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CES
Anyone following CES news? I am very casually. Have the Spike livestream going in the background and the Mad Katz guy is on right now showing off their new Street Fighter arcade sticks. They've always been an impressive product, but the newest version lets you take 2 sticks and link them together side by side, creating an exact replica (same dimensions) of a Japanese SF arcade cabinet surface. That's pretty badass.
Comments
Whatever, Gizmodo sucks balls regardless.
Part of why people are sort of meh on CES is that tech has turned into an industry trying too hard to force trends on consumers when they aren't actually asking for them (Boo-ray, 3DTV). I think people would really like to have a device such as a smart watch or glasses w/ HUD that lets them keep their phone in their pocket when they just want to check a notification or even do a very short task.
Spike just plugged an upcoming announcement of partnership between Taco Bell and an unnamed tech company. I'm turning this off.
You have a business, you want to make money. It's very hard to come up with something that a lot of people want and will pay for. It's a ton of work, and the risk is very high. You have to spend a lot of money on marketing and development.
Instead, what you can do is make a business where other businesses are your only customer. Then you only need a handful of customers. You can handle each sale in person, and each sale is a multi-million dollar deal. Risk is much lower, and your customers are richer. Most of the money is in the bank accounts of corporations, not individuals.
As a result, you are seeing lots of people developing products that serve the needs of corporations, but not much serving the needs of people. Google, Facebook, and even Mozilla make all their money from B2B. They may have individual consumers as users, but those users are the product, not the customer.
What you see in consumer technology is not people trying to make things better for consumers. No better user interfaces or open devices. No lower prices. Very few things that actually make our lives better, even though they are possible. Instead you see consumer technology that serves other corporations better than it serves the people who actually buy the devices.
I think there will always be a place for physical media, although the applications may become more narrow. However, I don't think network bandwidth will ever exceed the bandwidth of the station wagon full of backup tapes/BD-ROMs/holographic data crystals/whatever hurtling down the highway. Sure, the latency sucks, but if you just want to get a massive amount of data from point A to point B quickly and don't care when the first bits show up so long as all the bits show up on time, it works.
Also, network bandwidth has already exceeded the bandwidth of shipped media in most cases. If I order the complete Cowboy Bebop on Amazon and start torrenting it simultaneously, no bets on which one arrives first.