[opendtv] Re: Closed systems
- From: Craig Birkmaier <brewmastercraig@xxxxxxxxxx>
- To: opendtv@xxxxxxxxxxxxx
- Date: Mon, 21 Dec 2015 10:38:24 -0500
Regards
Craig
On Dec 20, 2015, at 10:04 PM, Manfredi, Albert E <albert.e.manfredi@xxxxxxxxxx>
wrote:
As always, you have to understand cause and effect. Otherwise, you miss
everything. The reason it is hard to run Mac OS on regular PCs is that Mac OS
does not support the wide variety of devices that Windows does.
Can you provide an example?
I'm not talking about boards that plug in - those have always been more of an
issue for both platforms, and there are boards for both platforms that are
unique. Desktop PCs do tend to use boards for some standards features like
audio and graphics; while Apple integrates the chips for these functions. And
Apple no longer makes desktops with expansion slots; with Thunderbolt it is
easier to connect to external drives and expansion devices.
And the reason for that is that Apple doesn't want to.
That's just not true anymore. If you look at the devices most people connect to
PCs and Macs they work with both platforms. Printers, displays, keyboards, even
mice. I will say that this was not always the case. 5-10 years ago driver
support for printers was a crap shoot with Macs. But now Apple sells a lot of
products, not just Macs, that can drive printers, and the device manufacturers
are providing good support.
What makes Macs work easily is that they have a closed ecosystem.
I would not characterize it that way. I would say that Apple has much tighter
integration between the hardware and operating system. This is especially true
for iOS. The fact that Macs are now selling well into the enterprise suggests
that the ecosystem is not only open, but easier to support. The recent deals
with IBM and Cisco suggest that there is growing interest in both OS-X and iOS
in the enterprise. Not to mention $25 billion in sales to the enterprise in the
last fiscal year.
That is also why Windows monopolized the workplace. Cause - effect. Everyone
on the planet, except Craig, knows that if you want Apple products to work
well, you HAVE to do things "the Apple way." If you deviate, you're in
trouble. By design.
Everyone in the world knows that it is easier to set-up and maintain Macs than
PCs. That is why Mac sales keep growing, while PC sales are declining in double
digits.
Windows 10 is working out pretty well in that regard, mainly because
Microsoft took it upon itself to make sure the drivers work. Microsoft
provides all of the drivers needed for Windows 10, and updates to these
drivers. Well before the 29 July date, Microsoft went in and checked
everyone's PC (they had to be Win7 PCs or newer, though), and informed the
users of any impending compatibility problems, with their hardware and their
apps.
They had no choice. The last two Windows versions were commercial disasters.
Microsoft is still trying to wean people off XP, which is what I am running.
And things are not going smoothly with Windows 10. They have had to recall
several recent updates. I'll concede that it is a daunting problem to make an
OS work with hardware from so many manufacturers; that's a major reason many
Windows users buy a machine that works out of the box, then never update it.
Not that any OS update is a piece of cake. OS-X updates are fairly easy now;
the biggest hassle is re-entering passwords for cloud services. But there are
always a few updates after a major release to address the bugs they missed.
It is very interesting to see how quickly people update their iOS devices. This
is where Apple has a huge advantage over Android, as the hardware permutations
are tightly controlled. Android manufacturers all add layers on top of Android
to support their unique hardware features, so updates are scattered and
dependent on the device manufacturers not Google. As a result it's a nightmare
for App developers, as the Android installed base is more like Windows, with
large percentages of devices running older OS versions.
That is why Google is now putting more resources into the Nexus hardware, so
they can keep up with iOS and provide reference hardware designs for the other
Android manufacturers.
In your dreams they might be.
Sorry, but that's a fact.
I can give you links to a number of recent articles that talk about this.
Google is doing it with Nexus. Amazon is doing it with its tablets and Fire TV.
And Microsoft is doing it with Surface and X-Box.
And there is good reason to do so. The original IBM PC was a box full of third
party components, all of which were evolving rapidly thanks to Moore's Law. The
motherboard was the reference design, with all kinds of cards that plugged in
for audio, graphics, networking, etc.
Over time more and more of these functions were integrated into ever more
powerful chips. Now you can buy an entire PC on a chip. Apple not only designs
the CPUs for iOS devices, but now those chips also support a wide range of OS
level functionality.
One example that is causing heartburn in DC these days is the on chip enclave
that handles encryption. Even Apple cannot decrypt private data on iOS devices.
The ability to tightly couple hardware and software is now the essence of
device design. That is why Google, Samsung, Amazon and Microsoft are starting
to emulate what is working for Apple.
