5 years is a very long time to see how a bet will turn out... further, it's a notoriously difficult time-period for prediction in the tech arena... a common saying is that prognosticators overestimate the changes that will occur in the next 2 years, but underestimate those that will occur in the next 10 years. that's because it's fairly easy to see what's "around the corner", but harder to see the disrupting change that isn't yet looming. 5 years back, facebook was nothing but a little pea in its pod. myspace was the king of the social-networking sphere, with a membership of 80 million accounts -- staggering at the time, leading to a sale to rupert murdoch for a cool $800 million... not the $1.6 billion pulled down by youtube, but still amazing. further, myspace paid for itself, almost fully, in just one year, and all rupert had to do was route search requests to google. now, though, myspace is a vast wasteland, badly mismanaged. and facebook? well, i don't have to tell you about facebook... they have 500 million members. and the capitalists learned the $10/account valuation of myspace "wasn't quite enough", so facebook is valued at $60/account, totaling to $30 billion, and making mark zuckerberg the world's youngest billionaire. that's how much things can change in 5 years in the tech world. and that's why 5 years is a very long time to settle a bet there... so, with all that as deep background, you will understand why i'm glad that today terminates a bet i made exactly 5 years ago. here's the u.r.l. where you can see what actually happened:
http://www.teleread.com/library/you-can-buy-the-mit-100-laptop-for-200/
david rothman said this, talking about the o.l.p.c. machines:
Could U.S. school districts end up with $100 models? At that price we’re talking serious competition for p-textbooks, and the effects could be major for publishers. With prices so low, libraries will easily be able to lend the machines to patrons. Ahead–eventually: The $50 e-book-capable computer on sale at Kmart, in line with my 1992 prediction.
rothman had been giving that line about $50 e-book-machines many times in the previous 5 years, and i often called him on it. and i called him on it this time. only this time, he let down his guard, and moved up the timeline:
Folks, tune in a year from now, and we’ll see who’s right.
he even said:
I'd bet my money on it.
so i said this:
if the m.i.t. laptop is selling for $200 or less next thanksgiving, i’ll buy you a turkey, david. and if there’s a $50 computer — i mean a real computer – available on _any_ thanksgiving in the next 5 years, i will _buy_it_ for you. because the cost of _lunch_ will hit $50 before there is a $50 computer. and i can buy you lunch…
rothman responded with:
Hey, Bowerbird, I’m not a betting guy, and worse, I’m a vegetarian. We’ll just enjoy gloating privileges–you or I.
so first he wants to _bet_, when he's making his big claim. but when someone takes him on, he's "not a betting guy". still, ok, fine, i don't care to take his money, i'll settle for "gloating privileges", as he put it. so i went back a year later to tell him that he was wrong... then the year after that, and every year since, i came here. (because he banned me from his blog. coincidence? right.) and i've been "gloating" since. he was wrong. i was right. stuff your tofu turkey with _that_... *** i also said:
meanwhile, it’s important to note that color touchscreens are available _this_christmas_. the only problem is that
it's interesting that, even years before the iphone came out, i knew that _touch_ would be an important part of the arena. that's because you needed to use the full surface for screen, which meant a hardware keyboard was out of the question... i also said:
high-res screens really _will_ be cheap in 5 years!
with the high-res screens on the iphone4, i nailed that. *** in terms of things that i didn't see coming, one of 'em was the crucial importance of wireless in selling the hardware... i _did_ see the importance of the large catalog of amazon, but i missed the vital nature of the instant purchase option. another invisible was the ability of apple to carve out an agreement with chipmakers to customize to their desires, creating a chip that gave good usability under low power. *** in terms of a thing we _did_ see, but which still has not paid off to the important degree we _thought_ it would, we've got to put mary lou jepsen's screen in that category. color-capability indoor, but still useable in direct sunlight, low cost and with a low power draw, this screen _delivers_, but mary lou just can't seem to get it into a commercial use. here's hoping that that situation changes, and soon... *** but now let me talk about bigger issues than the bet... because the problem with rothman is not just that he was/is an idiot. after all, there are lots and lots of idiots out there. the problem with rothman was that he used n.l.p. methods to sucker lots of fools who then believed whatever he said, including some of the people who are on this very listserve. (if you admired rothman, you'll already know who you are.) so rothman was an idiot who had a little bit of _influence_... along with jon noring, another idiot who used n.l.p. methods, rothman was able to make some noise about the .epub format. i won't bother to go through all of the many twists of plot, but suffice it to say that, here in 2010, we are still paying the price for this combined rothman/noring idiocy with their pet format. what comes to mind is the popular saying:
"be careful what you wish for, because you might get it."
