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Why the NFL's TV Blackout Rule Is Now Self-Defeating

Kevin Maney — Sat, 25 Sep 2010 12:20:00 EST

This Sunday, another NFL game is getting blacked out on local TV because of sagging ticket sales -- which just proves that the NFL doesn't understand what it has done to its own product.

NFL games have become better to watch at home than in the stands, a reversal of the usual sports arrangement. The games are now more like a taping of Two and a Half Men, with the fans in the stands as little more than the studio audience.

For two decades, the NFL has worked hard to make its games the highest-fidelity televised sporting events in the world. It pioneered replays, close-up shots, and computerized enhancements (like those virtual on-field first-down lines). It jumped on the high-definition bandwagon early, and is now pushing into 3-D.

Watching Is Way Cheaper Than Attending

Meanwhile, Americans have been loading up on giant, flat-screen TVs with surround sound. Now, when you stay home to watch a game, you can lounge on your comfortable couch and experience the game in a better way than if you were in a hard plastic seat hundreds of feet from the field.

And, of course, watching from home costs nothing. But the average NFL ticket price is $76.47, which doesn't include the cost of parking or paying $15 for a beer.

Normally, the experience of seeing a sporting event in person balances the convenience of watching it from home, so fans retain a desire to get to the games, and they'll make that trade-off often enough to fill the stands. That's been the case for the NFL -- until now. With ticket prices going up while the home experience has improved dramatically, fans are deciding to stay on the couch.

TV Ratings Are Soaring

The result: Attendance is expected to fall as much as 2% this season, after dropping each of the past two seasons -- from 17.3 million in 2007 to 16.7 million last season. At the same time, the NFL's TV ratings are soaring -- up 15% last season over 2008.

The Looming Battle for the Future of Mobile Devices

Kevin Maney — Sun, 29 Aug 2010 14:30:00 EST

Filed under: Technology, Hewlett-Packard, Dell, Google , Microsoft, Motorola, Nokia, Research In Motion, Apple, AT&T, Verizon, Palm, Cisco Systems, Samsung, Best Buy

Mark your calendar for an all-out global war among mobile operating systems starting late this year.

These OS platforms will run the new generation of tablet computers and smart phones. Apple (AAPL), with its iOS running the red-hot iPad and iPhone devices, has a commanding position at the moment. But the market is about to get flooded with competing devices from Hewlett-Packard (HPQ), Dell (DELL), Samsung, Asus, Cisco (CSCO), Best Buy (BBY) and probably Motorola (MOT) and Nokia (NOK).

It Matters Who Wins

They'll run on an expanding range of operating systems, including ones that are already popular (namely, Google's (GOOG) Android) and others that you've probably never heard of (MeeGo, anyone?).

Who wins matters. This is the kind of war that the Windows OS won on desktop PCs in the 1980s, setting up Microsoft (MSFT) for a couple of decades of dominance in the personal technology arena. It seems improbable that a single platform will similarly end up dominating mobile computing, but most markets won't tolerate more than two or three global standards. We wound up with two major PC platforms (Windows and Mac), three cell phone systems (GSM, CDMA, TDMA), two videotape formats (VHS, Beta) and so on.

At a recent tech conference, Kevin Johnson, CEO of Juniper Networks (JNPR), told me he thinks there will be more than two but less than 10 viable mobile platforms. Jon Rubenstein, the former Palm chief now at Hewlett-Packard, says: "It's reasonable to have three to five (mobile) operating systems out there."

The Lineup of Competitors

Some of the major players in the fight:

Apple, of course, with the iOS for iPhone and iPad
Android is catching up fast in number of users and apps. Dell, Cisco, Best Buy, Asus and others are all coming out with Android-based tablets in coming months.
Hewlett-Packard with its WebOS platform, which it got when it bought Palm earlier this year. H-P recently revealed it will start selling a tablet based on WebOS early in 2011. Only H-P machines will run WebOS, much as only Apple machines run Apple's iOS.
Microsoft's Windows 7 will be available on a version of H-P's tablet and on tablets from Fujitsu, Dell and others.
Research In Motion (RIMM), maker of the BlackBerry, is expected to unveil a tablet based on its proprietary platform.
MeeGo, which is the descendant of two previous platforms called Maebo and Moblin. (They sound like names of characters from The Hobbit.)

Who's probably going to win? Ultimately, users don't care about platforms -- they care about what they can do on a platform, i.e., the apps. That's where the winner will be found -- in the apps.

