Tag Internet

Starlink and Natural Monopolies

A couple of weeks ago Elon Musk tweeted (or Xed, or whatever it’s called today) that Starlink has broken even and congratulated its team. The company has been offering fast satellite internet access through its own Low Earth Orbit (LEO) constellation of more than 5000 satellites. As part of SpaceX, it’s the first company of […]

Hotmail

In the summer of 1996 hotmail was released to the world and it wasn't much later that I opened my first account there. It was an innovative email platform that promised to liberate people from their ISP provided email. It was one of my first non-ISP provided email addresses and one I still have. Like today, the mid-1990s was an era of walled-gardens, only at the time they weren't called Facebook, twitter or Google, but AOL, Compuserve and loads of local BBSes offered by several small ISPs. Service providers were only beginning to adopt their, still current, position as 'carriers of content and services' not purveyors thereof. And in this environment, hotmail was innovative, in the same way that netflix, skype and all those other unbundled services are innovative for they liberate you from the increasingly threatening grip of ISPs and the few dominant players that keep entering new markets, doing a bad job at it, but winning 'cause their financial prowess kills the competition in the meantime. I used to use my hotmail account quite a bit between 1997 and 1999. I gave up shortly after Microsoft started really changing it --- at the beginning they didn't do much to it; it still ran on FreeBSD and Solaris. By 2001 it had already lost much of its 'innovative' features (and it ran on Windows 2000) and under Microsoft's ownership it stagnated as other services rendered it obsolete. By 2002, my hotmail account was only used for a few quasi-dodgy online merchants to whom I didn't want to give a more 'important' email address and since GMail took the world by storm with its 1GB offer in 2004, I practically stopped using it alltogether. As such it is now full of enough spam to feed the world twice over. And now, Microsoft decided that hotmail is to be no more, replaced by the title of its equally mediocre monstrosity of an email client, Outlook, and revamped to look like an app of their Metro environment. Yet another one of those early, pioneering web brands of the 1990s is, even in name, dead. Ah well, at least we still have Amazon =)

KF8. The path to fragmentation.

Amazon announced Kindle Format 8, a new format for ebooks destined for its popular ebook reader. The new format, based on html5, promises books with small file sizes, excellent rendering performance, varying typefaces, tables and, in general, much more complex layouts and as a result way more beautiful books than the standard experience typically found […]

Advertising Googlocrisy.

Here's a pretty good reason why you shouldn't trust companies, even if their 'motto' is 'Do No Evil': Google seems to be penalising sites that carry paid links, while at the same time AdSense has become one of the most ubiquitous ad-schemes around. Technology aside, whether you carry paid/text links or AdSense is the same thing: advertising on your page. Google's algorithmic dependency on hyperlinks to determine content quality and relevance is nothing but it's own problem and while they can do whatever they want to their engine it kind of reflects bad on them (see abuse of market position) to penalise sites this way, especially when they run an extensive ad service too. Think of Microsoft doing the same for all pages carrying AdSense because their engine used Javascript created links to determine the page rank of a site. People would be crying foul before the bytes had settled on the press release (and they'd be right of course). Now, think of Microsoft having anywhere near the search engine market share that Google has and I'm sure someone would probably be contemplating a class action lawsuit about lost visits, profits etc. due to unlawful discrimination. Will people blink first by removing paid links and sticking to Google's ad services out of fear of losing traffic, or will the company end up losing market share in the long term as a consequence of mediocre search results and annoyed users?