"Profit is to be found not just in pleasing dissatisfied customers, but in dissatisfying them in the first place so they will then pay to be pleased."

Great quote. I've long seen things deteriorate just so you can be encouraged to pay for the new, improved service. A infamous example was in Caller ID. Initially Caller ID was supposed to tell you who was calling you. Not all numbers were shown. After a while Qwest started selling a "Premium" Caller ID package for a couple dollars more a month that promised to show you more numbers than the ordinary Caller ID service would. Cost of the new, improved service to Qwest? I'll bet Zero. Profits? Great! Allowed by regulators to get away with it? Oh Yeah!!

Bob wrote, "The only way to solve THAT problem is by taking back ownership of our own last-mile connections and creating a true competitive marketplace for backbone services. It's a move that would pay for itself almost instantly, but I doubt that it will ever be allowed to happen."

Can you expand on that some more? What if such a feat could be pulled off in one dedicated community, to inspire others?

Bob...

Are you saying that the US is lagging behind because of a stupid chicken/egg game?

The Telcos won't lay off the fiber because there's no content demanding it \\\ The content providers aren't pushing the envelope because there's not enough consumers with high-bandwidth to sell to?

I appreciate people that refuse to give up, even when so-called experts try to dissuade them. I was excited to hear your announcement last week, and I'm excited to discover that you're still dedicated to it this week.

I think history shows that great things have been done by those who didn't "know" they were impossible. Bravo!

Bob,
Maybe you have the answer. Your talk about AT&T buying a piece of IBM brought this question to my mind. This will, of course be a disaster. All corporations sold and bought end in a half arsed mess. Why do the top leaders keep doing it?
I was at a company that was just bought up. The company had bought a smaller company earlier in the year, weakening their cash position. (Polycom bought (SpectraLink bought Kirk))All the analyst agree it was a dumb idea, twice.
None of my former coworkers can explain the reasoning.
It is a cognitive dissonance or something. All the stats say this will flop, all our advisor's say the same, but we are special, lets do it! I know, I know, follow the $$$.
I am off topic, maybe this is fodder for a future post.

More power to you on the moon thing, but while I agree it could generate useful discoveries, it eems to me we have pressing challenges to address than a contrived race to put more stuff on the moon. Addressing those challenges will also generate spin offs while accomplishing a real objective instead of a contrived one.

Anyway, what's up with the long-delayed NerdTV season 2? Is moon race going to delay that even more?

On a tangential topic:

If you discover a way to do a moon shot in 18 months and for a lot less than the current astronomical cost (if you'll forgive the pun), I imagine there will be a lot of people interested, like: NGO's, corporations, third-world countries, and various other groups that like to toss things around.

Has anyone from the Gov't dropped by and had a chat with your team? I'd be interested in hearing about that in your upcoming articles (if you don't "disappear" or otherwise are "discouraged" from your project)

;-)

So, I feel like I'm reading Bizarro Cringly. Haven't you been pontificating about the impending bandwidth crises for years. A (very) quick search through your archives shows that as early as 2003 and as late as February of this year, you were talking about internet video eating up all the bandwidth. Is this a sudden change of heart, or am I just confused?

So, I feel like I'm reading Bizarro Cringly. Haven't you been pontificating about the impending bandwidth crises for years. A (very) quick search through your archives shows that as early as 2003 and as late as February of this year, you were talking about internet video eating up all the bandwidth. Is this a sudden change of heart, or am I just confused?

IBM sold her Global Network Services to AT&T many years ago. Now, just what is it that IBM sold to AT&T again?

Both Verizon and AT&T are competing to get broadband to the home. Verizon wants to use fiber for the last mile while AT&T wants to condition the existing copper wires. AT&T finds out that conditioning the old copper wires is tough. Dark fiber to the home does not exit in US and it is not just waiting to be lighted.

I am spending 2008 to attempt to create the world land speed record for a certain type of self-propelled vehicle. Everyone tells me my idea will not work and they're wrong. Dead wrong.

