Harry Café de wheels

整理電腦檔案時，順帶看看一些之前的舊照片。這回有幾張是在Woolloomooloo的Harry café de wheels拍的，有的是我自己那時還再當學生時特地去吃熱狗堡時的照片，另外有幾張是前年2009回去雪梨探視當時在那裡遊學的妹妹時領她去吃時拍的。 其實應該要品嚐的招牌美味其實是Pie，但我們拍的照片似乎都沒有主角本尊，本人去過真正有摸到派的幾次，點的也是配角類美食，蔬菜口味的派，反而不見肉派蹤影！坦白說，是真的還不錯的「粗飽」類美食。而且其實沒車代步的人不需要跑到Woolloomooloo去吃，現在China Town附近就有哩！

Cute niece laughing

Fly Away

Beyond NAPSTER: First It Was Distribution Of Music-But Where To Now?

Introduction
Since the end of twentieth century, fast-developed technology has brought severe change into this world. The significant transformation in business landscape is the coming of digital economy. It produces impact in every level of business activities, for example, strategy thinking in executive level, technology adoption issues in internal organization or the change of business model. Most traditional industry more or less have to somewhat modify their existing model to get fit into this digital age in case their dominant role are replaced by other new type of business, e-business. From the view of music industry, their predominance is challenged by digital music developers. Napster can be seen as the vanguard to carry this revolution out. Traditional recording industries have started to react towards this new generation of business. The process of the struggle is still going; the final say hasn’t been defined. This essay will take a close look at the development of Napster, discuss the current issues and possible future trend in music industry then conclude where Napster is now.


Development of Napster
Napster, a online music sharing software which works like a search engine within users’ computers, writes a short page in the digital economy history. The following is the development of Napster.
Rising wind
Napster Inc. (www.napster.com) of Redwood City, California, the USA, was an innovative start-up software development firm that was among the first P2P (peer-to-peer) Internet business. It was started by Shawn Fanning, grew up in Brockton, Mass. Another founder, Shawn Fanning’s uncle John, plays an important role to commercialize this dream business. The beginning of Napster is devised as a better way than search engines to find MP3 music files. Shawn Fanning did not see the software that is developed based his own interest is turning into a business. Shawn thought all he did is the favor and enthusiasm on technology. In January 1999, Shawn dropped out of college to focus on Napster. In May, the elder Fanning incorporated the company. John got 70%; Shawn got 30%. (Ante, Brull, Berman and France, 2000)
Overwhelming wave
Napster attracted enormous adherents and grew in a rapid speed. In order to build a large user base quickly, Napster made its software available for free. On June 1 of year 1999, Shawn gave his 30 friends to test the beta version of the software through online chat rooms. It could not be impeded spreading it to other online users when they got their hands on it. In just a few days, Napster was downloaded by 3,000 to 4,000 people. The power was proved. Therefore, Napster's first round of funding which can run Napster for six months had raised in the that summer. (Ante, Brull, Berman and France, 2000)

Meanwhile, Napster swept across the colleges like a tornado. At Oregon State University, Napster was taking up 10% of the school's Internet bandwidth by October, 1999. At Florida State University, Napster was consuming 20% to 30% of that school's pipes. (Ante, Brull, Berman and France, 2000) Napster had passed the 1 million-download mark at that time. At its peak, it even showed off an international base of more than 50 million users. (Canzer, 2003) The network resources were eating up by Napster, therefore, colleges started banning it to save the limited bandwidth in campus. Later, the founders of Napster brought in a CEO, Eileen Richardson, to run this company that has grown dramatically in September, 1999. Eileen Richardson’s mission was to stabilize the company, raise Napster's first round of venture capital, and soon after find a CEO to replace her. (Ante, Brull, Berman and France, 2000)
Ebb tide
Although Napster started to discuss the cooperation of distributing music online with major record companies based on the copyright relevant problems since October 1999, the situation was not go smoothly in Napster’s position. Before December 7,1999, RIAA sued Napster for copyright infringement, the relationship between Napster and the RIAA had worsen to the point of warfare. On May 21, Napster finally raised $15 million from Hummer Winblad and brought in Hummer partner Hank Barry as interim CEO to replace Richardson. On June 16, Barry brought in Microsoft Corp. shredder David Boies to improve Napster's legal defense. On June 19, he hired Milton Olin, a former senior vice-president at A&M Records, to be COO. On July 12, Napster hired another music exec, Keith Bernstein, who was a vice-president at Universal Music Group's digital-music division. (Ante, Brull, Berman and France, 2000)

