Irreal

Robert McMillan over at Wired Enterprise has an interesting article in which he reports that Google claims to be one of the world’s largest hardware makers. We’ve all heard stories about how Google custom builds much of its equipment but I always imagined a medium sized shop with four or five guys assembling servers. Apparently, it’s much bigger than that.

Google, it seems, designs its own servers, network gear, and possibly other computing equipment and farms out the actual manufacturing to the same Taiwanese and Chinese companies that make machines for Dell and HP. Google is pretty secretive about their hardware work so few details are actually known. Much of the material for McMillan’s report came from Google’s CFO Patrick Pichette during the annual stockholders’ meeting. These details were apparently given to help convince the stockholders that Google has the requisite hardware expertise to handle the Motorola mobile phone acquisition.

McMillan has some interesting speculation as to what this could mean for hardware manufacturers such as Dell, HP, Cisco, and Juniper as more and more companies move to the cloud and consider building out their own data centers. Follow the link to get the full story; it’s pretty interesting.

As longtime readers of Irreal know, I have a fascination for the various media and how they are coping in the digital age. One of the media sectors about which I haven’t had much to say is newspapers. Mostly that’s because I don’t read newspapers and haven’t for many years. I use to be voracious reader of them, often devouring two a day but I came to see them as broken products. The reporting that wasn’t outright tendentious was flabby and often significantly wrong. Michael Creighton famously described the situation with the Gell-Mann Amnesia Effect. As techies, we’re all familiar with the effect. When was the last time you read a story about a technical subject in a newspaper that didn’t have significant errors and a complete lack of understanding?

The other day I saw an excellent article over at Gigacom by Mathew Ingram on newspapers and their failure to thrive in the digital age. Ingram has a key insight that, while obvious, hadn’t occurred to me. Newspapers’ customers are not their readers but their advertisers. Ingram points out that most often even the newspapers themselves fail to remember this and act as if their readers really were the customers. That explains pay walls and talk about how the readers should be willing to pay for the content they consume. That would make sense if, in fact, the readers were the customers but they’re not. The advertisers are.

That fact, Ingram says, also explains why newspapers in their current form are doomed. Before the Internet, the papers were able to establish monopolies on information delivery but those monopolies were really monopolies on the delivery of printed advertising into targeted areas such as cities or metropolitan areas. Those days are gone. These days, advertisers have a choice of several advertising channels many of which offer more finely targeted advertising than newspapers were ever able to offer. And if an advertiser wants the broad based advertising that newspapers specialized in, Ingram says, they have billions of websites on which they can drop a cheap display banner.

Follow the link to find out what Ingram thinks the future holds for newspapers. Most people can’t imagine a world without newspapers but I can tell you that my little corner of the world has been newspaper free for some time and it’s quite pleasant. As I wrote in Living Without Flash, I was sure I’d miss all the content that Flash brought me but after it was gone, I didn’t miss it at all and hardly noticed its absence.

From time to time something happens to make me think that maybe big media has caught a clue and is moving to saner policies. The last such example was Tor’s abandonment of DMR—a significant step forward. Sadly, reality inevitably intrudes and the media powers demonstrate that they’ve learned nothing.

As a case in point, I offer these two posts as a contrast in perceptions of reality. Thomas Hambleton writes on his blog that It’s 2012 and this still happens. The post, which documents his unsuccessful attempt to buy Paloma Faith’s new album, bears an uncanny resemblance to one of my favorite Oatmeal comics. Here’s a guy that wants to give the record labels money but they refuse to take it. Yes, yes, they have contracts that restrict distribution by region but you know what? It’s 2012, there’s this thing called the Internet, and maybe it’s time to rethink distribution policies from decades ago.

What does big media think? This. What can you say about a man who simultaneously whines about people pirating his product while opining that his customers are being unreasonable for not wanting to wait for his company to get around to selling their product locally? He’s entitled to his opinion, of course, but he shouldn’t be surprised when people disagree and turn to pirate sites for their instant gratification.

For some insight into the problem from the publishers’ point of view, see this comment from Patrick Nielsen Hayden, one of publishing’s more enlightened executives, on John Scalzi’s site, Whatever.