This is why I want to be part of Team Cringely. I'm used to people explaining how I will fail. But like Team Cringely, I am going to succeed. I created an aphorism years ago which might be worth remembering: "People will be confident in my successes if I can keep the look of astonishment off my face." Good luck Bob!

Way to go Bob - will the powers really allow a group of people to send stuff up ? that is way cool. You mind me of the other greats - Heinlein, Robertson, etc. Wish I had something to contribute beside my well wishes.

As far as the bandwidth a 3 gig symmetrical line to every home/office etc should be mandatory. Except of course the current government is still stuck in the "stone throwing mode" making the shift to an information economy that much harder to reach.

FON does not have a deal with Speakeasy, as near as I can tell from a quick search on the subject. FON once claimed to have an agreement with Speakeasy, but they turned out to be lying or exaggerating, as Speakeasy roundly denied it. Why mention that FON has a contract with Speakeasy when they clearly don't?

A real space expert said "The minimum budget that seems remotely realistic to achieve the prize goals is well over $15M".

It appears that's old school thinking, so we better not use old-school methodologies on our way to success!!! Things change. It requires a new box.   Go Bob go!   (said with look of total confidence)!

Best of luck to Team Cringely!

If anyone figures out how to do it cheaper - you'll be dead. Not kidding.

Canadian Gerald Bull found that out the hard way.
He was testing a SuperGun that could actually shoot a Sputnick into space by using a super super long artillery gun.

Mossad killed Bull who at the time was working for Hussain in Iraq and testing various designs of the SuperGun in Iraq.

Is "FLV" going to be the official acronym for the carbon fibre tube?

> Is "FLV" going to be the official acronym for the carbon fibre tube?

oh yeah!

> "...solve THAT problem is by taking back ownership of our own last-mile connections"

yes, please DO expand on this.

You can probably save some launch weight by having the whole thing lifted into the upper atmosphere by a large balloon. Hi enough, and aerodynamic farings and other features of surface-launched vehicles aren't needed.

Damn the pessimists. I wish you the best of luck and I hope you kick butt. What could possibly go wrong? :-)

I see Burst.com got a new Patent Granted on 9/18/2007 sure does look like Tivo might have used some or a lot of prior art. IMO

and Apple added more legal staff to fight Burst.

http://www.investorvillage.com/smbd.asp?mb=389&mn=1464&pt=msg&mid=3154913

caselaw.lp.findlaw.com/cgi-bin/getcase.pl?court=Fed&navby=case&no=005077 - 71k -

BT is a bit expensive £24.99 or about $50 per month -they have cheaper options but limited to 250mins use per month -I would use that in a day !!
Tom in England

Blah. Who cares about this telecom and business crap? You're going to the moon! I've been waiting for this column all week. More moon details! I'm totally stoked, and I feel special even READING about it. Good luck bob.

I think the TYCO optic cable was the last long line. And an air piggy back lauch would be cheaper than a ground launch and the craft can be reused. It just has to be designed to land and take off from the moon. That saves size and fuel. Look at how many boosters and junk is required on a ground launch. If it detached in space and used a solor fuel to get it to the moon all you need is a way to get it back. Has any of you scientist figured out a way to get solar energy into a plasma type fuel that can be stored and used later, like how a wind up flash light works. But since there is no one that we know of on the Moon to wind up a generation type storage cell. Solar energy would have to be converted and accessed with one long drain to send the craft into orbit back to Earth. Electric motors might be able to propell the craft out of the Moons limited Gravitational pull.

Getting to the moon does not require reaching orbital speeds. The only reason you have to go 17,500 miles an hour to achieve orbit is so the arc of your trajectory matches the curvature of the earth. If you're traveling direct surface to surface, you don't have to orbit anything.

Also, if time is not a major factor (and for a robotic rover that doesn't need oxygen, time is much less of a factor) you "only" need to maintain a thrust slightly greater than the pull of gravity until you get above the atmosphere. At that point, you could set thrust = gravity and your initial momentum would continue to carry you forward. When you got to the equilibrium point (about 6/7 of the way there), you'd flip your craft over, and start thrusting at just moon gravity.

