With my wife grounded by a nasty ankle injury, we took in three movies and I escaped to a rock band reunion. Oddly, they all confirmed the same lesson: nostalgia is a temptress — fun, but wholly unreliable. 

Owen Wilson is the hero of Woody Allen’s new movie, Midnight in Paris. He is a Hollywood screenwriter working on a piece about a nostalgia dealer even as he visits Paris and is transported in style back to the Lost Generation of the 1920s and 30s. The film is complete with a hysterical Hemmingway, a brilliant Stein, and appearances by Dali, Picasso, and both Fitzgeralds. It is a romp – the sort of film that Allen made in the good old days before he married his step-daughter.

Allen understands that mature cities are built on memories — perhaps Paris most of all. Memory is impossible in emerging cities (in Beijing today, the drivers frequently get lost because entire neighborhoods are transformed so thoroughly that they seem foreign). Mature cities are often wealthy enough to be politically liberal but most are culturally conservative, even as they attract the great minds of every age. Inevitably, the Golden Age of any great city is thus built by people who idolize an earlier Golden Age. Into this vortex steps Wilson, a Texan version of the traditional Woody Allen romantic, neurotic schlurb. It all works well, with the obvious exception of Carla Bruni, who should stick to her day job as the first lady of France. (Unable to cut her from the film altogether, Allen simply created a new character, wonderfully played by Lea Seadoux, to take over 90% of the role offered to the hopelessly wooden Bruni). 

We also treated ourselves to a pair of movies I passed on when they first came out but have since been told by many constitute the best romance films ever made: Before Sunrise and Before Sunset. Both films consist almost entirely of conversation between Ethan Hawke and Julie Delpy. Once again, there are ties to Paris and nostalgia, and some of the ties are subtle. For example, the second film opens at Shakespeare and Company, the famous bookstore founded by Sylvia Plath and frequented by Hemmingway, Dos Passos, and other characters out of Midnight in Paris. Plath famously published James Joyce’s Ulysses, which takes place on a single day, June 16, Dublin. Before Sunrise takes place during a single day in Vienna and ends with our two lovers agreeing to reunite in Paris the following summer on, you guessed it, June 16. The second film opens with viewers wondering whether either had shown up. The movies are wonderfully rendered, brilliantly acted, and an ode to the trap of powerful memory, especially powerful romantic memories. Very highly recommended and available for streaming on Netflix.

On the advice of a friend, I caught the Buffalo Springfield reunion concert down the street at Oakland’s the newly restored Fox Theater. The theater is beautiful, but tells a powerful political tale. It was refurbished by Jerry Brown as mayor using redevelopment money, despite the Paramount, a landmark Art Deco theater one block away. The Paramount was empty the night of the Springfield reunion — and Jerry Brown is now proposing, quite rightly, to eliminate California’s wasteful, zero-sum, redevelopment spending.

The Springfield are nothing these days if not nostalgic. The concert opened with On The Way Home: “When the dream came, I held my breath with my eyes closed”, which pretty much described the graying, cannabis-mellow crowd.  

Buffalo Springfield reminded me of the new atomic elements reported in today’s Times. Like all of the heavy particles, it is highly unstable and blows apart after a split second. The three founders still seem deeply incompatible. Stephen Stills is a classic rocker and always has been. He looked pretty good, he has lost some weight, but he can no longer sing. Furay is a pop singer, good at the girl songs, who should have joined the Eagles. He can sing, but his guitar playing is like a guy leading church camp. Which figures, since Furay has been a Christian minister for the past three decades, but apparently needs another 15 minutes of rock star fame. 

Then there is Neil Young (who Stills once wrongly accused of being “a folk singer who wants to play in a rock band”). Young is just more talented, more committed, and all around more bad ass than Stills or Furay. Young played off to one side, but the stage always tipped his way. In the encore, he broke loose and lit up the place with Keep on Rocking in the Free World, which revealed Stills and Furay to be what they always were: Young’s backup band. The idea that these guys in their 20s and on drugs even practiced together, never mind made albums and toured, is hard to imagine. The reunion produced some memorable music, but ultimately no nostalgia can overcome the core incompatibility of the band’s founders, who stayed together less than two years. 

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Sometimes an artist captures lightning in a bottle. Usually they aren’t sure how it happened and few can repeat the magic regularly. In 1968, Van Morrison recorded Astral Weeks under awful circumstances. Today, it is widely recognized as a transcendant work, truly one of the greatest albums ever recorded.

It is an album that has made me think and feel alive for four decades. The story behind Astral Weeks is as remarkable as the album itself.

1967 ended badly for Van Morrison. He was 22, in New York, and broke despite the commercial success of “Gloria” (which Van wrote when he was 17) and “Brown Eyed Girl”. Creative differences with his label had led to a contract dispute with its founder Bert Berns.

On December 30, Berns died of a sudden heart attack and control of Bang Records passed to his vindictive wife. Illene banned Van Morrison from her studios, continued to block royalty payments, threatened any club tempted to offer him a gig, and tried to have him deported when she discovered that her husband had not filed all of Van’s immigration paperwork.

Morrison was desperate. He solved his visa problem by marrying his American girlfriend. They fled to Cambridge, Massachusetts, where Van went acoustic. One night Lewis Merenstein, a Warner Brothers executive, heard him play a song called Astral Weeks. “I started crying. It just vibrated in my soul, and I knew that I wanted to work with that sound” Merenstein reported years later.

Warner Brothers set to work figuring out how to resolve Morrison’s byzantine contractual problems (one part of the resolution required Van to record 3 songs each month for three years for Bang.  He did all 36 songs in an afternoon. They were original, discordant nonsense – nobody said the songs had to be good).

In a brilliant move, Merenstein decided to back Van Morrison with jazz musicians. He contacted Richard Davis, who may have appeared on more jazz albums than any other bassist. They found a guitarist, percussionist, and drummer who were all experienced session musicians with strong jazz backgrounds.

THE ALBUM

Jazz musicians collaborate — but Van Morrison didn’t do collaboration. He told the studio musicians to “follow him and stay out of the way”. There were no preparation meetings, no discussions, and no lead sheets – the basic thematics of a song that give musicians something to improvise from. The musicians ended up appreciating the artistic freedom, even though Van, who recorded from his own booth and never spoke to them, seemed shy to the point of being anti-social.

They recorded in three sessions in September and October of 1968. Years later, Van recalled the times

“You have to understand something,…A lot of this … there was no choice. I was totally broke. So I didn’t have time to sit around pondering or thinking all this through. It was just done on a basic pure survival level. I did what I had to do.”

Warner issued Astral Weeks in November, 1968. They did not promote it heavily and the album was a commercial failure. One prominent industry review compared Morrison to Jose Feliciano. According to Merenstein

“(Warner Brothers) just didn’t know what to do with it so they did nothing. They were expecting ‘Brown Eyed Girl’, and the first thing I played them was a seven-minute song about rebirth with no electric guitars and an acoustic bass. They just shook their heads.”

Astral Weeks never even reached the Billboard 200. But it got an extraordinary review by Lester Bangs in 1979 and when Rolling Stone reviewed the album for a second time in 1987, it was to declare Astral Weeks a masterpiece. They declared that the album

“sounded like nothing else in the pop-music world of 1968: soft, reflective, hypnotic, haunted by the ghosts of old blues singers and ancient Celts and performed by a group of extraordinary jazz musicians, it sounds like the work of a singer and songwriter who is, as Morrison sings in the title track, ‘nothing but a stranger in this world.’”

The album sold slowly but acquired a following. It took 35 years to sell its millionth copy and “go gold”.  Many Van Morrison fans don’t know the album and many who know Astral Weeks are not fans of the Van Morrison famous for “Moondance”, “Domino”, and “Wild Night”. More than any album I know, Astral Weeks profoundly affects people. I discovered it in the seventies when I was about the age Van Morrison was when he wrote the music. Producer Lewis Merenstein said in 2009, “To this day it gives me pain to hear it. Pain is the wrong word—I’m so moved by it.”

Astral Weeks has been compared to an impressionist painting – it evokes without directly portraying. It’s a poetic, even mystical album with syncopated rhythms, frenzied and painful vocals, and lyrics that evoke images instead of ideas or stories. It is, in many respects, vocal jazz without the customary extended solos and improv. Some find loose or hidden narratives in the music, which Morrison describes as largely stream of consciousness fit to a melody.

