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a jaundiced eye: dark fiber
for wednesday, march 5, 1997. HDWebTV
With all the fuss surrounding WebTV, you might have forgotten one big reason why it is so ugly, boring, and perfect for television:
We never got HDTV.
Saint Nicholas dedicated much of his analog book, Being Digital, to the discussion of several technical, political, economic, and sociotechnonomitic reasons why. It was the Japanese. It was sabotage by the Americans. It was the alignment of the planets.
Well, I don't give a lick for any of that. WebTV is selling like hotcakes, like the dancers on the deck, and the band plays on.
Peter Drucker said that in order for a new idea to succeed, especially against entrenched, if paleozoic, ideas, it had to be at least 10 times better, cheaper, etc.
This is to account for the energy it will take to get people to notice, to get industry to adopt it, to get blah blah blah. Well, it is also a truism (often voiced by Mr. George Gilder) that the slowest, most pig ugly kludge wins if it can leverage a large installed base of customers, hardware, etc.
Looks like we're stuck with ugly TV and ugly chips. Gil Amelio, are you listening!?! Please do something to help us out of this mess.
Make it insanely great.
© 1997-2001
Steven Champeon. All rights reserved. |