Life Is Rich

Can’t really say it much better than Marc Hedlund at O’Reilly. Content Providers are a bunch of morons. They have customers standing at the cash register waiting to pay for a product – and instead of selling you the product, they would rather treat you like dirt and tell you screw off – the only way you can get it the way you want it is to steal it. That’s smart.

That strategy really has been working for the music industry (not). People don’t want to steal content. They just want to be treated fairly and respected in exchange for their purchase. Look how successful Amazon and iTunes have been – selling non-DRMed content in a way that meets the needs of the customer.

Wake up “content providers” – before we start finding different providers of our content – be it music, TV, movies, or anything else.

In my new WoW-clean state, I’ve been slurping up books right and left. Years ago, before the distractions of WoW and babies and such, I tried to read at least one if not a couple technical books a month. This was a fairly expensive (but necessary) proposition at nearly $50 a pop. I also reviewed development books for a couple companies — usually one every other month (which I got paid for – helping to offset the cost of my monthly book purchases). Of course, six months later a new edition would come out or the book would become stale, often earning it a trip to Goodwill. After skipping the technical reading ritual for a couple years, I think I’m getting back into the groove.

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In yet another example that Microsoft just doesn’t get it – as much as they say they do (and their ads claim), Microsoft has once again come out with their complex product stratification with 7 versions of Windows 7. While Windows 7 been getting some good press, I believe it’s entirely due to it being so much better than the disaster that Vista has become. Even so, this pricing and branding scheme just proves that Microsoft is moving in the wrong direction. I don’t think they realize that the market is eroding around them. Latest data out today shows that 1 in 10 computers on the Internet is a Mac, and more than ever before are also Linux-based (although a much smaller percentage than Macs). Considering that it wasn’t long ago that only 3% of the computers on the Internet were not MS based, you can see the significance of this swing.