Morrison wrote all of the songs on Astral Weeks in 1966-67, when he was 21 or 22 years old. He told the LA Times that Astral Weeks is “poetry and mythical musings channeled from my imagination.” And quite an imagination it was:

• Astral Weeks the brilliant opener, described by Morrison “one of those songs where you can see the light at the end of the tunnel.” The Warner guys were right — this ain’t “Brown-Eyed Girl”.
• Beside You in contrast, is “..basically a love song. It’s just a song about being spiritually beside somebody.”
• Sweet Thing is a popular, circular lyric about nature and romance, described by one critic as “seemingly beginning in the middle of a thought: ‘And I will stroll the merry way.’”
• Cyprus Avenue refers to a street in Belfast described by a local as “where all the expensive houses and all the good-looking totty came from…mostly upper-crusty totty…There’s a couple of big girls’ grammar schools up ’round that direction.” Song is over the top with longing and harpsichords.
• The Way Young Lovers Do is described by Clinton Heylin as a “lounge-jazz” sound that “still sticks out like Spumante at a champagne buffet.” Maybe the only track that would get a B.
• Madame George was originally titled “Madame Joy” and Morrison actually sings the words “Madame Joy” in the song. A swirling, compassionate song about a transvestite (or about George Ivan Morrison?). One of the most emotionally and musically nuanced pop songs ever recorded.
• Morrison wrote Ballerina a powerful tale of yearning, in 1966 about the same time he first met his future wife, Janet. A tale of longing that makes people cry.
• Slim Slow Slider is a tragic song about watching a young girl die. The songs ends abruptly with the words, “Every time I see you, I just don’t know what to do.” It has been said to be about a junkie but Morrison only has said that it’s about someone “who is caught up in a big city like London or maybe is on dope, I’m not sure.”

CRITICS

The album caught the attention of Sean O’Hagan, a brilliant music reviewer with The Observer, who praised the album’s “vaulting ambition. It is neither folk nor jazz nor blues, though there are traces of all three in the music and in Morrison’s raw and emotionally charged singing”.  O’Hagenlater declared Astral Weeks “perhaps the greatest work of art to emerge out of the pop tradition.”

Greil Marcus, Rolling Stone’s first rock critic (who had reviewed the album very favorably in 1969) and a noted music author said that Martin Scorsese told him that the first half of his movie Taxi Driver was based on Astral Weeks. In an NPR review, Marcus said he has listened to the Astral Weeks record more than any other.

“You can hear these moments of invention and gasping for air, and you reach your hand and close your fist and when you open your fist there’s a butterfly in it. There was really something there, but you couldn’t have seen it. You couldn’t have known.”

He asserts that Astral Weeks ended up a touchstone – “a common language” that reached across generations. 

“I was so shocked when I was teaching a seminar at Princeton just a couple years ago, and out of 16 students, four of them said their favorite album was Astral Weeks. Now, how did it enter their lives? We’re talking about an album that was recorded well before they were born, and yet it spoke to them. They understood its language as soon as they heard it.”

• Elvis Costello: “Astral Weeks is still the most adventurous record made in the rock medium, and there hasn’t been a record with that amount of daring made since.”
• Johnny Depp, in a Rolling Stone interview in 2008, recalled how when he was a preteen his older brother (by ten years) tiring of Johnny’s favorite music of the time said, “‘Try this.’ And he put on Van Morrison’s Astral Weeks. And it stirred me. I’d never heard anything like it.”
• Steven Van Zandt (Bruce Springsteen’s E Street Band) said: “Astral Weeks was like a religion to us.”
• Alan Light of CNNTime magazine: “Astral Weeks didn’t reach the charts, but its mystic poetry, spacious grooves, and romantic incantations still resonate in ways no other music can.”
• Glen Hansard of The Frames says that he was captivated by the feeling of freedom when he first heard the album. Hansard says: “It made me realize that so much of what makes music great is courage, and up to that, what I thought made music great was practice and study…This album says there’s more to life than you thought. Life can be lived more deeply, with a greater sense of fear and horror and desire than you ever imagined.”

People who got the album under their skin (including, obviously, me) never let it go. As a result, the album born of desperation, death, and pain now regularly outpolls its modest sales.

• Mojo, 1995, declared Astral Weeks the second best album ever made.
  
• London Times 1993, called it the third greatest album of all time
• Time Magazine, 1996 declared it the third greatest album of all time.
• MTV, 1997, said it was the ninth greatest album of all time
• Rolling Stone, 2003, called it #19 of all time

In November 2008, Van Morrison performed two concerts at the Hollywood Bowl in Los Angeles, playing the entire Astral Weeks album. The band featured Jay Berliner, who played on the album. A DVD of the concert was distributed exclusively by Amazon, but is now scarce – reportedly withdrawn at Morrison’s insistence.

Many, many people have never encountered Astral Weeks. If by chance, you are one of them, stop the madness now. Your universal music vendor has it available here. You can get a CD of the Astral Weeks live concert here.

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In the Heights author Lin-Manuel Miranda performed a preview of his newest project: a hop hop album on the life of Alexander Hamilton, at least some of it told from the point of view of Aaron Burr, the guy who met Hamilton for a duel in Jersey and killed him.

I am not a huge fan of hip-hop. But after watching this, I'd be happy to learn. Check it out (hat tip to James Fallows for the pointer).

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iTune customers have downloaded more than 6 billion tracks which is both extraordinary and odd. After all, most tracks are available for free online and free is a tough price point to compete against. Nonetheless, iTunes last year appears to have sold more tracks than users on file sharing sites downloaded for free.

How can Apple charge for something that is easily obtained for free? Some say they do it by adding enough convenience and value in the form of seamless device-website integration, reliable virus-free tracks, cover art, indexing, search, and recommendations to lock in their customers with love and loyalty.

Others say that’s fine, but Apple also cheats. They argue that Apple uses its iPods, iPhones, iTunes store, and “FairPlay” DRM standard to enforce a vertical monopoly by forcing iPod owners to use its store and forcing iTunes users to buy iPods.

Every consumer learns that Apple does this. Other online music stores cannot sell music files encoded with Apple’s FairPlay, and competing devices from companies such as Creative Labs and iriver cannot play FairPlay files. Consumers who want to listen to songs downloaded from iTunes must either have an iPod or convert the files to an open format, which is a real schmertz as those of us who have done it know. iPod owners who want to play music from other stores must also likewise circumvent the files’ DRM. Is this legal? iPod customers and the French government are both suing Apple to test these arrangements in court.

A bigger question is: does it matter? Earlier this month, Apple announced that Universal Music Group, Sony BMG, Warner Music Group and EMI would all offer their music without DRM. Eight million songs are available in Apple’s DRM-free format, with the remaining ten million tracks expected to be DRM-free by the end of March.

In other words, Apple has figured out that a one-way lock in is sufficient (iPods work only with iTunes). They do not need to enforce two way lock-in (I believe that DRM-free iTunes tracks will play on other devices). In any case, Apple encodes your email address in the XML metadata on each track you download with or without DRM, so if your files end up on Limewire, it is not hard to find the source.

Every business seeks to build and defend advantages — that’s what it means to have a business model. In this respect, Apple is doing what it has always done — integrating hardware and software to lock in users. It is hardly foolproof — note that their share of the desktop computers may be growing but it is still in single digits.

But the Apple model increasingly depends less on technology lock-in and more on assisting music discovery. Music discovery is subtle — but if there is going to be growth in the new music industry, discovery will drive it. Discovery takes many forms.

• Deliberate discovery. My favorite music discovery engine is Owl Media because I got to know the founders and the people who built their technology. Owl searches the digital fingerprint of a song you like to discover similar songs. The main problem is that nobody wants to search — listeners clearly prefer to be surprised by music they like.

• Discovery also occurs at online music stations. LastFM pioneered this category and is still the most social of the music radio sites. You can learn about new songs from those who like the same music you do, interact with people who share your tastes, and find out who is listening to the track you like right now. If you use music to make friends, it’s a great site.

• As I type, I am listening to Pandora on my desktop. I set the site to the “Keith Jarrett channel” to get piano jazz I like. Now and then I hear a track I like and with one click I add it to my iPhone. It’s a great service from an Oakland-based company. I’d like the business a lot more if their “music genome” were not hand-coded by hundreds of music freaks (picture Google trying to hand classify every web page) and their revenue was less dependent on iTune affiliate fees, but that’s business nitpicking. As a consumer, I like it plenty. Plus their free iPhone app rocks (and is reportedly the most popular iPhone app of all).

• iTunes itself is promoting discovery with Genius — it’s fine recommendation engine. It badly needs a new name, since Apple uses Genius to describe the geek squad toiling in the rear of every store. The problem with recommendation engines is that they only work while you are shopping.

