Posts tagged with “business skills”

Dear Google

Hey Google, it’s me Basta. Just wanted to drop in and give you a little advice.

You see, there’s this huge “war” over HTML5 video formats going on. Apple and Nokia are pushing H.264 (which is a beautiful format, don’t get me wrong) and Mozilla and Opera are pushing for Ogg Theora (which I have very little experience with, mostly because I have zero reason to interact with it). We all know Microsoft is going to vote for Windows Media Video format or uncompressed AVI or some dumb shit like that, so nobody even asked for their two cents. So now it comes down to you. Sure, you share a bunch of code with Apple and Nokia (WebKit) and you probably won’t end up paying the five million dollar licensing fees to use H.264, but everybody loves open source! And Theora is free regardless!

Now internally, you’ve got your YouTube guys saying that Theora would crash the internet, but at the other side of your offices, you push for open standards and a more open web. That’s a tough choice to make: on one hand, you’ve got a beautiful, efficient codec, and on the other, you’ve got your principles and community-centric values. Tough choice indeed, my friend.

Ah, but wait! Didn’t you just spend an exorbitant amount of money on…what’s that…a video codec company? Google! You sly bastard you! Now, you’re sitting here with the format that you could only hope to ever possess; the holy grail of video codecs! VP6! It’s the same guy that powers Flash (flv), which just so happens to be the driving force behind YouTube, Vimeo, Viddler…hell, even Xtube uses your new toy.

Back on track: I’m certainly not the first person to think of this, though I may have foolishly assumed I was. It’s simply genius. You’ve suddenly come into possession of THE SINGLE MOST POPULAR CODEC EVER TO BE CREATED, and you just so happen to be in a war which will effectively DETERMINE THE FUTURE OF VIDEO ON THE INTERNET FOR THE REST OF THE CENTURY. Now I’m no Howie Mandel, but I know a deal when I see one. Here’s the plan: make VP6 an open source codec. No charge to consume it. You’re already charging boatloads to implement encoders for it; why charge to actually consume it?

And not only do you have VP6, but you also have VP7 and VP8, On2’s latest codecs. They apparently do a kick-ass job (Skype is using VP7 for video conferencing and ABC and Fox are using it in their episode players) so far, so I wouldn’t doubt that they would make good choices for open sourceability. Let people use them. Consider how quickly you’d become the dominant force in online video! Adobe would surely implement VP7/8 if given the right to freely. Now you’ve got Adobe using the codec of your choosing in practically every browser on the planet. Apple and Nokia would KILL to have those codecs made available to them, so you can count on their video element tags supporting your new toy.

Mozilla and Opera will likely be more wary. Mozilla is a big fan of “open” stuff. Theora is “open”. Somebody owns a patent for it, but they promised not to sue anyone. Did you know, though, that Theora was once actually On2’s [now defunct] VP3 codec? That’s three versions behind what Flash uses (and tweaked to hell by open source devs), but it’s still a load of once-On2-now-Google code! Convincing these two guys that the new formats are better to use than Theora shouldn’t be a problem at all

So what would happen here? Well, first off, you’d have all the HTML5 goodness that you could possibly want (well, there’s still IE…but come on. it’s ie). Second, you’ve got yourself a stake in practically every browser on the planet. Third, every video production platform suddenly wants a license to encode the ON2 codecs. Sure, Apple’s going to be a little pissed now that H.264 is done, but it’s not like they have bigger problems or anything.

Anyway, good luck with your decision, Google, and give me a call when you get a chance.

With love,
Basta

One more thing

Last night was the September Lehigh Valley AITP meeting. It was held at DeSales because the usual meeting place is now unavailable. A company did a product demo on a social media application that they’ve been developing. Granted, it wasn’t anything special (and was woefully inadequate for the market they’re attempting to appease), but it nonetheless provided an interesting opportunity to mingle with some professionals in the area.

The idea behind the app was to create a social media aggregator merged with a social publishing API. It was kind of bland, but (somewhat) interesting.

One gentleman (whose name shall not be written) sat at the table adjacent to mine during the demo. About halfway through the QA session afterward, he raised his hand and proceeded to say something along these lines:

I can imagine that this feed, once you’ve added a bunch of people to it, starts filling up pretty quickly with people posting all the time. You get a couple thousand people posting and it’s going to be going pretty fast. What do you do when you’ve got this scrolling like a roll of toilet paper and posts are shooting past you?

I lost it. I think maybe four or five people might have given me dirty looks because I cracked up in my seat. Scrolling like a roll of toilet paper. That’s the best way to describe something of the sort that I have EVER HEARD IN MY LIFE.

For reference, I want “Matt Basta: 1990-20?? / His widgets were ‘scrolling like a roll of toilet paper’” carved on my headstone. Pretty please?

Wrong DNS

Earlier today, I set up the parameters for http://rent.serverboy.net/. It takes a few hours to propagate fully, so I let it go. Imagine my surprise about fifteen minutes ago when I found that instead of reaching my test page, I was presented with a login page for my email.

The cause? I’d copied and pasted the wrong IP address. FML.