"An OS needs a huge base of developers making lots of apps consumers want, and that in and of itself will drive OS trends," says Ralph de la Vega, who runs AT&T Wireless (T).

Who's Got More Apps?

Developers will choose to create apps for the platforms the most consumers and enterprise users buy. At the moment, users are voting overwhelmingly for Apple and Android, and a little for BlackBerry. Developers are responding in kind. Apple's iOS App Store has in excess of 225,000 applications, and the Android Market has more than 70,000. After that, the number of apps for the other platforms falls off a cliff.

So right now, it looks like just two operating systems will dominate the mobile Web -- iOS and Android.
Microsoft might hang in there, but more as a mobile platform for businesses, not consumers. Microsoft CEO Steve Ballmer has said that making a successful Windows-based tablet is now "job one" at Microsoft -- though Microsoft has spent more than a decade trying to make a popular Windows tablet, with little success.

And the other platforms? Unless they get a huge influx of popular apps, they'll die. Consumers will avoid devices that can't do the things they want to do.

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Will Your Next Doctor Be a Robot?

Kevin Maney — Sat, 21 Aug 2010 06:00:00 EST

Filed under: Technology, Health Care, IBM

Next year, when IBM's Watson computer competes live against human contestants on Jeopardy, think of this: The machine might be your next doctor.

A projected doctor shortage has been making headlines in the U.S. since the passage in March of health-care reform, which is expected to give 32 million more Americans health insurance by 2014. At the same time, enrollment in medical schools is going down. One report by the Association of American Medical Colleges predicts a shortfall of 150,000 doctors in the U.S. in the next 15 years. Europe, Japan, New Zealand and other countries are facing similar challenges in health care.

Most of the proposed solutions involve incentives to get more students into medical schools. There's another way to attack the problem: create artificial intelligence doctors that can handle a lot of routine medical questions, easing the traffic to doctors to check out a rash or a child's fever. Sure, robots may not have the same bedside manner as human doctors. But the idea is that they wouldn't replace doctors, but would allow the human physicians to focus on more serious care.

Building a Robot Doctor

The idea is not so far-fetched. Technology is emerging that could handle some medical diagnosis through a laptop or smart phone. And there's no question that a robot computer could be loaded chock full of information. IBM's massive Watson computing system, for example, has been loaded with millions of pages of information from everything from classic novels to Wikipedia to books of historical sports statistics.

But being a doctor requires more than just knowledge. At the heart of Watson is software called DeepQA, which allows the computer to understand Jeopardy's often-tricky questions, and in a split second find the most likely answer out of millions of possible answers in all that stored data. The software will be tested in public sometime in 2011, when IBM's Watson is expected to play on Jeopardy. As it is, the massive computing system has been playing practice rounds in a mock studio against former Jeopardy winners, and Watson has been winning more than half the time.

IBM believes DeepQA will have plenty of applications beyond talk shows - including health care. Imagine if the same kind of system was loaded with every medical reference book and scientific study and information about prescription drugs, along with the latest news about flu outbreaks, weather or other factors that might impact health. A patient could then access a DeepQA doctor over the Web, ask questions and get informed and knowledgeable answers.

There's already a crude version of this on the Web - a site called Doctor Robot, created by Russian physician Aleksandr Kavokin. It asks patients to fill out a questionnaire, and attempts to match answers with a possible diagnosis.

Robot Doc's Special Features

Other new technologies could also help create a sophisticated computer doctor. Scientists keep improving machine vision, which enables a computer to analyze an image - so you could send a computer doctor an image of your rash, for instance. Wearable devices like Fitbit can track exercise and calories burned and automatically send the data into the network for use by a computer doc. Apps on smart phones could help patients keep track of other health information and send it into the system.

And efforts continue to make individual health records electronic, so a computer doc would have access to your medical history. Companies such as 23andMe offer genetic analysis that can identify predisposition for certain diseases, something else that could help an online physician with a diagnosis.

The X Prize Foundation is doing its part to make sure computer-based doctors become reality. The X Prize, which funded the contest to build an aircraft that could reach space and return to land at an air strip, this summer announced a $10 million prize to create an artificial intelligence physician. The prize will go to "the first team to build an artificial intelligence system that can offer a medical diagnosis as good as or better than a diagnosis from a group of 10 board-certified doctors." It also should be accessible through a cell phone.

Of course, there are major concerns about privacy and the acceptance of such systems by the medical profession and general public. The big question will be whether society is ready to trust health care and health data to the network. But the doctor shortage may force those issues. Long waits at doctors' offices and primary physicians refusing to add new patients might convince the public to try computer doctors, especially if Watson does well on his test.

