Why the GOS will fail

I remember feeling pretty frugal early this decade, when I bought a 733 MHz PC with a 40 Gigabyte hard drive for just $700. Here you've got something twice as fast, with twice the storage, for $200 retail.

If you just need office applications and a link to the Internet, this is cool. It costs less than a dumb terminal did at the start of the decade.

With people tossing their old CRT monitors by the millions this year, and unpacking new flat panels, I'll bet you can find yourself a screen with just a short drive into the suburbs, and you'll be doing the environment a favor.

It's Moore's Law in action. Things get better-and-better faster-and-faster. You double 1 and get 2, but double 1 billion and you get 2 billion, just as fast as before. All this despite the switch to low-power, multi-core technologies on the part of chip-makers.

So where can this go wrong?

Network access.

This box has a modem and Ethernet port built-in, but you still have to pay to get online. Even if you have a $10/month plan, you also need a land-line phone, which costs $30-50/month. Want broadband? You're looking at $50/month, plus either a phone or cable connection. Figure $100/month easy.

The target market for this machine is going to find that a steep price. It's simply unnecessary.

Fact is there is no longer a need for either a phone or a cable network. Telephony is a low-bandwidth service. Double the speed of any broadband connection and you can get full-screen TV, any channel, any show, any time.

The fact is that Moore's Law is being violated, being ignored, to serve the interests of cable and phone monopolists. They prefer divvying up the bandwidth as "services" so they can charge out the wazoo for it. Cable operators charge both the stations and listeners, plus get a cut of the ad revenue. The much-ballyhooed "FIOS" is just the phone network becoming cable, and cutting your copper to do it.

There is no technical reason for any of this. Give us fatter broadband pipes and we can replicate it all for the price of Internet access. Bring competition to the existing phone network and you can get four times the present ADSL speed, even using old technology, even on copper.

Policy choices have already slowed the Internet's last-mile to a crawl, and it's getting worse. You already know about Comcast stopping BitTorrent. Do you know Verizon is now copying the Verisign "SiteFinder" scandal, redirecting misspelled requests to its own ad pages?

Network neutrality? Please. It's the CorporateNet, and it only feeds the interests of a very small number of corporations.

It was a policy choice to allow these duopolies to return. New policy choices can restore competition and free the bits.

But it won't happen in time for this product. Everex will sell a lot of boxes this holiday season, but I suspect these will be like a lot of other presents from Christmas past, lost in a closet somewhere because they can't be made to work, or because the owners can't afford to let them work.