Full screen because I want you to get the flavor of it.

This is a sign in a Subway sandwich shop in Idaho. How they enforce i don’t know but personally I like it. If somebody can’t live without the phone in their ear for just a couple of minutes so as not to hold up the line then they deserve to be kicked to the rear. I run across this in WalMart the most. Some woman fumbling for her checkbook, a pen, and she all chrunched over yapping on the phone not thinking one wit about what she is attempting to do. All the while the lines keep piling up.

There is not much in this world that is so damn important that you have to be on the phone 24×7. Observe, Engage, Execute. Then please get the hell out of the way.

HT: Consumerist.

Mr. Byfield posted an article over at Datamation here. I must respectfully disagree with his analysis. Here’s why –

Look, even free costs money. Ask any father that has had a 4yo daughter bring home a stray cat. The fact is over the life of a product the support costs are the big dollar number not the buy. Having worked in the Enterprise Space I can tell you after getting your list down to potential candidates the next item on the check list is exit strategy! Not knowing how you will get out at the end its attendant costs can cost you many fold the entry price of the product. Ask anybody who used MS’s Enterprise Commerce Server, which is no longer available.

The allure of FOSS is not that you don’t spend any money on entry. Smart enterprises will get a support contract if they can for things like Red Hat, Sun Office, etc. Having that support pays dividends in saving in-house labor on searching for a solution. It helps mitigate the life cycle costs of the product. The real allure of FOSS is a reduction in lock in. Consider a product like Tivoli over say Nagios. Tivoli is an excellent product. But they have a game they play. The tool is broken up into salable components. It always seems that next component is in that next bundle. They don’t sell it ala carte. The database is proprietary, and transition costs to another product expensive. Nagios on the other hand is a use what you need philosophy. But your team will burn hours getting up to speed on Nagios. With Tivoli management can just write a check and have it deployed.

With the myth of ‘free’ dispensed with, still why use SaaS like services. Well in a nutshell ROI. The last company I worked for always had a quandary as to providing the necessary tools to everyone vs the attendant costs and support for those tools. The classic example is MS Project. In a perfect world everybody would get a copy. But why? In a large company less than 15% of the seats really need it. Not only that but tools like Project scream to be a shared platform choice. Project gains leverage when the project plan can be interactively edited by all concerned. Given those two factors using such a tool as a SaaS makes sense. You pay for the proper concurrent usage, share it online and when you are thru with it you discontinue use and the expense. The savings can be dramatic.

Finally there is the matter of ’scale’. Desktop applications are very different animals than something like Google or Twitter. You could not imagine something like Google as a desktop metaphor, the Google ToolBar notwithstanding. SaaS today has glommed onto tools like spreadsheets and Writers as it is a common metaphor with a large user base. But Saas will evolve and that evolution will look less and less like the desktop and more and more like Twitter, FaceBook and other interactive mediums. It is the only way one can scale and disperse the usage of such applications.

I might agree that for an Office Suite an Open Office on every desktop might make sense. But again, Open Office has the very nice trick of being a shareable tool. So why not load it on a in-house server and concentrate the admin costs to a single back end system. But the road is clear, having pushed applications out of the data center so people could get work done, we are now swinging back to the data center to help mitigate support costs. For common tools on every desktop leave them on virtual servers in-house. Those tools that are specialized, used infrequently and need to be shared. Rent, don’t buy.

In a very comprehensive article Extra, extra, read all about it - or, sadly, not @ Comment, John Ibbitson covers the woes of the current pulp media –

That’s about to change. Across the United States, newspaper revenues are declining, along with circulation. As the American economy totters on the edge of recession, those declines are becoming precipitous and more pronounced than elsewhere. The Newspaper Association of America reports that classified newspaper advertising shrank by 16.5 per cent in 2007.

Circulation declines are also accelerating: Nationwide, newspaper circulation as of March 31 was down 3.6 per cent from the same time the year before; the year before that, it was down only 2.1 per cent. The Standard & Poor’s Publishing & Printing Index is declining at three times the rate of decline of the S&P 1500.