neither noring nor rothman was smart enough to know that a file-format, in and of itself, doesn't mean very much at all. even if you call it "an _open_ format", and then try to slander any other option with the thinly-coded insult of "proprietary". as long as it _sounded_ good, that's all that they cared about... (noring frequently opined here on this listserve that perception is more important than reality itself. i kid you not, he said it.) and the corporate publishing houses were more than happy to adopt .epub as their favored format. (why anyone really cared what format the corporations wanted is still a mystery to me... did we care if the recorded-music corporations blessed .mp3? i consider corporate blessing to have been _a_warning_sign_.) what nobody ever bothered to do was to create any open-source proof-of-concept _reference_implementations_ for the format... for any e-book format, you need a reference implementation for an _authoring_tool_ (first of all) and for a _viewer-application_... even at this time, years and years later, the world is still lacking open-source authoring-tools for .epub format, which means that self-publishing authors still have to face a stiff learning-curve... even worse, the viewer-program situation is a _complete_ mess. the reason is simple -- d.r.m. -- and could have been predicted by knowledge of the history of the format, since in an earlier life, it'd been sabotaged when microsoft tried to saddle it with d.r.m. both rothman and noring _knew_ of this history of sabotage, but did nothing to rouse their followers to stand up against the d.r.m. rothman even went in the other direction, supporting a thing he liked to call "social d.r.m.", which is code-name for "doesn't work". (which is why the corporate publishers were loathe to support it.) and make no mistake about it, the corporations _wanted_ d.r.m. so the publishers had adobe create a version of d.r.m. for them. (if you know anything about the recent travails of adobe, you'll know that this was an extremely stupid course of action to take; but throughout this scenario, the publishers have been stupid.) now, amazon wasn't gonna pay a per-book fee for adobe d.r.m., so they went off and invented their own. and apple did likewise. and barnes&noble too. while meanwhile, the corporations were financing all kinds of alternative formats as well, like iceberg and blio and who-else-knows-or-even-bothers-to-keep-up-with-this, indicating not even its parent organization really believes in .epub. so now everyone has their own viewer for .epub, and -- of course -- none of these are compatible with each other, or with the standard. thus we are reliving the old "browser incompatibility" nightmares... so now people who make e-book files are finding that they need to "tweak" their files so as to make them work with each type of viewer, which means the "standard" format isn't really a "standard" at all... especially since now publishers are thinking they need to "enhance" their e-books, with audio and video, which .epub does not support. meanwhile, the x.m.l. movement which served as the basis for .epub has now waned, and .html5 is the new kid on the block, so everyone is now babbling about that, which means that now .epub is looking for a facelift to .html5, so we can expect everything to _stay_ in flux, and for mass confusion to reign, probably for many years to come... in one sentence, everything .epub is one big mess. and this "standard format" -- which promised oh-so-many benefits -- has delivered on _none_ of them. all it has done is suck all the oxygen out of the room, so a decent "open standard format" has no chance now. which is pretty much what the corporate publishers wanted all along... they are trying to sabotage e-books because they know e-books spell the end of their gravy train, and they are trying to stall the inevitable... so give it up for rothman. he gave the corporations what they wanted. *** rothman left teleread. installed someone else as the editor, and sold the masthead. nonetheless, the gee-whiz unreality -- the perpetual sucker for a press release -- still permeates the blog on a regular basis, as evidenced by this recent entry...
http://www.teleread.com/chris-meadows/new-electrowetting-advances-could-lead... the article contains the predictable tagline:
Steckl hopes to attract commercial interest for the next stage of the development process, which could take three to five years to bring a product to market.
another guy, promising the sky, hoping for a big paycheck. anyone care to bet me that, in "three to five years", this line of research will be looking for a new set of funders, and again promising some miracle product "in 3-5 years"? yeah, i thought not... *** and while i'm at it... there's another disturbing post on the teleread blog today:
http://www.teleread.com/copy-right/prominent-authors-claim-project-gutenberg... might wanna go over there and do some damage-control... or maybe it's not necessary, since every single one of the commenters on the article have questioned the tone of it. a good example is this comment, from "jb", who says:
The point of saying that PG is “kidnapping” works is to imply that they are willful copyright violators, without actually making the overt accusation. It’s a slimy tactic. And it’s extremely disappointing that Teleread took the bait. Note the vague wording of the original headline: PROJECT GUTENBERG IMPROPERLY PD’D COPYRIGHTED WORKS, AUTHORS CLAIM Teleread got suckered into being part of a smear campaign. Or, maybe they wanted to jack up page hits with a more inflammatory headline. Either way, it’s annoying.
this is the legacy of rothman. did i mention he lost our bet? *** the good news is that rothman has largely retired. noring too. the bad news is that they have been replaced by a full _army_ of idiots, who have used n.l.p. and social-networking to build a reputation-circle around themselves, and they bond at the "future of publishing" conferences they hold for each other... best place to get acquainted with this daisy-chain is twitter... depending on how much power and influence this little circle is allowed to obtain, they could muck things up _really_ badly. fortunately, i don't think anyone is stupid enough to give them any _real_ power or authority. but, you know, you never know. meanwhile, thank god for amazon. if they hadn't led the way, e-books would still be in the dark ages... -bowerbird