Author: Michael Swaine

Michael Swaine was part of the launch team for the first personal computer newsweekly, InfoWorld. He co-authored Fire in the Valley, the seminal computer history book on which the movie Pirates of Silicon Valley was based. He was the long-time editor of Dr. Dobb’s Journal and of PragPub and has launched, written for, and edited numerous other magazines.

Categories
Technology

Quibi’s Big Bet

I’m always on the lookout for those points of intersection between technology and culture. So I’m intrigued by Quibi’s big bet.

Quibi, if you need a reminder, is the company that Jeffrey Katzenberg started two years ago to deliver short-form mobile video. Meg Whitman is the CEO and they demoed some of their technology at CES this month.

I call what they are doing a big bet because they are gambling on new directions in three aspects of their business.

The market gamble: mobile only, Millennials as the target demographic, a revenue model involving subscriptions plus advertising.

The content gamble: all new content developed exclusively for their platform and for their format, consisting of quick bites. Quibit means quick bites and quick bites means short-form content, ten minutes or less, including movies chopped up into ten-minute chapters to be released weekly.

The technology gamble: the tech demoed at CES is Turnstyle: the patented tech that delivers landscape and portrait views of all content simultaneously, so the viewer can flip the phone to see a different aspect of the content. That could lead to some interesting viewer interactivity. It could also be an underused gimmick, but what’s definite is that it will constrain content creators: all content needs to support the feature, meaning basically shooting the movie or show (or ad) twice.

Each of these bets can be criticized on its own. The restricted market and questionable revenue model will be competing with free. The content, the form of the content, is new and untested: it may not connect, but they are committed to it. The tech: Turnstyle may be seen as a gimmick, but they’re committed to it and so are their content creators. The technology restricts them to new content that content providers are willing to develop for this complicated format. And then the basic question: is there room for another channel?

What I find intriguing is the way that these bets dovetail. The technology constrains the content, the content defines the market. They can’t unpack this thing, take pieces of it, and pivot. It’s really one integrated concept. One big bet.

And it is a big bet.

Katzenberg and Whitman are big names, but they have recruited a serious crew, including execs from Hulu. (Some executives have bailed, though, but whether this indicates troubles within is unclear.)

And they are lining up serious creative talent. The Verge lists some of the talent: “Zac Efron, Idris Elba, Kristen Bell, Chrissy Teigen, Kendall Jenner, Tyra Banks, Steph Curry, 50 Cent, and Avengers: Endgame directors Anthony and Joe Russo all have original Quibi series in the works.” Trevor Noah is developing a show. 60 Minutes is producing a short-form version of itself. Steven Spielberg is developing a series. Reese Witherspoon is on board.

And putting serious money into the project and the content. “They’re making content at $100 a minute,” Katzenberg says, “we’re making content at $100,000 a minute.”

I think it’s fair to say that these innovations, taken together, represent a paradigm shift. That they are defining a new kind of content.

Whether they will succeed or not is unclear. That’s what makes it a bet.

I’m interested in your thoughts.

Categories
Technology Writing

Five Links

His business card runs Linux

For those of us who think for a living

A Neil Gaiman poem on refugees

Cory Doctorow on fixing the internet

A sanity checklist for remote workers

Categories
Swaine’s Flames Technology

Dirges in the Dark

And oldie but goodie.

Sorry Circuit Cellar Serenade

A long, long time ago, I can still remember how the circuit popped and hissed and stank, when I thought that I could take a chance with that old electron dance, and maybe I’d be lucky and give thanks. But the circuit closed and made me shiver, as full mains voltage was delivered through me via my thumb, could not have been more dumb. I can’t remember if I cried when I committed thumbicide, but something touched me deep inside, the day the circuit fried.

Dot-Com Lament

Did you write the Linux kernel, and do you have faith in the Doctor’s Journal, if your broker tells you so. And do you believe in K and R, can coding save my house and car, and can you teach me how to code real tight? Well I know that you’re a finance fool, ’cause I saw you writing business rules, you reek of affluence, and I dig those dollars and cents. I was a lone day-trader with a rebel yell, and I margin-traded till the closing bell, but I knew that I was SOL the day the market died.

Little Green Apples

Now for years he’s been back on the throne, this one the company disowned, but that’s not how it used to be, when the jester built the circuit board, a design so fine it won awards, and said this Apple’s made for you and me. But because the king just couldn’t count, the sugar-water saleman pounced, and from his throne the king was bounced, but now he has returned. And while John and Gil both turned a page, Jeff Goldblum pranced upon the stage, and lime computers were the rage, the day Amelio cried. 

Talkin’ Intellectual Property Blues

Helter Skelton: Edward Felton and Dmitri Sklyarov were dealt a hand that neither one forsaw. They ran afoul of the law. They gave a talk and read a book, the DMCA said, you’re a crook. Now you can’t even post a link but you may end up in the clink. We all sat down to code and watched our rights erode. Oh as the programmers try to make the scene the lawyers start in to get mean on 2600 Magazine, until we turn the tide. 

Sympathy for the Devil

Oh and there we were all in one place, except that place was cyberspace, which everybody seems to want to own. And you know Bill is nimble, Bill is quick, Bill has never missed a trick, because winning is the devil’s only friend. Oh and as I watched him on the prowl, the Netscape hounds began to howl, no way in hell that we — can compete with something free. And as the marketshare hopelessly fell and they sold out to AOL, I heard competition’s sad death-knell, the day the browsers vied.

Carly’s Tune

I met a girl who sang the blues and I asked her for some HP news but she just smiled and gently coughed. I went down to the gadget store where I’d bought oscilloscopes before, but the man there said they’d spun that business off. And in the boardroom the children screamed, directors cried, and Carly schemed, but not a word would they say — about the old HP Way. And the two men I admired most, their fabled legacy is toast, their business on a downhill coast, the day that HP died.

Backstory

The tune is Don McLean’s American Pie; the verses capture moments in the ongoing story of the personal computer industry at the time this was written.

Sorry Circuit Cellar Serenade

The memory of seared flesh no longer fresh, we can recall with rosy-spectacled nostalgia the heady thrills of hobby computing, when Steve Ciarcia’s Circuit Cellar column in Bytemagazine taught us how to solder our digits to our widgets.

Dot-Com Lament

For a magical time, it was possible to believe that the law of gravity had been repealed, that Internet companies could be erected on hope alone, and that technology stocks would rise forever. The dot-com crash infused the proceedings with the raw taste of sobriety. Linux kernel, Dr. Dobb’s Journal, K and R, and tight coding are tech talk; day-trading and margin-trading are finance jargon; and SOL is what the believers in the repeal of gravity were when it all fell down.

Little Green Apples

A verse about Steve Jobs. Stripped of power in the company he founded, Jobs left to start a new computer company. Years later, Apple was on the ropes and he returned triumphantly to save the company. Co-founder Steve Wozniak was indeed a jester, having run a dial-a-joke service for a while, and did build the original Apple circuit board that is considered a work of engineering art. Jobs got into trouble at Apple because of his wildly unrealistic projections for Macintosh sales, and was stripped of his power by John Sculley, whom Jobs had hired away from Pepsi-Cola with the pitch “Do you want to sell sugar water forever, or do you want to come with me and change the world?” Gil Amelio was the turnaround artist who brought Jobs back into the fold, only to find himself forced out by the founder. The original fruit-colored iMacs released soon after Jobs returned had a lot to do with Apple’s turnaround, and actor Jeff Goldbloom did dance oddly in commercials for the iMac.

Talkin’ Intellectual Property Blues

Sympathy for the Devil

Carly’s Tune

I really should explain these too.