February 11, 2004

Technology non-leaders

Posted by Scott at 03:44 PM

Broadband - While the US does innovate in many technology areas, there are plenty of places of basic technology infrastructure where we are severely lacking relative to a bunch of other countries you wouldn't consider as technology blazing. Here's an excerpt from today's Wall Street Journal Op-Ed page:

“After leading the technology boom in the 1990s, the U.S. now ranks 11th world-wide in high-speed Internet use per capita, behind the likes of Germany, Canada -- even Italy. In South Korea, the global leader, 73% of households have broadband. The number in the U.S. is 38%, according to Nielsen/Net Ratings.

In Japan, which also outranks the U.S. and has the fastest (and cheapest) connections anywhere, broadband users can and do download entire movies in 20 minutes. In American homes, where most people are still using 56K modems and old copper-wire phone lines, that task would take more than seven days.

Slow broadband deployment does more than prevent most Web surfers in the U.S. from taking advantage of the latest technologies and "killer apps." It's also a drag on the economy. The telecom industry has lost in excess of half a million jobs since 2001, and market capitalization is down $2 trillion from its peak in the late 1990s. The next generation of Internet applications has arrived, and the sad fact is that America by and large isn't up to speed, let alone in any position to lead again.”

I'm not blaming people for not buying broadband (nor does the article). It's the economic / business / regulation climate which keeps it so expensive that keeps consumers from considering it worthwhile.

Megapixel Myth - The digital photography equivalent of the computer "MegaHertz myth" is benchmarking camera quality based upon megapixels. Weblogger Fazal Majid does a good job of explaining why it's not as simple as "how many pixels" when judging a digital camera, but marketers don't want you to be confused by the important details.

“A digital photo is the output of a complex chain involving the lens, various filters and microlenses in front of the sensor, and the electronics and software that post-process the signals from the sensor to produce the image. The image quality is only as good as the weakest link in the chain...

The problem is, as most consumers are fixated on megapixels, many camera manufacturers are deliberately cramming too many pixels in too little silicon real estate just to have megapixel ratings that look good on paper...

If there is a lesson in all this, it's that unscrupulous marketers will always find a way to twist any simple metric of performance in misleading and sometimes even counterproductive ways. Sometimes, more is less.”
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