Yes, within any given enterprise, the company will tend to use a standard PC
brand, to make it easier to deploy services and debug problems. But within
that enterprise, also deployed are many, many non-Microsoft products. No
company wants to be totally beholden to one manufacturer, for all their
hardware and software.
Yup. Bring your own devices really upset the applecart for the corporate IT
departments. I've seen the turnaround with several friends who have tech
support jobs at the university and hospital. 5-10 years ago they looked at Macs
like some kind of virus. Now they own iPhones and have no problem supporting
Apple devices.
Really, Craig? Are you implying that Microsoft is preventing anyone else from
building PCs?
Not at all. I am stating that the old open system business model is crumbling
under its own weight. PC sales have been declining at, or near, double digit
rates since the start of this decade. Relying on third party manufacturers to
drive the platform forward was not working - the process is just too
cumbersome. So Microsoft is changing its business model to allow them to
integrate hardware and software, and to move more quickly. Thus could actually
help the third party manufacturers - i.e. leading by example.
As far as I know, Microsoft is competing against any number of other vendors,
with its Surface Pro. I have seen no inkling that Microsoft plans to block
attempts to install Windows on non-Microsoft products. None.
Yup. But over time they are likely to become much more like Apple, as Microsoft
will always be a generation or more ahead of the other devices.
And then there is the minor issue of whether the hybrid PC/Tablet devices will
help reverse the rapid decline of the PC platform.
Dunno, because they might want to build their own closed-in, proprietary
ecosystems, that I would also dislike? Or is this a trick question?
No tricks. The answer is simple.
They are unable to compete effectively against Apple's tight integration.
Developers create Apps for Apple first, then try to make them work across an
ecosystem with disparate hardware designs, running multiple versions of Android
that have been extended by different manufacturers.
What have I been saying about the little streaming boxes built out of, and
depending on, collusion? Same applies here.
There are more smartphones than PCs now Bert. The world has fundamentally
changed. Apple has a thriving developer community that is making billions off
of their "collusion."
You never answered my question about Swift. It is a programming language
developed by Apple that has largely replaced earlier development environments.
It is the fastest growing programming language in history, and was just
released into open source. It's not just the devices Bert, it's the entire
business opportunity.
This is no different than what happened with Microsoft after Windows 95, with
one exception. Microsoft turned their success into a monopoly and started using
it to kill competitors...until they were caught.
That's completely false. Think "open architecture IBM PC platform." We
started out with only DOS as a Microsoft product.
It took nearly two decades for Microsoft to build the Windows/Office monopoly
Bert.
The reason businesses went to PCs was precisely this. They had a wide variety
of options, for productivity software, and hardware devices, that would run
on this IBM PC platform.
So why did they then standardize on Microsoft's productivity and back office
software Bert?
What happened to Word Perfect?
What happened to Lotus 123
What happened to Netscape?
That's how this PC dominance evolved. It was much later that Microsoft also
dominated in the productivity software arena, with Office. We used Smartware
first, and Lotus, WordPerfect, Profs, FoxPro, VMSmail, DEC Pathworks
networking, etc., all on the open architecture IBM PC design, running DOS and
then Windows. This was the genesis of Microsoft/PC dominance.
Thanks for making my case!
The genesis of Microsoft dominance was Apple's failure to protect its
intellectual property. Remember Sculley taking Microsoft to court for copying
the Mac GUI?
Microsoft tried to make the windowing techniques a layer on top of DOS - it
never worked well. When they built a new OS from the ground up with Windows 95,
they won the PC wars and soon monopolized the business.
Please get off the misguided notion that I advocate forcing
everyone into walled gardens.
You have always advocated this, Craig. Everything you advocate works toward
this goal, whether you're aware of it or not. And even your categorization of
Internet TV as spelling "doom and gloom," which slipped out subconsciously
perhaps, indicates this.
Earth to Bert. The people who live in the United States spend hundreds of
billions on entertainment. TV is part of that, but we go to see movies, listen
to the radio, buy music, movies and TV shows on vinyl, tape, discs and now
bits.
People started paying for MVPD service because it offered more choice and was a
good value. It still offers more choice, but it was allowed to grow into an
oligopoly propped up by the politicians who now make up a significant part of
the content.
There is no going back. Now that people are willing to pay for TV, "free" (ad
supported) is losing the audience. FOTA and FOTI will not go away - they help
pull people into the paid ecosystems. But the paid services are not going to
disappear either.
For some reason, you don't like open and interoperable systems. I've yet to
understand what your motivation is.
FOTFL - I'm almost the father of interoperability when it comes to TV Bert.
I cannot fathom why you believe the monopoly PC is an open system that is the
best front end to TV entertainment, while devices that use the Internet to
bring entertainment to your TV are evil, collusion, and closed systems.
The content owners decide what to support, and how much it costs...