The Sunday edition of The New York Times is arguably the best newspaper in the world. Its circulation has declined almost 10 per cent in the past year alone, although part of the reason was management’s decision to cut back on discounted papers.

We have covered that before of course no new news there. But what will survive/replace the pulp media?

Small town Editions

More on Pulp is Dead, Its Just Not Buried

My career in IT started pre-Internet so I have seen much of the history unfold with a near 50 yard line seats. But I have to ask does Microsoft really ‘get’ the Internet. This discourse pops up from time to time on the tech blogs. But now I have detected three events that tend to indicate a trend.

But do I need to remind folks we have sort of been here before? When the ‘Net burst on the scenes in the late ’80’s it was novel and a user supported affair. But it was not long before the NCSA browser was adopted by Netscape and off to the races. For well on 18 months Netscape had free reign in the marketplace with Microsoft sitting on the sidelines oblivious to the paradigm shift. Eventually they recognized the threat and developed IE.

Now? Well its what Microsoft is doing rather than not doing this time. –

A) The Yahoo non-assimilation. We have covered the Yahoo - Microsoft dance several posts. I won’t elaborate too much. Then rumors floated of a possible Microsoft - FaceBook match up. All these moves appear to be an effort to develop a ‘Net income producing presence separate from the desktop metaphor.
 
B) Shutting down the book search engine effort. We then get this from the blog Google Operating System.

“Given the evolution of the Web and our strategy, we believe the next generation of search is about the development of an underlying, sustainable business model for the search engine, consumer, and content partner. For example, this past Wednesday we announced our strategy to focus on verticals with high commercial intent, such as travel, and offer users cash back on their purchases from our advertisers.”  

In other words, the book search engine didn’t make enough money and Microsoft decided it’s better to focus on areas that are more profitable. Instead of improving their search engine with valuable content from books and offering better search results, Microsoft chose to make decisions based on the short-term profits.

C) Removing unpopular XBox games from the download site. Then from Wired we have this —

What on Earth is Microsoft thinking?

Consider the case of Asteroids Deluxe, above. Maybe it’s not the most popular game on Xbox Live Arcade, but surely there are some people out there who want to play a high-def version of Atari’s classic shooter, right? Last I checked, that was the whole point of digital delivery: You don’t have to only publish the hits. Zero cost of goods and just-in-time inventory means that you can sell a little of a lot of different things.

So why is Asteroids Deluxe in danger of being yanked from the Xbox Live catalogue?

Xbox Live general manager Marc Whitten told Next Generation this week that Microsoft will soon begin to delete some Xbox Live Arcade games from the service. The rationale is, to put it nicely, paper-thin: To “focus on quality over quantity” and “make it easier to find the games you are looking for.”

That is, Microsoft is going to reduce digital download games choices. That would be like iTunes dropping ‘By the Dock of the Bay’ because Sam Cooke only sells 2 tunes a day. But that is what Microsoft is preparing to do.

So what do all these events have in common? Short quarter thinking. Its the only thing that makes any sense. But let me lay the ground work for why.

Consider the games reduction. It makes no sense. The sunk cost for housing the games for download has already been paid. So even if a game only does 5-6 sales a week it is by this point nearly pure profit both for Microsoft and the game developer for their royalty payment. I would recommend the book the ‘Long Tail’ by Chris Anderson for a full explanation. But non-physical goods to do not incur warehousing costs like physical products so their retention does not impact the bottom line. Then we have Microsoft backing out of the book search concept. Ok granted it takes expense to keep feeding the machine but as a competitive move for LiveSearch its a bad move. It leaves the the concept totally to Amazon and Google. That indicates a brand retreat to consumer. Finally we have the Yahoo deal. It is interesting that Microsoft felt compelled to buy a revenue stream when there were supposed to be constructing one with LiveSearch. Now I will grant that sometimes it is cheaper to buy into a market than build your presence in that market from the bottom up. The Yahoo thing had a aura of desperation to it. It never made sense to me that Microsoft was going to battle the boardroom without the backing of the institutional investors first.