You could, in theory, travel to the moon at just 100 mph, (provided you could maintain thrust continuously for the 125 days it would take to get there).

And remember that gravity lessens by the square of the distance, so away from the surfaces of the planets you can throttle back your thrust and maintain the same velocity. Or keep the same thrust and accelerate continously (but reaching thousands of mph is not needed).

Of course, this is currently all hypothetical. The practical engineering challenges are many. The more mass you have, the more thrust it takes to cancel gravity. Conventional rockets have to bring their own fuel and oxidizer, which requires more thrust, which requires more fuel, etc. Finding the sweet spot for that is a major challenge (which is why the term "rocket science" is reserved to really hard problems).

The ion drive NASA recently used on one of its probes used this principle of small, continuous thrust and eventually built up a huge velocity. I'm not sure if it can produce enough thrust to lift something on the order of, say, a dishwasher, or maybe a small car (which is the likely size range for a probe and its delivery vehicle, minus any fuel).

This is all to say, no, you don't need to achieve orbital velocity to reach the moon.

---
On a different, but related, subject: I'm a computer programmer, and am greatly interested in joining Team Cringely.

We have been trying to tell you Bob. That we were coming to show the way, so please tell your friend's to help you take back the internet today by joining The HyperLinker in spreading the demand for cheaper bandwidth. We have a solution which I can/won't, all I will say is that there were stiil some good frequencies left and I quess you'll be hearing about us

So one would need thrust or torque, as seen in the new electric vehicles. Example the electric car that out ran a Porsche in the quarter mile. It got the jump because an electric motor does not need to gain momentum. It is instant on. So if you can build a three fueled space vehicle, lithium torque motors for propulsion - solar cell power for crusing space at 100 mph - standard rocket fuel or some other fuel for lift off from the moon and back into orbit... Im out of brain fuel cells so Ill just stop. If I think of more ill be back.

Only 50 volunteers? Or only 50 qualified volunteers? Frankly, I would volunteer, but my expertise is in systems engineering (managing complex interactions and interfaces in integrated systems.) I did work at the Johnson Space Center for 10 years though.

Now, how will you prevent this project from going the way of the baby monitoring pajamas? Nothing ever came from that, did it? As I remember it, your volunteers had selected a microprocessor before even understanding the monitoring problem. This seems to be a similar case where you selected the solution before fully defining the problem. As once said, "A problem well-defined is half-solved."

BTW, nobody is going to let you attach anything to an aircraft without extensive airworthiness and safety testing. Especially something carrying fuel.

The issue of dissatisfying a customer and making him pay to be satisfied reminds me of the defense industry. There you gladly let the customer pay you to make any stupid thing, because the customer will also pay you more later to make the right thing. And I thought it was unique to the defense industry! ha!

Good for you Bob. I am always irritated by folks that can't see past their own noses and work to discourage innovation because they are convinced that it just can't be done. I wonder if they have ever considered the rule breaking that went into creating the first light bulb, telephone, or personal computer.

I wish Team Cringely the best of luck and can't wait to see your rover kicking up some moon dust.

Long live Team Cringely!!!

BTW, nobody is going to let you attach anything to an aircraft without extensive airworthiness and safety testing. Especially something carrying fuel.

Seems to me the people who shout the loudest about how things CAN'T be done are usually those most afraid to try. Whatever happens with Team Cringley's moon mission, it's worth the effort, as is every other attempt to do things differently. We can't learn anything unless we keep trying.

"BTW, nobody is going to let you attach anything to an aircraft without extensive airworthiness and safety testing. Especially something carrying fuel.
wertyq | Oct 06, 2007 | 4:17AM"

This should perhaps read:
"BTW, nobody is going to let you attach anything to a CERTIFIED" aircraft without extensive airworthiness and safety testing. Especially something carrying fuel."

The rules are less stringent for experimental aircraft. You're only risking your own life, not the lives of paying passengers.