The power of music discovery became clear to me last night. While working on a laptop at Starbucks, I listened to the stream of music that they play into all of their stores. Most stores also have a flat screen to display the name of the musician they are currently playing. One song caught my attention because it had the sort of complex, poetic lyrics favored by the songwriters who have long rocked my world: Bob Dylan, Bruce Springsteen, and Tom Waits.

I looked up at the screen and saw the name Josh Ritter. An instant later I had him on the laptop, watching him do last week’s Letterman show on YouTube. Within five minutes I had reviewed his bio (early thirties; son of two neuroscientists from Idaho), caught the editorial by the Amazon writer who was as blown away as I was (“…the best album of 2007, hands down, by the most under-accorded American musical genius…today’s Bruce Springsteen, today’s Bob Dylan….), perused his lyrics (phenomenal), and looked up his concert schedule (Feb 26 at the Great American Music Hall). I had work to finish, but later that night I checked out more tracks (see this or this).

I have yet to spend a nickel on the guy. But thanks to the emerging technology of music discovery, I found an amazing musician on a tiny label when I wasn’t even looking.

Discovery turns out to be a cousin of search. Search is how you find information, media, people, or experiences that you know you want. Discovery is when you find these things without knowing in advance that you want them. At best (as happened to me), the web helps you discover things even when you are not on a website.

The technology of discovery starts with your demographics and makes statistical inferences about what people like you typically like, it starts with your known shopping habits and uses that to help you discover stuff, or it starts with your keywords as a representation of your desires and intentions and goes from there. (Does Google save every search term you have ever used? Yep — along with your email and documents if you let them).

Getting discovery right is not simple — but the rewards to companies like Apple, Amazon, and Google (and potentially Starbucks) are huge.

As for Josh Ritter — check him out on Letterman.

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The play was performed for community college students in Sacramento, who will, I venture, one day wonder what all the fuss was about.

Wonderful.

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The occasion was a benefit concert for the Seva Foundation at Oakland’s beautiful Paramount Theater. It was geezer rock for a good cause. With single surprising exception, the musicians were museum pieces, stuck in the past. The concert organizers however, have spent three decades teaching and learning. It turned out to be an uneven concert, but a remarkable story.

The Seekers

In the late sixties, Larry Brilliant was an idealistic medical student. He moved to San Francisco from Michigan to do his internship and befriended a local free thinker and concert promoter named Hugh Romney. Romney was a New Yorker who had taken walks with Albert Einstein as a child and had been one of Bob Dylan’s earliest friends in Greenwich Village.

When American Indians occupied Alcatraz Island in 1969, Brilliant joined them as their unofficial doctor. Some filmmakers made a movie about the occupation and paid Brilliant with a plane ticket to India. Brilliant ended up staying for many years, first studying in a Himalayan ashram with the Hindu mystic Neem Karoli Baba.

Baba instructed Brilliant to rid the planet of smallpox. Brilliant, ever the obliging student, joined the World Health Organization’s smallpox eradication program that in 1980 certified the worldwide end of what had once been the world’s most terrifying disease. At some point during these years, Brilliant encountered another student of Neem Karoli Baba, Dr. Richard Alpert, a Stanford-trained psychologist who had been fired from his tenured position at Harvard along with his colleague Timothy Leary for distributing the hallucinogen psilocybin to undergraduates.

Brilliant returned to the US and reconnected with Alpert
and Romney. Both men had changed their names. Alpert  had taken the
name Ram Dass (“servant of God”) and had become a popular writer and
speaker on spiritual awareness. Hugh Romney had become well known for a
muddy concert in Woodstock New York that had almost turned into a
nightmare. Romney captured and shaped the spirit of the event when he
distributed a whole lot of granola and famously offered that "What we
have in mind is breakfast in bed for 400,000!". At a concert a few
years later, BB King dubbed him Wavy Gravy, and he decided to keep the
name.

When Brilliant returned to the States, he and his wife Girija
Brilliant, an accomplished public health professional, published an
article entitled Death of a Killer Disease about their
experience eradicating smallpox. It was a personal account of their
decade in India that concluded with an appeal to readers to find the
compassion and understanding to support international health programs
to benefit those struggling with poverty. 

Readers were moved, and soon
$20,000 of donations arrived in Larry and Girija’s mailbox. The first donation that the Brilliants received was a check for $5,000
– a significant amount of money in 1978. The money came from a 22 year
old who had recently taken his own spiritual quest to India. The
experience had so moved him that he shaved his head and had taken to
wearing Indian clothes.  The young donor was a circuit board designer
at Atari named Steve Jobs.

Inspired by the supportive response, the Brilliants gathered friends and colleagues to discuss their next public health
project. Ram Dass and Wavy Gravy were among the 20 or so who showed up
in Ann Arbor in 1978. They considered a campaign to eradicate diarrhea, then
the leading killer of children (Brilliant says that Gravy proposed
to hold fundraising concerts under the slogan “No Shit”).  But knowing
that 80% of the world’s blind could have their sight restored with
simple cataract surgery, the group decided to focus on eradicating
cataract-induced blindness.

One of the founders introduced the group to Dr. G. Venkataswami, a
retired eye surgeon in India who was just setting out make cataract
surgery affordable to the poor. That was the beginning of Seva’s
partnership in the high-volume eye clinic that would become the
internationally acclaimed Aravind Eye Care Systems.

Thirty years later, Seva-supported programs and partners have helped
three million blind people to see again through affordable cataract
surgeries. In just the past year, Seva’s Sight Program benefited over
500,000 people worldwide, including more than 25,000 children. This is a staggering achievement –very few
charitable organizations can claim to have had such a profound impact.

Two people, more than any other, have been responsible for keeping Seva
financed. The first is Ram Dass, who according to Brilliant “would just
do another 40 city book tour whenever we really needed money”. Ram Dass
was not at the event and appears in public much less these days, although he has a
thoughtful video on the Seva website. The second fundraiser is Wavy
Gravy ("I’m in it for the buzz, man"). He is passionate about Seva, and has organized annual concerts
for them every year since he got the Grateful Dead to raise $100,000 in
1978. It has been a long, strange trip and Seva ("to serve without regard to self") appears to have achieved the kind of momentum and
international standing that assures it a strong future.

Larry Brilliant has continued to live up to his name. In 1985, before
the creation of the world-wide web, he joined another remarkable friend, Stewart Brand,
to launch The Well – one of the world’s first online communities. Two years ago, Google named Brilliant Executive Director of Google.org, a
foundation endowed with 3 million Google shares (at their height, worth
about $2 billion. About half that now).

I had not heard of Seva when I showed up for the concert. I had met
Larry Brilliant a couple of times and thought very highly of him, but I
had no idea that he had founded Seva. I had no idea that his best
friend was the Berkeley fixture, a generous clown referred to by Paul Krassner as “the
illegitimate son of Harpo Marx and Mother Teresa”. Wavy is now 72 and
stooped after three spinal surgeries, with puffs of kinky white hair
showing underneath his white derby. He carried his trademark cane with a large rubber
fish on the end of it and wore his clown nose. This is a Silicon Valley story
that has nothing to do with technology and everything to do with
passionate entrepreneurship.

The Musicians

So how ironic and sad that the concert itself was so frozen in time
(not that it mattered – the performers were donating too). As Seva was
being founded, Jackson Browne, Graham Nash, and David Crosby had all
done their best work. Bonnie Raitt had done a lot of her best work, but
she takes more risk and bloomed later ("Nick of Time" did
not come out until 1989).

Raitt opened with an acoustic version of James Taylor’s "Rainy Day
Man," before bringing out gospel singer Ruthie Foster. Foster, the only
non-geezer on the stage, had, according to Gravy “left a smoking hole
in the lawn at the San Francisco Blues Festival this afternoon”.  Slide
guitar virtuoso Roy Rogers joined Raitt for a bluesy "Gnawin’ on It,"
and Jackson Browne came out to sing "Thing Called Love" with her.

The musical highlight of the evening, hands down, was Elvis Costello – a virtuoso
who continues to evolve and impress. I haven’t followed him closely,
but this is not the punk “Pump it Up” Elvis I expected. He sang
Raitt’s "Love Has No Pride" with an aching passion. He even managed to
ignore the two white-haired dudes who slid in from the wings for a bit
of celebrity harmony: David Crosby and
Graham Nash. They could raise a lot of money for Seva by releasing that song
alone — really impressive.

