These are my un-edited highlights from reading "The Master Switch" by Timothy Wu. I'm hoping to write an article on the book soon.
Just to give it some context, the book looks at the history of revolutions in the communications industry as a way of analysing where our current Internet revolution may be heading. A great read.
“Selling radio sets—the old revenue model—was a good if limited business, for ultimately few households would need more than one radio every few years. But advertising revenues could expand indefinitely—or so it seemed then”
“academic studies suggested that films were dangerous to children”
“The denial that Armstrong had in fact invented FM was, if not the last straw, then very nearly the last. A man’s decision to end his life is inevitably a complex one and cannot easily be blamed on any one person or event. [...] He was nearly bankrupted, as the lawsuit with RCA consumed the once great fortune from his earlier patents. [...] The story of FM radio gives some taste of what television’s inventors were in for, and a sense of David Sarnoff’s genius in the art of industrial combat. [...] He was a man who proved it is possible to defy both Joseph Schumpeter’s doctrine of creative destruction and, as he turned RCA into a television company, the adage that you can’t teach old dogs new tricks.”
“Films are not screwdrivers”
“Within two years of the iPhone launch, relations between Apple and Google would sour as the two pursued equally grand, though inimical, visions of the future. [...] Steve Jobs accused Google of wasting its time in the mobile phone market; a new Google employee named Tim Bray in 2010 described Apple’s iPhone as “a sterile Disney-fied walled garden surrounded by sharp-toothed lawyers.... I hate it””
“these firms and their allies are fighting anew the age-old battle we’ve recounted time and time again. It is the perennial Manichaean contest informing every episode in this book: the struggle between the partisans of the open and of the closed, between the decentralized and the consolidated visions of a proper order. But this time around, as compared with any other, the sides are far more evenly matched.”
“Like all centralized systems, Jobs’s has its merits: one can easily criticize its principles yet love its products. Computers, it turns out, can indeed benefit in some ways from a centralizing will to perfection [...]”
“Apple’s long-standing adherence to closed design left the door wide open for the Microsoft Corporation and the many clones of the IBM PC to conquer computing [...]”
“The first major exercise was in blocking Skype, the voice-over-IP firm whose software lets users call each other over the Internet for free, eating into AT&T’s long distance margins.”
“And just as our addiction to the benefits of the internal combustion engine led us to such demand for fossil fuels as we could no longer support, so, too, has our dependence on our mobile smart phones, touchpads, laptops, and other devices delivered us to a moment when our demand for bandwidth—the new black gold—is insatiable. Let us, then, not fail to protect ourselves from the will of those who might seek domination of those resources we cannot do without. If we do not take this moment to secure our sovereignty over the choices that our information age has allowed us to enjoy, we cannot reasonably blame its loss on those who are free to enrich themselves by taking it from us in a manner history has foretold.”
Ban on women driving should be considered world wide... :-) I would never allow my wife driving my car.. :-)
Posted by: Links of London Bracelet | February 16, 2012 at 07:06 PM