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Game Over: Why the Console Business Is Doomed

Kevin Maney — Wed, 16 Jun 2010 09:22:00 EST

Filed under: Technology, Microsoft, Netflix, Sony, Apple, Nintendo

Video-game console makers apparently believe that their business is going to be saved by motion-sensing technology that could let you play Madden NFL 11 by running around your living room and hurdling the dog.

Um, right.

Based on what's happening at the huge "E3" Electronic Entertainment Expo gaming show in Los Angeles this week, it's looking like consoles have finally jumped the shark. The business model is gasping like the plot of Star Wars: The Clone Wars. For a host of reasons, the console's best days are behind it.

Total sales of consoles -- Microsoft's (MSFT) Xbox, Sony's (SNE) PS3 and Nintendo's (NTDOY) Wii -- are in decline. Overall, the U.S. games business is down 11% this year, and industry revenues shrank by 8% in 2009 to $19.7 billion, according to industry research group NPD.

Admittedly, use of existing consoles is creeping higher -- up by 10% this year, according to Nielsen. But that's because the game boxes are increasingly being used to do something other than play games, says Brad Raczka of Nielsen. People are using consoles to play DVDs, go on Facebook, download Netflix (NFLX) movies and do video chat -- all activities you can do just as well, if not better, on other kinds of hardware.

Meanwhile, forces are lining up against the console. Teens and adults who aren't hardcore gamers are shifting their time to social network games like Farmville and games on their smartphones. (I'm totally taken by Ragdoll Blaster.) Give most of that casual gaming market a choice between buying a next-generation console for $300 or an iPad for a little more than that, and many are going to pick the Apple (AAPL) product and shift their gaming to that device.

Welcome to the Cloud, Gamers

At the same time, game-streaming start-up OnLive announced at E3 that it will go live Thursday with 23 titles. OnLive and other similar ventures are threatening to prove that consoles are a 20th-century technology model up against a 21st-century trend toward cloud computing, media downloading and entertainment that follows you anywhere.

Think of how the whole console ecology works: You buy a stand-alone, powerful piece of hardware that only has one real purpose -- playing games. It's only compatible with games made for that hardware, so if you switch to a different brand, your old games won't work -- the equivalent of making you buy all new software if you switch from a Dell laptop to a Toshiba. And then, to get the content -- i.e., the games -- you have to go to a store and buy physical media at inflated prices. Consumers are already ditching music CDs in favor of music downloads. How long before they lose patience for buying hard copies of games?

These days, the cloud is all the rage. Ideally, we'd like our applications, personal files and entertainment to be stored in data centers and available on any of our devices through an Internet connection. Console games are stuck on your home TV. A cloud-based game would let you start a game on your home TV, pick it up on your iPad while you travel, and finish it on your laptop when you get to your destination.

OnLive opens that possibility. So far, the technology seems to work -- you can play graphics-rich games like Crysis over the Internet with no latency, just as if they were on a console. In fact, you can play Crysis on any computer, not just a souped-up machine with a high-end graphics card. The game sits on an OnLive server, available wherever you happen to be. Whether OnLive can find the right pricing, cost structure and marketing appeal to make its business work remains to be seen. But by making the technology work, it shows that cloud-based gaming is possible -- which in turn shows that console gaming's best days are behind it.

The Console Empire Strikes Back

At E3, the console makers are fighting back. One of the show's biggest announcements was of the Microsoft's Kinect, an add-on for the Xbox that uses cameras and motion sensors to track body movements, letting users control their games without touching a controller. It doesn't feel like the breakthrough the Wii represented when Nintendo introduced it in 2006. Kinect will have its fans, but it's not likely to reinvigorate the Xbox. Meanwhile, Sony revealed more about its new motion-sensing controller called Move, which it hopes will boost the popularity of its PlayStation 3.

But the thunder was stolen from both of those announcements when Apple unveiled the iPhone 4 last week. The new iPhone has a gyroscope that lets it detect motion and gestures, and that's expected to lead to a new round of innovative mobile games for the smart phone -- the kinds of games that are already stealing time away from consoles.

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Why Palm Can't Win: It's Stuck in a Cell-Phone Market Dead Zone

Kevin Maney — Tue, 27 Apr 2010 13:10:00 EST

Filed under: Technology, Investing, Google , Apple, Palm

Lenovo is the latest company considering a bid for smartphone maker Palm (PALM). But such a move, for Lenovo or any other company, would mean investing in a brand that has about as much commercial appeal as another L'il Wayne rock album.