The conclusions? –

• Microsoft’s acumen outside the desktop/server environment lacks insight and in many cases is too much ‘me too’ in scope.
• Its ability to generate revenue is below that of its competitors. That is evidenced as part of the first bullet point.
• Microsoft’s pull back over these markets and its move to buy market may indicate a revenue shortfall and likely short term bad quarters for the giant for the balance of the year.
• Unable to get these revenue streams to a break even point Microsoft faces some tough choices. Couple that with all is not well in the desktop arena regardless of the rosy Vista projections. The Windows margins have been shrinking for two quarters now.

The bottom line? Is Microsoft the next Novell, like Novell was in 1995 having been speared by the Microsoft juggernaut in the server market? Wish I could ask THE question — “Bill did you know 3 years ago when you handed the COO job to Balmer that the franchise was running out of steam in the marketplace?”

I’ll put the crystal ball down now. Anyone have any other explanation for the events I have just outlined? I am all ears!

Like so much goes on in Washington the DC Court of Appeals has ruled on American Bird Conservancy, Inc. v. FCC. Upholding part, vacating part. The main complaint is the FCC has not followed procedure in regards to the Species Protection Act and the National Environmental Policy Act [NEPA]. All of this is administrative BS of course.

BS? Yep. First a disclaimer. I want migratory birds protected as well. Gives me that much more Pintail to shoot at. Yes I hunt. But back to the BS. I say with the following observations. I have visited many a microwave tower and cell tower in prior lives. Did I have to step over mounds of dead ducks? Nope. But I have swept a heck of a lot of Bird S**t off them. Point is my experience is most bird species use the freaking towers as roosting sites and are seldom killed by them.

I also note that part of the whole legal issue appears to be the color of the lights. Huh? That is immaterial. Anybody who has sat in a duck blind know that towards sundown most migratory species set down before dark. Another words most ducks could care less about the color of the lights since they are sitting in a marsh somewhere supping on duckweed and taking a nap.

Endpoint? This is a bunch of hooey cooked up by a bunch of busy bodies with more cash than cents.

Mr. Malone of the WSJ lays out aspects of societal and business change that the US faces in say the next 50 years. He throws terms out like ‘fat pipe’, ‘process patents’, ‘free internet’, etc. Our loyal Thridpipe readers already know all this because we have this electronic pulpit on high. We have been laying this prescription down since this blog was created. —

- Build up Brand America. Government agencies, including the USAID and United States Commercial Service, need to promote American brands, via the Web, hardware and software, to everywhere in the world where they are currently unknown or disliked. Voice of America needs to become a massive Internet portal to the American economy and media.

The U.S. International Trade Commission must actively pursue illegal international threats to our e-economy from hackers to scammers — such as bringing serious economic sanctions against nations that look the other way (or even support) these activities. We need to capture the dominant share of the minds of the next two billion, enforce an honest Web, and make America again synonymous with the best.

- Create a Fat Pipe. Many of the great fiber optic lines entering and leaving the U.S. were almost dark a decade ago, and that abundance created an opportunity that helped propel the creation of companies like Google. But Google’s recent announcement that it was going to install its own cable across the Pacific to Japan suggests that the age of cheap bandwidth is almost over. Late last year, a report by Nemertes Research predicted a bandwidth shortage by 2011.

The U.S. needs to have the fastest, cheapest and most reliable Internet access on the planet, both inside our borders and in our connections to the rest of the world. Like the railroads and the interstate highway system before it, we need a program of direct investment, subsidies and tax breaks to assure that Americans always have the world’s best Web access – and the rest of the world has the best access to us.

