John C. Dvorak

Jon, I've been looking into a lot of elements of information goods, and there are a few bits I'm coming to realise, slowly (it's only been 30 years I've been studying this).

1. Information is a public good. Nonrivalrous, only very difficultly excludable. Strong positive externalities. Hal Varian's got a good piece on this. Doesn't mean you cannot sell it, but it means that doing exclusively has serious negative effects.

2. Free-sample giveaways are almost always an excellent idea. John Dvorak's recent "Whatever Happened to Wordstar" had an excellent illustration of this:

Worse, in 1985, the company produced Wordstar2000, a copy protected program that was nothing like the older lovable Wordstar and which contained annoying copy-protection features that scared most users away. While many pundits including Esther Dyson predicted great things for Wordstar2000, users rejected it. The product was big and slow and expensive. And despite complaints by the company and others, people wanted software they could copy and use on more than one machine. During this era piracy sold software and created market share. People would use a bootleg copy of Wordstar and eventually buy a copy. Wordstar may have been the most pirated software in the world, which in many ways accounted for its success. (Software companies don’t like to admit to this as a possibility.) Books for Wordstar sold like hot cakes and the authors knew they were selling documentation for pirated copies of Wordstar.…

Original opinion, since hardly anyone sees fit to link people to it: http://online.wsj.com/public/resources/documents/121310virginiahcruling.pdf

(Personally, seeing as how the Commerce Clause already allows Congress to regulate a simple act of commerce between me and my literal neighbor with things like the Consumer Product Safety Improvement Act (http://www.dvorak.org/blog/2008/12/24/new-overreaching-toy-testing-law-will-force-small-us-toymakers-out-of-business/ ) which has criminalized most garage sales, if the Commerce Act also empowers them to force me to engage in commerce with some entity, I'd like the Supreme Court, if it rules in favor of the government on this, to kindly provide some citations of things Congress is actually not allowed to do on account of the Commerce Clause, because I'm no longer able to come up with anything.)

John Dvorak has a interesting piece on Burroughs here :

"The [ElectroData derived Burroughs 205] drum had two sections. The high speed access section which had each piece of data duplicated 10 times and offset on various bands on the drum to increase the access time by 10. Here the average data access time was .85 milliseconds."

my mom performed her bank clerk job on Burroughs Adding Machines, in the early 50s.

IBM famously was required to sign the 50 year Consent Decree for hobbling the 7 Dwarves by developing new machines using sales and supply contract deposit payments for vapor ware https://techmonitor.ai/techonology/ibm_and_the_1956_consent_decree

http://www.dvorak.org/blog/ibm-and-the-seven-dwarfs-dwarf-one-burroughs/

edit : Dvorak auto correct on phone sorry

Yep, here you go:

http://www.dvorak.org/blog/2010/01/13/chinas-sophistcated-hacker-army-the-worlds-best-cyber-terrorists/

The FBI report estimates that since 2003, the Chinese Army
has specifically developed a network of over 30,000 Chinese
military cyberspies, plus more than 150,000 private-sector
computer experts, whose mission is to steal American
military and technological secrets and cause mischief in
government and financial services.