The Air Launch is an old idea concept that to recolection came from years past designs of the next generation PRIVATE sector space vehicles. Check back during the last lull of NASA, a lot of talk was flying. The drawings of future crafts and prototypes were seen by many in magazines like Popular Science and on the web. That where I saw the idea being kicked around. So im sure who ever has been working on those designs for about the past ten years have looked and studied all the issues. Come on folk's, it's not rocket science... har! har!

To the moon?
I'm in, and onboard.

Bob said: It will be good for the workers, too, because they'll be going to a company with a real benefits package and a solid pension plan.

ATT is currently hammering its employees in negotiations on healthcare benefits and has (at least internally) announced its intention to "get out of the healthcare business." Though the company is wildly profitable, the acquired IBM employees would be ill advised to think that profitability will translate into benefits or security for them.

This lunar lander prize is winnable, and Bob has exactly the right idea. I'm a self-taught orbital mechanics amateur answer man who is on board - this is gonna be fun. I'll be preparing a report for Bob to help him refine the mission profile.

There is a spreadsheet workbook for free download on my site demonstrating how do-able the Google Lunar X-Prize is, at least in terms of rocket capability and mass budgets. If anyone's interested, I can explain how to use it on the forums.

In regards to patents. If someone claims that their idea is a Generic form of someone elses. Since Generic patents have been debated in the drug industry. Should'nt the same rules apply, that they cannot use the patent until it expires? Meaning anyone useing the technology in a exsisting patent should be subject to penalties, even injunction to sease operations until patent expires or the infrenged company gets requested compensation. "Generic" a not so easyily assumable term, if you ask me.

It's gotta Hemi

Four not yet developed Electric Galactic Servo Motors. Would put this baby on the moon. With the brains on this board it can be done in six months. Then collect all the meteorites that land on the South pole and extract all the minerals from them that don't burn up in entry to earth and coat the ship with it or inpregnate the skin of the ship with it.

www.youtube.com/watch?v=xySn4SE26pA

"...works well to tie those customers to BT ISP service, where the future of telephony clearly lies." Does anyone not realize this is what Google has been planning all along, well, hopefully. Why would Google buy all that dark fiber over that last few years, plan to bid on the 700MHz spectrum, etc. Google phone? Possible. Google iPhone? Possible. I can't wait for the FCC auction.

(reposted from last week's comments...)
-- Alex's anti-satellite missiles under Mig-21's --
This sounds the simplest of all I've heard.


A large passenger jet could hold larger such launch vehicles -- perhaps even using large anti-satellite missiles as boosters for a less powerhungry final guidance and landing system . . .


What do you put on a rover package to control its entry and descent onto the moon? An altered guided missile? If any of these use vectored thrust or retro-rockets, then an off-the-shelf solution might exist, but it seems ill-suited to this challenge . . .


How about a satellite guidance system? They are just pressurized gas releases, right? They wouldn't be powerful enough.


We need something with lateral guidance rockets. . . All of these have been custom-designed for moon landings, Mars landings, and space dockings, as far as I can think of. So, unless I'm missing something, there are no off-the-shelf moon landing packages . . .


Isn't this the missing component? We have no alternatives for descent vehicles... We have to change course . . .


The next step would be to determine the feasibility of designing and manufacturing final guidance systems ourselves . . .


Perhaps something of a buckyball-esque roll cage. The payload is all inside the ball -- while mounted on the frame of the ball are membranes filled with inflatable landing pads. Protruding through the corners of this soccer ball pattern, we have a network of guidance rocket motors.


Imagine a one-meter diameter metal-framed soccer ball inside another two-meter diameter metal-framed soccer ball. The outside 2m frame holds the final guidance rockets. They slow the vehicle to suborbital speeds over the lunar drop zone. This framework is then detached and dropped from the 2m ball framework itself. We're much lighter now. Now, a second, lighter 2m ball framework is exposed. It has descent guidance rockets, perhaps ion drives. This slows us to impact speed at which point the padding between the 1m and 2m ball is inflated . . . and we crash . . . softly . . .


Out crawls the robot and begins exploring and broadcasting.


Greg

T-Mobile's offering VOIP over Wi-Fi is a great thing. I wish they did not charge extra for it, but it appears that they do.

