Forbes.com completely misses the point about what killed the "CD Market"

I stumbled upon a completely nonsensical article in Forbes.com, a supposedly reputable business analysis site/magazine that shows just how ignorant business-people can be sometimes:

The iPod [ has ...] a proven record of disruption, with customers bypassing record stores to tap into illegal distribution networks, along with Apple's iTunes music store, to fill the up their devices.

The result: Sales of CDs fell more than 30% to 614.9 million units last year from a peak of 881.9 million in 2000, according to the Recording Industry Association.

It should be obvious to anybody that there are many root causes to the demise of the CD industry, but the iPod is not one of them, it simply did the best job of capitalizing on the opportunity. The real causes are:

• The ability to store music in MP3's, a small (reasonably) high fidelity format that could be downloaded in a few minutes over the internet.
  
• Napster, the first truly successful peer-to-peer music sharing network
• The fact that the studios would release CD after CD with one good song, and 12 fillers, and charge $18 for the privilege
  

With these root causes, even without the iPod, CD sales would have fallen dramatically. Forbes is blind not to see this.

To place the demise in the hands of the iPod gives Apple far too much credit.

Forbes goes on to say that shortly Apple will do the same thing to movie rentals that they did to CD sales, and kill blockbuster. However, there are a few key differences:

• Unlike music, movies take a long time to download, and take up a lot of hard drive space
• Watching movies at home is moving towards High definition, and even when compressed, the files are huge. Lower video quality movies (the kind that look fine on an iPod) will be of less appeal to many consumers who own an HDTV
  
• "Bandwith caps" on internet connections though the major internet providers are becoming pervasive, which may actually make it more expensive to download than to rent if you go over your cap.

Forbes goes on to claim that:

[The rental stores'] days might be numbered: The iPod has killed before. It will kill again.

I just have a hard time believing that this will be the case.

Is the paragraph dead?

This morning I was doing my regular online news circuit, and reading a printed magazine copy of "Canadian Business", when I noticed an interesting difference for the first time: Online news & blogs don't use periods to end sentences any more, they use paragraph breaks.

I opened up an article about the Bhutto assassination, and found that 24 out of 34 paragraphs had only once sentence, the remaining paragraphs had two.

Meanwhile, my Canadian Business magazine had 3 - 5 sentences per paragraph, with no spacing between them.

3 - 5 would be in line with what I was taught in grade school about writing, however that was pre-internet.

I suspect that the reasoning for doing one sentence per paragraph is that it makes it easer to read in narrow 600 pixel columns, and you don't have to worry about extra paper costs like you would in print.

There are a number of other ways that writing style "rules" have been changed by the internet since I was in grade school:

• Referencing authors is no longer required, simply provide a hyperlink
• There's no such thing as a word count, use as many or as few words as it takes to get an idea across. When I started reading blogs, my mind had to get around the idea a 100 word blurb might be just as valuable as the 600 word one-pager in a typical magazine article.
  
• Feel free to completely omit any background details on the topic you are discussing, even if it is very recent news. If your reader wants to know more, the answers are just a Google search away.
  

I find it interesting that by modifying the media (from print to screen), that the rules of grammar and writing style get modified as well.

$85,000 phone bill? Shame on you Bell...

Sometimes the cell phone industry is just too easy to slam, as is the case with Bell recently charging a customer $85,000 for their cell bill. As reported in the Globe & Mail:

When their son called Bell Mobility, however, he received more bad news. The bill had since climbed to $85,000 because the company was charging him on a per-kilobyte basis.

In what Bell Mobility calls a “goodwill” gesture, it offered to reduce the charges to match the best data plan available for using cellphones as a modem, according to Bell spokesman Mark Langton. He said the outstanding bill now totals $3,243.

This is of course, absurd. What makes it extra-odd is that these types of stories about cell companies seem to come out with a certain amount of regularity, and makes the telecoms like Bell look very very bad.

All it would take to prevent a PR nightmare like this would be to send a daily text message to customers giving minutes used, data used, and current running total for the month.

But of course, they won't do this, because they love making as much $$$ as they can by tricking their customers into spending more than they know they are spending.

UPDATE: Even the American news over at news.com is picking up on this story. Global humiliation for Bell, they did it to themselves.