- Revamp Nafta. While the Democratic candidates are calling for the abolition, or crippling of the North American Free Trade Agreement, what we should be discussing is how to revamp it and other trade accords to reflect the newly emerging world of people-to-people, not just business-to-business, trade. We need to be prepared for a world where knowledge workers around the world are hired online by the minute – in other words, radically simplified employee contracts, payroll tax documentation and W-2s, and improved tax laws on home offices, part-time work, and self-employment.

But most of all, we must not impede this inevitable transformation by doing anything to limit free trade – even if that means reaching individual trade accords with countries regarding buying and selling on eBay, MySpace, Facebook and the like.

- Promote a Free Internet. The lights of intellectual freedom that have been created by the Internet are slowly going out all over the world – look at China’s recent blackout of Web videos of events in Tibet. We need to fight to keep the Internet open and accessible to everyone on the planet, and keep tyrants from censoring their people.

Short of that, we need to keep the U.S. an island of Web freedom, open to anyone who can reach our servers and sites. A good start would be to require U.S.-based companies to maintain free speech in all their international subsidiaries – no more Yahoos helping foreign governments locate dissidents.

- Reform patent laws. In an era characterized by “free” downloads as well as the proliferation of pirate content sites, the overly broad U.S. patent and copyright laws need to be reformed to reflect these new sensibilities. Today they stifle innovation. A good place to start would be a revamping, if the not the elimination, of “business method” patents, which even Justice Anthony Kennedy has suggested can suffer from “potential vagueness and suspect validity.” Meanwhile, patent approvals need to be made faster, tougher and cheaper.

- Make education more open. It is time for the rest of us to accept the reality that education in the U.S. is now a multi-platform (public, private, home) experience, and begin building Web-based curricular support for all three. It is in our national interest to make all schoolchildren well-educated and competitive in the modern economy.

Now we are not Malone clones. There have been articles we have vehemently disagreed with. But for once he is firing all the cylinders. Most definitely get rid of the ‘business process’ patents. They are a scourge. But we ought to go further. First roll back patent use to 17 years as was originally fostered. If you can’t turn a profit in that period of time you don’t deserve to keep the patent anyway. Patents and copyrights should also have innovation and sunset provisions. If a patent holder does not utilize the patent or license it for deployment within the first 4 years then the patent is invalidated. As well if a copyright is not longer a published work available for first release purchase or the death of the author then it becomes public domain. I love Elvis Presley recordings, but something is wrong when the estate is still in force collecting royalties.

There is also one that Malone missed. ‘Promote the Everyman’. Foster an environment that anyone who wants to compete can do so. The function of government should be to build that stadium of equal opportunity. The place to start is in revamping small claims court to include all the provisions of superior court as to court directed remedies. Today most small claims are only available for remedy of monetary damages. The problem is in many cases the damage stems from systemic abuse by corporations. The little guy has to be able to have their day in court. Abolish one way contracts and forced arbitration as a manner to receiving products & services. Eliminate legal extortion by making it a penalty of disbarment for a lawyer to blindly issue legal threats without ascertaing that there has been actual damages to his client.

Mr. Malone is to be commended for this piece.

Read the whole article here.

The FCC in a new release of working papers has specifically run a discussion on the valuation of cost vs free transport and the Nash Equilibrium. –

One complicating factor is that allocating additional spectrum to unlicensed use may, under certain conditions, reduce consumer welfare. The economic problem is straightforward. Markets work best when the choices that economic actors make reflect the cost that their decisions impose on society. Economic agents typically incur the cost of their decisions by paying an appropriately informed market price. Due to the free entry condition inherent in unlicensed use (as traditionally conceived), there is no assurance that consumers will take into account the negative effect of their spectrum consumption decisions on the value other consumers place on using the same spectrum. Thus, rational users may “over-consume” freely available spectrum compared to the level that would promote both consumers’ and society’s interests. This welfare reducing outcome is referred to as the “Tragedy of the Commons.”

