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CEO Concerns at Apple and Microsoft Illustrate the Need for Succession Plans

The future of MSFT is going to be turbulent at best. Ballmer may be hopeless, though it's not entirely his own fault. It was only a matter of time until they found themselves in this position given their dependence on Windows and Office.

For the longest time MSFT exploited the commoditization of their products through strict licensing and high per-PC license prices, and now that those days are coming to a close their inability to truly innovate is coming to light. Vista is a bloated and unstable OS which was clearly pushed to market too early, their Xbox brand has been saddled with poor hardware quality and customer service issues from the beginning (in addition to the connectivity problems people have been experiencing on Xbox Live), their attempts to gain an online presence with Live.com and then the Yahoo! takeover bid have BOTH failed, and many institutions are reluctant to upgrade to Office 07 in an effort to stave off high training costs and lost productivity from workers who won't know how to use it. Just look at how thriving the market is for third party plug ins designed to make Office 07 more accessible...

Add to that AAPL's gain in momentum (with many people actually rallying behind the company, as if it is some sort of social movement), the number of home users who are sticking with XP and Office 03, and a growing number of dissatisfied Vista owners (many of whom spent large amounts of money for the privilege) - and you have a pretty clear case for a serious crash in MSFT's share price in the next several years.

Also, I firmly believe the open source community is going to give MSFT's price models a huge kick in the face in the fairly near term. If the Linux community can ever adopt a single standard, throwing all of their support behind it, Windows will lose its dominance in very short order.

I owned stock in MSFT up until last fall. I do not regret selling, and don't believe I ever will.

eBay's Revenue Diversification Increasing

Positive as those results may have been, this is an obvious pump.

Surely, a user named "Only eBay" would be long eBay.

Take this article with a grain of salt, and don't forget the impact eBay's many negatives could have on their future performance before you go long with real money on this one.

Comcast, Time Warner: The Broadband Salad Bar

I suppose a third option would be to simply stop promising speeds they can't effectively deliver, but we all know that won't work. All of a sudden lowering people's Internet connection speeds would make the age of our nation's communications infrastructure impossible to deny.

So, the communications companies look for scapegoats...

Comcast, Time Warner: The Broadband Salad Bar

The problem is that these companies have been overselling capacity for years, and now it's finally catching up with them. Instead of rolling out fiber in the 90s like the tax payers paid them to, they pocketed the money and offered us DSL and cable over the existing copper wires instead.

www.newnetworks.com/Sh...

Now that video on demand is taking off, at the same time as the BitTorrent protocol made P2P infinitely more efficient than it ever has been, their oversold capacity is becoming brutally obvious.

So what do they do? If you ask me, they have 2 choices here:

1) Do the job they were already paid to do, and lay out a publicly owned fiber to the home network, accessible to everyone and open to competition OR

2) Blame the mess on net neutrality, manipulate the public into believing it's bad for competition, and try to get it repealed. Once it's done and neutrality is dead, open the floodgates of Deep Packet Inspection and protocol filtering. Over saturation isn't an issue if you can simply block packets of data at will.

Clearly, the telecom industry is choosing option #2. I find it rather upsetting, though not at all surprising.

Comcast and BitTorrent Become "Net-Neutral" Friends

I need to make a correction and can't edit. This sentence:

Comcast can’t add a clause to the lease, which prevents the lessee from only using so much of the leased highway.

should read:

Comcast can’t add a clause to the lease, which prevents the lessee from using the entire leased highway.

I must have gotten confused in my wording when I initially wrote that.

Comcast and BitTorrent Become "Net-Neutral" Friends

Also, with respect to the ownership of the lines, I’m not talking about the initial DARPA project which became the Internet of today. I’m talking about this:

www.newnetworks.com/Sh...

All the money and tax breaks given to the telcos as incentive to upgrade their networks to true broadband 15 years ago went right into their pockets. And now, they are trying to claim net neutrality as their enemy, and the cause for why they cannot upgrade their infrastructures while our nation falls behind. Look at how broadband works in Japan and parts of Europe – they’ve had true broadband for years. The telcos are holding progress hostage, by using it as leverage to get net neutrality repealed. Net neutrality doesn’t cripple advancement, ISPs overselling capacity is the real problem here. Abolishing network neutrality just makes it easier for them to continue overselling without upgrading the old copper lines.

And you can’t compare ownership of an apartment building to ownership of the Internet. The Internet is a construct of the people who use it, bloggers, web designers, entrepreneurs, etc. It’s not any more or less “owned” by any one person than any other marketplace.

“We are slowly sliding into the morass of socialism in every aspect of our society. This "we the little people" vs "them - the greedy capitalist pig businesses" net neutrality argument is just another example.”

You can’t be serious. Net neutrality is socialist now? And while I don’t normally subscribe to the “greedy capitalist pig businesses” thought process, I make an exception for the telecommunications industry. Their history of fraud and corruption is far too deep to ignore. Repeal net neutrality, and the telcos will ruin the Internet the same way they ruined every other medium of communication. All this talk about competition is hogwash, unless you genuinely believe you are getting fair service on your cable TV, cell phone, and/or land-line long distance plans.