Maybe so. And yet, broadcasters provide an alternative that the vast majority
of the country's population can use. But this does not change your advocacy
for everyone to go to by-subscription, proprietary hardware, walled gardens.
They provide an outdated alternative that is limited in terms of the content
people want. We could all still use horse-drawn wagons Bert. But cars and
trucks are more convenient and the local general store has been replaced by
Walmart and Home Depot.
The simple fact is that it did not matter how well the ATSC standard worked -
all that mattered is that it was mandated by the government and that the FCC
mandated the use of their intellectual property in hundreds of millions of TVs.
The broadcasters went along with the pain of the DTV transition because they
won the war in 1992, and got their lucrative second revenue stream.
BTW, I have just started hearing CBS advertise their programs "on cable,
broadcast, and streaming on demand." At last. It looks to me like online
streaming has reached the mainstream.
Was that on the air or something on a website or App?
We asked for interoperability
Yes, and we got it, and it works.
Sorry. You got a completely CLOSED standard that is now outdated. There has not
been a single significant upgrade in 20 years. And please don't tell me about
A-90 and the DOA mobile upgrades.
But You can now plug a $39 dongle into the TV and access a world of content
using current, interoperable and open standards.
It works for an increasing number of people, as they cut or shave the cord.
For some reason, this disturbs Craig greatly.
Does not bother me. FOTA TV has been around my entire life. A long time ago it
was the only choice. Now it's my last choice.
We got a standard OTA digital system, and we also got mandated-to-be-neutral
Internet broadband access, and Craig is vociferously opposed to both of these
concepts. Go figure.
I was only opposed to the way the standard was created, and the lack of
interoperability and extensibility. These concerns have proved to be valid.
And I support net neutrality, just not a government regulatory scheme that is
slowing innovation, limiting competition, and driving up the price.
Net neutrality was working before the FCC decided to turn ISP service into
another regulated oligopoly.
at the peak, 95% of U.S. Homes subscribed to a MVPD service...
Oh, now it went up to 95%? Interesting.
I've seen that number but cannot find it now. What I can find is that the peak
was in 2010 with 88.5%; at the end of 2014 the NCTA claims 85%.
Please provide proof. In any event, that trend has been reversing. The ATSC
mandate is serving millions of new households each one of these past several
years, Craig.
Can you prove it?
The number of cord cutters is just a few million and many of those are not
using antennas.
VOLUNTARILY. These millions of new ATSC households would have had the option,
if you had had your way.
I assume you meant WOULD NOT have had the option. Obviously they do have the
option for significantly less than $100.
You mean, if your intention was to force everyone onto walled gardens? Sure.
Duh.
No Bert. No mandate was required to bring receivers to market. The only thing
that was forced was the tuners in hundreds of millions of TVs that people had
to buy, but never used.
If you are completely naïve about collusion, you might naively suggest this.
But we have seen how real collusion is, even with streaming devices. I
scratch your back, you scratch mine.
Get real. The tuner mandate did not even happen until 2002. There were ATSC
tuners on the market by then - not very good, but they existed.
Ask yourself this: who gets the royalties from the ATSC receivers?
Clue - the CE industry funded the development of the ATSC standard and took
over the MPEG-2 process to entrench their reworked IP. Why in the world would
they NOT build the receivers and collect royalties on the back end?
Craig seem oblivious that this goes on, or maybe he advocates it? We are
lucky that people have become so dependent on a neutral Internet by now that
there would be a massive revolt were the ISPs to use the tactics of previous
networks. ATSC is to TV broadcasting as IP is to the Internet. The lingua
franca. It's all good, Craig. Relax. Everyone like it this way, except you.
What a bizarre analogy. Aside from the fact it is not even close to being true,
the Internet works, is updated continuously, and everyone uses it. ATSC barely
works, is outdated, and hardly anyone uses it.
Read my lips, Craig: EXACTLY! And why on earth would the congloms allow that
to happen, with THEIR OWN intellectual property? Why should they? So they
would have to negotiate deals with Google, instead of negotiating directly
with those that matter? I can't begin to understand why you still haven't
figured this out.
There are all kinds of organizations that sell TV ads Bert. Broadcast stations;
the TV networks; cable systems; syndicators; and traditional regional ad
services. Google tried to enter this market and the resistance was huge; nobody
would do business with them. And this had NOTHING to do with Google TV.
It was obvious from the beginning, when the CE vendors were behaving like a
bunch of lemmings, that Google was going to get too much power over conglom
product distribution. Ads are part of that equation, Craig. Ads pay the bills.
Ads pay a declining portion of the bills Bert. Subscriber fees pay for content
as well. Netflix and HBO have NO ads; dittos so for the new ad free version of
Hulu. People are willing to pay to avoid ads.
