How Bad is the Web in Mobile Safari?

There's been a lot of complaining about how the new iPad doesn't support "the real web" because it doesn't support Flash. The implication is that Flash is so essential to the web, that not having it in the iPad makes the web browser useless.

There's a post at http://theflashblog.com/?p=1703 that attempts to drive this point home by showing some photoshop mockups of what they think web sites will look like on the iPad.

Rather than fake photoshop mockups, how do some of those sites look in mobile safari on the iPhone today?

Are there websites that don't work and are broken? Certainly. But implying that the lack of Flash makes sites like CNN, Disney, and Google Financials useless is just wrong.

[update]

Mark Damon Hughes has another good comparison of the sites demonstrated above.

Middlemen

They've been around for a long time now.  They're around in almost every market segment, taking their slice of transactions.  Lawyers are the middlemen between to parties in a legal dispute.  Grocery stores are the middlemen between farms and consumers.  Up until now, record labels have been the middlemen between musical artists and their fans.

Bringing two people together to do business has always been a hard thing to do.  Direct contact between buyer and seller is almost always the best, but sometimes its just really hard to connect.  Enter the middleman (or middlewoman).  New middlemen are popping up all over the internet.  Social networking sites are the middlemen between people trying to connect.  Sites like Digg and Technorati are the middlemen between Bloggers and readers. Google is now the middleman between just about everything (content) and everyone (searchers).

Which brings be back to the record labels.  It used to be if you wanted to make music and get it into the hands of your fans, you pretty much had to go through a record label.  What did the record label really do for you though?  For the most part, they did some advertising, and they got your Vinyl / 8-track / Tape / CD from you to record stores, and then into the hands of your fans.  

With the costs of producing music plummeting, and the ability to do your own advertising and distribution, where's the value from the record labels anymore?

Death of a Record Label

I predict that within 50 years, maybe less, the record labels will look nothing like they do today.  Oh they'll probably manage to hang around, but instead of the media titans they are today, they will be relegated to online bit bucket hosting and credit card processing.  That's really the only thing that's a little bit hard to do still.  The real power will be in the internet's new middlemen.  Google, iTunes, Amazon, these are the places where fans go to look for music these days.  What music fan goes to Universal's website to look for new music?  Bands in the future will simply check the 'music host' option from their local internet service provider, register with iTunes, and then do some advertising and play shows.

Will this mean the end of music superstars?  Probably not.  I think it just means that hype will die down, and only the bands with true talent will last long enough to get their music into enough fans hands to be called superstars.

Will there be more bad music out there?  Probably.  However social networks, peer ratings and the collective audience will quickly sort the good from the bad and allow you to find good music that you like.  Sites like Last.fm are doing this now.

So there's my prediction.  I'll check back in 50 years and see how I did.

NBC To offer video download service

The New York Times is running a story about NBC offering their own video download service this fall. So it looks like NBC is wanting to get in on the download action directly. At least they're not trying to hide their reasons for it.

“We did this to eliminate the middleman,” said Jeff Gaspin, the president of NBC’s digital division.

NBC seems to be waking up to the fact that the business they are in is media distribution, and that the distribution model has shifted online. Apple saw this much earlier and jumped on it. Now that the model has proven successful, NBC is looking to go it alone.

It will be interesting to see how this plays out. Initially NBC says they will offer shows free for download just after they air. It looks like you only have one week from the air date to download and watch it however, and then it seems they won't let that episode be downloaded. The downloads themselves will be restricted to Windows-based PCs, and will stop working after seven days. It's unclear if that's seven days from the day it is downloaded, or seven days from the initial making available after the air time. This sounds like it makes it impossible to pick up a new show mid-season, then go to NBC and back sample the earlier episodes. If you really like a new show you'll have to hope for re-runs, or buy the DVDs at the end of the season.

It doesn't sound like the free part will last long however. From the NYT article:

But NBC intends to transform the service into a model similar to iTunes by the middle of 2008 - that is, consumers will pay NBC directly to download episodes of the shows.

I will have to reserve judgement on the pricing until it is announced, but I'm not optimistic. One of the rumored reasons for the NBC-iTunes breakup was pricing, that NBC wanted to charge more. I can't really see how NBC expects to charge more that Apple's $1.99 per show, especially if the shows are really only rented for a week.

