There’s a good read over at slashdot concerning RIAA quotes about losing money this year due to napster. It is pirated music and i guess it’s probably illegal, but how can they claim that music swapping is cutting into their profits when they’re total revenue is increasing every year?
The world is changing, the internet is changing, it’s quite the world that we live in these days. A constant state of flux. There’s talk of the dot-com collapse, internet start-up’s bombing out, making no money. The internet started out as a medium for communication and information sharing, maybe it’s heading back in that direction. Although I doubt corporations will shy away that easily. Currently, many of them don’t really have effective business models. A lot of the internet start-ups were using it as their sole source of income, and that income never appeared. It would be more effective if companies used the internet as an extension of their real world business or combined the two so they worked in tandem. Some of the companies that are pretending they have have a tandem business model are no longer using their real world company to it’s full extent, using it as a platform to draw attention to their internet business. Companies that are now seeing dwindling profits due to over-investment in the internet.
It seems like i’m painting a doom and gloom portrait of the internet, i’m not trying to do that, I love it. It’s more that if companies want to survive, they have some thinking to do. Many people have a social stance that’s very anti-corporate, myself included, but I think corporation are going to have to stay as part of the internet to help foster growth. They’re the ones that will be investing in the technology that makes the internet work. That’s enough, I have to get to bed and then wake up to write a bloody midterm.
And then there’s this that just confuses the hell out of me.