What T-Mobile is trying to do is to neutralize the advantage other carriers have in terms of better coverage. Their thought is probably that if you have good coverage in your home and T-mobile hotspots then some of Verizon/AT&T's competitive advantage is neutralized. And they are taking advantage of a marginally free resource to do so -- bandwidth.

By the same token you can be sure that bandwidth or no bandwidth Verizon will never offer VOIP over its phones. Verizon's raison d'etre is the quality of its coverage and offering VOIP de-emphasizes their main selling point.

I do wish that T-Mobile or some other carrier came out with a highly optimized Wi-Fi phone that used mobile minutes only when it needed to.

I wonder if Bob's Russian friends have a line on the AN225 air-launch vehicle that is currently under development. . . a 150 ton launch vehicle launching from an altitude of ten miles plus. . . will go a LOT further than one taking off from the ground. . . This could cause the Russians to leapfrog well ahead of NASA's decidedly retro (can you say "Apollo") next-generation launch vehicles.

"Profit is to be found not just in pleasing dissatisfied customers, but in dissatisfying them in the first place so they will then pay to be pleased."

Brilliant! This should be called Cringely's law.

Hello Cringely - I read your column faithfully so thanks for the effort as it provides quite a bit of value. You do, however, make a mistake now and again and this is one of those times. Bandwidth growing on trees is often cited and much less often actually true. The reality is that telcos are not economically retarded (at least not most of the time). They spend on only as much bandwidth as they need and that means that when usage demands move up a notch like they are now due to Youtube and other, more bandwidth hungry apps, bandwidth in certain parts of the network does, in fact, become scarce. It is also a misconception to think of dark fibre as scarce bandwidth. Lighting fibre costs money and so is only done when scarcity forces it - note that optical demand is very strong right now - that ain't because there is too much bandwidth lying around.

BT ahd the first mobile phone company in the UK. It was always kept at arms length from the telephone business (separate billing etc.) and a few years ago BT sold it off and it became O2.

Now we begin to see their thinking. Get a load of money (mobile phone companies were getting good prices back then) and get the regulators of their back (BT still has most of the POTS service in the UK) and free themselves up to offer an integrated service, leveraging the copper they own to every house in the country.

think 1984 divestiture and brilliant upcomming arising artist madonna sting & da poepo so wit dat in regards to proper paid training services is where the wireless industry lie loyal withing their own with-holding support, that sets them apart from the floc...the real issue still stands as to shellfish and cablevision wtf!!!

BT only sold their mobile network off as they were desperate for money because they were heavily indebted mainly because of the aquisition of second string telcos around the world but also because of the great frequency auction the UK government ran. To ascribe it to a great masterplan would be incorrect(BT actual kept some of the debt the mobile division ran up as they were so keen for a sale)

ONCE AGAIN TEH FUCHING FERRET STANDS IN THE WAY OF PROGRESS. ANY STRATIGY TO MAKE THE INTERNETS FASTER WILL BE THRWARTED. IMPROVING THE LAST MILE WITH FIBAR WILL CAUSE LEGIENS OF TEH FUCHING FERRETS TO CHEW THROW THE CABELS WITH THERE VAIN RIPPING TEETH. THIS WILL LOCK THE USERS INTO RECEVING THE I TONES MIND CONTROLL PACKETS THRU THE NEW I PHONE DEVISE FROM STEAVE JOBES. WHEN APLE RELEASES THE I BUTTOX DEVISE THE USERS WILL HAVE THE MIND CONTROLL PACKETS DIRECTLY IMPLANTED IN THERE COLLON AND THERE WILL BE NO ESCAPE FROM TEH FUCHING FERRET.

Bob - You couldn't even build a fiberglass airplane, and now you want to land on the moon? j/k ;) Good luck! I hope you can pull it off. I will watch the pbs show win or lose...

Re. Lunar lander .... Put the Lunar module in lunar-stationary orbit and LOWER the Lander/Rover down by cable .... keep Lander tethered (loosely)while it/Rover gets samples and winch it back up when time to go home ....

