121–130 of 152 posts
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I'd be fine with a wireless last mile to avoid cable messiness.
Wireless gigabit? Does not compute.
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Admittedly this probably has a lot to do with luddite technology policy, but surely it has more to do with the U.S. having 10 times the land mass and 15 times the population as Scandanavia [1]. [1] Stats from Wikipedia, summing Norway + Sweden + Denmark area and most recent population vs. United States.
Actually, Norway and Sweden has a lower population density than the US has; we've got even more land mass per person. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_countries_and_dependenc... I think it has more to do with that we don't leave infrastructure development squarely in the hands of the market.
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I thought the "download" part was funny too. 1g is as fast as many people's laptop hard drives anyway, so local storage is pretty much pointless.
Local storage still matters since bandwidth is not the only thing people care about: http://rescomp.stanford.edu/~cheshire/rants/Latency.html
The hard drive certainly quickly becomes an OS-managed cache though like ram is for hard drives now though.
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The way Google throws products on the market to increase competition for the benefit of its core products ... it's genius. Are there any other companies that do this?
Yes, tons. See "commoditize your complements". Microsoft is a master of this as well. http://www.joelonsoftware.com/articles/StrategyLetterV.html
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That's the thing, I think internet access is essential to being an educated citizen nowadays, and many websites are no longer viable for dialup users to visit. High speed internet for all should be placed on the same level of importance as education for all.
If you feel it is essential for the educated citizen today, then it isn't Google's job to address the lack of broadband in some areas, but rather the government's job. I'm fond of the idea of refreshing old programs like Rural Electrification by changing them into new broadband expansion programs. Whispers of this have been made by politicians including our President while he was campaigning, but as far as I know not…
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Yes, tons. See "commoditize your complements". Microsoft is a master of this as well. http://www.joelonsoftware.com/articles/StrategyLetterV.html
I don't know of any real market changers from microsoft, save IE, which was an attempt to kill competition and preserve market. Maybe I am too far from the microsoft circle to know of any...
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The way Google throws products on the market to increase competition for the benefit of its core products ... it's genius. Are there any other companies that do this?
Yes, tons. See "commoditize your complements". Microsoft is a master of this as well. http://www.joelonsoftware.com/articles/StrategyLetterV.html
(Not nearly as spectacularly as Sun creating Java to spite Microsoft, and ending up commoditizing their hardware business. But I do not think Bing would look like such a good business strategy without the obsession of beating Google.)
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I forget where the link was (I think somewhere on yc), but it showed a chart of internet access speed through a few years, rated by countries. Most of the large-nation world had grown by 10%+, many over 50%, in a few years, while the US had dropped by a couple percent. This is in addition to most of those countries being higher already, so it's not merely a 5kbps -> 8kbps jump. My price for internet access not going…
Average access speed is dropping because of the increased penetration of wireless access in the US lately.
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I don't know of any real market changers from microsoft, save IE, which was an attempt to kill competition and preserve market. Maybe I am too far from the microsoft circle to know of any...
Wasn't the XBox hardware pretty much sold at cost to sell their games for their own platform? How many recent games does Microsoft have for the PS or Nintendo?
Note: the Wii is the only recent exception to this rule that I know of; the hardware has been sold at a profit since day one.
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I forget where the link was (I think somewhere on yc), but it showed a chart of internet access speed through a few years, rated by countries. Most of the large-nation world had grown by 10%+, many over 50%, in a few years, while the US had dropped by a couple percent. This is in addition to most of those countries being higher already, so it's not merely a 5kbps -> 8kbps jump. My price for internet access not going…
There is the possibility that the providers aren't intentionally gouging their customers. Even though the market is small, there is enough of a market to drive prices down. I think it's much more likely that those companies are just so horribly inefficient that it really does cost them a lot to provide you with high-speed access.
I don't buy inefficiency. They're selling it at this speed for this cost because they can, just like cell phone companies. Which from a business standpoint makes perfect sense, but it's at the cost of screwing everyone else. Since significantly better businesses / strategies clearly exist if it's just a sign of business incompetence, why haven't the successful ones, say in Japan or Korea, migrated over here and decimated the market?