Barry renewed the negotiation with record industry with focused topic that how the industry could use Napster to its benefit. However, the music industry's licensing concerns still cannot be passed. Contractual problems with artists and publishers over royalties have yet to be worked out, these brought the limitation of distributing music over the Napster service. On July 26, Napster’s argument had been legally dismissed by Judge Patel. Later, Napster shut down its service to develop an effective filter as well as its fee-based service since July, 2001 and it has never reopened again. In June 2002, Napster declared bankruptcy due to unbearable lawsuits and debts from operation stop although Bertelsmann has decided to buy the company at a reduced price. (Holloway, 2002) The tide, which Napster brings into music industry, is in the down term but has not make a full stop. The fans who love to share digital music files on the Internet keep waiting for the next step of Bertelsmann-Napster.
Digital copyright issues
The unprecedented new business with enormous potential, Napster, failed to come true its great dream for “fair-use” due to the copyright issue that its counter, record industry argued. Napster believes the service that it provided, sharing music files through one-to-one model, is legal under the federal statute called the “Audio Home Recording Act, (AHRA)”, which allows consumers to create or transfer digital music for noncommercial purposes, for example, to create MP3 songs from a CD you own to play on your portable MP3 player. However, sharing music within millions Napster users detriments the rights and interests of the copyright holders. From the copyright holder’s viewpoint, the Napster’s users are like theft, which take their property without gaining the approving from them. The Napster and Napster-like new business did not respect copyright holder’s legal rights. (Sherman, 2000)

As the raising of digital economy and new media-Internet, the digital copyright issues should be taken into account seriously after Napster’s story has been known broadly. Due to the relevant copyright legislation for Internet or new type business has not been built up appropriately, so that Napster takes advantage of the leak of unsound legislation. Although Naspster lose the lawsuit, the follow-up improvement for the copyright legislation needs a lot of effort to conduct norms. Otherwise, the more and more Napster-like business will continue to use it and challenge the traditional industries through their sophisticated technologies. The continuous negative and costly cycle in lawsuits block the development of new type business and the transformation of traditional business.

The Future trend
From distribution channel to integrated business model
Napster-like P2P technology not only is a distribution of music, but also is the new business model of music industry. After the Napster’s leading to the revolution against traditional big record companies, the music companies join together into two different groups to start joint venture for online distribution of that group’s copyrighted music, which are Pressplay held by Sony and Universal, MusicNet held by BMG, EMI, Warner, RealNetworks and Zomba Records. (Holloway, 2002) This shows that record industry is trying to learn the basic lessons from the new enterprise in digital age and they realize that catching up with the digital trend and satisfy the needs of customer is needed. Old and centralized distribution channel has make customers abandon traditional CDs because of the relatively high cost but low quality commercial products. The Andersen study found that nearly half of the consumers it surveyed are willing to pay to download or stream music if there is any easy, moderately priced way to do it. (Mathews, 2000) There are suggestions for record companies; they should “move away from spending their energies killing the technology and instead concentrate on harnessing it, manipulating it and ultimately exploiting it to the commercial benefit of their artists and their business.” (Adegoke, 2002, p20) It may be seen that new music businesses which integrated the digital distribution as a whole will be the mainstream.

A new integrate music business model is developing and the original Napster-like distribution channel may become one department of an integrated new music company. As the Napster were bought by Bertelsman, the owner of one of big record company-BMG, the possibility of becoming one part of the integrated music business is obvious. “Napster sits there as the perfect opportunity for record companies to profit.” (Dvorak, 2001, p.81) However, what strategy for music industry to take advantage of emerging technologies and the distribution power of the Internet challenges the wisdom of business.

New technology impact extends to whole content industry
The Napster-like P2P exchange network technology also possibly impacts the rest of content or entertainment industry, such as movie companies, TV programs producers or game software developers. By using P2P computing software, anyone with a computer that is connected to the Internet is allowed to share material directly with anyone else, without going through a central computer server. This is different from the traditional Internet transfer structure; files are generally stored on enormous servers and subsequently delivered to users on demand. (Canzer, 2003) All information flows in such a new and guileful way without any pay for use requirement or involving copyright concerns. Whole content industry will have the same hard time compare with music industry if they are unconscious of the threats from new form transference of digital content. Three most popular P2P multiple file-sharing software (not limited on music files) after Napster, Kazaa, Grokster and Morpheus have had a combined 70 million active users in August 2002, the strong power of these new channels cannot be ignored.


Conclusion
To sum up, the coming of digital economy produces impact in every level of business activities, for example, strategy thinking in executive level, technology adoption issues in internal organization or the change of business model. Traditional industry more or less have to somewhat modify their existing model to get fit into this digital age in case their dominant role are replaced by other new type of business. In music industry, the predominance is challenged by digital music distribution channel, like Napster. It arises a big wave of free sharing music online and ends up with a bankruptcy announcement and a low-priced selling to one of its opponents.

