Opinionated comments on mobile phone industry news
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All entries are written by Anders Borg, CEO and Consultant of Abiro, that has a long experience in strategic planning, developing embedded and Java software, usability aspects, and the mobile phone industry in general. You can also read the latest Mobile News entries on your phone via wap.abiro.com, and we provide many News Feeds from popular news services. For advertising and contribution queries, please use the feedback form. News feed (local) FeedBurner Feed
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Sunday, June 24, 2007
Anecdote: De-evolution of technology
This is one of those moments where I sense marketing and convenience has more significance than technology: when it comes to music audio quality, and secondarily mobile application platforms.
I've been talking about this subject before, but I got a reminder when I bought a guitar effect that didn't cost much at all and that handles 24 bit / 96k samples/second audio through a 32 bit DSP pipe. The sound is so clean there's not a trace of any distortion (except the intentional one). Those are the kinds of figures I'd expect from modern-day distribution formats of music, not the current "less-than-CD" quality. I know, most people don't care, and again marketing is way more important than technology, right?
Well, actually no, because that's like saying that an orange but useless hammer is better, and should be more expensive, than a useful but less colorful one. Now, people making tools know that marketing and technology go hand in hand, so you will actually find orange hammers, but that are also of a very high quality.
The cost of storing music on a server, even at a high quality, is relatively speaking none, so the cost is in bandwidth and marketing. For third-party services like iTunes the music companies take almost all of the revenue (which is ironical, considering they at the time of the launch of iTunes didn't believe in this distribution model), so there's not that much money left for Apple. By now though, through Apple's power, I believe they've been able to negotiate better deals.
Allofmp3 does it right by offering several different formats with different quality, including FLAC, that is a non-lossy compression of CD audio. Unfortunately Allofmp3 is not considered 100% legal, and we are still talking CD quality.
In commodities business where there's no technology evolution to talk about, like beverages, fast foods, clothes etc, marketing and brand is everything, as anyone can make similar products, yet possibly not at the same price for efficiency and volume reasons. Still, note that you as a consumer funds the marketing, so even if the logistics are very efficient, there's a noticeable amount of marketing spending enveloped in the consumer price of the product.
In terms of music distribution it's as if the commodity model applies, as it seems more important that music is quick to download than actually sounding great. It's a pity, as already the CD was a bad compromise in terms of audio quality, and future audio formats at least need to be better than CD. All the same, "lesser-than-CD" formats are now marketed as "CD quality" as if that was the best there could be, and as if that was actually true.
Another area of technical de-evolution is in application platforms (to take a currently hyped topic): The promoters of Ajax mean it can replace Java and Flash Lite on mobile phones when it comes to local applications. It can't. All with any level of technical competence knows this. Still, it's now touted as the saviour of mobile applications, again pushing marketing more than technology. It seems people don't even know that Ajax is just a "mash up" of existing technologies, with a few tiny additions. You can't even take a photo on a phone via Ajax, nor can you make anything that looks and behaves like a game (except possibly "Hang Man"). Ajax is clearly hyped more than it deserves.
So a call to action to all involved in the electronics, software, and specifically mobile industries: There's no "d-e" in evolution. Do some actual technology evolution.
Are we in a new dark ages / knowledge white spot, where marketing replaces fanatical religion as the controller of the mindset of the masses?
And yes, I'm one of those that can actually hear a difference between LPs, CDs and MP3s, and the difference is remarkable when you move from a lesser technology to a better one (in other words MP3 --> CD --> LP). I definitely don't want the physical format of LPs back. I'm just saying there are technologies that can achieve the same level of quality and dynamics as LPs.
I've been talking about this subject before, but I got a reminder when I bought a guitar effect that didn't cost much at all and that handles 24 bit / 96k samples/second audio through a 32 bit DSP pipe. The sound is so clean there's not a trace of any distortion (except the intentional one). Those are the kinds of figures I'd expect from modern-day distribution formats of music, not the current "less-than-CD" quality. I know, most people don't care, and again marketing is way more important than technology, right?
Well, actually no, because that's like saying that an orange but useless hammer is better, and should be more expensive, than a useful but less colorful one. Now, people making tools know that marketing and technology go hand in hand, so you will actually find orange hammers, but that are also of a very high quality.
The cost of storing music on a server, even at a high quality, is relatively speaking none, so the cost is in bandwidth and marketing. For third-party services like iTunes the music companies take almost all of the revenue (which is ironical, considering they at the time of the launch of iTunes didn't believe in this distribution model), so there's not that much money left for Apple. By now though, through Apple's power, I believe they've been able to negotiate better deals.
Allofmp3 does it right by offering several different formats with different quality, including FLAC, that is a non-lossy compression of CD audio. Unfortunately Allofmp3 is not considered 100% legal, and we are still talking CD quality.
In commodities business where there's no technology evolution to talk about, like beverages, fast foods, clothes etc, marketing and brand is everything, as anyone can make similar products, yet possibly not at the same price for efficiency and volume reasons. Still, note that you as a consumer funds the marketing, so even if the logistics are very efficient, there's a noticeable amount of marketing spending enveloped in the consumer price of the product.
In terms of music distribution it's as if the commodity model applies, as it seems more important that music is quick to download than actually sounding great. It's a pity, as already the CD was a bad compromise in terms of audio quality, and future audio formats at least need to be better than CD. All the same, "lesser-than-CD" formats are now marketed as "CD quality" as if that was the best there could be, and as if that was actually true.
Another area of technical de-evolution is in application platforms (to take a currently hyped topic): The promoters of Ajax mean it can replace Java and Flash Lite on mobile phones when it comes to local applications. It can't. All with any level of technical competence knows this. Still, it's now touted as the saviour of mobile applications, again pushing marketing more than technology. It seems people don't even know that Ajax is just a "mash up" of existing technologies, with a few tiny additions. You can't even take a photo on a phone via Ajax, nor can you make anything that looks and behaves like a game (except possibly "Hang Man"). Ajax is clearly hyped more than it deserves.
So a call to action to all involved in the electronics, software, and specifically mobile industries: There's no "d-e" in evolution. Do some actual technology evolution.
Are we in a new dark ages / knowledge white spot, where marketing replaces fanatical religion as the controller of the mindset of the masses?
And yes, I'm one of those that can actually hear a difference between LPs, CDs and MP3s, and the difference is remarkable when you move from a lesser technology to a better one (in other words MP3 --> CD --> LP). I definitely don't want the physical format of LPs back. I'm just saying there are technologies that can achieve the same level of quality and dynamics as LPs.