That's because Palm is caught in a dead zone between the two categories of products that excite consumers the most. At one end of the spectrum is high fidelity, which includes products or services that deliver a fantastic, cool experience, that usually cost more and that are more difficult to get. At the other end is high convenience, those products or services that are ubiquitous, inexpensive and familiar. To illustrate: Wal-Mart (WMT) is high convenience. A great boutique shop is high fidelity.

Consumers usually like products or services that fit clearly in one category or the other. Products that land in the middle -- those with so-so fidelity and so-so convenience -- struggle for acceptance. One great example of this was the Cadillac Cimarron, General Motors' misguided attempt in the 1980s to make an economy Cadillac. Talk about a fidelity and convenience clash.

Rapper L'il Wayne's Rebirth record further illustrates the middle ground's lack of appeal. Even though it sold decently, critics murdered it as being too rap for rock fans and too rock for rap fans. Even his devoted followers aren't clambering for an encore.

Where Are the Apps?

So here's Palm's problem: The mobile market used to be focused on a phones' coolness; now it's centered on what the phones actually do. In other words, it's all about the apps now and about how good the phones are at using and accessing those apps. Want proof? Commercials for Apple's (AAPL) iPhone or Motorola's (MOT) Droid phones focus entirely on apps.

This trend means that phones with the best apps win. In a reinforcing cycle, app developers will flock to the phones with the most customers. So far, the iPhone and Google's (GOOG) Android -- not Palm -- are clearly winning the most customers and developers by sticking to either end of the customer trade-off spectrum.

The iPhone and iPhone operating system are staking out the high-fidelity territory. Google's Android system, already included in phones by Motorola and HTC, is on the path to becoming a convenient, ubiquitous operating system for phone manufacturers around the world.

Meanwhile, Palm's WebOS gets high marks from reviewers, but it's not as high-fidelity as the iPhone operating system, especially when married to Palm's phones. Palm also isn't as convenient and as ubiquitous as Android, which can increasingly be found on all kinds of phones.

Palm Loses Market Share

The penalty for landing in this dead zone has been consumer apathy. From December to February, Android-based smartphones gained 5.2% market share, making up a total of 9%, according to ComScore, which tracks and provides Web metrics. The iPhone stayed flat at about 25%, while Palm lost 1.8%, falling to a 5.4% market share.

Even more telling: In a survey early this year by Appcelerator, a Mountain View, Calif.-based company that offers a platform to Web developers to build applications, 87% of 1,000 developers said they were very interested in making iPhone apps, and 81% said they were very interested in making Android apps. Just 14% said the same about Palm apps, a sign that Palm's market share will likely continue to slide.

For what it's worth, Windows Mobile, Symbian and, increasingly, BlackBerry phones are landing in the same dead zone. Apple is winning fidelity; Google is winning convenience; everyone else will hang around as also-rans.

So while Palm is up for sale, it's finding few buyers. Lenovo is rumored to be interested. But as viewed through the lens of consumer trade-offs, Lenovo would appear to be better served by leaving Palm on the table and making phones that do a great job running Android apps.

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We Are the World Wide Web! Happy 25th Birthday, Dot-Com

Kevin Maney — Fri, 12 Mar 2010 11:00:00 EST

Filed under: Technology, Media

Years ago, I asked Marc Andreessen, creator of the first web browser, what surprised him most about the dot-com forces he helped unleash. "eBay," he said without hesitation. "Who knew there was that much crap in people's garages to sell?"

Personally, I'm a little more amazed at a site like Belch.com, "the largest collection of digitally recorded belches on the Net." But maybe that's just me.

It's pretty mind-blowing that the dot-com domain is 25 years old. On March 15, 1985, a Cambridge, Mass., computer maker called Symbolics registered symbolics.com: the very first dot-com site. (That company, in its original form, died in the mid-1990s, and symbolics.com is now an odd blog about web sites.) To give you an idea of how slow things were around the dot-com registration office in those days, the second site was registered in mid-April of that year (bbn.com), the third in mid-May (think.com), and the fourth in July (mcc.com). By the end of 1985, the world had a total of six dot-com sites.

How things have changed. A hundred thousand dot-com sites are registered every day, according to the WhoIs database. Nearly 86 million sites are active, and another 311 million dot-com sites over the past 25 years were born and then deleted. In the meantime, we had a sizzling dot-com boom, which turned into history's greatest transfer of wealth to people who spent their teen years playing Dungeons and Dragons -- followed by the inevitable dot-com bust, when many of those geeks were forced to sell one of their two Porsches.