Comcast and BitTorrent Become "Net-Neutral" Friends

User 155013:

“Currently, you can start a business that sells toilet paper online and uses minimal bandwidth or you can start another version of YouTube that uses massive amounts of bandwidth and you would be charged exactly the same amount for your connection.”

This isn’t true. Companies which use vast amounts of bandwidth already have to pay more for what they use. Websites such as Google or Youtube have bandwidth costs in the millions per month as is (and rightly so – I’m not arguing that the telcos shouldn’t be allowed to sell higher levels of tiered service). Companies like Comcast already are compensated for the use of their bandwidth. Are you suggesting we allow the telcos to add per MB surcharges on top of the existing $2+ million Youtube or Google pay per month to get the levels of service they need to reach all their users?

And you cannot really compare the Internet to any physical medium – your apartment and trucking analogies are comparing apples to oranges. No truck is free under existing net neutrality provisions, because all Internet users are paying a “toll” to use the roads. When Comcast sells Internet service at 15Mbps down/5Mbps up, they are leasing the consumer a 4 lane highway. Whether that consumer chooses to use that highway to capacity (50 to 100 trucks, or maybe just a lone Prius) is up to them under existing neutrality laws. Comcast can’t add a clause to the lease, which prevents the lessee from only using so much of the leased highway. When ISPs sell these service plans to the consumer, all they are doing is providing access to the Internet at whatever the stated capacity happens to be. It’s then up to the consumer how much or how little of that capacity gets used at any given time.

Should Comcast be allowed to lease you that 4 lane highway, only to turn around and tell you that you can only use one lane at a time? If they didn’t have the capacity to support it, why did they lease you a 4 lane highway in the first place? Isn’t that fraud?

“Comcast and other providers charge subscribers different rates for different upload and download speeds, why not charge based on volume of bits transferred.”

As a consumer, would you genuinely accept this pricing structure from your ISP? If companies started trying to price Internet access the same way they price text messaging by cell phone, it would be a disaster.

Also, how would this work with web-based companies who already pay millions per month for the bandwidth they need to reach all of their users? Should they then pay more on top of that, based on how much data they transfer to the millions of people who are also paying extra to receive that data? This is the part wherein the big telcos win, while everyone else loses.

The article I linked to above by Tim Berners-Lee summarized what net neutrality is really about very well with this one line:

“If I pay to connect to the Net with a certain quality of service, and you pay to connect with that or greater quality of service, then we can communicate at that level.”

Comcast and BitTorrent Become "Net-Neutral" Friends

dig.csail.mit.edu/brea...

Comcast and BitTorrent Become "Net-Neutral" Friends

The skeptic in me can't let go of the possibility that this is just for show. Net neutrality ever goes away, and they're right back to throttling at their own discretion. Along side all the other ISPs, who'd love the abiltiy to determine what can and can't pass through their lines.

Chamberpost:

Hate to call someone out like this, but I think your view of net neutrality is tragically short-sighted. Comcast is simply backing down to pressure here, pressure which came in large part from existing net neutrality legislation.

Also, it seems like you don't fully understand the intent of net neutrality. Existing net neutrality laws only state that all information sent over the Internet be treated equal - all packets of data must be transferred through our (I say "our" because the tax payers paid for it - Google 200 billion dollar "broadband scandal") network infrastructure without being subject to the scrutiny of anyone between us and the information we intend to receive. It effectively represents the Internet's First Amendment...

Make no mistake, an Internet without neutrality is good for Comcast, all other ISPs, and no one else. The vast majority of the growth we've seen on the Internet has come from the fact that it is its own encapsulated free market. Anyone can start a business online from anywhere, using a third party hosting provider, and have a chance at global success. Current neutrality laws make the Internet a construct of the people who use it. Repealing those laws would hand the companies who sell us access the right to also determine how we can use it, and this simple fact is far worse for the growth of technology and the advancement of e commerce than a law which prevents the telecom industry from acting like the telecom industry...

A lack of net neutrality threatens the freedom of the Internet, and all that talk about how it inhibits innovation is telecom propaganda. Compare the lists of companies standing behind each side:

Over at handsoff.org (a phony grassroots site funded by AT&T, IIRC), you have a long list of telecoms, some no-name companies, and "The American Conservative Union."

While over at savetheinternet.com, you have Ivy League professors, the founder of craigslist.com, Google, the ACLU, the Electronic Retailing Association, a handful of educators, a myriad of private technology advocacy groups (professionally and as hobbyists), and Tim Berners Lee, one of the people who helped found the Internet as we know it.

The simple fact is that the Internet belongs to the people who use it, and net neutrality keeps telecom greed from getting in between that. "New Media" pages like myspace or facebook, worth billions to themselves, would not have been possible without net neutrality.

Censors Take Down YouTube and Google News in China

And this is why Net Neutrality is far, far more important than people seem to understand.

"in China you cannot find a lot of information about the 1989 Tiananmen Square uprising on the Web, including the famous image of the lone man standing in front of the line of tanks. Most young Chinese have never seen that image."

Hooray for the suppression of information! Who needs an enlightened and educated populace? Just let your censors decide what they can think, it's so much easier that way. All your citizenry needs to be is compliant, nothing more...