More on the death of cable TV
Posted on | June 15, 2009 | Comments
Recently I upgraded an old computer with an HDMI-capable video board and a wireless keyboard to make it my home theater PC (”HTPC”). I plugged it into my TV, sat on the couch, and happily experienced Windows 7 on a 52″ screen. Two weeks in, my experience is:
- Zero time watching cable TV any more. Zip. Nada.
- Hulu rocks! Colbert etc. – not available with my skimpy cable package – is now available when I want.
- Some time browsing the web from my couch. It works OK, but the experience is inferior to a laptop, so this won’t be a heavily used application of my HTPC
- Music rocks! I can now play music on my home stereo using my favorite PC software and/or Pandora. It’s incredibly easy to use, ie a a great form factor, and the sound quality is as good as your home stereo. I believe that HTPC’s are a serious competitive threat to Sonos et al.
- Photos rock! This was the biggest surprise. Remember your father’s slide shows? This is the new shiznit, and photos look spectacular. It’s a significant upgrade in experience from looking at photos on a PC.
My anecdotal experience agrees with my thinking (here and here) about the decline of the cable industry.
Oh, and Henry Blodget has a nicely written post on the topic as well.
Financial Analysis of a Lemonade Stand
Posted on | May 28, 2009 | Comments
I’m in business analysis mode. This parody of a business analysis of a lemonade stand made me laugh!
Sync is a Holy Grail
Posted on | May 27, 2009 | Comments
Sync is one of personal computing’s holy grails. Here’s an interesting article on why it’s difficult.
I think that this problem is well on its way to being solved by Ray Ozzie at Microsoft, with MS’s Live Mesh product. Live Mesh may be the next killer OS feature: with Live Mesh, you can painlessly have everything about your PC (browsing history and personal data such as word docs and spreadsheets) automagically synced across all your windows platforms – eg laptop, home computer, work computer, or a computer your visiting, just as long as it’s running Windows. (No cheesy hardware eg Pogoplug required!) Sorry, but it won’t work on a Mac or on Linux. I think this functionality will have network effects and is a difficult enough problem that it might keep people like me on the Windows platform just a little bit longer.
What I’ve been reading…
Posted on | May 26, 2009 | Comments
Lots of interesting reading going on at my house these days…here’s a few interesting snippets:
There aren’t enough hours in the day, and I’m always looking to improve how I spend my time. Here’s Ben Cashnocha’s “information diet”/routine.
I love being an entrepreneur – the challenges and the rewards fit my risk profile and personality. But it’s not a lifestyle for everybody. Here’s a great writeup about common entrepreneurial lifestyle struggles.
We all know that Nancy Pelosi has no integrity…and she’s been caught, on record, lying.
There’s a famous 70-year long longitudinal study of Harvard men, called the Harvard Study of Adult Development. It’s a fascinating study because such studies are rare, and this one was conducted extremely thoroughly. Here’s one researcher’s attempt to ferret out of the data just What Makes us Happy – it’s very interesting reading.
I always thought of Roger Ebert as simply a movie critic. But apparently there’s quite a bit more to him: here’s an excellent short essay by him on death, and life. Wow.
Food for Thought
The American people, North and South, went into the [Civil] war as citizens of their respective states, they came out as subjects
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