The crowd was starting to warm up, so Jackson Browne took the stage and
quickly put out the fire. Browne had five amazing years in his mid to late
twenties. His 1972 debut album, Jackson Browne gave us "Doctor My
Eyes", "Rock Me on the Water", "Jamaica Say You Will" and "Song for
Adam". The following year For Everyman sold a million copies, mainly on
the strength of the debut effort.  Late for the Sky (1974) included the melancholy "For a Dancer" and the apocalyptic "Before the Deluge". Martin Scorsese featured the title cut in Taxi Driver. In 1976, Browne
released The Pretender, probably his darkest album –
which is saying something. The title track may be his best and best
known song although Running on Empty (1977) is probably his biggest
commercial success.

But this guy is frozen in 1977.  Maybe he is
as tragic as he has been trying to tell us for all these years. Maybe
he is the Prozac-deprived Pretender who really is Running on Empty. He
turns 60 next week — and last night he played cuts from his new album Time the Conqueror (why not just call it Ready for the Embalmer?) Thankfully backup vocalists Chavonne Morris and Alethea Mills showed evidence of a pulse as well as some fine pipes.

Part of the ready-for-the-archive feel to the evening is that Raitt and Browne spend a lot of time on left wing political causes.
Browne has even worked a lot of dreary "why is impeachment not on the table?" lyrics into his latest. Both worked hard for John Edwards, both helped found an anti-nuke group
of musicians following the Three Mile Island nuclear generator accident
in 1979. The causes are not my concern — just the feeling that performers are culturally stuck in 1978, and they are politically stuck in 1968. (Confronted with this observation at the concert, a friend countered "true, but 1968 was a very good year").

It was a fascinating evening, mainly because it contrasted people with forty years of genuine experience with those who had four years
of experience repeated ten times.

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If everybody had an ocean
Across the U.S.A.
Then everybody’d be surfin’
Like Californi-a

A song about surfing – the sport we lived and (especially) dreamed! In the early sixties, Southern California went surfer crazy. It was not just music — it was walk, talk, dress, and mindset. Those of us too young to own boards or drive stuck to "body womping" at Huntington and Corona or, if we were especially reckless, "pile driving" Newport’s fearsome wave known as The Wedge.

We worshiped the bronzed surfers who were a few years older and a lot better than we were. My next door neighbor Bobby
Weinman was radiant the night he found himself immortalized in Surfer magazine. We stared for hours at the photo of him dropping straight off a translucent green twelve footer at Laguna.

You’d see ‘em wearing their baggies
Huarachi sandals too

A bushy bushy blonde hairdo
Surfin’ U.S.A.

You’d catch ‘em surfin’ at Del Mar
Ventura County line
Santa Cruz and Trestles
Australia’s Narrabeen (How did a beach near Sydney end up in Surfin’ USA? Doesn’t even rhyme.)

All over Manhattan (Beach, you Hodad)
And down Doheny Way
Everybody’s gone surfin’
Surfin’ U.S.A.

The song became our anthem. I got my own radio so that I could wait
for 93 KHJ to play it. We would scream the names of (mostly) local
beaches as definitive evidence of Californian superiority over British
invaders. Could Dave Clark hang ten? Could you even imagine Gerry and
the Pacemakers in a woody? And don’t make me laugh about that other
Brian Epstein import from Liverpool that called themselves, of all
things, the Beatles.

Haggerties and Swamies (Torrance and Encinitas, respectively)
Pacific Palisades
San Onofre and Sunset
Redondo Beach, L.A.
All over La Jolla
At Waimea Bay (Not California, but surfing’s then Mecca had to be in the song)
Everybody’s gone surfin’
Surfin’ USA

We
didn’t realize that the lyrics were written by three brothers from nearby Hawthorne who were not
yet old enough to buy beer. Nor did we know or much care that they had ripped off of rock legend
Chuck Berry (the Beach Boys not only copied the melody of Sweet Sixteen but
youngest brother Carl Wilson had just turned sweet sixteen himself when
he helped sing it). Mr. Berry noticed the theft and arranged to
receive not only last minute album credit, but all royalties on the hit song to this day.

None of that mattered at a time when music and surfing ruled our imaginations. Eventually the Beach Boys descended into drugs, lawsuits and illness, someone shot our president, and a car accident left Bobby Weinman quadriplegic.

But spring and music, like surf, still come in unstoppable waves. Today a young kid with an iPod at Lake Merritt was in
thrall to the first song to rock his soul.

We busted out of class
Had to get away from those fools
We learned more from a three minute record baby than we ever learned in school
Tonight I hear the neighborhood drummer sound
I can feel my heart begin to pound
You say you’re tired and you just want to close your eyes and follow your dreams down

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Metcalfe’s Law is a lesser known but equally powerful law concerning not hardware but the economics of networks (specifically a telecommunications network, but the Law appears to apply more broadly). It says that the value of a network is proportional to the square of the number of users.  A telephone is an easy example: the first one is useless, the second one can call only one other machine, but the millionth one increases however slightly the utility of each of the other machines (assuming they can connect. You have to count Chinese phones as a separate network if you don’t speak Chinese). Plenty of people debate whether Metcalfe (who invented Ethernet and founded 3Com) got the math right, but the principle seems sound and goes a long way to explaining what economists like to call network effects: businesses in which each participant is better off when a new participant joins. This is a topic for another day, but Microsoft, Google, eBay, iTunes, and a lot of other "can’t live without them" businesses have taken powerful advantage of network effects and Metcalfe’s Law underpins a lot of the economics at work.

Even less well known than Metcalfe’s law is what arrogance and alliteration led me some time back to term Manley’s law, which states that all media wants to be digital, downloadable, and free. Like Moore’s or Metcalfe’s theorems, this is a hypothesis that can be falsified: Moore will be proven wrong the day chip density stops increasing, Metcalfe the day that bigger networks are not more valuable, and me the day that media stops becoming digital or freely exchanged. By now you have noticed that Manley’s law is in  some respects a corollary of the other two – I doubt that it would exist except as a by-product of Moore and Metcalfe.

Manley’s Law is having a good run lately. For simplicity, let’s define media as books, movies, and music — although you could apply it to photographs and several other media types. Music digitized first simply because the files are smaller and people want to listen to the same song more often than they want to read the same book or see the same movie. 

MUSIC

Manley’s law hit the music business so fast and that the New York Times referred this week to “the anarchy sweeping the music industry”.

Music became a digital media on August 17, 1982, when ABBA’s The Visitors became the first CD to roll off an assembly line at a Philips factory in Langenhagen Germany. In 25 years, analog vinyl LP albums have been reduced to an audiophile niche and cassettes and 8-tracks have mercifully disappeared altogether.

Five years ago, iTunes made music commercially downloadable and since then, Tower Records, Musicland, Sam Goody and many smaller retailers have disappeared or been absorbed by chain discounters like Wal-Mart and BestBuy.

This week Apple Computer announced that in January iTunes passed Wal-Mart to become the largest music retailer in the United States. CD sales have declined every year since Apple launched iTunes and in recent years CD sales have fallen in double digits each year. In 2006, 38% of US teens did not by a single CD. In 2007, the number was 48%. 

So music became digital and downloadable – but iTunes does not give
music away for free. The company has sold four billion tracks at a buck each, so what about the last part of Manley’s law – that nice bit about media becoming free?

Apple has sold perhaps 130 million iPods (it passed 100 million a year ago). That works out to an average of 33 iTunes tracks for each device.
But iPods hold somewhere between hundreds and thousands of songs, so even if you account for obsolete devices, you have to ask what
people are putting on their iPods if not paid music (or videos) from iTunes?
Answer: they are loading them with free content.

Some of the free content is ripped CDs — and not all of these were paid for (what, after all, are people buying hundreds of blank CDs for, anyway?).

Some free tracks come from MySpace, which according to a Forester analyst now has more than 8 million artists and
bands (and today announced a deal with several music labels to compete with iTunes). iTunes has the largest music catalog in the world with
6 million tracks — so 8 million bands and artists is a really large number. Some of these tracks have never sold a single
copy – but the experience of most long tail media markets is that there are a lot
fewer of these than you might think. Describing the role of MySpace in music, Forester notes that “Acts including Lily Allen,
Sean Kingston, Arctic Monkeys, and Dane Cook were discovered on the
site by users”. (I don’t know most of these artists, although I saw a fast-rising Lily Allen at South by Southwest last year and was
impressed).

P2P file sharing, denounced by the music industry as illegal downloading, continues to grow by double digits each year. Growth may be slowing, but only BigChampagne knows for sure. BigChampagne is a
smart company that has tracked file downloading for years. They sell information about which demographic
groups download what music in different parts of the country. Record companies pay handsomely for the information (thus admitting that sales of CDs and iTunes tracks are a poor indication of what people actually listen to). Record companies use the information to persuade local radio stations to play what is popular. The result is not necessarily more sales — often it just means that more people download the song for free but it really helps plan lucrative concert tours.