One solution involves treating spectrum allocated to unlicensed use as a “common pool resource” and utilizing a congestion etiquette to allocate spectrum to competing
users. Most existing etiquettes are based solely on engineering principles, as opposed to
market principles. This study defines four new potential congestion etiquettes, and examines the Nash equilibrium outcomes of each when spectrum users are allowed to choose between licensed and unlicensed options. We show that while each of the etiquettes improves the performance of the congestion-prone service, by reducing or eliminating the Tragedy of the Commons problem, …

But we have this from one of the Founding Fathers of the Internet age –

Bob Metcalfe thinks 1 Tbit/s Ethernet is inevitable, and he also believes the industry will have to tear down some standards to get there.

The “Father of Ethernet,” as he’s often called, will be delivering one of the keynotes at next week’s OFC/NFOEC show in San Diego, sketching what he believes will be the path to get to 1 Tbit/s speeds.

And in an exclusive LRTV interview, Metcalfe points out that the path might leave behind the equipment and even the fiber that’s been in the network for years.

“There comes a time when standards have to be overthrown,” he says. “We’re going down into sort of a dead end. I think that dead end is deep enough that we’ll get to 100 Gbit/s. The evidence is, to get to terabit Ethernet, we’ll have to break out of that dead end.”

Metcalfe, of course, has no problem with that kind of thinking.

“There’s now room to break loose of the stranglehold of standards and now move into some really fun new technologies,” he says.

But would anyone even need terabit Ethernet? It’s a question Metcalfe dismisses with his usual candor:

“We build it; they will come, I’m sure. It’s happened every time for 35 years.”

Understand where I am headed with this? There is a fundamental difference in viewpoints between readings. The FCC in the Nash analysis is a viewpoint in scarcity and how to manage it. Metcalfe on the other hand is a viewpoint in expanding bandwidth beyond which possibly the Nash Equilibrium problem does not apply. But regardless of your understanding of the technology involved you see here the classic matter of a governmental viewpoint of scarcity that must be managed vs a mindset that says that within bounds bandwidth will be cheap, and available. [Nobody escapes the laws of physics, STNG not withstanding. Sorry]

In the paper Modeling the Efficiency of Spectrum Designated to License Use and Unlicensed Operations apply the ‘tragedy of the commons’ and the Nash Equilibrium analysis to broadband spectrum usage. Reading through it, it appears to be a seminal piece of work. The Nash approach was predicated on a given set of choices with a known set of constraints to the player(s). So if I were a cable company like Time-Warner and not intent on spending another dime on technology. Looking at the Nash analysis as a means to maximize the income from the given customer reaction(s) would be a very valid way to approach things.

Yet here comes Metcalfe, ‘Its time to break out of impulse and go to warp’. Yes he is willing to ditch CDMA, ethernet, his brainchild to go for something faster and better. Fact he recognizes that it is the only way to get beyond 10Gbps in any practical manner. The goal is 1Tbps bandwidth for starters. Which brings us to our ‘nut’. Nash becomes almost of little consequence as the FCC paper would define it when given there is a unbound supply of bandwidth on a per subscriber basis. Will we get to 1Tbps wireless anytime soon? Probably not. Wireline sure. But is 1Gbps wireless possible? I don’t see why we could not get there in the next 10 years. Keeping in mind that the Auzzies have already developed a prototype 5Ghz chip for wireless.

But we won’t get there with an FCC that thinks, and acts in terms of ‘Tragedy of the Commons’ for that truly makes it a common tragedy for us all.

FCC working paper 42.
Metcalfe video clip.
If Only….

PS: I am not a Nash basher. His work “Nash equilibrium and welfare optimality” as part of game theory has been recognized in the financial sector as the underpinning of Quant Theory. His body of work is on par with Smith’s “…Wealth of Nations”. A wonderful movie was made of Nash’s life by Ron Howard, “A Beautiful Mind’. available on DVD.

