20070104   

Michael considered fate at 13:27   |   Permalink   |   Post a Comment

Beta-Max and VHS, in their most abstract form, will never have to do battle in the consumer markets again. Technology has a way of creating obsolescence and in this case it is the old-skool product warfare that we will never see again.

Why? Because with technology comes speed to market and excellent cloning abilities. Reverse-engineers never had it so good and that translates into consumers getting a free meal, even if it is leftovers.

Late last year NEC announced they had developed a chip capable of reading both Blu-Ray and HD DVD formats. Now, from Warner Bros. we have a disc capable of storing both Blu-Ray and HD DVD content.

Isn't life beautiful? This is the equivalent of the operating system wars, by the way, if you hadn't been paying attention. For close to two decades the desktop war has been quietly smoldering under the surface like a coal vein in Centralia, Pennsylvania. Now, with the advent of Intel-based Apple products we are all one with each other, like a big 'ol sit in. OSX86, the bootlegged version of Apple's operating system, can run on non-Apple hardware. Windows XP is happy to chug along on a MacBook. Linux, as always, is happy to run on just about anything - even your grandmother's pacemaker.

The end result, though veiled behind a smokescreen of technomumbo and technojumbo for the befuddled consumer, is choice, competition, and forced innovation. This isn't a post about the downfall of Microsoft and Apple's amazing market prowess (and luck) but I will say that Vista will be a major test for the softies. Can they adapt? Big lumbering elephants are little concerned about small insects zipping around at their feet but even a pachyderm has been known to rear up in fear at the sight of a tiny mouse.

So how does all this benefit the consumer? Because the corporate monsters gobbling up every startup that comes along want to control every revenue stream and therefore your pocketbooks: bad thing. They lobby the politicians to allow overuse and misuse of our socio-economic "technology" like copyrights and patents: bad thing.

Technology allows for copycats, and that same speed to market that allows NEC and Warner Bros. to attempt stop-gaps against a DVD-format war is the same speed to market that allows Joe-Shmoe (or Jorge-Bjornsson, as it were) to use freely available tools on his shit-box Pinto-esque hardware in order to break the HD DVD and Blu-Ray DRM encryption system: good thing. In the end, we are always (and usually unknowingly) heading towards equilibrium: good thing. We will never get there or we'll just overshoot our target, but the market forces of big corporations will always be pressed up against the wall of forced innovation, the individual will always look for the easiest alternative. Meanwhile, the craptastic attempts of small-fry think-tanks and indie advancements will always be usurped by the big machines which are much more capable of delivering overall "quality" on a level which is the most acceptable while still being the cheapest: ultimately, and unfortunately (because I honestly do love my 1970's behemoth of a stereo that still works to this day) this is the face of efficiency, the most powerful tool we have to stop the bloodbath that is human destruction of non-renewables, besides innovation: good thing.

In this age of information society is our "hardware" more powerful than our socio-technology? Is blogging and the individualisation of media more important in the long run than the software and hardware tools that publish them? Is our technological dependence a crutch or a cage and, if so, does choice open the bars?