tnl.net

Chronicle of a Death Foretold

July 16, 2003

The recent announce­ment of AOL putting a final nail in Netscape’s cof­fin comes as a no sur­prise. As I pre­dicted ear­lier, AOL saw lit­tle value in sup­port­ing the open source project as much as it did. So Netscape, which once was rec­og­nized as the lead­ing inno­va­tor in the browser space, is dead. In a way, this was a move that […]

Tipping the Edge

July 7, 2003

Tim O’Reilly recently talked about the evo­lu­tion of soft­ware and how all soft­ware should be net­work aware. While I gen­er­ally believe that this is true (see my Feb­ru­ary 2000 arti­cle on Hybrid com­put­ing), I’d like to make a few com­ments on Tim’s note. Dis­cov­er­abil­ity and Secu­rity The first assump­tion is that soft­ware should be able to con­nect automatically. […]

Dangers of Digital Rights Management

June 5, 2003

Over the past few days, I’ve been writ­ing about the Microsoft/AOL deal and why I think that it is a dan­ger­ous one to all of us. My core fear about the deal is that it will increase lock-up in the Inter­net space due to a new con­cept called Dig­i­tal Rights Man­age­ment. When using such a sys­tem, con­tent is encrypted […]

Mozilla after AOL

June 4, 2003

Over the past few days, I’ve been spend­ing time cov­er­ing what hap­pens now that AOL and Microsoft have set­tled their dis­pute. How­ever, one area that I have not cov­ered is what could hap­pen to Mozilla mov­ing for­ward. With the new agree­ment, AOL has received a royalty-free license to use Inter­net Explorer for the next seven years. Since […]

AOL-Microsoft Settlement: The Future

May 30, 2003

AOL and Microsoft have announced an end to their feud. It seems to me that there is a lot in there that needs to be dis­sected and pon­dered about. It will impact the devel­op­ment of the Inter­net for years to come. IM : One of the con­di­tions for the AOL/Time Warner merger was that AOL open its […]

Microsoft and AOL: Friends again

May 29, 2003

Microsoft and Amer­ica Online set­tled their browser law­suit, putting an end to spec­u­la­tions that AOL would dump IE from its lead­ing client. As part of the deal, AOL receives a seven year royalty-free license to include Inter­net Explorer and will get an early peek at any­thing new in Red­mond. Most inter­est­ing to me in the different […]

Tivo and Digital Media Servers

April 9, 2003

Back when they came out, I said that tools like Tivo and Replay could change the face of tele­vi­sion watch­ing. A cou­ple of years ago, I assumed that game boxes would be the new home media cen­ter. What I missed, though, was the end run that Tivo was doing around the game com­pa­nies. With yesterday’s announce­ment that they would […]

Paid Content on a tiered structure

Reports that AT&T is plan­ning on intro­duc­ing a pre-paid card for online con­tent show some poten­tial new devel­op­ments in the online space. If we were to fol­low the model fur­ther, we could see some­thing new devel­op­ing, with com­pa­nies offer­ing a bas­ket of con­tent for a fixed price. For exam­ple, imag­ine you would like to get a sub­scrip­tion to the […]

Lack of synergy

February 12, 2003

Accord­ing to an arti­cle in the Wash­ing­ton Post, AOL is loos­ing mar­ket share to Road-Runner. The inter­est­ing thing is that both com­pa­nies are owned by AOL-Time-Warner but are not play­ing together. This rep­re­sents a huge prob­lem for the com­pany as it is the most vis­i­ble area of poten­tial syn­ergy between AOL and Time-Warner. Here’s a crazy thought, […]

The Convergence Game

November 18, 2001

This week, Microsoft launched the Xbox, a new gam­ing sys­tem that takes the Red­mond giant into another mar­ket. Today, Nin­tendo is unveil­ing the Game­Cube, their new entry in a bat­tle they have fought with Sony for many years. With these new gam­ing sta­tions enter­ing the mar­ket, a new war is start­ing and in the end, it is a war […]