And now here we are in 2010, when dot-coms have become part of the fabric of everyday life, as ubiquitous and essential as traffic lights or toothpaste. It's hard to imagine that there was a time, back before the Soviet Union collapsed, before Steve Jobs got punted from his first reign at Apple (AAPL), before the original "We Are the World" (pictured), that dot-com sites didn't exist.

For most of dot-com's first decade, hardly anyone knew what a dot-com was. The relative few of us who had computers were still using dial-up modems to get on Prodigy, CompuServe, and America Online: enclosed communities that didn't let us out to the wild and woolly Internet.

The Information Superhighway

I saved an issue of Time magazine -- April 12, 1993 -- featuring a cover story about the coming "information superhighway," as we called the Internet back then. It gets a lot about the future right: Lotus Development founder Mitch Kapor said he envisioned "a nation of leisure-time video broadcasters, each posting his creations on a huge nationwide video billboard." (Hey, that's YouTube! And if Kapor thought of it, why didn't he build it?) And yet nowhere in the long article can you find a single dot-com address.

Andreessen changed that. He built the first browser with classmates at the University of Illinois-Urbana-Champaign and, in 1993, co-founded Netscape Communications, with Jim Clark, to release Mosaic, the first commercial browser. Mosaic let users find their way around the Net, providing them with graphics and allowing them to click through links into the space that Tim Berners-Lee had created only a few years earlier: the World Wide Web.

Almost instantly, Internet users around the world began downloading copies of Netscape's browser. Andreessen started doing a "what's new" page about these new dot-com sites. There wasn't much to say. "If an Indian restaurant posted its menu," Andreessen recalls, "that was a big deal."

At about that time, I started writing about emerging dot-com sites. Someone told me about Yahoo, and I went to visit the company when it had six people in a beaten-down office park next to some railroad tracks in Silicon Valley. Buckets dotted the floor to catch water leaking from the ceiling. Employees manually scoured the Net for new sites, then listed them under one of the categories on Yahoo's front page. Within a year, that task became too overwhelming to do by hand.

'What About eBay?'

The dot-com bubble years were something to behold -- often in the manner of, say, Mardi Gras on Bourbon Street. We had the bombastic disasters like Webvan, and silly toy sites like HotOrNot.com, where strangers rated each other's looks. (As if that happens in real life. Yeah, right.) Belch.com got its start in 1997. And there were the parties, like the one at investor Heidi Roizen's house, where Bill Gates hit golf balls off the roof.

Yet a lot of amazing stuff got started from 1995 to 2000, too. I got to see most of it. I talked with Jeff Bezos when Amazon.com (AMZN) was just a bookstore. I had lunch with investors in Hotmail as they were basically inventing viral marketing.

Google (GOOG) came toward the end of that period. I remember heading to a cocktail hour at the swanky PC Forum conference in Scottsdale, Ariz., around 1998. In line at one of the bars, someone introduced me to a painfully geeky guy named Larry Page, who was peddling his new Google search engine. I remember thinking two things: (1) We've got Alta Vista and Lycos, so nobody needs another search engine, and (2) this guy is between me and a merlot. Not one of my more prescient moments.

As for eBay (EBAY), the legend was that Pierre Omidyar in 1995 wrote software for a Web site that would help his girlfriend trade with other Pez collectors. Omidyar later told me: "It's a very good story that at its core was true." In fact, as he explains, he got to thinking that auctions were a good mechanism for reaching the right value of an item. He wrote some software and put up a Web page he called AuctionWeb. It was only a section of a larger site he had built for consulting work he did under the name Echo Bay Technology Group. When he went to register the site name, echobay.com was taken.

"There I was at the counter, filling out the paperwork," he says. "This was back in days when you had to fill out paper to get a domain name. So I said, 'Hey, I'll just abbreviate it. What about eBay?' Turned out to be a lucky choice."

After the Bust, Sustainability

In March 2000, to much wailing and gnashing of teeth, the bubble collapsed. But really, maybe it was a good thing. The irrational exuberance got washed away -- it was, after all, irrational. The Nasdaq and venture-capital funding of tech companies had spiked crazily from 1998 to 2000. Since 2003, it's settled into a respectable, more sustainable level.

And the dot-com crash certainly didn't kill entrepreneurship or innovation. Post-bubble dot-com start-ups include Facebook, MySpace, Twitter, YouTube, Huffington Post, Zillow, Digg, Yelp, Mint, and that latest bastion of Web weirdness, Chatroulette.