Looking at the news feeds today I ran across this little ditty compliments of Tom’s Hardware, from Gartner –

Market research firm advised its clients not to wait until a recession is officially announced to cut their spending. Instead, “action is required” now, the company said, as “economic factors in the United States have deteriorated” to justify the preparation of cost cutting.

“Last October we published research recommending that organizations should prepare two IT budgets for 2008, the first reflecting guidance already provided by senior decision makers and a second ‘backup’ budget assuming the need to cut costs in response to the arrival of a business slowdown,” said Ken McGee, vice-president and Gartner Fellow. “Since that time the factors we based the research on - such as GDP growth projections and expert predictions for the likelihood of a recession - have worsened to a degree that convinces us it is now time for clients to prepare for cutting IT costs.”

Don’t have the source link, sorry. But we had this advise from the same Gartner in 2005 –

Gartner urges caution before downloading Firefox The Web browser may not be an unstoppable juggernaut

Matthew Broersma
February 10, 2005 (TechWorld.com) — Companies should think twice before jumping on the Firefox bandwagon, according to research firm Gartner Inc. The open-source browser has been gaining market share steadily over the past few months, helped by industry support and user enthusiasm, but Firefox isn’t the unstoppable juggernaut it might seem.

Browser switching is taking place at the level of individual users, rather than organizations, and some of the factors that make Firefox more appealing than Internet Explorer are likely to go away as the browser gets to be more popular, according to Gartner analysts Ray Valdes, David Mitchell Smith and Whit Andrews.
“The growth in usage of Firefox is driven by factors that are not inherently sustainable,” they warned in a study released last week.
…

Being kind, I will say — “kind of like stating the obvious isn’t it?” Taking a peek at ThridPipe’s stats we have roughly the following breakdown - IE 45%, Firefox 35%, All Others - 20%. Ooooh, looks like Gartner missed that one. Fact is Gartner usually misses more than it catches a trend. The reason of course is that every industry is different and even in recessions some industries are in growth mode.

My number one recommendation is know your industry. It drives not only your IT needs but your projections on income. Save your money and pass on the Gartner subscription.

We picked up on some discussion from InfoQ on topics related to Software as a Service. We believe that Saas will be part of the underpinning that pushes ThirdPipe transport. Saas is to Visicalc as ThirdPipe is to the Apple II. Its the demand engine that pushes the ThirdPipe supply chain forward. Listen in to a few clips then we’ll regroup –

Services that are built largely from other services are a reality, and offer many clear advantages. [For instance] … by leveraging service options like Amazon’s EC2 and S3, a very small company can build a simple, narrowly focused service and can cost-effectively sell it to a mass audience.

The types of services that could be used in the creation of new services span the spectrum, from base infrastructure services to complementary high-level application services that can be composed or mashed up.

Example services include: compute and storage services; DB and message-based queuing services; identity management services; log analysis and analytic services; monitoring and health management services, payment processing services; e-commerce services like storefronts or catalogs; mapping services; advertisement services; in addition to the more well-known business application services like CRM and accounting.

And…

Eric Norlin adds:

I believe that Greg is right on the money with the idea that the very process of building a “software company” is being altered by the service-based architectures being provided by “saas infrastructure enablers.”

And…

Larry Price argues:

EC2 and S3 are amazing and cool and Werner Vogels is a rock star for having lead the team that created them; but until there is a common portability standard and multiple suppliers, the market for virtual infrastructure services is not mature.

What is part of this proposal is the development of a derivatives market in business processes. A MashUp at this level on top of virtual services is not much different that its financial cousins on Wall Street — CDO’s, CDS’s and Options. It has some of the same dangers as well –

• Subprime meltdown = S3 outage.
• Bank reserves = Capacity planning (Or the lack of as we are finding in the financial world)
• CogHead failure = Hedge fund bankruptcy*

The Larry Price quip hints at the problem, but not far enough. It was tough enough that a MashUp would go Google Maps - in-house infrastructure. But when the MashUp goes purely virtual the level of complexity in meeting 9’s quality of service requrements (if needed) become almost impossible to calculate. Not only that but for every service provider added the level of portability of the application diminishes. My ability to move my Db off of S3 to BlueCloud is reduced for every additional API that I add to my overarching app beyond simply the Db API call.

