There are some new indications that the momentum of the web is shifting more decisively toward content, but not in the simplistic “content is king” sense. What’s happening is a combination of fairly complicated and interrelated shifts, and these are gradually changing the way the online business model works. How that will impact the online…
The Field of Dreams Becomes a City of Patio Gardens
One of the issues that now face the networking market is the fate of Nokia, the once-giant smartphone and networking company that has seemed to stumble in every market race for the last couple of years. There have been all manner of analyses of why this has happened, but they’ve all (in my opinion at…
Slices of Online Future
News Corp has finally launched it’s iPad-paper, The Daily, but it’s obviously way too soon to know whether the experiment in a newspaper that’s neither printed nor online, but instead is appliance-targeted, will work. The price is lower than that of print news to be sure, but at $40 a year it’s still more than…
Google, Ads, and Kill Switches
There’s a mixed bag of news for Google to confront their new CEO, and it’s mixed in multiple dimensions. Android and the basic business of search are showing a combination of positive and negative signs, and confusion is never a good thing. On the Android side, there’s excitement over the new Honeycomb version for tablets,…
Bits Don’t Rule and We Don’t Rule Them
FCC has filed a response to two provider lawsuits on net neutrality (one by Verizon), saying that because the order has not yet been published in the Federal Registry it’s not technically in effect and cannot yet be challenged in court. That seems a rather lame move, but as I noted last week the current…
Lessons from the (Earnings) Season
LinkedIn, not consumer-directed sort-of-rival Facebook, is filing for an IPO. The move may be a sign of confidence in the markets for early 2011, a sign of lessening confidence beyond the first half, or simply another indication the financial markets are eager to make a quick buck. One interesting thing about the move is that…
Hulu’s New Business Model is Bad Industry Juju
AT&T’s report on earnings reinforced some structural changes in the industry that Verizon’s report had already suggested. One basic truth is that mobile services are more profitable and more fertile areas for growth than wireline. Another is that mobile service gains and ARPU both depend substantially on broadband and smartphones rather than on voice services. …
Finding the Bucks, or Making Them
Earnings season is underway, and I think it’s clear that the results are generally positive and probably more so than expected. That raises again the possibility that the recovery is proceeding more quickly than economists expected, and another sign that may be true is that the major parties in the US now seem to be…
New Brooms?
The shape of the networking industry has long been determined by forces on the outside in what could be called the “on-net” space, and two powerful players there are undergoing management transitions. Apple is losing (at least temporarily, though we hear management expects Jobs’ departure to be permanent) its charismatic CEO and Google is switching…
Enter Cisco Videoscape
Cisco took what could be a giant step for itself at CES with its new video ecosystem. Called Videoscape, it combines in-home tools and software to centralize the mediation and management of video relationships, creating what’s probably the most architected video service layer available to network operators today. Since Cisco was already doing well in…