I won't argue that the content owners decided to block competition from Google.
Not supporting their attempt to sell ads is one thing. But blocking Google TV
devices was much different - that was a clear net neutrality violation.
What did AOL have to offer that Time Warner needed? AOL offered an
Internet-like, but walled in system, before people got a clue that what makes
the Internet really appealing is its openness.
AOL had the technology to integrate TV and the Web. Time Warner tried the
closed system approach with the Full Service Network - the open Internet killed
that misguided attempt to force everyone to pay to reach cable subscribers. AOL
was already in trouble as broadband ISPs came on line, and people began to host
websites outside the AOL walls.
What killed the merger, however, was that AOL wanted to use the Internet to
bypass the MVPD walled gardens that were making money for Time Warner.
I would think you would have supported Steve Case, as he pioneered just about
everything you like about OTT TV today.
Pretty hard to go backwards now, eh? What did AOL have to offer nowadays?
Who knows what might have happened if Time Warner had embraced the direction
Case wanted to go. Obviously the closed AOL content approach was already giving
way to the open web. But the resources were there to get TV on the Internet
years before others even tried. Time Warner chose to become part of the current
content oligopoly, and feast on subscriber fees from all the channels they
bundle.
Where is the bandwidth shortage Bert?
You repeated over and over and over again that there is, Craig. Go back to
the end of 2014:
Fri, 19 Dec 2014 09:24:31 -0500
"And for now, limitations in broadband deployments limit the number of homes
that can simultaneously watch content from the Internet."
What has that got to do with the question Bert?
That statement is absolutely true. If every MVPD subscriber tried to get on the
Internet and watch TV at once the systems would crash, or at a minimum slow to
a crawl.
But everyone IS NOT trying to watch OTT services. More than half of what
everyone watches is delivered over the in-band pipes or FOTA TV. Only about 23%
is now streamed.
The reality is that only in a small number of cases are we seeing issues with
OTT delivery, and in almost all of these cases it is not the last mile, but the
interconnections or the servers that are the problem. HBO has had issues, Sling
has had issues, CBS All Access has had issues. In each case this has had to do
with inadequate provisioning to handle the traffic or problems with their
servers.
Sat, 20 Dec 2014 08:16:37 -0500
"Sorry Bert, but there is nowhere near the capacity needed to support a major
shift to Internet delivery of unicast streams to the masses.
Mon, 22 Dec 2014 11:54:16 -0500
"But it will take most of the next decade to create the Internet
infrastructure to support this shift for the masses."
Tue, 30 Dec 2014 10:02:26 -0500
"But we are not typical consumers, and the Internet is not ready for a mass
shift. It will take years."
Thu, 1 Jan 2015 13:08:09 -0500
"The switch to everything being delivered via the Internet will take at least
a decade as consumer behavior evolves and the requisite infrastructure is
created."
Again, all of these statements are completely accurate. But it is worth
understanding why.
It could happen faster IF there was sufficient demand. But that demand is not
there yet, in large measure because the oligopolies are in no rush to change
the business model and devalue the infrastructure that is making them money.
The reality is that almost anyone who wants to move exclusively to OTT deliver
can easily buy a broadband service that will do the job. The only exceptions
are in some rural areas where broadband is not yet available.
These are only some of your oft-repeated pronouncements, Craig. I'm not going
to waste the time to find the rest. Evidently, you must think that there's an
huge shortage of capacity.
Not at all. The reality is that there is not a huge demand for that capacity.
The capacity is being added as needed based on the realities of how people
actually watch TV. The capacity does not exist today to support the desires of
a pundit who wants everyone to hook up a PC to their TV and watch CBS.com, Hulu
minus and WWITV.
Glad to see that after excrutiating effort, maybe you finally catch on. The
switchover is happening, and could happen even more quickly, if the last mile
infrastructure were used efficiently.
So where is the shortage Bert?
Let me answer, since you keep avoiding the question.
The shortage is in wireless broadband, specifically the telco LTE networks.
This shortage makes it possible to sell bits at high prices and to meter the
service, unlike the wired broadband ISPs - although it is worth noting that
some wired broadband services do place caps on customers who use hundreds of
gigabits per month. The wired services obviously can meet the demand, they just
want you to pay more.
But the telcos cannot supply unmetered bits to everyone, especially in large
markets where customer density is high. So they need more spectrum to deal with
the shortage. And it turns out that broadcasters have a lot of underutilized
spectrum.
Fortunately, millions of WiFi hot spots are being deployed, which provide
access to unmetered bits and takes some of the load off the cellular networks.
Bottom line, when it comes to watching OTT TV there is no shortage of bits on
the big screen in the family room. Only a shortage of demand.
Regards
Craig
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