It would also be interesting to research what the cascade effects were of the S3 failure. I think Amazon should at least issue a white paper to the industry as a whole as to what the multiplier effect was. We need to know in order to be able to assess risk. Were I a VC partner I would want to know that before I plunk my money down on a purely virtual venture.

It will become quite clear to the Saas providers that a series of unified APIs based on service set will be required. They will resist at first as differentiation provides lock in. But long term the unification will occur. Committes will be formed for Db, GIS, Presentation, QoS Metrics, etc. But in the end a portable set of APIs will come to be. The development community should demand it now before we move too far down the Saas road map.

Linky
*CogHead is solvent, I am referring to the hedge risk in the underlying ’stock’. In this case S3 service.

In what was an interesting article by Michael Malone, prinicpally about TJ Rodgers. Rodgers is an iconoclastic figure in the silicon enclaves of Calif. But the article has a fundamental flaw. In fact so fundamental as to call into question the authors understanding of things irregardless of his reputation. So what’s your beef Dog? Here –

A decade later, one of the scientists who worked with Noyce and Hoerni, Gordon Moore, by then co-founder of Intel, realized that this miniaturization/mass-production technique was advancing at a rate never seen before in human endeavor. This formulation was the famous Moore’s Law, which defines the modern world.

Most of us now understand, and appreciate, Moore’s Law, but in the semiconductor industry they live it every day. And T.J. is one of the best of them. And what he saw in SunPower was the impending arrival of Moore’s Law to the alternative power world … and more than anyone, he knew what that meant.

Even the nontechnical folks have probably heard of Moore’s Law. But what is it ? Here it is from the first reference ever offered by Moore — “The complexity for minimum component costs has increased at a rate of roughly a factor of two per year … Certainly over the short term this rate can be expected to continue, if not to increase. Over the longer term, the rate of increase is a bit more uncertain, although there is no reason to believe it will not remain nearly constant for at least 10 years.” Moore later modifed the rule to a doubling of transitor density every 2 years.

Mr. Malone’s expertise as offered in the ABC article.

Michael S. Malone is one of the nation’s best-known technology writers. He has covered Silicon Valley and high-tech for more than 25 years, beginning with the San Jose Mercury News, as the nation’s first daily high-tech reporter. His articles and editorials have appeared in such publications as The Wall Street Journal, the Economist and Fortune, and for two years he was a columnist for The New York Times. He was editor of Forbes ASAP, the world’s largest-circulation business-tech magazine,

So what’s the disconnect? In a nut shell applicability. Moore’s law applied to the rate that which engineers could place transistors onto a silicon substrate. Initially the assumption that Moore made was that the rate was sustainable for at least 10 years. Later it was found that the limiting factor is in quantum physics. There is a physical limit to how small the electrical paths may become before electrons start jumping paths.

But that is a far cry from the limitations of solar power. The limitation is not under control of the engineers in this case but for lack of anyone else — God. That limitation is the power density of sunlight falling on the earth’s surface. Depending on who you quote its somewhere around 1.4Kw/m2 maximum. So that is your physical cap right off the bat. The second is the nature of sunlight and its effects on materials. You don’t get 100% efficient conversion, there is loss for conversion to heat.

Is there any part of this article that is applicable? Yes. Conversion efficiency and improvements in production cost. Applying IC fabrication techniques can improve the materials that should improve the conversion factor. Applying those same technologies to fabrication will reduce costs, which NanoSolar is actually doing. But you will not get a doubling in conversion efficiency every 2 years. The fundamentals are different.

But the base fact is one may not simply take Moore’s law and its near exponential growth in transistor density and make an inference that the same will be made in solar power production is erroneous and bad reporting if not bad science.

ABC article.
Solar density.