However, the revolution of traditional content or entertainment industries has not stopped yet. What Napster and Napster-like P2P exchange network bring not only a change of distribution channels but also the transformation of strategic business model. Like all ways of creating competitive advantage, this strategic tool adds perceived value-added services or products for customers, which is better than other competitors, such as providing more convenient methods of shopping for music, the allowing ability to create a customized CD of only the music the customer desires, information about the artist to enhance the purchase experience, or simply a lower price. (Canzer, 2003) Napster actually extends far beyond the music industry or even copyright law. It has given new prominence to the principle of aggregation, Napster aggregates music, other similar network, Kazaa, Grokster and Morpheus aggregate other digital file. With all these going on, it is worth to understand how such a markets are formed and which of the various aggregation are likely to prove the most successful. Moschella has identified five broad patterns from new successful stories, which are strong vendor leadership, consortium-led, permission-based, voluntary and fair use. (Moschella, 2001) Bertelsmann put effort to build a joint service with Napster might someday repeat the strong vendor leadership pattern; recording industry might follow the second pattern by copying the automobile industry to build Convisint business-to-business exchange network…etc. Not only music or entertainment industry should think about what patterns are becoming part of their industry but also whole industry in this digital age. The strategic process of adding-value to traditional industry is still going; the final say of the digitalization in digital age has not been defined. Any involver should keep trying to conduct a bright blueprint in the near future.




References
Antr, S.E., Brull, S.V., Berman, D.K., France, Mike (2000) ”Inside Napster” Business Week, Issue 3694, pp.112-118

Holloway,Andy (2002)” Space Oddity” Canadian Business, Vol. 75, Issue 18, pp.77-78

Canzer, Brahm (2003) “E-Business: Strategy Thinking and Practice” Houghton Mifflin Company, Boston, U.S.A

Mathews, A.W. (2000) “Can the Record Industry Beat Free Web Music?-Industry’s Public Relation Blitz Includes Pop Stars, Speeches, Appeals to Good Citizenship”, Wall Street Journal, Jun 20, New Tork

Adegoke, Yinka (2002) “Music Industry Must Rethink Digital Formats”, New Media Age, Sep. 19, pp.20

Dvorak, J.C. (2001) “Doing Napster Math”, PC magazine, Company Business and marketing, May 8, p.81

Kover, Amy (2000) “Napster: the hot idea of the year: lawsuits may kill Napster, but the concept behind the company could revolutionize infotech and reinvigorate the PC industry”, Fortune, June 26, Vol. 142, p.128

Moschella, David (2001) “The board lessons from the Npster case” Computerworld Framingham, Feb. 26

Sherman, Chris (2000) “NAPSTER Copyright killer or Distribution Hero?” available at : http://www.findarticles.com/cf_0/m1388/6_24/66456907/print.jhtml accessed date:17.04.2003

找”跟”遇”
這幾年老聽到人家問我：為什麼不找個男朋友？一個人在這裡多無聊啊! !


說真的，我不是很喜歡這問句，特別是對”找”這字眼。

通常人家問我這句話時，我心裡面第一個反應是 “又來了” ，接著我會笑笑的回答：遇不到合適的，也沒辦法啊! !但其實我心裡真正的話是“為什麼要找?” “為什麼他不來找我,非得我去找他?”
最近的一次，是某天中午跟新同事一起吃飯時，一個馬來西亞女生問起的，我想他是好意的，問完我問題等我回答官方說法後，他雞婆的又補充了幾句說，找個男朋友多好啊!有人照顧你，生活不會無聊，找到了有錢的更好，就不用擔心生活了。我實在無言以對，不知道要答些什麼。而後呢，他又問更尷尬的問題，年齡，我本來以為他比我年紀大，因為他就一副婆婆媽媽三姑六婆樣，結果還比我小二三歲。末了，又再跟我強調一次找男朋友很重要很重要。他說他一來這裡開始時，就很積極的在交友網站上認識朋友，好幾個男朋友都是在網路上認識的， 這也太積極了吧!他來澳洲也不過才幾年，就交了好幾個男朋友，好像他來這裡的目標就是找到個不錯的男人。

其實我不否認有個另一半的重要性，但是這麼的目的導向，好像又太過了。並不是全然反對主動追男的舉動，只是覺得感覺上就少了些什麼似的，而且觀察下來， 絕大多數男人都有那種容易到手的就不會珍惜的壞毛病，女人何苦去委身於這樣的人，而只希冀於能在他羽翼下求得依靠與溫存呢？

關於這，其實我還是比較喜歡用”遇”這個稍微被動一點的動詞，在種種因素都紛紛將你指向某人時，他就出現了，不是嗎？“遇”到了之後，再化為更積極的行動把自己缺的一半補起來，不是感覺上會好一些嗎？而且還有另一個要點是，感情不是單方面的要對方來補你缺的這半，你也得看自己能不能補好對方缺的那一半，好吧!我承認我是太理想化並且陳義過高了點。