Friday, Aug 29, 2008
The rise of the blogosphere
Blogs have been with us for years, but 2002 was the year that blogging as a movement came together. Everyone stopped worrying about explaining that "blog" was short for "Weblog" and defining it each time the subject came up as "a frequently updated personal Web page with new entries added at the top and older entries in reverse chronological order." New or newly improved software tools made it easy for non-technical users to make their voices heard. The political intelligentsia -- spurred by the profusion of "warbloggers" who emerged in the wake of 9/11 and the Afghanistan war to drum a conservative beat -- began to accept the notion that new ideas, valuable dialogue and even original news could bubble up from this newly democratized "chattering class." And in December, it was largely the blogging class that kept alive the story of Trent Lott's scandalous pro-segregation comments at a Strom Thurmond birthday bash, after the mainstream press dropped the ball. Lott's now-shaky grip on power is proof that, though the Internet economy may have fallen on hard times, the Internet polity is just beginning to flex its muscles.
Microsoft, bloodied but unbowed
If your company had $40 billion in cash and was making about a billion more every month, what would you do? Anything you wanted, probably. You would think big -- look beyond your traditional markets, and try to remake the world in your technology. Perhaps it's that sort of thinking that accounts for Microsoft's expansion in all directions this year; the company introduced so many products in so many industries that it doesn't seem accurate to think of it as just an operating system monopoly anymore. The firm continued its quiet assault on Hollywood, releasing a new version of its Windows Media "platform," which furthers its long-term, increasingly successful, goal to make Windows Media the dominant file format for digital audio and video files. The company also released a new "flavor" of Windows -- a "Media Center Edition" -- bundled with TV-recording capabilities, a feature that media companies have never been fond of. The year also saw the release of such non-PC products as a Windows cellphone, the Tablet PC, and Xbox Live, an online service for the company's game console.
Microsoft still faces threats -- it cellphone business, for instance, has hit some snags, and Linux is an ever-present danger to the Windows line of servers. But what may have been its biggest obstacle -- strong governmental policing of its activities -- fizzled in November, when a federal judge approved Microsoft's slap-on-the-wrist antitrust settlement with the Justice Department. Now the company is ready to go wherever it wants to.
Free software: Don't call it a comeback
There were no headlines for free software in 2002, at least not on the order of the glory years of the late '90s. But a funny thing happened while Wall Street and the mainstream media stopped watching: Free-software programmers continued to go about their business, improving their code, releasing new products and expanding their domain.
The slow-moving Mozilla browser project finally delivered a usable browser. Yes, it took a lot longer than anyone expected, but the end result is quite competitive with Microsoft, and still improving bit by bit, every week. 2002 was also the year when desktop productivity applications started to enjoy a higher profile. The coders at work on projects like the AbiWord word processor aren't necessarily concerned with dethroning Microsoft from its software hegemony (though some of them wouldn't mind!) -- they're just having fun, doing what they like to do, writing code without having to worry about what features the marketing department wants, or the possibility that a corporate downsizing might wipe out two years of work.
The free-software dot-coms are mostly gone and will probably never return, but the free software is still out there, getting better all the time.
AOL Time Warner's merger troubles
It's hard to remember why, a couple years ago, anyone thought it might have been a good idea to bring together America Online and Time Warner under the same corporate banner. We can probably chalk it up to tech-bubble delirium -- at the time, every idea seemed pretty good. Since the merger, which coincided with the bursting of the bubble, the combined company has seen nothing but trouble. Revenues at the online service have been hurt by a terrible ad market and fewer people willing to sign on for dial-up service; the company has also been criticized for the slow growth of its broadband service, and it's being investigated by the SEC for allegedly overly aggressive accounting practices. And the troubles at AOL have damaged the rest of the company, whose stock price has fallen more than 70 percent since the merger.
In response, this year AOL Time Warner tried to erase all evidence that the merger had ever occurred. In July, it underwent a high-profile restructuring -- and by the end of the summer, Steve Case, the chairman, was the only former AOL executive with a senior position at the merged company. AOL also unveiled a new version of its connectivity software, and in December it announced big plans to add content from its media brands to its online service. But industry experts and investors weren't very comforted by the move -- especially as the company admitted that advertising and e-commerce revenue could fall by as much as 50 percent next year.
What's next for AOL Time Warner? Perhaps, some advise, it should go back to being boring, old-media Time Warner.
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