Musicians with recording contracts are starting to make their
music available for free – or accept that it is free anyway. Some use
free music to promote concert tours, merchandise, or albums.
Radiohead famously released its album In the Rainbows for direct download and asked people to pay whatever they wanted. About 1.2 million people downloaded the album and some paid. Nine Inch Nails did something similar.

Estimates vary as to how well the Radiohead experiment worked. The high estimates assume
an average price of $8, meaning the band grossed $10 million. The low
estimates assume an average price of $5 with 60% not paying, so the group took in
$2.4 million. Not a flop – but here is the punch line: even though the album was available for free, more than a half million users downloaded free it on a P2P site anyway. Habits are hard to break and free is a tough price point to beat. It turns out that not even free can always compete with free.

MOVIES

Up next: Hollywood. Movies went digital in the 90’s, when DVDs were adopted by consumers faster than any technology in history – DVDs became a majority of movie rentals within five years of its introduction as a consumer product. Note that in each of these markets digital content is not enough — you need a very easy to use device before digital media takes off.

Movies are now widely streamed and downloaded. In January, nearly 79
million viewers, or a third of all online viewers in the U.S., watched
more than three billion user-posted videos on YouTube, according to comScore’s latest report.

Making movies for YouTube has also become much easier with the advent of low cost video cameras like the Flip, which now accounts for 30% of all video camera sales on Amazon.
The little device is a point and shoot videocam that makes recording and
uploading video chimp simple. I am astonished at
the things one can usefully video when shooting becomes this easy.

Commercial films are already available for download at zero marginal cost. Vongo enables
free downloading of studio movies for subscribers, who pay a $10 monthly fee. BitTorrent hosts and clients distribute thousands of
licensed and unlicensed movies in a manner that is not economically different from P2P sharing of music files, although the underlying technology is improved. With iTunes video and cable pay per view offerings also increasing, will movie rental stores follow music stores into oblivion? Yes, they will – and fairly soon. This is why Blockbuster is trying to figure out an online streaming or download strategy. Your neighborhood DVD rental store is toast.

The film industry hopes that the move to Blu-ray Discs (which has now prevailed in the HD
format wars, much as DVD and VHS did before them) will enable stronger cryptography to prevent free sharing of movies. Blu-ray employ
several layers of digital rights management using a standard developed
by a consortium that includes Disney, Intel, Microsoft, Matsushita
(Panasonic), Warner Bros., IBM, Toshiba and Sony. Nonetheless, since it appeared in
devices in 2006, hackers have successfully broken the lock several times. It may be technically possible to encrypt a movie in a manner
than cannot be hacked, but in a war between movie studio
technologists and thousands of smart 17 year olds with too much time on
their hands, history is on the side of the teenagers.

BOOKS

Books will be the last media to go digital for a couple of reasons. First, consumers like the analog form factor. Books are portable, shareable, resalable, and don’€™t require batteries. They
have an emotional impact that only analog media delivers. Books sit on a shelf like Dumbledore’s Pensieve — evoking memories and old friends. You can browse them in
stores in a way that is still hard to duplicate on line.

That said, eBooks have advantages. They are searchable — which matters to researchers, students,  technicians, and search engines that help users discover content. They can be delivered wirelessly, instantly, and cheaply. They are obviously portable.

More fundamentally, analog books are not a great business. Most books lose money for a set of reasons that are very well known. It starts with economically delusional publishers who pay advances to authors that they do not recover in sales. 

Books turn out to be expensive to print, transport, and store.  Booksellers have an almost unrestricted right to return books to distributors –“ a right given to
no other retailer that I am aware of. As a result, 25% of all books in
the economy are moving backwards to distributors or publishers and away from retailers and customers. (These practices may not continue.  HarperCollins just announced a new imprint that will offer no author advances or return rights to retailers).

Worse, 500 new titles are published each day in the US – double the number of ten years ago. Most lose money for their
publisher — indeed most are read by a very small number of people (the
overwhelming majority of books in university libraries, for example,
never circulate at all). During the past decade, publishers have not
sold more books — they have published more titles and they have raised prices. This is neither healthy nor sustainable, especially in the face of strong evidence that all reading, and the reading of books in particular, is in long term decline in most countries.

The first books to go digital are those expected to sell the fewest copies. Lulu, Author House, Xlibris,
and others have developed business models that enable authors to
digitally publish specialized books (meaning books that almost nobody wants to
read). Lightning Press has persuaded a large number of publishers to
digitize their "€œback list"€ (books more than a year old) and and print them on
demand instead of warehousing and remaindering them. As the print on
demand market develops and as electronic readers like the Amazon Kindle or the Sony
Reader become easier to use and affordable, people will buy obscure books
either digitally (cheapest), used (cheap), or printed on demand (most
expensive). Many books will never be printed at all, as the
price of digital books follows music and movies to zero.

For good reason is Apple’s iTunes closely studied by people in the book industry. Apple is the first company to tightly control and seamlessly integrate five critical media assets:
digital content, metadata, a retail website, distribution economics,
and consumer devices. This is not simple game to execute and Apple does it in movies as well as in music. Steve Jobs has denied any
interest in producing a wireless book reader to compete with Amazon’s
Kindle – so you can bet that a team in Cupertino is hard at work building one (Jobs€™ frequently claimed to have no interest in developing a phone or
videos for iPods. For many people, vehement denials from Steve Jobs are the equivalent of product development announcements).

Digital book content is not especially hard to come by. Amazon has
scanned or acquired digital copies of hundreds of thousands of books, as have Google, Microsoft, and Lightning Press (although not all of
these scans are of commercial quality and most do not contain resale
rights). Amazon has high quality metadata (bibliographic information
about the book) but this most of this data is commercially available to competitors.
Amazon has a retail website, although it is optimized for physical, not
digital goods and Amazon has actually lost share as a music retailer
due to a weak download offering. Amazon set a $10 price point for digital books, which looks to me to be $3 too high, and Amazon’s wireless Kindle, although popular, is klutzy by Apple standards.

So figure that an iBook is on the way –
perhaps a jacket pocket version of the MacAir or a larger iPhone  or
both. Apple is likely to come out with a better device and a more
functional website, but Amazon learns fast, knows ecommerce better than
anyone, has powerful metadata, and knows the publishing community
better than Apple does. An alliance between Lulu or Lightning Press and Apple would surprise nobody –“ especially since Amazon has acquired a print on demand company,
BookSurge, and now requires that all POD books use BookSurge as a
condition of appearing on its retail website. This has produced the predictable uproar among authors (which
must make Steve Jobs laugh. It would never occur to him to sell
a media product on his website that he did not fully control).

Will digital books become free? Many
already are free – specifically books whose copyrights have expired. But
without a reader that is as easy to use as an iPod or a DVD player, a digital copy of a
book is not worth much. Once we have a reader that is easy and fun to use, free books
will proliferate. Unlike CDs and DVDs, books will not vanish any time soon,
even though most small bookstores and large bookstore chains are doomed to the fate of their music brethren. Regional bookstores with scale
will survive –€“ and they tend to be the best bookstores now anyway.

All media wants to be digital, downloadable, and free.
A writer, a musician, or a filmmaker has never been an easy vocation
and will be less so as technology makes it a widely accessible
avocation. Those who are used to selling books, movies, and music are in for a
shock –“ digitization has devalued their products and trying to prevent
or reverse this trend is silly and counterproductive. We can and surely will debate
whether this is creative destruction or just plain old destruction –€“ but media products will be increasingly available for free regardless of one’s view of the trend.

The result will be dozens of new business models. In music, concerts are becoming a huge business -– rapper JayZ (who names these guys?) is reportedly about to sign a $150 million deal with a concert promoter instead of a record label. Ozzfest, the annual heavy metal, hard rock tour and festival founded by Ozzy Osbourne and his wife Sharon makes more money now that the concerts are free because the promoters and the bands do very well from sales of food, merchandise, and yes CDs sold at the concerts.

Behind the new business models will be dozens of new ways to acquire media. As I noted in Gravity Lessons,
when I was a kid, I could consume video content only by watching
commercial television or going to the movie theater.

Today you can still
watch commercial TV or go to the cinema – although it is likely now a
cineplex showing a more movies to smaller audiences. Or you can record TV on your TIVO and skip the ads, you can subscribe
and watch the show ad-free on cable, you can pay-per-view, you can buy
a DVD new, buy one used, you can download a podcast, you can borrow a DVD
from a library, rent it from Blockbuster, download it from
Vongo or a P2P site, subscribe to Netflix, stream it on iTunes, YouTube, or
MySpace, etc. In some cases, you pay for your content – in others (P2P,
libraries, YouTube, Tivo) you do not.