There's an old gag that dates back to the Six-Day War about two members of one desert-dwelling tribe who meet two members of another allegedly-smarter tribe on a train, and brag of their intent to travel on one ticket. When they see the ticket inspector approaching, they both slip into one of the carriage's toilets, and, when the inspector knocks on the door saying "tickets, please", a hand comes out holding a single ticket, which is duly collected.

By coincidence, they find themselves seated opposite each other again on their return journeys, where the second group advise that travelling on one ticket is no challenge, and that they're travelling with no ticket. When the ticket inspector is sighted in the distance and the first pair slip off into one of the toilets again, one of the others knocks on the door and says, "tickets, please". ...

Yeah, the moon's all well and good, but the real pearl of this week's column is the first one that was picked up: "Profit is to be found not just in pleasing dissatisfied customers, but in dissatisfying them in the first place so they will then pay to be pleased." The only way that principle could be bettered would be if your customers didn't even realize that their pleasure was now costing more than it formerly did.

It really struck a chord, especially in such close proximity to the discussion about IBM, and it finally made some sense of one of life's current minor embuggerances, to wit, one litre cardboard milk containers, which I note here in Oz have suddenly been afflicted by designers who want to give them one bevelled edge for an eye-catching red stripe. Excellent for product visibility and thus very good for impulse buying, but catastrophic for the manner in which it corrupts the container's structural integrity, a yardstick by which the original shape was no trivial accomplishment -- delivering milk in a cardboard box that retained its shape when you poured it was never going to be easy. So why did they do it?

I'd suggest that its real purpose wasn't just to compete for an annual packaging industry design award, as you might otherwise be inclined to suspect, but rather to dissatisfy previously-satisfied customers who would then be more inclined to pay instead for its sturdier sibling, a smart, new moulded plastic "bottle" of the same grade of milk, at about the same price ... containing 10% less milk!!!!

Create a world net without the telecoms by using micro satellites to somehow make the FON net of Britania go worldwide by creating focus and transeiver points to make it possible. Shorttalk, use someone with a satellite dish and a FON link to send to satellite network and do same at other spots.

You know I think you should for sure try and do this moon landing thing. And if you miss, and only get your payload about 22,240 miles up, I think you just got a business model....

The whole VOIP thing will boil down to one thing - Femtocells.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Femtocell

With this mini base station connected to (or integrated in) your DSL modem you can make GSM phone calls in your home for free. And the GSM operators will push this strongly so they can free up capacity at their base stations. Game over VOIP providers...

J:-)N

I, Cringely:

Hello! Me, Anthony here. Well, light up some of that dark fiber, for Pete's sake, and get us going at light speed I say. All comes down to profit, don't it? Maybe Bill and Melinda will decide to help out...or Paul Newman can come up with a new product line to provide bits and bytes to the digital poor? Love your stuff. I cross-posted on your piece to http://blog.innovators-network.org The Innovators Network is a non-profit dedicated to bringing technology to startups, small businesses, non-profits, venture capitalists and intellectual property experts. Please visit us and help grown our community!

Best wishes for continued success,

Anthony Kuhn
Innovators Network

I love your column, Bob, but I disagree with you this week about the bandwidth scarcity issue, mainly because available fiber is not the limiting factor for bandwidth. All that dark fiber is unusable until it is "lit up," the extensive process for which I have outlined in my responsive post (http://blog.vpisystems.com/22/bandwidth-scarcity-myth/). There is, unfortunately, a tremendous investment of time and resources necessary to transform dark fiber into bandwidth. Saying it "just" needs to be lit is like saying that the oil in the ground "just" needs to be pumped, refined, and distributed to fuel my car.

As for your perspective on carriers creating a market of dissatisfied customers, I fear it may come to pass. Most carriers this week at the World Broadband Forum in Berlin reported that they feel that the current model of them continuing to add enough bandwidth to keep good QoS for best effort traffic is "unsustainable" as a business model.

Thanks for sharing your insights every week (and keep reaching for the moon)!

Best regards,
Mark Mortensen
VPIsystems

> though, alas, not a single woman

So much for Bob's other goal of joining the 238,857 mile high club.