iPad announced but most likely AT&T will be its demise

The big announcement of the iPad was made yesterday (or day before...kind of lose track of days in this wintery wonderland). I've been waiting on this announcement, not because I want one, but for weeks I've been wondering what the hell it was. I kept hearing all sorts of undocumented speculation, but no one really knew what the thing was. Well, it turns out it's not an oversized iPhone (although Apple haters are trying to make it seem as if that's what it is...or an oversized iPod). It's not that. It's basically Apple's attempt to monopolize on the ebook future.

For awhile now, the claims of a new frontier in reading has been on the horizon, most often discussed in the mentioning of the Kindle by Amazon. But the Kindle was just too expensive for a product that requires you to buy more junk from Amazon. At prices dictated by Amazon. So I was holding off. The iPad is essentially Apple's attempt to jump into this market.

And jump it will. But it will also bring about the creation of the iBookstore, which is going to be Apple's attempt to monopolize the book market like iTunes monopolized the music market. And then the movie market. And then the television weekly program market. But the difference is: People already have a foot in the bookstore market, so Apple isn't inventing the wheel here; it's trying to reinvent the wheel and then pretending that the car wasn't already invented before it.

But even with that jibe, Apple can still do it. So what can stop this from happening?

Well, AT&T to be honest. It almost destroyed the iPhone the last time because when the iPhone was released, AT&T did everything it could to screw up this wet dream of a marketing opportunity. It dropped tons of calls. It forced you into two year contracts that were ridiculous. It had lousy coverage areas. It had crappy 3G service. Its customer service consisted of two cavemen in Delhi who had to use Verizon phones to communicate with you because AT&T kept dropping their calls. Basically, it was AT&T being AT&T.

Well, it can happen again. Over time, AT&T actually fixed a lot of its problems with the iPhone, although it never could change the fact that AT&T is still AT&T (an example is a conversation I had with AT&T recently over my Internet service that went very much like this:

AT&T: Hello, welcome to AT&T, which has the fastest Internet connection in your area. How can I help you?
Me: Hi. The tech recently came out here to install my AT&T dsl but he couldn't install the fast service, so he had to drop me to the slowest service you had due to some weird line problem you guys have. I was adding AT&T because my other service was kind of crappy, and AT&T promised to be a lot faster.
AT&T: I'm sorry you had a problem. How can I help you?
Me: Um, you're still charging me for the fastest service, but you can't provide it.
AT&T: Are you saying you want to subscribe to the slower service instead?
Me: Um, no, I'd love the fast service, but your tech couldn't provide it. You're ONLY giving me the slow service.
AT&T: So you want to downgrade?
Me: No, I don't want to pay for the fast service if you're not providing it.
AT&T: (silence for a moment) Unfortunately, I don't show that your area has access to the slower service. I can only offer the faster service.
Me: Um, that's not physically possible. Your tech--
AT&T: One moment, let me put you on hold.
(insert endless silence on the line as minutes pass)
AT&T: Welcome to AT&T, which has the fastest Internet connection in your area. How can I help you?)

Anyway, so the point is, even with all of this, AT&T can actually capitalize big time on this announcement. ALL THEY HAVE TO DO is inform the current iPhone users that they can use their already paid for 3G coverage on an iPad as well as the iPhone. This will cause more sales of iPads and continuous business for AT&T rather than more continuous jumped ships of people who give up on their iPhones and switch to Verizon. Instead, what is going to happen is that AT&T will demand that you pay for 3G coverage twice at $30 a shot to cover two separate items from the same company. If you want to sour a relationship with a customer, this is exactly how they can do it.

But mark my words, they will. Because remember, this is AT&T. They can do the smart thing, take a dip in new sales of service (but not in current business) or they can melt their market share they already have. Basic economic theory says to go for the quick profit. Sound economic theory says to do what I'm suggesting. Stupid people in business will do the former; brilliant ones will do the latter. Guess which one they'll take. We'll leave that to the future so we can laugh at them when the obvious happens.

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What cable companies don't want to face about their future

A recent article on CNN.money stated that cable companies are going to be raising their prices over the next few years, to where people are paying about $95 for cable per household. The article goes on to state that the reason cable companies have to do this is because a lot of their clients have switched over to Web programming and cable offerings that can be obtained through such sites as Hulu.com, so their only option is to raise the prices on the subscribers that they have left.

As one of the many people who have left paying cable behind, I can say without a doubt that cable companies have a much worse time ahead of them than they want to admit. Granted, I still get cable because it's lumped in with my current housing package, but to be honest, if it wasn't, I wouldn't be paying for it because there's not enough on television that I want to pay to watch. I used to love watching certain television shows on the Sci Fi channel (which for some mysterious reason has changed its name to SyFy, or something stupid like that). Most of those shows are gone, or on hiatus, or in mid-season disappearance mode, or whatever. Most shows on other channels have either ended their run (Monk) or got cancelled by the networks (Firefly, Sarah Connor Chronicles, Veronica Mars, etc.). Honestly, there aren't enough shows left worth watching. I'm not a fan of reality programming, or the latest version of American Dancing With the Idols, or whatever those shows are. So, I have really zero desire to subscribe to cable. I watch about the average of three or four shows now, if that (trying to think: Lost, Chuck, Stargate Universe....), so I'm not really missing much. I even missed those shows when they played because they have the strangest broadcast scheduling (kept getting put on hiatus in the middle of their seasons as if this would entice me to watch the other garbage they put in its place).