The result is an explosion of choices and a hugely increased chance that you will produce as well as consume media. Consumers today  would never dream of trying to watch every movie available, listen to every song, or read every book. You have to go back to Thomas Jefferson to find a President who could have read every book available in English during
his lifetime. Franklin Roosevelt could have listened to every bit of
music recorded during his lifetime and Jack Kennedy could have watched
every movie. Today a person is almost as likely to create as consume writing, movies, and music during their lifetime. This is only possible because media is increasingly digital, downloadable, and free. 

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These days you can find that sheepish expression on the face of media executives who are paying attention. They have run off the cliff and the descent has begun. All the frantic footwork in the world is not going to keep some of these guys from making a large and messy hole in the ground. Whether they publish books, movies, or music, media companies confront an astonishing fact: their content is increasingly available for free.

Many denounce the sharing of copyrighted files as theft – but they are pedaling air. The music industry illustrates the challenge. Only about 10% of digital music is paid for – the rest is exchanged for free. The New York Times reports that "Peer-to-peer networks yielded five billion downloads in 2006, whereas 509 million songs were downloaded from iTunes-style services". Although almost as many households pay for digital music as exchange it online, those who get music for free generally get a lot more of it.

Many people expect that as more songs are made available for purchase without copyright protection that both commerce and P2P file sharing will increase. The response of the music industry in general has been a case study in Roadrunner chasing — they have spent dramatically more money on lawsuits than any of the P2P services have ever taken in revenue. But as the industry has squashed file sharing sites, others have grown to take their place. Napster is now a paid service (and a dying one), Streamcast, Kazaa, and Grokster are a shadow of what they used to be. But BitTorrent, Limewire and Freenet have sprung up to take their place – from offshore locations if necessary. The industry says they want to monitor individual downloading; P2P programmers are now making this more difficult.

The media genie is not going back into the bottle. Even Hillary Rosen, the Dark Princess of the Recording Industry Association that sponsored the lawsuits acknowledges (having now left the Association) "I have always thought that people were just putting their finger in the dam with litigation and other kinds of enforcement." The person who once pedaled "sue your customer" as a business strategy to save the music industry now admits that even favorable Supreme Court decisions have little impact on the file sharing or on the core economics of the music industry.

CD sales have declined for six consecutive years in the US. Traditional music retailers are collapsing rapidly: Tower Records, Musicland, Sam Goody and many smaller retailers have ceased operations or closed stores in part because Wal-Mart and Best Buy took away the hits business by undercutting them on price. Today these megastores account for about 65% of retail sales. Even the hits business isn’t what it used to be: the top sellers have accounted for a smaller share of sales every year for five years until even Best Buy is now devoting less space to music sales. Music labels have lost about a quarter of their market value in the past year alone; most are losing money and laying off staff.

Paradoxically, the music economy appears to be growing, not shrinking. There are more recording artists than ever — and more labels. They may make more money on merchandising and concerts than on album sales, but total dollars spent on music does not appear to be shrinking, even in places like South Korea where almost all music is either exchanged for free or available as a low cost monthly service and traditional CD sales have collapsed.

The DVD and book industries are heading in the same direction – even if most people in these industries don’t know it yet. A huge share of the cost of publishing books is taken up by the cost of printing, store display and merchandising, storage, transportation, and returns. Without these costs, newly published books would cost $5, not $25 and publishers and authors would earn just as much on each unit sold but would, of course, sell a lot more units. Since electronic publishing eliminates these costs, you have to wonder why this doesn’t happen.

The answer is that publishers take one look at the music industry, become paranoid about electronic books, and strangle them in their crib by restricting, encrypting, and overpricing them. This has temporarily kept demand for good electronic readers low and the price of available readers high. But the pressure is building: analog media wants to be digital — and digital media wants to be free.

Indeed, if you look around, you will see that books and movies are increasingly available for free at sites like BitTorrent. Even Google lets you download a .pdf file of any off copyright book here. Programs to unencrypt e-book are easy to find. But for the lack of a Sony style reader, books would trade on P2P networks just like music does. Record labels, publishers and movie studios may be infatuated with encryption schemes (aka DRM, or Digital Rights Management). But DRM doesn’t work. Consumers hate being tied to a platform and 17 year olds make a sport and frequently a business out of picking the locks.

The media economy does not need to shrink — it needs to respond to new technologies with new business models instead of new laws. TV is a good example. Think about how you used to watch TV as a kid. There were a small number of stations and you watched your show with advertisements. How many ways can you watch a TV show today?

• You can still watch it the old way — the content is monetized with ads
• You can record in on your TIVO and skip the ads — the content is not monetized
• You can watch in on cable — the content is monetized with subscription revenues
• You can watch it pay-per-view — the content is monetized with your payment
• You can buy the DVD new — the content is monetized by the purchase of the DVD
• You can buy the DVD used — the content was monetized by the first purchaser but not subsequent ones
• You can borrow the DVD from a library — the content is monetized by the purchase of the DVD, although the content is freely shared. Is this piracy?
• You can borrow the DVD from a club like Netflix that lets you check out DVDs — again the content is monetized by the purchase and shared.
• You can download it and burn it onto a DVD — – the content is monetized by the purchase unless it is a P2P exchange
• You can stream it on YouTube or MySpace — the content is monetized with ads
• You can download it or stream it onto your cell phone — the content is monetized on your phone bill.

Notice that none of these technologies require or benefit from encryption. All tolerate copying (just as Netflix knows that some fraction of its customers copy every DVD they rent. Many customers however, myself included, cannot be bothered to copy movies — except perhaps for This is Spinal Tap).

In short, it is possible but often challenging to monetize digital content. You have to work at it and you have to accept that people who are determined to have your content for free are going to get it.

Which brings me to the B-52 Stratofortress. This bomber is a marvelous piece of gravity-defying technology that has changed little since it was introduced in 1954. It is still in service, but the Air Force was paying close attention to technology shifts and so planned to obsolete the planes over the next few years.

The Air Force noted that the problem with high-altitude bombers is accuracy: it is hard to engage in pinpoint bombing from 35,000 feet. So the Air Force decided to spend $320 billion — real money, even by Pentagon standards — for a bunch of fighters that can fly in low and fast and deliver precision-guided munitions from low altitude. Bombing, the thinking went, would be taken over by jet fighters and bombers would go away. Early in his term Donald Rumsfeld actually mothballed our bomber fleet, including the Darth Vader-compatible B1 and B2 Stealth planes.

Writing in Slate, Greg Easterbrook describes how unforeseen technology change proceeded to leave the Generals in Wile E. Coyote mode:

..unexpected technical breakthroughs resulted in extremely accurate munitions that can be dropped from high altitude by bombers, at less cost and risk than using low-flying fighters. The result has been that during the Afghanistan and second Iraq campaigns, most of the air punch has been delivered by a handful of the remaining bombers. Some 80 percent of the bombs dropped during the U.S. seizure of Afghanistan fell from bombers; the share dropped on Iraq since March 2003 is nearly as high. Though bombers have in this decade turned out to be far more important to U.S. military action than Pentagon strategists expected, the government still plans to invest fantastic amounts of money in fighter planes that would be used mainly to drop bombs.

Bombs not only got cheaper (a cruise missile costs a million bucks, a JDAM about $30k), but bombs became unbelievably accurate. A B52 moving at 600 miles per hour six miles above ground can now hit a Taliban campfire every time. Not near the campfire — in the campfire. B52s now literally fly close air combat support — meaning that they can very reliably hit bad guys who are fighting near good guys.

Nobody saw this coming. In World War II, B52s literally never hit anything more specific than a town. They could not hit railroads or bridges or roads. We firebombed enemy cities since that was about all we could count on hitting. By Vietnam, a B-52 could drop a load of ordinance to within 1,000 feet — enough to target buildings, but useless against tanks or bridges. By Kosovo, we were bombing to within a few feet. Now, unless the technology fails, bombs go exactly where they are told to go and are delivered from an altitude that cannot be reached by ground weapons.

The Air Force is still planning to buy the fighters — just as most of the entertainment and publishing industries are planning to continue business as usual, hoping that digital media will not require fundamentally new approaches. Both will soon run out of road and find themselves pedaling air.

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He is surely one of the great pitch-men of all time. He quivers with excitement about his products and damn near levitates his adoring audience. For the last decade, he has made better use of graphics than any speaker I’ve seen. No lame PowerPoint here — just a single number that is two-stories high, then fade to black so the spotlight can return to Steve — where everybody wants it to be. Jobs is a spellbinder, a corporate rock star with a hypnotic hold on his faithful.