I will have to test this out on a Windows machine at work, since I don't have one at home. I'll be curious to see if NBC can put together an offering that is as easy to use as iTunes. I'm a little worried about the implications for 'TV Video' downloads if NBCs model proves effective. It seems each of the old guard Networks would likely follow suit with their own video download services.

Apple got out in front of all the old guard media companies, and quickly became the new network, the new aggregator. As a customer, I don't really care about NBC, or Apple. What I care about is a simple, direct path from the content creators to me. If NBC can pull this off, and I can still watch Battlestar Galactica on my schedule instead of theirs, more power to them.

Network Neutrality vs Getting What You Pay For

There is a lot of talk these days about Network Neutrality, and all sides of the debate use the term to mean different things. Ars Technica has a great article about Network Neutrality and Deep Packet Inspection, and it has me wondering the same thing I've been wondering each time I hear Network Neutrality brought up.

It seems to me we have three primary players.  One is me, the end user.  Two is the other end of the 'tube', lets pick on Google since they're big and have more money than they probably need.  Three is the network owner, I'll pick on AT&T for this example.

AT&T is in the business of selling bandwidth on this big 'ol network that it owns, or leases, or cobbles together from a bunch of OTHER people who own networks etc, but for my example, I'll deal with the simplified AT&T.  So AT&T owns a network with a certain maximum bandwidth, and it makes money by selling people small slices of bandwidth on its network.  Google is a huge company that is ravenous for bandwidth, and it buys a huge chunk of it from AT&T.  I'm a little guy on an iMac in my living room, and I pay AT&T for a really tiny slice of bandwidth.

Once AT&T sells the bandwidth, why should it care if I talk to Google?  If I hit my bandwidth cap, I get throttled.  I paid for 5Mb lets say, and when I hit 5 that's it.  If I keep requesting more and more connections, either my new connections get refused, or my old connections get throttled back to make space in my little 5Mb slice for the new connections.

Google should be the same way.  Now Google's numbers are huge compared to me, and if too many of Google's connections are being throttled because Google hasn't bought enough bandwidth, then Google's customers might start to get upset with bad performance, and Google will be forced to either buy more bandwidth or deal with unhappy customers.

However, lets say that Google has purchased plenty of bandwidth, and in fact is doing a great job of serving its customers, so much so that Google is making money hand over fist.  I have heard the argument made that 'Google is getting rich on the backs of the networks', AT&T in my example.  Should AT&T be allowed a cyberspace version of a stage coach hold up?   Pay us a percentage of your ungodly profits or we'll throttle your bandwidth?  Google has paid AT&T for a certain bandwidth slice, as long as they don't exceed that limit, why should AT&T have any expectation of getting money out of Google?  Is it just that Google is better at making money with a given allotment of bandwidth than say Yahoo?  Isn't that like saying FedEx is better at making money on highways than UPS, so we should charge FedEx more to use the roads?

In my simple mind, packets are packets.  If I have an agreement with AT&T that they will deliver to and from me a certain rate of packets, then they better live up to their end of the bargain, or we'll be talking to the BBB.  Now if AT&T has oversold their available bandwidth, and too many people are actually using what they agreed to such that AT&T actually CAN'T provide each user with the bandwidth they agreed to, well that's a problem AT&T needs to deal with by either increasing its maximum bandwidth, or by not overselling what they can actually provide as much.  Similarly, if I've paid for a 5Mb connection, I better not get upset when I can't download 10 iTunes movies at the same time, each at 5Mb.  I can buy more bandwidth if I want to.

I know the real situation is much more complex than this, however this seems to be the fundamental question.  People are afraid of AT&T making deals with Yahoo to give Yahoo traffic priority, presumably at the expense of traffic from people who have not signed up special deals.  As long as that doesn't mean depriving Google of the bandwidth that Google has paid for and AT&T has agreed to provide, then I don't see the harm.  Yahoo is getting more and paying more, they're getting what they paid for.  The moment AT&T denies Google the bandwidth they have agreed on, AT&T needs to be taken to court for breach of contract.

I've never known anyone to complain about getting more than what they've paid for.  But I certainly know that customers will not stand by long and put up with not getting what they've paid for.