Linux For Suits

April 2000



Now What:
Are we going to let AOL turn The Net into TV 2.0?


AOL Time Warner makes Microsoft look like the corner store.
John Katz

They're breaking out the champagne in Redmond.
Craig Burton

The AOL/Time Warner deal is the News that Won't Go Away. Almost overnight Microsoft became a non-issue. Some commentators even began to see Bill Gates as a sympathetic figure, like Caesar in his last days. Suddenly, we had new Caesars to worry about: AOL's Steve Case and Bob Pittman. The feds could shatter Microsoft into a dozen Baby Bills (or Baby Borgs) and everybody would still be wondering if AOL could actually pipe-weld The Net to the rusty back end of TV's history.

Break up Microsoft? Like, so what? All the pieces will still be caught in The Net, and better than half the people who log on have @aol.com addresses. Which is creepier: a crashy OS or a giant ISP that dumbs down the Net?

Well, are we going to do something about that? Can we? Slashdot's John Katz thinks the situation could hardly get worse. "There is no way for innovators or entrepreneurs to challenge it," Katz writes about the AOL - Time Warner deal. "No one can compete with the software, the cheap access, the wide range of content. This company is bigger than many countries." How big, exactly? Let's take a look at what Time Warner brings to the table:

Meanwhile, AOL sells the Internet on training wheels to nearly 55% of the people who log on from the U.S. alone. And they make money doing it: better than $5 billion a year. That's on top of Time Warner's $26+ billion.

Against that we've got what? A bunch of hackers?

Well, yeah. And that's why we'll win.

AOL didn't invent the Net. Hackers did. And they didn't invent it as yet another way to pump out "content" and suck back credit card purchases. They invented it so nobody could own it, anybody could use it, and nothing could threaten it.

"All the significant trends start with technologists," Marc Andreessen told us back in 1998, when we interviewed him about the open sourcing of Netscape's Mozilla code (Betting on Darwin, Linux Journal #52). In the same interview, he added, "Technologists are driving progress, and it's easier to drive with Linux than with anything else."

So let's savor this irony: while Netscape now belongs to AOL, and Mozilla (still funded by what's left of Netscape) famously lags behind Microsoft's Internet Explorer in the consumer market, Intel is quietly building its new home Internet appliances — TV set top boxes and thin network clients — with Mozilla code running on Linux. If these catch on, they'll bypass AOL and every other mass market megalith that continues to regard the Net as yet another one-way shipping system between a few suppliers and a zillion consumers. These appliances will prove yet again that the connections that matter most are the ones between human beings. And that includes the human beings who do e-business with each other.

From the day the first packet moved across a TCP/IP network, economic power has been shifting steadily from supply to demand. Wars and marriages between giant suppliers still make great stories, but those stories have little or nothing to do with what's really going on. Hackers — the programmers, inventors, developers and architects who are building out this new world — have been trying to make sure that the stuff that matters most is what works for everybody because it belongs to nobody. They do it by making markets what they were for thousands of years before industry turned "market" into a verb: places where people gather, talk about what matters to them and do business together.

Demand will win because it is equipped to win. Mouse-to-mouse, link-to-link, page-to-page, email-to-email, voice-to-voice, customers are going to come out on top, along with the companies who make it easy to do business with them. Those companies will know that the best way to relate to customers is as human beings; not as abstract populations to attack, control, capture and herd like dumb beasts.

The real war is between markets and marketing. For decades, marketing has been the military wing of business, working "strategically" to "attack," "capture" and "deliver impact" to populations it calls "eyeballs," "seats," "end users," "demographics" and "consumers" (which Jerry Michalski calls "gullets that live only to gulp products and crap cash"). The problem with marketing is that there is no demand — no market — for its insults. That's why markets will win.

Is the AOL/Time Warner deal a bet on markets, or on marketing? Credit where due: AOL has done a terrific job of equipping demand to deliver clues (as well as money) to supply. But the "consumers" AOL wants to "aggregate" and "deliver content" to will only become better equipped to screen out unwanted content, and, more significantly, to converse with its sources.

What happens when the mute bottons on remote controls send "we hate this" messages directly back to the advertisers who pay for the media? What happens when consumers turn into real customers with real names who express no desire for "messages" mostly intended for somebody else? The business model for mass media advertising falls like a bad tent, that's what.

There's an old advertising adage that says "I know half my money is wasted. I just don't know which half." In the advertising tradition, even that's a lie. Direct mail, one of the most efficient forms of advertising, counts a 3% response rate a success. The dirty truth about most advertising is that it has always been woefully inefficient, especially in mass markets. But a lot of it has been successful, which is why it's still around.

That success, of course, came in the absence of alternatives. Worse, it came in the absence of demand from consumers. But consumers were never advertising's real market. They paid nothing for advertising's goods, and exerted no direct influence over it. As a result, countless marketers and "creatives" in advertising agencies (including the hip new "interactive" agencies) still labor over screens and keyboards to come up with "messages" to "deliver" to people who have little or no interest in it.

The notable exceptions, of course, are classifieds, yellow pages and trade publications like Linux Journal, which are not only sources of useful editorial content, but of relevant additional information paid for by companies that are interesting to readers.

So here's a clue for mass marketers who think AOL's customers are going to sit still for the kind of heavy abuse that television has been delivering to its addict for decades: there is no demand for messages. There never was. When that clue finally arrives, it will be like a fist through the screen.

Provided, of course, that the hackers keep doing their good work.

The fight is far from over. The good guys will win the OS war and maybe even the browser war. But there are other enabling technologies that still belong to suppliers with controlling intentions. Streaming media is one. Instant messaging is another. Both could be far more useful than the bait-for-advertising vehicles we see today. Look at the differences between AOL's Instant Messenger and what's starting to come from the Jabber people. Better yet, join the movement.

Let's start to show these guys what's really valuable.

— Doc Searls


Doc Searls is Senior Editor of Linux Journal and co-author of The Cluetrain Manifesto.