In some weird way all of us who are technology entrepreneurs wish we were Steve Jobs — and many other people do as well. Having on two occasions seen them together in small groups, I think that even Bill Gates wishes he were Steve Jobs — especially since Jobs’ keynote at MacWorld completely upstaged Gates’ awful speech about "digital lifestyles" at the massive Consumer Electronics Show in Las Vegas.

Once again his Steveness appeared badly shaven in his trademark jeans, black turtleneck, running shoes, and water bottle. He delivered a multi-media masterpiece, mixing film clips, product demos, phone calls, photo montages, music, VIP visits, and voice mails from his board member Al Gore. You can watch a sample below or the whole thing here.

It helped, of course, that Jobs was announcing nothing short of the coolest electronic gadget ever — Apple’s new iPhone. Thousands of middle aged dweeby white guys were trembling with techno-lust by the end of this presentation.

We want our iPhones. Very. Very. Badly. Apple’s stock rose 8% on Tuesday — and Nokia, Motorola, and Blackberry all fell about 8%.

For reason is Steve Jobs referred to as the Babe Ruth of Silicon Valley. The Apple II, Macintosh, iPod, and iPhone are each revolutionary products. Most are radical not because of new features but because the products have strong personalities that create an entirely new experience for technology users. The personality of these products — both their legendary strengths and weaknesses — is a direct expression of the remarkable Steve Jobs.

Beyond Apple, Jobs built NeXT Computing and Pixar — which are also transformational companies. Our great grandchildren will study this guy both for his genius and potentially for his blind spots.

APPLE II: 1976

During the Carter Administration, I was newly married, living in San Jose, and working as a machinist in Sunnyvale. I had heard about a guy in nearby Cupertino who was selling a computer he called an Apple — after the fruit that landed on Sir Isaac Newton’s head. I remember driving to Cupertino to get one and seeing the fabled Apple logo for the first time. The machine had been out for some time, but was still a hobbyists device and not widely used (Apple II sales took off after Dan Bricklin wrote Visicalc for it in 1979). The beige computer was gorgeous — it had 8k of memory, no hard drive, and no floppy disk drive — less power than many pocket calculators. It cost a lot more than the car I drove it home in. My new wife was not impressed.

We wrote our own software or we loaded programs from cassettes using an ordinary tape recorder. (OK, after a few weeks, I was able to write a BASIC program that could count to ten all by itself. Programming is hard).

Soon Apple introduced a floppy disk drive — it held perhaps 200k and cost $400 — a couple of week’s pay for me back then. I bought Visicalc the moment it came out (and used it to build models of young Silicon Valley companies to try to unionize. Apple was always high on the list). Eventually I bought a Z-80 card so that I could run WordStar under an operating system called CPM (an OS that was soon purchased by a geeky kid from Seattle who had scored a contract to write an operating system for IBM’s personal computer).

I loved the Apple II — with its weird green phosphorous screen and coupler to let the machine talk by phone with other computers. It had a personality that came directly from its creator — a working class valley kid with an attitude and a real knack for product design. I also loved that you could buy third party software like Visicalc and products like the Z-80 card that went into slots in the motherboard. The Apple II may look like a toy today, but it was the source of so many "omygod" moments that you knew that this little device and its successors were going to change everything. It proved to be Steve Jobs’ last open architecture product however — and until I bought an iPod two years ago, it was the only Apple product I ever owned.

MACINTOSH: 1984

The first most of us knew about this computer was an advertisement that appeared out during the 1984 Super Bowl that many believe is the best TV commercial of all time. It ran once — and if you saw it, you didn’t forget it. Here it is:

Shortly after he ran the ad, Jobs introduced the Mac. It had gorgeous graphics, beautiful typefaces, and an even stronger personality than the Apple II. It was the product of a process so secret that it was housed in an off-limits building that flew a pirate flag (the product was code named "Macintosh" — and team grew attached to the name). The Mac pioneered the graphic user interface, typefaces, windows, and a mouse (Well, Jobs borrowed all of these ideas from Doug Englebart at Xerox’s Palo Alto Research Center and forgot to return them. Then again, Gates borrowed them from Jobs — and PARC wasn’t doing anything with the ideas anyway — they were sort of lying around).

Watch Jobs roll out the MacIntosh in this brief clip here. He clearly loves this technology — it’s incredibly touching.

By 1984, personal computers had been out for three years. They were clunky machines even then, but they did lots of things and did them pretty well. We had spreadsheets, word processors, databases, and even had basic modems which were slow and stupid, but you could dial up bulletin boards and swap software with a friend if you spent enough time fiddling with the communication protocols.

So why a Macintosh? Why a computer built on proprietary hardware that ran only software built or certified by Apple? Why release a computer that had such a small market share that talented developers wouldn’t code for it if they could? Why release a product that is fully controlled and proprietary when IBM / Intel / Microsoft had built a platform that ran on hardware available from dozens of companies and supported software written by tens of thousands of developers? Was the Mac the product of smart entrepreneurship or an act of brazen egotism? And was IBM/Microsoft or Apple the Orwellian control-freak?

Jobs explained his rationale in a brief interview: "Microsoft has no taste — and I don’t mean that in a small way, I mean it in a big way"

The Mac was revolutionary, but it was a failure. Microsoft copied it well enough to make Macs irrelevant to computer markets during the 80s and 90s.

Like the iPhone announced this week, the Mac was very expensive and like the iPhone and the iPod, the Mac was a closed environment, not an open platform. Relatively few programmers wrote code for it, not simply because it was a smaller market, but because Apple actively restricted its expandability, controlled hardware manufacturing, and discouraged independent software developers. It was slow running some applications and pathetically slow to engage in the chaotic, emerging world of online dial-up bulletin boards. On the other hand, it was elegant, the limited software ran very well, and the beast seldom crashed or got infected.

When Mac sales fell well short of Jobs’ predictions and upgrades promised by Jobs and his team did not release on time, the CEO Jobs had hired to run Apple removed him from the Macintosh group. Jobs appealed to the board, which he chaired, but within a year of the launch of the Mac, the board fired him. Steve Jobs was not yet thirty years old.

Being fired from a company he had founded and led was a massive public humiliation. In commencement speech he gave last year at Stanford, Jobs described the experience as one of the three formative experiences of his life (along with dropping out of college and learning that he had terminal pancreatic cancer). His brief speech has become famous for its deep honesty about what matters in life and what has mattered in Jobs’ life.

I recommend it highly — it’s a great talk and my kids have been forced to read it or hear me talk about it so often they can almost recite it. Watch the address below or read it here.

NeXT COMPUTING: 1985

Jobs did not retreat to the wilderness — instead he started two more companies. The first he dubbed NeXT — a company that produced a brilliant little box that ran an obscure version of UNIX dubbed NextStep. Like Macintoshes, it was aimed at the student market. Like Macs, they were cool — the NeXT cube was a Frog Design creation featuring a stark metallic cube. Like the Mac, they were expensive: $10,000 each. Sun Microsystem CEO Scott McNealy dismissed it as ""the wrong operating system, the wrong processor, and the wrong price" (McNealy later invested in NeXt and incorporated many of its tools in Solaris). Bill Gates was more concise, asserting simply: "I’ll piss on it".

NeXT was the system of choice for a certain geek elite, but sales never came close to the 150,000 units per year that its Fremont factory was designed to produce. Jobs brought out less expensive models and (in a move he repeated with Macs a decade later) shifted from Motorola to Intel processors.

One famous user of the NeXT cube was a Swiss developer named Tim Berners-Lee, who used it to create the first web server and the first web browser: the World Wide Web, or modern Internet, was invented on a NeXT cube. NeXT, which ended up a far more successful software than hardware company, paradoxically wrote WebObjects — one of the first platforms for building large-scale dynamic web applications. It became NeXT’s biggest money maker (it too is expensive — but iTunes, Dell, and BBC News still run on it).

Apple, meanwhile, went into a long nose dive as Microsoft products came to dominate the market. Soon, Apple was looking to replace its aging Mac operating system and realized that a highly secure, stable, graphically-oriented OS was essential to compete with Microsoft. The company that had exactly what they needed was….NeXT Computing. At some level, Jobs had continued to build Apple even after leaving the company.

In one of the most amazing second acts in American business history, Apple bought NeXT, brought back Jobs and he has run the company ever since. The NeXT operating system was retooled as OSX and is now the foundation of every Apple computer.