This is the problem cable companies have with the rest of the country. They don't offer enough quality programming that people are really excited about subscribing to. What they have is an audience of people who turn on the tube for companionship, or as a talking night light. With other diversions like World of Warcraft (for me), dvds (Netflix), the Internet (I can't even begin to point out the opportunities available here), and whatnot, cable companies really aren't the "necessity" that they want people to expect. There's an old marketing aside about how most of the things we have today weren't really considered necessities in the past. Someone had to convince us that we really needed them. That includes the telephone, the radio, the television, the microwave and then the computer. In the beginning of all of these technologies, ad men had to convince us we needed them. Now, we expect them, so we now think of them almost as if they're part of Maslow's Heirarchy. They're not. The radio is almost nonexistent these days, the telephone moved to the cell phone, and each thing reaches a point to where it is replaced with something else. Cable is that way, too, because television has slowly been replaced by so many other items that occupy our time and attention. Cable companies aren't going to want to face that anymore than record companies wanted to face that their business model was irrelevant ten years ago, and they were about to be surpassed by file sharing sites. Come to think of it, they still haven't gotten over that, nor have they come to realize it either.

So, cable companies are going to slowly realize they've become somewhat irrelevant. Or that they should be irrelevant. The only thing they have in their favor is the complacent viewer who will continue to buy their content. But that can only last so long. The dvd was out for quite some time before the last vinyl record buyer finally switched to cds and dvds; some never did. But a huge company can't survive on the nostalgia factor.

At least, that's what they're going to discover.

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Criminal nabbed through World of Warcraft account

The story is here.

Turns out that police sent a subpoena to Blizzard, which runs World of Warcraft to track down a fugitive who was trying to escape justice. Now, I'd be all for this particular turn of events if the fugitive had actually done something OTHER than a drug crime. His crime was dealing in multiple controlled substances.

I'm not into drugs, nor have I even dabbled in it. Been against them personally for my entire adult life. But I am not a fan of criminalizing drugs; always felt the solution was to treat the addicted rather than put them in jail.

Unfortunately, way too many resources are spent chasing drug crimes, so that other things are left behind. And even worse, drugs are so visual in our society that it gives avenues of criminal behavior the go, rather than treats it as a symptom to be cured. If gangs are going to do bad things, I'd prefer they stuck to actual crimes so that police went after that sort of stuff. Unfortunately, in this society, that's never going to happen.

Too many careers are made on the enforcement of drug crimes, and that's not a boon for an enlightened society.

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Speaking of hypocrisy

I don't know if anyone has caught these obnoxious commercials Comcast has been running. The gist of their commercials is that their broadband is being made lightning fast with some special chemical they're adding to it (some fantasy they've created that they're somehow speeding up the Internet). Then they turn around and ban you if you actually use their broadband a lot. They tend not to mention that last part. In other words, if their ad was true: They offer great, fast service that you'll be banned from using if you ever take advantage of it.

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I think I'm giving up on this new fad thing called the Internets

I'm to the point where I don't care anymore. I'm in one of those demographic areas of the country where we live right on the edge of a technological city hub but we're just far enough away to be somewhat of a third world country. If I lived 50 miles to the west, I'd qualify for all sorts of great Internet services from companies competing against each other. Instead, I'm stuck with either Comcast or AT&T. And because we're part of that third world country mentality out here in the crime capital of America, or is it the literary nadir of America (I forget which accolade we're embracing today), if we want Internet service we have to pay out the a** for it. You can't even touch Internet service out here without a HUGE "fee" for not also having digital cable services (no, not the simple plans either, but the ones that run at minimum of about $70), and THEN you can pay for high speed Internet. If you decide to go all Che Guevara and choose AT&T instead, you can't get "high-speed" Internet without first having a data phone plan, although you CAN choose the $10 line, which after taxes, weird unexplainable fees and mole-bashing charges, comes to $32, and THEN you can get the high speed Internet. But that "high-speed" Internet from AT&T tends to last about an hour before it just stops working. But that's okay, because you can then call AT&T and have them come out and find out what's wrong with it, BUT they'll have to charge you a $150 visit fee if by some chance the fault isn't AT&T's (which for the record, if the modem turns on, the technician determines it's YOUR fault, and he doesn't have time to wait an hour for the connection to stop working again, so cha-ching, that's $150, thank you). So, I now have a service called Clearwire, which is about the same price as the others, but it has no "you have to have cable or phone service" in order to use this wireless tower service. The only problem is: The high-speed for this service isn't really all that high, as I keep discovering every time I try to watch a Netflix movie online, because the movie starts up, plays twenty seconds and then has to refeed the connection for 7 minutes and thirty-eight seconds, before playing for two minutes and doing it again. Same thing with You tube.

So, you might get an idea why it just doesn't matter to me anymore if they want to charge for how much bandwidth you use. Right now, I've become one of those grandmas only checking email (and IGN) because I really can't do anything else. Yesterday, I found this paper thing on one of my shelves and opened it. It was this really old technology we used to refer to as "books". I downloaded some of this information for about a few hours yesterday and wondered how this new technology had gotten past me while I was so busy dealing with Internet, porn and American Idol.

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