The whole dot-com thing remains vibrant after 25 years. It may feel less exciting than it used to, simply because it's become ubiquitous. Pew Research Center statistics show that 55% of the U.S. population used the Internet daily in 2009, as opposed to 30% in 2005. Among those 18 to 29, a whopping 93% use the Net. And, of course, using the Net means using dot-com sites.

The Runway Ahead

I'm looking forward to what might come next. Toward the end of 2009, venture-capital investment in Internet start-ups climbed 40% from the third quarter to the fourth quarter, says research firm ChubbyBrain.

So far this year, money has flowed to dot-coms of all sorts. Recently funded Busuu.com is an online community offering free language courses. Then there's SecondMarket, billing itself as "The marketplace for illiquid assets" (which seems odd, because if those assets now have a marketplace, they're no longer illiquid, right?). Vook offers electronic books that combine text and video.

There seems to be a lot of runway left in the dot-com universe. Chances are that in the next decade, something will come along that amazes Marc Andreessen even more than eBay.

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The Trade-Off: What Toyota Has in Common With Starbucks and Coach

Kevin Maney — Mon, 15 Feb 2010 10:00:00 EST

Filed under: Company News, Columns, Autos

When Toyota (TM) tripped and did its recent -- and ongoing -- faceplant, it became the latest company to fall victim to an old problem. Toyota was making the same strategic mistake that derailed Starbucks (SBUX) and fashion company Coach (COH) in the past decade.

Continue reading The Trade-Off: What Toyota Has in Common With Starbucks and Coach

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The Trade-Off: Why 'Avatar' Won't Spark a 3-D Bonanza

Kevin Maney — Thu, 07 Jan 2010 07:00:00 EST

Filed under: Technology, Columns, Media

In the past week, 3-D has come to look like the greatest thing for the movie industry since talkies. Avatar, the lushest 3-D movie ever made, just passed $1 billion in global revenue. And the movie-theater industry announced that Americans spent $9.9 billion at the box office in 2009, up 10% from the year before.

Continue reading The Trade-Off: Why 'Avatar' Won't Spark a 3-D Bonanza

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The Trade-Off: Why we'll solve traffic jams with information, not more roads

Kevin Maney — Wed, 11 Nov 2009 20:30:00 EST

Filed under: Technology, Columns, Economy, IBM, Google , Apple

Sooner or later, politicians will realize that roads are becoming a terrible way to deal with traffic.

This is top of mind, because Republican Bob McDonnell just won the Virginia governor's race in part by promising to build roads to unsnarl traffic in the suburbs of Washington, D.C., where earthworms move faster than cars on the Beltway. "Traffic congestion is a quality-of-life, economic development, and environmental issue," McDonnell said during his campaign. He wants to spend $17.5 billion on roads.

Continue reading The Trade-Off: Why we'll solve traffic jams with information, not more roads

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The Trade-Off: Why the Chevy Volt won't be a winner

Kevin Maney — Thu, 22 Oct 2009 20:00:00 EST

Filed under: Energy, Company News, Technology, Columns, Honda Motor Co

Consumers constantly make trade-offs between fidelity and convenience, weighing the quality of an experience against the ease of getting that experience. We'll give up some fidelity to get more convenience, or vice versa. And the products that most people gravitate to -- the products that make people happiest -- tend to be either the most convenient or offer the highest fidelity.

A hundred years ago, that trade-off killed the electric car. And it's going to seriously hobble the Chevy Volt when it hits the market next year. That's because products that fall in the middle no-man's-land -- offering neither outstanding fidelity nor astonishing convenience -- struggle in the marketplace. And the Volt seems to be driving straight into that ditch.

Continue reading The Trade-Off: Why the Chevy Volt won't be a winner

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The Trade-Off: Why the NHL should get off TV and put games online for free

Kevin Maney — Thu, 08 Oct 2009 19:30:00 EST

Filed under: Technology, Columns, Media

The National Hockey League has just started another season -- and just missed a chance to take a bold step to win a new generation of fans. The NHL should put all games online for free, supported by ads.

The NHL's TV ratings are the worst among major sports. Ratings in 2008-2009 were down compared to the mid-1990s. Regular-season games on nationwide network TV were getting a 1.0 rating -- half the audience that watched NHL games on network TV in 1995-96.

Continue reading The Trade-Off: Why the NHL should get off TV and put games online for free

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