While needling Google yesterday for not owning up to its portal ambitions, I underplayed the power of the CES announcements--the Video Store, especially. Battelle has a good write-up, which I won't regurgitate here. The important points are the revenue split with content partners (70 percent to the content provider, 30 percent to Google, per Battelle); the content provider's control over the price; the potential long-term impact on the cable and broadcast industries; and the start of diversification of Google's revenue stream.
Google Pack is smart, too. And as long as the company's plan is only to "poke Microsoft in the eye from time to time" (as Battelle puts it), instead of going after its monopoly in operating systems and office suites, then maybe Google won't, in fact, bite off more than it can chew.
I keep expecting Google to screw up, but as yet they haven't, at least not in a major way. Maybe they really are smarter than everyone else.
Henry B. - I would like to hear what you think about "Peak Oil" and the economy.
Posted by: Less Esmore | January 09, 2006 at 09:23 PM
The "peak oil" concept makes sense to me (finite resource). I have no insight into when we might get there--or whether we've already passed it--although the "China changes everything" argument is hard to refute. If prices remain at this level (or higher), new sources of extraction will emerge, and they should extend peak production for decades. But it's definitely hard to believe that the world will once again view the stuff as being as cheap and plentiful as air.
I'm afraid I'm a nabob of negativity on the economy. I think the massive consumer debt load, fiscal deficit, Social Security and Medicare bombs, pension-sytem disappearance, housing bubble, and generational conflict will require some major stress to work themselves out. I haven't a clue as to when this might happen, although it's not hard to view a slowdown in the housing market as a powerful first domino to fall. Housing, consumer spending, the economy, and the stock market are all linked, and they'll probably all go down (or up) together. And I do find the current consensus that the yield curve is now irrelevant, that it's different this time, a bit absurd, given how popular similar arguments were back in 1999 (I made a few myself).
Posted by: Henry Blodget | January 10, 2006 at 08:14 AM
Thanks HB: Read this essay: http://www.lifeaftertheoilcrash.net/ It is a real eye-opener and difficult to debate on the subject of Peak Oil.
Posted by: Less Esmore | January 10, 2006 at 11:55 AM
Thanks HB: Read this essay: http://www.lifeaftertheoilcrash.net/ It is a real eye-opener and difficult to debate on the subject of Peak Oil.
Posted by: Less Esmore | January 10, 2006 at 11:55 AM