PIXAR: 1986

Shortly after founding NeXT, Jobs bought the computer graphics group from Lucas Films (of StarWars fame) for $5 million and invested another $5 million in the business. Initially Pixar was a hardware company that sold specialized animation computers. Disney was one of its largest customers, but the systems never sold all that well. To try to boost sales, John Lasseter, a former Disney animator, created Luxo, Jr., a famous animated short. Realizing that the company could produce full length animated movies, Jobs approached Disney for funding, promising the people who invented animated films that he could computerize the process of animation better than they could.

He was right. In November of 1995, Pixar released Toy Story. The film became the highest grossing film of 1995, generating $362 million in worldwide box office receipts. Toy Story‘s director and Pixar’s chief creative officer, John Lasseter, received a Special Achievement Academy Award for his "inspired leadership of the Pixar Toy Story team resulting in the first feature-length computer animated film."

Pixar moved from success to success. A Bug’s Life, Monsters, Inc., Finding Nemo, The Incredibles, Cars, and Toy Story 2, all followed — and all were box office smashes, giving Pixar six of the top grossing animated films of all time.

• Toy Story 2, at the time of release, broke numerous opening weekend records all over the world and won a Golden Globe award for Best Picture, Musical or Comedy in 1999.

• Monster’s, Inc. reached over $100 million at the domestic box office in just 9 days, faster than any animated film in history at the time of its release.

• In 2003, Pixar released Finding Nemo which broke every one of Monsters, Inc.‘s opening weekend box office records that had been set only 18-months earlier. Finding Nemo generated $865 million at the global box office and received the Academy Award® for Best Animated Feature Film.

• The Incredibles, released in 2004, earned more than $620 million worldwide, elevating it to the second highest grossing Pixar film and amongst the 25 highest grossing film of all time and four Academy Award nominations.

Disney was thrilled, but Jobs chafed under the terms of the deals. The contentious relationship culminated in the purchase of Pixar by Disney in January of 2006 — a deal that made Steve Jobs the largest owner of Disney by a wide margin. Walt would be pleased.

iPOD: 2001

By the late nineties, Jobs and many others understood that the business of music recording, distribution, and retailing was profoundly broken. Labels had become risk averse and hit driven, retailers had to cover costs with sales from fewer and fewer groups, and the theft of music on websites like Napster and KaZaa threatened the entire system. The music industry decided that the smartest thing it could do would be to sue its customers for illegal downloading. Hmm.

Steve Jobs saw an opportunity not simply for a better MP3 player or a better music website. He realized that he could profoundly restructure how music was sold and delivered. He had a chance to do in music what he had done with personal computing: transform the industry by using technology to set a new and higher standard.

This meant getting record labels to agree to a scheme of digital rights management of the sort they had long opposed. Jobs could not have done this as CEO of Apple — but he was now a very successful Hollywood movie executive — both the CEO of a major and very wealthy studio and the juice behind both the software and the creative talent that produced a new generation of animated films. He had effortlessly become our new Walt Disney — and he had the access, savvy, and clout to create a new deal for the music industry and a hip, classy, fully integrated offering to his customers.

The launch, which took place a few weeks after the September 11 attacks in 2001, was a watershed event for Apple — the company has grown up and to the right ever since. You can watch Jobs launch of the iPod here.

Once again, Steve Jobs’ personality pervades the product. The iPod is easy to use, stylish, and vaguely hip. It is also entirely closed as a platform. As Randall Stross explains in today’s Times Here is how FairPlay works: When you buy songs at the iTunes Music Store, you can play them on one – and only one – line of portable player, the iPod. And when you buy an iPod, you can play copy-protected songs bought from one – and only one – online music store, the iTunes Music Store.

The only legal way around this built-in limitation is to strip out the copy protection by burning a CD with the tracks, then uploading the music back to the computer. If you’re willing to go to that trouble, you can play the music where and how you choose – the equivalent to rights that would have been granted automatically at the cash register if you had bought the same music on a CD in the first place.

Even if you are ready to pledge a lifetime commitment to the iPod as your only brand of portable music player or to the iPhone as your only cellphone once it is released, you may find that FairPlay copy protection will, sooner or later, cause you grief. You are always going to have to buy Apple stuff. Forever and ever. Because your iTunes will not play on anyone else’s hardware.

Unlike Apple, Microsoft has been willing to license its copy-protection software to third-party hardware vendors. But copy protection is copy protection: a headache only for the law-abiding.

What impact has the iPod had? It has not solved the crisis of the music industry — sales of CDs are falling faster than online sales are rising. On the other hand, the part of the music business that Jobs invented — downloaded digital music — is healthy and iPod/iTunes owns about 60% of it, thanks to consumers who are willing to be locked in to a technology controlled by a single company. Why would consumers do this? Simple: songs are a buck and iPods are reliable, fun, and easy to use.

Increasingly however, music is not a product, it is a service. Stross reports on the views of Dave Goldberg, head of Yahoo! music

Eventually, perhaps in 5 or 10 years, he predicts that all portable players will have wireless broadband capability and will provide direct access, anytime, anywhere, to every song ever released for a low monthly subscription fee.

It’s a prediction that has a high probability of realization because such a system is already found in South Korea, where three million subscribers enjoy direct, wireless access to a virtually limitless music catalog for only $5 a month. He noted, however, that music companies in South Korea did not agree to such a radically different business model until sales of physical CDs had collapsed.

iPHONE

Which brings us to Tuesday. Jobs announced Apple TV, which lets you show stuff from your Mac on a flat panel TV. He announced that Apple Computer changed its name — it is now just Apple, Inc. Because Apple is no longer just a computer company.

Then Jobs unveiled the iPhone. How cool is it? It’s sexy thin, runs OSX, has no keyboard but uses a Multi-Touch screen that figures out what input you need. When you need to type, there is a touchscreen keyboard. For buttons, your finger just pokes. To scroll through songs, voice or email messages, photos or contacts, it lests you flick along the bottom of the screen. You can "pinch" a photo between your fingers to expand or compact the image.

In Jobs’ words: "…multitasking, networking, power management, graphics, security, video, graphics, animation." Like the Blackberry, it has an ambient light sensor. Like the Treo, is has a camera. Unlike either, it has a proximity sensor to shut off the touch screen when you have it against your face. It has an accelerometer to sense whether it is in portrait or landscape mode. You can watch video, listen to music, manage contacts, scroll through contacts, pick which voice mail to answer, get cool album art. Jobs said Apple has filed over 200 patents related to the phone.

Retrieving voice mail is easier because you can touch only the message to want to hear, so you can pick which message you want to listen to first rather than listen to them in order. Jobs said the iPhone’s virtual onscreen keyboard is better for typing than most of the plastic tiny keyboards in most smartphones. It wouldn’t take much, but he poked with his finger instead of typing with his thumbs. Hmm.

Connectivity includes quad-band GSM, EDGE, all three Wi-Fi protocols — 802.11b/g and the forthcoming 802.11n — as well as Bluetooth 2.0 and EDR wireless. Cingular will be Apple’s exclusive partner under a multiyear agreement (Cingular got the exclusive distribution rights by signing a deal two years ago sight unseen.) The 4GB iPhone will run $499 and an 8GB version will be $599. Available in June.

Ominously, my 14 year old was not impressed.

"Look, they didn’t use the 3G network, how lame is that? It’s another closed platform — you won’t get much software for it" (he despises Sony for crippling his PS2 this way). "Your Blackberry lets you open attachments and edit documents or spreadsheets" (well, sort of) — "the iPhone won’t". "Plus the lawsuit with Cisco over the name makes them look stupid".

The kid is right, of course. Jobs is just not a Web 2.0 kind of guy — and never has been.

User generated content? I don’t THINK so! You want an iPhone, it’s just like an iPod or a Mac — you get it Steve’s way. You can enter Steve’s world or you can stay out — but you cannot modify it in any way. In Steve’s world, there is one visionary, a lot of developers, and millions of users.

Not for him any talk of open systems, turning consumers into developers, or platforms for participation. Jobs quotes computer scientist Alan Kay to the effect that "People who are really serious about software should make their own hardware." Well, if you want to run a few programs and have them execute flawlessly, this is hard to argue with. If you want to promote innovation by turning loose tens of thousands of developers, it is a less interesting approach.

Problem today is that software is migrating rapidly from the desktop to the web. The value of an open system that can support thousands of programs is diminished in a world where a browser can support thousands of websites and a small number of tasks need to work in an integrated way. This environment plainly favors Apple — just as the 1980s and 90s favored Microsoft.

 
  Technorati : Apple, Macintosh, Pixar, Steve Jobs, iphone, ipod

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