June 11, 2001– Newsletter #134

Greetings, Weekend Silicon Warriors,

Did you hear…

NAPSTER is going to go the corporate way. It was
announced last Tuesday that NAPSTER would
participate in MusicNet a coop made up of
AOL/TimeWarner, BMG and the EMI group. NAPSTER
will license the music and distribute it. The MusicNet
site is scheduled to go live toward the end of summer.

CNN is reporting that hacking against dot-com
companies is on the rise…by those whom the companies
laid off. Nicholas Middleton hacking Slip.net was the
latest example. He received three years probation for
altering company records.

South Dakota has had enough of government employees
goofing off on the Internet. Governor Bill Janklow has
given up on trying to set filters and play one-upmanship
with the employees. He has dropped the filters in favor
of the pink slip. You mess around and break policy on
the Web, you’re out of a job.

Internet Explorer 6.0 will be out soon. The browser
should contain something titled the Platform for Privacy
Preferences (P3P). It will allow users greater control
over cookies.
Simply turning off cookies is making it tough to surf
lately. Many sites simply won’t allow you their content
with out them. P3P should help you with that yet still
allow you control over how much you wish to be
“tracked”.

Now onto today’s topic…

The Web search engine Google, on its homepage,
proclaims, “Search 1,346,966,000 web pages”

Uh…no. Thanks. I’ll just stick with these four.

Academic discussions regarding what the Web “should”
be usually differ radically from what the Web “is”.

CNN just released a study that suggests over 50% of the
total time users spend online is dominated by only four
companies. That’s down from 11 companies just two
years ago. The four dominating companies are
AOL/Time Warner, Microsoft, Yahoo, and NAPSTER in
that order. AOL/Time Warner alone owns almost a third
of the pie itself taking 32% of online time. The majority
of that time comes from email and instant messaging.

The pie is getting bigger. More and more people are still
coming to the Web. The areas providing content for
those users are dwindling. Consolidation is the name of
the Internet game.

The CNN report of its own survey also noted the results
of a Jupiter Media Metrix survey that reinforced the
thought of the Internet’s great consolidation. The Jupiter
study noted that 60% of all surfing time is dominated by
only 14 companies. They are, in order; AOL/Time
Warner, Microsoft, Yahoo, NAPSTER, Juno, Ebay, EA
Online, Excite, iWon, Disney, Lycos, About, FlipSide
Sites, and C|Net.

The reason for the rapid consolidation is fairly evident.
Smaller Web companies have become starved of cash.
They either sell to those larger companies that have the
cash or die. If they die, more than likely they’ll be
grabbed after the funeral. Once the money started dying
out, buying and marketing became the way to success.
The larger companies could do it and they do it well.

I certainly cannot say that process is terrible and hope to
have a leg to stand on. I once owned HTML Goodies
outright. It was draining my pocket and I was happy
when Earthweb came along and supported the site by
buying it out. Goodies would be long since dead by now
had I been asked to support it. I seriously considered a
couple of offers before the Earthweb offer that would
have simply allowed me to break even.

Well…so what? So what if the Internet world is being
lead by less and less parent companies? There are still
jillions and jillions of pages out there. They’re not all
owned by the top four, right?

Right. We’re just not going to them in great enough
numbers. If we do, then a smaller site shows itself to be
viable. Sooner or later the big boys come knocking and
either buy, or create an equal, thus making it even harder
for the smaller site to function. No one can blame the
smaller sites for selling out, at least I hope no one would.
Could you be strong enough to simply go out of business
on general principle rather than bow to a larger corporate
group? I couldn’t. I didn’t.

So what do you think so far? Is this a bad thing? If
so, why? Better yet, who’s fault in all of this? The big
companies must be at fault, right? Not so fast. The few
articles that discussed the trend took a tone that this was a
terrible thing. Why? Is it lack of choice? If so, it’s kind
of “lack of choice” after the fact. There was a time when
we didn’t have to choose AOL, but we did. We just
simply chose it into a phenomenon.

Microsoft is the same way. We never had to choose the
products. There have always been MACs. We simply
chose Microsoft into a monster.

Why is it when a company becomes large to a point that
it starts to become newsworthy that, all-of-a-sudden, the
company is doing something terrible? A successful
company doesn’t come out of nowhere with giant sums of
money. AOL was built. Microsoft was built. They
became successful because they put out products the
majority of people felt were worth the money. The
companies became wildly successful. That’s bad?

OK, I’m off subject. Maybe you don’t feel a company
becoming large is bad. Maybe it’s the company’s
gobbling up smaller companies that’s bad. If so, then
we’re back to the same question. How big a customer
base may a company have before that customer base is
considered obscene?

So what’s my point? I’m simply trying to understand
how we continue to make companies large and powerful
by choosing them and buying their products again and
again and then stand back aghast when we find out that
the company is bathing in money and buying up smaller,
failing companies.

We proclaim that we want freedom of choice. We had it.
We all chose a small grouping of companies. Some may
claim it was a lackadaisical attitude by the audience.
They should have researched. Well…they didn’t. They
made their choice. They made their choice off of a
friend’s reference most likely. Don’t tell me the majority
of people chose one company over another because of
gobs of advertising money. Fifty commercials cannot
touch the reference of a trusted friend.

We chose. They got huge. They’re in charge. Now we
want choice.

Hmmm…

>>>>>>>>>>>>

That’s that. Thanks for reading. I can’t tell you how
much I appreciate it.

Joe Burns, Ph.D.

And Remember: Mind your Ps and Qs! I love this one.
No matter which history of the term you give, someone
has a different one they proclaim is correct. There are
two that are most often stated as being the correct history.
One is that Ps and Qs stood for pints and quarts.
Barkeeps would keep a tab of drinks by marking P and Q
down on a sheet. So, to mind your Ps and Qs was to keep
an eye on what you drank. Tell that to someone. More
than likely you’ll get that that is wrong. He or she will
most likely tell you the term came from early printing
whereas the letters were placed, one by one into a plate
that was then loaded into a press. The problem was that
all the letters were backwards so they would print
correctly on the paper. To mind the Ps and Qs was to
make sure the correct letter was being used. Those are
just the big two. Another is that the term is a shortened
version of “Mind your Please and Thank-you” used in
order to remind children to be polite. What about the
theory that is came from the French? The term might
have been from dance suggesting to students to mind
their figures pieds and queues. I actually found seven
different theories in just a quick look around.