"><U>here</U></A>. </div> <bR> <div> Copyright Roger Whitehead and Christopher Ogg, 2001. <I>eComWatch</I> may be circulated freely in its original format with  copyright notice intact. For permission to reproduce any article, please contact the editors. </div> <bR> <div> Roger Whitehead -- <A HREF="mailto:rgw@office-futures.com" TARGET="_top" TITLE="mailto:rgw@office-futures.com"><U>rgw@office-futures.com</U></A>  </div> <div> Christopher Ogg -- <A HREF="mailto:cogg@isn.net" TARGET="_top" TITLE="mailto:cogg@isn.net"><U>cogg@isn.net</U></A>  </div> <bR> </td> </tr></table></body>