Americans ever-so-slightly favored their music in digital rather than physical form in 2011. This is a first. It’s not a last. Physical albums declined five percent last year after declining 20 percent the previous year. Total digital sales rose by eight percent in 2011. Even Stevie Wonder can see where the trend lines lead. At about the same time that America embraced digital over physical, I said goodbye to my compact discs. Like any good atavist, I did not step willingly into the future. I was pushed there by Santa Claus, who left an iPod in exchange for my being good for goodness sake in 2011. Anticipating the future was much easier when I didn’t have as much of a past.
Apple founder and former CEO Steve Jobs has died. Jobs, who has been suffering from pancreatic cancer, had looked weak and frail recently, and it was clear that his resignation was due to his failing health. Steve Jobs changed the world at least three times. He created the first mass-market personal computer, the Apple II (a version of which I bought sometime around 1979 with my Bar Mitzvah gift money.) He changed the music business forever with the creation of iTunes. And he again changed the computer business forever with the invention of the iPad. And between those things, he invented the iPod and the iPhone, which set a new standard for “smart phones”. It’s hard to imagine what the world would look like had Steve Jobs never been born. I would venture to say that many millions of people would find their lives a little less productive and much less fun. To me, Mr. Jobs was like a real-world Howard Roark, absolutely insistent on creating what he wanted to create because he knew it was good, valuable, and true. And perhaps I am projecting here, given that my son’s middle name is Rand, but I see Steve Jobs as a Randian hero, a person who is all but irreplaceable in modern society and whose motivation came from his own drive to do what he knew the world needed, not a desire to be popular or even appreciated. Rest in peace, Steve. (For a more detailed biography of Steve Jobs, see this article .)
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Appreciating Steve Jobs
Steve Jobs died today after a long battle with cancer. He was 56. Founding NeXT would have been enough to turn anyone into a cult hero in his field. Acquiring Lucasfilm’s Graphics Group and turning it into Pixar would have made anyone a respected business leader. But for Steve Jobs, those were feathers in his cap called Apple, the company he co-founded with Steve Wozniak, and then later saved from extinction by returning to lead it again. He led Apple to its point today as the most valuable corporation in America, measured by public market capitalization. To do that, Jobs had to beat Microsoft and he had to beat IBM. He won in the end. Far from just a visionary, people from Apple have always said he was a hands-on leader, who had a personal stake in the success of the company and of the products he helped create. Apple ][. Macintosh. NextStep. iMac. MacOS X. iPod. iPhone. iPad. Jobs leaves behind an incredible legacy, and his death will be felt by his industry, and the world. RIP. My focus tonight having been on Steve Jobs, I’m going to run through the rest of my queue of stories more quickly than usual: Sunlight wishes it had Jobs’s attention to detail. Their Enforcement Actions database is suffering from integer overflow as it mis-reports anything over about 2 billion dollars in fines. According to Free Press, Prepaid Wireless Internet doesn’t really count as competition because, well, it’s inconvenient to the cause of claiming there is no competition. Copyright enforcement is out of control. Even as Barack Obama signs ACTA , the treaty that aims to spread the Digital Millennium Copyright Act and more to the rest of the world, In California we are now subject to warrantless copyright raids by the government. Isn’t that special? By the way, Public Knowledge can’t make up its mind. The Soros-funded group opposes ACTA, which only exports laws that already exist in America, but favor actual government expansion at home . Hmm. Typical of OSI-funded initiatives to promote liberty abroad and big government in America. When Apple censors apps, the outrage is palpable. But when Google censors apps , they get a pass, it seems. The FCC continues to be an opponent of innovation and freedom in the marketplace as it seeks to put spy, er, GPS chips in all phones by government dictate. There is no legitimate reason for government to demand that. It’s hard to laugh at insane European regulation when the Obama socialists are just as bad as the Brussels socialists. And yes, the FCC’s run by socialists. That’s why they want to tax your Internet in order to pay for the Internet of others . That’s what “Universal Service Fund reform” has been code for all along, just as I warned. House Republicans are busy. They passed a bill to reclaim some “broadband” stimulus money , while in committee Greg Walden continues to work on America’s pressing spectrum issues , issues that he won’t be rushed on, as they need to be done right . Republicans are also looking at Government’s role in Internet security . Psst, guys: the answer is ‘none beyond advisory.’ For some information on the LightSquared/GPS dispute from the other side, visit GPS World , which you can tell by its name has a particular focus. Patent trolls now claim to own WiFi , a threat to small businesses across America. Stop the madness! Why are Richard Blumenthal, Al Franken, and Sheldon Whitehouse seeking to ban binding arbitration for wireless contracts? Is it because the ABA has been shedding jobs lately and lawyers need more work?
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Tech at Night: Steve Jobs 1955-2011
So, while Google may have seen the light on Net Neutrality ( which is actually, amusingly enough, making the far left sound like me ), they still have other issues going on. The WiSpy Street View spying issue is still ongoing, with South Korea raiding their offices and Germany pressuring the firm to be more transparent and responsive to privacy complaints about the program. Because as I said earlier today , asking Eric Schmidt about privacy is like asking Phillip Morris about smoking. The conflict of interest is inherent. Everyone who hides his identity from Google Analytics, Google Adsense, and every other Google program is costing the firm money. Meanwhile, the EU and the FTC are targeting Apple for an incredibly ridiculous reason. You see, Steve Jobs has kept Adobe’s proprietary, intellectual property-protected Flash framework off of iOS (which drives the iPod Touch, iPad, and iPhone). Reasons given include CPU load which drains the battery, and no apparent need for it with the maturity of HTML 5 and CSS 3 technologies available in the Safari browser and its Webkit framework. So naturally the governments are claiming that this open embrace of open, unrestricted technologies… harms competition. Yeah. Seriously. As far as I’m concerned, any government entity that forces Apple to license a closed, monopolized technology, or punishes Apple for failing to do so, loses all legitimacy forever in anything it ever says or does. That’s how irrational this is, to question the abandonment of closed technology in favor of industry standard, open technology as anti-competitive. For crying out loud, Webkit is an open source framework. Anyone can grab the source and use it, even Adobe itself, thanks to its roots in KDE . Apple does virtually everything it can to open up Webkit and Safari, while Adobe has done nothing. And yet Adobe is the good guy here, per the FTC and the EU. What a joke. I cannot express enough how much this burns me up. Meanwhile, at the FCC, the FCC has caught onto the latest buzzword that the rest of the Obama administration uses when it wants to grab power online: “Cybersecurity.” Hold onto your CAT-6 cables, because the government is coming, and it’s here to help. The FBI isn’t here to help , though, unless you’re a big corporation making millions of dollars. According to TechDirt, the FBI has made missing persons a lower priority than copyright infringement cases, which aren’t even supposed to be criminal at all, but rather civil matters. This is a subsidy, pure and simple, but in this case is literally coming ahead of people’s lives and safety. Shame on the FBI. Yet while the FBI goes nuts over copyright, TSA is going wild with file sharing as it saves half-naked pictures of travelers, despite promises that those pictures would not be stored in any form. That claim was of course laughable from the beginning, when even plain, old copiers store data these days. Do we miss the time before the TSA yet? And to finish up tonight, let’s just get a reminder of the hypocrisy of Free Press . As much as they demand transparency for thee, they themselves tell plenty of lies and keep plenty of secrets. Free Press is having many meetings to lobby for its agenda that it’s not even bothering to disclose under the Lobbying Disclosure Act’s requirements. Oops. Good catch, Daily Caller.
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Tech at Night: Google, Apple, Adobe, FCC, FBI, TSA, Free Press
