Allan Masri 's Techdirt Comments

Latest Comments (24) comment rss

  • On the post: Is It Possible For Newspapers To Save Themselves?

    Allan Masri ( profile ), 21 Sep, 2009 @ 07:56am

    Institutions can't change, you're right

    Institutions find it hard to change because everyone in the company knows how to make a profit using the same old practices, and no one in the company knows anything else. Newspapers had the opportunity to become Craigslist, but Craigslist has revenues in the $250 million range. The New York Times has revenues in the $3 billion range, and Craigslist has the lion's share of classified ads for the entire US. Google has a large workforce of skilled software engineers and online marketers. Newspapers have workforces of journalists. When Intel and IBM made big shifts in their business models, they were successful because they did not need to hire new technologists, only retrain the ones they had. A better paradigm is what happened to Time/Warner and AOL. AOL was a leading exponent of the internet. TW acquired it to use its expertise in making changes to their business model. The resulting company did little except milk AOL for profits and then throw the company away, precisely because TW executives had no understanding or respect for the new technologies. Newspapers are fated to die by their nature in a world that has passed them by.

  • On the post: Facebook Ordered (Again) To Turn Over Source Code

    Allan Masri ( profile ), 10 Sep, 2009 @ 09:36am

    A little legal sense here

    Under the rules of evidence, Facebook is required to turn over to the plaintiff all documents that apply to the case. The judge may be ignorant of technology, but he is not ignorant of the law. Can the same be said of those criticizing him here? Don't they prejudge the case before it has been tried?

    If the software relating to the patent is as elementary as it seems at first glance, Facebook could easily defend itself with a "prior art" claim, that is, by proving the code in question was in general use before it was patented and therefore the patent is invalid. If the patent is declared invalid, all programmers will benefit from the eradication of another bogus software patent.

  • On the post: Andy Grove: Patents Are Like Mortgage Backed Securities

    Allan Masri ( profile ), 08 Sep, 2009 @ 12:24pm

    Only in Andy Grove's fevered brain

    Only in Andy Grove's world (which is not congruent with our own) does a patent derivative bear a close relationship to a mortgage derivative. Above all, there is no assumption that the value of patents will continue to rise indefinitely; most patents decline in value due to competition. Patents all have income associated with them, and that is their value; mortgages frequently have no value associated with them (if there is no equity value in the property) and are then purely speculative. There will never be a patent bust where all patents suddenly lose value, because their variety is far greater than that of real estate, crossing many industries and nations. I suspect there will never be an insurance derivative of patents that attempts to cash in when a patent loses value; but if there is one, it will not be subject to manipulation since the patents will not all fall predictably at the same time. The patent market will more closely resemble the equity market, where bubbles may exist in parts of the market but seldom in the entire market at the same time.

  • On the post: Random Facts: Why SMS Is Only 160 Characters

    Allan Masri ( profile ), 08 Sep, 2009 @ 11:47am

    Re: Data Efficiency

    So the East Asians get to say more in each txt than anybody else does.

    Uh...no, there is not a one-to-one ratio between words and characters in Asian languages. More like one-to-two in Chinese, but Japanese is even less condensed since it uses many particles and spells out many words using syllabaries. Irrelevant, I admit, but amusing.